Okay, so it’s been two Mondays without a post, and it’s looking like a third is coming rapidly. So I’m just gonna come out and do this now.
I’m putting the blog on a temporary hiatus. Hopefully things will be back to their normal self around mid or end of July. Perhaps I will get friends to come in and do some guest posts. I’m not sure.
I don’t know if I have regular readers, but on the off chance I do, I want to put this out their to explain, and quickly explain why.
For starters, it’s certainly not for lack of games. This has already been an incredible year. I haven’t finished my Blue Prince writeup, I haven’t even started playing Expedition 33, or Deltrarune chapters 3-4. There’s also Monster Train 2, and demos for stuff like Abyssus and Jump Ship. I also could write about High Tide, or any of the other board games I’ve been playing, or the Magic Final Fantasy set, and what it means for the futures of that games.
But….
My workload for my full time job is requiring more focus from me then usual, the sort of off-the-clock energy that I’d usually put into games, rants, and other sorts of things.
I probably could smash out a few weeks of content if I wanted. I can see that I have mostly finished drafts on a few demos, a Age of Darkness write up, and I could technically put a Blue Prince write up out.
But I don’t really want to write things purely for the sake of tossing out words onto a web page.
So until future notice, consider this site on a temporary hiatus. Hopefully it won’t become a permanent one.
Category: Uncategorized
Gametrodon’s 4 Year Anniversary
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.
The First Post
In our very first post, I talked about some games I saw at PAX that seemed cool. These included Lucifer Within Us, Knuckle Sandwich, and Genshin Impact.
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.
Storybook Brawl was pretty good, but then they got bought by a crypto company. Then the CEO of the company committed an $11,000,000,000 fraud. So you can’t play that anymore.
Oh, and there was that whole Blizzard being a shitshow thing.
2022
2022 started with a bang: mostly me banging my head against a wall as “Gamers” continued to fail to understand how to read a shareholder letter.
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.
Nobody Saves the World was great. Pokemon Legends: Arceus ran like shit. Stacklands and Mad Rat Dead were good. CRIMESIGHT was unlike any other game ever made, and Konami killed it because they’re fuckers. Perfect Heist 2 was also great, but I’m not sure it still has a playerbase. I played a dating sim as a joke.
Oh! And Neon White came out! And Hazelnut Hex!
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.
Deceive Inc was cool. I ranted a bit about Diablo 4. Lorcana was a thing. Clank! Legacy was good enough that I bought the sequel.
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.
2024
2024 was truly one of the years of all time. There were bangers, like Slay the Princess, Palworld, and Baldur’s Gate 3. And Tactical Breach Wizards,
There were non-bangers like Knuckle Sandwich and Legend of Mushroom.
There was X-Angels (NSFW!).
And there was Athenian Rhapsody. God, Athenian Rhapsody.
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.
Athenian Rhapsody is really difficult to discuss.
Oh, I also saw the eclipse. And there was a complex bit of board game inside baseball that I accidentally had front-row seats for. Finally, I covered the Indie Games Night Market.
The Present
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.
Is a Jigsaw Puzzle a Game?
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.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Ed Note: It seems that any discussion of works, or works inspired by H.P.Lovecraft require a disclaimer, a sort of preemptive dismissal of Lovecraft as a person. So I’ll do that here. Lovecraft was tremendous racist. Those elements populate his stories, and their tropes.
Looking at his legacy, I also frankly feel a sense of pity. It’s hard not to feel such a thing for someone who found existential dread in the concept of air conditioning.
Whenever I want to illustrate how different types of stories lend themselves to different gameplay experiences, I tend to compare Dungeons and Dragons, and Call of Chtulhu. Both are tabletop RPG’s, generally about a group of characters working together, often to try to save the world. In modern DND characters can get hit with swords, fireballs, poison and spike traps and keep trucking.
In Call of Cthuhlu, it’s a incredible victory if everyone is even alive after a given session, regardless of how many limbs they have left. Or if they now have extra! Both are possible.
In that sense then, Arkham Horror: The Card Game felt fairly reflective of the brand. I played through the intro campaign with a friend, and by the end both of our characters were worse for wear, and we only just barely stopped Arkham from being leveled via throwing someone else into a wailing mouth of tentacles.
A classic.
It’s also a bit muddly to try to summarize the mechanics. The players do all the normal things that Lovecraft protagonists do, but now with cards. They travel from location to location (cards), equip gear (cards), fight enemies (cards), and take damage (not cards, tracking chits).
The most re-used mechanic then is the idea of the skill check. There are four skills, and players will be given a number to try to beat. This is done by drawing from a bag of numeric modifiers. Some are positives, most are negative, and a few are conditional. There’s also an instant failure! Some of these checks can be quite high, necessitating either burning cards from your hand to pump the check, or having a friend help you by doing the same.
