Author: MrBlueSky

Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated

I liked playing Clank Legacy. After playing through the full campaign of 10 games, if you asked me to bring out my copy and play a game, I’d say “Sure.” If you pulled out a fresh copy, and asked me to play, I’d probably pass.

Let’s talk about why that is.

The full title of Clank Legacy is Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. I’ll just be calling this game Clank Legacy for the writeup. The subtitle does give us the game’s primary source of flavor and story: the Penny Arcade D&D Actual play. It’s an interesting enough story, but the entertainment value is carried by the humor and tone rather then the narrative arc.

It’s also an incredibly self-referential title.

Ah, yes. The Clank Legacy is Legacy Clank.

Clank Mechanics

Clank is a deckbuilder with a board movement component. The goal is to get the most victory points, but unlike Tanto Cuore or Dominion, the biggest source of those points is from moving around the board and grabbing artifacts, gold, and items instead of buying VP cards from the buy row.

In most senses it’s a fairly standard deckbuilder. Each turn you draw five cards and play them. When your deck runs out of cards, the discard pile becomes your deck.

As I mentioned, the game starts to diverge from standard deckbuilders when it comes to the goal. The end goal is to get from the starting zone, grab an artifact, and get back to the starting zone without dying. There’s more it than that, but it’s a decent general overview.

Cards generally give one of three resources: Movement, Skill Points, or Combat. Movement is used to move around, Skill Points are used to buy cards from the game’s version of the card market, and Combat is used to defeat monsters in the game’s version of the market.

The next big place where clank differentiates itself from many other deckbuilders is that you must play every card in your hand each turn. And this is a bad thing because decks start with two copies of Stumble, a card that generates Clank’s eponymous mechanic: clank.

From left to right: Skill, Movement, Clank, and Fight.

Clank is a semi-random damage mechanic. Whenever you generate Clank, you put a wooden cube of your color into the Clank pool. Whenever a new card is added to the market, if it has a Dragon Attack symbol on it, all the Clank goes into the Clank bag, and then a number of cubes are drawn out. If your cubes get drawn out, you take them as damage. If you take all of your life as damage, you get knocked out, and may score zero points.

There’s another primary way for attacks to happen, though. Once a player does make it back to the starting zone, they score some extra victory points, and each time they would take a turn, they instead perform a dragon attack against all other players.

There’s a key interaction that I want to highlight here, because we’re going to come back to it later:

  1. Clank has a buy row of random cards, and those are refilled after each turn when a player buys cards with Skill, or defeats monsters with Combat. There aren’t any other ways to interact with the row.
  2. Clank’s primary mechanic to force players to end the game is that some of the cards trigger dragon attacks when they flip up into the buy row.

Just keep this in mind. It’s going to be important in a bit.

Legacy Mechanics

Time for the other half of the title! Legacy. This is a Legacy board game, and as such, it involves all the classic Legacy mechanics. Permanent powerups, permanently changing board state, and using the game’s campaign structure to perform mechanical scaffolding, slowly doling mechanics and ramping up complexity over the campaign.

And because it’s a board game instead of a video game, it involves Legacy components and behaviors. Half a dozen sticker sheets, a bunch of envelopes with hidden contents, tearing up cards, removing tokens, and eating cardboard. That last one might just be me.

There are a lot of envelopes. Like, a huge number of them.

On the the whole, I found it a bit cumbersome. Not bad, just unwieldy. It also requires some additional components that aren’t included, notably a permanent marker of some sort. And maybe an x-acto knife to cut stickers in half for the parts of the game where you’re supposed to place them on creases on the board, and they don’t stay stuck.

I like the Legacy components. Now admittedly the game’s lookup book for events, the Book of Secrets, fell apart at the binding almost immediately. But I’ve had actual books do that to me, so I’m willing to ignore it.

Yes, I painted the minis. Yes, I was much more proud of them before I looked this closely at this high resolution picture. No, the Dwarf isn’t done yet even though I’ve already finished the campaign.

