Category: Genre

The DreamWorld Playtest is an AI Nightmare

Disclosures: I received an unsolicited playtest key for this Beta via KeyMailer, the key distribution site. The content in this write-up was made in what the game describes as “Alpha 2 v 1.0”.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, as such I present the following.

Now that I’ve got your attention, either via lust, fear, or horror, let’s talk about DreamWorld!

DreamWorld, full name “DreamWorld: The Infinite Sandbox MMO” based on the press content I had to read, is not intrinsically interesting. The general gameplay is just “Cruddy Valheim MMO.” The controls are somewhat clunky. The graphics are tolerable, and there’s very little to actually recommend the gameplay.

The games only real strong point, outside of the one I’m about to talk about, is it’s building system. And even that, while in depth, isn’t particularly easy to use.

Even as I type this with the game in the background, a single doe clips back and forth at 90 degree angles in the distance.

But the first line of the game’s press release is what really caught my eye:

Surely this could only end well.

A Bad Idea, Implemented Poorly

DreamWorld allows players to use text-based generative AI to create 3D models that can be placed in the world, hence the Venus de Milo Pikachu above.

Using generative AI to create 3D Models isn’t new. Services like Meshy have been around for a bit, and models like Shap-E for local use also exist. But DreamWorld is the first game I’ve seen actually use one in “real time,” instead of just using it to generate assets to place into an in-development game.

As an idea in the abstract, it’s somewhat interesting . As a practical implementation, what DreamWorld currently has in its Alpha lacks necessary guardrails to prevent copyright infringement, adult content, or combinations of both!

Pikachu prior to fusion.

Before I get into the problems with bad actors (me) using the system, I first want to note that the system is entirely useless even if no one uses it to try to create pornography.

In DreamWorld, only the player who generates an asset can see the asset.

The result is that even using this in a positive way, like to cleverly generate extra decorations, the end result only appears for the building player, and no one else. For everyone else, it just appears as a sparkling box. So, the system is useless.

Secondly, assets are only cubes.

Every assets is just cube. It can’t be a chair, or a chest, or something clever and useful, it’s just a static cube. No dynamic properties, no color changing, just cubes.

A Lack of Reasonable Guardrails

DreamWorld appears to lack any sort of moderation on its models. While it limits users to 5 prompts per day, this isn’t much of a guardrail.

Here’s a brief list of prompts and results I tried out.

Prompt: Pikachu
Result: Copyright Infringement

With this “success” I decided to try for something slightly more risque. While I suspected their were filters for various keywords, I guessed that traditional artwork would not be subject to those filters.

Prompt: Venus De Milo
Result: Tasteful Nudity

With this confirmation that content didn’t appear to be filtered or moderated, I decided to move onto something a little more clever.

Prompt: Venus de Milo with the head of Pikachu
Result: Less tasteful nudity

Almost certain of my inevitable ban, I decided to show this off to a few friends. This led to suggestion that if there was a filter, it probably wasn’t calibrated for euphemisms in context.

Spoiler: It was not.

I didn’t end up creating anything too interesting with my remaining generations, but I do think this does a pretty good job of demonstrating that the game is absolutely not ready for prime time.

Now, some folks will be saying “What’s the harm?” or “This is only a problem because you made it a problem.” For those people, I would like to point them to the following document on Roblox from Hinderburg research.

I not opposed to adult content in games. I’ve written about a fair number of them on this site, and I’ve even suggested a few that are worth playing.

But adult content in unmoderated online spaces exposed to children is a bad idea. Unmoderated online generative AI is a terrible idea.

Final Thoughts

I don’t much like generative AI. If you want the longer take, read it here. But ignoring my personal feelings, this is still a bad implementation. Assuming there are no bad actors, the system does nothing meaningful. Taking bad actors into consideration, it lacks any meaningful human moderation or reasonable safeguards.

I reached out to the DreamWorld team on Discord and via Email, and they confirmed on both channels that in the future they expect to allow other players to view generated assets.

All I have to say on that is that I hope they have better moderation by then.

Cobalt Core

I finished Cobalt Core months and months ago, and Fritz has been bothering me to review is ever since. So! To buy myself some peace and quiet, let’s talk about this sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder.

This game was made for me. I love roguelikes, especially roguelike deckbuilders—I’ve 100% completed Hades and Slay the Spire, and I’ve sunk countless hours into trying to do the same in Monster Train (not yet, but one day). I’m a sucker for crew-on-a spaceship games. And Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of my favorite games ever (published by Brace Yourself Games, the publisher of Cobalt Core).

So on paper, a spaceship deckbuilder roguelike that’s like if FTL, Hades, and Slay the Spire had a baby published by the publisher of Crypt of the Necrodancer would be the perfect game for me… And it is. Cobalt Core is fantastic.

