#59 - The Best Design Advice on the Internet – Part 5

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

Hayward. I'm AJ Brandon. And today we have a secret third host who is communicating with us in the form of writing a blog. It's our regular co-host, Daniel. First name Daniel, surname Dot Games. AJ, what are we talking about today with Daniel? Today we're continuing our excellent conversation, deep diving into Daniel's blog.

We're not giving more context than that because this is like part a bunch of a bunch yeah yeah go listen to the others and listen to the rest if if you refuse to the absolute dot points which is what people outside of america call bullet points the dot points are that he's got this amazing blog we love it and we're putting thoughts on we're diving deep into it so i guess everything you just said covering again so which is exactly how we are treating his very concise blog

just going over everything he says but okay uh yes we are we are mistreating his blog so i have no no headers or anything like that i just copied a bunch of notes in order and split them into agree controversial and disagree i'm still on agree your your notes are chronological because this is a disaster lead us.

Off aj what do you got in the section for feel bad when a player gets something bad don't make it clearly worse than another option in every way just make it different in some way to hide the fact it's worse if you have a spear with range three and strength three it's fine to have an axe with range one strength four even though it might be worse it is it at least has some upside over the spear what's not okay is to have a sword with range two strength to it peter which section of your agree

disagree does this go in i don't i didn't i didn't capture this note so i assume i assume agree but not not worth saying anything about but i i will say we talked about this a little bit what episode were we talking about soul forge how like they don't have a generic which which one oh it was balance they don't have a generic killer creature because it just gives you no room to to do this and so even though i didn't note this down i really do think this is good advice.

In our infamous AEG game that we're always talking about, we run into this all the time. We don't have costs on almost anything in the game. I literally don't think anything in the game has costs right now, unless I'm misremembering. And so if a faction has 10 cards, you can't have one that's just worse than the other. Cost is a good way to get around this, where you can have a 2-2 and a 1-1, where one costs four and the other one costs one, you know?

So this is something I actually disagree with. We talked a bit about this in our balance episode, that there's reasons to have things that are better or worse. In fact, I think there's a number of different reasons. So let's look at Ticket to Ride. Ticket to Ride is a game where you could get a wild card. A wild card is strictly better than a normal card. Is it a feels bad that the average card you pull isn't a wild card?

No, because it makes those wild card moments where you do get them very special.

Is it is it a problem to have a plus three strength versus a plus two strength card in blood rage no because it's a drafting game and like we said with the the sushi go example in our balance episode if you have a you know three point card versus a one point card it's not that you're comparing the three point to the one point it's you're comparing that three point to the card that has potential to be 3.5 points or it could be zero if you don't get the set and then

later in the draft you're comparing the one point card to that same card are you going to is that card going to be a 3.5 or a zero i think there's a number of different reasons that you would have different strength effects in the game even just the case of like uh thematic situations or or those excitement pulls or the context of getting stronger over the course of the game or even just having different market pressures if you see a card like we're saying where

in in a running market where you You have a card that costs one in the first slot, two in the second slot, three in the third slot. Well, maybe there's a better one in there, but it's going to cost you more and the players sort of end up balancing that out. So I don't think having a strictly worse option in the game is necessarily an issue. I think there are contexts where it's fine. It's funny. I think this is probably an aesthetic difference because I don't

think in any of my games... Oh, actually, no, that's not true. Critic Kitchen has ingredients with values 2 through 7, and a 7 is more than three times better than a 2. But I think that's the only game where I've ever had that strictly worse card. I think literally every other game I've published and even designed, like the AEG game, I think every other game of mine has at least it's better in some way.

Which is interesting and like you said there's reasons to it just doesn't it doesn't occur to me or like it's just not where i go so like this line of thinking i'm like yeah obviously this and you're right there are ways to do it and and the two through seven was completely an our decision so like that that's an example of we're working with a co-designer can be a really good way of getting you outside of the box that you you know we all accidentally put

ourselves in but yeah never occurred to me i've got one oh sorry go ahead no no please continue did you have an example from our game nope nope please please continue okay you have a happy face and that always spells trouble you're not having fun are you aj this is not the time of the podcast where we have fun oh shoot you're right man all right we'll skip past all the fun sections in his blog.

Don't put all your ideas in one game just pick one thing and make a game about that, obviously there are exceptions uh our ag game is every idea we've ever had in one game but i think as advice to new designers yeah absolutely just pick a thing and make that game.

And the the more you can attune yourself to doing that it's it's about cutting cruft as much as anything like the better you can get it being like here is my one idea the better you'll be positioned to make a game that has four ideas because each of those is going to be a pure one idea and not an idea with seven hats on you know yeah i i mean again the one thing to to say here as a caveat is this is also something that we both have a strong

aesthetic preference for in that like we like daniel really appreciate a we do like that we both we all appreciate a very focused experience it does what it does as well as it can and it doesn't have a bunch of extra cruft that isn't pulling its weight. But there are some genres more than others that this is more acceptable. And if you have a really big, expansive, three-hour epic game, then that can have a lot more different things in it, right?

I've probably quoted Brandon Sanderson before on this, which is an unexpected choice of reference. But he says that a novel cannot be carried by one idea. To carry a full novel, you need two or three ideas. A short story, a novella, they can be carried by one idea, but the bigger your story is, the more kind of ideas it needs. And I think that applies here. I've talked about my like planting a seed and everything growing out of the seed theory, I assume a lot.

And so for me, I have, and this is what you're talking about. We have such admiration for when someone takes one seed, plants it, and everything comes from that. And that's, you know, pick one thing and make a game about that. But I have such an appreciation for a game like Great Western Trail, which is two seeds that are planted kind of together and they grow into one. Oh, it's beautiful when that happens.

But I do, I still think that that central core aesthetic of, you know, make sure you understand what each idea is um my next one directly relates to this i'm gonna i'm gonna go again being small is not a downside games do not sell more as they increase in size probably the reverse and again this this is his blog we talk about this every time is very targeted towards like how do you make a game that will sell as many copies as possible and be as well received on bg as possible

like they're sort of his twin goals and so if if you only play three hour euros and you want to make a three hour euro a lot of this advice doesn't directly apply i mean actually a lot a shocking amount of it does but in terms of like getting published that's what it was his goal is getting published and i can tell you i have what 30 games signed and almost all of them are under 30 i can count on on what i think literally on one hand the number of my signed games that are more than 40 dollars.

Yeah, the more you can compact a game, the better chance you'll have at selling it, which if that's your goal, then do that. And part of it, too, is we've talked before about things like accessibility and stuff, how if you have to go to a foreign website and download a film and then download a subtitle pack, and then that's how you can watch the movie, not many people are going to experience that. If your movie is free on YouTube, many, many people are going to be able to watch that movie.