The legacy elements themselves are quite fun an interesting. There are a few that are a bit underwhelming, for example one that is effectively just madlibs. But there are some really fun ones around upgrades, events, and expanding the board. They’re quite enjoyable, and very compelling to interact with and chase after.

Keep that bit in mind as well.

The Actual Critique

So, we’re now like eight paragraphs deep about game mechanics. In a moment, we’re going to discuss the game a s a whole. But first one last distraction.

Imagine a world where chess pieces are edible, and quite tasty. It’s not important why. What’s important is that if you choose to play chess, you’re going to be tempted to eat at least a few of those delicious, delicious pieces. So on your turn, you can play the actual game, Chess, or pull one of your own pieces off the board and have it as a snack.

This is a game design problem. Actively consuming your resources to do something that opposes the theoretically primary goal changes things. And if you play with an opponent who agrees that eating is more fun than playing, you might spend part of the game just taking turns munching on pawns instead of going for check. It’s a very different experience.

This is of course, a metaphor for the primary “problem” I have with Clank Legacy.

Stickers > Victory Points

It’s more fun to run around doing quests and unlocking legacy events than it is to to get victory points. Putting out stickers, reading things from a big secret book, and unlocking new cards and quests is really fun! It’s the whole point of Legacy games.

This means that in many of the games I played, the game stalled out. It wasn’t that we weren’t having fun… But we definitely weren’t optimizing for “winning.” We were optimizing for doing as much legacy “stuff” as possible. We would actively tell our opponent what our plans for the next turn were, and what cards needed to stay out. Often, we would give thoughts or advice on the opponent’s plan to try to help them have a better turn.

Clank Legacy is, in theory, a competitive game. But it wasn’t very fun for me to play it like one. Trying to “win” felt like it came at the expense of trying to actually have a good time.

The main issue here, is that when this happens, the game turns into a version of the Cold War, instead of a race. Because the advancement of threat and danger is dependent on the market row, and players buying from the market row, there’s no outside force pressuring the players to run home.

In addition, if one player wants to accelerate the pace of the game, they have buy cards from the market row. And if those cards aren’t good, they’re actively making their deck worse.

Overall

I liked Clank Legacy. I’d play more of my copy, because despite finishing the campaign, there are still interaction points, quests, and other special things we haven’t completed. And it also might be fun to actually go and play a round competitively! I’m not sure. I haven’t played it like that yet.

But if someone asked me for a fresh campaign, I feel like I’ve seen enough already that I wouldn’t be interested in starting from scratch, or replaying through some of the initial games with very simplified mechanics.

Spoiler Warning

You’ve been warned. From here on out, we’re getting into spoilers. You can still stop reading this sentence. Or you can stop at this one. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So you know that whole design problem I mentioned up above? The one where the game can be stalled out with no issues, because the buy row remains stagnant?

One mechanic I haven’t mentioned is the patron. Patrons modify setup and few other game mechanics, generally in a small and (quite frankly) often negligible way.

Except for the last Patron in the campaign, effectively the final boss fight. Instead, it’s the only Patron in the game that actively clears cards out of the row every turn. In addition to that, if it reaches a certain (very badly defined and poorly worded) threshold/trigger, it clears EVERY card out of the row.

It’s the only mechanic that does continually clears cards out of the market row in the whole campaign. And then, because this is a legacy game, you destroy that Patron, never to use it again. So the designers are clearly aware that they could induce the extra time pressure, and prevent the cold war stalling. But they actively choose to do it only once, for a single game.

Pikmin 4

Overall I like Pikmin 4. I have issues with how its mechanics play into the game’s overall theme and aesthetic, and I have skeletons worth of bones to pick with the game’s difficultly curve, but I liked it. I would recommend it. If you want a game that doesn’t quite play like anything else, grab this.

Pikmin is one of Nintendo’s strangest franchises. An apocryphal tale states the series’ designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was inspired to create the game after watching ants while he was gardening.

