Card Games

Solo Play – Escape from the Space Station

I picked this solo game up on a lark because it was on clearance at a Kohl’s and the clearance was 75% off or something, so it cost me a couple of dollars. I really didn’t know what to expect from it but it sounded interesting with it’s enticement of puzzles to solve, and my slowly growing interest in playing more Solo Games. Then I sat on it for a few years not actually playing it.

The box contains:

One Scenario “read first” note
3 trifold papers with information about the station
2 cards of punch out tile pieces
10 Puzzle cards
1 Solutions Paper (sealed)

The Puzzle cards and punch out cards are made of thick cardboard material. One thing that became apparently after inspecting the contents was, this game is essentially meant to be played once, only. I didn’t really want to destroy the game, in case I wanted to ass it on or maybe play it again, though there is zero replay ability here really. I instead too photos of the cards, and marked them up in a photo editor, instead of actually writing on the cards and papers themselves.

The basic premise is, you are trapped on an out of control space station and about to collide with an asteroid belt and you need to find a missing part in order to fix the station and save yourself. You have to do this by solving puzzles and finding clues to translate symbols in a “Universal Alphabet”, then translating a secret message.

Initially I was a little disappointed, a lot of the puzzles on the cards are super simple. You shade in parts of a grid, or fill in some simple word puzzles, or do some easy math. Though apparently the math was not that easy because in the case of the Pyramid addition puzzle, I messed up my math and I had the right idea to solving the puzzle, I didn’t have the correct total to start with…. twice….

Addition is hard, ok? Especially with a calculator.

Anyway, where the bigger puzzle comes in is figuring out what the clues actually mean. Some are very straight forward, others are not. I didn’t manage to solve two of the puzzles, the previously mentioned math error, nor one of the word association cards. I did puzzle things out by completing enough of the alphabet to be useful for translating the hidden message. There are no instructions for how a lot of it fits together, and you end up using almost every piece of information given in some way. There are clues hidden in surprising places, places I had been kind of ignoring as simply being “flavor text” at first. Also, the methods for translating the symbols vary, it’s not all just “Hey, the one with the squiglies here is the letter E because this card told me it was directly.”

Overall, I found the game enjoyable, and the latter half was more enjoyable than the first half led me to believe. I would say it actually took me a couple of hours of casual play over a few days to get through everything and find the missing component to “escape the space station”.

Solo Play – Food Chain Island

Aug 2nd, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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Something I have hoped to do for a while is play some solo games and do some write-ups on them. I have to start somewhere, and today, I am going to take a look at a wallet sized solo card game called Food Chain Island by Button Shy Games. I recently backed a Kickstarter for another solo game by this same group, and one of the pledge options was to get copies of some of their other, previous titles, so I figured, why not.

The game itself consists of 18 cards, a rule book, and a card wallet to hold it all together. The pre printed cards are nice quality and the wallet container holds everything nicely. Each card has some cutesy animal art on it that is nicely designed.

The cards consist of 16 animal cards with various values and abilities, and 2 special cards that are set aside for play as sort of wild cards. Basic gameplay starts off by shuffling the 16 animal cards, which is harder than it sounds, because somehow shuffling so few cards is a bit tricky. You then place the cards out in a 4×4 grid shape, though there are some alternative layouts suggested by the instructions.

The object is to end up with only one animal remaining by having animals eat each other. Animals can only eat animals that are adjacent to each other, that have a lower number value. There is some extra trickiness here because there are also special effects that activate upon eating an animal, which can be positive or negative. This leads to some strategy though on choosing which animal to eat next. Because you may find you have an animal stranded where it can’t reach other animals, or effects that mean you can’t make a move afterwards.

I played several games of this before writing about it and only actually won my first game on the round I was taking photos of gameplay. Though I think part of my issue was I kept forgetting about the two bonus cards. These cards can be played anytime and kind of feel like they exist solely to help players get out of “stuck” situations. I would propose one way to “hard mode” the game would be to not use the special cards at all.

Overall it’s a fun little card game. The art is fun, the game itself has some planning and strategy involved which is good.

Review – Faerie Solitaire (PC)

Sep 23rd, 2011

by Ramen Junkie.

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Subsoap | 03.15.2009

Solitaire is a game that has like 500 zillion variations. In fact, Solitaire is more of a genre of card game played alone than a type of game itself. Faerie Solitaire, as far as I know, isn’t based on a previous “classic” style of Solitaire, but then, the reference material surrounding this game isn’t real plentiful. It certainly isn’t the standard 7 piles, flip 3, collect Ace through King solitaire.

