Button Shy's Wallet Games

Boardgames
#15

I got sucked into the SO SMALL fervor. I like having some tiny, solo-able games in my desk for interminable conference calls or some such.

Sprawlopolis really is great. I misread the rules the first time, and Tom’s review helped me correct it (I didn’t know that the scoring goals also gave you a target score). That made all the difference.

Spaceshipped feels like Space Trader in a deck. It’s… fine. Ish. This would be excellent as a 52 card deck with 2-3 more game mechanics. The Button Shy constraints seem to have shaved this down too far and it ends up being mildly entertaining but swingy and luck-driven. I’m going to kick this one around a bit more, but probably won’t stay around.

Food Chain Island is underwhelming after 2 plays. The decision space is too open and the information is too inaccessible, everything in long text paragraphs. So you’ve got this huge array of possible moves, the implications of which either have to be constantly re-extracted by reading the text or stored in a huge amount of mental RAM. Made it high friction to play. But in the end, it was also somewhat easy, I got down to 2 piles on my second play.

The problem is that each animal’s ability applies to the NEXT move, not the move of that animal. So instead of having 16 or so moves, you have 16*15 possibilities.

Maybe as I memorize the animal abilities it will feel more accessible - but that said, I’m already doing pretty well at getting close to winning.

I don’t know. I think this one is underwhelming as well. This bias to upvote something due to size and cost is real, but in the end maybe they really are only just fine.

I have Liberation and Seasons of Rice on order but strongly suspect I’ve just spent way too much money on mediocre wallet games.

My advice to all is to get Sprawl and stop there.

3 Likes
#16

I agree from what I know.
I gave away Circle the Wagons.
Food Chain Island is just a bit too easy. The decision space is not that big.
Sprawlopolis is awesome and has a nice persistent crunch.

I am waiting for Seasons of Rice, Tussie Mussie, Agropolis and because it looked so pretty Death Valley.

Sprawlopolis was only just translated to German last year and it gets my „Sonderpreis bestes Solospiel 2020“

2 Likes
#17

I finally played this tonight, and was underwhelmed – sadly the decisions never felt interesting, and it took way too long to play (but wouldn’t be as bad at the supposed 30mins). It’s mostly a matter of trading your way to enough money to win, and most of the time you can see what the market is going to do for the next few turns, so the decisions are pretty much planned out for you in advance – you’re either buying low, selling high, or treading water until you can do one of those two things. The deck throws lots of random events and speed-bumps at you, and you’ll want to upgrade your ship, but I found it all a bit dull.

I had higher hopes for it, so I’d included the two mini expansions in the order. I guess I’ll try those out, but this wasn’t a great first impression unfortunately.

OTOH I have been enjoying a few games of Food Chain Island recently. It may be simple, but it’s fast, I enjoy the art, and it makes me think.

1 Like
#18

I always have a cube at my desk at the office. It’s cute how taken by it some of the “kids” are, like it’s some mystical object. It’s a shiny, nice MoYu GTS3m speed cube—world class for like $40, why not?! I’m hardly fast in relative terms, but to your point, it’s about the pleasure of the solve at this point and it’s a great mindful fiddle object, so the smooth action (and relative silence) counts for a lot. “My office” for the last 18 months has been my house; I have several polyhedra to occupy this urge at the moment.

/Derailment

4 Likes
#19

Man, I first solved it as a way to spend time during my insomnia bouts. So that would have been high school? In college I got so tired that I learned to fall asleep. Ever since then, insomnia has been an infrequent visitor.

I’ve got an old clunky one that sticks with every turn. The top two rows are solved and the bottom is not, because I’ve forgotten one of the three moves I figured out to rearrange the bottom corners. And I’m too proud to look it up and too busy to re-solve.

It sits there taunting me literally every day.

I think I’ll get one of those better engineered ones, though. That may just entice me to dive back in.

2 Likes
#20

I’ve had a few games of Ragemore now (bottom row), and I think this one is another miss for me.

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The artwork is nice, but it suggests a theme which doesn’t come through at all in the gameplay – and I don’t really notice the art while playing in any case.

The game is a balance of several aspects and you can lose the game in five different ways through having either too many or too few cards in various areas, with the difference between those states not being much (3-4 cards); so you’ll often be unable to do the thing you really wanted as it would trigger one of those ‘lose’ conditions, and you instead have to lessen the pressure somewhere in order that you’ll be able to play a card there in a later turn. There’s some set collection and hand management and attempting to acquire the right cards at the right time in order to capture other cards, but it’s also a bit fiddly and unintuitive/abstract.

