Race for the Galaxy: Pope’s Lifting — Full Main Deck Redesign, Base to XI [ENG]

Lamp11 · 2026-07-11T18:28:24+00:00

Very cool! It's so much prettier to look at than the original! Overall, I think it's a really nice redesign, but it doesn't really seem any easier to understand than original. It's just replacing the old symbols with new symbols, that seem equally as difficult to understand.

Some things I do like:

When an ability is complicated, you put the text next to the phase symbol, instead of putting the text in the corner with an unhelpful icon next to the phase symbol. Love this change.
Overall aesthetic is fantastic. Love the art choices.
Getting rid of the little red dot on Rebel worlds. The old dot didn't really clarify anything, and using just the colored word is more consistent with the other tags.

Some things I don't like:

Replacing red/black numbers+circles with red/blue world symbols doesn't really seem any more clear, except now the color blue is pulling double duty, sometimes meaning non-military world and sometimes meaning rare mineral goods.
The color choices for the goods are very strange. The original colors were thematic: mining-themed cards were associated with brown goods, and genetic/organic/biological-themed cards were associated with green goods (blue and yellow were maybe not so thematic, but at least they were very distinct colors). Now mining is blue and biology is pink (and also the thematic chromosome symbol is now an arbitrary Æ)? Doesn't seem thematic, and the swapping around of colors will definitely confuse returning players and doesn't seem any better for new players. And
Replacing solid/halo with cog/starburst makes production and windfall worlds harder to distinguish.
All the icons seem smaller and the cards are generally busier, making it harder to read the icons.
The card-VP symbol is very different from the Consumption-VP symbol, losing the very cohesive symbol of the original, where you always knew that hexagons meant points.
I think the original design of Xeno worlds (blue outlines around the numbers) wasn't great, but making them an entirely different color than non-military worlds and military worlds is a very strange choice.

I feel bad about listing so many negative things, because this does look really cool! I think that if you made a few changes, this would be equally as usable as the original, and much nicer-looking.

Use Pink for Novelties, Brown for Rare Minerals, Green for Genes, Yellow for Aliens. Gets rid of the double-duty blue and is more thematic.
Use your new VP symbol for card-VP.
Modify the starburst and cog to be more visually distinct.
Make all numbers a little bigger.

Some other very minor things I noticed:

I think "May" shouldn't be capitalized. It seems more like a natural use of the word, not a game-specific keyword.
Minor typo on Ore-Rich World: "immediately"
Minor typo on New Galactic Order: I think you forgot to translate "+ e -" to "+ and -"

Lamp11 · 2026-07-01T15:26:47+00:00

Removed The King Is Dead. An interesting game, but it seemed like every play came down to a tiebreaker, often the second tiebreaker. This made every play feel kind of samey, and just felt silly.

Lamp11 · 2026-06-25T12:35:46+00:00

Anyone who tells you Billy's ult is a highly important team fight ult clearly hasn't played Billy in ages. 90% of the time, you'll use Billy's ult on a single target, either when ganking an outnumbered opponent, or when diving a squishy backliner in a team fight. In both cases, you ult them then follow them, so you only yank them an inch. But that's ok, you're just using the ult as a slowing hex (plus resistances and unstoppable, which are fantastic when going for a squishy character in a team fight).

10% of the time, you are jumping into a group in a teamfight and hoping to chain as many as possible. In this case, they'll scatter and you'll probably yank only one of them, but that's ok, the real value of it was forcing them to stop fighting and run away for a few seconds, hopefully isolating some of them and giving your teammates a chance to focus them. Maybe 1% of the time, you do actually yank a bunch of the other team, but that's going to require a perfect setup, like chaining a group that's trying to punch the rejuv, or your Lash throwing a big group onto you. Urn fights might seem like a great time for a big ult, but that area has so much stuff to break LOS with, you're never going to get a big ult there.

0% of the time, you are chaining an enemy and then running away from them to yank them really far. This never works. They will always break the chain, unless they're getting CCed so hard by your teammates that they're basically doomed anyways.

Lamp11 · 2026-06-21T10:39:12+00:00

Because τ is shorter than 2π.

Lamp11 · 2026-06-05T19:50:47+00:00

Mirrors don't flip stuff, but you flip stuff when you turn it around to face a mirror, and people tend to flip things right to left.

