The required look back at 2025

 As is pretty much always the case, 2025 had positives and negatives for me as far as gaming experiences go. I think that’s pretty much just the human condition.

Easily the best gaming experience I had in 2025 was going to the first convention since 2019. (I think we still have no idea of the long term social and economic effects of the pandemic) I got to see old friends and play a lot of different games.

And the low point of the year was simply that the gaming time just wasn’t there. That’s just how life works. I usually like to play some journaling games for NaNoWriMo and it was December before I thought of doing that. I literally remembered Dicember on December 30. My time and my mental energy have have just had other focuses.

Buttonshy’s Playtesting continued to deliver for me. It has given me a community to interact with and a way to give back to the broader community. I’m really thankful and glad that I get to be a part of it.

Another highlight was Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games. None of the eight games (plus the bonus game since I backed the Kickstarter) are perfect. However, collectively they are fun and accessible. They offer wide variety of accessible gaming experiences in a convenient way for both time and physicsl space.

And, oddly enough, my guilty pleasure of Metal Snail’s Paper Pinball series picked up. Any given game in the series is, honestly, a so so Roll and Write. But I found grabbing a few and playing them back-to-back really engaging. The whole is greater that the parts.

2025 wasn’t a bad gaming year for me. But I did have to focus on what really gave me joy.

The Judas Contract disturbed me. Which was almost assuredly the point

 I recently read The New Teen Titans - The Judas Contract for the first time. I went in knowing that it was a very important story in the run that defined the Teen Titans, even though the team had been around since 1964. I also I knew it was controversial. And I also knew the basic plot lol

It was like watching The Usual Suspects or Fight Club in 2025. The twists are well known, even if you haven’t seen them.

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The Teen Titans have brought the very young and very powerful (and very unstable) Terra onto the team. Unfortunately, she is the partner and lover of their nemesis Deathstroke the Terminator. She helps get them captured by an evil organization. When they inevitably break free, she completely loses it and accidentally kills herself in her meltdown.

Oh, where to start.

The storyline is where Dick Grayson, the original Robin transitions to Nightwing, which is a huge deal. It introduces Jericho, a mainstay of the Titans for a while.

But the real point is Terra.

I read the 2017 edition and Marv Wolfman wrote in the introduction that their goal was to make Terra the anti-Kitty Pryde, which is wild to me. That seems incredibly specific and potentially petty.

And the character is either clearly designed to be disturbing or Wolfman and Perez have some serious issues. Or both.

Terra has many child-like design elements. A page girl haircut, a slight overbite, a small frame. At the same time, she many troubling unchildlike behaviors. She smokes, which in 1984 meant you were either a bad guy or Wolverine. She’s a minor in a physical relationship with Deathstroke who is old enough to be her dad. And she’s really eager to kill people.

In fact, you can read Deathstroke as the victim in the relationship. Which is really problematic. Beast Boy/Changljng is also depicted as the victim in their interactions, even though he treats her terribly. (This is easily the nastiest version of Beast Boy I’ve read)

Most striking of all, in a series that had a lot of focus on character development, both Raven the empath and the literal narrator explicitly state there is no reason for her to be a bad guy. She’s just evil. Wow.

It’s easy to invoke misogyny but I think it’s appropriate In this case.

The Judas Contract is striking. If I’d have read it in 1984 when it came out, it would have knocked me off my feet. I can see why is still remembered forty years later. However, I cannot get over how… problematic it is. And how intentional that choice was. 

Games don’t have to be good to be educational

 When I looked at Orphan Source Detected!, it reminded me of the kind of Print and Plays I saw when I first started looking at PnPa back in the early 00s. Minimal graphics, basic mechanics but very grounded theme.

The idea is that you are a scientist with a Geiger counter trying to find six orphan sources in a rural area. An orphan source is a self-contained radioactive source that isn’t under proper control. Real thing, real problem. Historically, it looks like they have been caused by a combination of carelessness and stupidity.

The game itself consists of a seven-by-seven grid. You add a die and something to write with. Each turn, you pick an empty square, roll a die and write the number in. One through four gets you nothing. Five and six gives you out plus one and plus 2 in adjacent squares. Seven or more, you’ve found one of the orphans sources. After you’ve found a source, roll for casualties but you get to subtract the number of sources you’ve already found from that roll.