Notably, cards are burned before the modifier is revealed. As such, playing cards directly into a automatic failure is possible, and does not feel good.
Skill checks are used for attacking enemies, interacting with locations, and searching for clues. It’s the first situation mentioned above that causes the most problems, as enemies remain attacking you until dealt with, either by you or a friend.
Enemies, by the way, do not use random checks. Their attacks will always connect. Their dark plans always tick forward. Luck is only a factor for the player, not the grand things that dwell in the spaces between space.
I don’t know if I like the Arkham Horror card game. My primary experience of it is a sense of disappointed relief after completion. I was a alive, but those I had sacrificed were not. I feel no call to purchase the expansions and add-ons, to delve ever deeper into a world of mysteries, unpleasant secrets, and cosmic horror, not because I lack curiosity, but because I will never truly win. Because victory is not victory, it is a mere delaying of inevitable death, because I cannot kill the un-killable, because a stat block for the things that lurk is the dark is a cruel joke, numbers that can only at best sketch a foolish outline of inconceivable majesty.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game is $60.
Million Monster Militia – A Bunch of Unsolicited Feedback
Updated 7/7/2024 – This write up has been updated to include the dev’s response.
Pre-Script: It occurs to me after writing all of this that it will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t actually played the game I’m talking about. Whoops, and sorry. Actual reviews on a game to come later this week.
I’ll do a review of Million Monster Militia at some point, but it won’t be this week. To make a long story short, I think my time would probably be better spent trying to give some constructive feedback then bashing.
First, some context:
1. Million Monster Militia is a bag builder/slot builder heavily in the vein of Luck Be A Landlord. You draft units, units are randomly placed onto a 5×5 grid, and you try to score enough total points each round to pass a threshold. It has somewhat different framing then Luck Be A Landlord, but that is how it works.
2. I’ve played 16 hours of it. I don’t think this makes me an expert, but I do think it gives me space to have some thoughts.
3. Right now, I don’t recommend the game for a lot of reasons, many of which are fixable/are already being fixed, and a few more which might not be.
Hello developers!
Hopefully this doesn’t come across as rude. Most of the time when I write things for this blog, I aim for a tone of being a perpetually snarky dipshit. Obviously this isn’t quite the correct tone for sincere feedback.
This whole thing is grouped into three parts. The first ones are things I think you NEED to do. When possible, I’ll try to give examples, and say why I think you need to do them.
The second part will be a bunch of general thoughts and feedback, and while you could ignore any suggestions I make here, I suggest you read them at least to hear the thoughts.
The third part is just insane ramblings. I think they’re relevant, but they also could just be wrong.
Okay. Here we go.
Part 1. Please Make These Changes
- Fix The Wording Of Unit Abilities
There are a lot of units in your game. Many of them do not actually do what they say they do. I know you’ve already fixed some of these, but you haven’t fixed all of them. I’m going to give one example, but I had about 10 earlier.
The Time Bomb says that it gives a multiplier of 0X to all units. That’s not true. It doesn’t give a multiplier of 0X to itself. Maybe this was missed because it has base zero damage.
Plenty of your units do things like this. I am begging you to fix them.
Dev Response:
Thanks for pointing this out. I'll put the example of the time bomb into our bug tracker. It's really easy for descriptions and abilities to get out of sync. If you have more examples of this please let us know so we can fix them!2. Add An Options Menu
Yes, there already is an options menu. No, these are not enough options.
This is what your game looks like on my screen. There are two critical problems here. First up, there is no resolution, secondly, I cannot actually move the game window.
Maybe everything was coded so that the game can’t be rescaled. Fine. Just add an actual top bar or something so I can drag it around then.
Dev Response:
You should be able to move the game window with the arrow keys, and resize it by dragging on the corners.
3. Keywords/Codex/Readability
A bunch of folks on your Discord have already suggested this one, and even better, they suggested good keywords, so I’m not going to dig too much into this one. But yeah. Better readability on units, keywords/key text being called out, and things like the codex having filters or searches would all be nice.
Dev Response:
Agreed that these would be nice to have! It would be quite an undertaking currently as it'd require rewording all the units, and some things work almost the same, which means we'd have to probably change how some things work to line up under these keywords. I agree this would be nice an ideal world, but we'll have to weigh the benefits against the time it would take to implement.4. Have Units That Create Additional Units Show Those Units
For any unit that creates an additional unit/item/etc, make it so that I can see what that unit is. Here’s how Luck Be A Landlord does it. You mouse over a unit, and a pop-up of information shows up above that.
I don’t need you to make it pop-up. For all I care, it can open a link to a Wiki page if it has to. But I need it to show me what the extra units it generates does.
