#56 - How to Balance your Board Game Part 1

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

Hayward. I'm AJ Brandon. And today we've decided to go back to our roots. Why are we going back to our roots, AJ? We hate our roots. Well, I think when we started this podcast, you had a very, very clear vision for what this was. This was the craft. We could have just easily titled our podcast The Craft.

In your model of hook craft spirit what we want to do is we want to teach designers how to be able to build the best games possible that is that worked on like so many different levels that was amazing did you did you write that that was great no i was actually frantic because i was clearing things off to make my desk look less messy but recently we've had a lot of questions relating to the industry where it's at what publishers are looking for those sorts of things

and because there's a lot of people who've listened to us talk so much about the craft, they trust our opinions and want us to talk about industry stuff, which is what a lot of other podcasts focus on more. And particularly because we started a series where we were talking to publishers, we ended up with a bunch of them in a row and that sort of thing. But we want to make sure that we are still giving people what the point of the podcast is, tools to be able to be better designers.

Yes. I was just telling you before we started recording, I went to a playtest the other day And I was like, God, I love the craft. I just like the mechanical part of it is where my heart lies. Like, I think I've gotten good at the selling. And that's part of why we wanted to bring that into the topic. Because I'm like, when we started this podcast, I was not at all qualified to talk about getting your game signed. Now I very much am.

But my heart will always be with the actual guts of the game. I just love it. I love it. Now, it's not to say we're not going to ever talk about publishing stuff again. But we want to re-reform. In fact, we have another publisher interview lined up for straight after this. We just wanted to realign to the craft. So, AJ.

But first, we're going to bookend with other stuff because we're also going to do a publishing tip at the end. We had homework. Yes. So Jay called in with a, well, didn't call him. Long time listener, zeroth time caller. Jay wrote in a different forum about a few ideas. Not even directed at us. It's like as far from calling as you can get. Jay was sitting at home and we were spying on him through the window when he made a really interesting point.

Do you want to remind everyone what the interesting idea Jay had was? Yes. So he approached game products first, which is sort of the literal opposite of what we just said we were going to do. But we want to complete our homework because we are good boys. And so he had this idea of a way of generating game ideas, which was just start with three bullet points. They have to be hooks. Generate a bunch of those until you have one you're more like, oh, that actually sounds really cool.

And then start the design process. So it's sort of like designing from a sell sheet that we've talked about before or designing from a amazon product idea or a kickstarter which is a really really valuable way to get your game signed but it's sort of codified so you don't have to think about kickstarter or anything like that it's just like what are you what are your hooks start from those and if you fall in love with the idea go design that game rather than

designing a game falling in love with it and being like and now how do i sell it which is something i think we talk about a lot in our sell sheet episodes especially where it's like you you can't it's really difficult to start from an unsellable product and try to sell it compared to starting from a sellable product, Yeah. One thing I've seen a few times in forums is, guys, I need help trying to figure out what the hook of my game is now that I've completed it.

It's like, no, no, no. That's putting the card before the horse. That's very 2018, Peter. Absolutely. That was me. I'd be like, okay, I finished. Now, how do I, because I had made a company, so it was going to be signed by me. And then I was like, okay, I finished this game. Why will people buy it? Now, the thing that we said right at the start of the episode about focusing on the craft, the good thing is this applies always. Oh, yeah.

If you're just designing for fun for you and your sister to play a game, cool. The craft is as important as it is if you're designing to sell a game. And what you don't want to be, what I think my nightmare is being the designer who doesn't craft a game and sells them anyway. Oh, I think we both know way too many designers who are really good at sales and really charming and they play the game and they're in the network, but I just don't ever want to play their games.

I never want to play their games. That's the nightmare. So the craft, no matter what path you're taking, I mean, if you listen to the podcast, I don't think I have to sell you on this, but the craft, the craft, the craft is what matters the most. AJ, did you do your homework? I did do my homework. Yeah, no, no prompting. No one had to remind you last minute that we had homework.

Peter's not insinuating that I forgot. This is a cheeky jab at himself because he forgot until right before we found Corbin. But he assures me it'll be very good and you won't notice. So I think so. We'll find out. We have no way of knowing now. So my bullet points are Shredders is a fantasy snowboarding game where you race to the bottom of the mountain using bladed snowboards. Build momentum for extra speed and powerful attacks at the cost of maneuverability.

Pop-ups, pop-up book style modular pieces for fast setup, great table presence, and replayability. So those were in order, thematic hook, mechanic hook, and component hook. So the pop-up book idea is that you then physically like use that as a dexterity element?

No. So the idea is think of just like, you know, board that's bi-folded, you fold it out, and then rather than like putting little tokens on or just seeing that there's a tree in the art of it a little tree pops out okay gotcha but it's it's not like you don't then balance stuff on it like a dexterity game no you you might put one of your snowboarder models onto a slope on there.

But no there's no dexterity elements whatsoever gotcha i love i love violent snowboards like shredded is a very good pun i think i think that's really fun i'm gonna do mine which is less detailed than yours even though i i remembered the homework and did it months ahead of time months ahead of time so it is it is atlantis and i'm sure there's other games called letters but my game is atlantis it is an area control game in which you are playing on

the island of atlantis that sinks into the water and it comes in a like a little plastic box of some kind and every round you pour one more glass of water into it and so the water levels rise and so various places that were one unit might suddenly the water now splits them and so you're area controlling over multiple different different territories as the physical literal actual real life water rises yeah that's awesome i i wanted to do a game that incorporates water for a long time that

yeah that's so sick me too so when you're like hey peter don't forget to your homework i was like what's cool water okay uh how can you do it oh that's actually and then i was like oh this is actually great i'm very happy but was that three bullet points yep mechanical is oh you're right it's not a hook i just wrote area control for mechanical like that's a hook i mean it's weird because the component and the mechanics are very tightly integrated

where like i i would say like you You've definitely got a component hook in water. That's got your table presence and everything. And yes, that does play mechanically. But if you're mechanically saying you area control, functionally, it is just a fancy way of dividing up the areas. You know what I mean? So I wouldn't necessarily... I think there's ways... For example, just off the top of my head, the board could always start at a random rotation tilt.

Sure. So now it's like a spatial... Like, you don't know if this next glass of water is actually going to split these territories. And so it's sort of like a little bit of gerrymandering. I don't know. I think there's definitely a way to make that, like, because you're right. Like, you could just have pieces of wood that you take off. But if there's an element of, like, I think this is actually going to be one conjoined piece of land.

And you pour the water and you're like, no, it split my empire. No, I gerrymandered it effectively. Listen, if it counts as only one hook, it is one extremely good hook. Yeah. Let's leave it at that. I think they're all so integrated that, like, yeah, it's one hook, but it covers the, like, the theme is the mechanics is the component. That was the idea. Love it. Cool. Homework done. Any other follow-up? No, no. Let's get into it, baby.

Okay. This is probably going to be a multi-part note because AJ said he has... Five full Google Doc pages full of notes.

What are we talking about today, my friend? Today we're talking about the thing that all designers love to obsess over, balance. Yes. The most important thing when you're starting a game. Before you have even a hook, you should have it perfectly balanced. Before you show anyone, it needs to be 100% balanced. Completely agree. This is a classic AJ-led episode, by the way, going back to our roots again.

Yes. Now, the thing I want to lead with is, as loathe as I am to focus on definitions, I think there's a lot of defining that we'll need to do this episode early on. And I want to be very clear with the framework that we're viewing all these things from before we get into some general tips on how to balance your game, which are probably going to come out more in the second episode than the first.

