Category: Uncategorized

Adventure Quest Worlds

There are a lot of things that go into writing about a game for this blog. Sometimes it’s desperation. When Sunday rolls around and I scrounge through anything I’ve been playing recently to find something to talk about. Sometimes it’s joy. I prefer when I find something exciting or new, something I want the whole world (or at least the portion of it that reads my blog!) to see. Occasionally, it’s a sort of vindictiveness, where my writing transforms into my one little jab I can make at the developer for taking my money (replaceable) and my time (not so much).

Today we’re not doing any of those, because this is something different. This is a post about nostalgia. A frankly, it’s probably more about me as a person than it is about Adventure Quest Worlds.

Just to be as clear as possible:if you do not want to listen to a 30+ year old man ramble about a flash MMO from his childhood, now is the time to leave.

Adventure Quest Worlds is a Flash based pseudo-MMO by Artix Entertainment. I call it a pseudo-MMO rather than a true MMO because most zones are instanced at low player counts. But if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ll be familiar with most of what’s present here: fairly slow combat, fetch quests, and grinds, all filtered through the lens of Flash and what was technically capable in 2009.

This is normally where I’d elaborate on mechanics, but I don’t think that’s really necessary here,. Even in the context of the game itself, most mechanics can be ignored. The one thing worth touching on is the class system. Unlike most MMO’s, classes are an equipable item that can be swapped while not in combat.

In theory, this is useful because it lets you swap from tank to healer to DPS on the fly! In practice, it lets you swap from your trash clear to your boss sustain class. I quite like it, and getting new classes was my primary motivation for playing most of the time.

Now that you’re caught up, put on your rose tinted glasses, pull out your finest rage comics and le reddit memes, and step into this time machine, because we’re headed back to 2009.

Welcome to 2009

Welcome back! It’s Obama’s first term after the Bush administration, there’s hope for the future, and I’m in high school. It is a better time than middle school, but still not a great time. My interest in games is growing, and there’s just one problem: I never actually get to play them. My screen time limit is 20 minutes a day and the family computer is a Mac.

Enter Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s free*. It’s engaging. And it plays in a browser, so I can play my account anywhere. Home. Library. Friend’s house. Relatives’ places at Thanksgiving. Home again.

It’s this ease of access that is going to define my experience with the game. Please remember that the iPhone is only 2 years old at this point in time. I won’t even get an iPod touch until 2013. While PC gaming and many of its all time classics exist, (TF2, Myst, Doom, CoD4) they are completely out of my reach.

From this standpoint, then, Adventure Quest Worlds is going to define my gaming habits until I finally get a personal Mac laptop and move on to things like Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, and other Steam offerings.

In a world controlled by parents and tech limits, it is quite literally the first time I have ever played a game like this. And unlike Runescape, the only actual competitor, it’s much simpler. Even better, it’s got weekly content drops. There is always something new, always something to do.

Glasses off, analysis on.

With the value of hindsight, Adventure Quest Worlds didn’t do much that other, bigger games hadn’t beaten it to punch on. Everquest had been around for a decade. Wrath of the Lich King has just released.

Its defining feature to me, a highschooler living on a day to day basis, are its weekly updates. These incremental storylines, drip-fed advancement, and progression content dropped each Friday. I’m sure that other games had things like this, but I suspect that what defines Adventure Quest Worlds was just how consistent these drops were. Some were just quest chains and zones, but some were wars: events in which the community had to work together to defeat the oncoming horde or all would be lost!

As a cynical adult, I look at these and suspect that the story would continue on regardless of the community’s success or engagement. But as a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that if failed, if we faltered, the entire narrative would shift.

The defining feature, then, of AQW, was that it truly pioneered the live service game before we were even using that term to describe video games.

Rose Tinted Glasses Back On Now

I look at these things now as a cynic, but back then I was fully on board. I loved the design notes (a sort of a patch update combined with lore that would be published each week) with all my heart. AQW and the Artix Entertainment team is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever felt some sort of deep parasociality for. Of course, that wasn’t a word we would have used for it back then. We didn’t have that term.