And similarly, that applies to board game pricing models, as well as many other things. When you're designing a board game, if a board game is cheap, more people can experience it. And board games are a really interesting medium in that they self-propagate, they market for themselves. If you have a cheap game that you can play with your friends easily, well, then you just, you know, effectively advertised to all the people that you just played with.

And if one of them buys it and then plays it with other people, I think that's why party games are special.

Non two-player games and non solo games but yes very good call but i think that's why party games have the potential to explode the way they do you know absolutely all right what you got so this is one of my favorite sections it has to be that way section oh god yes i yeah i think this is a bug been bugbear of mine for many years but he he again his whole blog like a lot of it's not new thoughts but it's just so well expressed yes so let's let's read some quotes here

sometimes in a game design there's a rule or system that's clunky complex unthematic laborious or otherwise detracts from the game however this rule is necessary in order for the game to function players and publishers don't care why there's some flaw or clutch in your game there may be a perfectly good reason why it's there the publisher is still not going to accept your game they can, just publish a great game that doesn't have those problems.

I have that whole section, and I have the next sentence as well, which is, you're the game designer. Your job is to fix your game's problems. If you can't fix them, you can start working on another game. Heck yes. Man, I used to have terminology for this, and again, it's probably on old episodes. We've been doing this for many years, AJ. I don't know if you've noticed.

But yeah, the classic example is just you sit down on a prototype, you sit down on a playtest night, You start playing a prototype and you find some laborious rule that was made to fix some other rule and some other rule. I've been talking about this a lot recently for some reason. I think that one of my skills as a creative is my ability to, not just creative actually, interpersonal relationships too, is the ability to step back and try to look at the slightly bigger picture.

I'm going to use a fight as an example, AJ. Let's say you and I were having a fight over the dishes, as we frequently do. This is probably the number one thing we fight about. The question, like the way to solve this is not dishes related. I call it zooming out. It's to zoom out and be like, hey, when you, like what's happening here? When you see the dishes aren't done, you don't see a dirty dish. You see Peter doesn't love me.

When I hear you asking me to do the dishes, I don't hear I want you to love me. I hear, I need to control what you're doing every moment of the day. And like, neither of us are trying to say this. I actually very recently had a big fight with my girlfriend, not a big fight. I had a big conversation with my girlfriend and before it could even turn into a fight, we zoomed out and it was like, what, what do you hear when I'm saying this? And what, what are you actually trying to say?

And once we could intellectually understand what we were actually trying to communicate, we were able to zoom in. And the, the problem wasn't even a problem at all.

I'm talking a lot about relationships here, but this is, this is, I think my skill with games i have countless times i have sat down with a game and they've had like some small issue and i've been able to be like well no that's not the issue the issue is your victory condition or the issue is your you know something that's nothing to do with the specific problem that they're having and i don't know how to teach this this is my classic unhelpful advice but.

If you've got a mechanical issue, sometimes it's related to the card. Most of the time, it's not the card, it's the game. It's a structure issue, not a content issue, to use some old terminology. And so, yeah, people who can't do this will instead be like, okay, this card is overpowered, so I need to add a rule that it only works half the time. Ah, but now if you draw it against this deck, it doesn't do anything. So I need to add a rule that it only works half the time.

But if the opponent has none of this then it works at double strength ah but that means against this power and you just keep on fixing fixing fixing this card until it's a wall of text um that's that's sort of the archetypal example but yeah go ahead yeah i was having a conversation with someone i play tested their game recently and they asked for my advice on some problems that i identified and how to solve them and i said well there's i think just about always an easy way to solve

any problem in a game and that easy way is to add a rule like i think you're gonna say abandon the game well that doesn't solve the problem but if if if you're like oh i have this issue i can just about it's hard for me to imagine a situation where i can't just be like well just add this rule and solve it what but 90 of game design in my opinion is solving problems in a clean way solving problems without having to do that x adding that extra complexity to the game.

And it's funny when you're with a with new game designers oftentimes you you see you see them solve them with the rules you you give a piece of feedback oh this is a problem because of this reason and then you're like oh cool i'll just add a rule to do this you're like no no no no. Yeah whereas when when you and i are uh in a play test like we don't even have to have that It's like we identify a problem and then the only solutions that

either of us would accept is one that comes at no extra rules cost. Or if there is an extra rule, then what else is that rule doing for us that justifies it being there, right? And a big part of this is, and we talk about this all the time, just having more tools in your tool belt, playing more games and seeing how they do things. Oh, I remember, sorry, right before the podcast, we were talking about me doing a mini-sode about a problem solving. I finally remembered what it was.

So we might do that after this recording. But the main point of this thing is like, people don't care why there's a flaw in your game. There might be a reason, doesn't matter. And this is such a shift in mentality that I think is so important.

It's it doesn't it doesn't matter how well you can justify a problem they're just going to go with a game that doesn't have that problem it doesn't matter how much you can be like well it actually doesn't work the other way cool then the game doesn't work and you need to either fix the problem or like you said abandon the game now i'm i am much more abandoned heavy than you are.

Famously so but that's because i have this abundance mentality of like cool i will come up with 20 new prototypes tomorrow if i need to there's always another game this this game doesn't need to be the one that's solved yeah i i think that having that abundance mindset not being afraid to let go of games that you can't solve problems for and and accepting that like you can come back to it later is so valuable and that's why i think just about all

people who are trying to be full-time designers or like take this really seriously as a potential profession or way to make money are people who work on multiple games because if you just focus on one game for a very long time then it's very very hard to let go whereas if you're working on four games it's very easy to let go of one that you're not able to solve a problem for all people who will intensely work and then put it aside and intensely

work the next one because some people aren't able to like multi multi-game task in the way that that you and i are i'm gonna go back up to the section i was so in some complex games working out what's going on is half the mental challenge i want the challenge to be the strategy, not comprehending the game. Again, I live in the world of prototypes. This is true of so many prototypes where I'm like, just what am I doing?

I want to do this thing. You've set up 15 obstacles. Just let me do the thing. I might have talked about this before. Alex and I have a big game coming out from Carbon Alchemy in like three, four years. I don't know when it's coming out. And we've gone through multiple iterations of this and the core has always been rock solid. And it's just been like getting the game to work twice in our three, four years, maybe three years of working on this.

I think probably about three years twice. We've hit this point where we're like, okay, we love this. This is a, this is a work. And the first time that happened, we invited Mike Mihalsic and Matt Wolf over and we sat them down, excited to show off our game. That was really cool. And I don't think I've ever seen two people more frustrated by a playtest in

their life because we had all those obstacles. We had this rule that literally, while this token is in a certain position, you just can't do half the game. And we had this other rule that was like, ah, actually, no, you have to do this first and so on and so forth. So they're like, look, we see it. We see the cool, fun game.

Just let us play that. just let us play this game instead of consistently not letting us play the game which is one of my most common pieces of feedback just let me have fun with your game and we were just so deeply entrenched in it and it's worse when there's two of you because you figure one of you will spot it.

