Category: Rants

Probably shouldn’t have abbreviated that quite so much, but GMG stands for Game Makers Guild! If you haven’t heard of the Game Makers Guild, they’re a group down in Boston that provides a bunch of services for indie designers, including design help, curation, and also runs playtesting events.

I’ve written a fair amount about various playtesting events I go to, but this one was different because for once, I brought a game! (Okay, it’s not just me, it’s a game I’ve done at most 30% of the work for.)

Before I talk about my own game though, I want to talk about another game I saw there, called Rule the School.

Rule the School

Rule the School is an area control game by Alfred Septembre. Players are competing candidates in a school council election, and are trying to win by having their supporters most effectively placed to influence the outcome.

In this sense, it looks pretty straightforward, but the real fun bit is the action selection system. On each turn, one player draws 3 supporter cards, chooses 1 to keep, 1 to give to their opponent, and 1 to throw away. Then, they slot that supporter card into one of their actions, and the supporter they chose adds its effect to the selected action. Alfred described it to me as “slotting the key into an ignition switch,” and I really enjoyed it.

I don’t really have anything to say on Rule the School, other then to note that by the time I was playing it, I’d had 4 hours of sleep, been awake playtesting games for 8 hours straight, and Rule the School knocked me back awake. It’s just a very fun game, and I hope I get to play more of it in the future, whether that’s at PAX East Unpub, another GMG event, or somewhere else.

If you want to learn more about it, Alfred talks about the game a bit on his blog here, or on his instagram! Its really fun, and I hope I get to see more of it.

Anyway, now let’s talk about my game!

Welcome to Card City

I’ve been working on a game called Card City Critters for a few months now, co-designing it with Max Seidman. It’s something we’re calling a “live action collectible card game.” Let me explain how we got here.

I love collectible card games, of all sorts and sizes. Whether I’m talking about what I’m seeing at PAX Unplugged, playing One Piece for the first time, or throwing myself into tournaments for games I’ve only played twice, I love CCG’s.

But CCG’s also have a lot of a problems. From a player standpoint, they’re incredibly expensive in terms of both time and money. If you don’t have a local community for a specific game, it can be hard to find folks to actually play with.

From a design standpoint, there are a lot of problems, but they’re almost all outweighed by the billion pound elephant in the room: if you choose to make a collectible card game or trading card game, your product is competing with Magic: The Gathering. This is something that I view as a pretty bad idea, even if I respect those who choose to do it.

Still, I love trading card games. I love learning a system, seeing strategies I would never have thought of myself, opening booster packs for the first time, and just generally getting to experience all the weirdness and excitement of a new CCG.

So my question for myself was “How can I create an experience that lets players have all of those fun moments, but is also far cheaper, doesn’t require a long term commitment, and also doesn’t compete with big players already existing in the space?”

And while it’s a work in progress, Card City Critters is my and Max’s attempt to design that system.

For my mildly belated birthday, one of my friends put together a trip down to Funspot several months ago. If you haven’t heard of Funspot, it’s the “world’s largest arcade” according to Guinness World Records.

It’s an interesting place, both for the entertainments inside, and a secondary “vibe”. One of the first things you might see driving up is the electronic outdoor sign switch over from an image of Funspot’s mascot Topsnuf the dragon, to the yet unanswered question “Who is John Galt?”

After arrival, if you need to relieve yourself and use the first floor bathroom, after exiting you may find yourself looking up at a large picture of Ronald Reagan extolling the virtues of video games for their values in training future pilots for the Air Force.

It’s an interesting tone.

I’m here to talk about the games though.

The Games

Funspot has several hundred cabinets, dozens of pinball machines, and just a general smörgåsbord of other types of arcades. I absolutely can’t review all of them, and I’m not going to try. Instead, I’m just going to section them off, and give my opinions on the various parts of Funspot.

Pinball

There are two general areas for Pinball: a set of old machines, and a set of standard more modern ones. Despite having a lot more machines, I think I generally enjoyed Capital Pinball‘s games more.

A big part of this is because when the machine breaks at Capital Pinball, I’d turn it off and on again, and at Fun Spot, I’d have to find some exhausted looking employee to fix it, which might not actually happen. Two quick shoutouts on machines: first to Gottlieb – World Series, the first Pinball machine where I managed to never even score a single point, and Joker Poker, a machine one of my friends quite liked.

Mini-Golf

There’s a self-serve indoor mini-golf area at $5 a person. It’s not the most inspired mini-golf I’ve ever played; most of the holes are basic straight shots or maybe only two bounces. There are no real gimmicks or super clever designs, but it’s perfectly serviceable, good for maybe one play-through total.

Arcade Machines

There are a lot of old arcade machines. I actually don’t have too much to say on these, as I probably spent the least amount of time on them. Old arcade games are fascinating to me from a technical and design perspective, but as gameplay experiences, I tend to find them a bit underwhelming. Also, a few of the ones I did try to play just kind of ate my money and didn’t start.

