#39 - The Best Design Advice on the Internet – Part 1

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

I'm H.A. Brandon. And this is the best audio mixed podcast on the internet. We just won our third award for best audio mixing. Definitely no audio quality issues whatsoever. And no one has left comments commenting about how we should fix it. It's really nice how we keep getting five star reviews for everyone's like, the audio really makes this podcast.

I don't even know anything about game design. I don't here to listen to sweet sweet evenly mixed tones all this to say we are working on it we promise.

Aj any follow-up i should have asked you this before we started recording because you're probably just going to be like nope uh yeah probably no nothing what do you want to talk about today today i want to start a long series we don't know how long it's going to be but it's be long yeah our running theory is four to six episodes on a really really interesting blog daniel.games which is written by daniel i should check the pronunciation before patchneck am i close let's go that daniel i think

his last name is actually games so his name is daniel games and his blog is daniel.games from now we're just gonna say daniel and daniel.games is a really, really good game design blog that has a ton of fantastic game design advice. But there's also a bunch of stuff that I personally, at least, strongly disagree with. So we wanted to do a series where we talk through a lot of his points, not every single point, but the points that we either very strongly agree with.

It's a lot. It's almost every single point. Yeah. Everything we strongly agree with, things that we strongly disagree with, and we're going to chat back and forth about it.

So in a way it's sort of like a response or review or critique of his ideals but this isn't supposed to be an attack on his blog and it's not it's also not supposed to be like this is the best thing on the internet but it is really good and like i'm gonna just immediately disagree i think this is the best game design resource on the internet i think it's exceptionally good i think that there are some really good podcasts i think this blows all of them including ours out of the water.

So I'm going to discreet you for a very important reason, which is we're covering his blog on our podcast. So all the points that he's made, we are co-opting into ours. So ours is the best. Let's do a kind of high level review before we jump into the specifics. So this is a series of a hundred odd, 50 odd, however many articles. Sorry, there's a very strange noise in my apartment right now and I don't know what it is.

I think it's a very low flying jet. Okay. I'm just going to keep talking through it hopefully that doesn't come through in our perfectly mixed audio i live right next to a highway so occasionally you'll hear sirens cars and now apparently low flying jets so it is a series of 50 to 100 250 i can't remember the number articles they're like little bite-sized articles and it is recommended that you just go from the top and read all the

way through it is immaculately presented there is no fluff it is just thought thought. He spent a lot of time really sort of embodying his game design theory principles into this blog. And in fact, he has an article talking about how he did that, where it is just what you need and nothing more and nothing less. And as AJ mentioned, there's a lot of stuff that he disagrees with, a lot of stuff I disagree with. And for me, that's almost a strength of it. This guy is not afraid.

Daniel is not afraid to say what he feels. And I would much rather something with strong opinions than something with milquetoast opinions. I respect that position, but I can't take that same position because if a new designer said to me, hey, I'm looking for game design advice, I want so badly to recommend that blog, but I would feel uncomfortable doing that because there are things that I disagree with so strongly that I think could lead them down a wrong path.

And in fact, I have recommended his blog to multiple designers. And every time I do, I have to give a pair of... Exactly. I have to get a paragraph of caveat text. And I can't cover every single little caveat that I have, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this with you, so that I can say, listen to our podcast, and then you'll have at least context for it. And I would still suggest that any new designers listening still read the whole thing.

But I think that you can sort of look at this as a guide, or at least a conversation about what's. Things that aren't as definitive as perhaps he presents them.

It's a little bit more controversial. AJ, it's time for our favorite recurring segment of the podcast, Peter's Politics Corner. Are you ready for this week's Peter's Politics Corner? After the recent election, I can't imagine it'll be controversial at all.

No, it's nothing to do with actual politics. My favorite writer on the internet is a woman called Clementine Morrigan, or Clementine morrigan and she has an instagram account where she posts blocks of text on her instagram it's very weird and i love her writing and i disagree with her about most things and so for me i am personally very driven towards this like she's very political very political she's insanely far left and also very anti-culture and anti-left in

some ways like anti-cancel culture kind of stuff it's a fascinating mix she has all the opinions she states them with complete certainty and i think Her blog is the one that made me be like, oh, I actually enjoy reading that much more than my own preferred method of communication, which is like, hey, guys, sometimes this might be helpful to maybe consider this thing.

I tend to prevaricate and disclaim and filter, filter, filter, filter in a way that I think sometimes gets in the way of strong communication. So Daniel Doc Ames and Clementine Morrigan are two of my literal favorite pieces of writing ever, and they are both full opinion, even in ways where I completely disagree with them. And I just like that as a style. Right. I totally get that.

And I think to me, that's sort of the crux of this conversation is that a lot of what he says, I mostly agree with, but I think that he says things prescriptively instead of qualitatively. And I think that that sort of might mean that he's really convinced that everything he says is totally true or it's like he thinks that's right for the audience of people who are reading this blog.

And I honestly am not totally sure which is which. I mean, there's a third option, which is that, and I think he says this in the blog, it is more effective writing if you state it as a fact than if you add, like, because he's trying to just keep it as clean and tight and elegant again this is his game design principles in action as possible and by cutting out they're called weasel words by cutting out the weasel words you can just make the points i think

the reason why and i'm sure you disagree with i'm sure you agree with this i think the reason why i like this style is because it trusts the reader not to be an automaton who just blindly follows all his advice which clementine morrigan is also she's like people always recommend me with i disagree with her but you don't need to say that like you can just recommend something and not assume that therefore you agree with everything like you know no one agrees with someone else's interpretation.

This is a very big meta conversation. Do you have final thoughts on that? I do. I think that one way to think of this is the old adage, you have to know the rules before you know how to break them. Daniels.games is very good at telling you a lot of rules that are correct 90 plus percent of the time. And if you're an advanced enough designer to know when to break those rules, good for you.

You can figure that on your own. Like you said, he trusts his audience. but that being said a lot of my commentary is going to be some specific that some some of the most common times his advice does not hold true that's at least my goal of adding to it and then i'll add i'll add one more sort of note on top of this which is that he is trying to do a very specific thing and all of his feedback is through the lens of that

incredibly specific thing he is not trying to make twilight imperium like that he considers making twilight imperium to be inherently bad. And that's not true inherently, but it is true for what he's trying to do. Does that make sense? Yes. I think one more note of context to build on that is that he has this platonic ideal of a game as being like in its purest form, being as elegant and as simple as possible.

And everything comes sort of from that perspective of wanting to have the shortest, tightest, fastest leanest rule set most depth and every single thing he says is built around that premise yeah cool okay how do you want to do this aj i just have i have my notes sorted into three categories agree disagree and controversial do you have it done by section or just like bullet points i just have bullet i just pulled quotes as i was reading because i knew it was going to take forever

anyway so i just pulled quotes and each one of them oh god like a full half of these i think we could do an entire podcast episode on let's just go back and forth reading our notes. So I'm just going to be agree for a long time. So I don't know if we want to save disagree for a different podcast, but mine are just going to be agree until we get out of agree. First one I have written down is no one has any business telling you how to design games if they're not a successful designer themselves.