But it existed! I wanted to be them so badly. They were the reason I got interested in game design. They were the reason I started to try to teach myself Flash. More than anything else, this game probably defines my taste in music, to the detriment of my friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass me the aux cable. Voltaire, Paul and Storm: these were things I learned about through Adventure Quest Worlds.

If you want to know how old Adventure Quest Worlds is, there is a cross-promotional area with Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Not the keypress, the webcomic. That webcomic. The one loss is from.

If I had to describe how foundational this game was to my personality, it might be this story. At some point in High school, my family took a trip out west to visit the great American national parks. Outside of Glacier National Park, I remember very little of it.

But I remember being in the very first PvP match of Adventure Quest Worlds, because I was matched into Artix, the owner of the company. And I was just completely and utterly awestruck. I have no evidence that this is a real thing that happened. I doubt even he remembers.

From 2008-ish to 2012, this game, the developers, the community, and everything about it was such a critical portion of my life that it remains in my heart over a decade later. A little part of my soul that cannot be taken from me.

Returning to 2026

I recovered access to my AQW account sometime month. I was thinking about the game again after a 10 year stretch because the company ran a crowd funding campaign to try to modernize it. They netted a bit over 2 million dollars for the effort. Not exactly chump change, but not anything exciting enough to be in the headlines.

Disclosure: I was some of that 2 million.

I cannot really recommend playing this game as who I am now. Despite its update cadence, it’s surpassed in every way by other games. It’s a worse grindathon than Runescape, it’s less mechanically exciting then any other premium MMO on the market. In an era of Roblox and Fortnite it’s less interesting or accessible.

The story is, at best, mediocre, and at worst actually bad. As a weekly adventure serial, it was compelling. As a constructed story whose beats I have spent the last two weeks working through, it’s deeply underwhelming. Its endgame hyper grinds are the sorts of things that provoke a sort of twitchy, nervous reaction from me. The sort that I get whenever I’m playing a clicker game, and I find myself opening up the AutoHotKey documentation. Or even worse, looking at Github repos of bots.

But in 2009, I can’t see any of that.

Back to the Past – 2011

This infatuation won’t last forever. In 2011, Minecraft will release. It runs on Macs, I have a personal laptop now, and college is on the horizon. Adventure Quest Worlds will fall by the wayside to modded Minecraft servers, and trying to run a server myself. I’ll try to write my own mods, but will be so overwhelmed by the complexity and community that I’ll give up.

There’s probably a true story of Adventure Quest Worlds. One that tracks the drama, the weirdness, the major players. One I’m not part of, not in any meaningful way. I was never more than a player. The game means more to me than I do to it.

Please Step Back Into Your Time Machine

This isn’t really a proper game review. In a real review, I’d break down and give examples of why the story doesn’t work (relying on parody more than anything else), I’d dissect why the game’s player base has cratered (failing tech stack, poor mechanics, and lower ease of access) and I’d skewer the monetization (why grind for 2 weeks when I can spend $5?). If I wanted to take a positive spin, there’s probably a strong piece in considering how well the SVG art style has aged, even if the re-use of rigging for animations has not. But I’m not doing any of those things.

Here we are! 18 years of Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s still alive. You can still play it. It’s outlived better games. Fucking hell, it’s outlived actual honest to god human people I know.

But here it is. Here I am.

May 10, 2026
My LGS cancelled weekly Lorcana, and now the game is dead.
Non-Clickbait Title: Ravensburger has shot itself in the foot repeatedly, and it killed my local Lorcana scene.

Okay, so that’s a little bit of a lie. My local game store (LGS) did cancel their weekly Lorcana events, but as far as I’m aware, the game isn’t dead. Yet. But the local population of players has cratered.

I like looking at weird things that happen in TCG’s, and Lorcana has recently given me an interesting little case study in players at my LGS, and how/when the drop-off happened.

I also think that for the specific population of players I played with, I can trace back the decline to two or three fairly specific events, and that interests me! So let’s talk about it.

But first…

Why does it matter that weeklies are cancelled?

The store I went to for Lorcana ran casual weekly events. These were non-prized, non-competitive freeplay events. You bought in for $7, got a booster pack of your choice, and were entered in a raffle to win some other organized play prizes.

