#57 - How to Balance your Board Game Part 2

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

Hayward. I'm AJ Brandon. And we have decided to sit on opposite sides of the screen to balance the video. AJ, why is that super relevant? Because we're talking about how to balance your game, part two. Part two. I should mention this episode is sponsored by Trader Joe's Aussie-style biscuits, in that during our break between episodes, I went and got them and I'm going to be eating them over the course of this episode. So you may, if you're watching on YouTube, you may get to say Tim Tam Slam.

What's that? I'm not going to shamelessly plug my drink. You'll just have to pay attention to what I drink and go buy it yourself. And if you're an audio listener, you just can't. If you drink in a specific way, we'll know. We'll know. Yeah, we'll hear the sound of me sipping from the can. Yeah, the satisfying sip that only a diet Dr. Pepper can give. All right, audio listeners, this is for you. Oh, God, that's so disgusting. It's so disgusting. You can't be Diet Dr. Pepper.

All right, let's just dive right in, shall we? Yes, this is part two. If you haven't listened to part one, recommend doing that because we're not going to recap. Let's go. Be cautious with data. I've got some examples here. I know Peter loves examples. So, Peter, I have a question for you. If you're trying to determine the strength of a card and you're looking at a data set, is win rate when this card is included in your deck useful?

Yes it's not the most useful but it is definitely useful sure we're very pedantic and completely correct answer is win rate when played accurate or use whatever term you want to use i mean yeah same answer i feel like that answer is going to be the same for all of these which is unhelpful yes so the more help well hang on i'm gonna i gotta examine the premise first.

Useful towards what goal peter we got six pages of this stuff you ask me questions you know we've done 56 episodes of this aj you know how this works i'm skipping to the punchline we got we got too many pages i'm sorry a useful the more useful metric between besides those ones is win rates in hand when drawn because if you have a big expensive card then when you play it often you're going to end up winning the game if it's in your deck you may never end up drawing it so it doesn't matter at all

and the implied context here is a card that costs something went like you're talking magic gathering because i was i was in a whole other world of like systems sure yeah magic the gathering is my default one thank you for calling that out yes so in magic the gathering as as an example if you have an expensive card then it can clog your hand you don't actually have the chance to play it so you might lose because you drew the card so that's a more useful metric to

look at so when you're looking at win rates of factions if you're looking at win rates of cards if you're looking at those sorts of data-driven approaches i would just caution you to be careful about exactly what you're looking at and what pitfalls you might run into looking at some subset of the data i don't think a data-driven approach is that helpful i also agree with that so i question the whole premise of this exercise i i think that.

It is an easy i think that as gamers we want there to be a right answer this actually directly relates to our fun problem our fun question for the last episode i think we want there to be a right answer to wrong answer and so if you have a spreadsheet that's more likely to give you the right answer and maybe we should have actually started this whole balancing in terms of like how important is different types of balance because win win rate if card is played from hand

is like i i've designed a hundred games and i've published 25 and i've got 30 or 30 more on the way i would never i've never factored that in i don't think i ever will factor that in i just don't think that's an interesting question on any level.

Or even a useful question compared to almost anything else you could be doing with your time i'm much more about experiential play i'm much more about was it fun to play was it fun to play against i care very little about like did someone win when they had this particular card in their hand and they played it for me it's just like no is is that card fun the well the use of that is specifically to see is that particular game component too strong so

this is something like a magic designer if they're trying to balance the card to not be too strong for tournament play or not be too weak so that nobody's playing the card is it still a useful thing if you're a magic the gathering designer who's listening to our podcast for tips on how to make cards perfectly balanced for tournament play write that one down everyone else i think you can pretty safely know that all right well this is why i have six pages let's keep going

everything is context dependent if I were to say to you another magic example you're asking me a question AJ you know it's a trap.

Another magic the gathering example if I said is two mana destroying artifact is that good is that a good card well there's a million exactly there's a million things that make the question completely unimportant there's a lot of YouTube series where they take like a pro from one game put them in front of cards from another game like is this card good and they get a lot of clicks but it's completely worthless because like But...

The question there is, well, what are my other options for destroying artifacts? What is the quality of artifacts my opponents are playing? What is an artifact? What is an artifact? How many artifacts could my opponent be playing? I might never see them draw one. What's the opportunity cost of the card that I'm choosing to play here versus other cards? It's just completely useless. And so when you're looking at balancing things, nothing ever exists in a vacuum.

Whenever you make a change to one card there's probably knock-on effects to other cards and and similarly like you can extrapolate this to everything where you can raise the value of a card without actually turning any of the knobs on it you can change the context surrounding the card to make it stronger let's take this out of the tcg territory actually no one more thing on tcgs there's a really interesting youtube video that i recommend which is

what is the value of draw two cards and they go through i think like five or ten different tcgs and every one of these tcgs has a card that just says draw two cards and they compare the cost and the value and it's just a really interesting breakdown of exactly what you like it illustrates what you're saying like draw two cards means something completely different in pokemon to yugioh to magic the gathering to hearthstone it's just it's just such different

systems while all being in the two-player dueling tcg world i'll just i'll just interrupt really quickly to say i disagree with their conclusions but still interesting please continue i don't remember the conclusions i just remember being like that's a that's a really interesting like everyone has it it's such a good point of comparison it's like what's the basic carb of every culture you know rice versus bread versus whatever

true so i want to take this out of tcgs because i just don't think that's applicable to most of our audience or me.

And i want to talk about how you balance a card in a in a non-tcg so for let's let's pretend there's such thing as an average standard game in your average standard game you're not going to have these like crazy knock-on effects in in every direction. Even something as complicated as Ark Nova, you can still pretty effectively test what a single Ark Nova card does and feels like and is balanced without having to worry about too many other factors.

There's obviously like what time of the game you draw it and what else you have in play and what your zoo looks like, etc. But it's still, I think, a contained enough environment that you can playtest that one card. Something like the AEG game that we keep talking about is a much higher complexity, I would say, not in terms of game mechanics, but the situationalness of every card.

Because we have six factions and every card needs to be balanced against every other faction and we've got another six factions coming so now that the combinations just go crazy so when we tweak a card in our game it requires a lot more playtesting i would argue i've not i didn't make ark nova but you know critter kitchen is a game with a bunch of systems but we can pretty confidently test a single card effectively so if there is a card that you're worried about put

it on top of the deck and play with it and if there's a situation that you're worried about set up that situation put it on top of the deck and play with it so a lot a lot of the stuff of like how many games are one with this in hand like if you have that data sure great you probably don't it's probably not worth gathering but if you are worried about a particular card put it on the deck and play with it and again it's it's really less about like okay if someone gets a card and

that card it means oh you got that card you are just going to win the game is over that's very boring. And that's almost exclusively the time I care about balance. We were playtesting the assassin bug versus the mantis sisters yesterday. And we played two games in a row, not yesterday, earlier this week, we played two games in a row where I literally not only didn't score a single point of damage, but I also at any point knew where the hidden movement character

was at all. So I just wasn't playing the game. And AJ will attest, I got very frustrated and kind of petulant and, stomped my foot and said this game sucks i hate you and then burned down the whole.

Database but by balancing to that faction we get some data and then we can then we're going to run that same faction and someone else will get more data and so in in that very complex multi-faceted environment changing one card yeah that has huge knock-on effects and the more integrated your game is the more those knock-on effects are but unless you are a very experienced designer your your game probably won't have that many knock-on effects and so it's much easier to test a card

and isolate would you agree or disagree i disagree something you said a long time ago where you said a lot of our listeners aren't going to be designing games where this is relevant i think a lot of especially new designers start from i want to make better magic the gathering i'm not saying whether or not they should in this conversation but i think a lot of people are designing those types of games i've got multiple games that i designed even as an experienced

designer that are partially in response to magic the gathering card-based dueling games and whether if you're making a ccg there's a lot of like moving parts and interactions and stuff but even if you're not making game system as open as a ccg i still think there are a lot of games that have those open systems where there can be a lot of interactions definitely you're right our game is an outlier and on the very extreme end and definitely i also agree

that like most designers aren't needing to worry about every one of these things that i'm saying definitely the majority of designers i would say are probably designing something that doesn't require that level of scrutiny for knock-on effects in the system per effect. Partially because a lot of the effects that you end up designing aren't going to be crazy bananas things. Not everyone out there is Carl Chudok trying to create things that are doing something insane every turn.

