#42 BONUS Holiday Special

Music. Ho, ho, ho! And welcome to Fun Problems, the Problems of Fun bonus Christmas episode with only me, Peter, and no other hosts.

I'm Peter C. Hayward. I am also Peter C. Hayward, because apparently that's the only way I'm allowed to participate in this episode. You're just about to watch, AJ. This is the one where you're the audience and I just hosted all by myself. AJ, what is a bonus episode? Bonus episode is not related to game design. Today we are just chilling and having fun. Well, I guess sometimes we talk game design on our bonus episodes. We can't help it. It's something a little bit more

off topic. And we just wanted to do a fun holiday special for you guys. So we're going to release this on Christmas Day. That's when you'll be hearing it. We are recording this well in advance of that. But we just wanted to leave. If the world has ended before Christmas Day, this will never be heard. That's true. Or if one of us has died, then this is the voice of dead people. Real holiday spirit today. Are you going to release another AJ has died episode?

That'll be end up being like half the content did you that was listed as the trailer for our show for a little while when we imported it to the new server do you know why i don't know why do you because it was short and so the new service was like it's the shortest one it's probably a trailer they put it up as a trailer very ridiculous yeah you mentioned that we're going to talk about game we're not going to talk about game design but we probably will as my girlfriends will

attest it is very hard to have a conversation with me without it turning into a conversation about game design i i think in these terms now this is this is how i'm wired to the core uh okay so we got a just a grab bag of topics this is one i wanted to talk about forever and it is tangentially led to game design but not really have you heard the famous quote if there are aliens and they play games they will have independently invented go. So the idea is that Go is such a pure game.

The old school, old school, the like invented in 4000 BC game Go is just so pure and so classic that the quote is basically saying, look, that game would be invented by any alien species that made games because it's just so pure. Someone told me this once, and it's been rattling around my head ever since, and I've wanted to have a conversation about it because I thoroughly disagree.

I almost could not disagree more. and i think this attitude is a really interesting one that i want to explore a little bit the other game that i actually talked about this with with someone and the other game that was brought up where he's like no look this game could have been released at any time and been a hit and he said dominion so it's it's sort of the same idea of like dominion is just such a great game that it transcends when it was released and i

want to talk a little bit now bonus episode about the effect that culture has on success so you and i might have talked about this off podcast i'm just now remembering but the the examples that i'm thinking of are wings that i wanted to go into are wingspan go and dominion because i think these like reflect in different ways go uh have you played go i have not i actually don't even know how to play it i know you put down rocks and you score points and you like switch that there's

a grid on your turn you put down one rock of your color if you ever completely surround an opponent you take that rock off. And then it's whoever has the most area control or something. You can limit the grid or you can play in an unlimited grid. And it's one of those ones that they were like, computers will never be able to solve this. And then deep learning meant that they suddenly could.

And there was some famous game where a computer played a move that everyone watching was like, oh, I thought the computer was good at this. And then like 20 moves later, they're like, oh, that move, that move was better than any human could ever have worked out because of deep learning or whatever. Class and so the the argument is that this game is as pure as you can get because it's just like.

Area control in a grid two player and it's famous for there's only one rule like there's two rules on your turn you put down a rock and if you surround the opponent then you remove their rocks i don't actually know how you win the game but that's the essence of it the thing that this quote and this whole concept is not understanding is that like there are so many cultural suppositions in there so like this idea that two-player is the most pure sense of game is entirely cultural like

you know most sports are not two-player humans don't gravitate towards two-player the fact that competitive is the natural way to go is also like a very distinct cultural thing like you could easily imagine a world where instead of competitive games being the dominant and cooperative games not it being the exact opposite and then this idea that like go is is you know pure abstract no hidden information no randomness nothing like that that's not inherently better like these are all cultural mores

that are just being layered on top on top on top on top on top so this idea that aliens would have invented go i mean even separately to the idea of like creativity and the fact that you know you could have a million monkeys in a million rooms designing a million games and never come up with the same game twice so i i disagree with the premise and that's the basis of why i want to talk about dominion dominion released early thousands like 2006 2008 somewhere in there.

And what people, Dominion is a deck builder. It's considered the first deck builder. There's tech, like there's a bit of debate around that, but for all intents and purposes, it's the game that invented deck building in the game that definitely popularized deck building. And the thing about Dominion is that it didn't just take off in a vacuum. It took off in a world where Magic the Gathering had been dominating for a decade.

It took off in a world where people understood this idea of building a deck and it captures that feel, but allows you to skip the part where you have to sit there and like buy cards and put them together and i i think like without this without magic the gathering a dominion obviously wouldn't have been designed but even if someone came up with with dominion in 1976 or you know 1991 i just don't think it could have taken off i don't think that the the the cultural room

was there for it to explode i think it might have done okay but it wouldn't have become the powerhouse that it is today you look like you have thoughts i do i i agree with where they are not welcome this is the peter only episode aj i made that very clear go ahead all right let me put on my best australian accent and oh yeah yeah it's gonna be great.

No i think that dominion would definitely be one of those ones that would have succeeded years ago i think part of it is because there was a lot less competition back then and like if you look at the games that were coming out like i think it would compare very favorably to a lot of games that were coming out then or at least there were what kind of year are we talking about here oh i think i think anytime in in the 80s 90s you know i think there were oh i completely disagree so sorry you

go on i've got many thoughts this is the conversation i wanted to have okay so in the 80s in the 80s trading card games didn't exist that was invented in 1990 whatever by richard garfield so the ecosystem around trading card games didn't exist like comic stores existed but they didn't sell games so dominion let's say you're dominic x vacarino you it's 1981 you come up with dominion you've got to pitch it to hasbro.

Like it's it there's no scaffolding financially for this game to take off it's not going to take off in walmart or target it's just not right i'm saying like i'm not saying it would have been what it is today right right right that's something like that but what i am saying is that i think it could have been much more successful than like did okay because i just think that the quality of the design comparable game of the time though well like katan came out in the 80s mid 90s mid.

Well, I'm talking 80s, 90s. I think if it came out in the same time period, it's got a low enough complexity that the barrier to entry is low, even though it's a bunch of weird concepts. And there were games that came out with weird concepts around that time. Wasn't Puerto Rico late 90s or was that early 2000s?

2002, yeah. Okay, okay. So maybe I'm off there, but I feel like there was a fair bit of experimentation in the 80s and 90s with some new mechanics, and especially in the more hardcore gamer space and the more Euro-y space. We even saw a lot of weird player dynamic things coming out around that time, but I may be slightly ahead or slightly behind on my decades there. I don't disagree with your premise that a lot of its popularity and a lot of

its success was because of the cultural touchstone of Magic the Gathering. I certainly agree. I think with that particular example and that particular design, I think that game could have done quite well in a different era. I'm very glad you disagree because for me this is like the fulcrum.

This is like the litmus test of my theory. So I'm going to debate back, and I know that you're okay with that, which is that I think there's two levels in which it just didn't have the support to even become like a moderate success. One is, like I said, the structural financial, like Catan, Carcassonne, they're the first Euro hits, right? They're the like 90s, opened up the world of Euros, and they are – like Catan is Monopoly Plus.

