The Decision Space Jam!

Yo, a couple quick notes before we engage the Interdecisional Spaceships podcast player. First, this week's episode is a bit different than normal. We're talking about the Decision Space Jam, a game design jam run in our podcast community. If you are brand new to the show, don't be alarmed. Most of our episodes aren't this inside baseball. I still think you'll enjoy this oddball episode, but if not, have no fear.

We'll be back with the regularly scheduled programming next week with the show deep diving the trick-taking mechanism second the episode you are about to hear is what we in the amateur podcasting industry like to call a rough cut i didn't do as much post-production as normal because i ran out of time it still sounds pretty good and just as a quick shout if you find you like the more unedited vibe we always throw the unedited episode videos

up on our patreon page So consider this a preview of that. Okay, Interdecisional Spaceship, run the show. Music. Welcome to Decision Space, the only show to take place right here in the space between the turns in your favorite games. I'm Brendan Hanson. I'm Jake Friedman. I'm O'Hollinan. And this is the podcast about decisions in games. And today we are joined by our special guest, Aurora, a good friend of the podcast.

She's joining us today to talk about the Decision Space Jam, the first design jam we've run as a podcast. We're going to talk together about our experience designing games, playtesting games, running the jam itself and how that went. All of which Aurora was an integral part of, so we're so happy she's joining us for it. And then we'll also share two of the community favorite games from the rating review portion and talk about those a bit as well.

To also bring up like any of our favorites, personal favorites. I have one. Oh, I'm excited to hear what your personal favorite is, Aurora. I have a couple too. I found this process, this decision space jam that we did. So for those of you who aren't familiar, if you're just tuning in, as Jake said, it's our first sort of game design jam. So Aurora had this idea. What if we did a decision space game design jam?

We gave a prompt to whoever wanted to participate and they could design a game and share that with the community so we can all give feedback on each other's entries and kind of learn and grow together. And if you are tuning in, don't worry if you've done nothing with Decision Space Jam, there will be interesting nuggets for you to glean from lessons we've learned, interesting games we've played that you'll be, I think, enjoy hearing about.

There's some really novel ideas throughout a ton of entries. I was stunned with this sort of level of novel idea generated by the more than 22 entries that we saw. And that's just including the games people went through. Forward with submitting. I know there's people like myself who spent the time designing a game and then maybe for whatever reason didn't fully submit. So it just generated an enormous amount of conversation. And these prototypes were played over 120 times, which is really cool.

Okay, so before we get right into that conversation, I just want to say thank you so much to everybody who voted for us for the Golden Geek Awards. This will be the last you're hearing about it for the time being. But if you're listening to this on launch and want to vote for Decision Space, you still can. You'll have a couple of days to do so. Voting will end on the 12th.

Okay, let's talk about the Design Jam. Let's start at the very beginning. I think it'd be helpful. Aurora, you sort of conceptualized the prompt. Can you talk about the prompt just a little bit and sort of talk through what you were thinking with why a roll and write? Why some of the restrictions you put in place and maybe touch on some of the restrictions? Okay, yeah. So roll and writes are generally very easy to play asynchronously online.

My initial idea was for everybody to do the testing together and run them, but that proved a little more difficult with the high number of submissions that we got. But just in case, I made sure to put a clause in that it should be playable solo, so anybody can just get in and test it. Obviously, solo games are easiest to test. You just sit down and you play by yourself whenever you have a free moment. So that was the first constraint that I put in.

The second one was roll 2d6 and use that as your random input. I... I don't know exactly why I chose specifically 2D6 and not 3D6 or any other kind of input. It wasn't anything specific. I just, I didn't want to use an input that I knew from a different game because like the Voyage uses 3D6. And I think that if people would be prompted to use an input that they are familiar with, it would be harder to like step away from that as an initial design.

The rest of the constraints, which was to fit in like an A4, was mostly to try and keep it from being too complex. That didn't work. Thank goodness we went with 2D6 and not 3D6.

In some ways, I think people saw the single A4 standard sheet and saw it as a challenge of sort of how much game can I fit on a single piece of paper? How big of an idea can I make?

Yeah it's cool yeah i'll jump in and just say the first thing that you know defied my expectations was was just that i was expecting with 2d6 a single piece of paper playable solo we were going to get simple light games and we really got anything but all the vast majority of the 22 games submitted this contest are feel like robust full games that have significant rule books and can be quite complex to play so that was that was definitely a surprise to me

i think that i don't really necessarily agree that they are complex to play like it's from the games that i've played i felt like there was rules complexity but it didn't bring like calculation complexity to the game. It was more like, you know, old D&D charts where you roll and try to find whatever happened in a specific situation rather than really produce a complex system to interact with.

That makes sense. And unfortunately, being that we had 22 design games entered into this contest, I didn't have a chance to play all of them. So I apologize to those designers who submitted games expecting us to get to them. So I think we did, in a sense, over promise and under deliver, just because we quite simply didn't have time to get through them all and wanted to get this episode to you before the design jam was in the too distant future or too distant past.

But of the ones I played, I think maybe more so than decision complexity is just the fact that like so many had a bunch of different mini games going on, right? I was kind of expecting, so the game I designed, right, it was basically one core idea, one core puzzle. And it felt like a lot of people went in different directions, right? Where you had a bunch of mini games kind of tied together. And it was just doing a lot more than how I envisioned the designs coming in.

I think I was definitely impressed with the range of themes and sort of structure of games. There's definitely, Jake, you designed the game sort of theme. We're very creative people, right? Having a podcast about games. So you designed a game largely kind of like Quix or Welcome 2. I also designed a game kind of like Quix or Welcome 2. I'm being facetious, maybe not the most creative in terms of what we kind of structured our game around.

But I would say a lot of the other games that came in and the designs were super unique in terms of the mechanisms that were at play or that ran a gamut of sort of designs. One that really jumped out to me that I thought was really neat was Fearsome Beast. This is a game that thematically is about sort of taking on a fearsome beast.

