Gametrodon

Author: MrBlueSky

  • Single Player Magic The Gathering

    Single Player Magic The Gathering

    Recently I promised a friend that I would make them a single player Magic: The Gathering experience. This is funny for a lot of reasons. Mostly that the person in question is a game designer who loves single player games, and I’m a game player who hates them. But a promise is a promise, and so I spent a lot of time playing single player magic.

    And I have some thoughts.

    I’m going to detail those thoughts, various game modes, and my experiences with them. I’m pulling them from this list on Board Game Geek.

    Also, in case anyone who made any of these ends up reading this: please keep in mind, I’m a hater. I already don’t like single player board games. I’m doing this mostly for research on my end. Don’t make changes to your mods to try to please me of all people.

    The Wrath of Zorr

    The first one in the list, Wrath of Zorr, is possibly the least interesting to me, both from a play and design standpoint. It’s a standard game of Magic where you roll against a series of tables, resolving effects and creating tokens for the AI opponent.

    Notably, it appears to be from 2013. The problem with this is that creature power has been substantially pushed up since then. I was able to grab one of my commander precons, shuffle in the commander, and beat it to death with ease.

    Zorr’s turn 3 best outcome is arguably to get a 1/1 flier and kill spell, or a 1/1 flier and a 2/2 bear, whereas a 3/3 for 3 is practically the floor for creatures in the precon I was using.

    Wrath of Zorr also requires the player to make a lot of decisions about what to kill, when to attack or block, and redefines existing magic terms, notably completely changing what “Exile” means in context.

    I suspect that 15 years ago with creature power level much lower, this could have been a more interesting experience. As it was, I found it dull and clunky.

    Aaron’s Solitaire – Moonfrog Edition

    Aaron’s Solitaire is another single player variant that uses a single deck between the human and AI player. The player plays a normal game of Magic, and the AI plays cards off the top of the deck for free.

    Aaron’s Solitaire suffers a bit from the same problem, despite coming out in 2019: creatures are too strong when they aren’t controlled by mana costs. This time though, it happens in a slightly different direction, because it allows cards like this to pop out on turn 1.

    Valgavoth, Terror Eater (Duskmourn: House of Horror #120)

    Do you know what happens when this occurs? You lose.

    Same for this guy.

    Again, I didn’t find this mode to feel very much like playing Magic, and I didn’t exactly have a great time.

    Horde Mode + Garruk the Slayer

    Horde Mode was the first one of these I’ve played that offered something that felt a bit closer to standard Magic experience. While the player plays a standard game of Magic, the opponent plays with an 80 card deck, and that deck also functions as their life. On each of their turns, the AI player resolves up to the top 3 cards of their deck (Stopping early for mythics/rares/uncommons) and then swings in with everything.

    I’ll give Horde Mode some credit here. It was more fun than the other modes. But it was still not very fun, because I found it to mostly be a deckbuilding puzzle rather than a gameplay puzzle1, and the deck I built was this abomination.

    Still, the deck as life was cool! I liked that.

    Takeaways

    Based on playing these, I came up with a few specific design goals for my single player variant.

    1. The game should play like Magic (no custom cards, no redefining keywords, all rules work normally), but it shouldn’t feel like a standard game of Magic.
    2. The player should have to make some interesting decisions about how to “play” the game. Meaning you shouldn’t be able to win with just deckbuilding. (Also, boardwipes and control lists should be at least somewhat pressured.)
    3. The AI’s actions should not be super random, and if anything, should be telegraphed to player within reason.
    4. The AI and player should be on roughly even power curves. The AI should be limited by mana costs to some extent.

    Anyway, I made a prototype of it. The result was something I’m calling Spiderman Vs The Portal Master. It was well received, and probably violates a lot of copyrights. Given how well it went over, I’ll probably go back to it at some point and make a version I can release for folks to play if I find the energy.