These events were the lowest possible entry point to get into Lorcana and connect with the local community. If you are brand new to the game, if you’ve never played a card game before, if you didn’t go out to card game events… this was the easiest way to try out the game in the lowest stakes, most chill energy environment available.

Without these events, the first rung on a ladder of getting into the game has been removed. It won’t stop weirdos like me who show up to sealed events for games they can’t play, but I do think it makes it much more daunting (and expensive!) for almost everyone else.

I think this is bad, but I think its especially bad for Lorcana. A lot of Lorcana players in our local were Disney fans first, and Lorcana players second. The traditional label for this would probably be “casual” players, but I don’t think that fits here. These were folks who came to every pre-release and bought cards by the booster box. They might have played the game casually, but they didn’t engage with it casually. They were more interested in making decks around their favorite characters than trying to break the meta.

Anyway, that’s a lot text to say:
1. Loss of weeklies was bad because it removed the first step in on-boarding for new players or players who wanted to get more involved.
2. It’s especially bad for Lorcana because it removed the environment where a lot of players could play the sorts of decks they liked to make.
Cause #1 – Weekly Challenges

Prior to Lorcana’s set 9 (Fabled) release, Lorcana weeklies had a point a system. Each week, you could show up, earn points for doing a variety of different things, and at the end of the season, the folks with the most points got some special prizes.

I don’t want to focus on the prizes here, but I do want to look at the challenges. Some of them notably rewarded playing weird decks. So instead of everyone just showing up with their best deck each week, there was an incentive to build out a deck to try to meet that weeks challenges, or to play a multiplayer game.

In short: there was a reason to keep things fresh.

(And as a side effect, probably lower the power level of the decks of the players who really wanted to earn points.)

When Ravensburger got rid of this, it removed both the incentive to show up every week, since prizes were now just raffles at the end, and it also meant that there was no reason to even try to make a new deck every week. Meaning that on a week to week basis, every week started to feel the same.

Cause #1.5 – Prize Adjustments

I debated giving this a full sub-section, but I think its comparatively minor. A bit after the weekly scoresheet changes, Ravensburger swapped out their prizes. Previously, I think there had been things like playmats, pins, and cards. Right now, there are only cards and these really underwhelming card boxes.

How underwhelming? Underwhelming enough that I, the king of taking free stuff, the supreme sovereign of snatching up game-adjacent garbage, paused before accepting one of these things. I mean, I still took it. But I was unenthused.

I don’t think that this on its own really did too much damage to Lorcana, but I do know that for specific players, this was highly demotivating. It wasn’t a bomb, but it was a surgical removal of another incentive for that set of player to show up and play.

Cause #2 – Set Rotation

Different games have different terms for the idea of set rotation, but all of them loosely follow the same idea: at some point in the lifespan of a TCG, older sets of cards removed from the standard play pool in order to make room for new sets of cards. It can be viewed as a necessity in order to prevent the game from becoming stale, or a way to get people to buy new cards.

Regardless, virtually every card game does it, and Lorcana was no exception; they called it Core Constructed. And after their rotation, Lorcana required that decks at these weekly casual events be in the Core Constructed format.

I think this was a terrible idea.

I do think that Lorcana needed rotation from a mechanical standpoint. Set 1, while not committing any of the flaws of say, Alpha Magic, or base set Pokemon, has some flawed designs.

Honestly, on the grand scale of “Well that was a mistake,” a free Wheel of Fortune still ranks lower than “What if land destruction was free?” or “What if you could take turn 5 on turn 1?”

So yeah. Rotation made sense from a competitive standpoint, and a design standpoint.

But I don’t think it made sense for the large subset of the player base who were Disney fans first, and Lorcana fans second. There were a fair number of adults and kids who could no longer play their favorite deck because those cards weren’t reprinted in Fabled, and so… they stopped showing up for weekly casuals.

Synthesis

So when my LGS held their final casual Lorcana event, I was the only person who showed up. I sat around for a bit, did some drawing, then went food shopping while the rest of the store was full of folks playing Riftbound.

The removal of weekly challenges and prizes disincentivized entrenched players from showing up to play, while also making the ones who did show up bring the same deck week after week. Set rotation killed off a lot of casual decks that didn’t need to be killed off, while making folks who’d never played a card game before feel a bit cheated, and question their investment of time, money, and energy in the game.

