Odyssey Aquatica reviewed

Plus a memorial podcast episode for America's favorite splort

Dice Exploder: Still Kickstarting

If you’re thinking about backing the Dice Exploder season 3 Kickstarter and haven’t, do it now! This is a short Kickstarter; it’s only going through next Friday, October 6th. So get in while the getting’s good! We’re well over halfway there already.

You probably haven’t watched the campaign video, which is fine, who watches those things. But this clip of Mikey Hamm from the backers-exclusive bonus episode is… I mean I’m biased, but I think it’s just a hoot:

I actually made a previous campaign video that was deemed “too unprofessional to be see the light of day” by several early reviewers, but I’ll release it publicly once we hit 69 backers. It’s that kind of video.

Blaseball on the Plodcast

In the year of our lord two thousand and twenty, many things occurred. But one of those things was the cultural event known as Blaseball.

Blaseball was, more or less, a simulated baseball league that ran one game an hour, one season a week, that players could bet on and then use their winnings to vote for global rules changes. It got... weirder from there. And bigger. And memeier. It became nothing less than a lifestyle.

And then, this past summer of 2023, it ended.

What made it such a phenomenon? What made its fans so passionate? Was Blaseball even a game? And what will we do with ourselves now that it’s gone?

This week on the podcast I’m joined by Chris Greenbriar, former moderator of the team discord for the Core Mechanics (that’s one of the teams from Blaseball) to reminisce and celebrate Blaseball’s legacy and everything that made it beautiful.

It’s melancholy and sad and hopeful. It’s a riot. There were so many memes.

I’ll be at Big Bad Con this weekend

If you’ll be there, come say hi! I’d love to talk. In fact, me and Victor are going to have an informal Dice Exploder meetup at the hotel bar on Friday between the afternoon and evening dinner blocks. Stop by if you like!

Here’s a picture of me for reference:

Odyssey Aquatica

Finally, today I have for you another of my essays from my time as a judge for The Awards in 2022. This time it’s about Odyssey Aquatica, the Paragon playset (aka Agon hack) by Tim Denee.

Tim’s work is incredible. It’s gorgeous, it’s inventive, and it’s pretty funny. He comes up twice on the podcast over the rest of season 2. He’s also prepping with Evil Hat to crowdfund Deathmatch Island, another Paragon playset doing a Hunger Games / Squid Game thing. Just look at that thing.

Anyway, here’s me 10 months ago writing about my favorite of his completed works:

Okay, just so we’re all on the same page, the author of Odyssey Aquatica looked at a game with the ton of the Fast & the Furious about doing epic Greek adventures (Agon) and was like “what if you did a Wes Anderson movie with this?”

Sometimes the base concept of a work feels award-worthy by itself. The very idea of an RPG that feels like a twee little family drama is not something I’d thought of before seeing this, but by the gods I love it. I needed it. The fact that it then succeeds? That it successfully compares and conflates the adventures of a celebrity like Jacques Cousteau, the Big Fish style tales you may have heard about your father, and Homer’s The Odyssey? This thing is incredible.

See how adding memoirs takes Agon’s (and Cousteau’s) epicness and opens up space within it for intimacy and reflection. Note how many Agon hacks suffer from the loss of the pantheon of Greek gods as a consistent cast of characters within the game’s soap opera, and how Odyssey Aquatica knows it must fill that void with rivals, an inclusion which again underlines the epicness of your adventures while also humanizing them with the personal.

This is to speak nothing of how beautiful this game is. It feels tactile and present despite only existing as a digital product. The almost Star Wars poster cover. The “60s wallpaper” background on the copyright pages. The beautiful (fake) old books and the stylized artwork for each adventure. It’s exquisite. The layout, too; the fonts and lines and section headings are all as crisp and clean as the uniforms I imagine our crew ironing each day. The overall aesthetic is so clearly great while never becoming too flashy for its own good.

It’s not perfect. In part because of the way Agon’s designers have allowed the game to be adapted, there’s a lot of “[X mechanic] has become [Y mechanic].” “​​Pressure replaces Pathos, and Agony is called Barotrauma.” However necessary it is, I find this dry and dull to read. I imagine it’s difficult to prase and figure out the rules if you’ve never played Agon before, and it may be clunky and confusing to translate in your head if you have. It leads to a flattening of the game down to only mechanics for a few pages. And not every conversion feels like it will hold up perfectly; “I used some gear” pales in comparison to “I called upon the favor of the Goddess Athena, and she saw to it that my spear flew true.” But given the constraints the game’s operating under, I don’t know how you’d do much better with what it needs to accomplish.

Odyssey Aquatica is an incredible piece of work. It’s a brilliantly original adaptation, both of Agon and of The Life Aquatic. The fact that it’s made by a single author, from design through layout, is incredible. Tim Denee’s put out several products since this one that live up to the same standards, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of his design career has in store.