For the last half a year, I’ve been working a project called Card City Critters. And now, it’s ready to revealed. And if you live around Boston, or are willing to make the trek down, you can play it in a week from now at Boston FIG.
(Please imagine the Jurassic park theme played with a kazoo)
Card City Critters is a collaborative design between myself and Max Seidman. It’s an event-only experience that we’re calling a Live Action Uncollectable Card Game. In it, you’ll get a deck, earn cards to improve that deck, and face off against a variety of challenging non-player opponents (me and my friends in funny hats).
Games are fast, frantic and fun! They take 8-10 minutes for experienced players, and use 15 card decks. After each game, you’ll earn booster packs that you can use to upgrade your deck, and improve your chances of winning.
We’ll be running our first public version of the game at the Boston Festival of Indie Games, on December 7th. In it, players will be able to select from one of three starter decks, face off against up to 4 NPC’s with their own wacky play styles, and finally attempt to stop the Magnate, and his Scheme Engine from taking over Card City.
Quick FAQ’s
Where can I play it?
We’ll be debuting the first version of the Card City Critters at Boston Fig on December 7th. Since it’s an event only experience, this will be the first chance for the general public to try it out. Internally, we’re considering this our first public Alpha version of the game!
Do I have to play against other players?
No. While decks in Card City Critters can be played against other players, it’s primarily a PvE experience, with players facing off against non-player characters (NPCs).
How far in development is it?
We’re very proud of our underlying card game engine in Card City Critters, and believe it’s an incredibly fun game. That said, we’ll still likely be changing quite a few things in the game as development advances, and it’s also possible that the whole game gets a new name at some point in the future.
We’re at the point where we think the best way to improve the game is to start running the experience, and learn from watching people play!
Also, as I’ll note below, we’re still working on how to actually make money off it.
Likewise, the art/art style are currently placeholders. Fun placeholders! Hand drawn placeholders! But placeholders nonetheless.
How much will it cost?
At Boston FIG, it’ll be free with admission to the festival. In the future, we expect to charge for the event. Currently, we don’t ever plan to sell cards, decks, or boosters separately from the events—it is an uncollectable card game, after all.
Will I like it?
If you like collectible card games or trading card games you’ll probably have a good time with Card City Critters. While absolutely anyone can play it, it’s probably at it’s best if you’re already a little familiar with the genre. That said, we’ve got versions of the experience for folks at all levels of getting into card games. Roleplaying/LARPING is not required.
Is this a TCG/CCG?
We don’t plan for it to be.
Our plan is to eventually sell entry to events, not sealed product. When you collect cards from previous events, you’ll be able to bring a few cards to future events, but this won’t give you a big mechanical advantage. Instead, it’ll let you bring in 1 or 2 favorite cards. In addition, while we’re very pleased with our underlying card game, we see it mostly as being played in events, not as a standalone or separate game.
There are a bunch of great experiences you can have playing TCG’s and CCG’s, but we’re interested in distilling those down into our game, not competing in the space.
We’re early enough in development that this could change. What exactly we end up selling is still up in the air, but we don’t plan to be competing in the TCG space with the game.
I want to get involved in playtesting/follow project development/learn more. Where can I do that?
The best way to learn about future events is to join our mailing list! If you’re very curious, and would like to learn more, you can also join our Discord here. We’ll be recruiting playtesters from our Discord, and announcing events on the mailing list.
Finally, I’ll be talking about each of the player decks, and a bit of their background over the next week, so keep your eyes on the blog if you’re curious!
What a strange egg. I wonder what might hatch from it?
Woo. It’s been a week of Holiday, and unpacking things, and just general work. As such, this is going to be less of a play by play account, and more of a somewhat lucid sequence of things that occurred at Unplugged.
So lets get to it!
Indie Game Night Market
This was the second year of the Indie Game Night Market at PAX Unplugged. Last year, I snuck in and chatted with a bunch of folks about the process, and the games they had at the market. This year though, I was behind the counter with Max Sideman helping him demo and sell his game Skyline. As a result, I didn’t have any time to actually buy or play games from the night market, so this is going to be a bit of an abbreviated section.
Things were much smoother this year, as the whole area been turned from last year’s queue space into a series of microbooths.
2025 IGNM Booth Layout
This solved some of the big problems from last year, but introduced a few of it’s own. Folks could queue up for some for the games they were most interested in, and it anyone who showed up later still had a chance to browse.
The downside was that unless you were choosing to browse, I think it was harder for folks to see as much of the market as last year. Also, the non-sidescrolling structure meant that whenever a queue like did form, I occasionally had to shout over folks heads to ask if anyone just there to buy Skyline instead of demoing it.
Additionally, the #IGNM hashtag on BlueSky has a bunch of folks sharing their pictures of the event, if you want a sense of the vibes. I’ll be honest, after setup and pitching the game for an hour and half, I didn’t have the presence of mind to think to take pictures.
First Look
I spent a lot more time this year then I usually do at First Look, up on the third floor. First Look is where publishers will bring in either newly released, or yet to be released games, and have them available for play.
