A few months ago I mentioned in my Granite Games Summit writeup that one of my favorite prototypes at the event was a deck builder with a working title of “Cubism.” I also noted that I didn’t really want to write about it while it was still in the prototype stage.
It’s been a while since then, but I’m happy to note that this week I can finally talk about that prototype. Mostly because it’s no longer a prototype, and it has a new final name: Avant Carde.
Avant Carde is a deck builder where players take on the role of collectors organizing shows of their artwork to score awards.
If you’ve played a traditional deck builder, you’re likely familiar with a lot of the base components of the genre. Players are given a (weak) starting deck that they make more powerful over time by using it to generate resources, and purchase additional cards to be added to the deck.
Where Avant Carde innovates, though, is in how it handles playing cards during a players turn, and also its scoring and buying system.
In something like Dominion or Clank, any card can be played in any order, though there might be advantages to doing things a certain way. Avant Carde is different.
Avant Carde has a something more akin to an Uno style chaining system. Once a player plays a card for their turn, the next card they play has to match the previous card in either color or number to continue the chain. At the end, they count up the number of cards in the chain, and any other abilities those cards might have, and that number is the amount of money they have to buy with.
This chain, for example, would generate 5 money for the player.
This leads to a really interesting balance where the more expensive and powerful cards can end up being a bit riskier to play if they aren’t in a color that you’re collecting.
Avant Card also has some interesting changes in how it handles the buying area. Unlike Ascension, where a limited pool of cards are available at any point in time, or Dominion, where everything is always available, Avant Carde splits the difference in a pretty fascinating way.
Another neat thing: The abilities in Avant Carde aren’t on the cards in your deck. Instead they’re on the cards you lay out above the buy row! This means you can change all of the cards’ abilities by just swapping out 6 cards.
You’re collecting cards numbered 2-7. Every number is always available, but the stack of cards for each number only ever has the top card flipped up and visible. And since the numbers come in different colors, even if you have the money to buy a high-cost card, it may not make sense to actually buy it if it’s completely off color, and would be hard to include in your future chain.
As tempting as that 5 might be, splashing into blue to play it could be difficult.
I’ve really enjoyed Avant Carde. It’s one of the few prototypes that I wanted to play every time I saw it over the last few months. I’m even more excited to see the final game. It’s a fascinating deck builder with some really neat mechanical innovations in the genre.
If any of this sounds cool, Resonym is currently running a Kickstarter for the game that you can check out.
Disclaimer: I am friends with the designers at Resonym, which is how I ended up playtesting it, but it’s honestly the best Resonym game I’ve played
Grotto Beasts is an entertaining TCG with a really clever resource system that I haven’t seen used before. It’s good fun. But at the end of this writeup, I’m not going to recommend buying it. I absolutely recommend playing it! Just… not spending money on it. But we’ll get to that.
The most unique part of Grotto Beasts to me is the resource system. It’s very interesting and not particularly complex, but it is very different from anything I’ve seen in a TCG, so I want to go over it in detail first.
Grotto Beasts’ Resource System
Every card card in the game has a cost. To “play” a card, you have to pay its cost, which you do by placing cards facedown into a zone called the summoning pool. The summoning pool cannot be rearranged, and is not a discard pile/graveyard.
Here’s the neat part: whenever an opponent plays a card, you draw cards equal to the cost of that card from your summoning pool. If you didn’t have enough cards in your pool, you continue drawing from your deck..
In addition, except for the first card you play each turn, you cannot play cards if your opponent’s summoning pool is empty.
I found that in the games I played, this led to a bunch of really interesting decisions about what cards to use to pay various costs, and how to order them into the summoning pool. A heavy cost card might be useless now, but placing it at the very bottom makes it hard to get back. Likewise, it gives the game a sort of tempo pace. Dropping a high cost card into your opponent lets them draw a fair number of cards back, and can give them the answers they need to deal with it.
