#41 - The Best Design Advice on the Internet – Part 3

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

Hayward. I'm AJ Brandon. And this is the hundredth part of our ongoing series about Daniel.Games. AJ, what is that? What's even happening? What is a podcast? Who on earth is skipping to part three in this series? Even if it's your first episode, you're like, oh, I'll check out this Fun Problems podcast.

I'll start part three in this series if that's you write in and and tell us we are going through daniel.games very amazing game design blog we're giving our thoughts on it what we agree with what we don't agree with and i'm scooching a little closer to the mic for a more yes we have identified one of the audio issues which is aj relaxes and leans back away from the microphone so hopefully the slope uh yes daniel games is the best game

board game design resource on the internet in my opinion and so we wanted to steal the best stuff for ourself i know we want to do like a deep dive into it which i'm fairly sure daniel himself will enjoy he seems the type yeah maybe when we're done 72 episodes from now we could get him on and have him defend himself for all the things we disagreed with tell them what we got wrong okay so the way that we're doing this is just reading quotes and then discussing.

I have sorted mine from agree to disagree. So right now we're firmly in agree and I'm going to jump in with some stuff on playtesting. What you're looking for is let's play again, unprompted by you. If they ask to play it later, that's even better. Do I need to give context for this or is that pretty self-explanatory? That's self-explanatory. I want to ask you a point blank, honest question. How many times does that happen to you? It happens with the bangers.

I have definitely, definitely had games where at the end of the playtest, a playtester has been like, again, and that's when I know I'm onto something. And then asking to play it later, I think it's happened like maybe half a dozen times ever, but I have definitely had playtesters reach out and be like, hey, still thinking about that game. Let's go again. But just to clarify, you wouldn't require your playtester saying that before

you're like, okay, it's done. I can publish it or I can pitch it to a publisher now. So we can jump forward to this. This is probably from my disagree section. Daniel.games and I have very different opinions about when a game is ready to publish.

And his stance i mean comes back to what we were saying last episode and we'll continue to say for every episode is that he has different goals than i do he said at one point i would consider it a failure this is not a direct quote this is from memory i would consider it a failure if i released a game that didn't make it into the top 2000 on bgg and that to me is bonkers that's the quentin tarantino approach quinn tarantino says he wants to make 10 great films and nothing else and every

time he makes a film that isn't great he has to make two more to make up for it and he'll stop at 10 once he has 10 great films he's done this is not how i operate on any level firstly i don't believe that you can decide how well something will land in the market before it's released i i have a phrase that i use called testing testing to the market so i'll use fiction as an example, I have a theory about fiction that...

Recently, a lot of fiction, both written and movies, have drifted away from really solid story structure into other kind of stuff, which I won't get into because it's not a podcast about fiction. And I believe that the audience is hungry for really solidly structured stuff. Now, this is a theory I have. I am not doing a podcast about how to write fiction because I want to test it in the market.

I want to write some stuff that's structured, and if it does well, I can be like, aha, my thesis was correct.

What i don't want to do is be like you know what i reckon everyone really wants stories about snails i'm not going to write a story about snail i'm going to release a story about snail i'm just going to say this as a fact so i'm a big believer in testing in the market my biggest hit as we mentioned last episode is a game called things in rings which i wouldn't necessarily rank in my top five or ten games like i don't love it i like it i obviously made it

it's very pedo people are really connecting with it i'm very happy that it's doing well it's not one of my favorites and if

i was daniel.gamesing it that game would never have made it to pitch yep that's fair you went through a lot of stuff there so i'm not sure if there's a way to loop it back but we can just move on from that i think so yeah the quote that i said was you are you asked cool do you only pitch a game when people say let's play again and i don't because i'm not trying to only make top 2000 bgg games which sounds like a cop-out sounds like an excuse but sorry i'm gonna keep talking.

Forever, I have a lot of Buttonshy games. Buttonshy games don't make the top 2,000 of BGG.

I think of their entire catalogue, there are maybe two or three that have, and that's great, but there's no way of knowing which ones will until they do, and I would much rather have a game published with this publisher that I really like, with this audience I really like, for a.

The reason I asked was because I don't want people to look at that as a metric for like, I need to wait until people are asking to play my game again. That's what means it's done. Because I agree, some of my games that are like the best ones I've done, the one we have with AEG is a clear example. That's one where people have asked to play it again. That's a vanishingly rare number. And I don't say that being like, oh, I guess all my games are terrible.

It's like the bar for someone to ask to play a prototype again with unfinished art and that sort of stuff, especially mine, which are really hideous. That's a high bar. Yours look much nicer, especially because you do AI art for everything. So everything is always really pretty as early as you can get it once you've gone past the MVP stage. And so I could understand people wanting to play this more. But even then,

that is a really high hurdle to clear. So to me, it's more like if people are asking to play it again, you are really onto something, you might have a hit rather than saying my game isn't done because this isn't happening. And the way I read the quote was what you're looking for. I think that that doesn't mean you have to find it, but like when you get that, you're onto a banger. I have a party game that is currently being looked at by a publisher that I

think is the best thing I've ever designed. It's called Triple Crown. I won't go into the mechanics at all, but I think it's the best thing I've made.

I have never pulled that game out without people wanting to play it 20 more times it is like it is a standout success now in an ideal world all my games would be like that but if I only pitched those games I would only pitch one in every you know one every 30 games now that's not to say that the rest of my games are bad it's just that I don't I'm not holding myself to that standard because I if I did I wouldn't have my biggest hits in the world.

Right like out i think i think there is a difference too between saying, games are to that standard objectively versus the ones that you like to make or whatever like you know i've i would feel you said with things and rings it's a like not love for you but i think you also understand that it's very appealing to people from that market oh yeah if if i released a game that was like even if i sold a few copies or whatever if it's the type of thing where it's like yeah.

There really wasn't an audience for it and people just didn't like it like to me my measure of success this may just be a very personal thing like if i get a game that's under a six on bgg that would be what stings for me and for me it's less about getting lots of games out there and more about having consistent bar of quality i i would rather every one of my games be very good even if it's for a niche audience or or not for me that kind of thing as opposed to the standard of every game

i release has to be a mega hit and everyone has to love it you know i yeah i there's another part of daniel's blog that we talked about earlier which is like make.

A lot more games i believe with that part i just don't stop the make at like i i literally have a lot of games made i have a lot of published designs and while still taking the advice oh not you didn't need the advice but while still practicing that you get rid of things early if they're not working yes you kill a lot of games but you still make a lot of games and you still see a lot of games through to fruition yeah and i don't i don't believe that

publishing like let's say i have a game that is an 8 out of 10 daniel's philosophy seems to be only pitch the 9.5 to 10 out of 10s they're the only ones that are worth doing because they'll become mega successes and they'll make you more money i don't think getting an 8 out of 10 or even a 7 out of 10 published is going to slow down those mega hits if if anything i think it's the reverse you're more likely to build up the momentum like reiner

knizia doesn't have a single game in the board game geek top 100 i would not call him a failure yeah which daniel isn't either but no we're not saying that but like reiner knizia has many many many games that are not in the top 2000 and probably many games that are less than a six and i just don't think that you can know what's going to work until it gets out there. Like a lot of people's biggest hits, when, when, when things in rings took off

and I was like, oh, it's funny that this one took off. My friend was like, yeah, that's how it works. Every music artist like that one took off or cartoonists or whatever like it's always the one that you don't expect so by pre-filtering it you stop those hits from being able to happen.

