SIGIL

I like bubblegum. I like cereal. I like a hearty stew.

That doesn’t mean I want to mix all of them together and eat the result. I have a similar problem with SIGIL.

Sigil (full name SIGIL – Magical GPS Action RPG), is a single player alternate reality game. Players walk around in the real world to move in-game. Combat is real time, and takes place on a large grid, involving casting spells, and trying to avoid the enemies spells. There’s a tone of whimsy in the design and theming of the enemies, which is a nice change from every mobile game being themed around nude anime girls.

All of which is to say, I’d really like to recommend it. But I’m just not having enough fun with it, and there are some real pain points.

First up, exploration. You can only interact with items in an 150m radius of your player character, and there are a fairly limited amount of things to do. In theory, that’s when you get up and walk around. But unlike Pokemon Go, or Orna, SIGIL doesn’t let you see far away from you, or a map.

This makes it hard to set goals, or to target specific items or enemies to fight. If there’s some sort of system for how enemies and harvestable items are spawned, the game does not explain it, and I have not been able to figure it out just by looking. The game also doesn’t have an in-game map that underlays the interactable objects. This means that the only way to get more stuff is to just go out, and walk around.

This brings us to the second big mechanic: Combat.

Sigil has a grid based real time combat system that feels really interesting. The game starts you out with a single long range attack and block, but there are unlockable spells to summon minions, walls to block to block projectiles, and spells that require you to charge. You do all this while moving around, trying to stand in specific locations on the grid to get buffs, and pick up “Mana” that boosts your resource pool for the fight you’re in.

I have a few problems with the combat, but none of them are directly with the combat mechanics. Instead they’re all parallel problems. First off, you can’t play combat passively at all. You have to be actively engaged, moving around, attacking and blocking at all times.

Which is fine. That’s how video games are supposed to work. The problem is that with most video games, I’m not playing them while also trying to avoid walking directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

The other issue with combat is the performance. I have a relatively new iPhone, and on the lowest settings, the game just sort of chugs along, occasionally lagging, and in one instance straight crashing.

My last painpoint is with the resources themselves. There is no easy way of figuring out how to get most things. One critical resource that’s used in every single hex craft, or hex upgrade, I straight up never found.

Instead, I went and bought it from the game premium currency shop, because of course it has a premium currency shop. It also has ads you can watch after combat to double your rewards bonus. This to me is almost more egregious, because, remember, this is an augmented reality game. You seriously want me to spend data streaming and watching an ad while I’m walking around outside?

You know what screams victory to me? Being told that if I watch an ad of someone screeching at a slot machine, I could get double rewards!

SIGIL is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has a beautiful weird Tim Burton-esque world I actually would like to know more about, instead of being the typical mobile “Wow, you’re in a world where you need to collect girls who are an anthropomorphic personification of rocks/trains/boats/the subconscious desire to be loved.” It has a strong and unique combat system.

But the combat doesn’t work with the augmented reality, the crafting feels incredibly grindy, and typical mobile garbage rears its ugly head early, and doesn’t put it down.

BattleBit Remastered

I’m not sure I have anything new to say about BattleBit Remastered. On one hand, I’ve played close to 60 hours of it, bought copies for friends, and generally had a really good time with it. On the other hand, the game already has thousands of positive reviews, and hundreds of thousands of players. So my writeup feels like tossing a single match into a volcano.

BattleBit Remastered is falls into the genre of the “Massive” FPS. That is to say, the smallest maps and game sizes available are 32 players vs. 32 players. The largest games are 127 vs. 127.

BattleBit doesn’t have any features that feel outwardly revolutionary or genre defining. The thing is, this doesn’t really matter because it does everything correctly. Perhaps the biggest thing for me is that the game is incredibly well performing even at the highest player counts and game modes.

A Quick Story

Because of the high player count, it’s easy to assume that BattleBit is a game where a single player or group of players can’t have any impact. I don’t think that’s true.

One of my favorite moments was when I was playing on a winter map with only a single set of roads. Working with my friends, we managed to sneak around back, and seize control of a small outpost area. We then built a spawn point near the area, and set of barricades blocking only road to the other 75% of the map. This meant that vehicles couldn’t get past, and led to at least a dozen enemy vehicles including APC’s and tanks just slamming full stop into the hastily erected barriers, and letting us shred them with rockets.

It’s moments like this that make BattleBit feel great for me. Working with other folks to flank or block areas can feel really fun and meaningful!

Just Very Good

It’s hard to figure out the best way to praise a game for just doing almost everything very well. Maps are interesting and balanced, offering spots for both sniping and close range combat. The guns feel pretty good, with comparable stats and time to kill. No single class feels overpowered.

The game also has an effective party and squad system that just works really well. Players can just create a party when they log into the game, and then invite friends later. There’s no having to back out, no MMR, and the high player count means I’ve never run into the “Oops, we already have a full party” issue.

