#36 - Rethinking Rethinking Genres

Music. Hello, and welcome to Fun Problems, the problems of fun. I'm Peter C.

Hayward. I'm AJ Branton. And this is the only board game design podcast being recorded right now by someone who has a game on Kickstarter in the whole world. It's the only one. Who has a game on Kickstarter? I don't have a game on Kickstarter. I have a game on Kickstarter, AJ. Oh, of course. Robotopia, which we've actually talked about extensively on the podcast, is currently on Kickstarter, and you can go check it out in the link that AJ will put below in the show notes.

There is also, if you're watching and not listening, there's something pretty unusual happening, which is that for the first time ever, AJ and I decided to wear clothes while recording. And for the first time ever, I'm not blue. Yeah, AJ's not blue. I am a little blue. No, I am midway between the blue beard. It's not as natural as you might have assumed. Maybe he's born with it. Maybe it's hair dye. I have to bleach and then dye.

And i didn't realize until we sat down and turned the camera on that i have i am in between those steps so uh normally i wouldn't even do this but i'm traveling for the next like two weeks this is the only chance that we get to record and let's face it this kind of behind the scenes content is why you check out our youtube channel so now you know my travel details you know what i look like with bleached hair you know it all what more could they possibly want game design content,

oh speaking of that's what our podcast is about we're gonna start with some follow-up from was that our last episode or was it a few episodes ago i've it's all it's all blurred together for me i think it would have been two episodes ago now but i can't keep track anymore we i don't edit it so it's it's not in my mind anymore last time i think it was last time we'll pretend it's last time we talked about the third type of cooperative game the mystical magical third type rumored

by the ancients and that sparked quite a conversation in our discord channel aj did you know we have a discord channel, I did. And I joined it because I actually care about the podcast. Unlike you, Brian. There's a Brian out there who's not in our Discord. Please drive. We could use more Brian. It is. Yeah. This episode is, that part of this episode is just for you, Brian, to make you feel guilty.

So yes, the Discord, very active, very lovely community, lots of conversation about game design, had many thoughts on the types of cooperative games. Do want to summarize the position that people not position but like what what were people saying aj well i think the main thing is you presented a few different types of structures for cooperative games and everyone rightly pointed out a bunch of.

Different games that don't follow those very very rigid structures you set out but do you want to sort of clarify a bit of your position as to like why you gave those structures so firstly i don't know if anyone actually pointed out any exceptions i kept asking for them and i never i don't remember seeing any but they might have been there and i just missed them i'm not trying to create a taxonomy that splits all cooperative games i it's

more of a thought experiment so i may be getting too defensive i'm very caffeinated right now so if i'm a little that's why i wasn't trying to create a strict taxonomy that you know every cooperative game is either a mammal or an invertebrate or whatever like i was just saying that if you look at the market if.

You look at the games out there almost every cooperative game falls into one of two categories which is an extremely strict formula so it is quite strict and that's not because i'm like the natural way for games to evolve is a or b i'm just saying if you look at pandemic spirit island flashpoint fire rescue like dozens of others forbidden island they all follow this really specific structure and i don't think that's a coincidence i think there's something about that structure whether it's

familiarity or just like an inherent way that it's built that like in the same way as if you look at hollywood films they all follow a three-act structure that's not because someone in hollywood just like is like you got to do this or i'm not going to sign your film it's because the human brain seems to just like that pattern and so i thought it was helpful to identify that pattern and say look this is how most successful cooperative games are and if they're not they tend to be this so

it's less a taxonomy and more an observation that is hopefully useful to designers because then as you said right before we started this call, like, if your game's not working and it doesn't fit one of those patterns. It might be worth being like, what if I apply this pattern in the same way as if a screenplay isn't working? There's going to be a lot of screenplay talk in today's podcast, by the way.

If a screenplay isn't working and you just can't get it to work, it might be worth reading a book on three-act structure and applying it and seeing if that solves the problem. Yeah. And I think it's also a good sanity check. Like when you're able to look at your game in those sorts of terms, you are saying, this is the fires. Are the fires successfully drawing my attention away from the primary goal? It's a really helpful sanity check to think about your game in that structure.

In the same way, I think that the structure versus content episode that we did helps you identify where your problem actually is.

And I think just having the language and the understanding of what the game is and it's different systems is of a lot of value to me and to hopefully all of my listeners yeah and then the the third type i realized that this this was the framing we used it wasn't meant to be like and that is all games but just like this third type has also started to be successful what lessons can we learn from that how can we apply that so some of the cases people were making was that like games

can be split up in different ways or this or that, and people are trying to take mine and tweak them. And I'm like, absolutely do what you like. But my point is not a definitive taxonomy. It's just like, here are some structures that work. See if these models are helpful. And I think you and I are both on the same pages.

We don't want to spend our days just delineating, splitting all these little hairs and everything, because just like your example earlier, we can come up with this framework for what a mammal is, but then you look at a platypus and you're like, well, that doesn't quite fit. Do we spend all day arguing whether or not that's a mammal or whether or not it needs to be its own category on its own? Or can we just move on with it? Some corners of the internet do.