And you're almost playing a tennis style match back and forth with the beast that evoked fighting Ganon or Ganondorf in a Zelda game, maybe like A Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time, where you have to sort of hit back and forth. And I just thought I was thematically there with the game right away and was really engaged. And I thought the way in which a lot of these small games that fit on a single piece of paper really put me in a headspace quickly was impressive.

Roll a Coaster Park by Alex Cannon also did that for me. I felt like I was nine years old again, playing Rollercoaster Tycoon in the best possible way.

I thought that game was fully formed, really interesting and and quite fun yeah i absolutely agree the the theme in a lot of them were like really stood out out to me like i played scavengers which you walk around the world and scavenge stuff and i really felt like i'm walking around the world and scamming stuff that work it worked completely that game even had a cool thing about do you end the game with a dog that to me just felt so much

almost like the person was trying to make fallout yeah like the prompt was It was like, can I make Fallout the roll and rate? And I, yeah, that one was impressed. Very impressive. That's Scavenge by Breakfast was the name. Yeah, I think that's the most complex game on the list. Yeah, that's definitely you were alluding to with the charts of what to acknowledge, right? With Scavenge, yeah.

Scavenge is cool. And I'll also note really quickly, Jake, sorry, I know you want to jump in, that all of these games, all of the entries, you can view all of these games by joining the Decision Space Discord and going to the Decision Space Jam channel. And I'll also put a link to the spreadsheet that Aurora created with all of the links to all the files that you would need to play these games or read about them on the page for this on decisionspacepodcast.com for the episode.

Yeah, thanks for mentioning. I was going to say the same thing. So once again, we're in sync.

Also, once the episode goes on air, we will also have all the feedback that people submitted open to everybody that made submissions so they can actually see the feedback.

Nice. Awesome. yeah i think one of the really cool things about participating in this game jam is the fact that the constraints were as restrictive as they were i would say fairly restrictive right you have to use only your components are limited to 2d6 and a single sheet of paper must be playable solo that feels like fairly restrictive constraints and yet as we're talking about these games it's clear that despite that or maybe because of it the personalities of the various designers

really shone through where you know brendan and i of course were coming at it from our own like very mechanism centered frame of way of thinking about games where somebody else did you know like you guys are saying right a boss fight exploring the world and then there are other ways too i mentioned on a previous podcast, a game I really enjoyed, Kanban D6, was more.

You know the theme was kind of whatever it was sort of like just like this manufacturing game but the designers like personality really came through in the rule book of just like having all these little witticisms about manufacturing and production that really made the game come to life in a fun way that surprised me so the game ends with you can come if you can you know achieve the goal of shipping all six shipments out

and you have dice left over you can get bonus points by like completing a golden handshake award at the end of the game. It's just like small things like that just added a really good sense of humor to the game, made the whole thing a lot more fun to play. And again, you know, not something I would be expecting to be laughing at a manufacturing games, but here we are.

Aurora, did you, okay, so maybe we can spend a moment talking about some of the lessons we learned participating in the design process because I participated and I definitely learned some lessons. So I thought that the prompt was really fun. It pushed me to make a game that I never would have made if I hadn't participated, which I think that's number one for me. That's a good prompt, right? If we're participating, making things we wouldn't otherwise make, it's great.

So there's a quick mini review of your prompt, Roar. Thank you for making such an awesome prompt. I made a game that I initially called... I don't know. It was a Jack and the Beanstalk themed game that I finally called... And it was essentially all about growing these beanstalks by writing values in ascending order. And then when you had a complete beanstalk, you gained access to this other treasure track that you were trying to steal treasure.

But there's this other little section of the board where you're circling values. So whenever you roll 2d6, you could choose to either write both the values or the combination of the values together. And if you write both the values, you had to circle over in this special giant thumb area, both the values, or if you circled them together, you just had to circle, I think it was the highest one. And I think that was my favorite mechanism that I'd done.

If I was going to sort of revisit this game, I would focus on that and rethink some of the other elements because I found there was, I wanted to have this sort of push your luck element. It's kind of like, what if I could take can't stop and welcome to her quicks and kind of mash those two games together. Maybe that'd be really, there'd be some emotional highs.

And what I learned, I managed to teach myself a lesson that I should have already known, which is that we as players are incredibly loss averse. We don't want to lose things we already have. And the whole game was structured around completing something, being given a lot of points and then being told, but you might lose this thing that you've already completed.

And I think it led to some awesome feedback from my play testers, Aurora being of those included, that it feels really horrible to lose something you already have. So I think in Can't Stop Right, you're often losing progress towards almost having something that feels not as bad as losing, losing something you've already completed.

And I think that one of the big things about that game outside of maybe some thematic issues where the game wasn't teaching itself with its theme as effectively as it could be, is that it was just not optimal to press your luck in the game at all, because it felt so horrible and was.

Mechanically so detrimental to lose anything that you just kind of didn't push your luck so it wasn't succeeding in that realm but i thought that yeah it was it's great fun so if you hear from psychologists that loss aversion is powerful you should just trust them and not think you're more clever it was my lesson learned okay i uh i also made a game and i did not submit it.

Backyard archaeology backyard archaeology which i really love the theme of the game that i came up up with, which is like a little kid digging up the backyard of the house and coming up with the rules as they dig. I made a lot of iterations of this game, and the lesson that I learned most of all is that I need to be able to step back and go to an older version and go again from there. I sort of did that with the sheets, but I didn't do that with the rules.