Catan can work because people knows no monopoly and so it can be sold in those same kind of environments like in germany especially they were starting to experiment with stuff a little bit more but like catan dominion i would say is a full order of magnitude more complex than no not order of magnitude but it is a full point of complexity more than catan i think that it is very natural for us because we already had the language of magic the gathering we already had a lot of like cards you

know playing a card that costs something is almost a magic the gathering invention it's so funny you say that because i think of it in the opposite way i think that actually i would say dominion is simpler than katan but it's because we have the scaffolding of monopoly that katan is right right and and that that is sort of what i'm saying like neither is more i guess i think katan's a little bit more accessible because you don't have to read a bunch of cards you'll have

maybe like one or two action cards in the game or whatever but other than that it's just all like numbers and rolling dice and buying stuff for resources whereas dominion is a lot of like okay this has this specific effect and you have to like i don't know if you remember i mean i assume you remember in dominion you've got this really strict economy you've got the buy economy the the play economy and the something else economy and you got the

coins you got this and you got like there's a lot of concepts in dominion that just aren't in katan. And so I think in terms of like, if, if again, if you came up with it in 1985, where do you sell it? And I'm actually curious. I don't know the answer to this. I don't know where Cosmic Encounter sold because that's a seventies game that is like way more complex than anything else of its era. Diplomacy as well. Like those are sort of like the hits of the day, but those are hugely interactive.

Like I think actually those games more like diplomacy, especially more tied into the war game audience, which Dominion just doesn't hit.

So in terms of just pure finance where do you sell this game i don't know like who do you pitch it to where do you sell it when it came out there was a thriving ecosystem of gamers of magic the gathering stores of like it dominion basically captured a chunk of magic the gathering players and then they spread it to their friends i was introduced to dominion by a friend of mine who is massively into magic the gathering and i think the core seed audience that made dominion the

hit it was is mtg players who were like i want my friends to play magic gathering and they won't because the barrier to entry is way too high this game lets me get those people to play the equivalent i think that's why dominion exploded in the way it did and even like where its core audience came from so from a purely financial point of view that's one and then secondly i just think like you said the scaffolding of monopoly

is why katan works the scaffolding of magic gathering is why dominion works and why it was designed like i think i think donald has been very open about the fact that like magic the other thing was a big inspiration for him how could i think. Yeah and without without that being such a part of the public consciousness i think the mechanics of dominion would just be overwhelming yeah,

I still disagree. I still think that it's a weird mechanic, if you haven't heard of that type of thing before, for sure. But it's still such a simple game. And I understand simple to gamers, and especially simple to us with the mindset that we have, is very different to that audience.

But i think that even though it's it's something where you can't scaffold onto it i think that it would have found a home and been popular even if it took a while to like reach full popularity i just did a quick search of some older games and carcassonne is one where with the scaffolding for that just be dominoes because that's like that was effectively the first like tiling game that sort of picked up right yeah carcassonne the the way that i know most people get into carcassonne or

historically was imagine a board game where you build the board as you play like that's sort of the hook so to a certain extent yeah i think dominoes is probably the closest comp i don't know if there's anything else that particularly jumps to mind so tigris and euphrates was 97 and that game is very popular and that's a really complicated and really hard to wrap your head around game.

And obviously obviously it's not to the successful level of of demeaning again i'm not trying to argue that point no no i i don't even know if that one was successful in its own time i don't i think that one had like a resurgence 10 years later but that that one what is that like area control people always list that as an abstract like that that's playing off your checkers and chess kind of audience like that's that's who that's appealing to you uh you uh you brought up the next

game wingspan i'm very curious yes this one okay wingspan is is a mega hit it is probably the largest hobby game hit of the last 10 years arguably i definitely think so i think outside of katan and and ticket to ride if you consider those hobby games it's of like non-party games i think it's the biggest besides those ones for sure by the way ticket to ride in case you don't know is very scaffoldy uh is very much scaffolding off rummy it's

the same core mechanism of rummy like that that's the starting point for that i actually didn't know i've never played rummy oh right yeah no it's it's the set collection like put them in your hand try to build up as many as you can play them all at once etc etc like the the board part's not but the cards is like running rummy light yeah what do you think my my case is for wingspan that's interesting, because i think there is a very specific thing that made wingspan explode i

also think it's a fantastic design like this none of this is me impugning the design of these games at all. I don't know what made it explode. I know that it kicked off the big nature game thing. Was there a nature game that came out before that sped into it? Or was it because there weren't nature games before then? Or is it something? Neither of these. Okay. This is just my theory. I don't have stats for this. But I think if you think about it for a second, you'll probably agree.

Wingspan was the game that gamers' wives would play.

And again just like i think dominion took off because the people who were like i want my friends to be in the magic the gathering this is a way to get them into magic the gathering light i think wingspan was a lot of male gamers with wives who they're like i want you to play this heavy game and they're like i don't want to be at or like punching other orcs in the face like that just doesn't appeal to me whatsoever wingspan's theme the fact that it was designed by a woman uh and and like

the elegance mixed with complexity like opened it up open up the gaming market and the design market to women and i think like it was perfectly poised in history i think 10 years earlier women weren't sitting at the table with their boyfriend trying to persuade them to play they were like yeah you you boys go off and have a game night we'll go do whatever and so i think it was exactly poised that like it was it hit the exact moment where you don't try to say.

Yes and I think just to clarify slightly what you're saying is like the reason why Gamers Wives would be more interested in that one is because it doesn't have a super dry economic theme and it doesn't have a fighty theme it has a nice peaceful theme gorgeous art and has smooth gameplay along with that.

But uh and the crunchiness so like that was and you hear this all the time like i i want to play games with my wife she won't except and i'll list a game and wingspan is probably the number one one that fits that and then i know a lot of people after playing wingspan were like i could design a game which hadn't occurred in them before or oh i like this therefore i will try terraforming mars because it's like that and now suddenly so i think that was

the the gateway if you will for a lot of i'm gonna say gamers wives it sounds very derogatory but like i think we can all agree that the primary demographic of gaming especially when wingspan came out eight years ago was men and it has shifted and i think wingspan is responsible for that shift but also i think it was poised and so this is what i mean when i say like if it hadn't been wingspan i think it would have been something else in the next five years now i

think wingspan's amazing and i'm glad that it was wingspan and i'm trying to buy a copy right now because i realized i don't have it but i think that wingspan 10 years earlier wouldn't have succeeded 10 years later wouldn't have succeeded it would have done okay but like dominion i think that the so the the basis of what i'm trying to say here is like if aliens invented games they would invent go i don't think so i. Think go is very very very much a product of

its time and a product of its culture and i think people who say dominion would have taken off at any time no i think it would have done okay maybe like it could have hit you know it could have maybe gotten published and had a few sales but in terms of being a powerhouse in terms of being a big hit yes it's amazing amazing it's sort of like we've been going through the daniel.games blog and he says you know being smart it does not put you ahead of the crowd it's a

prerequisite if you want to be a mega hit and obviously there's and my point is that there's no way of like deliberately setting out to create a mega hit because the base entry is the game has to be amazing and then you need culture to like coincide in a way that you exactly hit a spark and that's why i don't think aliens would have invented go.

Any thoughts on that, AJ? Yeah, I'm definitely on board with the premise. I think that people absolutely underestimate culture and they absolutely underestimate the importance of the moment in time that you are in and what the zeitgeist is currently with. I think World War II games in a few decades are going to be very faux pas. I think that the cultural zeitgeist is going to be very anti, or at least it's going to be a much more controversial topic than it is today.