Right, right. But I think that genre markers, our topic for today, is really helpful in allowing people to have the language to communicate clearly what games they're working on, what games they like, think about genres in a slightly different way perhaps, while not having to get bogged down in the minutiae.

What an excellent segue in today's topic. For, I think, the third episode in a row, we're doing a Peter-led episode, which is so rare in this podcast, but so common in the last two months for some reason. And I wanted to, in my head, the title for this episode is Rethinking Rethinking Genre. Because I have been doing a lot more thinking about genre. In fact, we both went back and listened to our old genre episode, which was not nearly as bad as we remembered it being. Right?

We both independently listened and independently reached the conclusion of like, oh man, we've been hating on that episode for not nearly enough of a reason. I think like there were some bad parts of the episode and I just edited them out. So everything that's in there, I stand by it. And I think, yeah. We also thought that was the genre marker episode and it's not.

What were you saying, Sam? I don't do. I was just saying, I think that the aesthetics of play that we were bringing up, Like we really did talk about different ways to think about genres. And I think that it is a really useful episode. I'm going to stop telling people to skip it now. Yeah. Now we just got to tell people to skip the parts of previous episodes where you told them to skip it and then we're all caught up. It's fine.

Perfect. It's like an about time how he can't go back in time past a certain point, but he can go back in time past a certain point if he then goes back in time and stops himself from going back in time a certain point. If you haven't seen that film, that's a very strange and obscure reference.

Okay rethinking rethinking genre i've been thinking about genre a lot aj so i'm going to do my classic peter that episode thing of asking you some questions to get your opinion before you know what my thoughts are what are let's go with five board game genres actually let's let's start more broadly than that what are five movie genres not more broadly let's start let's start off topic, action comedy romance yeah. This is already interesting because it's like, does sci-fi count as a genre,

right? Or is that just a setting? And let's do horror. Okay. What are five genres of board game? Also interesting because, again, does Euro count as a genre? Let's go with yes. Let's say Euro, yep. I want your genuine, like, I'm not trying to trick you. I just want to start the conversation by thinking about how we think about, by rethinking how we think about. Peter's always trying to trick me. I always have to stay one step ahead.

When you're that close to the microphone so i don't know what you just said.

So we'll go with euro we'll go with area control social deduction let's do bluffing and let's do take that okay now here's here's my real point can you name five board game mechanisms that are also genres yeah i would be using a bunch of the same ones right i think it's really interesting and my i'll flag my fear up front i don't know how useful this conversation is going to be but they generally turn out useful and if it's not we can just not post

it i have been thinking a lot about genre lately because i when i'm not making board games i'm also a screenwriter and i write novels and novels and screenplays have very strict not strict novel very established is They have very established genres, and if you want to succeed as a writer, understanding genre is key.

It is paramount. It is so important, and I don't think board games has the equivalent. Because I don't think board game, I think we could name a few, but I don't think board games really do genres in the current culture, 2024 culture. I don't think we really have genres of board games. And I think people inherently want genre, and I'll go into why genre is useful. And we talked about this a little earlier, but I want to dive into it again.

I don't think board games have genres at the moment, with a few exceptions. And I think some of the ones that you mentioned are actually really good indicators of that. And I think that makes it really muddy to talk about board games uh any any any thoughts on my opening statement completely agree i may dangerously dip into some of the content from our previous episode but let's try and avoid that if we can.

Yeah then we'll have to tell people to skip this episode the so let's let's go to screenplays because it's just so well established a comedy is a genre and we've talked about genre markers do you want to describe genre markers people who haven't heard that episode including us it wasn't the one that we tried to listen to?

Yeah. So genre markers are identifiers of common elements within a game or within a given genre. So there was a famous game called Rogue. You may have heard of the genre Rogue-like and that means it is like the game Rogue. It has those elements from Rogue that became its own genre.

And there's actually a really famous summit of like designers where they establish like what individual parts of roguelikes make it a roguelike and that is how i think of genre markers it's like you you could say well it's missing this one little genre marker over here but it's got all seven of the other ones right so the genre marker is a very strong indicator of whether or not something falls in a given genre it's something that audiences

would expect to see if they experience a piece of media that claims to be of the shaman. And this draws from gender theory. So gender markers is what the term is sort of riffing on, which is, you know, what is it to be a man? What is it to be a woman? We're not going to dive into that because that's two levels of off topic. But you can't just be like, well, here's a strict rule. Here's a strict set of rules of what it is to be feminine or masculine.

Instead, you have markers. And if you follow a lot of those markers, then you are considered masculine. If you follow a lot of the feminine markers, you're considered feminine. But it's not like, well, you're not wearing a dress at this very moment. Therefore, nothing about you is feminine.

