MrBlueSky, Author at Gametrodon

Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition

Note: The Missing Expedition is the two player co-op expansion for the competitive base game, Lost Ruins of Arnak. While I’ve played a two games of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I’m mostly going to be going to be focusing on my experience with missing expedition. That said, the co-op expansion sits on top of the base game, so the game mechanics are pretty much the same.

At the end of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I was feeling a sort of intense “Hmmm”-ness. Not good, not bad, just “Hmm”. It wasn’t because the game is boring, but because the campaign was one of extreme highs and lows, and for various reasons I’ll get into, it ended on a low.

Lost Ruins of Arnak is made up of a bunch of different design elements, but isn’t really defined by any of them. It’s like those little fancy cheeseboards. There are deckbuilding elements, but given that you only draw 5 hands from your deck, and one is the starting hand, it’s hard to call it a deck builder. It’s got worker placement, but you only place 2 workers each round, and there are only 5 rounds.

The general structure of Missing Expedition is as follows: Like base Arnak, the game is played over 5 rounds. On each round, players draw a hand of five cards from their deck, then take turns performing primary actions, with the solo-mode opponent taking actions to lock off options from the players as well. Once a player can’t take anymore actions, they’re forced to pass, and can take no more turns. Once all players are out, the round ends, things are reset, and the next round starts. In addition, on a given turn, players can take any numbers of fast actions.

The actions fairly standard Euro sorts of things. Place a worker. Buy more card for your deck. Spend resources to advance down a progression track. Buy a different type of card. Play a card.

Like I said: Cheeseboard.

So now lets talk about the individual games a bit.

The Campaign

The Missing Expedition is six games long. Now, it doesn’t do the scaffolding campaign or legacy thing, where new mechanics are slowly introduced between games to build player familiarity. Instead, each game is more like a mod-pack, that sits on top of the base game, and adds even more mechanics and game behavior.

And while this does a lot of things, one thing it does do is make setup pretty slow. Arnak has a lot of pieces, cards and deck to be sorted, and setup was about 20-30 minutes each time we played.

I like the word Modpack to describe the co-op expansion, because Missing Expedition feels like a game for people who already a played a ton of Arnak, and wanted more, as opposed to a comfy tutorialized version where you don’t have the urge to shank your friends after they take the cards you wanted to buy.

For example, we ended game 1 with -12 points, and that game took four hours to play. It was not what I would call a energizing experience. But we got better! Game 2 ended with only -0.5 points.

Games 3-5 ended up going much better, giving us a fair amount of confidence going into game 6.

It was also game 6 that we realized we had been doing the games unlocks completely wrong, and should have unlocked much more then we actually did.

Game 6

Game 6 was the lowest of the lows for the experience. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that is very hard. Another was that the story conclusion was a little bit lackluster.

Remember when I mentioned how each scenario works differently? And it’s all specific rules each time?

We misread one of the rules, and as a result played the last third or so of that scenario completely incorrectly.

I don’t have a good way to describe the experience of realizing the last four hours of what was supposed to be a climatic experience was, in fact, just kind of a mistake/waste of time. Now, we could replay it, but this is supposed to be a campaign game. If you know what’s coming, for me there’s not much point.

So. It ended on a low.

Conclusion

The Missing Expedition feels like an expansion made for people who already love Arnak. Like, really love Arnak and have played it a bunch. I think Arnak is fine, and so most of the fun for me was hanging out with a friend and trying to find ways to game the systems.

It also (and I should note my friend disagrees on this, so it’s purely a matter of taste) didn’t quite deliver on the narrative to the extent I was hoping? None of the mysteries brought up are really solved, and most of the story is just… fine. Not funny or super engaging, just present to remind you that it’s there.

We also really struggled with the rulebook at times, which led to the game 6 fiasco. I’m more then open the fact that my dumb ass can’t read rule books. But I was playing with someone who designs board games, and even he was having trouble. I don’t think The Missing Expedition does a great job managing the different game modes.

If you like complex co-op Euro games or loved Arnak and wanted more weird Arnak, The Lost Expedition might be right up your alley. But for me, I’m going to disappear into the forest.