They'll just move away from it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My, my, my sister's boyfriend, I was having a conversation with him and he was like, look, my advice to anyone trying to enter a creative field is look at the, like, don't look at the outliers. Don't look at the top hundred people in the field, look at the next 400 and see how much money they're making because that's attainable. And I mentioned this to a friend and my friend was like, ah,

but you should look at the top hundred to be aspirational. I'm like, no, no, you're missing the point.

The top hundred is not replicable like no one else can become knitzia you you could be twice the designer and twice as proliferate as knitzia is right now and not become knitzia because he was at a time when he was producing the exact right kind of game for the exact right kind of audience and there wasn't as many publishers wasn't as many designs blah blah like he did a lot of stuff that you just can't replicate like no one else can make

ticket to ride 20 million copies sold like that's just not happening no no one else can be elizabeth hargrave now that's not to say don't try but if you're looking for a realistic what you can do you got to skip past the outliers and look at what normal humans who don't have like the the miracle of luck on their side can accomplish, completely agree you the the top one percent doesn't get there because it is the best one percent it's because it is among the best and got very lucky.

And again, like being amazing is the prerequisite. You can't be like, well, I'm amazing, therefore I will. No, cool. Now that you're amazing, you've got a chance, but it's still a very, very, very, very, very low chance. Okay. Next topic on my list was, oh yeah, my girlfriend suggested this one.

She thought it'd be fun if we talked about things that annoy us in tabletop gaming separate to design.

So like as players or anything like that which is a very broad topic but it is it is a fun topic for a bonus episode i think have you got any to start us off because i have one that i think you will agree with i've got i've got some and i'm sure more will come up as we start talking about this you go i've just i've just talked for 40 minutes so sure i just monologued when i'm playing with someone and they bend my cards like oh and they like bend it halfway as they like put it

on the table like to the point of actually creasing it yeah yeah like or just when it like bends well if they bend it to the point where like afterwards you can see what they did at all.

Hugely triggering if you bend it they're not coming back to the table yeah i if you bend it a little bit while you're like playing with them in your hand or you like snap them a little bit on the table totally fine i'm a magic player you know i snap my cards too a little bit but it's like when when people are just like being like really like caveman-ish like it's just it's it's so triggering i i don't see my cards i'm i'm not like super fussy about my components or

whatever but it's like the easiest thing to avoid just don't bend your cards just don't do that specific thing no i get you i'm i'm very non-precious about games i'm not a possessions person and i you you literally have a copy of glory of to rome that you play so i can totally see why like a game like that but yeah i i try to be respectful of other people's cards because i know that that is a a pet peeve and especially in a game with hidden information where it's like you know avalon,

cool i recognize the back of that card great i have to throw the game out and buy a new one or sleeve it or whatever yeah okay i'll do one which your your comments reminded me of somehow oh crap it's kind of ahead. Planning the cards. Oh, yes. I don't know why this reminded me of it, but players who don't start planning their turn until it's their turn. Oh, my Lord, yes. And I'm going to illegally segue into game design here.

Games that put the information horizon in a place where you can't even start to plan out your turn until it's your turn. I was at a playtesting event yesterday, played a really fun, cool, Halloween-y kind of themed game that has already got a publisher and is going to come out.

And it had as soon as he taught the mechanic i was like this is really novel and cool you roll one dice one die per player plus one and then you go around the table once all the dice like you you claim one and take your turn once all the dice are gone then you re-roll and go again so that means that the first player gets the first pick and then the last pick and then without any kind of like turns round structure the second player then gets

the first and last pick and the third so on so forth great idea in theory what ended up happening is if the player to my right was taking the last pick i can't even start to think about my turn until it's my turn until they roll at the start of that or worse if i roll yeah until i roll at the start of my turn i literally can't do any planning so a it annoys me on games design that way but when a player can plan their turn out and doesn't oh gets

my blood boiling i don't like wasted time i like efficiency i don't like i never make people wait and I don't like it when people make me wait to the point where like if we need to get in the car and find directions and this is part of why I like Euros so much and like efficiency games I want to be in the car and then while driving find the directions I don't want to like find the directions and get like the order of events really matters to me I agree I am so.

Hypersensitive about wasting my time it bothers me immeasurably i only have so many days hours years left on this earth i don't know how long that is and i want to use that i do and enjoy oh i know exactly how long you have oh dear is that because you've already put out the hit, there's so many reasons that could be and they're all bad but yeah and the thing is i don't care if someone's aping a bit that that's okay with I understand

sometimes it's, you have a hard turn, you're trying to figure things out. Yeah, yeah. But if someone's not trying to figure out something that they could be figuring out and then start, you're just wasting everyone's time and super, super, super rude, frankly. Agreed. All right, what you got? All right, I've got a couple of rulebook complaints. Oh, rulebook complaints. Yes. Rulebooks that exactly fit the size of the box. Okay. So you can't get them out without like squishing it together.

Like without bending the cards. Without bending the book, yeah. Like if it's literally the exact size, then it's really obnoxious to try and get out. Whereas if it's a tiny bit smaller, it's no problem at all. No problem. i have a game called meow which you can see if you're watching on youtube right there.

And of we have a whole line of these box size and every now and again we would forget to put the half moon cutouts and it literally doesn't cost any extra i don't think like maybe a cent or something like that right and yet the difference in like i i gave someone a copy of meow and we opened it and she was like it's really hard to open i'm like oh yeah it is yep yep you're right it is i forgot i like can't do anything about it now it's so annoying

because it arrives and you're like ah crap now what are your other rule book complaints i i have one other one and this is this is definitely in you know pet peeve territory where it's not a huge deal but it's not wrong.

It is use the back of the rule book yes i if you didn't say that i was going to you oh my god what did i play yes i played some game yesterday and was like oh it was a uh potion explosion i bought potion explosion for my girlfriend and we were playing it and she was like okay how do i know what these do's and i flipped the rulebook over and put it next to her and it's a big reference sheet with everything she needs to know and amazing like use the back of your rulebook as a quick guide there's

always something you can put there my favorite would be if it was like if you can't if you don't have an obvious thing like potion explosion does do a like quick setup like don't make me go through the rule book and find the setup just put it put anything you can on the back that's not effing credits putting credits on the back that's prime real estate right there the best you could possibly do and i don't think i've ever seen

a rule book do this but if you had especially if you have a big a large physical sized rule book in terms of not like number of pages, but like literal length and length. But not the size of the box. Right. Is if you have all the things for setup that are easy to forget, and then you have reference of like icons or keywords or around structure, that kind of thing. So it's like, it's very easy to remember a lot of game setup.

It's like, yeah, you put one of these tokens on each of these spaces, but then you're like, wait, how many cards do I have in hand again? Is it six or seven? That's such an easy thing to put up. Absolutely. Yeah. Or put it on the components. Like, I love it when you have a little player sheet for yourself and it says in the top right corner of the back, like, here's what you start with and you don't, man, I hate going through a book trying to find setup stuff.

Actually, the same playtest from yesterday, the way that you set up locations was each location needed three tokens from like six through 10.

And so you got the bag of those tokens and you put three of that token out and then you put the bag back and i was like i promise you the replayability getting from this in no way compensates for how fiddly and annoying it is and i could not get this desire to understand it he was like but it doesn't take that much time i'm like i it takes infinitely more time than it's adding and i peter i'm especially sensitive to this and it comes back to the wasting time thing

like what you're doing there is you're making someone's 10th game better but one in a hundred players is going to get to a 10th game less than that frankly yeah and so you're you're making a hundred times more work to slightly improve that 10th i had another one and it's gone i've got to start writing these down okay keep coming up to me as you're talking um oh yes yes okay this is this is probably my number one pet peeve is i'm always the games teacher, because I'm very good at teaching games.

