Tag Archives: games

I Gave the Deck of Many Things Early… Two Years Later

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I run a DND game with some of the best people that I know. One of the things that I did was give the Deck of Many Things to one my players very early. We’re talking around level 6. She has pulled all but three cards. You would think that that would be a mistake but it has been great so far. At least by my estimates.

I want to tell you how some of the cards has played out and my thoughts on it.

Balance(Your mind suffers a wrenching alteration, causing your alignment to change. Lawful becomes chaotic, good becomes evil, and vice versa. If you are true neutral or unaligned, this card has no effect on you.)– The PC is a dark moody person. This turned them into a happy go lucky and joyful cheerleader type. She used her previously pulled wish card to get rid of this because she hated it so much. This only lasted like two sessions but the player made it really fun.

Skull(You summon an avatar of death-a ghostly humanoid skeleton clad in a tattered black robe and carrying a spectral scythe. It appears in a space of the DM’s choice within 10 feet of you and attacks you, warning all others that you must win the battle alone. The avatar fights until you die or it drops to 0 hit points, whereupon it disappears. If anyone tries to help you, the helper summons its own avatar of death. A creature slain by an avatar of death can’t be restored to life.)- She pulled this card in the middle of a town that they just arrived at. Everyone was horrified but then she one-shotted the devil that appeared. The kind of problem with this card is that the devil that’s summoned isn’t that hard.

Knight(You gain the service of a 4th-level fighter who appears in a space you choose within 30 feet of you. The fighter is of the same race as you and serves you loyally until death, believing the fates have drawn him or her to you. You control this character.)- This spawned a fighter to protect her that she named Bart. I decided that Bart was the same age as her Shadar-Kai character so several hundred years old. He had an existential crisis about being that old physically but not having a childhood. It has led to a lot of fun conversations about personhood and consent. He has also become a character of his own, whom I play. I try to balance him well, you don’t want him to do too much where you’re just playing with yourself but he’s good at making suggestions to keep them on track.

Rogue(A nonplayer character of the DM’s choice becomes hostile toward you. The identity of your new enemy isn’t known until the NPC or someone else reveals it. Nothing less than a wish spell or divine intervention can end the NPC’s hostility toward you.)- The player’s husband plays a circle of wildfire druid who has a little pet squirrel. Guess who turned against the player that pulled this card? I waited for him to cast a spell and had the squirrel attack her instead. Now the squirrel has to roll to resist the want to attack her instead of the target. This has led to so much humor though it’s still kind of new.

All in all, I don’t think that these things or any of the subsequent other pulls have broken the game. I think that it’s okay to give it to them early but you have to check the temperature of the room. I trust the people that I sit at the table with. That they want to have as good a time as I do.

Poker Replacement

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I made a joke over the weekend that when I come to power, I’m going to force people to go through every western and digitally replace every poker or blackjack scene with Magic the Gathering. It was supposed to be a funny joke about the juxtaposition of a nerdy game vs the toughness and manliness of the wild west. But then I thought that there must be other replacements for poker.

Board games were a definitive out. It’s hard enough to keep track of all of the pieces while you’re living in a house. Imagine trying to find the top hat for your Monopoly game while you’re on the dusty trail fighting outlaws and trying to maintain law.

Thus we must consider portability. It has to fit in the saddlebag and be able to be kept together easily enough. So, Dungeons and Dragons is straight out. All those clanking miniatures, books, maps, the thousands of dice and such. No way that a cowboy can herd cattle with that. This also ties into knowing how to play. Everyone knows how to play poker but what if you have someone that plays pathfinder instead of DND? What then?

Finally, we have to think about what could cause the most tension when playing it. How many people have died over particularly vexing hands of poker. We know that Bill Hickok was killed holding a hand of black aces and eights. So, that means that you need to have some tension. That leads me to figuring out what the ultimate replacer to poker would be for the cowboys and cowgirls.

Thats right, it’s Jenga. Portable? Yes, sir. Instead of carrying 52 cards, you’re carrying 54 little pieces of wood. It can easily be made again, what carpenter can’t make 54 tiny little rectangles? Plus, if you’re truly desperate, you can use them as fire starters. Tension?

“Son, you topple that tower, you’ll be eating a bullet.”

Boom. Both me proving my point with an onomatopoeia and what’s going to happen to the kid when he topples that tower. Then we got Jenga, where the rules are so simple. Remove block put on top. Done. Plus, you can’t cheat as well at Jenga as when you’re playing poker.

There, I think I’ve proven that card games should be replaced by Jenga in westerns. No one asked for this but there it is.

Paperboy 2: Temptation Awaits

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I played Paperboy 2 for the SNES when I was a kid. I was playing it again through totally legal means and thought about how excellently, this game tempts you with things to whip newspapers at.

