Week in review: Week to 21 February
Feb. 24th, 2026 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. At the weekly board game meet, we played Liar's Uno while we were waiting to see who turned up, and then the main game was Clank!.
In Clank!, the players are exploring a dungeon and trying to retrieve valuable treasures, while trying to avoid making noises and waking up the guardian dragon. There's a push-your-luck element, because it doesn't matter how much loot you've got if you don't get back to the surface with it before something eats you or the game timer runs down. We had a lot of fun, although we realised along the way that we'd forgotten several important rules -- including, most importantly, one about when the game ends. We had thought that the game enters the final countdown when the first player gets back to the surface with their loot, but when that happened we checked the rules and realised that actually the countdown starts whenever a player exits play for any reason -- meaning it should have been started earlier, when another player who had been trying a high-risk strategy had gotten himself eaten by the dragon.
. I went with friends to a concert by the iconic punk rock band The Living End. It's not my kind of music particularly, but my friends were going and it was at a nice outdoor venue in good weather, so I figured I might as well go along and see how it went. I still don't think it's my kind of music particularly, but I had a good time.
. I went on a walk with some of my relatives and we talked about how our weeks had been going. We're hoping to make it a regular event.
. I was looking for new ice cube trays and decided I wanted flexible silicone ones instead of rigid plastic. I couldn't find any regular cube-shaped silicone trays, but I came across a set that made ice blocks shaped like animal heads, and decided that a bit of extra whimsy wouldn't hurt. They were available in dog heads and cat heads, so I got one of each. The dog heads are working a treat, but I haven't been able to get the cat heads out of the trays -- the extra surface area of the whisker details is providing too much grip on the ice blocks.
. Since I'd had to pay for it as part of the bundle, and it had already downloaded itself, I figured I might as well try out War of the Chosen, the big expansion DLC for XCOM 2. I have mixed feelings about parts of it, but on the whole I'm having a positive experience.
The expansion changes up several of the game mechanics and adds a bunch of variety in terrain, mission types, and enemies. It adds new characters, both as allies and enemies, and fleshes out some of the story.
Things I like:
- The new soldier management mechanics are interesting. These include a system where soldiers who often go on missions together become buddies and get bonuses when they're deployed together in future, and a fatigue mechanic where soldiers get tired if you send them on too many missions in a row, so you have to let them rest and send different soldiers out. The latter might sound like an obstacle, but it's really a sneaky way of encouraging the player to spread the work around so that all the soldiers gain experience and opportunities to level up; in the base game, it's very easy to get into a habit of sending out the most experienced soldiers every time because they have the best skills, and ending up with one squad of really powerful soldiers and everybody else being really low-level and going to be in a lot of trouble if something happens to the powerful squad.
- The increased variety of terrain and new mission types is nice. So far, there hasn't been any one mission type showing up so often that I go "oh, this again", which could be a problem in the base game. The new terrain includes increased variety within existing biomes as well as entirely new types of terrain, including missions happening in subways or sewers, or in landscape that has started growing weird alien vegetation.
- It's nice that the resistance groups that you join forces with have characterised leaders and goals now and aren't just interchangeable NPCs. (And that now, when you go to the aid of a resistance base being attacked by the aliens, there's a chance you'll arrive to find that some of the people in the base are fighting back and not all just cowering in corners waiting for you to save them.)
Things I'm less keen on:
- I'm dubious about some of the new story choices; in particular, having named alien characters with their own scenes takes away from the enigmatic nature of the alien leaders in the original and raises some questions that the game is not equipped to answer.
- Casting all the new resistance hero characters with actors from Star Trek: The Next Generation is a fun easter egg but means I'm taken out of it slightly every time one of them speaks.
- The new missions set in a ruined city filled with zombie hordes that have nothing to do with the plot of the rest of the game are exactly as tedious as I expected they would be when I heard about them.
Something I'd expected to dislike, but actually haven't so far, is that several of the obligatory story missions have been revamped specifically to rule out the easy solutions that players had found for achieving the objectives. There's one particular mid-game mission which had become effectively a solved problem where I just had to go through the same sequence of moves each time I played it; the revamped version breaks that sequence of moves, so that I had to actually work at completing the mission, and the result was that I had fun playing it and was interested in how it would turn out. It remains to be seen whether I will have the same response to the final boss mission, which I gather has been rejiggered specifically to remove the strategically-convenient geography that I've been relying on over multiple play-throughs to make the final boss fight much easier than the game designers intended it to be.