So I wasn't able to match the rules with the correct sheets that I produced which made it very hard to go back and revisit an older version and take it again from there so basically I had those branching paths that I could have investigated but I wasn't able to go back to a node that I found satisfying and take it again from there so if I did that I could have submitted a game just like an older version that worked worked rather than like and like i think that even like physically mapping out

those branches could be like very important for development like actually writing out so this this version came from this version and this version came from this phone and this is development i tried to add this to this version and maybe i can try and add that again in a later version if that didn't work in this one having that branching arc of the development process could have really helped me to step back and try something different from a stage that worked.

Yeah. Why can I ask this question opposite to both of you? Why did you ultimately decide not to submit? Because there's no, you know, you didn't have it didn't have to be a perfect game. So I was, I was not confused. But I was just curious why you guys chose not to when you had games that you could have submitted.

I ultimately had things that I knew I wanted to change about the game that if I was going to keep working on it, and I felt that I would rather than get more feedback on the game, I kind of ran out of time is the short answer, Jake, if I had had more time to work on it, I probably would have submitted, but I wanted to be in the position where if I was going to get feedback from people for it to feel like I was utilizing their time well,

and I had gotten the game to a point where I was sort of like, this is what I would do to design direction wise if I did work on it more. and then we had a baby. So then I decided I want people to playtest each other's games, other submitters' games, and I'll put my effort towards testing other people's games. So that was kind of where I ended up. Similar to me, I don't want to get people to waste their time testing something that I know is broken.

I made some changes and it broke the game. I played it myself. I knew that it was broken. I even got some feedback from other people for that specific version, and I knew how it was broken and what I might need to do to fix it, but I didn't have time to do that, and I didn't want to waste people's time playing that in a submission. Like, the thread is there. You can go and look at the last version that I did and try and play it. That works.

But I didn't want to put it like in a submission form and elicit additional feedback because I didn't need additional feedback. I knew it was broken. That makes sense. And very courteous of everyone's time from both of you. I did get a chance to play one of the versions of your game, Aurora. Maybe not the last one that ended up breaking it because the version I played was really fun.

So I hope that you maybe try and dig back through the thread because there was something good there that was at one point posted. It, I can try and find it myself because I think that there's some really good ideas in this backyard archaeology game where you're creating the rules as you play the game. It's a great hook too.

That's a great idea. Yeah. I think that it's possible that this game just needs to break out of the constraints that I set for the game jam to really shine. Yeah. I think that's also a really good potential takeaway from the game as well. So for me, I ended up submitting a game, though, you know, knowing that it was not a perfect game by any means. The one I made is called Soul Power.

And the idea I had was it really started kind of as a thematic idea of two souls kind of reaching out and trying to connect with each other.

And the way that manifested mechanically in the board game was using mechanisms similar to quicks or welcome to where you have a row of boxes that you're trying to fill in ascending order with random dice results and then splitting that row in half so that you have two different boxes that you're trying to fill both of and then connect together there are some other kind of small small mechanisms that kind of went

went with it where you had to pick between basically filling out a box or activating a special power and if you you know did one or the other or sorry rather you. In addition to filling out a box, you would be activating a special power or doing a set collection thing, forgoing a power. And I thought I had some cool ideas, but it kind of ended in a place where a lot of my game designs tend to go. And I think that's probably pretty common to other people who maybe have done

game design themselves in an amateur way, which is like, this game totally works. It's playable. People can understand the rules as written. And it's just not as fun as I want it to be.

And i feel like that capturing that like fun is that's like the the last piece right and being like this is a maybe even a you know a game that i want to like recommend or you could even say like publishable but without that like i you know what do we what do we really have so i think maybe a lesson for me is just i'm just trying to like follow my instincts more as i'm playing the game and just trying to like lean into like listening to like what players like want to do as

opposed to trying to like approach it from a more like theoretical incremental way you know maybe taking a page out of aurora's book and you know trying to wildly change something up as opposed to what i did which was just you know small incremental changes the whole way through like the final version of my game Looks very similar to the first draft I ever tried of it. And I thought Soul Power was a very neat game. It's pretty straightforward. Like you were saying, Jake.

And I gave you feedback privately and through Google Forms. So I'm not going to give you too much feedback on the air yet. But I will say one thing that I think is tough to do in a roll-in, right? Or tough to do in any game, right? Is to have an arc. And have that arc be different every time when you have the same input mechanism of rolling dice can be tricky. and then also having big moments that are memorable can be tough.

And I think two of the community favorites, the two community favorites both do a pretty good job of having variable turns and big splashy moments potentially. One of them may be a little bit better than the other. One of them I think is just incredibly novel in its idea. And that's the charming element of the game. And the other game does a good job of having an ebb and flow of turns and sort of what you're trying to do.

I thought the most challenging thing was trying to design a the game, I want to be really intentional about having a few different ways to approach the puzzle, even if the puzzle was fairly straightforward. And I was able to get that in my game, but I wasn't able to necessarily make those paths interesting, interesting enough to sort of want to keep coming back.

One of the interesting similarities between my game and Aurora's game was that both of us picked a relatively small number of dice rolls.

I think mine was just 12. and i i maybe i'm mistaken but i remember aurora's being similar to that as well yeah and i've noticed in playtesting games that a lot of people went with just way more turns than that you know 25 plus turns uh and i think that also helps too with what you're saying like it's probably the longer your game is you know or just like the more different you know events that happen 25 five turns versus 12, it makes it a little bit easier to have that arc. Sure.

It's so stinky to bring that up because, When I designed my game, like basically my game was about you write a number in a hex and you use the other number to produce a rule. And when I was playtesting it, like my natural instinct as a designer, when it's my first prototype I make, I try to make it as short as possible to show. So I made like seven hexes, small circle, and I put my numbers in them and tried

that. And then I added more, I tried a bigger board and I played that and halfway through I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. This is not, I don't, I feel very repetitive. So I cut it to like, I don't remember exactly the number, but it's like 14 hexes, so 14 rolls.