You definitely have to think and plan your way through the game, but I haven’t found it particularly fun yet.

3 Likes
#21

I had a more enjoyable game of Ragemore just now (it has the benefit of being quick to play, so I’m giving it a chance to grow on me). This was largely on account of things going badly and forcing me to make a lot of unwanted plays just in order to stay alive, and so it was quite satisfying to pull out a win at the end.

If more than two cards are “killed” during the game you lose. I had one card dead early on, and was about to play the card that lets you resurrect a dead card, when I realised that I couldn’t play that card (because it matched the top suit of both quests), which meant that… I had to kill that card instead, without using its ability. So instead of the graveyard being back to zero cards, it now had the maximum two, including the only card which could get cards out of the graveyard.

Much of the rest of the game was me trying to avoid the seemingly-endless stream of things which were going to kill a card : )

I had strong cards for “fighting” (which is more “turning enemies into allies” in this game), and so this did let me add most of the would-be “kill a card” enemies to my own party – but this meant that almost no cards were going into the quest piles at all – and the only way to win involves fulfilling quest requirements.

In the end there were just enough cards I could get through into the quests, and the sheer size and variety of my own party allowed me to fulfil quests far more easily than normal (which has a side effect of cycling cards from my party back into the draw pile, which was permanently on the brink of emptying and losing me the game towards the end), and in the end the balance was just on my side.

If the game was always like that, it would be quite good : )

3 Likes
#22

It certainly does look pretty, so I was hoping to hear good things about it. It’s a shame when the art is really nice but the game is disappointing. Oh well.

I’m hoping that Unsurmountable will be good. I think Food Chain Island is neat, so I’m curious to see what else Scott Almes does with the format, and it seems like it might have a similar elegant simplicity about it. (Has anyone played Ugly Gryphon Inn? It’s his other solo wallet game. The cards look kinda busy/fiddly, but my interest is piqued.)

1 Like
#23

Unsurmountable print-and-play at PNP Arcade is good value at $0.00.

I understand the game has five difficulty levels, which range from trivially simple to virtually impossible, which is nice to see in a solo game.

1 Like
#24

I am also interested in this one!

#25

It hasn’t been mentioned here much, but Skulls of Sedlec is one of the best of the wallet games that I’ve played so far. I’ve only played it solo (which requires the “Monstrance” expansion), and I also have the “Castle Guards” and “Executioners” expansions, both of which provide enjoyable variations on the puzzle.

Tom talked about it in his video and I’d recommend checking out the base version via PNP if you’re on the fence.

1 Like
#26

Oh, I didn’t realise he was so prolific a designer. Along with numerous other things, it looks like he designs the “Tiny Epic” series of games. I guess the Wallet Games series allows him to focus more on the Tiny than the Epic : )

Besides Food Chain Island, Martian Dice is the only game of his that I’ve played (and it’s another tiny thing which punches well above its weight). I’m even more interested in his output for this series now.

2 Likes
#27

After exactly one game of Hierarchy w/ solo Emissary expansion I think it feels quite similar to Food Chain Island. The process is different, but in both games you win by achieving a valid numeric-ish sequence of all the main cards, each of which has some kind of unique ability which affects the basic rules when you use it, and you have a random side-selection of extra cards (“Edicts”) which are something like a combination of the friendly waters and tough skies cards of FCI (they each have their own unique ability which you can employ one time at any point of the game and, depending on difficulty, you must use a certain number of them).

The set-up (with the deck split into two alternating hands of cards) is more complex than FCI, and the game doesn’t have the spatial element and perfect information of FCI (rather than your moves being restricted by card adjacency, this game limits your moves by only having three cards in each of the hands at a time), but the end result and planning feels similar to me.

There are similarities with Elevenses For One as well, which is an even tinier card game about putting a random arrangement of eleven cards into order whilst navigating the unique rules of each one. I guess I quite enjoy this style of puzzle. (My main reason for picking up a bunch of these Wallet Games was because I was permanently carrying EFO in my jacket pocket, and having additional similarly-portable options appealed to me.)