The Rest of the Systems
The rest of Grotto Beasts’ systems are functional and fun, if not as fascinating. Combat is similar to Magic, where all attackers attack at once. Unlike Magic, attack values are summed, and then defense values are summed. Each player chooses how to allocate damage across the enemy line. Cards only have one stat for combat, Power, so it’s fairly easy to keep track of what’s what.
Damage that isn’t blocked goes through, and when it does, the player who did the damage banishes cards off the top of their deck into a score pile, somewhat akin to Pokemon’s prize card system. These cards can’t be looked at, and the first player to get 10 prizes wins. There are also cards that can generate prizes with their effects.
The Good, the Bad, and the Jerma
The Good
For all intents and purposes, this card game was created as Twitch streamer merch. That said, the game itself is strong, generally fun to play, and has interesting and unique systems. I have no real complaints about the mechanical structure of the game, and it’s much better quality then what I would expect for a tie-in product. God we live in a weird world.
Ed Note: As far as I can tell based on the rulebooks, while a wide number of people contributed to this project, only one person is specifically credited with the game’s design: J. Evan Raitt.
One big thing that I really appreciate about the design is that outside of a single six sided die, it doesn’t require any external components or trackers for things like health, counters, or life. It also doesn’t have a complex zone setup system. I mention this mostly because it’s one of my pet peeves with Nostalgix.
The Bad
But while I don’t have complaints about the game’s design structure, I do have two incredibly large bones to pick with some of the specific designs. First, the starter decks. There are two starters decks, and they felt extremely unevenly matched.
One is called Super Luck, and it’s mechanically themed around coin flips and luck. It offers cards that increase the payoffs of winning coin flips, with some ability manipulate those flips. It has a consistent identity and strategy.
The other is called Lot O’ Grottos. It feels much weaker for a variety of reasons. First, the grottos themselves are primarily a defensive tool for the deck, and some provide search and discard pile recursing. But the deck’s stat lines on its creatures are incredibly low. One of the “tricks” the decks has is a 4 drop card that lets you sacrifice creatures at the start of a turn to get a card that costs one more. Except while the deck has two copies of a card that costs 6, it has no card that costs 5, and only two cards that cost 4. That means it’s a card that turns 1 drops into two drops, which aren’t much stronger.
In addition, the Super Luck deck gets a card named Festive Mimic. It’s a 3 cost, 2 power card that has an effect that triggers when it’s played. Its effect is “Roll a die, then draw that many cards.”
Grottos gets a card named Bobbin. It’s 3 cost, 2 power card, that has an effect that triggers when played. Its effect is “Draw a card.”
This isn’t the greatest sin I’ve ever seen committed. I’m more sympathetic to a card game that prints a version of Swords to Plowshares than I am to one that prints the Power Nine (Looking at you, MetaZoo)
However, these are problems with the design of specific cards, not the core mechanics. I haven’t written about this specifically here, but the initial sets of Magic were kind of janky, and the initial sets of the Pokémon TCG led to a dumpster fire meta. A set TCG with some bad initial set design does not make a bad game.
The Jerma
Indie card games are my kryptonite. I will play one demo game of something I’ve never heard of before, and that will be enough to sell me on it. Show me something even mildly exciting, and I will be forking over cash for a booster box.
So why don’t I recommend Grotto Beasts? Ultimately, pricing and production quality.
The cost of cardboard is too damn high.
Grotto Beasts’ boosters are $10 a pop, while the 2P starter set is $80. The starter set contains 2 decks, and 2 boosters, making each deck come out to $30 for 40 cards. For comparison, the Pokémon starter sets retail at aprox $15-20 a deck, with the higher end comp/premium products going for $30.
These prices are high, which is unfortunate and might be tolerable except for one final thing: production quality.
The physical cards are kind of crap. After just three games, the cards themselves were showing scratches and scuffs on the edges. In addition to this, one of the cards I opened in the boosters was straight up missing any sort of finish on the front of the card.
I spent part of this weekend running a pre-release for the new Pokémon set with the same friend I played Grotto Beasts with. And we both agreed that the print quality of Grotto Beasts is much lower quality than current Pokémon cards.
