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Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition

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.

Green Mountain Gamers – Winter Weirdness

It’s time for another event writeup! This time it was Winter Weirdness, one of the board game days put on Green Mountain Gamers (if you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and looking for stuff to do, maybe click that link). As always, I’ll be quickly recapping the day, what I played, and what I thought about it.

Morning

After arriving, we started out with a quick game of Tiger and Dragon. I’ve written a ton about Tiger and Dragon already, and it was my favorite board game of last year, so there’s not too much to recap there.

After that icebreaker, we cracked open a friend’s copy of Parks that he found at a yard sale for $5. This turned out to be an incredible deal, because Parks is great. It’s amazingly well produced, with beautiful tokens and art. But more importantly, it’s actually fun. The main mechanism is moving down an action track that you can’t go back on, while trying to get enough resources to visit parks and score points. I might do a bigger writeup on this game at some point, but I really enjoyed playing Parks.

I then played Glory to Rome. It’s still very good, and we used one of the expansions, perhaps incorrectly, but we used it nonetheless. This was probably my fifth or so game of Glory to Rome, and I really felt like it was starting to click, or at least starting to click enough that my engine turned on and outscored everyone else to win.

Witness the power of a ton of docks.

After that it was time for…

Lunch

Someone mentioned that there was a very good grilled cheese sandwich place nearby, so we went over there. The Meltdown did have very good sandwiches, with a caveat.

When I think grilled cheese, I think buying them from a really sketchy guy in a parking lot at 1:00 AM in college for like 8 bucks, because he’s the only source of food in a billion miles. That is my expected grilled cheese experience.

And while I have no meaningful thoughts on food itself (this is game blog, not a food blog) I do think paying a net of $25 for a single grilled cheese sandwich with fries is bit… much.

Great food, would probably pack a sandwich next time.

Afternoon

Heading back to the event, I cracked open a copy of Epic: Guardians of Gowana that I’d picked up recently, and played of game that. Despite taking almost of my life in damage on turn 1, I was pleasantly surprised by Epic. It’s a cool little expandable card game, with a neat resource mechanic where all cards cost either 1 or 0 gold to play, and each player gets a max of one gold each turn. It worked much better than I was expecting.

Then I joined some other folks for a game of Everdell. For various reasons that have nothing to do with the game itself, I’m unlikely to ever purchase, or have any friends who own a copy of Everdell unless I somehow manage to get it secondhand. That said, I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve played it before, so I wanted to give it a second shot. Everdell is a cute little tableau builder/worker placement game, and I had a good enough time that I’d probably want to give it yet another shot.

After that, I managed to get in a game of Space Lion, one of the games I’d brought to the event. I got my copy at PAX, and I’ve been trying grind out some more games before I do a secondary writeup on it. I did write about it pre-Kickstarter, but now that I’ve got a full copy, the game has been changed quite a bit. There’s a bunch of improvements to graphic design, along with some structural changes that make for a better play experience, but do remove some elements I liked from the… hmm. Prototype version? Beta? Not quite sure what to call it.

Finally, with it getting late, and the friend I got a ride with showing no signs of finishing up his game of Ark Nova, I sat down to play Three Sisters. Well, I planned to, but unfortunately we didn’t quite have time to finish the game out. I’ll try to get a full game in at some point, but I liked what I did play.

Wrap-Up

Overall, great time. There are two more events coming up, and I’m currently planning to be at both of them. Hopefully if you’re in the Vermont or New hampshire area, I’ll see you there, and if not, well, I’m planning to be at Granite Game Summit, PAX East and PAX Unplugged this year as well.

2023 Placeholder Awards

The presents have been opened. The award lists that people actually read have been posted. The games industry itself has been gutted like a fish, along with the rest of the technical sector.

Ah, 2023.

It’s surprising to me that the first year that truly felt “post” COVID was still such an incredibly shitty year in so many ways on a global level. Usually I wrap up the year with a list of dead games. But that sort of thing feels less important than, say, the thousands and thousands of layoffs.

Instead, it’s time for the return of the Gametrodon Placeholders.

Bad Graphic of a Trophy

As always, the criteria are simple: winners must be something I played this year and wrote about on Gametrodon. And unfortunately, that means that I can’t just give all the awards to Baldur’s Gate 3 and call it a day, because I haven’t finished it, nor have I done a writeup on it.

Best Board Game

I played a lot more board games this year than I did last year, in a lot more genres than usual. That said, there was only a single game that I played over a dozen times, at multiple different events, with different people, and even sat down and randomly taught to strangers.

A game so generally agreed to be “pretty good” that everyone in the group I played with went and bought their own copy of the game. As such, it’s the obvious winner.

