Last Train Outta’ Worm Town has a long name, long enough that I’m just going to refer to it as Worm Town from here on out. If it’s good enough for the opening menu screen song, it’s good enough for me. It’s probably not good enough for any level of SEO, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Worm Town is an asymmetric hunter/hunted game in the vein of Dead by Daylight. It’s very clearly inspired by the 1990 film Tremors, so much that I’m confident making this statement without having actually ever seen the movie.
Here’s how gameplay works. Players play either as either a surviving human, or a worm. Humans win by completing a set of tasks, including finding a special key, clearing the train tracks of obstructions, and refueling the train with random objects. Worms win by eating all the delicious humans.
Maps for gameplay are semi-randomly generated. A few features will always be present in approximately the same place. For example, the train is located in the middle of the of the map, and the quarry is always in the north east. However the locations of rocks, cactus, clusters of buildings, and consumables are randomized.
The human player controls and systems on their own are fairly limited. You can pick up and store items. You can carry items up to a total of 3 weight units, plus one item in your hands. You can throw items away from you. There’s also a set of equip-able items that tend to be single use, including a rifle and a zipline that I still don’t actually know how to use.
The worm is much more interesting. The core mechanic to the worm is simple. You can’t see human players if they aren’t moving on the ground. As a result, humans are invisible on top of buildings, large rocks, or while on the train. However, you’re much faster than humans, and you have a short cooldown jumping attack to launch to launch yourself into the air. You can also burrow underground for even faster movement.
Personally, when playing with my friend group, we’ve found the game to be a bit biased in terms of the human players, and it’s also not a very deep game. It’s possible that the game is much more fun with higher player counts, but I haven’t experimented with that.
For $8 bucks, a game that everyone can download and play pretty quickly, Worm Town is a pretty decent time. It’s not as fleshed out as many other games in the genre, and the controls don’t always work, but it’s really good as a medium level filler game when no one else in the discord can agree on what to play.
Ed Note: This writeup is a bit light this week. I’m heading out to PAX Unplugged 2023 shortly, and I need a bit more time for my other writeup. If you’re also gonna be there, why not hit me up on Twitter?
I spent some time dragging Dragonwood over the coals recently. As such, it seems fair to spend an equal amount of time talking about another very simple game that I actually really enjoyed. That game is Quickity Pickity.
Quickity Pickity is a manual dexterity, real time set collection game. The goal is to be the first player to win 3 rounds. Here’s how rounds work.
Each round, the goal is to build sets of fruit. Fruits have 3 characteristics: they can be smiling or frowning, they have a shape, and they have a color/pattern. A set of fruit is multiple fruit tiles that all have the same expression and either the same color or shape.
All the fruit tiles start face down. Once the round starts, players flip up fruit tokens in real time, and take them to place into their own sets. The catch here is two-fold. First off, once you place a fruit in one of your sets, it can’t be moved or removed. Secondly, if you take a fruit, you must place it in a set.
But while the general gameplay is the same each round, the scoring changes.
At the start of each round, the players flip up a score card. These determine how points are awarded for the round, and are fairly variable. They might payout aggressively for large sets, or instead just reward a large number of points for medium sets. They might even punish for sets that are too large, or only payout for sets with an even number of fruits.
In addition to this, each round has a special fruit: a specific color and shape that rewards bonus points. Bonus fruits give yet another thing to keep track of and switch up.
The round ends when all three of a set of monkey tokens have been flipped up, at which point players stop and score points. Now remember when I mentioned that fruits can’t be moved? Well, if you accidentally placed a mismatched fruit into a set (for example, put a frowny face fruit in a set of smileys), there’s a massive penalty of minus 10 points per bad set. This almost always enough to lose the round.
While I liked Quickity Pickity, I do have one big gripe and it’s with the round ending monkey tokens. It’s very easy to flip one over, and not notice, and there isn’t really a penalty or reward for spotting that fact. Twice in the 9 or so rounds I played, we flipped all the monkey tokens up without realizing it. We only noticed later that the game was supposed to be over.
Monkeys also have an interesting effect of being an acceleration mechanic. If a player thinks they have a big enough lead, they can quickly try to close out the game by quickly flipping up tokens with no interest in collecting sets.
But these are minor complaints. The score cards do a really good job of actually making each round feel different. I had to actively change up my strategy each round based on what the payouts were. And this is while there’s room to improve the actual set building. Bonus fruits also did a good job of contributing to this, keeping the game from feeling stale.
I really liked Quickity Pickity. It’s simple, fun, and offers decisions that aren’t inherently complex, but are compressed into such a tight time frame that they’re still fun to try to solve.
