Author: MrBlueSky

Cassette Beasts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

I never actually played the multiplayer, since it wasn’t out during my play through.

Cassette Beasts is a monster collector RPG. After arriving on a mysterious island, you learn you’re trapped there. You also learn that the island is populated by monsters that can be captured in Cassette Tapes, and used to battle each other. There’s also a set of Gym Leaders Team Captains across the island, each of whom specializes in a different elemental type of monster. You get your own tape deck, and learn to use it to transform into the aforementioned monsters.

Then a hole opens up in the ground, and you fight a dying eldritch god in a subway station.

That’s not a spoiler, by the way. This happens just about 20-30 minutes into the game, but it’s the moment that Cassette Beasts sort of cues you into, that no, you do not in fact know what’s going on, and this isn’t a Pokemon clone.

Quick Notes

Two quick notes about Cassette Beasts.

First, I streamed my entire play-through of the game. If you’re curious about my experience, just watch that. (Especially if you think I’m being unfair about some of the bugs.)

Second, there’s a really good write-up by one of the developers of Cassette Beasts that you can read here. It contains spoilers, but it’s a really well written retrospective on the design choices they made, and why they made them, and I’m going to be referencing it a bit.

Cassette Beasts has two main game play states: overworld exploration/puzzle solving, and turn based combat.

Overworld

The overworld is pretty straight forward, and generally doesn’t have too many twists outside of the aforementioned eldritch god zones. You wander around, and over time you get a few traversal upgrades. You get a slowly descending hover, the ability to turn into a spiky ball to climb walls, and a dash to push through obstacles.

Outside of the weird zones, the Cassette Beasts overworld is by far the weaker of the two modes. It’s not the most inspiring thing to explore, and while it has cool moments, it also can be a bit buggy. There was a part where I just repeatedly clipped through the floor, which was bad, but not as bad as when the game just continually crashed.

Again, fun moments. But it’s mostly there to carry the meat and potatoes of the game, the turn-based combat:

Combat

Most combat in Cassette Beasts is 2v2, with some situations that change that. But in general, it’s your two monsters versus two opposing monsters. This is also where it starts to make significant shifts from Pokemon.

Here’s an example: thematically, you’re not actually capturing monsters, you’re just recording them to use their forms later. Since it’s a transformation, it breaks if you take enough damage. At which point any extra damage (either from multi-hit attacks, or other enemies) goes directly onto the player character. If it was Pokemon, it would be like saying that your trainer has a health bar. This means you can actually get knocked out mid battle, even while you still have monsters left to fight with.

Attacks use a fairly simple energy system, where each attack has a cost. At the start of each turn, each character gets a set amount of energy. As such, using big attacks means having to save up energy for a bit, or finding another way to generate it. But it does mean you can’t just spam your most powerful attacks out for free each turn.

There are a lot of other really interesting systems here, including the way type match-ups work (pretty much nothing like Pokémon), and the fact that all moves are effectively items that can be equipped and unequipped from your monsters. But the short version is that the combat is good, and I often found myself trying to break it, or experimenting with various setups, which is what I want in a game like this.

Fascinating and Frustrating

I like Cassette Beasts, but I also found it kind of difficult to play at times. The game is incredibly open-ended in letting you progress its story and quests, but that comes at the cost of occasionally feeling directionless.

There was one bit where I spent at least an hour and a half trying to solve a puzzle that it turned out didn’t really exist. The actual solution was to bring a specific character to that area that I hadn’t met yet.

There was another time late game where I pretty much just ended up grinding, because it didn’t feel like it was possible for me to beat a boss at my current power level.

At the same time, I pushed through those moments, because I wanted to see how the story would resolve. The boss designs were cool, and while the world is a bit barren, it’s still exciting to find the small secrets in it. For a two person project, it’s hard not to be impressed by the game.

It’s a very solid game, and I’d probably spend more time on it if there just weren’t so many other games available to play. As it is, though, it has just a bit too much friction for me to be interested in spending more time on it after beating the main story.

Dice Miner

I debated writing about Dice Miner. It’s a clever little game, but quite simple, and I figured anyone who wanted to know about it could just ask ChatGPT. But when I tried asking ChatGPT, it got even the basic details wrong, proving that there is in fact still value in writing about games as a human, assuming that you want accurate information to exist in the world.

Image of filled dice mountain.