It’s Tiger and Dragon.

It’s not the most complex, or thematically rich, but it very quickly became the go-to game of the group I play with. It’s the game everyone wants to play, and is simple enough to teach quickly to boot. In short, it’s the best because it got the most play with the most people, and the least friction.

Honorable Mentions: Clank Legacy, Quickity Pickity

Best Soundtrack

The criteria to even be in the running for Best Soundtrack is pretty simple: was it good enough to add to my running playlist? Even though currently that playlist is mostly just my “Waiting for my feet to heal” playlist, one game easily beat out the competition.

It’s Pizza Tower.

There’s not too much more to say on this. The music is just too damn good. Pizza Tower is an equally fantastic game that I didn’t feel too equipped to evaluate. But if nothing else, it’s the only music this year that really made me want to start swinging at folks.

Honorable Mention: Baldur’s Gate for that one bit, and maybe Herald of Darkness from Alan Wake 2. But I didn’t play that game, I just love the song.

Best Multiplayer Shooter

I’m going to be honest. This one is mostly a tie between this game, and the game in the runner up slot. But the game in the runner up slot has about a billion more sales than the winner, and I’d rather bring more attention to the smaller one.

The best multiplayer shooter of the year is Deceive Inc.

I don’t love everything about the game, but I’d much rather have more interesting and weird multiplayer shooters with multiple paths to victory, and unusual mechanics.

The runner up is, of course, BattleBit, which I think everyone has played at this point, but still deserves it. And as I’ve already observed, this was effectively a tie. But if I’m giving an award, I’d rather it be to something like Deceive Inc that not everyone has heard about.

Game Of The Year

Remember that inclusion criteria I mentioned up above?

I lied.

The game of the year is Baldur’s Gate 3.

Have I done a writeup on this game? No. Hell, at 65 hours, I haven’t even finished a single full playthrough.

It’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had, and is ridiculously flexible as a game. It’s also far from technically perfect. I spent at least 6 of those 65 hours trying to fix bugs or errors, and having to reload save files. That said, it’s probably the pinnacle of PC games at the moment: incredibly well designed maps, the greatest voice acting ever, fairly interesting combat, and just generally an excellent game.

Last Train Outta’ Worm Town

Last Train Outta’ Worm Town has a long name, long enough that I’m just going to refer to it as Worm Town from here on out. If it’s good enough for the opening menu screen song, it’s good enough for me. It’s probably not good enough for any level of SEO, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Worm Town is an asymmetric hunter/hunted game in the vein of Dead by Daylight. It’s very clearly inspired by the 1990 film Tremors, so much that I’m confident making this statement without having actually ever seen the movie.

Here’s how gameplay works. Players play either as either a surviving human, or a worm. Humans win by completing a set of tasks, including finding a special key, clearing the train tracks of obstructions, and refueling the train with random objects. Worms win by eating all the delicious humans.

Maps for gameplay are semi-randomly generated. A few features will always be present in approximately the same place. For example, the train is located in the middle of the of the map, and the quarry is always in the north east. However the locations of rocks, cactus, clusters of buildings, and consumables are randomized.

The human player controls and systems on their own are fairly limited. You can pick up and store items. You can carry items up to a total of 3 weight units, plus one item in your hands. You can throw items away from you. There’s also a set of equip-able items that tend to be single use, including a rifle and a zipline that I still don’t actually know how to use.

The worm is much more interesting. The core mechanic to the worm is simple. You can’t see human players if they aren’t moving on the ground. As a result, humans are invisible on top of buildings, large rocks, or while on the train. However, you’re much faster than humans, and you have a short cooldown jumping attack to launch to launch yourself into the air. You can also burrow underground for even faster movement.

Personally, when playing with my friend group, we’ve found the game to be a bit biased in terms of the human players, and it’s also not a very deep game. It’s possible that the game is much more fun with higher player counts, but I haven’t experimented with that.

But I still recommend Worm Town, mostly because of its pricing model. See, only player needs to actually own the game, and everyone else just downloads the free version.

For $8 bucks, a game that everyone can download and play pretty quickly, Worm Town is a pretty decent time. It’s not as fleshed out as many other games in the genre, and the controls don’t always work, but it’s really good as a medium level filler game when no one else in the discord can agree on what to play.

Ed Note: This writeup is a bit light this week. I’m heading out to PAX Unplugged 2023 shortly, and I need a bit more time for my other writeup. If you’re also gonna be there, why not hit me up on Twitter?

The Finals – First Impressions

Naming your game The Finals is a bit of a crime against words. It also makes me wonder if the game ever had some sort of comp scene, what that would be called. The Finals finals? Finals of The Finals?

