#45 - The Best Design Advice on the Internet – Part 4

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

Hayward. I'm AJ Brandon. This is the last board game design podcast. After this one, legally no one's allowed to start one, so congratulations for being here for the end of the journey. We hope you've enjoyed all that have come before and this one. And if you try to start one, you'll be hearing from our lawyers very soon. Yes, we will. First is lawyers, then assassins, and then flowers for the widow.

It's a nice three-step process uh aj what do you want to talk about today today i want to talk more about the best design advice on the internet do you mean the podcast fun problems yes because we are recording about daniel.games and we are including all of his best advice this is for part four part five some some crazy part so uh we will we will mention all the stuff you need to know but do go listen to ones first. Daniel.games is a device blog by the designer of Radlands, an Australian called

Daniel unpronounceable surname. Sorry, Daniel. And it's amazing. And we, it's very complex. Firstly, people have issues with the tone. He's very arrogant a lot of places, but he's done a draft to get rid of a lot of that tone and we're working from old notes. So it's a bit of a mess, but that's what it is. Anything I missed?

Yeah. He also reordered where everything is. So right before we started doing this series so it's it's kind of annoying but you know what i appreciate that he keeps it up to date you know like that's yes just more respect for him so a go and read it it's incredible really really strong recommend b this is going to be out of order and c everything we're quoting is something that he said but it might not be something he stands by currently

yeah and i think it's also worth flagging that when he wrote everything down he writes it down in the most concise way possible which is fantastic and we are doing the opposite we are expanding on It's a disgustingist point. Which is the opposite of fantastic.

And of course, the one overarching thing that comes up just so frequently with this stuff is oftentimes he'll be very prescriptive in terms of... What is the correct thing to do in game design and the only way to design games is this. And I like that as a writing technique. We don't think that way. And in fact, there's some stuff that I pretty heavily disagree with him on. Yeah. So we're going to try and limit repeating ourselves. But just know that that's sort of the subtext and main text.

I don't know. my notes are sorted into agree i have thoughts and disagree and i'm still on agree so everything i'm going to be saying is stuff that i i agree with and then at some point we'll do an episode which is just all the stuff i disagree with remember we thought this was going to be a two-parter i didn't think it was going to be a two-parter i thought it was going to be like four or five and i was so so mistaken all right

do you want to do you want to lead us off i think we're in the same section yes so this is the don't create a whole game section and the exact quote is for my designs there's a 50 chance the game is never played again after its first playtest that is that is why i was like i think we're in the same spot because that was the first quote that i pulled and i was pretty sure that was going to be in that section this is i think something i am particularly like

on his side about and you and i have discussed the fact that you know there are projects where i'm like i don't want to work on this and you're like but it's going to be amazing and i'm like but i want it to be amazing yesterday i don't care about it being amazing tomorrow i want to move on to the next thing that excites me so i i very much like i play i throw out i play i throw out i play i throw out if it's not working by the first three drafts is my rule it goes

away and a lot of the time after the first one is like ah yeah this this is nothing.

I think three drafts is but sent me i find nowadays i have a much higher success rate at starting designs that starting from a place where it's a good idea exactly that it works so i think, nowadays I'm at better than 50% but honestly maybe I should be cutting, them more aggressively and I think that one trap that I fall into, this is on my mind since we just recorded the episode with Alex about co-designing that should be out by now,

is that when I'm co-designing I'm much less likely to scrap a project and I think that's something I need to be more cognizant of, because it's not just my project it's somebody else's and if it was just mine I'd be like yeah it's not working I'll throw it out but because it's something we agreed to work together and we got excited about and you get so much pleasure from working with someone so like that's interfering with the signals you're like but i'm having a great time

and it's like no aj you're having a great time hanging out with your friends the game that you're working on isn't necessarily a great time i'm just going to give an example of the most recent game that i can remember just completely throwing it off the first draft and i'm sure every designer has this thing where they they build it in their head and it's perfect and they bring it to the table and it sucks for me it was this idea that i've been in love with for like four years and

i finally sat down to build it and literally one play i was like oh this this is absolutely nothing which is that there's like four seasons to the game so let's say what are the seasons uh summer autumn.

Winter spring wow that was really hard for me to remember and every card has four things that you can do and you start with a hand of four cards and you have to choose which one to play when but once it's played it stays up front of you and it re-triggers during that so the first one you play will trigger four times the second one you play will trigger three times the third one you play etc etc terrible just just a mess

the first thing you do is read 16 pieces of information and try to predict like i like strategy games where you have to think ahead it was it was a disaster it It was just so messy. But in my head, it's such a clean system that fits together well that I'm still part of me is still like, but maybe so anyone listening, feel free to take that idea. I think it's not going to work, but if you can make it work, please do. I want to play that game.

Yeah. And just as a tip to newer designers out there who might not be as comfortable throwing things away, I would say, think of it this way. When you're playtesting, is it like, oh, I see things that I can fix about the game and you're sort of focused too much on that.

Or is it that there's something really good here and there's bad parts that you can fix if you don't see that thing that's already working then you need to reassess the core of it right if you if you play test and you're like yeah i see all these areas that i can fix it and maybe someday it will get good after three play tests i think that's a fair rule of thumb if there's still not that really fun thing in it i think it it's okay

to let it go and just try another thing did we talk about scarcity mode in the collaboration episode i know i brought it up but yes okay so So for me, the easiest thing that makes it easier, the thing that makes it easiest to throw designs out is that I have more designs than any human can work on in their life.

I have a list of ideas that is more. So rather than go from the top down and spend two years on each one, I just want to spend like, I want to burn through the bad ones to get to the good ones. And I would be surprised if there are many designers listening to this who are like, but I only have three ideas. Play more games. Play more games if you have three ideas, because you should, to be prescriptive, have a list of 700 ideas that you're excited to work on.

Or listen back to our very first episode about coming up with ideas.

Okay. The next quote I have is, I think, from that same section, just create the beginning. I think it was a header, so it's in all caps, but I like to imagine it's being shouted. I'm currently working on a really cool solo project that will be a campaign of sorts. And the desire, the natural desire as a designer is to be like, cool, let's make all the content and then start playtesting. No, like he says in this post, just make enough to like play three turns.

After three turns, because remember, you're not looking for the complete game. You're looking for that spark of like, oh, this is fun. This is an interesting decision. And so you don't need an end condition. You don't need 20 cards in the deck. You need two cards in the deck.

The one I printed out i want to have a deck of like 30 spells in the end i have five spells i want to have a you know 20 locations that you can explore i have four locations and playtesting right now i've been playtesting a bunch because i'm really enjoying it kind of sucks because i'm like oh what will i draw next oh it's that one again right one of the four that i've created but the fact that i'm frustrated there's not new material rather than the

game breaking down before i even get to that point is a very very good sign yeah literally the first playtest i had with game where i want to try an event deck of sorts i literally made three events because i wanted to play the game for three rounds and that that was it our game cozy hollow i think for a long time we were playtesting with four tools because each player gets two tools and we were like cool you know if.

Sometimes i'll make like five or six just so that mid game if one isn't working you just got a quick replacement rather than have to sit there and ideate but bare bare bare minimum mvp mvp i was watching ted lasso last night mvp mvp do you have any more from that section no all right my next thing stuff is about numbers and player count i think balance is my next section all right i've got a few before then or hit me before then work so work is where a player must do non-entertaining physical

or mental tasks in order for the game to function for example when you play barren park with less than four players it tells you to remove some combination of tiles from each of the piles of tiles numbered one to seven do i really need to do that would the game be terrible if there were just too many of those tiles great i think that you and i hyper sensitive to work i think that like work working with you the the first thing we do is cut work cut work cut work we actually had a conversation

today with the developer we're working with and they were like We want to do this. And I think you and I, we didn't voice it in the meeting because we wanted to go and play test it. But our first thought was like, it's going to add work. And I will do, this is going to sound lazy. I'll do anything to avoid work. Yep. Yeah, strong. I love that term, by the way. You know how useful I find it to have a term for concepts. I think work is an amazing descriptive word for that exact thing.

I always think of it as like bitsiness or fiddliness or this or that. Work is the perfect description. And that example is setup work, but it is true across the board. Well, I think setup work is some of the most insidious work because a lot of designers think- Expensive.

Yeah. A lot of designers think, oh, it doesn't count because you have to do it at the setup and people expect to do it at the step it's so annoying having to do a 12 steps process where it's like first build this deck and then do this thing yeah a very good litmus test is i used when i first played pandemic i wasn't used to hobby games and everything and building that deck in pandemic was a nightmare like just just read the rule book and think of how many steps

there i understand you probably designer out there already understand how pandemic works and you're used to more complex games that have more complex setup but think of the steps of first separate these two types of cards and that have the same back and then you make 10 separate piles and then there has to be the edge case of what if they're not quite equal and then yeah you put in one of each of these cards then shuffle each of these sections of

the deck and then stack the deck on top that's so much work for someone who just sat down to play a new game.

There's one game that might be an exception, but I don't think in any of the games I've published, there has ever been a rule where first you go through a big deck of cards and you take out certain ones marked for certain player counts. I hate that. Despise it. Do whatever you can to cut it. I've got a co-designer friend who pulled out a game and he was like, okay, so the first thing is how many players do we have?

I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This game you're making is for a target audience and people will do it. But sort of as to the quote, like, will the game really break if it doesn't?

