Author: MrBlueSky

Baldur’s Gate 3 at 4 Players

It feels a little pointless for me to write about a game that has already been devoured by the game journalism/influencer cycle that is modern games media So to actually add some value here, most of this writeup is going to be from the perspective of how the game plays with 4 human players, and some of the oddities with that.

The best way I would describe Balder’s Gate 3 is that it’s a digital version of Dungeons and Dragons, run by a strict but infinitely patient Dungeon Master. Yes, you can win all these combat encounters by just shoving people off cliffs. Yes, you can attack random people around you. Yes, you can let yourself be dominated by the purple mindfuck octopus. It eats your brain, you die. Better load a save.

This is where Baldur’s Gate is at its best in some ways. The engine handles all the stupid fiddly bits around combat, rolling dice, keeping track of HP, movement, spell slots, inventory, items, weight, etc.

Brief aside: Baldur’s Gate also gets to do one thing that tabletop D&D doesn’t: forcing players to learn systems via failure. Unlike a standard D&D game, where TPK’s mean everyone rolls up a new sheet, BG3 can wipe the party, ask “Now, what did we learn from that?” and have you run it back. And when it comes to learning D&D’s esoteric bullshit, I think this is quite a strong way to do it.

Act 1: You meet in an out of control spaceship.

So first, some background. I’m not a massive RPG person, so the only way I had any real interest in BG3 was playing the game with friends. I also didn’t want to spend $60 only for everyone to drop out.

Before buying, I got the three friends I planned to play it with to promise that we would play the game every weekend at some point on Saturday until we finished it. The hardest boss (scheduling) already defeated, the adventure kicked off.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is split into 3 parts, or Acts as the game calls them, with limited ability to go back once you proceed from one to next. To my mind, Act 1 is the strongest, with Acts 2 and 3 being a bit weaker for reasons we’ll get to. But at 4 players, Act 1 worked quite well.

We spent a lot of time messing about in Act 1 and it had some of the most satisfying moments of the game for me. The highlight, though, was the Underdark, and some of the roleplaying choices it offered. Baldur’s Gate tends to play more with the tropes of “Good vs. Convenient” rather than “Good vs. Evil.” This is to say, you can get what you want by letting people suffer, or can stick your neck out for them, and have someone else try to chop it off.

I think the strength of Baldur’s Gate’s writing was the clearest to me when I found myself wanting to really have my character (a paladin) stick to his ideals even when it was incredibly inconvenient. On the whole, though, Act 1 as a group of 4 didn’t really have as many of the pain points that would start to crop up later, starting in…

Act 2: The woods are dark and deep and trying to eat us.

Act 2 is where problems started to crop up. If Act 1 is traditional D&D fantasy (after the opening), Act 2 ratchets it up a bit, bringing you into the Shadow-Cursed Lands. They’re lands that are cursed by shadows. And these shadows try to eat you. One cool mechanic is that they won’t eat you if you’re carrying a torch. Which is fine except if you’re a party of 4, everyone is going to be carrying torch. This means no one has a weapon out when you get ambushed.

It’s also where we started seeing bugs. Here are some notable ones. We got soft-locked at our camp, and had to lose an hour or two of progress. The host player’s computer crashed each time he talked to an specific NPC for a romance-chain cutscene. Once, one of our characters was permanently locked up jail, even while not jail, and required that special type of esoteric bullshit to fix.

Act 2 was also where the meta-gaming got ratcheted up, at least a bit. Of the 4 of us in our party, two hadn’t played the game before, and two had. There were a few encounters that we did not do in what I’d call the “full spirit” of the game. For example: when I go to talk to strangers, I do not usually immediately barricade the entire room with pallets in case, say, I’m attacked by flying ghouls mid conversation.

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I don’t harbor any ill will towards my friends for this. I knew they’d played before, and it’s hard to just play a game knowing everything that happens, and not spoil anything. On the other hand, it kind of a bummer. I think sometimes failing to protect an important NPC and living with consequences of that is fair.