There is nothing in the rules about having to make a trail of spaces, that each one has to be adjacent. I also figure that the bonuses only get added to empty spaces. I mean, to already searched spaces that have a number in them.

So, the obvious strategy is trying to chain bonuses. My boards look like I’m making a checkerboard of numbers. You can’t find an orphan source without getting bonuses since you can’t roll a seven on a six-sided die without a sharpie.

There are variations but they are all different radioactive materials with slightly different modifiers.

Okay, there’s not much here, mechanically. The basic strategy is really obvious and the random number generating powers-that-be can wipe out your plans. A series of ones left one of my plays with missing sources and a decimated rural landscape. I found it amusing when my plan came together but there’s a lot of other light Roll and Writes that do that better.

The real value of Orphan Source Detected! for me was the rabbit hole it took me down researching real life orphan sources. And the game actually includes helpful links!

While the Goiania Incident that required over a 100,000 people to be screened for radiation contamination is mentioned in the rules, the Ciudad Juárez cobalt-60 contamination incident is the one that really blew my mind. An accident ended up contaminating 6000 tons of rebar, requiring the demolition of hundreds of buildings.

Orphan Source Detected isn’t a good game but it led to some good history lessons.

https://ellie-valkyrie.itch.io/orphan-source-detected-osd-solo-roll-and-write

I’d never played Point Salad yet it filled me with nostalgia

 Point Salad is a simple yet effective little game that made me feel like I was back when I first discovered the broader world of board games.

It consists of a deck of double-sided cards. One side shows a vegetable. The other side shows a scoring condition. Lay out three rows, one of scoring cards and the rest of veggies. On your turn, you take two cards from the common market for your personal tableau.  You can turn a scoring card over to be a veggie card but a veggie card can never flip to be a scoring card.

When the cards are gone, most points wins.

The scoring cards are, of course, the heart of the game. And they aren't just things like having X points for having sets of veggies. Some cards give you negative points for certain veggies as well as positive points or have the most of a given vegetable out of everyone. You can't get points if you don't have any point cards. And, while there isn't any direct interaction, indirect conflict quickly develops  as players try for similar goals or take cards to keep them out of other folk's hands.

Point Salad is simple and intuitive. Most of the rules are literally on the cards and none of them are hard to understand. And, while you don't get to directly do anything to another player, you get in each other's faces really quickly. It takes ideas that you've seen before and distills them down to about as simple as they going to go and still work. It isn't a complex game and it wouldn't be the center of a game night. But playing it made me happy.

When I first discovered games like Bohnanza or the Very Clever Pipe Game (both very early gaming experiences for me), I was impressed by both their simplicity and the amount of play that I could get out of them. As I mentioned, Point Salad had that kind of feel for me.

I understand that it has been revised and rethemed as Point Galaxy, including a solitaire option. I am seriously thinking of looking into that.

In the Tree of Azathoth, CT Phipps finds new levels of cosmic horror - it’s like Cthulhu Christmas!

 When I read Cthulhu Apocalypse by C. T. Phipps, I knew I wanted to read the rest of the series. And I didn't feel the need to write  about the second book, the Tower of Zhaal, because I figured it was a trilogy and that I could write a summary of my thoughts of the finished work, the full arc of the work.

… Yeah, it turns out that not the right way to approach the series.

What I realized while reading the third book, the Tree is Azathoth, is how much each book is its own beast, is a stand alone, complete thought.

John Henry Booth is a serial hero in the sense that he isn’t the hero of one story but of ongoing stories. Which isn’t a bad thing at all. King Arthur and Robin Hood are serial heroes, for crying out loud. And Phipps, as I later learned, used him in short stories as well.

At the same time, the John Henry Booth at the start of Cthulhu Apocalypse and the end of the Tree of Azathoth, they are not the same character. The later Booth is so much more messed up for one thing.

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The first two books in the series are Weird West works, set after the stars were right  and the Great Old Ones rise up. Heck, the Tower of Zhaal is a clear riff on The Magnificent Seven. (Which, to be fair, I have never seen. I have seen Seven Samurai though)

And the Tower of Zhaal is a rip roaring fun ride. It is a roller coaster of an adventure with the heroes (spoilers) summoning Cthulhu itself to save the day at the end. 

