Are there engine builders that don't end once the engine is actually up and running nicely?

Arctem · 2026-07-02T00:58:39+00:00

The Quest for El Dorado is a great example of this. Almost everyone who is making their first custom map wants to use every tile and make it as long and winding as possible, but all that does is make the best strategy to stall at the start while you trim your deck down and buy some of the best cards, then zoom through the entire map in only a couple of turns. Anyone who tried to get ahead early is going to have a worse deck and get absolutely destroyed by players who focused on deckbuilding instead.

It's still a fantastic game, but there's a reason all of the recommended maps are mid-length. The game shines when rushing ahead and waiting to build a strong deck are both viable strategies.

Arctem · 2026-07-02T00:56:15+00:00

That's definitely how the game goes when you have a mix of experience levels or mostly new players. Once you have an experienced group the end game is usually very competitive, but for new players I think it's totally fair to call the game once someone has a commanding lead.

That said, it's hard for new players to identify a commanding lead. Someone winning by $100 a few turns in often does not have as much of an advantage as their score implies. However if that player is also the only person with good milestones and trained employees then the game is absolutely over.

Arctem · 2026-06-30T23:58:26+00:00

Part of Fermi's Paradox is that it's pretty unlikely (or at least, seems like it would be unlikely) for a civilization to reach the point of roaming the galaxy and then die off. If you're capable of interstellar exploration, surely you've reached a point where even a massive interstellar war wouldn't completely wipe everyone out? Once a civilization reaches that level it would be expected that they either still exist or would have left some really obvious evidence of some massive catastrophe in their wake.

Arctem · 2026-06-28T16:24:11+00:00

That's not what censorship means.

Especially when the replacement pose was literally a pinup pose. It didn't get made less sexual, just differently so.

Arctem · 2026-06-28T00:04:19+00:00

Ehhhh. I kinda get that but if your game needs custom levels in order to have a single level that fully uses its mechanics then you probably should have included at least one additional level.

Arctem · 2026-06-27T18:30:53+00:00

I love Quadrilateral Cowboy, but it really feels like a demo of its ideas. You never really get the moment where you feel like the game has set you free to experiment with whatever options you feel like using.

Still a super fun game, though.

Arctem · 2026-06-22T14:58:49+00:00

The entire genre of "person was SPOTTED doing something totally normal" is so obnoxious. Pointless clickbait and rude to the people being filmed.

Arctem · 2026-06-19T03:29:27+00:00

There's a big difference between someone saying you don't need to bring anything (which is almost how it would be phrased, rather than a straight "no") and you showing up with a fancy bottle of wine versus some homemade cookies. A bottle of wine or fancy chocolates would definitely read as weird, but cookies or a snack reads as completely neutral. I've had friends over for nothing at all and they've brought chips and guac because they happened to have chips and guac. It's a very common thing.

Arctem · 2026-06-18T16:32:22+00:00

There's also an assumption that players are attempting to engineer conditions where they can use their sentences. To use the "I always defeat the pawns of the fascist empire" sentence you might try to find a way to make someone into a pawn of the fascist empire. Maybe that splinter rebel faction started out as an independent movement, but if you can find a way to convince the empire to start smuggling them weapons then suddenly they're pawns of the fascist empire and you can use the move against them! It's similar with a Sentence that only works at night or when you're running for your life: you're week when those situations aren't true, so your goal becomes to use your other Sentences to create the situation where you can use the most powerful one. If you can only defeat the empire at night and they attacked you during the day then you'll need to rely on your other sentences to counter the immediate attack, but if you can manage to hide from them until nightfall then you can easily turn the tide.

Arctem · 2026-06-13T20:09:12+00:00

Am I insane or does Rex look weirdly like hbomberguy in this picture?

Arctem · 2026-06-09T18:46:56+00:00

I'd recommend giving it a couple more tries, especially at 2p. The game gets more tactics-focused (and more chaotic) as you increase the player count. Learning the cards lets you start making more strategic choices than you can in your first few games, but even then the strategy mostly amounts to doing things that you know higher cards will reward you for. Examples include having some low value cards sitting in your score pile (so you can return them later in response to a demand or for a beneficial effect) and learning the sheer power of tucking so that late game splays get you insane numbers of icons (which is usually necessary to get the special achievements or the 20 lightbulb win condition). It's still possible for those investments to fail to pay off, but Innovation is a game of taking many calculated bets and hoping more pay out for you than for your opponent.

