Games – Fascination Place

Firmament

Earlier this summer I played Firmament, the new puzzle game from Cyan, the creators of Myst.

I love these sorts of games, and I wrote about what I like about them a few years ago in the context of Zed. I enjoy a mix of puzzles, setting, and story, which Cyan has historically been good at providing. I backed Firmament on Kickstarter as soon as they announced they’d be doing a Mac version, having also backed their previous game, Obduction, which I enjoyed a lot, though I thought it had a few flaws.

Firmament modifies the traditional point-and-click interface with a device the player uses called an Adjunct, which they use to connect to sockets throughout the game which provides some additional flexibility in how the player interacts with the world. It also both makes it clearer what you can interact with, but it feels somewhat limiting since everything has some small variation of the same interface. I’ve seen it theorized that the Adjunct mechanic was created to make the VR experience of the game better or more consistent or something. I guess it’s possible, I dunno. Maybe that was a concern 4 years ago when they started making the game?

A spoiler-free review first, and then some further thoughts:

The setting for Firmament is that you wake up from long-term sleep and are greeted by the Mentor, who appears to be a ghost of your predecessor. They’ve woken you up and advise you from time to time. The world consists of three settings, an ice zone, a botanical garden, and a sulphur-based power plant, along with a central structure1 called The Swan. You travel between them via conveyance pods, and have two waves of tasks to accomplish on each world to get to the conclusion.

There are basically three sorts of things in these games that I dislike: Puzzles that are too hard (this is obviously subjective), having to walk back and forth a lot to solve a puzzle, and things that are hard to see. Firmament has a few spots where there were things I just couldn’t see and I had to use a walkthrough – a video one in one case – to figure out what I was missing. This is frustrating because it feels like I just was never going to figure it out on my own. The game does pretty well on the other two points, although there was one puzzle I didn’t so much figure out as stumble into the answer for. Better lucky than good, I guess?

The game’s weakness, I think, was its story. Since Cyan’s games are solo endeavors with little capability for you to interact with anyone in the game, they all take place in environments where the people who used to be there are gone, and finding out what happened to them is part of the adventure. Firmament feels pretty thin, here, as the Mentor and one other character are the only ones you learn much about. There were clearly more people around, but we learn very little about them. I think they could have threaded more characters and more events into the game and provided a richer story to explore. As it was, it definitely felt less sophisticated than Obduction.

(I’m inclined to think that the use of AI to assist in generating parts of the game are not really at fault as this article thinks they might be. I think they just didn’t spend enough time coming up with enough story to make it satisfying.)

I think the game took me about 15 hours to complete. I did run into one bug, but it turned out not to affect me in that puzzle. Other people have run into more serious bugs, but they’ve been fixing them. If you enjoy games like these, give this one a try, but temper your expectations, especially if story is your main interest.

A few more spoilery comments after the cut:

Knotwords

Today I’m going to sing the praises of a very clever and fun word puzzle app I’ve been playing on iOS: Knotwords, by Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger.

Knotwords is like a second cousin to crossword puzzles. You’re given a grid of rows and columns, which is broken up into sections, and for each section you’re given the letters which go into the squares in that section. So there might be a section of 5 squares, which includes pieces of 2 or 3 rows or columns, and you need to figure out which letters go where. The trick is that each row or column is a complete English word, often consisting of 2 or more sections.

Here’s a recent simple puzzle and its solution (it briefly explodes the grid when you solve it, which is what I captured for this image):

What makes Knotwords enjoyable for me is that it exploits the human mind’s ability to pattern-match, but it also allows the player to break down the puzzle into smaller pieces, building up words out of multiple sections as you go. My approach – especially with larger puzzles – is to identify the sections which appear most tractable to figure out the word, and then build out from there.

Sometimes the sections allow you to reason about the letters through knowledge of English words. For example, if there’s a section of 5 squares, with two 3-letter words which overlap, you can sometimes figure out that there are a limited number of ways to combine the letter to make valid words. Vowel placement is often key. Sometimes you can eliminate combinations, for example knowing that there’s no English word which begins with the letters ‘BK’. Knowing the 2-letter words is also helpful. The app also tells you when you’ve entered an invalid word, so you’re not just guessing. And you can ask for a hint which gives you the dictionary definition of a word you choose on the grid, but it’s rewarding to solve puzzles with a few hints as possible.

Knotwords does reward having a good vocabulary, but the words are not usually rare. I’m more likely to spell a valid word and go “What the heck is that?” and then look at it differently and realize it’s a perfectly ordinary word. I’ve solved a couple hundred puzzles so far and maybe only encountered a couple of words I didn’t know.

The system is self-correcting in a way. Sometimes you build up a valid word, but it leads to other words being invalid, and then rearranging letters to fix things up untangles the other words. You quickly develop an instinct for which words are almost certainly correct (spoiler: longer words usually have only one solution).

If that sounds good to you, then you’ll be happy to learn that there’s even more to discover. In addition to the basic puzzles, there are “twist” puzzles, where each row and column has a number indicating how many vowels are in that line. For example:

And the solution. Whenever you solve a puzzle you get a happy little bunny person in the bottom right cheering you on:

Usually additional constraints in puzzles like these make things easier for the player (for example the “Sudoku X” variant of Sudoku), but that also means the twist puzzles can be harder because you have more information to work with.

Every day you get a new simple puzzle, a classic puzzle which gets larger and harder each day from Monday through Sunday, and a twist puzzle which also gets harder through the week.

