Magic’s New Play Boosters

Content Warning: Maximum Amounts of Inside Baseball on TCG’s

Magic just announced a new type of Booster Pack, and it’s something I find fascinating for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that it has the potential to break some things horribly. Before I get into those things, I’m going to lay out a few assumptions. If you disagree with these assumptions, you’ll still enjoy the article, but it may sound like rambling from a madman.

Assumptions

  1. Magic cards are artificially scarce. It costs just as much to manufacture a rare or a mythic rare as a common or uncommon.
  2. Past a certain point, when opening booster packs to collect cards, the only card that matters is the rare or mythic. (Yes, there are uncommon cards with value like Pitiless Plunderer, but they’re few and far between.)
  3. Rare cards are more powerful. If two cards in the same set have a similar effect, and one is rare/mythic, and the other is common/uncommon, the rarer one will be better.
  4. Magic’s limited formats are reliant on uncommon and commons cards making up the bulk of the strategies and play.

Why New Boosters?

There are several reasons for play boosters. Most are in the Mark Rosewater writeup, but one is conspicuously absent: manufacturing cost. Back in December of 2022, the Pokemon TCG updated its boosters pricing, but also added additional rare cards. For Pokémon, adding more rares doesn’t have much of a trade off, because Pokémon doesn’t have a limited format.

But Magic does have a limited format, and that format is popular enough to cause a problem. Some Magic players use booster packs as game components to play one type of game, and some buy boosters to get components to play a different game.

Wizards’ first attempt to fix this problem was to split things out into Draft Boosters and Set Boosters, separating the two types of players. The aforementioned Mark Rosewater writeup is a 4 point memorandum on why that design failed for business reasons.

So now Wizards has done the opposite. They’re attempting to combine both products into a single product to be used by both audiences, solving the above issue of product availability and stocking.

A New Set of Problems

However, in moving the problem from a business problem into a design problem, they’ve opened the potential for a variety of incredible things to wrong, and that’s what I’m excited about.

See, Wizards is trying to make this product serve two masters. If the contents are a downgrade from Set Boosters, it’s going to piss off everyone not playing limited formats. The whole thing that made set boosters desirable (more variety of cards, more rares) could go completely out the window. Given that Set Boosters are the product that everyone is buying, according to Wizards themselves, I’m hopeful they won’t destroy the fun of Set Boosters.

Instead, I’m hoping they keep the rare rates up, and run Limited formats into the ground adding 50% more rares to a format with traditionally limited bombs.

Even if they don’t do that, though, having draftable cards from “The List” should be a real hoot. I’m looking forward to seeing Wrath of God and Skullclamp in low power limited games.

Ultimately, they’re going to have to make the experience different for someone: either drafters, or collectors. I’m hoping it’s the first, because watching Wizards warp a format for money is much funnier than watching people open trash rares.

Autum Antics – Green Mountain Gamers

Two event writeups in as many weeks? I know, it’s a real rarity. As always, I’ll be talking about what I played and what I saw, this time at the Green Mountain Gamers event from this past Saturday.

Perhaps most importantly, if you’re in the New England area, and looking for more folks to play games with, go join the Green Mountain Gamers facebook page for notifications about the various gamedays and events.

Necessary shilling out of the way, let’s talk about the games.

Morning

The day started off with Bullet♥︎, the only game I own that requires emoji to be displayed properly.

This was followed up by a quick game of Tiger and Dragon with a few folks. I’ve been playing a fair amount of Tiger and Dragon, and I’m very bad at it, but I generally enjoy playing it. It’s also fairly light, and easy to teach so that was fun.

Half of that group then went off to play Lords of Vegas, while me and a friend pulled out a copy of Dragon Castle, and played that for the first time. I enjoyed it, I think they had slightly less fun with it.

Then we went back to an age old classic, Race for the Galaxy, otherwise known as “The game I cannot win.” I have 14 game losing streak in Race for the Galaxy.

Yes, I’m counting. Yes, that includes yesterday’s loss.

Afternoon

After a lunch break that involved eating a sandwich the size of my head, it was time for some afternoon games.

This started off with Aegean Sea by Carl Chudyk, the same fellow who made Glory to Rome. Now, I have a policy on this blog of not doing writeups on games unless they I finish them. So, there will be no full writeup on Aegean Sea. There will be only the following statement:

I think I hate Aegean Sea.

Aegean Sea has the questionable honor of being the first board game I think I’ve ever effectively rage quit out of, along with every other player at the table. I found the action system grating, it seemed like everything I made immediately got destroyed, and it was just one of the most painful games I’ve ever played. We played a few turns, no one was having fun, and everyone decided to be done.

