868-BACK: steam reviews

Back in the heyday of the 2010s there used to be people who were paid to play videogames and write about them. Entire websites were dedicated to listing these "reviews". Some would even assign a numeric score to each game, and then - I know this sounds weird but I was there and I swear it's true - there was a site called Megacritic that would display the average of these numbers as though it meant something! Unfortunately this profession has gone the way of the farrier and the spargelblancher, and now we rely solely on the Steam Users to understand whether a game is any good.

To assist you in navigating this complex and uncharted world of modern videogames, I've gathered together a few common themes from the reviews that have been granted my game 868-BACK. I think it might help to shine some light on the situation. By the way, if you look closely at where I wrote 868-BACK you will see that it is coloured orange: this means that you can click it with your mouse pointer to take you directly to a shop where you can purchase the game for your personal use. Please do so at the first opportunity.

Here is another piece of orange text: 868-BACK Steam reviews. This one will take you to a very tall page where you can read all of the writing quoted here in full.

Without further ado, here are the facts that I believe can be deduced from these reviews, with supporting quotes:

This game is quite good.

• "This is, no hyperbole, the best video game ever made." - Personman
• "868-BACK is the best roguelike ever made." - jonah.ostroff
• "Potentially best roguelike I've ever played. " - Zenryoku
• "Hands down one of the best indie games out there" - Shakerbaby
• "a once-in-a-decade strategy experience." - drewww
• "GOTY 2026" - tozac
• "One of the best games to come out in the recent years, for sure!" - berandro
• "without doubt one of the greatest video games I've ever played" - Aiwass
• "40 hours in, i'm thinking it belongs in that sacred tier of roguelikes, with the spelunkys, spires, noitas, quds, etc" - goldee
• "This is not only the greatest roguelike I've ever played, but one of the best games I've ever played, period. Seriously, this game is a masterpiece of the highest tier. Stuff this good comes along like once a decade." - Misery
• "This is one of the greatest roguelikes I've ever played. Period." - Jakey Snakey
• "An absolute triumph. Richly thematic, terrifically compelling, impossibly deep. If you like turn-based tactical games or roguelikes, it doesn't get better than this." - avianism
• "Unbelievably good." - shiftyarmx
• "this is one of the best designed games I've ever played" - Gandalf
• "GOTY an it's not even close." - Tea Party Crasher
• "Best modern interpretation of cyberpunk AND best modern roguelike." - Kalir
• "It's truly an astounding game. The music haunts my dreams. The story is surprisingly affecting for a game I expected literally 0 story from. I implore you to get it." - Tome
• "This is one of the all-time greats already." - Toni

This is something new.

• "Roguelikes have gotten a little rote. 868-BACK is a breath of fresh air with a family of ideas that regularly take my breath away with their unexpectedness, novelty, and subtlety." - drewww
• "It feels like I've never really played a real roguelike before. Like the world knew only checkers, and then someone came and invented chess." - Nozomu
• "The basic layer of the hacking gameplay would be varied and thoughtful enough to carry a game by itself, but the addition of the overarching "campaign" creates a texture and flow unlike anything I've played. Many games exist where you'll play through a long series of missions or battles, broken up by visits to a home base or overworld map where you prepare for the next one; this is the only game I've played where those two layers feel completely inseparable, and where neither is the inferior." - kriptosporidium
• "It's hard to think of another game that's bursting with this many exciting ideas" - metanet_raigan

This is a large and substantial game.

• "this is the densest, richest chocolate cake i've ever tasted. this is the neutron star of game design" - Delta
• "An absurd amount of videogame. " - Sam Barlow
• "I'm blown away by what I've played of 868-BACK so far. The game feels _so much larger_ than anything he's released before." - HarassmentPanda
• "the game feels generous and full of surprises. I've only played a few hours and during each run I've discovered new parts of the game that I didn't know existed. Not sure how long this feeling is going to last, but at the moment I can't say for sure what the game actually is or how deep it goes, and I don't know when I'll know. And I love that!" - MarechalBanane
• "This game has a shocking amount of depth: a vast trove of items with subtle interactions and combos" - sdenton4
• "Simply amazing. A worthy successor to 868-HACK, that does not only expand the concept but adds so many fresh ideas on top of it, it's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane." - Toni

(In addition to the things they say: many of these reviews show hundreds of hours played! I think it must be true.)