Here’s Pikmin 4 in one sentence: “Pikmin is a game about strategically managing ants. Except the ants are mobile semi-sentient plants and everything wants to eat them.”

As a summary, it hits a lot of high points. Pikmin is a strategy game. Your units are adorably small, and the Pikmin, while not stupid, have the same amount of self preservation skills as an ant. They also exist in a world where they are the very bottom of the food chain.

Story-wise, Pikmin 4 is the lightest in the series. The main game modes have unlimited days to work with, even though the time pressure is still present. The story does what it needs in order to serve the mechanics.

Mechanics

Gameplay in Pikmin 4 takes place across zones. Each zone is a single large map that can be revisited. Each visit is one day, lasting about 16 minutes.

Unlike other RTS games, the player only has direct control of two units. These are Oatachi and a custom player character. Oatachi is an upgradable space dog, and the Rescue Team member is a small alien in a spacesuit.

Across these zones, the goal is to explore and retrieve treasure and castaways, and delve into dungeons. There are other game modes. I’ll cover them later.

There are two pillars to Pikmin’s gameplay: real time combat, and strategic management and planning. The real time combat is simple to explain. The player character and Oatachi can command a force of Pikmin to follow them, and instruct them to interact with objects or attack enemies by tossing Pikmin directly onto those enemies.

The indirectly controlled units, the Pikmin, come in several different flavors. As this is the fourth game in the series, there are now seven types. Using the right one for the right task is often necessary. For example, don’t throw the yellow Pikmin (electricproof) into the fire.

Pikmin will attack enemies that they’re tossed onto. Most enemies will eventually shake Pikmin off, flinging them to the ground. Both Oatachi and the custom PC can whistle to call fallen back Pikmin to the main group. While Oatachi the PC control mostly the same, they do have some of their own strengths and weaknesses.

These are the micro mechanics of Pikmin, small interactions dependent on mechanical skill. But they’re fairly subservient to Pikmin’s macro mechanics, a term the game even has it’s own word for: Dandori.

Pikmin’s macro strategy revolves around a really interesting push/pull tension. The player has a limited number of Pikmin, and can only control their own character and Oatachi directly. Ultimately this turns Pikmin into a sort of resource allocation/routing game, where the real question becomes “What is the minimum number of Pikmin I can allocate to any single task, and still complete that task in a desirable manner?”

Combined, this is what makes up Pikmin’s mechanics: the high level ability to plan and route individual enemies and encounters, and the quick twitch ability to deal with enemies effectively (and respond when things don’t go according to plan).

Game Modes

Pikmin 4 has multiple game modes. They all use pretty much the same controls, but I do want to cover them quickly.

Overworld Expedition: As mentioned above. Adventure around a large map with a 16 minute timer looking for treasure and enemies.

Dungeons: Can be entered from the Overworld, bringing Pikmin with you. With no timer, dungeons made up of a series of floors, with various challenges, often with a themed gimmick (ice, conveyer belts, etc), and a boss fight at the end. You can’t refill Pikmin during a dungeon.

Dandori Challenges: Also entered from the Overworld, these are effectively puzzle rooms. You’re given a set amount of starting Pikmin, a goal, and a time limit. Beating them requires getting a certain amount of points, or completing the goal within the time limit.

Dandori Battles: The player faces off against an equivalent NPC to try to gather more stuff than they do over a given period of time.

Night Explorations: The easiest way to describe these might be “tower defense.” The player is dropped into a night time version of a day time area, and has to defend an object called a Lumiknoll until time runs out, or all enemies in the map are defeated.

They differ in two key ways from day time, in that enemies will periodically aggro and actively attack the Lumiknoll in waves, and that the only Pikmin available are Glow Pikmin. Glow Pikmin are immune to all elemental damage, and also warp back. The end result is a fairly different experience than normal gameplay.

Shipwreck Tale: Closest to something like a New Game+, this mode has the player trying to complete a separate set of objectives on the same maps, but with only 15 days. It’s much harder than the base game.

End Result: Pikmin has a lot of pretty different content.