Each month there are two puzzlebooks, one classic and one twist, each with thirty puzzles. The later puzzles in these have additional twists, such as word themes. At first I was intimidated by the puzzlebooks as I got to the midpoint, but while they get pretty large, it’s not too hard to work through them. While it takes me upwards of 25 minutes to get through the largest ones, you can always pause and come back to it later.

Knotwords has built-in gamification, such as tracking your stats on the daily puzzles, achievements, and of course tracking your streaks – which you can recover if you happen to break one!

One thing to know is that the app does not yet support syncing your progress across devices; as a result, I play it only on a single iPad. (Apparently syncing is in the works, though!)

I’ve never really made the leap to doing traditional puzzles like crosswords and Sudoku on computer, but Knotwords fills that space nicely, and in a way that wouldn’t be nearly as good on paper. It’s free to try, with an in-app purchase to unlock the full range of puzzles. I didn’t hesitate to buy it once I finished the trial, and I hope this post helps it find a few more fans.

Online Personas

Recently I had a little conundrum about what persona I wanted to present in some online communities I’m in.

When I first got online – around 1989 – this wasn’t really a concern. I mean, it was for some people, I’m sure, but for most people the need and the tools weren’t really there. I didn’t participate in any dial-up BBSes, and on USENET and on mailing lists it was usually the case that your e-mail address and real name were right there in anything you posted. By today’s standards those communities were very small, and safety and privacy was not much of a concern for most people. There were a few communities which developed anonymizing posting systems, but they were in my experience very much the exception.

I had a brief fling with changing my display name on USENET in college to “Night Watchman”, because I was often online late at night posting stuff. It seemed cute at the time, but kind of dumb now.

(I have one friend who to this day refers to me as ‘rawdon@rex’, since ‘rex’ was the name of the machine I posted from in college. Machines in Tulane‘s computer science department were named after Mardi Gras parades.)

I’ve never been shy about posting under my own name, on USENET, on mailing lists, on social media, and on the web, including my journal. The one thing I’ve generally avoided doing is posting my address and phone number. Not that these things are particularly private – I have a listed phone number¹ – but I figure that a lot of shenanigans and mayhem are largely because of opportunity and convenience, and I can save myself most of those potential headaches by not making it trivial for people to find me. (Of course I have no idea whether these precautions have had any effect at all.)

People who want to remain anonymous or appear under an alias is much more common today – and often for good reason – but it’s still not really a concern of mine. What triggered the recent conundrum is the growth of services where you only appear under a “handle”, which by convention tends to be short and memorable. The two sites I was interested in were Magic: The Gathering Arena and Twitch, which only show users under their chosen handle. I think this grew out of online video games of the 1990s and 2000s, and a lot of people who were active in those communities have consistent and often (?) memorable handles. I wasn’t active, and so I don’t – and I kind of envy them.

I could have simply used my name ‘MichaelRawdon’, as my handle – and on Twitch I did for a while. The advantage on Twitch is that when I interact with a streamer they could call me by my name. The disadvantage is that almost no one else uses their name as their handle, and so it felt out of place and a little lame. I also wanted both of those to have the same handle, so in the event I interacted with the same people on those platforms they would possibly recognize me.

My first attempt at a distinctive handle was ‘mRawd’, but that didn’t feel right. After several months I hit on the following: My account on Twitter is mrawdon, and I realized I could capitalize it like “MrAwdon”, in theory pronounced like “Mister Awdon”. That felt a little clever and a little more sensical, so that’s what I went with.

It’s worked out… okay. A couple of Twitch streamers end up calling me “Mister”, which is a little odd but at least a name they’re not stumbling over. So I think I’ll stick with it for a while.

(Why didn’t I go with ‘rawdon’? Mainly because it’s already taken on Twitch and on Twitter, and maybe even on Arena. It’s an uncommon name, but common enough that it’s already taken in many online sites.)

I wish Twitch did what Discord does, which is allow you to choose a default handle, but then to customize your display name for each channel. I’d definitely make use of that by having a recognizable handle for Twitch channels who know me from other area (e.g., who I interact with on Twitter, or support on Patreon), but having something else for most streams where they have no reason to know me.

Anyway, maybe too many words about too small a subject. I bet hardly anyone else ever worries about this sort of thing.

¹ Kids, ask your parents what a ‘listed phone number’ is.

Birthday Week

Last Thursday was my birthday, and we had a heck of a busy week around it!

For starters, we went to to Disneyland last weekend, flying down Saturday and coming back Tuesday, spending 2-1/2 days in the park(s). Since SuperShuttle has gone under, we tried Wingz, which is like Uber and Lyft except that they vet their drivers more carefully (or so I’ve read), and they primarily do airport transportation, where you can request a ride weeks ahead of time. Our trip to and from the Anaheim airport both went really smoothly, with friendly drivers who were on time and flexible. It was probably a little more expensive than Lyft, but not a lot. Would definitely recommend. We learned the difference when we used Lyft to get home from the San Jose airport on Tuesday and got a driver with a messy car with way too much air freshener.

The big change at Disneyland since our last visit (two years ago!) is the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge (or “Star Wars Land” as lots of people call it). It’s still kind of in its formative stages, but it was pretty populated while we were there. The main ride, “Smugger’s Run”, is okay, being kind of a guided video game you play with 6 people, with excellent graphics. But the scenery in the area is the main draw, with an elaborate settlement with a large reproduction of the Millennium Falcon, as well as a small Resistance base in some nearby ruins (with a ride which opened the weekend after we were there). And also the second place in Disneyland that sells alcohol, a cantina you should reserve a spot in ahead of time. They also have a build-a-droid experience, and a build-a-lightsaber experience, and Debbi bought me the latter as a birthday gift. The lightsaber seems like it’s really high quality, with nifty audio and visual details.