We were so deeply entrenched in this game that we didn't see any of these things that like this quote says comprehending the game was was most of it we'd just gotten so far past that that we're like yeah we can see through the spreadsheet we finally about two months ago got back to that point without with other people being able to able to come along the journey with us which was very nice this is something i think about a lot there's a lot of different types of

complexity and every type of complexity puts a mental burden on the player i'm going to forget one of them because you know i don't have my notes right in front of me for this type of topic but off the top of my head there's board state complexity which you know imagine sitting down to play a game of chess that's halfway through you haven't built up to the point where you're out there you're like what is going on yeah that so board

state complexity is how complex is the current state of the game that you have to keep internalized in order to, There's comprehension complexity, which is just, can you understand the rule being presented to you? This is pretty famous on certain really obnoxious Magic the Gathering cards where you have to read them six times. Oh, do you remember the Gloomhaven example I sent you a little while back of the attack damage one? Oh, yeah, yeah, I do. Can you pull that one up pretty quick?

Can you pull that one up while I keep going through them? Yeah, yeah. So there's comprehension complexity. There's strategic complexity. And while, again, we want you to have a lot of depth in terms of the strategy that you're using, we don't want to be confusing how you are supposed to play the game and strategize. A famous Magic the Gathering example is a card that costs you mana and costs you the card to play.

And the only effect of it is you discard your entire hand, which is like what player is going to look at that card and be like, oh, yes, I know how to use this tool to win the game.

Like who wants to lose all their cards jay we have we have like 15 chats so i couldn't even start to think of which one it would be in all right i'll tell you what i will let you go to the next point and i will find that one then i'll read the card because it's just such a good example okay uh so this actually relates directly to what you're saying there's also an ug factor that puts people off the moment they see the game if

a game looks complicated people will be less likely to want to play it this is an interesting one i could put this in controversial um so firstly this is what you're talking about of like game state complexity but like right from the start so you take something like boop for example beautiful game at the start of the game it is a blank five by five six by six grid and nothing else like there is no board state complexity when you start boop goes the same way it's just a grid nothing

else and then boop and go don't get more complex because only one type of piece whereas even something like chess by comparison you look at that and you're like wow i have to learn what six different things do just to be able to like start thinking about this game i say this is controversial because i have that weird type of brain where i sit down at a heavy euro and there is this genuine delight in my soul when i look at a game that i have no idea what's going on and i know that

in like 20 to 40 minutes i will understand all of this complexity like it's like looking at a mountain and being like oh that seems exhausting to climb but soon i will. Be at the top of that mountain i will have climbed it that really appeals to. Me that appeals to a lot of heavy gamers so he's you.

Know again all daniel look game stuff he's right that if a game looks more complicated people will be less likely play it if you're going for as many people as possible yes but if you're going for the specific like.

Heavy euro crowd that's an irrelevant fact yeah and i feel that too when i'm playing or when i sit down to play a game and i see that there's like 50 different types of resources and there's like 20 different zones and the board's covered in iconography i feel fatigued before i start to play the game and i i feel a big rate of interest, think i found the card that i i was talking about if not this is still a pretty good example,

okay so this one reads kill one adjacent normal enemy whose current hit point value is less than half the difference between your maximum hit point value and your current hit point value.

That's a nightmare i'm gonna read it one more time kill one adjacent normal enemy whose current hit point value is less than half the difference between your maximum hit point value and your current hit point value i want to use this whole topic to segue into something i've been thinking about a lot this is this is not new half of this is new so i am i'm increasingly becoming a purist, this is this has always been the case for me in that i don't like victory points

i want a really simply stated goal get to the end of this line you know be the first to collect these three things, and yeah the the stupid argument that that we've probably discussed many times it's like those are victory points cool that's not what i'm talking about victory points is like how do you win have the most victory points wow what a simple goal how do you get victory points okay strap in you can build a tree do it and that's what i mean

when i say like that's what i don't like about victory points is when it's like what do i do here is a table i want a simple clearly stated goal and then how do i get to that goal is interesting this has always been true this will probably always be true i'm a i'm a writer when i'm not making board games and story at its foundation is a comp like a a. Great story is a compelling character has a clear goal and has to face overwhelming obstacles that is like all of western storytelling

boiled down to the simplest points the more compelling the character the better the story the more the more important the goal the more compelling the story and the more the higher the obstacles the more compelling the story like there's only three levers and the more you can increase them the better your better your story you know what i me i'm using very general terms and so my my board game equivalent of that is you know i i just want really clear like point me in the

direction and give me interesting puzzles to solve i haven't got a sentence in the same way as i do with stories and so i'm i'm really just increasingly.

Again the victory points thing is not new but i'm increasingly like tell me what i'm trying to do and make that really obvious and then i also am leaning more and more away from this is good but also it's bad we were talking about this with our game just yesterday i wouldn't know two days ago when we were playing like i i we're working on a faction that has an earthworm that has tunnels and right now as an earthworm being on a tunnel offers positives and negatives and that's

fine it works for our faction all that kind of stuff but i am just increasingly like just let me let me do something that's only positive and the lighter your game is the more i think that's important unless the entire tension comes from that balancing of like is it good or bad, Like, don't give me a card that's sort of like the one you were saying with magic. Like, discard your entire hand to do this. Cool. Now it's a chore just to work out how to maximize this card.

Give me a cost and give me an ability and make the ability good. Great. Yeah, I think part of, just to sort of zero in on a specific element of what you're talking about here, I think the most important thing is the clarity of the goal and having that be pure. The games that are the most difficult to develop mental heuristics for, meaning a sense of direction or a rule of thumb, are the games where there's reasons why progressing towards your goal isn't actually a good thing.

And I find that so distasteful. I think in a game, there could be a reason to, like, pluses and minuses to smaller actions you take within the game.

But for the overall goal that needs to be so focused and so clear and whenever it's not i think you run the risk of having some massive problems like i'll just say i want i want to reword this whole point to be less didactic for both of us which is the more that getting towards your goal is a good is a bad thing the more complexity you're adding to their game and that's not always bad to add complexity but we are both inclined

towards not adding that complexity So the obvious example is games where you can spend victory points. It just doubles the complexity of the game. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, never do it. But like, just be aware that every time you're doing that, you're adding complexity and ask yourself, is this a space where I want to add complexity? If that's the core tension of the game, or you're trying to make a very complex game, great, go for it.

But in most cases, that's not actually what you're trying to do. You look like you disagree. I'm just thinking about, I think that that is a clear way of saying it. And my only thought was, is it enough to say that it's just adding complexity? And I think that it is. I think that is a very clear definition.

But I think that just to be clear about the consequences of that complexity, you turn off new players, you make it harder to engage with the strategy of your game, you make it so that- Yeah, I'm saying complexity in terms of what we always talk about with a complexity budget. I'm not saying strategy, I'm deliberately choosing my word, complexity, which is not inherently bad, but has a huge cost to it. And is that where you want to spend your budget? Yeah.