So the way that I... It's probably too late to suggest this, but we could split it into like this type of balance is an episode. This other type of balance is an episode because I think we're going to have some really clearly differentiated types. We can figure out the titles later. So first off. No, we're going to start with our hook, AJ. First off, I want to define balance for the sake of this conversation.

Balance is tuning knobs, meaning adding or moving stats or abilities, things like that, to achieve a particular goal. And the way that I view balance is through what goal you are trying to achieve. So I think a lot of designers look at balance as, do you have a 50-50 win rate? That's sort of like the default. But I think there's a lot of different lenses to look at. Is every option equally viable, I think, is a better way to put that.

Right. So let me spread these out into multiple different things here, because I think there's a lot of different ways to talk about this. So the first way that you can look at balance is through a lens of victory, and that is simply a skill check. Now, the way that I would define skill check balance isn't a 50-50 win rate between factions, because what you're tuning for is the skill of the player.

You lost me. Can you say that again in different words? What do you mean by a skill check in this context? So in terms of goals, skill check is one goal of balancing. The goal here is to determine which player is the more skilled and whatever skill this game is testing. Oh, I understand. I was thinking like a D&D skill check, and I couldn't understand how it reached at all.

Right. So let me try to rephrase just to make sure that I understand, and that's hopefully the listener will understand as well. You're saying that one goal of balancing your game, one use for the tool of balancing is to make sure that skill is the determining factor over who wins rather than random draw what you get, like what elements you're exposed to. So, for instance, arm wrestle would be a pretty pure skill check game.

Whoever is the stronger player is probably going to win 100% of the time. There's not many factors besides that, right? Yeah. Chess would be right up there for a completely different example, where aside from first player, it's generally the better player wins, like always. Then there's what I would call fair chance as a balanced design goal. So the goal of this one is to get that 50-50. It's to have a roughly equal chance. 50, 15, or two-player game, yeah. Yes, thank you.

A lot of these, I'm coming at through the lens of ortho games, meaning 1v1 competitive tests of skill, regardless of if that's the main goal of what we're talking about at the moment. Gotcha. So for a fair chance game, sorry, for a fair chance goal, I look at that as roughly equal opportunity of winning the game. And for these types of games, which I would argue... Regardless of skill? Pardon me?

Are you saying regardless of skill? I'm saying skill is still a factor, but the goal isn't to... the goal of the designer isn't to make a system that is going to determine which player is the best by winning the majority of the time. The goal is to give both players a good game where they both felt like they had a good chance of beating the other player. This actually ties closely to our catch-up mechanisms episode we recently did.

Yes, absolutely. I think that's what inspired you to do this episode next. Yeah. And what I would say is a lot of designers, I think, don't really consider skill checks. I think rightly so. I don't think many people come down to play a game to be like, all right, we are going to check these eight skills. And at the end of this game, we have determined universally that this person's the better at this game. Because if they did then, and that was how the game always goes,

every time you play a game, they're always going to win. I mean, again, not necessarily. There are definitely player archetypes, player personalities, and especially genres where that is the focus. So I work in the abstract space. You know, that time you killed me is an abstract game. I've got another upcoming abstract game, and it's something I think about a lot. And so if you're designing for the abstract audience, they want the better player to win. That's the desired goal.

I'd say that's a pretty high priority. Yes, absolutely. And then there are certain players and these players then become designers and they're like, I hate dice, I hate drawing cards, I hate shuffling because in their ideal world, there's a quote from Kevin Smith. He says, every writer is actually writing their ideal world. I think every game designer is to some level designing their ideal game. So for a lot of people, the ideal game is the one where the better player wins.

And there is a lot of merit to that. If that's what you're trying to do, that's what your audience wants.

Great, that's a great fit. So I think I disagree with the idea that, designers aren't generally doing that maybe that's not a focus for you but i know that in my early career i was like the better player has to win that was a very strong focus for me it can certainly be a goal i'm not sure if that's worth being the priority in terms of like what's going to appeal to players but you know i'll i'll leave it there, And then there's some like more edge. That means I won everyone.

We had an argument and I won. For the record, Peter, you don't have to gloat. You win every argument with me. It's because I edit. I can just cut out the bits where I don't. Wow, AJ made a really good point. Let's cut that and then just have me retake it. Yeah, let's record it again later. I have a Slack with my sister. We chat all day in the Slack. And recently our joke has been deleting the other person's comment and they're just restating it as our own.

So you'll be in a conversation that you'll see them say the thing that you just said and you'll scroll up and your message isn't there anymore it's it's hilarious if you have a slack with your sister i recommend it continue sure that wide demographic that we repeal to so then there's some things that don't fall nicely into those categories in terms of victory condition design goals you know sometimes you want the victory yeah

well i'm still looking at from like who do you want to win what percentage of the time that as as this sort of grouping of design oh it's still in that subset. I got you. Yeah. So sometimes if you're playing a horror game, maybe you want the monster to win more often to make it seem scarier. Right. And then there's co-op games and stuff like that. But we'll get into those a little bit later.

I just want to talk quickly through some high level points so that we can bring these terms up while we talk about our stuff. So then for other design goals, I stopped thinking about the winning of the game and the losing of the game.

And I think of other types of goals that you can have within the game so the number one thing i think design balance goals are is to prevent strategic collapse you want multiple options to be viable if there's only one viable strategic option there is strategic collapse it's no longer a game you just do the thing that is what a lot of a game being defined as like a series of interesting decisions once the decisions become obvious they're

not interesting anymore and this is also tied to part like this is this is a small form of of different paths to victory yeah exactly.

I think i want to run through a couple more and i'm going to come right back to this one and we'll keep going so thematic like i said providing a specific experience you might tune the balance of some element of the game in one direction or another in order to feel appropriate yeah classic example of this is in a lot of historical war games yes a side lost in a actual real life war they will balance the game so that side is almost definitely going to lose

and for that audience that's fine they're not playing to win they're playing to like give the best shot and so, in same ways like you can you can play a solo game that just has a high score and nothing else and be like yeah you you won obviously you always like that side always wins but i managed to hold these three cities that historically they didn't hold so that's impressive and it's like it's a it's a very weird different way of thinking about game design that's an excellent example.

And then the last one for me in terms of broad goals, again, these are very high-level things, is simply having a functioning game or a functioning economy. You know, you want to make sure that you have enough inputs to be able to generate outputs. You want to make sure that you have enough money to be able to buy the cool things. You want to make sure you don't have too much money so that buying things becomes completely irrelevant.

And I think for bottlenecks, just to go into them a little bit, because I don't feel the need to go into them further down, I think bottlenecks are much more relevant to consider in games that escalate a lot, and also games that have longer playtimes are more susceptible to hitting a bottleneck at a certain point. Do you have an example? You know what? I should have come up with an example. I do not, actually. Do you have an example, or am I wrong? I'm trying to quite

understand. I'm just trying to understand that I know what you mean. So, actually, I've got one. So, in Brass, this is one we both played.

I was about to say as my suggestion as an example yeah one of the bottlenecks is in the first half of the game canals and the second half of the game railways i think they are called maybe the roads and the idea there is that those provide you access to multiple options of different places and everything and if you didn't have the mid-game wipe of canals to then replace them with railways then the economy of the game would be messed up because the whole board would be full they need

to have that reset in order to stop it from bottlenecking. Gotcha. So that's not quite what I was thinking. I don't have a good brass example to use, but I was thinking like, let's make up a theoretical game where you're shipping goods to different planets. And the first half, you're just on your planet building a spaceship. And then as soon as you build a spaceship, you have access to all the trade routes to all the different planets.