Oga's Cantina — The interior of Oga’s Cantina.

We rode a lot of the old favorites, including Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 3 times. The Indiana Jones ride is showing its age and broke down a lot, including twice when we had fastpasses to it. Space Mountain was slammed as usual, and Haunted Mansion has gotten very popular lately, typically with a wait time double that of Pirates of the Caribbean. We rode Star Tours twice, though its current Rise of Skywalker form is not as interesting as what it was after its overhaul a decade ago, when you could go to 3 different world on each ride. Hopefully once RoS leaves theaters they’ll put it back to mixing things up on each ride.

My favorite ride used to be the Californian Screamin’ coaster in California Adventure, but they’ve reskinned it using The Incredibles – a film I’m not much of a fan of – and we didn’t get to ride it because – you guessed it – it broke down when we had fastpasses. Oh well! Alas, the nifty “tour of California” theme of California Adventure has now been erased by the Disneyfication of the park over the last decade, so it’s lost a lot of its charm. The new Lamplight Lounge is pretty nice, although I don’t think it’s displaced the Hearthstone Lounge for me (the best kept secret on the property, I think). A Bug’s Land is being demolished for – I believe – a Marvel superhero area, presumably to integrate with the Guardians of the Galaxy ride behind it. We also road Soarin’ twice, which is also not as great as its previous Soarin’ Over California incarnation was.

Anyway, that and our tired feet aside, we had a good time and will try to go back sooner than another 2 years!

My actual birthday rolled around on Thursday and I treated myself to my free Starbucks drink in the morning to go with the scones Debbi baked for me. I had a pretty quiet day at work – lots of people were busy so I went to coffee by myself, and in the rain yet! (But, I love rain.) The original plan was for me to grill hamburgers for dinner, but instead we went downtown to Don Giovanni, which was yummy.

And Friday we went to Sundance the Steakhouse, which is what I always pick for my “official” birthday dinner. Their Moscow Mules are especially yummy for some reason, and birthday mud pie for dessert is also a nice bonus. Debbi noticed that some of the crew from Fox’s NFL broadcast show were eating there, including Jimmy Johnson and maybe Terry Bradshaw, but we didn’t want to stare so I’m not sure. They were in town of course because the 49ers were hosting the Green Bay Packers in The NFL championship on Sunday.

Saturday I went to Isle of Gamers for the Magic Theros: Beyond Death prerelease. I had a pretty good deck, I thought, although nothing obviously broken. My first match was a tie, but with 2 more turns I think I could have won it. I won my second match easily, and then tied my third match (and we barely started the third game). I think I played pretty well, but a 1-0-2 record was just barely better than break-even. Well, it beats a sharp poke in the eye! I can confirm that the card Ashiok, Nightmare Muse is a house. It almost singlehandedly won 3 games for me.

The deck I ran was close to what’s shown here.

Sunday we finally took down our Christmas lights, a week later since we were away last weekend, and then we watched football for the afternoon. The Niners annihilated the Packers, as the Packers’ offense was sloppy and the defense had no answer for Raheem Mostert’s run game. It was kind of embarrassing, really. The Niners face the Chiefs in 2 weeks in the Super Bowl.

I had today off for Martin Luther King Day, and Debbi didn’t. I think in 2023 MLK Day will fall on my birthday and I’ll get it off work for that reason (something that sometimes happened when I was a kid, as MLK Day was a holiday for some of my childhood in Massachusetts). I took care of some long-standing chores and finished Charles Stross‘ latest Laundry Files novel, which means I’m caught up on his books for the time being.

And that was about it. Not a bad, um, ten days of birthday celebration of various intensities. But I’m kinda ready for life to get back to normal for a few weeks, anyway. More rain in the forecast tomorrow, so that’ll make me happy.

Zed (and other Myst-like Games)

I spent a few hours on my recent vacation playing through the computer game Zed. I’d backed it on Kickstarter a while ago, and it was eventually published with the help of Cyan Ventures, an arm of the company which produced the Myst series, which I adore.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed by Zed, though it helped clarify what I enjoy about games of this sort. While the art, sound, animation, etc., are all important elements in providing a sense of being present in the setting of the game (which was the breakthrough triumph of Myst, I think), the main factors are having an engaging story, and having interesting gameplay usually puzzles or challenges to walk through the story (and usually not combat). The gameplay also allows the player a certain amount of agency, or at least the illusion thereof.

Cyan’s games do a good job of balancing both elements, particularly in Myst and Riven, as well as the sequel (not by Cyan) Myst III Exile. Cyan’s most recent game, Obduction, also hit this sweet spot for me. (I reviewed it here, though it seems I thought some of its puzzles were a bit too far on the hard side, which I’d forgotten.)

Zed is heavy on the story but very light on gameplay. The framework is that you’re playing the role of an artist with dementia walking through memories of his life to collect ideas for a final gift for his granddaughter, but it’s a heavily guided experience where you roam regions of his memory in sequence, being exposed to the narrative of his life, and collecting a small set of objects in each area, but that’s really all there is to it. There are no puzzles, nothing else really to do, and negligible agency. It looks great, the story works pretty well, but it feels like doing a walkthrough of a game rather than playing a game. I worked through it in about 4 hours (by contrast, Obduction took me about 20 hours).