And the thing that I hate is, well, you never told me that. Oh, yeah. Like, firstly, I did. Like, literally, this is my job. I promise you, I told you the vital rule that you need to know. Most times that I know it's a rule people will forget, I will repeat it multiple, like half a dozen times. And it's always that rule that I've repeated half a dozen times. They'd be like, well, I would have done different. I'm like, I don't know what to do.

Like, yeah, sure. Maybe that rule shouldn't be in the game because it's so easily forgotten. But I did say it and I said it more than once. And I said it to you specifically. Don't tell me I didn't say it. This actually dovetails into from pet peeves of like games to pet peeves of players.

Yes. so the the type of person who it's like they're like you're giving me too many rules can we just like get started but they're also the type of person who the the thing that you leave out which is like the the one in the hundred edge case you don't bother telling them right and then it comes up and you say and they're like oh well why didn't you tell me it's like because you didn't want to yeah you didn't want to and and you correctly didn't want every

single edge case this is one of those things that like new designers when they're pitching a game will start going to edge cases and you're like what are you doing like i don't even want to know the rules let alone it's also like a sell sheets episode i'm like this is so hyper specific this is not what i need to know at the start of the game that same complaint but zoomed out a little bit people who genuinely get upset about winning or losing their first game

like you could make the case people who get upset about winning or losing at all is frustrating, but I get it. Some people are competitive. I'm not. But people who are like, this game, like... Don't expect to like have perfect strategy and that's not how games work my girlfriend i play a lot of games and i don't i don't know that we've ever played a game for the first time once.

I mean literally we've played every game for the first time once but we've we if we play a game she always wants to play a second time because about halfway through she'll be like ah i get how this works and then she wants to go again from the start knowing that and there is never any rancor like the first game's a throwaway like i wish that everyone would just internalize the first game doesn't matter it's to learn the rules but when people get upset

about losing or like like like you're saying like oh i would have played differently if i'd known this and it's like well then play again like cool you learned a game calm down calm your farm i am so disinterested in playing with super competitive people but listen i i used to play magic in tournaments If you are in a tournament setting with something on the line, I totally understand.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. If we're just playing whatever random stupid game and then you lose, and then it's the people who have to make excuses constantly, who it's like, oh, well, you only won because you drew that card. You got lucky. I'm just like, yep, sure.

But then it's always something. It's like either you got lucky or when those people don't have any sort of ego shield in the game they're just like oh it's because you play a million games it's like yeah no duh that's how being good at things works it's like i never understand that if it's like you go play basketball with someone and you're like oh you only won because you play more basketball than me like yeah like a competitive test of skill and this person has practiced that skill more.

I won this Halloween game and it wasn't even close. I think I got 51 points. Second place was like 24 or something like that. And the guy was like, okay, like you obviously picked it up much faster than me.

And that's why you won. It wasn't annoyed at all. But it was like, yeah, this is what I do for a living. Like, you're the same way. We are just very good at not only games, but like first time playing a game, because that's what playtesting is.

Almost every single time i play test a game i'm playing that specific set of rules for the first time and i play test twice as much as i play published games and when i do play published games i rarely play them more than once because of how i have to manage my time now exception being games i play with my girlfriend where we will hit the same game again and again and again but like at a party like if i played that game cool

i'd actually rather play something else for the first time to to see how they do it yeah so the very specific skill of playing a game for the first time designers experienced designers who played this a lot are going to be through the roof with that yeah i was i mean oh go ahead i was just gonna say i have a play tester and.

They realized that like after like a year and a half of play testing with me every week they're like i've never won a game against you and i was like we play test once a week i play test eight more times a week and i made the game and each of the changes each time it would be kind of weird if i didn't win at least the vast majority of the time yeah i had someone yesterday was saying that this is going to sound like a brag but genuinely this was what they said to me that that time you

killed me is the best two-play game they've ever played they're like nothing else comes close they love it love it love it great game and they said you know do you still play it and i was like i can't like how can i play that game because i made it and then i play tested it for a year i think to this day i am probably still the best that time you killed me player like i just not only like understand the systems but they i am

like they are they are internalized because that's how design works now not every designer is good at playing every one of their games and i'm not pure logic pure like abstract what you're saying oh man i gotta start writing let me open up a thing to start writing this down because every time i go to say a thing i've forgotten it.

What was the last thing you were saying i was talking oh yes the okay i'm gonna make a claim here that i don't let me know how this lands i can sometimes i can often tell how well designed a game is by how well I do at it. And this is why I had to disclaim this. No, I feel that. I feel that. Do you want to try to put that into less stupid words? Yes. Because you know what I'm saying, right? I do. So because, like you said, we play so many games for the first time.

That makes us very good at those kinds of games.

If we can't do well at a game that we are playing for the first time then it's maybe not always the case but it's often going to be the case that the reason why we didn't do well is it's a game where the heuristics for how to do well are clear yes thank you yeah i couldn't work out of phrase that basically the game games will tell you what to do that's what victory points are that's what incentives are this could be a whole episode games will tell you what to do

and if the game tells me what to do and i do that and i lose that's the game's fault not my fault this sounds like i'm such a sore loser which you know is not the case and hopefully listeners after 38 episodes have picked up is not the case but like it drives me nuts and and again we mostly play prototype so this is in a prototype i'll be like look the game is telling me to do this thing and i did that thing and i lost you actually gave an example of this in in a recent episode where

you said like the players kept thinking that x was the right move and so you redesigned the game around making it clear that x is not the right move and that's that's what i'm talking about like if the game is saying hey do this and i do that it's like you idiot why did you do that because you told me to game and if you weren't trying to that's poor design that's poor communication and design is communication yes and i can actually give two examples from the game we have

with aeg where solved exactly that problem. We had one faction where the wrong move was, basically the factions got a pick up and deliver element to it. You send out units, you pick up stuff you bring back, and players would always first turn, alright, I move all my workers forward. But there's also combat in the game. So you move them closer to your opponent, and then the opponent kills them. And they're like, well, why did I lose?

It's like, well, because you just, instead of your first turn setting up and gain more workers, or one of those types of actions. Setting up defensive play. Right, you just sent them forward. But the heuristic for a new player. For that faction in that game, yeah. Yeah, heuristic is like a general sense of direction, general strategy, that sort of thing, rule of thumb. The sort of implicit instructions. Yeah.

So players were like, it's pick up and deliver. I need to move my workers to go pick up and then move them back to deliver. I move forward. That was the wrong move. So we redesigned the faction so that that was the right move. So that there was less punishment to doing that. And then there was a different faction. Doing the thing we were telling you to do.

Yes. And then there was a different faction where it was designed to be a hit and run faction where you have incredible mobility, you have pretty good strength. This is a great fix. This is Peter's fix. That's why it's so great. Oh, was it? I dare you don't remember. That's funny. So it's a faction where it's like high mobility, high attack, but they're kind of glass candy. They're very, very vulnerable to attacks. So the idea is you move in, you attack, you move out.

But players weren't taking advantage of the movement. They were like, oh, just dump everything into attacks and just charge straight at them. And then they would lose and think it's underpowered. And so Peter had a great fix, which was that when you take damage of that faction, you just get to move away.