It doesn't work like that same with genre so in in screenwriting in film you know a comedy one massive genre marker is it makes you laugh that is a very clear genre marker and the key one i would say for that for that genre and then there's you know fantastical situations happy ending maybe because you know comedy and tragedy with originally the two genres of the two formats of scripts back in shakespearean time it just literally meant does it have a happy

ending or a sad ending we've moved away from that and comedy now means is it funny but another genre marker would probably be a happy ending, etc etc and and if you go specifically into that genre then there are like little sub genres so like british tv shows will almost always british sitcoms will almost always have an unlikable main character and you know fish out of water surrounded by every man like there's a whole bunch of stuff that is typical of that genre and those are genre marks.

And board games and my theory this this is a lot of theory from peter today my theory is that board gamers tend to be more sort of rigid rules followers than i'm going to say like people who watch movies just you know the the self-selecting group of people who sit down and follow rules to have fun with their friends are more likely to like rules and genre especially sort of like is is a step removed from that genre is wibbly wobbly genre does have

genre markers rather than clearly defined lines and so that my theory is that because of that board gamers tend to describe stuff by stuff that is literally in it or not so when you're listing genres i was curious if you would say worker placement as a genre because worker placement is a mechanism oh my uh my apple's giving me a little thumbs up my apple computer means that certain interactions create certain reactions on the thing sorry audio listeners so

worker placement is a mechanic any game could have a worker placement mechanic it's also sort of treated as a genre you brought up what was another one you said social deduction i think is more clearly on the genre side of things whereas.

You didn't say push your luck yeah bluffing push your luck push your luck is a mechanism, and it carries you know that mechanism inherently carries some genre to it but i think board games doesn't have genre because we really want to be able to put stuff in very clean boxes binary yes or no and that's where the euro debate it really starts to fall apart to yeah please pause for just one quick second there's a very interesting

point to bring up push your luck because i have realized over extensive game playing that i am not generally a huge fan of push your luck games but i love push your luck as a mechanism in a game that's like more than just that one thing. The example I think of is Feast for Odin, which has a dice rolling mechanism in this middle of this big, heavy worker placement game. There's a push your luck dice mechanism.

If anyone said, oh, what, you know, Feast for Odin, that push your luck game, I'd be like, no, no, no, no. The, this came up in a conversation on the Buttonshy Discord recently where we were trying to list horror films and someone said Hotel Transylvania, which is a kids animated movie with like wacky characters.

And it is horror themed but it's not in the horror genre so for me there was a really clear like it is not it doesn't have any of the genre markers of horror but it has horror l like a horror hat on like a horror set of clothing it would be like calling portal a first person shooter you shoot things from a gun from the first person it's a public right and so video games actually i was going to dive into as an example of something

where first person shooter is a genre and also a very literal description. Real-time strategy is a genre and also a very literal description. Role-playing is interesting because it's not a very literal description, but it is a genre. And then there's, you know, puzzle game and so on and so forth. So I think board games and video games are obviously very linked. And they both have this overlap of treating genre and mechanism sort of synonymously.

And I don't have a solution for this. And this is why I say I worry this is a useless episode but i really wanted to dive in a little bit to what is the purpose of genre and what the absence of genre in board games does for us so yes genre genre theory is so big in screenwriting so big in film studies so big in in novels and all that kind of stuff and genre is really useful like these things don't come about just because of tradition they come out you know they may be a form

because they're useful and kept for tradition but there's always some element of usefulness in history, and I think genre continues to be useful to this day. The purpose of genre, and we talked about this a little bit in Rethinking Genre. Is that if you, and this ties into genre markers very directly, if you like this game that has these seven elements, you are more likely to like a game that has overlapping elements. It's as simple as that.

If I like Feast for Odin and that has worker placement, resource management, polyomino puzzle, push your luck, you know, victory points, blah, blah, blah. You could list the mechanisms of Feast for Odin. That's one of my favorite games. I am more likely to enjoy a game that has overlap with that. And rather than having to sit down and do it quite as methodically as that, most industries or most media has genre.

So you can say, oh, I really like it when characters meet, start kissing and have a happy ending. Cool. If you like 20 films that do that, you'll probably like the other 20 films that do that. And you're a fan of the romance genre. So general opening statement, that's what genre does. And that's what genre is. Any strong thoughts on that? Pretty uncontroversial.

Yeah, nope. Totally on board. I'm just going to dip back into the episode we've referenced a few times here, and then we can keep moving forward with that. So I think what we were doing in the previous one was talking about aesthetics of play. And that was like, what is the reason why you go to certain games as opposed to the underlying mechanisms that exist in the game? What dynamics are they actually creating for you as a player? And here's where I'm going to risk it. I'm going to risk it all.

Here's the cut content from that episode that didn't quite work out. If we now just cut to us in different positions with different lighting, you know what happened. So the point I was trying to make that ended up having to get cut was simply that another way that BGG could represent this sort of thing for the user is instead of just telling you there are dice in the game or even like it's push or luck version of dice. In the game, you could have something where it's dynamic based.

So you have on one axis, think of the weight of BGG, right? If it's like a one out of five, then it's a really light, easy game. If it's a five out of five, super complex. So imagine the same sort of thing, but it's for player interaction. Is there a lot of player interaction? A little player interaction. Is the player interaction aggressive or positive? Is the game high luck or is it low variance?