And so he said oh let's try it without that worked fine his his instinct his natural first step instinct was to take like was to build those like deck per play account don't make that your first instinct if you absolutely need to do it to solve a problem maybe and i say maybe because a big part of this blog is if you need to do it to solve a problem the game's not good enough don't don't solve problems avoid problems well and i think it

also depends on what type of thing you're making If you look at Pandemic versus Forbidden Island, Forbidden Island uses the same structure of Pandemic, but it's targeting families and kids. And in that one, you don't set up the deck. And if you've played Forbidden Island, you'll see why Pandemic has you set up the deck. Because drawing zero Epidemic equivalent cards until you get to the bottom and then having four of them in a row is quite a different experience.

But like Peter says, this is like, you try not to have this happen. And you might think, but then really weird stuff can happen. Sometimes that's interesting. You know, if you have, what is it? It's a Wonderful World. That's a drafting game that just has one big deck of cards. And there are no different eras like Seven Wonders. There's no different types of cards for player counts. There's just one big fat deck.

And you know what? Sometimes that means round one, you see the only ever payoff card you're ever going to see for the strategy you're doing.

That means you have to prioritize it you know you might have to take yeah that's interesting absolutely 100% I had no thought on that but it's gone so move on and we'll see if it comes back to me I always have follow up I've got more for work. Sometimes in your game, or sorry, something in your game should be- I remembered, sorry, I'm going to interrupt. Go for it. Stonemaier's design guidelines. One of the things he really strongly recommends is not having rounds.

And I think Daniel talks about that maybe even in the section, because having rounds involves, now you have a teardown stage, a setup stage. Now, I've made games with rounds, I've made games without rounds. The platonic ideal, after reading this blog, I sat down and made a game with no rounds, no special anything.

The first player gets one coin second gets two third gets three etc etc and then you just start and you play doing the exact same action every turn until someone wins it's so clean there is no work and it's so like instantly fun and it's because of this blog so yeah no no rounds is a really good example of no work if that makes sense okay something in your game should be worth one point if that's not the case your point values are too high what is your opinion on this so,

So Jeff Fraser came on the podcast once and argued the opposite, I would say, and not argued as in him and Daniel, we got him onto debate, but he made the case. He gave me a really good, useful design tool, which is that if you start at one, the difference between like one, two, three, and four is two times, three times, four times. That's a massive swing. If you start at two, two, three, four, five is one and a half times, twice, two and a half times. And that is a much more gentle curve.

I think gentle is not a word that Daniel is interested in. So I can see why Jeff, especially because Jeff is a developer and he comes from that developer smoothing stuff out mindset, which is great. You need that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Having said that, since reading this, this blog changed my life.

The reason why I want to do this 20,000 part series is because this blog upgraded me as a designer. I sat down with a bunch of my games that I had been playing for a while and playtesting and just applied some principles and the games just got better and cleaner. It's a big bag of tools that have made my games actively better just from reading it. And this was one of them. I have a game, Tiny Folk Cafe, where you serve customers and you get coins.

And I'm going to say it out loud. You're going to be like, Peter, come on. You'd either get two or three coins from a customer, and at the end of the game, every three coins was a point. That's fine. I changed it to you get one or two coins from customers, and every coin is a point. You know what? It's more than five times better.

It's just like every part of that is better. Because now when I'm collecting, like, let's say I serve four customers, I used to be like, okay, two plus two plus three plus two is nine.

Like, it's doable. It's fine. now it's one plus one plus one plus two that is you don't even have to think about it and obviously at the end converting points into coins into points one to one how could it be better than that, yeah and it's very i just want to zero in on something you said and emphasize it a little bit which is smaller numbers have bigger impact that's effectively like what daniel's saying what you're saying here is that when

you go from one to two that is a huge jump and that's what what jeff was saying as well but whereas jeff was seeing it as like it's it's a barrier to being able to sort of balance certain things you know it can cause you some issues it makes a gradiency issue right but having a low granular fidelity yeah, sorry go ahead yeah you use fidelity i use granularity i mean the same is probably better but yeah i just remember we did an episode on it i was like what did we call that episode.

But yes having a low granularity means that every number matters a lot and every increase matters a lot and that's something that really appeals to me as well yeah in in this game you can obviously save the coins for points or you could buy stuff and the the artifacts that you could buy cost two three and four using using that rule and i just made them one two and three and they used to be worth different number of victory points and now they're all worth one it just like it just shrank the

numbers like literally just like reduced all the numbers by whatever factor that is and in the process it's it's less balanced but it's less balanced for everyone it's not like it means it means now now the fact that this one costs three coins and is worth one vp is part of the decision making process whereas before it was roughly balanced, now now that the imbalance is an interesting decision point for the player go ahead completely agree i think that more

imbalance is more interesting like obviously there's extremes here people but i think that having evenly applied imbalance i have no issue with developers are often being like is this too good and i'm like well if it is then the game is use that more and it's not like if it's not fun that's the problem but when people are like man everyone has access to the four actions and one of them is like 10 better than the others cool like what Why is that a problem?

Oh, you. I'm talking about you. I just remembered. I was like, who do I have this conversation with? You're developing a game for Coffee Bean at the moment. And you're like, look, of the four acts you can tape, one of them just seems much better. And I'm like, okay. Cool. I don't think it is. I think it might be better, but I don't think it's much better. And fortunately, that kind of thing is everyone has access to all actions at all times.

And I think that's pretty easy to test of like, cool, try playing a game where

you just do that. if that's the winning strategy yeah there's a problem because now it's not a game of choosing what you do i don't think you can i'm not i'm not trying to have a professional argument with you on the podcast i was just like when did this come up recently and it was you, i've got another one in the work one and this one's so near and dear to my heart, so this is in relation to observation and counting he says try not to make a exact high number matter.

A player must be observant to make sure a condition is or isn't being met, or must constantly evaluate known information. A better way to do this is to make the number only be counted at certain points or when certain things happen. So for instance, in Catan, whenever a player rolls a seven, all players with more than seven cards discard half their cards. But you don't have a strict hand size of seven. We even referenced this, I think, in the co-design episode with Alex.

Yeah. Yeah, I found I'm actually in the same section as you. So I'm going to go backwards slightly. Did you already say this? Some games are adjusted for different player counts by forcing the player to go through each deck and remove certain cards. This is common and should be avoided.

Just really solid advice. I think that's what we were talking about. And then, sorry, I wasn't looking at my notes as you said them, so I don't know if you literally just said this. Halve all the numbers in your game. Does it still work properly? Good. Keep going. You might like the exact ratio of buildings worth two and seven points, but just make them one and three points, please. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

That was the line that made me go through Tiny Folk and be like, what am I doing?

Why am I making these things? I think it was like, yeah, i think the artifacts cost three four or five so it's just this whole other like annoying scale just yeah literally literally do that literally halve the numbers in your game round up all of them or round down whatever you want to do and then play it and if it doesn't break balance to that you know what's a fantastic example about this is slay the spire the board game is literally a developed version

of the video game for in-person play and all the numbers are i think it's about halved maybe it's a third or something like that but they reduced the numbers why they reduced the numbers to make it vastly more playable it used to be that a standard basic attack dealt six damage now i think a standard basic attack does two damage and because of that it's again it creates some of those like slight imbalances which are interesting but it

makes it so much less difficult to play the game and requires so much less work for the player to get to the fun part 100 and And a reminder to people, work is specifically not fun activities you have to do to get to the fun. If in your game, counting is really fun for some reason, then it's not the work.

Maintenance is almost another word for it, where you're not making choices, you're just doing stuff because the game needs you to. It's a pet peeve of mine in board games and screenwriting when I can see, look, this needs to happen, so we're just going to make it happen. Oh, I hate it. I hate it so much. But yeah, going back to the thing I was bringing up there, which is the making exact high numbers matter and players having to make sure that a certain condition is met or not being met.

Those are two enormous bugbears of mine. And that's why most heavy Euros don't land with me is those specific issues. Can you give me an example of them? I mean, I'd just be naming heavy Euros that I haven't played in four years, to be honest.

Oh, you know what? black angel would you may not have played it but i just want to hear what you're talking about yeah so any game where it's like i need to have a specific combination of resources, multiple turns down the line and i have to plan out every one of my turns to be able to oh i think pipeline pipeline or something where it's like yeah i need i need six wood and five steel and four stone and eight gold and then

you're sitting there doing like a bunch of is that what you mean yes and then you have to like reverse engineer it so you're like well this turn i can get two of this and then this turn i can get three of this and i can convert one of this and then you're like it's just so so heady and again this this is by no means all heavy euros all i'm saying is this is the most common thing that turns me off of heavy euros okay let's talk about robotopia because that game

is is kick-started so we can be completely honest about it it's garbage.

What what do you think of the what is the bottom right the blue tiles that have like oh, for those watching my my camera if i do certain gestures it makes certain emojis appear, in robotopia there's to get a certain guild tile you have to have a combination of things is that is that scratching this i just want to pinpoint i'm not fully understanding this this comment so i just want to dive into it yep so that is something that is the type of thing that i'm talking about but i don't have

it in robotopia and i haven't played robotopia in a while so i'm to remember why i think the numbers of the things are much more consistent like usually for the blue tiles if i recall correctly it's like have seven of this one thing or have two of this two of this two of this two of this and for me that's that's so much easier to keep track of i did this very very unconsciously at the time when i was designing this i did i was oh yeah i wanted them all to be patterned so if you're

collecting multiple things that were all the same color or the same number of things or it was one two three so like i think there's one where it's like one green generator two green robots three green cubes stuff like that and similar to what i was saying about like it's not imbalanced if everyone has access to it some of those are easy to get than others it's obviously very situational based on the board state and where

you are and all that but all of them are relatively easy to remember as a result.