With our faction game with AEG, every faction has a leader and they have HP. And if you reduce one of their HP... Well, not true now. There's always an exception that I mentioned. As of yesterday, that's no longer true.

It's like talking about magic the gathering here's the rule technically not always, it's just funny that you brought up the the one thing that we just right well so one thing that i had considered at one point was a character where as their hp lowers they you know get more powerful like a sort of berserker thing you know because i think that kind of mechanic can be like fun to play with as a player but as the opponent on the other side it's like oh

wait so i'm not supposed to attack you anymore and immediately i was like all right i don't want to make this anymore that just sounds miserable yeah i yeah that you want you and again this this is all this one points being said in different ways but it's really important and it's really been something i'm thinking about give players an obvious path and i don't mean obvious as in like there's no strategy the game but like don't punish them for everything that they do um let let people

let people have wins actually i think oh hey i just i just found the note that you started this with if players get something bad hey what you got. If people keep doing something the wrong way or understand a rule the wrong way, change the rule so that's the right way. The alternative is to change human nature, which is impossible. I feel like we've talked about this a thousand times because we both feel so strongly about this.

Yes, the only caveat I'll say here is that sometimes a thematic reframing can solve your problem because players just understood the wrong way or thought it was the wrong way because you express the theme in a very poor or unintuitive way. Or, you know, maybe it could be that there's a graphic design issue that's caused them to play the wrong way.

Sometimes there are solves other than changing the rule, but don't be afraid of changing the rule and do not force players to keep doing the thing that you want them to do without helping them to get there.

Yeah, this is actually very close to another thing that I often talk about, which is take off the rails. I played a game, this would have been Unpubbed maybe three years ago.

I really enjoyed it it was it was a very very simple elegant game you're putting cards down into a grid basically uh no it was lines that's right there were like four columns and you were putting cards down into these columns and one of the core rules of the game was you can't put a card into a column if it's two cards longer than another column and i said to the guy cut that rule like due to the way the game works oh that's right sorry you're putting cards into columns

and then drafting those columns and he was worried that someone would end up drafting a column that only had one card in it and i was like but that like the rule of make this game more boring like like you've already balanced it because you are going to be stuck drafting one of these so you want to make sure that one is not worse than the other so just let people play it where they are and have it have it fall where it is and this this is this is a direct parallel to.

Work out what people are naturally doing and make the rule that and take the rails off and balance around that there's a daniel games quote which is you know balance is easy whatever it is from, i think i quoted it in the balance episode as well like balance balance is the easiest part so make the card fun and then balance around that or whatever so like both taking off rails and making the rule obvious like i lean so hard into this and

i get a lot of game sign because when you sit down and play my games it works the way you naturally expect it to work i'm feeling a bunch of credit kitchen questions at the moment because people are diving into the the more advanced content and it's it's i'm really enjoying that almost every question the answer is yep your assumption was correct almost every time they're like okay so this card does this do this yep does this do this yep does

this work for this like this yep like it's almost like i would say literally 95 98 percent of the time it's just a yes and the fact that they have to ask you know that's a whole separate thing as a game gets more complex but had they just gone with their gut they would have been right 98% of the time. And that is not true of most prototypes, but that is true of a lot of the majority of published games.

And, you know, they got published because they work the way that you expect them to work. Mm-hmm. There's a, I've got a quote between your last two that I'll read now until the problems are fixed. A game is not finished. I just really like this as like you, you've, it's, it's, it's, it's directly tying into the, like, we don't care why there's a floor fix the floor until you have, you haven't done your job. The game is not finished until you've fixed that problem.

And if it's a core problem and you can't fix it, you don't have a game. It's just doubling down on the last point. Okay. I'm going to jump back up to my section.

Penalize players in a way that doesn't send the game back in time i think a lot about forward momentum because not all games have it not all games need it i played one of my games recently and it doesn't have victory points and the the person who was playing it clearly just couldn't wrap their head around a game heavy euro game not having victory points because at one point they said hey there is nothing that says this game will ever end this game

could just go on forever and i was like well cool i've been playtesting this game for years and it's never gone on forever because people naturally start doing the thing that makes them win but i am always conscious of games having that forward momentum and one of the worst things you could have a game especially a light game but probably any game is have that like okay take a step back and it's like cool i just spent 10 turns doing this it's

a reason why in a lot of euros you just can't destroy other player stuff or often your own stuff this is this is arguably the biggest flaw of robotopia, which is that in robotopia to achieve your goal you give up your engine again and again and again like three times during the game oh i guess the fourth time you win the game so it's twice in the game you take a step forward by like scrapping half your engine which at the time i was like man why is it no one ever done

this and now i'm like oh i know why no one has ever done this.

Nope i agree nothing to add i'll go into one more and then i'm caught up with you um another feel bad situation is when a player gets no recognition for what they achieve because because it's an all or nothing system and then he gives an example from my city and this is an interesting one because this directly voids my victory points point in my games generally there is a winner and everyone else loses there's not like a ranked system but and i talked about this a

lot in the cooperative games episode i'm a big fan of iterative steps towards victory because then even if you don't hit that last step you've still taken like you know victory village pillage you village and victory points have the same initials this has caused many issues in my career village pillage you win by getting three relics almost no one ever finishes that game without getting a relic so they still get that like achievement whereas games like i can't think of any because

they don't exist where it's like you either have won or you've done nothing yeah that's frustrating and i i tend away from designing those. Yeah. So this is a really important lesson to learn. And this actually is very, very relevant in terms of making losing fun. If you have a game system where at the end of the game, players have no numeric, clear progress towards the goal that they were attempting, it sucks. It feels so bad.

It feels like you didn't do anything. even if you did if you got really close to winning but there's no like visual way to track how well that you did or how close you had gotten to your goal that is so unsatisfying and that's why i'm a big fan of having more granular progress towards your goals that's why hp is so ubiquitous right it's like oh you beat me but i got you down to two hp that's pretty good yeah the i this this both supports and also negates part of what you said um you

said numerical progress towards victory i think that the exception to this but is covered by the visual thing is when you build an engine even if i get no victory points if i've got a kick-ass engine like i feel like i made a thing that was cool yeah yeah all right what you got when either option is fine i often ask players how they believe it works and i make it that way yeah i do that all the time me or you i i do oh Oh, good. I do too. Yeah.

In a play test, especially with designers, if they're like, hey, how does this work? I'm like, what's your gut? Cool. That's the rule. Because so much of the time, and I cover this in a different way in another episode, so much of the time, it just doesn't matter. Like designing a game is a million micro decisions that frankly don't matter, but you have to make them. So the two tools that I use for this are what publisher am I thinking of and what would they do?

