Author: MrBlueSky

Odd Tabletop Games New England

That’s right! I did in fact get out of my apartment on a long weekend for once!

It’s been a while since I covered an in-person event, hasn’t it? I think the last one was Granite Games Summit. I spent yesterday up in Manchester, New Hampshire at the Odd Tabletop Games New England event, hosted at the Boards and Brews game cafe.

As per my usual format for these sorts of things, I’ll be talking about what I played, and the event in general with a small amount of commentary not related to games at the end.

Author Note: I think my general enthusiasm for weirdness for is fairly well documented. For example, see this entire blog. That said, tabletop RPG’s are definitely my third category of focus when it comes to games, after video games and board games. So there may be some things here that I have different opinions on than most folks more in the scene.

Academy of Adolescent Monsters

Academy of Adolescent Monsters was the first game I played yesterday, and probably the most fun I had at the event. It’s a fairly rules-lite tabletop RPG with a simple premise and system for problem resolution. After creating the setting (the school), a starting situation, and the characters, the game starts.

Given how rules-lite the system is, it might just be faster for anyone interested to just go grab the rulebook and read through it. The general gist is that “problems” exist, and players state actions they wish to take to resolve the problems.

To solve problems, the player roles a D20, states what they want to do, and consults a sheet of outcomes. If the player used a positive trait, they can move around a personal bingo board grid and select a different value than the outcome they got. If they use a negative trait, they have to keep the outcome, but get to mark off an additional value.

The results of the lookup table range from solving the problem, to changing traits to positive traits, to just making things worse with various resolutions in between. Much of the fun from the game is the result of the players’ willingness to engage, really embroider the story, and buy into it being “The worst day of school ever.”

The designer, Daniel Jansen, ran the game for us and did a fantastic job keeping things smooth and on-tone. By the end of the school day, we had reconstructed a clock that changed time, convinced a car possessed by a hermit crab-entity to become the Driver Ed teacher, and stopped a camera that stole souls and teeth. In short, a great time.

I don’t think I have much valuable critique or issues with the game. During play, I incorrectly interpreted one part of the system involving changing dice rolls by consulting my bingo board, but it’s such a small confusion I’m not sure it matters.

A game like this feels like it works perfectly in a format like the event: as a one-shot with a bunch of players all willing to buy in and let everyone have their moment to shine, or embroider the fiction.

Overall, I had a fantastic time with this.

Side Note: There were definitely a few moments where I had to catch myself and step back a bit, because if given a chance to make up a monster, I really want to add all the details, instead of letting everyone else contribute. I tried to rein myself in.

Untitled DB Cooper Game

The second game I played was “Untitled DB Cooper Game” by Dr. Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman of Tiltfactor. I suggested the name “Cooped Up” and was told that no one likes puns, so sadly, I’m going to just have to refer to this as ‘Untitled’ for the rest of the writeup.

Untitled is a multiplayer story-telling and hidden details game. One player is the storyteller, one players is the accomplice, and the other players are the interviewer and FBI. The storyteller and the accomplice have agreed on a secret signal: an item in the room where the game is being played. There are also several location cards, and the storyteller tries to weave in details that will point the accomplice toward the correct location. The game is played over several rounds with the signal object staying the same, but the stories changing.

In short, the storyteller tries to secretly hint at a location with using a prearranged signal among the details of their story, while the FBI and Interviwer try to figure out the secret item.

It’s fun, if a bit challenging as the storyteller has a limited amount of time to talk. I got a few critical things wrong that led to me giving up the game a bit too early when I played as storyteller.

We Have Always Lived Here

The last game I played was Glen Given’s “We have always lived here.” It’s a solo journaling game about creating a haunted house.

It did not resonate positively with me.

One of the reasons may be that I’m not big on journaling. Another could be that as someone who isn’t an inherently positive person, I put a lot of effort into trying to maintain a positive mental attitude. As such, if you ask me to pick a sad, lonesome, or haunting song, there is part of me that stands up and suggests that the most appropriate choice is obviously “Macarena,” as a sort of self defense mechanism.

There are many design choices here that I find somewhat aggravating, but are also likely intended to aggravate. The game requires a high number of components and items to complete it, including dice, coins, a deck of cards, song, etc. The system for selecting items from lists feels deliberately cumbersome, involving counting down lists over and over and over, until only one choice is left.

