Author: MrBlueSky

PAX Unplugged 2023 – The Trading Card Games

Ah, Trading Card Games, or if you’re me, “The Money Hole.” PAX Unplugged is almost always awash in TCG’s of some sort or another, and this year was no exception.

Alpha Clash

Alpha Clash was the indie TCG of the show for me. Were there other small TCG’s at the show? Yes, but if you can afford a Disney license for your product, you’re not small enough.

It’s also the one I’m probably going to write the least about here. It’s actually interesting, so I’m going to play a bunch more and do a full writeup later. But as a teaser, here are some of the game’s mechanics:

  • Every creature effectively has haste. (Okay.)
  • All cards are lands. (We’ve seen this before, but still neat.)
  • The entire system for resolving combat has been blown up. There’s a secondary system to prevent the game from stalling out in a game of chicken with combat tricks. (Actually very new and interesting.)

As with almost all games, I do have problems with it. I dislike the the rarity system, and I don’t love the American comic book aesthetic. But the game’s actual mechanics are far more solid than pretty much every other indie TCG I’ve run into over the last few years. So this could be one to watch.

If this sounds interesting, here’s a link to the game’s webpage, and the game has a fully functional TTS implementation as well.

Star Wars: Unlimited

I’ve done some thinking about other Disney properties in Lorcana, but I never put my thoughts into writing in my “Future of Lorcana” writeup a while back. I was curious if Lorcana could potentially see Marvel or Star Wars cards, and the answer right now appears to be “No.” Otherwise I suspect Fantasy Flight wouldn’t have shelled out for a license for Star Wars: Unlimited.

I never actually asked anyone what the Unlimited in the name meant. Presumably the amount of money Fantasy Flight hopes to make with the game? Regardless, I did play a demo of Star Wars: Unlimited.

I don’t have much to say on the game itself. It’s not uninteresting, but the starter decks and demos often don’t translate into thrilling gameplay. Meanwhile, Star Wars: Unlimited doesn’t have any incredibly unique inherent systems if you’ve already played a ton of games.

The most interesting part of the game for me is how it handles the ever present “actions on opponent’s turn” problem. Star Wars: Unlimited makes it so that players don’t really have turns, they just have actions. Doing anything: attacking, playing a unit card, using a commander ability, or playing an action card all use up your action, resolve the effect, and then pass priority to your opponent. In addition, one of the actions that can be taken is to pass all futures for the round, and in exchange, get to act first next round, called seizing the initiative.

If I remember correctly, I think this sort of mechanic might have been in Star Wars: Destiny, another collectible game by Fantasy Flight.

My overall thoughts on Unlimited are kind of just “Okay.” Star Wars has negative brand loyalty from me, mostly because I just don’t care about the franchise. Also because I’m petty and billion years ago dated someone who cared too much. There were some elements in Star Wars: Unlimited that felt like fun flavor touches with how certain mechanics functioned, or characters worked together. But while I’d play more of the game, I’m not in any rush to acquire a copy. It launches March 8th, and I suppose I’ll see what state it’s in at PAX East.

Lorcana

The most notable thing about Lorcana for me at PAX Unplugged was that the prices were “within expectations” as opposed to an “arm and leg.” Usually things are not notably cheaper at Conventions. Usually it’s the other way around. But booster boxes and decks were at MSRP. For comparison, single booster boxes are currently $207 dollars.

Not cheap, but yknow. Normal prices. Also 8% sales tax. The hell is that Pennsylvania?

I was going to say that I didn’t actually play any Lorcana at the show, but that’s not true! While I didn’t play any during the show, I did run into a very friendly group of folks in the hotel lobby Wednesday night, and spent a few hours chatting with them. And also beating them with their own starter decks that they’d just picked up. Because y’know, I’ve played the game before. A lot.

There wasn’t anything in the new set that immediately stood out to me. Looking back at it now, it does have at least one new keyword, and some new typal references. It also had a fair amount of space on the show floor.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic earns a slot on this just barely above Pokémon by virtue of the fact that I actually did play some Magic at Unplugged. It was a grand total of 3 games, they were all two-headed giant Ixalan drafts. Me and the friend I was playing with won every single one, admittedly some by the skin of our teeth. But win we did, and I was able to get a copy of one of the Dr. Who commander decks with our prize tickets.

There’s not too much to say on Magic, really. Ixalan is a fun set. Pasttimes is still running events in a way that makes no sense. You still have to use the terrible MTG Companion app whose one saving grace is that I can log in with my MTG Arena Account.