If you’re looking for an interesting small game, it’s $23 on Oink’s website. As always, that not a sponsored link or anything. I just think think Quickity Pickity is good.
Tiger and Dragon my favorite game Oink Games has published. It’s also my favorite game with Dragon in the title that I’ve played recently. (The other two in that category are Dragonwood, and Dragon Castle.) It’s stayed entertaining even after playing 8 or so times, and is relatively simple.
Tiger and Dragon is sort of a trick taking game played with a set of numbered domino-like tiles, for 2-5 players. The group I’ve played with likes it best at four players, but I personally also really enjoy it with three players.
Here’s how a round works. Each player takes number of tiles based on the number of players, with the starting player taking an extra tile. Then the starting player places one of the tiles from their hand, as an “attack.” Going clockwise, any player can play a tile that matches that number to block. If they do, they then become the attacker, and choose a domino to play, and the process repeats.
But if none of the other players choose to block, and it cycles back around, the original attacker gets to place a single tile from their hand face down, and then attacks again.
The goal of the round is to be the first player to empty your hand. Whoever does so scores points based on the battlefield in use. Battlefields modify the games scoring rules, and the first player to get 10 points wins.
The strategy and fun of Tiger and Dragon comes from how the tiles are numbered. Each tile has the same number of copies as its value. There’s a single 1-tile, two 2-tiles, three 3s, and so on all the way up to eight. There are also two special tiles, the Tiger and Dragon, which we’ll talk about in a moment.
But let’s say another player attacks with a three, and you have a three in hand. You can block with that three, or you can decide to try to hold the three, and force another player to block. If another player blocks with a three, you now have the only three. This means that when you attack with the three, it will likely cycle the entire table, letting you play an extra tile for free.
Unless of course someone plays the Dragon.
The Tiger and Dragon are spoiler tiles. The Tiger can block any even tile, but be blocked by any even tile. The Dragon does the same thing, but for odd tiles. This makes them the strongest defenders, and the weakest attackers.
The end result is a very fun game of bluffing and hand management, that I highly recommend, and hope gets restocked at some point in the future. (I guess you could buy it off Amazon.)
I heavily recommend Tiger and Dragon. It’s incredibly repayable, has a fantastic level of planning and bluffing, and is just generally a very fun game.
Author’s Note: Apparently Tiger and Dragon is based off an old Japanese game called Goita from 1860. The amusing part of this for me is that the apocryphal designer of Goita has a Board Game Geek page, which for some reason I find very amusing.
I’m supremely “Meh” on Dragonwood. The shrink wrap on my copy of the game had a sticker informing me that it won the Mensa Select award. This award is shared by Dominion and Set. I’m not sure why Dragonwood, of all games, was added to that lofty grouping.
Maybe there’s a high level of strategy present in Dragonwood and I’m not smart enough to understand it. Maybe the people giving out this award only play 5 games a year. If I had to guess, I would guess the second one.
Dragonwood is incredibly simple. On a player’s turn, they either draw a card from a central adventurer deck to their hand, or play adventurer cards from their hand to try to capture monsters or obtain equipment from a central row. The adventurer cards have five colors, and are numbered 1-12, with a set of each.
Capturing a monster requires you to play a set of cards as a strike (a straight: 1,2,3), a stomp (same number: 8,8,8), or a scream (a flush: blue, blue, blue). Then you roll dice equal to the number of cards you played. If the sum of your roll value is higher than or equal to the value of the card you are trying to capture, you take the card. If not, you return your played set of adventure cards to your hand, and then have to discard a card as the cost of failure.
Monsters are worth victory points. Equipment gives bonuses to future roles.
This is pretty much the entire game. It’s also worth noting that game’s six sided dice have faces: 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4. The end result is a fairly narrow range of expected outcomes.
The game ends when the adventurer deck has cycled twice, or both of the dragon monsters have been defeated.
Frankly, the end result is rather boring. There are virtually no interesting decisions to be made. Instead, you just do a quick analysis of if the expected outcome is worth the victory points. The equipment is almost all beneficial stat sticks, or one time buffs.
The nicest thing I can say about Dragonwood is that if I was trying to teach someone that board games aren’t difficult to learn, Dragonwood would be a great example an easy-to-learn game. Not “easy to learn, hard to master.” Not particularly fun. But a simple enough game to learn to play from the rulebook.
I believe this is called damning with faint praise, but it’s all the praise I can muster for Dragonwood.
Naming your game The Finals is a bit of a crime against words. It also makes me wonder if the game ever had some sort of comp scene, what that would be called. The Finals finals? Finals of The Finals?