This is challenging but accessible.

• "The very elegant onboarding. The tutorial does not overstay its welcome, voluntarily eludes a lot, only giving you the starting tools and encouraging you to set off and explore the game by yourself, trusting you'll be smart enough to figure it out. It introduces a bit of friction, but a desirable one that spurs curiosity, joyful experimentation and produces empowerment." - MarechalBanane
• "Great game. Easy to pickup, absurd amounts of depth and complexity to discover as you play." - Xcalibur
• "After being scared off by the look of the original 868-HACK for so many years, I must say that this is surprisingly approachable" - lorandbehold
• "This game is hard, but there isn't any burden of knowledge involved. Everything is on the screen in front of you. There's very little, if anything, that you need to memorise or learn other than how to play the game and what you can get away with." - Cat-Gonk

This is a good entry point to my work.

• "Michael's games have been my favorites for years, but this is the first one that I think is truly accessible to any fan of turn-based tactics & strategy games. An amazing tutorial." - Personman
• "This game takes that signature broughlike formula and cranks everything to the extreme. After his hiatus I am so happy to say he has not lost his touch, and this is his magnum opus. " - Chloyster
• "So fun! Ive played and like 868-Hack but never got too deep into it, and i assumed this would be overwhelmingly more. It is more, much more, but its also more FUN! Feels like more of an adventure and a romp than just pure strategy. This sequel has managed to add much more choice without somehow adding more AP. I don’t know how, but its just expressive as heck and so engaging." - derftymutt
• "I liked the first one so much I got a tattoo about it. this one's better." - squidlarkin

This game is thematic.

• "overall not just a very solid roguelike, but also one of the most evocative expressions of cyberpunk-style hacking i've seen in games as a whole " - lemon
• "Also the music is FIRE and the graphics have a very cool style to them. I feel badass playing this game" - warp_pipe
• "The game convinces you that this is a Living World that is much larger than what you're seeing with a bunch of deft touches" - h_zeera
• "Aesthetics and art design are top tier. Music is other worldly. Michaels best game to date." - GizaPlateau

This all sounds rather positive, but in the absence of Megatron Megacritic providing an averaged rating, how can we really be sure? Maybe you will have to check for yourself. Several people are saying it is the most significant Game Of All The Year ("goaty" for short) - it would surely be embarrassing not to play it soon! You still have time. Remember, look for the orange text.

• "Most of all, this a game filled with joy, and that wants to give joy." - zippyzip

imbroglio notes 15 - mizzenmast II

I love playing games with people. I have ended up mostly making singleplayer games because they're easier to sell. Here's a game with a construction phase inspired by TCGs; a common way to play those card games is draft, which adds an initial phase of play to distribute cards. Could we draft Imbroglio? I can't make the main game multiplayer, but we could add a multiplayer phase where we pick weapons for our board, and then play them out to see who did better. At the time I was playing async card games like Ascension online: we'd typically start a game and take several turns quickly while our play times overlapped, and then it would slow down and finish over a few days; this could work like that - a synchronous phase of drafting and then do the solo part in our own time. I implemented this pass-and-play on one device and never got as far as networking because it wasn't great for a bunch of reasons. I think the draft mechanism was: you're offered four cards / take turns picking one each / alternate who starts each hand. Some iterations had the last card being thrown away, or like "pick one to draw and one to throw away" but that just got more complicated.

