I was gonna put this in my Blue Prince write-up, but it’s kind of its own thing, so I’m pulling it out real quick.
While playing Blue Prince I wasn’t hitting the same wall of frustration I’ve hit with other puzzle games like Type Help or Return of the Obra Dinn, or even things like Braid and Escape Simulator.
I think Blue Prince is uniquely designed to prevent puzzle game frustrating. It uses its new dual roguelike/puzzle structure. It’s also interesting enough that I want to talk about it for a bit, and make my best guess about how the design of the game leads to avoiding this common emotional experience that I’ve found in other puzzle games.
There are three main elements that make Blue Prince less frustrating than other puzzle games.
1. Puzzles in Blue Prince are a bit easier than puzzles in many other dedicated puzzle games.
This doesn’t mean they’re not challenging, but that they’re not quite as a evil as they could be. Instead, the difficultly is placed into finding the puzzle.
2. The roguelike nature of the game. Most of the games puzzles are self-contained… But many puzzles require combinations of multiple rooms and other manipulations, so it’s not always possible to find them on any given day. The result is that sometimes if you find yourself stuck with a puzzle, you’ll run out of steps, and be forced to take a break.
During that break, you’ll play the roguelike portion again, and get to experience some level of success and enjoyment, so that by the time you return to the puzzle that blocked you before, you’re not feeling frustrated.
3. Finally, because of the type of game Blue Prince is, you don’t need to solve all the puzzles to make forward progress. Solving puzzles helps! But unlike many of the games above, in order to get to the end of the game, you don’t actually have to solve very many things, if any at all. Instead, you mostly need to collect information.
SMALL SPOILER
In fact, I think it’s mechanically possible to find Room 46 on Day 1. That said, I don’t think anyone is actually capable of doing that completely blind, but I bet it can be done, because you mostly just need to know what you need to do, and how to do it. But it’ll also still be a challenge, because it relies on being a very effective drafter.
I have a very specific memory of absolutely losing my mind at Return of the Obra Dinn, and that one moment colored a lot of my experience with the game. But because of the way that Blue Prince is set up, the game actively prevents you from ending up in the sort of fugue/frustration state of just raging at a puzzle that refuses to be solved.
I only ended up slamming my head into a wall over and over when I actively chose to do so. If I didn’t want to, it was entirely possible to avoid any given puzzle and return to it later.
In This Essay, I will
So let’s put it all together.
First, the game splits the satisfaction of puzzle solving into two parts: spotting the puzzle, and then solving it, but cranks down the difficultly of the solution part.
Second, because the game is a roguelike, it actively forces you to restart in situations where you hit a wall, or cannot make progress on a puzzle, diverting your attention from a frustrating experience temporarily.
Finally, it minimizes the number of puzzles that are truly needed to make forward progress, with many providing bonuses or hints, but not stacking them in a truly linear fashion.
The end result is that making progress is mostly dependent on collecting information, not necessarily solving puzzles.
A Quick Caveat
I’m writing this having seen the credits for Blue Prince, but not having done… well, quite a large number of things actually. I have around 50 pages of notes for this game, and I suspect there are a huge number of things I haven’t put together yet!
So it’s possible I’m wrong about a few things above, especially the difficulty of later puzzles. But I still think the rest is a pretty fair observation about the roguelike nature of the game, and nature of forward progress lets Blue Prince avoid some of the frustration the genre is known for.
I’ve been spending money on a lot of projects last week, and I thought it might be interesting to briefly talk about why I’m crowdfunding those specific projects. I have a pretty specific set of standards when it comes to crowdfunding, and so far, they’ve (mostly!) kept me from being burned. They’re also a little different between video games and board games. So what are they?
The Rules
Obviously, I have to want the project to succeed. But even then, I tend to run it past these small internal checks first.
The developer or publisher has delivered another project. This doesn’t have be another game in the same genre, or even another fully produced project on their own. It doesn’t even have to be the same scope. For example, when I backed TemTem, I suspected it was likely to fail (or at least not quite meet the hype). But Crema Games had released Immortal Redneck, so risking $20 wasn’t too big a gamble.
If they haven’t released anything, there must be a fairly extensive demo, or playable prototype. This is more common for board games than for video games. Usually, by the time a board game gets to the crowdfunding stage, there was a “playtesting it on Tabletop Simulator or Screentop” phase. But if possible, I want to play the game before backing it.