Anyway, Dice Miner. Dice Miner is a fairly straight forward dice drafting game, with some set collection elements. The game is played over 3 rounds, and each round the players draft a third of all the dice in the game. Players take turns drafting dice off a large cardboard mountain, trying to score the most points. There are two catches. The first is that only dice with two sides exposed can be picked. The second is that you keep dice you pick between rounds, rerolling them into new values that may or may not be more useful.

So let’s talk about the five different types of dice, because between them they provide the meat of the game, and the primary source of my gripes.

Dice Types

Image of each dice type.
From left to right and top to bottom: Tools, Treasure, Caves, Hazard, and Magic

First up, Treasure. Each pip on a treasure dice is worth 1 point, with every treasure dice having sides marked with a 3, 2, three 1’s, and beer. More on beer in a bit. The player with the most treasure at the end of each round gets double points from their treasure.

Next up, the Cave. Its sides are numbered 1-5, with a beer on the sixth side. It scores based on collecting runs. For example, a 1 is worth one point, a 1 and 2 is worth 3 points, a 1-2-3 is worth six points, and so on. Runs must start at 1, and be contiguous.

The third set is Hazard and Tool dice. These are linked, so I’m going over the effects together. Hazard dice are worth negative points, and have either Dragons or Cave-Ins on their surfaces, with a higher number of dragons. Also beer. So why would anyone ever take them? Well, sometimes players are forced into taking certain dice. But more often, players will take hazard dice because when combined with Tool Dice, those negative points become positive. Tool Dice have shields, pickaxes, chests, and yes, beer. Shields turn dragons into points, pickaxes turn cave in into points, and chests let you keep dice on certain values between rounds.

The last type of dice is Magic Dice. These let players reroll other dice at the end of a round, but don’t score any points on their own. Also, they don’t allow players reroll Hazard Dice.

Oh, and beer. Almost every die has a beer side. When you draft a die with a beer (or roll one from a past round) on any turn afterwards, you can reroll that die, give it to another player, and pick two dice from the mountain, including dice with only one side exposed.

Overall, it’s a fun little drafting game, but after five or six games, I do have a problem with it. And if you were paying attention, you might have already spotted it from the way I structured my paragraphs.

The Problem

It’s not really worth it to try to heavily invest into more than one strategy. This is less true in two player where you might hate draft, but stays constant at other counts. Treasure wants lots of treasure. Caves needs lots of caves. Hazard and Tool only function together. Magic works as an ancillary to everything, but doesn’t give points on its own. End result: all strategic options favor “forcing one type.” And after you’ve tried all the types, games start to feel samey.

This isn’t as true for the two player version, where individual dice picks open up options for an opponent. But at higher player counts, enough choices get made that it’s hard to control pacing.

I do like Dice Miner, but I wish it had more to it, or at least more relationships between the types of dice. At its current level, it’s simple enough to teach to infrequent board gamers. I just wish it had more meaningful strategic options.

Mega Spring Meltdown 2024

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and various parts of my body on are strike. Must be spring! Green Mountain Gamers Mega Spring Meltdown event was this past weekend, and so I made the arduous trip up to Lebanon, NH to take part.

As always, I’ll be talking about what I played, and a bit of what I saw. One small thing though first, if you like these write ups, follow me on Twitter and help me change the ratio of human beings to porn bots that follow me for the better.

The Event

Like other Green Mountain Gamers-hosted events, this was a relatively small event. It’s just a bunch of folks in a big room playing games. There are some small raffles, and a few “Play to Win” games, but that’s about it. It’s a nice cozy affair with no real lines or waiting, just games, chatting, and occasionally folks stepping out to get food.

The Games

I got through a pretty decent number of games, given that I showed up about four hours after the event had started. The first one was Parfum, a dice and action drafting game about creating perfume. It was fine, but I got a bit of a runaway lead early on, which did spoil some of the tension going into the latter half of the game. I like the systems, but do wish there was a bit more to do with them.

Parfum was followed up by another dice drafting game: Dice Miner! I generally like Dice Miner, and some day I’ll actually finish my write up on it. But the long and short of it is that I enjoy it, but do wish it had more types of dice to draft. That said, I was glad to show it to a few folks who hadn’t played it before.

What followed were the first of several games of Mottainai that I played throughout the day. Mottainai is very interesting and could be considered a follow up to Glory To Rome. It definitely will receive its own writeup at some point, but perhaps the most interesting about it is how alien it plays. I found I had a lot of success “looking for lethal” as it were, instead of trying to build out a large strategy.

