#thinking of making a tarot card design esque illustration

[bluebellthesponge]

i am saurrrr excited for an upcoming graphic design project we are doing teheheh

[waytooslowly]

Arcana Famiglia Impressions

I finished playing Arcana Famiglia awhile ago but I never got around to making a blog post because I was totally going to make screencaps to illustrate it with, but that takes work so that I never got around to it (but maybe writing this will get me to?) 

On the whole, I enjoyed Arcana Famiglia and the production values are high, and I liked the characters and the heroine. But I also thought that as a game and a story, it was often flawed. 

Probably the strongest aspect of the game was the art:  really liked the character designs and the manga-like way they had of illustrating scenes, especially action ones. This was effective and interesting to watch.The CGs are also nice, and the overall attention to detail in the menus and other graphics was good too. 

The system was complicated, but while intriguing, it eventually became tedious and repetitive in practice. So this is one of those games where there’s the conceit that we’re on a calendar system and you have to choose what to do every day (in practice just choose the character or even to experience), but the random events are often boring, and even some of the regular events were surprisingly short and perfunctory. The quick-time event battles are relatively few and painless. On the whole I found the most annoying thing was the way you had to get one of the three endings for each character (which I discussed in a previous post). Plus, all of the endings are really short! Sometimes that was ok, and sometimes I was left wondering ‘what was the point of making that a separate ending’? 

As for the story:  to avoid spoilers, I’ll be vague here. The premise of the story is that on the Italian-esque island of Regalo, an organization known as the Arcana Famiglia shares power with the local lord, and in practice (although in aesthetics they resemble the mafia) they’re like some kind of local government. The head of the Famiglia, Mondo, awakened the power of the Arcana (named after the major arcana of the tarot cards). Each card binds to its user and allows them a certain special power (and they can use it to power up their normal fighting abilities), but this comes at a certain cost. The theme of the price of this power is unevenly handled in the story, I felt, even though it is one of the central themes. Sometimes the problems seem to be very serious, yet other times are resolved awfully easily. (This is something that continues through the story). The heroine, Felicita, and the other major characters, possess the power of the Arcana, and at the beginning of the story, her father, Mondo, declares that they will have an Arcana duel in order to determine who will marry her:  but if Felicita loses, she will have to stay inside of the mansion for the rest of her life. The reasons for Mondo’s bizarre decision are explained through the course of the story. 

Anyway, the writing is really good when dealing with some of the backstory and the friendships and family relationships between the characters. There’s a lot of really hilarious ensemble scenes with the characters which are maybe the best parts of the game. But I felt that the romance is often much weaker. Not that I didn’t appreciate the strong platonic relationships between the heroine and the love interests, but I guess I prefer games where the beginning of the romantic relationship occurs mid-route, rather than at the very end. (Maybe it’s because this game is rated for a relatively young-ish age and more often play the 17+ games? (Comparable to a M rating in the U.S.)) Also added to this was how short a lot of the endings were. However, in pure plot-focused exposition, sometimes things felt really under-written (I felt this was really bad in Debito’s route, especially). While VNs are often bloated and too long, this game actually felt too short for some of the stuff it took on. (When I read on Japanese blogs that this was supposed to be like a shounen manga x otome game, that made sense to me. Usually a shounen manga goes over twenty volumes in telling a story. There wasn’t enough enough space in this game to really fulfill the potential of the story, IMHO. ) Maybe the other two games fix these issues, but in a VN you’re supposed to do it all in one game, I think.  

(I’ll discuss spoiler stuff and my thoughts about the characters in another post)

[tabletopontap]

Top 30 Anticipated at Essen Spiel 2019 (#20-11)

This post picks up where my last one left off--continuing on with my #20-11 most anticipated games at Essen Spiel in Germany. Please note that all images were taken from www.boardgamegeek.com. Thanks to the people who post pictures of these games. 

20. Botanists - Agie Games published this tile-laying game designed by Violaine Malié and illustrated by Pedro Codeço. It supports 2-4 players in 30-60 min. There are some unique tile placement rules in this game that I haven't seen before. It looks interesting but hard. When I read about how you can rack up a ton of negative points, I thought I might not do well at this game. I'd still give it a try, though.

19. Pirate Map - This looks like a quick  family game for 2-6 players in 20 min. Probably a filler game. The publisher is Tranjis Games, the designer is Eugeni Castaño, and the artist is Pedro A. Alberto. This game sounds like a card game version of Tobago. You have to listen to the pirate captain's story, then as a group you play cards to build out the treasure map. I'm guessing that you have to play cards showing certain landmarks based on the pirate's story. This sounds like a game that might be fun for younger kids.