Pokémon

I didn’t play much Pokémon this year outside of looping by the Pokémon booth to get some pins. At this point, I’ve played those demos enough that I could probably run them. They did add a small raid battle mode which was almost cool, but unfortunately, doesn’t actually have any meaningful strategy.

As such, it’s hard to tell if Pokémon was mostly at Unplugged as a collector’s game, as opposed to a TCG.

Everyone else.

It was an interesting year for PAX TCG’s. There was a lot more support for mid-level entries than I was expecting. The show had at least semi-dedicated areas for Flesh & Blood, and One Piece. I think I saw SolForge fusion over somewhere as well. That said, I didn’t play any of these, and didn’t feel very compelled to.

Unlike last year, with Gem Blenders & Genesis, and last year’s PAX East with Nostalgix, it felt like a very light year for the true indies, with Alpha Clash really being the only one.

Still though. Lotta card games.

The Backlog Cleanout

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, and what better time for a bit of cleaning? Specifically, cleaning out the backlog of all the games I played, didn’t write about, and now too much time has elapsed for me to give a fresh review. For each of these games, I’ll be giving my general impressions, and talking a little bit about why I didn’t actually get around to doing a full writeup. I’ll also go in semi-chronological order, so let’s get to it, starting with one of this years indie darlings:

Pizza Tower is a side scrolling platformer that I think is supposed to be in the vein of the old Warioland platformers. I say “I think” because I’ve never played one of those games. My lack of familiarity with the genre is what prevented me from doing a writeup of any sort.

See, I usually like to talk about games in the context of other games, their inspirations, and what they do better than their predecessors. But everything about Pizza Tower is incredibly alien to me. It has an art style that I think is supposed evoke Courage the Cowardly Dog. It has an extremely fast pace, and is very focused on speed and collectable items for points. It was a really difference experience from other games I’ve played.

And frankly, given that the game has an overwhelmingly positive rating with 44,000 reviews right now, I’m not sure I have much to add. I thought Pizza Tower was weird, but good. It also has my favorite game soundtrack of the year, because it just goes wayyyy harder than it has to.

I’m honestly surprised that I never got around to writing about Inkbound. It was one of my games to watch from February last year. And then I bought it, and played 40 hours, and never did a writeup.

Inkbound is a lot of things. It’s a roguelike. It has good multiplayer. It’s an isometric turn-based battler. And it’s really fun. So why didn’t I do a writeup?

Part of that is that I’m conflicted on how I feel about Inkbound’s structure. My internal conflict isn’t helped by the fact that the game itself is in a state a flux. If I’d written a full review earlier, I would probably have complained about the game’s microtransaction store, which has now been completely removed. I would have also probably praised the game’s dual movement/action resource system, where both moving around and performing attacks pulls from a single resource pool. That system has also been replaced.

I may do a writeup on the game in the future. I love the game for its mechanics, and I’m mildly frustrated by it for other reasons. But there’s been so much more added, and so many changes since I logged my 40 hours. At this point even if I sat down today and wrote something, it wouldn’t be indicative of the game’s current state.

Before I say anything about APICO, I think it’s worth noting that I paid approximately $9 for it and bunch of other games on an itch bundle, and not the $20 it currently costs.

APICO is another multiplayer game that I mostly played with friends, and as such, there were quite a few systems I never actually engaged with. It’s trying to be a comfy pixel world game where you breed bees, and gather honey. I think it’s supposed to feel small and cozy.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d like to respond to that design goal with the following screenshot:

Not pictured: my other friends running around desperately trying to keep our system functioning.

Instead of the comfy sim, APICO turned into something closer to Satisfactory. We attempted to hyper optimize production and throughput, which is why I had 12 interactable item windows open at once. As you might expect, it did end up feeling rather grindy.

I don’t really like or dislike APICO a huge amount. It was amusing to play with folks, but some of that was the chaotic dichotomy between the game’s cute pixel art, and our frenzied thrashing to keep our honey cola soft drink production up.

I probably would have gotten around to doing a writeup on PlateUp if I’d played more than 4 hours of it. It’s a multiplayer food production game in the vein of Overcooked. But it trades specific levels out for a roguelike set of upgrades and runs.

That said, I only played 4 hours of it because that’s how long it took for there to be a conflict between my friends, and then we never returned it to it. And I have no desire to play a game like PlateUp by myself.

End result? I dropped it much earlier than I would have otherwise, and I’m also now realizing it might have been a waste of $20. Oh well.

Dragon Castle was one of three games with “dragon” in the name that I played in a one week span, the other two being Tiger and Dragon, which I loved, and Dragonwood, which I hated. Being the awkward middle child of the trio, compounded with the fact that I only played it once, meant that I never really got around to talking about Dragon Castle.