Having said that you are looking for that let's play again if if you never have that with any design then i don't think you're at the quality of like i don't think you're at the level of starting to really heavily pitch or like you know if you're getting a lot of rejections and you're never having a let's play again those things are probably related or if people groan when you pull it a prototype like this one again they start sobbing okay next one is from the same feedback section

i love this quote i love so many of those quotes a good designer is like an airline pilot if something's wrong with my work i absolutely want to know it's this idea of separating ego and the airline pilot example is so key because if you're defensive or reticent to take feedback at the prototype stage i can tell you from lived experience you will regret that at the publication stage i have published games that don't work on some level that are broken on some level and had

i been like an airline pilot and been like let's make sure this beauty flies before like we do we do it for real i would be in a better spot so yeah i just think that that quote is really a great framing like if something's wrong i want to know that should be your attitude going in you're not being defensive you're not making excuses you are trying to find the problems Because when it flies, if those problems are still there,

you will crash and burn. And again, live the experience, regret it forever.

Yep. And even if your game is a success, it could have been bigger, it could have been better. And people could have enjoyed it even more. You know? You don't want to look back and be like, every time you pull out that game, you're like, look at that little hang. I wish I had X'd.

Playtesting itself is a skill and you need to train your playtesters teach them how to give feedback any thoughts on this one i think i agree but i would be very simple in my teaching i do not necessarily agree that you need your playtesters to be very skilled as playtesters when you playtest my games you're amazing you're you're very able to quickly identify the root core cause of issues in the game much weaker play testers will only identify that there is an issue and weaker play testers still

will just say i didn't have fun when this happened yeah the the worst play tester quote-unquote in that category is still fine that's most of my play testers i even have a play tester who's like you know she really wants to be a super useful resource but she's you know And this is her first time ever playtesting with me. And I said, listen, all I really need from you is to say what you felt when things happened. Like, I felt helpless when you played this card. I didn't know what to do.

I didn't have any sort of strategy. That is training your playtest though. I'm just saying like the, what I'm saying is I don't think it's like a super complex skill that you have to teach them or anything. They don't need to have a degree in playtesting. They just need to understand that what you're not looking for is suggestions with no, like that's the worst kind of feedback when someone's like, Hey, you should do this.

And it's like, okay, well, what, what problem are you trying to solve? What did you feel like? So yeah, training your playtests in that sense to start expressing feelings, to not comment on the UI. I mean, I've probably told you, AJ, this story, but maybe not on the podcast. One of my favorite bits of feedback I get occasionally is they'll finish a game and I'll be like, cool, any thoughts? They're like, yeah, it's really cool that you have these like covers for the

card. They're talking about the sleeves. They're genuinely excited by the existence of card sleeves. And I'm like, okay, cool. This, it was useful to see them move the parts around, but that's not going to be a useful play tester.

On the flip side i i used to write with a guy we were we were screenwriting partners we don't work together anymore but we we had we had some fun while we did he was in la he played one of my games critic kitchen this was maybe two months before the kickstarter he had never played like a game heavier than uno before he made a suggestion that i passed on to the publisher, first of all i play tested with alex my co-designer and then we passed on the publisher and we made that pretty fundamental

change two months before the kickstarter critic kitchen has these different locations in order and he was like this or this location that's the end that should be at the start and we were like oh he's absolutely right that that should be at the start like i don't know how he this non-play tester non-gamer picked it up maybe it was a screen play structure thing but so yeah even the most unlikely of places you can get incredible feedback And that I think really improved the game by like 10%.

But yeah, I think training your playtests is a useful thing to have. So in the feedback section, if a publisher plays your game, rejects it, and gives you feedback, take this feedback as gospel. Yep. Yep. I think- He's basically saying like, playtesters are the best, sorry, publishers are the most directly who you're trying to pitch to, like take their feedback more than anyone else. Because now there are some publishers who, you know, I wouldn't trust their

opinion any further than I could throw them. But even the publishers who maybe have not had a huge hit, like they see so many games and they have such a strong understanding of how it works. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they've played thousands of games more than you, assuredly, and they absolutely can see issues that you don't.

If you really think that they're wrong, then get another opinion maybe from like someone else who's in the industry and been very successful, like a different publisher, if you know them, or a successful designer or something. But in general, treat it as gospel. Just assume that even if you disagree, you're wrong and try to figure out why you're wrong. Yeah. Do you have another one for feedback? No, sorry. I burned through all my feedback ones. Okay. Let me see here.

We worked out between episodes that he recently rearranged his blog. So our notes are sort of different to the order than it says on the site. So this is going to be a bit of jumping around as we try.

I interrogate playtesters, specifically asking them for negative feedback. I want to succeed. I'm wrong about things all the time, and I want to know what I am. This is absolutely the attitude you need. And if you're playtesting, and if you have someone playtesting you for the first time, I would strongly suggest opening up feedback by asking them about something negative.

Make sure that they understand they are allowed to be as negative as possible, and that that's a good thing, and that's helpful to you.

So if you open the the most common question i ask and i actually don't ask many questions but the most common we'll ask it to and to someone who hasn't played this much before is just what was the worst thing about the game what is the most negative experience you had during the game what was the the least fun part of the game because even if i know what happened because i saw it like i saw it on their face i saw what happened yeah it's giving them permission to articulate

it exactly exactly right so i take a slightly different approach it's similar but it slightly different i say like my general feedback question unless i'm trying to specifically pinpoint one thing is what's one thing you liked and one thing you didn't like and this is for two reasons firstly it's useful to know what people enjoyed because sometimes it's stuff that i didn't expect sometimes i'm on the verge of cutting something and then three people will be like i like that i'm

like oh like maybe i'll still cut it for various other reasons but it it re-enters consideration as a thing to stay but also i think most people are uncomfortable giving negative feedback so in the same way of giving them permission to articulate it by saying what did you like what didn't you like they feel better they feel more balanced if you're like hey crap on my game some people are going to be like no it was pretty good actually whereas if you say what did you like what didn't

you like then you're like oh cool they're you know i've divided this feedback now i can compliment the game it's like a compliment sandwich it's not for me i don't care. I don't, I don't have an ego in this, but it's about like giving them in a different way, permission to say a bad thing by asking them for a nice thing first. Personally, I absolutely hate being asked what my favorite part was or that sort of thing.

Because then I feel pressured to say that I liked something, even if I didn't like something. I am not a liar, but I can be a jerk. You know, I, most prototypes that I have played, I would say the average prototype. I'm like, if I was being completely straightforward and completely honest, I'd be like, there's nothing here. This is garbage. You should throw it away. And I'm happy. That's different to there's nothing that I liked at all.

Well, there are many, many, many prototypes that I've played. I don't like anything about them at all. Often these are on the earlier stage or whatever. But also keep in mind, it's me. Who's pickier than me? Yeah, I'm as picky as you. But I can always find a thing that I liked. When someone decides to make a game, they are trying to do something, right?

This is why I asked that question, what are you trying to do? and even if the implementation is garbage almost always what they're trying to do has a glimmer of interest in it gotcha yeah i have never said i like the idea of the game i don't think right because i'm looking at it as it currently stands not as it's intended to be so that's there's a way right if i'm asked what do i like i can always find that like what it's intended to be like oh i think it's a really interesting idea too

whether that's theme or mechanic or whatever of like there's always something interesting there and i'm going to say it as a general thing like i've never played a game where there's literally nothing interesting on any level maybe it doesn't work for many reasons it doesn't work maybe it'll never work but the ambition for me always sparks a little bit of like oh that would be cool if that could be made to work that is not my lived experience but i'm also a

much more negative person than you and i don't want to dwell further on how negative I am and how all your prototypes are bad.

