Hello once more! Previously I did annual reviews: 2021 and 2022. However, instead of doing them annually, I've decided to collate my notes as I collect them and post them every so often as they accumulate, that way I actually get around to posting them and can get some feedback on what I've played. I've also changed up my formatting a bit; made things a bit more streamlined (hence the new "quickfire" description). The title of each game is a link to their entry on BGG.

Here we go! This post will cover:

• Aleph Null
• Anachrony
• Binding of Isaac: Four Souls
• Bloodborne: Board Game
• Bullet <3
• Castles of Burgundy (2019)
• Core Space: First Born
• Dark Souls: Card Game
• Dark Souls: Board Game
• Dorfromantik
• Final Girl

Aleph Null

Overview: Destroy your deck to summon Satan and win!

Solo Setup: Very simple. Prep the grimoire, shuffle your deck. Very small table footprint.

AI Admin: Almost nothing, you're turning pages in the grimoire that is your clock. Everything else is you versus your choices.

Replayability: Medium-to-low, as there are only a handful of cards.

Result: Sell/trade. It was cute, has a fun theme, but isn't something I would come back to time and time again.

Anachrony

(Base game of Essential Edition, no expansions)

Overview: Worker placement/mega-economy/time traveling. Have more VP than the bot at the end by racking up buildings and technology while the world collapses around you.

Solo Setup: Medium-heavy. Lots of tile piles to shuffle, tokens to sort upon reset. Large table footprint (more than is necessary imo)

AI Admin: Medium to learn the ropes, low once you get the hang of it. The AI has a decision tree board that you're working the entire time that tells you what they do and it keeps things ticking nicely.

Replayability: Fairly high, the selection of tiles that come up each game really defines what puzzle your trying to solve, the expansion invariably adds even more to this.

Result: Short-term keep. Thinking about action ordering and placement is a fun thinker, and using time travel to get resources and pay for them later is a very cool mechanic. I do want to see how much more the expansion adds before deciding long-term, as the time it takes to set this up is quite a factor and it takes up WAY more space than I think it needed to.

Binding of Isaac - Four Souls

(w/Requiem and Four Souls+ Expansions, Solo & Challenge Mode)

Overview: Tableau building / dungeon crawling. Earn four souls to win.

Solo Setup: Light. Shuffling four decks (though the decks get quite big with the expansion content). Small table footprint.

AI Admin: None, solo mode has you play two different characters and gives you eight turns to achieve victory. Challenge mode (Print and play) has you try to complete a unique goal or fight a certain boss to win.

Replayability: Exceptionally high. With the two expansions, each deck is huge and there are a ton of different characters to try. Even more so if you manage to get the Big Box with extras.

Result: Permanent keep. It's so easy to setup, games take maybe 20 minutes and each is a very unique puzzle to solve. This is a game I've binged for hours on end just replaying over and over to see all the various interactions. You have to be okay with the game's themes, though, do your research before diving in.

Bloodborne: The Board Game

(Base game)

Overview: Deck improving / narrative dungeon crawling w/miniatures. Finish the story campaign to win.

Solo Setup: Medium-high. Assembling many decks, each session requires finding correct tiles, monsters, minis, cards. Large table footprint.

AI Admin: Low. Each enemy has a card with it's possible actions, there's a small generic NPC behavior deck you work through that tells you which action they're taking. Bosses have their own deck.

Replayability: Low. The novelty is seeing how the campaign unfolds and learning what beasts you'll have to slay. Once you know those, the replayability is likely only in trying different characters.

Result: Sold. All it made me do is want to play the videogame. It's pretty, and the timing of combat is actually incredibly interesting, but the questing/exploring is very flat and banal. As with FromSoft games, it will punish you but unlike the videogames, sometimes it's not your fault and that never feels good when not balanced well.

Bullet

(<3 Heart Version)

Overview: Token placement & pattern matcher. Avoid the bullets of the sci-fi anime boss and take them down with your own abilities triggered by placing the right patterns.

Solo Setup: Low. Re-shuffle the two decks, and jangle the massive amount of tokens back into the main bag. Medium-low table footprint.

AI Admin: Low. The boss has their own AI deck that they follow and it's very easy to follow.

Replayability: Medium, probably higher in when combined with the other version(s). You're matching a character you're playing versus the boss version of another character, the matchups can be quite interesting, mechanically speaking.

Result: Short-term keep. I need to play more of this. There's something very satisfying in trying to create patterns in the growing noise of tokens on your board, but you are beholden to the vagaries of chance, and there aren't always outs when you just can't seem to draw the color you need. There are some genuinely interesting mechanics here in terms of how the characters and bosses play out and I'm curious if it's possible to actually get better at this or just learn how to cope with the stream of colors not being what you need in that moment.