If I do that two turns before you, I've gotten through that bottleneck early and that can give me a huge advantage.

Is that related to what you're talking about? Yeah, that's another one, for sure yeah again these are these are very broad things yeah and so how does this relate to balance well just in terms of you want to balance the economy you want to make sure that there are enough resources in order for players to be able to take actions they don't run up against the wall where it's like oh it half we're at the halfway point i can no longer build canals because the whole board is covered in canals those

types of things or if for instance there's not enough of a resource in the system let's say i think you're talking about economic stagnation and uh surplus like deficit and surplus basically okay yeah so balancing an economy would be the sort of headline for this for this whole yes yeah gotcha so yeah going up an agent in age of empires would be another really clear example of a bottleneck are there any design balance goals that i haven't

mentioned because i think these cover everything i can think of the the only one i think you have covered this but i just want to give a more extreme example is breaking a game.

So like an infinite combo or like the classic you win on turn one or you know you win before the opponent gets a chance to go or you you can essentially be like hey you skip your next seven turns like that is sort of covered like you've covered that but i just wanted to to pull that out as a as a thing that a lot of the time when you're thinking about balancing that's one where i think it's an emergency definitely do this focus on that i think that's worth liking absolutely.

So I'm going to run back to preventing strategic collapse for a moment. Yep. So in preventing strategic collapse, making sure that each option is viable, there's an economic theory. Have you heard of the Pareto efficiency or the Pareto frontier? No. Basically, you just have a black mirror upside. On one axis, you chart one attribute. On another axis, you chart another.

You put wherever things fall onto that axis. and then the outside curve is the Pareto Frontier and those are the only viable options. So for example, let's say we're trying to balance Magic the Gathering and on one axis we have mana cost and on the other axis we have their stats, you know, attack and HP and stuff. If you have a one mana 1-1 and a 10 mana 10-10 on that chart, one of those is the highest on one of the parts of the graph, one of them's the lowest.

But if you look at them, they both might be viable options because maybe a 10-man 10-10 is a really powerful way in the game, and maybe the 1-mana 1-1 is really efficient. So they both have a use. But as soon as you make something that's a 1-mana 10-10 in the most extreme example, both of the other options are now completely worthless. They fall outside the Pareto frontier because it is strictly better for one than the other.

And that's obviously obvious, right? Like we all know how strictly better numbers work. But the point I would like to make is that when you're designing and trying to balance different components or different factions or whatever in your game, one way to do it is to try and think of different metrics for these things and where they would fall on them. For example, if you have decks in Magic the Gathering, you could chart the power

level versus the consistency. If it's a very inconsistent deck, it can be a bit higher on the power level, those sorts of things. And again, most of the time when we're designing factions or like things that are composed of multiple component parts, it gets really complicated really fast. But I think it's really valuable to think of what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses, and, you know, is there a comparable other faction that is strictly worse in multiple aspects? Does that make sense?

Yes. I've very heavily gone to the game Soulforge. I think we've talked about this before, back when it was first released as a digital game.

And one thing that I learned, this is before I was designing games on pretty much any level one thing i learned from soulforge is that you've got you've got your monsters you've got the enemy monsters and you've got spells uh so soulforge didn't have an economy oh let me let me let me change the phrase that soulforge didn't have card costs and that's something that's always appealed to me village pillage has no card costs critic

kitchen has no card costs like card costs for me are not a natural thing that i lean towards i always just make everything free or everything costs the same and then balance accordingly i think it's a really useful tool, and I think we've talked about it before, but my introduction to games was sort of through Soulforge, where everything was just, it costs you one of your two plays, no matter what the card is.

And what they didn't have was a spell that said, destroy one creature, because that gives you no levers to pull. Once you have a destroy one creature spell, every other spell is either strictly better or strictly worse. Like maybe, you know, maybe the best you could do is like destroy one of your creatures and then destroy two creatures. But you have to have to like, now you literally have to enforce a cost.

What they had instead was there's multiple levels of creatures and the cards level up as you play them, et cetera.

So they had a level one card that was a level one spell that was destroy a level one creature they had a level two spell that was destroy a level one or two creature and then a level three spell that was destroy any creature and like on paper that's the same as destroying a creature but it's really not because suddenly you have a thing that like limits what you know it's a lever that you can pull so now in the next set i

can't remember any actual examples from the game but they could do a card that was you know destroy a creature destroy one of your creatures and then destroy any creature and it's not strictly worse or strictly better it's situationally better or worse and so one thing i'm always thinking about when i'm designing especially no cost games no cost cards but let's say one mana cost like your base card is how do you make sure that it's not,

so flat that every other card is going to be strictly better or strictly worse yeah and that leads into talking about what you call levers i call knobs same thing it's something that you can deeply technical times.

It's something you can adjust on the card that or it's something you can adjust on the component that you're worried about, in one way or another you could for magic cards you have a lot of knobs you've got the mana cost the mana color you've got the attack the defense the abilities and abilities can be a million things yeah exactly and you even have tags where it's like this is a creature type you can have those types of things. You can see- This is a dragon type, and a 1-1 dragon type.

Might like be functionally identical to a 1-1 worm type or whatever i don't know the different keyword 1-1 giant type but if you have a card that's all about dragon cards and that's so different like even though there's no inherent difference between them yeah and that's just a free way to add depth as well where it's like you know you have a card that's you know like you're saying one strength but a dragon versus a card that's three strength but doesn't have a

creature type well all of a sudden there is a reason you might play one over the other and adds a lot of strategic depth yeah i also want to get into power budget so power budget is whatever class of thing we're looking at if it's a single card if it's an entire faction it is the total amount of power that faction is allowed to have so by limiting some elements of its strength again talking about the parade or parade or frontier we can boost other ones so really

on our mind example would be the Mantis Sisters from our game with AEG. Those are ones that have a huge weakness. They've got two leaders, you only need to kill one of them, and they don't have particularly high health, and they don't even get to spawn in other units, which would tank hits for you in that type of thing. What they do have is extremely high mobility, so they can get away from attacks. They can get in for an attack and then leave.

It's hard to get away from them. So by pulling back on some of the knobs we can push other ones and overall as a faction the power budget remains the same now the one thing you have to be careful of is of course let's say a faction is comprised of just four cards in your hand so each turn you play a card that's it that's the whole game well okay if one of those cards is 10 times stronger than the other ones that might be balanced overall in terms of the power budget but you're only

going to ever play that one card every turn so you do need to have access to the middle times yeah, If you're listening to the podcast and watching the YouTube video, the visuals every time AJ is talking about the Prado Frontier don't exist. You're missing nothing. Let's talk a little bit about the, literally we were playtesting, was it yesterday? God, it's been a big week. And we have a card, the Assassin Bug, who's one of the factions in our upcoming AEG game.

And we wanted to change a card from, I can't remember what it was. We wanted to change it to move twice. And so we quickly pulled out the rest of the cards in the deck. We found one that was move twice with push. Which was just strictly better. So we needed to do literally this. So we sat down and like this, I'm saying this because it's a really tangible, practical example of what we did in the last 24 hours.

We sat down and we were like, okay, well, maybe this one is move once with push and then move. And this one is move twice and don't leave tracks or move twice, but one of them must be to a flower.

