Mood Swings Review - Magic: The Partying?
Transcript
Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vassal.
I'm Zee Garcia.
Today we're reviewing one of the weirdest games I think to kind of come out in a while.
Yeah.
Um what you may not know and it's it's called Mood Swings. Mood Swings is designed by Mark Rosewater who has changed Magic the Gathering more than any person even at the designer himself, Richard Garfield.
Sure.
He's been in charge of Magic the Gathering for well over a decade, maybe more. Um and is the head developer there. Magic the Gathering occasionally publishes these weird things called Secret Lairs. They're anything but secret. Everyone knows about them, but they are like little quick buy it now or never see it again
Yeah.
and they usually insert some random thing like The Walking Dead into Magic.
Sure. Or or it's a celebration of a specific artist. It's usually a few cards for a lot of money.
A very expensive price gouging for sure. But this time they're they did one of these Secret Lairs, but it has nothing to do with Magic. It is this game called Mood Swings which Mark Rosewater said he's been working on for
20 20
20 some years?
Yeah.
And so this is sort of a vanity project that he did and I thought, "Well, this is different."
Right. Right.
So I bought it on the Secret Lair. It wasn't nearly as expensive
That's true.
as the usual Secret Lairs are, but I will say I was a little surprised because this is a card game and they market it as a collectible game. It cuz it is a collectible game.
It is. It's you you're not getting a full amount in each of these things. You get a random assortment of cards from a bigger pool. This also is marketed as a prototype.
That's true. It's called a prototype here on here, but you I just bought it from you and it's packaged and it's done. So that's not the definition of prototype.
Sure. There's a lot of strange things like we said. I'm going to go ahead and show you an overview if you don't know what we're talking about here. We'll come on back. We'll give you some thoughts on this. Here I'm going to be showing you the game set up for three players, mainly because if you're playing with three or four players, you're going to be using this hurt feelings card and I want to show you that. All right. Uh to set up the game you're going to shuffle up the deck, deal everybody five cards, then you are meant to reveal the bottom card of the deck, and the player who has most recently felt that emotion is going to be the start player. I have felt regret the most recently, so I am going to start the game. Uh and I'm going to on my turn, this is your rules here by the way, I am going to either play a card or pass. To play a card entails putting that out in front of me and triggering any abilities on that card. So, I could say play this card. I'm going to play composition.
Uh composition here says, "After playing this mood, choose another player. That player chooses a card from their hand and gives it to you." I'm going to pick that player. That player would then look at their cards and give me one of those cards. All right. And then it goes to the next player who may play. You'll notice on the cards they have a color, they have an ability, uh and then they'll have a die face here with a value in it. That is the strength of that card. Then it would be that player's turn. That player is going to play this da da da da da. Let's see. They're going to play this card here, thrill. And thrill has a strength of one and it says, "After playing this mood, you may put any number of your other moods uh into your hand. If you do, you may play that many moods uh this turn."
I can't do that. Never mind. Um I'm going to do this one, sloth. Sloth says, "While in play, this mood's value increases by one for each card in your hand." So, they play that card. It's a three printed on there, but they actually have four more cards. So, right now their total is seven, okay? Then we go to this player. This player is going to play um They're going to play patience. Patience here says uh it's a white card. It is a five, but it says while in play this mood's value is one if you played it this round. So, once they play this card, they're actually going to flip it to show the one up there. With that done, we've gone around the table once. Now, we are going to see who the winner is for the round.