So then I went and played Everdell, while my friends played Spirit Island. Everdell is a tableau builder with more expansions than card types, and has so many components that I’d consider it a bit overproduced, but that’s just me.

I mostly liked Everdell, and I’d like to try playing it a few more times. I think that may not happen (for various reasons), but if I do get to play it again, I’d like to try a few more expansions.

Then, after a mere 11 hours of moving cardboard, it was time to head out. I’m looking forward to the next event like this, even if I don’t know the date yet.

Ed Note: I plan on doing writeups for a few more of the games on this list at some point in the near future. When I do, I’ll link to them from here.

Moonring

I haven’t beaten Moonring yet. Normally, I don’t write about games until I beat them, but I’m going to talk about Moonring early, because I’m done with it (for now). I also recommend you download Moonring immediately, as long as it’s been at least two months since this post went up.

Moonring is a singleplayer cRPG with some roguelike elements. It’s brilliantly weird, and has a fantastic tone and art style. Moonring is also the buggiest game I’ve played so far this year, with an impressive smattering of bugs and crashes.

Here’s a quote from the sole developer that might shed some light on why it’s so buggy:

To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting more than – maybe – a hundred or so downloads of Moonring. In addition, only two of us (me and one Discord member) have been bug-testing, so reports have been few and far between up until now.

Dene

I recommend playing Moonring, but I recommend playing it a few months from now after we’ve had a few more patches.

So, what makes Moonring unique enough that I’m willing to look past a crash-to-desktop every time I try to throw myself into a pit?

In a word: ambiance. Moonring is based off a much older series of games, most of which I’ve never played, but the primary influences I believe are the Ultima series, early text based adventure games, and early roguelikes.

The end result is an interesting set of mechanics, combined with a series of practical changes to make things more human.

Mechanics

Here’s an example. Instead of dialogue options, or a dialogue tree, you talk to NPC’s by typing key words and phrases. But instead of forcing the player to type in every single option, or remember everything an NPC ever says, the game highlights key phrases from past discussions with that NPC, and shows them above your character. It also has auto-complete functionality to fill in words. In addition, the game has a note system to keep track of what you’ve heard.

There are still secret phrases, and riddles, but Moonring is set up in such a way as to let those be the focus, rather than syntax or brute force.

Another good example of Moonring’s unusual elements is its leveling system. Here’s what happens when you defeat an enemy in Moonring: they die, and maybe drop an item. Here’s what doesn’t happen: you get experience points of some sort.

That’s because leveling up in Moonring isn’t tied to classes, or kills, but instead to a series of objectives you can complete for the the gods of the world. Every god has certain general objectives, like visiting their hometown. Others objectives are specific to the god in question. The Great Wolf for example, rewards the player for hunting a deer. The Lords of Dust give a bonus for repairing a construct.

And Moonring does the same with the roguelike mechanics. Instead of forcing a full restart if you die, only the game’s dungeons are somewhat rogue like. Die in the dungeon, and the game kicks you out to before you entered, but also regenerates the entire dungeon.

It’s probably not a game for everyone. Between food meters, managing amber lamps, and mechanics that feel counter-intuitive to many modern design choices, it can be overwhelming. But I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it, and I’m excited to play more.

As soon as it stops crashing.

Conclusion

Moonring isn’t currently good enough to unseat my favorite example of game mechanic revisionist history; that’s still Shovel Knight. But it does a fantastic job presenting what feels like an alien piece of design, without sanding all the strange corners off.

Moonring is free on Steam, but again, I really suggest if this sounds interesting, you wait a bit. It’s still fairly buggy, and sometimes can be quite frustrating.

Odd Tabletop Games New England

That’s right! I did in fact get out of my apartment on a long weekend for once!

It’s been a while since I covered an in-person event, hasn’t it? I think the last one was Granite Games Summit. I spent yesterday up in Manchester, New Hampshire at the Odd Tabletop Games New England event, hosted at the Boards and Brews game cafe.

As per my usual format for these sorts of things, I’ll be talking about what I played, and the event in general with a small amount of commentary not related to games at the end.

Author Note: I think my general enthusiasm for weirdness for is fairly well documented. For example, see this entire blog. That said, tabletop RPG’s are definitely my third category of focus when it comes to games, after video games and board games. So there may be some things here that I have different opinions on than most folks more in the scene.

Academy of Adolescent Monsters

Academy of Adolescent Monsters was the first game I played yesterday, and probably the most fun I had at the event. It’s a fairly rules-lite tabletop RPG with a simple premise and system for problem resolution. After creating the setting (the school), a starting situation, and the characters, the game starts.

Given how rules-lite the system is, it might just be faster for anyone interested to just go grab the rulebook and read through it. The general gist is that “problems” exist, and players state actions they wish to take to resolve the problems.