We basically took the one that was the most powerful and reduced it by half a step so that we could bring the other one that was less powerful and bump it up by half a step and have two roughly equal cards it's and it's so valuable having those little knobs even if they're not strictly numerical you know we've got you can move twice or you can jump which is simply move twice except you can move through someone you know you jump over them which is a subtle difference

but a very powerful different effect and it doesn't come with significant rules baggage either it's a it's a very natural extension of the rules i'm going to talk about Bellatro a little bit. Bellatro is, I think it was Indie Game of the Year or Game of the Year or something. It has replaced Barbara's Year as my favorite game. I love it. And in fact, if you want to hear me do a whole episode just talking about Bellatro,

let me know, because I would so happily do that. I have so many Bellatro thoughts. I think about it all the time. I'm about to finish the final deck on Gold Stake, which if you know Bellatro, you'll know that that is 15 decks worth of going through all the stakes, and I've just been having a blast the whole time. Bellatro, one of the big, I'm not going to go into too much details, but one of the big things is malt.

So if you can add malt to a card, that is very good. If a card has malt, that's great. There's two ways to add malt to the cards in your hand. One is turning into a malt card, which is this card has four malt. The other way is this card has a one in five chance of making 20 malt, which numerically those are identical, but one in the game is pretty much always worse.

So the it's called a lucky card one in five times it produces 20 malt and one in 20 times it gives you twenty dollars so it's such a like funny difference between like always getting four malt means you can rely on it's consistent one in five times getting 20 malt is not quite as good because it's just so inconsistent you could play five cards and get no malt from that and tank your whole run but that one in 20 chance of getting twenty dollars is so such a

powerful incentive that it makes it like one of the most fun kind of archetypes of the game and then obviously there's cards that affect odds and there's cards that let you re-trigger and blah blah blah but just that that that for me is a really good example of the same thing but like the variability making it actually worse and so they add a really fun buffer because now if you're playing a round that re-triggers a lot and increases your odds that's an economy card which the four malt is never

going to be an economy card and so i think belatra this is why i could do a whole two-hour episode just on Bellatra it's it's a microcosm of like brilliant decisions every every like every layer of that game but that just really directly like ties into like the difference between the consistency and the inconsistency so I want to move on to how to assess how good something is going back into the period of frontier those sorts of concepts and.

A few different things you can do. You can look at what the rate is. So if I pay this much of a cost, what do I get comparably from other effects in the game? You can look at how easily can I get this effect elsewhere? Is this the only card in the entire game where I can do it? Oh, I see what you're saying. Rarity. Yeah, like if this is the only card in the entire game that lets me fly, well, that makes it a lot more valuable because I'll never be able to get that again.

What impact does it have on the game? should be pretty self-explanatory but like what ribble effects can it cause not just like the immediate thing but what's like the the downstream effect of it and what counterplay does my opponent have to this effect those are some questions that i think are are worth asking yourself gotcha i'm trying to work out how to turn that into like examples i'm trying to think of a very well-known game that we all know

uh katan let's let's use the action cards in katan so the action cards in katan are very i would say they're all very situational but they're above rate what's that sorry but they're above rate right if you buy one of those cards above rate so like what you're paying for them you get more than what you put in i'm pretty sure there's like a literal one where it's like the amount of resources that costs you to buy it it will

then give you more resources than that because you had like the random opportunity but the downside of course is the yeah you don't know which which one you're getting out i was thinking of something like the Monopoly card, which is potentially, you know, 20 resources. You could theoretically get 20 resources from the Monopoly card. The Monopoly card in Catan is pick a resource type. Everyone gives you all of that resource type from their hand.

It's a very, very powerful, but you don't know what people have. And if you do know, it might not be the thing that you need. And so it's an example of like the situationalness counters the power of it.

So synergy synergy is really interesting because you get more than the sum of its parts so how do you assess a synergistic card there's a card in rogue book which is a game by richard garfield it's like a digital ccg it does zero damage five times first of all new players look at this and it's kind of confusing like if you haven't seen any card boosting effects you're like i don't understand, and I don't like it for that reason, but that completely aside.

It has obviously a floor of does literally nothing. Floor being like the worst possible case. It does literally nothing five times. Yes. At the cost of some amount of your mana. So the floor of the card is actively bad for you to play. That's the worst case. Because it has a cost and no benefit. Yeah. It's below rate. Yeah. The ceiling, meaning the best possible case of the card, is extraordinarily high.

If you have a bunch of stat boosting effects, each one of those effects is probably balanced around increasing a normal attack, not increasing it five times, which is effectively what this card reads. So I think the short answer, obviously, all of what we're saying here is an art, not a science. But when you're considering it, think about the floor, think about the ceiling, think about the average, think about how hard it is to achieve the ceiling and the floor.

And remember that multipliers stack there is a keyword in balatro which is just re-trigger and it means the card you activate activate again so if i play it's a poker based kind of.

System of play so if i play it you know in this game you can play multiple the same time so let's say i had five five of clubs if i have a re-trigger every card then cool i've played five clubs and then i've played another five five of clubs like i've managed to do that twice but when you have something like that lucky card that i was talking about earlier it's a one in five chance of plus four malt and a one in twenty chance of twenty dollars and then

do it again so you could theoretically by retrigering one lucky card you could get forty dollars it's very unlikely but it's entirely possible it gets really crazy because there are multiplier effects which is different to malt it's very confusing technology so for example there is a card that is just point one point five times your whole score triggering that twice is one point five times 1.5 which is 2.25 there are there

are different combos you can build that let you trigger that seven times and now suddenly you're in the in the 30s or the 40s or something it just gets.

Absolutely bananas that i i played uh i've been playing a little bit of slay the spire it's not for me but i wanted to check it out because everyone loves it so much and a really great example of this is just like do three damage versus do one damage three times so it's like a less extreme version of the richard garfield one if you have a plus one to every attack the second one is you know what's that point point three times as good point one point three times good if you have an enemy who every

time they're attacked they shield it's much worse it's just yeah it's a lot of fun i i think i think we've done episodes on design space before it's one of my absolute obsessions but like if you have little stuff like this then the design space expands in a really intuitive way i think yeah it's it's like organic depth for the players and it's more design space for you to create that depth with very little cost. And cost being complexity in this case, not like a balancing cost, just for clarity.

I just want to talk about this a little bit more. Why? Why is this important? Why is balancing important? This specific kind of area we're talking about of like, why does it matter if one card is better than another? So I think it goes to your goals. So again, if it's a strategic collapse thing, you want to make sure that all the cards have a use.

It doesn't have to mean that every card is equally useful to you at this moment, but with like Slay the Spire or Bellatio, presumably there would be a run where you were building a deck and this card would be a good, interesting, fun card for your deck. If that is never the case, then you want to tune knobs and adjust how it functions in order to make it synergize or work well enough to be worth considering at some point.

And i think it's important to emphasize that like it has a use case again i mean he's blotcher i've been playing a lot of blotcher lately there are some really crappy jokers there's one that's like if it contains a pair get eight malt and eight malt is nothing like i said a single card can provide four malt by itself as part of a larger synergy without taking up a joker slot so a pair giving you eight malt or whatever it is like cool that's

crap but at the very start of your run where you are completely weak that's a huge power boost that can get you through the first like, third of the game by itself not literally by itself but like that can be a key part of getting through the first third of the game i also well while we're in this kind of area i want to talk about when it is valuable to have some cards that are worse than others because it's something i've really struggled with

as a new designer and i think we've probably talked about it before but we've been going for five years we're going to repeat topics.