And that felt like right because like it it it properly built up and and then halted at like the peak instead of oh i'm doing the same thing over and over and over again absolutely so maybe the final thing we can touch on from lessons learned here as we pivot into discussing community favorites is okay thoughts on writing rules did i found that so normally my play test is when i play test historically i have three published games right

so i've done this before i have experience with writing rule books, I still find writing rule books really tough. I think writing rule books is, for me, as someone who actually writes professionally in my work, really hard. Writing a rule book is just difficult. And it takes a lot of time to do well, and a lot of iterations to do well, and a lot of outside feedback to do well. I think it's a little hard to get outside of your own brain.

So I think my biggest lesson learned is always have someone else read your rules before you publish it on the internet for lots of people who want to generously give you their time to do so. Because it's nice to just have a little sanity check. But I do think if we do another decision space jam, there's good rule books in the entries that we could use as examples for others where the set there's nice section headers, a good description of play overall.

I think that's really a really key thing that everyone can do in a rule book to kind of guide players, especially at a publishers are all going to have different perspectives on how rule books should be structured, I found, and they'll kind of make the rule book what they want their rule books to be. But at this level, or when you're pitching games, I think it's so helpful to just include a paragraph that's sort of like, this is kind of what playing this game looks like.

And setting the stage of play like that can be really helpful in having players come along the journey of reading a rulebook with you.

So I really appreciated when games did that. On that topic of rules, I don't find it particularly challenging to write rules. I usually write a rule book with like shorthand for gamers, and then I elaborate when I need to. But regarding the feedback on rules, the thing that I did when reviewing the games is I recorded my PlayStation with a microphone on my computer. And I also read the rules for the game on the video.

So anybody that got feedback from me got the video of me reading the rules and trying to figure out how to play the game as part of it which I think and I got some feedback saying so that this really helps people like figure out exactly what they didn't write well in the rules and of course if they can actually see me play the entire game then they know if I made any rules mistakes that they need to clarify yeah it's interesting being that in you know 2024 24 as a board game

enthusiast that plays board games every week. I rarely interact with rule books, right? I like to watch rules videos online.

First that's kind of the way i tend to learn games or i can watch you know full playthroughs or i'm being taught the game on the on the table but here oh my gosh it just made all the difference in the world when you're trying to play one of these games that people submitted because it's it's just can be really frustrating like you want to play a game you want to give good feedback and there's just nothing more frustrating to me personally about playing a game not knowing if

you're doing it right or not that's just a really frustrating playing experience that's going to impact the way i perceive that game as being fun and you know even in other design style events i've done i did the stonemaier design day here you know that it didn't really matter as much either because you have the designer they're teaching the games so yeah.

I mean i don't think you can you can really overstate in online design jam like this that the fact i know brendan you've sort of said this before like the rule book is the game right that is the thing that you are presenting uh and i think people by and large spent more time you know testing and playing their game than they did on the rule book itself so i i agree with with everyone in that you know of prioritize that make sure you have somebody else reading before submitting is is you know

just absolutely essential advice and this is maybe jumping ahead in our conversation but i'm going to insist that if we do future rolling rights or not rolling right sorry future design jams that one of the rules we will have is before submitting you must have at least one other person read your rule book great great great should we move on to community favorites talk about the.

Two games that kind of bubbled to the top as being maybe the the most the most fully realizing the prompt is that a fair yeah and so i don't know if it's most fully realizing the plant i think i think one of those two is like extremely innovative and interesting and the other one is the most maybe complete game that has like absolutely no issues yeah and had a great year The way we're picking these two games is just that these were the two highest vote rated games by reviewers and play testers.

So we asked people to submit feedback on at least three games if they entered the design jam. That's where the number 120 came.

Logged plays comes from that's the amount of feedback sent around and as part of the feedback we ask people to rate the game basically one to six with you know one being you know the worst and six being playable fun and intuitive so and these i think both were rated in the high fives is that right yeah yeah exactly so let's start with maybe we start with arrival by casey reinhardt So Arrival is a pathing roll and write all about, and let me paint a picture for you all.

The board, the A4, the sheet, I should say, is a abstracted world map that depicts travelers who you can pick up on your plane. Your plane is sort of a line, it's a route that you're going to be drawing across this map, wonders that you can visit with these people in your plane. To visit it, you simply will fly over. So your line goes through one of the hexes depicting one of these wonders. And you want to have a lot of people on your plane when you go past.

And then also airports where you can deliver passengers. There's five different airports on the five different... There's just more than five continents in the world. There's five different airports scattered across the six continents here. Antarctica is not on the map. So basically, you're trying to...

I just want to interject real quick. quick i love the the minimalist map of the hexes it's gorgeous yeah and i particularly love that it's a map with new zealand yes yeah new zealand manages to have a dot a single passenger hanging out on it i thought that the presentation of this game arrival was also very strong it was among the best that i saw there were some other strong standouts but this felt very clean from a graphic design standpoint and the rulebook was laid

out really nicely too and thoughtfully just had lots Lots of enjambment and nice bullet points that made it in headers that made it easy to find what you were looking for. So I think this is the game that we were saying feels the most maybe fully complete and fully realized. Maybe we can talk about two things we loved about it. And one thing that we thought if Casey wanted to continue working on the game that they could by doing,

they could explore in that direction. Does that sound good to y'all? Sounds good. Okay. So, and you know, if you have two things, great chime in. And if not, that's fine too. For me, I thought two things that I love. One thing was that I was pleasantly surprised because I thought when I first saw it, I sort of felt it was going to be completely the same every time just sort of, Oh, this looks like it'll play out exactly the same way.

And I was pleased that I played it twice. And each time I played because of the way the dice came out, I sort of had to pursue slightly different strategic paths between dropping passengers off it and just picking up passengers and trying to get them to airports quickly, filling up those airports to try to get some of the bonuses like turns. It turns out there's this bonus you can use where you can turn mid die roll. So if you roll a six, you could move six spaces.

