#48 - Grab Bag Minisode

Music. Welcome to Fun Problems. I'm Problem C. Hayward. And I'm AJ Problematic.

AJ Fundin. I told you this before we started. Oh, Fundin. Oh, yeah. I set this off, AJ. You ruined it. Now we can never record an episode again. Welcome to a mini-sode. We just recorded like four hours straight. We recorded both of the halves of AJ's presentation and we were like, you know what? We're ready for more, but I have a meeting in half an hour, so we are going to cover a grab bag of topics until we run out of time.

AJ, what do we got? We were going to talk about following the dog slash don't fight the current. Yes, I worry that this is a metaphor I've made before, but I find it so useful as a designer. So, AJ, you've decided you want to make a game. What a lot of, especially new designers do, is they have a very clear vision of where they want the game to end up. It's like going out with a dog and trying to go to a specific place. So you're in a big field and you're like, I want to go southwest 500 yards.

Cool. If the dog wants to go southwest, you are going to sprint behind that dog and get there in record time. And it's going to be amazing. But do you know what other directions exist, AJ? No, what other directions exist? All of them. Every other direction exists.

So if your dog for whatever reason wants to go even south you are going to be constantly fighting this dog to get it southwest fighting fighting fighting fighting the current fighting the dog if your dog wants to go northeast you are not moving you are just going to be stuck in place straining and straining and you can spend as a designer months or years trying to get the damn dog to go in this one specific direction if you don't have a spot in mind you just

want to go as far as you can, you know what you can do? Follow the dog. Follow the dog. Whichever way the dog wants to go, cool. You are now running behind that dog. And this held me back as a designer for close to a decade. I'll use Robotopia as an example. Robotopia, I really wanted that to be a game with zero randomness post setup. I wanted you to shuffle that board, put it out, and then play with no randomness.

And in fact, if you play Robotopia, you'll see there's a bunch of stuff still in place from that where like the conveyor belt once it's set is entirely player driven the goals for the different factions don't change the guild powers don't change the position of factory tiles don't change i could have stuck with that i got pretty close i could have stuck with that there is a level of randomness in robotopia well there's there's two sort of one is that you get shuffled and

dealt two starting cards another is there is a big old random deck of action cards peter the idealist would have been like, no, not okay. And I could have spent another five years struggling with that game. I have a game that I ended up abandoning because I just couldn't get it to match my vision. As soon as the action cards were the fun part, I lent into it. I followed the dog instead of trying to force that damn pooch to go in the one

direction that I wanted it to go. Don't fight the current. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Cool. That's our episode.

I think just expand on that a tiny bit another way to think of it is what the game wants to be yes and we talked last episode about my design doc and having a vision for the game and that's very important and that should be your guiding principle but if you find something that's fun in the game that isn't the thing that you originally thought then maybe it's worth considering making something else and make a new design doc and say okay

well if if i want to have this thing in the game because this is the really fun thing that's working and the thing that I thought was going to be fun isn't. How do I recreate this product and lean into that? It's super useful when working with a co-designer because two people, you're twice as likely to be stuck on like, it has to be this. And so one of the reasons we do this podcast is I find it incredibly valuable as a creative to have terms.

Once I have a term for something, I can understand it and it makes sense. So once you start thinking about don't fight the dog, if we're co-designing something and we find that, you know, maybe this dice mechanism is fun. Cool. Let's lean into that. even if we weren't trying to make a dice game now it's a dice game your game is going to be better.

Faster if you if you just follow the dog and having that phrase means that you can say it to yourself you can say it to a co-designer don't be a dick but having it as a as a verbalizable concept for me makes it more clear when i'm like oh man i am fighting the dog i'm fighting the current i am refusing to budge from my initial vision even though the game wants to go in a different direction uh this i came up with this with alex he was in la and we're working on a,

we're working on a card that's right i had this okay here's the pitch you know polyomino tile lane games what about a tile lane game where they are all completely different shapes so like one might be a giraffe and one is an umbrella and this and that and without being able to pick it up and look at it you have to try to work out if it'll fit in the space right that's that's the premise that was the pitch we started working on it within half an hour we followed

the dog and it was now a stacking game about like a really cool novel stacking game it had nothing to do with that initial pitch whatsoever whereas i think even a year or two ago i might have been like what are we doing this isn't this isn't the polyomino not polyomino tile lane game i wanted to make instead we follow the game and now we have something super fun that we're in the middle are pitching like follow the dog yep there was a game i was working on with stefan and there.

