Category: Multiplayer

PAX East 2022 – The Board Games Post

A look at the board games I played at PAX East, 2022.

While PAX East doesn’t focus on board games in the same way as Gen Con, or PAX Unplugged, they’re still there! Despite having a smaller presence, PAX East’s tabletop sections stays open late into the evening. So let’s go over the fun board games I played at PAX East.

Disclaimer: This list is no particular order, but I have listed bigger/released games closer to the bottom of the list. I played Dominion. It was fun. But it’s been out for 10 years, it doesn’t need top billing.

So let’s get right into it. Drum roll please!

1. I ripped this image straight from the Space Lion site, and 2. Pretty sure this is a concept box, even if the art is somewhat finalized.

First up, we have Space Lion! It’s an asymmetric bluffing/placement game. At the show, I only played the demo which used a single army. The full game is supposed to include four armies, if I remember correctly? The general gist is that you have a hand of cards, which are your units. Each round, you and your opponents place cards face down at various locations, and after placement is finished, you flip them up. Whoever has the highest unit value wins that battle, and the goal is to destroy the opponent’s base. While this sounds simple, I’ve completely skipped unit abilities, exhausting units, and the fact that each army is supposed to play differently.

Unfortunately, the game isn’t actually out yet. There was a Gamefound campaign running, but it was canceled. Still, if you’re interested in the game, there’s hope! The creators announced they were taking the lessons they learned from the first campaign and planning to try another at some point. If that all sounds interesting, you can sign up for their mailing list here. I hope it succeeds, as it was one of my favorite games from the show.

Another unpublished game is Small Time Crooks. I found this one in the Unpub hall. If you’re not familiar with Unpub, it’s a small area where you can play test board games in various states of development. The games can vary quite highly in their levels of completeness. You’ll find folks looking for publishers sitting next to a first prototype of a hand made deck of cards.

Small Time Crooks though! It’s a hyper-lite GM-less RPG? The mechanics are pretty straight forward. You have a character, and you have a randomly generated target to rob. The target consists of a series of random rooms. Each room contains a skill check, which you make via dice rolls.

I’m honestly not sure how well it would work with multiple players, but the demo was neat. I think it’s worth keeping an eye on. And if you want to do that, here’s the link to their website. My notes say that they’re planning a Kickstarter at some point in 2022? Weirdly enough I could never find who is actually making the game.

Update: You can also find them here, on Twitter! Thanks to the Unpub hall for pointing this out for me.

Leaving the indie and unpub space, let’s head over to a game that had its own massive booth.

Calling Dice Throne an incredibly polished “Push-Your-Luck” dice brawler is underselling it a bit, but it feels fairly accurate. I only played a single 1v1 game, but it worked like this: each player picks out a character to play. The character determines the starting health, energy, hand size, and most importantly, your attacks. Each attack consists of a matched pattern of dice rolls. On your turn, you have three sets of rolls. After each roll, you can choose which dice you want to reroll, and which to keep. The end result is that you’re generally trying to roll specific patterns to inflict damage, while using your own abilities to keep yourself alive. You can also use your hand of cards to modify dice rolls, and upgrade your abilities.

It’s very polished, and the two characters I saw seemed pretty different. I didn’t rush over to buy a copy afterwards, but I’d play it again. Also, the game box is massive, and I’m not sure I have space for it. Like, much bigger than other board games.

Of games I played though, the last one is one I owned: Dominion.

A deckbuilder like Tanto Cuore, Dominion is over 10 years old and is the OG of OG deckbuilders. There’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been written about, but let me summarize it anyway. Each player starts with a deck of cards, and a shared market. The market consists of 10 of 21 non-starter cards, and also a few more. Your goal is to spend the currency you get from you hand to buy cards from the market and add them to your deck, and improve your deck’s efficiency, so you can buy victory point cards. But as victory point cards only give VP at the end of the game, you want to avoid buying them until you have to.

Overall, it’s a very solid game, and playing it with someone who hadn’t played before gave me a solid appreciation for how well it’s held up all these years later. It also gave me a sense of nostalgia for a time 10 years ago. Y’know, back when you could just go places, the world wasn’t falling apart, and my parents weren’t divorced!

How time flies.

In any case, that’s what I played at PAX. This was only a microscopic sample of what was available, but as I tend to focus on video games while at East, it’s all I have to write about today.

Oh, and I also played lot of MTG, but that might just end up being its own post.

Top 4 PAX East Games with Demos

Four cool things from the show floor that you can experience from the comfort of your own home.