And what feels right to you, the player? Cool, because I just don't care. All right, here is the thing I disagree with the most, possibly the most dangerous, I think, advice in here, and probably the number one reason why I don't feel comfortable recommending this blog without adding a caveat. Do you know what it is? He might have updated it out, by the way. He has done a full job since we started this series and took these notes.

True. This is Your Game Is Not Done, and I'm simply going to read an update for a game.

I'm not going to read anything past that. his mobster game update yeah glad i didn't stop at revision 251 revision 287 is so much better yeah i hasn't he now abandoned that game or something i just remember hearing like i i saw elsewhere not on the blogs i i think it was twitter or something someone asked him hey is that the mobster game ever get signed he's like oh it'll never get signed i'm done with it I was like, yeah.

Okay, I've skipped down to my disagree section because I think this is from the same section.

100 revisions for a medium light game is now my minimum. If I finish the game before then, I'm just fooling myself and I'll keep working on the game until it's actually finished. You're free to skimp on the revisions if you like. Just remember that your competition are not. I am the competition, so I can pretty steadfastly disagree with this. I don't think I've ever done 100 revisions for a game.

Even the game that we have with ag which has six super super like very asymmetric factions which has all this other stuff they can mix and match in all the different games it's two player head to head so they have to be like more well tuned to be able to do the matchups than something like.

Root where you know you've got more players there's some sort of you know political balancing that can go there that game we did about 50 before it got signed like yeah i i version pretty diligently or i i used to more so before component studio but even with the components studio i version so i can tell you ag game was signed at version oh man even earlier than that about version 13 or 14 robotopia is probably my game with the most versions and that was and and my my versioning system

is every time i build and create a prototype in tts or physically so if i print something that's a new version if i update tts that's a new version so there's always a playtest in between i know i never version without playtesting it this so this is this is my tracked version i'm sure you have a different yeah so there are more versions than that for the ag game because i also did versions for that one and i i was just strictly going off of i didn't even go for like new versions

i did play tests it was 50 play tests and between every play test i make some sort of change even if it's minor so it was robotopia was 34 versions and i think that's my most i i find this data really interesting so i'm just going to keep going until you tell me to stop oh critter kitchen critter kitchen was signed at version 41 that doesn't sound right. Oh, sorry. Critter Kitchen was built off the ashes of an old game. And that game got to version four. That's why I was like, 41 seems too high.

Yeah. Critter Kitchen was maybe version like 15, 16. But to be fair with that one, we were sitting down with the same components and just running it with like five different rules. So still no more than version 50, I guarantee. And then Providence is my unsigned game. And that was version 38 is the most recent version of that.

So i think i literally don't think i've ever gone above 50 for any game in my life with my versioning system which you know you can you could argue is under under versioning what was things and rings oh you've heard the story things and rings wasn't versioned things and rings i pitched hey is this an idea okay i have version two was the most recent i know i don't think the audience knows oh right right fiction virgin a virgin uh version four maybe that game came together very quickly yeah and

and these aren't typical i'm not saying go sign version four but like i'm i'm what i'm really trying to say is a hundred plus revisions is not what the competition is doing and not what you consider a minimum standard yes and and just to i want to belabor the point too much here but my concern here is i don't want to see someone who can only do one play test a month say oh i have to do a hundred play tests or a hundred revisions of.

This thing and then you know spend the rest of their life tinkering away on something that they should have stopped yeah yeah sorry i i just find these numbers so interesting the game i just signed with keymaster version 17 and we worked for a year on that like but we just didn't need that many versions especially because i don't maybe he's counting like content tweaks as revisions so like with with the ag game every time we play i would argue we tweak a card.

It's very rare for us to go a full game without being like you know what the wording on this card could be better at the very minimum or let's swap this card out for this, But we're still not even getting close to 100 revisions. And a lot of that is after the game was signed, too. So many of my playtests are after the game is signed. See, unhelpful advice for why. All right, let's move on. Strongly agree with your disagree, AJ. Excellent. I got one. Sure. Players' feelings are never wrong.

There is a famous Neil Gaiman quote that I really like, which is, I'm going to paraphrase it. When you ask for feedback, the reaction, the emotional reaction is true and the advice is useless. Players' feelings are never wrong. This idea that feelings can be wrong is not a useful one. The advice almost always is, but the actual feelings like if someone says, hey, my hand hurts, it might have nothing to do with you, but it's still worth asking, why is your hand hurt?

Because the answer might be because you're standing on it. It might be because I slammed in the microwave two days ago. It might be because your game is made of knives. Like, find the information, and then it's up to you to solve it, not them. And to push that analogy a little bit further, if someone says, hey, I have a fever, you know, you don't say, oh, okay, you have a fever, you know? You say, well, you say that you have a fever, what are the symptoms that are making you say that?

If someone says, this card is overpowered, rather than saying, oh, the card is overpowered, their feeling was it's overpowered, you know, you can rewind that. Or maybe a better example would be like, there's not enough money in this game. Oh, yeah, that's a classic one. No, no, the classic one is I have too much money, which the solution to that is sometimes making stuff more expensive, giving you more stuff to do with the money or reducing the source of the money.

But like those are three really distinctly different solutions. And so, yeah, the solution is rarely just, like, assume, oh, cool, okay, everyone's income is halved, because sometimes the income is right, or you've got the numbers as low as you can, but working out, like, why do you feel like you have too much money?

And the answer is often, because there's just nothing interesting to spend it on, you know, if you can only spend it on wood, and you can only store four wood, then yeah, you have too much money. So, yeah, listen to players when they point out problems, do not necessarily listen to them when they give you solutions, but ask what they're trying to solve. Yeah, try to work out the root cause. I'm going to tell a story which I think I've gone 180 on over the years.

And so I'm going to name the people in it because I think they were right and I was wrong. It wasn't me? No, but you, Kevin. Kevin and Alicia, friends of the podcast. We're both friends with them. They've not been on the podcast, but they don't listen to the podcast. But Kevin and Alicia, the first night that I met them. Have I told you the story? Yeah.

Yes. Okay. The first night I met them, I played Dracula's Feast. and their feedback was this this is like you pitch this as a party game it's set at a party and yet i'm doing this really dry boring deduction could we do voices or something and i i don't i don't agree that voices was the solution for dracula's feast but god 10 years nine years later i'm like yeah they were completely right that game is completely mispitched at the time

i was like you don't know what i'm trying to make you've misunderstood the game it's meant to be this really dry boring deduction i didn't think boring at the time but whereas now i'm like yeah they were completely right players feelings are never wrong they were right that the the solution was not to add silly voices to the game the solution in this case was work on a different game but the solution was not to pitch this game as a party game when it's really not it's a it's a sudoku

puzzle split among nine people being played competitively it's not a party. Very good. First player. Assuming you're interested in your depth to complexity ratio, which you should be, by the way, everyone, you should seriously consider not mitigating the first player advantage. The objective of mitigating first player advantage is to improve the game at an unnecessary complexity or strange rules is often not worthwhile.

