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YF19pilot posted:Going off of this, I didn't see any must haves (though Dust being dirt cheap is tempting as hell). But, these games popped out for me. What's the general thought on these: Tide of Iron is a cross between Commands and Colours and playing with toy soldiers as a kid. If you buy it, slightly widen the holes on the squad bases or your figs will either not go in or not come out. Lords of Xidit is exquisitely bland. Eclipse is well worth $50 IMO, but you really need the first expansion to balance Plasma Missiles and they're not selling it. Romans Go Home is a 10-minute filler with a bit of push your luck. It's fun and worth $5 of anyone's money. Nations is an abortion. I wouldn't take it if it were offered free.
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Broken Loose posted:jesus christ codex is loving awful *bangs gavel* On a more serious note, I have thought about some points of contention that you could potentially bring up, including: - Degenerate strategies: the starter box quickly descends down into very degenerate strategies but this, I feel, is alleviated by playing with the standard 3 hero game and being able to mix and match heroes (with a small penalty). - Reaction limits; what I mean by this is that it is difficult to change what you are doing once you are locked in, and there is no meaningful way to scout out an opponent until you've see them play the cards in question. I think this is alleviated by the inclusion of the tech lab and still being able to change your tech choices. Also tech II is reached relatively quickly in games and that does tell you what you are likely to expect. - Money limits aren't really a limit in the end game. I agree with this but end-game choices are driven by cards and not by money, which feels to me like an intentional part of the design. Add-ons are actually critical in the game, because the guard tower helps stop early pressure and the stockpile is necessary to exert pressure in the end. - Tech III is overpowered: this is an intentional design in order to prevent matches from stalling. They aren't insta-win because as far as I'm aware, none of them have haste (although they have nasty arrive effects). - The game is basically "Damage Race: The Game". Drawing it's roots from Hearthstone, I think this is partially true but misses the inclusion of the patrol zone, which does shift the balance more favorably towards the defender. Also, the presence of the tech buildings does a lot more in terms of making attacks not an obvious choice as well (do you go for face, do you clear his units, do you attack the add-ons, do you attack the tech buildings and if so, which one?). - It's bullshit that you can get into situation where you have a bunch of cards you can't play because your hero died/your tech building got destroyed and then when you rebuild them, you have to discard your hand and can't build them until the reshuffle! It's usually possible to prevent the hero from dying/tech building from being exploded through good play (which sometimes requires you to play more cards than you would usually in order to ensure that you have enough bodies to block possible attacks). The only issue I have is flying units preventing you from playing anti-air/your own anti air units, but towers can help in those situations or direct damage spells from a hero (tech 0 spells are especially good for this). - The codex is impractical and gives you too much choice: I'm gonna outright disagree with this, purely on the fact that the game actually has a really smart way to throttle what you immediately need from the codex: at the start of the game you only need to worry about spells/tech I, then at tech II you will likely only have a single spec. I suggest for the first few games that you don't go 'I wanna do this combo' but instead 'I want to try this spec' and things tend to fall into line easier that way. - You need to know the entire enemy codex to play them properly. I don't think this is completely true but I would still argue this is part of the design. Much like BattleCON/Yomi (I know you hate Yomi, bare with me), matchup knowledge is important, but there are still variations within the matchups due to how the codex works/specs work. When I learnt Yomi I built my knowledge gradually, and I think the same can be true of Codex. Hopefully this will be another interesting disagreement like we had before with TtA and Yomi and, to my eternal shame, Panic Station.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:02
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If you don't know much about me, a warning: This might get a bit lengthy. I feel sick to my stomach. I used to defend David Sirlin. I claimed he was "an rear end in a top hat with good ideas" or something to that effect. I was wrong. Dear GOD I was wrong. The last 4 days have been one constant moment of clarity; you know, that bit where you're staring at yourself in the mirror at 7AM holding an empty bottle of Jack and telling yourself to get your life back together? It's like that except every bully and bit of bad behavior I've ever excused in my life. I instantly grew standards out of the soil of some rich white kid from Southern California's most earnest attempts to shake gullible internet morons for money. Holy gently caress. How did it get this bad? How did I let it get this bad? How did we