Why these standards?
Rule number one is designed to filter out two groups of people: scammers and dreamers. Scammers are simple enough to understand: if something is too good to be true, it probably is. Dreamers are a more complicated group. Being good at marketing and pitching (the skills crowdfunding rewards!) is absolutely not the same as being good at game development. Or working with manufacturing partners. Or managing international shipping regulations. Or any of the other dozens of things that need to happen behind the scenes to actually get a board game to your door.
Rule two actually serves a bit of a different purpose.
I buy things because I want to have fun. The goal is to exchange money for enjoyment. That said, I’m not too picky about the order in which that exchange happens. If a game developer makes a fun game I can play in Tabletop Simulator and I have fun playing it, I’m willing to give them some money.
The Projects I backed
So now that I’ve set out these little rules, let’s look at all the projects I backed, and see how well they align.
This one is entirely a “previous projects” back. Brother Ming has a strong track record of consistently delivering, and I’ve really enjoyed some of his game designs. As such, it’s the sort of thing I’m willing to take a chance on, even if I haven’t played the game myself yet.
Just like Pond, this sort of a legacy back. I very much enjoyed Space Lion, I spent a lot of time playing it with friends on Tabletop Simulator before it released, and Solis Game Studio successfully delivered it.
This last one is a little bit more on hopes and dreams. I backed the original Super Battle Mon campaign. The cards came in recently, I played it, and it was a ton of fun, so I’m putting up some money for the expansion. I’m optimistic it’ll fund at a reasonable price-point, but I mostly just want to see some more Super Battle Mon cards.
So all these projects are going to succeed?
I have no idea. I sure hope so!
To be frank, I have some worries about all of them.
Pond looks excellent, but has a high number of components and additional pieces, all of which could drive the cost up significantly if the current tariffs stick around. Space Lion was a bit of a niche game in the first place, and hasn’t hit its funding goal yet. Super Battle Mon has hit its funding goal, but is still sitting at a wildly low amount of money for custom printing of a TCG.
In short: None of these projects is a given. That’s the risk of crowdfunding. But for all of them, I want them to succeed, and I’m optimistic that they can, and will.
It’s been four years since the first post on Gametrodon, and I have to say: Wow, how time flies when you’re distracting yourself from reality with digital and cardboard amusements.
Five years seems like as good a time as any for some retrospection. So let’s start at the very beginning.
I’d end up interviewing the Creative Director of Lucifer Within us, Jongwoo Kim, about the game. It was a really fun interview, and also demonstrated how much work interviews are.
2020
That first year of 2020 had the most total interviews I’ve ever managed to actually put up. I chatted with Max Seidman of Resonym about running Kickstarters and Surrealist Dinner Party. I talked with Jeremy Choo, the CEO of a Malaysian development studio about how their publisher stole their game, and how they tried to get it back.
Interviews, like RPG Module reviews, have not really become a regular feature of this blog. They’re a huge amount of work to do properly, and while I love talking to people, I don’t love transcribing and editing. The Secret of Shirakawa Castle has remained one of my favorite “tester” adventures in D&D though.
2021
There isn’t too much to say about 2021. The pandemic continued to ravage the earth, and it had some knock-on effects the world of gaming. Some standouts I want to draw attention to include Beglitched, Shovel Knight, Atomicrops, Disgaea 6, Luck be a Landlord.
But it’s okay, because I played Inscryption, and it was great. It would also see the continuation of Rants as a category of my posts. Even though none of my rants are particularly accurate or thoughtful except maybe this one about MetaZoo. That one I think I kinda nailed.
Finally, we had a Pour One Out, a semi-regular feature for all the games that died that year. Some years I do one of these, and some years I’m just not feeling it.
Honestly, 2022 was an incredible year for games.
Shame about the five year relationship I was in that ended near the end of 2022, and as a result would chipper-shred my productivity for uh…
Pretty much everything since then.
2023
I did manage to get out a review on Pokemon Scarlet. It has some fun drawings, something I haven’t really returned to since then. Pedigree Tactics also feels like it deserves a shout out for being a rare situation when I was able to give criticism that actually helped improve a game. I guess I did a Ludum Dare?