Zed is the first game of this type that I’ve played which has leaned so far in this direction; I’ve seen some which leaned too far in the other direction. I vaguely recall a 90s game called Obsidian which I played and felt was all gameplay (and surreal settings) and not much story. (I didn’t finish it.) Quern: Undying Thoughts is a more recent example: It’s full of puzzles (and takes a long time to work through them), but the story is pretty thin.

Another nuance is when the puzzles are too obscure or difficult, or which are tedious because they involve too much walking around (which takes time and is no fun if you’re not discovering anything new). Myst IV: Revelation is unfortunately an example of this, with several puzzles that made very little sense to me, and I ended up using a walkthrough for a lot of it. (The story was pretty good, though.) I suspect Myst V: End of Ages was similar, but the game was buggy enough (I think it didn’t play well with the video card I had in my Mac at the time) that I didn’t get very deep into it before getting frustrated and giving up. Quern had the too-much-walking-around problem in spades.

Anyway, I do love this style of game, and will play most games of this type that I come across as long as they’re on platforms I own (Mac and iPad, basically). Here are some others I’ve played:

Alida (2004) This one was pretty well balanced, with maybe a couple of puzzles that were too obscure.
The Talos Principle (2014): I’ve been playing on my iPad. The puzzles are pretty good, but the story is nearly nonexistent.
The Witness (2016): All puzzles – often very frustrating puzzles – and no story at all. I ha-a-ated this game and gave up after about 5 hours. The graphics are pretty mediocre for a modern game, too.
Tipping Point (2007?): Another game I’ve played on my iPad. It’s okay but I lost interest about halfway through and haven’t gotten back to it. I’m not quite sure why I haven’t found it satisfying.
Grim Fandango: Originally released in 1998, I bought the remastered iPad version when it came out a few years ago. I’m not sure this game really belongs in this category, though it seems adjacent at least. I didn’t get very far in it because it involved a lot of walking around from place to place, and frankly I got bored. It sure is stylish, though!

Are there are others currently available that I should try?

I’ll also try games that are clearly not really intending to quite be this sort of game but are similar in some key ways. Some games by Simogo feel adjacent to Myst but not quite the same thing. Device 6 is more of a story with a few small puzzles, as is The Sailor’s Dream. I enjoyed both, although Sailor left me feeling a bit empty at the end. I also tried Year Walk, but it felt like it was all walking around and not much progress.

Anyway, my disappointment with Zed isn’t going to dissuade me from playing more games of this sort. In fact, I backed Cyan’s next game on Kickstarter, Firmament, once they committed to a Mac version. And heck, I kinda feel like playing through Obduction again.

Gaming Podcasts

I’m breaking up the “nonfiction” podcasts I listen to into two entries: Gaming podcasts, and everything else. As I said in my intro, a few Magic: The Gathering podcasts have been key in keeping me motivated in running. I also listen to a couple of poker podcasts. I’ve listened to several others of each, some of which have ended, some of which I’ve dropped, but the ones included below I’ve been listening to for quite a while.

One common thread in these podcasts is that the hosts clearly put a lot of work into planning out their episodes and staying on topic (presumably through skillful use of editing and post production in some cases), so you know what you’re going to get: A consistent product, and a clear indication when an individual episode is going to be different. I’ve listened to a few podcasts in each category which don’t exhibit this discipline, and they often end up running 90-120 minutes per episode, and/or spend a lot of time in rambling digressions which don’t hold my interest.

So, these really are the cream of the crop that I’ve found for each game, at least as far as what I’m looking for in these podcasts goes. YMMV.

Magic podcasts

Limited Resources: Probably the podcast I look forward to the most each week, LR covers the limited (draft & sealed) forms of playing Magic, which are the formats I mostly play these days. Besides being a clinic in playing, LR is also a clinic in producing a professional-grade weekly podcast on its topic, with insight, humor and depth. I discovered LR back in 2012 because I figured there must be a podcast on Magic drafting out there, and this was honestly the only one I could find at the time. It had already been around about 3 years by then, and it was already very solid. Host Marshall Sutcliffe also does commentary on the Magic pro tour. Co-host Luis-Scott Vargas is in the pro tour hall of fame, also does coverage, and brings great analysis and usually-great humor to the show. Both of them show their enthusiasm for and expertise at the game in every episode.
Good Luck High Five (formerly Magic the Amateuring): The GLHF hosts have backgrounds in improv comedy and so they’re the rare podcast which is able to dive into off-the-cuff humor and make it work – but I think it’s because they have the discipline to not let it get away from them. They cover all forms of Magic in a friendly and upbeat way, and have both played competitive magic and worked in coverage of competitive events. They’ve recently picked up the proverbial baton of keeping their listeners apprised of developments in the MtG world, which I enjoy even though I’m not strongly plugged in to that side of the scene.
Drive to Work: By Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic, who records it while – you guessed it – driving to work. He releases 2 episodes each Friday. Rosewater has a great mind for game design and his podcast is worth listening to if you’re interested in Magic design, game design, and to some extent any sort of design.
Kitchen Table Magic: An interview podcast about the personalities and histories of the game. Host Sam Tang does a great job bringing out his subjects’ love of the game, and in the cases of long-time players their historical perspectives on the game. For anyone who’s watched the Enter the Battlefield video series, KTM is a more in-depth and regular feature with many similarities. Organized by “seasons”, it comes out weekly with some gaps in the middle and end of each season.
Allied Strategies: As a rule I’m not a fan of podcasts in a “friends hanging out” format, but this one makes it work, and I think it’s because they’re very good at knowing when to ad lib and when to rein it in. Two of the friends have been professional Magic players, and all three are entertaining and insightful. Not every episode is deeply interesting to me, as they rotate through a variety of Magic topics, but I listen to most of them. They usually end the episode with an amusing story from a recent event.

