Tag: VideoGamesWeLike

Tiger and Dragon

Tiger and Dragon my favorite game Oink Games has published. It’s also my favorite game with Dragon in the title that I’ve played recently. (The other two in that category are Dragonwood, and Dragon Castle.) It’s stayed entertaining even after playing 8 or so times, and is relatively simple.

Tiger and Dragon is sort of a trick taking game played with a set of numbered domino-like tiles, for 2-5 players. The group I’ve played with likes it best at four players, but I personally also really enjoy it with three players.

Here’s how a round works. Each player takes number of tiles based on the number of players, with the starting player taking an extra tile. Then the starting player places one of the tiles from their hand, as an “attack.” Going clockwise, any player can play a tile that matches that number to block. If they do, they then become the attacker, and choose a domino to play, and the process repeats.

But if none of the other players choose to block, and it cycles back around, the original attacker gets to place a single tile from their hand face down, and then attacks again.

The goal of the round is to be the first player to empty your hand. Whoever does so scores points based on the battlefield in use. Battlefields modify the games scoring rules, and the first player to get 10 points wins.

The strategy and fun of Tiger and Dragon comes from how the tiles are numbered. Each tile has the same number of copies as its value. There’s a single 1-tile, two 2-tiles, three 3s, and so on all the way up to eight. There are also two special tiles, the Tiger and Dragon, which we’ll talk about in a moment.

But let’s say another player attacks with a three, and you have a three in hand. You can block with that three, or you can decide to try to hold the three, and force another player to block. If another player blocks with a three, you now have the only three. This means that when you attack with the three, it will likely cycle the entire table, letting you play an extra tile for free.

Unless of course someone plays the Dragon.

The Tiger and Dragon are spoiler tiles. The Tiger can block any even tile, but be blocked by any even tile. The Dragon does the same thing, but for odd tiles. This makes them the strongest defenders, and the weakest attackers.

The end result is a very fun game of bluffing and hand management, that I highly recommend, and hope gets restocked at some point in the future. (I guess you could buy it off Amazon.)

I heavily recommend Tiger and Dragon. It’s incredibly repayable, has a fantastic level of planning and bluffing, and is just generally a very fun game.

Author’s Note: Apparently Tiger and Dragon is based off an old Japanese game called Goita from 1860. The amusing part of this for me is that the apocryphal designer of Goita has a Board Game Geek page, which for some reason I find very amusing.

Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated

I liked playing Clank Legacy. After playing through the full campaign of 10 games, if you asked me to bring out my copy and play a game, I’d say “Sure.” If you pulled out a fresh copy, and asked me to play, I’d probably pass.

Let’s talk about why that is.

The full title of Clank Legacy is Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. I’ll just be calling this game Clank Legacy for the writeup. The subtitle does give us the game’s primary source of flavor and story: the Penny Arcade D&D Actual play. It’s an interesting enough story, but the entertainment value is carried by the humor and tone rather then the narrative arc.

It’s also an incredibly self-referential title.

Ah, yes. The Clank Legacy is Legacy Clank.

Clank Mechanics

Clank is a deckbuilder with a board movement component. The goal is to get the most victory points, but unlike Tanto Cuore or Dominion, the biggest source of those points is from moving around the board and grabbing artifacts, gold, and items instead of buying VP cards from the buy row.

In most senses it’s a fairly standard deckbuilder. Each turn you draw five cards and play them. When your deck runs out of cards, the discard pile becomes your deck.

As I mentioned, the game starts to diverge from standard deckbuilders when it comes to the goal. The end goal is to get from the starting zone, grab an artifact, and get back to the starting zone without dying. There’s more it than that, but it’s a decent general overview.

Cards generally give one of three resources: Movement, Skill Points, or Combat. Movement is used to move around, Skill Points are used to buy cards from the game’s version of the card market, and Combat is used to defeat monsters in the game’s version of the market.

The next big place where clank differentiates itself from many other deckbuilders is that you must play every card in your hand each turn. And this is a bad thing because decks start with two copies of Stumble, a card that generates Clank’s eponymous mechanic: clank.

From left to right: Skill, Movement, Clank, and Fight.