Yeah. I'll tell you, and I'm deviating from it slightly just to explore this a little bit more. My system for balancing cards is one of two. One is don't worry about it.

I want to have played at least one game with every card if there wasn't an apparent problem it's probably good enough that's system one i don't strongly recommend that especially for new designers this falls under the unhelpful advice of like it i i wait until the game is signed and then i and i kind of bother starting with balance and that leads me to two which was in my early designs and especially for my signed games i just play it a bunch i just play it and play it and play it and

maybe again maybe this is all unhelpful advice but i don't think any amount of data is as valuable as sitting down and playing the game five times and you you and i this ag game it's it's it's our life at the moment this is why i'm so i'm talking about it so much we are meeting about it multiple times a week for the next several months we had a bit of a break we had a six month break from it while some contract stuff got negotiated and i i took a break i took

a month off work generally and we came back to it after six months is that fair, a little bit less than that it was like four yeah something that we came back after a four month break. And we could have said, look, we've been playtesting this game for literally two and a half years now. It's probably good to go. Instead, we said, hey, let's make our top priority. You and I sit down and try every faction. And on my to-do list is to make a list of every faction against every other

faction. I don't think we'll get through all of those. But enough that, like, very quickly in those games I was talking about, we were like, oh, Peter's just not doing anything. Literally, he's passing every turn because there is nothing he can do. That's a problem.

And that's a big problem. good and to your earlier point one thing that we did a lot like pre the break much earlier in this process is we went through the content of the game you know which cards you could come up with for each faction those sorts of things yeah and we'd say like what is the worst card for an opposing faction like which one doesn't do anything or conversely which one is the other player terrified that you're going to get and try and make it so that we balance

the cards every card is going to have different value against different factions yeah but it shouldn't like we're talking about last episode yeah but we want them to trim the ceiling and push up the floor so that there's never a card that you get where it's like oh this is useless against this faction or a card where it's like i have to dig for this one card otherwise all i'm doing is stalling until i get this card then i'm gonna win like both of those are bad and

so and this is why i'm interjecting to say like the the value of assessing individual cards i think is not as i mean again if you're imagining the other design is cool but you've probably got a you've probably got a system that is is far outside the scope of what we normally talk about but i think the value is in just playing it and playing it playing it and i will especially with a signed game and again this is unhelpful

advice but especially the signed game i will just try to get at the table as much as possible. Because those weird annoying overly powerful or underly powerful cards the outliers i spot them and this might be an experience thing but i really think if you just play your game with an eagle eye out for any card that is not fun in either direction you will see them and you can tweak them. We've talked about atomic car design in the past, right? Mm-hmm. It's most possible.

Uh yeah so so for me atomic card design is every card is completely self-contained, and the interesting thing is when it bounces off other cards so with the ag game again i'm going to stop apologizing this is just just where my head is at the moment 90% of my game design time at the moment is on this one game with the ag game we're coming up with new factions and we pull them in and i think you were surprised maybe i've misremembered and i'm just stroking my own ego here

you're like this faction just immediately works the other ones and that's because we did that work early we made every card like have it have an input and output and then you can plug any other card onto it and it all just works straight away and so i think with cards have i told the the home crafters home brewers story i don't think the one that you're referring to i've heard a different one but go for it okay i'm sorry i've ruined just six pages of notes with my with my ramblings that was when

i have a break and i have a coffee and i have a tim tam sorry an aussie freestyle traders joe biscuit so there's a game called homebrewers by ben rossett and matt o'malley who are wonderful designers and close friends of mine i really like them and i like this stuff they did uh fromage which is i think my game of the year for last year i really loved fromage and.

Brewcrafters was my favorite game for a long time your friend of mine kevin and i used to play that all the time we'd play like we played 50 games just the two of us we'd play it we'd play it again we played a third time in a night it was just like the game that we played homebrewers is a sequel to that where you are like brewing beers but at home like like the craft beer industry or whatever there is a single card in the deck that said if a value of a drink goes above a certain amount then this

thing happens and i can't remember what the thing was but it was very clear that people keep forgetting this because they changed the actual board itself to have a line at that point so that people would remember it for this one card and this is like actively offensive to me as a game designer don't change your system around one card cards should be atomic cards should just work and the more atomic your cards i think the easier it is to balance them now obviously all the combinations are

still going to be wild but compare like a card that adds a whole new phase to the game is a nightmare to balance compared to a card that taps into the existing inputs and outputs i'm going to extremely strongly disagree that atomic card is easier to balance than a complex card a complex card you can have all sorts of dobs to tune it i not not not i think using atomic to mean small as possible and i mean standalone a atomic card can be very very complex,

but it doesn't change other aspects of the game it interacts with other aspects of the games rather than changing other aspects of the game. Uh can you give an example yeah so so let's say there was a card in settlers of katan that said when you play this you know what actually game did this constantly was talisman.

You would it was more the expansions i guess but you'd have an expansion that just added a whole new board and the card that interacted with that board it was this whole other like side thing that was happening um so so a card in katan that said i'm so built i'm so atomic built that it's hard to say when this card is played stop the game and have a voting phase at the end of the voting phase draw two cards from the agenda deck and play one

like it's not it's not interacting with the game that exists it's adding a whole new thing i understand and i think new designers especially do this a lot whereas magic the gathering designers typically don't if if a new thing like that is introduced to magic gathering it's a big deal and there's probably a whole set around it whereas new designers i think will put in a card that's like oh yeah this card adds a mini game and it's like what are you doing because that's suddenly really hard

to balance in my opinion i'm happy i understand what you're saying and you know what's interesting is the more time goes on the more i've been attracted to games that pull off the atomic design really well suki yumi or inish are both games where it's like yeah you have a card it's just do all the things it says move on and yes i think that they both do it very well and and and all those things.

Are inputting to existing game systems yeah in the second set of our game we're introducing a new thing toxic and for for a draft toxic existed on one card in my entire factions deck and it was fine but you were like hey what if it was one of the core things in the deck i was like yes yes yes yes it's like the daniel dot games quote your game should either do none of the thing or a lot of a thing right.

Toxic being just on one card it felt clunky and and as soon as as soon as you pointed out not put it out as soon as you said another place to go i leapt onto that because i was like okay now it's not this one card has its whole system is that i think that's a really good example not helpful listeners but maybe for you to like that that's what i mean by an atomic card it plays with the existing systems in this case toxic is now being introduced as a system but it's for the whole faction not

just for that one card so i think that in terms of balancing cards the more atomic they are the easier they are to balance you disagree with that earlier are you on board now yeah i agree with you it is definitely easier to balance because you don't have to worry about synergies or knock-on effects and those sorts of things well you still do because you can combo cards but in a controlled way in a in a api way to use an old tech term and so yeah and that's

what i'm going to say like most games i aim for your cards to be atomic and b again i'm pretending there's such thing as an average game in an average game the board state is generally like the extremes are pretty limited you're either going to be very early there's not much on the board or very late there's a lot of stuff on the board and you can test that card at those two extremes and once in the middle to be safe and you're probably fine

in most games again the simpler your game is the easier it is to test i think honestly which sounds sounds tautological but but you know what i mean okay my main interjection is done aj please continue all All right, we've done two bullet points in 20 minutes.

Balancing for player skills. So this is something where if you have a character, faction, etc., and you want the power budget to be a certain amount, if it's harder to play, does it need to become more powerful to compensate for the extra difficulty?