It is a pet peeve of mine that there are like seven books out there about how to design games by people who have never published a game. Now, you're smiling. Why is that, AJ? Because I've never published a game either. It's true. I do have a game signed, and I have done development work, but I do not have a single game that I have designed that you can go and buy in the wild. But I actually, generally speaking, agree with this.

And that is why I didn't start a podcast by myself. I started a podcast with you. Between us, on average, the two of us have about 15 published games. Yeah.

But I think that I think that it's important that I did this podcast with you who does have published games so that we can have a conversation back and forth and it's not to say I think that all my advice is useless you know I don't I think that a lot of my advice is very useful and I think a lot of it comes from non-design related things like my experience as a board game store manager I understand a lot more about product design and those sorts of angles and things

but i think that broadly speaking as we as we might have to say again again i actually completely agree and again that's why i'm not doing this with just anybody i'm doing it with you yeah the the a lot a lot of people are you know the phrase of like in a gold rush the way to make money is to sell shovels there are a lot of aspiring game designers and so there's a lot of people who are like oh i could sell like i can't get my games published but i could make money by selling to them and

it is in those people's best interest if they're trying to make money from it to pitch themselves as the authority, as the person who knows. He says later in his blog that he wrote this four years ago, but didn't want to publish it until he had a game out, which I admire the hell. You, you and I don't make any money from this podcast. We, we pay to make this podcast.

This, this podcast is a money suck, but I have a Patreon, by the way, patreon.com slash PDC Haywood has nothing to do with this podcast, but if you want to give me money, buy our games or I'll do that. And so you've never come on here and been like, okay, guys, I am AJ, the arbiter of what is game by my course, by my book, sign up to my, whatever, like you've never approached it from that.

And so I think, yeah, I think you're fine because you're not, you're not, I mean, literally no one has any business you're not making a business out of telling people how to design games but yeah i i have such a such a what's the word i'm looking for i don't like it when people make a make a literal business out of how to publish games without having published any games drives me up the wall i'll just add one more tiny note which is i

think it's hilarious when people are like hire me to tell you how to have a successful kickstarter because i had one successful Kickstarter that funded, you know, $60,000. It's like, oh boy, the expert over here. Yeah. Yep. There's one person I won't name names, but you can probably find this pretty easily who built himself as the Kickstarter expert. He was the guy who knew how to do Kickstarters.

And then after many years of selling his services, he bought into his own hype and ran some of the least successful Kickstarters you've ever seen. It was almost embarrassing how poorly okay that's my first one i'm going to bold it so i don't just keep reading it aj what you got board games are a social experience which digital games are not. I mean, you know, there's always exceptions. I mean, I would say that's,

does he not understand that multiplayer video games are a thing? I play that every week. Some people exclusively play multiplayer video games. Oh, this is a disagree. Sorry, you got to frame it for me. I was like, man, AJ really buys into this? No, no, no. So I think this is a strong disagree. Solo board games are very popular. To me, this comes down to aesthetics of play and what type of fun, what type of experience you're trying to get.

And I find, typically speaking, people go to games and movies and books and all sorts of other media to get an experience that they don't normally have. That's why you have people who maybe have a super boring job that doesn't use their brain. They might be more interested in playing heavy strategy games that actually exercise that. You have a really demanding day job. Maybe you want to play cookie clicker all day or those sorts of things.

But saying that board games are inherently a social experience, I just flat out disagree. if there's tons and tons of people who play purely solo for the puzzle and don't have any interest in playing socially. I think a stronger case could be made that board games are a tactile experience because that's pretty inherent. I mean, and I'm sort of the exception there because I don't play it for the tactile experience at all. I play it for the puzzle and for the social, et cetera.

Just for my own reference, are most of your notes disagree or is it a mix thereof? Huge mix. I would say definitely mostly agree though. I would say probably 70, 30 at a guess. Gotcha. For me, can you just say I agree with or disagree with before you say it? Because I was like, I'm still mentally like that. And I think that this is another good opportunity to talk about the fact that he is writing this blog through a very particular lens.

Which is that he doesn't believe in solo games. He doesn't believe in like these experiences. And I think if you would have a conversation with him as a person, he'd be like, of course solo games exist. But for what he's doing here, which is he's trying to min-max. He's trying to say your maximum chance of getting signed is with a 20-minute light game experience that has people around a table playing and almost can't be recreated in video game form.

And I would actually just like to say i only play board games for a social experience i hate playing board games solo and the games i design are purely around making the social dynamic interesting with other players because i i agree with that for my own personal taste at least so yeah and anytime and this will be true of a lot of my notes as well like a lot of what we're doing is just being like he's coming at it from this lens it's not the only lens what's the next one this

is a big one now that i've actually had multiple games signed with publishers i can see that my previous games weren't good enough i dismissed their flaws and issues as being unsolvable compromises in otherwise excellent games this is such a recurring theme of his blog this comes up again and again and again and if i could incept one idea into every designer's mind it would be this one we sort of touched on this in unhelpful advice and maybe a few other episodes but we we as as human beings

like our own stuff it's called like the kevin rule or something like that you know you you get two people to write their name on the board and then you ask them both to vote which is a better name, 100% of the time they vote for that. People like their own stuff. They like the stuff that they made. And board games are very much not an exception to that. And we also have this tunnel vision. And this is true of me. This is true of AJ. Like, this is true of every designer.

Where, like, we have a game that has a problem. And we're like, yeah, but if you ignore that problem, it's amazing. A, it's not amazing. And B, you cannot expect the audience to ignore that problem. It is, it is so fundamental to like how I approach games now that like, no, you can't just be like, yeah, but the game needs that to work. Cool. Then the game doesn't work. And he hits this note again and again and again and again.

And I think it is one of the, like, if you take one thing away from this blog, I would almost want it to be this.

Totally agree. later on he has the a whole section called that's like making an excuse or whatever and it's like i think it's called but it has to be that way is the name of the section and it's like well if you give someone a note and they're like well it has to be that way because if i don't have this terrible awkward band-aid solution then the game falls apart the solution isn't your terrible band-aid solution rework the rest of the game so it's not a problem and that is

a very difficult thing to here you don't want to have to be like oh yeah i just have to rebuild my entire game from scratch sounds great that's what you have to do though that is what as he says later start a new game and stop once you find an unsolvable problem i i'm about to start doing some video essays on my youtube channel and i can tell you my number one pet peeve in all of film and tv is when a character does a thing

because the plot needs them to to progress and it's the exact same thing like Like. I hate, hate, hate, hate it when a character's like, I'm going to do this. And the answer as to why they did that is so that the next thing in the plot could happen and not for any internal character reason. This is the board game version of that. I work in a few different disciplines, but they all kind of coalesce into one in my mind.