There’s probably a longer discussion on art, catharsis, negative emotions, creation, ritual, and subjective experience. I’ll let someone else smarter than me write it.

Other Things That Happened

I chatted with Carly Dwyer, the founder of Intramersive Media, about some of their projects, including one named “Magical Help Desk” which I found particularly interesting, and really want to try. I also talked to Dr. Loretta Brady of Saint Anselm College about some of the work that she and her lab have done around games.

I also spent most of lunch talking about parasitic wasps, breaking teeth, and still finished my sandwich. I don’t have a link for that last one.

Overall, good times.

Super Raft Boat Together

I had hopes for Super Raft Boat Together. Not high hopes; if the game wasn’t good, my year wasn’t going to be ruined. And likewise, Super Raft Boat Together didn’t pop my hopes like a balloon. It just sort of deflated them, like a bouncy house at the end of a birthday party. It was still fun to climb around, at least for a bit. But eventually it’s just a bunch of sad plastic, and you have to leave.

Super Raft Boat Together is a multiplayer top-down roguelite. The game’s twist on the genre is that instead of going through multiple rooms and challenges, the staging area is a raft. Said raft is apparently made of cake given the speed and ferocity with which it’s devoured by sharks and other denizens of the ocean if they aren’t shot before they reach it.

Mechanics

The structure on the whole is simple. Start a run, enter a zone. Fight off two waves of enemies, then fight a boss. After each boss, visit a shop and buy upgrades. After the final boss, start over.

Before I sink Super Raft Boat Together, I do want to say some nice things. The music is fantastic, and I love it. One of my favorite songs is used in this trailer. The actual gunplay and movement is pretty decent. I don’t love it as much as I love the music, but it’s not where my primary problem with the game comes from.

I have two zones of issue with Super Raft Boat Together, and how they intersect. Those zones are the roguelite mechanics, and the boss design.

Issues

Let’s start with the roguelite mechanics. I have a bunch of minor complaints here, so I’ll start with those. The game is pretty vague about what exactly its upgrades do, and to what extent. For example, one upgrade is “Chance to shoot fire bullets.” This is incredibly unhelpful. What’s my chance to shoot a fire bullet? If I get multiple stacks of that upgrade, is the chance to set them on fire additive or multiplicative? Or is it non-existent? Do fire bullets set enemies on fire, and if so, does that fire damage stack? Or do they just do extra damage?

How close? How much damage? I don’t know.

Compare this to something like Hades, or Risk of Rain 2, both games where items have explicit and defined properties, with delicious numbers included. (In Risk of Rain’s case, those numbers are on an inventory screen, but they’re still in the game!) Those numbers are important, because there’s a big difference between “+1% chance to deal critical damage” and “+25% chance to deal critical damage.” But Super Raft Boat Together doesn’t make this distinction, and this makes trying to create a build incredibly difficult, because very few items are explicit in their function.

It’s also not helped by what I’d describe as inconsistent or undefined terminology. A large portion of the game is building out the raft to provide space to maneuver during a run, but Super Raft Boat Together uses both the phrases “build speed” and “build rate” when talking about the rate at which the character generates raft pieces to place. Are they interchangeable? Are they different stats, and if so, which is which? I can’t tell from playing.

Both of these design choices make it much harder for me to engage with what I’ve always found to be a large portion of what makes roguelites fun: creating builds with synergies between various items.

The other thing that makes this difficult is that many of the items in Super Raft Boat Together don’t feel designed to be synergistic. There are very few items that scale off of other stats that can be influenced. My favorite example of this would be an item called Spectral Hammer. It’s only active when the player has died in a multiplayer run. In that case, it doubles their ability to place temporary ghost planks.

It has zero synergy with anything else in the game. I’m not even sure there are other items that buff being a ghost, and frankly, being a ghost is pretty useless. Better then nothing! But mostly useless.

So now, bosses, and boss design. I have several different categories of problems with the bosses in the game. Let’s start with the simplest ones: they’re pretty boring, there aren’t many variants, and several bosses share almost identical patterns (looking at you Giant Jellyfish, Giant Fish, and Giant Pufferfish). In addition, several of the boss fights aren’t boss fights. They’re just an extra wave of enemies. Shark Swarm, Ghost Swarm, and Fish Swarm aren’t bosses. They’re just an extra third wave fight.

The biggest problem I have, though, is with the game’s final boss, the Super Kraken. The Super Kraken is not incredibly difficult. However, it does something most of the other bosses don’t: it absolutely shreds every inch of your raft.