There's like one part of the game that was working and everything else wasn't and it and it was like the way to solve a lot of problems with the rest of the game was to cut the thing that was fun but then it's like well what what are we working towards and so we ended up stop working on that project but if we did keep working on it i would have done like i would try to do the opposite and the reason why we stopped is because i couldn't see the direction for doing the opposite and taking the

fun thing and finding a new direction for it but that's absolutely the way that we would have kept going in that one okay what do we got in that grab bag that's not.

Removing decision points this has been a real obsession of mine lately i play tested a game in my local la group maybe a month or two ago and it was a really cool little auction game that just had too many decision points and i end up at the during during my my trademark half hour feedback i literally just talked through all the decisions that you made in a turn so in this game it was like a vault wars kind of thing the storage wars is not vault wars vault wars is the john game

there was a storage wars kind of premise so you had these three doors and you chose which ones to put in the doors and then you chose one to half open and you did this and this and this.

And we talk a lot about boiling your game down to its core concept at its core this game was bidding on unknown or partially known information right that's what the game was, so the pitch that i made i hope the designer doesn't mind me talking about this very lovely man very cool and it took all this feedback really well and then went and did it and apparently the game got much better so i described it as on on my turn first i look at my hand of cards then i choose which

card goes in a then i choose which card goes in b then i choose which card goes in c then i choose which of a b and c i half open then i choose which of a b and c i like less than half open that is the end of the setup for the round then the first player decides whether they spend a dollar to partially open or two dollars to like fully open then the next play does the same thing blah blah and then you start bidding

and i was just like the game is the bidding but literally about 30 to 40 decisions had to be made before you get to the bidding and again we talk a lot about streamlining it's because you each one of those decision points you have to actively make. And the worst of it is when it's an optional anytime kind of action, not the worst of it, but that's definitely part of it.

In the game Fractured Aether that I'm working with Alex, I think we might have talked about in the collaboration episode, we have these little spells that you can cast anytime and then your main worker action. And we very deliberately, very consciously added a phase at the start of your turn where you use your anytime action. So they're not really anytime.

So that once you've placed your worker and taken your main action the next player knows that it is their turn that is so important to me just by stripping out those decision points or in this case condensing them to a particular phase i don't like having a two-phase turn i wish i didn't have a two-phase turn but i much prefer it to okay it's my turn i'm gonna do this the next player is like i'm gonna go well hey wait wait i gotta look at every possible power i can use like,

contain it and don't make it a floating decision point take your prototype this is very actionable take your prototype that you're working on right now i'm talking to you jeremy that you are working on right now and verbalize every possible decision that happens in a round the cleanest games i've got a game called fairy garden that i'm really really happy with it's just on your turn you choose which space to move your fairy to.

That's it. That is 100% of the decisions that you make. And there are only four possible spaces. From that one, and there's no other, not there's no other rules, but like that, that cascades to some other stuff that ends up, you know, making the game work. But the actual decision that you as a human are making is where do I move my guy? That's it. That is literally every decision point that you make. And it is so smooth to teach and so smooth to play.

And I'm really proud of it because I stripped out every decision point that I possibly could. Now, I think it's worth saying why it's good to strip these out. Yes, please do. I thought I started to get to that, but part of it is that, do you want to go? I can talk or I can let you actually contribute to the podcast you host. I'll take a turn and run it back to you to finish up some more thoughts because I assume you've been thinking about this more than I have lately.

The first thing is it's fatiguing. thinking a lot about having to think about. Having to think about a lot of different decisions is fatiguing and if the decisions don't matter or don't matter significantly or don't matter all the time then it feels like it's wasted time and I think it is wasted time, and the players could have been doing something more fun I also think I think about it as an opportunity cost right?

You have only so much time to play the game, how much of the time do you want to spend on each decision and think of it this way what are the most fun decisions were the least fun decisions i think i gave this example on the podcast before but i had a card game that had sort of a puerto rico or san juan slash race for the galaxy style of card expensing where you discard cards to pay for cards type of a thing and it was fun and it was interesting but it

meant that players were spending more than half of the time thinking about which cards they They were going to discard and not get to play with instead of playing the game. So I just cut it. And I was like, you just play two cards a turn. Everything's free. And the game was so smoother. It was so much faster. And most importantly, the decisions that people were making were fun. And the thing is, like, it was fun before. Yeah.

And it was interesting, but it wasn't the most fun or most interesting decision that you could make. And so it took people doing the thing that was work to get to the best part of the game and just took you straight there. I think it's a really excellent point. I saw a description, this was probably five, 10 years ago now, of games better and better as the years go by of identifying what the interesting decisions are and condensing to that.