So, the highest total. My total is three, one, seven over here. This player is going to win this round and needs to track that somehow. So, we are going to give them a cube. And what you're attempting to do is win three rounds. You win three rounds in this game, you win the entire thing. Uh whoever did not win, so both of us, are going to draw a mood into our hands. And the player has the lowest score in a three or four player game also gets this hurt feelings card that says, "This round you may play an additional mood during your turn." So, this player has the hurt feelings card. Whoever won is going to lead. This player is going to lead. And so, we start again. And this player now is going to play, let's say, um Uh oh, let's see. They're going to play happiness. How about that? Happiness here says, "While in play this mood's value is actually eight if a player has both a red mood and a white mood." Okay, well, it doesn't happen right now, but it might later on. Uh and so, this player now is a three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
This player now can turn this around because it has not been played this turn. And they can play a couple of these cards. Okay, so they'll do that. And then it comes to me and I will play a card from my hand. Uh self-loathing here. To play this card, put one or more of your moves to the discard pile. I could discard that one and play this, which is now a six. And we compare again. If the Don't forget this player was able to play also, I just skipped over and they could have played two, okay, because of this. We check who won that round. Let's say it would have been that player this time. All right, so they get a cube there. And then let's say we each draw a card because we did not win this round. And if I had the lowest total, then I get the hurt feelings card. And we do it again, starting from whoever won a cube or, you know, a control point this time. This continues around the table until somebody gets to three of these.
And when that happens, that player is going to be the winner of the entire game. That's basically all there is to it. Like I said, here are the rules for setup and taking a turn. And then on the back, scoring and what happens after scoring. And there you go, that is the entire game. Let's go ahead and go back up top.
Now I bought two of them because there's 45 randomized cards out of 133. And I will say I was prized in the two that we bought. There was like six duplicates. There was not very many.
not that much overlap. Of course, that's going to be dwindling, you know, results if you keep going.
That being said, what a ridiculously weird delivery system for this kind of game. This game, which is like Love Letter or
Yeah.
You know, just a card game. You have one deck for everyone. You don't need to bring decks to play against each other. The collectibility makes no sense. I don't care if something's a mythic rare.
It makes no sense. Yeah, this could have been just a full game. This is a game much like think Flux from someone whose entire point of reference is only Magic: The Gathering. And they're like, but it's collectible. Why is it collectible? What do you What do you mean? What else is there? What else could it be? You know what I mean? Like
Why is it Why are there rarity values?
What do you mean? Like that's every answer to every question that is very obvious to anyone who's played any party game that's kind of silly is Well, how else would you do it? Nothing else is conceivable.
Right. Why are there red, green, blue, and black cards? And white.
Why is it
Those are the five colors of gaming.
Yeah.
I like The card art is is sort of like sketches early sketches of Magic the Gathering artwork. Of course it is. You know what I mean? Because it's being published by them. Uh yeah. The whole thing is such a weird mix between a vanity project, but it's also very light-hearted in a way, right? It's not that serious. It's not taking itself serious. It's kind of silly. It's a silly game. It is Flux. It is basically Flux.
Yeah, it's I mean, the Sometimes the cards matter. Like But sometimes they don't. This card Grief, after you play it, play two more moods from the discard pile. Is that cuz grief dredges up things from the past?
I Sure. Yes. I think my favorite bit of design is in one of these two There's a card called uh Boredom.
Yes, I really like that.
Which is a red card. Uh here we go. Boredom is a red card. It has a value of four. Also, you should talk about the dice thing. Um and it it is blank. It is just a blank card. It's also weird to me that with the entirety of this game for all intents and purposes being 133 cards ever, right? There's so many repeated ideas. He took 28 years to do this or whatever it is, and there's still some blank ones, and there's some that are the same thing in every color.
The commons in particular.
the Gathering does cycles. I know they do, but it's Magic the Gathering. There's no relationship between the color pie and this game at all. It doesn't make any sense. There's no need for that.
Yeah, laziness [clears throat] and serenity are not green colors and fear is not blue. Wrath is red, I get maybe. But yeah, it's kind of a weird thing. And like Z said, in the top hand corner there's those dice which aren't dice because there's zero dice in the game.
Right, and then they might combine like you can't say print the seven so it'll be a six and a one. Okay.
I don't I don't
it light-hearted? Maybe? I don't really understand what the objective with the dice was.
I don't hate that. The problem I have with this game is there's just there's almost no game. On my turn I have some cards. I pick one to play. I'm trying to play the highest number.
Generally, yeah.
If I can't, then I'm trying to play something that will hopefully let me do the highest number.
Or hurt you. If I pull you back it's the same thing as me playing a high number.
Next turn. The only rule about this game I like is that the winner doesn't draw a card. Okay, that's that's not bad. It gives it's a little bit of a catch up thing to go there. But there's just nothing. If this is what it takes 28 years to design, I don't want to see what you design in a year.
