Recent reviews by Smokey

ROCK AND STONE

Runs great on a 3090!

All of the community art packs really make this a quick and simple way to generate maps for my DnD campaigns. Easily uploaded to roll20, I can use their grid to make for a seamless transition.

I mainly use my maps for displaying on a TV built into my table, and the ability to quickly iterate maps for my games makes this a must have.

I played a lot of this game during the original Alpha, and it was always entertaining.

Edit: Played a couple of 3 player games on the recent April 12th patch. It's still a fun core game, but the glitches and game issues make it too frustrating. This game is hard, and requires every resource to be used effectively. If you can't use something because of a game glitch, it pretty much kills the enjoyment.

So the game itself is great. I'm a veteran of tabletop and electronic card games of a similar nature, although I never played the tabletop version of Xenoshyft. The mechanics were easy to understand and pick up, and the card selection and balance seemed fine.

The reason I'm currently not recommending this game is due to the myriad game breaking bugs that we found in only about 4 hours of gameplay. After a patch or update, I will gladly re-review this game.

We had the following happen:

* Milita couldn't be played to an empty space on the board. When I discarded him at the end of the round, it also discarded a surviving stormtrooper. This can be a pretty huge swing in a game like this. Our assumption is that some sort of internal "card ID" got mixed up, and the game though the stormtrooper and the militia were the same card.
* To go along with the game getting confused, playing with one of the expansion powers (Grafting Lab), the tier 2 ability lets you bring back a card from the discard pile into your hand. It was a crapshoot what would happen when I would use the ability. Sometimes I would get 1 card, sometimes I would get all of the cards, and at least 2 or 3 times my TEAMMATE got the cards. This did not adversely effect the game since he could play on my cards, but bizarre nonetheless
* We had tons of bizarre issues playing cards on other people's lanes. On death effects like the vindicator armor weren't usable if they were played on another lane. We also had troops discarded at the end of combat we had placed in another player's lane for no discenible reason.
* The biggest, and gamebreaking-est of them all happened to us twice. We were in the 7th or 8th wave, and while we had both clicked done on a reveal phase (2 green check marks), the game wouldn't advance us to to the draw phase. We tried several things to 'jump start it', like both unchecking, one person leaving the game. It just wouldn't go forward. Very very frustrating after spending 30 minutes working towards the finale.

The UI is serviceable, but could use some help
* Why is your resource (Xenostathem) not indicated with the icon instead of the text. Pretty minor, but they have pretty icons for everything, I had to literally ask my buddy in the first game where on the screen my total resources were.
* Should give you a checkbox for 'auto pass' if you don't have anything else you can do in a turn, or if you and your teammates know you won't have much impact on their lane.
* I was constantly double clicking when I should be single clicking to use abilities, and it could be confusing what state you were in. The text seemed to blend into the background a lot. I wouldn't mind some more highlighting around the 'Done' button, or other text that tells you you need to do something before you continue.