So, you couldn’t make it to PAX. Perhaps you had other things to that week. Perhaps you had entirely reasonable concerns about the perpetual global endemic. Perhaps you were less than enthusiastic about the fact that ticket prices doubled since last time. Or perhaps you did make it to PAX but were working a booth the entire time.

Not to worry! I’ve compiled a list of four games that I played at PAX, really liked, and all have demos that you can go download from Steam. So lets jump in, shall we? Starting with…

Slay the Spire, with party mechanics and a metal vibe.

I like Power Chord. It’s a turn based roguelike, in which you control a literal band (musicians), on their quest to… look I wasn’t paying much attention to the story. I’m assuming you’re trying to kill the devil or something. The gameplay itself is very much like Slay the Spire, in that you have a deck of cards, and each turn you have energy that you expand to play them, and try to kill your opponents. Unlike Slay the Spire, your deck is contributed to by the members of your band. If that sounds interesting, you can click here to go grab a demo for the game on Steam, and here if want to just learn more about it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a release date just yet.

Perhaps turn based strategic gameplay sounds too relaxing though. In that case, next up we have…

I was gonna joke that the main character is named Turbo, but it turns out that’s actually his name, and now I don’t know what to put here.

Turbo Overkill is an entry in the boomer shooter genre, i.e., things like Doom, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, and Ion Maiden. These games are shooters that went “What if shooting things was fun, you had more than two weapons, and our entire graphics budget for polygons was stolen?” I will note that as a general rule of thumb, I’m little skeptical of boomer shooters at the moment. This is not because I dislike the genre, but because they always demo really well, even when I end up not liking the game as much (looking at you Desync.) Regardless of my whining, the demo was a lot of fun, and you can grab it here. Turbo Overkill is currently available in Early Access, and the devs have said that it’s 30% content complete. If you want more info about the game then you can check out their twitter feed here, because I couldn’t actually find another website.

Perhaps you want something softer and lighter, or perhaps you think crushing AI is for losers. In either case, may I offer..

I don’t love the art style, but the gameplay is good. I think they were probably going for a sort of Touhou vibe?

Swapette Showdown is a head to head match-3 puzzler. Blocks rise from the floor, you swap them into rows of at least 3 to clear them, and send trash lines to your opponent. You also have special abilities based on the character you select. Something like Puyo-Puyo is probably the closest equivalent? Look, instead of reading my poor description, why don’t you just download the demo here? And then, if you decide you like it, or have questions, or can’t quite get said demo to run right on your ultrawide even though you played it on a TV at the show, you can click here to join their Discord and try to troubleshoot.

But perhaps you hate anything with anime eyes. Perhaps you think indie games should never go past two dimensions. Perhaps you should just humor me because I’m running out of convenient segues. In that case, try…

I get that the little cat thing is supposed to be cute, but something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. It has big Furby energy.

Dwerve is technically a tower defense game. You construct towers, and use them to defend. The reason I wrote “technically” is because it has a lot of non-standard tower defense mechanics. There is no end point to be defended. Instead when you get into combat, enemies will go right for your delicious face meat. Towers refund their cost when they get destroyed, and you’ll be expected to rebuild them. And finally, the game isn’t structured as a series of levels; it’s a world that you actually travel through more akin to something like Nobody Saves the World. It’s a really interesting blend, and you can play the demo here. The full steam page is here, the game’s site is here, and I’m kind of out of things to say about it. Oh, except that it does have a release date for the end of next month (31st of May) so if you do end up liking the demo, you won’t won’t have to wait long for more.

Anyway, with that final entry on the list, that concludes all I’m writing about for the moment. Not all I have to write about, because I have a second window up of things I saw/played, and I still have 21 more games I want to write about. I need to find a way to break that list down into convenient bite size categories.

I think the way you’re supposed to end these sorts of lists is to encourage people to fight with you on social media as a roundabout cover for getting more interaction, so yeah. So, hit us up on Twitter if you disagree with our list? Not really sure how that’s possible, but I’m sure someone will find a way.

CRIMESIGHT

A fantastic asymmetric social deduction game.

CRIMESIGHT is an asymmetric social deduction game, and it’s fantastic. It might be my favorite giga-brain moment sort of game, and it makes you feel very smart, as long as you don’t scuff up wins that you have in the palm of your hand.

Which I’ve done a few times to be honest.

In order to talk about what I like about CRIMESIGHT, I’m gonna briefly cover how the game works. There are going to be several paragraphs going over the game’s mechanics. If you don’t want to read any more, here’s my summary of why I like the game: it’s full of incredibly clever mindgames and bluffing linked to an interesting balance of resources and information between the two competing sides.

A screenshot of a game of CRIMESIGHT in progress. I think I lost this one.