My opinion the way that you should balance that is for top end play if someone's playing the faction well they should be at equal power level if you don't do that you can run into problems it's so directly relevant to our recent play tests yeah believe it or not these are all notes that i wrote ages ago that's funny i i collected notes from years ago that i've just been like adding together that's why i've got six pages

because i just never like checked my notes i was just like here's a thought balance here's a thought balance here's a slight counterpoint to this one this is something we struggle with is that if a if a faction is very very difficult to play i think it needs to be slightly above the power curve see i disagree but i the way that i like it handled is just you label it if you say this faction is difficult to play if you want to get the same amount of power out

of it as an easy to play faction okay you're it's going to take more work but i think it needs to be even even just like an iota above because if it's like hey this one it plays itself and this one is really hard to play this is powerful why would anyone ever play the hard to play one like it's just there's no point you would because it's variety if this this is for like the first play versus the 10th play right if you play the game 10 times and you're

like okay i understand how to play all characters optimally now well if the hard one is just better then no one's ever playing the starter ones it's it's sort of the opposite problem whereas like if you want to learn the harder to play one you can.

Still get to the same point where everybody else is it just requires more skill and i think maybe we're using hard in different ways i mean like i don't use the word finicky but like if you have a faction where every turn you do one damage and a faction where every turn if you can correctly sequence five things you do one damage there is just no point in playing the second one right it's harder to play for the exact same value not worth it i don't think anyone would even for variety.

Yep and it needs to be like 1.2 damage at best you know yeah if something's yeah i i agree with that in in principle i just don't want factions to fall off as players get skilled at the game and the important thing to me is making sure that they're clearly labeled nor shima hex did not do this and people wrote in being like this faction's so weak and it's like no no it used to have to get good this actually brings directly to a thing which is player feedback is not useless but,

Every single game I've ever seen with multiple factions has someone arguing that this is the most powerful and is unbreakably good, and someone arguing that that exact same faction is way too weak and unbreakably good. I don't want to say dismiss all feedback or anything like that, but it's really tricky to pass any kind of feedback for something unbalanced because people just have different opinions. The people really, really believe their opinions. That's why it's their opinion.

And so that can be an incredibly difficult space to navigate. Really minor tip when trying to balance RNG. This is like the most art, not science. Just again, consider the opportunity cost of doing something where they don't know the outcome.

Is this input versus output randomness that you have to deal with?

What's the what's the potential you know high end low end average median just to think about lucky cards that i was talking about a really good example of that yeah but there's i don't think there's anything like special you can do for those kinds of things you just have to either play test them a bunch or or consider i i think the concern again like balance is such a is such a dead word to me i think the more important consideration there is is

it fun or what experience are you going for it doesn't matter so experience so when i'm using balance like balancing rng here what i mean is to whichever goal you're currently working towards at the start of this we establish different goals whatever goal you're working towards whatever if however you want this effect tuned this is how you look at rng to be able to tune it to that goal that's that's i'm trying to frame this right but i think what i'm saying is that like a every turn

this card does two that does does one damage to half the time this card does two damage mathematically those are identical so why do one or the other i think that's when you have to step into like you can't solve that from the points that you're playing there you have to go like okay what am i trying to do here pardon so it's very easy to get into a situation where two like two options are identically balanced sure but you still have to make that choice of which option to go with.

I'm just saying if you if you're trying to decide if you want this particular effect to be stronger, more consistent, whatever. If you're trying to adjust the power level of this effect, then those are the things that you can consider when looking at a randomized effect.

Compare hard numbers when possible and convert things into hard numbers when possible this is similar to a daniel the games point okay i i mean i've gone there yet actually i still haven't finished the blog so i'll give the example of the anglerfish my favorite whipping boy for balance so and baby peters too so the anglerfish is ridiculously overpowered in my opinion in aquatica in aquatica basically you can have cards and effects that get you resources and

you can have actions where you get to use those resources very vague but basically you spend resources to buy things the anglerfish allows you to get a card that has been discarded which just naturally happens over the course of play and if you want you can sort of manipulate the game in certain ways to be able to make cards discarded if you want to get specific one discard so it lets you have the opportunity to buy something and it or you

take something from the discard pile for free and get so you get the opportunity of getting the card but also you don't have to pay any resources.

Pretty good starting card is like you get to buy a thing and get about three resources so this card can effectively say buy a card and get nine resources because you could buy the most expensive one so if you just convert simply the the opportunity cost even though taking card from this card is a completely different effect on paper to buying a card by paying resources you can convert to like what the top end could be if you're utilizing the card efficiently does

that make sense yes i found the daniel games quote it was a good designer balances by changing numbers a bad designer adds text rules and caveats so not exactly what you're talking about but that's what i was thinking of cool for incomparables for things where it's not you can't do that sort of one-to-one ratio i don't have any answer other than just play testing and vibes i think the assassin bug's the best example in our

game system in that game if the opponent moves on to your space they're playing the hidden movement game they take a damage and you teleport and that's a lot of like their attack economy and they only have three HP where a lot of other factions have a lot more HP, can shield to defend themselves from damage and spawn troops that absorb hits for them. So like how can you possibly compare the HP to one and the attack power of another?

For that one, you just can't. I don't have any shortcut to try and approximate things. Just go with your gut, play test it, see how it feels. Play it, play it, yeah.

The best advice i can give for balancing is have a have a co-designer because then you have two people of like roughly comparable skill who are just having to play it again and again and again seriously like you know with with our game with aeg my goodness is it so much easier when just peter and i are playtesting back and forth because we know that we're both playing well like give peter any faction he's going to play it well

i i know the data that i'm getting is going to be solved if peter says something is not working i understand it is not working i don't have to stop and say well how good is peter was he did he make some mistakes there blah blah blah especially because not all information is open information i don't necessarily know if he did make a mistake.

Just just leap on that too one thing that we do that i really recommend for designers is when you are playtesting for balance talk through your move even if it gives away information i don't care about that and undo and redo like it's very easy to get locked into this like no we're playing a game you can't reverse a turn aj and i i would say on average once a game we'll just be like cool let's let's just go back to this state and keep going from there to see if i've made this choice

because then you can literally like get the data of was it this choice that lost me the game or is this card just annoying to play against especially someone makes a dumb mistake as in like something that's on board there was one time in our last game where you were like all right so you're here here here here or here but i actually there's actually one other possibility that i could have been and rather than just being like oh he he he he didn't notice that it's not useful data for me

to make a dumb mistake yeah um i also really strongly recommend like i i play test a lot of games as you can imagine and players are always like oh man that's really dumb turn can i just undo that i'll be like yeah yes like i'm not testing how perfectly you can play turn one of my complex three hour euro i'm testing like what it's like to play and so if on the first turn you took a in this game it was like a fire element instead of a gold

yeah go back and take a gold like i don't it doesn't the other players aren't gonna be like well hang on i got serious money on this game like let everyone play fake efficiently you know let everyone play to an artificial maximum level of play because then you're just getting better data.

Which also you should probably just do generally. If someone's like, oh, I made a dumb move, can I take that back? If it doesn't really matter, like there's no money on the game, it doesn't really change the strategy that you've done since then, just don't do it, who cares? Yeah. My last ever game of 18, 18, this is the big one, 1825. It was an eight-hour game, and four hours in, I made a really dumb mistake.

And the other players, like around later, I realized it was way too late to undo it, and other players had made their plans around that. So I sat there for four hours, knowing I'd lost from that point on. And I've not played an 18xx game since then.