That said, my friends had a great time with Tetris and Smash TV.

Air Hockey

Air hockey probably ahd the best token to fun ratio. There are three giant sheet metal air hockey tables, two of which mostly work. There are a few spots on the table where the air doesn’t come out, but overall, it’s air hockey. You smash the puck, try not to injure anyone, and just generally have a good time.

Skeeball

There’s a row of Skeeball machines, most in good shape. They’re an excellent place to watch an 8 year old just absolutely wing a chunk of plastic at the wall, an environmental storytelling explanation of the “Management reserves the right to limit players” sign. They’re a terrible place to earn tickets though, with a max of 10 for a perfect score. Overall, it’s Skeeball. You either know if you like it, or you spend a single token to find out.

Daytona

Okay, so this part was actually kinda cool. There were a bunch of Daytona machines, and they were all hooked up together. We had one 7 player game, and that was fun. Also, I got run off the road.

Ticket Counting Machines

Sometimes they count your tickets correctly! Sometimes they don’t. A lot of the time they break, and some kid in a high-vis vest has to come over, crack em open, and unstick the machinery. They still look super cool.

Prize Wall

I mean, it’s an arcade prizewall. It’s not great. I’ll be real here, I had slightly higher expectations from the “World’s Largest Arcade” bit, but like… not much higher. Maybe expectations is the wrong word, and I meant “hopes”. I had higher hopes for the prizewall.

Like, you could have some Magic cards? Or maybe gold bullion. Instead, this is your generic prize wall. There’s some candy, there’s T-Shirts, and there’s a few other things. But I think we turned like 40,000 tickets in 10 cups of candy and T-Shirt.

Overall Thoughts

Frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed by Funspot. While the number of machines is incredible, the cost to play and ease at which things break was disappointing. I enjoyed getting to hang out with my friends (you were all awesome!) but I’d probably choose to bring folks up to Capital Pinball instead for my next birthday.

If I’m being honest, part of this is also the weird super-libertarian vibe the place has. Maybe if it was a different time, I would feel differently.

I don’t really understand Randy Pitchford. He’s one of very few gaming CEOs whose name I remember, mostly because every time a new Borderlands game rolls around, he decides to randomly pick fights with people on Twitter.

And every time I have to imagine that there’s got to be a better way to manage him than this. Surely Gearbox employees must be envisioning the same thing. They actually know him as a person, I’m confident they could come up with a good solution.

Perhaps a good solution isn’t even necessary.

I don’t even think he’s rage-baiting people. I think he’s just like this. If I owned a company, and it had just released a product with more crashes than I-93 on labor day weekend, I wouldn’t be randomly picking fights with people on twitter.

Sure, there’s the flip side of it, which is that this behavior is so clockwork at this point, that he’s just a staple of “games journalism.” He is for IGN and Kotaku what pandas and tigers are for National Geographic. If I worked at either of those outlets, I’d have alt-accounts to constantly taunt him, on the off chance that I annoy him enough to get a reaction I could screenshot and post to r/games and meet my view quota for the month.

I would be tapping the glass all day long.

Every now and again, I come up with a Tough Question. I’ve put capital letters there on purpose, so let’s justify them before my editor removes them. A Tough Question is differentiated from my other musings by the following criteria.

A Tough Question:

1. Has an answer that can either be known with currently available technology, or is known by someone.
2. BUT, cannot be answered by me, or any “general” individual, without either insane amounts of effort, money, or some combination of both.

As an example, “Does Hidetaka Miyazaki [director of some of the Dark Souls games] actually have a thing for feet?” is a good one. I was going to put a picture here to demonstrate the weird frequency with which models in From Software games have rigged and properly modeled feet. Then I google “Elden Ring feet” and instead of a finding a poly mesh with rigged images, I found other things.

As such no images will included.

In this case, Miyazaki knows if he likes feet, but I’m never going to get a chance to ask him about that.

Another one was “Do manga authors die young due to stress?” This one seems like it would be fun. But then you learn that many authors have schedules that allow for only 4 hours of sleep per day, and nothing but work. Then 20 minutes later you get into the weird shit, and end up realizing that Japan’s criminal justice is kind of a joke. I also learned that life expectancy doesn’t mean what I thought, and before long you’re completely in the weeds, and have no good way of answering the question whatsoever.

Anyway, I actually did have a point with today’s writeup, so here’s today’s Tough Question.

“Why is it that Bandai can design, publish, and presumably make money off of producing multiple TCGs?”

Between Gundam Card Game, One Piece Trading Card Game, and the Digimon TCG, it seems like all of these products would presumably be competing with each other. At least a little bit.

But they don’t seem to be! All of these games exist, all have their player base, and all were popular enough in Japan to localize into the US.

All of which is to say, someone out there understands this enough to understand why it is a solid financial decision, and could presumably tell me!

But they won’t.