Poker podcasts

Thinking Poker: Much like Limited Resources, this is a fine example of producing a focused podcast. Co-hosts Andrew Brokos and Nate Meyvis open with a usually-short intro (a bit longer when they themselves have been playing in major tournaments), then launch into a strategy segment analyzing one or more hands. The rest of the episode is usually an interview with someone from the poker world. Some of the most interesting interviews have been with people who are only tangentially part of the poker world, and the hosts are excellent interviewers. Episode 200 is a good sampler of interviews with several of their best guests.
Just Hands: This podcast started off as what its name implies, individual episodes analyzing poker hands and that’s it. It’s been extending a bit into interviews, especially as one of the original hosts has recently left and the other is having a different guest each week. It’s a good listen, though I think their strength is in hand analysis.

Next time I’ll cover the rest of the nonfiction podcasts.

Dominaria Prerelease

Yesterday I went to the Magic prerelease for the Dominaria, and had a lot more fun than I expected! Of course, winning a lot will do that.

I went to the new Isle of Gamers, which is two doors down from their old location, but is at least 100% improved due to the wider and brighter space. They’ve gone all-in on a pirate theme (which they had before, but it feels more pronounced now), and they have a great-looking private gaming room in back.

My approach to sealed deck has been slowly evolving, and these days I tend to focus first on bombs I open and second on number of creatures across the colors, since limited is such a creature-heavy format. It feels like I rarely open pools in which I have more than one viable color pair unless the format supports 3-color decks. Dominaria certainly does not unless you’re base green, because there is very little color fixing (much like the last time we were in Dominaria, back in Time Spiral), and I think you have to have just the right set of stuff to even consider splashing.

As it turned out I had 4 colors in my pool with nominally enough creatures to build decks – blue being the one that didn’t. Red had some good removal, but the creatures were terrible. At first I as leaning towards black-green, but as I looked at it I felt my green was just not very good and white had a lot more punch. So I ended up going black-white.

At first I wasn’t sure I’d had enough playables, but after some thought I talked myself into playing this little combo:

This seemed a little sketchy to me, but I felt like I had enough Historic cards that it was worth playing. So in the end I ran with this deck:

Dominaria prerelease deck

My main reservation about this deck was its relatively average high converted mana cost and the low-impact 2-drop creatures (3 of them were 1/3s). I also did a test run and realized I had to be mindful of casting Demonlord Belzen l ok since I could easily draw a bunch of cards off of him but also lose a bunch of life.

My first round was against another WB player. Game 1 I mulliganed to 5 (my first 2 hands had zero lands total), and predictably lost – although if I’d drawn a second Swamp I might have made a go of it. Game 2 my opponent got stuck on 2 lands and quickly conceded. Then, game 3 went on forever and ever. I got out Traxos, put On Serra’s Wings on it, swung twice, and then he killed it. Then we got into a long board stall, I got back Traxos with Daring Archaeologist, he killed it again, and finally I managed to seal the deal with Belzenlok.

1-0.

Second round I faced another WB opponent, but this one went considerably quicker. The second game was a bit of a slog as I kept drawing removal for his good stuff, but I couldn’t get any good stuff of my own. Finally I put On Serra’s Wings on a Voltaic Servant and just kept swinging away with a flyer he couldn’t deal with.

2-0.

Third round I played a red-white deck which looked similar to mine only without as good a top end. I played Divest to lead off game 1 and saw that he had Gideon’s Reproach in hand, but I ended up with more gas than he did and won the first game. The second game we ended up in an early board stall and then I played a Serra Angel. Next turn I had On Serra’s Wings to play and had to decide where to put it. I decided to put it on the Serra Angel in case he had Gideon’s Reproach in hand, making the Angel a 5/5 and out of reach of his spell. His groan when he drew his next card told me that I’d guessed correctly, and I rode the Angel to victory.

Flavor win or flavor fail? Marshall Sutcliffe says:

3-0.

On to the finals! I played a fellow who had just defeated my friend Subrata at the next table over in the third round. He was playing a black-green go-wide deck based around Saprolings and Slimefoot, the Stowaway. He got Slimefoot out in game 1 and he was as annoying as advertised, but I managed to keep the pressure on with slightly-bigger creatures so that he kept chump-blocking with the tokens, and I finally pulled out the victory with a Serra Angel.

Game 2 was epic, and we had several onlookers for the match. He observed that he drew the other half of his deck from the first game, which meant bigger creatures. I managed to get out my Traxos/On Serra’s Wings combo, but he dealt with it through removal and a Mammoth Spider. He got a second Mammoth Spider out, but we ended up trading off some creatures and I used removal to bring us – around turn 10 – to the point where neither of us had any nonland permanents on the board.

A little more maneuvering resulted in me with a 3/2 flying Windgrace Acolyte on the board, but then he dropped a kicked Baloth Gorger, which put me in a bad place. I’d been drawing a lot more gas than lands, and I started playing creatures to chump his Gorger. He was on 8 life and I was around 13, and I was stuck on 5 lands. Just in time I drew my sixth land and played my kicked Sergeant-at-Arms, which gave me several blockers, and I followed it up with a Serra Angel which ended up being just enough for the win.