So I'm going to read a little bit of a lengthier quote here, and we'll just try and move on more quickly. I spent two hours... Hey, Jay, don't try to rush the process. There's going to be 100 episodes. We just have got to accept this and live with it. All right, let me read this nice and slowly then. Can you just read the whole blog? Reading the whole blog would be faster than discussing the blog. Go ahead. What's the quote? I spend two hours playing someone else's game and then I eviscerate it.

I just can't do anything else. Everyone else has lied to that person, failed to have any standards, or watered down their feedback in some way. Except me. When I tear apart the fundamentals of their game, they often ask for how I would do it differently. I usually can't say. This isn't a valid question from the designer, however. It's not my job to fix their weak game, and the fact that they can't do better is not an excuse.

And then he goes on to say, in a way, I'm still not telling them the whole truth. The correct answer for the majority of games I play is to scrap them. I think I have this in mind. So, broadly speaking, I completely agree with this. Here we go. The correct... Yeah, actually, so I have the rest of this quote. The correct answer for the majority of games I play is to scrap them. I scrap most of my own games, after all. I just can't tell people to scrap their games. Not immediately, anyway.

What's the chance that the game is in the top fraction of 1% of designs that get published, or even the top 5% that could get into the top 1%? Not much. I always took the view that this relative honesty was the best policy, but I've come to the realization that it probably isn't.

The key thing that changed my mind is that almost none of these people are going to be successful anyway so i'm really just being a jerk and ruining their fun if the game is decent i'll be more like i'll likely be more helpful for the rest who have a sub one in a thousand chance of publication it's best to leave them to their hobby i put this in my controversial section i have many thoughts on this what do you yeah well i i had the rest of the quote as a follow-up here as well i i am

in the same boat i am so mixed on it i i think that's why it's controversial because i actually don't have a strong opinion i i feel like some people use i'm just being honest as an excuse to be a jerk and to not have to consider someone else's feelings i try really hard to not be a jerk because it comes so easily to me and i am i'm being 100 serious if you listen to the podcast the whole way through, you might think, AJ, you sound so nice.

I absolutely have to try very consciously to not be relentlessly critical. Because to me, being critical is a path forward. I assume at some point we've talked- It has a purpose. I assume at some point, you and I have talked on the podcast about growth mindset, where it's the mindset of trying to improve yourself. And that's kind of how I view everything. Everything I do is through the lens of, I want to improve, I want to better myself.

And if I'm giving someone else feedback, i want them to get better as well the delineation is going to bring up mindset in the previous quote about listening to a publisher just to briefly explain there's a book called mindset which is on the fun problems reading list that i've just invented and it talks about the two types of mindset are growth mindset which is as you said like wanting to learn a fixed mindset which is not wanting to change because

you're already great and the sort of defining quality of fixed mindset is that they do not take criticism well because they take it very personally as like you are wrong. Whereas growth mindset welcomes criticism at all fronts because that's how you improve and that's how you get better. There's a bunch of different examples in the book. The book is actually mostly examples, which gets quite tedious if you're listening to the audio book, which AJ did, for which I apologize.

I read it and you end up just skimming most of the examples, but it's a really strong recommend. And the trick, I guess, the crux of it is that the mindset, it's largely about bosses and bad bosses or being a bad boss.

And a great boss has a growth mindset and surrounds themselves with people who will pick the idea apart because at the end of that the picked apart idea is more improved than the boss who surrounds himself with yes men who will agree that it's great and so it goes out with no changes that that's the i'd say that's the crux of the mindset philosophy in the book mindset yeah and so because i come at everything from growth mindset to me i i always view things as like

areas to be improved that's why I said earlier that I wouldn't be happy with a game gain less than a six out of 10. I'm being a slightly hyperbolic there in that. Yes, of course I can't control the audience and yada, yada, yada. But in my mind, having, it's the imperfections that drive me mad.

And I'm absolutely a perfectionist. I like to describe myself as a recovering perfectionist because I'm trying not to be, but everything I do, I always see the flaws in them and I always try to improve them. And sugarcoating things is not my strong suit. Assessing issues, I would say is. And absolutely, I can take that too far and I can be too negative. And I try to be cognizant of that, especially when I'm dealing with other people.

The way I think about this advice that he's giving here is that it's not universal. To me, you really have to match the advice to where the designer is at. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. If I'm playtesting with Peter, I will say unfiltered every single problem and every single thing that's working very directly. And I won't compliment sandwich him or whatever. He doesn't need it.

If I'm playtesting with someone who I know is trying to be a serious designer, they're trying to get published and everything. Then if I have the same rapport with them as I do with Peter, then I'll do the same thing. But for many of them, I will simply ask really direct questions that sort of get at the heart of it.

What is the hook of this game is a really strong question to ask someone if it's like i don't see who this publisher is for rather than me just being a dick and saying like this has no chance of getting signed what is your hook how strong do you think that hook is do you think that's coming across in the gameplay here i didn't feel that hook when i was told about it maybe here's a way to emphasize if i want to be giving suggestions and if i'm play testing with someone

who it's their first game or if i don't know how experienced they are then i'm going to just address them as though this game is going to publication even if i know there's a zero percent chance of that because it's more helpful to help them work towards the finished game that they have than to spend all day telling them that they should just give up on what they're doing.

Two thoughts for some reason i very distinctly remember this was metatopia 2017 or 2018, i played a game with designed by a designer who i knew was like had got published games had multiple published games and so i was like look i could sit here and and itsy bitsy all the things that do and don't work about this game but the issue is just it's it's not interesting enough like there's just not enough here to like as a starting level for the game and so i just made a note in our future episodes

to do which is like there's levels of designer and we sort of touched on this either earlier this episode or last one we're recording all these in a single day so they're blurring together a little bit which is that like for some people scrap scrap scrap scrap scrap, scrap, scrap is absolutely the right call. For some people, you need to learn to finish a game. And so, as AJ said, knowing what level the designer is at is the key thing.

The question I ask after every playtest, and I've said this before and I'll say this again, is what are you trying to do here? And if it's, I think this mechanic is interesting, I'm trying to explore it, cool, scrap the game is just flat out unhelpful advice.

Because by scrapping it, you're not exploring it. And maybe they don't want this game to be published, but by understanding this mechanism better when they do the next game, they can use that as a starting point, you know, like there's different reasons to make games. And so assuming that everyone is making a game is at the point where they are ready to like start pitching is folly. Just doesn't make sense. I, this quote that I pulled that AJ pulled resonates so hard with me.

The more experienced I get, the more frustrating I find playing amateur designs. And that's a horrible thing to say out loud. I said this whole blog is sort of like saying the quiet part out loud. And this isn't part of why I love it so much. It's so bold. Because yeah, most, you know, the correct answer for the majority of games I play is to scrap them. That is true if you're trying to be Peter C. Hayward.

Most people are not. So you've got to find out where they're coming from, where they're at, and then tailor accordingly. But it's true. The answer for most games is like, eh, there's nothing here. Having said that, I'm not God. I'm not omniscient. I have a friend who I play his games, and this literally happened in the last month. I said, look, mate, I'm not going to say his name. I said, look, mate, you've been showing me this game for a year, and the version I liked best was eight months ago.