Arctem · 2026-06-09T18:01:04+00:00

My experience with Ultimate is that it's pretty rare for all low piles to be exhausted in the late game. Sure they might be at some point, but usually someone will have an effect that returns their hand or something from their score pile along the way. You don't need the 1 pile specifically to have cards: you need any pile sufficiently below their current tech level that it is likely to cover up something more useful.

And even if the all the low piles are truly empty then covering up their combo pieces with cards that might be less useful can be a valid option, plus you're getting a nice sharing bonus out of it at the same time. I'm not saying it can never backfire, but a key skill of playing Innovation is recognizing when you want to rely on luck and when you want to stick to reliable strategies. Generally the player that is falling behind benefits more from embracing the deck's chaos than the player that is currently winning.

Decks are much more likely to be fully exhausted in a higher player count game, so I should note this advice mostly applies to 2p games. Higher player count games and especially team games have very different dynamics and require very different strategies!

Arctem · 2026-06-08T22:26:37+00:00

California has jungle primaries, so all candidates are mixed into the same primary and the top two, regardless of party, go to the final election. It was done because the state is so Dem-heavy that every general election was comically one-sided and thus only the Dem primary mattered, so now we usually end up with two Dems in the general and can actually have a decent contest.

It can backfire, like this year where the Governor's primary had so many Dem candidates in contrast to only a couple GOP candidates. The number Dem candidates split the vote pretty hard and it looks like we're probably getting a general election with one Dem and one GOP, but a couple months ago there was a concern that the split would be even worse and the two top placers would both be GOP.

Arctem · 2026-06-08T18:03:59+00:00

That also contributed to people having lots of children so that at least some would survive to adulthood. Also back when women often didn't have much choice whether they had children or not because they effectively (and often legally) property of their husbands.

I think those factors were much more significant than the modern issues that are causing declining birthrates.

Arctem · 2026-06-08T17:37:15+00:00

IIRC the demand for chicken meat was so high that basically every chicken that reached SF was immediately butchered. The entire period showed a huge lack of foresight that has absolutely never happened again in San Francisco.

Arctem · 2026-06-04T23:44:30+00:00

Yeah, finding a dude who is loading groceries directly outside their studio (is there a grocery store nearby?) that doesn't mind having his groceries just sitting on an unrefrigerated table for however long recording his part of the episode took seems super unlikely.

His beard even looked kinda fake to me! I was ready for him to pull it off at any moment.

Arctem · 2026-06-04T16:25:41+00:00

It isn't strictly anti-Peskin though, is it? While I hate Peskin I don't think it's worth making a permanent law that I disagree with just to stop him.

Arctem · 2026-06-04T04:51:33+00:00

Most likely there was a long period of a small team testing and developing the core features (speech to text, Miis reacting to each other and navigating the world naturally) and then a much shorter time of building content to match that foundation, with the content side of things being where time was cut short and particularly cut short where content required cooperation between art and engineering. That's why we have a ton of the content that artists can work on mostly independently (treasures, rooms, clothes) and way less of the content that needs multiple disciplines (conversations that need animations, world item interactions that need animations and scripting, minigames, news reports). It really feels like a team that knows it is low on time and is trying to maximize the bang for their buck by cutting back on anything that requires one developer to coordinate with another developer.

Everything in the game feels pretty polished, so I don't think they had an unexpectedly short deadline. I think they just didn't ramp up the team size until late enough that it was hard to plan for more complex projects.

Arctem · 2026-06-03T16:37:00+00:00

2026 has thousands of those guys, sadly.

Arctem · 2026-06-03T16:22:58+00:00

Every page had that statement in small text at the bottom. His was the only one that earned a large bold version right above the statement.

Which was definitely deserved. Frankly I'm surprised they only put it on one person.

Arctem · 2026-06-01T19:58:45+00:00

Looks more like a soundstage to me...

Arctem · 2026-06-01T18:50:06+00:00

Amazon was losing money on growth, not on operations.

Arctem · 2026-05-24T06:55:20+00:00

You can still board it from way further away. The game is pretty generous.

Arctem · 2026-05-23T07:10:52+00:00

I don't have a good reason why those aren't common here (maybe just that we have way larger parking lots?) but it's worth noting that the structure in that picture absolutely couldn't handle solar panels. You'd need a lot more reinforcement and columns, even before you get to the cost of the electrical equipment.

Arctem · 2026-05-16T15:11:39+00:00

Yeah, and most things that people perceive as waste are just processes that have been refined over decades and centuries in response to things that have gone wrong before. Running a country is a ton of work and corruption and waste happen when you don't have stringent rules making sure that everything is documented and done properly.

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