let it get this bad? I remember my first excuse. "He's not wrong about some parts of gamer psychology." Yes, Newt Gingrich is very effective at being a corrupt shitbag. Does that excuse being a corrupt shitbag? What if there was some way to be a corrupt sweetheart, like how Robin Hood turns theft into an act of kindness? In this way, I viewed myself as Robin Hood and David Sirlin as Charles Ponzi. We're both designers. We both play fighters. We both play games to win. I'm one Patreon away from being him. I at least try to be original some portion of the time, however. "Derivative design isn't plagiarization," I would say. Eminent Domain wouldn't exist without Dominion. Final Attack! wouldn't exist without Space Alert. Keyflower wouldn't exist without Caylus. Yomi took paper-rock-scissors and added characters, isn't that enough? Isn't it a bit harsh to say that Puzzle Strike is Dominion but with $4 Silver? For the purpose of this entire thing, I'm going to try my best not to focus on David Sirlin's repeated, unapologetic theft of assets and intellectual property. I spent 13 years doing graphic design professionally, and there are very few things I hate more than thieves seling stolen art as their own. If I meet him in real life, I would not put it past myself to reflexively punch him in the face and say, "Matthan Heiselt and every artist alive send their regards." I'm not going to focus on Codex's literal use of keywords and proper nouns stolen from Magic: The Gathering, Starcraft, Warcraft, and so on. That said, there are no original ideas anywhere in Codex. The titular component, the Codex, is a lovely version of the Spellbook from Mage Wars. lovely version, as in somebody hastily combined the Spellbook with Dominion's deckbuilding. It tries to be clever with the tease of "real" deckbuilding-- turn cards into workers, just like trashing Estates! There is nothing else, though. No buys, no engines, no manipulation. Just add cards to your deck and remove cards from your deck, and both of these things are mandatory down to the timing and volume of iterations. A player chooses what to trash, but the fundamental choice of Chapel-- whether or not to run a thin deck-- does not exist. The vast majority of the rest of the game is covered via a player mat/tableau with both an overwhelming amount of specific layout needs and not enough room to actually fit your cards and counters. I can't even call lovely Undersized Tableaus an original idea because 7 Wonders and Through the Ages did it first. Worse, the game tries to be representative of RTSes in only the most superficial and asinine ways that Sirlin has absolutely insulted people for doing to fighting games. Starcraft is 3 conflicting games in 1, 2 of which are terrible. The first is the game you intended to play, where you command an army to fight an enemy army on a battlefield. The second is one that bad players constantly play without realizing, which is Simcity except if you play it you lose accidentally and don't know why. The third is one nobody realizes they're stuck playing, which is the first game but you have a separate army of dudes whose only purpose is to fight a gigantic stationary mob of NPCs hanging out next to your base. That's what workers are. That's what you're making me do when you tell me to go chop wood. That's why Myth and Company of Heroes are lauded as True strategy games and everything else is a loving joke. Codex is a game about chopping wood, building buildings, sending dudes on patrol around your lovely little town, and poking other people's towns and dudes with your own dudes one at a time. The game doesn't even have the decency of letting you form squads. Derivative by itself isn't bad. I know what I like, after all, and if you make things easy by putting familiar things front and center then I'm more willing to cooperate with your social experiment of a game. Protoss, time travel, robots, psionic powers, remotely controlled drones, Guile from Street Fighter, all in a single ingame faction of an asymmetric competitive deckbuilder? You'd have to gently caress up really bad to get me to have anything less than the time of my life. It's super easy to gently caress up really bad when you don't care about the quality of your released product. I believed in the idea of playtesting. Put your game through the rigors, and if it doesn't break it'll be a masterpiece. Fantasystrike.net is an online gaming portal where gamers can compete ruthlessly in Sirlin-branded games, where usage statistics are tracked and noted for balance purposes, and where a large community discusses potential and exploits daily for their education and entertainment. So when Puzzle Strike got its first patch, I forgave it. Then it got its second. Then Yomi got patches. To say Codex was released incomplete with the hope of roping in early buyers and patching issues later is an insult to respectable companies run by legitimate businessmen like EA and Ubisoft. Codex has a 39-page FAQ, unformatted, as of November 2016. Mind you, my experiences actually playing the game have been in 4-player free-for-all mode. Before you tell me that I didn't experience the true canon version of the game, I played the game as described in the manual using the rules in the manual and I didn't make anything up. If you have the option of including a broken set of unplayable variant rules as an official way to play in the manual, you also have the option of not doing so. The moment you print out instructions that tell me to stomp on somebody's genitals everytime they use the letter E, you waive the right to criticize me as a player for improper execution of vowelence. 