All i was trying to say and well we can just leave it right there and i think i think we made it i noticed you didn't mention any fruit in that at all aj that is a joke only for us.

So yeah genre is really useful as a consumer because if you like romance you're more likely to like other romance and the reason i say it's almost vital as a creator is because as a creator you are creating for an audience and that audience can be you and it can be your girlfriend and it can be your mom but more often than not it's going to be for a broader audience than that especially like as as the point of this podcast is to talk about you know

succeeding professionally commercially etc you want to think about audience and so if you're a screenwriter you want to you know very few films are made way fewer films are made than board games by i think a factor of a hundred like i think it's two orders of magnitude fewer per year, films are made than board games and there's way more people trying to be screenwriters than there are trying to be board game designers so

it is a fiercely competitive field and so to succeed in that you have to know people and all the all the standard stuff but also you have to really understand what you're making and who you're making it for and so understanding genre gives you two kind of really active categories of tools as a creator which is genre expectation.

And genre subversion and this is what i mean when i say like we don't have this language in board games i think to the detriment of creators and even to a certain extent to all these members, i'm going to use area control as an example you listed area control as a genre i believe you did i might be misremembering yep it is a mechanism that has a bunch of aesthetics attached to it if you're playing an area control game it is highly interactive.

If you're playing an area control game, there is almost certainly some direct combat where someone wins and someone loses, and there is almost always some level of randomness. Like, area control sort of inherently comes with a lot of these things included. Not always, but genre markers, these would all be parts of area control. If board games sort of had its own genres, we might not call it area control, we might call it something else.

But for now, let's just pretend we still landed on area control as the name. My game coming up on kickstarter in about a week called vegas strip uh which you've done.

Extensive play testing for i was about to be like have you played it yes you've played it almost as much as possibly not well yes you you're a developer would you so first of all do you want to give just a quick brief of how that game works sure so it's a pretty pure i would say bluffing game where you've got these different casinos and you know secretly one of them is rigged so you'll be able so whoever wins that casino with the most area control is going to

score a bunch of points there but inherently you're not able to put the full amount of your strength into that location so you have to be sneaky about trying to win you have to win it when you are at a disadvantage from other people being able to play stronger tiles to that location so inherently it's about tricking your points into over committing to locations you don't actually care about sneakily going for the ones that you do and at the same time try to suss out

from the actions they've taken where they know is rigged and you don't know.

We talked a little bit in the Unhelpful Advice episode about how my designs tend to be sort of orthogonal to what a lot of people are doing. And one of the struggles I have, struggles in inverted commas, is on BoardGameGeek, my games end up with the weirdest categorizations. So you've played a lot of Vegas Strip. You just described it for the audience then. Would you call that an area control game?

Or do you think of that as an area control game? Yeah. Because I, as a genre or as a mechanism or both? I would say both. I think it's as pure of an area control as you get. Like I would say bluffing and area control, the two things I think of when I think of that game. Gotcha. I think if you said, oh, you like area control, come play this. The people who like area control would be largely disappointed by Vegas Strip.

Hopefully I'm wrong. If you love area control, back to Kickstarter, et cetera, et cetera. But for me, that is, we've talked about above the table and on the table, right? Yeah. So that game for me is so above the table. It's so much like looking at the other person and being like, Like, what, like, if I knew your information, there would be no game there whatsoever. If everyone just played with all their stuff face up, it wouldn't be a game. It would be, like, randomly whoever went first wins.

Maybe a little bit of interaction with the different casino powers. But that game for me is a bluffing game first and foremost, and uses area control as a mechanism, sure, to get into the bluffing.

But i think if you like eclipse twilight imperium ethnos like any pure inish then i think you'll probably like this game because it's well designed blah blah blah but i would never categorize it as an area control game and that's a good point and i mean my first instinct even i didn't say it was area control i said it was no you said bluffing absolutely yeah and so i think that yeah board game geek the last time i did this was it was fixing board game geek i'm back

on that train board game geek has three like categories that it uses it has i i don't have it up right now but i believe it's called theme category mechanisms and for the life of me i don't know what those really mean like it's just such such a strange mix and on any in any other media it would be genre you would have a genre and then maybe list the mechanisms you don't read romance books at all i'm. Romance books are really interesting because it's the largest section of fiction

by far. It makes the most money out of any type of book. It's such a huge industry. And the people who read it will read 10 books a week. They are voracious. So anyone who can write romance can make a living from it if they can output fast enough, because they always want more books.

And because it's such a large market, it's sort of like music or, and I'll get into a second, in that there are actually a bunch of mechanisms within romance that people really strongly gravitate towards you've probably heard of like enemies to lovers or there's somewhere you have to like i can't remember the name of it but you have to pretend to be married for some.