Bugs, Minor Issues, and Bones to Pick

Pikmin 4 isn’t perfect. One of my biggest issues with the game is that it has pretty terrible load times, taking forever to transaction between zones and dungeons. This is mostly not an issue, except for when you find yourself jumping in and out of a given dungeon floor to farm a specific type of Pikmin.

There were a few graphical issues, but far more annoying were some of the bugs related to the game’s task system. There’s very clearly a hidden system that manages the player’s actions around throwing Pikmin at certain interactable objects. These can include ropes to be unspooled, or sticks be dug up and used as a shortcut. Sometimes it just breaks.

Here’s an example: I would throw Pikmin on a rope, but they would fall off the ledge near it. The game considered them to be still performing the rope “task” but there was no way for them to get back up. So when I threw additional Pikmin, the hidden system managing the task wouldn’t let them interact with the rope, because as far as the game was concerned, I already had the max Pikmin that could be assigned, even though some couldn’t actually reach it.

This is intended to be an anti-frustration feature, as it actually is mostly visible when the game stops you from tossing more Pikmin then required to carry an object. But it was still annoying.

My biggest bone though, has much more to do with tone than mechanics.

Pikmin: Ants or Locusts?

Pikmin has a weird tone. It’s a tone that I generally enjoy, one where you lead small plant creatures against monsters fifty times their size, something captured quite well by the Pikmin 2 box art:

There are a few things underlying this tone, but one of the biggest ones is an unspoken statement that Pikmin are underdogs, and they are the bottom of the food chain. They are small, individually quite weak, and live in a giant world of terrible things.

So here’s the problem: Pikmin 4 doesn’t respawn enemies in the overworld once they’re defeated. It’s a reasonable design choice to allow anyone to progress through the game, and it means that obstacles don’t have to be dealt with more than once.

But it also means that after a certain point in the game, every map ends up feeling completely empty and wiped out, stripped clean of wildlife by the Pikmin. And it’s kind of a weird feeling, more like you’re commanding a group of loathsome locusts, instead of adorable ants.

I get why they did this, but it does lend the game a really weird tone.

Difficulty Curve

One of the strangest things about Pikmin 4 is the difficulty curve. I would say that approximately 80% of the game is incredibly easy, to the point of being a non-challenge. Then there’s the other 20%.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are two pictures.

These are my total stats for the game as to Pikmin lost/grown. I lost a total of 336 Pikmin, not including rewinds and redos.

And these are my stats for Cavern for a King, the final dungeon of the game. Total losses, with rewinds, for a single dungeon are 61 Pikmin.

21% of my total losses in the entire game came from this single dungeon and that’s including the game’s system for save scumming (rewinds).

Every dungeon in the game has a maximum of 5 floors (except for a single other dungeon with 6 floors), and usually 1-2 to boss fights .

Cavern for a King has 20 floors, 15 of which have bosses.

Up until this point in the game, I was actually going to write this article about how disappointingly easy Pikmin 4 was. But then Cavern of Kings was much harder than every other dungeon. The final night exploration missions required more save scumming than every day exploration combined. The final super secret challenges are incredibly difficult.

It’s a super weird thing because it’s not a bump in difficulty or a smooth escalation; it’s a massive jump. The term “Vibe Check” comes to mind, as it just feels like at some point, the developers pulled off the kiddie gloves with no build up in-between, and smacked me in the face.

Conclusion

I liked Pikmin 4. I recommend it. It’s supremely weird, and there really aren’t any other games like the Pikmin series. Pikmin 4 isn’t a perfect entry, but it’s very fun overall.

Even if it does have a difficultly sheer rock wall instead of difficulty curve.

Magic’s New Play Boosters

Content Warning: Maximum Amounts of Inside Baseball on TCG’s

Magic just announced a new type of Booster Pack, and it’s something I find fascinating for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that it has the potential to break some things horribly. Before I get into those things, I’m going to lay out a few assumptions. If you disagree with these assumptions, you’ll still enjoy the article, but it may sound like rambling from a madman.