I think it might be time to move on and he said to me oh i didn't tell you this game got signed a week ago i'm just testing a change before sending it off to the publisher for them to start the dev process and part of it i think is that he would show me only the broken versions of the game like he would have a version that was singing and then be like what if i change this and because we had regular play tests it was often broken and so i was just getting increasingly frustrated but i

wasn't seeing the versions of the game that worked and it's a pretty major like if i told you i'll tell you off air aj it's a pretty major publisher that you'd be like oh i didn't even know they signed games so also say like yeah the instinct that aj and i both have is what are you doing just move on just stop making this stupid game and keep keep fumbling around until you find something great and then make that game because that's how we feel about our games that's how we feel about each games,

but you are not getting the whole picture. And as he says, you know, none of these people are going to be successful early. So I'm really, I'm just being a jerk and ruining their fun. That in itself is not accurate. It feels like that, but that's just not accurate. Like games get signed that I wouldn't have expected to get signed. Games go on to be great hits. I've told the story a dozen times of how I played Spirit Island.

I was like, guys, you got to rewrite all of this and they didn't and you know what resulted spirit island so like indie yeah indie game i was like that the name is wrong because it's too close to forbidden island the end conditions are wrong this is wrong that's wrong and they're like cool thanks for your time i'm gonna ignore all of that i was like okay your funeral it was not their funeral so all this to say like it is it is a position of arrogance to know what's going to happen,

and it's a position of unhelpfulness to not meet people where they're at. This quote was in my controversial section because I absolutely, it resonates with me so hard. I feel that way with almost every prototype I play. And frankly, I play less prototypes as a result because it is a frustrating feeling. But what are you doing? Yeah. What'd you get? I'm done with that section, but I have one from Enjoyment or Success, which I think we skipped or it got rearranged.

I think it got rearranged, yeah. I just have one quote from that, so let's do it now. Just because something is an interesting idea for a designer doesn't mean it's going to be fun for players. I've seen all sorts of ingenious ideas that belong in an article, not an actual board game. You might be designing a game with some crazy constraint or a variant of some game, but with or without some feature.

These are not going to lead to publication. i think this is so important to hear because so many designers come up with things that are clever and not fun and being clever does not equal fun mark rosewater has talked a lot about how they used to do gimmick sets where it's like every single card is a creature there's nothing but creatures in it people didn't care people aren't like oh boy a set with only creatures tell me more and similarly like even micro games like oh it's only 18 cards well

i mean if you didn't have that constraint could you just make a better game if you include like five tokens like i'm not buying it because it's 18 cards only i might be buying it because it's a micro game but like you've imposed a arbitrary or you know not arbitrary in terms of the publisher but you could be imposing an arbitrary restriction on yourself or choosing to do something perverse just to see what it does and that doesn't necessarily doesn't necessarily and in

fact probably doesn't result in a great product yeah are you ready for the peter metaphor of the episode only one yes i am yeah Yep, only one. That's the new rule. I got to limit myself. It'll just be all metaphors all the time. The designing a game is like going for a long walk with a dog, with an enthusiastic dog. The goal in this metaphor is to go as far as possible.

If you force the dog in a specific direction and the dog doesn't want to go in the direction, you are going to move at a snail's pace. Sometimes you get very lucky and the direction you want to go matches up with the direction that the dog is already running and you get there. You've got a direction in mind and you follow the dog and you get there. That is rare because there are 360 degrees of direction to go.

If instead you just follow the dog wherever it wants to run you will travel for further in almost every case than if you force the dog in a certain direction i think about this all the time i used to be this was this was a real level up for me about three four or five years ago where i stopped forcing my games to follow some arbitrary restriction and started being like well what's the most fun direction i let the dog run

and i followed it and i came up with this metaphor recently i was co-designing with alex cutler he came out to la and we're working on a game and we couldn't get it to work the way we wanted so i was like cool let's throw out what we wanted and just this thing was fun let's follow that and then a day later we had one of my favorite games that we ever made because we followed the dog in the direction it wanted to run instead of being like no dog we're

going this way regardless of whether you want to or not and so yeah this is something that i see all the time with amateur designers including younger peter and i'm like just let go of it the button shy community is interesting because there is a huge specifically button shy audience they don't necessarily play other games they just play button shy games so when they want to design a game they are designing an 18 card game

and a guy called ian shout out to ian who i think listens to the podcast showed me a game at the button shy con and i was like this is really great it's being held back by being 18 cards he's like yeah but i want it to be 18 cards i'm like cool i want it to be fun i didn't quite say it like that and i I think he will accept that that was useful advice to hear at the time. I'm not just bullying Ian on air. And then I hope that he went on and developed it to be more than 18 cards because

it was such a cool, interesting concept. And the 18 cards was absolutely holding it back. I have play test once where the play tester was like, you know, you could cut these tokens. The game could be entirely cards and it would only take like two tiny tweaks. And he was right. It would only take two tiny tweaks. I could absolutely do just cards, but I don't care if it requires 10 tokens and the 10 tokens, you know, makes the game work a bit better and are a bit more usable.

So that's what I went with. Yeah. A hundred percent. I, I design a lot of button shy games. I have, I think, six Buttonshy games, and I love the constraint of 18 cards. That tickles my brain. I recently pitched one, and Jason, who runs Buttonshy games, wrote back being like, hey, this is really fun. This would be better not as a Buttonshy game. This is being held back by being 18 cards. So he doesn't want to publish inferior games that have been forced into 18 cards.

He wants to publish games that are great at 18 cards. Today, the day that we're recording this Black Friday, my game Ransom released.

That is an 18 card word game that sings for being in 18 cards i actually developed it out of 18 cards and then after a few months brought it right back and it was best at 18 cards nice that's what he wants to publish so this is not to say like 18 cards bad i have another game with amigo working title is birds bees and butterflies that started as 18 card games and then just like in your example i was like oh five tokens and two more cards makes this better

and it got signed by amigo because they're not trying to make 18 card games they're trying to make great games jason is trying to make great 18 card games and this one wasn't able to hit both of those jason at buttershy.

I know that the audience doesn't necessarily i'm into the next section the next one i have is ramp slash arc where are you yes okay uh ramp slash arc i'm gonna start your game should begin with the smallest possible actions and eventually reach actions that almost break the game then it should end again didactic disclaimer blah blah blah we've talked about that a lot i i mentioned one or two episodes ago we've been doing this for hours that i like treating these daniel.games

philosophies as a starting point because that if you can hit that amazing you can't always hit it and that's okay but if you can start with the smallest possible actions and then end with game breaking game actions and then end it all that's an experience that's what people want to play yep it's very satisfying to start off weak and get stronger it triggers the part of the brain that rewards mastery where you where your brain's like oh i'm better at this thing because you know

i'm doing more actions with it you're not really getting better the game is just handing these things to you but it feels like you're getting better i've been talking about the fact i'm playing a lot of roguelikes at the moment this is something that roguelikes do really well i'm playing through one i don't know if it's technically a roguelike but it's close enough called uh you must build a boat have you ever played this.

It's a match three game it's really clever it's a match three game where you're like you're running along a dungeon if you hit a monster you're. Trying to match swords and staves to like fight the monster. But if you hit a chest you're trying to match keys and if.

You hit a and in between those you're trying to like open up new items and like level up other stats and every time you finish a run you've got a certain amount of gold that you got from doing that run and then you go to the store and you just double some numbers and then you go back in and all the monsters are twice as hard so it does nothing like there is no tangible difference but human brain simple number go up good like it is uncanny how fun it is to see these numbers level up okay if

you so totally totally right just to touch on oscillating difficulty a little bit though if you want to essentially do that but have it feel i think a lot better you either have the enemy number go up first and then you catch up shortly after or vice versa you get stronger and then the enemy catches up that way you're like oh look how much more powerful i am and then immediately there's a new threat and you're like oh and i have to deal with this again that's actually

how they do it i was i was being hyperbolic you will finish a level of the dungeon and go to the next dungeon and suddenly like i can't defeat any of these then after five runs you've doubled all your numbers and you can defeat them so you get to the end of the dungeon you go to the next dungeon you're like i can't defeat any of these it's it's so it's i can see through it it's completely transparent and yet it absolutely works on me the other

thing oh yeah the mage knight is my go-to example for this by the way mage knight is a deck builder dungeon crawler game basically at the start of the game you'll have a hand of five cards and.