18. Paranormal Detectives - If Greenville 1989 can be considered the horror version of Mysterium, then this appears to be the party game version. The publisher is Lucky Duck Games, who made a big splash with Chronicles of Crime earlier this year. The designers are Szymon Maliński, Adrian Orzechowski, and Marcin Łączyński. JocArt, Mateusz Komada, and Katarzyna Kosobucka provided the artwork. This cooperative game is for 2-6 players and takes 30-50 min. 

One player is the ghost, while all other players are detectives trying to figure out what happened to the ghost. The BGG describes some of the ways the ghost can interact with others: "arranging a hangman’s knot, playing chosen tarot cards, creating a word puzzle on a talking board, drawing by holding the hand of a detective…." It sounds fun, but party games tend to have a short shelf life in my household, as they can wear out their welcome quickly.

17. Gates of Delirium - Married duo Mandy and Jordan Goddard are the designers of this Cthulhu-esque game of horrors. George Cotronis is the artist and Renegade Game Studios is the publisher. In this game, 2-4 players age 14+ will spend 45 min. trying to save humanity from other-wordly monsters...or they'll help those monsters along instead, depending on how they're feeling.

This card game looks interesting to me because of the split decision making. Each round, a player will decide if everyone is sane or insane. If it's a sane round, you'll play actions on your cards to help beat the monsters. If it's an insane round, you'll play the actions on your card that directly undermine your sane side. It's a total Jekyll & Hyde! You can score points either way. I suspect the trick is knowing when to play which side to maximize victory points. 

Teri Litorco (well-known for painting board game figurines) excitedly talked about this game in a YouTube video at GenCon.

16. Monster Baby Rescue - Designed by Vladimír Suchý with art by Jana Kilianová, this looks like a cute, family-weight game about raising baby mythological creatures! It's being published by both Delicious Games and Rio Grande Games. Players take tiles and follow the instructions on the tile to care for their pets. It looks like a board game version of Tamagotchi. For those unfamiliar, Tamagotchi was a digital pet you had to care for by feeding, cleaning up animal waste, etc. that was all the race in the late '90s/early 2000s. I'm expecting some fun game play from the same designer who previously brought us Underwater Cities, Last Will, and its sequel, The Prodigals Club.

15. Detective Stories: Stillsee - This game is published by IDventure and is another "escape room" style game. It's for 1-5 players age 13+ and takes 1.5-2 hours to play. It says you can play it cooperatively or competitively to see who can find the criminal first, but I'd rather just play it cooperatively. This game is app assisted and is supposedly a realistic criminal investigation game. I'm excited to try out different brands of escape games, which is why this one made my list.

14. Coralia - Produced by Huch!, designed by Michael Rieneck, and illustrated by Miguel Coimbra, this game is all about underwater exploration--a hot theme this year. Miguel's cover art does a wonderful job enticing players to dive into this deep sea adventure made for 2-4 players age 10+. Estimated play time is half an hour. 

Players will roll and place dice, as well as use cards, to move their remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) through coral reefs, discovering sea animals and perhaps finding sunken treasure! The production of the components looks nice; the see-through colored dice with custom die faces and the octopus meeples help this game stand out from other aquatic themed games released this year.

13. Pocket Detective - Designed by Yury Yamshchikov, this game is brought to us by Russian publishers, Jet Games Studio and Lavka Games. It's a co-op detective game that takes 45-60 min. for 1-6 players age 10+. Based on the age group, you probably don't need to worry about a horror theme or anything too graphic. The goal is to solve the case in as few turns as possible, kind of like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. 

12. Escape from the Asylum - Here's another Huch! game that has made my list. The designers are Martin Nedergaard Andersen, Alexander Peshkov, and Ekaterina Pluzhnikova. A big team created the art: Anastasia Durova, Dmitry Krasnov, Nadezhda Mikhailova, Pavel Korobkov, Anastasia Stupak, Maxim Suleimanov, Victoria Kochkina, and Victoria Volina-Lukian. It's a cooperative game for 1-6 players age 12+ and takes an hour to play. 

As I previously mentioned, this year a few new brands of "escape room" style games were introduced. This is one of them. Based on the description at BGG, I think the twist here is that players see the events through different characters' eyes. I could be wrong about that, but the concept is intriguing. What if we all have the same goal of escaping, but every player's character has their own secret motivations for wanting to escape? 

11. Decipher - Welcome to the latest word party game! The publisher is HeidelBÄR Games, the designers are Bill Eberle, Peter Olotka, and Greg Olotka, and the artist is Kwanchai Moriya. From splashy '80s aesthetics like Dinosaur Island to cute abstract characters like Kodama, Moriya's box covers really pop! 

In this game, one person builds a word out of abstract letter pieces, while everyone else has to guess the word. The fewer pieces you need to guess the word, the higher your score will be. This is for 2-4 players and takes around half an hour to play.

Stay tuned for my Top 10 coming up in the next post!