In addition, Act 2 also involved one of the major problems with the game at 4 players: NPC party member quest chains. Many of these chains require having the NPC present in the party for the chain. But your party is capped at 4 characters, which meant that we had to kick out a human player and have them sit on the side while everyone else escorted whoever it was to wherever they had to go.

It’s a huge frustration, and makes it very difficult to want to do these quests, as it meant not actually playing with my friends. You know, the people I’m there to play the game with. But more on that in…

Act 3: We’re outta time, and only got 4000 minutes to save the world.

Act 1 is pushing the shopping cart down the hill. Act 2 is the wheels getting a little wobbly. Act 3 is the bit where the wheels fly the fuck off, and the whole thing flips head over heels.

That’s not to say Act 3 is bad. Baldur’s Gate, as it is realized in the game, is one of the best designed cities I’ve ever seen in a video game. They manage to make every inch of it both relevant and interesting, but without feeling like it was designed just for the player. It’s fascinating design that I can observe, but not parse in any way that I would be capable of mimicking.

And because it’s so jam packed, there is a ton to do. That said, it does feel less fleshed out on occasion than some of the other acts. Finally, this where the “Add the party member to the party” comes back with a vengeance. There were at least four party quests we didn’t touch because it would have meant someone had to stop playing.

That’s not to say there wasn’t enough to do. Despite having party members who had played the game multiple times, we found a new-to-them side quest that elaborates on some pretty critical lore for one of the primary characters. I cannot stress enough how content packed this game is.

I do have one story I want to share though. Throughout the game, we had kept an NPC alive, and done various side quests around him. Many of these were a pain, but it was really fun to see him change as we helped him, and grow.

Then in act 3 one of my friends murdered him for armor. It felt really bad. It was made even worse by the fact that we didn’t need this chest armor, and this person got it only because they wanted to respec into a brand new build for the 5th or so time.

This was probably the biggest moment that broke the fantasy for me, and it’s unfortunate that this happened right before the…

Finale: wake up and choose violence.

The finale to Baldur’s Gate is a comparatively short affair compared to the rest of the game. It is an impactful and cinematic story moment and set of fights that doesn’t quite overstay its welcome.

It is also unfortunately where the game just shits the bed technically. Performance is incredibly bad. Some of the enemies really don’t quite look like they belong. We saw at least 3 fairly major bugs occur, including enemies not spawning, one member of the party having all of their items unequipped while still equipping them, and watching a magical spear that returns after being thrown… not doing that, and just vanishing.

It’s unfortunate, because instead of a blaze of glory, BG3 goes out with the equivalent of an oil fire. Instead of a sense of dramatic triumph, the primary emotion I have when I think back on this part of the game is frustration. I’d rather fight mind flayers than pathing and the framerate.

But when the dust settles, it’s time to take stock of the casualties, and the story.

Hey, remember when I mentioned issues with the NPC party member quests?

Epilogue: So long and thanks for all the flesh.

So. Because we hadn’t done many of the NPC quests, the “post” final fight sequence of cutscenes was one of the most depressing end-game sequences I’ve ever seen. Because we left almost every character to suffer.

This included watching Wyll, who only hours ago had promised marry my 7 foot dragonborn paladin, rushing off to the Hells with Karlach. So yes. After 76 hours, BG3 ended with my character getting cucked by Karlach. Yes, I am salty. Can you tell?

It’s unfortunate, but the result is that Baldur’s Gate 3 ended on kind of a low note for me.

Baldur’s Gate undeniably deserves its game of the year award. But it’s not a perfect game by any means. It’s a masterpiece as a result of its scope and depth, but not its polish.

And to be frank: it doesn’t quite work at 4 players.

Slay The Princess

Slay The Princess is a horror visual novel, in the purest sense. It’s well produced, with excellent voice acting, and art that does a very good job of communicating what it wants to. For anyone turned off by the “horror” aspect, this game has maybe one “jumpscare”-esque moment. It also doesn’t rely on any breaking of the 4th wall, like messing with files with on your computer or those sorts of things.

