My First Legacy Game (Charterstone)
October 23, 2020 | ≈ 768 words | Charterstone
Thoughts on Charterstone
Ok, so basically it’s been 6 months since I started this legacy campaign and it’s time to talk about it.
There is something very very out of place about playing a euro-style legacy game on a digital platform where nothing is physical and turns are taken pretty much completely asynchronously. No physical cards to tear up, no real time reactions to opening boxes. Also no boxes. Putting legacy components into a digital environment really brings home the feeling that video games did it first, and do it better in almost every way.
Besides the feeling that video games are superior in almost every way, the digital version of Charterstone is probably the superior way to play the game. Objective truth. I can sit in bed and take a turn and not have to spend any effort making sure I’m not being a pain in the ass to whoever is hosting me. Also having every single option highlighted for me like is like having a friendly robot helping me point out all my options in a real life game. Or a friendly human capable of running the entire game in their head helping me. Virtually the same thing really.
So Charterstone starts out as an extremely simple and boring worker placement game that has almost negative tension. At least the first 3 or 4 games. The first few games stand as a tutorial to worker placement games that gently wafts options towards the faces of people, urging players to start learning how to have fun calculating how to convert money and resources into points. The other thing the game does is fire unlock after unlock at players, forcing them to form a Pavlovian response to unlocking things in the game (since opening unlocks give players points). Then the real game starts.
Suddenly, the very simple and less than mediocre game becomes…a simple and mediocre worker placement euro-game. Honestly if you like euro games where you take a turn getting a nondescript cube and spending that cube for a different cube and then spending those cubes to get points and the term resource conversion makes your brain go brrrrrrr because you have formed a Pavlovian response to boring games (insert SUSD bit where they dressed in suits and did a bit where they were very boring euro-gamers eating boring soup and getting in boring bed), then Charterstone is gonna be pretty good. It’s got a lot of euroing to unlock in the form of crates, and each game gives players a specific goal related to a new mechanic to have players go outside of their main point strategy to find other paths to victory. But my issue with this game is how it was packaged.
If I were playing the physical version of the game, I would be pretty cynical of how the unlock system worked and I would have probably disliked the game a lot more honestly. It’s like walking into a store that knows human beings’ tendencies to buy things they don’t need because everything in the store says it’s going away soon; or more directly, it’s like playing a gacha game or a game with loot crates that manipulates people into enjoying a thing that doesn’t really exist (they are getting a virtual thing that has no value). Not that any of these things are remotely similar, but the fact that I am 100% sure people like this game more because they get to put stickers on their board and open hidden boxes and have things that are their own and it’s special. That shit is stupid. Playing the game digitally pretty much removes almost all of that feeling and the game turns into something I didn’t expect.
It feels like a roguelike eurogame.
It feels like the barebones of a prototype of something someone would make if they wanted to make a roguelike boardgame (yes, I mean rogue-lite fuck you). Each game gives you a boost based on what you did the previous game, and the entire campaign feels like a life-cycle of how long a roguelike would last.
And this feeling puts it pretty solidly in the mediocre range.
So my thoughts are that every legacy game should be made into a digital game, and they should wrap the whole campaign in the shell of a roguelike structure.
Which is actually just Dicey Dungeons. Imagine Dicey Dungeons except eurogame. That’s not what Charterstone is, Charterstone is just a mediocre digital eurogame with unlocks. Maybe play it if you like it when I say resource conversion. These have been my thoughts.