It’s a perfectly functional sort of tile drafting/placement/set collection game. I enjoyed it. But I didn’t play it enough, and it didn’t leave a strong enough impression for me to really be like “Oh, I love this, I must speak about it more.”

But hey, you know what game did leave a strong impression? Aegean Sea. It was first game I’ve ever played where 3 turns in, everyone at the table decided that they would rather play something else, and unanimously sort of just rage quit.

Rage quitting a board game might not sound like much coming from me, the poster child for ADHD medication. That said, I was playing with a professional game designer with multiple published games, and someone who just tracks how many victory points everyone else at the table has in games like Feast for Odin. In their head.

Goodbye Aegean Sea. You will not be missed. (Which is weird because I like other Carl Chudyk designs)

I’ve described Farlight 84 as Wish.com Fortnite. It’s a battle royale shooter, and outside of the cool vehicles, it doesn’t have a single piece of personality.

If AI ever does get around to generating games, this is the sort of thing that it will make. A generic mobile shooter stuffed with microtransactions and lootboxes. Characters that feel like they were designed by combining a list of demographics and fetishes, and making sure there was something for everyone.

Farlight 84 is polished gravel. Functional, technically effective, and displaying all the heart of the Grinch at the start of the book.

So I’d like to admit something. I couldn’t stand Mario Bros Wonder. I don’t understand how this game was even in consideration for game of the year.

Here’s the thing: I’m usually not in the position of not liking a game everyone else loves. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. The best example I can think of for this is Cult of the Lamb. And I think something similar happened here.

I found Wonder to be almost entirely spectacle at the cost of interesting mechanical innovations. And before you stab me, yes, I do mean the wonder flowers. The thing about the wonder flowers is that while what they do is new for Mario, it’s not new for games or even platformers. And I don’t even think Mario does it best. Mechanics like being chased by your shadow have been done in Celeste, and other 3D Mario games. Singing piranha plants are fun, but this demo level from Billie Bust Up feels like it executes the idea much better.

Anyway, I didn’t do a full writeup on Wonder because I think it suffers from the same problem as Cult of the Lamb. Because I play a lot of games, I’ve seen these perfectly fine mechanics done better elsewhere, even though they are executed here with in a very polished way.

But yeah, I felt robbed of $60 after playing this.

PAX Unplugged 2023 – The Full Demos

There’s not enough time to play a full demo of everything at PAX. I think if the show was set up to let you do that, it would probably be one or two months long. I’m not sure I could take that long off work.

That said, I did play a bunch of full demos! So, in no particular order, here are a bunch of things I played that you might not have heard of.

(Okay, in no particular order except Pack The Essentials, which is first because it’s pretty great.)

Pack The Essentials

There’s a lot to unpack about Pack The Essentials. The short version is that I really liked playing this, and I’m excited to see a full release. And while I did play it in the Unpub hall, it already has a publisher: Whacky Wizard games, a new spin off of Wise Wizard games.

Pack the Essentials is a tile drafting and placement game. Players take turns drafting tetromino-like tiles, and placing them onto a personal board. It’s a bit point salad, and your goal is to get the most victory points. You get points for a variety of things, from building chains of certain colored tiles, to surrounding other types of tiles, to using a secondary resource to flip the tiles into cats. Yes, your stuff turns into cats.

Prototype art!

Pack The Essentials was one of my favorite things at the show, and I’m excited to see the full version.

Author Note: If you’re wondering why the board looks completely different from the splash image, that’s because I was playing a prototype version which doesn’t have finalized art. The gameplay was still great.

Crystallo

I am putting Crystallo on this list mostly out of a combined sense of spite, and grudging respect. I did in fact play an entire game of Crystallo, and I actually won, admittedly on easy mode. But let’s back up for a moment.

Crystallo is a single player set placement game. In fact, you could call it a Set-like game, in that it takes the primary mechanic from Set. I don’t think that’s an unfair observation, since the person demoing it to me referenced Set when explaining Crystallo.

It’s a bit easier to see than to explain, so here’s a quick image of my finished Crystallo board.

Did this image help? I hope it did, because it’s eating a non-zero portion of the 10 gigs I have to host this site. A picture might be worth a 1,000 words, but it takes up the memory of like 400,000 words.

Crystallo effectively has two rounds. In the first round you build out a map of cards, one card at a time. You’re trying to surround specific colored emblems. Each time you do so, you complete a set, and you’re trying to complete enough sets to win. In the second part of the game, you try to get one more match of kind each, using all your remaining cards, plus an additional 9.