    1. And despite what some people think, I do think Magic is a game about piloting decisions, and not just deckbuilding. ↩︎
  • Spring Cleaning Write-up

    Spring Cleaning Write-up

    It’s been a little bit hasn’t it? In the interest of cleaning out my backlog of unfinished work and making it so that I don’t have to look at 18 drafts every time I log into this website, here’s a bunch of stuff I played enough to have opinions on, start write-ups, and then just never finish them.

    Order is going to be how good the games are, because one of is these is simply one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, some are the greatest games I played last year, and some were only marginally better than taking the money I spent on them and setting it on fire.

    Without any adieu or whatever, let’s begin.

    Blue Prince – The greatest puzzle game of the last 10 years.

    I started a Blue Prince write-up after “beating” the game, then went back and played another 50 hours, and I have still not beaten the game.

    Blue Prince is one of the greatest games in the last 10 years. It is easily the greatest puzzle game I have ever played. If you have not played it, and you like puzzle games at all, go play this. I took notes playing this game, and even with the screenshots, my Blue Prince google doc is 170 pages long. And yet the game never felt overwhelming, or extensively frustrating1.

    Blue Prince is a masterpiece. It is brilliant, and you should play it. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to.

    UFO 50 – 50 incredible games from Derek Yu and other collaborators for a video game console that never existed.

    You know what was great last year? UFO 50. I played a bunch of UFO 50, I was going to try to review it, then it turned out that was going to be too hard, so I was going to review a single game from UFO 50. That was Avianos, a dinosaur themed 4x game with action selection mechanics, and I couldn’t even get that done. So yeah. UFO 50. It’s incredible. You will find something you love in it, and that’s ignoring all the other secrets and collectibles, and a billion other things I never even touched.

    High Tide – Abstract tile movement game by Marceline Leiman

    I don’t know how to write a good review of an abstract ocean themed game about hexagon movement, but I’m not a full time game reviewer. Dan Thurot is, so I’m just going to link to his review, and hopefully that makes up for stealing the images from it.

    One thing I do want to quickly note is that it now has a commercial release, instead of having to make some sort of eldritch deal to get one of the very limited night market copies!

    Hytale – Minecraft, but not finished, but also designed by people to whom “quality of life” is not just 13 random letters in a row.

    What if Minecraft was designed by someone who cared about player experience on all levels of the game, instead of keep in a perpetual state of stasis by suits at Microsoft who are so scared of ever making any adjustments to their 2 billion purchase that Roblox already ate their lunch? You’d probably get Hytale, and if the game goes and manages to actually ship all of its content instead going back to development hell, it is going to be the best one of these crafting games.

    It’s a big IF though. Like a HUGE fuckin’ if.

    Gundam Card Game – I keep thinking it’s spelled Gundum, but I guess that’s wrong?

    It’s fine. Resource structure similar to One Piece, mostly entertaining to play, and nobody’s scalping it quite as hard as some of these other games, so that’s cool.

    Donkey Kong Bananza – I keep spelling “Bonanza” correctly, which is wrong.

    I was going to put Donkey Kong Bananza here, but then I realized I’d mostly already finished this writeup? And never posted it? I think because I got laid off almost immediately after getting it to 80% complete. Anyway, you can read that write up here.

    Highguard – Lessons should be learned here, but they won’t be.

    It lived, it died, we hardly cried. The most notable thing about Highguard to me is that it’s not the very bottom of this list, but you can’t even play it if you want to, so who cares?

    Age of Darkness: Final Stand – The worst RTS I have ever played.

    It is rare that I play a game that fails on every conceivable level, while still somehow making it to release. Age of Darkness is that game. It is so shockingly bad that even just thinking about it again, more then a YEAR after I last played it brings to mind a list of problems burned into my brain. Here it is!

    The game’s networking is awful and it disconnects in multiplayer constantly. The game is micro intensive while requiring equally expansive macro. The units are both hard to control and incredibly dull, with no single character matching the personality of zergling, space marine, or zealot. There are no alternate build paths, the campaign difficulty is a brick wall, the game just looks bad, and as a result of all of these it just isn’t fun to play.

    There is nothing redeeming, and nothing it does better than its ancestors or contemporaries. It’s not even bad in an interesting way, it’s just awful and I want my $28 back.