To solve problems, the player roles a D20, states what they want to do, and consults a sheet of outcomes. If the player used a positive trait, they can move around a personal bingo board grid and select a different value than the outcome they got. If they use a negative trait, they have to keep the outcome, but get to mark off an additional value.

The results of the lookup table range from solving the problem, to changing traits to positive traits, to just making things worse with various resolutions in between. Much of the fun from the game is the result of the players’ willingness to engage, really embroider the story, and buy into it being “The worst day of school ever.”

The designer, Daniel Jansen, ran the game for us and did a fantastic job keeping things smooth and on-tone. By the end of the school day, we had reconstructed a clock that changed time, convinced a car possessed by a hermit crab-entity to become the Driver Ed teacher, and stopped a camera that stole souls and teeth. In short, a great time.

I don’t think I have much valuable critique or issues with the game. During play, I incorrectly interpreted one part of the system involving changing dice rolls by consulting my bingo board, but it’s such a small confusion I’m not sure it matters.

A game like this feels like it works perfectly in a format like the event: as a one-shot with a bunch of players all willing to buy in and let everyone have their moment to shine, or embroider the fiction.

Overall, I had a fantastic time with this.

Side Note: There were definitely a few moments where I had to catch myself and step back a bit, because if given a chance to make up a monster, I really want to add all the details, instead of letting everyone else contribute. I tried to rein myself in.

Untitled DB Cooper Game

The second game I played was “Untitled DB Cooper Game” by Dr. Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman of Tiltfactor. I suggested the name “Cooped Up” and was told that no one likes puns, so sadly, I’m going to just have to refer to this as ‘Untitled’ for the rest of the writeup.

Untitled is a multiplayer story-telling and hidden details game. One player is the storyteller, one players is the accomplice, and the other players are the interviewer and FBI. The storyteller and the accomplice have agreed on a secret signal: an item in the room where the game is being played. There are also several location cards, and the storyteller tries to weave in details that will point the accomplice toward the correct location. The game is played over several rounds with the signal object staying the same, but the stories changing.

In short, the storyteller tries to secretly hint at a location with using a prearranged signal among the details of their story, while the FBI and Interviwer try to figure out the secret item.

It’s fun, if a bit challenging as the storyteller has a limited amount of time to talk. I got a few critical things wrong that led to me giving up the game a bit too early when I played as storyteller.

We Have Always Lived Here

The last game I played was Glen Given’s “We have always lived here.” It’s a solo journaling game about creating a haunted house.

It did not resonate positively with me.

One of the reasons may be that I’m not big on journaling. Another could be that as someone who isn’t an inherently positive person, I put a lot of effort into trying to maintain a positive mental attitude. As such, if you ask me to pick a sad, lonesome, or haunting song, there is part of me that stands up and suggests that the most appropriate choice is obviously “Macarena,” as a sort of self defense mechanism.

There are many design choices here that I find somewhat aggravating, but are also likely intended to aggravate. The game requires a high number of components and items to complete it, including dice, coins, a deck of cards, song, etc. The system for selecting items from lists feels deliberately cumbersome, involving counting down lists over and over and over, until only one choice is left.

There’s probably a longer discussion on art, catharsis, negative emotions, creation, ritual, and subjective experience. I’ll let someone else smarter than me write it.

Other Things That Happened

I chatted with Carly Dwyer, the founder of Intramersive Media, about some of their projects, including one named “Magical Help Desk” which I found particularly interesting, and really want to try. I also talked to Dr. Loretta Brady of Saint Anselm College about some of the work that she and her lab have done around games.

I also spent most of lunch talking about parasitic wasps, breaking teeth, and still finished my sandwich. I don’t have a link for that last one.

Overall, good times.

Super Raft Boat Together

I had hopes for Super Raft Boat Together. Not high hopes; if the game wasn’t good, my year wasn’t going to be ruined. And likewise, Super Raft Boat Together didn’t pop my hopes like a balloon. It just sort of deflated them, like a bouncy house at the end of a birthday party. It was still fun to climb around, at least for a bit. But eventually it’s just a bunch of sad plastic, and you have to leave.

Super Raft Boat Together is a multiplayer top-down roguelite. The game’s twist on the genre is that instead of going through multiple rooms and challenges, the staging area is a raft. Said raft is apparently made of cake given the speed and ferocity with which it’s devoured by sharks and other denizens of the ocean if they aren’t shot before they reach it.

Mechanics

The structure on the whole is simple. Start a run, enter a zone. Fight off two waves of enemies, then fight a boss. After each boss, visit a shop and buy upgrades. After the final boss, start over.