A game of Crimesight is played over up to 10 rounds, on a single map consisting of multiple rooms and areas, and with 6 pawns. One pawn is the Killer, and one pawn is the Target.

First, a little bit more about pawns. Pawns start the game with nothing, regardless of their roll. Each pawn can carry up to two items, and has two health slots. They can also carry a single weapon. Weapons do not take up an item slot, and cannot be dropped once picked up. Every three rounds, the day ends, and pawns need to eat, or else they will become hungry. Hunger, like any other injury in the game, puts a token into one of the health slots. A pawn with one slot occupied can only move up to two spaces per round, and pawn with two slots occupied can only move 1 space per round, and is also blinded.

Each round, the players in the game may issue a number of commands to pawns, determined by the player’s allegiance, and the number of other players in the game. These commands consist of a movement command, and an action. First, movement. Each pawn can move up to three areas in one round. If they move more than two areas, though, they get fatigued, and will only be able to move twice in the next round. Then the pawn does an action. The action can be to search an area for food, to use an item on a location or another pawn, or to interact with an object. Pawns always move, and then take an action; they cannot do otherwise.

Let’s talk about the two allegiances, Moriarty or Sherlock, and the differences between the two.

The Moriarty player wins if they can have the killer pawn murder the target pawn. In order to do this, three conditions must be met. The killer must have a weapon, the killer must be in the same area as the target, and there can be no witnesses with line of sight. If the Moriarty player fails to pull this off in 10 rounds, the best they can hope for is a draw.

The Moriarty player also has several special advantages. They can see which nodes on the map contain food, weapons, or special items/objects. They start the game knowing the target and killer. In addition, if both Sherlock and Moriarty command the same pawn, Moriarty’s commands always win out, and will overwrite Sherlock’s. Moriarty can also always command pawns to move up to three spaces, even if the pawn is fatigued. Finally, they have access to a single special command, “assail,” which can only be used by the killer. When the assail command is executed, the killer will delay their action until the end of the round, and then move as close as they can to the target, and if their end location meets the criteria for committing murder, they will do so.

There are downsides to the assail command, however. Using it will reveal the killer and target, and if the killer does not reach the target that turn, there is a single final turn, after which if they cannot pull off the murder, Sherlock wins.

The Moriarty player also has one weakness: they cannot issue commands to the pawn designated as the target.

The Sherlock player has none of the advantages listed above. They start the game being able to see that 2-3 of the searchable areas have food in them. They don’t know anything about the rest of the nodes. They also start out not knowing who is the target, and who is the killer. There are only three advantages that the Sherlock player has over Moriarty.

For reference on why I included this photo: I played a game as Sherlock that went to 10 rounds. There was one obvious target, and an obvious villain. But, I thought to myself, what if the “target” wasn’t the villain, and the obvious villain wasn’t either, but Moriarty was instead using them to make us move the actual villain right next to the real target? AND I WAS 100% CORRECT. And this victory screen is from that game. Gigabrain strats.

The first is that the Sherlock players can issue more commands to pawns than Moriarty. The Sherlock player can also command any pawn, including the target. At the end of every day, they get additional information from “deductions,” where the game will tell Sherlock if the Killer is within 3 areas of the target, and based on that, narrow down potential killers and their victims.

The game has a really interesting balance of power and information going on. When the game starts, Moriarty knows everything, but has almost no “resources” (i.e., the killer doesn’t have a weapon, all of the pawns are fairly bunched together to prevent murder attempts, and they’re also all healthy making it easy to run the target away from the killer). On the flip side, the Sherlock player has the board state where they want it, (no wounded pawns, pawns all close to each other so Moriarty can’t move a single witness away from a murder attempt, no gas leaks, dogs, etc) but zero information about who they need to protect from whom.

As the game continues, the balance of power starts to shift. The balance of resources and board state shift into Moriarty’s favor as pawns split up to search the map for food, pick up weapons, or end up hungry if they fail to find any. However, Sherlock gets more and more information: each time the two clash by commanding a pawn, more info is revealed to Sherlock about can’t be the target. The end of day deductions also potentially cut out large swathes of possible murder/target combos.

I do want to talk about the game’s multiplayer modes a bit though. There can be multiple players on the Sherlock team, or multiple on both teams. So far I’ve played the 1v1, 2v2, and 3v1 modes, and I vastly prefer 1v1 and 3v1.

While the game supports up to four players, there can only ever be one player aligned with Moriarty, in 2v2. The second non-Sherlock player controls Irene.