And so immediately it makes it play the way it's supposed to and it rewards players for doing what they think they're supposed to do oh i move forward and attack that's a simple heuristic and now it's yes you move forward attack and you can still move away and that actually is still going to save you that first point of damage but if you don't but you won't just sit there and be slammed damage damage damage damage exactly you know why i don't mentally have ownership over that mechanic

why because it's just what we did with another faction this has right it's literally like i was like hey that thing that we did that worked let's do that again, but it really like it's different enough that it's not literally the same but it was very much the same logic hey you got anything else that annoys you yeah can i tell you my least favorite kind of player in in the world it's at australians aj tell me this all the time it's the let's just Let's figure it out as we go, player.

Opens 30-page rulebook. Slowly reads in my tone voice. For setup, step six, you're going to do this. When you start a raid action, first select one to four. No, no, no, no, no, no. We are not doing that. Do you? So if you've got a game night happening, do you learn the games ahead of time? Do you practice or teach ahead of time? How do you manage it?

So i've got some friends that i respect the hell out of that will learn the rules and then play a practice few hands or even a whole practice game like they might even play it solo just to know inside and out just to see how it all connects. As stated before, I'm a very social person. I can't do that. I actually find even just reading rule books painful. But what I will always do- I love reading rule books.

Yeah. It's a craft that I admire so much that like, it's like reading a really good novel. It's obviously not the same, but I'm just like, oh, I see what you did there. Or if they didn't, I'm like, ah, I see what you didn't do there. And I'm mentally noting it. Like reading a rule book, a well-written rule book is an experience for me. And reading a rule book is an experience for me. I had a big, I told you about this at the time and I won't name any names.

I had a big fight, quote unquote, with a publisher because they weren't giving the rule book its due diligence. And I was like, the rule book, like, it's so important. And then people always tell, this drives me nuts. People are like, no one really learns the game from the rules anyway. And I'm like, that's not true. Not true. A, I don't think that's true. And it's impossible to get the stats on it. B, cool. Okay, so even if it's, say, 30% of people who do, I still want them to have a good time.

And for me, investing in a rulebook, both time and, like, blind plays or cold play testing, like, all about it, because it pays off in spades, in spades, in spades, in spades, in spades. Anyway, I love rulebooks. I was asking you how you prep for a game night.

Yes so the way that i prep for game night is these days what i do is i will take games that i know how to play and i will bring one game that i have not played before and i will learn the rule that i think is going to be a good fit for that night that group of people and how many people i have etc and i will read the rules for that game before i go and then i will push to play that one game if possible if not you know it's not the end of the world yeah but then if i if i don't play it then you

know the next time that situation comes up I will re-read that rule book for that game and just rinse and repeat as my go-to, I am the type of player that you hate where I'll just be like, okay, give me two minutes with a rulebook and I can teach any game. Oh, but that's actually totally different because it's still, you read it, you internalize it. Right, right. It's the wasting time thing again. It's all comes full circle.

Like, why are four people listening to a monotone? Yeah, give me two minutes with a rulebook and I will have enough that we can start playing and then I'll learn more as we go. But don't slowly read it to me and then.

Having said that if you cold play just my game please do that that is so insanely helpful the the downside is that sometimes i will get a rule wrong for the first play and that sucks because it's like uh do you know the game hamlet the euro did really well on kickstarter it's a super cute little game you're building a hamlet which is a small english village and you're setting up these like chains of donkeys to deliver goods

and i don't remember what the actual rule is or how we played but i just know that those are two different things the first time we played.

We were playing this like weird convoluted thing i was like and and again halfway through i'm like this isn't right no one designed and published this game and i went look the rules are like oh here's how it worked and the rest of the game was really smooth and so like this ties into me being like yeah first game doesn't matter on a few levels like obviously it's better if you know the rules but in this case like no one knew it so i was like okay give me five minutes for the

rule and i'll teach it and i did and we got a rule wrong still had a good time and it was with um Barnes the the streamer youtuber and I think it like became her favorite game of the year so trust me that teacher did not destroy anyone's experience I've got one more type of player that annoys me this is a category I call absolute idiots I have one person in mind for this am I right here no yeah he isn't an idiot he's he's a normal smart person but

I don't know why game skin to people's heads where they're like oh i rolled badly on this die it's bad luck i'm gonna move over to this other one like perfectly rational people will or they'll be like well i rolled this die once and i failed now that i'm rolling it again my odds are better than you know the one six on the die because rolling it twice you know it's it doesn't change the odds and this person oh sorry i'm gonna i'm gonna piggyback off this very quickly

when two people have to draw a card and you draw it like that's the card that i was gonna draw is this what you're gonna say That's exactly what I was going to say. I drew I drew a card and then he drew A card or I drew the card first And he was like no I'm supposed to draw it first that card was meant For me and now you know what it is so there's no way to reset The board state it's like it's a randomly Shuffled deck.

I'm sorry for tipping you at the post but that's amazing that uh okay aj i'm gonna finish off this segment with a personal attack are you ready oh but here's the thing that you do that drives me the most nuts i i know what it is i i think i've told you before this is not a surprise do you tell me what i'm cheating all the time no no that that's fine it is annoying um aj aj will get so into his turn that he will cheat and i'll

be like aj what are you doing he's like i'm moving this thing here i'm like how are you moving that thing he's like i'm doing okay i wasn't allowed to and i'm like okay well i'm glad i was paying as much attention to your turns as mine no that's fine i get that you're just not very clever that makes sense no the thing you do and i'm sure i've told you this before but if not please feel free to cry that'll make good content is you will teach people a game and then utterly destroy

them with like super advanced strategy that there's no way of possibly getting on your first game the two examples that i can think of are the estates you taught me and someone else i think sean you taught me and sean the estates and as like which is quite a heavy game and as we were grappling with like wait what can we do on our turn you bought up like the most valuable thing at like half the price it should have been and ended the game with 70 times our points and we

were like what was the point of that like. It just you won by so much so competitively while teaching the game and then the other one was, oh when you showed me is it aquatica might have been that one ends very quickly as well so aquatica the first card that came out on the first turn was the broken card yeah and you bought it and then proceeded to crush me and i didn't really get to play that game now we did stop that and just start again because it was so unnecessarily like

one-sided and you're like yeah i think this card's broken cool then don't buy it in your first game in my first game and crush me with it so that that's a very targeted aj pet peeve that's very fair for me i it is it causes me physical discomfort to pull my punches i would rather like my solution to that that i try to do now is things like hey guys you see this card here buy this card it will win you the game yes yeah or or stop me from getting this card yes yes

do that just just because that way we're learning not only the rules but also the strategy yeah as opposed to at the end of the game being like oh i guess this game is very winnable someday yeah i i had that exact situation come up with my way for i was teaching glory to rome or i i think someone else was was oh you did this movie glory of rome as well and i you ended the game and i was like two turns in and i was like oh. It it makes the game not fun and i never play those games again.

That's a good reason to do it but it is the way that i do like because i i play other games with my six-year-old son who spoiler alert i could probably beat at most every game i will make up a rule that i follow there's a youtube channel called chess simp i don't i don't i assume you're not into chess but it's a it's a guy in asia who uses like an ai voice which at first is very grating and then i've learned to truly love it like he does really good comedic inflection

with this voice and every day he plays a game against a elo 100 player which is like brand new player with some ridiculous arbitrary rule and so one of them is chess but it's a platformer you can only move your pieces except for pawns if from your perspective they are supported by another piece.

