***
Probably fun with other humans, but the four-way solo mode is like something I'd come up with in desperation to try to get more use out of a multiplayer game and isn't the most satisfying activity, though it's quite nicely fiddly. It was cheap too, and the number cards are already getting a lot of extracurricular use for mocking up games that need more than four suits.
Star Realms: Fan Solo Challenges
Theoretically brutal if the right combos come up, but in practice this felt like the olden days of playing the easy AI on the app and seeing how much gratuitously excessive damage I could build up by the end. Dos cards once again served as generic counters so I didn't have to borrow from a game that actually gets played.
A nice tease for a new coloured faction without having to go to the hassle of designing the whole fleet. Unfortunately, the aesthetics are about all it has going for it, as the battle over bases wasn't as tense as I'd hoped, especially as they don't even use their abilities.
SmashMechs of Scarabos (2017 Challenges #2 & #5) ****
Finally a challenging adversary, not being able to take out their assimilated tokens ramps up the difficulty nicely, and sometimes having to buy cards you can't use just so they won't benefit the opponent is a good decision, especially with the 1 in 4 risk that it'll only get replaced by another red card anyway. However goofy the title, I prefer it to the official, plainer Machine Cult scenario and I'd play again.
Basically more vicious Nemesis Beasts that make you discard good cards an awful lot. A decent, if annoying challenge.
That's a proper card from the game, so why is the image squashed like a bad YouTube upload? A simpler precursor to the Frontiers bosses that play the cards properly, though the added step of not letting you use Blob cards would have helped sell the story.
Fave: SmashMechs of Scarabos
More eloquent opinions on flicking through The Art Book.
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude No. 27 (1962)
"I mean, like, what is going on in this? This is rubbish."
Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948 (1948)
Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia (1533)
"This is very detailed, and I like the different colours in it and how they made it."
Morris Louis, Alpha-Phi (1961)
"Is that all on the painting? Because that's rubbish."
Lucian Freud, Girl with a White Dog (1952)
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea (1952)
"Why is this even art? It's just scribbles like other ones, it's rubbish."
Willem de Kooning, Marilyn Monroe (1954)
"What is this? It's stupid."
Jeff Koons, Puppy (1992)
"This is so real and I love that they put lots of detail in it, but I think that it just looks very fake."
Odilon Redon, The Cyclops (1914)
1996 / Super Nintendo emulator game / 1-2 players
**
Choose best girl in worst season and beating shit out friends but don't special power not work.
2012 / Roleplaying game adventure / 2+ players
****
Dusting off some previously stalled characters – practical handypony Lillie Roase and scruffy alchemist Tatty Bogle – for their first thinly-disguised dungeon delve (this one's a musty occult library with traps and monsters; totally different), which was easily repopulated with established baddies and new allies, culminating in an annoying logic problem of my own invention that I helped her along with to ease the tedium. I should probably put more effort into developing our characters and their talents than just letting us find relevant power-ups in chests, but sometimes you just want the simplicity of Diablo.
DIY roleplaying game adventure
Besides some plot holes I didn't poke into, there's now little difference between this six-year-old's semi-planned RPG sandbox challenges and my own, to the extent that she preempted the specific plot point of finding a password in a book in a library that was going to feature in my follow-up. She pointed out that we were both nicking it from Final Fantasy VII anyway.