Yeah i i'm totally down i've got that as a note do you want to take lead on that or shall i no go ahead if you guys want to make sure we didn't miss it yeah so first off imbalance is just not always a problem for a lot of reasons i think one of the most obvious reason that you would have a card that is for all intents and purposes strictly worse than other meaning you compare the two cards and it looks like there's jet like 99 of the time one is always better than the other maybe there's

some completely bizarre way but basically for all intents and purposes one is strictly better than the other, why would you have a card that's worse than that? One is to show power progression. You start with something weaker, you get something stronger. The weak cards make the powerful cards feel better.

Yeah, we definitely have done an episode on arc and arc is such an, like if you can build arc into your game where you go from weak to strong, it is going to make your game just by itself more inherently fun.

Yes. To use a bunch of buzzwords, but yeah. Yeah, arc meaning over the course of the game, I'm trying to be more cognizant with our definitions and making sure that we bring new players along, especially because i hope this one gets linked to people a lot this is a good episode people share it with your friends we've decided halfway through that it is a good episode i knew it was gonna be a banger i was doing the show notes.

But arc meaning over the course of the game things change and evolve generally speaking you start weak and poor you end the game powerful and rich those sorts of things it's very satisfying my favorite description of arc is the first turn feels radically different to the last turn or to a subsequent turn. Yeah, because you don't necessarily have to be gained stronger over the course of the game. You could be weaker, but it's the difference in that progression that feels

interesting and satisfying. And normally that's in gained stronger. But I think that there's other use cases for weak cards too. There's one big one I have in my head, so I'm curious if it's on your list. Sure. So I've got a specific one with Sushi Go. So in Sushi Go, there are Nagiri, I think they're called, that are worth one to three points.

One is lower than three. If you are comparing those two cards, you would not take the one i know hot take right but the value of the other cards is relative this is a drafting game so the question isn't is the three better than the one it's is the three better than the other options in the pack so a three is always gonna be better than the one but the other top picks might be sashimi which if you have a set of three then each of those three cards is worth

3.5 points so the three on its own is clearly better than the one not necessarily

better than of the sashimi. That's not quite right, because there's no... That would be 10.5 if you had three which i don't think is a scoring option oh yeah you're right no, it's three for ten so it's 3.33 yeah good catch good but yeah i want to jump in here this is not my other point but i think i think it's super relevant there's also a moment of delight in like getting a good thing and giving your opponent trash like true hand handings like you know if let's say

you drew a hand and just had the three and the one it feels good to be like i'm going to take the three and i'm going to give you the one there's not a strategic decision there but it is still a feel-good moment don't build your whole game around that but i think there is value in just like the the dopamine of it or sure carry on and just to finish off that example earlier i said that the the sashimi could be worth more than the three nigiri it could

also be worth less that's only a set of three is worth 10 points so the one that might actually be better than in some context so those different contexts change the evaluation which can be really interesting do you have any other thoughts on making oh yes you didn't do my big one okay so this is i think.

Perhaps the biggest reason to do variable values and that is variable values or like strictly weaker you mean strictly strictly stronger strictly weaker sure okay and that is i'm gonna use a term this is not quite what i mean but you'll understand the push your luck element so i need cracks of quettingberg you can in in your bag to start with you have if you hit seven white tokens you bust. Or more than seven, I think it is. In your bag, you have threes and you have ones.

And you have a three and you have ones and you have a two. Three is. Every way. But there is a gambling element to it. So that's an example where it's given to you. Let's use, again, I'm in Bellatro world. In Bellatro, you can re-roll the shop any number of times. It costs you one more dollar each time you do. So the first time costs five, then six, then seven. And so if you roll the shop and it's just all crappy jokers.

There is a psychological incentive to roll it again because you might strike lucky. You might hit a joker that is just flat out better.

You might hit a joker that is flat out worse. If every joker is equally good you can you don't recreate that effect i i have a game that i was working on about six months ago maybe a little bit more where you would basically you could you could spend to draw cards from a deck so it was it was draw three choose one and if every card was good you would do it once pick the best card and be done but let's say one in 10 cards is worth 10 times the rest you're going to hit that again and again and it

is a genuinely strategic decision how much do i push my luck etc etc so that there are definite reasons to have completely imbalanced things for psychological reasons that that lead to super interesting decisions that i wanted to make sure we flag that because i mean it's it's in our game with um the the locusts in in the ag game is a very literal quasi-quailing mode mechanism where you can draw a token that's worth one action point

or you can draw one that's worth two action points or you can draw one that busts your game and is worth nothing and those are all like if they were all equally valuable it wouldn't be an interesting puzzle yep good call it's peter do you have a definition for tempo in music no in games have you have you not heard this term before i've heard it it's it's very like you live in the in the tcg world world a hundred times more than me so i think

tempo is very much a tcg term yeah so tempo i've seen used in a lot of different ways i'm going to give a really bad definition and then give a much better example. I think of it as curve shapes. Is that an accurate sort of... I'm just going to go really broad here. I think of tempo as a term that can be applied in a lot of different ways, like play patterns. There's a lot of different ways you can use the term play patterns. And tempo refers to the pacing of play.

So, here's my example to fix that bad definition, and then Peter King can do a better one because he's very good at... What's that? Word Wordsmithing. Languaging. Yeah. Wordmanning. So there are two cards in Magic the Gathering that have a nice mirror to each other. I'm so glad to talk about this example. I think I wrote this down like literally the year that we started Fun Problems. And I was like, I don't know when I'm going to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it.

This is the perfect example of tempo versus card advantage.

So there's a card, very famous in Magic, the most famous card, Black Lotus. Yes. Black Lotus is a card that costs nothing. You sacrifice it, you get three mana. So, effectively, you have spent one resource, a card, to get mana.

Another card divination it costs three mana you draw two cards meaning you have netted a total of one card because divination replaced itself it was one card in your hand now you've got one more so in one case you spent a card to get three mana in the other case you spent three mana to get one card this is the perfect encapsulation of black lotus does it not cost any mana it does not cost So it's the perfect mirror here. So think of mana in this example as tempo.

You give up a card to gain tempo with the Black Lotus, and you give up tempo to gain a card with Divination. The tempo is the pace of the play, and so things that slow down your opponent and things that speed up you, that is gaining you tempo as a resource. And does that make sense? i don't think you've you've and maybe i'm just dense but i don't think you've explained what.

Like you you've said tempo is cards no that's not really what tempo is no tempo is the pacing of play so by playing a black lotus you have sacrificed a card to get three mana which means you can then use that mana to do something on the board you have gained board presence are you're trying to say acceleration maybe is that the word yeah i i suppose so you if you sacrifice some resources in order to get more resources yeah it's it's

tricky because it's like certain resources i would i would say are tempo based and some aren't i want to spend too long hammering away this awkward definition but the the.

