#60 - An Entire Episode About Drawing Cards

Music. Hello, and welcome to Not Fun UnProblems, the not podcast that's not about un-game not designing.

AJ, how are you? Bewildered. How are you? I'm P2C Haywood. I'm with AJ Brandon. I'm doing all the introductions differently today. What are we talking about today, AJ? I have no idea. You said, AJ, I want to talk to you about picking cards from a hand.

And I said, let's do it so i was at a play test event a few weeks ago and i think i talked about this on a previous episode i played one of the most interesting prototypes i'd ever played it was like a train game did i talk about this uh yes yeah yes okay so the the i'm going to dive into the rules of this prototype a little bit i don't think the designer will mind in the game you're putting down tiles like hex shaped tiles onto a grid to basically build a train network it was not train themed

at all but it was very clearly a train game and i played it as a train game and had a very good time and the way that i i think i mentioned this the game was just over over like structured so the way the game worked was at the start of the game you would draw five tiles.

And on your turn you would each simultaneously choose one to play face down and then, simultaneously reveal them and then starting for the player starting player going around you'd play one and after you've done that you could discard any number of tiles and then draw any number of tiles you had a hand of five and like that's just 10 too many steps for any game oh i'm glad you said that i was i thought i was supposed to be able to

follow this perfectly for your next like thought i was like okay no not at all and and the the the struggle that the game designer was having was that he realized that the players needed some amount of information not too much information but not so i just want to do a mini episode about the different ways that you can provide players with options on their turn specifically the frame of like having a hand of cards because this is something that i would say comes up in 70 percent of games you

know minimum like it's a very common thing to be like you have a hand of cards or you have a market of cards and you play one in your turn all right makes sense are you following so far yeah so what what i think happened with this designer who's very lovely and very enthusiastic is that he just didn't have the tools that i had and the in my toolbox and the ability to assess the different strengths and weaknesses of them So I'm just going to go through a few and talk

about why they work and why they don't, and AJ, I'm sure you'll have opinions and also picked up on some that I missed. So, the basic structure of the game that we're talking about here is on your turn, you select and play a card. And maybe where you're playing it, you have options, maybe not, doesn't matter. The primary thing is that you select and then play an option.

In this game, it was tiles, it would often be, The simplest version of this, that I can think of one very famous game that does, is you just have a deck of cards and on your turn you draw the top card and you play that one. There is no choice, there is no decision point, there's no complexity, it's just draw the top one and play that. Do you know what game I'm thinking of? Is that Candyland?

Oh no, that's a great guess though. That is famously that, but there's one in our hobby that I think we all admire as a game that does it.

Would exploding kins count because you do play cards before then no because you have a full, full hand of cards no carcassonne oh yeah yeah i love carcassonne and i actually love this feature of carcassonne which a lot of gamers don't a lot of gamers play with this variant where you have two in hand or whatever but i love the the purity of in carcassonne you flip the top tile and then you choose where to place it and the placing

is the choice not the flipping the top tile now obviously it has weaknesses of randomness blah blah blah i don't care about that at all.

I like the elegance and the interestingness and the way it forces you into like look this is this is the one that you're playing what are you going to do it doesn't align with your plans that's part of the game so that's the very very very simple end of how you know choosing a card to play from your hand the next up from that and i'm sure you'll get this one is you have two cards in your hand and you play one what what's the famous game that does this and i'd love it if you have more than

the one i'm thinking of but there's one very famous one love letter yes correct the beautiful elements of love letter you have two cards in hand you play one draw one it means you always have a choice but the choice is extremely limited there's no hand management i mean there's literally a hand management aspect but right it's the most basic form there is and this works with love letter because where you're playing the card you don't really get a choice of you're just playing it,

often the card will present a choice such as, you know, choose another player and choose which card they have. But a lot of time it doesn't. A lot of the time the card that you're playing is literally just, cool, now execute this thing. And the choice is in having the two cards in hand. I would say the next step up, and I don't have an example of this, maybe you will, would be there is a public market of some number, and you choose one from the public market and execute it and then replace it.

I'm trying to remember there was a Ryan Lockett game that felt like it was essentially that, but I could be misremembering because it's been too long. So I'm going to say that I do not know of any game where your action selection is purely select from a market.

It the the the game that i played this was actually the solve and i want to dive into why that was but this one is is really interesting because it's quite different to the previous options i've mentioned because yes you've only i'm going to say three just arbitrarily yes you only have a choice of three but you can also see what everyone else's choices are and if it does replenish you can also see like there's a bit of randomness if it doesn't replenish then by choosing one from this open market

you are limiting their options as well as making a choice and if there's a counter then you want to pick a certain one like i think this actually steps up the complexity of the game quite a bit while still being essentially a trinary choice or a binary choice if there's a market of two right and then you can go you can go as complex as something like he had which is you always have a hand of five and you're choosing one of these five and you're replacing it from a mark you

know you can go all kinds of different places with it but i i just think that like.