So the example I think they used was like maybe a three-hour game in the early 2000s would have 25 significant decision points spread out over three hours nowadays designers with the new technologies that we have such as this podcast are able to take those same 25 decisions and put them into an hour and a half or an hour or 25 minutes like every decision you make that's not the impactful core decision of the game is just padding out your game i'm going to go three

for three in today's recordings mentioning on writing well which says essentially that a sentence that has the same meaning in half the words or using less fancy convoluted words is a better sentence. It's a design aesthetic. It's a writing aesthetic that I strongly agree with. The thing that you sort of covered, but I'm going to really isolate, is how much time it takes for people to make a decision. And when they are non-decisions, it is the most frustrating thing in the world.

I think it's also worth pointing out, like specifically zeroing in on minor decisions. So I think that is a very good point you just made, that older games often had like 20 or 25 decisions or something like that. And the rest are decisions that don't significantly matter. I think one interesting example, this may not exactly be one-to-one, but if we just think about risk, right? Ultimately, it's like, well, I want to take all the things in a continent.

So usually you're like, oh, okay, I'm going to fight for that continent and I'm going to fight these different ones.

You're technically making a bunch of different decisions about like how far past that you want to go or how far or how close to that you go but it ends up being a lot of decisions that don't matter as much as the bigger decision of am i going for this continent or this continent am i just leaving my troops on defense or am i going on offense and using them and if you distill the game a little bit more into that the game would be a lot shorter and still probably have a lot of the same fun i have

an older design called close encounter where you are a crew on a ship against it's a one verse many about an alien coming onto a ship and you have to identify and kill the alien or the aliens trying to kill the crew a friend of the podcast jeff fraser played it back when i worked i haven't worked on this game for six years now he played it and it was a full spaceship gridded out and every turn you would choose like you'd move up three and left one and

then choose which direction you're facing micro decision after micro decision after micro decision and jeff's note at the time was like hey what if instead of this room being 25 individual spaces it was just a space and you're either in the room or you're not in the room i could not understand this note it didn't make sense to me i was like that is the game and now with the benefit of uh of being an old man i'm like oh that was one

of the best notes i've ever received and if i ever pick up that game again that's exactly the point where i will start uh the the the sort of.

It gives the players room to make a thousand little mistakes and i don't mean mistakes as doing the wrong decision i mean like playing the game wrong every time you have a decision it is a thing that they have to learn the the sort of look for the scope of that decision learn how that it's just it's so much if you can cut it cut it and then any any i don't have any but any specific tips on how to cut decisions from your game you gave

a really good example do you have anything else like that i think you can look at situations where different components different decisions become relevant where they're normally not and cut those exceptions, it's kind of like a rules exception. So my favorite bugbear is, I'm sure I've mentioned a dozen times in this podcast, if the top card of the discard pile matters. So it's like, well, you can play this card as the top card of the discard.

Well, then every single time I discard cards, I have to consider that. If you look at those sorts of things where- I have to consider the order in which I discard things. If you look at any of those cases where this decision point normally doesn't matter and all of a sudden it does, then just remove whatever content you have in the game that cares about that or readjust your structure for it.

That would be the first one that comes to mind for me. That's inspired too. One is don't let players choose the order of operations. And this is very similar to my Fractured Aether example. If you can go, I mean, Magic the Gathering is an old game and very, you know, very successful, he understated.

But i think one of the things that if it was designed today it wouldn't do is like the phases of magic are you start your turn you may do any number of spells you enter the attack phase you may do any number of spells you end your turn peter i i really wish it was that simple but it's not remotely close to that but you know what i mean like yeah there's whereas i think again obviously every time we mention this people come in the comments being

like actually magic would be designed exactly the same way today and i'm like okay cool you know you're not ascending the point i'm trying to make it would be you end your turn by attacking you know like not literally that but there would be a phase where you do one thing and a phase where you do the other thing and that's the end of the phases so don't let players choose their order and then i think this is similar to what you said but i just want to put it in my own words just

cut choices like your example was really good of like yeah you used to be able to pay whichever cards you like from your hand just make it free like in in this vault wars game that i was talking about like you i i the way that i pitched it to him was like just like draw.