Look at that, a baby and a suckling pig. If you hit that pig it goes running off and might kill you. That’s a death worth having by my estimations. You save the pig and he gets revenge on you. It’s actually good if you hit the baby because it stops flying down the street out of control. There are like half a dozen you have to avoid. Is there someone at the top of the street just whipping her sextuplets down the street.

Then you have this old folks having a precious moment. Just asking for you to hit them with a newspaper so that they kick their legs up. What’s one subscriber out of ten for that street when you get to do that? You can get them to sign up through word of mouth if you aren’t a shit to the other subscribers.

Then there’s this dude. Just one little hit to that jack… and boom. He dies. No one would know. This game might be turning me into a psychopath.

To be fair to the paperboy/girl you have to deal with this bullshit.

Look at a man just whipping tires into the open street. I would be on the other side of his house catching those tires to resell them.

Then there’s this bullshit of gargoyles that are constantly shooting fireballs. What is this neighborhood? But then again, maybe that house makes sense when we have…

Active hauntings!

And a fortress that’s opening fire I guess on the people across the street. What did the local zoning board have to say about the moat? And the cannons?

I couldn’t find a screenshot of it but there’s also a convenience store that’s getting robbed every day and the only one there to stop it is the paperboy/girl.

The fact of the matter is that this town should have a great deal of news regarding these weird neighborhoods. But I guess news is so slow in this town that the local hiring and firing of paperboys/girls makes front page news.

Anyway, to get to the point. This game fucking rules.

Is Scrabble just reverse crosswords?

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I’ve been playing Words with Friends and I really enjoy it. Except for those people/possibly computers that play words right up against other words. Give me some room to work, asshats.

Now, whenever I like something, I like to think about the reasons that I like it. It helps me figure out what I can make that other people like. Because I’m a normal person that enjoys normal things in normal ways.

So, I started thinking about Words With Friends and that led me to Scrabble and that made me think, is Scrabble just reverse crosswords? I love crosswords and am I just building the weirdest one in the world?

Like check that out, you could just easily turn that into a crossword puzzle. What if I’ve cracked the code and that’s how crosswords have been made for years. Two people playing Scrabble and then they’re like, “Fuck it, good enough. Send it to the Times.”

I know that’s not true. Puzzlemasters are probably much smarter than me. I’m sure that they put in a lot more work than I could even imagine.

Are puzzle games the same as rogue-lites?

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Over the weekend, I bought and played Balatro. For those that don’t know, Balatro is a rogue-lite where you play different poker hands to gain chips and get a total in a set number of moves. Different jokers can be combined to increase your chips and help you win.

A rogue-lite for those who further don’t know, is a game where you don’t get to keep your progress after you die or fail in your task. Usually, your run can be anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending on the luck of the draw.

Balatro

It is addictive to say the least. I put in 11 hours before I knew what had happened. It got me thinking though that maybe the original puzzle games are rogue-lites in and of themselves. Games like Dr. Mario, Tetris Attack, Bust A Move and regular old Tetris. You have a run and you have to rely on skill and luck to see how far you’re going to go.

There is a delicate balance between those two that you have to maintain. Playing Balatro made me retroactively not like another rogue-lite, Slay the Spire, which has you climbing a tower while playing various cards to fight monsters.

Slay the Spire

I put way more hours into Slay the Spire over the years than I did Balatro. And yet, I never beat it. Maybe I was playing it wrong but I just didn’t even get close except for a handful of times. When I did though my character was so out of his depth and was easily defeated. I think that’s the point and it could definitely be a skill issue but I still think Balatro has it beat on ease of use. When I lost in Balatro, I would think that I had definitely made some errors here and there. When I lost in Slay the Spire I would feel like the game had decided it had enough of my shit and slammed me to the ground for my hubris.

It could just be me but I do feel like Slay the Spire could be a bit more forgiving. But then maybe that’s the whole point much the increasingly difficult Soulsborne games. I’m terrible at those as well.

Okay, so maybe it is me. But the fact of the matter, is that I keep coming back to games like Dr. Mario, Bust a Move and Tetris because they give me the feeling that I’m somewhat in control. Maybe I won’t get the pill, bubble or tetrad that I’m looking for but I’ll at least feel like I’ve accomplished something.

The worst thing that anything can do is make you feel like you’ve wasted your time. Whether it be a movie, book, TV show or video game. Do I feel like I’ve wasted my time playing Slay the Spire? No, I don’t. I never wasn’t having fun with the game. I just, I don’t think I’m going to pick it up anytime soon.

Admittedly, Balatro lost its attraction when I won the run. Hunh, maybe that’s why Slay the Spire is so hard. So that I’ll keep coming at it like Don Quixote at his windmill.