Category: Uncategorized

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.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

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.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

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.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

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.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

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.

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.

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.

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.