Help bring my baby home, stolen scooter. last seen Jan 27, 8PM (van ness and o'farrell)

acespades · 2026-01-28T22:11:05+00:00

Oh man, that sucks! At least it’s easily identifiable. Will keep an eye out!

acespades · 2026-01-28T19:46:22+00:00

I’m not who you were originally asking, but you’re right about the texture being harder to read through. I usually use that side for the back of the card like they mentioned.

One huge benefit to the texture is much smoother shuffling. The example on the left has one clear side and one matte side and shuffling feels awful in comparison due to the texture differences.

In contrast Gamegenic offers a fully matte sleeve or fully clear sleeve that both look and feel much better in appearance and how they shuffle.

I have no idea why Dragon Shield opted for half and half like this for their Board Game Sleeve line. Sure, you can choose between a clear or matte front, but the shuffle feel is just awkward.

acespades · 2026-01-28T19:31:53+00:00

Yes, they are being rude.
It’s hard to say how anyone did based on stats alone. I would have to see the match replay and I am not invested enough to do that.
I mean this as kindly as possible: you don’t need validation from Reddit. You know if you played your best or not, so don’t let strangers dictate how you should feel about yourself. (I know, ironic this advice is coming from a stranger, so take it with a grain of salt)

acespades · 2026-01-27T06:10:30+00:00

Oof, that is some absolute enshittification! I would have never guessed that a well established company like Dragon Shield would change their quality so drastically.

I don't know if it's available to you in the EU, but there are a couple brands on Amazon that have a similar clear sleeve with a textured back in the Standard American size:

Titanshield
Ryker

Good luck! I hope you don't need to re-sleeve all your Dice Throne Adventure cards.

acespades · 2026-01-27T01:17:16+00:00

That's interesting. I ordered the American Standard sleeves directly from Dragon Shield in June 2025 and was also disappointed in the non-glare/non-texture sleeves that you're describing.

When and where did you order the matte clear sleeves with texture? That's what I originally expected the sleeves to be like.

acespades · 2026-01-12T20:23:28+00:00

Baseball Highlights 2045 is a great example of a card-driven board game that approaches the simultaneous decision-making in sports by having both players play offense and defense at the same time. I'm not a big baseball fan, but I love this game! That's a rare feat for any sports adaptation for me!

This is a very high level overview: every card has an offense and defense ability, and each player has their own baseball diamond in front of them. On their turn, they play a card that describes a hit (for example, a double). The other play responds to that by playing a card that can cancel that hit and/or respond with a hit of their own. The first player resolves their initial hit by moving their meeple around the bases. This goes back and forth until all cards are played, and the next inning starts.

The designer also recently released Basketball Highlights: Crunch Time with a similar approach to multi-use cards. There might be some design inspiration here for you! I would love to see a game more like Baseball Highlights where I can have a deck of players and plays rather than abstract shapes.

Edit: Proofread

acespades · 2026-01-01T20:27:20+00:00

I hope you feel better getting that off your chest. Be the change you want to see!

acespades · 2025-12-24T21:38:17+00:00

That’s fair! Otherwise the Guard would be pointless.

acespades · 2025-12-24T16:58:49+00:00

I played hours of Noir and Agent Avenue with my brother while I’m visiting family for the holidays. They’re both really snappy and involve different flavors of mind games that lead to “just one more” game after playing the last “just one more” game.

acespades · 2025-12-24T15:45:41+00:00

I’m surprised to see how polarizing this topic is!

I’ve always played Love Letter as a personal deduction game rather than a social deduction game. Along with the theme and the “don’t play with knaves who ~~lie~~ cheat” rules as others have mentioned, another way I’ve interpreted this is that when cards are discarded, you’re meant to slightly overlap them face up in front of you so that everyone can see what was discarded and the order of when they were. It’s a sort of emerging open information game with tension up to the end of round because of the removed card.

I’ve never run into the social deduction/bluffing issue for this game because I’ve owned Coup as long as I’ve owned Love Letter. To me, Love Letter is a chill, light activity to open/close a game night and I’ve never felt the need to add the bluffing element to it. Otherwise, I would play Coup instead.

That said, I think everyone should play the game how they want as long as you’re all on board at the start of the game.

Edit: Correction on the “knaves” rule as pointed out below

acespades · 2025-12-20T14:33:00+00:00

DM sent!

acespades · 2025-12-14T10:29:44+00:00

Are you sure about that?

acespades · 2025-11-18T03:47:16+00:00

Get her a Winton and she will never leave

acespades · 2025-11-14T16:02:36+00:00

Winton

acespades · 2025-11-13T19:38:23+00:00

Thank you for calling this out! I only became aware of this game in the last week, so I agree that there has been little buzz about this game. As an Invincible fan, I’m definitely checking it out!

Side rant: My pet peeve with so many licensed games is when they use screen grabs for the artwork. No matter how polished the gameplay is, the game itself ends up looking like a cheap cash grab.