A problem is that Imbroglio runs often fail to get off the ground because of bad luck in the early game. It feels bad to do this whole big draft with someone and then flop. On the other hand maybe this is good because it encourages you to build a board that can reliably survive the early game! It had been an ongoing weakness in the game's design that, while it seems like there should be a trade-off between early and late strength in a board design, because you can always just restart and try again the winning boards are always going to be ones that focus on late strength. It's true that you don't want a board with literally no early strength because you need to be able to get it to that later point, but as long as it's above 0% it's just a matter of how long you want to spend retrying. When I added the Izu (weekly) mode I'd hoped that this might be what it needed to make the early-game matter, but I ended up not having it one-time-only because you sensibly want to test your board. So Draft Mode was my last stab at this: a mode where the multiplayer setup makes you care about Clubs and Braziers because your goal isn't to ascend, it's to play once and get more than the other person. This makes it a very high-skill game: in normal play most people are taking a few attempts to get going - yes that's partly because they're not having to build their boards for that condition but it's also just kinda normal not to expect perfect play. So who's even going to be playing this multiplayer-only mode that requires you to already be an Imbroglio fiend to even get started? A multiplayer game needs a player base to survive. I tried making it "best of two" or "best of four" but then it takes a very long time to play out. These problems seemed potentially solvable (e.g. if you replay you have to keep the new score) but the mode never reached a point of actually being fun so I abandoned it.

I eventually returned with the insight that it should just be another singleplayer mode. Yes it's for the experts - it's in the third expansion! - but if you only need one expert then at least it will actually get played. I came up with this lovely single-player draft mechanism: you're offered four cards / picking a card discards any to the left, then draw up to four. The idea was to simulate how some cards might pass you by in a multiplayer draft, but since it's just you you get that bit of extra control. You can take from the left to keep every card, take from the right to dig deep and maximise the number of new cards you see, or somewhere in the middle. I really like this system and I wouldn't be surprised to see more games building on it one day; I certainly might use it again.

It still felt bad to do the whole draft and then lose early, but this was easier to fix with just one player. Rather than some general rule like "best of two" I could get really explicit and just say "if you score less than 16 it doesn't count". I ended up with a streak system: that number starts low but goes up each round you beat it; if you ever miss the target then you get a replay but the number resets. A neat thing here is that if you're doing well it flips around to become a challenge: you have to get above the target or else you'll lose your streak and have to replay that round - always neat when a single rule can both give support at the bottom and challenge at the top.

Some draft games would let you choose your hero after the draft depending on what cards you got; that doesn't really work here since several heroes have these restrictions like "red weapons only" that would be awkward if the draft pool isn't set up to fit them. So we choose a hero before the draft. Also since the heroes have very different power levels, I'd like some way to mix it up so you're not just encouraged to pick the strongest, but I also don't want to just make it random because then your score depends too much on that chance. I came up with this neat format - seriously check it out if you haven't - where each round you pick the hero from two random options, and your total Draft score is the sum of your score with each hero. This is a bit like the rolling average I used in P1 SELECT except that instead of your previous 16 games you're always choosing which score to replace. If you do really well sometime, you can keep that score on the board by always picking the other hero when it comes up (until eventually you're made to choose between your two best). Again: a spicy format that more games could stand to build on, hidden away here in the third expansion.

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You might be noticing that between four new heroes - each breaking something fundamental about the game and so requiring substantial reprogramming, plus an elaborate new game mode, and the most complex set of weapons yet, this is actually an enormous expansion! Hopefully it made a whole lot of money to pay me for all that work. Unfortunately in typical fashion, each expansion sells fewer copies. Ossuary sold 2.73K, Phlogiston 1.27K, and Mizzenmast just 779 copies. Uh-oh. Well, maybe writing now will give it a little extra juice?

This was the last thing I released before the plague got me. Maybe if I'd been around to promote it better it could have reached more people back then! You can see the timeline right here on my blog: expansion released => updated a crash bug but I'm sick => nothing for almost two years => oops still sick. Sounds like I worked quite hard finishing off this game - I'm not sure if my overwork contributed to the illness becoming chronic, or if I felt like I'd done too much because I was already getting sick, or what.