Three cards from the deck and there's a b and c because that's not an interesting decision just literally cut the decision make it random and then balance around that randomness one thing that i've done a little bit of is leaning into timing restrictions on cards and being explicit yes rather than just having card that you can just play kind of whatever to do effects i never ever ever have a card that you can play anytime i don't think i've got a single game ever

designed that you have a card you can play anytime robotopia kind of takes that to the extreme where every card is when you trigger this specific action then you activate it and that's what i like i i want to say when you attack you may play this card because a that that removes edge cases and weird things because it's like it only happens when the super obvious opportunity happens it also means i don't have to think about using this card and especially when you're a newer player you don't

have the extra cognitive burden of having to think about that right you don't have all this extra stuff that you're worried about because you're like oh i have to think about whether or not i want to use this card it only comes up when you're attacking so when you attack you're like oh wait i'm attacking do i have any cards attack oh yeah i got this one the flip side of that is actually a little side benefit of that if i have a

like in robotopia i I have a card that says when you play a red robot, if I have no red robots and no way of making red robots, cool. I've got a quest now. Like I've got a goal. I want to make a red robot so I can use this cool effect. Fantastic example.

Uh what else we got here okay i'm gonna do hey so we're talking a lot about product recently we we do like to talk about design but the more frankly the more i design the more i think about product so that's what you get it's also very actionable and people like it so i want to do an example this is a game that doesn't exist in no way is this a real game whatsoever aj i want to design just like a quick vision for this game product first are you ready yep the game is called.

Bookworm go okay so it's called bookworm i think we're not going to take it literally, and what i want to do is create something that's going to appeal to people who are bookworms so i want to have a cozy vibe and something where when someone sees this on the shelf and sees bookworm they think oh i'm a bookworm i like books and i like board games so i'm going to pick this up or again if they have a friend who's a bookworm they're like oh you like books

here's a cool board game for you and then i want that game is on kickstarter right now it's called a place for all my books by alex cutler friend of the podcast and it is exactly that so i don't want to do that because that happens to it's it's doing record numbers it's already like double the previous highest campaign from this from this guy so let's say we're making a game called bookworm and we wanted the main character to be a

worm not that like what you said was perfect and that's evidenced by the success of this game. But just to not do that game, you're a bookworm. You're literally a bookworm. Okay, then I think in this one, it could be exploration-based or something like that where you're traveling from book to book. Or maybe it's like a worker placement you can place on the different books and get different effects from them.

I want there to be a spatial element. When I hear, and this is the conversation I'm going to have, like from that title, if you're trying to make product first design, and I just wanted to give a really clear example of what we talk about a lot. I hear that title and I immediately picture like a worm eating through books, which has a spatial element.

So to get that alignment that we talked about last episode, I hear bookworm and aside from your amazing cozy game that is on Kickstarter right now, go check it out. I think I want that game, the book exploring worm to have a spatial element. What's your take on that? There's no wrong answer here, by the way. I'm just showing like how, I just want to show how it works. Yeah. So then I'm thinking if we want a spatial element, it could be something that's tile-based.

That gives you modularity and again, leans into it. They're actually being literal books on the table, similar to your Mightier Than the Sword game. That's kind of what I'm visualizing. I'd be looking at a component hook where like the worm is coming through the books, like literally like popping out from it.

And maybe something like stacking related where it's like you can get multiple books and the books themselves are like actual books or something like that so you have a nice big point hook there and then accidentally describing a place for all my books again it's a book stacking game it means you're very good at this this is good this is all great and and i'm gonna i'm gonna go a different direction not because you're wrong and i don't want this to sound like actually aj the

correct answer was there is no correct answer i'm just gonna say like what is it you don't you don't feel like i'm correcting you no good i want i want like i want a little grid of words and you're like letters or something like that, like you're connecting the letters as a worm.

Like the thing I wanted to illustrate here is that, A, there's no wrong answer, but B, if you can start to think of everything being in alignment as early as possible, like we, obviously I put AJ on the spot and was like, go. But the more that you are doing this from the start of your design journey, the more you are thinking of a product, product, product, like Like in Australia, there was a kid's TV show called Bookworm.

So I'm imagining this very specific, like little glasses wearing worm with a big smiley face who like, likes eating books or whatever.

I hear Bookworm. I think it could be a word game. It could be a spatial word game. That's cool. That's not been done before, but it's all in alignment with the title. If AJ had said, and AJ wouldn't say this, but if AJ had said it should be a full drafting bidding game, cool. You've gone off brand immediately. Like you're not, you're not designing a cohesive product. You're looking up a place for my books? Yeah, I just Googled it. Maybe I saw an ad for it and it's like in the back of my head.