As a result, it almost entirely relies on the strength of its writing, art, and voice acting to tell a story, and a really interesting one. This makes it incredibly difficult to talk about.

As such, I’m left with two choices. I could engage with the work itself, and try to access it. Or I could dance around it, and look at the space it exists in, without engaging with it directly.

This writeup will be the second one. At the end of this writeup, there is a link to a page full of spoilers, because there are some things I want to discuss, but simply cannot without spoiling the game. But that page isn’t here, so if you are afraid of spoilers, you can keep reading (just don’t click on the link. There won’t be anything here that couldn’t be seen by looking at the steam page, or booting up the game.

To some extent, game reviews and criticism aren’t particularly well suited for evaluating games that are almost entirely reliant on narrative. Literary criticism tends to do much better at that. Game reviews are better at evaluating mechanics.

The primary mechanic of Slay The Princess is reading text. As far as mechanics go, is it a fundamentally strong mechanic? Yes. We have an entire medium of work reliant on that mechanic that isn’t games. They’re called books. Slay The Princess also has images, which means we can compare it to comic books, which are also pretty popular. Or we can call them graphic novels if we’re being fancy.

I think it’s a very strong visual novel, and if you enjoy horror, or games focused around narrative discovery like Gone Home, I would recommend it.

That said. If you want spoilers and longer form discussion, here you go. I suggest you only read this if you have no interest in the game, as doing so will destroy parts of the experience.

Slay The Princess is $18 on Steam.

Knuckle Sandwich

Ed Note: This writeup was written prior to the release of the 1.2.6 version of Knuckle Sandwich. The 1.2.6 update added an extra item slot, balanced party members, “Added level increase to late-game party members during regular difficulty runs,” and major buffs to every single held item. In short, it makes some changes to a large number of the things I complained about. I don’t think it’s enough to fix the game, but I find it both worth noting, and somewhat vindicating.

I don’t recommend Knuckle Sandwich for reasons that are hard to summarize. In short, the game fails to live up to its spiritual predecessors in either mechanics or narrative, while making a variety of design decisions I disagree with, and that make it frustrating to play.

Genre-wise, Knuckle Sandwich is technically an RPG. It meets virtually every part of the general definition we have for those games, so it’s unfortunate that I think the term is actually useless here. I think a more accurate descriptor would be “weird RPG,” which is to say something very much in the vein of Earthbound, Undertale, or No Delivery.

The main reason I simply cannot recommend Knuckle Sandwich is that Undertale exists. I think there’s a strong argument that Undertale does literally everything except (some parts of) combat better than Knuckle Sandwich.

I also can’t really recommend Knuckle Sandwich to people who loved Undertale, because the game is just universally worse. I don’t like having to say that. Knuckle Sandwich isn’t phoned in, or low effort. It’s just not as good as the games that have inspired it.

Here’s why.

Combat

Combat is the heart of Knuckle Sandwich’s mechanics. There is some exploration. There are some puzzles. But in both cases, they are fairly minor. The vast majority of this game is its combat.

While Knuckle Sandwich starts with the traditional RPG blueprint (a basic attack, a mana system (EP) for special attacks, HP bars, etc.) it quickly makes changes to the system. All attacks, from both the player and enemies, involve playing a WarioWare style mini-game of some sort.

I’m going to go into lots of detail, mostly in order to justify the level vitriol I’m going to be leveling against someone’s long term passion project.

Let’s start with the player basic attack.

There are three basic attack mini-games. This brings up the first problem: which one you get is random. Which would be fine if they were equivalent in terms of damage. But that was not my experience.

They’re also just kind of frustrating to play, with some taking much longer than others. They take a long time to start up. You can skip the wait by pressing a button, but that same button is used for the damage input. So if you get impatient, try to skip, and accidentally double tap, you miss a turn.