Clank is a semi-random damage mechanic. Whenever you generate Clank, you put a wooden cube of your color into the Clank pool. Whenever a new card is added to the market, if it has a Dragon Attack symbol on it, all the Clank goes into the Clank bag, and then a number of cubes are drawn out. If your cubes get drawn out, you take them as damage. If you take all of your life as damage, you get knocked out, and may score zero points.

There’s another primary way for attacks to happen, though. Once a player does make it back to the starting zone, they score some extra victory points, and each time they would take a turn, they instead perform a dragon attack against all other players.

There’s a key interaction that I want to highlight here, because we’re going to come back to it later:

  1. Clank has a buy row of random cards, and those are refilled after each turn when a player buys cards with Skill, or defeats monsters with Combat. There aren’t any other ways to interact with the row.
  2. Clank’s primary mechanic to force players to end the game is that some of the cards trigger dragon attacks when they flip up into the buy row.

Just keep this in mind. It’s going to be important in a bit.

Legacy Mechanics

Time for the other half of the title! Legacy. This is a Legacy board game, and as such, it involves all the classic Legacy mechanics. Permanent powerups, permanently changing board state, and using the game’s campaign structure to perform mechanical scaffolding, slowly doling mechanics and ramping up complexity over the campaign.

And because it’s a board game instead of a video game, it involves Legacy components and behaviors. Half a dozen sticker sheets, a bunch of envelopes with hidden contents, tearing up cards, removing tokens, and eating cardboard. That last one might just be me.

There are a lot of envelopes. Like, a huge number of them.

On the the whole, I found it a bit cumbersome. Not bad, just unwieldy. It also requires some additional components that aren’t included, notably a permanent marker of some sort. And maybe an x-acto knife to cut stickers in half for the parts of the game where you’re supposed to place them on creases on the board, and they don’t stay stuck.

I like the Legacy components. Now admittedly the game’s lookup book for events, the Book of Secrets, fell apart at the binding almost immediately. But I’ve had actual books do that to me, so I’m willing to ignore it.

Yes, I painted the minis. Yes, I was much more proud of them before I looked this closely at this high resolution picture. No, the Dwarf isn’t done yet even though I’ve already finished the campaign.

The legacy elements themselves are quite fun an interesting. There are a few that are a bit underwhelming, for example one that is effectively just madlibs. But there are some really fun ones around upgrades, events, and expanding the board. They’re quite enjoyable, and very compelling to interact with and chase after.

Keep that bit in mind as well.

The Actual Critique

So, we’re now like eight paragraphs deep about game mechanics. In a moment, we’re going to discuss the game a s a whole. But first one last distraction.

Imagine a world where chess pieces are edible, and quite tasty. It’s not important why. What’s important is that if you choose to play chess, you’re going to be tempted to eat at least a few of those delicious, delicious pieces. So on your turn, you can play the actual game, Chess, or pull one of your own pieces off the board and have it as a snack.

This is a game design problem. Actively consuming your resources to do something that opposes the theoretically primary goal changes things. And if you play with an opponent who agrees that eating is more fun than playing, you might spend part of the game just taking turns munching on pawns instead of going for check. It’s a very different experience.

This is of course, a metaphor for the primary “problem” I have with Clank Legacy.

Stickers > Victory Points

It’s more fun to run around doing quests and unlocking legacy events than it is to to get victory points. Putting out stickers, reading things from a big secret book, and unlocking new cards and quests is really fun! It’s the whole point of Legacy games.

This means that in many of the games I played, the game stalled out. It wasn’t that we weren’t having fun… But we definitely weren’t optimizing for “winning.” We were optimizing for doing as much legacy “stuff” as possible. We would actively tell our opponent what our plans for the next turn were, and what cards needed to stay out. Often, we would give thoughts or advice on the opponent’s plan to try to help them have a better turn.

Clank Legacy is, in theory, a competitive game. But it wasn’t very fun for me to play it like one. Trying to “win” felt like it came at the expense of trying to actually have a good time.

The main issue here, is that when this happens, the game turns into a version of the Cold War, instead of a race. Because the advancement of threat and danger is dependent on the market row, and players buying from the market row, there’s no outside force pressuring the players to run home.

In addition, if one player wants to accelerate the pace of the game, they have buy cards from the market row. And if those cards aren’t good, they’re actively making their deck worse.