So this analogy might not be relatable to anyone else, but it makes perfect sense to me. There was a game I was working on just very recently, and it had a problem where new players had a pretty hard time winning the game. It's a fully co-op game, and new players would just like lose, lose, lose because they were making terrible plays. They were consistently picking a couple particular actions that weren't very effective, but do need to be in the game because they can be very effective.

But if you just spam it, it has sort of diminishing returns without going into the game too much. And you have limited turns. There's a timer on how long you have. And players would just waste their turns looking around, basically, instead of actually doing things. And this wasn't an issue at all if you play the game a few times and start to understand. And some people would say, in fact, my co-designer and playtesters would often

be like, oh, yeah, it's fine. Because now that we've played it two or three times, I start to understand that I've lost or whatever. That is so unacceptable to me.

Completely unacceptable. Agreed. your consumers and your publisher your potential publisher are not going to be generous in the same way the play tester is yeah so i completely reworked and the entire action system for that role to limit how often they can do that and introduce some other gameplay you know it was like but it was a complete redesign of the whole thing just so that new players would be able to well so that i wouldn't be giving new players rope

to hang themselves with basically absolutely All right, what's your next one? My next one is another one we can do very quickly here. A board game is also the best way to play that specific game. Disagree? Gloomhaven is one of the most popular games out there. Digital is, I think it's almost impossible to argue. It's not better playing digital. The game is like 20 times faster. There's zero set up time, zero tear down time. The AI takes care of itself. The enemy tracks its own health.

It does so many things you wouldn't believe. If you've played physical and digital it's night and day and if you play digital and physical i think you would say you would be like me and refuse to ever play it physical again so if if we approach this less as a stance and more as advice like he might be saying make a game that needs to be a board game because that was my overriding design philosophy for many years like all my early jellybean games

i was specifically trying to make stuff that you couldn't play against a computer. That was my goal. So, like, Dracula's Feast is... There's a lot of reading people at the table. Village Pillage, there's a lot of, like, negotiation. My goal was to make a game that...

Does fit the sentence that you read i mean there's plenty of games and game genres where i think it wouldn't hold true even if you think like basically any against the game co-op maybe it's not necessarily better but like that's one that you absolutely can make it in either form and it's going to be good in either form pandemic's great physical it's great digital i think that's just, even if we're trying to be generous here i think that's too far

in the prescriptive end but again we don't need to belabor the point too much yep what's your next one okay this one is also going to be fast you might be smart but being smart is not an advantage this is as a game designer it's a prerequisite yes we we uh you know i'm gonna i'm gonna go out on a limb and say game designers tend to be more average than the the you know more intelligent than the average.

Person and as a result we've all grown up being told how clever we are and so we have that what's called the gifted child syndrome where it's like i'm great cool you're now in a field where everyone is there i did a like a shark tank thing many years ago 2016 i think it was and i you know someone came up and was like yeah i really love games and so and i was like no no i really love games is not is not notable in a pitch of like of everyone

like you're just it's like saying hey i should be here because i'm standing in this room it's like no everyone standing in this room is standing in this room, you don't get to use that as an advantage. That is a, you've gotten through the door. Cool. Now the journey begins. You're smart. You love games and you want to design games. Cool. That's where we all, now it's how do you stand above that?

Not how do you stand above your grandma who doesn't play games or your six-year-old cousin who isn't very smart. Totally agree. Totally agree. Serious board game design is a competition. How are you going to beat all those people? How are you going to beat me? We can't all win. So, totally agree. However, some people I worry are going to take the wrong lesson here and say, oh, I'm in competition with you? Well, that means I hope you don't get a game signed.

And that's not my take on this. That is what he's saying.

Well the way i take it is yes we're in competition your game has to be better than everybody else's to get there but it doesn't mean that you're going to get hit by sabotaging someone else's game i believe that firmly that a rising tide lifts all boats you know iron sharpens iron working with other designers and trying to help them get their game better and help and have them help you make your game better that's going to do better than trying to

like sabotage or whatever right We have warned that this is going to be a long series, and this is why, because I can't help but dive into it. Have I ever given the marathon metaphor on this podcast? I don't believe so. Okay. AJ, you are about to enter a marathon. It's going to be 10,000 people, and the top 100 people all win a billion dollars. You are in a marathon with a bunch of other people who have chosen to do this marathon. Now, this very directly relates. Who is...

A, AJ is in the marathon as a runner. Now, separately, AJ is betting on the marathon. He is betting on who's going to win. Who are you going to bet on? Is it the guy who's like, oh yeah, I'd like to be in a marathon? Or the guy who wakes up at 5am every single day and trains and does the course in ahead of time so he knows exactly where it is? Or the guy whose dad won the marathon and has been coaching for 20 years?

Or, you know what I mean? Like so many people, when they enter any creative field, this, this was originally about screenwriting with a friend of mine who was wanted to be a screenwriter. And I was like, cool. How much do you screenwrite? She's like, oh, I don't really. I was like, would, would you bet on you in this marathon? So the marathon metaphor, I think is really helpful because it's about the separation of you as the participant where you're like, of course, I think I'll win.

And then if you had to put a hundred dollars on the line, realistically, would you bet on yourself?

And so i'll use me as an example i'm incredibly lucky in that like a i have a systems brain where i get games b i have infinite spare time because of my various jobs etc etc c i you know i could go on this is unhelpful advice all over again but the goal is to get yourself from someone you wouldn't bet on to someone you would bet on someone messaged me on discord one day being like peter i want to get where you are i was like cool how many games have you designed he's like oh i designed one about

three years ago and i was like okay marathon metaphor would you bet on you he's like but i really want it i'm like cool then take the steps that would make someone betting on the race bet on you when he says rolling competition the hundred winners thing i think is really important you can't sabotage the hundred winners and like the hundred best runners and expect to win yeah like even if a you'd have to be the hundred and first best runner and b if you're spending all that time sabotaging

a hundred people, you're not going to win. So I think the competition metaphor holds up without having to worry about sabotage because it's not a one-on-one competition. It's a 100 people out of 10,000 or a million or a billion people will win. And just think about how much better you do if you're training with somebody else who also wants to win that marathon. You're pushing each other as far as you can. You're trading tips on things, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. For many years, the Toronto board game community was one of the best in the world. A lot of people, including myself, moved away. I'm sure it's still very good. I just don't have any contact with it. But for a while, it was this incredible powerhouse of minds who were all building each other up and up and up and up. And then you saw a bunch of publications all come out from that group.

The game design of North Carolina, same thing. like it's you know a bunch of like top tier designers playtesting each other's games and giving feedback and as a result like more games come out of that than than a lot of other places.

So all this to say like i i agree with you that like sabotage is not the way but i don't think that his metaphor inherently indicates that and i think the met the marathon metaphor illustrates that and it's also just a really useful way to think about it yep i just think we're both quoting from the same article because my next one sorry go ahead i just didn't want people to think of this as like oh we have to think of this as like yes yes that's it the bar is really high it's not

about making a game that's functional fair and balanced anyone can do that it's about making a game that's better than everyone else's functional fair and balanced game again i realize i'm hitting the same point again i just really love the way he writes about this so many designers like look i made a game and it works who's going to publish it and the answer is no one it's not about making a game that works it's about making a product that will sell and a part of that can be a game that

is better than anyone else's game he's very game focused and a little less product focus as as you know as we've talked about a lot my mind has really shifted towards product but i think the same the same thing applies of like yeah you can't you can't settle on it works it's got to be great yes and i'm gonna take that further like let's just pause for one quick second here.