Because i wanted and again i was not doing this to solve that problem it was just it fitted my brain nicer i wanted these clean patterns for each of them i will say that my first published game was a game called scuttle which is on the shelf behind me have you played that that's a, very old old design predates you by i don't think i have so in the in the episode with alex i was thinking about how i had to teach my co-designers that we store certain numbers in the brain.

So for example a game of like trying to reach an arbitrary high number if it's a hundred it's much much much easier to remember yeah like it's still going to involve a lot of math and counting up and stuff like that but if if you gave me one game that was like hey first 100 points win a one that was first to 88 points wins i would be like what are you doing start everyone with 12 points and make it 100 to win like it it means that i don't have to keep that number in my brain so in scuttle you

win by having 21 or more points which sounds like an arbitrary number until you've unless you've played blackjack in which case it's like yeah obviously 21 and uh for those who don't know scuttle has cards that look kind of reminiscent of like a traditional playing card deck yeah yeah yeah and it only goes up to 10 so it's one through 10 and 21 is a really handy number for that because it means you can't win with two cards you need two and a kicker or three

mid or four little like like it just does some interesting stuff if you're dealing with one to 10 and 21 is the goal that's a great example of scaffolding as well where you're right like that number has specific meaning and that meaning comes through to players clearly because they're looking at things that look like playing cards i think a much less good example of this is with hand sizes which is more like because there's so many games that

chose the arbitrary number of seven for your hand size oh yeah if seven isn't the hand size i can't remember it i i assume my hand size is seven for everything and whenever there's a game that doesn't have.

It if it's not seven i want something to help me remember it yeah like we were talking about with cartouche i think that i think we talked about that off air didn't we no no that was that was in the episode with alex okay because i was talking about with jeff how he was like yeah people remember and i'm like but i don't want people to remember a float floating point is the term i used i'm not a programmer so i might use that completely wrong we'll get a bunch of emails uh what else

yeah i'm in balance you in balance i thought let's see i thought that previous section was balance i think i'm in balance yes all right you start and i'll see i'll see if i'm in the same area as you, i should have written down headers this this is this is a disaster this is why we're the only only the second best advice on the internet. OK, so this is one where he says.

I know some cards i make are imbalanced too strong or too weak that's fine it just happened that the clean simple version of the card was imbalanced choose elegance over balance i am so i have that the next sentence i have as well as long as the card has some value and isn't feel bad for anyone i'm happy with it so this is obviously something you agree with oh yeah absolutely i do not oh what's this but i don't care about the balance it's not that i say oh it has to be balanced over elegant it's

that i choose play patterns over elegance and this is something where i know you and i have slightly different opinions expand i'm gonna mute myself and eat toast while you talk sure so we were just talking about card effect in the game we have with AEG earlier today and I had a suggestion that would make the play pattern better and you had a suggestion that was make the card more elegant basically and I'm greatly oversimplifying and in the end you had a different suggestion that was elegant and

improved the play pattern but if I have to choose between you're talking about scales right just so I know that we're on the same page no i was talking about the action tile for butterfly the the push to flowers thing yes yes okay thank you we had two very similar conversations back to back right yeah. But basically i just think that the way that players interact with the cards.

The way that the play patterns play out that is there counterplay to these effects is it enjoyable to use to me that's more important than having the simplest. Possible version of a card. And I had a different comparison of mine, but I lost it. But yeah, basically, the number one thing I care about is play patterns. And elegance is not far behind, but I think that you would probably flip-flop the two where elegance is more important to you and then play patterns would be like a close second.

Is that fair? Yeah, I think also the context of this is when he's talking about cards, he uses cards in a very specific way which is there's a big deck of cards you can draw them and then you basically use them once i guess the the cards that come out on the table can be used more than once but it's not like so the example that you're talking about was one of the four core actions of that faction in the game like every time you play with that faction you are going to see that card and it

is going to be on average one quarter of your turns using that card, that's very different to a single card in a deck of 60 you, Yes, I still care. Like pick any card on the deck of 60. I would rather that card be more complex and have a more interesting picker. Oh, like for instance, I know. I thought of one. There was a card effect in the game we have with AEG that was, I wanted it to read, deals one damage to only a minion or a troop, a not leader.

So it can't be used to you know kill the opponent but it could be used to kill the enemy troops which is a really interesting play pattern and you were very against that because i was going to say i would i would not like that in the game that's all right it's it's on the game but that i think that's another example of where i have veto power but like i i would go to bat against that card for like five different reasons

and i see those but again to me play patterns is number one by far interesting yeah i think part of it too is almost the scarcity mode thing of like.

We can always come up with something that doesn't like we can always come up with an elegant card that does the play pattern like in the example used earlier that happened twice with scales and with the action tile both times we were like well just do this and then we had a elegant thing that matched the play pad we were going for so i i won't compromise on that i won't compromise on elegance because i don't want to attach myself to this one elegant idea when

instead there's 10 possible elegant ideas and i'd rather have the best one of those i don't necessarily agree that there's always a solution that does both but maybe i'm just not a good enough designer to come up with those maybe maybe you're in scarcity mode i've done this long enough that there are very very very very few unsolvable problems in game design you'll run into them sometimes but the the more you designed and this is not me saying yeah aj you're not good enough i'm

saying like the the more you solve the unsolvable problem the less unsolvable problems you can even see anymore and yeah for me i just i just won't compromise on that i'm awful to co-design with because i just why put that in instead of spending an hour coming up with something that doesn't do that yep it's always worth trying for sure yeah we skipped a bunch of stuff because i have i have notes from earlier on the same page look at a player's hand they discard a card of your choice.

Oh i think this is still in work sorry okay so this is something that i i talk about all the time oh we talked about this in maybe we haven't talked about this okay i'm going to read the quote then i'm going to dive into it look at a player's hand they discard a card of your choice that's a decent ability but the player really should take note of all their opponent's other cards and keep them in mind that's not fun but you're a bad player if

you don't have we talked about this on the podcast before, don't know okay i am obsessed with incentives obviously you know game design is incentive design blah blah but specifically if to win a player should do something and that thing is not fun you have designed the game wrong and this is one of the reasons why i really actively dislike point salad games there's a game i don't think i want to name it because i've worked with the design and i like the designer i just like but there's

a game i played and if i've already talked about this then you'll be like pity you named it last time what are you doing there's a game i played and it was it was fun but it was a game where at the end you total up your victory points and win and i had a choice i could either do a which got me a token which at the end of the game converted into victory points i could do b which set up an engine that later could get victory points you won the game anywhere between like let's say 70.

To 120 victory points that was the range this was going to be a difference of one or two victory points at most and yet to be playing the game to win i had you know the game was telling me hey sit down and do this puzzle that is how you win this game and i i get angry at the game when it does that i get angry at the game when it's like hey just so you know in order to win this you have to do this really not in order to win the

the alignment we talked about this in the fundamentals of game design the alignment of game design is the most fun thing should also be what makes you win because players are going to pursue winning at the cost of fun so it is your job as a designer to line those up as soon as you have these little offshoot paths where it's like hey spend five minutes to see if you get another point like don't make me do that do not make me

do this so this is a really good example you know look at all the cards you really should memorize them oh okay i was gonna say two things one is magic arena actually if you use that type of effect it will just keep the cards revealed forever until like something happens where maybe it could have gotten shuffled in the deck and you don't know but the first time it happens it.

Even pops up and says you don't have to keep notes don't worry we're not going to make you do that and i'm sure i've said this before but bears are peeing my favorite whipping boy for this extra work is whenever it's the top card of the discard piles and then you choose now the order of cards that get discarded matter every single time for this one effect. I've got a game that deals with the top.

It's just been in my mind like i i've seen those words recently i can't remember what game because yeah i i normally really dislike that as well oh right yeah it's tiny folk it it is it is not a thing we have to remember delays basically once around you can use the top card of the discard pile one player can do that once around so you're never ever in a position where you can like do that and then reveal the previous one so i i have uh maybe maybe it's still a problem

maybe it'll get cut have you played bellatro have we talked about bellatro before i played blotro for like two minutes but i don't like poker so it's not for me gotcha i think it's amazing yeah you brought it up before yeah so in that game the the the big weakness of that game that the designers come out and been like hey look this is the way i want to make it it's going to stay like this if that's not for you that's not for you mad respect for that cool if you want to make a game about

memorization make a game about memorization just be aware that's what you're doing in blotro you're multiplying a crazy amount of numbers sort of like i imagine splay the spider gets to this splay the splay the spider slay the spire i imagine gets to this point where it's like okay i do sit down with pen and paper and like math out what this turn is going to do before i do it bellachro has that problem to the nth degree i actually today i watched a video of someone.

Playing basically an impossible mode it's essentially unwinnable but he's always seeing how far he can get it's the hardest deck at the highest hardest level with no jokers which is the main way you power up your deck and so several times in the stream he's like okay guys i'm pulling out the calculator because i need to know the exact number because we're dealing with like will i hit 21 900 or will i hit 22 000 and it matters like it's the whole run lost if you don't and

so that's a classic example of like if you really want to be like high level competitive you're gonna have a calculator handy, I don't. I play on the easiest stake on the easiest deck, and I have a lot of fun with it. But that's exactly the kind of thing we're talking about. What else you got? Cards with text should be self-explanatory. If a normal person will read the card and needs to check the FAQ, the card needs to be rewritten. This is a huge design philosophy of mine.