By using all five of these you can maybe move two spaces and buy something from a village and then by the end of the game a hand of five cards will let you leap across the entire map kill a dragon then turn around and go into like it's just it's such such clever level of, And one kind of way to do this without even having to swap out components, like in that one, I imagine you're like upgrading your card. So you like deck build and remove some crappy ones and add in super powerful ones.

But you can do this just by being additive. In the Hall of the Mountain King, you're building up this like pyramid of actions. And then when you take one, you go down the pyramid and each level you get to pick which one you do. There's a lot of ways you can do things like that where Gnar. It's just like adding more and more things to the pile. And then you take an action and you trigger all the things in the pile.

Lots of ways to do this but yeah having an arc is really valuable i'll also add that he's saying here about progressive arc where things get stronger you can also have a regressive arc which i think broadly speaking is much less appealing because it doesn't trigger that part of the brain that has mastery but having an arc either way is going to have some level of satisfaction so if you start really powerful it's like i do this one thing boom 10

enemies are like whoa sweet and then slowly things fall apart for you for one reason or another thematically let's say you're on a starship and the starship is slowly like being damaged you.

Can't repair it and you're like lasers again worse and worse and worse it really makes you appreciate them when they're really powerful and it makes you feel like there's an arc to the game where it's a lot more satisfying than doing the same action over and over again it's changed in some way it's become more interesting to you a great example of a game with a regressive arc is welcome to you're trying to fill in all the squares and i guess

a lot of rolling rights but welcome to and patchwork especially as the game goes on you have fewer fewer fewer options and so it becomes more and more puzzly until you're like oh i need this specific thing and it's it's so compelling i just want to say again this blog inspires me like now i'm thinking like that sentence your game should begin with the smallest possible action eventually reach actions that always break the game then it

should end i want to go and make that game right now that's so exciting to me he's encapsulated this idea that i love this really appeals to me as a designer and a player and by putting it into words it makes me want to go and make that game i said after i read this blog i sat down and made five games.

Love it yeah if you read the back of the box and it says you know by the end of the game you're breaking it like yeah that sounds pretty interesting that sounds exciting that's all i have from that section i assume you have more because you haven't said any yet i do there is nothing inherently better about a game being longer as with game weight length can enable deeper play but doesn't add anything on its own so i obviously caveat caveat ti is the

obvious counter example but broadly speaking agree and yeah i think he's saying it length doesn't inherently add something in ti length is not inherently adding something length is enabling what it's trying to do sure sure and then he quickly follows it up with a good game ends one turn too soon which is the thing i want to dwell on yeah i think that is such amazing advice whenever i finish a game when it's early i'm always like did it

drag a little bit just cut a turn even if you're like it didn't drag try cutting a turn anyway most of the time it's going to make it more fun the only time i add length to a game is if it finishes before i got to do the cool exciting thing if you're doing a tableau builder like i imagine you're doing polyomino building or whatever and you have like five pieces that you took and then the game ends like well i didn't really get to do enough with that add one turn

at a time until you're like that felt very satisfying yeah and stop.

I wish I had read this six years ago, because I was very much of the belief that longer is better for no reason. My co-designer, Matt, who's here in LA, I talk about a lot. He did Mighty Than the Sword, which we looked at. He's very good at this. He's always like, cool, let's try it with one turn fewer. And I'm like, what? But it was fun. He's like, yeah, let's try it with one turn fewer. Huge improvement.

Interestingly, you and I had an issue, an issue. You and I ran into an issue with that AEG game where it was ending too soon.

And that might be because we were overly implementing this but i've i've never encountered that except for that one time so it was interesting to like reverse a bunch of our systems and try to solve it that way i think not to bore the listeners too much with this game that they don't know but i think what happened they will we were yeah they sure will we're not gonna shut up about once it comes out i think what happened there was we expanded what a turn was

more and more before it was designed so that each action was extremely atomic it was like i move that's it and then you know to take a different action to do an attack but that felt very very clunky and so as we sped up those actions and gave you more it sped up the game exponentially and that's what caused the game to end too early so we had to increase health to balance out the length of the game again, i'm on to a new section here are you yes i'm on okay so i made these notes like

three months ago and then this morning sat down and made them again starting from where i ended but this one is one that i did this morning and that i did three months ago so this is one that's shifted i'm on theme sure let's just do that that's fine don't make your game literally 10 times harder to publish by choosing a boring theme and i'm actually going to scroll down to my notes this morning because i i copied that same one but with more context.

If you're designing theme first, you must choose a fascinating theme. When you tell people the theme, they should immediately be interested. Don't make your game literally 10 times harder to publish by choosing a boring theme. It's ludicrous to have complete freedom of the theme because you're designing theme first, yet not actually choose a novel or interesting theme. I just really like that. Because you see it all the time. People are like, yeah, this is a theme first

game about boring theme. And you're like, well, then why?

But obviously the relevant part was that center. don't make your game literally 10 times harder to publish by choosing a boring theme this is a lesson i learned at the start of this year or the start of last year like in the last year or two i was in this pattern of just making games that were good mechanically and had no theme, and they weren't getting signed and then one publisher was like hey what would it be a good theme and i sat down for literally 10 minutes came up with a theme

that i was like i am so much more interested in this game and i made the game and i love the game just by having this theme And so now I always do a theme pass. Yep. It's actually one thing I really add as a dev. I'm devving a few games at the moment. I'm like, hey, what's the theme? They're like, oh, just this. And I'm like, cool. What if it was this? They're like, oh, that's much better. Let's do that. And you see a lot of games these days trying to add the twist, right?

Because there's only so many standard themes in existence. So that's why I think anthropomorphic animals are so popular. It's not this. It's this with anthropomorphic animals. Cowboys, anthropomorphic animals. fantasy anthropomorphic animals it's it's like a modifier to make it slightly unique it's it's spice yeah and that's that's it with our game with aeg you know i'm not sure if it's going to stick exactly where it is but it's fantasy but tiny you know.

More from this section you got any keep going you're good i don't just want a pretty pirate themed game i want to feel like a pirate roaming the sea attacking other ships at will this is so key and this is again something i've been really what's the word guilty of in the past don't just add a i think i've told this story before someone emailed me the game pitch and i was like it was a racing horse game and i was like hey this seems interesting

but i'm not going to publish a racing horse game email everything oh what kind of themes do you like i was like well i don't know like time traveling like ants half an hour later he sent back the same game but it was now time traveling ants.

No why is that bad aj because if your game can be repasted that easily it means that's not integrated enough you're not going to actually feel like time traveling ants and also you like time traveling and ants you didn't say time traveling ants you took it okay and the fact that was so quick meant i was like okay put no f into this i don't like time travel because i like the words time travel i want to experience time travel in the game i don't like ants because i like a picture of ants i find

i genuinely find it so fascinating because of the way that they act you can't just add ants to any game and be like it's ants now you know i don't just want a pretty pirate themed game i want to feel like a pirate it's so important that when don't i call it checklist thinking hey aj we're in peter's metaphor of the of the episode i call it checklist thinking where you're like oh i need to do these things so i'll quickly do them so i can check them off no you don't want to pick a theme

so that you can check off picked a theme picking a theme is not a checklist item it's it's a core like there's more to it than just add theme.