15 minutes into the game, 2 of us realize simultaneously that I can voluntarily determine the winner of a 4-player game at will using my army, 3 turns in. Promise of Payment causes you to instantly lose if not paid, and since a player losing ends it for everybody, this results in one of the most direct kingmaking beelines in gaming history. Then, of course, I asked a question about the card. "Does Promise of Payment discount summoning a Hero?" Let's break this down. Promise of Payment says, "The next card you play this turn costs $0. Pay its gold cost during your next upkeep or lose the game." Well, is a Hero a card? Heroes aren't units, after all. Since Prynn Pasternak becomes suddenly useless if her own cards can't affect her time runes, we have to assume that yes, Hero cards count as cards. Something's burning. Does summoning a Hero card count as playing it? Play as a term isn't defined anywhere-- but Play Area is, and summoning a Hero brings that Hero to your Play Area. But wait, David Sirlin said, "putting a card into play is not playing a card," on his own website. I smell toast. When somebody refuses to use a card in a game because it looks complicated, I instantly judge them. I don't act on it-- it's just an unconscious reaction. So when I refused to play Gilded Glaxx because I didn't understand the wording, I recognized that I must be some sort of invalid. So tell me, what's the difference between "this unit can only leave play by dying from combat damage" and "this unit can't be sacrificed and he can't leave play unless he dies from combat damage?" Rhetorical question. The answer is 3 messy keywords. In Dominion, a card that cannot be gained or bought simply says it cannot be gained, because gaining a card is a mechanical byproduct of buying a card. If a unit can't be removed from play except from being reduced to 0 HP, then there's no need to point out that it cannot also be killed voluntarily by the player. Keep in mind, Sacrifice as a thing is defined in the manual explicitly as a unit being destroyed. A keyword is only useful if you can replace it with the rules for it and still make perfect sense, just like real words. Try it yourself! Go to the Dominion Strategy Wiki and find me any card that breaks if you replace "Buy" (in a sentence) with "Gain during the Buy Phase by spending coins accumulated." So Gilded Glaxx is a card that can't be destroyed, neither can it be destroyed. My face feels numb. Why do some cards have keywords defined fully but other cards don't define those same keywords? Why do some cards differentiate between cards and forecasted cards when "cards" would achieve the same amount of clarity? Does waiving a tech req(uirement) on a card enable you to play cards from a different specialty? I can't feel my arm. Why do some cards define only a portion of their own keywords? Why are keywords bolded only sometimes? Why are words that aren't keywords occasionally bolded? Holy poo poo, I'm actually having a stroke. This game reads like a first draft by a first-time designer. Even the flavor text changes between random lines, random lines in quotations, actual quotes with speaker citation, actual quotes with anonymous speaker citation, any of the previous but in a random font size, or nothing at all. This amateur hour design isn't just limited to the words on the cards, mind. The strategic goal of a player in a game is to prevent the opponent from executing their strategy as much as possible before you execute yours. I'm used to things like infinite combos in fighters, control in card games, disruption in strategy games, manipulation in social games, and so on. Remember, though, that when you design a game, anytime you allow a game state that removes options from the player, you need to exercise caution to prevent this from absolutely crippling an opponent. If Possession allowed you to trash your opponent's deck, why would you do anything else? That stated, I'm a very sweet person in real life. If you've heard my commentary, this should come as no suprise-- I'm cheery, patient, and very good at conversation. It is unheard of for me to physically, publicly outburst negative over a board game. At one point tonight, in the middle of Coolstuff, I physically threw my cards onto the table and yelled, "gently caress this piece of poo poo game!" This requires context. An opponent killed my Hero, who was maximum level, using a means I did not expect (or know about using information gathered from playing the game naturally), especially considering I was not an optimal target at the time. To cast an Ultimate spell, you need a Hero in play who is max level and who did not reach max level this turn. To cast a spell at all, you need a living Hero in play. Consider my surprise when I discovered that not only did I get screwed out of being able to do anything on my turn, but also that there was no Eminent Domain-inspired ability to manually carry over cards between turns. You can lose Tech Buildings, which means you are not allowed to play cards of that Tech level. You are not allowed to build more than 1 Tech Building per turn. If you trashed your low-tech cards and then lose your buildings, you can potentially get screwed out of up to 3 consecutive turns of play. It takes less work for an opponent to send you back to the stone age than it would for them to just kill you (15 HP vs 20 HP, respectively). Basically, a great deal of the game rides on multiple different card types that require you to have other cards in play to allow them to be useful. If you draw the wrong hand after losing a skirmish, gently caress you. If your card economy relies on the draw power of an Ultimate spell and your opponent has removal, gently caress you. Remember that bit in Dominion where DXV made Copper cost $1 so it was impossible to come back from specific economy destruction scenarios? You don't? Oh, right, because Dominion is a good game, as opposed to Codex, which is loving terrible. Keep in mind that even if this ability were balanced competitively, it's not balanced, mechanically. Losing entire turns to RNG is a death sentence, albeit one with a delayed timer. It's only good for providing immense amounts of negative psychological feedback in exchange for an equally immense amount of design laziness. Any piece of poo poo can put "you lose a turn" into a game intentionally, and it's even easier to do it unintentionally (just look at any game that uses dice-based resolution). I had a couple paragraphs here, now deleted, where I talked about the loss of innocence and how I can no longer pretend to be blind to Sirlin's awful behavior, design habits, and business practices. He steals other people's art and ideas, shuffles the furniture around, and tries to sell it as a hip new thing. He doesn't care if there's a gas leak in the house he's selling, nor does he care if somebody points out that he doesn't have the right to sell the house in the first place (furniture be damned). He doesn't even have the decency to execute it well, which is the ultimate crime. If the game wasn't a 2-hour slog through broken rules, stolen assets, half-assed executions of ideas conceived by REAL game designers, and intolerable smugness, there'd be literally nothing remaining to praise. Codex is long, bad, poorly written, poorly balanced, and unoriginal. I regret having played it. I could have spent that time holding my cat and watching Upright Citizens Brigade for the 83rd time.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:08
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Broken Loose posted:Codex is long, bad, poorly written, poorly balanced, and unoriginal. I regret having played it. I could have spent that time holding my cat and watching Upright Citizens Brigade for the 83rd time. It feels like you are expecting a level of quality/playtesting out of a single developer (and his indy games company) that you would also expect from Wizards of the Coast. I'm sure Codex is a little rough around the edges, but that's to be expected of a new card game that's so ambitious. It's a drat sight better balanced (and the rules better explained) than the first set of Magic cards. It's also really not fair to criticize Sirlin for using game mechanics from other game. Mashing up two existing concepts is 99% of human creatitivity, and you do this yourself! If he steals some art ok fine crucify him, but game mechanics are fair game to steal.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:36
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I love you Broken Loose.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:40
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Yeah, I can't think of any well-balanced deckbuilder designed mainly by a single person. They literally do not exist. And if they did, they'd probably cost thousands of dollars for a starter set. I mean, if it costs hundreds of dollars to rip off everyone else while adding nothing new, surely it must cost orders of magnitude more when you also do things like "playtest" and "actually pay artists"?
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Nov 17, 2016 13:44
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Welcome back, BL.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:49
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"It's bad because it's only designed by one person" doesn't actually invalidate BL's screed, imo.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:50
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Broken Loose posted:amazing Codex rant poo poo man, I just lurk this thread 95% of the time and I've missed you posting.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:52
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silvergoose posted:"It's bad because it's only designed by one person" doesn't actually invalidate BL's screed, imo. This, a thousand times this.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:53
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silvergoose posted:"It's bad because it's only designed by one person" doesn't actually invalidate BL's screed, imo.  Yeah, I guess your right. If Rosenburg can balance all of 100 things going on in Feast for Odin by himself, than Sirlin doesn't really have any excuses.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:55
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Jabor posted:Yeah, I can't think of any well-balanced deckbuilder designed mainly by a single person. They literally do not exist. Are you being sarcastic? I hope you are. Tone just doesn't come through on the internet.
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Nov 17, 2016 13:55
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Broken Loose posted:When somebody refuses to use a card in a game because it looks complicated, I instantly judge them. I don't act on it-- it's just an unconscious reaction. So when I refused to play Gilded Glaxx because I didn't understand the wording, I recognized that I must be some sort of invalid. So tell me, what's the difference between "this unit can only leave play by dying from combat damage" and "this unit can't be sacrificed and he can't leave play unless he dies from combat damage?" Rhetorical question. The answer is 3 messy keywords. In Dominion, a card that cannot be gained or bought simply says it cannot be gained, because gaining a card is a mechanical byproduct of buying a card. If a unit can't be removed from play except from being reduced to 0 HP, then there's no need to point out that it cannot also be killed voluntarily by the player. Keep in mind, Sacrifice as a thing is defined in the manual explicitly as a unit being destroyed. A keyword is only useful if you can replace it with the rules for it and still make perfect sense, just like real words. Try it yourself! Go to the Dominion Strategy Wiki and find me any card that breaks if you replace "Buy" (in a sentence) with "Gain during the Buy Phase by spending coins accumulated." So Gilded Glaxx is a card that can't be destroyed, neither can it be destroyed. My face feels numb. You might realize this, but I'm 99% sure the reason why Gilded Glaxx has that wording is so that you can't sacrifice it to pay costs (which would allow you to sacrifice it without it leaving play? Who knows!) Minor nitpick aside, this captures some of the reasons why I decided against picking this up while it was on kickstarter really well.
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Nov 17, 2016 15:06
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I want to watch Broken Loose Play X-Wing just to watch him melt down over how badly some of the cards are worded and how vague the interactions can be.
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Nov 17, 2016 15:13
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Jabor posted:Yeah, I can't think of any well-balanced deckbuilder designed mainly by a single person. They literally do not exist. I just need another $5k and I can purchase the Dominion base set.
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Nov 17, 2016 15:19
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That rant did not disappoint. Welcome back to the thread BL.enigmahfc posted:I want to watch Broken Loose Play X-Wing just to watch him melt down over how badly some of the cards are worded and how vague the interactions can be. Can we Kickstart this? I want to see this too.
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Nov 17, 2016 15:22
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Yall who jumped on Feast for Odin were smart. Amazon list price right now is $180 
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Nov 17, 2016 15:45
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deadly_pudding posted:Yall who jumped on Feast for Odin were smart. Amazon list price right now is $180 http://store.401games.ca/catalog/7720884/a-feast-for-odin Better Hurry, only 9 copies left.
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Nov 17, 2016 15:46
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Broken Loose posted:That said, there are no original ideas anywhere in Codex. The titular component, the Codex, is a lovely version of the Spellbook from Mage Wars. lovely version, as in somebody hastily combined the Spellbook with Dominion's deckbuilding. It tries to be clever with the tease of "real" deckbuilding-- turn cards into workers, just like trashing Estates! There is nothing else, though. No buys, no engines, no manipulation. Just add cards to your deck and remove cards from your deck, and both of these things are mandatory down to the timing and volume of iterations. A player chooses what to trash, but the fundamental choice of Chapel-- whether or not to run a thin deck-- does not exist. The vast majority of the rest of the game is covered via a player mat/tableau with both an overwhelming amount of specific layout needs and not enough room to actually fit your cards and counters. I can't even call lovely Undersized Tableaus an original idea because 7 Wonders and Through the Ages did it first. quote:Worse, the game tries to be representative of RTSes in only the most superficial and asinine ways that Sirlin has absolutely insulted people for doing to fighting games. Starcraft is 3 conflicting games in 1, 2 of which are terrible. The first is the game you intended to play, where you command an army to fight an enemy army on a battlefield. The second is one that bad players constantly play without realizing, which is Simcity except if you play it you lose accidentally and don't know why. The third is one nobody realizes they're stuck playing, which is the first game but you have a separate army of dudes whose only purpose is to fight a gigantic stationary mob of NPCs hanging out next to your base. That's what workers are. That's what you're making me do