The Mechanics

Okay yeah I guess I have to explain the mechanics.

You have a spaceship. It points to the top of the screen.

There’s an opposing spaceship. It points down towards you. Fight!

You and the opposing spaceship take turns. On your turn you play the hand of cards you drew from your deck, doing things like firing your blasters, activating your drone bays, shielding your ship, or moving your ship left and right. Your ships are aligned in vertical lanes, so that each component of your ship is lined up with a component on the opponent’s ship (or empty space). You’ll move your ship around to try to make sure that your blasters line up with the opponent’s vulnerable cockpit, and that their blasters line up with empty space.

The rest is pretty straightforward deckbuilder roguelike. Try to kill the opposing ship without taking too much damage (ideally none). Spend money to upgrade your ship with “relics” (to borrow the term from Slay The Spire) heal yourself, and add cards to your deck. Choose your route through each system between combat, hard combats, shops, encounters, etc. Each system ends with a miniboss, and you’re trying to beat the final boss.

And there are a reasonable amount of pre-run options. You can choose different ships with different specialties and configurations. Also each card in the game belongs to one of several suits, one for each of the crew members. At the start of the run you choose which 3 crew members you’d like to play with this time, and that determines what cards you can see. Each crew member has their own focal mechanics, like the one who’s good at drones, or the one who has strong attacks that overheat your ship.

The Story

Another place Cobalt Core really shines is its story. For a while, it seemed like roguelikes and story didn’t mix, and most deckbuilder roguelikes didn’t even try to have a story.

(To some extent, I wonder how much “writing story” and “designing card game mechanics” are skill sets that don’t overlap.)

When they tried, the narrative would be very very lightly implied with environmental storytelling. Seriously, why are we slaying this spire? Something something, pact with heaven, so now I’m on a monster train.

Then Hades happened, and suddenly every roguelike is trying to be character- and story-driven. It’s really hard to land that, but Cobalt Core pulls it off. The characters are cute, and I wanted to learn more about them. And perhaps even more challenging: the dialogue is good and funny. I’m not going to write anything more in order to avoid spoilers. Just go play it.

The one iffy story bit is how the story is rolled out. Whenever you win a run, you can unlock the next cutscene from one of the crew members you chose to play with. When you unlock all the cutscenes, there’s a final final boss battle and you can win.

I didn’t mind this, and I was interested to unlock all the custscenes. But the cutscenes got in the way of the “one more run” feeling that can make roguelikes so great. The most clever roguelikes even elide one run into the next so that you just keep trying. And Cobalt Core’s cutscenes do the opposite, interrupting my play experience and providing a point to put down the game. Even though I liked the scenes, I often found myself pausing the game and walking away without watching them.

I don’t really know why Hades is able to offer story in the hub without disrupting that flow. Maybe it’s because each of the dialogue updates you get from characters are so short, and there are always only a few. But I’d have liked to see more of that in Cobalt Core.

The Problem

In my opinion Cobalt Core has one big problem: there just isn’t enough of it. Is it worth the $20 price tag? Absolutely. In fact, go buy it now on Steam or Switch.

But I’m used to roguelikes really letting me test my mettle by giving me tons of difficulty ratchets and interesting achievements to chase. Cobalt Core really doesn’t have these. It has a few ships and 4 or so difficulty increases to unlock, but there’s no incentive to even play on those other ships. I had to invent my own personal goal of winning on highest difficulty with each of the ships, and even that wasn’t too hard.

So in short, go buy this game, play it, and then the studio can invest that money in adding to the game. I don’t even want much; just a list of arbitrary challenges/achievements, and maybe 15 more difficulty ratchets. Add those, and I think Cobalt Core is perfect.

X-Angels

Ed Note: This write-up discusses content intended for an 18+ audience. There is no intrinsically 18+ content or art in this write up, but there are images that some might consider risque, and there are links to content that is 18+ (Though that content is age-gated a second time). All of which is to say: You have been warned.

Prologue

I played a great game recently that I probably can’t recommend to you.

That said, you can know for sure if you’d enjoy it by answering a few questions:

  1. Do you like deck-builders?
  2. Are you interested in seeing a very competent, if a bit limited execution of the genre? One that maps the whole thing into a much larger, longer run of an experience with some visual novels elements?

Yes to both so far?

Great.

How do you feel about hardcore animated pornography?

Ed Note: It occurs to me after writing all of this, I should probably be a bit more specific in who this game is for. The porn in X-Angels is very much geared toward straight men. Sorry for anyone else whose hopes I might have gotten up.

Act 1. I Play It For The Mechanics

X-Angels, by BaranceStudio, is an incredibly fun, if somewhat limited deckbuilder, probably best compared to Slay the Spire. Like Slay the Spire, each turn, you draw a hand of cards, and play them to deal damage to enemies and opponents. Cards have variety of effects, ranging from damage, to generating shields to block incoming, to generating buffs, de-buffing, or applying permanent triggers to yourself.

