The Pirate Cove: February 2020
Welcome to the first issue of The Pirate’s Cove newsletter, a twice monthly publication about indie gaming, streamers and developers, and streaming. I’m PrairiePirateYo, a Twitch Affiliate who mostly streams Geoguessr with Chat, Minecraft, and survival/exploration games. I’m a middle age gamer living in the USA. My day job for years has been full stack web development.
This newsletter will have an accompanying podcast starting in March 2022. The newsletter will have feature reviews of games, regular look backs at vintage games, a section on RPG gaming, news, and more.
Review: Among Trees
3 of 5 stars
Among Trees is a sandbox survival game from FJRD Interactive (https://www.amongtreesgame.com/) which was released in late 2021. The game is very beautiful and chill to play but marred by some bad game mechanics and the fact that it has been abandoned by developers.
Since I started gaming more seriously two years ago, I’ve found that my favorite genre of games are ones focused on survival, exploration and building. So, when I spotted Among Trees in my Steam queue, I was intrigued enough to choose it for streaming on my New Game Night.
The Good Stuff
If you are looking for a chill survival game with beautiful aesthetics and UI/HUD, Among Trees is a fun game. It doesn’t throw a lot at you in the form of constant mob attacks or having to recover lost resources. There is plenty of foraging and exploring. Love how the game gives botanicals (flora) the attention they deserve in a survival game. The crafting menu, equipment slots, and health bars are easy to see and use.
The aesthetics of the game feel realistic, in a cartoon way that doesn’t venture close to the '“uncanny valley” of creepiness. It does feel like you are out in the woods, where resources are scarce and danger is there, but in a realistic way. There is a bear, but this isn’t Valheim where you are being attacked by something every five minutes.
The Disappointments. This Part Will Talk About Bears
Let’s start with the smaller issues and move up to the big problem with this otherwise fabulous game. There are different game modes. I picked the survival mode, so I could stream what an average player would experience. Survival is supposed to be about survival, so finding resources is supposed to be a challenge. But after the first could of hours collecting nearby resources, it became hard to find anything. I decided to try fishing, because that’s what you normally do in these games. Plus, I had to feed an adorably cute, hungry red fox.
I may not be familiar with fishing mechanics in most survival games, but I have played one fishing simulator and am familiar with the mechanics. Fishing in Among Tree started as comically difficult and after 30-40 minutes spent catching one fish, rage quit inducing. I thought maybe it was just me, but other player reviews complain about the fishing mechanic.
I was also expecting that Among Trees would be more of a building game, especially when it comes to building your main house. But it requires you to gather resources for house additions. You don’t build the additions; they just appear once you have the right number of resources. Even with a set building design, it would be more fun to craft the various parts, instead of just collecting X number of wood planks and BOOM, there is your new kitchen addition.
Let’s talk about the bear. One of the main mini bosses in this game is a bear (maybe multiple bears) who is patrolling an encampment that has some important resources. When you get to the 5- or 6-hour mark of playing this game, defeating the bear becomes pretty critical, as you have to do this to access resources necessary to make additions to your house. I tried taking on the bear several times, all of which ended with me being mauled to death. I managed to sneak and steal some resources, but it you need to get all of the resources from a camp, you’ll have to fight the bear.
This situation felt very sus to me, so I looked at reviews of the game on Steam. Lots of players praised the vibe of the game but shared that the bear is unbeatable. Maybe this is the case because the game was released in beta mode and the developers subsequently stopped developing the game? I looked at the achievements stats for the game on Steam. Looks like only 12% of the players defeated the bear, which suggests either a broken game mechanic, problematic combat coding, or unfinished game play coding.
While defeating the bear is no crucial for enjoying the game for hours, this busted part of the game is part of the reason for my rating of Among Trees.
Classic Gaming Corner
In this section of the newsletter, Prairie will look back at classic games from the 20th century, both video games and tabletop games. Let’s look at games Prairie has played and other games from that era.
If you were getting into tabletop strategy games in the late 1970s and 1980s, you probably played or ran across a game published by Yaquinto Publications. If you had a board game shop nearby, you probably recall the shelves and shelves of thick boxes of games of this genre. People who knew about tabletop strategy games would often call them “war games.” One of the Yaquinto titles I owned was the popular “The Ironclads”, which covered naval warfare during the U.S. Civil War. I’ll re-visit this game in a future newsletter.
Yaquinto also published plenty of science fiction games, including one that I owned, Starfall (1979). In The Space Gamer, Jeff Jacobson described the game: “Starfall is a game where 2-4 futuristic empires with 24th-century technology find, conquer, and colonize other systems and fight each other.”