In the 1v1 modes, the game is fairly straightforward, since each player knows who the other player is. 1v3 is where things get interesting, because as a Sherlock player, you start the game not knowing which of the other 3 players is playing Moriarty. I find this neat because it lends an extra level of trying to read other player’s moves and actions, which isn’t present in the base game, and also lets you play more mind games as Moriarty.

This brings me to 2v2, and why I don’t enjoy it or the Irene roll very much. When playing the Irene roll, you effectively play a weaker version of Sherlock, but on the side of Moriarty. You can only command one pawn, you can’t see the location of items, you do know the victim and target, but you can’t use the assail command. It can be amusing, but it still feels like a fairly weak roll.

On the flip side, it’s not much fun to play against Irene either. Unlike Moriarty, if Irene issues a command to a Pawn at the same time as Sherlock, it’s a toss up on whose action goes through. And even if Irene wins out, it doesn’t give any information to the Sherlock player about who is/isn’t a target.

Outside of that one thing, I don’t really have any issues with the game. The game’s text display can be a bit frustrating, and there isn’t really a good option between “Tell me all the rules each time something happens” and “Tell me nothing,” but that’s pretty much it.

So that’s CRIMESIGHT in a nutshell, an asymmetric social deduction game for up to 4 players. I find it incredibly fun, and setting up either clever kills, or blocking them makes you feel smart. If all of this sounds like your cup of tea, you can buy CRIMESIGHT here on Steam. It’s $20, and it’s worth it.

Satisfactory

I like Satisfactory. There are a lot of other things I could say about it, but I spent days playing shapez.io, and Satisfactory is Shapez.io in 3D. That is to say, it’s a game about automation and factory construction, and the optimization of those systems.

The story of Satisfactory is that you are [EMPLOYEE#7190] for some gigantic space megacorporation called Ficsit, pronounced Fix-It, and you’ve been dumped onto some lush untouched wilderness to turn it into a giant factory. The reality is that it doesn’t matter that there’s a story, because there might as well not be one.

In any case, after being dropped down onto a planet, there’s an opening segment that amounts to a tutorial. After being introduced to the ability to construct buildings and craft parts, the player is free to do things at their own pace. There’s no real time pressure to get anything done. There is some hostile enemy wildlife, but even those are pretty non-threatening. Let’s talk about those for a minute, because Satisfactory is a game about building things, specifically giant factories, and everything that doesn’t contribute to that feels fairly vestigial and pointless.

Sure, there’s some hostile wildlife, and trees, and rocks, and whatnot, but they only matter to the extent that they get in the way of building. The AI for this wildlife is laughably stupid. The primary enemy, a sort of dog/armadillo thing, has constantly gotten stuck on loops trying to charge me, and then running in endless circles. It’s ineffectual enough to be forgettable, and annoying on the few instances when they actually do manage to connect a hit. The weird murder bumblebees are frustrating, but mostly pointless. Combat is just not very good.

Exploration is a somewhat similar boat. You can select from 4 different worlds to spawn into when you start the game, but they’re all fixed, not random. There are a few things that you can pick up as you venture around the world, and some crashed ships to find, but even those crashed ships are only interesting because they can give you access to hard drives, which give you research. Research lets you pick between various sidegrades/unlockable recipes.

Research is the game’s primary internal motivation. Most additional buildings, structures and tools are unlocked by research. The game itself consists of tiers, and completing the previous tier’s mission unlocks the next two tiers or so, and those tier’s associated missions. All of these missions involve feeding resources into something, usually your space elevator or remote dispatch drone.

Research serves a sort of tutorial gate, forcing the player to get familiar with what they currently have unlocked before they get access to more complex buildings. Let’s look at how the game handles electricity as an example.

Almost every building in the game requires electricity to actually do anything, from auto-miners to assemblers, to constructors. At the start of the game, after building the HUB, it comes equipped with two biomass burners. These can be powered by stuffing them full of leaves, and wiring them up to whatever needs power. Additional power requires building more biomass burners, which will also need to be kept supplied.

When you get far enough along the tech tree though, coal becomes available. Coal-powered generators can be set up to have coal routed directly into them with conveyors, so manual refills are no longer necessary, but in addition to coal, they also need water. This means pipes, and potentially, pumps or a pump system to make sure that water is getting where it needs to be fast enough.

Getting the most out of your power setup with coal can be a bit more involved than biomass burners. It requires at least 3 building types, a miner to dig up the coal, a coal burner, and a pump to supply the water. You might find after building your first set of generators that you need more power, and end up setting up a few more, only to realize that you’ve underestimated the amount of coal to keep things stable. Or maybe you redesign things, and forget to connect your pumps to the rest of the grid, causing a network wide outage, and forcing you to restart the coal plants semi-manually with an attached biomass burner. Maybe you’re burning too little coal, so you set up more burners, only to realize you’re now behind on water.

At its heart, Satisfactory is a game about optimizing systems. Optimize your inputs and outputs, remove bottlenecks, and try to make sure you have enough power throughout it all. While the exploration and combat feels rather week, the building gameplay is incredibly enjoyable. The game is still technically in Early Access, with a fair amount of “WIP” content, but nothing to make me hate it. You can find a link to the game’s site here, and I heavily encourage you to check it out.

P.S. When I started Gametrodon, I did so with the intention of not wanting the site to turn into the game equivalent of those baking websites that open with 3 paragraphs about how this recipe was the last surviving thing they have from their great grandmother, who got it from a mysterious shop next door that disappeared the day after they purchased it. But Satisfactory really makes me want to do one of those writeups, because it has a lot of things you could write about related to the game that aren’t really related to the game.

You could cover the fact that the game had timed Epic Store exclusivity when it first came out about 5 years, still requires some sort of weird ghostly cross-play solution to play online, and that switching that behavior requires you to contact customer support for some reason. You could point out how it’s kind of weird for a game to still be in “Early Access” after 5 years of development and patches, and the weird things that exist in the game because of that, such as the creepy fucking alien artifacts that will speak to you, and make scary noises, but have been a work in progress for over 3 years. Or maybe you could cover the sort of weird tone the game takes around construction and its theming. “Here’s a perfectly vibrant planet, full of unfucked nature, get down there in the space suit you’re renting from us [VALUED EMPLOYEE#3719] and fuck it up.” I’m not sure that the lyrics “Paved Paradise, Put up a Parking Spot” was supposed to be a How To guide. It’s vaguely uncomfortable, much like any worker placement board game where you realize that the “workers” you’re placing, based on the game’s setting and historical context, would have all been enslaved Africans. Not uncomfortable enough to make you stop playing immediately, but it does make you pause the next time you’re about to pull it out at family game night.

In short, there’s a lot of interesting hot takes you could make about Satisfactory. Fortunately the preceding paragraph of extended one-liners has gotten my desire to be Yahtzee Crosshaw off my chest. I don’t need fame and fortune from writing snarky hot takes about video games.

Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duel

So, for folks who’ve played Yu-Gi-Oh before, and are wondering if they should play Master Duel, here’s my opinion in brief: Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel can be fun, but only to the extent that you play against other people with decks that function at a similar power level. I can’t speak to higher level decks, because I never made one. I spent a non-zero amount of time being thrashed by players who did make high level decks.

A big critical note: Master Duel is ALMOST ENTIRELY PvP. There are some small PvE sections of the game, but they effectively function as tutorials.

As far as being a digital implementation of the physical game, it seems to do a solid job. I have some problems with how it handles certain mechanics, and there’s also very little flare compared to something like Hearthstone, or Legends of Runeterra. When an opponent searches for a card from their deck and adds it to their hand, the game only shows you the card for a brief moment, instead of keeping it revealed. I hate this, as the game has something like 5000+ cards, and I have no idea what a large number of them do.

Finally, its in-game monetization is fucking awful. I don’t give a shit about some “f2p btw top ranked” motherfucker. The only difference between this game and a crackhead with a knife coming at you in an alley is that the second one is being more transparent in their desire to obtain everything in your wallet.

I’d write more about this, but I already did. Master Duel is #4 on my Least Favorite Game Business Models list.

I’m going to be honest. I don’t have much more to say on Yu-Gi-Oh that provides value in the form of a review. Modern Yu-Gi-Oh is an incredibly alien beast to me. Opening turns can go through what feels like half a player’s deck, only to have any advantage gained be destroyed by one or two cards. First turn kills from the second player are common. The game’s balance seems to rely on handtraps, cards that you discard from your hand to negate your opponent’s effects, and quickly recognizing your opponent’s deck archetype. Knowing their combos and how to interrupt them is just a critical skill as knowing how to play your own deck.

I played 40 hours of Master Duel, and this review is the best I can offer. I know that I enjoyed playing against my friends who also installed it. I know I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as a “single player” game, which it effectively is in many ways. I don’t like it as much as Duel Links, which had a lot of PvE content. I enjoy some forms of competition in card games, but I don’t enjoy grinding ladder, and that’s primarily what Master Duel seemed to offer.

But hey, it was free*. If you still want to play it, you can grab it here.

*Free to get your ass repeatedly handed to you by Eldlich the Golden Lord, seriously, fuck that card, and that deck.