So here’s my guess as to what happens next:

The lack of casual play will remove a critical part of the playerbase pipeline. The events that are still supported will have lower and lower turnout, as it becomes less and less interesting to play with smaller numbers of people.

End result? No more Lorcana at the local game store.

Conclusion

Okay, so I know I called that part above this synthesis, but I think there’s a much more interesting takeaway here: Ravensburger doesn’t understand their playerbase, and treated them like they would Magic: The Gathering players.

To be fair, I would have made the exact same mistake if I was in their position. No one has to put me in charge of a possible multi-million dollar TCG yet, based off a brand worth billions of dollars, but still.

There’s an assumption that the final form of the “hardcore” player of a CCG/TCG is out grinding tournaments, tracking their full collection, building copies of and iterating on meta decks, and just generally fully engaging with the game portion of the collectible card experience. I think in the case of Lorcana, some of the meat and potato grinders weren’t doing that. They were collecting, they were buying tons of cards, and they were making fun weekly decks for character they liked.

These were the ‘hardcore’ players. They attended every prerelease, they had built decks for store championships, they tracked every set. But the game was only a portion of the experience, not the end state. Lorcana had core players, but they looked and behaved differently than they might in another game.

Or at least, that’s my crackpot theory.
March 12, 2026
Card City Critters – March Update

It’s early March, we’ve finished up our largest playtests yet, and that means it’s time for a progress update on Card City Critters!

Here’s the short version: We’re still plugging away at the game. We’ve run two larger scale playtests that are closer in vision to what we want the final game to look like. We’ve added dozens of cards, a bunch of activities and puzzles, and we’re working hard to add more.

Now for the longer version.

After Boston FIG, we were confident that people enjoyed the base battle card game. As a result, we’ve been focusing on some of the other components. In our minds, the final version of Card City Critters is a longer and slightly more involved experience, something a bit more like an escape room or immersive theater.

We’ve run two playtests of this version of the game. These were 2.5 hour events at local game stores, where players started out by getting a deck, and then solved puzzles, challenged their fellow players, and dueled NPC’s to earn additional cards for their deck.

These have given us a lot of great feedback, but also illustrated some pain points in our current design.

A lot of our puzzles are hit or miss. Some people really enjoyed searching through bulk cards, other folks found it frustrating. Most folks have enjoyed our scavenger hunts, but felt let down when someone else solves or gets the grand prize first. Our “find lethal” puzzles are too difficult.

We’re also still working on our grand finale. At Boston FIG, this was a boss battle with the Magnate. For our first playtest, this was something similar, but we found it didn’t work well with a higher player count. For the second one, we tried something new (but no spoilers)!

While this worked much better, the boss cards were overtuned, and the result was a sweep for the boss. Whoops! Still, some of these boss cards seemed to work well, so we’ll be revising those ones that worked well, and redesigning the few that didn’t.

Probably the biggest thing that we’re still grappling with is how to balance puzzles and dueling. Right now, people feel like if they do one, they miss out on the other. We’ve tried a few fixes for this, but none have really worked. Solving this is our next big challenge.

Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to just focus on what isn’t working, so let’s talk about what is! First up, we’ve got a shop, and over a dozen unique shop cards.

These include some unique and powerful cards, and players have enjoyed them. It also has our first set of non-standard emblems that you can be swapped out for the base ones! (You might recall that emblems are our deckbuilding restriction: you can have one of each color to go along with your deck, and choose any to flip over. Each emblem you flip prevents you from playing cards of that color in your deck, but gives you a permanent bonus instead.)

Also, we’ve added a set of cards called fossils! These are cards that you can collect, and then fuse together into powerful dinosaurs, becoming more powerful the more fossils you find, and these have also been quite popular. I need to redo the art on a few of them though….

So yeah! We’ve been up to a lot. While we don’t have a date yet for our next big public playtest, we’ll be at Granite Game Summit later this week with a smattering of decks and puzzles for folks to try out. We’ll be there on Saturday, March 7th at 10am, so if you happen to be swinging by, feel free to give it a try!