Now, he did give an example that I think we talked about in a previous one about how to do it organically. But I think this is the point where you and I disagree. So in about nine years time, I'll do a podcast being like, AJ was completely right about this. I think that there's a feeling of unfairness with no mitigation. I mean, friend of the podcast, Nate will like lose his mind if there's none there. And again, I think that, I think it partially depends on the genre that you're talking about.

You know if you've got like a competitive ccg matters a lot there's a lot to the oh yeah yeah absolutely if you've got a silly party game matters a heck of a lot less but i think i also think what one factor that we didn't discuss last time is that let's say setup is five steps adding one step to five steps is not as much of a deal oh hang on sorry my phone's freaking out, okay stop you're right okay can you hear me yep testing testing i can hear you.

Hello i can hear you okay it looks like give me a thumbs up if you can hear me, all right cool so i got a silver alert on my phone like you know those like amber alert things but for an old person and so my computer is like whoa we don't know what's happening is disconnected so it says i'm uploading my stuff what i might do is just it says i'm recording but i can't hear you which is sort of a necessary part of the whole process. And either way, we're going to have to go in and do some editing.

So I might just end this one and then start a new one with it all working. Okay. My audacity is still going though, so you don't have to worry about that. Okay, it says we're uploading, uploading. If you want to go to the restroom or anything like that, we'll take a very brief break while it finishes uploading. Oh, no, it's finished. I was going to close Riverside, send you a new link and start again. Is my camera not working? Hello, hello? Hey.

Let me do the old unplug-replug. I can neither see nor hear you. You can always tell a little friend. I can now see you. I cannot hear you. Fuck, it's me again. Why is this not letting me hear you? Your screen's going blue. Let me just switch. Say something for me. Something for me. Stupid fucking... I'm so worried about this. Say something now? Something now. Yes, okay. Thank God. Sorry about that. I got a, I got one of those government alerts. So firstly, my ear was suddenly full of alarm.

Like that that's a that's a thing for me it gets me flustered and then nothing was working so it's just really fucking annoying okay i've worked out how to turn them off so if there's a if there's a government alert i will just die i'm okay with that there's an option to turn off amber alerts which i've done but silver alerts are apparently not covered by that and there's no separate thing so i've just now turned off all government alerts what are we talking about first player

oh yes yes thank you i'm still recording in audacity i'm in audacity i never stopped yep me neither so one thing to factor in is that if you've got like five setup points and adding one more is proportionally adding way less than if you have one adding a second you know so i i think if you already have setup rules just tweaking those to add a first player like the coins especially like it's a simple one if it's like first player gets three wood

and two diamonds like that i don't like i think that's inelegant but if it's something really simple i don't have an issue with it i think this is just an aesthetic disagreement that we have not disagreement.

Different aesthetic taste yeah i think for some games it's easier to add than others for instance if you have to have everyone get starting resources anyway cool you just adjust that right it's done exactly and daniel actually goes on again i think we may have covered this in a previous one but i'll just reread it in case we haven't ideal place to add mitigation is inside the game components themselves because they're invisible and add no complexity in scrabble

there's no special rule for going first it's just that there aren't many premium squares that you can reach on your first turn and i think this is this is the the money right that's the dream and if you're committed to doing 200 divisions i can see why this would be a core rule right i'm not trying to say like good enough is good enough but if a game works without 200 you know we're both agreed that if a game works with a slight inelegance of like you can't bake it into

the core rules i'm very okay with that yeah and i think that there's a lot of different ways you can think of to do this a lot of games will have like randomly hand out you know these player boards one of them will say that they go first and it comes with like slightly worse layout or something if you're already handing out player boards then cool you might as well bake it into that.

Got a sports game and one team has to start with the ball i have to tell someone where it starts so i just say it goes with the person who's going second so you know there's a lot of ways that you can hide it yeah the game i was talking about where you start with one two three four five coins based on play order i needed the players to start with coins anyway so it's just it's not like i've invented these coins to put in you have to start with either one coin each or you

might as well like for me it's the same starting with one each or starting with equal to play it there's no added complexity there there's still that same step in the rules of handout coins so i i don't see that as a huge cost i've realized i've misread my own system so earlier when i said that he gave an example from my city for like when you don't get anything for what you achieved that was my note not his note because i've i've got

one here saying first let first class letters example i'm like i'm pretty sure he did not make an example of my unpublished game um in my city have you played that the canizia legacy game no but i'm familiar with it or i no i did play my city there's my island and my city i have played my city yes i really liked it my girlfriend i played through the whole campaign and at the end of it in a two-player game you either got the two points for winning the game or you've got nothing and i can

assure you that was a that was a rough game where four games in a row she got nothing so we were one whatever percentage of the way through the campaign and she's literally the equivalent of playing nothing now she has gotten the like the catch-up mechanisms and all that but in terms of victory points and we've talked many times about how fueled by victory points humans are she's literally.

Not done anything whereas i'm at eight points and she's like oh this campaign is over i guess i don't know if there's a better way to do that i think that game is really good but that's the example that sprung to mind yeah campaign games that have an ongoing score between games that is a tough thing to pull off personally i'm not a fan i think if you're doing a competitive long-form campaign system each game should be completely

self-contained you can have meta progression but i wouldn't track wins over the long haul because it runs into that type of problem i don't think there's every time.

Charter stone is the other legacy game that we've played right through it was the same thing like after after game eight we were like oh peter is i don't think we can win from here like, yes we had the same thing it's the catch-up mechanism but over a longer over a longer period amusingly there was i forget what it's called the negotiating one with the king that came out a while back oh the king's dilemma yes the king's dilemma thank you so in that one it has.

Possibly an interesting solve for it that didn't end up playing it in our campaign like in our campaign it was just very clear that after a certain point it was over but it has. Sort of two different types of victory points and we didn't finish the campaign because we stopped playing for other.

Reasons but the we assume at the end of the game one of the two points matters and the other one doesn't and we get to decide over the course of the game by like votes and stuff like that which one of the two matters because one of them is like chaos points and one of them is like order points or something and so if you you know ruin the if one person's clearly like winning the game on order points and like oh i'm gonna be the king of the world you're like hey guys maybe

we don't care about order so much maybe we just blow off the the town and rule the ashes you know i i think i haven't played it still haven't played it but oath i think does a really interesting where like the player who wins and how they win determines the next game but it's not a camp like you don't track the thing so it has an impact on the next game right and has an impact per player on the next game but it's not a meta scoring progression all right let's do one more

each and then we will maybe even have some fun so sure avoid creating rules for certain conditions and times and this is just an extension of our of our dogged anti-rule position and this is one that has the example so i have a game called first class letters coming up very soon from game head i think actually at the time of recording it's it's going to be a geekway in four days so if you're if you're geekway if you're at geekway hopefully you bought it aj if you're

going to geekway in four days then you should you should pick up a copy and it's it's like a it's a really i'm really proud of the design it's really clean like boggle style roll roll dice write down words score points. And there is a advanced system where one of the dice has to be in your word. The base rule is that you roll a bunch of dice, one of them can't be in your word. The advance is one can't be and one has to be. So it's just an interesting way of thinking about how to make words.