Assumptions

  1. Magic cards are artificially scarce. It costs just as much to manufacture a rare or a mythic rare as a common or uncommon.
  2. Past a certain point, when opening booster packs to collect cards, the only card that matters is the rare or mythic. (Yes, there are uncommon cards with value like Pitiless Plunderer, but they’re few and far between.)
  3. Rare cards are more powerful. If two cards in the same set have a similar effect, and one is rare/mythic, and the other is common/uncommon, the rarer one will be better.
  4. Magic’s limited formats are reliant on uncommon and commons cards making up the bulk of the strategies and play.

Why New Boosters?

There are several reasons for play boosters. Most are in the Mark Rosewater writeup, but one is conspicuously absent: manufacturing cost. Back in December of 2022, the Pokemon TCG updated its boosters pricing, but also added additional rare cards. For Pokémon, adding more rares doesn’t have much of a trade off, because Pokémon doesn’t have a limited format.

But Magic does have a limited format, and that format is popular enough to cause a problem. Some Magic players use booster packs as game components to play one type of game, and some buy boosters to get components to play a different game.

Wizards’ first attempt to fix this problem was to split things out into Draft Boosters and Set Boosters, separating the two types of players. The aforementioned Mark Rosewater writeup is a 4 point memorandum on why that design failed for business reasons.

So now Wizards has done the opposite. They’re attempting to combine both products into a single product to be used by both audiences, solving the above issue of product availability and stocking.

A New Set of Problems

However, in moving the problem from a business problem into a design problem, they’ve opened the potential for a variety of incredible things to wrong, and that’s what I’m excited about.

See, Wizards is trying to make this product serve two masters. If the contents are a downgrade from Set Boosters, it’s going to piss off everyone not playing limited formats. The whole thing that made set boosters desirable (more variety of cards, more rares) could go completely out the window. Given that Set Boosters are the product that everyone is buying, according to Wizards themselves, I’m hopeful they won’t destroy the fun of Set Boosters.

Instead, I’m hoping they keep the rare rates up, and run Limited formats into the ground adding 50% more rares to a format with traditionally limited bombs.

Even if they don’t do that, though, having draftable cards from “The List” should be a real hoot. I’m looking forward to seeing Wrath of God and Skullclamp in low power limited games.

Ultimately, they’re going to have to make the experience different for someone: either drafters, or collectors. I’m hoping it’s the first, because watching Wizards warp a format for money is much funnier than watching people open trash rares.

Autum Antics – Green Mountain Gamers

Two event writeups in as many weeks? I know, it’s a real rarity. As always, I’ll be talking about what I played and what I saw, this time at the Green Mountain Gamers event from this past Saturday.

Perhaps most importantly, if you’re in the New England area, and looking for more folks to play games with, go join the Green Mountain Gamers facebook page for notifications about the various gamedays and events.

Necessary shilling out of the way, let’s talk about the games.

Morning

The day started off with Bullet♥︎, the only game I own that requires emoji to be displayed properly.

This was followed up by a quick game of Tiger and Dragon with a few folks. I’ve been playing a fair amount of Tiger and Dragon, and I’m very bad at it, but I generally enjoy playing it. It’s also fairly light, and easy to teach so that was fun.

Half of that group then went off to play Lords of Vegas, while me and a friend pulled out a copy of Dragon Castle, and played that for the first time. I enjoyed it, I think they had slightly less fun with it.

Then we went back to an age old classic, Race for the Galaxy, otherwise known as “The game I cannot win.” I have 14 game losing streak in Race for the Galaxy.

Yes, I’m counting. Yes, that includes yesterday’s loss.

Afternoon

After a lunch break that involved eating a sandwich the size of my head, it was time for some afternoon games.

This started off with Aegean Sea by Carl Chudyk, the same fellow who made Glory to Rome. Now, I have a policy on this blog of not doing writeups on games unless they I finish them. So, there will be no full writeup on Aegean Sea. There will be only the following statement:

I think I hate Aegean Sea.