Why not peter that was a very unfun experience and no one's fault i couldn't just drop out and we played that game a lot we played a lot a lot a lot all right here's a here's a little cheat let players balance the game themselves have an auction have a rolling market where you know the one that's been the market for the longest cost one the second longest cost two etc etc so then if someone sees a card like oh it's really good

cool it's it's actually fun that it's imbalanced and that it's stronger because now they're like but is it three times as much money stronger or does someone else value it that much is someone else going to buy this card make it cheaper there's drafting cards where of course you know players can prioritize the cards if they think it's broken go ahead and take it i was funny i was play testing a drafting game with someone, and at at the end of the game he was like his feedback

was well i mean this card is so strong i mean i ended up with like two or three like really busted cards this game so i mean if you want your game to come down to rng that's fine it's like hold on two really good cards and it's a draft definitionally like it was not rng that you ended up with both of those cards i went through like every month it's not every month i just go through my bgg reviews to see what people said and someone reviewed quitter kitchen as this game would be better

if you just roll dice where you place because it's so random and i was like oh boy oh boy for a worker placement game yeah it was it. I guess, to minor credit, this actually comes up a little bit later, but there can be a feeling of helplessness or arbitrariness when you're doing simultaneous actions, where it feels like, well, if you do this, I do this, that kind of thing. Auctions, now that we're diving into it, auctions also have a really high entry, like a really challenging entry point.

You need to understand the value of so much of the game to be able to effectively auction. Especially if you lose your bid either way.

Yes, yes. but yeah yes especially there but even without that there's a stevenson's david and daniel stevenson's made a game called empires which i did some some light development on and it's all auctions it's nothing but auctions from start to finish and it the market bounced off that game hard because it's just so hard to value what an auction is and and like you're saying you lose you lose the money that even if you don't win the auction another way

you can get players to balance for you is king making if you have targeted aggression in your game or other such mechanics if there's blocking even in euro games then you can have players gang up on the leader that sort of thing which is a form of balance if you if you care more about like balance from like the headwind sense or tailwind sense yeah this overlaps with our episode about different catch up mechanisms yeah i think

the the key if if you want to sort of rely on this a little bit and make it like a social, political dynamic to the game, then the key is to make sure that players have strong directional heuristics, meaning they understand the position of the players and how close they are to victory. I think Twad Imperium is just the best example for this, because if you see like a ton of ships on the table, you're like, wow, that's pretty powerful. But I can see you have two victory points out of 10.

So you're not really a threat because you can only get one or two around. Whereas you can clearly see if someone's got nine victory points okay that is the person we have to team up against i think regardless of what their board state looks like they are about to win.

Exactly and conversely root does still have victory point tracks but the what each faction is doing is so opaque it's very hard to be able to internalize if i'm supposed to team up on them or not so while that works well if you're experienced at the game if you're new to the game i i didn't find that it was actually a very useful balancing mechanism yeah i i think the trend you're saying is if you're relying on the players to balance the game they need to understand the game

so it's not a great entry point for balance, For sure. Do the work, basically. Handicaps. Handicaps are interesting. I think, generally speaking, they're quite distasteful. I think they introduce a feel-bad, but I don't think that they're useless.

I just think that they're inelegant, if that's fair. and handicaps you know the more traditional sense is what we talked about recently so i'm not going to rehash them too much catch-ups headwinds things that are like subtle giving people the opportunity to shoot the moon hidden scoring which doesn't again affect balance but does affect perception of a position and stuff like that but i think more raw handicaps where it's like you just straight up get something to start do have a time

and place in games that are tough to get other players into i gotta tell you like we talked about that that time you killed me handicap system in the catch-up episode i think didn't we i don't remember that one but maybe we did go ahead go again if i forgot someone else forgot we might have talked about it we we're here these days i i think we i think we talked about off air where you oh really have extra pawns maybe we did talk about i don't know but you have extra you

start with fewer pawns uh if if you are better at the game.

And that that when you said like games that are hard to get other people into i was like oh he's talking about not intentionally but you are 100 talking about that i know so many people have a copy and they're like i just want to play it with someone and no one will play it because it's so like grueling in a good way i don't know some weird way to solve a game but for the but for you if you were trying to play it with someone who was weak at games or that type of game or whatever it's it's

an interesting challenge for you because now it was it was off camera because it was when we were talking about coming up with a handicap system for our ag game i was driving that's what i thought okay so let me briefly explain it in that time you killed me you can teleport back in time and replace the pawn that just went back in time it's it's like a time travel joke basically and you you start with five off the board each and the handicap system is just starting

with four three two sorry you start with four off the board and the handicap system is starting with three two or one so like the grand master level is starting with one and i was saying to aj on the on the call you've you've either never played or played once if i recall correctly i played a couple times yeah you've played a couple of times i've played it infinite times because i designed that game over two years and played.

If AJ started with four off the board and I started with one, I think it would be a close match. And that's really compelling. A, it's such a simple handicap system. And B, I think that's just really compelling. I did some quick Googling and I was worried that handicap was considered an ableist term. It seems that handicap in the way that we're using actually predates the alternate term for disabled.

And so handicap to refer to people with a disability is now being phased out, but it's being kept as the, or at least there's no replacement term for the way we're using it, in case you're worried about that at all.

I appreciate you bringing it up. i if if anyone again if anyone in the comments knows that i'm wrong about this please let me know because we i couldn't find any replacement term so i think i think this is just the current term cool co-op and solo so solo is interesting in that oftentimes they just end up being a score attack and it's simply you know you play and you see what like people who are weak at the game get what people who are strong at the game get you make the numbers

accordingly for adjusting for For cooperative games or non-score based solo games. I think one way to frame the difficulty mode is thinking about the people who are playing them. So if you have an easy mode, think either the entire group or at least one person in the group. Is not in your target demographic. This is a family who is playing with a little kid. The little kid isn't the person that you're designing the game for,

but it's a co-op game. They're going to play it with people who are less into the games. So make it easy enough that that player can play it, have a good shot of winning it, and be able to understand what's going on. If you're playing on like a normal difficulty mode, I would say target hobby gamers having a slightly easy time with it.

I think for a hobby gamer, if they have a slightly easy time with it like something like pandemic normal mode then a casual gamer would find it slightly hard or maybe even a little bit more than slightly hard and i think that's a good level for a normal one because uh then the casual gamers have something to aspire to the hobby gamers feel smart and and jump ahead to the advanced modes you know and this is just a recommendation not a solved

issue by any yes you can find debates everywhere of like how many times should you win a cooperative game um so these are these are soft recommendations not the rules by all means but because everything else we say is hard rules that have no exceptions.

For other difficulty modes i'm curious what you think about this i think about this kind of thing a lot because i really like very challenging co-op modes and i find again this is very much just my taste but there's the type of difficulty mode that simply says you can make fewer mistakes i don't find that necessarily super compelling there's ones that cut your ability to play the game i really do not like those and then there's ones that layer on challenge in in terms of just scale there's more

challenges to to do but my favorite one is different ways to do it so i'll use pandemics in three different ways to to show these examples base pandemic if you go up a difficulty you just add a epidemic card that's totally fine it can mess with the pacing a little bit which i don't love is this that little track on the board that you start with like you started no spot on that track.

No, you start the same spot, but the epidemic cards are what increases that and pulls out a card from the bottom and puts three on it. I haven't played it in years. I have a half memory of like there being the thing where I was like, what's that for? Oh, it must be for higher difficulty. Yeah. So you remember at the start of the game, you divide the deck into X piles and then shuffle in one epidemic card that's really bad into them.

For base pandemic, you just add more of those. So again, totally fine. It messes a little bit with the pacing.

I'd prefer if it didn't do that, but that's good. pandemic legacy cuts the fun cards if but but that's partially because it's a meta progression thing so in in pandemic legacy if you succeed you get less funding you get less of these cool cards and that just keeps going i do not like this approach because it means that i don't get to play with the cool toys when i play on a higher difficulty i want to get to use the cool toys because i can use them in extra creative ways that

we players can't do i i don't want to lose those and there's a quote i think about all the time i've probably mentioned on the show before the the better you are at golf the less golf you have to play.

