Don't you hate it when you're forty bucks deep in a whore's asshole before you notice the smattering of warts decorating her otherwise pop-star worthy bum? That's how I felt about Mojang's new-but-not-really tactical CCG - Scrolls. Perhaps I shouldn't be upset about the glaring flaws of a game that is still in beta, but let's not kid ourselves here, this is Mojang we're talking about, their definition of beta is not the same one the rest of the planet is using. The game being in beta hasn't stopped them making a cold, hard $2,000,000 from their "testers." This clever strategy excuses the games incompleteness while they pass around the tithing plate to collect from suckers like me who swoon over the combination of tactical map control and strategic deck building. It is a full on lets-pay-royalties-to-Lucas-to-barrow-Admiral-Ackbar-fucking-TRAP however, and here is why.
This game is slow. I mean painfully slow. Sometimes it is slow in a glorious way, the sort of profoundly beautiful intellectual paralysis that comes from recombining your options in countless ways until you run out of working memory and just have to pick a card. Unfortunately however, most of the time it is just slow because all of the interesting complexities of the game reduce to tiny (often random seeming) advantages: how many cards u got bro? Did your card destroy two of your opponents cards? Sweet, that's +1. Did you lose a card for no reason? Dag yo, that's -1. Up one, down one, over and over and over until these little advantages add to the game. This timid approach to game balance is the hallmark of mediocre game design. Might there be a whole macroverse inside a game that works on such small advantages? Like chess, or bridge, or Starcraft, or go? Perhaps, but games that work through such fine quantities of advantage are either fundamentally symmetrical, or rigorously balanced. Scrolls is neither, it is a CCG; overripe with randomness and balanced as if they really meant beta when they said it.
Slow matches translate to slow card gain, which wouldn't be so bad if building up resources allowed you to invest in your deck. Mojang went full-retard on this one though, and decided that even when you spend a weekend generating the cash, they're only going to sell you another pack of random bullshit which has a hentai girl's chance in Tentacle Hell of actually getting you something you can use. Even the cards you buy with Real People Money are randomly generated each day. The goal here is pretty clear - they know you believe that your strategy is a few cards away from being truly excellent, and they're not going to give them to you. Never mind that you're probably wrong. A couple decades playing other CCGs has taught me that the vast majority of my ideas are fundamentally flawed. Most of the fun, for me at least, comes from being able to test multitudes of these whimsical combinations. Not so in Scrolls. Mojang gave you lemons, bitch, so you best erect a lemonade stand, even if it means making 5 cents an hour.
You might imagine the game to be dynamic and evolving, with a keen metagame that jettisons players unable to keep up with all the nuanced layers of deck building and map control. You might imagine it, but that doesn't make it so. There is something deeply alluring about Scrolls. Watching someone play the game, if you haven't tried it yourself, may convince you that there is a great deal going on between the lines. It is exactly the sort of game you would expect to have layers upon layers of complex subtly hidden within each overt action. Yet somehow, despite the sometimes insightful coordination of inspired game elements, it just isn't there. When you actually sit down to play, the delightful engaging moments are surprisingly rare. The grueling pace at which you gain cards keeps you from trying new ideas, and the conservative card balance reigns in the interesting card combinations to a toxic dullness. It may someday blossom into an interesting and dynamic game, but whether or not it is there now, Mojang is certainly willing to exchange your money for untested digital rectangles scrawled with inspired mediocrity.