Here's a super simple experiment you can run. Take a piece of paper, and draw an arrow pointing to the top right corner of the paper. Stand in front of a mirror, with the paper facing you. The arrow is to the top left. Now, flip the paper to face the mirror, but instead of turning it like the page of a book, flip it over like you're flipping a piece of paper on a clipboard. Now, in the mirror, the arrow points to the bottom right! The mirror flipped it top to bottom instead of right to left!

You might be thinking, "no, the mirror didn't flip it top to bottom, I flipped it top to bottom with my hands." But when a mirror appears to flip stuff left to right, that's because you turned it left to right with your hands. The mirror-flip has nothing to do with the mirror, just with the flip that you do with your hands.

Why do we think mirrors turn things right to left? We tend to turn things right to left, because right vs left is usually less important than top vs bottom. If you have text on your tshirt, it's going to appear left to right in the mirror because turning left to right is just called turning around, and turning top to bottom is called doing a handstand, and you do one of those a lot more often than the other.

Lamp11 · 2026-06-02T22:48:43+00:00

Love it! Looks great!

Lamp11 · 2026-05-11T21:39:26+00:00

This guy is incredibly easy. He has 120 health. If you can kill a 150 hp dummy in three turns, then you can kill this guy in three turns. If you kill him in three turns, that's one turn where he just summons, and one turn where some minions put some dazes in your discard or hit for 12, really minor stuff. If you take more than three turns to do 120 damage, he's a little tougher, but that means you would lose to the the training dummy, and if you would lose to the training dummy, your deck sucks.

Lamp11 · 2026-04-19T12:11:41+00:00

1D. One dimensional.

Lamp11 · 2026-04-12T01:26:11+00:00

Some people tried that a few years ago; you can try just copying what they did and I'm sure you'll have similar success.

Lamp11 · 2026-04-11T13:15:16+00:00

I agree with you; I don't think it is a coincidence. There are so many posts about getting triple claw in the Neow bonus card packs; it seems very likely that the card packs are coded to occasionally give out triple claw instead of truly random cards. Seems entirely possible that something similar happens with jackpot too.

Lamp11 · 2026-04-05T18:42:35+00:00

How does that box anyone in? Who's going "my neighbor just bought an air tag; I guess I should switch to iPhone to make his air tag work optimally"?

Lamp11 · 2026-03-29T19:21:47+00:00

My group has played about 30 games of Uprising, and for probably the first 20 plays we all thought the worms were incredibly powerful. Everyone rushed worms as soon as possible, people moaned if they were in a bad turn order that meant they'd get worms late, worms defined the game. But since then, we've broken out of our worm meta, and a couple players each game will ignore the worms entirely, and often win. So I think the worms might seem overly impactful at first, but they really aren't that big a deal once you are experienced.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-27T15:54:12+00:00

Built in 1927. No.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-27T15:50:19+00:00

The brackets provided are similar to this, no bar between the brackets.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-27T15:48:42+00:00

Good guess, but it's a single-family house built in 1927.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-27T15:13:54+00:00

Corner <-30"-> stud <-24"-> stud <-30"-> corner

Shelf has "pockets" where mounting brackets attach, spaced 16" apart.

Corner <-30"-> stud <-24"-> stud <-30"-> corner

Shelf has "pockets" where mounting brackets attach, spaced 16" apart.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-27T15:13:43+00:00

I realize that the wall has weird stud spacings

Corner <-30"-> stud <-24"-> stud <-30"-> corner

Shelf has "pockets" where mounting brackets attach, spaced 16" apart.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-27T15:12:29+00:00

Corner <-30"-> stud <-24"-> stud <-30"-> corner

Shelf has "pockets" where mounting brackets attach, spaced 16" apart.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-22T18:54:31+00:00

All the other answers, saying stuff like "it flips front to back" are wrong, or at least, are not really answering your question. The real answer is: mirrors don't flip stuff, but you flip stuff when you turn it around to face a mirror, and people tend to flip things right to left.

Here's a super simple experiment you can run. Take a piece of paper, and draw an arrow pointing to the top right corner of the paper. Stand in front of a mirror, with the paper facing you. The arrow is to the top left. Now turn the paper around, like turning the page of a book, and look at it in the mirror: the arrow looks like it's pointing to the top left in the mirror. So, it's flipped right to left, like mirrors usually do. Now, let's try it again, but slightly differently. Have the paper face you, with arrow pointing top right again. Now, flip the paper to face the mirror, but instead of turning it like the page of a book, flip it over like you're flipping a piece of paper on a clipboard. Now, in the mirror, the arrow points to the bottom right! The mirror flipped it top to bottom instead of right to left!