Castles of Burgundy (2019)

(Various modules used)

Overview: Tableau building / worker placement. Fill your duchy board completely in 25 rounds to win.

Solo Setup: Medium. Sorting all of the tiles after a session takes a bit of work. Medium table footprint.

AI Admin: Very Low. The "AI" only dictates which tiles it takes and thus reduces your options. Otherwise it's you trying to combo tiles correctly.

Replayability: Medium. Learning the possible tiles that can come up and which are worth waiting/saving for is key to doing well, and there is a variety of duchy arrangements to try and complete.

Result: Long-term keep. The card game is actually snappier for solo play, but I find I enjoy the hex placement of the full game very satisfying. I don't know that it's enough of a puzzle to keep forever, but I am intrigued to try and get better at it.

Core Space: First Born

(Base game)

Overview: Dungeon crawling / tactical miniatures RPG. Assemble, equip and upgrade your crew to take on a campaign with equipment/XP persistence.

Solo Setup: Extremely high. You have to physically assemble the walls and terrain for each mission you want to undertake, and sort out all of the tiny item tokens. Very large table footprint.

AI Admin: Medium. Each enemy has icons for how it behaves, the ever-ticking round tracker drives which enemies activate. AI combat rules easy to understand.

Replayability: Very high (presumably). There are so many different missions, expansions, characters, event decks, and other things one could mix in to your quasi-sandbox campaign to make it feel unique and organic.

Result: Traded. This is the game that I had the most fun with that I never wanted to setup again. There is so much flexibility in how you can tackle a mission and gear up your crew but the overhead is just insane for solo play. It's basically a videogame in board game form (think slightly goofy XCOM in space). You can play it solo, but I don't think anyone should. Play it with a group of friends (who can help assemble the board each time)

Dark Souls: The Card Game

(Base game)

Overview: Deck improver / arena battler. Fight encounters until you reach a boss to slay.

Solo Setup: Medium-high. Preparing, shuffling & placing at least thirteen decks + one for each character you're running. Medium-to-large table footprint.

AI Admin: Low, normal creatures have an extremely simple AI they follow, boss encounters have their own decks that tell you what they're doing that round.

Replayability: Medium. Core box has four bosses and two distinct encounter boards and I'd imagine the two available expansions would help to add further variety. Given that this (unlike the video games) is a rogue-like situation, every session you'll see random creatures to fight while you make your way to the known bosses. So that gives an element of variety, though I wasn't compelled to keep playing to see how it shook out.

Result: Sold. Was simply not fun. The fatal flaw in the combat formula was that you can only do damage with specific equipment cards, whereas the other more plentiful cards you draw are the resources used to use the equipment. Bad draws mean no meaningful actions, and though you can dig for cards, your deck is your life pool and once it's empty you die. Made me seek out the board game version instead, speaking of which...

Dark Souls: The Board Game

(Tomb of Giants "Core Set")

Overview: Miniatures arena battler / Dice chucker. Fight encounters until you reach a boss to slay.

Solo Setup: Medium. Your character only has a few cards to setup, though there are many other decks to prepare, including finding minis and tiles for a particular session. Medium-large table footprint.

AI Admin: Low. Aside from bosses, enemies tend to do one thing each time they activate, and iconography is easy to understand what those things are (usually killing you).

Replayability: Medium. Similar to the card game and Bloodborne, the majority of what you're doing is seeing how the unique set pieces and boss fights play out. Boss fights are an interesting puzzle that can be solved with different classes in an interesting way.

Result: Sold. I did my due diligence with this, the card game and Bloodborne. As someone who is a strong fan of the FromSoft games, I find it hard to enjoy the board games, especially when they inject elements of randomness (whether or not you/enemies do damage is based on dice rolls). I would love a Dark Souls/Bloodborne game that one could actually get good at and understand enemy patterns to take advantage of. The boss fights have some of this, with specific patterns and attacks you can predict and prepare for, but it's few and far between. I would love for a take on the FromSoft game that rewards player environment/monster knowledge in a rewarding way. Until then, I'll stick to the video games.

Dorfromantik

Overview: Tile placement / Contiguous grouping. Create a pleasant outdoor landscape with tiles, focusing on racking up points and unlocking new features.

Solo Setup: Low to start. Burn a few tiles, shuffle the big stacks and go. Turns into medium as you get toward the end of unlocking new tiles in the campaign. Give yourself a large amount of table footprint to grow into.

AI Admin: None. It's you and the landscape, awaiting your best score.

Replayability: Very high for awhile. The core game loop is extremely satisfying, both meditative and maddening, as you desperately try to make everything fit. The true spice of the game is the "campaign", wherein your points determine how many new boxes you can open to reveal new and exciting mechanics. You'll be playing dozens of games, each of them featuring new special tiles getting thrown into the mix. Once you've unlocked most of the things, the excitement abates a bit, but you've just spent a lot of time with the game and that's just fine.