    I’m not even going to link to it. They don’t deserve it.

  • Donkey Kong Bananza

    Writer’s Note: I got laid off about a week after writing the majority of this article, forgot about it, and came back to it in mid April after getting a new job. So if this write up feels a bit temporally disconnected, that’s why. I also don’t feel like changing it at all, because even 4 months later from my initial write-up, my Switch 2 has been at best a Pokopia machine. I feel mildly ripped off by getting a Switch 2.

    One of my Christmas presents (from myself, to me) was a Switch 2. I’ve been cautiously looking at the Switch 2 for a while. I was going to write “the last few years” there, but apparently this thing came out in June? Like, last year June?

    2025 was a very long year.

    Anyway. Switch 2. I was gonna ride it out for the long haul and pick one up second hand or something, or wait a few years, but then the invisible hand of the free market decided to divert the entirety of the world’s rare minerals into the Plagiarism Machine we’re pretending is artificially intelligent. RAM has quadrupled in price, other computer parts are looking to do the same, and dear reader, being the savvy fellow I am, I realized the game consoles are also made of computer parts!

    Anyway, I now have a Switch 2. It was $450, came with Mario Kart World, and I also grabbed Donkey Kong Bananza, Pokemon Legends Z-A, and Kirby Air Riders1. Oh, and Pokopia. Each of these was $70. $730 for 5 video games. So when you think about it, about $165 per game.

    Donkey Kong Bananza is not a $146 game. It is maybe a $65 game, and that is STILL less than I actually paid for it.

    I should probably talk about gameplay, but I’m not really going to.

    Nintendo doesn’t launch consoles without a some sort of flagship game, and for the Switch 2, that was Bananza. Instead of a Mario platformer, though, this time we got a Donkey Kong one.

    Bananza is a 3d platformer and its primary gimmick is terrain deformation. A fair portion of most levels can be destroyed, or picked up and thrown around. I’ll be honest, it’s kind of hard to describe in words, so I’m just gonna link Dunkey’s video. It’s a bit of a cop out, but I’m not sure that you’ll benefit much from me describing traversal mechanics for 4-5 paragraphs. If the game had just come out, I might do that, but it’s been six months. Instead, I want to talk about how the game made me feel, cause it’s a bit of a weird one.

    When I think back on Bananza, I don’t really remember all that much. The game itself is like a sort of weird fugue state. There were no moments where I found myself particularly excited, or came up with something I thought was a particularly clever solution.

    Instead, the game was more like 16 hours of primal id. Early on, you get access to a set of special transformations, and because of how charging up to use these transformations works, it’s possible to just chain them together one after another. Turn into a giant monkey, shred everything, get enough gold to refill the charge, repeat. This wasn’t all of Bananza, but it was a lot of it.

    On the flip side, I find myself very impressed with Bananza as a game, from a design and technical standpoint. I found myself constantly wondering how the terrain deformation actually worked, or trying to figure out how you’d design a level to generally keep the player going where you want when they can just grab a section of the floor and use it as a surfboard, or blow up half the level looking for collectibles. How do you make it so that they can’t actually block their own progress, or get REALLY lost?

    And yet, despite how impressive it is, I don’t really find myself enthused by it. So maybe that’s worth talking about for a bit?

    A Great Craftsman with Poor Tools, and Vice Versa

    Something I often hear repeated about Super Mario 64 is how invigorating it was at the time. The idea of 3d graphics, the squishy Mario face on the start screen with real time 3D deformation. I don’t know if this is true. I wasn’t really around for that. But my understanding is that this was indicative of an exciting new future, where games had much more power and space to work with.

    In a similar sense, it might seem tempting to look at Bananza and envision an equally exciting future for the Switch 2, but I have my doubts. For starters, we already know that the Switch 2 is under powered compared to other consoles. Looking at Bananza’s terrain deformation and gameplay and being enthralled by potential is like being excited by the balls a contact juggler uses.