And we ran into this issue. Actually, I'll give you the really obvious one, which is when it was just random dice and you would pick one at random to put on the must and one to not. We had must use q can't use you aj what's the problem.

It's very hard to think of a word that doesn't have a u with a q yeah and especially because this game has additional restrictions on what words you can make so like it it was a nightmare and so at some point someone i can't remember if it was a play tester or who but someone was like we'll just write down a list of impossible combinations no no no no no no no but i have never done that i never want to do that go ahead that outrages me yeah no and and actually with my my solo roguelike game

that i'm sure i've talked about before we've run.

Into a similar problem and i don't know how to solve this one which is that there is a character in this game it's like a dungeon crawling game there's a character who jumps onto enemies to defeat them and there is an enemy type who you can only attack from adjacent spaces you can't jump onto them and the publisher of this game this game is signed the publisher in his second game ran into this combination and it's an extremely rare combination but obviously possible because

he ran into it straight away and so the the hit again the the obvious change is well just if you're playing with like ah it it disgusts me um with this one i don't know how to solve it because i don't want to cut either of those two rules there are there are theoretically ways to mitigate it because every round you have a shop and you can buy new attacks so you can just buy one that doesn't evolve evolve it jumping onto them but there's always a chance

that you don't get that one so i think what we're going to do is we're actually just going to rearrange the content to make this already unlikely thing really unlikely where by the time you unlock the the character who jumps or the boss who can't be jumped onto you know you you've you've played 50 games at that point. So that very rare, impossible combination is so much less likely. And if you know it's coming up, then you mitigate it for it early on the shop, et cetera, et cetera.

Because I don't know how to solve this, but I will tell you, I really don't want to have a caveat that says, hey, by the way, if you're playing with this character, don't play with this boss, because that's just gross to me. Yeah, the only other way, without knowing the game system, is to come up with a tool for them to be able to change their position or be able to make that work, or an alternative for the boss where it's like.

No adjacency unless this thing, which you know again very inelegant to add that but adding unless one word you know unless yeah you know they're one hp or this this will shock you aj this game has no words it's all symbols so right right uh it would literally like there's about eight symbols in the game and one of them is i'll go into a little bit more detail it's a shield so you can't defeat the enemy until you've attacked them twice and so you can't jump onto them while

they've got the shield so you need to attack them and then kill them and you can't jump onto an enemy while it's got the shield because normally that would kill it but in this case it doesn't so it would involve either cutting that from a whole like cutting that icon yeah it it doesn't work for any cases where you can have a cost so instead of a you can't do this it's you can do this but it costs you no it's so clean in so many ways that like and the thing is like i've said this before

i don't mind a one in a million impossible combination it's just that this happened like you unlock the jumping character and the shield boss at the same moment and so if i just shift them so that you unlock one way after the other it's still possible but you.

Know going in like by that point you'll know the game system well enough to be like oh i'm playing the jumping character i shouldn't choose the boss with the shield that's a bad combination you just it's not reasonable to expect people to know that in their third game right and as you say yeah you do have some mitigation it's just the the players will then at that point have the strategic ability to do that cool hey last one aj

uh turn order don't use completely variable turn order where play doesn't go around the table in a circle.

As always if the game is about the varying turn order it is acceptable yeah this is interesting because alex and i have providence my unsigned game that i was just talking about had like 38 revisions and then we have this upcoming cardboard alchemy game which is built on the bones of providence and that story i told earlier where we were like we made this absurdly complex game that no one else could play it's because providence is already a reasonably complex system and then we

built a whole new game on top of that we better talk about this before providence has that variable turn order and one of the things we did to stop ourselves from building a second complex game on top of the first complex game was just cut it i think it works in providence i think it's interesting providence i think it's worth it in providence but i'll tell you we didn't miss it when we changed it to around the table.

Variable turn order is one of my all-time least favorite things to see in a game. It is so easy to lose track of whose turn is. It's so easy for someone to be like, all right, I'm done. And then the other person doesn't realize that it's their turn and you waste time there. There's so many, switching the turn order is so tedious. I'm actually going to be more prescriptive than Daniel is here, which is rare. Because usually Daniel's super prescriptive.

Daniel says, don't use it unless the game is about it. I would say, don't use it unless your game is about it. And it is very carefully integrated and the change of turn order flows well in a zone of play where it indicates the current turn order and is like clear to the players. Just to show a bad example of this, in TI you have rolls that- Strategy cards that have the number of the turn order on them and an ability. So you draft those, you take them, and then you have them.

But there's nowhere for someone to look consistently that has the turn order referenced whereas if you can imagine a game system where you have you know rising sun is a great example rising sun does variable turn order really well because it has the the tiebreaker track which is used for a dozen different things it's always there it's frequently referenced it has the player's icon there at a glance you can see exactly what's going on that's what i wanted

my turn order systems i want it to be i know i look here and it will show it to me so when my turn is done i know exactly who the next person is and And again, it has to be about turn order and it has to be a focal point and it has to really matter unless it's doing all of those things. I think hard pass, redesign your game to make it not matter. I feel pretty strongly about that. Have you played far away? I have played far away. It's been a while though.

So far away, every round you draft a single card. That's, that's the main decision point. I'm not going to say it's the only decision point. You draft a single card from the middle that has a number. That number does a few things. mechanically it's a game but also that number determines the order in which you're going to draft cards next turn or king domino is probably a clear example, where arguably this breaks a lot of the rules you just said.

Now, obviously the game's built around it, but there's no zone of play in Faraway or King Domino, which tells you turn order. I have never seen anyone confused by it. So I would add a third kind of condition of like, if the game is simple enough that you are just taking one action per turn, go nuts. There's an excellent counter argument. I agree with that. Yeah. Cool. AJ, I have a publishing tip for you. Are your ears primed?

Yes. I can't see them. and people who are listening to the podcast can't see him. How are we meant to know? Oh, yeah. Check these bad boys out. All you YouTubers. Okay, well, that helps me, but now you have to describe what that looked like for people listening to the podcast. I took off my headphones. I gave my head a little shake, so my hair tossed all nicely. It was very sexy. It was shockingly sexy. If you have something for ears, you're welcome.