The thing about Crystallo is that it was not particularly “fun” for me. In fact, the main emotion I remember feeling was immense stress, and mild frustration. There was a palpable sense of relief after I finished, because apparently when a game frustrates me to no end, my response is to sit down and finish the entire thing instead of going and doing something else.

I should work on expanding that skill set to the rest of my life.

Anyway, I do respect Crystallo, but it’s absolutely not a game for me.

Canosa

One of my personal “classic” board games, which is to say a game that I remember from my childhood is Quoridor. Fairly simple rules, but what felt like a complex game to play.

Canosa gave me a very similar vibe. It’s probably easiest to describe it in terms of something like Chess, but that’s still inaccurate. There are two types of pieces: Sailors and Sirens. Each player has one Siren, and your goal is to move four sailors to your own island. The catch is that you don’t own Sailors. Instead, their ownership changes. Sailors and Sirens have colored rings on them corresponding to the player, and there’s a set of mechanics for moving those rings on and off. Which ring is the highest on the sailor determines which player controls it.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure the retail edition has the beautiful wooden pieces, but I can still dream.

Playing it feels very similar to playing something like Quoridor, Connect Four, or Chess to me. The main skill you need to succeed is the ability to look ahead and figure out what your opponent is going to do. But that’s hard enough that it’s fairly easy to missing an option or fail to spot a solution.

I don’t think it’s fair to evaluate a game like Canosa after one play. But I would play more of it! Just preferably not against the game’s creator again, because getting butchered isn’t exactly the best experience. But I would play more.

Skyrockets

Skyrockets is thematically a game about fireworks. Mechanically, it’s a real time sand timer management game. Players have hands of cards with two colors on them, take turns playing cards. Whenever anyone plays a card, you flip the two sand timers that match the card’s colors.

You win by flipping the largest sand timer several times, but you can only flip it after it runs out. Meanwhile, you have to keep all the other sand timers from ever running out. It’s a fairly simple concept, but worked pretty well.

On the whole, Sky Rockets felt like a lightweight game I’d bring to a family gathering, or maybe play as a quick thing at a larger event. It’s not uninteresting, but it also didn’t sell me on itself quite enough for me to grab a copy on the spot.

Shape Invaders

Shape Invaders is a tabletop game, in that it takes up an entire friggin tabletop. It’s a physical dexterity game for two players. Each player has a set of slim plastic pieces that they set up on their side of the table. Then they take turns flicking pieces and trying to knock the other player’s mothership off the board.

It’s actually quite fun, and I really liked it. It also has a sort of comeback mechanic that works really well. Each player has a set of pieces that can’t be flicked, called shields. Whenever your mothership would be knocked off the board, you remove a shield and place the mothership where the shield was. It’s much better than a flat life system, since it’s possible to go after shields early.

Dungeon Drop

Dungeon Drop is another “most of a table” game that has some physical dexterity elements. I’ll be honest, I did not enjoy Dungeon Drop at all. Here’s how the game works.

You start by dropping a large number of small plastic cubes into an enclosed area. On your turn, you drop more cubes in, then select a set of cubes encapsulated by other specific cubes to pick up. There’s more to it than that, and there are some special powers that involve flicking cubes, or different cubes being worth different amounts, but it just wasn’t very interesting.

Most of the game is just spent looking for good patterns on your turn, and hoping no one else spots them. There just wasn’t very much I found interesting about it.

PAX Unplugged 2023 – The Unpublished

Everyone has their convention rituals. Some people go to panels, get autographs, or eat food at a specific place. I always try to spend at least some time down in the Unpub room and play prototypes.

This year, I played two games in Unpub that really stood out to me.

Abracabattle

Image Taken from the Abracabattle Pitch Kit.

First, there was Abracabattle. Abracabattle is a tableau building battle game. Players are battling wizards, adding cards from a central buy row to their attacking spellbook, and then casting those spells based on the outcome of dice rolls. At the same time, casting spells generates wisdom to spend on even better spells.

Abracabattle is probably the perfect example of the sort of thing I go to Unpub to see. It’s a fairly fun, if currently a little unpolished, with a simple premise and enjoyable gameplay. It’s also very much a work in progress, with a limited number of cards and synergies, and a bunch of placeholder art.

But Abracabattle is fun, and it feels like it just needs a bit more time to cook to become something really interesting. For one, there’s a lot of open design space in its design. In addition, at least one of the game’s elements—snakes—really works. In fact, let’s talk about snakes for a moment.

Some spells in Abracabattle are Snake Spells. Snakes spells want to be next to other snake spells. Some of them get stronger when next to other snake spells. Others reward you when you cast nearby snake spells. The snake mechanic is a really cool design, and it also means that some of the “trigger when nearby stuff triggers” effects also synergize well with the rest of the pool.