So I went 4-0 in matches on the day, 8-1 in games, and finished first in the tournament, which was good for 9 prize packs!

People have been speculating that Dominaria is going to be a slower limited format, and that’s how it felt yesterday. I rarely felt like I didn’t have time to get down my 4-drops and slow my opponents way down. I’m sure there are a few faster decks in the format, but it feels like there are ways to deal with them. That kind of makes sense in a format with the Kicker mechanic.

I’m pretty happy with my deck, though in hindsight I think Divest wasn’t really pulling its weight and I should have replaced it with almost anything else – even just a combat trick. I’m also not impressed with Caligo Skin-Witch, mainly because its kicker cost is too high for what it does and its 1/3 body is unimpressive, but I didn’t have a great choice to replace it with. So I don’t regret playing it, but I think it’s a card to avoid going forward.

Overall I was happy with how many redundant moving parts my deck had, so I really didn’t have much trouble slowing down fast starts, dealing with big threats, and getting out my own big threats. Each game played very differently, but my deck was pretty consistent in always having something useful to do.

Oh, and On Serra’s Wings is just as awesome as people have been thinking it would be.

I’ll definitely have to see how this set plays in draft. I think it will be a lot of “good stuff” decks with minimal synergies, but that can still be fun.

Obduction

This past weekend I finished playing Obduction, the latest game from Cyan, the folks who made the MYST series of games. I backed it on Kickstarter and played it on the Mac through Steam, starting with some of the, well, I guess post-beta but pre-final releases.

Not to bury the lede: It’s a fine game which I enjoyed thoroughly! But I wanted to write a little historical perspective about my experience with Cyan’s games.

A friend of mine introduced me to the original MYST back in the mid-90s, and I powered my way through half of it, got stuck, put it away for a few months, then came back and finished it. While I enjoyed the puzzles, to me it was primarily an experiential game, the first game I ever played where I had genuine moments of feeling like I was really there – in hindsight an amazing accomplishment since the rough edges due to the technology of the day (texture mapping, animations, etc.) were quite apparent.

I played the sequel, Riven, when it came out, and while the technology was considerably improved (the renderings were gorgeous), the story felt less expansive and a little more awkward than the first game. (I wrote a little about it at the time.) A few years later I picked up the third game, MYST III Exile (which was not made by Cyan), and felt that it shored up the deficiencies of the previous games, and despite the thrill of the new of the original game, I think Exile is the best of the MYST series. (A bit more here.) I was also a big enough of the fan of the series that I read the three novels they published (which were okay).

I thought things went off the rails a bit with MYST IV: Revelation (also not by Cyan), which, despite having a good story, had some puzzles that were very unintuitive and frustrating to try to get through without a help from a story guide. And then I only barely cracked MYST V: End of Ages (which was by Cyan), in part due to some serious problems it exhibited with a lot of Mac technology at the time (some graphics cards would cause it to freeze the whole machine regularly), and also due to a disenchantment with the rendered animated people, which felt like a big step down from the interleaved live action footage from other games. (Sadly, I bet it doesn’t run on newer Mac hardware, and it looks like the Steam version is Windows-only, so I may never return to it.)

Despite that finish, ten years later I was pretty stoked for Obduction!

It took me a little while to get into it, partly because the early releases seemed to have some bad performance problems on Mac hardware, requiring me to ramp down the resolution quite a bit to get decent performance, so I played a few hours of the game late last year and then put it away for a while. I picked it up again a few weeks ago and played a couple of hours per week before finishing it. The final version has much better performance and I was able to get pretty nice resolution out of it with only a couple of moments of stuttering (some of which I suspect involved loading resources from disk). For reference, I played it on a late 2013 model MacBook Pro, so it might play better on a newer Mac. (I did find that the “seed swap” devices were often tediously slow, though.)

Obduction has a premise similar to MYST but arguably a little more grounded: Rather than mysteriously arriving on an island, you-the-player are one of many people who have been plucked from your time period and dropped into a bubble of Earth in the middle of another world. The game’s title plays on the sounds-like word “abduction” as well as the dictionary definition of obduction (“an act or instance of drawing or laying something (as a covering) over”) and the tectonic definition (in which layers are flowing above or below each other), all of which are appropriate in the story. You find yourself in a nearly-abandoned town called Hunrath, with chunks of Earth from different time periods lying around, messages from the former inhabitants, and signs of a battle from the recent past.

As in the MYST games, you need to find clues to what happened and solve puzzles to get things working in the village again, until you eventually unlock the secret as to what’s been going on and how to get beyond Hunrath to start fixing things. There are a lot of clever bits, including ones that make you feel clever when you figure them out.

The game’s biggest problem is that some of the puzzles are still too hard, in the sense of being basically unintuitive: You need to stumble on the right thing, or put together pieces which don’t logically go together. I relied on the player’s guide which came with the Kickstarter reward for some pieces, because I just wasn’t interested in endlessly wandering around some parts of the world to look for something I’d missed. I also found the puzzles involving the alien number system a little too annoying. But, your mileage may vary. Unfortunately, the final puzzle of the game I found utterly unintuitive and ended up going onto the web to find out what I had to do to solve it the “right” way (as it leads to multiple endings). They do need to walk a fine line between making the puzzles challenging and making them understandable, and I think Obduction is just a tad over the line to not understandable, though better than MYST IV. The first three MYST games all nailed the balance, I think, but maybe they just made it look easier than it is.