Sure and then there's pandemic on the brink which is an expansion for pandemic and what it does is it replaces epidemic cards with super duper epidemic cards that have extra challenging effects to go with and for me that's the best solution in this one because it makes the game much more interesting and in a different way for the advanced players in a way that other players would hate they would not want to have to deal with

these weird restrictions and extra punishing mechanics but as an experienced player i still get to use all the core tools of pandemic just to solve different more complex problems, I'm a big difficulty level fan. I think it's a really interesting thing that you can do to adjust. You say co-op, I'm going to talk solo because that's sort of where I live. Although I guess French Toast is a cooperative version, and there's just two decks. There's the basic deck and the advanced deck.

That advanced deck exists purely because Carla Ferguson of Weird Giraffe Games got so good at the game that she could get any card, even not knowing what the card is, in less than one round.

She's worked out a way. so i just added cards that were just like way more difficult for that exact player i'm very glad i did i'm gonna talk about balacho this will shock you balacho has i think it's eight stakes per deck and it goes from white stake to blah blah all the way up to gold stake and each one of them just adds an extra rule and so what you know the first rule is the first first round of each the first hand of each round doesn't score you any money the top one is some jokers cost you

three dollars per round to keep and so it's just each one layers a new rule on and i think that's an amazing, again, Bellachro is my baby at the moment. I love it. I love it. Switches for Bellachro. And I think that kind of system is great. I haven't played enough of it, but I believe Spirit Island does something very similar, where there's different invader decks who are the people who are thematically coming to colonize the island.

And you can increase each of these decks by different difficulties. Sentinels of the Multiverse, I know, had a basic and advanced mode for each villain.

And it had a lot of villains of various difficulties. That one, I think they just kind of trusted the players would be good, and so they just didn't bother testing a lot of the advanced ones. So people would come out and be like, yeah, this advanced deck is actually impossible. Don't do that, is my advice. But I think any, sort of what you're saying with like the super pandemic cards, anytime you can make the game more challenging in an interesting way,

that's always, I'm very content driven. So that's what I want to do. It does mean it's hard to play test. Bellacho has one of the stakes is the blue stake and it just cuts one discard per hand. There's an update coming soon. He's like, I'm redoing blue stake because it's just not that interesting. It's more challenging, sure, but it just, it limits the different things that you can do. You just can't do a straight flush build anymore. It's just impossible.

You don't have the discards for it. so it's like yeah i'm just going to switch that up something else and the game as a whole will probably become easier because every stake layers the top of the others so everything blue stake and above will just be easier but it'll be more fun and so this again sounds like stupid advice if you can make it more fun do that like super super epidemics my my solo game that i just announced was signed with um smoke and dagger that's got these challenge cards that

once you've beat the whole once you've unlocked everything the roguelike you start introducing these challenge cards and they're just a rule that you have to play around and it just makes you play in such a weird interesting way so yeah anything like that i'm a huge fan of yeah i dig it turn order this is one i'm i'm pulling straight from daniel.games you you want to you want to deal with this organically if possible saying the first player also gets this it

it's fine you can do it but it's pretty, inorganic and elegant i like the example that daniel gave where he talked about.

A scrabble where like you can go first just to be clear you're talking about some games have a first player advantage some players have some guys have a last player advantage how do you balance around it's better to go last in this game it's better to go first in this game yes thank you so in scrabble they organically do it by where they position the bonuses so if you go turn one okay you're not going to have access to all the best bonuses and you may end up setting up the opponent to do

the same i've got a sports game very simple you've have one player going first that's an advantage you get one extra turn the opposing.

Team starts with the ball you know the ball had to start somewhere it's not an extra rule for me to say that they start with it it's just a nice organic way of of rolling that out i i think i think we disagree on like the inelegance of just starting with resources i think it's annoying if you have to consult a table if it's like okay first player gets a wood second player gets a wood and two stone third player gets no stone but a gold like i think that's fiddly

and annoying i have a game working title is fairy garden and the first player starts with one coin second with two third with three fourth with four fifth with five and i just think that's so like i think that's very very elegant and if if there even is one then like it it solves the the first player advantage because of what you said like you get one extra turn cool although the second player gets an extra coin and it just it scales one-to-one i i think that kind of thing i actually find that

very elegant i realize it's my design but anytime a game does that where it's just like what is your what is your turn of the play account cool you get that many extra things done like that doesn't offend me in the slightest and as you know i'm anti-setup rules but that kind of thing i'm like yep cool.

Tiny folk cafe my little worker placement game first player starts with one coffee bean second star player starts with two like same thing i think something like that is absolutely fine do you have more first player things because i got a few that i know of i do not because to be honest i don't really care about first player advantage very much a lot of abstract games that time you killed me that time you killed me i think you just start in a different era to the other player so that is like

the they're not balanced like past is not as good as future or whatever it would have been so long since i played that game i can't even remember but one player starts in the past one player starts in the future and that kind of balances itself but what a lot of abstract players a lot of abstract games do and how ag games almost does is the first player just gets one fewer action if you've got a two action game first player starts with one action and then

it's two two two for the rest of the game and that's that's a very common very simple abstract balancing rule the most interesting abstract balancing rule is if there's like a blank board and position matters the first player chooses a position the other player then either plays as that and goes second or lets them play as that and go first so like it's it's it's sort of like completely like a beard it's like a beard it's such a weird interesting one and then the the best solution of

course is when there is an advantage to going first but also an advantage to going last so we have a key master in the process of signing my area my book area control game that we've talked about in the soul sheet episode before mighty than the sword and in that one going last it's a it's an area control game so going last kind of is a huge advantage but we.

Have absolutely nothing because going first gets you first access to. Some stuff so it it sort of balances that way. I can think of a bunch of others where like there is a if so i guess what i'm saying is if there is a last player advantage make it good to go first for some reason if there's a first player advantage make it good to.

Go last for some reason mechanically like in the structure of your rules rather than ideally rather than arbitrarily handing out whatever for sure i want to zoom in on mana curves because i do believe our designers are designing their own uh little card games and ccds and stuff like that so i just want to.

Briefly talk about a few points to again the whole point of this one is just to get you thinking about these things in different ways so the more expensive a card is again we'll just use magic as a simple example here the more expensive a card is the less flexible it is because you can't play in conjunction with other cards if you have a you know two three cost cards you can play either one of them on turn three or you can play both of them on turn six or anywhere in between a six

cost card you have to wait until turn six and it takes up your whole turn six unless you have a bunch of black lotuses very true. So it's it's a much clunkier tool and it has to be worth it especially because in something like magic your resources aren't guaranteed you might not have six lands by turn six and the game might even be over by turn six maybe your opponent ran you over so who's the frontier gentleman we were talking about last episode,

Frontier, gentleman. He had a curve that was a frontier. Oh, Pareto. Pareto, yeah. So Pareto, in your example of that, you said like a 1-1 cost 1 and a 10-10 cost 10. And I think in almost any game with mana, it wouldn't be that because 10 is so expensive that it would be a 1-1 cost 1-1, maybe a 2-3 cost 2. And then like it scales in this really interesting way, I think, with most mana games. Right. And that's what I want to talk about with this point is just the way.

That you have to think about scaling these effects.

So in magic because your mana isn't guaranteed because the games don't always go that late because of all these different things the high cost cards have to be exponentially powerful they have to be insane when they start costing six plus mana and they're taking space in your hand yeah yes but if you look at something like hearthstone in hearthstone you get a mana every single turn it is guaranteed so it actually has a different power curve and because

it's guaranteed every turn that makes the the higher cost cards much more important and it actually means that the one cost cards the biggest cost to them is the opportunity cost because you can get up to 10 mana in hearth stone and then have that for like 20 turns one mana is like nothing in it and so normally you'd think well you should get nothing for it because you're spending so little resources the mana isn't the cost on the one drop it's the opportunity cost it's the card itself so the

one drops in hearthstone actually have to be really pushed if you compare like a one drop in hearthstone to a one drop in magic is night and day because in magic what one drop right exactly yeah man basically man is a much less important resource in because it's consistent yes um as what a lot of tabletop games do to sort of.