Normally that has to be a straight line, but if you use a turn, you can turn once within that path, very strong in this game. So I was pleased that I sort of could pursue harder in one direction, each of those strategies, depending on how things came out. And then I also thought the system, there's a system in this game where every six rounds, it's a 24 round game, there's a little scoring objective that you have to, that you check against when playing solo or in a group setting.

If you play it that way, you'd compare against one another. I thought those were a fun benchmark for me to check in on and see how I was doing and to have something to aim towards loosely. Something that I thought could maybe be improved from Casey's perspective. I do still think if I was giving this feedback, Casey, I wish the map if maybe could be seated differently, or maybe there would just be multiple maps.

But I think if you played this game, maybe 10 or 15 times, you'd come up with sort of optimal ways of approaching it. And it might start to feel a little bit samey. So one sort of variability around the objectives or around maybe the locations of things could go a long way in terms of increasing the replayability. Yeah, it's interesting that I think your first positive point and your last point kind of contradict one another.

They do. They do, for sure. I only played it once, and I felt like I could probably pursue whatever strategy I wanted, no matter what the dice rolled. I didn't feel very constrained about it by the die rolls. I plotted a path, and I went there, and that's about it. I think using some kind of different random input but to maybe constrain the movement a little more could help this game a lot. I also really liked the mid-game objectives.

They were very fun to aim for. I only managed to finish the first one, but I observed that it would probably be way more fun if it was a multiplayer game and you had to race other players rather than just do your own threshold thing. I think, though, that in a multiplayer game, I haven't played multiplayer, but I think that if at every stage, instead of picking one, instead of doing the one specific...

Thing rather you you could aim for one of them like maybe call a shot like once you reach one you call the next shot and then everybody's racing for maybe different things that could create a lot of uh a lot of a lot more variance in what you might want to do in a multiplayer game and then that might vary the strategy a lot because you say okay i'm i'm gonna go for this one and somebody else is going for that one so you do you do slightly different things yeah Yeah.

Awesome. I also agree, Aurora. I felt that the mechanism of roll two dice and then just pick whichever one you want felt like a ton of agency. So it was interesting because this game reminds me a lot of another roll and write we've all played together, Voyages, which is a novel, similar pathing game. You're moving around a hex grid and that one you're trying to, you use one of the dice for your direction and another one for movement. And then you do something with a third dice that you roll.

So a little bit more restrictive, but, and then this game also felt a little bit like Get On Board To Me, another sort of roll and write adjacent game. So a mashup of those two. And I think that I never felt that clever playing Arrival, but I had a lot of fun. And I realized that part of not feeling that clever was that I wasn't necessarily picking between combinations of things, but I was picking this or that, right?

I can move one or I can move six and I can move one in any direction or six in any direction. So I was just evaluating a pair of options. And it made me realize that perhaps sometimes feeling clever in games comes out of when we feel we're evaluating more options that are combinations of options that we have to put together. Because being clever is finding that right combination. Whereas here, it was fairly straightforward to evaluate both of them.

But I will say the moments in Arrival, it was paced really well. There was a nice arc, pick up passengers, try to run to an airport, drop them off. It felt good. Get a bonus, use that bonus to give you some momentum. This is where the arc really came together for me. Yeah, it also was very thematically coupled. Like, everything in the game is very walkable and very understandable because the theme works really well, except picking up passengers mid-game.

No they have grappling hooks they're just throwing them into the air you're secretly batman or something yeah all your passengers are batman right all your passengers are batman yeah i like it you're yeah you're lucius fox or alfred sadly this one wasn't on my list that i've of games i've played yet though i'm excited to after reading the rule books which i really appreciated the clarity of just listening to y'all talk one thing that really strikes me about the constraints of

the design jam is how you know two dice tend to function designers tended to approach it in one of two different ways one being kind of what i think all of us did in our designs of like wow this is really a limiting resource and you have to just make the most of what you've rolled. Versus what it sounds like is the case here where there's so much surrounding the dice roll that you feel like despite having the exact same input, you have a ton of agency over what you can do.

And maybe it's not a huge surprise that people gravitated towards that in this case. Yeah, I guess as a final little piece too, I just, y'all, I just totally blanked on what I was gonna say, I'm so sorry.

I had it and then Jake was making his point and i just completely fizzled sorry jake gotta edit this part never i'm leaving it so rare no you can't leave it just kidding the patrons will know well so we jump to the next game that are i think was actually the highest rated of all the entrants at 5.5 and that was bart de jong's game street organist and i looked up how to say bart's last name can i say it okay yeah i think it's barty young barty young something like that

it's dutch so okay that's an honest attempt, party on yeah mine was also an honest attempt i wasn't like trying to slander.

It was just poor it was just a poor attempt jake that was a liar's attempt you know it no i i also want to point out specifically one of the questions in the feedback form was if you want if you played it more than once or want to play it more than once and a street organist got uh eight yeses which is yeah yeah and yes i think i'm not surprised having actually played this game, that it is the type of design that makes people want to go back to try again,

both to experience it and also because the puzzle offered is really novel and interesting. Okay, so what is this novel and interesting puzzle, Jake? Yeah, so in Street Organist, man, I hope I'm getting this theme right.

But essentially, you are creating sheet music for self-player pianos which is a thing that exists in denmark wait where do we say bars from the netherlands amsterdam netherlands and amsterdam yeah i guess not amsterdam specifically i don't know that's like someone saying you're you're probably from new york right yeah right but that's fine no okay.

Right. So the really cool twist of this game, which also sees you, of course, rolling your 2d6, is that instead of looking at the value indicated by the dice, which almost all of the other entries did, if not all, here you're looking at the pattern of pips and using those pips to overlay them on top of the sheet music, which is pre-populated and printed on your player.