Before I sink Super Raft Boat Together, I do want to say some nice things. The music is fantastic, and I love it. One of my favorite songs is used in this trailer. The actual gunplay and movement is pretty decent. I don’t love it as much as I love the music, but it’s not where my primary problem with the game comes from.

I have two zones of issue with Super Raft Boat Together, and how they intersect. Those zones are the roguelite mechanics, and the boss design.

Issues

Let’s start with the roguelite mechanics. I have a bunch of minor complaints here, so I’ll start with those. The game is pretty vague about what exactly its upgrades do, and to what extent. For example, one upgrade is “Chance to shoot fire bullets.” This is incredibly unhelpful. What’s my chance to shoot a fire bullet? If I get multiple stacks of that upgrade, is the chance to set them on fire additive or multiplicative? Or is it non-existent? Do fire bullets set enemies on fire, and if so, does that fire damage stack? Or do they just do extra damage?

How close? How much damage? I don’t know.

Compare this to something like Hades, or Risk of Rain 2, both games where items have explicit and defined properties, with delicious numbers included. (In Risk of Rain’s case, those numbers are on an inventory screen, but they’re still in the game!) Those numbers are important, because there’s a big difference between “+1% chance to deal critical damage” and “+25% chance to deal critical damage.” But Super Raft Boat Together doesn’t make this distinction, and this makes trying to create a build incredibly difficult, because very few items are explicit in their function.

It’s also not helped by what I’d describe as inconsistent or undefined terminology. A large portion of the game is building out the raft to provide space to maneuver during a run, but Super Raft Boat Together uses both the phrases “build speed” and “build rate” when talking about the rate at which the character generates raft pieces to place. Are they interchangeable? Are they different stats, and if so, which is which? I can’t tell from playing.

Both of these design choices make it much harder for me to engage with what I’ve always found to be a large portion of what makes roguelites fun: creating builds with synergies between various items.

The other thing that makes this difficult is that many of the items in Super Raft Boat Together don’t feel designed to be synergistic. There are very few items that scale off of other stats that can be influenced. My favorite example of this would be an item called Spectral Hammer. It’s only active when the player has died in a multiplayer run. In that case, it doubles their ability to place temporary ghost planks.

It has zero synergy with anything else in the game. I’m not even sure there are other items that buff being a ghost, and frankly, being a ghost is pretty useless. Better then nothing! But mostly useless.

So now, bosses, and boss design. I have several different categories of problems with the bosses in the game. Let’s start with the simplest ones: they’re pretty boring, there aren’t many variants, and several bosses share almost identical patterns (looking at you Giant Jellyfish, Giant Fish, and Giant Pufferfish). In addition, several of the boss fights aren’t boss fights. They’re just an extra wave of enemies. Shark Swarm, Ghost Swarm, and Fish Swarm aren’t bosses. They’re just an extra third wave fight.

The biggest problem I have, though, is with the game’s final boss, the Super Kraken. The Super Kraken is not incredibly difficult. However, it does something most of the other bosses don’t: it absolutely shreds every inch of your raft.

This would be mostly just annoying if it wasn’t for one mechanic I haven’t talked about yet: mercenaries and pets.

Mercenaries are hired with coins. Coins are added to a total between runs, but not kept between runs. Pets are bought with cash. Both mercs and pets are valuable sources of DPS, but like the player, they can’t shoot if they’re not on a raft. They also can’t build rafts, and pets will just float away if they get knocked off somehow.

Pre-Super Kraken
Post-Super Kraken, on the best fight I’ve ever gotten.

Unlike most other bosses, the Kraken will absolutely kill your raft, and kill mercs because it attacks a lot more of the screen (many other bosses will just actively target human players). This means that by the time the game loops, most of the raft is destroyed, all the mercs and pets are usually dead, and everyone is hanging on by a thread.

Which brings up another problem: there’s no shop after killing the Super Kraken. Instead, each player gets three free items, one of the highest rarity, and two more of variable rarities. Except many of those items won’t be damage items, and the second round vastly increases the number of foes, while also vastly buffing their health.

End result: It’s incredibly difficult to come out of the Super Kraken fight in a good position to continue the run, even if every player has full health.

It’s also hard to think of a reason to want to continue the run. The enemies are re-used, just with more of them. The bosses are actually now easier than the base waves.

Conclusion

Super Raft Boat Together isn’t awful, but none of its pieces click together. It falls flat on key parts of what makes a roguelike compelling for me, lacking both interesting boss variation, and meaningful and compelling build synergy. If you need a one time thing for game night, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it in many other situations.

If you’re still interested, you can find Super Raft Boat Together here on Steam. And you can yell at me for my bad opinions here, on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter.