Tobold's Blog
Thursday, March 31, 2022
 
Steamforged Games - A redemption story

Once upon a time, back in 2016, a small and relatively unknown board game company called Steamforged Games launched a Kickstarter project for Dark Souls - The Board Game. It got a huge number of backers, over 31k, and made £3.7 million. The "estimated delivery" date was for April 2017. What actually shipped in 2017, a few months late, was just wave 1 with the core game box, a fact that hadn't been explained in the Kickstarter campaign. Wave 2 and 3, with the expansions and stretch goals were delivered much later, with worldwide wave 3 fulfillment being finally complete in January 2020. As you can imagine, a lot of people were not very happy with this. So if you search Reddit for lists of board game companies to stay away from, Steamforged Games is usually mentioned.

In November 2020, Steamforged Games launched another Kickstarter for a board game, this time with their own original IP, called Bardsung. They still got 10k backers and £1 million, but an original IP attracts less people than a licensed game, and Dark Souls shipping fiasco had hurt the brand of the company. Estimated delivery this time was May 2022. Nobody believed that. By this time, there had been a lot of other companies with a lot of other Kickstarter campaigns, and everybody knew that actual delivery was usually at least 6 months late, if you were lucky. In addition to that, there was a pandemic going on, and the first inklings of manufacturing and shipping problems in the board game industry. Manufacturing a big box board game with tons of miniatures for £75 and shipping it to customers within 18 months? Impossible! Can't be done! Especially not by a company with a bad track record on shipping.

Except ... sometimes a company that gets a lot of flak for having failed in something is then really, really motivated to do better. Plus, nothing teaches you the pitfalls of a process better than having gone through a failed process once.

Today, March 31 2022, my copy of Bardsung, including the stretch goals box "Bardsung Fables" arrived. Two months early. None of my other Kickstarter projects ever arrived early. Especially not the board game ones. And I only paid a total of £101 ($132) for the late pledge including the Forteller narration and shipping. For 10 kg of game and tons of miniatures, in today's market this is brilliant deal. Miniaturemarket.com has the game for $170 plus shipping, and that is just for preorder, and without the Fables box.

I am happy, and seriously impressed. Kudos to Steamforged Games for having learned how to deliver a Kickstarter board game on time. They went from a company that had shipping problems to a company that is first in class in shipping Kickstarter board games. That is an impressive feat!

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- posted by Tobold @ 1:12 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
 
Diversity in board games

Unfortunately the culture wars constantly spill over into hobbies that I am interested in. The latest attack on board games is an article called Why is board gaming so white and male?. It suggests that male, white people have been successfully excluding female and non-white people from playing board games by not representing them sufficiently on the cover art. Quote: "The cover art images on the boxes of the top-ranked 200 BoardGameGeek ranked games with games such as Gloomhaven (2017), ... skewed heavily toward white-presenting males.". I would invite you to see for yourself, by looking at the cover art of Gloomhaven:

Do you find this image "skewed heavily toward white-presenting males"? The only humans I see on this cover art are definitively female, and as far as I can make out not very white. There is a lot of racial diversity on this image, albeit fantasy races. While the publication has a tag line of "Academic rigour, journalistic flair", the one thing actively insulting the reader's intelligence is a survey held with 320 respondents described as "a set of respondents who were mainly from North America (73.8 per cent). The majority of survey respondents identified as women at 60.4 per cent, including trans women which represented 4.9 per cent. More than a quarter of my survey respondents identified as men at 25.3 per cent and 9.4 per cent identified as non-binary.". If you take a small enough sample for a survey and make it sufficiently different from the actual population, you can prove pretty much anything with survey results.

The sad thing is that there is a perfectly good answer to the question why board gaming is very white. And unsurprisingly it has nothing to do with cover art. Instead it has a lot to do with socio-economics and Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

If you look up Gloomhaven on Amazon.com, you will find that it costs $140. When we are talking about board gaming as a hobby, we aren't talking about $20 retail games like Monopoly or Scrabble. We are talking about Kickstarter campaigns that currently often are at least $100 for the most basic pledge, and can easily get to $500 for an all-in pledge including taxes and shipping. A typical board gamer is somebody who A) has hundreds of dollars in disposable income, and B) has sufficient disposable time he can spend playing games, which according to Maslow would definitively fall into the upper part of the pyramid of needs, somewhere between cognitive needs and self-actualization.

In an ideal world, these requirements would be met by many people, and regardless of skin color. In the real world, especially in the real USA, white Americans are significantly more likely to have the sort of income, time, and needs for playing these expensive board games. That isn't exclusionary, it is statistical. YouTube has some great channels of black content creators playing board games, but statistically they are underrepresented, because blacks are statistically underrepresented in the upper income percentiles. Putting a black person on the cover art of an expensive board game is not going to change that.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Sunday, March 27, 2022
 
Kickstarter adventure board games of March 2022

While I am European, I do not care very much about the type of board game that is generally described as Euro game, which is often very abstract. I much prefer the American style of games, in which there is a sense of adventure and story. I don't just want to play for victory points at the end. (Side note: We played a 4-player game of Clank! Legacy Friday night, where I basically sabotaged my victory points in order to trigger a big story event, while another player ignored the events and maximized his points. I guess we had different "win conditions" in our heads.)

So this month on Kickstarter, I was very much interested in three different games that are more my style: Malhya, Lands of Legends, then Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders, and finally Fire For Light. And it is interesting to see how different not only these games, but also their Kickstarter campaigns are.

Malhya has 3,426 backers as I write this, 4 days before the end. If you just look at the base pledge, this is the most expensive game of the three, because it is the only one that doesn't have a cheaper pledge with standees instead of miniatures. But then it is also the most complex game of the three, and the one with the biggest amount of stuff you get. Malhya is produced by a French company, so from the start they are planning different language versions. In order to facilitate that, they are using a lot of icons instead of text on their game material. That does turn some people off, because it looks confusing until you learned how everything works. But the upside is that it makes the game prettier to look at. The theme is relatively generic fantasy, but with an original fantasy world. There are a lot of new ideas in this game, and the makers are doing an excellent job of explaining those ideas on their YouTube channel, in two languages. While it is the first game of this group of developers, they teamed up with a company that already has done several successful Kickstarter campaigns, and knows what it is doing. The biggest risk with Malhya is that it is very complex, and will need a lot of energy to learn and bring it to the table. The biggest strength is that the complexity makes the game rather deep; think lifestyle game, like Gloomhaven, with lots of hours of gameplay.

Tidal Blades 2 is a much easier proposition. Base pledge with standees (and I love standees) is much cheaper at $89. The campaign still has 12 days to go as I write this, and has already 4,326 backers. It will be the most backed and most funded of the three games on my list. If you buy the deluxe version with the miniatures, you are looking at $159, and there is an even more expensive pledge that includes a RPG book. Which brings me to my point of criticism: Tidal Blades 1, Tidal Blades 2, and Tidal Blades RPG are three very, very different things that share lore, but not much else. This is not a sequel in the sense of "oh, I liked Tidal Blades 1, I should back Tidal Blades 2". Tidal Blades 1 was a Euro style worker placement game, Tidal Blades 2 is a campaign adventure game. Also it is the first campaign adventure game from the company, so we don't really have a track record that would suggest whether the game is good. The risks/strengths of Tidal Blades 2 somehow perfectly complement Malhya: The strength is that it looks a lot simpler and easier to bring to the table, while the risk is that the gameplay might not be deep enough to last you through to the end of the campaign.

Fire For Light is puzzling. I saw it played on YouTube, and liked many aspects of the gameplay. But the base pledge at $99 is more expensive than Tidal Blades 2, and the all-in pledge with miniatures is a hefty $269. The problem is that the Kickstarter campaign doesn't make it obvious enough what you get for all that money. Or as they say "The components here show a sampling of the core box", instead of showing everything, which is probably the worst idea ever for a Kickstarter project. As a result, they only got 207 backers, 23% funded, and a strong likelihood that this won't fund at all, even if there are still 15 days to go. I think where this went wrong is that it is designed to be a legacy game (a fact which isn't really explained all that well), and a lot of the components are in "secret packages", that the developers don't want to show because of, you know, spoilers. But because they show neither the total amount of components you'll get in the box, nor how the gameplay gets more challenging from chapter to chapter, this looks like a very light game for too much money. You see the first photo of the game on the Kickstarter page and think "this is it?". I think there is more to this game, but they might need to cancel this Kickstarter and rethink their marketing to make that more clear to the audience.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:06 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Saturday, March 26, 2022
 
Triangle Strategy - An unexpected opening

As reported in my previous post on this game, I found the start of Triangle Strategy rather linear and too heavy on dialogue. But as I have experience with previous Square Enix games, I assumed that this was some sort of tutorial part (and yes, 10 hours of tutorial isn't unusual for Square Enix games), and at some point it would open up like most Final Fantasy games. Well, I am at the point where the game is opening up, but not in the way I expected it to.

When in chapter 3 I first encountered the scales of conviction, I dismissed them as a gimmick. Yeah, you can choose to either travel to Aesfrost or Hyzante, but in chapter 4 you will be back on exactly the same linear path, regardless of your choice. But it turns out that in chapter 7 the scales of conviction become a far more serious choice, because the choice changes the next 4 sub-chapters of the game, and significantly change the tone of the story. And as far as I can see, in chapter 9 the choices become even more impactful. And because all battles in Triangle Strategy are staged, you can by making different choices have at least one very different second playthrough.

What doesn't change, however, is the basic structure of each chapter. Unless you skip the dialogue or grind mental mock battles beyond the point where that is useful, you will spend more than half of the game in dialogue and story, and less than half in gameplay activities like character management and tactical battles. That certainly isn't for everybody.

[Spoiler Warning!] Games with a lot of story frequently have some sort of philosophical message they want to convey. In Triangle Strategy that message appears to be not only that choices matter, but also that choosing the less moral thing leads to easier outcomes, while taking the high road is significantly more difficult, but is the only way to get to the best ending. I find that message a bit naive. And is somewhat sabotages the advantage of the game of you being able to replay it through a very different story; yes, you can, but there is only one "morally correct" path, and if you deliberately make different choices in your next replay, you will be forced to behave a lot less like a hero. I am very tempted to restart the game, and take the less moral, easier path first: It appears as if that is what you are supposed to be doing, so that the game ends up "enlightening" you, and you take the "golden" path in the second playthrough.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:52 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, March 24, 2022
 
Define review bombing

Gamerant is ranting about Tunic being review bombed. Tunic is basically a cute version of Elden Ring, with a cute little fox fighting brutally difficult boss battles while the game gives very little useful information to the player. Critics love it, as they love Elden Ring. Actual players are far more mixed in their scores. A good number of them saw a cute game that promised to play like one of the older Zelda games and then got really frustrated when the game turned out to far too hard, with no way to lower the difficulty. I don't call that "review bombing".

Yes, review bombing does happen for various reasons. A game can get a lot of negative user scores for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the game, often political. Or tribal, with users being upset that a game is either exclusive to a certain platform, or not exclusive. Cyberpunk 2077 is being review bombed (presumably by Russians) after the Polish CD Projekt Red pulled the game from sales in Russia and Belarus over the invasion of neighboring Ukraine. There are some borderline cases, like a game getting bad user scores for issues like monetization. But in general I would define review bombing as not actually being about the game being good or bad.

Tunic and Elden Ring having lower user scores than critic scores is a very different phenomenon. Elden Ring is so successful, I recently even saw a TV ad for it on a major French TV channel during prime time. And nowhere in the ads does it inform you that if you are not very good at action games, you won't have much fun. Tunic is, if anything, even more deceptive, because it looks so cute. It looks like a game for children, but it is likely to make first the child and then daddy cry. As one of my commenters remarked, if you buy a book or a movie that is too challenging for you, at least you can read or watch it to the end if you so desire. Brutally hard video games simply stop you from getting past certain points if they are too challenging for you. If you buy Tunic or Elden Ring, play it for a few hours and then rage quit, you are completely justified to rate the game low on Metacritic or Steam. Yes, it is a problem of the game "not being for you", but in absence of a warning label that is the game's fault. The infinite health cheat mode that I used to play Elden Ring should be included in the game as a "story mode difficulty".

- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
 
Triangle Strategy Flow

I am about 10 hours into Triangle Strategy on my Switch. And while I like the game overall, I would say that it has some serious problems with the flow of the game. First of all, I spent less than half of those 10 hours doing tactical combat; the rest of the game was taken up by exposition: Cutscenes and "exploration" phases, which also mostly consist of dialogue. I just hope the ratio of combat to exposition gets better, because right now there is far too much exposition and not enough time where I as a player can actually do something interesting.

The second problem is that it seems as if there are no random or procedural battles at all. There are the battles in the linear story, and they come with a level recommendation. Right now the level recommendation is 9, while my characters are between level 7 and 8. So to get up to the recommended level, I can only do "mental mock battles" in the encampment. But there are only 5 mock battles to choose from, and only the last gives full xp. So I need to grind that mock battle several times until everybody is up to level 9. Some variety or random battles would have been a lot more fun.

Finally, while there are "exploration phases", which consist of talking to every NPC on the screen and collecting a few blinking spots of treasure, there is no real exploration in this game. You either have exactly 1 next story point to go for the next cutscene, exploration, or battle. Or you have that 1 story point plus an optional cutscene with "what happens at another location" for background info. At very few points in the story, only once up to now, there was a scene where my retinue voted where to go, and I could try to persuade them to vote the way I wanted. So, 10 hours played, chapter VI, and only 1 minor story branch (visit either A or B, but both will then be followed by C).

I do like the tactical combat system. But the rest of the game is rather "meh" to me. I just hope the game picks up in later chapters.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:13 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Monday, March 21, 2022
 
Humble Bundle for Ukraine

If you would like to make a charitable donation for Ukraine *and* score a bundle of games at the same time, Humble Bundle is currently offering a Stand with Ukraine Bundle. 100% of the proceeds, which currently are over $9 million, are going to humanitarian relief efforts. As usual, the bundle is a mixed bag, but there are some good games in there. It certainly looks better than the 998 games itch.io has in their Ukraine bundle.

The bad news is that my Steam library of unplayed shame is growing.

- posted by Tobold @ 3:35 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Saturday, March 19, 2022
 
Making fun games

I just bought Triangle Strategy on the Switch, a recent and generally well-received turn-based strategy game that looks like Octopath Traveler and Final Fantasy Tactics made love and had a child. Besides good reviews (for a turn-based game, they don't usually get extremely high scores), I also bought the game because I have a certain trust in the Square Enix brand. They made a lot of games I like, and seem as if they know how to make a fun game. Or maybe I am wrong. Because Square Enix, together with PlatinumGames, makers of successful games like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, also just released Babylon's Fall. And everybody from critics to players just agrees that this is one of the worst games published this year, boring and confusing.

We can assume that the developers didn't plan to make a boring game. And they do have a track record of making good games. So even when not making a direct sequel of a successful game, one could have thought that these people would have known what makes a game fun to play. Only that of course the result shows that they do not. Which begs the question: Does anyone? Is there some science behind making a good game? Or is it all just developers stumbling in the dark and getting lucky sometimes, and sometimes not?

I feel that the answer to this has a big impact on what kind of games we are getting. If PlatinumGames feels that they know how to make successful games, we could get all sorts of new and innovative games from them. If they feel that only their sequels are successful and they have no clue about how to make a new kind of game, then we will get endless rehashes of the same stuff.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:03 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Friday, March 18, 2022
 
Play2Earn

I made an invention: The Blogchain. It will move my blog onto the blockchain, with every blog entry becoming an NFT. Investors will be able to invest into these valuable NFT properties, while readers will be able to earn cryptocurrency by posting comments. If this sounds like utter bullshit to you, it is because that is what it is. But it is also the business model behind Play2Earn games. For example GameFi promises to serve game developers, game investors, and game players by creating a "liquid market for all game items".

Basically it is the gamification of Bitcoin. Bitcoin mining uses a lot of electricity, which makes is bad for the planet, but consumes very little manpower. It is completely possible to use similar technology in which the token/NFT/cryptocurrency is created by people playing games. Many of us will have experience in having "grinded" some virtual currency or resource in some online game. And back in the days of MMORPGs, the trading between players of virtual resources versus real money was a big issue. What if the developers, instead of fighting real money trade (RMT), cash in on it? And get investors into the deal as well?

Play2Earn games like Axie Infinity already exist, but as the payouts aren't great the players are mostly in less rich countries, where $200 per month is significant. And the whole operation smells a bit like a Ponzi scheme, because the money is coming from people first having to buy in-game property before they can play in Axie Infinity. If *everybody* in the game is just there to make money, the economics of the whole thing just don't work. What made RMT viable in MMORPGs was the interaction between players who had more money than time with other players who had more time than money. If rich people can have a maid, nanny, or gardener, why shouldn't they have somebody farming gold in their favorite online game for them? Ah, capitalism at it's finest! /sarcasm

What is new, compared to MMORPGs, is the idea that blockchain technology could allow virtual items in games to become "non fungible", and enable safe trading of these items outside the game. However, there is still the issue of quantity. A big part of the original value proposition of Bitcoin was that there was only a finite supply of it, a maximum of 21 million. Since then it has occurred to some people that even if the supply of any single type of cryptocurrency is finite, the overall supply of cryptocurrency is infinite, because new cryptocurrencies are constantly created. Hey, can I interest you in some ToboldCoin? It turns out that the value of a NFT of Pepe the Frog's butt heavily depends on how many of the 100 NFTs of the same image are on the market. Right now for example gold in World of Warcraft is infinite, but even if you reprogrammed it to be finite, there can be an infinite supply of in-game resources by having an infinite number of different games.

Another problem is that games aren't permanent. No, World of Warcraft isn't dead. But it certainly doesn't have the same player numbers anymore than it had at its peak in 2008. If the source of revenue is players spending real money on virtual items, the change of "hotness" of a game over time certainly affects that "investment". And yes, some online games have shut down over the years, which makes the value of virtual goods in that game zero.

So, overall, I would remain very careful when handling any cryptocurrency, NFT, or other token "investment". They all belong to the Greater Fool Theory of investment. That makes them extremely volatile, and likely to become worthless in a sudden downturn. Linking them to games doesn't fundamentally change that.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:22 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Thursday, March 17, 2022
 
Malhya, Lands of Legends

I had shown much restraint with Kickstarter / Gamefound board games this year, and not backed a single one. I was tempted sometimes, but in the end I often considered the games not exactly my style, the project not solid enough, or too expensive. But this week I backed Malhya, Lands of Legends on Kickstarter. And I would like to explain why I think this one stands out:

First of all, Malhya is a narrative adventure game, which is the type of board game I like the most. So there is both a story with choose your own adventure style choices, and there are board game elements like tactical combat and resource management. In this case there are both overworld exploration adventures and dungeon crawling, perfect! This is exactly the sort of game I tend to back on Kickstarter, because to get all those elements into a game, you need quite a lot of components, and that has its price. In this case €140, which given that the game has miniatures is actually still quite reasonable. Yeah, I would have liked a €100 version with standees, but unfortunately that was not an option. At least the game isn't going overboard with giant sized "miniatures" that only drive the price up and aren't actually all that useful for playing.

The reason I trust the Malhya project is that I know a bit of its history. The game has been in development since 2019. I was able to have a look at the game went I went to the Spiel in Essen in 2021. And at the time the game already looked very well polished. This isn't "let's get funded first and develop the game later" sort of project. It is fully developing the game first, and then using crowdfunding for the production cost. This is a company that has already delivered several other Kickstarter projects, so it is a relatively solid bet. And because this isn't their first rodeo, they already took care of some important details of shipping, so that there aren't any nasty surprises like VAT or other sales taxes being added later. Luckily for me the company is situated in nearby France, so shipping is just around €20 for me. Shipping cost are listed in a very transparent manner. And yeah, it sucks if you want to have a board game shipped to Alaska, Hawaii, New Zealand, or Guadeloupe, but at least you have been warned, and this isn't exactly the game developers fault.

Because the game is already well developed, you can find videos on YouTube with board game channels having been sent a prototype review copy. Seeing the game played or shown is probably a better way to decide whether this is something you'd want to back. However, I don't think this is the greatest Kickstarter deal ever. You will probably be able to buy the game at retail for €150 or €165 (I've seen two different estimates of MSRP). But the print run is probably going to be small (the Kickstarter has 2,000 backers up to now), and I wouldn't bet on retail availability world wide for a niche game like this. So I am happy to give them my money early, in support of the developers, and have peace of mind.

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- posted by Tobold @ 1:21 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Monday, March 14, 2022
 
Availability of games over time

Over 30 years ago, around the end of the 80's, I was playing SSI's Gold Box games, PC games like Pool of Radiance with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. I just read that end of this month these games will get a remastered re-release on Steam. I don't think I will try those, even remastered a 30-year old PC game would be rough. But in general, the availability of PC games over decades is rather good. Platforms like GoG have lots of old games, and the oldest game on Steam, Dragon's Lair, is from 1983.

That contrasts sharply with my recent experience when trying to get some board games from a few years ago. I had picked up Dragonfire, a game from 2017, and then found out that it was nearly impossible to still find expansions for that. Then I wanted to try Runebound from 2015, and could only get a French edition, and none of the expansions. Apparently there is a lucrative business on eBay, where people sell board games from a few years ago at vastly inflated prices. Availability of board games over time simply isn't great.

That explains to some degree the FOMO (fear of missing out), which is very prevalent in the discussion of crowdfunded board games on Kickstarter and Gamefound. Not only are there frequently "Kickstarter exclusive" parts to the game. But also not all Kickstarter games make it into retail, and if they do, they often will be in stock only for a limited time. You can always get Settlers of Catan, but a game that wasn't a smash hit might easily disappear and not be available 5 years later at all.

Before Amazon, books used to have the same problem. Shelf-space in book shops is limited, so they stock the latest bestsellers, and the great classics, but not some random book from 5 years ago. Then Amazon came with the Long Tail business model, showing that aggregate demand for those older books was still good enough to make selling them viable, given near infinite shelf-space in mega warehouses. Too bad Amazon never got heavily into board games, when I buy a board game on Amazon it is more often than not from a third party seller.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:14 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Sunday, March 13, 2022
 
Board game channels on YouTube

I was watching a video of Quackalope basically giving a video reply to a thread on BoardGameGeek in which some people criticized him for his board game channel on YouTube, claiming it was all paid advertisement disguised as review. While you could just dismiss the criticism as a mix of jealousy and the fact that people tend to be not very nice to each other on the internet, the subject made me think about board game channels on YouTube. From the overall time I spend on YouTube, probably half of it is currently spent on board game channels. So how do they compare to other stuff on YouTube?

The first thing to know is that board games are a niche hobby compared to let's say video games. IGN, a big channel for video game reviews, has 16.5 million subscribers, and their recent Elden Ring review got 3.4 million views. The biggest board game channels are The Dice Tower and Watch It Played, both with just under 300,000 subscribers. BoardGameGeek as a YouTube channel has 135,000 subscribers. While Quackalope is one of the bigger "individual" board game channels, he just has 37,700 subscribers. So ripping him for being overly commercial and a sellout to companies making Kickstarter board game projects is a bit unrealistic. Elden Ring apparently sold 10 million copies on the PC alone, a successful board game on Kickstarter is selling 10,000. If somebody really want to become rich by selling himself on YouTube, he should definitively choose a different subject matter other than board games.

Having said that, the small size of the market and the community does somewhat result in board game reviews being less than perfect. Board game YouTube content creators often sound like kids talking about their new toys. While the board game market is much smaller than the video game market, the price for an individual game is often higher. Especially with Kickstarter projects that can have all-in pledges of $500 or more. As consumer advice, a YouTube content creator excitedly playing with the prototype game the company with the Kickstarter project sent him is often less than ideal. You basically need to ignore what the influencer is saying, and try to gleam as much as possible from what he is showing of the game, especially if he is playing it on camera, to see for yourself whether that gameplay appeals to you.

Normally good video game reviews are more analytical. Many video game review sites have some sort of scoring system, like how are the graphics, how is the story, and so on. Only for Elden Ring have many reviewers recently thrown out the analytical approach and just gushed about it. For board games, most reviews are gushing like that. It is very rare that a board game reviewer on YouTube does *not* recommend buying the game he is reviewing. The best you can hope for is the reviewer admitting that not every board game is a good fit for everybody, so if you like very thematic beer & pretzel games, you will probably not like that highly abstract complex Euro game.

Beyond some sort of buy recommendation, or the Dice Tower's "seal of approval", at least board game reviewers on YouTube don't use review scores. Which is just as well, the review scores on BoardGameGeek are all over the place and actually not all that helpful. And speaking of helpful, where the YouTube board game channels shine outside game reviews is other helpful information. Watch It Played got so big by Rodney Smith patiently explaining the rules of every board game out there to his audience. If you start playing a new board game, watching a video on how it is played before reading the rulebook is usually very helpful. And both for learning a game and for making a buy decision, watching somebody else play the game is great.

Overall I think that the practice of game companies sending out prototypes of their games to YouTube reviewers, or even sometimes paying for playthrough videos, is not a bad one. Many years ago I said on this blog that you could buy my opinion, but it would cost you $100,000. Most people can't really be bought as cheap as a free game or some minor cash. If a YouTuber is overly enthusiastic about a prototype, it is usually because he is honestly really happy about getting to play it early. And some of the comments calling him a paid shill then are often more about other players jealous of not having that sort of early access. Kickstarters for board games have a high rate of delivery, but more often than not they are late. It is somewhat annoying to see somebody happily playing a game, knowing that even if you fund it, you won't be playing it before 2 years or so.

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- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Saturday, March 12, 2022
 
Rise of Cultures

For about a year, I have been playing Shop Titans on Steam and iPad. Steam says I have been playing for 3,742 hours, which gives a very wrong impression. In reality Shop Titans just runs in the background on my PC while I do other stuff, and from time to time I switch to that window, click a few buttons, and go back to whatever else I was doing. But anyway, I am level 71 now, and progress has slowed to a crawl. My heroes are all maxed out, I have all the recipes you can get without buying them with real money, and the buildings of my guild are all at a level where the next level seems unobtainable. Time to stop playing this.

This would seem like not much of a problem. Aren't there nearly a million of games on the App Store that I could play instead? Yeah, but the overwhelming majority of those games are utter shit. It is really, really hard to find a game that isn't just a facade designed to get your money, while offering only trivial or ripped-off gameplay. And compared to Steam, the curation and review system on the App Store is basically non-existing. Even a Google search for good mobile games brings up mostly drivel from sites that have been paid to promote the more successful exploitative games. I have yet to find a good way to identify decent games on the app store, other than stumbling onto them by pure chance.

I do like for example city building games. But the large majority of those on the App Store are PvP games. Simple business model: You can play for free, in which case you are the content, the target for other players to attack and plunder; or you can spend a fortune to be the one who plunders other. Because players are busy with each other, the developers don't need to actually provide much content. A complete scam.

So I was very happy to discover Rise of Cultures. Despite a name that seems assembled from the names of those PvP city building games, Rise of Cultures is actually a pure PvE game. It has actual gameplay and content. There is a city-building part, where you need to arrange your buildings in a way that the building that provide "happiness" are strategically placed to boost the production of your other buildings. Then there is a PvE battle part, where you conquer regions, which ends up giving you more expansions for you city. You can also group up with up to 20 players into an alliance, and there is a PvE treasure hunt event every week to do together. And while there are certainly ways to spend money to progress faster, you can perfectly play for free without other players just plundering your city.

I don't know how long Rise of Cultures will be entertaining. You advance your city from one "historic" age to the next, starting in the bronze age. I made some progress, joined a nice guild, and am currently quite happy with the game, after having played for about 2 weeks. I assume that at one point in time the content will run out, but that is okay.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:30 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Friday, March 11, 2022
 
Making discussion illegal

Florida lawmakers approved a law that would make it illegal to discuss white privilege in the workplace. It is the next step in the escalating war of mutual cancel culture, where both sides are trying to make it impossible for the arguments of the other side to even be heard. America is slowly transforming from a country with an absolute right to free speech, via an imaginary "right to not hear things that offend you", to a country where discussing opinions at the very least gets you fired, if not jailed.

Humanity already tried burning people for heresy. It didn't really work out that well. And that was in a mono-cultural environment, where the crime was saying something that offended the large majority of people and their beliefs. Today the beliefs of half of the population are offensive to the beliefs of the other half, and vice versa. The internet has contributed a lot to creating echo chambers that enforced existing beliefs instead of questioning them. And now this swaps back into real life. With both sides believing that they hold the absolute truth, and that holding and discussing a different opinion should be punishable.

No pun intended, but racial relations are not an issue that is black and white. There is some truth to the idea that racial discrimination can happen simply because of stereotypes. But there is also some truth to the idea that it isn't exactly fair to discriminate against a white person in order to "fix" discrimination against black people elsewhere / previously. Two wrongs don't make a right. Being aware of racial discrimination is a good thing; but some of the ideas to fight discrimination are widely impractical (I'd love to hear somebody's detailed explanation of how "slave reparations" are supposed to work in detail) or actually more likely to enforce people being treated differently because of their race. Segregation is still wrong if you give the black side the nicer lunch counter. 

Any difficult subject is best treated with open minded discussion. Suppressing that discussion and punishing people for talking about their beliefs is counter-productive. In this complex world, there rarely is any absolute truth. The best we can hope for is an acceptance of different viewpoints by all.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments
Thursday, March 10, 2022
 
3D Printing Update

Joe asked for an update on my 3D printing activities. 3D printing for me still is a solution in search of a problem. Before COVID, I used to play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons with friends gathered around a table. And because we like the tactical combat aspects of D&D, we needed miniatures. That was a perfect application for a 3D printer: Small print runs, it doesn't matter if the quality isn't ultra-high, and as long as you don't count the cost of the printer itself, printing a miniature is much cheaper than buying one. Services like Hero Forge allow you to create models for roleplaying heroes, and some talented people have created STL files for every creature in the monster manual.

Then the pandemic struck, and we moved our D&D games online, to Roll20. Suddenly I didn't need 3D miniatures anymore, I needed just token images. As a result I quickly ran out of ideas on what to actually use my 3D printers for. I occasionally print some small household item I need, but the applications are limited. I also sometimes print something for my board game hobby, like for example a token tray. But you can buy small bead storage boxes made out of polypropylene from Amazon, for about a dollar each, and they are much better than anything I can print.

So these days I am using my 3D printers rarely. Unfortunately, if you don't use your printer for some time, you can run into problems later: Some of the plastic filaments used tend to absorb humidity slowly from the air, and degrade. Or I need to oil some gears, calibrate the build plate, etc. Lots of work for very little printing. I would really recommend anybody who thinks of buying a 3D printer to first think what sustained application he has for it. Otherwise it is just a toy.


- posted by Tobold @ 7:22 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Tuesday, March 08, 2022
 
Overlapping hobbies

If you visit your friendly local games store, you will probably find a lot of different products there: Board games, role-playing games, trading card games, wargames, miniatures, and a lot of other stuff. The reason why this is all in the same store is that there is some overlap between different hobbies, and it isn't unreasonable to think that somebody who is interested in one of them might also have some interest in some of the other stuff. There are some historical relations, like Dungeons & Dragons starting life as a squad-based fantasy wargame. Brands like Warhammer or Dungeons & Dragons frequently end up on products from different genres, from board games to videogames. And it isn't unusual for people to start out with one type of hobby, and over time migrate to something else. I was heavily into Magic the Gathering in the 90's, but am far more interested in board games these days.

The problem arises when an assumption is being made that if a customer likes A, he *must* also like B. A product is launched hoping to attract both the fans of hobby A and the fans of hobby B, when in fact the product is only really interesting to the intersecting set of people who like both A and B.

In particular there are a lot of Kickstarter board games that assume that because you like board games, you must be a fan of miniatures. That is simply not true. Yes, in any board game community you will find people who like miniatures, and who display with pride their painted board game miniatures. But there are also a lot of people like me, who don't really care about miniatures. Some companies have realized that and offer the same game either with cheap standees or with expensive miniatures. But other games only have the expensive miniature version.

If you don't paint miniatures, they are usually just grey. On a game board a set of color standees often looks better and is easier to distinguish one figure from another than unpainted miniatures. But miniatures are expensive. So even the core pledge of a miniature-heavy game like Kingdoms Forlorn is €139 / $152 without shipping (I don't believe their estimated shipping costs of just around €30, especially since they don't say how it varies with the size of your pledge), and the all-in pledge is €429 / $467. Yes, that all-in pledge is going to be an impressive big box full of plastic. But it certainly isn't going to be as much game as you could have bought if you had spent the $500 for a stack full of different games with cardboard standees or wooden meeples.

While I am certainly not poor, I do watch what I am spending. And so I have skipped a lot of games over the past year, from Descent to Kingdoms Forlorn, which simply seemed too expensive because of their miniatures. The prices and shipping costs of board games have gone up a lot over the course of the pandemic. This leads to some people being priced out of the hobby, or at least having to be far more selective in what they are backing. A lot of games would have done better if they had been on offer also as a cheaper version, without miniatures. Hobbies overlap, but the overlap is never 100%.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:50 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Sunday, March 06, 2022
 
Old Man Ring - Final Part

I just uninstalled Elden Ring. I had spent the last few days playing a new character, a confessor, because I thought that maybe a character with melee combat would be more fun. That was true, to a degree: There are parts of the game, like Ashes of War, that simply aren't usable by mages, because there aren't any ashes for staves. And the whole weapon/shield/armor collection and upgrading made a lot more sense with a melee character.

Then I decided it was time to finally leave Limgrave, and, still using the infinite hitpoints cheat, managed to kill Margit, the Fell Omen. But the story still made absolutely no sense to me, and other than following the glowing pointers at sites of grace, I still had no clue what to do next. So, with the pointers and help from YouTube, I set out to understand the story, by doing a sort of cheating speedrun from boss to boss. I got until Starscourge Radahn until I noticed something: Without external help I would never have discovered the rather laborious sequence of tasks needed to unlock that boss fight. And after having done it and killing Radahn, the whole thing still made no sense to me. And I still needed external help to find out where to go next.

At that point I realized that it was unlikely that even if I followed the story all the way to the end, there would be some sort of satisfying narrative emerging. So what is the interest of playing? Generally, for a RPG, I am interested in mastering the (turn-based) combat and progression system, and in following the story. With Elden Ring I thought I could skip the combat part and just do the exploration and story part. But after a grand total of 39 hours, the exploration had become boring and the story was still far too obscure. Time to stop and uninstall the game.

While I can see the attraction of Elden Ring, I still think that in many aspects it is a very flawed game. Not just technically, but also in game design, regarding exploration. Much has been said about Elden Ring being such a great open world game. But Elden Ring is only open world until you reach a location. Locations are very often rather linear, with sites of grace telling you that you are on the right path, until you reach the location boss. Very often there is just a single way to get from A to B within a location. Often you are forced on a linear path by the fact that you can't climb, that jumping is very limited, and that you can drop down only a certain distance without dying (which curiously is true even if you have god mode cheat on). Even in the open world I quite often had to take the long way round for a cliff or mountain. It wasn't the most fun exploration experience, not like Breath of the Wild. Not even as good as Assassin's Creed or Horizon games.

In the end, Elden Ring is the best Dark Souls games. And the number of people who can really enjoy a Dark Souls games is small. For the average gamer, I wouldn't recommend Elden Ring. And even with cheat mode, Elden Ring was an experience for me, but not a great one. I don't regret having tried it, but I reached the limit of my patience with the game. It simply doesn't have many of the features that I enjoy in a game. I would rather play something like Triangle Strategy. Or replay Breath of the Wild, if I wanted an open world game.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:56 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments
Saturday, March 05, 2022
 
Git Gud

I don't do numerical review scores on my blog, because I do believe that different games are the right choice for different people. Having said that, there are a lot of publications out there that do give review scores. And it would be in all of our interests if there was some sort of honesty to these review scores. If you have a PS5 and want an open world, action adventure RPG that came out this year, which one should you take? If you take a look at review scores, you might think that Elden Ring with a Metacritic score of 97 is a better choice than Horizon Forbidden West, with a score of 88. However, unless you are a fan of Dark Souls games, you are probably more likely to have fun with Forbidden West.

If you take 1,000 random gamers with a PS5 and let them play both Elden Ring and Forbidden West, a greater number will enjoy Forbidden West, and a smaller number will prefer Elden Ring. If you take 1,000 die-hard Dark Souls fans with a PS5 and let them play both Elden Ring and Forbidden West, now a majority will say they prefer Elden Ring. But that is due to pre-selection bias. And I don't think review scores should have this sort of pre-selection bias. Because the people who actually need a review score to decide which of these games they want are obviously not die-hard fans. The extremely high review score of Elden Ring is a trap, that will lead some people to buy the game who will not enjoy it very much.

The Dark Souls games have a very toxic fanbase whose response to any sort of criticism is that anybody who doesn't absolutely love these games needs to "git gud". They do not *want* Elden Ring to be accessible. Average gamers failing to have fun and to succeed at Elden Ring is considered a feature, not a flaw. This is indicative of people who derive some sort of self-worth from being "gud" at video games. Which is pretty sad, actually, because video games are way down the list of things that a reasonable person should strive to "git gud" at.

It is kind of disappointing how game journalists succumb to the pressure of trolls and aggressive fans, so that very few of them dare to honestly review Elden Ring. By any sort of system that actually looks at different parts of game, like graphics, performance, user interface, etc., there is no way that Elden Ring would score a perfect 100%. It is a good game, but it certainly has a number of serious flaws as well. It seems that game journalists were more afraid to be scorned by people shouting "git gud" at them than actually "gud" at reviewing games.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:13 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments
Friday, March 04, 2022
 
Hexplore It

Hexplore It is a series of board games about exploring hex-based fantasy realms. Basically a board game version of the hex crawl in roleplaying games like D&D, lighter and without the need for a DM. I bought volume I of Amazon, but then backed volume IV on Gamefound. And I just added a bunch of stuff to my pledge for volume I, because the developers made a very interesting addon that completely changes volume I: Klik's Madness is a 500+ pages hardcover book that adds a substantial campaign to a game that wasn't originally designed to be a campaign game. Interesting!

I must say that I love campaign games. The bare minimum campaign is something like Gloomhaven, where the campaign choices unlock scenarios. But I prefer bigger story books for campaign games, with more choices. So Hexplore It, which was up to now on my shelf of unplayed games, just went way up in interest for me by adding this campaign book. If this would be something that is interesting to you, you can follow that Gamefound link and find both volume I: Valley of the Dead King and the Klik's Madness campaign book in the addon section. The pledge manager is open for late pledges, even if you didn't participate in the original campaign, until the end of March, with everything supposedly shipping in June of this year. Looking forward to this!

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- posted by Tobold @ 6:09 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Wednesday, March 02, 2022
 
Old Man Ring - Part 4

While I will continue to play Elden Ring some more, I will stop blogging daily about it. Not sure if there will be a part 5 of this series at all, but it won't be tomorrow. In this last past I will talk about the elephant in the room, the reason why user reviews for Elden Ring are less positive than critics reviews: Technical game performance.

I followed about a dozen different pieces of advice to change various settings in Windows, with the display drivers, and inside the game. But Elden Ring is still stuttering on my Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070, which is not a bad graphics card. Actually it feels as if the problem doesn't have anything to do with the graphics card at all, rather the game in random intervals freezes for a second or two, and then plays the events of those 2 seconds in fast forward. As you can't really control your character that way, you probably die if that happens while you were in a boss fight, or running towards a cliff. I'd call it "lag", but then I am playing offline, so the term wouldn't be correct either. In any case, I am just one of many people who are having problem with the technical performance of Elden Ring, and in a game which is all about microsecond reaction time, stuttering is very bad.

There is probably going to be a patch that improves stuttering in the foreseeable future. However, while we are at it, it has to be said that Elden Ring simply is programmed rather badly. Once you use cheat modes and are less worried about battling monsters, you realize that you spend a lot of time battling the user interface, which is godawful. Just look at the very simple and fundamental operation of quitting the game: The number of operations and the time it takes to do this in Elden Ring is staggering. You can't just press ESC a couple of times and be out.

I have the impression that in a game this dark and gloomy, which is all about punishing the player, the players think that the lack of UI quality of life features is just part of the design philosophy. But me, coming at Elden Ring with a background of MMORPGs, not souls games, I notice how much worse Elden Ring is with regards to controls in comparison. Also, Elden Ring isn't very friendly to new players, because it refuses to explain how the game works. The tutorial is just covering some basics, and for example never explained to me how to sprint or sprint-jump. I constantly find items of which I have no idea what they do in the game. And finding out whether the new weapon you just found is better or worse than the weapon you have is very difficult if you haven't played the previous games, because there is a page full of rather meaningless stats and you don't know which ones are important.

Don't get me wrong, Elden Ring certainly has its good side, and some entertaining potential, even for me as a slow old man. But sorry, the current Metacritic score of 97 is just overhyped. For a game to have such a score, it would have to be technically excellent and user-friendly, which Elden Ring certainly isn't.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Tuesday, March 01, 2022
 
Old Man Ring - Part 3

In this part of my ongoing series on Elden Ring, I will talk about exploration. I love exploration. It was probably my favorite part of the MMORPGs that I played. So how does Elden Ring stack up?

Elden Ring fulfills two conditions of a good exploration game: It has a large world with not too many restrictions on where you can go, and there are lots of things to discover when exploring that large world. So, yes, I am having fun with exploration in Elden Ring. And if I understand correctly, previous Dark Souls games were much more linear, so open world exploration is really a big plus for Elden Ring for fans of the "souls" genre.

Having said that, I had originally read some reviews that compared Elden Ring with Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is probably the benchmark of open world exploration games. And sorry, Elden Ring doesn't come anywhere close, it isn't even playing in the same league. What made Breath of the Wild special was the fact that if you saw a landmark on the horizon, you a) could get there, and b) there would be something interesting there. Elden Ring fails on both counts of that. Elden Ring has neither climbing nor swimming, and limited jumping, which improves a bit if you are on a horse. But as a result, there are many, many spots on the map to which you simply can't go. Elden Ring sticks to the old school world design of having mountains and water that restrict where you can go, and thus lead the player along certain paths. It's okay, and there still are a lot of places you can explore, but it isn't Breath of the Wild.

Also, in Elden Ring, what you see is not necessarily what you get. I went to interesting looking structures in Elden Ring to find out there was no entrance, and nothing much to find there. I liberated a fortress that had a suspicious absence of interior rooms, several buildings of it simply had no entrance anywhere. I saw magnificent pillars spanning a sort of bridge between islands, only to find that there is no way to reach the top and cross that way. The world design in Elden Ring is great for looks, but it hasn't been designed to be reachable everywhere. You can't even get on the roof of most buildings, so it doesn't even match Assassin's Creed games.

In World of Warcraft, some of my more fun expeditions where taking a low level character to a high level spot for something, e.g. fishing. That usually involved dying several times, because the lower you are in WoW compared to the monsters, the higher their aggro radius becomes. In comparison, exploring higher level areas in Elden Ring is somewhat trivial: Aggro radius is tiny and doesn't get bigger with level difference, monsters are mostly slow to react to your presence, and with the horse you can get very early in the game you can basically get anywhere without much risk.

So, overall I enjoy exploration in Elden Ring, but I would grade it just okay, not great. If you are looking for a replacement for Breath of the Wild, you'll have to wait for Breath of the Wild 2, releasing later this year.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:18 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
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