The first game we played was Magical Athlete. I liked this one. It’s a very simple roll and move, with a drafting component. Is it a high skill game? No. For me, the joy of the game is in watching everyone else lose it when Lady Luck turns against them. In what’s becoming a running theme of this writeup, I suggest Dan Thurot’s review if you want some more in depth info.
This was followed up by Take Time. It’s a co-operative card placing game, probably most similar to the crew, and is all about inferences and hidden information. I’m not great at these sorts of games, but my friends who were seemed to be a little underwhelmed by it. Whether that’s mediocre gameplay, or the games complete lack of anything resembling a narrative, who can say.
Stem and Branch also goes kinda light on the narrative. It’s about raising the animals of the Eastern Zodiac, but really it’s about playing cards on a board to gain victory points. I didn’t parse the games actual strategy until pretty late into it, and spent most of it just making whatever move I could on my turn. It’s not bad, but it’s not incredible. The art for all of the Zodiac Animals however, is absolutely incredible. Loved that bit.
Slime Artist is Pictonary with play-dough, or perhaps silly putty. There is more to it then that, and perhaps a slightly different set of scoring incentives in that you want only one person at the table to recognize your creation, but if you don’t like sculting or moulding, you will not like this game. Fortunately my mother is an art teacher, and I have played with a lot of clay so I do like it.
Finally, there was Subliminal. I should note that I don’t really see words as being constructed from letters, so word games aren’t really my thing. Still, Subliminal isn’t really about spelling. It let me down anyway. I did not like Subliminal. The weird abstract art is the best thing about it, and everything else is pretty mid.
PAX Rising
I spent less time at PAX Rising then I would have liked to, but I do want to give a few quick shoutouts to some things I saw there.
First up, the Brightcast folks had a booth there, and were selling Brightcast! I love Brightcast, and while I missed the Brightcast tourney that was held at the event, I hold in my heart of hearts that I would have won if I’d played. Or at least not gotten knocked out in the first round. Also, they found my missing card box containing pretty much every promo I’d picked up that weekend when I left it near their booth, and got it back to me so that was hugely appreciated.
Next up was Krampusnacht, a game about playing as various dark versions of Santa Claus to capture children to sacrifice to the devil. This was one I played more for the vibes then the gameplay, as it’s a bit too “take that” for me. Still, the public domain art selection is incredible, I loved getting to see it.
Collectible Card Games
It wouldn’t be PAX without a new crop of CCGs, and this year was no exception. I’ll likely have more to say about Riftbound in a few weeks, so for now I’ll leave it out of my description, but as much as I hate to say it, I think it’s probably pretty good, if not hugely innovative. Instead, I’ll quickly cover the other two.
Cookie Run Braverse Trading Card Game is interesting, and yes, that is its full name. I don’t hate or love it, and found myself mostly bemused by the few rounds I played. To give credit where it’s due, it’s the first TCG in a while that I’ve seen that uses no external components to the deck, instead having what feels like a very interesting win condition in it’s break system. Thematically, I do not care about Cookie Run. I just don’t. It’s weird combo of Pokemon and Magic’s resource system was a bit hard for me to parse at first, but at least with starter decks doesn’t offer much of note.
OverPower on the other hand is much more interesting. It falls much closer to Flesh and Blood, or Universus, games I have noted in the past I just don’t have a good time with. However, something about Overpowered clicked for me. There’s no creatures or spells, instead there’s a series of actions and reactions, of bluffs and responses. It’s fairly clever, and I found the demo game I played to be fairly engrossing.
Button Shy Booth
I like Button Shy. They publish a bunch of wallet games, pretty much all consisting of 18 cards, a wallet, and rulebook. I’ve written about Skulls of Seldec from their catalogue before, and this year, I spent some time playing Phantasmic and Revolver Noir over at their booth.
First, Phantasmic. It’s a magical buffing/dueling game. It’s simple, quick, and despite that I didn’t quite get how the up/down bid works while I was playing it. Still, I’d like to play more.
Revolver Noir is a much slower thing. It’s a two player duel set in a mansion. It’s fun, but can feel like it drags a little bit, especially if neither you or your opponent are landing any shots, or connecting any traps. While I was at the booth, I heard from one of the folks running the booth that they’d met a group of folks who would play the game without the cards, and just memorized the rules.
Allplay Booth
Finally, the Allplay booth. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t have strong thoughts about Allplay in general, but I did win both of the games I played, so it gets recounted.
First, Twinkle Twinkle. It’s a fairly straightforward drafting/set collection game with the twist that the value of sets is determined by how your stars, planets, and other cosmic debris are placed on your board. The art is cute, the drafting is straight forward, and I have no real strong feelings about it on the whole. But I won!
Then, we played Kabuto Sumo. Kabuto Sumo has been a bit of a running joke between me and a friend for the last few years, as he apparently played a game of Kabuto Sumo that went on for two full hours without a winner, and since then has been convinced it was bad game. As a joke, I bought him a copy of the game for christmas last year. We have never once played it.
It took me less then 15 minutes to defeat him, suggesting at least somewhat it’s a skill issue on his part. Or perhaps luck. But I prefer to think of it as skill.