Simulate this sorry not that not that magic isn't a tabletop game what a lot of hobby you know what i mean like boxed games do is they will split the deck into three maybe maybe this is an older thing i don't see this much at all but you'll see a lot of games be like okay once you finish the level one deck then you start drawing from level two deck once you finish level two to actually start drawing from level three deck and it's it's a way to

almost like i guess artificially solve this problem it means.

A lot of sorting it in the game which is i think is why you don't see as much but it definitely means that like on your you're not going to draw turn one a thing that you just literally can't afford because it's impossible instead you're of get through that deck and then start drawing the level two and then start drawing the level three yeah as another point of comparison wingspan versus it's a wonderful world i'm not here to disparage wingspan much but in

wingspan the other year it came out i know listen listen it's very very popular again not here to disparage it much but i do think one thing that's an interesting point of comparison from wingspan to it's a wonderful world which are very different games but are both at their core card based engine building games is that big deck of cards games I call them. In Wingspan, you could see like four end-of-game VP cards come up right away. And it's like, well, I don't really want any of those ones.

And it does have release the levers and all sorts of things. But if you look at one of those cards in Wingspan, its value is so low at the beginning versus an engine-building card is so valuable at the beginning because you'll have it every single turn of the game. And It's a Wonderful World. That's a really interesting game. And again, completely different games. Try and bear in mind that the point comparison here is the engine building versus point getting structure of these decks. The tempo!

Yeah. It's a Wonderful World is just a four-round drafting game. But in that game, turn one, you may very well take a card that is only endgame scoring that you're not going to use until the very end of the game. Why? Because those cards are very rare. You might not see another one and it doesn't have one of those graduated decks.

And you might even hate draft those from your opponents seeing that it's there because any card can be cashed in for a basic resource and so again i'm not saying one's better than the other that's not what i'm trying to say just it's something to consider the stage of the game the value of the card are there ways to make cards more valuable at different stages of the game something to consider but i do think it's also interesting the way that wingspan has it because,

knowing that sort of imagine the other one called turning the corner knowing when you're like oh i want to pivot from engine building to those points gain or in dominion is probably a better example when you want to start buying those victory point cards that's a really interesting decision that's organic and is dictated by the pace of other players and the tempo of uh that particular game.

For sure so just going back to mana curves and everything like that one interesting thing is thinking about the sort of riders uh you know we were talking about before about uh tags you know types those sorts of things yeah all kinds of writers like creature tags like goblin or dragon or whatever onto a card or even just adding an ability like first strike you you hit before your opponent does those types of effects generally speaking have an outsized effect on

cheaper cards because it's affecting the overall power budget of the card so much more first strike may be a poor example because it scales off the attack points of the card but think of it this way if you add like let's say plus one health to a one cost creature you've often just doubled its health if you had plus one hp to a six drop you've increased it by one six the same thing's true for a lot of abilities where the value gets the six drop the mana cost or the or the the

mana cost yeah sorry you said adding one health to a six drop makes it one six is good and i was No, one-sixth better. Sorry, one-sixth better is what I was going to say. Right, but I'm saying that a six-drop doesn't necessarily have six health, does it?

No okay cool yeah sorry just a quick point of comparison but the sort of standard curve for magic cards is attack and defense equal to its power for quick estimation stuff so just consider how much of the power budget of the card is is coming from that effect and is it outsized because of the cost of it would would that small rider be a huge rider on a cheap card versus a really tiny rider on a more expensive card i'll tell you a thing to avoid that i've seen many new designers do let's say

you have a card in the game that if you draw it you just win uh let's say we're playing magic someone someone's found this broken card and put in their deck this is this is the argument that i disagree with yeah but they don't always draw it like that's that's not that's not a compelling argument to me yeah tell that to the person who plays against it when they do draw it yeah did they have a good time and this is this is why earlier i was saying like force those annoying situations because they

probably won't draw it i just don't think it's a reasonable defense see what happens when they do rather than playing it 10 times being like they never drew it it's not a problem like that that just doesn't statistically make sense yeah it's not very likely to roll the skull in dead of winter twice on your first turn and have both your characters die that happened to my friend he did not have a good time yeah so we're sort of rounding the end here perfect balance

is impossible imbalance is fun i have one thing that i i is as very niche topic that I had no advice on. I'm curious if you have any. Team-based games. I mean, obviously, there's like some sort of self-selection bias where it's like, oh, I know I'm good at word games, so maybe I'll split myself up from my wife who's good at word games when we play codenames or something like that. My Australian friends and I are not allowed to play games like Monika's on the same team. We just have a whole...

Decrypto. We have a whole language that is just impossible to decipher. Do you have any thoughts on balancing team games? Any ideas? I... I don't, I don't understand the question. Can you, like, are you talking about, like, the crypto or something like that? Let's take it to Crypto as an example. Do you have any advice for, as a game designer, to help create a balanced play experience where both teams

feel like they have reasonably equal chances of victory? Let's look at it through that specific lens. Yeah, I think that does fall on the players. Yeah, I think so too. You and I are both very, very, very good at our AEG game. If we had a two versus two mode and we would play testing, we wouldn't be on the same team because it would just be a slaughter.

Literally, no matter who in the world we were against, you and me and your team are going to be pretty close to unstoppable so it's like a social contracts thing it's a social contract exactly it's a golden circle i want to talk about balance a little bit i have a few thoughts that i came up with and also i've while i was finding that daniel.games quote i found the whole section on balance so i want to quote him a few times too.

Actually i'll start with his quote and then i'll talk about how it directly relates to me, oh crap i can't find it now how embarrassing and we're not gonna edit this out everyone knows that appears a fool who doesn't know how to keep his tabs in no order people drastically overestimate the importance of balance it's nice that things are balanced but plenty of other things are more important your balance is also very easy to achieve almost anything can

be balanced which means really do whatever you like and just balance it all later i know some here this is one i was thinking of i know some cards i make from balance too strong or too weak that's fine it just happened that the simple clean version of the card was in balance choose elegance over balance as long as the card has some value and doesn't feel bad for anyone i'm happy with it and this is what i meant when i said like a spreadsheet saying how many times the card was

played in hell like i just i. Care about what it feels like when it hits the table i care about if you are guaranteed to win every time you draw it sure that's obviously a problem but like 90 of the time if a card is stronger than it should be it's actually fine and and he talks a little bit about how, if if you're drawing a bunch of stuff then yeah you're probably going to get one or two that are stronger above the curve but you also get one or two that

are below the curve and your opponent will get it like theoretically and i guess this is this is similar to the rolling rolling a skull twice on the first turn like it can happen and i'm countering my own like what if they don't draw it i'm saying like if if you have one card that's a guaranteed win that's a huge problem if you have five cards that are even you know 1.5 times as powerful as the others.

Someone has to draw all of them and no one else draw any of them if you're drawing enough cards for it to really be a problem like the i'm more concerned with cards that are like consistent use so in our game the assassin bug you play a card and then you get back in your hand you play it again you get it back played again that's something i'm much more concerned about than the butterfly which is you have some of the caterpillars are just way better than the others these give you

powers in the game but once it's dead you don't have it again for the rest of the game so if if i play the really powerful caterpillar unless it's guaranteed to win me the game that's a problem but if i play the really powerful one cool just target it and now it's gone and the strong part of my engine is gone you know what's funny is in my notes for that exact quote from daniel.games I literally say I vastly care more about play patterns than balance which is exactly what you just said,

I do have one more point that I thought of actually if I can go yes go for it, When I was talking about RNG earlier, I said, you know, consider the highs, lows, average, etc. One thing you can do for RNG is the more RNG you have, the more it averages out. So if you have one very consequential die roll in your game, that's going to suck when it fails. If you roll 50 dice over the course of the game, you know, you're going to miss some of those important die rolls.

But if you roll 50 dice, every time you add an extra die, it increases the bell curve average.