What do you need in order to have a game get published and be successful? You have to have a great game with a great hook that you do a great job of selling to a publisher. It compounds and everything, but it all starts with that core design having to be able to pass the rigor of the thousand other games that get submitted to the publisher.

That's not an exaggeration for some of the larger publishers it's again i'm gonna keep going back to the marathon metaphor now that i've introduced it like if of all the games like this one that functions is that the one you're gonna bet on because like there's people out there like daniel like me who have games that function.

And change people's lives like it's such it's such a gap and you can't realize that for the inside yeah with the game that we signed with aeg which they literally said you know we've seen a thousand games this year and and this is like you know wait we were the only game they signed in a full 12 month period, Yes. And why did that get signed? Well, it played really well. It had many hooks. I think you could argue it has six plus hooks in a game.

So is your game going to beat that? If not, don't bother pitching to AEG, at least the larger company. And we're very handsome. I feel like you skipped that by accident. Definitely. Definitely. The handsomeness played a role. Okay. This is just going to go long. I've just accepted this.

Have I talked about inside out and outside in thinking this is something i think about all the time as well i don't recall okay so this is a this is a peterism inside out the same as the marathon metaphor inside out is this is the best game i have made therefore it should get signed outside in is this is a game of the thousand i'm looking at which one do i want to sign as a publisher i don't care about signing the best game that you've designed i care

about signing the best game obviously best is a weasel word weasel word weasel word disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer and it's like it's so vital to shift your thinking from inside out i have done this as well as i can and my mom loves it therefore it's worth doing to outside in where does this fit in the market where does this how does this match the publisher's needs this this is something i used to host a podcast with the youtube channel cracking the cryptic and you would

be shocked at how many emails we got from people being like hey i've been watching the channel for years if you ever want me to have if you ever want to have me on as a guest let me know and it's like hang on why why would we have you on as a guest because from their perspective it's a parasocial relationship they're like i'm really interesting therefore they should have me on from my point of view as the host i'm like it's it's a show where i interview

the two people who run the channel why would and and some of them would say like if you ever want a random viewer's opinion what like. It just doesn't make sense. Inside out and outside in thinking is a really useful like tool or lens to add to your arsenal. What you got? It might sound counterintuitive to remove a part of your game that adds positive gameplay. But if it generates enough of a reduction in complexity, it's a good thing, even if you don't re-spend the complexity elsewhere. Okay.

I'm going to jump in because my next one is the same section. So we can just do both at once.

Design your game not just for maximum depth but also for minimum complexity go ahead i'm gonna i'm gonna fill off that that complexity ratio isn't linear increased complexity enables, exceptionally greater gameplay you might think your game is simple is fairly simple for what it is and that only the necessary stuff is in there but that's almost certainly not the case your game is far more complicated than you think it is so all this is just to say you really

want to have the maximum possible value from your depth to complexity ratio. Complexity, how many rules do they have to learn? How much cognitive load do they have? All that sort of stuff. And then the depth is how much value they get out of those systems. How much interesting decisions do they have? How interesting are those decisions? And I think it's really worth reiterating that it's.

Not a linear skill if you add a little bit more complexity you can get a lot more depth out of it you don't get it automatically though just because you add more complexity to your game does not mean your game is deeper you want to and and that trimming back complexity even if you're cutting something that is fun is it fun enough to justify all those extra rules i got a single letter for you aj Okay.

Why? Why is this important? I think this is a really interesting conversation to have with me because I have so many friends that love heavy games. Okay, geez, Mr. Braggy. This is a really interesting conversation with me because I'm very popular. I am very popular in my small little pond, big fish small pond. Among my three friends, I'm very popular. Exactly. All three of my friends really like me, Peter. All three of my friends say I'm the most popular person they've ever met.

So, in a lot of the playgroups I play with, they like really complex games, and they do not care how complex the game is going to be. If it takes an hour to learn the game, and then we have to constantly reference the rules, they don't care at all. That is not the vast, vast majority of people, and even the people who like those big, heavy games.

I would be willing to wager would like the game more if they were more streamlined now there's obviously some people who are like i just want maximum depth i do not care the limit of the complexity but again that's not the vast majority of people the vast majority of people will in game will enjoy games much more and they might not even realize that they have that preference there's a lot of people who you know would would really enjoy brass birmingham and would

really enjoy it's not a really even more complex game nemesis nemesis is a very very complex game brass birmingham is like weighted pretty highly on bgg in terms of complexity but it's actually pretty simple you have like four actions there are a lot of rules exceptions though to be yeah that one that one is pretty layered in rule exceptions yeah but not three resources and their horses and zebras they all like function in different slight like annoyingly different

ways it's worth it it justifies itself but. But yeah, pretend I picked maybe two better examples. But like, you know, one is number one on BGG, the other one's like very high on BGG. I think if the designers had streamlined Nemesis more and released it and people didn't know about it, they would enjoy it more without knowing, if that makes sense. Let me try that again, putting it a different way.

People don't realize how much complexity adds to their own unenjoyment, I don't think, at the top end of of of gamers there was there's a game apex legends that.

I thought was like so beautiful when it came out it was so smooth so elegant each hero has a passive a tactical and ultimate passive is always in play tactical press a button and get back every few seconds ultimate takes a few minutes and it's really powerful and in in trying to keep their players engaged because the live service game they keep adding more and more complexity to it and now it's like literally quadruple the number of abilities per character it's it's insane

and that complexity creep doesn't mean much to the people who've been playing it for a long time and similarly if you're a really heavy game it's the the frog in the boiling pot yeah or or just scaffolding like we've talked about before you you've already learned all these concepts adding a little bit more doesn't hurt you but it's more like they're adding expansions but then if you're joining for the first time it's got every expansion included exactly and and you

would be surprised how many players limits are lower than you think and you'd be surprised how much more players are going to enjoy games again even if they don't necessarily realize it because they're always asking for the heavier thing yeah i i think thinking of it as a cost is really helpful i also think of it as like gates almost like every rule you add is a new gate that people have to get through to start playing the game and some people can fly and they just

skip all the gates and don't notice and you as the designer can fly and skip all the gates without noticing. But the more gates you can remove the more people can come in to i'm in metaphor mode today.

I'm going to devil's advocate briefly because i think there is a subset of players that is notable, where they thrive on passing p-a-r-s-i-n-g the rules like that's what they want to do and i think a lot of first time gamers weirdly like this and it's going to sound so counterintuitive but like i got into gaming through a game called virgin queen and twilight imperium because, i was told yeah these games have an 80 page rule book and

i was like an 80 page rule book I'm intrigued and there's something rewarding about mastering this 80 page rule book now I don't think that I'm not making the case that this is how you should design games but I think there is a distinct subset of people who like that level of crush. Again, to Daniel.games that don't design for those, but I just think it's worth noting that they exist. It's just that the knowing who you're making it for and not using that as an

excuse. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, Virgin Queen knew exactly who they were making that game for.

