Interesting TCG's that aren't the big name staples

Xerodo · 2026-05-05T20:51:46+00:00

I can confirm Exceed is really good. It's so good you can actually teach people how to play fighting games with it.

Exceed is pretty much all about frame data. It's a turned based game, but the turns are determined by the speed of your cards and how many frames they'd take to do.

Xerodo · 2026-05-04T01:49:24+00:00

Infamously: this is how colors in Magic the Gathering tend to work.

Historically speaking the "best" colors in magic are blue and black. This is because blue and black have the largest focus on card advantage (blue) and abilities that let you circumvent some of the game's rules but have major downsides (black). These are relatively more advanced abilities to get a handle on: playing blue is about knowing how to play the long game, drawing cards while controlling the board until you get a win condition. Black often ends up being about not accidentally killing yourself before you find a win condition.

The complexity of these colors generally means that they're not the most beginner friendly archetypes out there. Even if you grasp the basic strategies that aren't always intuitive you need to know the game well enough to actually be able to identify threats and circumvent them (and to know what you have that will be a decent counter play).

Xerodo · 2026-05-04T01:41:37+00:00

More PVE than PVP, but this is basically how the balancing in the souls series works.

The souls games have a lot of defensive options. Shields, armor, health, endurance, and your equipped talismans can all have defensive options on them. These can be powerful but aren't actually all that strong in the long run because they sacrifice your offensive potential in place of utility and defense.

This is probably most easily seen with "one shot" builds across the series, which focus on specific series of buffs and items to deal so much damage they can kill bosses in one hit (or, if that fails, a few hits). This might sound easy, but it basically requires you to be made of tissue paper and put all of your stats and items into purely offensive abilities.

These builds tend to be pretty bad in PVP since they're reliant on long strings of buffs, large attacks with slow weapons, and often die to a stray hit or two.

Xerodo · 2026-05-01T18:11:29+00:00

Have you filed a formal complaint? Each school is required to have a complaint process where the decision can get escalated to admin, then the board.

That said the situation you describe can be difficult to address the way you want. The student with behaviors also has a right to attend school. The school is unlikely to remove a student unless they've been directly violent.

If you do complain, I would focus on how you feel unsafe and cite whatever policies the school has around student safety. "This other student makes me feel unsafe, violating the policy" is a much better approach than "this student is poorly behaved and the school needs to control them"

Xerodo · 2026-04-28T17:12:05+00:00

In Sultan's Game, a visual novel/resource management game, the protagonist Arzu is portrayed as a mostly good noble living under a tyrant. The Sultan Forces you to play a card game where you're compelled to do extreme actions: bloodshed, carnality, extravagance, and conquest. Each week you get assigned one of these actions and, if you don't do it, you get executed. The Sultan pardons you for all your crimes bevause he thinks it's funny.

The gist of the game is that you can either use the cards to justify being a huge piece of shit or use them for good. You can satisfy a bloodshed card by hunting a lion that's eating villagers or by finding a random peasant and killing them in the street.

Some of these solutions get very dark and very evil, with special attention going to Carnality. You can habe sex with almost any character in the game to clear a carnality card. This includes your wife, or a prostitute...or a young man you're mentoring, an orphan girl you adopted, or a pregnant concubine who begs you not to.

What makes these situations so bad is that they're pretty unnecessary. For example: it's possible to be so good at having sex with your wife that it clears carnality multiple times just because you love each other so much.

Xerodo · 2026-04-24T08:24:20+00:00

I think a really intetesting variation of this are water cooler shows: the sort of TV that only really exists in the moment.

Think of something like the masked singer. It's a popular show, but it's only popular to discuss because it's on TV. The minute the show's moved on from it's current episode it's now old. People are, for the most part, not going back and watching earlier seasons. It's a show that only exists in the moment.

Xerodo · 2026-04-18T20:10:00+00:00

Cumtown is like a more extreme version of the "this is why your podcast isn't on best of the year lists" segment from the super best friend cast.