That’s not to say that I consider BattleBit to be perfect. There are some small things that are frustrating around loadouts and stats. It’s not possible to have more than one loadout saved for any class, which means that swapping weapons based on the map is a bit aggravating. I also find the body armor/helmet/backpack system incredibly confusing, as cosmetic variations of various items are intermingled with the stat changing ones.

But none of these issues actually impact the core gameplay: running, gunning, and getting shot by a sniper halfway across the map.

In Conclusion

BattleBit is also blessedly free of all the other bullshit I usually feel obligated to point out or excuse. There is no battlepass, no microtransactions, no in-game cosmetic store. The game is $20. You can buy it once and then play it with your friends for as long as you want.

If you like first-person shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield, you can buy this game right now safe in the knowledge you’ll get your money’s worth.

Board Game Roundup

Number 6 won’t shock you. It’s made out of cardboard.

I moved recently, and one side effect of that move is playing a lot more board games. So this week while I try to avoid destroying the computers at my day job, let’s talk about some of the board games I’ve been playing.

Note: I’ve included links to their BBG page, less because I think BGG is some incredible source of wisdom, and more because I think linking to an Amazon page is pretty useless.

1. Root

Root is a 2-4 player asymmetric tactics game. It also has one of the most interesting problems I’ve ever seen in a board game, and that problem is that it is very cute.

No, really. The game is incredibly adorable, and that’s a problem because I think a lot of non-board gamers would look at it and go “Oh wow, that seems friendly and approachable.” A lot of hardcore board gamers would look at it and go “This didn’t cost $600 on Kickstarter, contains less then 50 plastic models, and doesn’t model industrialization in the 18th century. Get it out of my sight.”

Then you open the game up, and realize it has 3 rulebooks. A quickstart rulebook, an example and setup rulebook, and a rulebook simply entitled “The Law of Root” and references to things like section 9.2.9.

Long story short, Root possesses a level of depth and complexity that is very much not telegraphed by its adorable art.

I think my favorite thing about it is how different the factions are. When I played, it was a game where everyone else played Civilization, while I played Diablo, running around gathering loot as the Vagabond.

I really want to play more Root. It seems like a really interesting game.

2. Clank: Legacy

Of all the games in this list, Clank: Legacy is the one most likely to get a full writeup at some point. That’s because I’m playing through a full campaign with a friend, and we’re six games deep.

Clank is a movement based competitive deck builder where you build up your deck while adventuring around a board. As you do so, you collect items that get you victory points, and then try to escape with a valuable artifact.

Clank: Legacy takes that and adds a bunch of events and twists into the mix, as well as doing a bunch of the standard legacy stuff (using the legacy model to provide scaffolding, letting you put stickers on the board).

I’m enjoying playing it because I like the Acq-Inc theming, but I do wish the game itself was slightly more co-operative. There’s so much to search out and discover, but it feels like playing “optimally,” especially at two players, forces games to end incredibly quickly. This ends up being a detriment to the legacy system because you don’t get to explore much of it!

3. Potion Explosion

Potion Explosion has marbles. And unlike Gizmos (later on this list), it actually does a lot with them. It’s a variable set collection game, and the primary mechanic is pulling marbles from a central dispenser.

There’s a sort of match-3 element present as well, where if marbles of the same color touch after a match, you can pull and add all of those marbles to your pool in addition to one you pulled out. I’m not doing a great job of describing it, but it’s very fun, and actually takes advantages of the physicality of the marble dispenser.

4. Worldbreakers

Worldbreakers describes itself as “a tactical card game set in alternate 13th century Asia.” I only played one game, and the structure felt very much like an LCG in the vein of something like Netrunner.

The big selling point for me would be the game’s relative mechanical simplicity, and count up structure for victory, where you win by scoring points as opposed to running your opponent out of life.

I won my game, and liked it enough that I’d play again. I’m curious to see how tactical and meaningful the choices are when I have a greater sense of the cards and their abilities. And also when I have to play an aggro into control deck matchup, as opposed to the other way around.

Note: I’m pretty sure Worldbreakers was a KS exclusive, with a limited pre-0rder for a second KS run. So getting a copy of this is probably quite difficult. I’d suggest finding someone else who already owns and just playing with them, or trying to find someone who would bring it to a convention.

5. 7 Wonders

I liked 7 Wonders, but I don’t have too much else to say on it. It’s a tableau builder with a pick and pass drafting mechanic (like Magic drafts or Sushi Go).

I’ve always liked drafting games, I enjoyed 7 Wonders, and I’d probably play it again for its mechanics. But I wouldn’t say I was enthused by it. The theme is just sort of your traditional “build a thing wow.”

On the other hand, 7 Wonders is already so well known I’m not too worried that my one lukewarm take is going to any real impact on it.

6. Gizmos

So Gizmos is a resource management engine builder.