Reason yeah yeah and people who like those will read every single one of that small town is a genre military is a mechanism i suppose like these are all huge and then and then combining them in interesting ways so i think romance books i don't think any other game design podcast has ever said that is more similar to board games than almost anything else because board games are a form of media and then it's all about combining mechanisms in interesting ways

like if you can do enemies to lovers in a small town with military i guarantee romance authors gonna be like oh i've never thought of those combining in the same way as you know you say what what if there was a worker placement game with deck building then you're like oh how would that work and suddenly you've got ruins of arnak and dune imperium have you ever googled a movie before like just typed a name of the movie into google

and then seen like how google pops it up like that yeah there's like the people who are in it and similar and well the thing i was the thing i'm trying to get at is it.

You know dark things like that and i think that something like that could be a really good way of trying to figure out a way to do genres and board games if it's like what is this board game this board game is exciting chaotic you know those kinds of things to describe like a light push or luck or take that sort of game and then for for like a little sort of this game is cerebral strategic deliberate what you're describing there is tone and tone is sort of on a third axis compared to

genre and mechanism right so for example if i said a dark comedy that's very different to a light comedy and that those are obviously diametrically opposite but so i think i think board game i think they do have tone where like you said um thinky or chaotic etc are really good tones and genres often come with a tone like a gritty comedy is a very rare thing a dark horror is very common i don't mean the screen is dark so.

Is is there like a framework for genres that you would like to see in board games ideally this is what i'm saying i don't i don't have a solution i would just i would love it if we had genres and i don't think we do right now and i think we're close and i think that back in the day euro was a genre i think back in like 1995 euro had a very specific set of genre markers and they were minimal i mean to use our own language minimal content maximum structure heavy player

interaction but not aggressive always progressing never going backwards no destructive behavior low variance drive low variance resource economic driven yes yes and euros were very interactive that was a hallmark of 1995 euros euros today we almost use to mean not interactive yeah very commonly yeah feast for odin i love it it is not a highly interactive game at all and it is considered like a heavy euro is almost its own genre and so again

this this is my concern is that it's not helpful but i just think thinking about so the two things i mentioned were genre expectations and genre subversions. And I think we do this to a certain extent where, you know, romance, as much as like a comedy almost needs to be funny, romance needs a happy ending. I'm talking about the book genre here. If you don't have a happy ending, you are going to genuinely anger your readers.

Like people who go into romance want to know that it ends happily so they can like relax and enjoy the ride. And no matter how horrible intense things get in in.

A darker romance they know that the guy and the girl are going to fall in love and their love is going to improve them both and they're going to be together forever there's there's sort of a subcategory that which is called happily for now where it's not a happily ever after but like they're still enough happily and if you fall and and if you're writing that the romance readers want it explicitly labeled they want to know going in that this is a happily for now because even

that is enough that it it breaks the genre for them and so genre expectations in other mediums too are really important but i think comedy make you laugh and romance happily ever after are the key ones and i think if we had the tool i think if we had the tool of genres in board games then it would be easier to.

Meet genre expectations without that what do we do and i think we do similar things we just don't have that convenient framework model and language yeah i definitely feel that i think it was even in the episode that we did the first time for fixing bgg where i mentioned specifically recommending nightfall to people at who are really to deck builders because i'm like well if you play all these deck builders you must really be able

to enjoy this one and it's like no it's because it's not hitting the notes that they expect from deck builders because it's too elaborate and too complicated has all this extra stuff and what they were going to for the deck builders was the lighter faster churn through your cards and that sort of thing there is a famous thought experiment by richard garfield i think it's called random chess do you know if that's the name of it yeah the the idea is basically it's a new game

called random chess you play a normal game of chess and then once one player is checkmated the other player they roll a die and if it's a one through five they win if it's six they lose and it was a thought experiment on like what it is to to be a I think it was chance first determinism or whatever it was but it's really interesting to examine in the point of view of genres because abstract I think is almost as close to a genre as board games has and,

So abstract, people who sit down to play an abstract, they have a lot of very clear expectations. And if you break those expectations, you will hear about it. So random chess is technically an abstract game in every way, except for the dice roll at the end. And I guarantee, aside from the fact that people who play chess would be like, well, I'll just play chess. I guarantee that people who play abstracts would hate that change because it subverts their expectation of the genre.

I know someone who's really into abstract strategies and I was like, have you played Santorini this is ages ago you know back when Santorini was new and he was like, oh well the thing is is it's only an abstract strategy with some of the rules some of the rules make it not an abstract strategy anymore right and that's a genre markers sort of thing yeah that time you killed me so I'll get on to that time you killed me in a second but.

Understanding genre expectations mean that you have a much better chance of delivering to your audience and I was saying that's kind of the focus of the podcast so like if you know what people who again we don't have genres so i'm just gonna have to use mechanisms in its place if you know what people who play a hidden movement game are expecting you can you can design something that will satisfy those expectations if you know what people

who want to play a bluffing game are expecting you can deliver those expectations well and part of it too is when you have something that, sort of is more different than the genre typically is it can be very difficult to communicate that to your potential customers.