We've done Village Pillage, one, two, three, four, technically seven expansions to Village Pillage, because the new one's coming with four.

And yeah seven expansions village pillage and i am very proud of the fact that we do not have an errata or faq section anywhere and we've never needed it every card it is crystal clear exactly what it does and if it wasn't sort of like we were saying about play pattern versus elegance it got cut because i knew we could come up with a card that didn't need it and so village pillage is it's not not that it's a complex game but there is no part of the rule book and there's no threat

on bgg no one's ever needed one this is this is a very well-played game like this is not an obscure hit that only two people an obscure game that only four people have played village pillage has never had to explain a card in the rulebook and that is that is my goal now i don't always hit it critic kitchen has pages of a runner because there's seven different things combining in weird ways but i will always always and i think with um

the the ag game this is why i'm always like cut it i don't want people looking at the rulebook to see how a card works, Yeah, to me, this is like just such an automatic thing of like, yes, you need to do this. But I think one way to think through how to do it or how to make life easier for you in terms of writing the text is to think about the structure of the game rather than the content of the cards, right?

Because if you have a card where it interacts with something else in a weird way, if the structure of the game is really clean, often you can have complex things that just make sense. I think Glory to Rome does a fantastic job of that, where in Glory to Rome, it has so many different weird interactions. And whenever someone asks me a rules question like, if I do this and this, does it work like the way I think it does? The answer has every single time been yes.

It always works the way you think it does. The dream. Yeah. My whole next section is about playtesting. Did you either skip that or made it a different order to you?

I don't see playtesting anywhere close to me let's jump back to balance and then we'll go backwards to playtesting yeah i'm still in balance yeah yep that's what i'm saying my balance stuff it predates sorry my playtesting stuff is before that okay so for balance i've got another one the other thing about cards is that a player has many of them some will be imbalanced individually, but a hand is likely to be balanced overall. Yeah.

He brings up the example, maybe you've got this in your quotes, of Scrabble, which I really like as an example, where the two blank cards, the two blank tiles, they're worth zero points, that's their weakness, but they're still the best two tiles in the game. And a Q is the worst, because you might not have a U. I play Scrabble with my son, and he drew a Q the other day and had no U, and it sucked for him. And so I won.

It'll shock you to learn that I beat my seven-year-old son in Scrabble regularly. I've never, never, never, and obviously the queue's worth 10 points and that's how it quote unquote balances, but there's still better and worse cards or tiles in Scrabble. And I have never had that interfere with anyone's enjoyment of the game because you're drawing a bunch of them and the game is, here's gradient, here's a range of stuff, go for it. And I'll just repeat that when Daniel's talking about cards,

he doesn't mean any possibly specific card. He's talking about a big deck that you draw from and that's your hand and you take actions. So he's using cards in a very specific way. Yeah, I'll also add that this doesn't just apply to cards. The biggest thing this applies to is dice. Counterintuitively, the more dice you roll, the less random your game is because it's more likely to even out.

I would argue one of the few weaknesses of Undaunted is often the game comes down to a very small number of consequential dice rolls that often are basically a coin flip. You can position well for it, but it's often just out of your hands. But if you rolled significantly more dice, then it would even out of a lot more. I stopped playing Virgin Queen after the second game where someone did the gunpowder plot, which the last step of the gunpowder plot is roll a bunch of dice.

If six of them are sixes, you win. If not, you've spent the whole game building this for no reason. Which it's thematic or whatever, but man, I hate that as an ending to a game. I hate it. Yeah. Yeah, and my classic example of game using bad mechanics in a good way, Black Orchestra, where the whole game comes down to a weighted against you die roll, and you spend so much work just getting a few percentage points more likely

to be able to hit it, and then you roll your dice, and you're like, yep, I failed. Cool. What's the Richard Garfield thought experiment? Like random chess or something? Yeah, you play a game of chess, then roll a die and see who actually- If it's a six, you win. No, if it's a one, then you lose, no matter what else happened. Yeah, so it's like, it still matters, the skill, but the thought experiment is proving that you can be high random and high luck.

I've got, if there are two options. Sorry, high luck and high skill. Yes. If there are two options and one is chosen only 25% of the time, that's still fine. Yep. See, this is the opposite of what you were saying earlier about play patterns. What do you mean? So, let me try and restate what my position is.

I care about a fun play pattern meaning it's engaging for the players to take that line yeah and that's it that's it so like that could play in a lot of different ways but basically if the way that people play with this thing is fun then cool i'm on board with it if and if that come and if that really fun play pattern becomes less fun to make a more elegant version of it i like more fun version than the more elegant version yeah on board i'm gonna

go again because this is one of my favorite quotes of the whole blog a good designer balances by changing numbers a bad designer adds text rules and caveats yep 100 100 i think i have oh sorry god oh go ahead i have traditionally not costed cards it is it is very rare for you to pick up a ptc game and find that cards have inherent costs on them village pillage every card you can buy and we've got hundreds at this point is one turnip it

costs you one turnip to buy a card across the board which meant a lot of like balancing internally to make sure that the cards were all worth one turnip or the other way that people do it is an auction system of some kind where it's like yeah there's no numbers on them because you the players work out what they're worth and how much you prioritize them so i i could name examples of that but it's pretty self-explanatory.

This blog especially this section made me realize the benefit of of costing stuff is it gives you another number to change and changing numbers as he says is just the best way to balance anything um the the ag game that we worked on today which is why it's top of mind for both of us the four actions you have available don't have costs there are no costs on those so we have to use there's also very few numbers in the game like there's there's a few but we sort of have to use text

and rules to to balance those and when we have a number it's a big sigh of relief for both of us because we're like, oh, good, good. We can just like, oh, we can tweak that number. So his sort of didactic position is give yourself lots of numbers to work with. Not an overwhelming amount, but like, you know, Magic the Gathering has a cost. It has a defense. It has attack. Between those three numbers, you can make a lot of interesting cards before adding a single word of text.

A 10-1 in Magic the Othering is so different to a 1-10 that like, wow, that's a lot of design space just because they've got three numbers on the card. But even if you only have one number, if you just have, say, a cost of a card and that's the only number that you have, I would rather, I agree with him, I'd rather see it where you just plus or minus that cost rather than changing the text to make the game more verbose to be like, oh, here's the one exception to that thing.

And i think one of the difficulties that we've run into with our game is like you said we have so few numbers that we can't just rely on knobs knobs being the term of like something that you can adjust up or down typically dials let's dive into this a little bit because i think this is a really interesting useful point or discussion not not necessarily a point i i i think of it as.

Not only the dials that you have but also the the things that you can tweak and change without it, making the game significantly more complex so i won't use the ag game just because that's still, in development i'll talk about the the game i was saying that i pulled out i only have the four cards for and so i'm playing it with just those four cards i was one dial short and i can't explain how i knew i was one dial short but i had three types of resources which

were very different levels of like basically it's got gold it's got apples it's got crystals and it's got stars but stars are extremely rare and you might get like one of them in the game so that's not really a dial like i can play with so i had i had these three resources and i could change the numbers on those and that was about it and that wasn't enough design space for me for me to to do things so i added a good or evil track and now there are some actions that when you take them you go

you you get more evil and there are some actions that require you to be on the good side of things to take them so like you visit a village you see all their stuff cool you got a bunch of stuff but now you're two more evil you go to a village they won't they won't give you shelter for the night unless if you're in the evil zone it's it's a very like it is another rule absolutely i'm not trying to say like look i did it with no rules but it's such an interesting intuitive

rule and that was all the dials i needed to make all the content i want in in our ag game that i just said we're not going to talk about we don't have many numbers but what we do have is when you attack someone there's is it two or three different yeah there's three different things that you can attach to that i'll just say it's a push piercing and uh.

What's the third one is there range range oh of course so like and each of those is trust me fairly intuitive once you understand the game and so anytime we ran into this problem of like this card is just worse than this one we're like we'll just give it a different effect and it doesn't even like those three effects aren't necessarily ranked they're just different so in the same way as i was saying a 100 a one to 10 one attack 10 defense monster

is so different to a 10 attack one defense monster an attack with push and piercing is so different to an attack with range that i'm comfortable having those roughly in the same kind of thing and so they're not dials that we could turn necessarily but they are tools that we could use to roughly balance the stuff so here's why i disagree i see what you're saying here's why i disagree because it changes the play patterns if you have an attack that has piercing versus an attack that has

plus one range those have very different play patterns and if we have an effect where we're like we need we need to make this attack or this card or whatever a bit stronger if we just haphazardly slap one of these keywords onto it it can dramatically change how that effect actually plays out for the opponents a push for instance moves the enemy unit that you were attacking and that can also be applied to movement.

And I think specifically when we apply it to movement as one of those knob modifiers. That dramatically changes how the move actually functions and what counterplay the opponent has to it. So I think- It sounds like a plus to me, not a minus. Well, it's something that we need to consider, right? We've had it before in discussions about making something better, and you'll throw out one of those modifiers that you think would be a good fit for it.

And you may very well be right, but I always have to take a second and be like, well- You're coming at it not from the approach of, like, does this work, but, like, what does this, what play pattern does this change?