This would be mostly just annoying if it wasn’t for one mechanic I haven’t talked about yet: mercenaries and pets.

Mercenaries are hired with coins. Coins are added to a total between runs, but not kept between runs. Pets are bought with cash. Both mercs and pets are valuable sources of DPS, but like the player, they can’t shoot if they’re not on a raft. They also can’t build rafts, and pets will just float away if they get knocked off somehow.

Pre-Super Kraken
Post-Super Kraken, on the best fight I’ve ever gotten.

Unlike most other bosses, the Kraken will absolutely kill your raft, and kill mercs because it attacks a lot more of the screen (many other bosses will just actively target human players). This means that by the time the game loops, most of the raft is destroyed, all the mercs and pets are usually dead, and everyone is hanging on by a thread.

Which brings up another problem: there’s no shop after killing the Super Kraken. Instead, each player gets three free items, one of the highest rarity, and two more of variable rarities. Except many of those items won’t be damage items, and the second round vastly increases the number of foes, while also vastly buffing their health.

End result: It’s incredibly difficult to come out of the Super Kraken fight in a good position to continue the run, even if every player has full health.

It’s also hard to think of a reason to want to continue the run. The enemies are re-used, just with more of them. The bosses are actually now easier than the base waves.

Conclusion

Super Raft Boat Together isn’t awful, but none of its pieces click together. It falls flat on key parts of what makes a roguelike compelling for me, lacking both interesting boss variation, and meaningful and compelling build synergy. If you need a one time thing for game night, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it in many other situations.

If you’re still interested, you can find Super Raft Boat Together here on Steam. And you can yell at me for my bad opinions here, on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

Dorfromantik: The Board Game, as you might be able to tell from the title, is an adaptation of the video game Dorfromantik: Doesn’t Actually Have a Subtitle Because It Was Made First. Admittedly, capitalizing every letter in the latter half of that last sentence was a stupid bit, but it’s about the quality that this writeup is going to have, so I’m keeping it.

I’m not sure I have much useful to add about Dorfromantik: The Board Game (a name I’m going to shorten from here on out). Both versions of the game have won a billion awards, and a sold a ton of copies. Instead, I’m just going to look at a few parts of the game that raise interesting points, and then wrap up.

First though, let’s talk about the gameplay. Dorfromantik: I’m Going To Misspell This is a co-op and singleplayer board game. On a player’s turn, they do a single thing: they pick up one hexagonal tile and place it connected to other tiles. This is the only thing they will do on 98% of their turns.

Before you decide that all you need to do to win the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award is buy a hexagonal holepunch however, know that there is slightly more to the game than that. There are two types of tiles: task tiles, and generic tiles. If there are ever fewer than three task tiles on the board, the player must draw a task tile on their turn. Otherwise it must be a generic tile.

When you place a task tile, you also place a score token on top it. This is the number of items that need to be connected to score that tile.

This image blatantly stolen from Gem Klub on BGG. Hopefully they’re cool with it.

For example, in the above image, the river has a 6-task on it. This means that you need a total of 6 connected rivers to score the task tile, and it currently has 4 connected rivers. The wheat on the left side however, only needs 4 connected wheat fields, and currently only has 2.

I’m skipping over a lot of ways of earning points, but this is the core gameplay. Pick up tile, play tile. Rinse, repeat, and try to maximize score by maximizing the number of score tokens you can remove before you run out of other tiles (among other unmentioned strategies). This brings up the first point: it’s kind of odd to me that this is considered a co-op game.

Don’t get me wrong. That’s not a bad thing. But Dorfromantik: The Are You Tired Of This Joke Yet is inherently multiplayer in the same sense that Sudoku is inherently multiplayer. There’s no individual resource, score or value whatsoever.

The game says it’s for up to six players, but there’s no difference in mechanics between a 6 player game, and a 60 player game, outside of maybe inconvenience. Unlike something like Beacon Patrol, Dorfromantik doesn’t even try to pretend to be a distinctly multiplayer experience.

The other interesting thing about Dorfromantik is that it’s a “Campaign Game.” It’s apparently not a “Legacy Game” because you don’t destroy the pieces.

In reality, all that means is that you unlock extra things, but you don’t get to eat any delicious juicy cardboard. While in theory you could put everything back into the tiny boxes it came with and start a new campaign, you’re probably not going to. Or at least I’m not going to.