If you're making a game for Splatter Games and, you know, actually, Jodeming Games, I'm dubbing a game for you guys right now, Corpo, and that's aimed not at, like, the max-heavy audience, but it's definitely designed to be played by a heavier audience that likes more craft we are targeting that slightly heavy audience and so we've given ourselves a little bit more complexity budget and i actually have a note about this for like seven episodes from now in the same

in the same series about how was that turn order because i have it too yeah yeah exactly, about it's about genre we'll get to it in in 17 years time but again just to reiterate this you, have definitely underestimated how complex your game is as a designer and you have overestimated how much so you've underestimated how much that matter and you've overestimated your players yes always.

Just to give a very simple rule of thumb here, again, we're ignoring the top 5% of super heavy games that are made for super heavy gamers that you almost certainly are making if you're a first time designer and you shouldn't be. Or actually the thematic games. If I was told, hey, Peter, we want a game that explores the heavy political system of Dune and we want it to be law accurate, that's a different audience than playing a game with my mom and my sister over Christmas.

Sure but if you're playing a 30 minute you know light euro game like splendor you got to be able to teach the game in a couple minutes like max and if you're teaching someone even like a 45 minute game hour-long game you really want the rules explanation to be like five minutes if you if it's 10 minutes for an hour-long game i think that's really pushing it it's like yeah and i you know for for our game that we have with ag it's highly asymmetric

so you have to teach two different factions and if you look at something like root it takes like a friggin hour to teach each player's faction and that you're not going to be able to internalize both your faction and other factions ours you can teach both factions in 10 minutes and you can play the game in 40 minutes probably i feel like root is actually a really good example of what i was talking about where the craft is sort of yeah like the craft is sort of what people want from that game

in a sense like i'm not and that's not a criticism of design as as we've talked about before i think it's brilliant but people want that chunky gritty like bitsy experience from that game yeah okay continuing.

This theme it's funny i wonder when we'll diverge and like my notes will be like from much earlier than yours a finished game should be elegant it should appear childishly simple and not far from self-explanatory coming up with complex things is easy coming up with simple things is hard you are miles ahead of me miles this is from that same section.

Maybe it's not it doesn't matter it's my literal next note i'm like i don't think i am um i thought it was i thought so much for the time sorry yep braggy peter time i am so happy with a number of my recent designs because they are three sentence rules and deeply emergent gameplay and that is, i've been doing this for 15 years now i've been doing this for like 2009 i think i started designing maybe a little bit later that doesn't matter and i am now just at the point of like oh these

two rules create a really interesting experience like it is and it is rare it is the vast minority of my games and i'm already filtering like my ideas so hard it's it's so hard to come up with simple things i just really like that sentence coming up with complex things is easy coming up with simple things is hard and this idea of of your finished game being self-explanatory oh beautiful like i i live for those moments where i see a prototype and i'm like oh i could tell you how

to play this from looking at it or when someone's playing one of my games i say the same thing like that's the dream the goal the the the end goal that we should all be aiming for i just really like this chunk or if you're like this is how it goes and like obviously yeah.

How could it possibly work any other way yeah i should make a running list of like episodes we should do but i i wouldn't mind doing an episode potentially about like how like ways to make your game self-explanatory or like uh childishly simple i just think that i'm gonna write this down right now episode ideas childishly simple i just think that's such a great way of putting it go ahead i will say that's a great goal i'd love

that as again a platonic ideal that is so in line with my personal aesthetic my personal taste obviously not fully universal but i think that is an amazing thing to strive for yeah and from the lens of making those 20 30 minute games yes, and i think a lot of games would benefit i think the vast majority of games would benefit from focusing much more. And a lot of games, I think, have just layers and layers of unnecessary systems.

There's a game, I mentioned on the podcast before, Airship City, has this genius central mechanism. Love it to pieces, except it's got like 10 extra things bolted onto it where it's like, here's a medium-heavy Euro game. And you're like, but what about just this cool thing? It's like, yeah, you just make the fun thing. Yeah, this was a Peter Floor for a long time. I'd come up with a fun mechanism, but I wanted to make a heavy game,

so I would just add stuff to it until it became a heavy game. Great. All right. I think it's up to me next. Yep.

Uh, this is in the section limit choice section. Are there parts? I've got a few more from that section. Do you want to, do you want to go through? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, this actually directly relates to what you said. So I thought that might be the next one you're going to read. Once you've worked out your core, remove everything else from your game other than what's needed to support and enhance the core. I want to be playing your amazing core. Not a whole lot of other stuff.

This episode is subtitled Peter metaphors. Have I told you the seed metaphor or have we talked about it in the podcast?

Stop asking. Just tell everybody. i just don't want to if we did it like three episodes ago i have no memory for these things okay so i i as i mentioned earlier i work in a bunch of different creative disciplines and i realized kind of the universal unifying theory of what stuff i work on is that i want a single great idea and i want everything else in your piece to grow out of that idea so i think of it as a seed in the ground and

the tree grows out of that what what are you applauding i'm applauding that sentence oh i thought you were being sarcastic no no that i i so strongly agree with that it drives me nuts when i watch a movie oh actually can we talk about severance have you seen severance, i've not seen severance but you can talk about it i'm going to talk about severance so if you really don't want to hear my thoughts on severance there's no spoilers

but severance is theoretically about this one great idea which i'll tell you i think it's the premise of the show so it's okay which is that people sign up for this program where when they're at work, their brain is separated, severanced into a different person. So they have no memories of their outside life when they're at work, and they have no memories of their work life when they're outside it. Amazing sci-fi corporate concept. Like, great.

Absolutely love it. That, for me, is such a great core seed that a whole show could have grown out of that. As well as that, there are these weird religious aspects to it where like the founder of the company is sort of like a cult and they have a book of his quotes that they read from like it's the Bible and they have rituals. And I just don't know why any of that is in there. In the first season, it doesn't resolve at all. It's just like another thing that they're doing in the show.

And everyone but me loves this. So I'm the problem here in a sense. But for me, it's that core philosophy of plant a seed, have everything grow out of that seed. Right. So this is something I really want to touch on is it's not necessarily that severance is a bad show because it doesn't do that. The question is, could it be much stronger if everything in the show did have a way to tie into that central theme? That would be more satisfying.

The metaphor that I have is that you've planted the seed and you've grown a tree. And then also there's a shrub at the side, get rid of the shrub.