Yeah like for instance the uh the butterfly we just added push onto it well we added push onto its fly ability where it goes anywhere and basically can just push someone off of that space but the play pattern changed that is now the opponent can't block any spaces you can teleport anywhere and just force them off and that was a point of concern for me in the most recent play test so it's just something it's one of the reasons i like working with you is that you are approaching it

from this very different angle um you and jeff approach it often from the same different angle to me and so it's always fun to have those conversations i'll talk about village pillage once more which.

Is that there's these four suits and in three of the suits it really really matters who you're opposing so like if i'm playing a wall it needs to do something very different against a raider than it does against a farmer and so even though i the only number i had in village pillage for a long time was the turnips i could add or remove turnips from a card that was it but by having that other tool of like well okay what does it do against each different one

now it could be like look this guy is just a little bit too weak compared to the rest what if if he's against a merchant he gets an extra turnip like just that little tweak is enough to balance it and so it's it's a new dial not not a dial it's another one of those tools for balance that i find really interesting but to your point we had to be super conscious to always make sure because the core of the game is scissors paper rock we had to always be conscious to make sure that walls were

bad against farmers farmers about against raiders raiders are banned against walls that had to always be the golden rule and then within that we had a lot of freedom yeah that's a great point and i think that considering other types of knobs that you can add to your cards that aren't numerical is super valuable i think for instance tags are kind of similar to what you're saying there where instead of like what's against it's like if you play this and you

already played one of these this turn you get the extra boost or whatever yeah or arc nova Terraforming Mars, they have those tags where it's like, look, this card is not as actively powerful, but it unlocks the ability to use a bunch of other cards that interest.

Yeah, and so that's a way to add a knob that adds a ton of depth in a very simple way, right? It's like this card does this normal effect, and then if you have this extra thing, then it goes from being slightly underpowered to slightly overpowered, makes it 10 times more interesting, almost no extra complexity. Yeah, yeah. Okay, what you got? Okay, this one's a little bit long. In an earlier version of my gangster game, location cards would come and go throughout the game.

I wanted the board to keep changing. I could have said every turn or every round, draw a new location card. However, I didn't want any kind of turn structure where players had to remember to draw a new location. I wrangled with this for a long time before settling on a fantastic and easy answer. I created a clearly imbalanced gateway car space that people wanted to go to, which also drew a new location card. I love that. I think that's amazing.

Genius this is where robotopia came from like not this blog post but like worker placement games what do you do you put out your workers end it around you take them back i wanted to see what happens if you didn't and so when you in robotopia we've talked about this a lot but you put your workers out and they never come back to you you can make new workers but those workers will never return okay cool now the board's full what do we do you move the master robot and wipe a big

chunk of the board and for every worker that you wipe you get a little bonus architects of the west kingdom came out around the same time as i was working on robotopia and i was sort of worried that he'd done the same thing and he's done it in a very different way have you played that game, i have it's been a long time so i want people basically you can go to a space and then you can go again and if you go there again you get a

bonus for every worker that's already there so you're incentivized to just like hit the space up again and again and again but at any point another player can be like hey i'm gonna go there and send all your guys to jail so the more of your people it's sort of like a pushy luck game it's very different to robotopia while being compared for I think good reason. Yeah, because in both games, it's an incentive thing.

The more workers there are out on the board, the more incentivized someone is to do the action that clears it. And it does it in an organic way that doesn't require turn structure or anything like that. Yeah. And yeah, it gets rid of work. It gets rid of round structure. Yeah, there's some really interesting stuff there. Yeah. That's it for me for that section. I've got, in simpler, more fun-based games, imbalance can add excitement.

It might not seem like a good idea for some things to be clearly better than others, but when you get them, it's exciting.

And i think this is where he uses the scrabble thing as an example you know playing uno draw four is the best card draw for a while this just it's just better but it's fun to draw though it's like it's it's fun to play fun to draw and i think this is something that i was as a designer very afraid of for a long time like one one player having more fun than others no no no no no and i have i have way taken my foot off the gas now

the other extreme is like oh you drew that card you're going to win don't do that yeah i feel like a lot of designers get so annoyed a lot of newer designers especially get really annoyed at playing games from our childhood that were really imbalanced and have a lot of like negative memories from that but you don't think of the positive.

Imbalances that were fun right you remember the like oh someone drew like the draw five uno card and kept playing that against me over and over and i ended up with 10 000 cards in my hand i couldn't do anything about it but if you draw one or two extra of the wild cards and ticket to ride off the top of the deck that feels really good feels so good and it's not going to win you the game no it's still just one card you know it's it's functionally no

different than if you had just drawn the actual card that you needed but it feels so much better i'm going to jump back to the stuff that about i think it's play testing section.

It's good to acquire a game design buddy or two. You want someone with the same level of seriousness as yourself. I love that he specifies seriousness. Yes. This is very simple, basic advice, but the advantage of having a game design buddy. So I have a local designer called Matt who I work with and we weren't designing together. I think I talked about this in the collaboration episode. We were just playtesting together because we were both serious about it.

So about once a week, I was going down to Beverly Hills a lot. I live in LA to go to medical appointments. And so every time I was going down to a medical appointment, because my doctors were all in the same complex in Beverly Hills, I would message him and be like, hey, I'm in Beverly again. Do you want to playtest? And that turned into us. He started coming out here and we meet halfway. That turned us into co-designing.

But it all became because he, like me, runs a business from home and wants to be a game designer. So he was like, yes, I want to playtest with you as often as we reasonably can while it's still fun for both of us. And so just by playing each other's games back and forth, I got a lot more stuff at the table than I would going to even a board game convention or a playtest day because it's two of us. So as long as your game plays at two, you play mine, I play yours,

you play mine, I play yours. Cool. You are getting 50% of the time is spent on your games. Yeah. Much better ratio. That's the only, like, that is why I'm able to do so much playtesting, right? If I had to go to a playtesting event, play my game, and then play seven other people's games.

And like the games i'm bringing i'm trying to keep them tight right and i'm gonna stop it early if i already see a problem so i'm usually playing for under an hour sometimes well under an hour to get one of my play tests done and then someone else is like here's my three hour game and i want to play test the whole thing and you're a jerk if you don't have we done an episode on play testing because we really should we'll we'll check later make a note hey you read the next one

i need to close my door because my grocery delivery is about to arrive okie dokie next one is try to keep visible information to a minimum.

This is something Peter and I feel so strongly about. There's also an UGG factor that puts people off the moment they see the game. A game looks complicated, people will be less likely to want to play it. And if it's too late for them to get away, it's feel badness before the game has even begun. A simpler game also just looks nicer. I know that we both feel this. I feel this so strongly.

We've been doing this podcast for five years. I deeply apologize if I'm just saying stuff I've said a dozen times on the podcast or other already if i see text i have to read it i don't know what it is about my brain but you can't show me text and i ignore it so if i'm watching a subtitled movie i am reading the movie i do not know what's happening on the screen outside of that little text box if i'm reading a comic i get

to the end of the page i'm like who said all those things and it's it's just draws me and this is one of the reasons why i love euros so much because it doesn't icons don't do that to me icons i'm able to like gloss over if your game has a bunch of text i am reading your game and and and that's that's overwhelming like that's all i'm doing.

Village pillage we hired a developer village pillage and what they wanted to do was take the luck out of the game entirely by the first instead of having a little market of four cards that you can buy they want to have all the cards in like four columns and you buy from the bottom so buying one unlocks the next one and i set it up on the table and i i blanched i was just like i need to read every card no no no no and

village pillage is a very light game which i assume you've played at one point it is not a game where you should have 25 cards on the table at the start of the game it's it's all wrong no it is so exhausting just looking at all these different pieces you got five different resources and then 15 different types of units and then each terrain type is a different thing and it's especially all at the start of the game super overwhelming think of how much less overwhelming something is

like carcassonne where by the end of carcassonne the board state's really complex but you've built up to it very slowly literally piece by piece that's much less overwhelming and even when it's all built out think of how simple and clean it looks there's a pretty little castle over here there's you know a nice little road over here it's still not visually busy it each towel has like a couple things on it at most really,

100%. And like you said, text is so much worse than icons in terms of visual busyness.

I am relentless when it comes to cutting text. You experience this. Relentless. Text on cards in your hand, totally fine. Text on the board, not fine. Use iconography if you have to have something. Even in your hands, I want to cut every word. I'm reading a book about fiction writing. Well, not about fiction writing. I'm reading a book about writing generally called On Writing Well by William Zinzer.

I'm loving it. It's from the 70s, I think. I'm reading the 30-year anniversary edition and really strongly recommend if you're a writer and even if you're a game designer because like he's just talking about how to cut words cut words cut words and the things that i'm i've been a professional writer for well over a decade now and i'm learning so much from this book that i've heard people talk about never understood and this book is making me understand it so he says like go through with

a red pen and and cut a word does the sentence still make sense without it great destroy that word look at your you know collection of two or three words could they be one word instead of adjective word is there a word that covers that adjective and and this is the one that i think is really relevant is there a shorter word for what you're trying to say.

And i can't remember what game it is but i was working on a game recently and i changed something like the the term characters to folk let's say it wasn't folk but f-o-l-k and i cut half a page for my rule book like it's it's and on individual cards that's huge it's so much one thing think of how sorry i was just gonna say think of how much more an icon does as well rather than yes yep when you play this card gain one gold to your supply or something like that

instead there's just a picture of a gold coin yeah so clean i'm working on the tiny folk cafe rule book at the moment and And I had, sorry, a little module for Tiny Folk Cafe.