Next up, the player’s special attacks. After 10 hours, and at max level, I had 4 special attacks. I was given one to start, got two from leveling up, and had a fourth from an equipped item.

This is an INCREDIBLY small amount of options, and many of the attacks are just bad. A 4 turn 1 point defense buff is awful, and I barely ever used it.

Finally, there’s also a defense command that regenerates a single point of mana and ups defense. But because of how enemy attacks work, it almost always felt like a mistake to use this.

Since some special attacks are granted by equipment, let’s talk about items real quick. Characters have 3 slots: a left hand, a right hand and an accessory. I only saw about 3 weapons total throughout the entire game. Two were knives and one was a pair of scissors. There were also several pairs of gloves that boosted defense, but since they took up both the left and right hand slot, they didn’t feel worth using. The strategic options are again, incredibly limited.

More annoyingly, equipped items take up inventory slots. This would be tolerable except each character can only carry eight items. This means if a character has three items equipped, they can only carry five other items.

This isn’t helped by the fact that key items have to go into your inventory. So if you find a key needed to open a door, you either have to toss items out, or backtrack to an item storage PC.

There are lots of design decisions in games that are subjective and up for debate. The item limit in Knuckle Sandwich is not one of them. It’s a bad system. It punishes equipping items, it punishes exploring for extra items that the you can’t carry, and it punishes carrying quest or bonus items with you in case they have a fun interaction or might be useful later. I hate it.

Before we fully dive into the rest of Knuckle Sandwich’s combat, I want to talk about how the game interfaces with with some other standard RPG mechanics. These are: party members, stats, and leveling.

In combat, you can use the player character, plus up to one other character. There are 3 primary party members, and a few more that join at various points. But for a vast majority of the game, you only have a maximum of one other party member available.

And for the brief portion of time while you have access to all of them, there’s no reason to use any party member but the highest level one. Experience points are not shared across the party. As such, one member will always be significantly higher leveled than the others.

It’s a really questionable structure. Combined with the fact that it’s hard to tell what stats even do, it makes me wonder why the game even has levels. In addition, enemies don’t respawn, so grinding levels isn’t even an option if for some reason you did love a specific character.

So let’s talk about better parts of Knuckle Sandwich: the rest of the combat. There are two types of enemy attacks: standard attacks, where you can press a button to avoid all the damage, and the mini-games. For the standard attacks, enemies will perform some sort of mini-animation with a tell. Press a button right after the tell, and you’ll dodge the attack.

The individual mini-games are generally more fun, and are fairly varied. Some are shmups, there’s an infinite runner, and several are Wario-Ware like quick reflexes.

Some are less fun, like the one that asks you to do math very quickly.

But while I did call this the good part, that’s not entirely accurate either. Because while the individual mini-games are fun, they’re not hugely fun to play over and over and over. And combat really drags on.

And I have a problem with the bosses as well. To keep this brief, here’s a summary: Knuckle Sandwich has many boss fights where you don’t progress by “winning.” Instead, you defeat them by tiring them out, or just engaging with a separate system. As a player, since I didn’t know which fight was which, I ended up wasting resources and effort on fights where I didn’t need to, and that feels bad.

At it’s heart, the problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s combat system is that it just doesn’t have much strategic space. Many of the RPG mechanics feel ancillary to the real time mechanics, and the real time mechanics are a mixed bag that quickly becomes repetitive.

But now let’s talk about the story.

Story

From here on out, there will be spoilers for every part of Knuckle Sandwich. You have been warned.

My primary problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s story is that it feels unconnected. It hits all the story beats of the weird RPG. A weird world, bizarre characters, strange non-logic, and friends. But many of these don’t feel earned, or even internally consistent.

I’m not a writer, so I can’t break down exactly why the story didn’t work for me. Instead I’m going to give three or so examples.

Let’s start with cannibalism.