In Clank!, the players are exploring a dungeon and trying to retrieve valuable treasures, while trying to avoid making noises and waking up the guardian dragon. There's a push-your-luck element, because it doesn't matter how much loot you've got if you don't get back to the surface with it before something eats you or the game timer runs down. We had a lot of fun, although we realised along the way that we'd forgotten several important rules -- including, most importantly, one about when the game ends. We had thought that the game enters the final countdown when the first player gets back to the surface with their loot, but when that happened we checked the rules and realised that actually the countdown starts whenever a player exits play for any reason -- meaning it should have been started earlier, when another player who had been trying a high-risk strategy had gotten himself eaten by the dragon.
. I went with friends to a concert by the iconic punk rock band The Living End. It's not my kind of music particularly, but my friends were going and it was at a nice outdoor venue in good weather, so I figured I might as well go along and see how it went. I still don't think it's my kind of music particularly, but I had a good time.
. I went on a walk with some of my relatives and we talked about how our weeks had been going. We're hoping to make it a regular event.
. I was looking for new ice cube trays and decided I wanted flexible silicone ones instead of rigid plastic. I couldn't find any regular cube-shaped silicone trays, but I came across a set that made ice blocks shaped like animal heads, and decided that a bit of extra whimsy wouldn't hurt. They were available in dog heads and cat heads, so I got one of each. The dog heads are working a treat, but I haven't been able to get the cat heads out of the trays -- the extra surface area of the whisker details is providing too much grip on the ice blocks.
. Since I'd had to pay for it as part of the bundle, and it had already downloaded itself, I figured I might as well try out War of the Chosen, the big expansion DLC for XCOM 2. I have mixed feelings about parts of it, but on the whole I'm having a positive experience.
The expansion changes up several of the game mechanics and adds a bunch of variety in terrain, mission types, and enemies. It adds new characters, both as allies and enemies, and fleshes out some of the story.
Things I like:
- The new soldier management mechanics are interesting. These include a system where soldiers who often go on missions together become buddies and get bonuses when they're deployed together in future, and a fatigue mechanic where soldiers get tired if you send them on too many missions in a row, so you have to let them rest and send different soldiers out. The latter might sound like an obstacle, but it's really a sneaky way of encouraging the player to spread the work around so that all the soldiers gain experience and opportunities to level up; in the base game, it's very easy to get into a habit of sending out the most experienced soldiers every time because they have the best skills, and ending up with one squad of really powerful soldiers and everybody else being really low-level and going to be in a lot of trouble if something happens to the powerful squad.
- The increased variety of terrain and new mission types is nice. So far, there hasn't been any one mission type showing up so often that I go "oh, this again", which could be a problem in the base game. The new terrain includes increased variety within existing biomes as well as entirely new types of terrain, including missions happening in subways or sewers, or in landscape that has started growing weird alien vegetation.
- It's nice that the resistance groups that you join forces with have characterised leaders and goals now and aren't just interchangeable NPCs. (And that now, when you go to the aid of a resistance base being attacked by the aliens, there's a chance you'll arrive to find that some of the people in the base are fighting back and not all just cowering in corners waiting for you to save them.)
Things I'm less keen on:
- I'm dubious about some of the new story choices; in particular, having named alien characters with their own scenes takes away from the enigmatic nature of the alien leaders in the original and raises some questions that the game is not equipped to answer.
- Casting all the new resistance hero characters with actors from Star Trek: The Next Generation is a fun easter egg but means I'm taken out of it slightly every time one of them speaks.
- The new missions set in a ruined city filled with zombie hordes that have nothing to do with the plot of the rest of the game are exactly as tedious as I expected they would be when I heard about them.
Something I'd expected to dislike, but actually haven't so far, is that several of the obligatory story missions have been revamped specifically to rule out the easy solutions that players had found for achieving the objectives. There's one particular mid-game mission which had become effectively a solved problem where I just had to go through the same sequence of moves each time I played it; the revamped version breaks that sequence of moves, so that I had to actually work at completing the mission, and the result was that I had fun playing it and was interested in how it would turn out. It remains to be seen whether I will have the same response to the final boss mission, which I gather has been rejiggered specifically to remove the strategically-convenient geography that I've been relying on over multiple play-throughs to make the final boss fight much easier than the game designers intended it to be.