Starfall was intended for 2-4 players, but could be played solo, which was the only option for me, as I couldn’t find any peers in high school who would play a tabletop strategy game. I remember the game as being appropriately complicated, which helped the immersive aspect of the concept. The game came with hexagonal space charts, a big instruction book, and hundreds of cardboard game tiles (or chits)
From what I remember, the game was about exploring and creating a galactic empire. Big emphasis on establishing wormholes as critical transportation routes between quadrants. Yaquinto strategy games always had an incredible amount of detail baked into their games, so this meant that there was a learning curve for new players, but with enough gameplay detail to keep games varying and long.
Roll 20 For RPG Goodies
Another regular section of the Pirate’s Grove will focus on role-playing games, ranging from Dungeons and Dragons 5E to independent D&D creators to RPGs with other themes and genres. I’ve returned to playing RPGs in the last couple of years, after a nearly 35-year absence. I will discuss my early experiences with classic RPGs, but this section will review creators, games, modules, and more.
I currently play RPGs weekly with two groups. I am a DM hosting a D&D 5E game with some local friends. We played via phone for the past year and recently started playing in-person. The other group is spread out across the U.S. and consists of some passionate RPG gamers. We play independent D&D clones like Old School Essentials, and special one-offs.
I’m also really fascinated with the renaissance in RPG mapping. I love maps and geography. Hell, I host Geoguessr streams on Twitch twice a week. One thing that got me into Dungeons and Dragons originally were the maps and the fact that creating your own maps was part of the fun. I will be looking in depth at various RPG map creators.
Review: Cairn
Cairn is an adventure RPG game by Yochai Gal. My Wednesday night RPG group played this recently as a one-off adventure. Cairn’s focus appears to be on outlining a simple RPG system that can be enjoyed by RPG veterans and by players who are new to RPG gaming.
As players, we found the game system to be fairly easy to pick up (without having seen the booklet or player sheets beforehand). Character creation is a speedy process, and the gameplay is mostly understandable. Cairn simplifies character creation, combat, skills, and has a really cool set of principles for players and the “gamemaster.” The principles themselves should be adopted and used by DMs and players using other systems.
We had three main gripes about Cairn’s simplified system. If you are going to re-invent the hit point part of characters, at least give it a name that isn’t close to hit points. Hit Protection is confusing. Cairn also seeks to minimize dice rolling, going with more narrative and logical DM decision-making system. I’m one of those players (and DMs) who loves the dice rolling part of RPGs. More dice rolling please, not less. And combat damage just doesn’t make much sense, with damage being applied first to hit “protection” and then to strength. Can we just stick to the Hit Point scale like other systems?
On the other hand, given Cairn’s vibe, it should be OK to add back stuff like initiative rolls or whatever you prefer from other RPG systems.
Cairn’s approach to letting the GM use their own discretion to manage scenarios logically and naturally reflects my approach to DMing 5E D&D.
I really love Cairn’s “Principles” for players and Wardens. For Wardens (or DMs), principles include “Emergent experience of play is what matters, not math or character abilities” and “Telegraph serious danger to players when it is present. The more dangerous, the more obvious.” For players: “Don’t ask only what your character would do, ask what you would do, too” and “You'll find that most people are interesting, and will want to talk things through before getting violent.”
Keeping with Cairn’s emphasis on keeping things simple, there is a table of 100 spells (roll a d100), basic gear packages for each major character class, and a fascinating table of “scars” for when your character is critically injured.
News
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet were announced today. They should be available in late 2022.
When I checked Twitch on Friday night, around a half million people were watching streamers playing Elden Ring
Hello Games released the Fifth Expedition last week for No Man’s Sky. A few weeks ago, Hello Games released their first major update for No Man’s Sky of 2022, the Sentinel Update.
Upcoming Podcast
Look for my new podcast, The Pirate Cove, debuting in March 2022. The podcast will feature interviews with streamers, gamers and game developers. It will also include game reviews, news, and opinion. We’ll see what happens!
Twitch Schedule
I stream on Twitch as PrairiePirateYo (twitch.tv/PrairiePirateYo). Regular schedule below. Additional streams are announced on Twitter (@YoPrairie) or in my Discord.
Mondays ~ Geoguessr with Chat (!cg), 5pm EST
Tuesdays ~ Minecraft (from Utopiacraft), 8pm EST
Thursdays ~ Minecraft (from Utopiacraft), 8pm EST
Fridays ~ Geoguessr with Chat (!cg), 5pm EST
Saturdays ~ New Game Night or Live Art Stream
Website
You can find more about PrairiePirateYo’s gaming, additional blog posts, gaming resources, and more at Utopiacraft.io.
Thanks for joining!