Last night, a buddy and I were stuck on the team selection screen in Wardogs. Manticore (Green) and Valkyra (Red) were 100% full, but Lonestar (Blue) had plenty of vacancies. Yet, there we sat—locked in a stalemate with a dozen other players desperate to not join blue.

"Anything but blue," we chanted, spamming left-click over Green and Red.

It is, for some reason, understood in Wardogs that Blue team kinda sucks. It seems like a silly claim to make in an FPS where teams are scrambled every match and everyone starts with the same exact resources, but Blue's infamy began during Wardogs' closed betas and has only cemented since launch. If you're a Wardogs player, you immediately knew who this article was about.

"The battle before the battle," reads one top-upvoted post on the Wardogs subreddit, depicting a team select screen with a sparse Blue roster. Another post renames each faction according to difficulty: "Easy" for Green, "Normal" for Red, and "NIGHTMARE MODE" for Blue.

Even the devs are acknowledging Lonestar's bad rap.

"Lonestar actually did it," Bulkhead co-founder Howard Phillpott posted on X today in response to a Lonestar win screen.

To a degree, the Blue team hate is a joke that the community and devs are having fun with. Most aren't taking it super seriously, but some definitely are.

"They literally are the dumbest people on the planet," wrote one aggrieved Redditor, citing counterproductive behavior on his Lonestar teams, like "using the respawn vehicle to just drive circles in the FOB, not realizing no one can spawn because they keep moving it."

Last night was the first time I actively avoided Blue, which delayed me getting to play by a few minutes. In more extreme cases, an entire match can be delayed by folks dragging their feet with Lonestar.

"The server would boot up, the first 40 or so players would sort into teams, and then the match start would come to a complete halt as people refused to pick Blue," recounted Reddit user PogoMarimo. "These would be 80+ pop servers and they would go 10 minutes without launching because not enough people were willing to pick Blue to get the match to the starting population needed."

"I, of course, was one of those refusing to choose blue, because I had already done Blue duty twice that day and saw awful things happen. I'm not ashamed to admit it."

Anecdotally, I have witnessed some truth to the Lonestar hate. Of the three matches I played last night, the two I played on Blue team were undeniable stomps—the sort of matches where Red and Green have sturdy FOBs and drill towers controlling the hot zone, while it took 45 minutes for our Blue base to construct a complete wall.

My last match of the night was on Red, and the difference was dramatic: Within 15 minutes, a squad of dedicated building specialists had constructed a super FOB with reinforced walls, barbed wire moats, enclosed sniper towers, mortar emplacements, and a maze of doors and alleys meant to deter infiltrators. Green had a similar setup on the other side of the map, while Blue was just sort of… there.

So if there is something about Blue, what is it, exactly?

One popular theory is that Lonestar is the worst team because it has fundamental disadvantages. The blue pants and patches that all members wear allegedly make them easier targets in forested areas. I think there's some truth to this, especially the blue jeans of it all, but none of the factions camouflage particularly well out in the open (an intentional bit of design, I reckon). But perhaps Lonestar has it worse than the others.

The other theory is that Lonestar beginning in the southernmost corner of the map, while Manticore and Valkyra begin in the West and East, sets the Blue faction up for a two-front war. I think this could have some merit—it is notable that the headquarters aren't lined up a perfect 120 degrees around the circumference of the zone, but it's hard to say for sure if this actually translates to a Blue team sandwich with any consistency. This talking point is coming up enough that I expect Bulkhead will chime in someday soon with data that supports or disproves it.

Another, less talked about possibility, is that Blue team's infamy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Folks have one bad night with Lonestar and decide to believe the reputation, or hear it's the team to avoid, or notice everyone else actively avoiding it, and you end up with a Blue team full of less experienced players. It's a fascinating problem—if it even qualifies as one yet—unique to Wardogs' three-team format. Maybe I should try to buck the trend and go Blue. At least I know there's always a free seat.