I got rejected from a publisher today. It was not unexpected. i didn't expect this this is one of my long shot publishers and they wrote back saying hey peter really like the game amazing you're very handsome you've got sexier ears than your co-host which i thought was a weird note to give a rejection but you know what are you gonna do but we found that this game just didn't have enough replayability and we the standard line you'll always

hear from publishers is we only publish a few games a year so we need to blah blah blah which is absolutely true something to keep at the forefront of your mind publishers are only publishing a few, so there there are a few things that i as a as a designer can do to this i can aj yeah aj let's say you get this feedback aj we just looked at your game we really enjoyed it it plays clean it plays easy people had a good time but they didn't have the urge to play again what do you do,

What do I do with that? Honestly, my takeaway from that is it's just not it's a good, not great game. It's just not good enough. And I think if you're at the point of pitching a game like that, you accept that that is what it is. You hope that you find a publisher that doesn't feel that way. But I would not retune the game at all. I think that is a huge number of games. For me personally, as a player, the vast majority of games I will play once

and be like, that was good. and I do not feel the need to play it again. That is how I feel about almost every game that I play. So I don't take that as any sort of huge issue. I just take that as it's an extraordinarily competitive market today. It's not up to snuff for that publisher. Move on. Excellent. So that's roughly what I'm going to do. So I guess it's less of a tip and more of a glimpse into the process. So I'm going to take this game that, by the way, I'm very proud of.

I think this is a really nifty game that works really well.

And i'm going to pitch it to a few other publishers for whom i don't want to say replay value doesn't matter but looking at their catalog they don't do the the peter c haywood thing of just having infinite content so like you know critic kitchen there's seven eight eighteen different critics and and 28 different carts and 50 restaurateurs and a million zoo chefs like that's the way that i normally add replayability to my games with the content content content i didn't do that with this game.

I got the email i i felt a little bit like i betrayed my past self but i deliberately wanted to make a really slick clean game that didn't have more content for playability and sure enough the the first big publisher i pitched or two has been like hey this doesn't have enough replayability, so my my gut instinct was to go back and add that like variable player player you know playability because that's something i'm very good at that's something

i always do it did feel weird not to do it for this game and if i keep getting rejected for this game maybe that's the next step because I like doing that anyway. And it's always a fun challenge for me to see how I can put that into a game where most people don't. I feel like that's always one of my little trademarks. But first, sort of like you said, I'm going to pitch it to some other publishers. I think the game is great. Maybe it's on the good end of great, but I do think it falls into that.

I think it's very publishable. Maybe that's a better way to put it. In fact, I've played tests with people and that's the thing they use. They're like, oh man, yeah, this plays and feels and looks like a published game. That's great. That's what you're aiming for. And so I'm going to pitch it to a few publishers who I work with, a few publishers who I don't, and just see if it sparks with anyone the way it sparks with me.

If it doesn't, which is probably what's going to happen so much of this game is, so much of the designer game, I mean, is rejection, rejection, rejection. Then I'm going to look at all the notes I've gotten from these publishers. And getting a rejection from a publisher, and this is maybe the tip, getting a rejection from a publisher is like getting an advanced playtester to playtest your game.

Like their notes are going to be more directly applicable than anyone else you can play it with except for me peter hayward so for now i'm being like okay this advanced pet playtester didn't like it now i need to check is this game not for them or is their note broadly applicable so i'm just going to pitch it to a few other people if they all say no then i'm going to go back and be like okay time for draft time for the next

revision can i apply is there a theme to these notes can i apply it is there something i want to see from the game that I didn't do, etc, etc. That's my publishing tip. Does that make sense? That's good. Cool. How do you feel about having nuff? About having nuff? Yeah. Isn't nuff fun? No, like fun reversed. The opposite of fun. Nuff. Better now that I understand it. Less so than having some fun. Oh, okay. Let's do that then. It's fun. I mean, oftentimes my fun questions aren't that fun.

It can be a little more serious. Today, which part of your body do you wish you had cancer in? Okay, hopefully they're not that bad. You know what? You want to do the fun question for today? Oh, I'm not prepped because we agreed that you would do the fun questions and I would do the publishing advice. So I can come up with one, but this goes against our agreement. Okay, let's go with... So here's how I work. I look around the room.

Okay what meal do you think you have eaten the most in your life the most times that's probably really easy one and that is going to be a bagel with cream cheese which really yeah so when i was growing up i didn't know i was lactose intolerant and had a really bad time or anti-semitic that was news as well yeah, And as Peter knows, I don't know if I would call myself a foodie. I would a thousand percent call you a foodie. You are definitely a foodie.

Okay. Back when we had the LA trip planned, I think one of the main draws was that you were coming to the home of food. So when I was growing up, my mom made all my meals, as often parents do. You know what's funny is that your mom made all my meals too. Right.

So when I was growing up my mom would make me meals but she'd be like you know I'll make you something what do you want I'd be like I could only say things that I know right so I'd be like bagel and cream cheese is fine so she made that for me every day for lunch for like 10 years, do you remember what bagel type it was just a plain bagel just plain cream cheese had they not invented everything bagels yet, and for when I switched off that it was tomato soup Campbell's tomato soup,

made with milk and for my breakfasts i had instant oatmeal or those like instant breakfast that's like the powdery mix with the milk you'll notice that a lot of these things have to do with dairy yeah so those those meals i had why your face is the way it is.

Yeah audio listeners are like what's wrong with everything everything uh very sexy ears though i think a lot of my like foodie sort of the way i am is is partially in response to having to eat the same thing over and over again yeah i was also i didn't eat much and i was very very very thin my dad was very angry and i spent a lot of my teens and 20s angry and then very consciously moved away from that and now people often describe me as like a calm non-angry person that is a

direct response to my upbringing see how i took the fun question and made it not fun yeah that's good have i ever talked about the meal that i invented that no one but me has ever eaten i don't think it's gonna be something really weird isn't it so campbell's tomato soup and a packet of potato chips and you just pour them in and it's like savory cereal. It's the most ridiculous thing. I don't like it. No, you're correct. I haven't had those in 10 years.

I mean, on the other hand, chips aren't that different from crackers. No, no. I don't think it's an inherently bad one. It's just, I don't know why. I was very proud of that. For me, the answer is very, very easy, and that's spaghetti bolognese. I love spaghetti bolognese. It was my favorite food as a kid. When I first moved out of home, my angry dad would actually make bulk spaghetti bolognese and fill them with a freezer because he was worried I wasn't eating.

So I would have a freezer full of nothing but like individual containers of spaghetti bolognese that I would pull out, put in the microwave, eat. When I started cooking, I cooked spaghetti bolognese. And nowadays, I would say about four days a week on average, I have a meal of spaghetti bolognese, which I make with impossible meat. We talked about before. I really like it. Yeah, it's just like it is the food of my childhood and adulthood and my whole life.

So I would be shocked if there is any meal that even comes close.

I generally go through like waves of like in particular food for a long amount of time. So Speckley-Bolognese has never left the rotation. Nice. AJ, do you want to not do a spoiler for next episode because we don't do that anymore? Sure. Do you want to know how we end this episode? How do we end the episode? By saying goodbye, everyone. Bye! Music.

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