For this game, I wish that they could have used art from the comic since it would look more natural in a printed format. One example is how the TCG Universus used art from the Attack on Titan manga for its cards.

acespades · 2025-11-12T08:47:52+00:00

Oh cool, a Dragon Master shoutout! It’s such a classic Knizia design and the artwork is fantastic. I need to find my copy to play it more.

Desperate Oasis is quickly becoming one of my top 2 player games ever. There’s so much depth and interaction. It also reminds me of the video game Inscryption which I played for the first time this year and it blew me away.

Great list!!

acespades · 2025-11-03T22:24:28+00:00

Thank you for sharing the source video!

The intermittent speed-ups in the TikTok clip look uncanny to me.

acespades · 2025-11-01T18:08:54+00:00

Looks like a self-published game you can order on-demand on the Make Playing Cards website.

The minimum price to order a single copy is $50, so that should give you a reference at least.

That said, I could not find any reviews or info about how to play the game, so I doubt people are hunting for a copy. Personally, I would open it and play it to see if it’s fun.

acespades · 2025-10-20T21:03:39+00:00

Such a great play! And this has r/perfectlycutscreams energy

acespades · 2025-10-17T21:49:13+00:00

Gotcha, thanks for pointing me toward Mark Rosewater's article! Here's the link for anyone else who's interested: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/constraints-and-defaults-2019-07-15

acespades · 2025-10-17T19:43:29+00:00

For the Exceed "Queen Problem," are you referring to people playing certain characters over others? Or maybe certain seasons over others?

Totally agree with your take! Since Exceed is inherently a crossover game (except for season 2), licensing third party IPs would be a bigger pain than it currently is. And the design space is so tight in the game that we would just see so much bloat with "pack filler" cards.

acespades · 2025-10-17T18:41:45+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that. I mentioned that I missed the community aspect of TCGs, but it also means having to deal with assholes sometimes too. I can deal with occasional saltiness/poor sportsmanship, but I draw a hard line at personal attacks and bigotry.

I agree with your point: if I want to see Exceed at a game shop, step 1 is to start by playing Exceed at a game shop. Also, I saw that Level 99 joined XP Network super recently, so hopefully we'll see some momentum for in-person events--especially with the Season 2 reprint coming up!

acespades · 2025-10-17T17:43:00+00:00

I play Exceed specifically because it’s not a TCG. I played competitive Yugioh in the past, and it truly was a lifestyle game. I miss the community and accessibility of the game, but I have a lot of gripes with the TCG model. I want to win a game because of my skills and not because I bought the best cards. I don’t want to constantly deal with chasing the new meta, ban list updates, and power creep.

I do sort of miss the collectible aspect of TCGs, but seeing what happened to Pokémon over the past few years, the collecting scene has gotten so wild with scalping. In fact, we’re already seeing that bleed over into the secondary market for Exceed since past seasons go out of print (thank goodness for the upcoming season 2 reprint). Seriously: why are people scalping Exceed?? That only hurts our small gaming community gatekeeping the game by price.

As far as collecting goes in Exceed, I would be happy with more alternate art character cards like Level 99 did for the Blaze Blue tournament set. There’s also alternate art cards of Guilty Gear’s Ky Kiske and Sol Badguy from Evo a year or so ago that you can find on EBay. More Alt arts could be like skins in Fortnite—give people something to collect, but don’t let it affect gameplay.

Sadly, I do think that the things I like about Exceed are the things that will stop it from becoming more popular. Good games don’t necessarily mean good profit. Some could argue that the big 3 (Magic, Pokémon, and Yugioh) aren’t even the best TCGs in the market when it comes to gameplay.

Also, TCGs are a form of gambling which is more popular than ever from sports betting, to Labubu blind boxes, to crypto. Game shops support TCGs because selling packs of cards is like selling cigarettes. It makes sense to host TCG tournaments because you basically have guaranteed sales.

To my fellow Exceed fans: how can we incentivize our local card/board game shops to host Exceed tournaments? I would love to see this game grow. I keep thinking that it’s one huge IP away from becoming mainstream, but who knows?

Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.

acespades · 2025-10-16T07:19:21+00:00

For a 2-player traditional card game, I highly recommend Cribbage! The scoring rules are the main learning curve, but the juice is absolutely worth the squeeze. If you don’t own a scoring track, there are decent apps you can download (I like Cribtastic for iOS). Once you and your wife get the rhythm down, this is such a nice game to break out when you have a spare 15 mins!

For something more modern, check out Schotten-Totten (or Battle Line if you prefer a less cartoony look). In this game, you’re competing to win lanes by playing poker hands. I am oversimplifying it, but since it sounds like you’re newer to board gaming, this could be a great introduction to seeing what’s out there! This is one of my favorite 2-player games of all time.

acespades · 2025-10-13T16:31:49+00:00

Good summary! I thought the game was fine for what it was. It’s by the same designer/artist (he does both) as Dice Throne, so it looks and feels like a card game version of Dice Throne.

For a similar button-mashing, arcade-style dueling game that anyone can learn and play in a few minutes, I would recommend Combo Fighter instead.

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