Skulls of Sedlec

Work has been incredibly busy lately. As such, this review, much like Skulls of Sedlec, is going to be incredibly compact.

Skulls of Sedlec is an 18-card pattern building, open drafting, and set collection game. Two of those three phrases I didn’t know until I went and looked them up on Board Game Geek, and I somewhat disagree with the third. It also has 12 expansions of which I will be reviewing zero. After all, the point of a Button Shy game is to make a micro-game that fits into a wallet, not one that you can go band for band with.

The full rules for Skulls of Sedlec are less than a page long, so I’m not going to spend too much time on the rules. The short version is that cards are divided up into piles, and on each player’s turn, that player takes one of three actions. You can:

Flip two cards in piles face up, then take one of them into your hand
Take a single face-up card from a pile into your hand
Put a single card from your hand into a stack/tableau.

Board Game Geek calls this game a set collection game, but I disagree. After all, most cards don’t score based on being part of a set. Instead, they score based on their relation to other cards in the pyramid. Some, like the lovers do need to be in a set to score, but many like royals or clergy have their own unique scoring rules.

Overall, I quite enjoyed Skulls of Sedlec. It’s a very compact game, and I’m not sure I’d get more than 2-3 more plays out of it. But it’s quick enough that I feel I could teach it pretty easily, even to non-board gamers. I’ve seen a fair number of people note that they didn’t consider it worth playing without the expansions, but I found it quite enjoyable, even as a standalone.

Spiral Knights

Ed Note: This is less review and more fugue state rant. It has been a very long week. Better writeups to come in the future when I have my brain back.

I found Spiral Knights while desperately searching for literally anything I could write about this week with even an ounce of passion. Work has been long, and while there are games I would like to talk about, six plus hours of meetings per day will evaporate anything even resembling a coherent thought.

Spiral Knights is interesting for a lot of different reasons, none of which have an ounce to do with the the actual gameplay. That’s because the gameplay is effectively multiplayer PvE 2d Zelda, grafted to a gear grinder. And even that oversells it a bit. It does have some minor puzzle elements, but these are rare.

What it has going for it is a fairly smooth multiplayer experience, allowing up to 4 players to join a party, and travel through its levels, which are called the clockworks. As already mentioned, those levels are somewhat random, and if the whole party dies, you lose all the stuff you got.

Still, this is a F2P game. You can pay to win in Spiral Knights harder than you can in most other games. You can buy resurrections and skip the grind by buying gear. You can even spend premium currency to buy non-premium currency off a sort of in-game real money trading house.

No, Spiral Knights is interesting because it’s somehow still around. For reference, the earliest achievement I have for this game is from god damn two-thousand fucking eleven. You know, back when I still had dreams, and my parents were together, and Obama was president. All good things, except maybe the second one.

In what universe does a 10+ year gap between achievements make sense?

Is it a sleeper hit? I don’t think so. Steam Stats has the game at about 150 players per day, and only 75 at low points. This means that for a non-zero portion of the time I spent playing it over the last few hours, I’ve been more than 1% of the online player base.

And yet, in an era where mobile games announce their closing and opening dates in the same tweet, this cutesy grindathon with less strategic and mechanical depth than Puzzle and Dragons has lived over a decade.

I don’t get it.

On the other hand, calling this a live-service game is inaccurate. What even appears to be the last actual patch was over 4 years ago. This is a shambling monstrosity, likely kept alive by… well, not even a skeleton crew, probably just a single skeleton. I wouldn’t be surprised if the main servers are running off something in a basement somewhere.

The forums are full of complaints and disappointment. The most lucid posts note that the game is effectively an archive of a past project. There are complaints about performance, and DMCA strikes the company running the game has levied against player-made mods.

On the other hand, Spiral Knights was fascinating to me 10 years ago. It was the game where I figured out how to arbitrage, trading TF2 items for Spiral Knights energy, and then back. It was also one of very few games that would actually run on the Mac I had back then.

Staring at Spiral Knights is a sort of fever dream: a game that should be dead, and yet still has my character, and their items, years after I’ve touched it. It is so old that I turned off my ad-blocker on the wiki, which is still up, and could still see the rest of the page.