Early in the game, you’re attacked by a character while taking out the trash at your job. You kill the attacker while defending yourself. Then you have to chop up this person you murdered and serve them as burgers. Your boss gives a whole speech, and a bit about how you’re now in this together. This seems to be setting up for a sort of Barber of Seville situation, where the player is going to have to murder people who won’t be missed, and cook them.

Except none of that happens and the game seems to immediately forget about this plot thread until the literal Final Boss. Yes, those letters are capitalized on purpose. In retrospect, there are hints at what is going on, but the whole thing is mostly just… never mentioned.

Instead, you meet the other party members, and the characters that the game seems to suggest are your friends. But for some reason they don’t really feel like your friends. The biggest one for me is that your character is mostly just dragged in wake of these “friends” instead of actually joining them.

There’s also a big mechanical reason why they don’t feel like your friends. The “friend” characters don’t actually join the party until later in the game. At that’s where the RPG design really gets in the way encouraging you to only use one of them. While they’re all given their own sub-sections of the narrative where you work with them, those sub-sections don’t focus on those characters as people.

This matters because when Knuckle Sandwich later tries to pull a big emotional event, it lands flat. It’s sorta sad, but I wasn’t attached enough to these characters for it mean much. Likewise, when the game tries to do the “kill god with the power of friendship,” that moment fails equally.

None of Knuckle Sandwich’s supporting cast were given enough time for me to become really attached to them. I don’t dislike them as characters at all. But I feel about them the way I feel about my neighbors. Perfectly nice people. If they asked for help, say shoveling snow or jumpstarting a car, I’d be on it. But there’s no real emotional connection outside of a polite mutual ignorance.

All that out of the way, let’s talk about the biggest plot point of Knuckle Sandwich. You only get to know about it because it’s explained in a monologue in the game’s ending sequence. The whole game is…. actually, I don’t need to say what it is. Because it doesn’t matter!

The big reveal is barely relevant to the entire rest of the game. It isn’t really mechanically present, it isn’t brought up until after it’s been dealt with off-screen by an NPC. And then the game just kind of ends. You, the player, effectively never have to deal with it, outside of one very short semi-postgame sequence.

The vibe I get from Knuckle Sandwich is that the game was made in sections, instead of as a whole piece, and also made under a weird deadline. There are large sections of the game that feel sprawling and unconnected, and others that feel rushed and compressed. If you told me that Knuckle Sandwich as it currently stands is about 30-40% of the game that the creator had in mind, I’d believe you.

But the end result is failure to deliver on both the weirdness of the world and the attempted emotional story beats. Instead, it feels like a set of strung-together vignettes or dream sequences.

Art

This is going to be the one part of this writeup that isn’t me just trashing 5 years of someone else’s work. While I have no strong feelings on the game’s music, I do really like the art. I really don’t enjoy the glitched sections, but I think the animations and art style for almost every other part are great.

The art also feels high effort. For example, the weapon equip system is a bit nuts (in a good way). The game seems to have sprites for each character carrying each item. Personally I’m very curious as to how it all works behind the scenes.

But there’s something else I want to talk about. There’s a single thing about Knuckle Sandwich that I really love. And that is a very specific tone that the game manages to evoke. I don’t know if it’s even intentional, but I love it nonetheless. The primary character of Knuckle Sandwich spends the game with a bruised face, and bags under their eyes, and in my playthrough used knives and scissors as weapons.

The end result is a character who looks utterly defeated, and yet chooses time and time again to square up against cult members, robots, mecha suits, and alien gods. They get up, and they keep moving forward. There’s a distinct tone of simply not caring anymore that I find incredibly unique. I can’t think of another game that made me feel like this.

It’s doesn’t redeem of the rest of the game, but it is memorable.

Conclusion

Knuckle Sandwich is made with heart, and I wish I could recommend it. But the game simply isn’t fun to play. Its strategic elements are light to non-existent. Its real time tactical elements are enough of a mixed bag that they can’t make up for the lack of strategy. The story, while not a mess, feels poorly paced, and manages its plot points badly. The music is fine, and the art is well-made, but those things don’t make the rest of the game fun.

