Crying in the Theater Seeing Sheep Detectives

A move will humble any gamer, especially when you’re staring at a wall of boxes that all say “games.” While I’m packing up and Clay’s dialing in a newly upgraded office setup, we take a break from the usual board game grind and go over the fence into the stuff we’ve been watching and playing lately and why it’s scratching the same strategy itch.

Clay brings a wild movie recommendation: Sheep Detectives, a murder mystery where a flock has to solve the shepherd’s death. It sounds absurd, it’s way better than it has any right to be, and yes, it lands real emotional punches. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at a premise and then gotten completely won over, you’ll get it.

From there we pivot into digital deck-building games and why they’re exploding right now. I break down what makes Slay The Spire 2 such a smart deck-building roguelike, including the most important deckbuilder lesson: you don’t have to take a card every time. We talk archetypes, enemy intent, relic synergies, and how limited card removal changes your whole strategy. Then we dig into Vampire Crawlers, a Vampire Survivors inspired dungeon crawling deckbuilder with a slick sequencing mechanic that can double your power when you play cards in the right cost order. We also shout out Balatro as an easy, addictive on-ramp to the genre.

If you’re into deck builders, roguelikes, strategy games, or you’re just curious why digital card games feel so satisfying, hit play. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review. What’s your go-to deckbuilder right now, and what’s the one rule you wish you learned sooner?

Transcript

Welcome And Moving Chaos

0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. We're back. We're better than ever. Looking confused as ever is my co-host, Clayton Cable. Hi, Clay. How are you? Confused. How are you? Confused. What's going on? I don't know. Honestly, I I start right as you hit record, I just started thinking about something else completely. And then the music was playing, and I was thinking about this other thing, and I was looking at my other screen, and then you popped up and you're like, Clay looks confused. And I was like, oh my God, we're on a podcast. And here we are. We're here. We're here and we're over the fence today because uh honestly, we have not been getting a whole ton of games played. Clay, I know that you've been playing games, but you're gonna let those marinate a little bit, maybe marinate for a later episode. Yeah, yeah. I gotta sit up, sit on for a little bit. But we got some life changes coming up here at the podcast. Uh, I am in the process of moving, which is why I'm sitting in front of a very white wall behind me. Uh, and I'm sitting here staring at a mountain, a mountain of boxes that all say games on them. Games are in boxes. Yes, we're moving. We're hitting the road. So we're gonna go over the fence before I hit the road, and uh, we're gonna talk about what we've been doing outside of gaming. So, Clay, take it away. What have you been doing outside of gaming?

Clay Levels Up His Office

1:29

Geez, um, not terribly much. I have been gaming more, which is a positive, um, which means the things I'm doing outside of gaming are less, but I will um, can you make me big? Make you big. I want to show off uh sorry, listeners. Um, I did redo my office here. So if you're watching on video, you can see my background has had a real uh level up situation. Uh I got some like acoustic paneling back there, so maybe I sound better. I put some shelves in and I have I'm flexing a little with the Tigris and Euphrates up there. I've only played that like twice. So um, but these are just some like classic Kenitias back there that I thought kind of give a good vibe. Uh but yeah, and then you know, got oh, this doesn't look great yet, but I need to put some recessed lighting in up top. I got a little shelf of all my military paraphernalia over the years, some wrestling things. But yeah, my office is now a comfortable place. Sorry for everybody who had been watching the past year. I was literally recording in like a junk room, and my wife said, that's enough of that. You're a professional podcast host, you need to have a professional-looking office, and so here we are. Um, very professional. But you know, I had somebody do the floor that's above my pay grade, but I did paint the walls and I did put up this acoustic paneling and the shelves. So yeah, I'm pretty handy. You're a handyman. This is as good as it gets here for me. I mean, these guys, Travis and Jared, will build an entire house for you, but I can maybe screw some panels into a wall. You just come in for the finishing work, which is just as important because Jared and I can build the frame and we can maybe put up some sheetrock, but you come in with the finishing touches that make it look so professional. So professional.