And I had to keep using the phrase, a barista with a bunny. That's a nightmare. So many words. I just came up with a little icon, which is a barista on a bunny. It made all of those cards from like 10 words into six. And that is a huge reduction. In the game Meow, which is, you can see right there. I had in the initial draft, and the developer I was talking about that came onto Village Pillage, he was like, hey, cut these words. Every card would say, on your turn, you may.

And he was like, you don't know any of those words because it is universally applied. In our AEG game, we have up to three chunks of text. And for a long time, we had loop, then loop, then loop. We cut the then. If it's a new paragraph, you just make it part of the structure, not the content. If it's a new paragraph, it is sequential. And then that let us cut the word then, which doesn't sound like much, but it really adds up.

And I think the number one, if I had to pick one spot, the number one spot that you should be trying to cut text is your reference cards. Because if people are looking at a big block of text, they're not going to look at it. This is very much on your mind, isn't it? Yeah. Just earlier today, I was cutting a ton of text from our most complicated character in the AEG game. And I was like, what is all this doing here? I think I've talked to that. We didn't have time to write it.

So I just copied and pasted something for the rule book and I've not gone back and like cut it down. That's why it's such a nightmare. And I don't know if this is the right call long term. But what I did for the short term is I also bolded the sections that are basically always relevant. And I didn't bold the sections that are like could come up basically. Or in a few cases, and I fully support this, you just cut the section that could

come up. And you said this is not a reference card rule. This is a rule book rule.

Absolutely. Absolutely. absolutely okay let's uh let's get through my playtesting section and then if you there's anything else you want to jump in am i done i think i'm back to balance this is such a confusing structure okay helping someone else with their game this is a long one helping someone else with their game will teach you things as well it's like a second game you're working on but you don't have to do any work whenever i play another designer's games i try to solve the game's

problems as though my own games. A buddy is, I think that's a separate point. So yeah, again, just talking about like having a playtesting buddy, it is going to sound weird. It doubles your designs. Oh, I want to jump back. You said that you don't go to a big play, well, not that you don't, but you prefer one on one playtesting because a big playtesting day, you're getting one seventh the playtime.

It is important not to underestimate how useful it is to get a bunch of eyes on your game, especially designers. I will often go out and visit Alex in North Carolina, like we talked about.

And he has the best i think the best like concentration of game designers in the u.s, i love it when i get to go there i will happily go to all their events even though i will spend three hours and only get to play one game because i get eyes on that one game from some of the best in the business and they massively solve problems i would never even thought of they come up with solutions and one of the joys of playtesting is that another person's suggestion in your game

is now yours you you own that like they just did free work for you essentially and vice versa when you give them an idea don't be like make sure make sure i get a name on the box or whatever, i got a game with amigo that was it was good it was good it was good and then a play tester was like hey you should do this and i did it became great immediately like amigo signed it in a snap.

It it almost feels weird to take credit for that because his idea brought my game from like oh yeah this is fun to amazing and i'll give him a special thanks of course isaac shalev who we friend of the podcast he's in our discord he's the one who things in rings had this complex like economy and he was like don't do that just make it empty your hand and first first empty your hand wins i implemented that change immediately showed

it to joe immediately signed the game like without eyes oh actually a different playtester ren who i think also listens, was playing my game picnic and was like what if this was a venn diagram like.

That my most successful game this is this feel this i feel guilty about this sometimes is frankenstein from like playtester suggestions the reason i don't feel that bad about it is because i give out a lot of suggestions that i know have helped get games signed but like this is the advantage of there's huge advantage just having a playtesting buddy there are also massive massive massive advantages of getting a wide variety of especially game designers to play your game yeah i

said before i have about nine playtests a week each one of those is a different person and so every one of my games will go through every one of those groups as long as the player count matches yeah because i i want to make sure and at least once but usually many times because i want to hear all the different perspectives on it and sometimes somebody's going to know something that it was only ever going to be them that would see

it in this particular way you know there is also while we're on this topic a huge value to first eyes on a game, As in, the people who have played it 10 times, they're not going to be able to give, like, they'll give excellent feedback for where it's come from, et cetera, et cetera. But new eyes on a game will spot stuff that those people never can because they've followed the journey. Great note. And also, if you playtest with the same person over and over again

and then show it to somebody new, you're going to realize how complex you made it. Yes. Your buddy, you can just keep adding more and more stuff. And every step of the way, they're keeping up with the changes. But then you show it to somebody else and they're like, whoa, this is way too much for a new player. Alex and I, we've got a game coming out from a publisher in like five years. It's going to be forever away. And we'd gotten to a point where it was their favorite thing that either of

us ever made. It was just incredible. We would play it and we would feel like geniuses and we would have the most fun. And then we showed it to two designers and their brains melted. These are smart guys. These are like professional game designers. They're like, this is, I want to have fun. I can see the fun over there.

You just set up so many barriers to me having that fun i'm angry at your game now and it was exactly that we realized we just like like it was built on providence this new game so it started from our most complex game and then built from there and we had to really really pare it back and don't make any excuses for your game if you're playtesting with somebody and it's their first playtest and they're a game designer or a hardcore gamer that has agreed to

playtest your game for you and they're confused about anything or or feel like anything is too complicated it is too complicated i think i mentioned i was working the tiny folk rule book the other day and i haven't touched that game in about two months i just i put it away for a few months came back to it and there were so many things where players complained i was like no it has to be this way and i was rewriting the rule book being like.

No, it doesn't. There's one character that you can play with who brings out a little display of spells. And the rule is when you draw, you can draw from the display or from the deck. When you play a card, you have to play from your hand, or you can use a special power that you play from the display. And I was like, it has to be this way. And I had four different playtesters be like, Peter, this is really confusing. I was like, no, no, no, it's fine once you get used to it.

And then when I was writing the rulebook, I was like, no, no, it doesn't have to. What? Why would like yes it led to some fun combos but people were getting stuck on it every time peter i know we're trying to wrap up but one of the next sections is it has to be that way.

Okay i'm gonna finish my my playtester section a buddy is also a very good source of motivation even when you're busy or unmotivated you keep helping them with their game and it helps you it keeps you connected to game design i am such a proponent of we are what we intake like you obviously we are what we eat is the phrase but i live in la which is a very expensive city to live in because i want to make movies and la is where movies happen and i mean not only like literally they

happen but every time i'd have a cafe i will overhear some conversation about movies maybe it's people who work in movies maybe it's people talking about movies when you drive around la unlike any other city every ad is for tv and movies either for them coming out new or for they're called fyc for your consideration ads because they want to get emmy nominated or whatever so you are constantly saturated saturated in movie stuff and so even though i'm not

an active screenwriter right now i want to keep in that mental space and so i want to live in la my girlfriend works at disney i am very connected to what disney's doing at all times now not behind the scenes way just like i'm very aware because she's working on cool stuff and i get to hear about it and it's yeah it's really incredible so having that whatever weekly playtests with the same person means that like he says even if you.

Haven't had a chance to touch your game you're still playing games and thinking about them and exercising that muscle it's not a problem for you aj i'm aware yes i i have to fight to take a break from it playtesters are too concerned with balance and power they just assume that fun is ubiquitous in games and it can be hard for them to stop thinking about power and start thinking about fun this is in my mind this is very very linked to my thing of like player testers not play testers players

want to win more than they want to have fun there's something in the human brain that if you're like hey compete for this then they want to win even if they're having a miserable time doing it i am i am particularly victim to this there are so many games where i've grinded through because i want to get 100 even though i've stopped enjoying it a long time ago but i need to get that 100 like i'm a completionist and so this is i think the same part of the brain where play testers will be like,

okay, here's how you can balance it. And I'm like, I don't, I can balance it. I don't care about that. I want to know what you enjoyed and what you didn't enjoy. Separate to like a power level. I have nothing to add, just agree. This is almost a paraphrase of the game in quote that I quote all the time. Listen to the playtester's problems. Generally, ignore their solutions and fix their problems your own way. Their experience is never wrong, but their suggestions usually are.

Yep, this is the classic advice that we've probably given a dozen times on here before. Okay, you'll like this one, AJ. Don't waste their time. End the playtest before they get tired of it. They'll appreciate that. Just test long enough to get a feel for the game. Don't make them play a whole game of an early prototype.

This million percent please have mercy on me you and i have done this a lot in it like today so before recording we play tested for like three hours that we're very in that in that zone, we were trying to play test a new rule and i was like okay we're done and you're like oh but but.

It turns out the game that we made is really fun so i was like really invested in the rest of the game and this has happened more than once where it's like yeah we've solved the problem we've identify the problem or whatever and we know that we we should just stop and with this game in particular it's great because it's like oh i suppose i want to finish the game i'm invested.

But yeah don't waste your time don't waste your play tester's time if you already know what you need to do for the next iteration just stop why would you not yeah there's no reason yeah i was oh god very very very early peter was horrendous at this i had a game that i was working on for like a year it was it was never good and i didn't realize that i i was in melbourne i started a play test and i got what i needed out of it i left to finish it and then like half an hour later one

of the playtesters was like hey what are you doing i'm like oh i'm just i'm hanging out over here and they're like so like can we stop and it never even occurred to me it had never thought to me that you could stop before finishing a game because that's not how game playing works and that was the day when i was like oh god what a horrible thing to do like i knew the game was broken but i was like well i gotta finish it they've started the game they have to finish it,

awful i think it's you that starts every playtest with by the way we can stop anytime, and as soon as he begins to do that i feel so bad the first time you did that i felt such a relief in my heart and i try to always remember to say that to people if i'm playtesting with them for the first time most of the people i playtest with i play this with every week so i don't need to say it but, It is so liberating knowing that you don't have to stay for the whole thing

and the designer is giving you the out. Playtesting is so valuable. As a designer, you should treasure that. Think of it as $10 a minute.