Aegean Sea has the questionable honor of being the first board game I think I’ve ever effectively rage quit out of, along with every other player at the table. I found the action system grating, it seemed like everything I made immediately got destroyed, and it was just one of the most painful games I’ve ever played. We played a few turns, no one was having fun, and everyone decided to be done.

So then I went and played Everdell, while my friends played Spirit Island. Everdell is a tableau builder with more expansions than card types, and has so many components that I’d consider it a bit overproduced, but that’s just me.

I mostly liked Everdell, and I’d like to try playing it a few more times. I think that may not happen (for various reasons), but if I do get to play it again, I’d like to try a few more expansions.

Then, after a mere 11 hours of moving cardboard, it was time to head out. I’m looking forward to the next event like this, even if I don’t know the date yet.

Ed Note: I plan on doing writeups for a few more of the games on this list at some point in the near future. When I do, I’ll link to them from here.

Moonring

I haven’t beaten Moonring yet. Normally, I don’t write about games until I beat them, but I’m going to talk about Moonring early, because I’m done with it (for now). I also recommend you download Moonring immediately, as long as it’s been at least two months since this post went up.

Moonring is a singleplayer cRPG with some roguelike elements. It’s brilliantly weird, and has a fantastic tone and art style. Moonring is also the buggiest game I’ve played so far this year, with an impressive smattering of bugs and crashes.

Here’s a quote from the sole developer that might shed some light on why it’s so buggy:

To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting more than – maybe – a hundred or so downloads of Moonring. In addition, only two of us (me and one Discord member) have been bug-testing, so reports have been few and far between up until now.

Dene

I recommend playing Moonring, but I recommend playing it a few months from now after we’ve had a few more patches.

So, what makes Moonring unique enough that I’m willing to look past a crash-to-desktop every time I try to throw myself into a pit?

In a word: ambiance. Moonring is based off a much older series of games, most of which I’ve never played, but the primary influences I believe are the Ultima series, early text based adventure games, and early roguelikes.

The end result is an interesting set of mechanics, combined with a series of practical changes to make things more human.

Mechanics

Here’s an example. Instead of dialogue options, or a dialogue tree, you talk to NPC’s by typing key words and phrases. But instead of forcing the player to type in every single option, or remember everything an NPC ever says, the game highlights key phrases from past discussions with that NPC, and shows them above your character. It also has auto-complete functionality to fill in words. In addition, the game has a note system to keep track of what you’ve heard.

There are still secret phrases, and riddles, but Moonring is set up in such a way as to let those be the focus, rather than syntax or brute force.

Another good example of Moonring’s unusual elements is its leveling system. Here’s what happens when you defeat an enemy in Moonring: they die, and maybe drop an item. Here’s what doesn’t happen: you get experience points of some sort.

That’s because leveling up in Moonring isn’t tied to classes, or kills, but instead to a series of objectives you can complete for the the gods of the world. Every god has certain general objectives, like visiting their hometown. Others objectives are specific to the god in question. The Great Wolf for example, rewards the player for hunting a deer. The Lords of Dust give a bonus for repairing a construct.

And Moonring does the same with the roguelike mechanics. Instead of forcing a full restart if you die, only the game’s dungeons are somewhat rogue like. Die in the dungeon, and the game kicks you out to before you entered, but also regenerates the entire dungeon.

It’s probably not a game for everyone. Between food meters, managing amber lamps, and mechanics that feel counter-intuitive to many modern design choices, it can be overwhelming. But I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it, and I’m excited to play more.

As soon as it stops crashing.

Conclusion

Moonring isn’t currently good enough to unseat my favorite example of game mechanic revisionist history; that’s still Shovel Knight. But it does a fantastic job presenting what feels like an alien piece of design, without sanding all the strange corners off.

Moonring is free on Steam, but again, I really suggest if this sounds interesting, you wait a bit. It’s still fairly buggy, and sometimes can be quite frustrating.