I don’t actually recommend playing Spiral Knights, unless you want a sort of time machine to the state of F2P games in 2011-2016. It’s grindy as hell, and exists in that sort of space where everyone was trying to figure out how to make the best skinner box possible, but without having really greased the gears down yet.

Better writeups to come next week.

Green Mountain Gamers – Winter Weirdness

It’s time for another event writeup! This time it was Winter Weirdness, one of the board game days put on Green Mountain Gamers (if you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and looking for stuff to do, maybe click that link). As always, I’ll be quickly recapping the day, what I played, and what I thought about it.

Morning

After arriving, we started out with a quick game of Tiger and Dragon. I’ve written a ton about Tiger and Dragon already, and it was my favorite board game of last year, so there’s not too much to recap there.

After that icebreaker, we cracked open a friend’s copy of Parks that he found at a yard sale for $5. This turned out to be an incredible deal, because Parks is great. It’s amazingly well produced, with beautiful tokens and art. But more importantly, it’s actually fun. The main mechanism is moving down an action track that you can’t go back on, while trying to get enough resources to visit parks and score points. I might do a bigger writeup on this game at some point, but I really enjoyed playing Parks.

I then played Glory to Rome. It’s still very good, and we used one of the expansions, perhaps incorrectly, but we used it nonetheless. This was probably my fifth or so game of Glory to Rome, and I really felt like it was starting to click, or at least starting to click enough that my engine turned on and outscored everyone else to win.

After that it was time for…

Lunch

Someone mentioned that there was a very good grilled cheese sandwich place nearby, so we went over there. The Meltdown did have very good sandwiches, with a caveat.

When I think grilled cheese, I think buying them from a really sketchy guy in a parking lot at 1:00 AM in college for like 8 bucks, because he’s the only source of food in a billion miles. That is my expected grilled cheese experience.

And while I have no meaningful thoughts on food itself (this is game blog, not a food blog) I do think paying a net of $25 for a single grilled cheese sandwich with fries is bit… much.

Great food, would probably pack a sandwich next time.

Afternoon

Heading back to the event, I cracked open a copy of Epic: Guardians of Gowana that I’d picked up recently, and played of game that. Despite taking almost of my life in damage on turn 1, I was pleasantly surprised by Epic. It’s a cool little expandable card game, with a neat resource mechanic where all cards cost either 1 or 0 gold to play, and each player gets a max of one gold each turn. It worked much better than I was expecting.

Then I joined some other folks for a game of Everdell. For various reasons that have nothing to do with the game itself, I’m unlikely to ever purchase, or have any friends who own a copy of Everdell unless I somehow manage to get it secondhand. That said, I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve played it before, so I wanted to give it a second shot. Everdell is a cute little tableau builder/worker placement game, and I had a good enough time that I’d probably want to give it yet another shot.

After that, I managed to get in a game of Space Lion, one of the games I’d brought to the event. I got my copy at PAX, and I’ve been trying grind out some more games before I do a secondary writeup on it. I did write about it pre-Kickstarter, but now that I’ve got a full copy, the game has been changed quite a bit. There’s a bunch of improvements to graphic design, along with some structural changes that make for a better play experience, but do remove some elements I liked from the… hmm. Prototype version? Beta? Not quite sure what to call it.

Finally, with it getting late, and the friend I got a ride with showing no signs of finishing up his game of Ark Nova, I sat down to play Three Sisters. Well, I planned to, but unfortunately we didn’t quite have time to finish the game out. I’ll try to get a full game in at some point, but I liked what I did play.

Wrap-Up

Overall, great time. There are two more events coming up, and I’m currently planning to be at both of them. Hopefully if you’re in the Vermont or New hampshire area, I’ll see you there, and if not, well, I’m planning to be at Granite Game Summit, PAX East and PAX Unplugged this year as well.

Shadows Over Loathing

Figuring out the genre for Shadows Over Loathing is a bit weird. On the one hand, you could call it a RPG. There’s turn based combat, lots of items to pick up and equip, and party and inventory management. A lot of the hallmarks of the genre.