Size of the theme should also match the size of the game do not try to attach a big story to a small game this one's interesting because i could i could find some pretty easy examples of this but i think generally speaking it's true like you might find lord of the rings fun as a theme that doesn't mean that uno your uno variant should be lord of the rings themed like it's not going to feel epic yeah there's there's so many counter examples though like you said but i

think i think specifically like we're looking at through this section this section is how you want to make sure that theme matches your mechanics and everything and the best shot you have of giving yourself the ability to do that well right from the start is to pick the scope of game that matches what you're doing lord of the rings is a very epic feeling series it's going to be very hard to make uno feel epic just by putting lord of the rings on and maybe a couple of powers yeah

patchwork is an even better example like you can't make lord of the rings patchwork because patchwork like patchwork is a perfect theme for that game you you're you're doing little like it's it's a cute little thing the example he lists i didn't write it down is azul he's like in azul you are laying tiles in a bathroom floor that is an appropriate size theme for that game because that game is about small meaningful actions not like big sweeping victories right okay this.

Next one i selected because i personally really agree with it are you ready sure i'd like to play a game about running an ant colony that's he actually said that yeah wow i was like i want that i'm gonna write that down as a thing i agree with well we'll have an expansion for our ag game if it's successful at some point there will definitely be ants what you got uh i'm i don't have anything for theme i think to me like all those were like things that we already

talk about that i didn't feel the need to cover them again if i go back to my previous notes i have one more turning a real life feeling into an actual game is extraordinarily hard but you only need a small amount of that feeling to come through in your game for it to be an amazing board game this is not done by slapping a theme on your game rules but by carefully choosing game rules that bring out your theme i think his whole section is actually like really A plus writing about theme.

He uses the example of how does it feel as a kid to go to the fairground? There's so many options. You can do this. You can do that. Cool. If you can capture just that feeling into a fairground game, you've nailed it. You can't capture the feeling of being on a roller coaster. It's a physical impossibility in a board game.

Don't try to capture the whole experience but like identify a feeling there's a sitcom writing book i can't remember the name of it it's really good it's by a woman who wrote for everybody loves raymond and her writing process she had to write a thanksgiving episode so she sat down and wrote out a mind map of feelings and tactile experiences and she landed on getting up in the middle of the night and going to the fridge and like eating

some thanksgiving leftovers something like that and from that feel like that that gluttony feeling of like you're asleep in bed and you get up to eat and like the guilt and the deliciousness of the taste like it's just a whole bunch of really tactile aesthetic things that she just captured that and then she wrote this episode of everyone's raymond where that was the end like that's the climax is is a character essentially does that and it's built up by by saying everyone's on

a diet no one wants to be on a diet but everyone's on a diet and the person who's forcing them to be on a diet at the very end of the episode gets up. And sneaks down and eats ice cream and the rest of the family come in and find her there but rather than critiquing her they all sit down and eat ice cream with her it won an emmy like this is an emmy award-winning script that came from this feeling this.

Like tactile feeling you have how can you recapture that i think i think this blog is incredible yeah i'll. Just i want i want to be specific with some examples. For this because i feel like a lot of designers out there might not.

Quite be able to grasp that what you're saying in magic the gathering they had a recent set that was a horror themed set they have to make a horror set using mechanics that function within magic and it's already hard enough to make a horror game feel like a horror game right so what they did was they included mechanics like impending where you play a creature and it's not actually creature yet it just sits there doing and it does some small effect but every

turn it ticks down and it gets closer and closer to coming with this giant monster you have to watch it slowly come up in that feeling of dread there and then they have a different mechanic manifest dread and that's you take a card from your deck and you put it into play face down the opponent doesn't know what it is and you can pay its cost to just flip it face up whenever you want to and so again there's this feeling of like well i could attack it's just little but

what if it's that giant monster they're about to flip up really good way of getting that sort of like unease and uncertainty feeling in the game yeah social deduction probably does this best like werewolves aren't real i'm sorry if you were sitting at home thinking they're real but the idea of werewolves is you don't know who to trust like that or mafia or whatever like it could be any of us and that game captures that feel like it doesn't

capture the feeling of fur growing from your skin or being eviscerated or anything like that but it does capture that like one of us is not right who is it i can't trust them up.

Had a horrigan it's been shelved for a little bit but the idea of that one was you have a certain number of actions you can take in a turn and you just pick whatever you want to do but when the monster's chasing you instead of choosing each of those actions is represented by a die you have to roll the dice and get the combination that you need to do the thing to simulate you like panicking and not thinking clearly not doing things right and so

you're doing this under time pressure trying to do this and that was that did exactly what i wanted immediately after playing my one my playtester said i felt like i was jingling with my keys trying to get the right one as the monster came up and i was trying to unlock the door that's great so yeah i just think this this one of like try to find one small yeah it's so good uh you only need a small amount of that feeling to come through for your game to for it to be an

amazing board game yeah let's do one more section what you got i've got a i've got a one quote that is kind of enormous to me at least.

Interlink if you can't interlink then your game probably doesn't have enough systems if you don't interlink your systems are just self-contained or easily solvable or just totally random or you end up with rock paper scissors the prisoner's dilemma or many other known and basic problems agree or disagree where are you coming up with this i so there's actually a follow-up to this one, not in this section, but very, very similar,

where he says that effectively all depth comes from interlinking systems talking to each other. And this is, I think, the thing that I need to chew on the most, that I have less of a strong opinion on right now, and the more that, if nothing else, this really got me to think. I talked the last episode about how I need a core tension to build everything from, And that tension is often the interaction between systems.

Or I find that core tension and then I attach systems to it that bring out that tension. I'll use Critter Kitchen as an example because it's been 17 seconds since I've talked about Critter Kitchen. Critter Kitchen came from this idea of I have one, two, and three. My one goes first, but only takes one thing. My two goes second, but takes two things. My three goes last, but takes three things. You have one, two, three. We simultaneously place them and we're racing for stuff.

That's the core tension that every single part of Critter Kitchen is built from. Alex then masterfully took that and added a system that the whole rest of it's built on, which is that you're competing for these ingredients that just have flat out different values. They're two to seven. So a two is much worse than a seven. Seven is the best. Two is the worst. Each location has three things out. You choose where you send your one,

two, three. That's the core tension. It's like, okay, I really want that seven, so I should send my one out. But no one's going to go there because they're all twos. So I can send my three out and get all of those.

That's the idea. the systems we added to that where there's a quantity and a quality system the quality system only cares about your highest number so you want that seven to maximize the quality that's the critic at the end of the game the quantity just wants as many numbers as possible so like three twos is the same as a six for that system and so these three interlocking systems i guess or one system interlocking with two others is the game like that's

where it all is but for me it still came out of that core tension does that make sense yep yep yeah i i think the thing we're talking about earlier too of like instead of saying get three fruit get one fruit per tree is inherently two systems interacting yeah it's just the i i never thought about from that axis about like depth being two things talking to each other and if you don't have two things talking to each other then it.

Is probably really easily solved you need the complexity of these two different systems to think about that's so interesting and i wrote this note a long time ago and i'm still chewing on it i i have something from i think the next sentence many games revolve around a giant interlink between two systems and it works a tickle a typical accommodation is to have one part of the game be spatial the other to be a competitive resource gathering

area that isn't spatial i do this podcast because i love breaking stuff down into models and systems i had never thought about this this way before and that's genius i could name a dozen games where you compete for resources then you put them into a spatial system agricola patchwork azul like.

