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.
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.
Card games? Card games! One of the great things about PAX East is that there are an incredible variety of new card games and weird TCG’s to play. In this post, I’ll be quickly going over what I saw, and what I enjoyed, and also what I didn’t.
The Good
These are all the games I recommend at least trying if you get a chance. Am I going to collect them myself? Not necessarily, but I do enjoy playing them, and would play them again.
Here Be Monsters
Here There Be Monsters is a placement and ability-driven head-to-head battler with a sort of wacky pirate theme. It was in Unpub, and unfinished, but was fun enough for me to play 3 games of it—which is rare for something in Unpub. The core mechanics felt like they were almost where they needed to be, but the cards themselves did have some balance issues.
I’m hopeful that I’ll get to see more of this game, though I’m not sure when. There’s a lot of promise here, and the core mechanics are fun.
Altered
It feels like we’re in a bit of a TCG gold rush at the moment. Altered raised over $7 million kickstarter. I didn’t back it for various reasons, but mostly a distaste of said gold rush.
That said, I will absolutely not turn down a chance to try to play new card games, so I did play it. It’s neat, and doing some fairly different stuff. There’s no direct combat; instead it’s effectively a series of cost checks, where you and your opponent try to have the most of a given value present at one of two locations. While what I played didn’t sell me on buying a case, it did convince me that it might not just be an attempt to cash in.
Star Wars: Unlimited
I actually rather like Star Wars: Unlimited. It’s just unfortunate that I’m not a Star Wars person; I actually find the Star Wars theming a bit of a turn off. But I’ve found the gameplay of all the demos I’ve played quite enjoyable. They’ve got a nice tension to them, and that’s enough to put it into the good category.
PAX is also a great opportunity to grab all the promos.
The Bad
Despite the title of this section, these aren’t necessarily bad games. They are, however, (based on what I played) games I will never demo or touch again unless I am paid cash to do so.
Flesh and Blood
I’d heard a lot of good things about Flesh and Blood over the years, and it’s one of the mid-level TCG’s that seems to have clawed itself a spot at various local game stores. So I’ve been curious about it for a while, and at one point even thought about picking up a starter set.
Holy crap, am I glad I didn’t. I hate this game. I pretty much just quit halfway through, and didn’t even grab the simple starter deck.
The short version is that I just found Flesh and Blood both boring and frustrating, and it felt more akin to playing a fighting game than a card game.
UniVersus
The best thing I can say about playing UniVersus is: UniVersus made it clear that I just don’t like the alternating turns of attack and defense pattern that both it and Flesh and Blood seem to be using.
It just never clicked, and I never had fun. I’m sure I’ll get plastered for this, but both of these demos felt random. They felt like I was missing much of the critical information I needed to make meaningful strategic choices. And the remaining choices—the tactical ones—were boring to me.
The Ugly
Welcome to the bad vibes section. It’s not even the mechanics for this one.
Gem Blenders
I wrote a bit about Gem Blenders a while back, and I was pleased to see they were still around, and had a booth. But I was somewhat dismayed to learn that with their switch to a full TCG model, they also switched their card backs. Meaning that if you purchased their earlier base set, the game is no longer compatible.
It just doesn’t feel great, y’know? Anyway, that lands them in ugly.
Final Fantasy TCG
Not good, not bad, just sorta there. Maybe this would have landed better another year, but I just didn’t get anything out of this one. Honestly, I felt a bit bad for the enforcer and 3 other folks total I saw playing the game over the con. It follows a weird version of MTG’s resource system that I found both very slow, and not too fun.
Something I’ve privately bemoaned/whined about over the last few years is how every year PAX East seems to have less games, and more brands and lifestyles. It’s a small thing, but one that annoys me slightly, and that I can’t do anything about.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that much. I don’t actually care if Verizon wants to brand itself as internet for gamers. I’m not all that annoyed at whoever wants to sell me a new gaming chair. And ignoring everything else, my main problem with Wyrmwood is that I am never going be able to both own a house and one of their tables.
Qiddaya is not like that. Qiddaya is a problem.
What is Qiddaya?
Qiddaya is a planned tourism center in Saudi Arabia. It is owned by the Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund controlled and owned by Saudi Arabia.
The distinction I want to make here is that Qiddaya is not a private enterprise, it’s a government funded venture. As for why it’s being planned, there’s probably a whole thing on the nature of economic transition, oil economies, and soft power that should be written by someone who knows what they’re talking about, IE not me.
Why Should You Give A Shit?
Under sharia, as interpreted in the country, consensual same-sex sexual conduct is punishable by death or flogging, depending on the perceived seriousness of the case.
Forced labor occurred among migrant workers, notably domestic workers. Conditions indicative of forced labor experienced by foreign workers reportedly included passport confiscation, nonpayment of wages, restrictions on movement, and verbal, physical and sexual abuse.
The law does not provide citizens the ability to choose their national government in free and fair periodic elections held by secret ballot and based on universal and equal suffrage; it establishes an absolute monarchy led by the Al Saud family as the political system.
In short: Qiddaya will be a city built by slave labor, in a country where same sex relationships can be punished by death, and run under Sharia law as controlled by a monarchy.
Conclusion
I cannot stop Qiddaya from being built. I have zero capacity, influence, or ability to protest it, the organizations behind it, or it’s purpose.
