Today’s comic is based on a tweet from Room51, and since it was posted almost a year ago we’ve been thinking about how hard it is to balance games. Sure, you can play a lot of games but as soon as it is released in the world there will be somebody who approaches your game from such a different angle, that it might upset your carefully balanced game in such a way it requires some additional balance tweaks. Luckily, Root has had a balance update which made some small but great tweaks and made the Cultists a lot more fun to play for example. Still, among our friends, the Woodland Alliance do have a reputation that you need to keep them down because once they’ve hit a tipping point, you’ll have a hard time stopping them. On the other hand, when playing Root with new players, the person teaching the game is often playing the Woodland Alliance because they are the trickiest to understand, which also might explain why they are perceived as strong…?

Speaking of last-minute tweaks – there were none in our gaming plans this week, which is quite the feat. On Tuesday, we played Descent: Legends of the Dark which continues to be very good. We really like the characters and have crafted consistent voices for them all which is quite rare for us. While we’re thinking about picking up the expansion at a later point, we are quite shocked by the change of character art styles between act 1 and 2. We think the over-the-topness of the character art in act 1 is fantastic, while the art in act 2 looks quite vanilla in comparison. Before we’ll start with act 2, however, we’re first going to start a Middara campaign, which was very kindly sent to us by Succubus Publishing, and looking at the size of the box, will keep us occupied for a loooong time.

On Friday, we played the second chapter of Threads of Fate and while it still has the right difficulty level for us, it makes us feel smart but the game doesn’t give up its secrets too easily. We think it had a few less elegant puzzles than the first chapter. The first chapter had a great way of including a small ‘check’ moment when trying to decipher things, which prevented you from encoding the entire alphabet the wrong way for example. This one had two puzzles that required you to understand some subtle hints that you needed to add to the solution to solve it which felt a bit cheap. On the other hand, the story took quite an interesting turn, and we’re very curious how weird the last two chapters might become.

On Saturday we played another game of Stationfall which was great. It’s the kind of game that you play for the stories it generates like Tales of the Arabian Nights, or Betrayal at House on the Hill, even though it’s quite a bit more complex than both those games. It’s the sort of game that can be quite frustrating if you’re trying hard to win but if you go with the flow and think on your feet there is always something funny to do that will advance your plans a little bit or mess with other players in the most unsuspecting ways. In our game we had a security bot going murder crazy that shot another character, who hadn’t been moved all game, on a whim, which turned out to completely destroy the plan of another player who wanted to do a last-turn reveal! We were also pleasantly surprised our game only took two hours, so it might start fitting in on a weekday game night if we get a little quicker at it.

This week, we’re doing a co-op night featuring Unmatched: Tales to Amaze and some Quirky Circuits but have no fixed plans besides that, we do have some fun games coming in, so we might play some of those.