With balancing is just a consideration of what resources you're cashing in for what and how much tempo you are allowing your players to gain to your early point adding to my definition or sorry and to my list of design balance goals of not being overpowered and winning turn one the winning turn one is because they have you've given players too much access to speeding up the tempo of the game you if you want your game to last x number of turns and it always lasts x number of turns and

then it's over then players cannot control the tempo of the game in terms of how many turns they have but they could potentially control the tempo in terms of how many things get deployed in those turns so yeah tempo i think of as the pacing of the game i i think my two issues with this definition and again i don't want to dive into it too deep is that like it's if you said the pacing of the game i'd be like oh how long someone takes to think about

their turn and that's not at all what you mean like it's just such a broad side of turn so let's break it down let's break down the game because i think that's such a such a broad term how fast someone builds their engine or how far someone moves towards their goal are you talking about one or both of those or neither i'm talking about both of those okay gotcha so that that's why it's tricky to nail down a definition because it it is applied in a lot of different ways right i i think so when

when magic and again i'm not a magic player i played as a teenager but i've really touched my sense when magic when magic is talking about tempo are they talking about dealing damage or is it just anything Anything that moves you ahead. Anything that moves you ahead. I gotcha. Or puts your opponent behind. Right, so like discarding cards from their hand or anything like that?

Well, discarding cards isn't actually. So here's a good example, or hopefully this is a good example to help you understand. If I spend one mana to play a card that then makes you discard a card. I have given up tempo for something else. I've spent that one turn of spending mana to not actually get ahead on the board and advance me towards winning the game.

I have spent my mana to do something else to attack your your cards as a resource whereas on your turn one you could play a creature and then that creature is attacking me every turn and doing stuff on the board i have given up tempo to hopefully disrupt you enough to make up for that tempo later because you are i think you're right i think this is like a few concepts sort of broadly like shoved under one i want to talk about efficiency games i want to talk about soul forge

so ruins of arnak is one of my favorite games and that is a pretty pure efficiency game the game is going to last five turns there are five turns and then you count points and declare a winner the amount of stuff that you can do on a turn is hugely like.

Engine building driven so for example like if you can just get one more action or one more turn basically in the first round that can lead to 20 more turns in the final round it is it is an insane escalation of like efficiency efficiency efficiency so that would be that that i think falls under tempo but i would i would call that an efficiency engine building sort of type of tempo right true soulforge had a creature i can't remember what it's called but it was basically a 7-7

with trample and and as i mentioned soulforge had no no costs at all so if you drew the 7-7 with with trample you could play it and in the first turn almost when it comes back to you on your on your next turn almost guaranteed to do 5 plus damage.

Average creature on level level one is two to five health so seven seven is huge it's probably going to eat a whole creature and then a second one and deal damage both times that it's doing that every time you play a card in in soulforge a. Upgraded version the next level goes into your deck for the next round so basically you shuffle the it's weird like a clone goes to your discard pile and the originals move from the game and

then you draw the clone when you when you shuffle your deck so it's a deck builder brilliant mechanism so that one was a seven seven at level one and eight eight at level two and a nine nine at level three which is a crazy slow progression my favorite card in the game was called the techno bansa that was a two two at level one a zero ten at level two and a twenty twenty at level three and so it's just maybe it was a two ten level two but it was just like it

was a very extreme power there was a legendary called chagrius who is a 1-1 a 0-15 and then a 30-30 with trample so basically you did nothing for the first two but if you get that level three out unless they have some crazy counter that will immediately kill it you've won the game so those are.

And again this this is i guess it's sort of engine building but this is a more much more immediate tempo contrast to me where it's about dealing damage to your opponent is that an accurate kind of yeah this is this is an excellent example so for instance just to use the term the way that i would if let's say you had a card that was like a zero one and then a zero one and then a 100 100 you have given up tempo the first two times you played it it didn't do

something and have immediate impact in order to gain a massive late game advantage versus if you had a large creature up front and then it got you know weaker or didn't scale as much you get a lot of tempo up front for the cost of it not being as strong later on okay so i i think the way you're using tempo based on this conversation is immediate.

Effects yes but also it could relate to i guess it's still an immediate effect but something that can help you engine build for longer if you have something that like you play turn one and that generates your resource every turn of the game then you've affected you're effectively giving up tempo turn one to gain tempo every single future turn of the game.

Yeah, I think tempo is a bad term. Because it's being used to do four different conflicting things, and I can't quite get my fingers around its slippery definition. Is this a good place to take an episode break? Let's, just because we're talking about tempo, I want to slide into one more thing and then we'll go. Great. So, in talking about costs, there's one that's sort of tempo related. By the way, if you're on a Discord, give us your definition of tempo and we'll watch the best one.

And read it out because right right now tempo is is it's like the word hand in poker it means like three different conflicting things or trick and trick taking like there's just these terms that just mean a few different things and it's it's very hard to define so just talk about costs for effects and things in pokemon you've got ex pokemon and the cost of them is when they die they give your opponent twice the victory points effectively oh i didn't know and so i'm sorry

i've not i've not accounted these these mustn't be in the generations i've played, yeah they're they're more modern and really badly designed so the the the problem in having a in having a pokemon sponsorship thanks aj the problem is in having them give extra vp when they die as the only cost while having lots of attack and lots of hp it means they can you know punch down all of your opponent's creatures and kill them and it's very

hard to kill them so they get to last for a long time and it's safer for you to like retreat them into safety so that deferred cost in many cases isn't actually ever paid or they win the game before you would actually have to pay it so using tempo again peter's favorite word you gain a lot of tempo for no cost there. I feel like using tempo synonymously with like results. You're giving up results now in exchange for results later.

This one gives you a lot of results for no cost. I'm not going to respond. Not because I'm mad at you. Just because it's a productive conversation, even though I'm going to keep using the word. I'm just going to mentally sum it out for results every time you use it until it's not working. You do, my friend. So another way to think about costs is resources that you weren't using weren't actually a cost.

This is the only thing i think about i match at the gathering a lot your life total is a resource what you don't lose the game until you go to zero and yes obviously you have to play differently if you have a low hp total because you know they can attack you and stuff like that but generally speaking in magic if you can pay even a huge amount of hp to gain a small amount of mana you weren't using that hp anyway and the amount of tempo that you gain for spending that hp is enormous.

So if you're going to make the cost something that you're not using or something that doesn't have an immediate effect, try to think of ways that you can layer in effects. My favorite example of this one is in Seven Wonders Duel where you've got this combat track and you win the game if you get to the end of the combat track. But if that's all it was, then it would feel really useless. You can ignore it until it's at the end, yeah. Exactly. It wouldn't matter until

that very last point. So it's not a real cost for the opponent to ignore it.

However, they... the sorry got my throat stuck a little bit they put little roadblocks in it so once you cross certain thresholds you get to uh steal or just make it destroy lose money destroy thank you uh so that's which is thematic too which i really like totally so that's a nice way of making sure there is actually a a cost and a granulated set of things a comparison for magic could be something along the lines of you know abilities that get stronger if your opponent's weaker things

like that but just something that's much better i was going to suggest one that a immediately hated, which was that every time you pass a five-health threshold, you lose a card. The problem with that is now it's a win-harder mechanism. Right. All right. Yeah. Let's stop here. Do you want to queue me up for fun? Oh, no, wait. I'm queuing you up for design stuff. We do that first, right? I can't remember, but yes.

As you know, my memory of the order of events at the end of episodes is far from my strongest skill. So I tend to have every episode with a sort of publishing tip. And today I'm actually going to be responding to a Kickstarter. Nope. To a YouTube comment. Someone asked, I'm wondering what you mean by Kickstarters need stretch goals.

And this is this is going into our publishing tips section because i think it's a really interesting way to think about product i've talked before about the zoe york trilogy of romance selling books that i read it's called like oh my god i can't remember them i'm going to quickly google it it's going to annoy me but basically they're books about how to write and sell, romance books for a market romance your brand that's the name of the series.