Now, creators who are better than I can plant two seeds and have them grow in an intertwining way that's incredible I have all the admiration in the world for that Great Western Trail is an example of a game that does that it's a rondelle that you're upgrading and also a deck builder and they are perfectly integrated and the game works because of these two incredible seeds that were planted and grew like grew as intertwining plants what it doesn't have is an area control game at

the side yeah unless your game is like like the warrior aware of games in which case that's your central seed right well okay that that ties directly to the next thing if your game is about one thing and that thing is great then your game is great if it's about 10 different activities they all need to be great for the game to be great i wish that i could tattoo this under the inside of a lot of designers eyeballs for a while there was this sort of like mini trend from one company

that i won't name where all their games were like five.

Mini games and they sort of related to each other kind of but not really and maybe one or two of the mini games were good and the rest were okay and i just i didn't understand why they kept doing this it was such a weird move to be like yeah you're gonna play this game for a bit then this game for a bit then this game for a bit and the resources from this carry on to that and they just go around the thing until until the game ends and none of the games will

were like stand out whereas if again the quote is if you just made one thing great i would have liked that much more than 10 average connected.

Any thoughts on on those quotes just so so much agreeance agreement yep so yeah the the seed metaphor just kill anything that firstly identify your core you gotta know what your game is this you've seen me do this in in countless feedback sessions the questions i ask are what kind of feedback are you looking for and then much more importantly what are you trying to make, um i was at origins a few years back and there was a designer who'd been like hanging out you know,

at a play desk convention you tend to hang out in a group and play a bunch of games and so he'd seen me ask this question four times and he said to me later the first time i heard that question i was like what a great question what are you trying to make then a few games later i played his and at the end i was like what are you trying to make and he's like i have no idea i heard you ask that question i was like what a great question

and then it hit me and i didn't know the the reason i came up with this is i was looking at a game that was about to be published and i said well what are you trying to do here and i was like we're trying to make a really good kickstarter like okay no. Like i can't help with this because there wasn't a core idea it was just a bunch of product things, all smashed together so you need to be able to identify what are you trying to make once you can do that like i

start from a central tension all my games are like oh this central tension and then everything in that game i mean platonic ideal aspirational everything in the game is there to highlight that central tension that's my seed that's my growth if you can't do that you're going to have a harder time working out what to keep what to cut if you don't know what the driving force engine of the game is you can't build the tracks go ahead what do you got.

Are you finished with your section? Because we were doing all your section. So this is in Limit Choice section. Are there parts of the turn that you keep forgetting, don't care about, or are actually a drag? If so, your turn structure is wrong. So good. So good. Yeah. This is a general philosophy that we have definitely touched on a few times, which is that if anyone is consistently forgetting it, it should probably go.

If you, the designer, are forgetting it, it should definitely go. A thousand percent.

I i i co-designed with a guy called matt who's local and this this has been our rule from day one like oh you forgot to do that the design of the game it's gone it's out like kill it you and i actually with cozy hollow have had this a few times we were like oh yeah we forgot we meant to do that okay stop the play test let's redesign the game from scratch because this thing isn't working do you remember the most recent example of that no do you yeah the the main character in uh cozy hollow if

you think it's interesting enough please relay the the story you can if you if you think so i don't know i don't know if it's super relevant okay let's move on but leave a comment if you really want to hear the one specific example but yeah i think it's very important to think about things like turn phases and stuff i think that comes up again later but in terms of like the structure of your of your turn make it as few phases as possible because even if it's something that's not hard

to remember people can still forget very very easily. Trim, trim, trim, trim, trim. This is probably from the same section. A turn should not be comprised of phases unless absolutely necessary. Make a turn about a single consequential action. Remove or minimize everything else. This blog changed me as a designer.

The reason I think this is the best piece of game design advice on the internet, not this one quote, but this blog in general, is that I've talked in the past about how, for me, Sunshine City is this before and after.

Of game design where before sunshine city i could not understand how to build an engine or have arc or have ramping after that like that was the game where i figured it out and all my future games were massively influenced by that i think there's before and after daniel.games like part of the reason why i will defend this blog to the end of the earth is because it's it's a it's a i was gonna say religion it's a like a philosophy that if you obviously

it's not right all the time for sure agreed 100 it's not right all the time but if you lean into it as if it is your games will get twice as good that's very true and so for me after reading oh my god i i've i've got like four or five games after this where i just reading this just immersing myself in this philosophy.

Massively improved my game design and i was a pretty confidently cocky game designer beforehand this one is one of the like make a turn about a single consequential action remove or minimize everything else the second i saw that i was like oh if you can apply that to any game now you're not always going to get there that's fine but if you use this as a starting point and i do this nowadays every time i'm making a game after reading this i'm like

okay what if your turn was just one thing as opposed to a series of connected things or a phase or this you can't always get there, but by trying, you know, aim, aim for the stars, aim for the moon. And even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. Yeah, I could list so many games where like pre this blog, it would have been like, okay, first take this income and then do this, then do this. Now it's just like, do this one thing or take income or this.

Very frequently, it's right to give you two actions on a turn because you can like set up payoff, right? That's an extremely common structure, especially in your games and stuff. But again, largely, definitely strongly agree. And I especially agree with how you framed it where this is a starting point.

Try to do this doesn't quite work for your design that's fine now you learned now you moved off but more often than not you are going to be making your game much better by trying this first and as well as that i mentioned earlier that like i've got some games that i'm just crazy proud of and i've realized that the games of mine that i'm not always like i'll use i'll use our aeg game as an example like in your turn you move the marker and you take that action now

that action can have multiple steps but it's not a multi-phase thing to choose that action and think of how clear that is too for the players you explain how to play well what do i do on a turn what were my what are my actions pick one of these four tiles yeah do what it says and if the tile says draw a card or play a card like it's it's just so clear it's it's spelled out like a menu i have a game called fairy garden i i think you might like it it's sort of like a canizia style game.

I know you're not a huge Knizia fan, but I think of my games, you'd like this one. And on your turn, you move your fairy and you activate that row. And activate that row is not any actions. It's just put one of your area control things on that. If you ever have two more than any other player, so if I have two and you have four or I have zero and you have two, you take that card and it gets replaced by a new one from the thing.

That's it. You move your fairy, you place the fairy dust, you take a thing.

But the choice you'll make, so okay, this is a really good example. there's multiple things happening there but there's one choice the choice is where do i put my fairy and then i resolve where i put my fairy this is actually really common in lacerda games in lacerda games they are really heavy robust games and so you might think and just looking from the outside how could you possibly make it about one choice every one of his games that i've played is one choice with a lot of cascading impact

to the rest of the yes yes scythe does it scythe has cascading choices but you choose one of the four and then maybe you choose where to go with you guys or whatever and then the other one i was thinking of as you were talking was.

Oh a tapestry tapestry is a card drafting game now there's seven different types of cards that you can take or you can take an income action but you always just do one of those you take a card or you take income that's it that's the choice you make village pillage you choose one to go the left one to the right that's it that's the entirety of the choice like boiling a turn down to one choice oh man anyway i love this book go ahead i'll just add one

more thing which is that even in games that have two actions that you're taking oftentimes like i said before it's because it's set up and then take the real action so for instance brass birmingham you do two actions in a turn, but very, very frequently it's, I take the loan so I can build this because now I can afford it. I place this railway here so that I now have access to the school so I can use it when I take this action.