The Sheep Detectives Movie Surprise

3:27

Speaking of professional, I also went to the movies. Okay, and you might be thinking, he probably, you know, he's a nerd. He's talked about Star Wars, he probably saw Mandalorian Grogu. No, I did not. Mario saw no, even better. The sheep detectives. Oh, baby, with Hugh Jackman. Uh Hugh Jackman is in a live-action sheep detectives movie, and the premise is Hugh Jackman is a shepherd, and he reads these sheep murder mysteries every night before they all go to bed. And Hugh Jackman dies, and the sheep solve his murder. It sounds so bad. I I couldn't, but the rotten tomatoes were good, and I was like, you know what? Mary won't let the kids go see Mandalorian and Grogu. I want to go to the I had it in my head, I wanted to go to the movies, so I was like, we'll go to sheep detective, and it was good. I cried, I cried in the sheep detectives. It was a heartfelt movie. Um, you know, don't sleep on the sheep detectives. Hugh Jackman, he can elevate just about anything. Except for Le Miz, in which his see singing was terrible. I have not seen that. Well, it's kind of old, it came out in like 2007. But how do you feel about his singing in The Greatest Showman? It was fine. I guess it was a little better than Le Miz, but he's got like a high bar to meet when it comes to Le Miz. Like something that's been performed for a hundred years now, and I'm sure he did just fine in uh Greatest Showman. I I think I saw I think I saw Greatest Showman once upon a time. Oh, I might watch it again. Yeah, it's good. But anyway, he doesn't sing in the sheep detective, so you just get to listen to his beautiful accent and um marvel at his vascularity. How is this guy looking like that? Seriously. With a name like Jackman, you have to like you have to show up ready to ready to meet the need. He had his sheep towing the line, let me tell you. I mean, it was good. It was good. Okay. Yeah. And you felt like uh the sheep put on a good performance? The sheep were well trained, they hit all their lines. I mean, that was impressive. I was blocking. They meet their blocking. Yep, yep. They did what they were supposed to do. I think Julia Julia Dreyfus was one of the sheep. Oh, Julia Louie Dreyfus. Yeah, it's pretty star-studied cast. Okay. Uh, but you'll never hear about it. But the Rotten Tomatoes are good. Okay. I'm reporting back to you that I cried, so it's not saying a whole lot. I tend to get emotional in movies, but you cried just because of like the emotional weight of it, or like was there like very sad moments? Is it a tragedy? Oh there was just emotional moments, you know. There's this like winter lamb that none of the other lambs want to like they shun the winter lamb, and you just feel bad for this little winter lamb the whole time. Um, so you know that created some emotional moments throughout the movie, and then there was the death of a sheep that was that was tough, but yeah, it was it was good, it was a roller coaster. You heard it here first, folks. If you're gonna go see sheep detectives, you better bring your tissues, yeah, and bring your thinking caps because it is a murder mystery too. Okay, so you are with the sheep, and you're like, Well, who did do this? Who did kill Hugh Jackman? Because it's uh it's up in the air, you don't really know, yeah. What you felt like you were able to solve the murder well in advance, or like you were with it until the very end. No, I I had no idea. I was like, they caught me off guard. You know, they did the final analysis at the end, and they're like, Well, this is how I knew it was that person who did it, and they went through the whole thing, and I was like, Whoa, I missed all that. Thank God these sheep are here because Clay would not be able to solve this murder. Yeah, I was too busy crying about the one sheep dying. I had no time to solve the mystery. Hate it when that happens. So that's what I've been up to, Travis. What's going on with you? Uh