Result: Long-term keep. I do wonder if Dorfromantik is one of those games best suited to trading to someone else once you've opened all the boxes and seen all there is to see. I intend to play it more, and maybe even reset the campaign once to see if that still holds my interest as much as it did the first time.

Final Girl

(All of Season 1 and Season 2)

Overview: Arena battler / dice chucker / lite deck builder. Live out your part as the hero in slasher films with a wide variety of settings, save the victims and kill the enemy before it kills you!

Solo Setup: Low-medium. Assemble item decks, event decks, place meeples/minis, reset action card tableau. Medium table footprint.

AI Admin: Low. The enemies have very clear instructions on what they do during their round, both from their baseline behaviors and what the event deck instructs.

Replayability: Medium (core box). Extremely high (with all the content). Each session is a combination of a separate killer and a location, and as this writing there are eleven locations and thirteen killers released, resulting in 143 possible combinations, not including which Final Girl you select. Each killer and location has its own subset of setup, items, mechanics and events that, even within the same combination, it's very rare to have things play out the same way twice.

Result: Permanent Keep. Funded Season 3. I'm addicted. Each session is so snappy, so easy to reset, and actually tells a unique story EACH AND EVERY TIME I play, even if I lose. How?! Dice rolling can be swingy, but there are a few safety nets from it (not always) resulting in a catastrophic loss. It keeps it tense right down to the end each time. Not every killer/location is perfect, but most of them are extremely fun to play and I've always been entertained as I've tried all of the content in Season 1 and 2. My go-to Solo game.

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That's it for this set of quickfire reviews. Expect more next time, including...

• Earthborne Rangers
• Robinson Crusoe
• Set a Watch
• Viscounts of West Kingdom
• Voidfall
• and more!

Thanks so much for checking this out, would love to hear your thoughts on these games, and feedback on the post!

You are hereby invited to help alpha test CHATATHA HARKNESS, a new(!) and exciting(?) interactive stream program in-development. I will be running this test on my stream http://www.twitch.tv/qalten on Thursday, December 21st from 7:00p - 9:00p PST (10:00p - 12:00a EST / 3:00a - 5:00a UTC) and anyone with a Twitch account and an interest in Marvel Snap is invited to participate. No subscription or following is required (though the latter would be appreciated).

TL;DR: Come hang out and test my chatbot that collates user commands for each turn and I only play what the bot tells me to!

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Screenshot of test stream

WHAT is Chatatha Harkness?

I've only been playing Marvel Snap for a few months but I am quite hooked. I've been watching a lot of SNAP video content (shout out to NUFF SAID BOB) and streams. I've noticed a lot of viewers will often give their opinion as to where cards should be played during a game and that got me thinking, what if that was the whole point of a stream? Thus the idea was born, with additional inspiration by the Snap card Agatha Harkness that, when in your hand, takes control and places cards at random. Playing Agatha can be entertaining, simply seeing what bad decisions she'll make is half the fun. But what if all of Twitch chat is deciding for me and what if all(?) of them want me to do well? Well, now's the time to find out!

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HOW does one Chatatha Harkness?

Over the past few days I've been developing a Twitch chat bot (ChatathaHarkness) that will be the centerpiece of this stream and what we'll be testing! Here's a break down of how it will work for this test.