So it's more likely that you'll hit in the middle of that so the more dice you roll the more random effects you have within that sort of framework the more it is actually going to even out and be balanced and the less you're gonna have these spiky outlier events yeah i think a really good example of why balance isn't the be all and end all which which was never your point i'm not trying to say that was is that a d6 is so incredibly unbalanced like it is the best result is six times better than

the weakest result and yet it is one of the most common now obviously games will mitigate stuff like that but generally speaking a d6 is crazy balanced and really fun to roll i want to quote daniel dot games again in simpler more fun-based games imbalance can add excitement it might not seem like a good idea for something to be clearly better than others but when you get them it's exciting and that's what i was talking about with the with the the the push

a lock kind of example like yet if if what you're doing is building a game around the unknown result of what you do they can't be like you've you've you've you've just you've you've hoisted by your own petard okay last one from daniel games is i'm gonna i'm gonna jump in just to build off of something you said there very briefly just to reiterate yes i agree balance is the most important thing there's a reason why our 55th episode is when we start talking about this.

Please please make this your 55th priority not even kidding.

Standard games and i have an anecdote uh if they're only if there are two options and one is chosen only 25 of the time that's still fine and this leads into some of your points about situational and that kind of stuff but like you you def you don't need everything to be equally balanced we we talked a little bit about different victory paths and then we didn't necessarily come back to it this is one where i think the balance is important weirdly because really yes if you.

Hear the end of thought i think you'll agree if you have three different paths to victory in your game and one wins more than the others i think what's the point of having the other two what about shoot the moon shoot shoot let's say shoot the moon wins one tenth as much as the others but you also go for it like one tenth of the time i think i think that's fine um i'm saying that get the the story i'm going to tell is a

friend of mine i won't name them i've probably told this sorry before they had three paths to victory and one of them was building out your tableau one of them was like collecting money and selling things at a market and the other one was like an area control game and two turns in i was looking at the various victory points i was like oh the area control game is worth literally twice as much as the others it was not even close, and so i started going for the one that was worth twice as much and

i was bored silly and i realized what had happened is that they wanted three victory paths one was very very boring so no one ever went for it so they thought oh i should make that one worth more so people go for it and so they kept on increasing this number and increasing this number increasing this number until it was ludicrously overpowered because it was so boring right so i'll talk for days endlessly about how making a game is about incentivizing the fun thing

they actually did the opposite. They incentivize the boring thing.

You have three victory paths and they're all equally fun they should all be equally incentivized, equally incentivized okay if you have one that sucks cut yeah absolutely or fix it and and i think what happened was one of the designers just really liked that style of play but no one else did so he was like this is really fun and everyone was like but but it's not and so he had to keep like he would watch people play i'm a big proponent of playing your games for balance.

And this is why i'm sort of pushing back on the spreadsheet model i think i think obviously you know data is good and it's my answer was always yeah it's useful but i think that if you are truly worried about a card sit down with the game force that card to come out and just see how effectively you can play around it or you know play into it or whatever yeah i think the way that i think about all these things because i do consider all these things it's interesting

because we design differently too like we'll be in a play test and we'll be like oh we need to come up with a card and you'll be like here's 10 ideas in 10 seconds flat because you're extremely good at that and then i'm gonna and then i sit there and like well this one doesn't really do that because of this or this one has this weird play pattern it's because this or this one seems imbalanced because of this thing and i'm not always right obviously but i think weird but these

sorts of tools i find useful to cut through the fog and to come up with the best guess to cut down on playtesting time so if peter has 10 great ideas which he always does then exactly just to be clear i'm not saying cool let's playtest these 10 ideas i'm like yeah which one of these seems fun okay let's try that one right so i think of all these as just little tools to skip ahead in that process to be like you know

what i think my my gut says we need to tune this up a little bit we need to tune that down a little. Bit before we do the playtesting and then as peter says the playtesting is always king yeah and don't worry about it playtesting playtest what's that and don't worry about it and don't worry about it yeah i i do think that i think that balance i think spending too much focusing too much on balance right i balance i think i've said this before i balance to the pitch.

I want to make sure that you can play one full game or ideally like two full games without balance problems being evident, the fun shining through i care a thousand times more about the fun than i do with the balance and again this is a 55th episode for reason i balance to the pitch and then if on your 10th game there's a problem cool once the game is signed i will solve that problem but what happens even with my like well maybe especially with my games is it

gets signed and then it gets redesigned and all your balance gets thrown out all of exactly exactly if you spend ages and ages like if our aeg game if we got a hundred percent perfectly balanced before the pitch which it certainly was not no then we would have had to just restart almost because three times we've done yeah massive like and and critic kitchen like zoo chefs weren't in it we moved in the design diaries we talked about how we move the locations around like you you

it's it's it's mvp in a different form don't hire an artist because the theme might change don't fully balance your game with a spreadsheet because all those numbers are going to be thrown out i have a game with a german publisher really excited for it and the first game was literally 18 cards it was originally made for button shy no i had to bump it up to 20 and three tokens so.

It stopped being able to be a button shy game so i pitched it to this other publisher they're like we love this great i was like cool here's the files and they came back they're like we want a whole different game with the same core concept so i designed this game really happy with it sent it off they were like okay cool we actually want this kind of game and this this is more than i think i've ever worked on a game before it's such a simple simple game

but i've had to redesign it i think i'm on my fourth full start again redesign and on this last one is the first time i was like oh i can make this symmetrical like mathematically symmetrical all the others had been pure gut and it didn't matter because that wasn't the part of the game that was constantly shifting and so even doing it mathematically this time was maybe a mistake but i was like oh for the first time i see a formula with which i can generate the 60

cards rather than generating 60 cards purely by like, I think there's too many of this, I'm going to add some more in. It would have been such a waste of time to mathematically equate every single card of that game because the whole game has been thrown out four times. Right. Do you have some publisher advice for us? Yes. Okay, this is a very specific, actionable one. I wrote down follow-up vagities. What do you think that means, AJ? If a publisher... Vagities is not a word.

Listen, you're the wordsmith. I would never try and call you out on that. I think vagities would be something like a publisher says something that's vague and just making sure that you understand exactly what they mean. You clarify it. You don't just make an assumption on it. Is that what it is? That's pretty close. What I specifically meant, and this was shorthand for me, so there's no way you could have guessed it, is I've had a publisher be like, oh, cool, look, we're not really looking at

anything for six months. Great. Put in your calendar, follow up publisher in six months, reply to that same email thread, be like, hi, we talked about a game six months ago.

You said in six months you might be interested, just wanted to check in.

And it's such a simple, small thing, but it means that you're, I think we've talked about like the nightmare of getting a form email as a publisher like hi i have designed this poker variant it is a great game and you should sign it's like yeah you did not write this to jellybean games at all yeah you just wrote a generic email sent to everyone by saying hi tim we talked six months ago and you said in six months time you might be looking for something i wanted

to check in you're treating them like a person you've given them an actionable thing to answer based on something they said and there is every chance that they'll be like ah no sorry we're still not looking cool reply great oh if you don't mind i'll follow up in six months like it it takes you 10 seconds and having a competent calendar but it can really help build that relationship with the publisher and and again show that you see them as a human good call which they're not i want to be clear

but if you pretend they are they'll like you for it shall we have some fun oh i don't know do you feel do you feel up to some fun a little bit okay let's have a little bit fun not too much fun, AJ. We had too much fun last time. It was a real problem. That's true. It was a lot of fun. What is something you wish you had the figurative strength to do or not do? You know, kick a habit or something like that. Oh, that's a depressing question, isn't it?

I'm addicted to heroin, AJ. Thank you for bringing that up on the podcast. If you listen to all the episodes, you know that many of these are not fun questions, but they are interesting.