Slay The Spire 2 Deep Dive

8:04

digital gaming smut? Yeah, I've been playing a lot of digital games. Uh, and I have been playing some board games digitally. Uh, a couple of deck builders that I want to shout out, though. Uh, the first is Slay the Spire. Are you familiar with this board game, Clay? Familiar with the board game for sure. Familiar with the board game based on the video game called Slay the Spire. Yeah. Well, Slay the Spire 2 just came out, and it is just as good as the first one. It is so addicting. It's pretty cheap. I don't think it's like a full, you know, $60 game. It's like maybe $30. And Steam Summer Sale is coming up very quickly. So if you have Steam or if you have uh other digital gaming platforms, Slay the Spire 2 is a deck building roguelike game where you are climbing this tower, fighting off all the baddies, using deck building. And much like the board game, you play a kind of archetype that has its own strengths and weaknesses, and you are building the deck to uh continue to progress. And so it does the thing where it shows you the enemies that you're fighting, and the enemies will tell you exactly what they're gonna do the next turn, whether it is attacking you, whether it is clogging your deck, they might be defending against attacks, and you have to pick the appropriate cards to play to overcome their next attack. So you might also defend if you see that they're attacking. You might need to you know shed some cards from your deck. Um, there's uh a different character that like is a necromancer that you can play as that has like a this bone hand that comes up in front of her, and you are continually trying to keep this bone hand alive because that's where the majority of your large attacks come from, but it also kind of acts as a shield. So each of these archetypes that you play as, I think there's six in the game. Um, they all are good at their own thing, and you have to build that deck appropriately. The hard part about this game, especially for newbies, is that at the end of each fight or at the end of each encounter, uh, you get to pick, you get your rewards, you get gold, you get potions, you get all sorts of stuff, and then it allows you to pick one of three cards that it will offer you, and those are kind of randomly selected. And um, the hard part for newbies is that you don't always want to take those cards because they clog up your deck. And so the opportunities to remove cards from your hand permanently are very rare, so you gotta be real selective about what you're taking on while continuing to get stronger. And so I I can't say enough good things about it, it's super addicting. You can play the first one on your phone. Um, that it's literally everywhere. The second one, I'm not sure it's gonna come to like iOS and Android immediately. Uh, but if you have a gaming platform out there, Slay the Spire 2 is a high recommendation for me because we love deck building here at OGN, and it is a deck builder, and it's pretty awesome. So dang. Slay the Spire 2. Boy, you know, the the board game definitely got a lot of a lot of love when it came out, and I knew it was based on the video game, but I just is it the whole system has just seemed intimidating to me. I don't know why. I've played many, many deck building games, but sure, just the fact that it's been around for a long time and it was a digital game, and it's like ah, digital games are weird, but at the end of the day, it's just a deck builder. And I I like what you said about the the newbie pitfall of taking too many cards because that is like across all deck builders, really. You you think you have to just buy as many cards as possible at the end of every turn. It's like, okay, well, I have five influence to buy cards. Well, I'm gonna buy, I'm gonna use every last bit of that, and I'm gonna buy these three cards. And sometimes they don't synergize well with your deck, and they end up just coming up and being uh more of a headache and getting in the way of the later turns when you can afford the the big stuff. Um, so yeah, I I never really thought about that, but as you said it, I was like, you know, that's really true. Uh I certainly fall victim to that at times where it's just like, well, the right thing to do is just stuff more cards in this deck. It's deck building, right? Yep. That card looks pretty strong, just throw it in there. Yep. But when when your opportunity is to cut back your deck and slim it to the absolute necessary cards, uh, when that opportunity is few and far between, you really have to take a hard look at what you have and try and make the most out of those next couple turns until you can get to that next shop because you have to pay, you have to pay to remove cards from your deck. Uh, not real money, game money. Um, but you can only remove one card every time you come to a shop. And sometimes there's like weird events that will pop up that allow you to do that, but they're pretty few and far between. And so you have to really be judicious with what cards you add to make sure that it's adding to this play style that you are trying to maximize. So for some, it's like all out aggro, like I'm trying to get highest attacks possible. But if I'm doing all attack and no defense, there's some enemies that will come in and just wipe you out in one hit. And so you have to balance the offense and defense. You have to you'll find cards that will do a little bit of offense and a little bit of defense. Do I split my efforts? Do I go all in on attack and try and clear them out in one go? Really difficult to do. Um, this game has a cool progression where you continually unlock new cards as you go through runs. And so you'll do one, you'll meet one achievement that will unlock new cards that will unlock new relics that change your playstyle. And you're trying to create these synergies between the relics, which are permanent boosts to your run, um, or maybe temporary. Some of them are like the wax relics that will disappear after three encounters or whatever. Um, and for the long game, like how do I get to the very end of this run? So yeah, I I love it. I think it's a really smart deck building system. I think the uh the different archetypes that you can play as are really cool. There are some that are just like action points, others are like magic-based, so you have to keep your mana up with your offense and defense. Um, yeah, so they they have some really cool archetypes that that drastically change how you play and how you approach encounters. So really enjoying that one.

