Can't seem to quote replies out of the thread search. Ah well.
Just spent a good few hours with Spellcaster University, previously mentioned in this thread.
It bills itself as a casual rogue-lite management type game, a sort of build your own Hogwarts thing. It's not incredibly deep but it's got enough fun stuff to sustain a few playthroughs. One thing the game's been criticized for its a doom clock on gameplay. The plot is you're running a school for wizards and the ultimate evil is sweeping across the land. You can slow down its advance using a couple methods, but ultimately it's just a clock before your run is ended. What wizards you managed to graduate may give you some bonuses that apply in later runs, several runs together forming the game's campaign. The criticisms say that runs aren't log enough and I can see the position. But when you set the "round" length to marathon, a single run can take hours and hours. There's a lot of variety and things to specialize and optimize for so I think the finite run length helps enforce some variety instead of building everything in a single run.
The semi-random nature of what rooms you get in a run, in what order, also enforces some extra run to run variety.
For all that it's pretty charming, in a euro-jank kinda way. Decent graphics. Cute little details like magical accidents affecting students, or localized magical weirdness shutting down classrooms until the right teacher can get in there to restore order. Decent moment to moment gameplay where you're not waiting too long to get a new room or unlock a new thing or induct new students or graduate other students out. You get that vaguely Hogwart's experience of setting up different Houses for students to join and each one having its own specialties. You get some light management responsibilities and design and decoration opportunities. You get a lot of dood dads to put in rooms to optimize things. In addition to helping you improve the kind of wizards you're teaching, you get fun stuff like dragons and fairy and witches cats running through your school, and it's all very cute.
As a sim though I'd say it's a fairly casual game. Students and teachers have needs but rather than it being hard stop things like not enough food or not enough beds or not enough entertainment areas, the game kind of hand waves it by just making students and teachers leave campus if their needs aren't fulfilled. They go get what they need off screen and then come back which represents additional delays in the whole "teaching wizards" cycle. So really most of the game boils down to efficiencies rather than say, survival elements. If you don't have enough stuff, whatever it is, students just don't learn as much by the time they graduate and you get less prestige and bonuses to your current and future runs. And I can see why the game doesn't put a lot of hard failure states on you. What you get is random and gets more expensive the more building cards you draw from the various decks. So they can't really ding you too hard for not having enough dormitories or dining halls or recreation spots, it's hard to predict when you'd have them. And the game's finite end time means they don't want you necessarily spending your limited cards building redundant rooms over better performing rooms.
So you won't find the kind of logistical gridlock here you'd find in other management games, SU just kind of abstracts the shortcomings away to "students spent less time learning." There's even sanity mechanics but that mostly boils down to "students may leave campus and some of them might not come back." None of it is to terribly hard to manage unless you're trying to be ultra efficient, so the game definitely feels more on the casual end of gameplay.
The amusing thrust of the game is how it models a school environment. Teachers have D&D alignments as do the students, and teachers have teaching ability while students have overall intelligence, and how the different alignments, teaching and learning strengths interact, available magic study classes, etc and so forth....come out to wizards graduating into various fields (there's a lot, like 200) it's pretty satisfying actually. Not so much you can necessarily keep track of most students, you can have upwards of 100 running around, but you can for example look back at them if they graduate and sorta figure out how they got to where they are. And if you've been to college, the meta commentary on Universities / Private Schools as a business is fairly spot on as well.
Anyways, it might be slightly overpriced at $25 and is a couple years old at this point with a few content updates under its belt. But I was pleasantly surprised and fairly addicted.
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Topic: Blurb on Games that probably don't deserve their own threads. (Read 327441 times)