In Conclusion
I absolutely recommend playing Grotto Beasts if you get a chance. While the game has a few mechanical issues, they’re nothing worse than the very first set of any other TCG.
But the sky-high pricing and miserable production quality of the product means I just can’t recommend it, and I don’t plan on buying it, especially with the issue of the starter decks being incredibly unevenly matched.
If you love Jerma, and want to support the project, more out of the sort of tradeoff that we as humans make when we buy content creator merch, you can find the game here.
I, however, am NOT going to go to this website here with a list of all the Grotto Beasts cards and download the images. Then I am NOT going to put them into a big sheet, and I am NOT going to find a way to print them as make my own bootleg set of of the cards to play with.
Every time I go to a convention, I promise myself I’m gonna write about everything I saw. And every time I get home, a bit overwhelmed, I cover 2-3 games, and then move onto the next thing.
So this time, I’ll write all it all up right now the bus ride home! But first…
The Non-Games part of the Event
This is a very small event compared to something PAX Unplugged. At its heart, Granite Games Summit is a bunch of folks in a hotel ballroom playing board games for four days straight.
It also has a very cozy feeling compared to other conventions I’ve gone to. The whole thing was very low-key, with plenty of of families and children. In terms of lodging, the Doubletree by Hilton is perfectly average. Still nicer than my apartment. For food, there’s enough stuff within walking or driving distance to be fine as well, but nothing special.
There’s very much an air of trust to the whole thing. One draw of the event is that attendees can bring their own board game collections to be borrowed from. And beyond that, the event organizers also provide an entire game library.
Overall, this is a low-intensity event, offering a chance to play a large number of games without buying them yourself. I don’t think anyone comes to an event like this for any reason other than to play board games. So let’s talk about those games!
The Playtests and Prototypes
Given that none of these games are out yet, I don’t want to say too much about them, and I won’t be saying anything I didn’t already say to the designers’ faces. Still, I spent a fair amount of time on them, so I’d like to talk about them a bit.
Cubism by Resonym A very fun deck builder. The designer is a friend of mine. Still in the tweaking stages, but if you see it at another event, I highly encourage you to try it out. It has a very clever twist on resource generation that I’m not sure I should spoil here?
Cypher Sessions Cypher Sessions is a beat-the-leader matching game about writing rap. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t have too much fun with it. I said as much in my feedback to the designer. I’d play it again if someone wanted to, but I don’t have any huge amount of interest in it. But it’s still in development, so maybe it will end up great!
The Armory The Armory is a set collection buying game about trying assemble collections of weapons and armor. It’s in the early stages, but its core concept does feel fun. There were some lulls and weirdnesses, and the game itself doesn’t quite feel ready for prime time, but I’d be interested to see where it ends up.
A quick note: If you’re the dev of one of these games, and would like me to update this article to link to your twitter or blog, please just send me a message on Twitter.
The Fully Released Games
Here are the fully released games I played. So no punches pulled. I’ll be giving my quick thoughts, and ultimately, answering a single question: Would I play it again?
Dice Forge
Dice Forge is a game about Forging Dice. There are customizable dice that you can snap the sides off of, and snap back on. It’s a heavily produced affair where your goal is ultimately to Get The Most Victory Points, by customizing your dice, and using the resources they generate to buy cards that give you victory points and abilities.
Would I play it again?Yes. I generally enjoyed it, and I’d be curious to try different strategies if I got a rematch.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Hogwarts Battle is deckbuilder with the Harry Potter license. I’ll talk about the game in a moment. First though, I would like to note two things unrelated to gameplay that drove me a bit nuts.
First off, it feels like every other name and item in the game has a trademark symbol on it, to the point of ridiculousness. In addition, all the game’s art has a tone of “on-file style guide movie images.”
Poor Harry Potter, emblazoned with the symbol of ownership by “She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-On-Social-Media” for all eternity.
The end result is that the whole thing has the artistic feeling of licensed children’s valentines from Hallmark, and a tone of tackiness. Someone in the chain of command had a decision to make: was it more important that players be immersed in defending Hogwarts from its villains, or that they know that, should J.K. Rowling’s estate ever wish to make a Peter Pettigrew themed vacuum cleaner, they own the rights to do so. They chose the latter.
