Cloaked Achievements

by Rogue Shindler, Achievement Master

25th January 2012

The most common questions I get ask as the Achievements Master all seem to revolve around hidden, or "cloaked" achievements. How many are there? How are they themed? WHAT ARE THEY???

Ahem. Well, obviously, I'm not going to just TELL you what there are. That would defeat the purpose, my friends! I will never confirm (and rarely deny) the existence of a cloaked achievement. Yes, a handful of people have asked "Is X a hidden?" and been right, but my elusive response is always "That is not a visible achievement." It's a guessing game, folks! It would defeat the purpose if I gave it away!

That said, all guessing games get old after a while without one of two things: success or hints. While several have been revealed and resulted in some extra fun over the past year, I've put together some hints to help guide you on your way. Even if you don't hit upon a cloaked achievement trying some of these decks, I think you will have a fun experience trying them out!

In general, all the cloaked achievements have a theme of some kind. Some of them are Trek-sense themes, some of them are meta themes. Some of them are ANTI-meta themes. If you are itching to poke around for cloaked achievements, pick a deck type you enjoy and try adding a theme. Got a favorite episode or movie? Try to recreate some of those events using as many cards as possible. Use all of something unique to an affiliation or deck type. Use ONLY that something. Does the deck have a crutch? Try playing WITHOUT it. If you look through many of the achievements, you'll see a lot of "ALL" and "NO" qualifiers. Deck types, sets, affiliations, card types. Pick something and run with(out) it. Even if you don't get an achievement, you will have devised a quirky new deck that could be a lot of fun to play.

Still, there are a number of cloaked achievements from sets Prime and Abed that have yet to be uncovered. We considered revealing them in favor of new cloaked achievements, but that hardly seemed any fun. Since most of these are fairly difficult "Win" achievements (one of the first of these to be revealed was Limited Resources), we have instead added some cloaked 'Hint' achievements. These Hints are "Play" versions of each of the as-of-yet unrevealed cloaked "Win" achievements, and unlike other hidden achievements, these will not be revealed when they are earned. Instead, you are rewarded for playing your oddball deck not just with achievement points, but with the knowledge that there is, in fact, a related win achievement, and only those that try will know about it. It is up to you whether you share that knowledge or keep it to yourself and increase your odds of earning some hidden gold!

And of course, you can always try hunting cloaked achievements on your own. If you play World of Warcraft or another game that has a similar achievement structure, you may find some hints by examining achievements there. Are there a finite number of ways to accomplish a particular deck style or goal? Try doing ALL of them! You can already see there are a number of variety-collecting achievements. Even if you fire and miss, all of the collector achievements to date have been retroactive, so chances are, you will be working towards a future goal. And you will always be getting credit towards an (Affiliation) Regular (or higher) badge.

Just remember, the primary goal is always to have fun!

P.S. As an extra hint, all of the icons in this article are from cloaked achievements!