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Now for the individual weapons:

Animate Figurehead
At some point I added hybrid heroes to the Izu (weekly) mode. My notes don't tell me exactly when - maybe it was in this expansion too? - maybe the previous one, anyway I'm pretty sure it was a later addition. Having gone to that effort I wanted to get more use out of the concept. I didn't want to just add all the combinations to normal play - that's 256 different pairings and most of them honestly aren't great; I'd worked hard to design good combinations and I want to keep those canonical. So how about a weapon that temporarily mixes them? The main question here was whether it should be red or blue - you'd expect blue because that's where I mostly put more complex effects. Since Susannah is red-only and Ixxthl is blue-only, there's going to be one of them that can't use it and therefore 16 combinations that it can't produce. Spending a while playing those pairings I felt there was the most joy red.

Lightkeeper's Candle
Duplicate your hero's power: always love a good echo. Neat to have an item whose valuation is completely different for each hero.

Whirlpool Trident
We were enjoying the Hourglass telefrags and wanted more, here's a red version.

Bludgeon Catapult
Makes weapons next to it ranged. Since I'd programmed the game in a way that made rewriting weapon effects really simple, I kept trying to make that a thing even though it never fit that well. Whetstone went through so many versions and I'm still not sure it's really there, now there's this and I'm also uncertain. The game would be cleaner without, but hey with 80 weapons there's space for an awkward thing. I gave it lots of damage to compensate for the power not being great.

Unicorn Tusk
Shopkeeper's "enemies use weapons" obviously caused a ton of problems because it wasn't designed in from the start. Effects like cursing were completely undefined when applied to the player. Jonah suggested "skip a heal" for a cursed player - it doesn't have a strong connection to the usual curse effect but it happens at gem o'clock and it feels like a curse so there you go. I wanted to make sure players knew what to expect when they're cursed, so here I made a self-cursing weapon which can elegantly fit that explanation into its rule text. Named for Unicorn to match Ossuary's Dragon Skull. I reworded Witchpact Blade to "+1 for each curse" instead of "+1 for each cursed enemy" to allow a combo here.

Void Cutlass, Smuggler's Chest
A little theme of "red weapons with scaling damage" to go with Witchpact Blade (curses) and Esoteric Prism (charges).
Most of these start at 1 and add bonus damage on top, but for Cutlass (♡ missing) that was too strong so it starts at 0 - that's cute because if you use it at 0 you get hit and now it's online. Except if it's a blue snake hitting you. Well that sucks. Let's throw in a ♡-spend on miss to power it back up.
The Chest also has this "additional copy" rule I'd been wanting in there to mix up the board construction rules, especially in Izu and Draft.

Portal Porthole
Tried this as a IV upgrade for Skeleton Key. It was strong enough to stand alone.
The new weapons needed to keep a sufficient density of curses to make sure there were still interactions for the earlier one so I periodically went through and just tried forcing a curse effect into anything. This one maybe feels a little arbitrary but it played well enough.

Distant Telescope, Shimmering Cloak
I was running out of ideas to fit the "spend ♢ when attacking" format: it had to get weird.
Telescope is Rimeclaws with a twist - instead of paying for extra damage you get another weapon's hit. Trying to increase interactions between different weapons to make it feel combo-ier. The "choose one for level" tech makes this useful enough.
Cloak could have just been "spend ♢ to block any hit" but that got too strong with Rings; "spend ♢ to block ♡ hits" was okay but weak; adding "spend ♡ to block ♢ hits" seemed fine. It's neat how it almost feels like it situationally doubles your hp: once you run out of one colour to spend on blocks you can still take the hits the normal way. Maybe it helps you survive without really moving towards winning: ok let's have another curse effect.

Treasure Map
Wracking my brains for more ways to do alternate scoring: manipulating gem spawn positions? It's not a full alternate win condition but it changes the flow of scoring enough to point in that direction. It's also another ♢ spend, great! And to fit the expansion theme, following the Map to reach the Chest is a good combo. It needed a little extra so of course I'll throw on a curse effect - wait - a charge effect feels less on-theme but plays much better, I guess I just go with it.

Blunderbuss
I wrote earlier in this series that I don't make weapons level up to become ranged because it can be a disadvantage. Well, here's the closest thing I found that I was okay with: it becomes ranged when it's charged. This could have fit fine in Phlogiston but I had another ranged weapon there and it basically fit the pirate theme here.