Vampire Crawlers Reinvents The Formula

14:38

The other one that I wanted to talk about is called Vampire Crawlers. Are you familiar with uh Vampire Survivor? Nope. Okay, so Vampire Survivor is a video game that came out, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago. And it is kind of like an auto battler where you are running around a 2D space as a hero, and each of these heroes kind of has their own thing that they do well, and you don't ever have to hit an attack button. You'll pick up weapons, and that attack will automatically fire off. And so the very first one you get is like kind of a Castlevania type hero that has a whip, and this whip will just like fire out to the side in one direction every second and a half, two seconds. So you have to kind of like play this spacing game where you're like you get in there, you attack, and then you back off. And then as you level up by attacking enemies, you will get more powerful spells, more powerful attacks, and they all fire off all the time. And so maybe your whip now fires two whips and one comes out each side. Maybe you pick up the Bible, and the Bible will circle your character and kind of clear some space around you. There's like garlic, and the garlic creates this aura that's like constant around your uh your character to kind of damage enemies as they come into that area of effect. That was a widely successful video game, and people took to it, and it's been super popular, and they've continued to add to this game since its inception, more characters, new levels, new enemies, all this stuff they keep adding to this game. Recently, they said, What if we took this and we turned it into a dungeon crawling deck builder? And so it's kind of a cool system. Um, you will enter into a dungeon and it's kind of like Doom graphics, where it's kind of this um, you know, boomer shooter type graphics where you're running through these hallways and you'll encounter enemies and waves of enemies will come at you. Now, instead of auto fighting, like the whip will automatically come out. Now, if you're going to fire that whip, it's a card, and that card has a cost to it. And all the characters have these mana. You're trying to, if I have three action points, which are the mana, uh, I will try and use those three points as judiciously as I can to maximize my attack and fight the enemies that are coming at me in waves. And after the encounters, you'll get cards. Same thing as uh Slay the Spire, where you will try and balance attack and defense and all this stuff. Uh, it'll tell you exactly what the enemy is about to do. You have a limited number of action points, you're trying to do as much damage to clear out those enemies, and then move through this dungeon to get to the next enemy. Eventually, you hit a boss, you'll fight the boss battle, and then you'll go down a level, and there's like maybe four or five levels to each dungeon that you're uh trying to clear. And you're unlocking new characters, new cards, and all this stuff as you go along. Um, the cool thing about this one is that all the cards have a cost, an action point cost, a mana cost, whatever you want to call it. This one has a cool thing where if you sequence the cards in order of mana cost or action point cost, then they will continually duplicate the damage and/or defense that that card will do. So for example, I have the whip. The whip costs zero points to uh use the whip. I'll I'll do a whip, it'll do eight damage. Boom. It'll attack that first wave. Then if I pick a card that has a one mana cost next, it will double the effect of that card. Then if I pick a two, it will double the effect of that card further. And so you're trying to string together cards in your deck and on your turn that can maximize the effects of those later attacks. Some will add mana, some will defend, some will um repel the enemy because they kind of march towards you in this kind of 2D, 3D type space to where they can get close enough and attack you. And so you're trying to push the enemy back, you're trying to do the damage, you're trying to maximize those turns with the limited mana that you have to do as much damage and clear those waves. I think it's really cool. I don't think it's like a world-breaking deck builder. It's not going to probably take off the same way Slay the Spire does. But again, it's a super cheap game. I think this game is like 15 bucks. And it's really cool to um unlock those new cards and see kind of a reimagining of that original system of vampire survivors in a deck building format. I think it's cool that developers like this take these huge swings with IP that has become so loved for a very specific thing and take a big swing and try and do something completely different with it. So I would recommend those two deck builders. I'm I have not beaten either of these yet. They're quite hard. Um, and you do have to do multiple runs to unlock everything, to see everything. I've unlocked maybe 10 different crawlers in uh vampire crawlers. Um, a lot of the same characters from Vampire Survivors are now being imported in. And so this game will continue to grow. Um, I'm not sure how much work they're gonna put into it. It's probably not gonna have the lifespan that vampire uh survivors did. But if you're into deck builders and that sounds more interesting than like an auto battler or a I don't I don't even know, like auto-attacking, side-scrolling game like vampire crawlers, um, then or vampire survivors, then vampire crawlers might be for you. It's so weird to me. I did not realize that digital deck building games were such a big thing. Oh yeah. Until until I found out about Slay the Slept Spire when they were making a board game, and I was like, wait, what the heck? This uh this is like a whole thing. Like they're they do this on the internet, like they they make they make specifically digital games that are card game like surrogates. It's weird,