when you tell me to go chop wood. That's why Myth and Company of Heroes are lauded as True strategy games and everything else is a loving joke. Codex is a game about chopping wood, building buildings, sending dudes on patrol around your lovely little town, and poking other people's towns and dudes with your own dudes one at a time. The game doesn't even have the decency of letting you form squads. Codex is obviously a derivation from Starcraft and, especially, warcraft, and people do think of those games when you say RTS: I think it's unfortunate to say the least since Myth is a good game and I appreciate resource-less games. If there is one thing that I will note in Codex, however, is that some of the paper-rock-scissors interactions aren't really that representative within the game. I think, however, that it is disingenuous to expect Codex to stick to a standard that you, yourself have created, and then to bash it for not confirming to your expect standard. quote:Derivative by itself isn't bad. I know what I like, after all, and if you make things easy by putting familiar things front and center then I'm more willing to cooperate with your social experiment of a game. Protoss, time travel, robots, psionic powers, remotely controlled drones, Guile from Street Fighter, all in a single ingame faction of an asymmetric competitive deckbuilder? You'd have to gently caress up really bad to get me to have anything less than the time of my life. I think patches for board games are crappy and I don't know enough about the Puzzle Strike patches to talk about them, but the Yomi patch was largely necessary to make some matchups better, especially in light of the expansion characters which weren't even present when the first version of the game was available. To note, the major change was to allow normals to draw a card: this required changes to the cards of the original 10 characters in order to accommodate this. An relatively inexpensive update pack was produced by Sirlin to achieve this. Sirlin has said that there won't be any changes to Codex or additions: the game, as is, is a full package. It might be because I play X-Wing and I'm used to poo poo like this, but there have been radical rule changes in X-Wing and looking through the FAQ now is a pain. Sirlin at least has provided a card database with all the latest rulings, so actually looking up rulings is fairly easy. Also, most of the rulings are clarifications rather than outright changes to the game, and it explains stuff that wouldn't fit on the card anyway. quote:Mind you, my experiences actually playing the game have been in 4-player free-for-all mode. Before you tell me that I didn't experience the true canon version of the game, I played the game as described in the manual using the rules in the manual and I didn't make anything up. If you have the option of including a broken set of unplayable variant rules as an official way to play in the manual, you also have the option of not doing so. The moment you print out instructions that tell me to stomp on somebody's genitals everytime they use the letter E, you waive the right to criticize me as a player for improper execution of vowelence. Tash-Kalar is dooooogshit when played 4P. 3P deatchmatch is also pretty bad. This doesn't make the game of 2P high-form any worse. Unfortunately this is more of an issue with the tabletop industry, where selling 2P games if loving hard and you want to be able to allow for more players because the game will sell better. quote:"Does Promise of Payment discount summoning a Hero?" Let's break this down. Promise of Payment says, "The next card you play this turn costs $0. Pay its gold cost during your next upkeep or lose the game." Well, is a Hero a card? Heroes aren't units, after all. Since Prynn Pasternak becomes suddenly useless if her own cards can't affect her time runes, we have to assume that yes, Hero cards count as cards. Something's burning. Does summoning a Hero card count as playing it? Play as a term isn't defined anywhere-- but Play Area is, and summoning a Hero brings that Hero to your Play Area. But wait, David Sirlin said, "putting a card into play is not playing a card," on his own website. I smell toast. I can't really comment on the keyword design or rule text because I haven't really gone enough into depth with it, but most of the cards I saw in the core didn't seem to have an issue with them. quote:The strategic goal of a player in a game is to prevent the opponent from executing their strategy as much as possible before you execute yours. I'm used to things like infinite combos in fighters, control in card games, disruption in strategy games, manipulation in social games, and so on. Remember, though, that when you design a game, anytime you allow a game state that removes options from the player, you need to exercise caution to prevent this from absolutely crippling an opponent. If Possession allowed you to trash your opponent's deck, why would you do anything else? Tekopo fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Nov 17, 2016 |
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Nov 17, 2016 15:46
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PS I'm glad your back and you forced me to think about Codex critically.