Splendor doesn't have a spatial system which sort of makes it interesting and unique in that sense but in terms of game design 101 that's a good starting point now he goes on to say like resource pools are acceptable but they're an easy and overused form of interaction try to do something better or create an interesting resource pool that's super interesting as well.

Again i'd never even thought of that system so for him to describe the system and then be like cool now do better i'm like whoa i i defaulted to that i always defaulted to that like the game i was talking about fairy garden where you just put the fairy down and you do the three things that's a competitive resource gathering and then you're trying to make sets like it's exactly that formula that game is i'm very proud of that game critter kitchen i literally described it you competitively take

these numbers and then you put them into like various combinations it is it is the default way things are done so it's a classic example of understand the rule so that you can work out how to break the rule yeah makes me want to go and design 10 more games very true i have one more from this section sure let's do it in general restrict the interaction to one part of the game, that's really interesting to me now ti is our go-to exception like ti has interaction in

every part of the game because that's not trying to make a daniel.games game but like again now that now i've got this lens to look at things through i can name so many games i'm like yes this is the one interactive part and it means that you can pre-plan it means that you can build it means you can do a bunch of stuff it is restricted and that is to its benefit it's a really useful tool.

Don't remember this line and i'm just trying to think of examples of games that don't follow it that i like that aren't ti now that you just said ti i was gonna say ti uh what's what's that sailing game you like the japanese sailing boat trading game traders of asaka yes what's the interaction points there you've got the the storms or whatever it is the the track that you're going up yeah so i'll just briefly describe it to listeners so it's it's basically a

gamer's ticket to ride each turn you do one of three things those three things can be either reserve a card which means it doesn't exist to the other players it only exists to you two you can pick up a card from the central row and it goes into your hand and it has a couple different effects three you use cards from your hand and the number on them is now currency if they're in your hand and if they're on the board that you're trying to buy they are cost and when you buy

it the row every single ship that matches is the suit the color of one of the cards you bought moves ahead if they if a ship moves all the way to the end then it scores and if a ship scores then there's a couple tsunami zones where if a ship is there then they will crash so there are a ton of interaction points there you have interaction points when you reserve cards of course because then they.

Don't exist other players you're taking from a common resource pool basically and if you take a resource card directly then you've done like 17 different things you've removed a ship that could that could have moved and now it can't you've removed a card that they could pick up for money oh the cards can also be for insurance but i won't get into that to protect you from the tsunamis so they can't take it for resources they can't take it for insurance

you can now use it for insurance for that type of ship you can now use it for currency tons and tons of interaction tons and tons of systems interlocked on a simple couple of choices. Magic the Gathering is another very obvious example.

Got yeah you got i'm not even gonna go into it you got a lot of different points of interaction in magic gathering but that game magic especially is a is an interactive game like that that's all the game is it's interaction like there's a little bit engine building obviously with your lands and your and your deck that you make but the thing you are doing with your deck is interacting, mostly there are definitely some multiplayer solitaire decks but mostly that's

correct and And I think mostly that Magic has so many interaction points because it's designed as a CCG that's supposed to last for many years. And it's supposed to have so many different types of card effects and everything. And actually, more recently, they've scaled back on the types of effects and interaction points you have, or at least limiting some amounts of the resource denial. The sort of games that Daniel is talking about is, he's not talking about Magic the Othering.

He's sort of talking about traitors of a soccer i guess so just kind of fit into the category of stuff that i would say he's talking about and he's not talking about twilight so yeah within within the realm of good well i i would say there's a lot of different ways to interact with your opponent but it's all from the same thing right it's always the row of cards you're either taking a card or.

You're buying out the row or you're reserving a card you're always interacting in the same section so i would say that actually is an example of limiting the interaction points to it it's not like you can directly affect the boats in some way everyone's just looking at this one row of cards that's the only thing that you care about so yeah i think that's that's a good identify a good a good way a good model a good model that is identified there but why do you think it's a

disadvantage to have more interaction points than that does it just muddy the game too much so so the thing that i said earlier i'll just repeat is that it means that it's sort of like you were talking about earlier of like the board the board state changes too much between turns your state changes too much between turns like it because he he would i guess he designs two player games but i think he would probably agree that like two to five is the best player count

because it's going to sell the most maybe not i guess he's only done a two player game so far.

If i can't trust my own stuff before the round comes back like i just can't possibly plan in fact he goes into this explicitly later when he's talking about like if i if i have my gold stolen from under me cool i can't even think about my turn until it's my turn again and he mentions that with radland specifically he made the hand a no-go area you cannot affect the other player's hand a because it means they can always kind of catch up and come back and b so that you can always have

an idea of what you can do on your turn even in a two-player game so i would say that the main thing is just that it stops you from being unable to keep up with the with the board state something, know we're going a little bit long here but just because you brought up i want to dovetail into safe zones different even in highly aggressive games some things should be off limits for interaction i need some kind of area where i can plan things and not have them destroyed personally i would

strongly suggest that it doesn't i'm no longer quite personally i would hey aj would strongly suggest having resources slash the core fundamental ability to play the game off limits so like maybe you can steal some like wood from me okay but like if it's hand management game where my hands are the actions that i play to play the game at all then you don't mess with that you can mess with things that i have done in the game like i collected some resources.

That's okay but in magic they've really limited hand destruction and destroying lands because if you don't have lands you can't play your cards and if you don't have cards you can't play your cards and therefore both of those strategies if you go too hard in that direction will prevent the other player from basically being able to play the game at all and it's not very fun for either player in a lot of cases but definitely not the player is being screwed i would say your engine

should generally speaking be off limits if you're making an engine building game and you've worked towards making your engine don't don't have it be taken away from you yeah i think the counter examples that would be just very combat oriented games which are like yes if you control this area you get a troop everywhere around it but again that's that's not attacking like your infrastructure in the same way that attacking an engine building game

would be exactly cool anything else from that section well now we moved into player interaction i just have one more thing uh player interaction as far as i'm concerned there's a minimum level of interaction a game needs things like competitive objectives are not sufficient because they don't actually affect the players. A shared central resource pool is just enough, but otherwise players should be able to understand and affect the other players through this pool.

Otherwise, this interaction just randomly affects other players. I call this resource pool solitaire. It's like a group of people playing basketball in the same area as people playing tag.

They bump into each other and affect each other's games, but not in any intentional way do you have thoughts on this again i love this as a platonic ideal i could name a bunch of games that break this rule and i really like like welcome to is one of my favorite games to teach i just love teaching that game i think it's super fun super accessible.

It only has shared goals that's what it does i've got it i've got a game coming out that has no shared interaction at all it's purely like it's a roll and write so we've got a common pool of dice and we're all doing our own thing sunshine city does the same thing so that's not to say like every game should be this but i agree that this is a great like thing to strive for and if you can hit that obviously depending on the experience you're trying to make then it's,

Right. So where I land is, for my personal taste, huge agree. And I think it's a very interesting way to look at it, of it being sufficient.

But I mean, obviously, multiplayer solitaire games exist. Obviously, they have a market. Obviously, people like them. That's totally fine. But I would say the way to look at this advice is to say, if I want player interaction.

Then I should think of it this way and i should look at this as the minimum barrier to that and if i don't care about player interaction and all i have is this perfunctory common resource pool or something like that cut it because all it's going to do is slow down your game or annoy your players and it's not. Actually adding anything let's zoom out what is the specific thing we're trying to solve here what is we're. Trying to make fun problems for the player right we want.