Editor’s note:You know, because Peter Pettigrew sucks.
Which is unfortunate, because this game doesn’t feel like it wants to be a cheap tie-in product. Whoever designed it seemed to really give some thought to the characters and items. One small standout function for me was that both Draco Malfoy and Lucius Malfoy have a similar effect, with the elder Malfoy being more powerful. The effect itself is “Not really doing anything bad on their own, but making bad things that happen worse.”
Which at least to me was a pretty good way to encapsulate those characters!
That said, this is not the strongest deckbuilder I’ve ever played, or even the best one I played this weekend. The game has 7 scenarios, all of which are additive as far as I can tell, and I played through 1-3 without being challenged. The lack of any deck-thinning mechanics or way to clear the row of items you can buy to add to your deck can quickly lead to a feeling of bloat with no mechanical remedy.
Would I play it again?Yes, BUT only to beat the game on the hardest difficulty, and see if it gets any more interesting/addresses any of the problems with the deck building elements.
This also would probably be a decent game to play with non-board gaming Harry Potter fans, or maybe your family.
Editor’s note: playing this game at a convention’s library is the best way to play it! You get to try it without giving JKR any more money.
KeyForge
KeyForge is yet another card game from Richard Garfield. I have to assume it was built around the question of “How can we remove deck-building, landscrew, and collecting cards, but still sell you blind box packs?” And thus was born the Unique Deck Game. Each deck is randomly generated in advance for you, and cannot be changed.
Snark aside, I generally like KeyForge. Did it disrupt the big 3? No. Do I only have the game because it’s mostly dead, and I bought a booster box of decks from a discounts bin for $40, when its MSRP is supposed to be about $120? Yes. It makes novel attempts to solve a bunch of problems in the card game space, even if they don’t all succeed.
Would I play it again?Yes. I find KeyForge entertaining, and the unconstructed nature lends to a lower power level than a lot of constructed TCGs. I might get bored at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet.
A Feast for Odin
Feast for Odin is a worker placement game about populating a Tetris grid. Is that an oversimplification? Yes. But this game took 30 minutes to sort components, 30 minutes to explain the rules, and 3 and half hours to play. Whatever I write here will be an oversimplification.
Analysis Paralysis: The Board Game
I would like to make a few quick observations, though. If games are art, and art is subjective, then I subject that I would like to never again be subjected to A Feast for Odin. The game has an 8.2 on Board Game Geek, a number would now be infinitesimally lower if I added my own rating. I found the game to be long, tedious, and I struggled to spot interesting mechanical interactions and failed to be engrossed the game’s theming.
This probably says more about me than A Feast for Odin, but it was my experience.
Would I play it again?No. I would rather do my taxes. It wouldn’t be more fun, but it would be shorter, and at the end at least my taxes would be finished.
Fun Fact: A Feast for Odin is a Euro-game, following the traditional Euro-game model of “Everyone should score about the same number of points at the end, despite the winner having a clearly better position.” I scored 30 points. Both my opponents scored OVER 90, and one of them had also never played before. I am very bad at this game.
Clank
Clank is the better deckbuilder I played this weekend. It’s still not great, but it does do some interesting things. The goal is to get into a dungeon, get loot, and get out. This is compounded slightly by fact that you need to do it without getting burnt to a crisp by the dragon living in the dungeon.
There are really three systems in Clank. There’s the deck builder, where the unique conceit is that you must play every single card in your hand each turn. There’s the board that you move around on. And there’s the Clank bag.
Some cards in your deck will generate clank tokens. These get added to the bag, and whenever various cards show up in the games buy row, the dragon attacks. You pull out a certain number of tokens from the bag, and take damage based on whose color they were. Things get more dangerous as players pick up the loot, giving the whole thing a feel of escalating tension.
Would I play it again?Yes. Each component of Clank is “just okay,” but as a whole, it feels like a much stronger game. Apparently the spinoffs also address issues with the game’s pacing.
