Something weird happened to me though . . . I had this card that was supposed to buff defence cards it was adjacent to, but that didn't seem to be happening.

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I tried it. Quite interesting. Only did one run so far. The whole deal with the shapes of cards being positioned on the field works quite well as a substitute for things like power costs. Powerful cards tend to require a good deal of area, and so there's that question--are they worth it or would you be better off filling that space with a couple of smaller cards? And there are analogous card improvements--there's a thing where you can remove one tile from a card, so it will take up less space when you cast it, and maybe be a less awkward shape.

Another thing that's interesting is that the moon surface you're playing the cards onto is not quite simply uniform. You can be under attack by one or multiple enemies, and they are attacking zones of the surface, not the whole thing. If it's just one enemy, it's attacking about two thirds of the surface. But if it's like four, each one is only targeting like a quarter. This matters, because a defensive card will have a rune on one of its tiles, and for the defence to work, that tile has to be in the area being attacked. So that complicates your card positioning.

So far when I got new cards I was only really thinking about their overall size and about what they did. I suspect if I get better at the game I will start thinking in terms of how the shapes interlock.

Another thing I'll say about this is it feels quite atmospheric.

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I would have recommended starting with the MATE edition until you were comfortable with Linux and all its quirks

I myself use the MATE version; I've found it very stable and comfortable. I first started using it because back at the time, there was a particular customization I like to do that MATE did and Cinnamon didn't, or later sort of did but really badly. It probably does it now, I'll probably check again sometime. (Specifically, I like one toolbar on the bottom and one up the right side to stick launchers on; at first Cinnamon really balked at that)

As Stella's comment on inability to view which apps are installed in the application manager . . . that's probably true, never occurred to me. Normally if I want to see if an app is installed, I look at the menus; only once I know it's not there do I fire up the software manager thingie. So it hasn't come up. But if your flow is different I guess that could be something you'd want. (To be clear, once you find a piece of software in the software manager, it DOES tell you whether it's currently installed--you just, I presume from what Stella says, can't get a list of currently installed stuff there)

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My wife had one for quite a while. Her computer needs are pretty simple so it was actually fine almost all the time (except when we wanted to move files anywhere other than Google's cloud; it hated that), but then Google decided to end-of-life it. It stopped updating and eventually started acting weird, and I persuaded her to get a cheap real computer instead when we replaced it, so now she has a basic little laptop running Linux. Even for her, though, there were times she wanted to do something the Chromebook didn't have as its basic repertoire, and there are probably ways we could have made it do them but for practical purposes it was like it just couldn't do it.

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learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming.

Apparently what they learned about that future is, there won't be one.

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Very low pressure, huh. So, quite different from PowerWash Simulator!

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On the question of how well Proton works vs. native, the thing about some of your points is that people expect Proton not to work. I mean, yeah, they figure it will work most of the time, but failure is part of the normal parameters of using a thing like Proton; if it works that's a positive. Whereas people expect native to work, reasonably enough, and if it doesn't that's a negative.

Nobody reports it to the devs when they try a Windows game in Proton and it doesn't work; they know it's not supported. And nobody is going to buy a game with a native version, start with Proton instead, find it doesn't work, and then complain on a forum that Proton didn't work, only to have the native version recommended. It's not a symmetrical thing when it comes to how and whether people complain, so I think it's plausible you could see more complaints about native even if Proton doesn't on average work as well.

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Nowadays doesn't everyone just target the Steam runtime? And before that, didn't everyone just target Ubuntu, and then maybe add others if they thought about it?

I do think it might be worth having a project that basically reproduces some relevant old libraries and stuff so as to run old Linux games and other older, not-updated software. Presumably it could be as simple as a Flatpak with some old stuff in it. Maybe you'd also want some kind of layer for translating sound and things. You could call it LINE. :grin:

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I suppose arguably Valve could say "If you want to sell your game on Valve's platform Steam, and that game has anti-cheat, that anti-cheat will run on Valve's Steam Deck or you are not selling your game on Steam".

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This game is still breaking the "1800s crime all happens in London" rule. :grin:

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