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Nov 17, 2016 15:48
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Nice write up. I've never heard of Codex outside of this thread and no one I knows plays it either, but just in case I will now be on my guard.
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Nov 17, 2016 15:55
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Anniversary posted:You might realize this, but I'm 99% sure the reason why Gilded Glaxx has that wording is so that you can't sacrifice it to pay costs (which would allow you to sacrifice it without it leaving play? Who knows!)
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Nov 17, 2016 15:56
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Some Numbers posted:That rant did not disappoint. Welcome back to the thread BL. "Break Broken Loose" 
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Nov 17, 2016 15:56
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deadly_pudding posted:Yall who jumped on Feast for Odin were smart. Amazon list price right now is $180 There are still copies left at Cardhaus: http://www.cardhaus.com/products/search?query=a+feast+for+odin&x=0&y=0
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Nov 17, 2016 16:08
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In the dark future days of the Trumpenreich, when all the world is scorched to cinders and the last humans make a hardscrabble living in the radioactive dust, there will be a man on what used to be a streetcorner in Florida, standing atop an upturned apple cart and ranting about the hubris of the past, the ills and sins of the legendary figures Sirlin and Cruddace. Most who pass him do not know of the words to which he refers, but nonetheless his fervour and implacibility fill them with something akin to hope, and a dream of days where folk can care about more than where their next mouthful of food will come from.
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Nov 17, 2016 16:10
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Also the 39 pages of rulings is pretty misleading when the document in question was just an extract of the rulings found within the Sirlin website (I think they are stored as an excel document there), when it has sections where it shows the title of the card but doesn't actually have any clarifications like this: "Savior Monk Scorch Scribe Second Chances" And when it is clear that the rulings aren't so much as rule rewrites, but clarifications and stuff like this: "River Montoya You can only reduce the gold cost of something to 0, not lower than that." "Young Lightning Dragon Thrice-per-turn means three times per turn."
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Nov 17, 2016 16:15
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MikeCrotch posted:In the dark future days of the Trumpenreich, when all the world is scorched to cinders and the last humans make a hardscrabble living in the radioactive dust, there will be a man on what used to be a streetcorner in Florida, standing atop an upturned apple cart and ranting about the hubris of the past, the ills and sins of the legendary figures Sirlin and Cruddace. Most who pass him do not know of the words to which he refers, but nonetheless his fervour and implacibility fill them with something akin to hope, and a dream of days where folk can care about more than where their next mouthful of food will come from. This was in my mind when I read that whole Broken Loose rant (I enjoyed it though)
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Nov 17, 2016 16:18
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I missed you, BL. Making the board game thread great again.
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Nov 17, 2016 16:31
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Now we just need his opinion on the other 100 games that came out in his absence. Let's start with A Feast for Odin.
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Nov 17, 2016 17:13
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enigmahfc posted:I want to watch Broken Loose Play X-Wing just to watch him melt down over how badly some of the cards are worded and how vague the interactions can be. But that's FFG in a nutshell though?
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Nov 17, 2016 17:15
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the panacea posted:Now we just need his opinion on the other 100 games that came out in his absence. Let's start with A Feast for Odin. A Feast for Odin is just going to be BL hyperventilating about his inability to roll high for raids or low for hunting. Good overview on Codex, though. I know to avoid it as a multiplayer game now, even though mostly I agree with Tekopo.
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Nov 17, 2016 17:24
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This conversation brought me back to the only time i ever played 4P High-form Tash-Kalar and was ripping my hairs out in terms of how loving long it took to get back to my turn and how random it felt compared to the beautiful symmetry of 2P high-form.
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Nov 17, 2016 17:32
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Tekopo posted:"River Montoya Has there ever been a game where this hasn't been the case?
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Nov 17, 2016 17:41
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Rumda posted:Has there ever been a game where this hasn't been the case?