Board in order to fill in notes to complete music where you're able to line up the notes correctly that's good for you where you're placing so say i'm placing a five right we all know what that looks like on a standard d6 you've got a box of four dots with one in the middle perhaps three of those are overlaid upon notes and then the other two are not then those are essentially negative points. And that that's pretty much the core mechanism of the game.

I think it's so clever how both Bart abstracted the dice and made the pit patterns a three by three grid, right? So a one is the central the center of the three by three grid filled in circled in, but it also makes the music sheets a grid. So you have all of these different notes on a melody, bass and drum line that are broken out into perfect grids. So you get to match these puzzle pieces.

I thought it was pretty brilliant. And then Bart says, okay, maybe we can go even further and have you rearrange pips and use powers to rearrange the pips that are there or maybe remove pips. And I thought that that was a really fun way to add some of that player creativity that I was talking about, where you sort of roll the dice and you figure out how to solve the problem and you're interpreting lots of different options.

The theme worked really well and was charming. But I felt from the perspective of, wow, this is an incredibly novel idea, using dice pips to represent notes on a music sheet. But I felt it could go even further potentially, where I didn't really necessarily understand why we were buying things.

I guess the ideas were, well, making music, right? It didn't totally come together from that perspective. So I wondered if there's this mechanism in the game where the die value you don't use becomes comes money that you can use to buy special powers to modify future results. And those are actually a really important piece of the puzzle. A huge part of playing this specific role in RightWell is managing the economy of getting that income while filling in your sheet and then using that income

to buy special powers that are going to move you forward. So you're trying to complete certain sections. I thought maybe inspiration or something along those lines might be a slightly more cohesive metaphor. We're sort of collecting inspiration and then having a moment of of inspiration that gives you a special power or something.

That was income was serviceable to make the game easy to learn and a design jam right yeah i think the only thing that i kind of wish and this would take the game in a totally different direction i'm picturing almost like dual-sided board or you know one or the other but wouldn't it be awesome if you could be somehow creating music on like a blank sheet like you're actually like making the music it would be a totally different game but i think that was kind of and i wouldn't you know change this

one but if there was any way to make it feel like i'm actually like making the music a little bit more thematically as opposed to what we have now which is like i'm like filling in the notes that already exist i don't know how you would do that but i think integration oh cool yeah right right and then because what this game already has in spades i think is a feeling of, like completionism right like at the end of the game you you feel like you've really accomplished a lot there's a lot of

kind of like satisfying elements of completion which i think is another really strong part of the design where you know not all where basically everything in the grid that you're filling out is segmented into different quadrants where you're getting. Moments of satisfaction over the course of the game where you're completing a quadrant and then earning a bonus.

And then it has the same effect that at the end of the game, in your final few roles, you're completing a bunch of stuff that's been almost totally filled in, which feels satisfying and it feels like it's kind of ramping up to the final moment.

So I think that could be heightened even more yeah like you're saying the app integration of like something like and this is what your song to you yeah this is what your your song sounds like i think that would just be incredible and it's it's like a an extra hook on top of a hook i think that's one of the strongest things here i think people listening when they're like oh you get to like it's a roll and write where you use the die patterns to

complete sheet music that's already a pretty satisfying hook and if you you could enhance that even more in some way i think that would be a winner but yeah i think you know both of these games like i said i haven't played arrival but i think this one certainly feels like a game that absolutely could be published and i hope people seek out to play this version for the time being and and hopefully bart you know continues to

pursue this i think if bart had come out with this game around 10 years ago and pitched it to whoever owns the guitar hero. License in the tabletop space, this is, it would just be a home run. It would have sold 10,000 copies. Just do four songs in every box. Okay. We're going to play Thunderstruck today. You fill out your music sheet. It's just, it's a huge winner.

This game is so novel and creative because most roll and writes, so many roll and writes are spatial puzzles, which really, this is a spatial puzzle, right? You're given these circles that represent notes that you have to fill in using die pits. But so many roll and write games are either spatial puzzles that are or routing routes type puzzles.

We were drawing a line like Arrival was or Trails of Tucana or Voyages like we talked about, or a lot of them are polyomino games like Cartographers or the... I don't know, My City, Roll and Write, where you're putting classic polyominoes. And Bart, the genius, says, but what if? No, we're going to use dice pips as a spatial puzzle.

I think it's so novel. And Jake, you're so right that there's so much design space that you could unlock with this core mechanism that Bart came up with of abstracting dice into a three by three grid and then having a grid based play sheet. The ways in which you could run with something like that are almost endless.

And I sort of hope Bart and maybe others do. I think it's really fun sort of rearranging dice pips and it's a puzzle you can wrap your head around without it being too complex in a way that is, yeah, I found it creatively really rewarding.

One thing about this game that we totally changed the structure. We didn't do two things we liked and one thing we could work on, but there is this- I forgot what we were doing. That's okay. Yeah, I did too. That's okay. Lesson learned. There's a mechanism where you're trying to make perfect parts. So you sort of fill in the sheet music from left to right, which I thought it was neat. It made me feel like it was actually playing or something through the street organ thematically.

But I found that, and Jake had mentioned, if you don't line the die pips up perfectly, you get an X on your music sheet. I was really averse to arranging in a way that I wrote an X on my sheet almost ever. I was so dedicated towards getting a perfect part. And I think it's, I didn't play enough to know if this is right, but I think you're mechanically that's really incentivized, but it just felt terrible. I just didn't want any bad notes.

And more so than making a mistake in some other games, I almost it felt like dissonant in my head. I was like, Oh, I don't want to see the, It's like messing up in a game of, I don't know, Guitar Hero or something. But that's the theme thing, too. You can literally hear it, which is pretty cool. Yeah. I just want to mention that Kanban D6 also used the pips. So cool. It's slightly different. You needed to fill a six, basically.

That's right. But that was also using the pips. I don't know if they inspired one another. I think they had a conversation about how you could use the dice differently in the Discord. That came out of that conversation. If that creative collaboration isn't incentive enough to join a design jam, whether here or elsewhere, I don't know what to tell you.