Editor’s Note: Dorfromantik has put some thought into facilitating multiple campaigns at the same time by providing a pad of “campaign sheets” where different groups can track their respective campaign progress, but it would still be a hassle to sort out the unlocked components every time.

Look, I don’t see myself playing a board game 10-15 times, and then wanting to do it again but with none of the upgrades I spent the last 15 games earning.

I usually end these writeups with either a joke, or tying everything together, but I don’t really have either of those today. Dorfromantik for me is the perfect example of the 7 star BGG rating. “Good – Usually Willing to Play.” I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it enough to evangelize it. It deals with multiplayer and campaign setup in a way I haven’t seen before, but not one that’s unique or interesting enough for me to gush about it.

Dorfromantik: It Is Pretty Okay.

Idleon – The Idle MMO

This writeup is technically about Idleon. But it’s also about Universal Paperclips, Spaceplan, and Cookie Clicker.

These are all incremental or clicker games. It’s a somewhat nebulous genre primarily defined by clicking, and ‘number go up,’ but much like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Admittedly he was not talking about video games.

And you might have noted that I didn’t put in links to any of those games.

Mechanics

Since we’re talking about Idleon, I’ll give it the minimum amount of respect I feel obligated to give anything I write about: a discussion of its mechanics at least a bit.

Idleon is an idle game. You make a character and kill monsters to complete quests and open new maps. You also get loot to craft new equipment. You’ve got your traditional MMO skills. Get ore to smelt into bars to craft equipment. Cut tree to get wood to get more equipment.

Get better equipment, go to a new area to get better equipment to go to a new area repeat until the heat death of the universe.

Idleon’s unique mechanic that separates it from some other idle games or clicking crafting games coughRunescapecough is that the player unlocks the ability to make multiple characters. So one character can be tasked on cutting wood, while another mines, and another farms monsters. Of course, these alts also need their own gear, and sometimes quest progression, and crafting items and carry upgrades and….

On Idle Games

Okay, so mechanics explained. Time for opinions. I am annoyed by these types of games. It isn’t because they’re bad, or poorly made, or uninteresting. It’s because they consume my time like a black hole.

If I met someone who sold drugs to kids “ironically” to make a statement about art, I don’t think we would get along. I feel a similar way about idle games.

Again, I’m not calling them bad. Spaceplan is really neat. Universal Paperclips might be the best doomsday AI simulator ever. Idleon is interesting.

But I don’t think there are any other genres of games that are so blatantly disrespectful of the players’ time, even within the current live service trend. While those games limit player progression with weeklies, and dailies, and time gates, and check-in events, they aren’t doing what clickers do. Live service games try to demand your attention, and parcel out progression. But they don’t demand that you actively do nothing.

And I resent that. I opened Universal Paperclips yesterday to remind myself how it worked, and then I “played” the game for two hours. Two hours in which I clicked and waited, and clicked and waited, and that was it. Then I turned on the cheats menu, and pushed to the end of the game that way.

Idle games are artificial progression incarnate. You can have the most effective build, set up an auto-clicker, but you always have to wait. Idleon doesn’t require the auto-clicker part, but it does give reduced gains for having the application closed, so in theory the best way to play the game is to turn the game on, and then go do something else.

If I wanted to run my computer idle for 8 hours a day with no real benefit, I would mine crypto-currency.

I “played” a fair amount of Idleon. I didn’t get incredibly far, but when I saw that the number of players with the achievement for unlocking World 2 was about 14%, I realized I was ready to be done.

Hold Up, I’m Not Done Ranting Yet

I resent idle games because for whatever reason, they work on me. I am entirely capable of looking at them, understanding how the mechanics work, and what they are going to make me do, why they are exploitive, and then I play them anyway.

One of my long term life struggles has been dealing with what I call the Oreo Problem. If I have a pack of Oreos, I will eat all of them. Usually in one sitting! The same is true for a variety of junky food.

I know I’ll do this. I don’t want to do this. I like Oreos, but I would like to like them in moderation. I cannot eat a reasonable number of Oreos. Instead, I don’t buy Oreos. I don’t buy cookies. I don’t buy chips.

I have the understanding to recognize my behavior, but not the capacity to change it in the moment. So instead my solution is to just not engage.

Back to Idleon.

I can look at Idleon, and understand why the structure is exploitive, but I can’t stop myself from playing it.