Spirit Island
Spirit Island is a co-op settler construction game. Oh I’m sorry, I mispelled that. It’s a co-op settler destruction game. This game also took 3 hours to play, though the setup time was much faster.
I enjoyed Spirit Island far more than A Feast for Odin. At least part of this is due to the theming being far more interesting. “Drive out the invading settlers as a powerful nature spirit” excites me more than “Acquire a cow.”
That said, given that both my teammates had played before, I don’t know exactly how impactful I was to the group. There was also a lot of time just spent resolving various effects, as opposed to using my various powers.
Would I play it again?Yes. I liked Spirit Island, and I’d be curious play some of the more complex spirits, and the ones with different playstyles. It was fun!
Wrap Up
Granite Games Summit 2023 was a good time, and I’d attend a Granite Games Summit again. I do think this is an event best attended as some sort of group, or if you’re already local to try to keep the costs for a hotel/travel down.
The other benefit to attending with friends/family is that you already have a playgroup for most things, and can hopefully find people fill out slots should you need them.
That said, this is a very focused event. It’s about playing board games for up to 4 days straight in a reasonable hotel in New Hampshire, and not doing much else. If that sounds fantastic, awesome. Go follow the convention’s account on Twitter, so you can find out when to buy tickets for next year (they sell out very fast).
Dungeons of Mandom VIII is compact bluffing board game. Personally I like it quite a lot, though that may be because I won when I played. It’s designed by Antoine Bauza and I WAS GAME, and published by Oink Games.
There are no other games in the Dungeons of Mandom series, but that doesn’t stop me from imaging what they could look like. In all seriousness though, the game is entirely family friendly. Unlike me.
The goal of Dungeons of Mandom VIII is to to be either the last adventurer standing, or the first adventurer to complete a dungeon twice. However, this is a bluffing game, not a dungeon crawler.
This is first obvious in hero selection. Instead of each player selecting a character, the group as a whole has a single hero between them. Heroes come with their equipment, but because this is the 8th Dungeon of Mandom, that equipment is likely going to be stripped off, in order to prove how manly you are.
There’s flavor in the equipment. Most of the characters have some form of HP boosting equipment, usually a piece of armor, or a shield. However, for the Princess class, this equipment takes the role of a Suitor and a Chaperone giving the fun implication of them being used as meat shields.
The E in fiancé stands for éxpendable
Equipment and hero selection aside though, the meat of the game is building the dungeon! On a player’s turn, they can choose to either pass and drop from the rotation, or to build out the dungeon deck. To build the dungeon deck, they draw a card from a the monster deck, and then make a second choice. They can add it facedown to the dungeon, or they can remove a piece of equipment from the hero, and not add the card they just drew to the dungeon.
The monster deck is made up of a bunch of different monsters, including some special monsters. Monsters each have a number associated with them, which is linked to how much damage they do. There are more copies of the weaker monsters, and only a single copy of some of the stronger monsters, such as the Litch, Demon, and Dragon.
Cool Monster Club – Not pictured: the dragon who’s just too cool.
This is core tension of Dungeons of Mandom VIII. “Do I think that with the remaining equipment, based on what I’ve seen my fellow players do, I can beat the dungeon as it currently stands, or do I need to pull back?” I played one game where another player chose to remove the equipment that hero needed to beat the dragon, and I knew that I’d added the dragon to the dungeon, so I chose to pass.
When one player takes an action, and every player after them passes, it’s finally time for that player to venture into the dungeon, and prove their worth! Or more likely, get stabbed in the face by the Litch for 6 damage and then beaten by goblins.
The exploring player reveals cards from the top of the dungeon deck one by one, either defeating them, or taking damage equal to their value if they don’t have some way to defeat them. If they get through card in the deck, they beat the dungeon, and get a treasure card! If they don’t, they take a hit. When a player takes two hits, they lose and can’t play anymore. However, if a player gets two treasure tokens, they win.