Experientially, though, Obduction is a pretty amazing piece of work: Wonderfully envisioned and executed, with only a couple of spots that feel a little glossed over (in some cases by necessity, since you still can’t really interact with the few characters you meet in the game). The sense of history and tragedy conveyed in Hunrath is extremely well done, particularly the bits in Farley’s house.

So, while slightly flawed, I found it perfectly enjoyable and rewarding, and while I might not run through it a second time for a few years, many bits have stuck in my memory, as with any good story.

I hope that Obduction isn’t Cyan’s swan song with this genre of game (which has fallen out of favor since its heyday around the turn of the millennium), but if it is, then they’ve gone out on a high note.

Shadows Over Innistrad Prerelease

Yesterday I headed down to Isle of Gamers for the prerelease for the latest Magic set, Shadows Over Innistrad. After listening to the set review on Limited Resources, and poking around on the net a bit, my feeling was that this would be a complicated set, and that assimilating all the information in the sealed deck prerelease would be pretty daunting, trying to figure out how best to fit together the various moving parts.

Once I opened my packs, I had this card pool:

Notice the following things:

I opened 7 rares (well, one was the promo card), of which 3 were land, 2 were planeswalkers (yay!), and 2 were not really great in limited.
All five colors are somewhat playable – this is a pretty deep pool.
Unfortunately, red is the weakest color, and green the second-weakest, and both planeswalkers require red.
Black is both deep and has a bunch of removal, so I’m surely playing black.

My first inclination was to go white-black, splashing red for Nahiri, so I came up with this:

That’s not awful, but probably not worth splashing just for one card, even a really good one. And there isn’t really any other red worth splashing. The other thing I realized is that it often doesn’t start doing stuff until turn 3, and it doesn’t make great use of its rare, Odric.

So I decided to try again, with blue instead of white, which gives me a little more early options, and a little more flying power:

I would characterize this deck as “unexciting midrange” (no rares other than the dual land!), but I hoped it would make up for that in consistency and evasion, and after some agonizing, it’s the one I decided to go with. Here’s how it played out:

Round 1: I played against a white-blue deck, and both of our decks ended up playing out as control decks against the other. I had more evasion than he did, but he had cards like Puncturing Light and Sleep Paralysis to deal with my Stormrider Spirits. I won game 1 mainly on the back of Daring Sleuth‘s flip side giving me lots of card advantage, and he won game 2 by grinding me out. Then we drew game 3 because we didn’t have nearly enough time to finish.

After this round I decided that Wild-Field Scarecrow didn’t do much in this deck, so I replaced it with the more aggressive Wicker Witch, which turned out to be the right choice. I also swapped out Merciless Resolve for the cheaper Macabre Waltz, which also paid dividends as I often had creatures in my graveyard I wanted to get back.

Round 2: Another white deck, this time white-black. In game 1 I recognized that my draw was much more aggressive than his and won by pushing through damage early, combined with overwhelming board position through my incremental card advantage. Game 2 was a squeaker, with me seemingly taking a big advantage and playing the Morkrut Necropod, but he had an answer for it in Murderous Compulsion. He took me down to 1, and he was also at 1. I ended my turn with 3 creatures to his 2, and with Broken Concentration in hand I countered his attempt to cast Bygone Bishop (I believe my spoken response when he cast it was, “No no, no no no – no.”) and that was enough to push through the last point of damage on my next turn.

Round 3: My opponent ran me over in the first game, playing a white-green humans deck which fired on all cylinders. Game 2 went much better as he never drew green mana and so stalled out in the midgame. He later told me his deck was mostly white, so this was a weird draw for him. For my part I was pleased that I mulliganed a hand with 3 islands, 3 black spells, and an artifact creature. Game 3 was the opposite as he kept a hand with 3 forests, 3 white cards, and an Intrepid Provisioner. He didn’t draw a plains until it was too late, and I won again.

Afterwards we chatted about his last game’s keep, and I told him that I’d had a similar scenario in game 2, where I’d mulliganed, and that I always seemed to do (and feel) better when I mulliganed color-mismatch hands like that. He pointed out that he had many more plains in his deck than forests, and he only needed one to get going. I don’t know what the answer is; if he had 10 plains in his deck, then the odds were he’d draw one by turn 4, but he really needed to draw one before that if my deck curved out (which it did). So it was a tough loss for him.

Round 4: My opponent here unfortunately also had mana problems, stalling out at 3 land in game 1, and I had just the right removal for the cards she could play (such as the ultra-annoying Sin Prodder). In game 2 she got mana flooded, and while she did play a big bomb in Flameblade Angel when she was still around 14 life, Press For Answers was exactly the answer I needed to push through a bunch of damage which she didn’t have any other blockers for.

So in the end I went 3-0-1 in my 4 matches, which was good for fourth place overall (and 8 packs!) in a field of over 50 people. I feel that my deck overperformed a little bit, and that my opponents’ decks underperformed – in some cases by a lot – so I’m not sure whether I truly “earned” my record. But sometimes you end up on the good side of the variance gods.