No, no, I think it's a really cool idea. And I think that's probably why you're getting to it. And Bookworm, I wrote this months and months and months ago before this game came out. So it was possibly a bad example. But was that an interesting or useful exercise, do you think? I think so. Yeah. So I liked that you brought up components. Like, cool, I want little worms. Or maybe just like a worm head and a worm tail. And like you said, you're like... Remember those locked nest monster meeples

that I sent you ages back? Oh, yeah. Where it's like the tail sticking out and then the loops. Yeah, it's all the stuff that you would see above the water as individual components. So you can make like this. Oh, it's so cool. Yeah. If you can imagine a sea monster in like an old sailing book or whatever, where it's at the edge of the map and loop-de-loops, each of those loops is like a component and you have the little...

So when you lay them out, your mind fills in the negative space and you see a full monster, even though it literally doesn't exist.

Like something like that with a worm head popping out could be cool that's cool yeah anyway okay so uh let's have some quick fun aj let's do it what's your favorite are we doing a publisher tip for today we do that last i'm the you of of intermediates uh what's your favorite book have we done that one we've done that one ah what's your least favorite book my least favorite book i really negative maybe not fun yeah let's let's do a different one.

What's your favorite device that costs less than $10? Device that costs less than $10. Or what's one that springs to mind? Oh, you know those scalp massagers? Oh, you like those? Yeah, it's nice. I might have talked about this before, but I have, it's a little can opener. That's like a, like a bot, like a, I can't show it because it's literally attached to the bottom of my desk, but it's a, so you know, you know, sometimes it's hard to open a jar or whatever.

It's a series of spikes in a triangle that you attach to the bottom of like a table or a bench so you can put the jar in and twist it and it does the gripping for you and i think i've used it like 10 times in five years but i just love that it exists i just think it's such a cool little thing that and because it goes under a surface you just don't know it's there so like next to me i have my big desk and there is a little

jar opening thing that if i ever have trouble opening a jar i can just come in and use my desk to open the jar. I just love that. It's so dumb and I think it's cool. That's great. I love things that don't take up like counter space. A publishing tip. Have you got one? I feel like you're on the hook again. I did so many the last two episodes. Let's go with, okay. Have we talked about following up publishers?

Oh we haven't that's a good one this is one of my least favorite parts of the job publishers, don't like replying to messages they don't like replying to emails they don't like replying to anything i am very fortunate that i work with a lot of different publishers and for me there is a huge gulf between a publisher who will respond in a prompt fashion and a publisher who needs follow-up after follow-up after follow-up i have a spreadsheet

where i track all my board game stuff One of those things is literally a list of every publisher I need to follow up, what I need to follow them up about, and the last date that I did it. And every two weeks, I have a recurring to-do item, follow-up publishers. I will tell you, I hate it a lot less when I do it in a batch like that, because I can just sit down and be like, first one, this publisher, write the little message, send.

Second one. And it means it's not floating. As you guys know, I talk a lot about, I don't like this in game design or in real life, stuff that just like you have to remember. Hand size is the example that I always use. Like, I don't like an arbitrary hand size I have to remember. I don't like remembering, oh yeah, you got to follow up this person, this person. So now that it's a list and I can sit down and batch it, sounds like I swore

about guano. So I can do it in batch every three, four weeks, whatever I've got it set to. It's much better, but publishers will not reply to you unless you follow them up endlessly. I have heard that European publishers are much better about this than American publishers. I've not had much experience with that. I would love if that was the case.

But right now I have a list and every three weeks I sit down and I message every publisher on that list being like, hey, where's that contract you promised?

Hey, did you get a chance to look at this game? hey i got you that thing that you asked for what's the next step it's it's excruciating so so what's the actionable feedback just do that the actual feedback is have the list and like track it that way so it's not floating and this is a little a little insider tip if you add a little personal note or question it doubles your chance of getting a reply if i write hey aj i've noticed that we haven't made a schedule we haven't made

a date for the next thing when are we going to do it it's a work thing and aj is going to avoid it aj is amazing at this this is not a real example if i say hey aj we need to make a time for the next recording.

Also how's your wife's new poodle he's gonna want to reply because he's excited to talk about fifi, right good tip cool good tip got a recurring one that's for for me but it's about like following up with publishers that have like lost the thread more so than like ones that you've already like signed stuff with like hey you remember how you said you were gonna do this thing six months ago and get back to me on no i have i have them all i have

every level of like publisher not following up it's genuinely one of my least favorite things about this job and this is champagne problem i love my job but oh i do not love that speaking of following up aj can you please finally get back to me and tell me how we end this podcast by saying goodbye everyone bye everyone. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can find us and our incredible Discord community in the show notes, or reach out to us privately at funproblemspodcast at gmail.com.

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