And because it's so disconnected from board games i found it incredibly helpful for reframing how i about board games so again this is our publishing tip i'm allowed to be as publishing heavy as i want one way to design games this ties into the exercise we did inside the episode is to think about the final step of the sale and i've talked about this a lot before is like the final step but in this case i mean the point where the publisher is selling it to the consumer how do

they see that how do they encounter it if you can build your game to that so for example critic kitchen we knew that that was going to go on cardboard alchemy's kickstarter and cardboard alchemy we know their brand very well they love stretch goals especially ironically got a kickstarter running right now with no stretch goals but as a company as a rule they love stretch goals they go stretch goals stretch goal stretch goal so during the design process we'd already designed the game and

if you listen to our design diary you'll know all this but we designed the game and pitched it and then when we're at the point of like developing it getting it ready for publication we were very focused on I'm like, okay, cool. How can we make little content hooks? So we knew that that game was going to go to Kickstarter, and so we wanted to make sure that the game as a product was as cardboard alchemy Kickstarter-friendly as possible.

And so what I meant by Kickstarters need stretch goals is if you're running a Kickstarter Kickstarter, as in all the bells and whistles and the stretch goals and the community hype and all that, you need to be unlocking stuff that gets people excited. And if you want to be unlocking stuff that makes people excited, you've got to have that in your game.

Aj and i've run into this a little bit with our ag game where we're like man this game is complete how do we how do we make stuff that gets people excited and we work that away it's really cool i hope it goes ahead because we are now in love with this whole thing anyway and we want to do it for itself but it came out of being like how do we make cool sexy fun kickstarters because this is going to be a kickstarter game if it's

not going to be a kickstarter game if it's going to be a retail game start thinking how does the back of the box sell this game zoe york's theory was that I think it might have changed since then, but basically most romance novels are sold through Facebook ads. So how do I make a novel that will Facebook ad really well? So she wrote her biggest hit, which was a military small town series, because she knew that people love small town books and they love military books and they love series.

So she basically Frankenstein those together into, I've read all of them, the Pine Harbor series, they're quite lovely.

The middle are quite lovely. The ends, it starts weak and it ends weak, but the middle is really good and so she she visualized the cover she was like how is this going to sell military small town, and then how can i build it into a series so it's about five brothers who are all from this small town and all went worked in the military at some point and so each of the brothers gets like you know it's just all there in the conception so what i meant by kickstarters need stretch goals was if

you are building this game for a kickstarter based company and i always try to have a company in mind when i'm building a game what are they going to do stretch it out.

If you have nothing it's going to be really forced and tacky it's going to be really like i don't know you get a bag with a face on it it's like cool that has nothing to do with the game you want stuff that makes people excited about the game um with critter kitchen that's that was where a lot of the carts came from we were like we want to unlock a cart every x thousand dollars and how do we make them cool one cart comes with gold coins one.

Cart comes with little pie dials one cart comes with a die you know each one of these is like oh man that's so tactile i can see how that would play i want to get my hands on that so yeah kick-siders needs stretch goals build your game to wherever you want to sell it good tip aj how do you feel about having a baby with me right now i think i'd rather have some fun fine you win this round see you do win i'll just edit this part so this is a an

interesting question that my wife asked me recently and she said how do you feel about having a baby with peter right now dear oh dear no thank you so i think you know these are divisive times people we're getting political wow this is no we're we're avoiding being political but i think that it's very useful to like reflect on things you believe and consider whether or not they're true and what the other side has to say as soon as we start dehumanizing their

side that some problems happen yeah so this is not fun problems either yeah so this is an interesting question my wife asked me she said what percentage of beliefs opinions facts you know etc would you estimate are wrong like do you think you're the one person on planet earth who knows absolutely everything i mean i gotta dive into what what it means for a belief to be wrong well so if you believe that the best way to solve an invasive species problem is to put out a bounty

on heads of that invasive species. The cobra problem. Yeah, those sorts of things. Every one of your...

Beliefs every one of your like religious beliefs political beliefs every one of the fun facts you think you know what percentage of those do you think are actually wrong oh man i don't even know where to start with that it's tricky huh yeah i i think i i'm getting i'm getting stuck in the definitions as i often do with these uh fun problems so like let's say i had a belief that humanity is fundamentally good well cool what is like how how

is that right or wrong what does it mean to be good like it just it it fractals down so much that i'm like i don't know where this where this question ends let me slightly rephrase for every one of those that has an objective truth whether or not you know that objective truth like if you had omniscience and you could like see everything for exactly how it was and you know which which percentage of those things that are i gotta

follow up more so now now now it's the word beliefs that i'm curious about like i believe that i'm talking to you right now does that count as one of my beliefs.

I mean no i i think i think so i could ask a different question if you want no no it's just i need to understand the question because like if we're talking about knowledge that i have of how the world works the stuff that i know that i don't know but i have an opinion one way or the other what yeah what once once it's all facts the percentage gets way higher because i'm like well i believe that this is a microphone and that i've got hair and that i'm a

human and i'm wearing a shirt but once you go out of okay cool objective facts gone then it's like well then it's all opinions let me let me try to ask the question back in a different way that i think captures what you're trying to say but in a way that works in my brain true how many of your moral beliefs, do you think will be mainstream in a hundred years time or widely accepted because i think that's what you're trying to capture Hmm.

Listening on the podcast pj's doing a little dance during this long silence what's your answer uh i would just i'd go with around 50 it's kind of a cowardice answer but i think about about half this this is something i think about a lot so this is a topic that actually nicole cutler and alex cutler friend of the podcast and i were on a road trip in 2019 or maybe even very early 2020 and nicole asked me the equivalent of this she said what do we think now that will just be,

incontrovertibly like untrue or different or like wildly changed in five or ten years and then two months later covet happened and so it was this really like wow we like we did not expect it like that wasn't in our belief system at all that the whole world could shut down for a period of six months we didn't see it coming so the ones that i think about are particularly around gender, vegetarianism. Oh, I had a third one, but it's gone. So for example, you know,

I identify as a male. I use he, him pronouns. I think if I'd been born a hundred years time, I would probably be they, them, and pretty much everyone would, maybe not literally everyone, but I think that would be the majority. If I'd been born a hundred years ago, I would never have even questioned it at all. See, I think a lot about trends and stuff like that. And I think there's just so many like splintering opinions.

And I think as time goes on the splinters are going to continue and become really entrenched so i don't know that a lot of my beliefs are going to be like widespread adopted to like you know to the point where it's such, commonplace like we we still have people who don't believe that the earth is round like.

Sorry if you're a listener and you think that the world is flat i guess we disagree but i don't know i i'll i'll say an optimistic 70 wow that is optimistic, i particularly think about this and and let me know if this is going to too much detail and not fun anymore about monogamy because i identify as polyamorous and i have since when i was 14 i encountered the term and i was like oh that's me and since then i have just always identified as polyamorous and i i think

about the word technology a lot actually this directly relates to board games i'm going to dive into it. About the word technology, because technology doesn't mean machine, it doesn't mean electronics, it doesn't mean any of that. It means a new idea, essentially. And so I think Jim Henson, 50 years ago, cheated on his wife, and then they got a divorce, Jane Henson. And my housemate, who I used to live with, she was like, that's outrageous. I thought he was a good guy, blah, blah, blah.