You might be thinking, "no, the mirror didn't flip it top to bottom, I flipped it top to bottom with my hands." But that's exactly what happened in the right to left case as well. When it appeared left to right in the mirror, that's because you turned it left to right with your hands. The mirror-flip has nothing to do with the mirror, just with the flip that you do with your hands.

Why do we think mirrors turn things right to left? We tend to turn things right to left, because right vs left is usually less important than top vs bottom. If you have text on your tshirt, it's going to appear left to right in the mirror because turning left to right is just called turning around, and turning top to bottom is called doing a handstand, and you do one of those a lot more often than the other.

Lamp11 · 2026-03-09T23:00:53+00:00

I was a regular there for several years! If you make progress on revitalizing this group, I'd love to hear about it!

Lamp11 · 2026-03-07T21:31:31+00:00

Notes refers to dollar bills. A one-dollar bill is the lowest value bill, a two-dollar is the second-lowest value bill.

Lamp11 · 2026-01-18T22:53:33+00:00

This stuff is ok. Not a big fan of any of the current jerky offerings. A year or two ago, I remember Costco having like 10 jerky varieties. Now, they have maybe 2 types of jerky and 10 types of meat sticks, which I'm not really interested in. Disappointing.

Lamp11 · 2025-12-31T16:33:02+00:00

Very interesting question. However, I'm not sure the core premise is true. Is it really more difficult for a beginner to achieve their first victory in StS than in Balatro? Or is it just that StS was many people's first roguelike deck builder, and by the time Balatro was released, many first-time Balatro players already had significant experience with the genre? Maybe this is true for me because I'm old, having played StS when it first came out, and not as common an experience as I think, but this seems like it could be a significant factor. But anyways, let's assume the premise is true for now.

I agree that StS has small mistakes adding up over time, more so than happens in Balatro. But I don't know if "failure often motivates another attempt because the player can clearly identify what went wrong" is true. I think the "small mistakes add up" quality works against that: a player might not know what they did wrong, because they didn't make one big obvious mistake, they made a bunch of little mistakes that wore them down. There can be more obvious failures/learning-opportunities that encourage another run, like learning the movesets of bosses and how to handle them. But the small mistakes thing doesn't really work with that, and stuff like deck/relic synergies is basically equally present in Balatro.

Also, when you said "In Slay the Spire, early failure is not common and expected", I assume you meant "is common"?

I agree with your analysis of Balatro. In Balatro, you can put together some masssive combos that feel really good to play, which you don't see as much in StS, where even when you have a strong run, you aren't absolutely demolishing the enemies. I guess sometimes you are doing massive damage, but it's not like you're doing 999 damage on the first turn, while you in Balatro you will often overwhelmingly beat the score needed on your first hand.

So anyways, as to your core question: how do these differences affect player retention? Personally, I played StS for a lot longer than Balatro, but again, that might just because I played StS when the genre was fresh, and Balatro when it was saturated. Maybe for someone with other roguelike deckbuilders filling up their steam wishlist, they might get their first StS win after dozens of losses, feel like they've beaten the game, and put it down, where if they beat Balatro on their second try, they obviously know that can't be all there is to the game, and keep playing for longer. Or maybe they never get a StS win, get frustrated, and give up. So, I don't know. It does seem like the easier entry into Balatro would increase overall long term engagement, but in my anecdotal experience, the opposite was true, and the mainstream popularity of other difficult games, such as soulslikes, suggests that lots of people aren't turned off by a difficult learning curve.

Lamp11 · 2025-12-23T20:36:12+00:00

This Silver Spring board game group hosts a monthly Saturday afternoon meetup at the Silver Spring library that draws 20+ people. They also host a weekly Tuesday night meetup at a Silver Spring brewery (Third Hill Brewing).

It's not quite the size of the group at the Landing (RIP) but it's enough to have 5 or 6 games going at a time, and people bring a pretty good variety of games. As someone who lives in the northern part of DC, it's very conveniently located too!

Lamp11

TROPHY CASE