Then, in the Tree of Azathoth, Phipps completely changes gears and we go from Weird West to Film Noire. Booth ends up in a city in the dream lands and find the role of hard boiled detective coming over him. And the genre flip is acknowledged in context.

The books are a well balanced blend of Cthulhu Lite and Cosmic Horror. The heroes are able to defeat eldritch abominations. Beings like deep ones and ghouls are humanized. Booth has civil conversations with shogoths and Nyarlathotep and more. But, in the big picture, the Great Old Ones won, every victory is fleeting and hollow, and humanity is entirely meaningless.

And the Tree of Azathoth is the bleakest book, at least unless Phipps writes another one. The remnants of humanity are ghosts living in a dream world. That was a nightmarish outcome that Booth fought against in the first book and now that is as good as it gets. 

I was impressed by how bleak it got. By the end, it was full on cosmic horror while still giving Booth agency. It’s good enough I don’t want to spoil it beyond saying that.

Through out all the books, Phipps makes shoutouts to many authors but Brian Lumley get a lot of them. Lumley was important both as a proponent of Cthulhu Lite and keeping Lovecraft alive before his worked made the jump to pop culture. 

But I just keep thinking that Phipps does it so much better every time he references Lumley. Phipps normalizes the Mythos more effectively with making monsters normal people. But when he goes for abyssal horror, it hits hard.

Since Phipps makes several references to Howard, particularly in the third book, I’m expecting swords and sorcery if we get a fourth one.

Even a fluff Knuza is good fun

 I recently saw a copy of Reiner Knizia's Cat Ass Trophy at a flea market. A gaming buddy talked me into picking it up and he made a good call there. It's not one of his greats but even a middle-of-the-road Knizia is a game that you'll keep playing.

The game consists of a deck of cards that has seven suits ranked one to eight. Each card has a cat up to some kind of silliness or mischief and that's as far as the theme goes. The art is more on the charming rather than cartoony end of the spectrum.

Deal out a hand of nine cards to everyone and then deal out a row of cards in the middle, the number depends on the number of players. You will have cards left over and they are out of the game until the next round. Your goal is to get an in-suit straight of five cards and five of a kind. Which means one of the cards in the straight will be also part of the five of a kind. Each turn, you swap a card from your hand with one from the row. If someone achieves the goal, they reveal their hand and the hand ends and you score.

(POST SCRIPT: We learned we’d been making a mistake in how we were playing Cat Ass Trophy. You don’t need a straight. You just need five of a suit and five of a rank. So we accidentally came up with a variant that I’m pretty sure is still balanced, just a lot nastier)

You can also knock, doing nothing with your hand. The first time someone knocks, nothing happens. The second time ANYone knocks, the hand ends and you score.

Like golf, you don't want to score points. If you have a run or a set, you won't score any points for those cards. For all the rest, you score each rank value once. So if you have one, two, three or four 7s. its always seven points. Play hands equal to players and lowest score wins.

Cat Ass Trophy is very simple. You However, it is still full of interesting/tough decisions and lots of tension. And, while all the player interactions are indirect, they also manage to be in-your-face at the same time.

The two elements that make Cat Ass Trophy engaging and fun (particularly if swearing at other players is part of your fun) is the fact some of the cards aren't going to be in play and the mechanic of knocking, You can be putting a hand together without knowing if it's even possible. And knocking keeps the game from stagnating, adds tension and gives players agency.

Knizia doesn't always design the most thematic games but his mechanics rarely disappoint. On paper, Lost Cities seems like dull fluff but, in practice, the game hooked enough of us to be considered a classic. He builds simple structures that end up having constantly branching, shifting decision trees.

Cat Ass Trophy isn't a game that I would have sought out but now that it's landed in my lap, i enjoy playing it.

So what is A Dragon’s Gift?

A Dragon's Gift is the best pick-up-and-deliver micro game I have found thus far. I don't think it's the final word on the subject but I think it's a fine word.

As of my writing, it's either currently on Kickstarter or about to be. Either way, a demo version is available on PnP Arcade. It's part of Scott Almes' and Button Shy's Simply Solo series, a series of games that has pretty reliably made me happy.