Why Digital Deckbuilders Are Everywhere

20:50

I don't get it. Yeah, yeah, and and I think the uh boom that something like Bellatro had has definitely inspired uh other companies to go after some older IPs. Like I think Vampire Crawlers is in like direct response to something like Bellatro, where you can continue to build these like broken builds where you go and you just wipe enemies out. It feels really good when you get so powerful in that game where you're just like clearing enemies out in one two cards. But again, you have to be a little judicious about what cards you're adding. You don't want to bloat your deck. Um, some of them will add some some fluff to your deck that is not usable, so it'll say like you just have to burn it for one mana cost, and it doesn't do anything but allow you to draw a new card, and so you're kind of balancing your action points against attack and defense. And yeah, I think it's a I it might this type of genre, like this deck building video game, may have reached its kind of inflection point where the market is flooded with them right now because everyone's trying to capture that like Bellatro lightning in a bottle. Um, but I think for right now, if you're into deck builders and maybe you want to dabble in some video games, now's the time to do it because there are plenty of them out there. I just gotta I just gotta try one. Um just gotta do it. I just gotta do it. I think I think Slay the Spire is probably the way to start. Um, you can get it on your phone and play it anywhere you go, that or Bilatro. And those are both excellent deck builders that I would recommend to anyone. I didn't realize Bilatro was a deck builder. Yeah, it is. Uh it is a Texas Hold'em-based deck builder where you will try and meet a certain point threshold by playing Texas Hold'em style hands. So you start with like a basic deck of cards, uh, and you are trying to make the best hand that you can to earn the points to move up. As you move up in levels, you will get points that then you can buy packs at the like in this shop between levels, between rounds, where you're literally ripping open these packs and getting new cards to add to your deck. Maybe they're just regular cards, like you know, the nine of clubs or whatever, but there are also jokers that you can buy that will completely change your game. And the way that you order those jokers, kind of in your like setup, they're kind of like the relics that you would get in Slay the Spire. They drastically change the way that you play that round. So and you can create some broken builds that where you're just maximizing points every time. Everything you're playing is a royal flush because the jokers have uh allowed you to count every diamond as a heart and every black card as well as a red card. And like it it goes some weird places that I'm not gonna be able to accurately describe here, but I think Bellatro is another way uh to get into deck building digitally that is super awesome. Yeah, all right. Uh downloading it now. That's your homework. Try Bellatro and or slay the spire. Okay, I will. Anything else, Travis? No, I we've been watching tons of TV and stressing about moving. So that's those are my two that I want to hit on. Okay.

Homework Picks And Quick Goodbye

24:13

Well, I guess we'll go back in then. Okay. Did we do it? We did it. We did it for Operation Game Night. I have been Travis, he has been Clay, we have been over the fence. Thank you for joining us, and we are out.