If I have any gripes with the game, it’s that I don’t love the elimination component. I get why it has to be there. Without it, there would never be any reason to not push your luck. But it sucks that you can end up in a position where you don’t get to play anymore.
Mythic Mischief and Klask don’t really have anything in common with each other. It’s not even like they had booths next to each other or something. Mythic Mischief is an action economy and movement-based game with victory points that almost reminds me of Chess. Klask is a skill-based dexterity game that feels like miniature air hockey.
So why am I covering them together? Because I don’t have enough to say about them separately to fill writeup! Anyway, let’s get to it.
Mythic Mischief
Mythic Mischief is an asymmetric grid-based movement game, designed by Max Anderson, Zac Dixon, Austin Harrison, and published by IV Games.
The best summary I can offer is that you and your opponents both control 3 miniatures on a 5v5 grid. Alternating turns, you attempt to spend your actions and use your abilities to place your opponent’s units in the path or directly on an NPC unit called the Tome Keeper.
Editor’s Note: Tome Keeper not to be confused with Dome Keeper
At the end of a player’s turn, the Tome Keeper moves towards specific locations. If there are units in its way, the Tome Keeper knocks them out, and the player who didn’t control those units scores points. Units that get knocked out can be replaced at the start of the next player’s turn.
There’s a fair amount to the movement and action system, and how it plays with the game’s upgrade choices that I don’t think I can summarize effectively, so I won’t try. It’s a perfectly fine system, but I would not describe it as “Sparking Joy,” at least for me.
It is worth noting that each player will be playing a different faction, with unique abilities and so keeping track of what your opponent can do is necessary to succeed.
I only played one game of Mythic Mischief, and it was a combination of a demo and an ass beating. I wouldn’t say that I hugely enjoyed it. That might have been because I lost, and because I get salty easily. But I also struggled with two other factors.
First up, just because of how the game works with scoring, it felt very difficult to make any sort of comeback once I fell behind. Secondly, the game reminded me of Chess in that it felt like a game of trying to find the “Correct” moves, and like a puzzle of chaining things together. That’s just not something I find very fun.
So yeah, if you do like deterministic movement games, or things like Chess, maybe you’ll get more out of Mythic Mischief than I did.
Klask
Klask is a manual dexterity game by Mikkel Bertelsen.
Honestly, it feels weird to be reviewing Klask here. It’s as if for some reason I felt compelled to write a review of Skeeball, or Soccer. The closest games I can think of as a comparison to Klask would be Air Hockey or maybe Foosball.
Those chips look really good.
All of this to say that the “Manual Dexterity” part of the game is absolutely not optional. Klask is played in an elevated square wooden box with sides. Each player has a magnet with a stick in the end that they hold under the box, and a pawn they place on top. The top pawn is moved by dragging it with the magnet from under the box.
The pawn and stick aren’t the only magnetic pieces, though. Klask also has 3 small plastic beads with magnets in the center that are placed equidistant in the middle of the playfield at the start of a point. These beads will jump and stick to your pawn if you get too close, and if 2 of the 3 stick to a player’s pawn, their opponent gets a point.
Points can also be scored by a player hitting the ball into the goal indent on the board, or if a player messes up and gets their pawn stuck in the indent.
The interesting part of Klask for me is how the tiny white beads open up strategy. Without them, the game is pretty much just air hockey with a marble. But with the beads, you can do interesting stuff like hitting them towards your opponent in order to close off parts of the board.
Overall, I like Klask. I just don’t like it enough to really want to buy it. That said, if someone asked me if I’d play, my response would be a semi-enthusiastic “Sure!”
Conclusion
I don’t think there’s any meaningful conclusion you can take out of things like both Klask and Mythic Mischief being present at PAX Unplugged. Maybe there’s some sort of testament to the diversity of mechanics and games present. Maybe there’s something to be said for the sorts of games you’d play if someone else is footing the bill.
And maybe there’s nothing. Maybe there is no purpose. Maybe the real journey was the friends we made along the way.
If you want more nonsense and to be notified whenever I write new stuff, maybe consider following me on Twitter? The site still seems to be up and functioning, at least for now.
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