It's been just about a year since Kingmakers, the game about bringing a gun to a knife fight, was delayed just ahead of its planned launch, and we've heard nothing about it since. Today developer Redemption Road finally broke that extended silence with a new "deep dive" trailer detailing everything players will be doing in the game, and also opened the door to signups for an upcoming playtest.

First things first: I would be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge the awkward cinematic interludes. They're really not great, and all I can say is that hopefully they're just bits of exposition built specifically for the trailer and not actually part of the game.

That aside, there's a lot going on here. Fighting large numbers of hopelessly outclassed enemies is still the central hook in Kingmakers, but you're also going to be leading armies on a strategic scale, building and managing settlements, and collecting resources so you can buy better equipment.

I'm really not sure how I feel about all that. Rolling into Bannockburn behind the wheel of a Leopard 2 has obvious appeal, but do I really want to be worrying about placing farms and erecting fortifications when I could be punching 120mm HEAT-sized holes in some peasant's hovel? But on the other side of that coin, what happens when the novelty of 'you have a sword, I have a SAW' wears off? Sooner or later it might be nice to have other things to do, especially if you're the kind of gamer who occasionally asks questions like, 'Why am I in Bannockburn with a Leopard 2?'

(The famous Battle of Bannockburn, for the record, does not actually feature in Kingmakers, which is about assisting Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndŵ in his 1403 uprising against the English.)

If you have similar questions about how the full Kingmakers experience will compare to the initial bonkersness of its 2024 reveal, the Kingmakers playtest may be a way to find answers, or at least get an early feel for which way it's headed. Go to the Steam page, mash the playtest signup button, and when (or if, I suppose) the time comes you'll receive an email notifying you that you're in.

One thing that isn't included in today's video, sorry to say, is a new release date—Kingmakers is still listed on Steam as "coming soon."

TCG Card Shop Simulator took Steam by storm when it hit early access back in 2024, offering players the thrill of collecting Pokemon-style cards without the burden of actually buying packs and keeping binders full of colorful cardboard. Now, after attracting millions of players and garnering overwhelmingly positive reviews, it's finally gone 1.0.

"TCG Card Shop Simulator was made because I was bored out of my mind after burning out from solo mobile game development back in 2023. I felt aimless and wasn't sure what to do with my life," developer Ding Shen Sia explains in a Steam news post. Having already built a TCG-themed game on mobile, the dev decided to expand the concept with a Steam game.

"From then on, I was a madman. I worked on it everyday and spent at least 90 hours every week for 6 months. And on 15 September 2024, I managed to launch TCG Card Shop Simulator on Steam Early Access, a month earlier than what I've planned. I had no big expectations or plans for it other than making the Steam Trading Cards work, but I would have been really happy if it sold 100,000 copies in a year (it somehow sold that amount in just 3 days!)"

As confirmed in a press release, the game has now reached 4 million players, and they've clearly found something to love. TCG Card Shop Simulator has nearly 50,000 reviews on Steam, and 96% of them are positive. Broadly, it seems that players are taken by the cozy vibes of running a small business – but some of the top reviews also thank the game for helping them kick their pack-ripping habits, so maybe there's a benefit there, too.

The biggest news in the 1.0 update is the launch of PS5, Switch, and Switch 2 versions of the game, alongside the existing Steam and Xbox Series X/S editions. But for existing players, the important part is that Tetramon TCG is no longer just a Pokemon-inspired theme for the products you're selling in store. It's now a real TCG that you can actually play in-game.

Nearly 2,000 new cards have been added in the 1.0 update, bringing the total up to 4,436, so there's at least plenty of variety to be found in the TCG. We'll see how much depth the game-within-the-game has soon enough, but for now, well… I bought my first Pokemon card packs in decades recently. Maybe I should check out TCG Card Shop Simulator myself before this new hobby gets out of hand.

Here are the best simulator games you can play right now.