I followed Mottainai with two games that require significantly less long term planning: Trio and Ghost Blitz. Trio is what you would get if someone looked Go Fish, and said, “Okay, but what if we made it good, and fun.” It’s a clever little game about memorization and deduction, and I’ve found that it’s light enough to play with non-gamers.

Ghost Blitz on the other hand is a genre of game I’ve traditionally been quite bad at: quick matching reaction speed. It’s simple enough to explain quickly, so here’s how it works. There are five objects, each a different color, and a deck of cards. Each card has two of the five objects on it, not necessarily the correct color. Whenever a card is flipped up, you need to grab the correctly colored object on the card, or if that doesn’t exist, grab the object not described in any way on the card (e.g. neither its shape nor its color pictured).

I did better at it than I usually do at these sorts of things.

Then there were a few more games of Mottainai, all of which I won fairly quickly, then the last “big” game of the day: Life of the Amazonia.

Life of the Amazonia is a sort of “not a city” builder where you acquire terrain tiles, and place animals on them to score points, doing both of the above via a bag-builder. It’s like a deck-builder, but instead of adding cards to a deck, you add tokens to a bag. It does have one really interesting quirk: you can’t split resource tiles. This had some really interesting effects around which tokens were the best to actually get.

Did I win? No. But was I close? Also no.

Would I have done better if all the rules for scoring points were explained to me before the game started? Probably not, but it’s a convenient crutch to place the blame on for my failure, so let’s go with that.

With that, it was time to clean up, and get out. Big thanks to Green Mountain Gamers for putting these events on, Resonym for prizes, and special shout out to the people who played a single game of Twilight Emperium for 9 hours.

The Planet Crafter

Ed Note: It would be much easier to just call the game Planet Crafter, but since the game’s title is The Planet Crafter, and SEO exists, I’ll be writing the full title each time.

I like The Planet Crafter. I’m saying that now because a lot of things I’m about to say might give an impression otherwise. So I want to get this out there: It’s a fun game.

It’s just kind of weird.

A lot of games describe themselves as offspring of other games, and you could do that for The Planet Crafter. You could say it’s descended from Cookie Clicker and Satisfactory.

But The Planet Crafter doesn’t come from a happy home. Instead, after the divorce Cookie Clicker got full custody until about the 13 hour mark, when Satisfactory finally got parental visitation rights back, and finally got to introduce The Planet Crafter to the idea of automation.

It’s a weird balance. Much of the play time is spent building structures to make numbers go up, so that you can unlock other structures to make numbers go up faster, in what feels at least like an idle game sort of structure. Eventually you get automation, and it’s possible to make some things automatic. But the game isn’t really about those systems.

For example, electricity generators don’t need to be connected to structures they’re powering, so the game doesn’t really lean into “Optimize the placements of inputs and outputs” the way Factorio and Satisfactory do. It sort of just trundles along. Even the structures that are dependent on placement don’t require too much effort to optimize. They each only boost up to eight nearby structures, and it’s pretty easy to just plop them in range.

General Funkiness

Undertale, one of my favorite games of all time, was made in GameMaker, a development choice that has big “In a cave, with a box of scraps” energy. It’s a good reminder that games are ultimately judged on if they are fun, and not much else.

It’s a thought that has stuck with me through most of my time with The Planet Crafter. The game is just kind of wonky, and there are a lot of funky decisions that make you wonder if the game works this way by design, or just because the developers couldn’t do something they wanted.

As an example, a large portion of The Planet Crafter is just walking around and grabbing stones, then running back to your space shack to refill on oxygen.

Sure, there’s also some building, but a lot of the early game is walking and picking up rocks by pointing your rock pickup beam at them until they are picked up. Somehow, an experience I could replicate in my driveway becomes absolutely thrilling the second I need some more iron to put up another wind turbine.

The thing is, this sort of functional design works here. The building is pretty much fine. Buildings don’t always go where you want, but because deconstructing anything gives a full resource refund, it’s pretty easy to fix any problems. The text on items isn’t always 100% accurate to what they actually do, but with the occasional exceptions of the rockets that cause asteroid storms, it mostly doesn’t matter. The units used on certain measurements aren’t correct, but only one person I played with noticed that.

That’s not to say everything functions. Some parts are just plain broken. The worst offender of this is the game’s mini map, which you can only move by clicking on in-game arrows. You can’t pan it by clicking and dragging, it doesn’t save your place, and the only overlay options available are basically useless. Also, it doesn’t really appear to be a minimap, just a camera that’s positioned up above the skybox that faces straight down.

