Category: Tier Three

Stellaris
by LepcisMagna

I don’t really like Civilization. While the idea of controlling an empire through the ages sounds good in theory, the amount of time you have to spend doing it mostly outweighs the amount of fun to be had. While this may be an inherent flaw of 4X games, I had high hopes for Stellaris anyway since I’m a bit of a sci-fi nerd (actually, that’s a lie: I’m a lot of a sci-fi nerd).

Stellaris has been sitting in my queue for ages, and when I first took a look at it I put it into Tier 1 after playing for an hour; admittedly, this was not a fair shake. But with a lazy Sunday afternoon ahead of me and having been reminded that I still hadn’t played Stellaris by a board game I played with Chezni, I sat down determined to play a game. I got up 8 hours later, having played about half a game and realizing I just didn’t care anymore.

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Windward
by LepcisMagna

Windward is a fun little game that I really can’t recommend. You command a sailing ship while you explore a waterway, trade between towns, and fight off the pirates controlling most of the land. If you play multiplayer, your friends can either join you or start a rival faction. While this is fun for an hour or two, there just isn’t enough to keep you going.

As far as I can tell, I’ve just described everything that happens in the game. Sadly, there are no sea monsters, no fleet building, no marvels. It’s a relaxing game, to a point, but the combat is boring and there’s really not much to pursue after upgrading your ship. Sadly, I must put it into Tier 3.

Steam link

Living Card Games
by LepcisMagna

I dislike Collectible/Trading Card Games (CCGs/TCGs), and in particular Magic: The Gathering (MtG). CCGs feel like the microtransactions of the board game world, and all too often are quite expensive to keep up with. Yes, there’s Pauper format, but simply removing all the more powerful cards to preserve rarity feels cheap, in more ways than one. Admittedly, some of my distaste for CCGs comes from a desire to have complete collections, which is pretty incompatible with the roughly 19307 cards (x4 copies of non-lands) printed for MtG. However, the artificial rarity is what really turns me off of CCGs. MtG is one of the worst, with “white border”, “black border”, and of course the “holographic” or foil cards (not counted in the above count). The rarity is there to preserve the secondary market, which forces WotC to ban proxies at official events. There are arguments for banning realistic proxies anyway (counterfeit cards), but I tend to disagree.

What luck, then, that Living Card Games (LCGs) exist! A way to have a fun, extendable card game without the hassle of a secondary market or being unable to purchase a specific card you want from the manufacturer. But there’s a lot of card games out there, and most are terrible. In this article, I hope to catalogue the ones I’ve either played or heard good things about and review them as I get to play them more. I’m going to try and focus on mechanics over flavor, since I’m pretty setting-agnostic when it comes to my preference in games.

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Betrayer
by Chezni

Betrayer? I barely knew ‘er! AHAHAHAHA… ha.

Lepcis has this great response any time I complain about a game but stop and ask, “Am I just biased?” To which he responds “No, you just know what you like.” That singular statement is a great way to understand that even though your preferences are swayed by your own personal interests, they’re still a valid method of evaluating something, as long as you’re aware of that and admit it. Thus, I am an extremely mechanics-driven player; I play to consume rules, tricks, puzzles, strategies, nuances (even bugs at times), stats and techniques. So–even while Betrayer presents itself *very* uniquely… it’s a horrible game mechanically, and because of this I cannot rate it higher than Tier 3.

 

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Alto’s Odyssey
by LepcisMagna

Endless runners are probably one of the few casual game types as old as Tower Defense.  They have been done and perfected in every way and in every style: from the sublime futuristic to the flash game classic to the puzzle version to the mobile modern to the ridiculously popular.  Any new entry must stand up to these and the thousand others which already exist.  Alto’s Odyssey looks pretty, but doesn’t have much new to add to this tired genre.

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Dust: An Elysian Tail
by LepcisMagna

The character above is responsible for this game going into Tier Three.  I feel a little bad about that, but there are just so many games out there that I just can’t see myself coming back to this one.

Steam link