And I was sort of like, yeah, obviously don't cheat on your wife, that's bad. But also he didn't have the technology that we have these days of non-monogamy. Had I never encountered the word polyamory at 14, I guarantee I would have cheated on all my partners. Not because I think I'm a bad person, but because I am hardwired not to be monogamous. Monogamy makes me feel trapped and I just have to break out of it.

And I've been given the technology to be like, oh, cool, I can have multiple girlfriends, I can have multiple partners without it being a moral issue.

If I don't have that technology in the same way as gay people in the 1800s probably cheated on their wives with other men because they didn't have any other way to live and so for me being like oh people in the past how dare they not follow our moral codes to me is the equivalent of like medieval knights why didn't they use a gun what an idiot like i think it's actually a parallel and the reason i say it's relevant

to board games is because board game technology has not like fundamentally changed but board game technology has like even in the last 10 years evolved so much and i don't mean like apps and stuff like that i mean the stuff we talk about on this podcast, the idea of variable class to victory and balance and like, you know, skip a turn mechanics that, you know, roll and move. Roll and move used to be the technology that people had to make board games.

So every board game had to be a roll and move. And since then we've invented alternate technologies. I realize I'm using technology in a weird way, but I hope it's making sense. So I think that a lot of the beliefs I have, either so mainstream that I just accept them without thinking, such as not being a vegetarian. I mean, I realize vegetarianism is fairly mainstream, but like gender, you know, like people look at Harry Potter and they're like, what a stupid society.

They arbitrarily divide everyone up into four houses and that just defines the next seven years of their life. And it's like, we kind of do that with babies. Like we fairly arbitrarily put them into one of two things. Then we're like, how you like trucks and you like dolls. And that is who you are as a person. Didn't you see the pink aisle? That aisle's for you. Right. And it's this arbitrary split that we are just so entrenched in that we don't question it.

My sister came out as trans, I think, three or four years ago, and it made me sit down and for the first time, even though I've had a trans husband, I've had trans girlfriends and I've known lots of trans people, that was the first time I was ever like, what is my gender identity? Because it was so close to home and such a normal part of my life that I'd never considered it. And that is a technology that we did not have 100 years ago, 200 years ago.

And the very, very rare person who identified as any kind of two-spirit or non-binary or anything like that was by far the wild exception. Yeah.

Am in my life the wild exception on a lot of stuff i had a blue beard well before it was a thing that people did i have never had like a i've not had a nine-to-five job for 15 years i've had a creative career i was an early internet person blah blah like there's i'm polyamorous there's so many ways where i just don't live by the by the mainstream way of things and yet i am aware how fully entrenched i am in like mainstream

society even for how far on one end of the bell curve i am i think that whole bell curve will shift over 100 years that's why i'm like i don't know 50.

I think right now i'm at a pretty far end of the bell curve and the bell curve will shift to meet me and i'll be right in the middle but that's obviously an arbitrary guess you know what's interesting is i'm like if you're like the wacky weird one which you are i'm like the most boring sort of element or at the very least i definitely was like i i think if you just like took a poll I would be like the most average male in a lot of senses and, you know, belief systems, all those sorts of things.

And I think I, one thing I try to pride myself on or I try to work on and I pride myself on is working on myself and is like trying to listen to other people's opinions who I disagree with. And I've actually changed a lot from where I started. Yeah. I'm not sure how much I want to talk about on the podcast. If it stops being fun, take it out of the fun. This has gone on so long, I'm actually going to pivot it back to board game advice. Let's do it.

I have my face. If you're listening to the podcast, just imagine that I have a face. My face has caused a huge impact on double digit people's lives. Because when they met me, you know, I've had this blue beard for 15 years now. When people meet me and they get to know me and they hang out with me and they're like, oh, he's a human who exists. Like I'm not, maybe to listen as I am, I'm not this like abstract figure. I have an apartment and a toilet and a bath and a kitchen.

Like I do all the normal human stuff that humans do. I'm not an abstract concept. A person who exists as a human being who has colored hair is the only way that people are like, I could have colored hair in the same way as I need to see my sister go through a gender identity shift to be like, I could go like it, even though I've been exposed to it as much as everyone has, like trans stuff is constant in all the media.

And that sounded really denigrating. You know what I mean? Like it is a thing that we are regularly exposed to. And yet I needed someone who I was very close with to expose me to it, to actually even question it for myself, I have been that person on the much more trivial affair of colored hair. So I can name lots of people who had never even considered coloring their hair. They got to know me and within a year they colored their hair because they're like, that's a thing that any human can do.

This is why I told you, I'm bringing it back to board game advice. This is why we say play games, play a diversity of games, play new games, play old games. Because if you only have this one technology available to you. Sorry, I'm going to tangent again, because this is the most clear-cut black-and-white example I think has ever existed. There's a YouTube channel called Cracking the Cryptic that I and AJ worked with for many years.

They do Sudoku puzzles, and we published a bunch of their Sudokus in books, and they had a viral video.

I think it's like five million views or some crazy number of views, where someone took a magic square, which is a three-by-three grid where all the columns rows and diagonals add up to the same number and put it in the middle of sudoku and they solve that and that one went super viral it's just this crazy viral thing they got i would i would estimate thousands of submissions of sudokus with magic squares that is not an inherent aspect

of sudoku but that was what people were exposed to as the first ever variant sudoku i used to be really active in their like setters channel and every new person for the next six months came in with a magic square sudoku because that was what they knew if you are only exposed to one technology in this case magic squares invariant sudokus that is your default starting point always and it's really hard to break out of that just as humans we're not built to do that.

So play games and be like oh i had never even thought that you could do this i've been playing a lot of black show i'm designing roguelikes go ahead yeah that's why there's so many roll and moves done by like you know family gamers or exactly yeah you ask any layman to design a game and their first is going to be roll and move because that's the only technology they have available to them so as a board game designer expose yourself to different technologies if

you're like i like area controls cool but if you only play area controls you'll see some technology but not as many as you would if you went out and played you know push your luck games and this and that and and then you you can you can bring new technologies into your genre and to your point aj like one thing that you're doing is you're exposing yourself to different beliefs and now they are options where before you had fewer options.

Just one more example on the board game spectrum i was play testing a friend's game once and you know he had told me about the pitch for it and i was like oh that sounds really cool i want to try it he's like yeah it's not quite working and he showed it to me and like basically there's like action selection then puzzle you do with the things you get right the action selection was super cool the puzzle wasn't working super duper well and i had played a game that

did something where i could just say well if we just apply that same principle like it in practice it's it's very very different but the principle of it is the same you have a card that is both a recipe and a component for other recipes in the spatial puzzle as soon as i saw it i was like oh that's just an immediate cool thing that that could work really well it's a new technology yeah, i'm some sort of genius who just came along and solved the

problem immediately it was just i had played that and i had that technology in my mind so i was able to apply it if you play that toolbox yeah if you played he probably would have done the same thing so to answer your initial question how many of my what percentage of my beliefs do i think are true the reason i can't answer that is because of the way that i see the world and the question for me is how many of your technologies could be improved by better technologies

and the answer is all of them like every way i have seen the world there's probably some better way of doing it like polyamory is a technology that we have but in 500 years they'll invent you know polyamory too super polyamory Yeah, yeah. Polyominoamory. And that'll just fit me better. But it's not more correct or less correct. And so that's why I really struggled with that question. So pardon my 25-minute answer to quite a good question.

No worries. It's a good thing that we didn't get political. That's the important thing.

Thanks, everyone, for listening. AJ, how do we end this podcast? By saying goodbye, everyone. Goodbye, 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. We'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.