Galvanic Sail
Another charge weapon that could just have fit in Phlogiston, but complex enough to save for later. I spent a lot of development time on fancy effects that could trigger automatic attacks, because making a combo that plays itself always seems like a cool idea until you try it. This and Venom are the survivors, sufficiently nerfed that the combo centering them isn't totally overwhelming, which probably makes them barely playable if you're not doing that specific build. I will learn!

Starshine's Pearls
We've spent ♢, ♡, ©, of course I'm going to try to make one that spends ★. It has to be pretty strong because you don't want to do that: let's kill two enemies. I enjoyed connecting a few weapon names with the characters: high damage in a power is a good counter for Starshine's lowered base damage.

Anchor, Tentacle Appendage
Fleshing out a last couple of combo possibilities with specific triggers. Basically you just go over the whole set of items repeatedly looking at different ways you can carve out a distinguished subset, and imagine what power could mesh with that subset. Anchor rewards attacking at a distance (which means not just basic ranged weapons, but things like Harp or Rodney that send a hit somewhere else, and Telescope that brings a hit from a distant weapon here). Tentacle rewards spending ♢ in a different style to how Ring does.

imbroglio notes 14 - mizzenmast I

Doug posted about one of my "imbroglio notes" posts today, which spurred me to have a little read over them again and reminisce. Obviously there are 16 of these, in keeping with the 4x4 numerology, and so I was surprised when I reached number 13 (from May 2018) and there were no more! I had been meaning to get onto finishing number 16 sometime - probably when I finally get around to releasing a PC version - but I had completely forgotten that I'd never even posted numbers 14 and 15.

It's really interesting to me to look back at this game, it feels central to my career: my masterwork (in the sense of the piece of work that marks the transition to being a master of a craft). That's not to say I hadn't done good work before that point, but it was a definite step up in scale and complexity, and I gained authority over the process. Part of that is the design was much more elusive - as evidenced by how much I've written about it - I really had to wrestle with the ideas to bring them through. This game also spanned a transitional period in my life: I started it in Scotland not long before our residence expired, worked on it while travelling, completed it back in Aotearoa, and then made the expansions early on in our time in Portugal. My father and father-in-law both died during that time. (These events are partly responsible for the severe delay on the the PC release.) Inevitably this won't be exactly the post I would have written back then, but it looks like I left myself substantial notes to work from, so let's get into it!

As I said in the Mizzenmast announcement post, I'd expected to make 4 expansions, but to maintain quality I merged the last two. Surprisingly many of the remaining weapon ideas I was experimenting with had a nautical theme - it wasn't clear how this fit into the setting of the game, but seemed surprisingly hard to avoid! I would just be trying out a new weapon idea, maybe it can be in such-and-such expansion, sketch a picture for it thinking about how to explain the mechanics.. oh it's a giant octopus tentacle, I GUESS I'LL THROW IT ON THE NAUTICAL PILE THEN. I just had to run with it.