So whenever i played chess against henry my son i play with that rule and it makes it surprisingly balanced because it's impossible with that rule like you just can't win unless you're playing against a six-year-old which point it's very very balanced so i i do that like when we used to play a lot of halo i'm very good at halo i would just make up some rule and follow that and i don't tell the other person because that's kind of dicky i guess announcing on

a podcast the same thing but that way like it's a handicap that they don't need to know about it doesn't benefit them at all and if they win i'm not going to be like well actually i was playing with this rule that i made up if they ask i'll tell them but no one's ever asked it just it just makes it like still an interesting challenge for me uh have you played happy city yes i play with you actually yeah yes so i play that with henry a lot and the rule

i play with that is that i can only build buildings in ascending order so my first building has to be one that my second building has to cost one more than my previous one more than my previous and again it really balances it like these little rules as a game designer they're fun for me to come up with and they they level the playing field.

There's a magic streamer who's like arguably top five magic players ever and there's a lot of magic players there's a lot of really good magic players top five is no joke no that's incredible that's like olympic plus yeah and when he's playing he'll often do what's called stipulation drafts where he's playing with some extreme restriction like that where he's yes any any card that has like this word on it i have to take it no matter what or i'm not allowed to attack at all yes

yes stuff like that yeah that's exactly the kind of thing i'm playing through i finished a roguelike called hoplite h-o-p-l-i-t-e and i finished it he played it no no i was looking at it though maybe because you really like it yeah i've accomplished everything that you can in that game so now when i play i'm like i'm always going to take the bottom upgrade and it just means i'm playing a new game because i'm like oh this is how this works now,

stuff like that really cool okay what's our next topic a to the j, Next one is, we were asked by someone in our Discord what our first design was. Oh, I didn't even see this question. So, mine's very bad, as you'd expect. They're all going to be. Do you know what my second design was? No. Dracula's Feast. Really? Yeah. That kind of shows. Yeah, very much so. So, there's two possible answers. I'll give them both because it's a bonus episode.

One is that my first design was, I'd been playing a lot of Magic the Gathering, which is a lot of people's like starting point. And my favorite thing in Magic was the enchantments that like affect all your creatures. So I played what's called a white weenie deck. So every creature in my deck had either one or two mana cost. That was it. Like, I think I had maybe A3 in there somewhere, but that was the exception.

And back when i was playing it the mulligan rule was if you have no lands if you have no lands in your hand you can shuffle and redraw and because most of my creatures didn't need one i would just shuffle and redraw until i got that one land i think i had four in my deck total and then i could just play all my cards out like turn turn turn turn it wasn't a very effective deck competitively but it was very fun and very cheap to put together and there was an enchantment

that i can't remember the name of that cost like two and it just gave all your creatures plus one plus one and when you're playing a white weenie deck that's incredible, So the game, I can't remember the name of it, it was like called Battle Creatures. That's right. It was the most generic name. Every creature had an ability that affected every other creature. Nice. And really easy to track. Was that? Really easy to keep track of. Yeah. And a lot of them were multiplicative. It was a mess.

Absolute nightmare. But it was very much like, I think there's a certain purity to people's first design.

Design because you're not thinking about marketability you're not thinking about how it'll work you're not thinking you're thinking like what do i like and just making that the other one was the other first design i have was called one two three flag and it was with a friend of mine and it was like a abstract it was like scissors paper rock you had like little stones on little circles that were connected by nodes and one would beat two two would beat three but three would beat one

and so on your turn you would either like attack and like move into an attack in adjacent space or place a stone and the goal was to like get the flag and return it because i love capture the flag in in game so much neither of them like i would even think about making today but like i said there's a certain purity to them what about you so i have two answers as per usual when i was a very little kid you know probably like eight or something oh i'm discounting like when i was

a kid because you know all right roll and move that i that i will do the same was it a roll and move Nope. Nope. Okay, tell me then. Tell me. Well, it's not much more interesting. My very first one was I took Monopoly, I took Risk, and I used the money from Monopoly to buy things and Risk, that sort of thing. And I played Yu-Gi-Oh!, so I made a Yu-Gi-Oh! variant type thing. But the first one that I made actually with half a brain in my head was a game inspired by Magic, of course.

And basically my thought was in magic it's really satisfying pulling off little combos and stuff but there's a fair number of guardrails for combos you have to work to break magic most of the time, And so I was like, what if combos was the game? And I think that's a fun starting point. The problem is I didn't know about mechanics. So it was like, I had basically like, you have resources and you have cards and you play cards.

And it's like, you're just basically trying to like create a chain of things and then attack.

But I ran into a limit of design space really hard, really fast because the game was like, play a card what cards do damage or i don't know i guess i'll make up some card types you can attract with and then there are tons and tons of things like that that were like global enchantments or or like familiars that like your opponents could attack but they just like give you passives and most of the passives were just more cards or more mana or damage to the opponent so uh it was actually a very

very informative first design i learned a lot from it and you can't just make combos in the abstract you have to have a mechanic to build around i i learned that very recently i was working on a game i won't go into it because i think it's a really cool idea that i still want to make and i think i was talking i talked it through with you and you're like yeah peter you can't just make combos you need to be working towards something with

the combos do you remember this no i don't i'll tell you i'll tell you off camera sure um that's a great question thank you.

Person on discord by the way did you know we have a discord you can come and join the conversation there's a link at the end of each video and in the show notes of every episode whoa it's so cool come join us it's great discord it is a great same same person i think asked what got you hooked on design which for me isn't a super interesting answer i don't think but, hooked on design that's interesting i was i got into design after playing a

game i've said before or everything I consume I need to create. I'm playing roguelikes at the moment, so I'm sitting down and working on a bunch of roguelike games. I listen to podcasts, so we make a podcast. I watch a lot of YouTube, so I make YouTube. I read novels, so I write novels. I started playing board games, so I started making board games. That's what got me into it. What got me hooked on it? Sorry, I know you said you had your answer, but it's- No, before it.

I've drunk most of this during this recording, so I'm very caffeinated. What got me hooked on it is a bit of a sad story. I was in a very bad relationship, just like not healthy, not pleasant. And board game design, Dracula's Feast specifically, I could just compartmentalize. While I'm working on a board game, I'm not having emotions.

And i was in such a bad place emotionally that like my way of escaping was sitting down and designing more dracula's feast characters and refining and refining and refining and refining, and so it was very much an escape like that that's genuinely what got me hooked on it is that i could just turn off emotions and just design design design and even to this day like when i'm designing i get into flow state straight away like design for me game board game design,

and video editing are the two things that i can just immediately be in flow state like as soon as i start i'm in flow state i also as i mentioned i also write that one i need to like build into it over a few hours and then i'm in flow state so when i when i'm writing i try to have nothing booked afterwards so that i can just like go and go and go and sometimes i'll write for 14 hours straight but board game design i can sit down in front of a spreadsheet and just go go go especially now that

i use like the ai art i really like making that for my prototypes and the the layout and component studio like all of it just taps together and gets me in flow state straight away what a great question what's your answer my question i think got more interesting listening to yours so. I was always interested in design. I don't feel unless I'm designing. It's the only time I feel anything. I was thinking more like what got me interested in design, but you're right.

Hooked on design is a specific question. I got really like game design works for me a lot because I really love the social element of it, of playtesting. That's why I love co-designing so much. And I think that game design just hits my problem-solving brain in just the right way that really connects with me.