Overall

I liked Clank Legacy. I’d play more of my copy, because despite finishing the campaign, there are still interaction points, quests, and other special things we haven’t completed. And it also might be fun to actually go and play a round competitively! I’m not sure. I haven’t played it like that yet.

But if someone asked me for a fresh campaign, I feel like I’ve seen enough already that I wouldn’t be interested in starting from scratch, or replaying through some of the initial games with very simplified mechanics.

Spoiler Warning

You’ve been warned. From here on out, we’re getting into spoilers. You can still stop reading this sentence. Or you can stop at this one. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So you know that whole design problem I mentioned up above? The one where the game can be stalled out with no issues, because the buy row remains stagnant?

One mechanic I haven’t mentioned is the patron. Patrons modify setup and few other game mechanics, generally in a small and (quite frankly) often negligible way.

Except for the last Patron in the campaign, effectively the final boss fight. Instead, it’s the only Patron in the game that actively clears cards out of the row every turn. In addition to that, if it reaches a certain (very badly defined and poorly worded) threshold/trigger, it clears EVERY card out of the row.

It’s the only mechanic that does continually clears cards out of the market row in the whole campaign. And then, because this is a legacy game, you destroy that Patron, never to use it again. So the designers are clearly aware that they could induce the extra time pressure, and prevent the cold war stalling. But they actively choose to do it only once, for a single game.

Pikmin 4

Overall I like Pikmin 4. I have issues with how its mechanics play into the game’s overall theme and aesthetic, and I have skeletons worth of bones to pick with the game’s difficultly curve, but I liked it. I would recommend it. If you want a game that doesn’t quite play like anything else, grab this.

Pikmin is one of Nintendo’s strangest franchises. An apocryphal tale states the series’ designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was inspired to create the game after watching ants while he was gardening.

Here’s Pikmin 4 in one sentence: “Pikmin is a game about strategically managing ants. Except the ants are mobile semi-sentient plants and everything wants to eat them.”

As a summary, it hits a lot of high points. Pikmin is a strategy game. Your units are adorably small, and the Pikmin, while not stupid, have the same amount of self preservation skills as an ant. They also exist in a world where they are the very bottom of the food chain.

Story-wise, Pikmin 4 is the lightest in the series. The main game modes have unlimited days to work with, even though the time pressure is still present. The story does what it needs in order to serve the mechanics.

Mechanics

Gameplay in Pikmin 4 takes place across zones. Each zone is a single large map that can be revisited. Each visit is one day, lasting about 16 minutes.

Unlike other RTS games, the player only has direct control of two units. These are Oatachi and a custom player character. Oatachi is an upgradable space dog, and the Rescue Team member is a small alien in a spacesuit.

Across these zones, the goal is to explore and retrieve treasure and castaways, and delve into dungeons. There are other game modes. I’ll cover them later.

There are two pillars to Pikmin’s gameplay: real time combat, and strategic management and planning. The real time combat is simple to explain. The player character and Oatachi can command a force of Pikmin to follow them, and instruct them to interact with objects or attack enemies by tossing Pikmin directly onto those enemies.

The indirectly controlled units, the Pikmin, come in several different flavors. As this is the fourth game in the series, there are now seven types. Using the right one for the right task is often necessary. For example, don’t throw the yellow Pikmin (electricproof) into the fire.

Pikmin will attack enemies that they’re tossed onto. Most enemies will eventually shake Pikmin off, flinging them to the ground. Both Oatachi and the custom PC can whistle to call fallen back Pikmin to the main group. While Oatachi the PC control mostly the same, they do have some of their own strengths and weaknesses.

These are the micro mechanics of Pikmin, small interactions dependent on mechanical skill. But they’re fairly subservient to Pikmin’s macro mechanics, a term the game even has it’s own word for: Dandori.

Pikmin’s macro strategy revolves around a really interesting push/pull tension. The player has a limited number of Pikmin, and can only control their own character and Oatachi directly. Ultimately this turns Pikmin into a sort of resource allocation/routing game, where the real question becomes “What is the minimum number of Pikmin I can allocate to any single task, and still complete that task in a desirable manner?”

Combined, this is what makes up Pikmin’s mechanics: the high level ability to plan and route individual enemies and encounters, and the quick twitch ability to deal with enemies effectively (and respond when things don’t go according to plan).

Game Modes

Pikmin 4 has multiple game modes. They all use pretty much the same controls, but I do want to cover them quickly.