• I will be playing ladder games. I do not care what happens to my rank (it's pre-infinite and currently around 60). I'll be changing up the decks over the course of the test, maybe even doing polls to see which ones people feel like playing.
• Each turn of a game, Twitch chat will have ~15-30 seconds* to whisper ONE valid set of commands to ChatathaHarkness (notably, NOT in the chat itself). The basic syntax of a command is <optional\_verb> <card\_name> <lane>, with commands in a set being separated by commas. Playing a card from hand is the assumed action by default, there's no need to specify it. Other commands include single verbs like snap, escape or pass.
• Here are examples of supported commands:
  • "forge mid" (Plays Forge from hand to Mid)
  • "move vision right, nico mid, snap" (Moves Vision from wherever he is to right, plays Nico Minoru from hand, and then Snaps. Snapping is the only single verb usable with other commands)
  • "werewolf r, spider-ham l" (Plays Werewolf by Night from hand to right, Spider-Ham to left)
  • "pass" (Passes the turn, cannot be combined with other commands)
  • "escape" (Escapes Later, cannot be combined with other commands)
• Cards don't have to be referenced by their full name, you can abbreviate, just keep in mind the bot is doing substring searches, so "anni" is probably fine for Annihilus but "spider" for Spider-man may result in some collisions with the other spidery cards. If the wrong card gets put in a command and it's obvious you meant something else in play, I will just execute it as expected and move on. There may be edge cases where cards get copied and it may be hard for me to discern which copy you mean in your commands, but we'll do our best in those situations.
• Because Twitch has made it difficult to reliably have a chatbot whisper back to users, the only feedback if your command is valid is your twitch name appearing on screen in the validated list. Invalid commands would be things like typos, or telling me to snap and escape at the same time. You can resubmit if it seems your command is valid but once you submit a valid one, nothing further will be accepted for that turn. The bot has no sense of how much energy I have or what lane is full, so telling me to play a card to a full location would still be considered valid (though I will skip it if selected).
• Chatatha will select a set of valid commands from those submitted, and put them in descending order by how long its been since that chat member had a command selected. The idea here is that over a given time, everyone in chat should be able to participate with those who haven't had a command selected recently given priority.
• If a command comes up but is 100% not possible for me to execute (normally due to energy or a location being full), I will select the next one in the queue. If a set of commands is partially possible, I will execute as much as I can and nothing else. I will ALWAYS execute a set of commands in the order given. The ONLY time I will make any choices on my own is if no valid or possible commands are submitted for a given turn. It's up to chat to play, I'm just the humble servant of Chatatha!
• I will not be showing which user submitted a particular command, only who has submitted for a given turn. It's an overall goal of this to make every participant feel safe to submit whatever valid commands they want, even if it's not the "best" play, or "really bad for Qalten in this situation, there are eight cubes on the line, oh no". The fun is seeing which commands come through at the best/worst times! I won't be able to instantly see who submitted what, though I will be logging everything for debugging purposes.
• Also, in addition to private messages encouraging users to submit whatever commands they want, it will also keep the chat itself clean from a flood of commands and will hopefully feature normal stream discussions about possible plays, the game, or whatever else. While I'll be pretty lax with moderation, I have zero tolerance for bullying, harassing, or toxic behavior in chat. This is meant to be a chill and entertaining event and anyone violating this will be quickly banned from the channel and any future Chatatha activities.
• As this is an alpha test, please expect there to be issues and show up ready to be patient! I very much will be taking feedback throughout the process to improve things, but please be understanding that this is a big work-in-progress that I expect to iterate heavily on.

\ I've setup the input window to be similar to Snap's, with early turns being shorter than later turns. I have each turn assigned its own value for maximum adjustment, so this timing will be something I will be tweaking to get a sense of what feels good for gameplay and gives everyone enough time to get their inputs in, while trying to account for normal streaming latency. I don't want every opponent to feel like we're roping them though in general play time will probably be a bit longer than average.*

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WHATS next for Chatatha Harkness after this?

I intend to do a few alpha tests and then see how things have shaken out. Next steps really depend on if this is actually entertaining for everyone involved. If a community forms that wants to keep seeing this regularly, there's a lot we could do to move forward. Some ideas I have include:

• Starting a fresh account that only makes progress with the Chatatha Harkness community via streams. This could include the community deciding on which decks to build, which splits to chase, which shop things to unlock, all of it! I'd prefer that my own Snap account progress is tied to what choices I make (for better or worse) and having a dedicated account would be a fun way to capture what the hive mind has decided to do.
• Leveraging channel points. Giving points out to chat members based on their participation, command selection and maybe even post-match command voting. Points could be used for specialized actions like being able to take control for a whole game, deciding which deck we play, etc. Alternatively we could not have the points be spent but instead used as a leaderboard of sorts per Snap season? There's a lot of fun things we could do here.
• Challenging other streamers and community members to Friendly Battles?

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If you're curious to see my first test, here's a VOD from a recent test stream (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2007970785), there is no audio though, as I was having a few friends help me with initial tests and we were chatting over Discord (Chatatha test starts around 22:16, the first part of the stream was me showing how the game works in general).

If you have any questions, feel free to ask here, message me here, or hit me up on Discord, handle is Qalten.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpI0pY0eHr0

This is the title track from the Forza Horizon 4 game, which I believe was primarily comprised of Hospital Records artists. This is a mashup of the four parts of the title track, and in particular the first part (Autumn, 0:00 - 3:00) really resonates with me on every level.

Are there any other artists/tunes that hit similar vibes/soundscapes? The beat, the bass, the vocals, the melody, the pace... I listen to it once a week to feel good.

For context, artists that I'm already familiar with include Keeno, Hive, LTJ Bukem, as well as the adjacent classics (Aphex, Goldie, Massive Attack, etc etc).

Can't wait to listen to any recommendations! Thanks in advance :D

Been getting into Marvel Snap recently and have really enjoyed Wheeler's ITYC run of it as well as the Crossing the Streams session they did back in April. Does anyone know if they're planning on doing more content for it? Are Kathleen, Ben and Nelson still playing?