Actually, You're Starting To Annoy Me a Little, Packrat

I keep coming back to this game again and again and again, and every time I mention it, I complain about it.

That doesn’t seem entirely fair, given how much I actually enjoy the game. It’s variable but generally beautiful, and great fun to play, when it’s playable.

But it seems to me at the moment that it’s actually not playable, or not unless you’re prepared to devote an enormous amount of time to it.

Once upon a time, you could flip through your friends’ and the rats’ packs, hoping for a decent card, rummage through the markets to see if a coveted item had appeared, make a couple of low-level items, and still not waste more time than would have been required for a quick round of Freecell.

But that’s not the case now, and it’s all to do with the increasing dependence on pop-up cards.

Take the two new sets, for example: Lucha Libre and Toys, Toys, Toys.

To make the top-level item in Lucha Libre—the Title Belt—you require a Wrestling Ring, Blue Amigo, and Purple Diablo.

The Wrestling Ring is easy enough: it’s expensive, but you can buy it. But those two wrestlers! Both require a mask (in addition to boots, cloaks, or shorts). And masks are pop-up cards.

They’re rare pop-ups, as well: I’ve never seen the Purple Mask in the wild. So I can’t make Purple Diablo.

And I need more than one mask: to complete the set, I need to vault the Purple Mask, the Purple Diablo, the Blue Mask, the Blue Amigo, and the Title Belt. That’s three masks of each colour.

So far, I’ve found two Blue Masks. So my collection has large, frustrating holes in it.

Toys, Toys, Toys is even worse, if possible.

The top-level item there is an Electric Train, made from a Metal Robot, a Model Rocket, and a Hot Rod. The Model Rocket itself is made from three other items, but at least those are all available in the markets, as is the Hot Rod.

But that Metal Robot! He requires (of all things) a Bubble Wand and two Wooden Soldiers. The Wooden Soldiers, I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn, are pop-ups. Once again, I have never seen one in the wild, although I did once gaze longingly at one in a friend’s pack.

And, remember, I need to vault the Metal Robot on his own as well as the Wooden Soldiers card itself.

Five examples of a pop-up that I’ve never even seen? Is it any wonder I’m becoming frustrated?

I’ve heard a friend say that his frustration with the game comes from the fact that the rats have nothing of value in their packs. When you play co-operatively, as we do, you don’t raid your friends’ packs, though they will grab cards that they know you need. So you rely on the rats to offer chances to steal interesting cards—and stealing cards is, after all, the stated aim of the game.

But, honestly, I’d rather buy everything—regardless of how slow and frustrating it is to build up credits—than have this reliance on pop-ups.

Because it’s ruining the flow of the game.

You can no longer just pop in and out of a game, planning on a quick flip through the packs. Chances are, not a single pop-up will appear in that time and, when you’re waiting for pop-ups and desperately reliant on them, the game then becomes an exercise in frustration.

I don’t know if the intention is to induce us to spend more time playing the game, but that’s the outcome of these changes to the game mechanics.

And I may be lazy and prone to procrastination—in fact, I dare say I am.

But I’m not sacrificing my work, my students, and my writing by spending more and more time looking for cards that never appear.

I’m afraid that as more collections come to rely on pop-ups and, consequently, the game shifts to a more time-intensive mode of play, my inclination to finish those Feats of Wonder is going to fall away.