    The “magic” isn’t in the balls after all. It’s in the developers, level designers, and programmers at Nintendo, not in the Switch 2. My personal computer is far more powerful than any of the consoles, and none of the games that have caught my attention over the last few years have really used that power for meaningful game mechanics. Instead, it gets used for higher and higher fidelity graphics most of the time.

    And as an audience, we’ve seen what the next generation Pokemon game looks like! It looks depressingly like the last generation Pokemon game. So I don’t have a huge amount of hope that the elegance in design and mechanics is going to translate to games that non-Nintendo developers make for this thing!

    A bit more about price for a moment

    The price of games generally doesn’t bother me. I say generally, because games are my primary hobby, and I don’t mind spending money on my hobby. Mostly. The PC I’m writing this on was around $4000 all things considered, and I’ve gotten thousands of hours of use out of it.

    That said, I feel like I got a pretty bad deal with the Nintendo Switch 2. I’ve spent $800 on this thing for 5 video games. Two of those games I found to be weirdly mid (Mario Kart World, Bananza), two I haven’t cared enough to actually play (Air Riders, Pokemon), and 1 has been pretty good (Pokopia). I’ve spent $730 bucks on a single “pretty good” experience so far.

    It does not feel worth it.

    1. I haven’t even opened my copy of Pokemon or Air Riders, and the 2 hours of Mario Kart World I played did not sell me on it whatsoever. ↩︎

  • PAX East 2026 – Day 1

    Like some monster in a horror movie who is defeated only to return for the sequel, I am back! And I’m back in the Omegathon. Also, I saw this rad card game, I played some sealed Riftbound, and I helped run the Pokecrawl!

    Woo. Very busy day. Let’s start at the top shall we?

    My morning was dominated by two things: Getting the most I could out of media hour on the show floor, only to be followed by competing in round one of the Omegathon. For media hour, I mostly bumped around the show, and chatted with a few folks, and I want to call out two things.

    First up, Brother Ming is out demoing Re;MATCH! It’s got a Kickstarter1running right now. Longest time readers will know that I have been waiting for this game since 2020, and that it has been a long and interesting road to get here, but I’m thrilled that it’s gonna be a real thing I can own.

    The first big discovery of PAX East, though, the first exciting new thing, is Eidol.

    It is Path of Exile’s crafting meets a card game. It is fascinating, it is ambitious, and I am so deeply hopeful that it works out. I recognize that I’m asking you to put your trust in me and join a Discord for a game that doesn’t exist yet. Even the Discord server is a bit sparse, but trust me: this thing has stupid amounts of potential, and if I could have you play this demo, I would.

    And as a final brief aside: Orna has a booth! I wrote about Orna almost 4 years, but since then the game has evolved immensely. I’ve been told the game now has a queuing feature where you can “collect” encounters, check ins, and events, and then play them all at once later, solving my primary issue with the game: trying not get hit by a bus while playing classic RPG combat is actually kinda difficult, so I may have to give it another try.

    Which brings up our next topic of interest: Round 1 of the Omegathon.

    Okay. So.

    It was Rocket League. I am quite bad at Rocket League, but in what is becoming a running bit, I was carried by my awesome teammate Dizzybelle. I would also like to note that unlike last year, I did practice rocket league. I played like 10 hours! I’m just very bad at Rocket League.

    Witness the faces of the returning “were very close to being champions”.

    I REMAIN ALIVEEEE.2

    Anyway, after that I grabbed some lunch, and did a little meandering before sitting down for my second competition of the day: a sealed Riftbound event.

    I haven’t played anywhere near enough Riftbound to have a good set of thoughts about it yet, but what I’ve played so far has been interesting, and I generally like it. I didn’t do incredibly, winning round 1, before getting cleaned out in round 2 by a much more experienced player who was kind enough to help me fix my deck after.

    I find Riftbound much more challenging than many of the card games I’ve gotten into recently, as there are a lot more play lines than I’m used to considering, even compared to Magic.

    Anyway, I had to drop from that early to get over to help run the Pokecrawl! I’ve done this about 3 times now, it’s always a fun event, and it’s even more fun to help run!