But let's... So we talked a lot about these, but there were many great games entered into this design jam, some of which we've talked about already on this podcast, but let's share if there are any other favorites that we want to highlight now. Yeah, I would like to mention Roller Coaster, which is the other game that I played that felt complete. It could definitely be tweaked some, but, you know, it needs a little bit more development, but it works.

As is, you could take this to a publisher and say, I have this game, let's publish it. It basically, like Brendan said earlier in the episode, it's like playing Roller Coaster Tycoon. They even had the orthogodal isometric view of the board, which really gave that feeling. And you used the dye to draw polyomino shapes, which represented different rides. And you put them in the park and then brought guests in and got points for that and everything.

Income and then built more rides. And it was just a very smooth experience. And I loved it. You could even take a loan. Yeah. I loved it. You could take a loan just like Rollercoaster Tycoon. It was great. The powers being sort of like business-y powers, that was a cute, clever integration, like tying that all together. And you have the pathing puzzle of Rollercoaster Tycoon in that way where you have to build paths to your attractions. And then you're also putting attractions.

It was cute. It was fully realized. I thought that one was really great too.

Jake did you have any other strong standouts for you yeah so i mentioned kanban d6 i really like that one i really like street organist and i'll mention one other that i played and i just thought it was clever was the i think it's called ho ho rolling right and i hope i'm getting this right but this is the one where you're like designing you're basically hanging ornaments onto a christmas tree and i think it was just a really cute sweet game uh and

one of the things that was so impressive to me about this design was that it actually i think was designed to like be a postcard that you could mail somebody so it has like the rules on it on one side and then allows you to you know play the game on the other side and also i think i think my my main the only real issue i had with it was it felt like maybe it was like a little bit long for what it was i remember there being just like a bunch of turns so that

it could maybe just be like cut in half to fit more with kind of the size and scope of like a postcard game but nevertheless you know i had a good time playing with it i like the idea of like a game that fits on a postcard that you could send around and at the end of the game it was another one maybe of all of these that had like the best sense of like completionism right like because i i designed a terrible christmas tree and i could like see all my ornaments clumped in the

wrong way and the lights going in all kinds kinds of crazy directions. And, you know, I thought that was sweet. And I really enjoyed it. So shout out to that one as well. Yeah, maybe at the end of this episode, I would love it if we could read out everyone's game name and author name, just as a way of saying thank you for participating.

So let's do that at the end. And as a reminder, just everyone, if you want to see the sheets we're talking about, or read the rules to these games, you can do that on the Google sheet for decision space jam number one tentatively linked in the show notes, I'm assuming Jake will throw it there or on the decisionspacepodcast.com episode page for this episode, which will be, well, you know the episode number, but it's episode 167 of Decision Space.

So I think that brings us to the future of Decision Space Jam. Is there a future? Will we do this again? What do you all think? I definitely hope so. Yeah, I had a blast doing it. I think definitely lessons learned.

And the biggest one for me was not to promise to play and review all the games myself. I think it's a. Forgivable mistake just in the fact that when we decide to do this i was thinking you know we might get a handful of entries never in my wildest dreams did i expect that 22 people would submit games and many more games were play tested in the forums for in our discord where we were play testing these probably upwards of 30 plus

i would guess so that was really cool i think i I would next time I would stick just with the criteria of like, you have to, if you submit, you have to play test three other games. Yeah. And I think we could, I think we could promise to fill up to three, all the games that, that didn't get any F maybe if somebody avoided it, we could at least one of us have a look at it to know what's up with that. Cause you know, maybe people avoid it because the rules are a beast and nobody

can figure it out. That's fine. That's fair. bill, but at least have a look at any entry that other people haven't gotten to. We could definitely do that. Yeah, other than that, I think that one lesson that we learned very early on and applied to this season jam is that we use the constraint as a sort of guideline and let people break the constraint if they feel like they need to. And naturally, we would like to take that into account.

Like, obviously, if you submit a game that has nothing to do with the constraints, we're not going to judge it through the same criteria as the rest of the games. But I think most of the games really stuck to the constraint fairly well. And there was nothing that, like, completely broke everything. Yeah, I think we had to adopt that rule just for our own sanity.

As people at you know we thought the constraints were pretty clear and they're just instantly a million questions about like well could i technically you know use the front and back side or like you know could there be rules on the sheet and whatever so we just said okay whatever do whatever you want because at the end of the day this is just to practice designing games and have fun and then we'll add a rule or we'll add a box on the feedback of

how well did the game follow the constraints i think that worked really well so i would definitely like to continue that policy in the future. I thought one of the coolest things that came out of the whole jam was the level of communication and collaboration going on in the discord. It was so cool to see people sort of testing each other's games in the design stage before submission even, and the level of ardent participation.

And I have gotten to the point where my expectations for decision space listeners in terms of the level of discourse they're having, and also the generosity of time they give to one another is very high. And I would say that the level of discourse and engagement here sort of exceeded that even. So that was so cool to see. I think there's room for us to tweak and enhance the feedback form a little bit.

I thought it was off to a good start and we did that a little bit, but it could be even a little longer, I think, when we're spending time sort of reading the rules and learning these games to play them, maybe encouraging just through the form people to spend a little bit more time giving deeper feedback. I haven't looked at lots of the feedback, but I think that would be appropriate.

I don't know. I tried to write a fair amount and it's okay if people don't give a ton, but I'd love to maybe help people think through how to give good feedback. And maybe we can give more examples of sort of, here's what a strong piece of submission looks like. There were definitely some people who submitted with a little bit more structure that made it easier to test. And I think we want, we all want everyone to test our games and give feedback.

And a nice way to do that is to make it easier for one another.