As always, more updates to come as we continue to plug away on this thing. The best way to stay up to date is to join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game, or to join the game’s mailing list here.

We also might be at PAX East in Unpub! Maybe! Not quite sure yet!

As always, thanks for playing our game, and more info to come in the future.

March 3, 2026
Quick PAX Writeup

PAX Unplugged has been great. I’ve been too busy doing a variety of things (Indie Game Night Market! Learning new CCGs! Losing all of my rare cards that I collected over the weekend, and just barely managing to get them back!) to really do too much writing.

For now, I’ll just say that it was a blast, and assuming I manage to get home, and not end up in a plane crash, I’ll try to talk about it a bit more tomorrow. But right now I need to pack for a way too early flight, and get some sleep.

Cheers, post more tomorrow.

November 23, 2025
PAX Unplugged – 2025 – Day 1

Another year, another PAX! I say that like it’s a bad thing, but to be honest, this has been a pretty chill year so far. As always, I’ll be recounting my day, but first I want to draw attention to a few cool things I think folks should check out.

Brightcast

Brightcast is great. If you want to know why, you can read my writeup, but if you want to just try it out, the designers have a booth this year, and are selling copies. If you find yourself walking past, I highly suggest trying it out. They’re in the PAX Rising showcase, at Booth #3143.

Re;Match

I’ve been following Brother Ming’s Re;Match since… well, before it was named Re;Match! It’s a fantastic fighting puzzle game, and if you get a chance to swing by and try it you absolutely should. They’re down at Booth 4009, and there’s also a Pinny Arcade Pin you can get doing a demo.

If you want to learn more and aren’t at PAX East, I suggest joining Brother Ming’s Discord server.

Anyway, Re;Match is rad, and I can’t wait for it to release.

Anyway, let’s talk about my day.

This was a pretty slow start for me. Most of my morning, and a bit of the afternoon was spent playing Magic, mostly the new Avatar the Last Airbender set. I might have some more thoughts on it later, but for now I’ll just say that we played some two-headed giant games, and won all three of them by the skin of our teeth. Honorable mentions to incredibly good cards go to Standstill, and Secret Tunnel.

This is very good if you drop it turn 2, and you’re the only ones with creatures. 6 cards is nothing to sneeze at.

MVP creature of the decks, and it doesn’t even start as a creature. Won us at least 2 games.

After all that Magic, it was already about 3:00, so after a quick break for some chicken and waffles from Reading Terminal, I took a moment to quickly browse the expo hall, and play some Re:Match.

The non-MTG games

Having spent the day playing a collectible card game, I decided that what I needed was to spend some more time playing a collectible card game, and went over to try out the Cookie Run TCG. I have no idea why this exists, and I’ll probably do a more full review of it after PAX Unplugged, but for now I’ll summarize my opinion as “Doing some interesting things, but not necessarily inspiring”.

After that, I met up with a few friends, and we tried out the demo version of the LoTR trick taker. It’s a co-op trick taker, and generally a pretty good time. I bought the first version last year, and never played it. So I’m going to crack it open when I get home instead of just buying another game I haven’t played. If you want an complete opinion, just read Dan Thurot’s review instead.

I rounded out the day by playing Magical Athlete, and I’m just going to link to another Dan Thurot’s review instead of trying to summarize it. Despite winning, I never had any of the truly exciting moments he experience, and while I’d play Magical Athlete with a specific group of friends, it’s mostly to see them lose it.

We ended the day with Stem & Branch. I’m gonna be honest, I’ve been up for 12 hours, and I don’t quite know how to describe this one. Maybe as a light-medium weight sort of points collection game? Honestly most games you collect points, so that’s probably not the best way to describe it.

Dishonorable Mention: Jungo. A friend played it, thought it had an interesting design, but didn’t think it was very good. A bit of a bummer, given that Trio has been one of our favorites, and Combo is also pretty good, but not everything can be a winner. (No, that’s not a bad link, Combo really did used to be called Surfosaurus MAX.)

Oh, and I got like 3 boxes worth of One Piece chaff for free, so that was neat.

Tomorrow I’ll be trying out Riftbound, and maybe finally browsing the Expo hall? Who can say.

November 21, 2025