Regardless of the weird naming, The Finals was neat enough for me to put 7 or so hours in. So here are some first impressions after that time.

And this is where I’d put my in-game screenshots, if I’d taken any before the beta went down.

Gameplay

The Finals is a multiplayer shooter, and most of the game’s novelty and innovation comes from everywhere except the shooting. The Finals’ innovation starts with its game modes: Cashout, Quick Cash and Bank It.

Gamemodes

Cashout and Quick Cash follow the same general structure, but with different numbers of teams and objectives in the game. In both cases, the goal is simple: get to a box, bring it to a deposit point, and then defend it while it deposits.

In Cashout, the game’s competitive mode, it’s four teams of three against each other, and in Quick Cash it’s only three teams of three. The scoring also changes between modes. Quick Cash requires 20,000 points to win, and only spawns 10,000 point boxes, making it effectively the first team to get two points. In Cashout, it’s 40,000 points. In addition, getting team wiped costs a large amount of points.

Bank It is closer to something like the dog tags mode from Call of Duty. There are various coin spawns around the maps, and enemy players drop the coins they’re carrying when defeated. Once picked up, coins have to be deposited in boxes that spawn in for about a period of 90 seconds to actually be added to your score.

What’s interesting about the game modes is that while I was playing them, they did generate a bunch of interesting decisions. Is it better to rush an enemy team that is trying to capture, or just to go after another objective on your own? Should you go in now, or try to wait for the third team on the map to attack first, then swoop in to clean up?

Traversal

The most interesting part of The Finals for me is the traversal, and traversal mechanics. In the context of this game, that can mean several things. It can mean putting down a zipline to go over a gap, a jump pad to make a surprise entry into a skyscraper, or a dash to zoom down alleyways.

Or, if you’re me, ignoring that and smashing through everything in your path.

One of the biggest features in The Finals is a incredibly high level of destructibility. Almost all smaller buildings and objects can be blown up or smashed to pieces, allowing the impromptu creation of entrances and exits. I’ve played games with high destructibility before, and often they end up turning the map into a giant pit as players destroy and destroy and destroy. But The Finals neatly manages to avoid this pitfall (ha) and maintain the structure of its maps while allowing much of them to be destroyed.

The end result is that a coordinated team can go across a gap, up 5 stories, and then through most of an office building in about 15 seconds. For me, this was the most fun part of the game, and it was a shame that only one of the loadouts I played really had the ability to conduct emergency home renovation. Which is as good a time as any to talk about the loadout system.

Loadouts

Loadouts in The Finals start by choosing a body type. There are three, ranging from heavy to light, with each having a different pool of items and weapons to equip, as well as different specials, speed, and HP.

I mostly played the heavy class, so I’ll use it as an example here. After picking heavy, you have 1 special slot, 1 weapon slot, 3 equipment slots, and 4 backup slots. The weapon slot holds a primary weapon. For the heavy, these include a large machine guns, a sledgehammer, flamethrower, and a grenade launcher.

Equipment slots contain grenades, walls, and other supplemental items like a rocket launcher. The Finals doesn’t have an external ammo system. Instead, while guns have to be reloaded, everything else is cooldown based.

Finally, the backup slots. Anything except special abilities can be placed into these slots, and they can be swapped out mid game. It’s important to note that even if you put a primary gun into a backup slot, you can’t swap it with a equipment slot while in game, only your primary. In addition, swapping items isn’t possible in some of the modes.

Overall, the loadout system is fine, but the lack of sidearm or secondary weapon to close out fights felt really weird. Presumably, those are supposed to be ended with say, flame grenades, but it still feels off for a fire fight to pause while both sides scramble to reload.

Overall Thoughts

The Finals was fairly fun. If I was grading it, I’d call it fine. There are a bunch of impressive things about it, including the terrain destruction, and the high fidelity while doing so. Does that mean I think it’s gonna succeed?

Not really.

I’m not sure how much space there is in this market for live service games, and make no mistake, The Finals is a live service game. It feels like it’s trying to primarily compete with something like Apex Legends.

Now, I could be wrong here. If the team creating The Finals is small enough, and they can capture a small portion of their playerbase as a long term audience, maybe it could become self-sustaining. But I could just as easily see it going the way of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt.

Perfectly good game! Interesting mechanics! Relatively fun! But might not hit critical mass. Same thing happened for Gundam Evolution.

It’s kind of depressing to continually see this pattern repeat, but hey, many of these projects have been in progress for years. I have to wonder if we’ll see this sort of thing continue.

Author’s Note: All the voice acting in The Finals is done with generative AI, a point covered in this podcast. Some people are, unsurprisingly, rather unhappy about this.