You want to cut it off as soon as it stops being useful. Yeah. One thing I do actually is if I have a new prototype that I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to stop the playtest after one round or a few turns or whatever, I'll bring two prototypes, right? I'll bring that one. And I'll be like, this one, we are going to stop after five or 10 minutes. And then I want to play test the other one. So then it's like, cool, we have 10 minutes of this one. And then I have a quick 20 minute pro type.

And again, maybe that one's actually an hour long, but we're going to stop 20 minutes. And then I'm only using 30 minutes of people's time to play test two games. That's a great deal for both of us. I think it's important to play test with designers and with non-designers. But one of the huge benefits of playing with testing with designers is they're okay with you tweaking stuff mid play test.

Like they understand this is going to happen i've got one play tester and i think like he's he's cool with it but i think it does irritate him a little bit that i always change things mid play test and sometimes it'll be to his benefit you know but it's still just like i would have planned around having this much more powerful version of this card the most extreme example of me. Learning when to stop it i get a lot of value out of teaching a game to play testers Yes.

There have been several times where I have taught a game, and at the end of the teach almost gotten everything I need out of it. I will generally play a round, but by the end of the teach I'm like, oh, I know that this game is not ready for people. It, again, sort of like I was saying earlier, it feels bad not to even have them play the game. So I will generally play a round and I'll always get something useful out of it. At the end of the teach, I can sometimes know that I'm done.

Have you ever had a teach where at the end of the teach, you're like, man, I'm tired just from teaching the game. I need to cut the rules. I've had that before. I get, not as much anymore, but I get flustered when I'm teaching a game for the first time. And so when a game's too complex and I'm teaching it at an early stage, that's when I'm like, ah, it's so uncomfortable for me. From the other side, as a playtester, I will end games before the designer necessarily would do.

The line that I use, I've probably talked about this before, is I've seen enough to give feedback.

And you said all the time thank you yeah you're welcome it's a gift so i've seen enough to give feedback basically means like exactly what it says i don't need to play this anymore i'm ready to give feedback if the designer's like okay i really want to see one more turn i'll play one more turn i'm not i'm not trying to ruin their day if they're like okay cool we've actually got an hour to go i'm like well i've seen enough to give feedback which is the point of the next

day like i'll get relatively assertive about it see i i i respect that i wish i could do that but yeah Yeah, Alex is the same way. He's like, I get trapped in these three-hour games and I just wish I was Peter. Well, so what I do is, before I get into a playtest with some random, what I try to do is I say, how long is the game? And if they say, it's an hour, then I say, if after an hour we're not done, can I leave? And if they say yes, then I will sit down and play. And if they say no,

then I will not. Yeah, I'm more assertive because I'm coming from the point of view of playtesting is so valuable. It is a gift that I am giving to you as a playtester. In the same way as I try to receive it as a gift that playtests are giving to me, I'm not obliged to playtest your game. If you've just played a long game of mine, sure, maybe, but even then, I don't feel an obligation to finish your game if I'm not going to get anything

more out of it and I've stopped having fun. If I'm having fun, I'll play it all day. Sure. I think too, for me, part of it is it's easier for me to say that because I don't like playtesting in other groups of people that I don't know for a lot of different reasons. This doesn't really come up for me very often.

It does occasionally, because I do still go to some cons, but for the most part, I'm just playtesting with other designers and we have an understanding of how things go. Last one from the section, people drastically overestimate the importance of balance. It's nice that things are balanced, but plenty of other things are more important. This is, sorry, second last quote, because that's actually two quotes.

And this is sort of what you were saying about like, you care more about play patterns than you do about elegance. And I think you would agree that balance is way below both of those. Balance is, I would say, by far the thing I care about the least. However, there's different kinds. I mean, I don't think of there being different kinds of balance, but I think of there being different goals of balance. And I think I might actually want to do like a Minnesota on balance at some point.

So maybe I want to end that there, but I could just go into some of my basic thoughts. I'll save the next quote and you'll save it. And this is the last quote for real. Balance is also very easy to achieve. Almost anything can be balanced, which means you can really do whatever you like and just balance it all later.

I love that. i love that approach of like again it's the unsolvable problem thing i was saying like if if you approach it as like balance is hard then you're going to be precious about it you're going to be in scarcity mode if you if you truly embrace anything can be balanced and i think anything can be balanced then you can just make the most fun game and and kick that can down the road and eventually solve it like i really think it's always solvable the

ag game we're working on is is so imbalanced sorry not so about it's so asymmetrical that true balance is impossible In the same way as, you know, Scissor, Paper, Rock is impossible to balance because, go ahead, you look like you have many thoughts on what I'm saying. Finish your thought, then I'll go. So a complex system is never truly going to be balanced, especially when there's any kind of randomness. Like chess is imbalanced is a very obvious example.

It's funny, I talked about there being almost no perfectly balanced games and someone brought up chess and I was like, nope. Literally not. On one hand, it's very easy to achieve balance, on the other hand, it's impossible to balance. But either way, balance shouldn't be the priority because if you're letting yourself be constrained by balance, you're not reaching maximum fun.

If you go for fun without being held back by balance, you will achieve more fun and a more fun game will a thousand percent of the time do better than a more balanced game.

Okay i'm gonna say my piece it's this is gonna be a long episode it's fine, all right so i think that there are four different goals of achieving a certain type of balance there are two in the traditional sense oh sure go ahead go for it no i can't go ahead, i was about to start bringing down one it's like we need to sell sheets i was gonna be like what is balance no okay you go so we don't turn this into a four-hour episode yeah the the two more traditional ways of thinking of like even

balance as the goal is to give each player an equal chance of winning the game skill aside as in skill is what's going to determine the outcome of the game so that is or even to separate it from skill the the way that you play is going to determine who wins which is subtly different. And there's a lot of complexities to go into that. Again, maybe that's a different episode, but that's point one. Point two is to prevent strategic collapse.

Strategic collapse being I could do X or I could do Y. X is strictly better than Y. I will not do Y. It's not an interesting choice anymore. Right. And so that's completely different, right? You could have a perfectly balanced game, meaning that both players have an equal chance of winning, but a completely imbalanced game in that both players only have one option that's viable each. So whenever we talk about balance, I really feel the need to articulate what we're doing here.

And there's two weirder examples, which is aiming for imbalance. So you can aim for imbalance for two reasons. One is imbalance in terms of not at the start of the game necessarily, but allowing a weaker player a chance of winning being the goal. You could imbalance the game by having high amounts of luck as the game progresses or giving someone a handicap.

Like if you're playing golf with someone who's bad, then, you know, you can give them a handicap and then you're playing against yourself in kind of a way, but they still have a chance to enjoy the game. And then the other kind of intentionally imbalanced game is providing an intended experience. For instance, if you're playing a one versus many horror game, maybe the one monster has a better chance of winning the game because they're supposed to feel like a powerful, terrifying monster.

And you're supposed to feel like weak humans so that's my really weird specific example of that is that there are some war games i've never gotten into the war game scene but there are some war games where the historical war was overwhelmingly won by one side so it's not it's sort of like i was saying about that bellachio run he's not even he's trying to win he doesn't expect to win.

It is it is the striving that's interesting not the not the winning right and that's an example of where it's like deliberately unbalanced to create a specific experience in the war game example historical experience of like this is what it was like to be defeated at gallipoli or whatever yeah mini mini balance rant over cool how would you feel about having some publisher tip i was about to say fun i was about to correct you on that and you and we were discussing the

publisher tip before do you want to hit everybody with it yeah i definitely remember what it was. Oh yes i i suggest this is an episode idea and you're like this is the publisher tip which i thought it was an interesting thing someone this is about right someone in the discord asked, as a topic idea oh i think it was an email we got anyway some a listener requested we discuss why do so many bad slash mediocre games get published this is the one right,

I'm very curious to hear your answer to this. Oh, boy. This is sort of straying away from publisher tip, but hopefully we'll make it something very actionable. Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't have picked this one as the stinger for today. Yeah, I was going to say. I thought it was a whole episode. Yeah, maybe do a quick other one. Yeah. We'll just put it hard. We can summarize it, and then if we want to, we can come back to it later.

Okay so my first point would be that the publisher needs to print something and even though they've seen a lot of even though they've gotten a lot of submissions they haven't gotten a submission that feels like it's the right fit for them and is better than this game that's that's number one publishers need to publish games the same business yeah number two a game isn't developed properly this could very easily be a case where it

doesn't get developed at all or it could be a case of the developer took it in a direction that ends up feeling non-harmonious with the original designer's intent so it feels a little incongruous i think we're thinking the same game but carry on. Nothing that i was developing by the way no no no no there's a specific story i'm thinking of but I think you are too.

Yeah. I think that the publisher sometimes could have it where they make changes, not realizing what those changes act, what the repercussions of them actually are because they don't engage with the designer during the process. With AEG, they're almost the opposite. They're like, please, every single thing that gets changed, how do you feel about it? But some publishers out there are like, cool, this is our game. We're going to do what we want with it.