Like when I worked at the board game store and I had someone come in and would ask about a game that didn't very neatly fit into one of these established mechanisms slash genres, it would be very hard for me to be able to talk to them about how it was different to the other ones. It was very hard for them to be able to grok it because to them it was like, all deck builders are this thing. So what are you saying? Right. What are you saying? It's not a deck builder anymore? Yeah. Yeah.

The flip side of that is subverting genre expectations or genre subversions. And again, this is a really important, useful tool for creators. If I'm writing a comedy and it's just ha-ha funny the whole way through, great, but it's probably not going to find an audience. Because in screenwriting, just like in board games, you need to differentiate yourself from what already exists.

And the way that you can do that is by subverting a genre, but in a way that still meets the genre expectations of the people who like it.

And this is a really tricky balancing act at the best of times i'm going to do another podcast first i'm going to share one of my screenplay ideas it's an action film about a woman who's working in a business working in a business working in a big company and she gets a text message that just has run and she immediately like leaves the build leaves the building and we find out over the course of the movie that she had a secret life as a spy 10 years ago she left that life she

you know got married settled down had kids and has has an old contact who's like if they find you i will warn you and that's what that text message is so for the rest of the film she's just like it's very kill bill or the the shane black film the last kiss goodnight i think it's called john wick like it's in that genre so it would meet a lot of those expectations.

The subversion that i haven't mentioned is that she is eight and a half months pregnant, and immediately it stands apart from every other film of that kind of hyper specific genre of past life of assassin catching up with you and you can immediately see how even though it meets all the genre expectations you're gonna watch that differently to john wick does that make sense yeah 100 sounds like a cool movie yeah no i really want i really want to make it.

I keep making board games instead. What a fool. So actually, yeah, now I've given you a non-board game example. Can you think of any board game examples that do an amazing job of genre subversion while also meeting the expectation? Because that is, it's so difficult that this is why I feel like genre would be a really useful tool for the industry, because it's hard enough without that language.

Sorry, it's hard enough with that language. Without that language, we're sort of groping around blindly.

I'll give two examples i think and then you can tell me if i'm off base with with what i'm saying this is useful in human conditions my go-to example for every episode it's a social deduction game but it's only for two players and it's possible that they're actually playing a co-op cooperative game so it's like kind of like a semi-co-op social deduction role-playing game it's like it i'm not sure if that's just defying genres or if that's subverting them how would you say?

I would say that qualifies. It is firmly in the social deduction genre. I think it would be hard to argue against that. But where you would expect eight plus players, it's two. And so it is limiting its audience in a sense. But for that audience, it is going to deliver. Yeah. For me, that was what caught my attention, was the player count. As soon as I heard social deduction to players, I was like, how is that even possible? I don't understand. Because you know what you are.

So yeah, that would be one, I think in a very, very, very different sense, Scythe could be considered to do that because I know that there were a lot of people who went to Scythe and were like, oh, I thought it was a super combat oriented game and they were disappointed. But I think for a lot of people who are more Euro minded, they went into it and they were like, oh yes, it's got combat, but it's like a Euro-y combat.

And I think that is almost a perfect example. I think that's exactly what I'm talking about. It is a Euro and it delivers on the expectations of Euro in every way.

And then it adds in a little bit of spice which is which is combat have you played dwellings of alder vale or andromeda's edge i have not i just played andromeda's edge for the first time the monday before last and it's a worker placement game if someone else goes to your worker space you resolve it as normal and then only one of you stays on the board you have a little dice fight one of you goes off the board the other one stays on the

board and this matters for two reasons one is that the worker placement is a spatial thing so you can only place adjacent to where you have a worker if you have none you can place anywhere so if i'm trying to like set up a chain of three actions i might go one two and if someone like takes my segment off the board cool i can't go to that third one anymore so that's one and then secondly when you pull back your workers it's it's a it's not a end of round phase it's a turn that you can take you

pull them back and activate spaces on your own personal board with the workers who are still out there so the ones who haven't lost so it is a heavy euro that is way higher conflict than your standard heavy euro because there is a dice battle you know possibly every single turn often less than that but like theoretically every turn you could have a dice battle and that has a huge huge swing so like scythe it does a really good job of euro plus combat.

That's exactly what I'm talking about, where there is an expectation that is still met, but it does something that some people might not like. So that Time You Killed Me is interesting because it's often described as the abstract game for people who don't like abstract games, because it is not pure and simple and small. You and I have played Shobu, and I assume you've played Chess and Checkers and Backgammon and Santorini and all the classic abstracts. Santorini's become a classic abstract.

I'm defining it there as that. They are very contained.

Sandorini has the like the deck of player powers but you can play without that and it's still a pure abstract and you know chess checkers shobu don't have that they have three rules and a board and you just go that's it it's it's a it's a pure abstract that time you killed me adds a bunch of wacky stuff in the space biff review i was just reading this the other day my favorite board game critic reviewed it and he said something along the lines of like people who

are in games for like serious choices are going to be offended by that time you killed me because it has nonsense with elephants and shrubs that refuse to remain shrubs or refuse to grow into trees and they'll throw their hands up and be like what are you even doing but if you're into that then it's exactly for you so it is not a it is it is defying the expectation of it's a pure tiny game which did turn a lot of players off it but if you want that

feel but with content it's exactly what that game delivers.