The basic card game works as follows, cards are laid out on the playing field in various patterns and the player gets a small stack to flip through. You flip through the cards and play cards off the field in consecutive ascending or descending order, depending on what’s on your stack. So if you flip a 5, you can pull a 4 or a 6 off the field and put it on the 5, then proceed to pull say, a 5 or 3. You can only pull cards off the field that do not have other cards on top of them.

There are also some fantasy elements to help make the game more interesting beyond a simple card game. Completing stages helps you free captive Faeries. You also collect eggs and gain little pets, though the pets don’t really seem to DO anything. Each round also earns some cash which can be spent to buy power ups such as Undos or pre flipped cards.

The gameplay itself is actually a lot of fun. It’s just as mindless as Solitaire but it also has quite a bit of complexity involved. You can proceed on without clearing the field for a Perfect but you won’t earn as much money. Planning out combos and patterns becomes more essential as you get into higher levels.

There are also strategic elements added via other game mechanics. Occasionally there will be cards trapped behind Ice, Fire, or Plants. In order to play these cards you have to unlock them first, often by clearing out a stack somewhere on the board.

Overall, Faerie Solitaire is a solid card game. Granted, if you’re not into computer cards you’re not going to enjoy it. The whole Faerie theme may also turn some people off thinking the game is “too girly”, but the reality is, it’s much more “Generic Fantasy” than “Girly Faerie”. Also, for the most part, the Faerie aspects can be completely ignored if so desired.

Faerie Solitaire can be found on Steam here.

NOTE: This game is also available on other platforms such as iOS.

Review – Poker Night at the Inventory (PC)

Nov 22nd, 2010

by Ramen Junkie.

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Telltale Games | Nov 22, 2010

So Telltale games, makers of something like 90% of the Adventure games on the market (maybe) had an interesting idea. Why not take the idea of computer poker, and instead of playing against made up kooky PC characters you don’t recognizes, why not throw in a cast of known characters from popular games and nerd sites.

Thus, you end up with Poker Night at the Inventory. You play poker against Tycho from Penny-Arcade, The Heavy, of Team Fortress 2 Fame, Telltale’s defacto mascot, Max, from the Sam & max series, and Strong Bad from the popular web series Homestar Runner. I didn’t even realize Homestar Runner was still around personally but hey, whatevs.

The Poker part of the game is limited to Texas Hold Em style poker. It’s not a game style I’d played recently, most of my Poker experience is in Draw Poker. It’s not too difficult once you get the hand of it though I find the game is based a little more on chance than I care for. This brings up Poker Night’s biggest flaw. Texas Hold Em, as near as I can tell, is very much a game of bluffing. This could be pretty interesting with real humans to compete against since you can “read” them or whatever. When you’re playing against a bunch of computer controlled AIs, this thrill is almost non existent. The characters do have some built in little stories and tells but everything really just seems to be randomly played. It’s not real obvious who is bluffing and who has something.

This also works the other way. It’s pretty much impossible to truly bluff the PC AI. The closest I’ve found is that shoving your entire pot in at once will cause all of the characters to gasp and often will force them to fold. Often, but not always, and they will almost just as often bet it all and go bust with nothing. Someone needs to tell the AI that calling a bluff when you have even a pair is risky but doable, but calling a massive bluff with “queen high” then going bust is kind of a stupid move.

Speaking of the table chatter though. It gets old. There was a bug on the initial release that caused the dialogue to not be as random as it was supposed to be, but even with that bug fixed, hearing the same 2 or 3 stories out of the 4 characters gets a little old.

So you don’t have the risk of real money poker, but you do get the monotony of playing cards against a computer for nothing, which is fun for a bit but gets a little old after a while. Still, the game is extremely cheap and if you are into Team Fortress 2 you can earn some fun special items from the players so the $5 price point is pretty decent.The real missed opportunity here is in DLC. Telltale doesn’t seem to have any desire to push any sort of DLC fo this game but the potential is huge. Just think, for maybe another dollar each, they could add more character packs. Then each game could be built from 4 random characters from the pool. Even sticking with the pool of sources used, the obvious additions of Sam, Gabe, Any other TF2 Class, and Homestar Runner would be entertaining. Maybe they just charge another $5 for a new set + new play style. The option to pick between different Poker play styles would be another welcome addition.