Not Even The Game We Deserve
This is usually a linkblog, meaning that the article just links to an external site in the header. However, this article does not: when I saw gamesradar+ publish this terrible piece about how Lorcana is ‘the card game we need right now’, I wanted to make sure you understood I am not endorsing this article at all.
It did stop me in my tracks, nonetheless.
This article is emblematic of the kind of attention extensible card games get as an object of design. Thousands of hours of BGG-board-style thought are put into play-and-store tabletop games that do not require time investment beforehand, but so, so little is spent on xCGs other than the common refrain of treating them like a known quantity because we’ve all had a brush with the people who play any of the Big Three and we know something in passing about them.
This article, for instance, acritically repeats that this game is ‘good for beginners’ without interrogating that assertion for one second. In fact, it catches itself not knowing how to couch the fact that this game has second-order, not-readable-on-the-board stuff that is not simple! (It does so with the other regular thought-stopping idea, ‘easy to learn hard to master’, that also gets repeated uncritically from time to time.)
What parts of a game are easy to learn?
What parts of a game are necessary to understand but not available to learn?
What is the learning curve to mastering? Has it been engineered to be kind to a beginner, or not? In what concrete way?
That’s why I started this linkblog — because these questions are just not asked and I wanted to at least put them into the world, even as I do not have immediate or satisfying answers to them.