Hierarchy isn’t a dedicated solo game, and you have to read the regular rules as well as the solo rules, so I feel that I was up and running with those other games more quickly than I was with this one; but that’s just relative – as with all the wallet games, it’s a lightweight rule set, and pretty straightforward once you start playing. Tom didn’t particularly like this as a two-player game, but the card design issue he was most vocal about isn’t such a factor in the solo game (the writing remains small, but nothing is ever upside down); and as something to puzzle your way through without having to worry about how long your turn is taking, I think this kind of game works well.

2 Likes
#28

Hierarchy might be my current favorite of the Buttonshy games. It’s a very straightforward flow with some crunchy decisions.

I’ve only played it solo, and it might not be as good 2-player.

3 Likes
#29

So this has actually grown on me more. Once you get past the fact that it’s a completely abstract game… there’s a bit of a hook here. The speed of set-up and play is a definite factor (it’s extremely easy to fit in a game of this) as is the “train factor” (i.e. having established that I can make this compact enough to play on the train* : )

So I’m still playing this, and I think not moving it to the discard pile after all.

It is one of those games that I almost never lose, though (not quite to the extent of The Maiden In The Forest, but the win ratio is extremely high). Per those earlier comments this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it still seems worth noting.

(*) It’s a bit marginal – but with my laptop to play on top of, and if I hold the completed quest cards in my hand, it’s completely do-able. I think my most compact train game is one of the solo Cribbage variants I play, as my tiny portable crib board isn’t in danger of sliding away, and I only have to deal with a couple of hands of cards at a time.

2 Likes
#30

4 new expansions for Skulls of Sedlec, including a new solo expansion (distinct from Monstrance).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/239309591/skulls-of-sedlec-expansion-collection

I don’t see myself ignoring this, so that leaves me… up to 2 games + 2 expansions I could add without bumping up the cost of shipping (and I already know I want Unsurmountable).

1 Like
#31

Interest corroborated : )

1 Like
#32

Tom takes a quick look at Rove, Moving Pictures, and Death Valley in his new round-up video (from 9:29 onwards).

Rove I’ve been keen on but it was sold out. I rather suspect I’ll be grabbing that at some point in the future. Moving Pictures is a lovely theme for me as a film-lover, but after some reading and pondering I’d decided against including it when placing my Sedlec expansions order. It’s interesting to see that Tom liked Death Valley this much, as I only heard a fairly negative report around these parts.

1 Like
#33

-1 isn’t a bad score, honestly : )

(Or at least, I’ve regularly been losing by much more than that in my recent games!)

3 Likes
#34

For these reasons I’ve actually been playing this more than any of the others recently. Not on a train, but it’s really so fast to set up and play that when I don’t have time for anything long this is a shoo-in to fill a few minutes.

The disconnects with the theme are still ludicrous (there surely must be a potential retheme where things would actually make some kind of sense), but in the end this one is a keeper for me.

Thematic hilarity in Ragemore…

The card art is dramatic good-vs-evil fantasy fare, and in the gameplay you have three actions: (1) Recruit; (2) Quest; (3) Fight.

  1. Recruiting allows one of your characters to convert one or more enemy characters to your side. Having successfully recruited from the enemy, your character then joins the enemy side. I guess it’s more of an exchange programme…

  2. Questing allows one of your characters to fulfil objectives for one of the two quests and, having succeeded in furthering your cause towards victory, your character then has a change of heart and… you guessed it… joins the enemy side.

  3. Fighting pits either one or two of your characters against a single enemy. If you are stronger than them, the enemy says “woah” and simply joins your side. If they are stronger than you, your character dies and… the enemy joins your side?! If the two strengths are equally matched then everyone fights for so long that they forget about what was happening (and then your character joins the enemy side).

You win the game by doing well at quests. You lose the game if:

  1. You run out of characters (fair)
  2. Too many of your characters died (sure)
  3. There are too many quest objective (ok)
  4. There are too few quest objectives (um)
  5. You have no enemies (…?!)

Mechanically there are reasons for all this – the cards are double-sided, and as an 18-card game you need the cards you’ve used to cycle back into the draw deck of enemies to prevent it from running out; and flipping the cards from side to side exposes and hides different abilities for your cards and the enemy cards, which is important; but thematically it’s absolutely bonkers.

(All of that aside, it’s a nifty little abstract game about matching icons and collecting sets, while maintaining the delicate balance of several different groups of cards which need to never get too big or too small, and dealing with the special abilities of the enemy cards. It’s not amazing or very exciting, but it does fill a niche and I’ve come to quite appreciate that about it. Also I now have a silly voice with which all characters announce their intentions of going on a quest.)

1 Like