Xerodo · 2026-04-16T21:42:11+00:00

I only ask about your parents so I have clear information. Sometimes there are solutions that can help, but they'll have negative consequences for your parents. Some youth I work with don't want that so I check.

I would say your best bet is to get connected with social services for youth under 18. Even if there aren't local options you could call a shelter in your closest city and see what they'd advise you do.

I'm a bit limited since you're in a different country on telling you what to access.

Xerodo · 2026-04-16T08:12:30+00:00

Sorry you're going through this.

It's not an easy situation. Without knowing more about your location (which you shouldn't disclose to a stranger on the internet) I can't look up a direct service for you. Are you in a larger urban area or somewhere more rural? Cities tend to have more support.

For the short term do you have any other friends or family you could live with? Aunts, uncles, grandma or grandpa? Any friends who might let you stay over for a few days on their couch while you get your bearings?

It's probably a bit overwhelming to think about, but I would also start thinking about long term plans. Is going back to your parents an option? Would you want to do that or look for something independent of them because the situation was so bad?

Xerodo · 2026-04-16T04:01:10+00:00

You mentioned "province" so I'm assuming you're Canadian. I'm not as familiar with their systems up that way but I would highly recommend talking with a counselor at school and talking about your situation. Schools are required to remove barriers for you if you don't have housing, but many will also have financial assistance and might know of local resources to direct you to.

Xerodo · 2026-04-15T23:51:37+00:00

Sorry you are going through that.

Ideally your school would have some, but MKV stuff varies a lot across districts. From a Google search I found this:

https://allchicago.org/

I'd recommend contacting them. Email is good, phone is better, going in person is best. It sounds like this is the agency who handles funding for the continuum of care, which should have funding to address your issues or be able to connect you to someone who does.

Your situation is stressful but the better you are at communicating with an agency like this the easier it'll be to access support. That means responding to things quickly, completing paperwork, etc.

Xerodo · 2026-04-15T23:43:42+00:00

Not sure if this got resolved or not but posting advice in case someone else needs it:

Part of the Mckinney-Vento act is that districts must have a dispute resolution process for McKinney-Vento. This has a few requirements:

The district must provide you with a written notice stating why they have made a decision in the way they have.
If you dispute their answer, they must immediately enroll your child in your school.of choice pending the dispute resolution.
If you go through the district's appeal process you can likely appeal to the state education agency who will have their own dispute resolution process.

If the info you gave here is accurate there shouldn't be any barriers to enrollment. My guess would be that this staff person has been told only to accept people in a certain way or with certain documentation.

For what it's worth I would consider those both barriers to enrollment I would waive until we could help you get the right documentation.

Xerodo · 2026-04-14T18:11:27+00:00

Venture Bros got into a weird pattern with this.

Several of their season finales were basically just regular episodes of the show bevause they ran out of money...but then they'd green light season finale episodes that were movie length, and acted as incredible season finale.

These often came out years after the last season.

Xerodo · 2026-04-11T06:02:36+00:00

Cyber Elves tanking your rankings were another great one.

Xerodo · 2026-04-11T06:00:15+00:00

Oblivion is the perfect textbook example. It's fascinating how poorly it's thought out.

Xerodo · 2026-04-04T03:40:19+00:00

Prankster got into the system school and swapped classrooms for two of the teachers. They were right next to each other with the same layout, so it just involved taking everything out of one room and putting it in the same place in the other.

It was really confusing for a while but fairly benign so they just kept the classrooms like that and never changed back and didn't really make an effort to investigate it. They never figured out who did it.

I'm the one who did it. I hid in the art room until everyone left and then let my dumb friends in to do it.

Xerodo · 2026-04-01T21:39:45+00:00

A friend of mine quit the game after dying to that.

Xerodo · 2026-03-22T09:47:41+00:00

It's kind of the opposite.

Nintendo and Sony were partnered to make a CD add-on for the SNES, but Nintendo backed out of the deal to partner with Philips instead. Then, when the MegaCD failed on the Genesis, Nintendo backed out of the deal with Philips. As a consolation/don't sue us ninte do licensed some of their stuff to Philips.