But if you’re still here, you probably answered “Yes” to two of those questions above. You know about digital deck builders. So let’s talk about all the things you haven’t seen before.

Now, is it a deep and meaningful visual novel experience? No. Not really.

Each “Run” of X-Angels takes place parallel to sort of visual novel experience. This on its own is actually pretty neat. The game feels more akin to full campaign than to a roguelike, and you can choose to do the games various areas in different orders. A single run takes a fair bit longer than comparable games, especially on the hard difficulty.

X-Angels also adds a system where, based on the first two characters you recruit (of four), those two characters define your deck-building and your X-Power, a sort of side meter.

When this meter is filled, it can be used to be activate a special power or ability based on which character you have active. The second kicker is that you can switch between characters mid-fight, allowing you to build charge on one character, then swap to another character to use their burst. It’s a cool little mechanic.

These are quite neat, and range from conjuring extra cards into your deck, to purging debuffs on yourself. And again, this is an area where it feels like X-Angels goes harder than it needs to.

Many of Lia’s abilities effectively poison herself, or scale off poisoning herself. So instead of having to add cards to purge that poison, she can use her X-Power to do so.

Also, I really appreciate that the game has an actual story instead of just “Lore.” I am so tired of games that are just “Lore.” I would never say that X-Angels has better gameplay than Slay the Spire, Monster Train, or Inkbound but at least it has a story with an actual fucking ending.

Intermission 1.

Several years ago, while looking at the trash that shows up on Steam, me and my friends got into an discussion about what the worst possible mechanic you
could combine with erotic content would be.

After a bit, we settled on Sudoku.

Then one of those friends, one who actually finishes their side projects, went and actually made the whole thing. It has multiplayer!

It’s called Operation Sexy Sudoku, but, here’s a little inside scoop: that’s just because the developer called it as “Open Source Software” as its development code name.

You will need to be logged into Steam to see this.

Anyway, they had made most of the game, and realized that they didn’t have one of the more critical elements for this sort of project: The porn.

At this point, we started trawling around on itch.io, looking to see if there was an asset pack, or some easy way to get a lot of anime pornography
that could be used in the game. And while we found a pack, after researching, it turned it out it was someone stealing assets from a developer calling BaranceStudio, and trying to sell them for money.

This is how I found out about BaranceStudio, and ended up following them.

Act 2. Adult Content, For Adults

I did put a whole disclaimer at the front of this, so I’m going to keep this part brief, and non-explicit.

X-Angels operates off what I’d call “Porn Logic.” It’s mostly fairly vanilla, but there is an option to opt into what I’d call the “bad end” route, which contains the typical sort of dark ending content you might expect from anime porn.

If I was to describe the sort of adult content you’ll see in this game, I’d say: There’s nothing here that you wouldn’t find in a dark romance or hentai.

That said, there’s a lot here that is absolutely not part of a healthy adult relationship.

I think that’s enough of a disclaimer. If you want to learn more, the game has a mature content descriptor on the Steam page.

Intermission 2.

It’s kind of weird that sex, something that most people will do in their life, is much more taboo in games than murder, something presumably most of us have not done, and will never do.

The obvious take is that “sex” in games bears pretty much the same resemblance to sex in the real world as violence in games bears to violence in the real world.

After all, if I shoot someone in Fortnite, I haven’t actually murdered them. I’ve kicked them out of the game they are in. It’s less eternal void, and more being tagged out in capture the flag.

The parallel version, then, is probably something like “Sex in games is almost always porn or porn adjacent.”. It has the same relationship to the real complexities of sex and relationships that violence in games does. Which is to say, pretty much none.

Does anyone else think it’s a bit weird that most video games that have sex, it’s used as reward? It’s at the end of a romance option, or it’s unlocked in the secret ending. Porn games do the same. “You saved the day, here are some titties and/or dick” is not a particularly nuanced take regardless of whether it’s full frontal or not.

Also, it strikes me as odd that when something is “Adult” or “For Adults”, that almost always just means “It’s horny.” Not that it involves rent, or taxes,
or the difficulty of meeting people as you get older, or the stresses of aging, or complexities of modern life.

No, “Adult” means genitals.

Act 3.

So why am I writing about this?

Well, there’s an interesting post credit sequence in which the developers talk about their intentions, and there’s a bit where they say, “Hey, this game was much harder to program and implement than our previous games! Anyway, our next game is going to be something much more complex then this!”

And I kind of respect that, in the same way that I respected it when they responded to me and my friend asking about their assets.

We live in an era where it can be super lucrative to make exploitative gacha games that sell softcore porn. Basically, selling microtransaction lottery tickets to children for the chance to see “not quite porn.” BaranceStudio could have taken this approach. Instead, they made a direct, interesting, and well thought out porn game.