And it's sort of like the intersection of like psychology and you know and then like the more hard numbers and sort of things but uh what got me hooked on it i think was the was that level of enjoyment with the ease and speed of iterating with component studio plus tabletop simulator i actually don't know that i could do this full time if i was doing this physically i find physical prototypes of anything more than just some cards that you have to cut out extremely tedious and

unfun and having that sort of super rapid iteration cycle of idea onto paper and and have it just work and and i'm talking metaphorically about paper of course right now just works so great for me putting it on digital paper so that that that's why you enjoy it is that one is that what hooks you on it yeah what hooked me was that level of enjoyment with the speed and accessibility of.

The programs that i use now yeah now i i as we've talked about many times component studio has doubled my prototyping speed like me honestly five times five times i i'm so deep into the weeds of it now do you use game variables i use them for everything now i don't but i i think i make less complex games at least component wise than you do most of my games are like mostly cards and stuff yeah you you would be shocked by how simple the games are that i use game variables

for now there after this i'll i'll show you or maybe at the end of this as part of the bonus episode i'll show you this ridiculous yeah let's do that at the end of this for the youtube audience only we'll cut it off for the podcast listeners uh go over to our youtube channel and you'll listen you'll get to watch me showing aj the stupidest comp you know the show south park yeah so the original south park pilot was literally

made by cutting up card and stop motion animating it and it took them two months for a five minute clip they moved from that when they got picked up by a network into the most complex special effects software that there is.

And still the show looked like it was cardboard moving along on a piece of paper. And they've said, like, yeah, we are using a, you know, $20 million jackhammer to crack open an egg. Like, it's just the most great... So this is what this feels like. I'm just way over the top for this, like, as you'll see at the end, this incredibly simple...

Okay what else is on our bonus episode aj we have best and worsts so we just have a bunch of these listed here we don't want to go too too long with this this sounds like we're gonna have fun is that true yeah i guess it sounds like rapid fire the fun part of the show what do you got best and worst dates oh man okay best date probably my my girlfriend kristin just really got along still dating longest relationship i've been in like consistently i've got someone

who i've been dating for eight years but sort of on and off whereas chris and i are coming up to three years our anniversary is um new year's eve and the i live in la she lives in la la it's very very sunny very famously sunny the original name of that show was it's always sunny in la and dennis was going to be an actor and the network was like we don't want another show set in la so they changed it to it's always sunny in philadelphia which works much better for a few reasons,

and so it had been raining for like three weeks straight rain rain rain very depressing very la is not built for this and i went on the date we went to a coffee store called priscilla's coffee and we sat down clicked straight away had a chat and as we got to leave we walked outside and the sun was out for the first time in three weeks and so we went on a walk just around the neighborhood and kept on talking for another hour and really

got to know each other it was very lovely great first date what about you best first date. So I think there's an argument to be made that I didn't really go on any dates, like basically at all. Yet, yet. Yeah. I actually, when I read this question, I went to my wife and I was like, what's your favorite date that we've been on? Because to me, if we go out for dinner, maybe that counts as a date, but it doesn't really feel like a date to me.

And especially because like in both the relationships I've been in, they were very like, we just sort of like became boyfriend, girlfriend immediately. And then like we, there was never really as much of a fancy courtship process or as much like assessment of like whether or not we wanted to be more serious or whatever. It just kind of happened straight away. But I asked my wife and she said that for our first anniversary,

that was her favorite one. because she said, listen, I don't care much about dates, like obviously, but most of the time, like I'll say, what do you want to do right now? What would you most like to do in the world? She's like, I just want to hang and watch TV with you, which is great for me. She likes you. Yeah. But she was like, it's our first anniversary. Please put in some effort. And I was like, yep, no problem. So I took her to the botanical gardens. Then we went to a restaurant that she

really likes. And then I took her to ice cream afterwards.

And then when we got home, while she had been out i put sticky notes all over our house that just said all the things that i like about her so it was like you know in the bathroom mirror you know i love your beautiful smile and then like each of the you know sticky notes was somewhere about a thing that i like about her and where she does it i think for our second anniversary kristin made me a deck of cards in a like ring like with ring binder

rings and each card has a thing written on it that she loves about me it's very very sweet she's much better at dating me than i'm a dating her. Okay worst first date like there there are a few i go on a lot of dates i really like dating i think i was in australia and it was with a lady who was deaf, I, you're welcome to disagree with me on this audience. I am very witty.

I am very quick witted with like, the reason I am fun to talk to is because I'm fast and bantery and witty and like funny, funny at speed. And on this day, like I don't speak much sign language. I speak a little bit of Auslan, but like barely. So we were communicating by her writing in a notebook and me typing on my phone. And it just kills the cadence.

Like it is impossible to be witty when you have to read what they say so by the time you finish reading it they've written it like earlier than that then you write your response then you show it it's just it i i got nothing and then i like i was i was trying i don't i don't know how to make a move deaf person this is awful cancel me now internet so like i put my arm around her or something and she wrote in a notebook this is creepy i'm leaving got up and left.

Easily my worst first date i was like fair enough like i didn't know how to i i'm good at dating i was not good at dating her so i was like i guess i'll make a move and she was very much like i don't like this move i'm leaving which valid but i don't know i don't know what i could or should have done, my second worst date was definitely with your wife oh it was terrible what about you, well i already did my best and worst dates but the

next you did your worst oh sorry worst date i have i ever been on one i don't know i i leave no usually like i think pass is your answer yeah pass na no best and worst vacations man. First vacation was 2022, I think it was. I knew you were going to say it. What? When you came to visit me, right? No, no, that was 23. That was great. I was on my way to visit Henry and I stopped in Chicago. And for a long time, Chicago is my favorite city in the world.

And it was my birthday. So on my birthday, I was like, look, I'm traveling to visit Henry. Henry lives in Toronto. I live in LA. And this is the time when I was catching the train to do that trip. So I'd just spent two days on the train.

And then i got to chicago and i went to see some improv and they're like we've sold out you should have bought a ticket already and i had tried to and the website wasn't working so i was like okay forget about it i'll just pick it up and so i was like in chicago on my birthday alone not able to see improv and for whatever reason henry didn't call me and my girlfriend didn't call me and it was just it was it was a mis i guess that's worst birthday as much as

worst vacation but it was a it was a miserable one what about you my worst one is when i when we were younger we drove to florida every year and we drove in like such a such a canadian thing yeah i know the the straight shot drive to florida i don't know why all canadians do this it's bewildering it's horrible as an adult i would never do it again but yeah everyone in your country seems to have done this i don't know why this became a thing well i know that my

parents are very cheap too cheap for a plane flight but they got a timeshare in florida but then i don't know why but for some reason this one year we didn't go to the timeshare and we went to this like really crappy like motel sort of place and it was like so either we're inside the hotel room which is like really small for four people and like they have a bad tv that you could see if they have anything on cable or they had a you know kind of small not very

nice pool that you had to walk by this big pond full of alligators. Imagine being like seven or eight years old and being like yeah you can go to the pool just walk past the pond full of alligators and it was like lauren is so weird. I don't think I was being paranoid there. No, that's insane. That's dangerous. It's very Florida. Yes, you're correct. And it's very Florida.

Do you have a best vacation? I do. So this was, we went to my friend's wedding in Chicago. And I really liked Chicago when I went as well. And Chicago was just super fun. We went there with some friends. We got to try a bunch of stuff. It was one of the few vacations that I've gone on as an adult.