Note: I’m aware that there’s something to be said for the wonder of discovery and experimentation, but I think at a fundamental level you’re making a bag builder, and that means I should be allowed to know what’s going into my bag.
Dev Response:
Another thing that would be very nice to have, but quite difficult to implement! We do already have this on our radar if we find the time to do it.5. Let Me Skip The Campaign Cut-scene, Let Me Fast Forward Damage
So now we’re veering into really nitpicky, but demonstrable territory. I don’t want to have to skip past the opening cutscene each time I open the game, it’s just kinda frustrating. Also, having timed it, I think that a full round (deploy/activate/return) takes about 10 seconds, which is just about (give or take a bit) twice as much as Luck Be A Landlord. Yes, it’s minor, but it adds up, and I think it does contribute to why I feel so burnt out after a game of MMM. It would be nice if there was a way for it to go faster.
Dev Response: The cutscene playing multiple times is a bug. Fast Forward damage is a little tricky but enough people requested it, that it should be on the list...
Part 2. General Rambling
You read the first whole bit. Awesome. This next bit is just a bunch of rambling, but I’ll try to keep it concise.
1. Going to War With the Army You Have
I’ve seen other people say this as well, but I really feel like I have to force builds to win. Synergy doesn’t feel like enough to clear anything past the tutorial. Maybe I’m not very good. But also,I’ve played for more than 10 hours. Usually I have a good handle on a game after that much gameplay. I’m not sure how I stayed bad in this one specific game.
2. Some of These Units Just Feel Bad
Time Bomb and Focus Shrine I am looking at you. I get that technically there is a use case for Time Bomb where you pick it up to stall rounds out while digging for more units? I guess? But it’s rare, so I’ve never actually done that?
And Focus Shrine. Okay, I do not understand this one. In exchange for doubling the damage of SOME of my units, I take double damage? Why? Is it because I’m supposed to draft multiple copies of it? Is there something obvious I’m missing?
Honorable mention for Biologist here. It increases the damage of plants. There are a total of 2 plants, and one of them eats humans.
Which Biologist is.
3. Some of These Units Are Always Good
Hello, Med Kit, Extra-Health, and Extra Life. Each one of these units should just have the text “Take an additional turn” on them. They are always good. There is no cost to taking them other then opportunity cost of the other items that they are compared to. They fit into every single build I’ve ever done.
It just seems weird to have a subset of items that work in every single build.
4. Do I have to Play Through The Entire Campaign To Unlock Custom Mode?
This one is like… just a question. Do I? Because a custom mode to place units and test stuff would be more useful to me while trying to beat the campaign, than after I beat it.
Part 3. It is entirely possible I am wrong about everything I express in this part.
Okay, so now we’re in the third part. Again, congrats on releasing your game, and reading through everything I’ve written so far. I’m not sure the approx $7 I gave you really requires you listening to all of this, but I’m either putting it here, or in the final review of the game, so I’m putting it here for now.
I think that some of what might be hurting my experience with the game is that while you’ve used a sort of base structure from Luck Be A Landlord, you’ve pushed certain parts of the system in directions that aren’t actually more fun.
Here’s a few big ones:
1. LBAL allows the player to continue drafting and playing through a full cycle even if the engine they’ve constructed clears the current target quickly, but MMM forces the player to advance when they beat a target. In LBAL, I’m rewarded for overly successful builds with more room to maneuver and pivot into the late game, in MMM I’m punished for them.
2. LBAL has systems that open possible builds without punishing me, specifically items and essences. These give me freedom find build-arounds and perma multipliers. But every thing in MMM is a unit, which means even if a unit can open a path to victory, it can just as easily end up being dead weight if the right support doesn’t show up.
Okay, and finally:
I think the fundamental math of adjacency is a bit broken in MMM.
To be clear, I am open to being dead wrong on this. I am not good at math. But I think the fact that you’re using a 5×5 grid compared to LBAL’s 4×5 means that you’ve pushed the odds of any two items being next to each from just about 30% down to 19%, or from just under 1/3 to 1/5.
Ed Note: Okay, I know the math here is actually wrong, because at best, I solved for the comparative odds of placing a object, then placing a second object and the object being adjacent, but those odds DO serve as upper bound. So assuming math is right, MMM is less likely to have favorable adjacency for any two things then LBAL is.
There are a lot of units that care about what they’re next to in MMM, but I think the odds are much lower, and this might be part of WHY it feels much harder to create synergistic builds that run across multiple archetypes (Monster Hunter + Hydra + something else, because it’s just much less likely you hit the favorable locations).
Conclusion
Congrats on releasing your game. I’m glad that you’re working to fix some of the stuff in the Beta branch. You have a interesting mechanical base to work with here, I hope you continue to work to improve the game, and if you read this entire thing I am sorry.
Also sorry for all the comparisons to Luck Be A Landlord.