Regardless of the weird naming, The Finals was neat enough for me to put 7 or so hours in. So here are some first impressions after that time.
And this is where I’d put my in-game screenshots, if I’d taken any before the beta went down.
Gameplay
The Finals is a multiplayer shooter, and most of the game’s novelty and innovation comes from everywhere except the shooting. The Finals’ innovation starts with its game modes: Cashout, Quick Cash and Bank It.
Gamemodes
Cashout and Quick Cash follow the same general structure, but with different numbers of teams and objectives in the game. In both cases, the goal is simple: get to a box, bring it to a deposit point, and then defend it while it deposits.
In Cashout, the game’s competitive mode, it’s four teams of three against each other, and in Quick Cash it’s only three teams of three. The scoring also changes between modes. Quick Cash requires 20,000 points to win, and only spawns 10,000 point boxes, making it effectively the first team to get two points. In Cashout, it’s 40,000 points. In addition, getting team wiped costs a large amount of points.
Bank It is closer to something like the dog tags mode from Call of Duty. There are various coin spawns around the maps, and enemy players drop the coins they’re carrying when defeated. Once picked up, coins have to be deposited in boxes that spawn in for about a period of 90 seconds to actually be added to your score.
What’s interesting about the game modes is that while I was playing them, they did generate a bunch of interesting decisions. Is it better to rush an enemy team that is trying to capture, or just to go after another objective on your own? Should you go in now, or try to wait for the third team on the map to attack first, then swoop in to clean up?
Traversal
The most interesting part of The Finals for me is the traversal, and traversal mechanics. In the context of this game, that can mean several things. It can mean putting down a zipline to go over a gap, a jump pad to make a surprise entry into a skyscraper, or a dash to zoom down alleyways.
Or, if you’re me, ignoring that and smashing through everything in your path.
One of the biggest features in The Finals is a incredibly high level of destructibility. Almost all smaller buildings and objects can be blown up or smashed to pieces, allowing the impromptu creation of entrances and exits. I’ve played games with high destructibility before, and often they end up turning the map into a giant pit as players destroy and destroy and destroy. But The Finals neatly manages to avoid this pitfall (ha) and maintain the structure of its maps while allowing much of them to be destroyed.
The end result is that a coordinated team can go across a gap, up 5 stories, and then through most of an office building in about 15 seconds. For me, this was the most fun part of the game, and it was a shame that only one of the loadouts I played really had the ability to conduct emergency home renovation. Which is as good a time as any to talk about the loadout system.
Loadouts
Loadouts in The Finals start by choosing a body type. There are three, ranging from heavy to light, with each having a different pool of items and weapons to equip, as well as different specials, speed, and HP.
I mostly played the heavy class, so I’ll use it as an example here. After picking heavy, you have 1 special slot, 1 weapon slot, 3 equipment slots, and 4 backup slots. The weapon slot holds a primary weapon. For the heavy, these include a large machine guns, a sledgehammer, flamethrower, and a grenade launcher.
Equipment slots contain grenades, walls, and other supplemental items like a rocket launcher. The Finals doesn’t have an external ammo system. Instead, while guns have to be reloaded, everything else is cooldown based.
Finally, the backup slots. Anything except special abilities can be placed into these slots, and they can be swapped out mid game. It’s important to note that even if you put a primary gun into a backup slot, you can’t swap it with a equipment slot while in game, only your primary. In addition, swapping items isn’t possible in some of the modes.
Overall, the loadout system is fine, but the lack of sidearm or secondary weapon to close out fights felt really weird. Presumably, those are supposed to be ended with say, flame grenades, but it still feels off for a fire fight to pause while both sides scramble to reload.
Overall Thoughts
The Finals was fairly fun. If I was grading it, I’d call it fine. There are a bunch of impressive things about it, including the terrain destruction, and the high fidelity while doing so. Does that mean I think it’s gonna succeed?
Not really.
I’m not sure how much space there is in this market for live service games, and make no mistake, The Finals is a live service game. It feels like it’s trying to primarily compete with something like Apex Legends.
Now, I could be wrong here. If the team creating The Finals is small enough, and they can capture a small portion of their playerbase as a long term audience, maybe it could become self-sustaining. But I could just as easily see it going the way of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt.
Perfectly good game! Interesting mechanics! Relatively fun! But might not hit critical mass. Same thing happened for Gundam Evolution.
It’s kind of depressing to continually see this pattern repeat, but hey, many of these projects have been in progress for years. I have to wonder if we’ll see this sort of thing continue.
Author’s Note: All the voice acting in The Finals is done with generative AI, a point covered in this podcast. Some people are, unsurprisingly, rather unhappy about this.