Isn't Chicago great? I love Chicago. yeah it was awesome so we had a great time there we saw my friend at his wedding the wedding was super fun it was just a fantastic time let me quickly see if my favorite place we in chicago still exists because i want to recommend it but if it's closed then i'm just teasing people by the fact that they can't go to it sure no it looks like it's oh wait hang on best restaurant

in chicago yes still around okay luella's southern kitchen it's on lincoln avenue in chicago, it's so good i really recommend it it's like southern food but in chicago and i the first time i visited chicago i like stayed two blocks away from it so i went every few days and just like love really strong recommend they do yeah they do gumbo they do like waffle and chickens they do all the all the southern foods and they just do a really great job of it.

Best vacation for me and this this is sort of almost a cliche answer at the start of this year at the end of last year, I went to Disney World for the first time. I'm a big Disney guy. My girlfriend works at Disney. And that by itself is obviously great. But it was like a little convention of all my favorite people.

So my BFF and her husband, Alex, who I co-designed with, and their two kids who are essentially my kids, I love them so much, and my kid, and both my girlfriends, and like my other, one of my other closest friends, Alison, who I loved a bit. It's Like you weren't there and my sisters weren't there, but otherwise it was like Peter Conn. I just had such a wonderful time. It was my first time for one of my girlfriends to meet my kid. It was the first time for various other people to meet my kid.

Like it was just magical. Magical is kind of a cliche word when you're talking about Disney World, but like the Disney part wasn't even the best part. It was, it was just being with all those people. And I did a very clever thing that I'm going to say so that everyone else who's doing this can do it. If you go to Disney World and you do one of those multi-day things, take a day off in the middle. People tend to be like, three days, go, go, go.

Stretch the budget and book that fourth. I think we did five days. So we did two days in the parks, one day just laying around the hotel, two days in the parks. Obviously, that's expensive. I'm not saying everyone can do it. But if you're already, if you're already splurging to go to Disney world, especially with kids, we had three under five or three under six, absolutely spend that extra money and have a day off in the middle.

So you can just like breathe and not burn yourself out. It was that day might've been my favorite of all of them.

It was just wonderful just had a really really great time that sounds awesome yeah it was super i've got so many photos from that and and as we mentioned in the last episode my house like i think that photo is from it my house is covered in photos and so many of them are from that trip i'm looking around now and being like that's from that trip that's from that trip that's from that trip just wonderful all right let's do one more and then i'll show you a weird

thing in component studio and then we'll be done sounds good best and worst meal like in the world or the that you've had oh i don't think i have a good answer for this one oh no you know what i do i have worst i used to do i think you know this you once described me as someone who like has just a billion weird like facets or weird side stories about my life i used to do drug testing as in like trials medical trials of course you did i mean the thing is once once you once

you take off like social norms then a lot of the world opens up to you i needed money i was this is when I first, first, first started being self-employed. So I needed money. And because I was self-employed, I could work anywhere. So about four times a year, I would go in and do clinical testing. The longer, the better, because they pay you by the hour. So if you're there for a week, you are getting paid for whatever that is, 154 hours, 156 hours, whatever the math is, at a pretty decent rate.

This is Australia. So like a minimum wage is way higher in Australia. And so I would do these whenever I could. This one, they didn't tell us, and I really wish they had. It was an antidepressant. And what they didn't tell us is that if you're not depressed, an antidepressant makes you depressed. So everyone was just miserable because we're on an antidepressant. And if I'd been warned, I would have understood what was happening. They just didn't warn us, which was very rude.

In these things, they have to control what you eat really diligently. So you'll get given a specific meal and you have to eat the entirety of that meal so that That's not a variable in like, you know, if you eat nothing, if you overeat, it's going to change how much the drug affects your system, et cetera, et cetera. I think they had just changed caterers because this was the only time it was like that.

And maybe it was because we were all depressed, but I think genuinely the new caterer, it was the worst food we'd ever eaten to the point where it was literally inedible. And we sort of had to like lead a little, Hey, no one here is eating this. You need us to eat. you need to bring us edible food in the breakfast we had toast that was great and then lunch and dinner we could not eat it and the kind of peak was they brought us granola and yogurt granola and yogurt.

Was greek yogurt and they hadn't told us it was greek yogurt so it just tasted like it was off and we all couldn't eat it because granola and yogurt is not normally like sour yogurt it was foul but yeah the one i remember was like almost like dumplings i can't remember exactly what it was but like every part of it was inedible it was disgusting so that's easily the worst meal i've ever eaten what about you so my best and worst are at the same restaurant oh they're

gonna say the same meal and I was like have you ever eaten one meal AJ so there's this I think it's a chain but I had only ever and still have only ever been to this one place it's called Mexicali Roses and it's like borderline offensively pretending to be Mexican and it it looked like the worst restaurant I've ever seen when I went there and then I had the best meal I'd ever had it was a burger just a burger and fries really simple but every element of it was done to perfection like

the baking was perfectly crispy the they even had like the instead of lettuce just being a leaf of lettuce it was like chopped up and like mixed with mayo or something apparently that's a thing and then similarly it didn't have like a slice of tomato it was like this bruschetta stuff which again apparently is a thing i found out about that years later but it was just amazingly good and then i was so excited it was where my sister used to live in peterborough and then I went back another time.

To, and I was so unbelievably excited for this burger. It's like Marshall's Burger, if you've seen How I Met Your Mother. I was losing my mind over it. I was just talking it up the whole time. And then we went...

Was a different it didn't say mexican roses anymore it was different name for the restaurant and then when i went there i was like is it the same food and they're like oh yeah it's still the same chefs and everything i was like oh okay and they brought out what is by far the worst burger i have ever had it would make everyone sitting around like waiting.

For the best yeah it was like imagine if you've ever seen parks and rec you know like the ron swanson burger which like here's the here's meat on a bun you can add ketchup i couldn't care less it was like just a flat ugly looking obviously frozen patty that they just bought from the store at the cheapest rate and then like a square slice of like american cheese which you know i i understand that it's not the worst thing you could put on a burger but it really do you

know why american cheese is the best cheese to put on a burger because it melts nicely because it melts without splitting it's a quote from the menu it the film the menu with uh ray fines as the chef he like he says at the very end like you know why american cheese is the best cheese to put on a burger because it melts without splitting this some quote anyway i thought i'd reference it but then i was half cocked because i couldn't remember the end of it anyway best and

worst meals right there yeah i don't i don't ever have a clear best it'll be a steak i really like steak i'm very original in that sense my girlfriend kristin who's been mentioned a lot this episode makes salmon and she's like peter this is the simplest thing in the world but i love it like she makes it for me very regularly and i always love it and then it comes with fried like she makes it with fried rice and she's like peter this is literally packet fried rice i'm like but it's so good so

yes i i don't have a i don't have a clear best but i have lots of like good steaks and salmons and like there's a tie place that when you come visit i'll take you to and it's just really good ties oh i love ties so much there's don't get time around here.

I show you my ridiculously sorry we'll wrap up for the for the listeners yes i'll wrap up the holidays hope you enjoyed this holiday special if you thanks so much then let us know if you didn't then shut the hell up everyone if you didn't let us know because this is this is a long episode even for us and it's just us when the podcast hello internet started they said what's our genre it's two white guys talking this was very much two white guys talking the podcast

but it is the holidays and so it's a treat for us and a treat for you thanks for listening we'll be back next year with all kinds of exciting content including 11 more episodes about daniel.games you think we'll get to that quickly that's all next year will be it'll be an entire year of daniel.games and nothing else i know but seriously thanks for listening come join our discord and we like doing this and we hope you like listening happy holidays everyone bye. Music.

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