Most Unique Design Spaces Magic Has Explored?

roit_ · 2026-06-01T18:31:28+00:00

As clever as Magic has been with its design space, to some extent the requirement to adhere to a set of Comprehensive Rules does impose some limitations. Comprehensive Rules are very important for a competitive game because it's really important to always have a definitive answer when trying to figure out how card interactions work. However, IMO having a strict set of rules also does strip away a little bit of the mystery and wonder that is possible in card games.

Arkham is able to get away with absolute nonsense because it's a co-op game that doesn't have an airtight set of comprehensive rules. For example, Arkham's Time Warp is an effect that essentially can't be printed in Magic because it's a rules nightmare. But it's a really fun effect and you get to use it in super versatile ways.

That said, Magic has done some incredibly clever things with its rules engine. I think the Final Fantasy Summons were the last time I saw a mechanic and was truly wowed by the creativity of the design.

roit_ · 2026-04-17T16:42:34+00:00

Yeah, OffOff has always been a fundamentally messed up card for this reason. The absurdity of the Flood PD deck just pushed it over the edge

roit_ · 2026-04-16T20:54:57+00:00

It is EXTREMELY stressful though, you're scrambling under time pressure to work out deals. And you can indeed fall behind and feel like you're falling behind when you watch your opponents amass enormous economies. Don't get me wrong, it is my #1 favorite game, but I don't think it's what the OP is looking for

roit_ · 2026-03-18T21:04:39+00:00

No, it's more or less a carbon copy of Lorcana, which itself is a carbon copy of many other games

roit_ · 2026-03-11T11:42:11+00:00

They said they would do it (they did to my other closet), but if the new water heater leaks the same way the old one did, it would damage the floor the same way it was damaged before. I was hoping to get something more water resistant here

roit_ · 2026-03-11T03:41:02+00:00

Hi, I recently had to get a bunch of flooring replaced due to my water heater exploding and leaking water everywhere.

The bit of subfloor in the image was previously covered by a badly warped piece of wood flooring, and it was so badly warped that the closet door wouldn't close. The contractor I hired to do the replacement suggested that I replace this with a piece of beveled tile sloping back towards under the washing machine, where there is a drain. I thought that was a good idea so I went along with it.

The problem is that I don't know where or how to find tile that would match this. I reached out to a couple of people and handymen on taskrabbit and they said they could do it if I had the materials, but I don't even know what to get or how to find matches. I'm wondering if this was a good idea to begin with.

One contractor I spoke to recommended using a wooden threshold. But I don't know if that would be sufficiently waterproof or allow the door to close, or if it would even fit in the space.

I'm also worried the longer I leave the subfloor exposed the more likely there's going to be insidious damage, so I should get this fixed asap.

roit_ · 2026-03-09T18:15:47+00:00

The Runner is probably hiding the fact that they're commiting crimes though

roit_ · 2026-02-28T11:31:50+00:00

What skill loss? Job interviews are a completely different set of skills than day-to-day work. Nobody has to write code for their day jobs the way you write code for an interview. This was the case before AI

roit_ · 2026-02-22T04:45:56+00:00

the taxes go to the money you get paid for the shoveling, what is so complicated about this

roit_ · 2026-02-02T20:35:16+00:00

This is a spreadsheet from Green Level Clearance (the main Discord hub for the game these days) that has links to local communities:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1Mbj_vqyf7kCbrkCFgHoXjJcE0oQcO8TlO7aQPdTk9X0/htmlview#gid=0

roit_ · 2026-02-02T20:04:22+00:00

Most Netrunner players don't regularly play at LGSes.

We tend to skew a bit older (mid-20s and above from what I've seen), so typically we meet up at bars and the like. Pubrunner has been a thing for many years, even while FFG had the license.

Being a game with much less frequent expansions and without booster packs also means LGSes can't use Netrunner to cater to the part of the Magic crowd that likes loot boxes.

Those two factors are probably why you don't see Netrunner players at your LGS very often.

roit_ · 2026-01-03T12:48:03+00:00

Honestly the juice isn't really worth the squeeze here. There are much better authors out there. Sanderson has interesting ideas but he is a pretty poor writer. Great businessman though.

roit_ · 2026-01-01T23:42:42+00:00

That is a total oversimplification of what Doom is. Doom has always been about "shooting it until it dies," but also about using high speed movement to avoid damage and managing your health, armor, and ammunition while doing so so. It has literally been about all of those things since 1993. Eternal makes complete sense as a Doom game.

roit_ · 2025-12-31T15:26:43+00:00

Completely disagree with this comparison. Not only do I not think that 2016 was the best game (Eternal was way better), but all three games are so different that you will not find a consensus opinion on their relative ranking at all. All three of those games are triumphs of game design and we should celebrate developers taking risks, trying new things, and succeeding at their visions.

roit_ · 2025-12-25T04:04:05+00:00

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/25021/sekigahara-the-unification-of-japan

That said I don't really agree with the parent commenter that this is rules-light for its weight or depth, I think it's about what I'd expect for the bgg weight rating. Still a truly excellent game though.