Wrap-Up
This was a bit of a weird PAX for me. I spent a lot less time in the Expo hall exploring, and lot less money, both in Reading Terminal and the show.
The whole thing was a little bit more of a blur then usual, and I couldn’t quite tell you why. Days went by quickly. I played a lot of Magic, chatted with folks, and generally tried to have a good time.
I think it was a good show. It’s possible my heart just wasn’t 100% in it.
PAX Unplugged has been great. I’ve been too busy doing a variety of things (Indie Game Night Market! Learning new CCGs! Losing all of my rare cards that I collected over the weekend, and just barely managing to get them back!) to really do too much writing.
For now, I’ll just say that it was a blast, and assuming I manage to get home, and not end up in a plane crash, I’ll try to talk about it a bit more tomorrow. But right now I need to pack for a way too early flight, and get some sleep.
Another year, another PAX! I say that like it’s a bad thing, but to be honest, this has been a pretty chill year so far. As always, I’ll be recounting my day, but first I want to draw attention to a few cool things I think folks should check out.
Brightcast
Brightcast is great. If you want to know why, you can read my writeup, but if you want to just try it out, the designers have a booth this year, and are selling copies. If you find yourself walking past, I highly suggest trying it out. They’re in the PAX Rising showcase, at Booth #3143.
Re;Match
I’ve been following Brother Ming’s Re;Match since… well, before it was named Re;Match! It’s a fantastic fighting puzzle game, and if you get a chance to swing by and try it you absolutely should. They’re down at Booth 4009, and there’s also a Pinny Arcade Pin you can get doing a demo.
Anyway, Re;Match is rad, and I can’t wait for it to release.
Anyway, let’s talk about my day.
This was a pretty slow start for me. Most of my morning, and a bit of the afternoon was spent playing Magic, mostly the new Avatar the Last Airbender set. I might have some more thoughts on it later, but for now I’ll just say that we played some two-headed giant games, and won all three of them by the skin of our teeth. Honorable mentions to incredibly good cards go to Standstill, and Secret Tunnel.
This is very good if you drop it turn 2, and you’re the only ones with creatures. 6 cards is nothing to sneeze at.
MVP creature of the decks, and it doesn’t even start as a creature. Won us at least 2 games.
After all that Magic, it was already about 3:00, so after a quick break for some chicken and waffles from Reading Terminal, I took a moment to quickly browse the expo hall, and play some Re:Match.
The non-MTG games
Having spent the day playing a collectible card game, I decided that what I needed was to spend some more time playing a collectible card game, and went over to try out the Cookie Run TCG. I have no idea why this exists, and I’ll probably do a more full review of it after PAX Unplugged, but for now I’ll summarize my opinion as “Doing some interesting things, but not necessarily inspiring”.
After that, I met up with a few friends, and we tried out the demo version of the LoTR trick taker. It’s a co-op trick taker, and generally a pretty good time. I bought the first version last year, and never played it. So I’m going to crack it open when I get home instead of just buying another game I haven’t played. If you want an complete opinion, just read Dan Thurot’s review instead.
I rounded out the day by playing Magical Athlete, and I’m just going to link to another Dan Thurot’s review instead of trying to summarize it. Despite winning, I never had any of the truly exciting moments he experience, and while I’d play Magical Athlete with a specific group of friends, it’s mostly to see them lose it.
We ended the day with Stem & Branch. I’m gonna be honest, I’ve been up for 12 hours, and I don’t quite know how to describe this one. Maybe as a light-medium weight sort of points collection game? Honestly most games you collect points, so that’s probably not the best way to describe it.
Dishonorable Mention: Jungo. A friend played it, thought it had an interesting design, but didn’t think it was very good. A bit of a bummer, given that Trio has been one of our favorites, and Combo is also pretty good, but not everything can be a winner. (No, that’s not a bad link, Combo really did used to be called Surfosaurus MAX.)
Oh, and I got like 3 boxes worth of One Piece chaff for free, so that was neat.
Tomorrow I’ll be trying out Riftbound, and maybe finally browsing the Expo hall? Who can say.
Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.
Before I go any farther, I want to note that do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the players time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.
If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the games discord seem to be having a good time.
A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.
Q-Side
The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.
But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.
Oh The Stuff You Can Get
Q-Up has four main resources, Q, Experience, Gold, and Gems. Lets start with Q.
After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.
This amount however, will be adjusted by your characters skills and items, which is as good a place to talk about experience and gold.
Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.
This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock, a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.
It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.
It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the games eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.
Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.
They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.
Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.
And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.
So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.
Narrative
From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.
Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.
This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr.Toads wild ride real fast.
The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.
I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.
After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.
This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.
Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.
This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.
Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to Novice rank.
Then things get odd.
I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.
Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.
This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligence’s attempt to restart the universe.
It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligence’s. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that they may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.
It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things then I was in any of the “whacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.
It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.
Putting on the Introspective Critic hat for a moment
Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in it’s aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random whacky hijinks”, but is instead Whose On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.
Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.
But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.
It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.
Hat is off, back to final thoughts
I like 90% of Q-Up. I like it’s mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.
It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more then the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.
Q-Up was $9. I think I got my moneys worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.
I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.
P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.