What I can do is be FUCKING PISSED that ReedPop is giving them a booth a PAX East in the middle of Massachusetts to shill their version of the story.
Games are both art and a business, neither of which are apolitical, and as a form of mass media are going to end up fought over and contested. That said, ReedPop and PAX have echoed a message of diversity and inclusion over the last few years.
It’s hard to take that message even the least bit seriously when they give space to a foreign government whose own laws actively contradict that message.
One Final Note
Oh, and by the way. If we were in Saudi Arabia, I’d probably be breaking the law by making this blog post.
The press law requires all online newspapers and bloggers to obtain a license from the ministry. The law bans publishing anything “contradicting sharia, inciting disruption, serving foreign interests that contradict national interests, and damaging the reputation of the grand mufti, members of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, or senior government officials.” On August 23, local media reported that the Council of Minsters approved a new tourism law that criminalizes any criticism of the country’s tourism industry.
P.S. I’m what I believe is referred to as a “whiny bleeding heart liberal”, but if you’re on the opposite side of things, you should still probably be pissed at Qiddaya/Saudi Arabia on account of it being a monarchist state run under literal Sharia law.
P.P.S If I was banking on my countries economic future, I would not do it by putting a water park in the middle of a desert.
Note: The Missing Expedition is the two player co-op expansion for the competitive base game, Lost Ruins of Arnak. While I’ve played a two games of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I’m mostly going to be going to be focusing on my experience with missing expedition. That said, the co-op expansion sits on top of the base game, so the game mechanics are pretty much the same.
At the end of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I was feeling a sort of intense “Hmmm”-ness. Not good, not bad, just “Hmm”. It wasn’t because the game is boring, but because the campaign was one of extreme highs and lows, and for various reasons I’ll get into, it ended on a low.
Lost Ruins of Arnak is made up of a bunch of different design elements, but isn’t really defined by any of them. It’s like those little fancy cheeseboards. There are deckbuilding elements, but given that you only draw 5 hands from your deck, and one is the starting hand, it’s hard to call it a deck builder. It’s got worker placement, but you only place 2 workers each round, and there are only 5 rounds.
The general structure of Missing Expedition is as follows: Like base Arnak, the game is played over 5 rounds. On each round, players draw a hand of five cards from their deck, then take turns performing primary actions, with the solo-mode opponent taking actions to lock off options from the players as well. Once a player can’t take anymore actions, they’re forced to pass, and can take no more turns. Once all players are out, the round ends, things are reset, and the next round starts. In addition, on a given turn, players can take any numbers of fast actions.
The actions fairly standard Euro sorts of things. Place a worker. Buy more card for your deck. Spend resources to advance down a progression track. Buy a different type of card. Play a card.
It is a dense game.
Like I said: Cheeseboard.
So now lets talk about the individual games a bit.
The Campaign
The Missing Expedition is six games long. Now, it doesn’t do the scaffolding campaign or legacy thing, where new mechanics are slowly introduced between games to build player familiarity. Instead, each game is more like a mod-pack, that sits on top of the base game, and adds even more mechanics and game behavior.
And while this does a lot of things, one thing it does do is make setup pretty slow. Arnak has a lot of pieces, cards and deck to be sorted, and setup was about 20-30 minutes each time we played.
I like the word Modpack to describe the co-op expansion, because Missing Expedition feels like a game for people who already a played a ton of Arnak, and wanted more, as opposed to a comfy tutorialized version where you don’t have the urge to shank your friends after they take the cards you wanted to buy.
For example, we ended game 1 with -12 points, and that game took four hours to play. It was not what I would call a energizing experience. But we got better! Game 2 ended with only -0.5 points.
Games 3-5 ended up going much better, giving us a fair amount of confidence going into game 6.
It was also game 6 that we realized we had been doing the games unlocks completely wrong, and should have unlocked much more then we actually did.
Game 6
Game 6 was the lowest of the lows for the experience. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that is very hard. Another was that the story conclusion was a little bit lackluster.
Remember when I mentioned how each scenario works differently? And it’s all specific rules each time?
We misread one of the rules, and as a result played the last third or so of that scenario completely incorrectly.
I don’t have a good way to describe the experience of realizing the last four hours of what was supposed to be a climatic experience was, in fact, just kind of a mistake/waste of time. Now, we could replay it, but this is supposed to be a campaign game. If you know what’s coming, for me there’s not much point.
So. It ended on a low.
Conclusion
The Missing Expedition feels like an expansion made for people who already love Arnak. Like, really love Arnak and have played it a bunch. I think Arnak is fine, and so most of the fun for me was hanging out with a friend and trying to find ways to game the systems.
It also (and I should note my friend disagrees on this, so it’s purely a matter of taste) didn’t quite deliver on the narrative to the extent I was hoping? None of the mysteries brought up are really solved, and most of the story is just… fine. Not funny or super engaging, just present to remind you that it’s there.
We also really struggled with the rulebook at times, which led to the game 6 fiasco. I’m more then open the fact that my dumb ass can’t read rule books. But I was playing with someone who designs board games, and even he was having trouble. I don’t think The Missing Expedition does a great job managing the different game modes.
If you like complex co-op Euro games or loved Arnak and wanted more weird Arnak, The Lost Expedition might be right up your alley. But for me, I’m going to disappear into the forest.