The idea behind the game is that a dragon protects a group of villages and they are making him a gift as tribute. Honestly, the theme could have been about building an atomic bomb or a super computer or founding a medieval city and the mechanics would have worked just as well. A Dragon's Gift is a train game in disguise. That said, tribute to a friendly dragon does stick in your brain.

A Dragon's Gift is a tile-laying game where you are trying to connect materials to towns that will make finished products. Each card has one town and one raw material on a network of roads. The cards are double-sided, showing the same network but with the town either inactive or active. A town has to be supplied with materials before it can be active and supply its good. Simple goods require two raw materials. Refined goods require a simple good and a raw material. The final dragon gift requires one of each.

Here's where it gets interesting. Your basic transport of a yak can only deliver materials across two cards. Each game, you get three special transports that break those rules. However, they get tapped when use and only get reactivated if you activate a town with a specific good.

A Dragon's Gift hits the mark for because of two key reasons. It is successfully minimalist and has clean, solid rules.

Like all the Simply Solo games, it consists of eighteen cards and nothing else. No pawns, cubes or tokens. I certainly don't mind games with pawns or cubes or tokens. In most pick-up-and-deliver games, they are absolutely essential. However, if I am using them, I'd like use them in a game that's bigger than a micro game.

More importantly, the mechanics are clean and intuitive. And, most important of all, they work well. It only takes a couple of plays to understand how the game works and what you are trying to do. However, reliably winning the game takes longer than that, giving you an interesting and replayable challenge.

A Dragon's Gift is not a substitute for Steam or an 18XX game. It strips down pick-up-and-deliver to about as little as I think you can go while still managing to be functional and interesting. It is a game for ten, fifteen minutes, which is often about as much time as I personally have. If you want a bigger game than that, you are going to need a game that is actually bigger.

I know that the final version of A Dragon's Gift will get some more spit and polish. And, if it follows the Simply Solo formula, there will be at least four expansions. And I will probably revisit the game for a more detailed review when is more finished. But the demo shows a world of promise. 

Excellent character work struggles against meh pacing in Shaman King

 Shaman King took me a while to get around to finishing. Frankly, if I hadn’t gotten the entire series in a bundle, I wouldn’t have. When it was a slog, it was a real slog. However, when it was good, it was really good and knowing that there was good stuff kept me picking it back up.

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Shaman King is a manga from 1998 to 2004 that’s basically about a tournament of magic users to become the titular Shaman King, who is effectively omnipotent. What I recently learned some folks call a battle manga.

I apologize to fans of Shaman King but I found it to be a middle of the road, average Shonen manga. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad. In some respects, it’s quite good. However, it doesn’t sparkle.

The biggest problem, in my arrogant opinion, is the pacing. There are points where the story just drags. During the American road trip, I reached the point where I took a couple month break. And, while some of the flash backs felt both unnecessary and poorly timed. Horo Horo’s tragic backstory was revealed so close to the end of the story there was no room for character growth from it.

Honestly, a good edit would probably remove 20% of the entire series with significant improvement. Not that a weekly manga can get edited like that but hindsight is 20/20.

So what was good?

The actual character work is strong. More than that, the characters grow and change with well developed arcs. 

In particular, I enjoyed Yoh as a character. Which was a good thing because he’s the main character. Initially depicted as a slacker who wants power so he can be lazy, he is revealed to be a convincing and striking all-loving hero. 

Enemies becoming friends is a defining characteristic of the Shaman King. Yoh routinely invites people who just tried to kill him over for dinner. Near the end, Hai joins the heroes at some hot springs and Hai’s explicit goal as the big bad is to wipe out the human race.

While the lead up to the finale is a series of slog fights that I didn’t find nearly as compelling as the earlier tournament fights (and I got through knowing the end was near), the end being hugging it out with Hai worked well for me because the groundwork for that kind of ending had been well laid.

Ultimately, Shaman King’s positives do come out ahead of its issues for me but it just doesn’t have that je-ne-sais-quoi. (And it’s not the age. I find Hajime no Ippo, for instance, compelling (but socially dated as heck) and it’s ten years older)