Gametrodon

Qiddaya Should Not Have Been Given A Booth At PAX East 2024

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.

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.

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.

Skulls of Sedlec

Work has been incredibly busy lately. As such, this review, much like Skulls of Sedlec, is going to be incredibly compact.

Skulls of Sedlec is an 18-card pattern building, open drafting, and set collection game. Two of those three phrases I didn’t know until I went and looked them up on Board Game Geek, and I somewhat disagree with the third. It also has 12 expansions of which I will be reviewing zero. After all, the point of a Button Shy game is to make a micro-game that fits into a wallet, not one that you can go band for band with.

The full rules for Skulls of Sedlec are less than a page long, so I’m not going to spend too much time on the rules. The short version is that cards are divided up into piles, and on each player’s turn, that player takes one of three actions. You can:

Flip two cards in piles face up, then take one of them into your hand
Take a single face-up card from a pile into your hand
Put a single card from your hand into a stack/tableau.

Board Game Geek calls this game a set collection game, but I disagree. After all, most cards don’t score based on being part of a set. Instead, they score based on their relation to other cards in the pyramid. Some, like the lovers do need to be in a set to score, but many like royals or clergy have their own unique scoring rules.

Overall, I quite enjoyed Skulls of Sedlec. It’s a very compact game, and I’m not sure I’d get more than 2-3 more plays out of it. But it’s quick enough that I feel I could teach it pretty easily, even to non-board gamers. I’ve seen a fair number of people note that they didn’t consider it worth playing without the expansions, but I found it quite enjoyable, even as a standalone.

Spiral Knights

Ed Note: This is less review and more fugue state rant. It has been a very long week. Better writeups to come in the future when I have my brain back.

I found Spiral Knights while desperately searching for literally anything I could write about this week with even an ounce of passion. Work has been long, and while there are games I would like to talk about, six plus hours of meetings per day will evaporate anything even resembling a coherent thought.

Spiral Knights is interesting for a lot of different reasons, none of which have an ounce to do with the the actual gameplay. That’s because the gameplay is effectively multiplayer PvE 2d Zelda, grafted to a gear grinder. And even that oversells it a bit. It does have some minor puzzle elements, but these are rare.

What it has going for it is a fairly smooth multiplayer experience, allowing up to 4 players to join a party, and travel through its levels, which are called the clockworks. As already mentioned, those levels are somewhat random, and if the whole party dies, you lose all the stuff you got.

Still, this is a F2P game. You can pay to win in Spiral Knights harder than you can in most other games. You can buy resurrections and skip the grind by buying gear. You can even spend premium currency to buy non-premium currency off a sort of in-game real money trading house.

No, Spiral Knights is interesting because it’s somehow still around. For reference, the earliest achievement I have for this game is from god damn two-thousand fucking eleven. You know, back when I still had dreams, and my parents were together, and Obama was president. All good things, except maybe the second one.

In what universe does a 10+ year gap between achievements make sense?

Is it a sleeper hit? I don’t think so. Steam Stats has the game at about 150 players per day, and only 75 at low points. This means that for a non-zero portion of the time I spent playing it over the last few hours, I’ve been more than 1% of the online player base.

And yet, in an era where mobile games announce their closing and opening dates in the same tweet, this cutesy grindathon with less strategic and mechanical depth than Puzzle and Dragons has lived over a decade.

I don’t get it.

On the other hand, calling this a live-service game is inaccurate. What even appears to be the last actual patch was over 4 years ago. This is a shambling monstrosity, likely kept alive by… well, not even a skeleton crew, probably just a single skeleton. I wouldn’t be surprised if the main servers are running off something in a basement somewhere.

The forums are full of complaints and disappointment. The most lucid posts note that the game is effectively an archive of a past project. There are complaints about performance, and DMCA strikes the company running the game has levied against player-made mods.

On the other hand, Spiral Knights was fascinating to me 10 years ago. It was the game where I figured out how to arbitrage, trading TF2 items for Spiral Knights energy, and then back. It was also one of very few games that would actually run on the Mac I had back then.

Staring at Spiral Knights is a sort of fever dream: a game that should be dead, and yet still has my character, and their items, years after I’ve touched it. It is so old that I turned off my ad-blocker on the wiki, which is still up, and could still see the rest of the page.

I don’t actually recommend playing Spiral Knights, unless you want a sort of time machine to the state of F2P games in 2011-2016. It’s grindy as hell, and exists in that sort of space where everyone was trying to figure out how to make the best skinner box possible, but without having really greased the gears down yet.

Better writeups to come next week.

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.

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.