Make a change and not realize that they're actually breaking something.

That covers a lot of the things i was going to say the the other stuff i'll mention is one a game being bad or mediocre might just mean it's not for you, and especially if we're looking at like successful games like games that have sold a lot of units if you're like why are these crappy games selling units you're approaching it from the wrong way you're saying why does this game you should be asking what who does this game appeal to

it doesn't appeal to me but why is it appealing to whoever it appeals to and i can think of a very successful games highly ranked in bgg that i just can't stand but i. Understand why they work the way they did so that's sort.

Of a reframing of the question yeah i think it's very valuable as a designer to stop and and instead of saying why is this bad game so popular say what is it about this game that makes it popular like like like reframe don't think about the negatives of the game think of the positives with exploding kittens i could name things that i think would actually improve it for its target audience but it's it's still so popular in spite of that i think i mentioned this

i play that with henry non-stop and i don't know if there's anything i would change about that game like for what it's trying to do i think it's pretty close to perfect i don't like the uh full art cards not like having there's two different effects that you have based off of the number of full art cards you have right i haven't played it in eight years all the steel cards require a pair to steal right and then isn't there a different effect if you have three of them versus two no

no okay not in the base game of the first expansion okay then then maybe i'm i'm misremembering it but i remember those steel cards being something where i felt like the text should be on because it's one of the more complicated effects and there's different pairs of the cards but maybe it's a less big of deal than i thought it was exploding kids is a really good example of one that everyone's like why did that game succeed and obviously succeeded because of the the artist and the and

the blah blah but also like for what it's doing it does a ridiculously good job henry loves that game i love that game playing with henry i'm not going to pull it out and play with you but like i will play with henry anytime and i'll have an interesting fun. Different experience every single time i would also say that many new designers don't value the importance of emotional spikes they'll look at a game like it's the balancing again.

Right exactly and they'll be like oh i just drew like garbage and you drew well and you won and And that's really frustrating and not fun, but they don't think of all the highs. The highs are big selling points and the lows are big selling points.

Being being toppled by the one in 30 chance right when you were like i'm totally fine that's a big exciting memorable moment and people enjoy those i think it's eric lang who has a has a bit of a spiel that he goes on about talisman because everyone's like talisman is a terrible game he's like name it name a game that does what's talisman is trying to do better than talisman does and that game is what for the 70s the 80s like

it's been we're kind of we're going on 50 years and nothing does talisman style things the way that as well as talisman does it's crazy, so this is this is answering a slightly different question which is why are popular games.

Why don't i like popular games the real question being asked is why do so many bad mediocre games get published i have published at least one bad mediocre game so i'll tell you the full story of that one which is i had i just had a kid i play tested it with a group they had a great time i didn't really have time to do anything so i was like cool this game is done and i published it don't do any of that don't not have a kid

i'm not saying don't have a kid but But as a publisher, I feel so bad about that. I mailed people a game that before it arrived at people's houses, it was broken. There was a BGG thread being like, hey, I just read the rules. Won't this strategy always win 100 at the time? Completely right. It was a broken game because it just didn't get its due diligence.

I've got a game out with my name on it that I didn't publish, as in the designer but not the publisher, where the publisher made a last minute decision that in a vacuum, I fully, fully, fully understand why they went with that.

But it just ruined the game it massively reduced the quality of the game and i'm not going to go into it but i think they regret it and i think all the reviews mentioned this is the first and main thing and i get how they got there and i think what they did could have worked had they done a little bit more around it but as a last minute decision killed it killed the game yeah that's funny i that just made me think of another obvious reason why bad game could get published,

i have one that might be the one you're thinking of if the publisher trusted that it was done. I was gonna be much harder i was gonna say because not every publisher is good at their job.

Uh it's just a fact like there's a range of skill in publishing and even they might be very good at the part of the job which is art direction marketing product design and just not have good taste for what makes a good game and so they release it and people are like oh this kind of sucks and they they just don't have that like skill set which is we're all different it's fine the biggest most successful companies do have that skill set you'll notice but there are plenty that

have like mid or small size companies that have not got the is this game good skill set they can see the product they can see the stuff around it and then i i do really want to mention that i don't think anyone ever knowingly publishes a game that is bad maybe you just said you did it no i thought it was good at the time oh right it was before they had an amazing time i published it and then as it was in in shipment people were like hey this sucks i was like oh god it does suck,

And there are exceptions, like you said, if a publisher needs to get a game out today, they might be like, look, this is not going to be a hit.

But I don't think anyone's like, ha, ha, ha, let me shovel crap out there. Another one, actually, is they just don't have time to finish developing the game. Yeah. So the broad answer is underdevelopment or sometimes overdevelopment. I could name half a dozen games that went in as really good prototypes and got the fun sucked out of them in the development process. And like you said, the mismatch or just whatever it is.

So yeah i think schedules is the number one answer because the game needs to get out if i'd had that game for another year i definitely would have fixed the problem with it i just didn't have that didn't have that time and skill level i guess like misalignment between you know what what makes a good game and what they want and then and then the other thing too is that there are times and this is the last one i promise where the game isn't the most important thing so use

exploding kittens as an example i think a lot of designers would point to that as a bad game that's a good product i happen to think that's a very very very good game for what it's trying to do i think it's exceptionally good i think there's a reason why it not only took off but it's stuck around the way it has but there are games where the actual gameplay part is irrelevant to how that like how well that game's going to do in the market and this

comes to like what we're talking about in terms of my my mental percentage is that 60 of a game successful or success slash chance of getting published will be product 30 20 design like i just think it's the smaller fraction and so if you're being like well hang on as a designer we think design is the most important thing obviously that that's our job that's the thing that we do the guy who makes submarine.

Periscopes thinks that the periscope's the most important part of the submarine because that's the thing that he obsessively does all day every day weird terrible example but you know what i mean so we think design is the most important thing in terms of a game getting published and or being successful it's really not i think it's a minority of it which is why i've pivoted so hard towards think about product and make a great game.

Because if you can hit the product pit, then the great games will get made. If you can't, if you're making amazing games that are terrible product, you're not helping the market. That was a lot of words. Go ahead. I mean, think of how many products Apple has made where it's just something that already exists, but then they slap a fun name on it and market it much better than the other person did.

And then it becomes this huge hit, even though it costs 10 times as much for a slightly inferior product, right? It all comes down to being able to actually market and sell it to people. And think of yourself, like how many games have you bought because the art really drew you in or something about the game? Even the mechanical hook sounded great.

Yeah but wasn't i was telling you only about that game with like the four the four thing the four seasons i want to play that game i have played it it's crap but i still want i would have bought that game yeah i don't know about you and and you know maybe we as designers and we're hardcore gamers are a little bit pickier but i would bet you that like 70 to 80 percent of games are purchased just off of vibes by the average consumer and like think of how many okay let me put you this

way any board game out there any board game out there that someone buys or could buy has a rulebook pdf or pretty much every single one right you could just read the rules right now and see if it's for you or not who does that like 0.1 i love reading them i don't do that I have no interest. That is negative interest to me. But then how many times have you bought a game, read through the rulebook, and immediately been like, oh, I never would have bought the Spider-Dreads rulebook

first? That's never happened to me. Really? That's happened to me. I don't think that's happened to me. Along the same lines as this product thing, one thing the publisher does often and should do often is take a gamble. So they might sign a game because they love the product vision and they hope that the game will get there. And I'm talking about publishers who even understand game. They might be like, look, this game isn't there. I've seen this happen.

There's a pretty major release from last year that i was involved tangentially the development process first few drafts garbage like just nothing completely flat dreck came out it's a lot of people's game of the year it's so successful and i haven't played i didn't play the last few months of development but from the first month i never would have guessed that it was and the thing is i've seen this publisher do this now

like five times they've signed games the developers brought it to a gaming group that i'm in i've played it i've been like why is this getting signed and then it comes out it either doesn't come out it comes out and it's still a crap game or it comes out and they've gotten the formula right and the alchemy has worked and it's magic and it's a gamble it's it's like saying why do people roll so many ones and twos when there's a six on the die because every time is

a gamble and sometimes you realize too late that you've lost that gamble but you have to push it out anyway sometimes you don't know you've lost the gamble until it's out sort of like the game i was talking about earlier like that was a poor publishing my part but it's it's not a guaranteed process that the game that play will will will play well in in in retail mm-hmm. All right. I really have to go. So let's do a very, very quick, fun question.

Yes. Peter, what is the best fun fact you have off the top of your head? Okay. So time began about... Facetious has every vowel in the correct order. Every time I hear the word facetious, I'm always like, oh, every vowel in the correct order.

You know the word palindrome? huh not a palindrome yeah so so palindrome means a word that is spelled the same backwards or forwards and the reverse of palindrome means a palindrome that means something else in the reverse order and mid whatever it is yeah i've seen that yeah uh do you know the word helicopter is made up of two subwords like i think they're from latin or greek or something like that, what do you know that so helicopter is just two words

crammed together what do you think the two words are what's your gut instinct i mean one of them has to be fly and no no i mean i literally the word is two words crammed together helicopter split that up into two words what are the two words heli and copter i would guess helico meaning spin and peter like a pterodactyl, isn't that wild that's not my favorite word fun fact helico spin peter comes together and becomes helicopter. That has been our episode of Fun Problems. AJ, before we go,

how do we end this show? By saying bye, everyone. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter at Fun Problems Pod, 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.