Overworld Expedition: As mentioned above. Adventure around a large map with a 16 minute timer looking for treasure and enemies.

Dungeons: Can be entered from the Overworld, bringing Pikmin with you. With no timer, dungeons made up of a series of floors, with various challenges, often with a themed gimmick (ice, conveyer belts, etc), and a boss fight at the end. You can’t refill Pikmin during a dungeon.

Dandori Challenges: Also entered from the Overworld, these are effectively puzzle rooms. You’re given a set amount of starting Pikmin, a goal, and a time limit. Beating them requires getting a certain amount of points, or completing the goal within the time limit.

Dandori Battles: The player faces off against an equivalent NPC to try to gather more stuff than they do over a given period of time.

Night Explorations: The easiest way to describe these might be “tower defense.” The player is dropped into a night time version of a day time area, and has to defend an object called a Lumiknoll until time runs out, or all enemies in the map are defeated.

They differ in two key ways from day time, in that enemies will periodically aggro and actively attack the Lumiknoll in waves, and that the only Pikmin available are Glow Pikmin. Glow Pikmin are immune to all elemental damage, and also warp back. The end result is a fairly different experience than normal gameplay.

Shipwreck Tale: Closest to something like a New Game+, this mode has the player trying to complete a separate set of objectives on the same maps, but with only 15 days. It’s much harder than the base game.

End Result: Pikmin has a lot of pretty different content.

Bugs, Minor Issues, and Bones to Pick

Pikmin 4 isn’t perfect. One of my biggest issues with the game is that it has pretty terrible load times, taking forever to transaction between zones and dungeons. This is mostly not an issue, except for when you find yourself jumping in and out of a given dungeon floor to farm a specific type of Pikmin.

There were a few graphical issues, but far more annoying were some of the bugs related to the game’s task system. There’s very clearly a hidden system that manages the player’s actions around throwing Pikmin at certain interactable objects. These can include ropes to be unspooled, or sticks be dug up and used as a shortcut. Sometimes it just breaks.

Here’s an example: I would throw Pikmin on a rope, but they would fall off the ledge near it. The game considered them to be still performing the rope “task” but there was no way for them to get back up. So when I threw additional Pikmin, the hidden system managing the task wouldn’t let them interact with the rope, because as far as the game was concerned, I already had the max Pikmin that could be assigned, even though some couldn’t actually reach it.

This is intended to be an anti-frustration feature, as it actually is mostly visible when the game stops you from tossing more Pikmin then required to carry an object. But it was still annoying.

My biggest bone though, has much more to do with tone than mechanics.

Pikmin: Ants or Locusts?

Pikmin has a weird tone. It’s a tone that I generally enjoy, one where you lead small plant creatures against monsters fifty times their size, something captured quite well by the Pikmin 2 box art:

There are a few things underlying this tone, but one of the biggest ones is an unspoken statement that Pikmin are underdogs, and they are the bottom of the food chain. They are small, individually quite weak, and live in a giant world of terrible things.

So here’s the problem: Pikmin 4 doesn’t respawn enemies in the overworld once they’re defeated. It’s a reasonable design choice to allow anyone to progress through the game, and it means that obstacles don’t have to be dealt with more than once.

But it also means that after a certain point in the game, every map ends up feeling completely empty and wiped out, stripped clean of wildlife by the Pikmin. And it’s kind of a weird feeling, more like you’re commanding a group of loathsome locusts, instead of adorable ants.

I get why they did this, but it does lend the game a really weird tone.

Difficulty Curve

One of the strangest things about Pikmin 4 is the difficulty curve. I would say that approximately 80% of the game is incredibly easy, to the point of being a non-challenge. Then there’s the other 20%.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are two pictures.

These are my total stats for the game as to Pikmin lost/grown. I lost a total of 336 Pikmin, not including rewinds and redos.

And these are my stats for Cavern for a King, the final dungeon of the game. Total losses, with rewinds, for a single dungeon are 61 Pikmin.

21% of my total losses in the entire game came from this single dungeon and that’s including the game’s system for save scumming (rewinds).

Every dungeon in the game has a maximum of 5 floors (except for a single other dungeon with 6 floors), and usually 1-2 to boss fights .

Cavern for a King has 20 floors, 15 of which have bosses.