Cruel Pirate Rodney
The first version of the vision disadvantage let you see a 3x3 square regardless of walls. I was very impressed with how large a 4x4 grid could feel when you only see some of it. The character was called "Blind Blacksmith Brenda", with the power to feed her weapon (which eventually made its way to Charlie). How this felt to play was very similar to the final version, but it had several problems. The interaction with ranged weapons was awful: you wouldn't know if a swipe was going to be a move or an attack (this was before there were arrows displayed to indicate attacks, but even with those you don't know what you're attacking). You probably end up not using ranged weapons at all and that's already Harry's disadvantage. Plus it's just generally very hard: you don't know where the gem is so you spend extra turns going the wrong way (similar to Simon, or even Johnny), plus you sometimes move into an attack from a hidden enemy. Also I wasn't sure how I felt about naming a character's disadvantage after a real life disability? I'm right into the blues, guys like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Boy Paxton I have incredibly high esteem for, I think I could write this respectfully, but it's always worth being sensitive because you don't know what someone else's situation is and you don't know what someone will feel who doesn't know where you're coming from. So I took that character out - Molly went there - but eventually returned to the idea because I'd been so pleased with the sense of space. I made ranged weapons reveal their targets and that was so much better that it just fell into place: vision should be proper line of sight! This also also removed some situations where you'd move into an attack (while leaving others, when the enemy is around a corner), and let you sometimes see the gem sooner. Playing it out, it felt like this was now "balanced". I really liked the mix between closed and open spaces instead of being all claustrophobic all the time, I really liked how it made the wall layout really matter. It felt natural enough that this could be how the game was meant to be all along - I'm always happy when a variation is plausibly the alternate-universe standard ruleset. This is pretty close to how vision works in many roguelikes - I'm also happy when rules that are standard in other games become weirdly oppositional in mine (compare with 868-HACK's "super melee attack"). And then of course making him a pirate with an eye-patch explains the reduced vision in a way that's less likely to offend anyone, while tying it into the nautical theme: perfect.
(Present day note: 868-BACK's "advanced graphics" powerup is essentially the same as this at a pure rule-mechanism level, but the display feels completely different.)

Starshine Sea-urchin
I clearly remember when I found the seed of this idea, walking along the coast of Fife past the old salt factory. I was pondering how to make different board-construction challenges for the different heroes: I already had Harry, Susannah, and Ixxthl's basic restrictions on the set of weapons, I had ideas how to increase the challenge of enemies and mazes, and I wondered if there was an interesting way to modulate the weapons themselves. With the weapon description language it's easy enough to make substitutions and rewrite them in a systematic way - replace all instances of "when this kills" with "when this hits" or something, but those types of effect get very fiddly and the subsets of weapons they affect feel very arbitrary. Ideally you want to affect at least a quarter of the cards in a clear and meaningful way. What's something that most weapons have? Well they all deal damage, and half of them have more than 1 damage. How about just "all weapons always do 1 damage"? This completely invalidates damage-only weapons like Cleaver, Broadsword, Brazier; maybe modify it to "weapons have -1 damage (minimum 1)". The neat thing about removing damage is how it shifts the focus to what rules a weapon has, to making combos - so I tried pairing it with Jeska's cursing power to fuel combos, but it felt terrible to kill her Broadsword interaction. Shuffled it around a lot, ended up not using it.
I came back to it for this expansion. I didn't like the implication of "don't use weapons with extra damage"; especially with the extra expansion weapons making that too obvious to play around. Might as well be a "no damage weapons" restriction - but that completely loses the original idea of rewriting weapons. Maybe I give weapons something else to compensate for reduced damage. Maybe they sometimes get the damage still - so I thought of using random damage, maybe the damage is a die roll like this is an normal RPG or something! A 2-damage weapon rolls a d2, 3-damage rolls a d3. It's nice that damage still matters even though reduced, and it's neat to add extra uncertainty to combat. In practice how you play this is still "no damage weapons" and that's a shame. So I make it more extreme. Damage starts at 0. Now even 1-damage weapons are diminished, they're no longer the safe option that avoids the penalty, it gets interesting. It's too harsh because you die whenever you get a few misses in a row (the correct play almost becomes "only damage weapons" to maximise your rolls but even those aren't enough). But it's getting somewhere, almost hitting that feeling of "this could be how the game was meant to be all along" just failing by not actually being good. I tried some different ways of hacking the odds - maybe it's weighted towards higher rolls, maybe it guarantees alternating hits and misses, maybe it rolls in the range [0, damage+1] - all of these kind of work for balance but the added complexity moves it away from the sense of being the primal "could have been all along" rule.
Maybe you roll damage before attacking so you know the outcome to make an informed decision. Adds some complexity. Intriguing how this adds tactical value to having open space to kite enemies while rerolling. Sometimes feels better because you reroll until you get the hit - spending turns but not taking damage. Sometimes feels worse because you don't have a way out and you know a turn ahead that you're guaranteed to miss and die. Feels really bad when you spend time rerolling and still get zeros. Okay what if it only rerolls when you attack? This is bad because there's no escape from a low roll. What if it rolls for all the weapons at once? Now the positional tactics are very clear because you can see where has damage and make an informed choice to go and get it, rather than just taking chances. Also allows me to weight the rolls favourably without having requiring extra complexity in the written rules because you can explicitly see the spread. It doesn't quite have the naturalness of "let's just roll dice like dungeons and dragons" but the clear visibility of outcomes makes it work.
Her active power went through lots of versions too. I really liked "swap your ♢ and ♡". This let you take some damage and then swap to keep fighting, distribute the damage to optimise heals from gems, use Spears to heal ♢, or spend ♡ on wands... but all these cute effects were very situational and 90% of the time it was a bad wait. Rodney's remote attack effect was here for a while, but fit better with his disadvantage so he got it. Because her disadvantage is so complex, her ability wanted to be strong but simple. I ended up back at "restore ♢". This might seem too much like a repeat of Harry, but it plays out pretty differently because it powers different things. In particular it helps enable mana-cost weapons which I'd been feeling were a little underused, and that fits with how her disadvantage is pushing you to focus on weapon powers more than their base damage. Once I'd settled on the random rolls being shown in advance, I tacked on a reroll and that made the power feel less generic and mitigated a lot of problems of reroll-on-attack: if you're stuck with zeros, "heal and take damage" is better than "miss and take damage", while "heal and reroll and wait in place as the enemy moves to you" is way better than "move next to enemy, take damage, miss, take damage".