There’s a big marble machine thing in the middle, but honestly, I’m not very impressed by it. They could have done the exact same thing if the marbles were just a deck of cards.

I’m pretty lukewarm on Gizmos. It might be because I never got anything to quite work, but it just didn’t feel very fun to play, and the marble components felt unnecessary to the actual mechanics of the game.

Avant Carde

A few months ago I mentioned in my Granite Games Summit writeup that one of my favorite prototypes at the event was a deck builder with a working title of “Cubism.” I also noted that I didn’t really want to write about it while it was still in the prototype stage.

It’s been a while since then, but I’m happy to note that this week I can finally talk about that prototype. Mostly because it’s no longer a prototype, and it has a new final name: Avant Carde.

Avant Carde is a deck builder where players take on the role of collectors organizing shows of their artwork to score awards.

If you’ve played a traditional deck builder, you’re likely familiar with a lot of the base components of the genre. Players are given a (weak) starting deck that they make more powerful over time by using it to generate resources, and purchase additional cards to be added to the deck.

Where Avant Carde innovates, though, is in how it handles playing cards during a players turn, and also its scoring and buying system.

In something like Dominion or Clank, any card can be played in any order, though there might be advantages to doing things a certain way. Avant Carde is different.

Avant Carde has a something more akin to an Uno style chaining system. Once a player plays a card for their turn, the next card they play has to match the previous card in either color or number to continue the chain. At the end, they count up the number of cards in the chain, and any other abilities those cards might have, and that number is the amount of money they have to buy with.

This chain, for example, would generate 5 money for the player.

This leads to a really interesting balance where the more expensive and powerful cards can end up being a bit riskier to play if they aren’t in a color that you’re collecting.

Avant Card also has some interesting changes in how it handles the buying area. Unlike Ascension, where a limited pool of cards are available at any point in time, or Dominion, where everything is always available, Avant Carde splits the difference in a pretty fascinating way.

Another neat thing: The abilities in Avant Carde aren’t on the cards in your deck. Instead they’re on the cards you lay out above the buy row! This means you can change all of the cards’ abilities by just swapping out 6 cards.

You’re collecting cards numbered 2-7. Every number is always available, but the stack of cards for each number only ever has the top card flipped up and visible. And since the numbers come in different colors, even if you have the money to buy a high-cost card, it may not make sense to actually buy it if it’s completely off color, and would be hard to include in your future chain.

As tempting as that 5 might be, splashing into blue to play it could be difficult.

I’ve really enjoyed Avant Carde. It’s one of the few prototypes that I wanted to play every time I saw it over the last few months. I’m even more excited to see the final game. It’s a fascinating deck builder with some really neat mechanical innovations in the genre.

If any of this sounds cool, Resonym is currently running a Kickstarter for the game that you can check out.

Disclaimer: I am friends with the designers at Resonym, which is how I ended up playtesting it, but it’s honestly the best Resonym game I’ve played

Buying Lottery Tickets is a Stupid Business Model

or Why Do You All Keep Making Live Service Games?

A Fritz Rant

Imagine that I come to you with an incredible idea for a business: buying lottery tickets. You are skeptical at first, but I make the following argument. We’ll only do it for a little bit. If it doesn’t turn out to be profitable, we’ll stop doing it, after a few months.

Oh, except instead of just going to a convenience store and buying Mega-Millions, I’m going to need you to get me a team of artists, programmers, a full QA team, and a publisher, because we’re not going to be buying lottery tickets, we’re going to be making live service games. So I guess in this metaphor, our lottery tickets take likely several hundred thousand dollars, and maybe a year or two to buy.

Let’s look at a few of those tickets shall we?

GUNDAM EVOLUTION just announced its end of service. Also, a bit ago, MultiVersus ended its beta, with a promise to return in 2024. These aren’t the only games, but they’re recent examples. CrimeSight was a paid game, and it was a brilliant deduction game with incredibly clever mechanics that never found a playerbase, and it shut its servers down. Oh, and The Cycle: Frontier, while it sucked, was a good example of this thing we’re talking about, so I guess I’ll include anyway.

As an outside observer, I don’t have perfect insight into what’s going on here, but I can make a guess. If I was in games purely for the money, I get why everyone would want a League of Legends, or an FGO, or a Genshin Impact. It’s tempting! And perhaps even the math makes sense. Maybe if you buy enough tickets, this all works out in the end.

But I can’t help but look at all of this and be mildly depressed. Thousands of man-hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and tons of effort is being spent on creating games that sometimes don’t even last a year.

And many of these games are good, when you peel back the endless daily quests, in app purchases, and optional addons that cost $30 a piece. They have their own communities and player base, but because they don’t become a massive hit, they get shut down.

It’s depressing to me that video games feel like they’re switching from something like a book, where you can have a cult classic that gets discovered years later, to something more akin to software as a service, where when it’s gone, it’s just gone.

Anyway, rant over. More games to come.