So yeah genre expectation and genre subversion we have equivalents of we have like we've gotten there the long way but i just feel like we're missing that direct language of you know this game is an abstract and here's what that means i'm gonna i'm gonna make a small complaint right now about board game geek and this is why i said this game could this episode could be called, rethinking rethinking genre brackets fixing bgg really rolls off the tongue do you know what the number one

abstract game is on board game geek no it is cascadia okay now because we don't have genre we instead have two definitions of abstract one one is absent of theme one is is that it's abstracted theme and and the other is that it's i don't know combatorial is the way that's normally described. Cascadia has neither of those. It has a theme that, like, I guess it's abstracted as much as any euro is abstracted. Like, it's... But all board games are abstract. We're still just moving meeples around.

And it is in no way combinatorial, which is a specific mathematical term about, like, taking turns and lack of luck. It is a game... It's a brilliant game. I'm not dissing the game.

It's a game where three random things are drawn, and then three random things for another want to put out and you take turns drafting them and adding to your tableau in no way does that satisfy people who like the genre of abstract the things that you're drawing are animals and different parts of woodland in in the cascadia region of the u.s in no way is that an abstracted theme but because we don't have a genre it sort of technically comes in and reaches

the top i would call it a light euro and i think everyone would agree it's a light euro but it crosses it ticks enough of the boxes it checks off enough like abstract technical things that it's considered abstract by board game geek and it's number one which is insane to me yeah it almost be like saying yeah sushi goes an abstract strategy like right yeah i mean you could you could absolutely say that because like it doesn't feel like you're

eating sushi but it's it's so high variance and like all the flat out games are like this they have a very clean simple system with very few rules and then the sort of like interesting decisions. And then I would call it a high level of variance.

Calico is another one where if the right piece doesn't come out you can't complete your sudoku puzzle or if the other player takes it you just can't do it and so those games don't work for me personally but i can admire the design i just don't think it's an abstract by any term except for a real like technical definition yeah so where does that leave us peter i thought you'd have more response so it wouldn't just be me ranting at

the ranting at the camera but no as per usual we agree what an uninteresting podcast you should have picked a different co-host, we have a game coming out through aeg that currently doesn't have a title but we're sort of working title is just battle bugs where you are playing a two-player dueling game in the style of unmatched using bugs on a little little board and you're moving around and attacking the other unit, i don't think you should ever call that an abstract game i

just don't think of it as abstract game on any level and yet if if like abstract if you read abstract to be like two player there's one winner cool then you can kind of be covered by that i was just gonna say well one of the factions was directly inspired by santorini but it was also the least abstract part of santorini, yeah if that shows up on the abstract list that will be wild.

But i would say like exactly what you said like it is no less an abstract than cascadia is so i i don't think that this is something that we can band together and solve that's not how culture works that's not how industries work it would this this is an it would be nice it would be nice if we had genres and so in the absence of genres and i'm going to go ahead and say we have an absence of genres in board games,

In the absence of genres, how can you use the tools of genres as if you were screenwriting? And I think that's about understanding expectations for your style of game. Let's just say genre. For your genre, like, we don't have terms for them, but you could probably still create a bunch of genre terms. So work out what genre your game fits in. Work out what the expectations are for that. Work out what the subversions are for that.

And I think that's a useful tool as a designer to be like, ah, I'm going to do this.

And often it's just like i have a game called fairy garden you haven't played this one but it's a very simple knitzia kind of style like all my games it kind of defies it's a bidding game but a spatial bidding game and it's a set collection game i think it's pretty firmly a set collection game and the the subversion is just that it's a mechanism that no one's done i i think the fact that it's a it's a bidding game with a spatial element that's

the subversion it's that combination of mechanisms and there is no genre name for it but i could list 20 other games in this genre so do that exercise as a designer work out like what am i trying to make i'm trying to make something that matches in in hollywood where i live we call it comps just comparisons which is a short way of saying that what are the comps for your game what is your game doing differently is it meeting the expectation of people who like those comps i

think that's the way of taking genre theory from another industry and sort of transplanting it into board games i think that's the useful takeaway and i think that also goes along with something that we said a few times before which is when you're designing something ideally you'll have about 50 of it being something familiar to your audience and about 50 being something new and unique because otherwise why would they care about it and

if you're looking at and you're saying the things that we do differently and the things we do the same are things that are going to appeal to that same sort of person but i know what i'm do to subvert it and have a unique hook and a unique product could be a useful framework. Before before we move on to having fun i was going to bring up feast for odin as a specific example for meeting all the genre expectations because if you like.