A lot of this year was just a fucking haze, if I’m being honest.
Oh! And Tiger and Dragon, a fantastic tile trick taker sort thing was probably the most played board game of my friend group in the last few years.
The year ended with a backlog cleanout of things I didn’t have the energy for a full writeup on, even though Pizza Tower and Inkbound absolutely deserved them.
I think the Athenian Rhapsody writeup was rewritten more times than any single thing I’ve ever put on this blog, and involved perhaps the most… soul searching? Internal dissection and critique? Thinking? I dunno. Just… it was a huge amount of effort for a very minimal outcome.
And so we enter the fifth year of Gametrodon. I’m not famous, or even internet famous. I’ve created some great opportunities for myself to talk to folks in the industry. I still don’t have a press badge, the one thing I wanted when I started writing this site. My quantity of work is definitely down from the first two years, even if the quality is up. (Thanks in no small part to my nameless editor!)
Which does raise a question: Is it worth it to continue writing this blog?
I’m not sure.
There have been several projects over the last few years I’ve picked up, and then dropped or failed to finish. Fluffy rants and personal opinion pieces are easy enough to crank out. Taking a stab at something resembling journalism, or full interviews, is much harder, and often those don’t even result in usable drafts.
Running and writing Gametrodon is a hobby that sits on top of my other hobbies, and like most side things I do, how long it lasts is mostly dependent on vibes and habit. There was that point in time where I was streaming 3 times a week, and that other point in time where I was making TikToks.
Honestly, though, I kind of hate playing the meta when it comes to this stuff. I may switch back to making comics, because at least they amuse me. I may just keep doing weekly writeups.
I have no idea where I am going in life, and this blog is just a part of that.
Oh, one more thing.
A Small Favor
No, it’s not money.
Look, if you enjoy reading Gametrodon, do me a favor and retweet and like my stuff on Bluesky. Or whatever it’s called now since Twitter died in a fire.
Not for every article or writeup, but for the stuff you find interesting, or useful, or informed you about a game you wouldn’t have heard of before.
Retweet that stuff.
I still have my small hopes of reaching the point of being a micro-influencer at some point, but beyond that, I like people reading my stuff. I like talking about games.
But it does feel nice to not just feel like I’m flinging words into the void every now and then.
Occasionally I see a take on the internet, and get real twitchy about it for a moment. This morning, it was a post about if puzzles are board games. Thus the twitching began.
The first thing I want to ask is, “Why are we asking this question?” That’s not superfluous, or being rude, it’s an important distinction.
The first response to the original question on Bluesky links to the Board Game Geek game criteria page. It is a very nice page, and I especially enjoy how it puts puzzles out of scope in one moment, and then puts escape rooms, a collection of puzzles, back in scope paragraphs later.
But the BGG page has a specific purpose. They want to limit and filter what sorts of products end up on their website, because they do not want to just have a list of everything. It’s a valid reason to define what a board game is, and to decide that a puzzle is not a board game for their purposes.
Let’s look at two others real quick. A friend asks you to bring something for board game night. You bring a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. Are folks going to be happy?
Probably depends on the friend group. But I’m leaning towards, “No.”
What about sorting things for a store? Do puzzles go with the board games? In my experience, often the answer is, “Yes,” though that might have more to do with packaging and distributor than content. But the last few times I’ve been in a store, the puzzles sit right next to the copies of Cards Against Humanity.
So going back to the original question, what I want to ask is: Why does it matter if a puzzle is a board game? Are you stocking a store? Giving a gift? Setting up a web page? Because that context is going to change the answer.
Why am I being twitchy about this?
I don’t like it when people define words around art and art adjacent spaces in such a way as to exclude certain things from being in that category. To do that, there needs to be a good reason for it.
The usual reason for folks doing that is to exclude a category of other people from being in their in-group. The prime example of this is “gamers” claiming that The Sims and Animal Crossing aren’t “real games,” but I’m sure their are plenty others. That’s not a good reason, it’s just being a gatekeeping asshole. Now, I don’t think the original question on Bluesky was posted to gatekeep. But gatekeeping is why my brain decided to do the record scratch noise, and spend 40 minutes on this garbage writeup.