    And now I am back home. And I am tired. This reads a bit more like a journal entry than it does a full writeup, but unpacking a million cards is all I have energy for now, so I’ll end it here, and I’ll be heading back to the show tomorrow!

    P.S: If you’d like to try out the newest Card City Critters puzzle, keep an eye out for me around the show! I’ll be wearing the same goofy green sweatshirt, and possibly a ditto bucket hat!

    1. Quick disclosures and whatnot: I’m a Kickstarter backer for the this. Do your own research before deciding to back Kickstarter projects, because my risk tolerance may not match yours. Okay, back to normal writing. ↩︎
    2. pls pls pls pls let this proclamation age well. ↩︎
  • Once Upon a Galaxy

    Once Upon a Galaxy

    Edit 3/27/2026: Quick preface: I think Once Upon a Galaxy is a good game, and you should play it. It’s cool. I don’t intend to change my actual writeup, but uh, rereading this today, I think it comes across a little less enthusiastic about the game and slightly more caustic than I actually feel.

    We all remember Storybook Brawl, right? It was a cool card based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of Shrek meets Grim. In 2022 it sold to a scrappy little company called FTX, and in 2023 it was shut down when everyone involved in FTX was being prosecuted for 16 billion dollars in fraud.

    As far as I can tell, at least some of the people in Good Luck Games went on to make Once Upon a Galaxy. It’s a cool little card-based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of pop culture references meet Grimm.

    Write what you know I guess.

    Making a game, getting it popular, selling it to a Crypto company1, then making a new company to make a new game that is pretty much just a better copy of your old game is a bold strategy. It seems to have mostly worked out for Matthew Place and the team at Million Dream Games, presumably because everyone who might be upset about them doing this is currently in prison2.

    But I’m not here to recount the one time in the last 20 years that financial criminals were held even remotely responsible for their actions. I’m here to talk about Once Upon a Galaxy.

    I’m gonna be honest, I feel like I should put an in-depth explanation of the game’s mechanics here, but I’d just be rewriting paragraphs 3 through 5 of my Storybook Brawl write up, so just go read those real quick. We can pretend I put them here.

    It’s actually a little tricky to find good images of Once Upon a Galaxy, because the combat screen and shop screen look pretty much the same to anyone who hasn’t played the game. Anyway, please appreciate my 23k Snapping Hydra.

    There’s a lot of things in Once Upon a Galaxy that were copied over from Storybook Brawl. The core conceit is pretty much the same: pick a captain3/leader card, build a team of units, have them fight each other, and stay alive the longest to win. But there’s also a lot of fat trimming going on here—places where Once Upon a Galaxy looks at Storybook Brawl and goes “No, I don’t think we need that.”

    Most notable is probably board size and reserve. Storybook Brawl had 7 combat slots, and 3 reserve slots. Once Upon a Galaxy has 5 slots. There’s no gold to manage for buying units either. Instead, every shop is just a 4-pick-1 rogue-lite style set of choices.

    Of course, there’s also a fair amount of stuff I haven’t seen before, or things that are tweaks from existing mechanics. Treasures existed in Storybook Brawl, but they were limited to a max of 3 per player, requiring you to throw one away when you got your fourth. In Once Upon a Galaxy, they are no longer locked down in that way, opening up a whole bunch of interesting space, such as dragons that care about creating them, and get buffs based on the number, to characters that manipulate the stat buffs they grant.

    I could probably write multiple paragraphs about Candy, a cross card type mechanic that influences a global “Sweetness” value, and is used as both a modifier of spells and card abilities. It’s also a good example of how the game creates glue for its archetypes, with various candy cards adding the Candy type to non-candy cards, allowing them to be slotted into an archetype they otherwise might fall out of.

    Generally speaking, the game feels fun to play even if a few strategies feel over represented, or good across multiple captains.

    This was supposed to be an image of an Animals comp, but then I got this CRAZY Paul Bunyan/Echoing Fae synergy combo off, and I had to see what happened, and then I realized I needed to stop playing if I wanted to actually finish this article.