To make the player have to make interesting choices does having a shared resource pool lead to interesting choices now in one way it can i'll use agricola as a really obvious example if i look over and i'm like oh aj really needs sheep no aj doesn't need sheep and there's four sheep in the thing right now agricola another sheep gets out at each turn or whatever i could probably not get that to get the thing i urgently need and know that he's not going to

get it that's super interesting and i would super interactive game space splendor i'm going to use as an a plus example in splendor there's two points of interaction one is the central grid of cards that you're drafting two is the three lords that you're racing to complete or whatever they're called the three goal cards when i play splendor i am constantly looking what everyone else is doing being like oh okay aj's going for that should i try to race him to it or should

i pivot century spice road works the same way so these are these are borderline multiplayer solitaire games but i find the interaction in both century spice and splendor to be so engaging interesting with just a shared resource and shared goal those two things that it absolutely like transcends multiplayer solitaire for me it's i mean the doubles in the details i i started thought the definition uh my fault because it changes my

decisions and it adds texture to my decisions that that's the that's the end of the sentence I meant to say. Good. Sure. And adding to the decisions, absolutely. That could be a way that you add free depth to a game, like we were talking about earlier. If my action affects you as well as affecting me, for sure. I think it can lead a lot to random, I get screwed situations because a lot of the time.

A lot of these games are more the kind of thing where players aren't thinking about what other people are doing, particularly ones aimed at more casual audiences.

If i was designing a family weight game that had say the the same drafting mechanism of azule i would seriously have to consider whether or not i actually want to have it in there because while it does make it more interesting in terms of potentially posing your opponents it introduces a really negative play space to the game where all of a sudden it's so mean that what you're doing to other people and it's it's only affecting one of your up to like four or five i think it

goes up to five opponents and that's actually not any sort of significant advantage so that kind of introduces the problem we talked about previously about the blog where you have a decision point that does technically put you a little bit up ahead actually but it's such a minor thing to like slightly hurt one other person comparatively to the value of taking the thing that you actually need that's not really a thing that's worth considering and in and i think if people are doing the hate

drafting intentionally with azul or that kind of thing then that is an interesting point and it makes sense but if you have someone who's sort of not looking at what people are doing and they're just like oh i'll just take this and then they happen to take the thing that just completely screws you that's a real feel bad moment without it without i think adding anything so it is very.

Nuanced yeah i i don't think you can i don't think the case of like well if the player does it accidentally it doesn't work like if if you designed a game where it's about hate drafting and a player accidentally hate drafts then that the player's playing the game wrong in a sense you know if it's about hate drafting for sure but my comment is more like if it's if it's not really about the hate drafting right like it's

the thing i said it's the thing from the blog earlier like it should have a lot of it or none of it right like just imagine the score for tiles that you get is like times 10 and the score for like negative tiles in in azul is like halved or something you know it's like then the impact of it is so small that's all he knew what he was making and he lent into it so the game experience matches up with what he wanted right it's funny that you bring up the example of if you're making it a family

game i've got a game with a publisher right now and this has only happened twice in my life i did not understand the notes they kept sending these notes they had to send them multiple times because the tweaks i made just weren't addressing them and i was like i don't know what they want so i talked to a friend to the podcast, Jeff Fraser, and I was like, I don't understand what's happening. And he said, well, it sounds like they're trying to make it a family weight game. And I was like.

Oh, suddenly every note made complete sense. They were suggesting stuff like take out the feel bad moments, take out the ability to screw your opponents, take out this. And I was like, but that's what the game is. Like that's, that's all it is. And once I realized that they actually just wanted the, the central mechanism, but not that feel. Cause they, they, and they haven't even confirmed this, but like, now I know what now I, now I can understand the notes and implement them because

they're trying to make that family weight game. It's just funny that you brought up that specifically when that happened to me in the last week. Cool. Okay. Any other thoughts before we wrap? No, let's call it there. Do you want to have some fun? Do I ever. So yesterday was Thanksgiving here in America, a time of recording. What, if any, are your family's Thanksgiving traditions? Because you guys have your own Thanksgiving. Yeah, we don't have any Thanksgiving traditions.

Let's broaden it out. what's your favorite family celebration tradition favorite family celebration tradition i am such a boring person peter i don't like celebrating things i don't even celebrate my own birthday, celebrate my birthday i said happy birthday to you does that count that's pretty celebratory, i'm gonna i'm gonna answer a different question instead but you can answer this one just so i don't have such a boring answer i'm gonna say what i'm most thankful for at this moment

oh okay what are you most thankful for at this moment at this moment there's definitely a lot of better things in the world and a lot better things happen to me but this moment i'm most thankful for spider-verse because spider-verse opened the floodgates for other animated movies to do cool things in different styles. Why did you just watch? You told me. Arcane. Arcane, that's right. Arcane season two definitely has Spider-Verse to thank for it.

And so does almost every animated movie that comes out these days. And I love the cool visual styles and everything is vastly, as a result of Spider-Verse, I bet it's made it much easier for all these different companies to do a lot of cool different art styles. And it's awesome. Have you seen Bad Guys or Puss in Boots the last one? I have seen both and I loved both animation styles.

Else i was gonna say animation both of those is very clearly spider versy and also exceptional did you see the tmnt movie the new one yes i did with like it's almost like claymationy. Yeah that one i love the animation style even more than those other two but i like the movie a lot less than the other two i put that one on and spent the first minute or two being like wow this.

Is a bold choice to have no visuals on the screen whatsoever just sound the app wasn't working i'd heard all about the bold choices so i was like wow they're really doing it that's amazing then my housemate walked in and was like uh that's hilarious but i didn't enjoy that you're right the movie like oh it's funny though i don't remember now like any of the jokes but i remember really laughing at that that was the same year as the adam sandler one leo did you see that oh man

i thought that was the most boring unfunny movie i had to stop it pretty quickly i found it hilarious i really liked that movie there's a bit where like they enter a musical number and there's all these like dancing clocks or whatever like arms and legs and the musical number ends and the clocks just stay around it's just like i think one of them like asked for a tip or something and they're just like in this i found that so funny i really like that movie i'm going

to talk about what i'm most thankful for is my girlfriends i. Assume we've talked about the podcast i'm polyamorous and i have two girlfriends i love them both so much they make me so happy i'm a very happy man i don't think you said on this podcast but i've said on podcasts podcasts are all the same to me and then celebration in australia christmas is in the middle of summer so we have a very different christmas experience than people in the northern hemisphere

right and the christmas like for me christmas is cold cuts shrimp and cherries like those are christmas foods and it doesn't feel like christmas unless i have those that's so weird. Do you like decorate with christmasy things like christmas lights and yeah yeah all the things we we still use a freaking what are they called persiferous tree whatever it is the oh yeah Yeah, all the stuff. Our postcards, our Christmas cards have snow on them. It makes no sense,

but yeah. Do you make snowmen out of sand or something? Nothing like that. We don't really have snow in Australia. We have it like up mountains and that's it. I lived in Toronto for four years and so snow is an experience that I'm okay with having visited and then left. Yes, I definitely don't love it. Not my favorite part about living in Canada, but also you live in a very snowy, I say very snowy.

I think I visited while there was snow there. So I'm like, it's even snowier than other parts of Canada. No, it is really snowy. We're off a lake. It's not great, but luckily my driveway is only the size of like one and a half cars. So it's not too bad.

That is everything. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next time with possibly this, possibly more of this, or possibly something else. Music. Bye. See you guys. 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.