It's set up payoff and it's all built around the thing you want to do leading into that one most of the time. What you got? This is one of my favorites. This is probably the thing that comes up the most often for me when I'm giving feedback to newer designers, but it comes up with experienced designers almost just as often, if I'm being honest, all the time. If a player has to make a choice, they will take time to think about the choice. This is my next one too.

They'll do this even if the choice isn't important. Dear Lord, please do not make things dependent on other things that don't matter except for that one effect the most egregious and probably the most common example is something that says take the top card of your discard pile back well if multiple cards get you know let's say you play cards in front of you during your turn and then all the cards get placed into discard pile at the end of the round

like dominion or any of the deck builder now all of a sudden i'm telling you every single turn of every single game that you play you have to care about exactly which cards on top because it might be affected by another card that maybe you'll draw, maybe you won't. It slows the game to a crawl for something that doesn't matter 90% of the time. And the 10% of the time does matter. It's not a fun or interesting choice most of the time anyway. Yeah, this is also feedback I give a lot.

There's a game, it's gone. Anyway, yeah, I only have so many games where it's like, yeah. And by the way, you've got to track this just in, oh, oh, let's talk about Cozy Hollow.

Cozy Hollow, your character has these like long-term goals. we call them vocations or something like that and one of them is build five buildings now if you don't have that vocation it doesn't matter in a previous draft we've fixed this obviously i'm not bringing this up as like aj i've got an idea for a game if you don't have that specific one card in the deck in play in this previous draft didn't matter who built the building building was built everyone had equal access to

it then you draw this card halfway through the game build five buildings cool well now it really matters retrospectively which buildings i built this this is sort of a from the main choice thing but like don't make people constantly track stuff for occasional effects now now we've fixed it so that i can't remember how we did it either it always matters which building is built by who or you get your vocations at the start

of the game so you know what you're tracking all along genuinely don't remember which one we did but yeah don't don't Don't make people track stuff all the time for a situation that comes up occasionally. That's just the worst. More specifically, too, if a player has to make that choice, they'll take time to think about that choice. They'll do this even if the choice is important.

Oh, my God. The pet peeve for me for this one is when you have optional actions that you can do any time on your turn, including as the last thing on your turn. That was my very next point.

I can't stand this. I dev this out of every game that I can. Because what happens is, you know, you've done your main action, the next player starts to go and you're like, oh, actually, no, I think I can still do this. I tend to, just to give a very directly applicable design tip. Front load this as like the optional stages phase.

So in Fractured Aether, one of my co-designs with Alex, you have these wizards that you can use at any time in your turn to cast spells that get resources or change positions of things that matter.

Like these things matter so now to go against this this whole phase thing there is a spell phase and then you do your one action and the whole point of that is just to get all the little like you can do this anytime once you've done your action you know that your turn is over the next player knows that the turn has started it just eliminates this like wait i gotta think if i want to do any of this before you start affecting the board kill it kill it with fire kill it kill it kill

it yeah i've got a game that has that that exact problem where well i think i'll frame it slightly differently than you did the issue that we're having is not that some might go oh wait i could have done this i didn't think of it it's that the other player doesn't know when their turn starts there's no formality that's like oh this has happened therefore they're definitely done and so it's super silly and i honestly i don't love the solution and it's it's

still in development so ideally i'll find a better fix but for now the other player would always draw a card to start their turn so instead of they draw a card to start their turn the other player hands them a card and that signifies that the turn katana monopoly both do you hand the dice over to say that your turn is done um aeg who we work with they have a system where they say knock knock.

To indicate their turn is over um i have the next sentence from this quote i don't know if you pulled that go for it steps in a turn are bad but steps with choices in them are worse try to combine the choices to one part of the turn and make those choices important make the rest of the turn automatic and choiceless it's sort of what we just talked about but i just i just love this blog so i want to i want to quote lots of it yeah completely i think i think let's let's finish

up turns because i've got like a few more things on turns and then we'll call that an episode, yep i've got one more on this section i think a player's turn should just be about doing the thing or things they want to, plus minimal, ideally zero, maintenance and bookkeeping. If there are tasks that must be done to maintain the game state, try extremely hard to move them from the turn to the round. Yeah. Preach. Yeah. That's, that's, I have that one too, Hans. I'm just checking like we are on...

Dude this is the podcast now we're daniel.games yeah uh okay he has he has 85 articles without looking do you know which number of the articles are on here, probably like four number two is called turn structure.

I'll tell you yeah this is three of page 13 of notes i have for the first half of the plot, yeah we're gonna be doing this by the way strap in pause can we just pause for one second here yep again we are not making money off of this podcast we are not monetized in any way but we are also not trying buy things and rings yeah buy peter's games but we are also not trying to do this to steal all of daniel's content we generally like want to discuss it back and forth but you

should support daniel and his games right now i think the only game he has is radlands but else has an expansion for it you should check it out it's a pretty interesting very tight game it follows most of his philosophies here pretty well and if you want to see sort of what this sort of mind and this sort of ethos creates i think it's a pretty cool yeah it's it's a really good i mean like you said don't don't people don't have business telling you how to design games if they don't

i got to the end of this blog and he was like how do you support me go buy radlands i went bought radlands immediately like i would have bought 10 radlands because i love this blog so much and then i played it and i loved it i think you liked a little bit less than me but like i, could direct like you said i could directly see the application of that, yeah so the the thing i want to do plus no maintenance so uh move maintenance

from the turn to the round is just great advice it's just like i don't think i'd ever thought about it in those terms i find it really useful to be able to put something into words and so when he's put this thing into words that i was like vaguely aware of leveled up leveled up my game design.

Incredible obviously like kill as much maintenance as you can but if you do have to do it don't make it every turn i have two more before that quote all turn options should generally be put into one menu they should not be a series of different menus of choices you may do a or b or c is much faster than you may do a or b then you may do c or not and offers the player more freedom love it i historically have moved away from not moved away i've historically shied away from,

menu choice designs i just i don't i just don't like them aesthetically quite as much on your turn you can either take income or move a guy or go to the goalpost like you know i i just don't like that as much it fee it just doesn't aesthetically appeal to me i don't think there's anything wrong with it i play a lot of games that do it but it is it is such a useful tool as a game designer, and the simplicity of just put them all in one menu.

Absolutely do that. And one menu doesn't necessarily mean one action selection menu, as in like action points menu, right? It could be on your turn, you play, you know, think of Concordia or whatever. You play one card from your hand. That is your turn. It's not, you can play a card. And also you can spend this thing over here. A card would, from this model, say whether or not you could spend the thing to do the extra action.

Exactly. it is better to do half as much on a turn if it means you wait half as long for your turn.