On the flip side, at least Knuckle Sandwich was made by someone who appears to give a shit. I don’t know that I’d purchase another Andy Brophy game on day one, but I’d at least look at it. Knuckle Sandwich might not be worth playing, but it’s not something that should be ignored. And if somehow this post has convinced you that Knuckle Sandwich is what you need, you can find it here.

Ed Note 2: Images are from the Steam Page, and Knuckle Sandwich press kit. I played this on my Steam Deck, and didn’t take screenshots. Frankly, I’m not replaying just to get screenshots.

2023 Placeholder Awards

The presents have been opened. The award lists that people actually read have been posted. The games industry itself has been gutted like a fish, along with the rest of the technical sector.

Ah, 2023.

It’s surprising to me that the first year that truly felt “post” COVID was still such an incredibly shitty year in so many ways on a global level. Usually I wrap up the year with a list of dead games. But that sort of thing feels less important than, say, the thousands and thousands of layoffs.

Instead, it’s time for the return of the Gametrodon Placeholders.

Bad Graphic of a Trophy

As always, the criteria are simple: winners must be something I played this year and wrote about on Gametrodon. And unfortunately, that means that I can’t just give all the awards to Baldur’s Gate 3 and call it a day, because I haven’t finished it, nor have I done a writeup on it.

Best Board Game

I played a lot more board games this year than I did last year, in a lot more genres than usual. That said, there was only a single game that I played over a dozen times, at multiple different events, with different people, and even sat down and randomly taught to strangers.

A game so generally agreed to be “pretty good” that everyone in the group I played with went and bought their own copy of the game. As such, it’s the obvious winner.

It’s Tiger and Dragon.

It’s not the most complex, or thematically rich, but it very quickly became the go-to game of the group I play with. It’s the game everyone wants to play, and is simple enough to teach quickly to boot. In short, it’s the best because it got the most play with the most people, and the least friction.

Honorable Mentions: Clank Legacy, Quickity Pickity

Best Soundtrack

The criteria to even be in the running for Best Soundtrack is pretty simple: was it good enough to add to my running playlist? Even though currently that playlist is mostly just my “Waiting for my feet to heal” playlist, one game easily beat out the competition.

It’s Pizza Tower.

There’s not too much more to say on this. The music is just too damn good. Pizza Tower is an equally fantastic game that I didn’t feel too equipped to evaluate. But if nothing else, it’s the only music this year that really made me want to start swinging at folks.

Honorable Mention: Baldur’s Gate for that one bit, and maybe Herald of Darkness from Alan Wake 2. But I didn’t play that game, I just love the song.

Best Multiplayer Shooter

I’m going to be honest. This one is mostly a tie between this game, and the game in the runner up slot. But the game in the runner up slot has about a billion more sales than the winner, and I’d rather bring more attention to the smaller one.

The best multiplayer shooter of the year is Deceive Inc.

I don’t love everything about the game, but I’d much rather have more interesting and weird multiplayer shooters with multiple paths to victory, and unusual mechanics.

The runner up is, of course, BattleBit, which I think everyone has played at this point, but still deserves it. And as I’ve already observed, this was effectively a tie. But if I’m giving an award, I’d rather it be to something like Deceive Inc that not everyone has heard about.

Game Of The Year

Remember that inclusion criteria I mentioned up above?

I lied.

The game of the year is Baldur’s Gate 3.

Have I done a writeup on this game? No. Hell, at 65 hours, I haven’t even finished a single full playthrough.

It’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had, and is ridiculously flexible as a game. It’s also far from technically perfect. I spent at least 6 of those 65 hours trying to fix bugs or errors, and having to reload save files. That said, it’s probably the pinnacle of PC games at the moment: incredibly well designed maps, the greatest voice acting ever, fairly interesting combat, and just generally an excellent game.

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.