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Nov 17, 2016 17:57
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Rumda posted:Has there ever been a game where this hasn't been the case? Maybe, maybe not, but whenever I teach any game where it could theoretically happen someone at the table asks me to clarify if you can. I played Inis last night and loved it, though I think everyone else at the table hated it (I didn't win, before you ask). For some reason two of the four players were incapable of understanding how clashes worked, they kept thinking that they could retreat rather than taking damage, and this slowed the game down so much that it ended up taking three hours post-rules explanation. I hope I get to play more of it though.
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Nov 17, 2016 17:58
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I vaguely recall a game where you had to track costs reduced below zero until the instant the cost was paid, at which point negative costs were increased to zero. So, if something costs 5, gets reduced by 10, and increased by 2, if you couldn't reduce costs below zero it would end up costing 2, but under these rules it would still be zero.
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Nov 17, 2016 18:05
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Broken Loose posted:Codex is long, bad, poorly written, poorly balanced, and unoriginal. I regret having played it. I could have spent that time holding my cat and watching Upright Citizens Brigade for the 83rd time. I love Codex. It's been one of my favorite games of the year. 1v1 is fun, quick, and feels balanced in the 10 or so games I've played. With that said, this is a good post. You make some good points, even if I don't agree with all of them. We're all glad you're back, Broken Loose.
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Nov 17, 2016 18:47
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In other tearing-down-tekopo posts, Phil Eklund is such a hard sell to my group that we have consistently been calling him Phil "loving" Eklund and I don't know if that guy will see a redemption.
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Nov 17, 2016 18:55
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quote:So Gilded Glaxx is a card that can't be destroyed, neither can it be destroyed. This probably makes sense if and only if you play Magic; in Magic, an Indestructible creature can still be Sacrificed by its controller, so he's clarifying that this creature can't be. I'm sure lots of Codex rules make more sense when phrased as "here's what's different from Magic". My thoughts on Sirlin: 1. He doesn't playtest nearly enough, or if he does then he must be surrounded with bad-at-games sycophants. There's no other explanation for Pandante, which is in my top 5 worst games/game experiences ever. It wasn't some delicate balance masterpiece that he just couldn't perfect without feedback, it was excruciating, tedious, unbalanced horse crap whose flaws (many of which were patched later) were immediately apparent. I think most of his other games have similar problems, but are just enough more complicated that they get more benefit of the doubt out of the gate, like "well, it sure seems like X is broken/always-optimal, but it must not be..." 2. He has a ridiculous hard-on for simultaneous action selection, and doesn't understand where it fits into reasonable game design. I remember reading a thread where Sirlin just couldn't grasp how simultaneous action selection introduces luck into game design. Someone pointed out how all his "it's all strategy" arguments could be applied just as well to rock paper scissors - and he just had a huge meltdown about errpp, no, that's different... cannot compute. Once you look at game theory and understand what an equilibrium/probability strategy for simultaneous choice looks like, you can't come back to seeing it some other way. Yes sometimes it's an appropriate choice - just like politics and naked randomness are sometimes good choices - but just like those things, simultaneous/hidden selection shouldn't be your staple. 3. He's too shameless in his plagiarization. Take elements from other games - sure. Fine. Everyone does that. But other people do it with decorum - not just in a sense of humility or politeness, but in a sense of "making a reasonably good faith effort to distinguish your thing from its source". It'd be different if he was recontextualizing ideas or something; but no - often the elements he takes are exactly the same, and fulfill just the same role in his game as they did in their source. He's not transforming other work, he's Kenny G noodling on top of it, only instead of a saxophone he's farting out more hidden action selection. And obviously, obviously, screw him for stealing art. The only thing distinguishing Sirlin from 8000 people on Kickstarter who want to make a knock-off card game that fixes Magic (honestly, not that hard if you don't feel compulsion to bring new things to the table) is that he somehow has got an audience. Some sort of nerdy Trump thing going on, where his aggressive, spiteful confidence appealed to a bunch of bad-but-try-hard gamers, and now he's just coasting on that. jmzero fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Nov 17, 2016 |
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Nov 17, 2016 19:01
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 14:39 |
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Some Numbers posted:
It should be a high tier reward on BL's next kickstarter. Make him play X-wing with you, or have him write a positive review of Talisman or other bad game of your choice, etc.
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Nov 17, 2016 19:12
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