Right.
But I know he's a good designer because I've seen his work on Magic sets and Magic, in my opinion, has gotten very good over the past 10 years comparatively. They've made a lot of changes and fixes to that system. He might be a better developer than designer.
Maybe. And I am worried that because he is so close to Magic the Gathering he's sort of uh you know, missing the forest for the trees. Is that the saying that it's like he's so close to it he can't pick he can't make anything but a Magic spin-off, which is this kind of is. This is sort of Magic the party game in a way. I don't hate this game. I just you have to go into it knowing it is Flux. It it I mean it I keep coming back to that, but this is a very random, silly pub kind of style game with, you know, take that and goofiness and absolutely not a whole lot of strategy. There's not even that many choices. Some of the cards give you a choice between do A and do B, and you're like, "Wow, yeah. Here we go. Let me count real quick. Are there more green cards or black cards?"
Green will be my choice. Cuz I hurt you more with that. Like again, the choices here are very simple. Is that bad? Not necessarily, and I think some people who play Magic the Gathering will play this as a I want to do something really silly and stupid when I'm not playing Magic. But if those people go outside of that sphere, they're going to find a whole lot of games that do that, too. This can't really compete with.
the only thing I can think of is like, "Oh, you're Magic, here's another collectible card game. What? Wait, I've been tricked into playing a party game." Okay.
Yeah.
But for me, I have to drop points based on just a mismatch. This collectible thing has no I'm not a big collectible thing anyway, but I get it. You're playing collectible game. Oh, I have a cool card no one else has.
Sure.
I don't care if your mood swings has a card I don't have. If anything, that would irritate me. I'm not going to buy another pack here
Yes.
to hopefully get that one card. And beyond that, it's just random. The common cards are all very boring. The most common card in these decks are the ones that say, "If there are two of or more of these cards on the table, then whatever, it changes value." There are a lot of those.
There's a lot of those. There's two per color because they do the enemy colors. If you know Magic the Gathering, you know what I mean. The enemy colors, if there's two of those, they take my card down from a six to a three. And then there's the the friendly colors. They take a card from a three to a six. Every color has one, you know, two of those. That's a big part of 133, guy. Really?
Yeah. So, for me this is a five out of 10. I just can't recommend it. I don't know who it's for. I didn't hate it, right? So, otherwise I give it a much lower score. But I don't care about it. I I played I was like, it's sort of amusing, sort of. Also, how fast the game goes. I didn't really have any agency. I hope I drew a good card. My favorite cards were very random cards, which are also random.
Right.
So, again, why not play just a silly little party game? I I I don't This is a waste of time.
I'm going to give it a 5.5. I'm coming in like
you know, I'm kind of so generous. I'm waffling between a five and a six. It's like a 5.5. I don't hate it either. Um it has a weird I'm not sure I understand the audience here. I think I I think I do, but it's a weird project. It's a weird thing for them to have made, I guess, is my point. And I can see them couching all of that knowingly by calling it a prototype and using artwork that isn't done and being like, it's just for fun. Don't be, you know, don't be so serious.
me money, so whatever.
Right. So, there is that, too. I I expected this to be after that many years in development and knowing that much about you know, game theory, for it to be a little more interesting. Hence the low score. Cuz I don't mind that it's silly and light-hearted, but it should be a better game, too. I expect the abilities to be a little more interesting from the the man at the head of Magic the Gathering. So, there you go.
There you go. That's Mood Swings. I'm angry. No, I'm not really angry. I'm bored. I'm Tom.
I'm ambivalent. I'm Zee Garcia.
See you next time.
Hey. Thanks for watching another video here on The Dice Tower. We really appreciate you stopping by and checking our things out. Thanks so much for joining us today. And hey, if you really like what we're doing here at the Dice Tower, then there are different ways to support the Dice Tower. One of those ways is through Patreon. We have links in the description to this video. We have links to lots of other things we do down there, so definitely check it out. But either way, we're glad you watch us. Tell your friends about the Dice Tower. Until next time though, I'm Tom Vasel and I hope you enjoyed this video.