So something like that too, having some examples is on the page that we link out to could be cool yeah the last idea i have would be to especially if we want to move away from the important constraint that all these games have to be designed as solo playable and maybe that's something we just keep but trying to create some opportunities for players to like play together live to aurora's initial idea i think that's definitely something that i missed here that i enjoyed in

the in-person design jam right of just like having the opportunity to be taught the game by the designer and also you just are automatically positioned to give feedback because if you enter a game you're there playing other people's games too so i don't know what that would look like maybe it looks like you know in the future if our game submissions have to be in some type of online playable format which is really a lot easier than it sounds like these days with services like playingcards.io

that makes even internet dunce like me able to get something up there.

And then coupled with that, potentially people signing up for slots to playtest live could be a cool way to have even more of a community feel. Yeah, absolutely. I think setting constraints to help people do so easily could really help us get that going. For example, getting a custom deck of cards on Tabletop Simulator is extremely easy.

So if we make the constraints a deck of cards, that would make it a game that's really easy to test multiplayer online on a tabletop simulator or some other platform. Yeah, awesome. Well, I wouldn't be shy about having the next Design Jam include cards. Cards are always fun. Yeah, all right. Well, I think the future for Design Jam is bright just because this seemed really popular. We'll get more feedback on the Discord as well.

If you're listening to this and not a member of our Discord, please feel free to join and let us know what you think about that. Probably not something that happens quarterly, just because this took us quite a while to organize. But maybe once or twice a year, I think, seems like a great, great place to start. I think that if we didn't try and play all the games, it wouldn't have taken so long. That's true. That's true.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Well, I think my last thought, and I just say this really speaking to the people who entered this design jam or considered entering one in the future is just thank you so much for doing that. Thank you. So especially to our play testers, there are a lot of people who play tested a ton of games that didn't design them themselves, which was incredibly appreciated. I know Jim in the discord especially did a ton of work play testing stuff as

did others. So I I apologize for not not mentioning everyone. But that made it really special. And then if you were somebody who submitted these games, we'll be giving you your feedback imminently at the release of this episode. And I just want to encourage you to, you know, continue working on these just because the jam is over doesn't mean that.

Progress with this game has to be. And in fact, listing, you know, I've found one of the hardest things with getting a game published is that like, it's just like having credibility for somebody to look at your game. And participating in this game jam automatically gives you that much more than somebody who's just submitting something raw out of nowhere. So you should definitely use this in your reach out email or video and say that you participate in this jam.

If you finished in the the top 10 of voting say that and so i think despite there being you know not like a traditional prize or whatever you should be able to use this to hopefully further the development of your game or just publish it for free for people to download and play on board gamer geek that would be awesome too and as a small small thank you to all the participants who submitted let's read out the names and maybe we can

each do seven so i'll start and then aurora maybe you can jump in and do the next seven, and then Jake, you can finish this out.

So thank you to Michael Prussell, who designed Zodiac, Scott Cabell, who did Pathfinder's Roll and Write, Pingto Games, who did Scrabble with a K, Jeremy Norton, who is Do Not Adjust with Kanban D6, Stefan Plav with Dice Tile Academy, Tobias Olesen-Gron with Bingo Survival, and Bart De Jong with Street Organist. I'm so sorry if I messed up. Yeah, you messed it up. You blew it. You stole Street Organist from Aurora. No, the index starts at two. Yes, Jake, come on.

Classic programming. Check where your index starts. We'd like to thank Keymancel for Feel of Game and Keymancel also for Roly Polyominoes. Patrix or Sanuk on the Discord. Kaiju Roll and Rescue. Jordan, Discord Torbjord for Locomotives. Sion Baylis or Chuchu Mage, Magoo, Chuchu Magoo for Hoho Wollenreit and Ross Diorfani, I don't know how to pronounce that. Maybe Diorfani? Diorfani for Dice Scrapers and David Walsh for Vine.

And finally, thank you to Casey Reinhardt for Arrival, Scott Nimmer, scnimmer08 on Discord for Shoot, Shoot Danny Mose for A Storm Rolls In, Alex Cannon for Roll A Coaster Park, Breakfast for Scavenge, Brent Lockie for Fearsome Beasts, and Benjamin for Dynamic Dice. And Jake Friedman for Soul Power. And I also like to shout out Breakfast for reviewing 17 games. Keyman Cell for reviewing 12 games, and Aeron for reviewing 10 games.

Okay, Jake, Aurora, what do you think? should we jq'd mention a special title for whoever did all the games should we just give a special a little special title to the three people who did 10 or more i feel like that was a real accomplishment doing 10 or sure absolutely i mean that's a huge contribution to the discord and i know everybody, appreciates it a ton yeah decision space jam tester champion decision space

jam number one or something yeah we'll give them a special title in discord for sure awesome, So with that, we'd love to hear thoughts from you. If this is your first time listening to Decision Space, you picked an interesting episode to follow all the way to the end with us on. This is not what we typically do. So go listen to another episode, but thank you for getting here. To all of the rest of you, thank you so much for listening to Decision Space.

We really hope you enjoyed this process and learned something along with us. If you participated in any way as a tester or a player or a designer, two of those were the same, maybe, we'd love to hear from you. Give us your feedback. What did you think about the process? What could we do better to help make this stronger for everyone? Or what did you learn? We'd love to continue this discussion with you on the Discord in the episode channel for this episode. And yeah, give us your thoughts.

We're all hungry to hear. And thank you to Aurora for coming up with the idea and for really officiating this entire thing and helping keep things move along. And thank you to Jake for being wonderful. I just feel very thankful right now. And thank you for having me again. And for those that haven't listened to it, definitely go back to listening to the episode on Barrage where I guested previously. Yes, that was a great episode. Actually, can we Barrage? I want to play Barrage.

Let's play Barrage. Okay. Awesome. Thank Hembree for intro and outro song. We'll see you next week. Goodbye. Goodbye. Music.