The Stack

I’ve received the last of my Kickstarter rewards for Hadean Lands: a copy of the game on CD-ROM, which Zarf accurately identifies as more a memento than a medium, a token of a game you’ve probably already downloaded and finished by the time the discs were mailed out. Nonetheless, it is a game on a physical medium, and that creates some problems for the Oath.

The Oath in its current form was written on the assumption that if I acquire any games on physical media, it’s because I haven’t played them yet. Taking the terms of the Oath strictly, I now have a CD that I duly played and blogged from start to finish while the Oath was active, but which went directly into the Trophy Case without passing through the Stack. This isn’t how I intended things to work. So I’m going to change the phrasing of the Oath slightly to recognize anomalous cases like this, and claim my self-granted reward for the posts I’ve already written.

There’s one other iffy matter, though. Hadean Lands isn’t actually the only game on the disc. It also contains a folder with 20 other games by Zarf — 19 previously released works plus one incomplete prototype. I played most of them to completion back when they were first released, but do the ones I haven’t completed count as on the Stack now? Even the ones I’ve completed are arguably in the same position as Hadean Lands itself. Ah, but there is in fact precedent for bonus text adventures on this blog. When I played the bonus text adventure included with Icebreaker, I didn’t count it as a separate game on the Stack, even though I did post about it. That very game is on the HL CD as well, and it would be strange to suddenly declare that it counts here but not there. And if it doesn’t, none of them do.