Why does the game give better rewards for having the game open and running? My guess is because having the game running boosts hours played stats, and bumps the game in the ratings and Steam suggestions.

Why are shops limited in stock, and restock once a day? Well, because it slows down progression for quests reliant on buying large numbers of those items, meaning players have to log in over multiple days and build a habit.

Why are stack slots limited? Well, it means that players want to log in every 12 hours or so, so that they don’t lose items that they can’t carry with them.

Why can I only have one item in active production at a time, even if I’ve unlocked more? Well, because now I want to buy the gold hammer in the cash shop so I can do two instead.

I recognize all of this, and guess what? I still want to play. I still want to boot up my computer for that increased progression.

I’m not going to. After this writeup, I’m going to uninstall the game. I’m not even going to boot in one more time, because if I do, I might get dragged back in.

Conclusion

I don’t recommend Idleon, even though I want to play more. I don’t recommend Universal Paperclips, even though it’s a brilliant exploration of AI misalignment and a whole other bunch of fun sci-fi concepts like von Neumann probes.

I just can’t.

I honestly can’t quite decide what my ultimate opinion on these sorts of games is. I think it might be something like this: There are certain design patterns that, regardless of their implementation, can just short circuit certain types of brains. At their best, they’re something like nerd sniping. At their worst, they’re games that actively encourage their players to run their computers for no reason.

I think that if you use those sorts of patterns as the base of your game, even if it’s being done ironically, you’re being a bit of an asshole, and I’d like you to stop.

I can’t stop myself from eating Oreos, but I can choose to not buy them. I can’t stop playing clickers, but I can choose not start.

Hi, I’m a Stupid Person Who Gives Review Scores

In response to Mike Drucker.

Hi. I’m the stupid person who gives review scores! You might know me from the byline of a million terrible reviews on Kotaku, GameInformer, or other gaming media sites swallowed up into useless reviews, copy pasted guides, and SEO milking trash. I might also not be real, and be a product of Chat GPT, but it’s not like you would know.

I make useful, helpful things like this! I’m a contributing member of society.

Of course, when I say that I give review scores, that isn’t entirely true. See, I can’t actually give a super low score, because that would make us look bad to the companies that purchase a majority of our advertising. And I can’t give too high a score either. So really, the editor gets to give out the score. And edit my review to make it work.

Here’s my job: I play a copy of Starfield, or Armored Core, or what have you two weeks before release for 10 hours, and then I have to write 50 pieces of junk about it for the next three months. I bet you think you’d like that wouldn’t you? Well, I’ve spent the last eight hours writing about how Elden Ring could be in the Armored Core universe. It isn’t, but rent is due, and I need those clicks.

Sure, I do have to give out that 8/10, but it’s not like I have any real choice in the matter. And yeah, my actual job is churn out garbage at a rate high enough that the internet will be flooded with white noise, in an attempt to boost our pages over a fandom wiki.

You know, at one point in time I really liked games.

I miss that time.

But hey, it’s fine. It’s good that we gave it an 8. After all, it’s not like art is subjective, and review scores are an ultimately pointless attempt to access a complex series of functions, and provide little to no value. I can’t really even blame consumers for this one. It’s not like you woke up and hounded us to assign arbitrary numbers to every piece of entertainment media over the last thirty years.

Frankly, it’s probably pretty good that I can just act like it’s your fault for being upset. It was kind of awkward when everyone started asking questions about nepotism, and how industry connections worked, and who actually assigned review scores.

Bit of a lucky break for us that “Ethics in game journalism” turned out to be a dog-whistle for neo-nazi misogynists. If they’d been reasonable instead of being jackbooted fascists for even 30 seconds, maybe people would have listened to what they were saying. And maybe even asked some questions!

Questions like, “Wait, is all your advertising coming from the product you’re reviewing?” and, “Is all gaming news just an incestuous cycle of freebooting and regurgitating press releases?” Something, something, even a racist and women-hating clock can be right about journalism twice a day and all that.

But that didn’t happen, and now we can continue to blame you, the consumer, for being angry and stupid, while we do our best to turn your search results into the world’s least helpful internet thread when you try to look up where to find an item.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to put up 800 words on how Animal Crossing is coming to Pokémon Go, or my car gets repossessed. And if you could follow my twitter real quick, that would be great, since that’s where I put all of my real opinions about this hobby I used to love.