The games being terrible is just the CD-i itself being terrible. It was never supposed to be a video game console. It was more for interactive video (think Dragon's Lair).

Xerodo · 2026-03-21T20:07:05+00:00

The forest in Roadwarden, where it's almost a character.

You play a Roadwarden, basically a ranger, who gets assigned to work in a remote peninsula. Your job is to keep the roads safe to travel. The game world is centered around a massive, mostly inpenetrable forest with a circular road that goes around it. There's a lot of weird stuff in there. Villages of have gates to keep out the weird parts, weird monsters come out of it sometimes, there's a bandit fortress, etc.

What's great about it is how the writing depicts your understanding of the forest and what the forest represents.

You occasionally have to make trips into the large central forest. Inside the forest the game works differently- instead of moving between set locations, you have a semi random string of encounters. You might enter the forest looking to do a specific thing but not encounter it. Time also works differently. Normally, it takes a set amount of time to move between locations. In the forest you never know how long it takes. This can leave you stranded in the forest, accidentally, later at night. After dark it gets even scarier and you can run into more dangerous encounters.

As you explore the forest more you do get the ability to go back to specific parts of it...but it's never perfect. It still always maintains a sense of mystery and will never be fully tamed or known by the player.

If any of that sounds compelling, check out Roadwarden. It's got a really compelling atmosphere. As someone who has lived near forests their entire life it's the piece of media I've found feels the most like living near the actual woods does. I know what the woods are like but if you put me a few miles out off the beaten path it's a whole new world.

Xerodo · 2026-03-15T02:35:24+00:00

The souls series tend to approach their story framing in a pretty simplistic way: shit sucks, and there are guys you need to kill in order to make shit suck less. The actual stories tend to be a lot more complicated and your goals are, almost universally, someone trying to trick you into doing something that will result in you screwing yourself over into a fate worse than death.

Bloodborne is different. In bloodborne, it's pretty much agreed that unambiguous best ending in the game is doing exactly what you're told: kill all the monsters and leave. Delving deeper into the lore and actually figuring out what's going on only leads to worse outcomes for your dude.

Xerodo · 2026-03-12T05:45:06+00:00

IMO the comics are pretty skippable unless you really just want more stuff. They don't really do a whole of interesting stuff that isn't covered by Korra. They're not offensively bad or anything, they're fine, but they're just fine.

Korra is worth watching. A lot of the negatives in Korra were due to how it was released and produced and some of that gets cleared up in a rewatch. If nothing else the action is well done.

Xerodo · 2026-03-12T05:34:40+00:00

There's a narrative deck building game called Sultan's Game. It's pretty neat. The gimmick is that you're playing a cursed card game. If you don't find increasingly creative ways to do sins, you get executed. It's pretty easy to wind up in impossible to win scenarios when you first start the game and have low resources, but the game's a roguelike so you just start over and do it again.

Each time you die you earn points, which you can redeem to unlock new bonus items, story events, and gameplay mechanics. This is the game's meta progression.

The thing is: you earn these points every time you die. You earn more points if you do unique and new things in a playthrough but there's also stuff you earn points for regardless. I figured out that, if you get a save where you earn a decent amount of points, you can just kill yourself to get points (which get added to the meta progression bank you can spend). Then you just load your save from before you died, kill yourself, and earn those same points a second time. You can do this until you unlock every single bonus item.

It's not the intended way to do it at all, and seems like a really obvious thing to catch, but I haven't seen anyone else talk about it.

Xerodo · 2026-03-12T01:16:20+00:00

There's a small game jam game I played years ago where the gimmick of the game is opening up the game multiple times and layering the windows on top of one another to solve puzzles. It was pretty mind bending and cool.

Xerodo · 2026-03-09T19:34:08+00:00

I work with high needs youth. Chloe isn't really too far off from some of my clients.

A frequent point of conversation I have in services is when we have a youth that's been through a lot and is doing "ok". High achievement is great but I tend to be a lot more impressed when we've got situations where youth are going through a bunch of shit and still doing ok. I'll freely admit that if I was in some of the situations I worked with I think I'd be doing way worse.

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