But the answer is fun. My answer is very boring, which is that i i would like to lose some weight uh in 2020 so every year i have a theme i have a yearly theme that i do every year 2020 it was the year of fitness and i went from about 190 pounds down to about 155 pounds over the course of a year yes and i walked for an hour every day i mean if you remember 2020 there was not much else to do so i was able to really 100 control my diet and my exercise and i would just

like i exercised literally every day i walked for about 30 to 60 minutes every single day of that year. And I 100% controlled my calorie intake because I had no choice. Not that I had no choice, but I was able to, like, I wasn't going to a restaurant. A restaurant, you're like, I don't know, maybe this is 600 calories. Maybe it's 1,500 calories. I have no idea. Whereas this, everything that came in, I could look at the calories and exactly

track it. So I lost, however much that is, 35 pounds in a year. And then 2021, the world opened up and I live in LA. And I don't know if you know the best about LA, AJ, but there is really good food in LA. And on top of that, I got really sick at the end of the year and I just wasn't able to exercise or particularly diet. it. And I just, a confluence of factors meant that I went up to 200 pounds, which was higher than what I started. This is classic yo-yo dieting.

Since then, 2021, I've been about 200 pounds. I'm at 211 right now, which is like the, I've been floating around 211 for about a year, which is not crazy. It's not like 300 pounds or anything like that. But I have, if you're watching the video, I have very, I have relatively skinny arms, maybe not as skinny as they were, but like looking at my arms, you wouldn't be like, wow, what a, what a chunky fellow.

But I carry all my weight in my gut i would stand up and show it to you but i don't think anyone wants that and that is the worst place for weight to be for your heart i am i am now bmi obese and obviously bmi is not the most reliable thing in the world but it still is a factor that i was at the low end of normal and now i'm i'm in technically obese and my my yearly theme last year was year of finance i really wanted to get out of debt and as as you saw in a fine episode that that

paid off a lot i not only made a bunch more money than i ever have but i also cut so much spending. And this year, I can't remember what my theme is this year, but it's not fitness. Is it me? Yeah, it's year of AJ. I'm actually curious on my year, so I'm going to look that up. But next year, I'm going to do another year of fitness. And my goal is very, very, very much to lose that weight again. Year of freedom. This is my year of freedom. I don't know what that means.

It means something to me. It basically means that I'm trying not to have obligations. I'm trying to just wake up and be like, what do I want to work on today?

And this is an incredibly privileged position. In no way am I denying that.

But it means that i do my best work faster and happier my best work has always been from like what am i inspired to work on today always it's like a one-to-one correlation and my goal this year so i i actually just turned down a bunch of dev jobs i am trying to start fewer new projects with obligations and i've also very cleverly backdoored into that year of financial freedom to finish my get out of debt plan so this is my year of

freedom where if i'm in the mood to wake up and work on a romance novel, I'm going to write a romance novel. If I wake up and in the mood to work on our AEG game, I'm going to work on our AEG game. Obviously, we have a lot of scheduled meetings and stuff like that, but I am just really trying, and especially I'm not committing to weekly meetings for more than a month at a time. Because last year, I had a weekly meeting every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and three on Friday.

And that doesn't leave many days without one. And those days where I can wake up, this is now wildly off tangent, wildly tangential to your question when i can wake up and just do whatever i just do better work and i'm happy doing it so next year i'm going back to a year of fitness because i just i gotta lose this weight it's getting ridiculous until then it's basically all free right you can eat whatever you want no i'm

trying to track calories and i do really well like five out of seven days and then. Something happens and i just i fall off the wagon and i don't know my scales also sometimes like if it's at the wrong angle it tells me i'm 10 pounds lower than i am i'm like whoa it's a great week And then I'll do it the next time, like, oh, no, I was not at all.

Standard disclaimer is weight is not the be all and end all i'm just aware that i am larger than i i should be to be as healthy as i can be especially with my body type, yeah peter's saying if you weigh more than him then he hates you that's explicitly what he is trying to say the other big factor is i've injured my knee so for six months i haven't been able to walk and i love walking i love it so much i would i would go on a weekly hike with my girlfriend and then a weekly like

every week or two with some friends and i just can't hike because i'm i just can't do it so i am just a lump at the moment it's driving me insane so for me i love meat i love dairy i love i love animal products baby and i didn't have a problem with that until recently like there's certain things that were like off limits to me as soon as i started understanding like how veal is made and stuff like that put bad taste in my mouth and then i But it

didn't. A bit of delicious taste in your mouth. True, true. It feels so good. I wish it wasn't from torturing baby cows. What's the duck one? Oh, faux gras. Faux gras. Yeah, I have a little bit of that. But I try really hard not to have those kinds of things, even though I love them. And I don't eat octopus or cut lamari or anything like that anymore. Because they're intelligent? They're really intelligent. But then as soon as you start going down that rabbit

hole, that's the thing. and bacon's the best thing ever. Rabbits are not intelligent, Ashley. Really? I heard that pigs are more intelligent than dogs. You said rabbits. You said once you stopped getting that rabbit hole. Oh, gotcha. So I honestly wish I had the strength to be vegan. I feel like morally, I feel like I should be. This is absolutely not a judgment call to anyone. I'm not a vegan. I'm not even remotely close. But that is something where I feel like morally, that's how I feel.

And I know I can't ever get there. My favorite blogger back in the day was a man called Ferret Steinmetz. He also wrote novels, including one of my favorite novels, The Uploaded.

Love that book. I love it so much. and he he wrote a post kind of 2005 that i think about and reference all the time and he called it condom theory condoms are 97 effective and there is a certain line of thinking of like oh they're 100 effective why bother and the answer is because they're 97 effective but we have as humans we have these like binary minds of like oh it doesn't work all the time not worth it and so a friend of mine and I often use the shorthand condom theory to talk about, like,

we both fall into these all or nothing traps a lot. I am not a vegan by any means. I only drink oat milk. Probably 70% of the meals I eat have impossible meat to replace normal meat. I have impossible chicken nuggets. I have impossible beef mince. I have impossible, what's the other one I have? It's just those two. Impossible patty melts for my, impossible patty melts.

And so I'm not vegan, but i'm effectively 70 vegan and so beating yourself up is like i wish i could be vegan just half your meat content and no you're not vegan but you're like you're doing so much more than nothing that condom theory absolutely applies in no world do i ever this is this is literally the only time i've ever talked about it publicly at all about being 70 vegan because what even is that No one cares.

I mean, no one cares if you're fully vegan. Yeah. But I feel like, yeah, I'm not vegan, but I am doing way more than Peter of two years ago. I love Impossible Meat, by the way. If you can get your hands on it, I really recommend it for stuff like, I use it in spaghetti bolognese and the Impossible Chicken Nuggets. I can't tell the difference. Literally, I have Impossible Chicken Nugget. I might as well be eating a chicken nugget.

So I would experiment with Impossible Meat. Sometimes you have to prepare it differently or sometimes you have to use it differently, but it really does an amazing job of replacing a bunch of stuff. Now, I still have bacon once or twice a week, and that's 0% vegan, but I've cut down. I eat spaghetti bolognese or a patty milk an average of once a day, and none of that is now meat. I drink oat milk because I like the flavor and the calories, and also it lasts way longer in the fridge.

Nothing to do with being vegan, but I was drinking a gallon of milk a week or whatever it was. You didn't ask for any of this input, but I'm giving you input anyway. I'll tell you, I'm also not going to do any of it. For me, it's not a meal unless there's meat. If I eat, I'll have like a giant bowl of salad, and I'll feel really hungry afterwards.

Have you tried Impossible Meat? i have i i didn't want to like to crap all over it i don't like and i can't tell the difference but, that's just it's in no way is it the healthy alternative it's like as bad for you as meat just with none of the animal stuff so it's like the same protein the same calories etc etc which you know if the taste was really close and i have had sometimes it prepared in a way that it's like really close and if it was really close i probably would

be able to like make the substitution for some of those, but step by step, see how things go in the future.

AJ, I have a question about Impossible Meat for you. By saying goodbye, everyone. Bye! 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.