This year at PAX East, I got a chance to meet some of the folks doing Speed Puzzling. Presumably the speed part is what elevates it to the level of board game, but it was something fun and neat that I’d never heard of before. It’s also something that would never show up on BGG.
I’d rather that board game enthusiasts had space for weird stuff that does not in fact conform to neat tables of rules, or perfect definitions. I’d rather we had more In Memory Of sorts of things.
Okay, but are puzzles board games?
A sandwich is a piece of meat between two slices of bread.
Is this a sandwich?
Which is to say: it doesn’t matter without additional context!
Someone who’s very hungry might be happy to have a hot dog after asking for a sandwich. Someone who catered a sandwich tray for a work event might be slightly less enthusiastic to receive sixty Costco hot dogs.
Ed Note: This article uses a few specific bits of terminology related playing limited Magic: The Gathering, mostly the acronym B.R.E.A.D. If you’re not familiar with the term/acronym, a brief read of this Stack overflow paragraph defines them well.
I participated in the first Regional Championship Qualifier at The Fourth Place over the weekend. As this is one of the more competitive events I’ve ever done, I thought I’d talk about the experience.
This was a Limited RCQ, starting with 5 rounds of sealed, and then cutting to Top 8 for a draft. The set for both was Foundations. But before I get into the event, let’s talk about prep!
Prep
I…. did not prep much. I prepped more than I have for most other sealed events I’ve done, but much less than I could have. I reviewed a fair number of sealed pools, I looked at some articles, and I did two drafts of the set prior. The first draft was on Arena, and I lost every single match quite badly. The second was a smaller in-person event where I won.
I do think the prep made a difference, but I also think especially in the draft, I could have done much better with my picks. More on that later.
Sealed
For the sealed portion of the event, this was the deck I ended up building.
After opening all my packs I was pretty confident I would end up in green. I had bombs in Scavenging Ooze, Mossborn Hydra, Sylvan Scavenging, and Ghalta, Primal Hunger. I also had removal in Bushwhack and Bite Down, and and a few giant growths.
My secondary color wasn’t as clear.
Looking at the rest of the pool, I scratched off white and blue as secondaries. They didn’t offer the bombs of red or black, and had limited amounts of mediocre removal.
Red had two big bombs in Shivan Dragon and Twinflame Tyrant, but it didn’t have any targeted removal before 5 mana, and even then, it wasn’t instant speed.
Black won out as a secondary color on the strength of its removal (Eaten Alive, and 2x Bake Into A Pie), and the fact that it still provided a very solid bomb in High-Society Hunter. My read at the time was that I had plenty of bombs in green, and more removal would serve me better in the sealed Environment.
Looking back at the pool now, I do think there was a strong argument for green/red, but that wasn’t choice I made at the time.
I made two spicy decisions in the deckbuilding. The first was not splashing for Twinflame Tyrant, despite having a Campus Guide and three Evolving Wilds.
I think this was the right choice. Twinflame is two red pips, and my deck has 8~ (more on this in a moment) double pip cards. It was much more important to fix my base so that I could drop my double pip bombs, than it was to enable a single additional bomb at the cost of less consistency.
The second decision was including Cackling Prowler over Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen. This was a mistake, and it was a mistake that I would proceed to fix the entire night, swapping the two after pretty much every game 1. I thought that the ward 2 on Prowler was more important than reach on Dwynen. I was very wrong. There are a lot of flyers in this set, and something that can deal with the birds was more important than something that took an extra two mana to blow up.
Matches
Generally speaking, this is where I would talk about matches. Unfortunately, after playing 9 hours of magic in a row, I don’t remember my opponents’ decks, and I did not take notes.
So instead, here are a few fun moments!
One opponent got out Extravagant Replication. This didn’t worry me, until suddenly they had four copies of Spitfire Lagac.
In another game, I was forced to burn 3 cards in Ambush Wolf, Giant Growth, and Bushwhack and seven life just to deal with Sire of Seven Deaths. I still lost somehow. Maybe it was the 3 for 1 and 14 life differential. Who can say.
Finally, in my last set of games, despite mostly being deadweight every other match, Revenge of the Rats finally did some work, giving me enough fodder to sac into Vampire Gourmand to push through, and get enough cards to recover from an incredibly bad situations.
Ultimately, I finished with a record of 3 – 1 -2, which was enough to put me into the top 8.