And speaking of systems that mostly work…

Multiplayer

The Planet Crafter multiplayer is another example of “This system is functional, occasionally breaks, but is also just a bit weird.” Outside of a few times where I’ve disconnected, and some items disappearing it mostly works! But it also doesn’t let you join from the Steam menu, and doesn’t have dedicated servers.

The one big thing about multiplayer, though, is that it lets you really divide and conquer. One person can be out exploring while another is building more production, and a third is messing with the game’s somewhat weird systems for capturing butterflies and animals. It feels like it would be an exhausting game to play on my own.

Overall

As I said in the start, I like The Planet Crafter. It’s a bit wonky, and unpolished in areas. But it’s incredibly fun to play, and I can’t think of another game that gives quite the same sense of the world being changed as the result of your actions.

Turning a corner and seeing a forest where it was once completely barren, or seeing the sky change color is a oddly magical experience.

PAX East – The Card Game Post

Card games? Card games! One of the great things about PAX East is that there are an incredible variety of new card games and weird TCG’s to play. In this post, I’ll be quickly going over what I saw, and what I enjoyed, and also what I didn’t.

The Good

These are all the games I recommend at least trying if you get a chance. Am I going to collect them myself? Not necessarily, but I do enjoy playing them, and would play them again.

Here Be Monsters

Here There Be Monsters is a placement and ability-driven head-to-head battler with a sort of wacky pirate theme. It was in Unpub, and unfinished, but was fun enough for me to play 3 games of it—which is rare for something in Unpub. The core mechanics felt like they were almost where they needed to be, but the cards themselves did have some balance issues.

I’m hopeful that I’ll get to see more of this game, though I’m not sure when. There’s a lot of promise here, and the core mechanics are fun.

Altered

It feels like we’re in a bit of a TCG gold rush at the moment. Altered raised over $7 million kickstarter. I didn’t back it for various reasons, but mostly a distaste of said gold rush.

That said, I will absolutely not turn down a chance to try to play new card games, so I did play it. It’s neat, and doing some fairly different stuff. There’s no direct combat; instead it’s effectively a series of cost checks, where you and your opponent try to have the most of a given value present at one of two locations. While what I played didn’t sell me on buying a case, it did convince me that it might not just be an attempt to cash in.

Star Wars: Unlimited

I actually rather like Star Wars: Unlimited. It’s just unfortunate that I’m not a Star Wars person; I actually find the Star Wars theming a bit of a turn off. But I’ve found the gameplay of all the demos I’ve played quite enjoyable. They’ve got a nice tension to them, and that’s enough to put it into the good category.

PAX is also a great opportunity to grab all the promos.

The Bad

Despite the title of this section, these aren’t necessarily bad games. They are, however, (based on what I played) games I will never demo or touch again unless I am paid cash to do so.

Flesh and Blood

I’d heard a lot of good things about Flesh and Blood over the years, and it’s one of the mid-level TCG’s that seems to have clawed itself a spot at various local game stores. So I’ve been curious about it for a while, and at one point even thought about picking up a starter set.

Holy crap, am I glad I didn’t. I hate this game. I pretty much just quit halfway through, and didn’t even grab the simple starter deck.

The short version is that I just found Flesh and Blood both boring and frustrating, and it felt more akin to playing a fighting game than a card game.

UniVersus

The best thing I can say about playing UniVersus is: UniVersus made it clear that I just don’t like the alternating turns of attack and defense pattern that both it and Flesh and Blood seem to be using.

It just never clicked, and I never had fun. I’m sure I’ll get plastered for this, but both of these demos felt random. They felt like I was missing much of the critical information I needed to make meaningful strategic choices. And the remaining choices—the tactical ones—were boring to me.

The Ugly

Welcome to the bad vibes section. It’s not even the mechanics for this one.

Gem Blenders

I wrote a bit about Gem Blenders a while back, and I was pleased to see they were still around, and had a booth. But I was somewhat dismayed to learn that with their switch to a full TCG model, they also switched their card backs. Meaning that if you purchased their earlier base set, the game is no longer compatible.

It just doesn’t feel great, y’know? Anyway, that lands them in ugly.

Final Fantasy TCG

Not good, not bad, just sorta there. Maybe this would have landed better another year, but I just didn’t get anything out of this one. Honestly, I felt a bit bad for the enforcer and 3 other folks total I saw playing the game over the con. It follows a weird version of MTG’s resource system that I found both very slow, and not too fun.