Downtime is obviously the killer of games and i have a game called providence and i have a game called fractured aether and they're both sort of built off the same model like playing them back to back you wouldn't you can kind of see the influence but it's really not it's not it's not an adaptation and providence you would do everything and then the next player would do everything the next player would do everything and so downtime could be five minutes like

it's a heavy euro so that's not the end of the world but in fractured a though it's just spell phase one action spell phase one action spell phase one action and the turns zip through it's it's crazy how fast they are this is extra relevant if your game is more tactical and strategic if i can think through my turn and the board state isn't going to change so much i'm gonna have to rethink my turn what comes over to me then it's not so bad if it takes a

couple minutes to come back around but if it's a game where the opposite is true and you're you can't start thinking about your turn until it comes back around to you you need the turns to go so fast yeah i was just playing a game the other day and it was like it i don't know how long it actually was but it felt like it was five minutes before it came around to my turn and then i well and because of the way the game is designed i could literally

only start thinking about my turn before them because the entire board state could be completely different the actions i choose and what they do and the board position of all the units was completely different. I was like, one way or another, this has to get fixed. Have you got anything else in the turny, roundy area? I've got one more. Nope, go for it. Even better, get away from having rounds entirely. Rounds tend to exist because

a game needs to undergo housekeeping. Does your game really need that housekeeping? I have been of this philosophy for a while in a very kind of backed into it sort of way. Stonemaier Games has a list of their 12 design principles. And one of them is no rounds. Just turn, turn, turn, turn, turn until the game is over. And I want to get a Stonemaier game published.

So, often when I'm designing a new game that I think could fit into their oeuvre, I will sit down and be like, cool, can I take rounds out of this? And that is, I've done that so often it's become second nature. Cozy Hollow, when we started, had a round structure, and then we were like, look, we think this could be a Stonemaier game. Like, obviously that's a long shot, they publish two games a year, but it fits a lot of their design philosophies, could we take rounds out?

That game is so much better without rounds. It is now it's it caused a bunch of other issues that we had to solve but it is a it is much cleaner if a game doesn't have rounds doesn't have housekeeping if you can cut it absolutely cut it i think in the section he maybe offers or maybe later on he offers some like specific advice on how to do that so like if if you need to replenish the board make it advantageous for a player to trigger the replenishing the board i don't think that's a

specific example used but that's the kind of thing where like rather than say okay end of round oh robotopia robotopia is a really great example of this robotopia is a worker placement game most worker placement games you place place place everyone takes back you place place place everyone takes back how does it work in robotopia aj someone has to credited developer of the game someone has to place one of their workers on space that moves this awesome giant robot into a new section and crushes

all those robots into recycled cubes that then become resources because the cubes are resources in this game that you can use so the more clogged the board state is the more pressure there is that players are like i really want the space to be removed the pressure well what i'm saying is like the more the need is there for it to happen also the more incentive there is it's they they rise together in a really nice way yeah uh and so that

that was because i was like maybe stoneware like this i got rid of rounds and yeah, the work is self-clear in a sense. Okay, that is all I have on turns and rounds. Sorry, go ahead.

I was just asking if we were done there. Yep. Yep. AJ, how do you feel about fun, comma, having it? Question mark. I love having fun, but only at the end of these episodes. Only once a day, which is apparently our recording schedule. Have you got a question? No, but I could come up with one. Do you have a question? I can come up with one, and I have. It is, who is the most impactful Daniel in your life? You got nothing? You don't like this question? I think I only know like one Daniel.

AJ, you were just saying how popular you are and how you have so many friends. I assumed a lot of them were called Daniel. They're all named Kevin or Michael. Okay, new question. Do you have any friends with the same name as you? No. No, there we go. Peter is a weirdly rare name for my generation.

Really? Yeah. Do you know any other Peters like of my age? Of your age? No. I am i am however very close friends with the publisher cardboard alchemy which is co-founded by peter vaughn and so he and i go out regularly and have pie here in la and we hang out and play games all the time i'm seeing him tomorrow for the playtest event that he runs so that is the most significant peter or daniel in my life was that fun was that fun enough you seem you seem like

you didn't have enough fun i don't think it was very fun okay what was yours go ahead i didn't have one but let's run back with something really quick let's do a favorite Because that's probably a quick one Who's your favorite Daniel? What is your favorite addition or change you've made to the place you currently live? Oh, I love my apartment. So I live in North Hollywood in a two-bedroom apartment, and I pay $2,000 a month, which for a lot of people, you'd be like, that's a lot.

For North Hollywood, that's bananas. My assistant is currently trying to find a one-bedroom place. She can't find anything for less than $2,500. It is such a good deal. So A, I love my apartment.

B just recently do you know this is this why you ask this is a leading question no i recently put up photographs of my loved ones in every room of my house so you can actually if you're watching the youtube you can see behind these are all photos of people that i love there's my son etc etc lots of people this is now in my studio in my bathroom in my kitchen just plastered like the cupboards have photos the walls have photos the windows have like every window on my house

can i show you this without breaking my computer has a little like display of photos you see that. Yeah so every time i'm brushing my teeth making dinner just like looking around i'm just i can just see people that i love that's so wholesome less fun than my questions like go ahead i have to ask where's my picture is that the toilet so you pee at me well you know what i had to find all the photos of you and me for the had to for the for the youtube intro there's like seven.

Literally every photo that has both you and me in it is in that intro so i just don't have photos of you that's fair that was a i do love that montage by the way if you're always an audio listener you should watch one of the youtube videos just for the intro if you got my my heart all warmed what is what is the improvement to your house that you like the most my favorite improvement is i switched out the light switch in my bathroom for a dimmer switch because you know what i don't

like is when i wake up in the morning and i'm blasted with bright light or when i'm trying to go to sleep and brushing my teeth i want to like calm down and like have the nice low light don't want to have a bright light in my face i always wanted that in every time i would use the bathroom growing up i was like oh this is so annoying i think we also had like particularly bright like fluorescent lights can i make a recommendation for you to look up i think they're

called closet lights they are little battery powered lights that you stick onto surfaces and they turn on from motion so i have some obviously in my closet but i also have one in my bathroom so when i wander in there in the middle of the night to pee that one light comes on and i don't have to touch the light switch and it's enough for me to see everything i need to see without any like bright lights coming on whatsoever.

Actually have those in my closets but the ones i have at least would be too bright for that but it sounds like i could get ones that are less bright aj you know what we're gonna do we're gonna foreshadow next episode what are we gonna talk about we're gonna talk about daniel games but i imagine that at some point we'll take a break and do something else in between the 20 episodes we're gonna record about this blog please let us know on the

discord come join our discord and let us know if this is useful i think this is like i like this format because it brings up stuff like the marathon metaphor that we never have like a space to talk about necessarily, and also i just think this like go read this blog and then come listen to us anyway because i think we're going to add a lot of insight to it yeah it's a gold mine and like we said at the start we're not covering every single thing just no particular

things that stood in yeah we've gone for an hour on the first two just covering the highlights so well this is also where like you said his blog is very concise mercifully and we are not being concise right no no that's that's why he's a better resource than us i suppose yeah all right that's all for now i'll talk next time bye. Music. The background. Thank you. Thanks for joining us.

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