A few lessons I learned from the day as regards the format:

The removal doesn’t look impressive in this set, but a lot of it works well against a wide variety of threats. It seems like there are a lot of 2/3 and 3/2 creatures, and doing 2 damage does really well against the latter, while the former tend to be less threatening. As one person put it, there’s “not a lot of beef” in this set. (But – small sample size alert. There are a number of ways to make some larger creatures, and I just didn’t face many of them.)
Morkrut Necropod is a better card than it looks like, as there are not many things which can deal with a 7/7 with Menace in the format, and sacrificing a land by the time it comes down is not a big penalty.
It doesn’t take a lot of Investigate sources in your deck to enable cards which need them such as Daring Sleuth. I think I had 3 in my deck, and that was enough to pretty reliably flip the Sleuth.
Also, Daring Sleuth can be a horse in limited.
Gone Missing can do some work. One game when an opponent was struggling with mana, I put his tap-land on top of his deck, which not only blanked his next draw, but it meant even if he had anything to play with 4 mana that he hadn’t played for some reason (such as a combat trick), he would have to wait an extra turn to play it. Also great to enable an alpha strike.
Accursed Witch is a great card. If they decide not to kill it, then it hits them for 4. If they do kill it, then (most of the time) it turns into an annoying enchantment.
Thraben Gargoyle is also surprisingly good; by the time you can flip it, if your opponent hasn’t been careful to hold back some removal, a 4/2 flyer is pretty hard to deal with.
Bygone Bishop looks awesome.

Also, having a deck where only one card costs double-colored-mana is a nice incremental advantage since it makes it harder to be color-screwed.

Also, it turns out that my worry about information overload was unfounded; while I could imagine that having several good Madness cards could lead to struggling to figure out how to use it effectively, I didn’t have that problem. And there are several good ways to interact with discarding and sacrificing and the graveyard which don’t require Madness.

This looks like it will be a fun format, though I think there will be more to keep track of in draft than in sealed (“Whoops I forgot to draft a discard outlet”), but it also looks possible to draft a pretty straightforward deck if you prefer. I also wonder if it’s going to be a less bomb-y format than most (i.e., a pauper rather than a prince format, as the lingo goes).

Obviously I have fun – winning is usually fun! Definitely more fun than the Battle for Zendikar prerelease last fall, where my pool was both not good, and not fun to play. And it was my best prerelease showing since Journey Into Nyx (which featured a fairly meat-and-potatoes aggro deck, albeit one with two great rares).

I’ve been averaging a little less than every other prerelease for the last few years, for a combination of reasons. I’m hoping I’ll be able to make it to the Eldritch Moon prerelease in late July.

A Long Birthday Weekend

My birthday weekends get a little more low-key over time. Having a big to-do of a party seems less appealing than it used to. Maybe for my 50th.

This weekend I decided what I mainly wanted to do as play poker, so Friday night I had five friends over for an evening of our low-stakes game. Rooting around for the new deck of cards I knew I’d bought, I looked at my order history on Amazon, and found that it had been over two and a half years since I’d hosted a game. Probably almost that long since I’d last played no-limit, too. But it was a successful evening for me, more than doubling my buy-in. I was particularly pleased with a hand where I turned two pair with a 4-straight on the board, and realized no one had the straight when they didn’t bet the turn, so I was able to make a little more money on the turn and river.

(I’ve been listening to the Thinking Poker podcast, and find it’s maybe even more instructive to learn about hand-reading by listening to it than by reading a book about it.)

Saturday was my actual birthday, and I’d thought of going to the Magic Oath of the Gatewatch prerelease, but decided that poker was probably enough gaming for the weekend. Instead I opened presents, talked to my Dad on the phone for a while, and then watched the Patriots beat the Chiefs in the playoffs.

In the evening we went to Amber India with some friends for dinner. They moved a few months ago (I think their old strip mall is going to be redeveloped soon), and their new spot has a nice outdoor patio (not suitable for this rainy weather, but should be great in the summer). The inside feels a little cramped and warm, but possibly they just have a few kinks to work out. The good news is, the food is still awesome!

Sunday was had a relatively quiet day, though in the afternoon we drove over to Half Moon Bay hoping to catch some of the rain showers we were supposed to be getting. We stopped for lunch at Cameron’s British Pub, whose English pastie was exactly what I was craving. Then we drove down the side street the pub is on and ended up at the Wavecrest open space preserve, where we hiked around for about an hour, getting our sneakers muddy and (in Debbi’s case) soaked. But it was a pretty – if blustery – day, and we had a good time. We then drove up to Point Montara Lighthouse where we sat in the car and watched the waves crash on. Alas, we never got more than some drizzle on the whole trip, which was a bit disappointing.

In the evening we started watching Person of Interest, which I’d been curious about for a while, but it never aired at good time for us. (Now that’s a concern we won’t have in the future now that we own a TiVo.) It’s good stuff, a little over-the-top, but at least as good as other police procedurals, and I understand it gets more sophisticated over time.

Oh yeah: And my company’s “gift” to me for my birthday was that we have Martin Luther King day off for the first time. So today we took care of a bunch of chores in the morning, including having a plumber over to fix two of our toilets whose gaskets were having problems. In the afternoon we had some other friends over, who hadn’t been able to join us for cupcakes on Saturday, and I played with the kids for a bit, and they chased the cats and Debbi’s BB-8 robot around for a while. We wrapped up the weekend with dinner, some more chores, and some more Person of Interest.

A pretty busy weekend in a lot of ways, but also some nice quiet time. And we did get that rain I was hoping for, but it came in last night. Wish we could get a good solid day of rain during the daytime on a weekend. But for now it looks like I’ll have to be satisfied with another shower tomorrow.

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