You could also play through the entire game without engaging with any of those systems, and instead just solving weird puzzles and picking the right dialogue options in conversation and interaction. Meaning that if you wanted to, you could just play it as an adventure game.

So, y’know. To each their own I guess?

A lot of Shadows Over Loathing’s strength is in its writing. Will you find it funny? Well, here’s a very simple test for whether. This is the company logo of Asymmetric, the folks who make the game:

If this made you laugh, or at least groan, you’ll probably enjoy yourself. Otherwise you may have a mixed experience.

There’s also one other test that will quickly filter out would-be players: how do you feel about a game that looks like this?

Yes, they’re very well-done stick figures drawings, but they’re still stick figure drawings.

Now that we’ve filtered out anyone who simply wouldn’t have a good time, let’s talk about the actual game.

Gameplay Loop

I don’t have game that I can easily map Shadows Over Loathing to in terms of its gameplay loop. Generally, you wander around looking for something to progress the current state of the main quest, while doing side quests and discovering esoteric bullshit along the way.

While this might just sound like stumbling along, it’s fun because of how much there is to see or do, and how weird it is. Fix a tiny lighthouse. Pull off a criminal heist with a bunch of elderly citizens. Do jobs for the mafia. Collect hats.

All of this is set against a backdrop of a main story that does a surprisingly good job of actually delivering on some of its loose 1920’s Lovecraft horror themes. One of the big issues with the pop-culturalization of cosmic horror is that Cthulhu has gone from the unwaking dreamer who will end the world to Godzilla with an octopus head.

Shadows Over Loathing is much more subtle, and given that it can’t really do horror with its art style, it aims for ‘discomforting’ instead. Sure, there are tentacles and shadow blobs, but there are also unwinding spaces that can’t exist and trees that call for a woodsman to deliver the axe. For every dozen fishmen, there’s one eternal baseball game that can never be called.

That said, Shadows Over Loathing was at its weakest and most frustrating for me when it got a bit too into the weeds of an adventure game. If there’s a single path through a situation, it can be quite frustrating if you’re unable to spot it. And because this game often runs on dream logic, especially during curse sequences, it can be easy to get stuck.

Running into Colonel Sanders as a vampire is funny the first time. But after the 5th time it’s just kind of annoying, especially when it’s the exact same dialogue tree.

In addition, while interesting, the overall narrative does feel a little rushed at the end. While the game is chock full of fun things to see and do, it felt like it was about 30% shorter than I was expecting in terms of the build up for the finale.

Combat

There’s one big system I haven’t talked about yet, and that’s the combat and leveling system. Shadows Over Loathing has a pretty unique take on character classes. They give you a sort of basic skill tree. But on top of that, you learn most combat abilities and a wide range of other perks from finding books. In addition, pretty much everything gives you experience points to spend.

Combat itself is a bit of a mishmash. It’s turn based, but you have action points to use for certain secondary actions, and you can use a given number per round in addition to that. Enemies can also be tabbed to see who and what they’re attacking, meaning the game is more of a puzzle to be solved than a DPS check or gear check.

Also, there are a lot of items, and switching them up is often necessary. How many items, you ask? Well, this is a screen of half of my hats.

And while we’re speaking about inventory, here’s a list of all my shoes.

I should note: shoes don’t appear to have a mechanical impact on the game, they just change your walk animation and play weird sound effects based on what you have equipped. But they’re still given an entire inventory slot. This fact is never noted or elaborated on in game once, and it’s a pretty good example of the tone of the humor in Shadows Over Loathing.

Final Verdict

I generally liked Shadows Over Loathing. I don’t strongly recommend it or dislike it. It’s weirdly novel, and I found it quite funny and clever, but it wasn’t earthshattering. It was a much better use of my time than Knuckle Sandwich to be sure. I do want to give it credit for a fantastic Steam Deck implementation.

If you want a funny and strange RPG/Adventure Game hybrid that will only require looking at a walkthrough 3-4 times, then I’d say Shadows Over Loathing might be right up your alley. It’s $23 on Steam and for the 15-20 hours I played, that feels about right.