    Probably the biggest mechanic (or the one I will attempt steal at some point) is slot buffs, where buffs can be applied to a slot, and not the characters in the slot, so that you can replace them without losing the picks spent on those buffs. And of course, some characters interact in a cool way with those buffs!

    One of the genre’s core mechanics has also been adjusted in a pretty clever way. Most auto-battlers have a mechanic where drafting multiple copies of the same unit powers that unit up, usually three copies. This could put you in a difficult place if you got the first two, but never found a third. Once Upon a Galaxy, banishes this, instead making each copy after the first a promotion, first to silver, then gold. Picking a silver unit gives an extra shop, and picking a gold unit gives a treasure.

    There are some things that are just copied, like the Slay4 keyword, which has been renamed to Hunt. I’m okay with that. I think it’s fine to copy your own mechanics.

    Then there’s the things they copied that I wish they didn’t.

    I have a limited number of complaints about Once Upon a Galaxy. Many of them are small-to-medium sized annoyances, like how some Captains have a single line of voice acting, and others don’t.

    The game’s UI is clunky5, and signing in to make an account has been the biggest stumbling block to actually playing. Every time I press the launch button, there’s a 2/3 chance that Steam doesn’t actually launch the app. I’ve gotten a few bugs where the games just kinda… crashes out a bit, and shows me a card named “404 Shop Not Found.”

    But none of these quite compare with the monetization.

    The monetization is “hmm.” I dunno even know that it’s bad, in a traditional way? I am a sucker for garbage6. Despite the fact that I’ve played 15+ hours of Once Upon a Galaxy in three days, I’m uninspired to buy anything it. Partly because it feels like a bit of a bad deal, with characters/decks running for about five to six bucks each. Partly because it feels a bit pay to win.

    It just feels kind of off.

    Most of these are small things. The monetization isn’t even egregious. There’s no gacha, and the battlepass is easy to farm, so while there is some FOMO, there’s no limited daily progression. Still, I wish it was a bit better.

    I generally like Once Upon a Galaxy. It gives me the play experience that other people get from Balatro, that of just sinking into a small math puzzle of upgrades, builds, strategies and signposts.

    I do think there’s a bunch of cool stuff here as well. They’ve trimmed out a bunch of vestigial stuff that auto-battlers traditionally have like gold and level management. There are neat new mechanics.

    So yeah. Go play it before it turns out Million Dreams Games hasn’t figured out how to monetize the genre yet, and they have to sell themselves to an AI company, then remake this game a third time.

    Also, if two of you use my pyramid scheme referral link here7, I can get 500 more gems total.

    I would like the gems.

    1. Good Luck Games was sold to FTX in 2022. ↩︎
    2. Or maybe not? Sure, Sam is still in prison, but some of these people only got 2 years. They say crime doesn’t pay, but apparently it does if you’re white collar enough about it. ↩︎
    3. Captains grant some sort of permanent build around passive or trigger-able ability. ↩︎
    4. Slay/Hunt is a trigger-able keyword that occurs whenever the unit attacks and kills another unit. The important bit here is “Attacks.” If a unit with slay is attacked, and kills the other unit on the defense, that doesn’t trigger the keyword. Using slay effectively means either gambling that your unit will get the first attack, or buffing it high enough to be able to take a hit, and smash back. ↩︎
    5. One friend who I showed this game to immediately stopped playing after 10 minutes because of how aggravating he found the on-boarding and UI. Knowing it was his sort of game, I persuaded him to give it one more shot.

      He proceeded to play for literally 12 hours in a row. I went to bed, woke back up, and he was still playing. The game is that good, and the UI is that bad.       ↩︎
    6. I spent $50 on an arcade version of Minecraft Dungeons yesterday, because it spat out collectible trading cards. The bright side to being an unemployed miser is that I now have a lot more free time to spend the money I spent the last 10 years shoving into a pile. ↩︎
    7. This is the only referral link in the article. All the other links are normal ones, and will just link to the Steam page. Figured I’d just put that disclosure out there. ↩︎