I’m excited to see what Abracabattle becomes, and I’m hopeful I’ll get to see it as a full game at some point in the future. Oh, and if you want to see what it looks like right now, you can play it on Tabletop Simulator.

Blackberries

On the other end of the spectrum, there was Blackberries, a physical dexterity game about picking blackberries. Cards are stacked into a huge heap, and each turn players use a single finger to nudge and move them about. It’s not very complex, but it’s quite fun, and I can see it working very well as simple one deck sort of game.

If you want to see progress on the game, the creator can be found over at jestinbrooks.bsky.social. I’d make that a link, except I’m not on Blue Sky. So I can’t actually seem to find their page. It is what it is.

Still though, Blackberries was quite fun, and I’m curious if the game will still work when it’s not printed on sleeved cards. It could be great! Or it could completely fall apart. But it was still a clever game in that moment, and I hope I see more of it.

Wrap-up

There was one other game in Unpub that I want to talk about, but it wasn’t actually unpublished, so I’ll be saving that one for another post. There were also a few other games I looked at, or played but didn’t feel strongly enough about to want to talk about them.

Still though, it was a lot of fun, even though I spent less time this year in Unpub than I usually do.

And hey! If playing unfinished games sounds interesting to you, or you’re looking to have people play your game prototype, maybe check out the Unpub website. You’ll be able to find info on Unpub’s other events. PAX isn’t the only con they attend, and there are a lot of other opportunities to try unfinished prototypes.

PAX Unplugged 2023 – Pre & Post

Welcome to part one of my PAXU 2023 writeup! If you’re mostly here for game coverage, you can skip this one. If you’re willing to indulge me in a bit of rambling on air travel, Philly, and the new OLED Steam Deck, feel free to stick around. Unlike most of the other posts in this series, this is just going to be some thoughts about everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.

First off, air travel! I actually don’t mind flying, and I used to do a fair amount of it for work. But I haven’t flown for work in years, so every time I think about it, I feel like the guy who talks about how he was great at high school football. But anyway, point is, I’m pretty familiar with airports, flying, and the whole thing.

Except this time I flew Cape Air, a smaller airline that services the New England area, and it was a bit of a doozy. First off, all the planes are Cessnas (I think—plane people don’t kill me please), which are very small. My flight back had 3 people on it, and one of them was the pilot.

It was an incredibly different experience than I was used to, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a weird way. The plane was much louder than I expected even with earplugs, and I could see out every inch of the plane. Honestly, it was pretty staggering. I’m fairly jaded on flying at this point. Doing it bi-weekly for 3 years will do that. But coming up through the fog and into the massive sprawling plain of clouds was just incredible. I have some photos, but they really don’t do it justice.

Also spent some time in a fancy airport lounge, and felt more upper middle class than I ever have before.

Some of this airplane and airplane adjacent time was spent testing out my new Steam Deck. I’ll probably do a full writeup once I play through a few more games on it, but in brief: good battery life, good screen, don’t love the controls, currently still mixed on it as a system. It’s also a bit bulky, but I wasn’t going to get a better chance to try it out than this weekend. I played a bunch of Shadows Over Loathing, which I’ve found to be quite good!

However, the Steam Deck didn’t get much time to shine because I spent very little time waiting in lines this week. That’s not say there weren’t lines, but they were mostly for food rather than games or demos. As always, I’m obligated to shout out Reading Terminal Market, and I’d like to specifically call out Sweet Nina’s, which makes killer banana pudding. Is Reading Terminal Market reasonably priced? Not quite, but the quality of the food is so much better than anything you’d get in any convention hall, I don’t know why you’d ever buy anything from the convention.

Seriously though. If you’re at PAX Unplugged, you should either be 1. Bringing your own food in, or 2. Going out and getting food. If you get convention hall food you’re being gouged for terrible food, at terrible prices, in terrible lines.

Speaking of terrible lines, here’s a riddle: what do you get when you try to have 10,000 people use a single escalator to enter a convention hall? Answer: a mess! There was a line stretching around Reading Terminal just to get into the line to get into security to get into the queue hall line. No, I didn’t mistype that last sentence, and you’re not having a stroke, it was that bad. Whoever thought having a single entrance with one staircase and one escalator to actually get in was an idiot.

Outside of that though, I was able to avoid most of the awful lines this week, and I’d consider it to be a pretty good show. My notes are a bit more chaotic, and I feel like I spent less time just grinding things out than I normally would.

Anyway, now that I’ve covered everything else, it’s time for board game posts! Which will be going up slowly over the rest of this week.