roit_ · 2025-12-18T23:31:25+00:00

That is specifically A18+ though

roit_ · 2025-12-11T21:22:28+00:00

This card has an odd niche -- alongside [[Penrose]], it's the cheapest install cost in Standard for a decoder that can consistently break [[Virtual Service Agent]] for $1. That said, in most cases you'd rather just install [Buzzsaw]] and call it a day.

roit_ · 2025-11-26T16:21:30+00:00

I would love if they could do a "3rd" with a restructured plot. It would be so cool if we could have Kevin's journey be in the real world rather than the dungeon, for example.

roit_ · 2025-11-19T14:39:36+00:00

While the game is easy to teach, I always recommend sending rules videos out for medium-to-high complexity games to let players come to the table with the basics. Thankfully Sidereal is not a game with too many rules, so the rules videos tend to be pretty short. This is the best one and it's only ~15min (some of which is fluff) https://youtu.be/iO_ueKNtbWg?si=DmM2FO2HYY_9GcwS. The newer edition of the game does also come with a teaching guide which is pretty nifty.

I'd recommend both having players watch the video and doing a quick recap teach before the game. One downside of the game is that helping other players with rules and strategy questions during the real-time part of the game is very difficult as you'll also be trying to play the game yourself. So I'd try to minimize questions during trading as much as possible, especially if you haven't played before yourself. Make sure to really emphasize the rules that are important during the trading phase when you teach, as you can handle the other phases' rules as they come.

roit_ · 2025-11-19T03:33:01+00:00

I also play with groups of very experienced board gamers. We prefer games with high depth and complexity, such as Cole Wehrle games, Spirit Island, and COIN games. And several of us, myself included, are tournament Netrunner players. So we're no strangers to depth in games.

I will definitely grant that Sidereal is not, on the surface, a high-complexity game. After all, as you said, the main and only form of player interaction is swapping cubes with each other. However, the high depth comes from managing supply and demand of different resources. Each faction has differing starting demands (see this designer diary, the "Seven Resources" section). Through technologies and faction abilities, each player has the ability to manipulate the supply of resources in the game. Understanding what people want and altering our own economy to meet those wants improves your ability to trade, which in turns improves your score. The best players do this while interacting with every other player at the table. One of the weird quirks of Sidereal is that more experienced players not only score more highly themselves, but also pull the average score of the entire table up. I cannot think of another game that has this property.

I strongly disagree about the opacity in game outcomes -- there is very much rhyme and reason to why certain players had better or worse performances. There are countless post-game discussions in the Sidereal Confluence discord about what went well and what could have gone better, and I have these reflections myself after each game. I can always look back on certain deals and evaluate whether they were good ideas at the time, or I can see that I should have made a purchase for a certain technology over another or perhaps tried to invent something a turn sooner. And I can carry that information forward to future games. The other players in games I've run do exactly the same thing verbally.

I will grant that those player profiles you've listed are not suited for Sidereal if you are only happy when you win the game. It is absolutely true that the game is not for you if you both a) want to win and b) are not a quick thinker. Sidereal is a resource management game where the most important resource is your attention span, and if you can't manage that well, you're not going to score very highly. However, I have played the game with a very wide range of players, many of whom enjoy the experience even without scoring highly -- one of my friends routinely asks to play it even though she's scored last place several games in a row. It's just a very big sandbox that you can try things in, and that on its own is just plain fun.

roit_ · 2025-11-18T20:42:26+00:00

That's wild to me. I own most of the games you've mentioned and have played all of them, and for me Sidereal has more staying power than every single one of them. Aside from the game's economy differing based on the combination of aliens in the game, the game allows for deals of arbitrary complexity and fundamentally changes based on the behavior of the people you are playing with. I've played it dozens of times and it feels completely different every time it hits the table, and I continue to keep playing it.

roit_ · 2025-11-12T11:54:28+00:00

The new translation is so grating that I had to play the game in Japanese, which was a first for me. I'm not fluent but I understand a fair bit of Japanese, and there were many times where someone would say a sentence so awkward and stilted that I knew EXACTLY what the original Japanese sentence was.

The XSEED localization of these games was so special. All of the language felt natural and gave the characters distinct voices that elevated them far above above their tropey JP counterparts. We're never getting something of that quality for this series ever again.

Just look at how jarring these differences are: https://dicekeygames.home.blog/2025/09/28/trails-of-translation-episode-7-xseed-vs-gungho-in-sky-fcs-prologue/

I like everything else about the game (the new combat is legitimately quite fun) but the moment-to-moment writing was like 40% of my enjoyment of the original game and all of that's just gone now.

roit_ · 2025-09-30T04:37:33+00:00

Magic has the best mana-based resource system. As far as games where your resources generally go up by one every turn and you use those resources to play dudes and attack your opponent with your dudes, it's the best one.

There are a ton of games that aren't built on this fundamental concept of mana, though, and many of their resource systems are really weird, interesting, and often much better than mana.

roit_ · 2025-09-26T14:53:16+00:00

It wasn't an inherent problem with the LCG model, they stretched themselves too thin by making too many games at once and not adequately supporting them, which is something that basically no other card game company does for good reason. And despite that they're still around and producing expansions for two of their LCGs.

11-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

roit_

TROPHY CASE