Up until this point in the game, I was actually going to write this article about how disappointingly easy Pikmin 4 was. But then Cavern of Kings was much harder than every other dungeon. The final night exploration missions required more save scumming than every day exploration combined. The final super secret challenges are incredibly difficult.

It’s a super weird thing because it’s not a bump in difficulty or a smooth escalation; it’s a massive jump. The term “Vibe Check” comes to mind, as it just feels like at some point, the developers pulled off the kiddie gloves with no build up in-between, and smacked me in the face.

Conclusion

I liked Pikmin 4. I recommend it. It’s supremely weird, and there really aren’t any other games like the Pikmin series. Pikmin 4 isn’t a perfect entry, but it’s very fun overall.

Even if it does have a difficultly sheer rock wall instead of difficulty curve.

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.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

Dorfromantik: The Board Game, as you might be able to tell from the title, is an adaptation of the video game Dorfromantik: Doesn’t Actually Have a Subtitle Because It Was Made First. Admittedly, capitalizing every letter in the latter half of that last sentence was a stupid bit, but it’s about the quality that this writeup is going to have, so I’m keeping it.

I’m not sure I have much useful to add about Dorfromantik: The Board Game (a name I’m going to shorten from here on out). Both versions of the game have won a billion awards, and a sold a ton of copies. Instead, I’m just going to look at a few parts of the game that raise interesting points, and then wrap up.

First though, let’s talk about the gameplay. Dorfromantik: I’m Going To Misspell This is a co-op and singleplayer board game. On a player’s turn, they do a single thing: they pick up one hexagonal tile and place it connected to other tiles. This is the only thing they will do on 98% of their turns.

Before you decide that all you need to do to win the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award is buy a hexagonal holepunch however, know that there is slightly more to the game than that. There are two types of tiles: task tiles, and generic tiles. If there are ever fewer than three task tiles on the board, the player must draw a task tile on their turn. Otherwise it must be a generic tile.

When you place a task tile, you also place a score token on top it. This is the number of items that need to be connected to score that tile.

This image blatantly stolen from Gem Klub on BGG. Hopefully they’re cool with it.

For example, in the above image, the river has a 6-task on it. This means that you need a total of 6 connected rivers to score the task tile, and it currently has 4 connected rivers. The wheat on the left side however, only needs 4 connected wheat fields, and currently only has 2.

I’m skipping over a lot of ways of earning points, but this is the core gameplay. Pick up tile, play tile. Rinse, repeat, and try to maximize score by maximizing the number of score tokens you can remove before you run out of other tiles (among other unmentioned strategies). This brings up the first point: it’s kind of odd to me that this is considered a co-op game.

Don’t get me wrong. That’s not a bad thing. But Dorfromantik: The Are You Tired Of This Joke Yet is inherently multiplayer in the same sense that Sudoku is inherently multiplayer. There’s no individual resource, score or value whatsoever.

The game says it’s for up to six players, but there’s no difference in mechanics between a 6 player game, and a 60 player game, outside of maybe inconvenience. Unlike something like Beacon Patrol, Dorfromantik doesn’t even try to pretend to be a distinctly multiplayer experience.

The other interesting thing about Dorfromantik is that it’s a “Campaign Game.” It’s apparently not a “Legacy Game” because you don’t destroy the pieces.

In reality, all that means is that you unlock extra things, but you don’t get to eat any delicious juicy cardboard. While in theory you could put everything back into the tiny boxes it came with and start a new campaign, you’re probably not going to. Or at least I’m not going to.

Editor’s Note: Dorfromantik has put some thought into facilitating multiple campaigns at the same time by providing a pad of “campaign sheets” where different groups can track their respective campaign progress, but it would still be a hassle to sort out the unlocked components every time.

Look, I don’t see myself playing a board game 10-15 times, and then wanting to do it again but with none of the upgrades I spent the last 15 games earning.

I usually end these writeups with either a joke, or tying everything together, but I don’t really have either of those today. Dorfromantik for me is the perfect example of the 7 star BGG rating. “Good – Usually Willing to Play.” I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it enough to evangelize it. It deals with multiplayer and campaign setup in a way I haven’t seen before, but not one that’s unique or interesting enough for me to gush about it.

Dorfromantik: It Is Pretty Okay.