Deck
1 Authority of the Consuls
1 Bake into a Pie
1 Day of Judgment
1 Exsanguinate
1 Felidar Savior
1 Healer's Hawk
1 Infestation Sage
1 Macabre Waltz
3 Make Your Move
2 Marauding Blight-Priest
2 Midnight Snack
9 Plains
1 Sanguine Syphoner
1 Skyknight Squire
1 Stromkirk Bloodthief
8 Swamp
1 Vampire Soulcaller
3 Vanguard Seraph
1 Youthful Valkyrie
Sideboard
2 Aegis Turtle
1 Archmage of Runes
1 Ashroot Animist
1 Bigfin Bouncer
1 Cackling Prowler
1 Consuming Aberration
1 Fleeting Distraction
1 Good-Fortune Unicorn
1 Grappling Kraken
1 Lightshell Duo
1 Mossborn Hydra
2 Run Away Together
1 Slumbering Cerberus
1 Sure Strike
If you are looking at this list with some level of confusion and profanity, I promise you. There is an explanation for why there is so much blue, when I am not even in the color. It is not a good explanation, because it was not made via good decisions. But there is an explanation, and it’s Consuming Aberration.
I have a bad habit, one that I may now be cured of purely as a result of how horrible this draft went. If the rare in the first pack looks like a bomb, I will take it. And then I will continue to try to pick into those colors, even if I really, really shouldn’t.
As a result, there are a lot of blue cards in this pool, instead of anything remotely useful or good.
There is a second card in this pack that tells a story, and it’s this.
This was not a first pick. It was a much later pick. And should probably have been a sign to me that not a single person at the table was going green/red. Did I listen to this sign? Did I pick the two Mossborn Hydras that were passed me to me, and the other strong red cards?
No. Of course I didn’t.
Instead, after, picking up a Day of Judgment and an Authority of Consuls, and proceeded to try to force Black/White as hard as possible in packs 2-3 to salvage the situation.
Top 8 Matches
I don’t know if the universe took pity on me, or if everyone at the table was having a rough time, but I did in fact manage to squeak through round one before being eliminated handily in round 2.
For round 1, I had an incredible stroke of luck, getting Authority of Consuls early into a blue/white go-wide deck in both games. This was an incredible bit of bad fortune for them, as it pretty much single-handedly turned off their deck’s ability to flash in Resolute Reinforcements to stall me. It also allowed me to get extra turns of ping in, as even when they got their larger flyers, they came in tapped.
Round 2, however, was the buck finally stopped. My opponent was playing midrange Grixis, with a fair amount of threshold dependent cards, and I just got stomped. While the games were slogs, they managed to both get board presence with a bunch of fairly useful cards, and even Day of Judgement couldn’t save me from Sphinx of Forgotten Lore, and Kioara, the Rising Tide, resulting in me going down in two consecutive losses.
While I didn’t stick around to watch finals, it did look like both players were playing three color decks, something I thought was interesting.
Tone and Overall Thoughts
My goal for the event was to get into the Top 8. This might sound intimidating, until you realize it was capped at 20 entries, meaning it was really more of a “Finish in the top 40%”.
I made a lot of mistakes. By my count, I’d put it at something like 4-5 misplays, and that’s not even counting missed triggers. Arena has made me very good at spotting play options, and outs. But it’s made me very bad at keeping track of my own triggers, and asking to hold priority at turn end.
My prep did help. I don’t know how much, but it did make a difference in some of the deck building, and knowing that certain cards I would have otherwise written off were actually bombs.
My draft was terrible. I had exactly 23 cards in my colors, and no fixing.
Generally speaking, this was a pretty chill and polite event, and I hope even the more competitive events at The Fourth Place stay this way. There was no shouting, and no real issues/conflicts, with players generally being polite but firm on various rulings.
This was a good event, and I wish I was more excited about the top 4 finish, but as I’m me, anything other than complete victory will always feel like a bit of a wash. I do think I’d try another Sealed RCQ though, as long as the set was good.
PS. The counts on this sealed pool look wonky at first, but this pool does not include 6 lands I opened, and the also the system doesn’t seem to like to count lands. But was 84 cards, as I’ve spent all morning double checking to make sure I got it right. It’s a similar case for the draft pool, as I didn’t include the lands.