Large rosenberg worker placement games as a genre let's call that a very very small genre then you're going to love feast for odin and then the subversion is stuff like it has a push your luck element. It has dice. Those are little subversions. So that one is way more meeting genre expectations spectacularly than it is subverting it. But there are some distinct and identifiable subversions in there, I would say. And how do you feel about like sandboxes like Western Legends?

Would you say that is a similar sort of thing where it can offer a lot of different things to different people? I think sandbox is such a tiny genre. Like I can only really name three or four that exist at all. So I think it's one of the hardest genres to design in. Yeah. Or one of the hardest mechanisms to design. So I think the fact that you can do it at all is almost a subversion. People are like, whoa, it works and it's fun. So I think Western Legends is like...

Right, right. I think I don't know enough other sandbox games to be like, ah, here's what it did differently. But I definitely think that just meeting genre expectations in that specific genre is so hard. Like time travel and film is probably similar. Like it is really hard to do time travel well. And again, time travel is a mechanism, not a genre. But if you're into that mechanism, then it's so hard to do like well that if you do it, cool. You don't have to worry about the rest nearly as much.

Fair. Cool. Shall we have a little bit of fun?

Yeah. You up for some fun? I like fun. You like fun? Okay. So I don't have this formed yet because I always forget to prepare these. I have been described when I'm in this bleach phase as young Santa, especially when my beard is all white. Right now it's largely blue. This is the only reason I genuinely, the only reason I agreed to do it today is because I still have a mostly blue beard.

What is an unusual, I already gave my answer in asking the questions what is a what is what is a description of yours that has stuck with you or that you've always remembered man i'm such a boring white guy like i'm that boring white guy i mean how has has any description that you're like oh i like that or i don't like that i feel like people don't describe me that often because i'm i'm such like a milk toast sort of thing you know like oh yeah he's he's

a brown haired white guy with a beard six feet tall just You never get any celebrity comparisons or anything like that? I get a lot of comparisons to random people that they've met. Oh my gosh, you look just like this person I saw the other day. I get that all the time. But whenever I see pictures of people, I'm just like, that's just another white guy. It feels like the Asian stereotype thrown back at me.

The one celebrity comparison I've ever gotten, do you watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

Fear no but i know what you're gonna say the character rob is that the actor mac mac is the is the character rob is the actor he does all the writing for the show by the way he writes that entire thing and in season 8 or 10 or 12 or something like that his character was fat for a season so he went and put on like 70 pounds and then lost it again for the next season because he just wanted like this character to be fat for one season i get compared to fat mac a lot.

Which is deeply unflattering and the santa one too maybe i have i have a very round face i'm a little bit overweight but i think it's mostly the round face, Mm-hmm. When I was younger, I used to get compared to, I never even watched the show, so I don't even know if I can remember off the top of my head, but there was one of those like mentalist type shows and I had like long shaggy hair and like the really smart Sherlock-esque.

Character had like the same sort of hairstyle. And so I got comparisons to that. Oh, that might've been it. I don't know, I'll put it in the show notes or something if I can remember.

But yeah, I got comparisons to him a bit, but my hair is now short as you can clearly see all audio listeners cool i think that's all for us today i just wanted to kind of jump in and revisit revisiting genre because i've been i'm working on a novel at the moment so i've been thinking a lot about genre and how difficult it is to apply that to board games and i think i think that's why i think that that's my that's my central case uh i'm really glad if nothing else we revisited this

so that we stop trashing on that old episode the poor thing we had we had listeners defending it we were like oh they're all fools you know maybe maybe this is like a self-love thing peter we're not that bad yeah please do come join our discord and if you have thoughts especially on like oh okay sorry i i realize we've already wrapped but i mentioned that i think abstract is a legit genre i don't think the name is very good but i think that it is a legit genre in uh in board games are

there any others that you're like ah that is a clear distinct genre separate to just being a mechanism i feel like social deduction is yeah i completely agree you listed that first and i was like oh no my whole episode is gonna fall apart when aj just lists five perfectly defined genres.

Yeah, I think that one stands out to me as probably the best one. Are there any other ones off the top of your head? No, but I think that because we don't have genres, we've actually developed a sort of language to fill the gap not very helpfully. So you'll often hear gateway game, light euro, which is sort of like it's filling the space of a genre, but without the definition that a genre normally comes with.

I genuinely wonder if in 50 years' time, because we're in the golden age of board games, or maybe we just exited the book called major board games whether we will be able to like, coalesce these into distinct genres over the next 50 years i've got another one tactics i think like again it's not a great name because it's so vague right if i say tactics games to most people i think that they understand exactly that'll bug exactly yeah i think even though

and it's so wide there's so many different things that fit into it but i do think it's still a very useful term because it literally describes what you're doing and it doesn't infer or sorry it doesn't imply that there's combat related to it but again I think as far as it's a genre for that genre completely agree come join our discord or email us with other genres that we might not have thought of and next episode we'll do a follow-up where I get where I just debunk it for 20 minutes,

I know we really love we love the discussions that this kind of stuff engenders cool thanks so much AJ and we'll talk to you later bye. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter at FunProblemsPod or reach us via email at FunProblemsPodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.