Castaway Charlie
I really like the hero disadvantages that restrict weapon availability because they give such strong direction for constructing different boards, instead of the less clear situation where you can play any board but different boards are optimal. But there just aren't many simple rules to distinguish subsets; red and blue worked well, "no ranged" wasn't great, "no damage" and "only damage" had sucked; what else even is there? When I started making expansions I tried a "no base weapons" hero, Leon suggested this could be the Shopkeeper - she only has expansion weapons because that's what's in her shop. But this didn't play well; the more-complex expansion items want to be mixed in with the simpler ones from the initial set. I loved the Shopkeeper idea though, so what if she only has the weapons that are left after everyone else has bought theirs? This is straight from 868-HACK - "Favoured Progs" bans the abilities you've most used in the current streak, forcing you to adapt. I really like this idea of restrictions tailored to a particular player's style. Eventually a different concept fit better for the Shopkeeper and this became (in nautical theming) a castaway who's making do with scraps. There's a bunch of messiness here: you can't straightforwardly share his boards because we have different best scores, if you get a top score with him you can't replay the same board. I saved this for the final expansion so that there'd be plenty of score information already to stabilise it.

The Shopkeeper
I didn't even consider the shopkeeper as a playable character until long after I'd drawn them for the button, but of course with such sparse worldbuilding it just made sense to use this one person that we'd met! As above, for a while they had Charlie's disadvantage. Jonah suggested "minotaurs use weapons" as a weird probably-not-viable idea, I tried it anyway, it took a lot of reprogramming to make it work but I loved it. It was too minor just on Minotaurs though so I extended it to all enemies.
Their runepower started as re-randomising the walls, generating a new level (like Zaga-33's "quake" item). Then I thought - scoring a gem triggers that effect, so why not simplify that to a power that scores a gem? Which is obviously really good. It ties several effects together to make a very flexible ability - use it to get past bad wall layouts, to heal, with curses for the ghost effect, or find weapons with gem triggers to make a weird combo. Or maybe simply as a scoring effect! So that was okay, but led to degenerate builds where you could stay in place on a rune-generation weapon, felt quite similar to the old Dream Wheel combos. Leon suggested teleporting to the gem to break stay-in-place builds, this lost some of the feeling of a merchant just buying points but solved enough problems to be worth it. Still you could save up a lot of runes and jump jump jump, so I went for the same solution as with Dream Wheel: it only works half the time. (The opposite half from the Wheel, so they can cover for each other!) A two-part power is complex but acceptable for final expansion; the night-time aspect is kept as simple as possible.

And that is plenty for tonight! The deluxe-sized expansion deserves two posts.