I just find it refreshing that someone made horny deckbuilder and sold it for $11.

Conclusion

So do I recommend X-Angels? Well, again, only if you like deck builders and male gaze-y animated porn. Okay, that’s a lot of qualifiers, but I think they’re pretty fair ones.

It’s not a perfect game. I didn’t encounter any game breaking bugs, but the save-file system is very wonky, and the translations are rough at times.

But if you do like the things mentioned above, and you prefer to earn your horny cutscenes instead of having them handed to you after you click through 90 lines of text, it’s pretty great.

X-Angels is $11 on Steam.

Abiotic Factor

Ed Note: This review is based on playing the game on a multiplayer server, with increased resources, bonus EXP gain for skills, and decreased hunger/thirst depletion rates. Screenshots are from the press kit, and were not taken during gameplay.

Genre-wise, Abiotic Factor is not the most innovative thing. It’s a multiplayer survival crafting game, with some light RPG and FPS elements.

The game has a new header image now, but frankly it’s a bit too heroic for my tastes. This one feels more accurate.

Where it sets itself apart is the setting. Instead of a tropical island filled with monsters, or an infinite world of cubes, you and your friends will find yourself stuck in a combination of Black Mesa and an SCP Containment Facility.

It also looks like Half-Life.

Gameplay

If you’ve played a survival-crafter before, you’ve seen this loop. Set up a base, venture out to gather resources, craft equipment, and then venture out to explore. Rinse and repeat.

The main difference comes from the setting and enemies. I don’t think it’s unfair to call the enemies in this game pretty much just lifted from Half-Life. You have the Not-Head-Crabs, you have the Not-Vortagaunts, and you have the generic military dudes.

There are more enemies, but if you’ve played Half-Life and Halo, you’ve seen 90% of what this game has to offer. And if you’ve played Lethal Company, you can crank that up to 100%. There’s a single spectacle section where you’re forced to sneak past a series of large spooky enemies, but then they never show up again.

One thing that is new are the mini-games. You can turn some of these off, but not all of them. Frankly, I didn’t enjoy having to play these each time I had to sleep, or use the bathroom. Because not using a bathroom will eventually kill you.

Lot less scary once you realize you just have to outrun him, then give him a whack.

Combat is tricky, but it’s a bit of a mixed bag. While some of the later game snipers are difficult, often enemies are hard to deal with because they just out-gear you when you run into them, not because they’re crazy smart or tricky. There was an early game robot that we dealt with by walking up, smacking it, and then running away. Rinse repeat 25 times.

I probably sound a bit more down on Abiotic Factor than I’d like to be. The game is fun, and the setting is pretty novel for this genre. It’s just that a lot of what the game offers is captured more in its atmosphere and lore than it is in the gameplay mechanics.

Incredible atmosphere, gameplay that’s purely a set-piece stealth section.

Building up a base, crafting progressive upgrades, setting up farms, and exploring out for new materials. These are all fun things to do, and Abiotic Factor does them well.

But I’ve also already done them in Minecraft. And Raft. And Satisfactory, VRising, Valheim, Terraria, Starbound, The Planet Crafter, and Don’t Starve Together.

If I was to give any real praise, I want to call out its quality of life features and unlock. You can develop auto-sorting. You can get the ability to pull resources from nearby boxes for use in crafting and repairing. Thank you Abiotic Factor for not making me play inventory Tetris each time I want to craft a single clip of ammo.

The Problem

The real problem though is that Abiotic Factor is currently Early Access. It feels like you can only play about 30-40% of the game. By the time you reach the end, you’ve been introduced to the world, and its factions and monsters… and just as things are getting exciting, there’s invisible wall that says “Future Content Here.”

And then there isn’t really an end game. While the base building can be fun, unlike Valheim or Minecraft, it doesn’t have enough freedom to turn into the focus of game. We built about 2-3 bases on our playthrough, and that was “good enough.” Sure, we could have built them better, or improved them, but we never felt any need to do so.

The same is true of other factors. There are no raids, rare mobs, weapons, or really anything to do. And that’s fine, Abiotic Factor doesn’t need these things. It can be a survival-crafter with a complete story and arc like Raft… but it doesn’t that story yet.

And as a result, I can’t really recommend playing it until it’s actually finished.

Conclusion

Abiotic Factor has a lot of promise, and there are all sorts of hint and nods lore-wise toward interesting things that might happen. For example, there’s a large red chair that appears to just teleport you into a backrooms style area where you have to solve a puzzle while avoiding invisible monsters to get out.

It’s fresh, and hits a certain itch when played with friends. It’s new and unique enough to be a good time. But it’s hard to view as a long term game, especially with no real end-game or purpose currently available, and with its story incomplete.

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.