Examining this so actually let's let's dive into a game uh twilight imperium one of the biggest most complex games on that one of those popular big and complex games on the market you have a hand of action cards which is a whole different system to the strategy cards strategy cards are drafted from every market action cards are different so you've sort of got like multiple systems into playing here and that i would say is like at the higher end of the complexity that gamer can handle and just

to just to reframe this conversation are you talking about, i thought this was specifically action selection using cards as the core mechanism is that what we're talking about today or is it yes yes okay so yeah for for twilight imperium just for people who don't know uh you take actions in that game they're completely agnostic of cards card there are multiple subsystems that utilize cards but the core of the game is you choose a thing to do that thing would be either

play effectively a card the action the strategy tile that you've drafted for the round or you can move troops on a map or you can do a bunch of other stuff or you could play a literal action card and that's the ones i was talking about in hand so like that that Maybe I jumped too complex in an unhelpful way, but the thing that I want to talk about, and I'm exploring this topic as we talk, so pardon if this is a little more rambly than usual. Mini-sode, man, there's no rules.

It is, in a game, I think you summed it up really nicely, in a game where you're making one primary decision and you want to do it from a selection, there are different ways to do this, and they have different uses, and they are just, what am I trying to say? They're really, there's effective ways to create different player incentives. The core of development, I would say, not the core of design, but the core of developing a game, is identifying the interesting choices and cutting all the cruft.

Would you agree with that as a general rule? So this is something that I think I'm very good at. I could be like, look, here's the interesting part. Now, how do we get to that interesting part in the simplest way possible?

So the example I gave was arguably one of the more complex ways possible, where you had a hand of five and you simultaneously played one and then you flipped it and you played them out and then you restocked from a deck but you could discard any number first oh let's let's talk about five card poker so five card poker you have a hand of five and then you choose how many you discard and you redraw that many to the deck right that's the that's

the core of poker i don't know poker very well so we'll say yes yes if if not that's i've just invented a new system.

What you're trying to do there poker is a bad example because you're trying to make sets but that's not uncommon thing at the end of the round of corpo for example the game that you you've done development on and we're coming with from coffee bean games next year or so you have a hand of seven cards you will play five of them in a round and at the end of the round you can discard down and you redraw back to seven so this this idea of what are we trying to do now this is gonna this is

gonna differ from game to game but what you're trying to do is give people enough choice that they don't feel stuck without giving them so much choice that they're overwhelmed so there there is a sweet spot. There is a point on the charts where you want to hit exactly that point of what's the least choices you can give so the game doesn't overwhelm or the least rules you can have that guarantees that your player has an interesting choice.

And all of these different systems are going to work. So I just want to talk through what they do and what they don't do. So let's start with Carcassonne. Carcassonne, they made the decision while either designing or developing this game, that the interesting choice in Carcassonne is placing the tile and then choosing whether or not to place a meeple.

And there is a lot of complexity in those two choices. Anytime you have a spatial puzzle, spatial puzzles, I think we've talked about this before, are like a cheat code for getting maximum gameplay with minimum complexity because we understand the rules of placement so intuitively that you don't need 10 pages of listing it anytime you add a spatial element to your game you have made the game way more deep without adding that

much more complexity it's like it's like a shortcut i actually make very few spatial games i only make them when i'm co-designing for some reason my brain doesn't really work that way and so carcassonne the spatial puzzle of where to place it is so complex and then on top of that each one can have up to like three or four different places where the meeple can go choosing whether to place the meeple and where to place the meeple is also very complex so all of that is so much interesting decision

space that they made the choice just draw a tile like that's not where the fun interesting decisions are the fun decisions are those following points so they went with the bare minimum and i think we can agree that is the absolute bare minimum that you can possibly do of you get one at random and then you play it aj some people play with this rule of the love letter thing where you have two you play one you draw one why

have they made that change because they didn't feel like they had enough agency. They didn't like feeling like they got screwed over by the luck of the draw and just got something that was useless. Do you want to hear why I think they're wrong?

Yes, I would love that. So I think that a lot of games that seem to have random elements that sort of turn people off, a lot of the skill of those games is in mitigating the luck, is in dealing with those problems, is in saying, well, I didn't get the perfect super obvious thing that I would just put in the obvious spot which wouldn't have been that interesting anyway but because i got this piece that doesn't quite do what i wanted to do how am i able to use that on the sports state in

a way that still you know gets me towards my goals yeah and i think that carcassonne actually really boils my point down to it to its core which is i think you said it really well they didn't feel like they had enough agency and i think that's what that's why we add these other systems in to give players agency so and like okay like you said with the meeples that is an element that adds other agency like oh i can't put this thing to complete the city that

i wanted but i can put this meeple down over here that blocks this person from getting you know whatever they wanted yeah and there's also the luck versus skill spectrum and this one really shifts at one way the other etc etc and it comes down to what game you're trying to make and if you want to if you want to home rule your games fucking go for oh sorry we don't say this dang go for it like absolutely you know you you paid for that game you play it in the way that's

most fun for you i not that anyone's particularly saying this but i i your shirt says rrf.

The the thing that i disagree with is that is when people use the framing of like they were wrong this is an obvious choice that they should have made and i think that that's what we're pushing back on okay so that that's that's the extreme case the next one is love letter love letter you have two cards and choose one now love those for example because that is almost the entire game like i said there are a few cards that let you like choose a player or choose a player and a card like

the guard or the i think is it the duke who's like choose a player whoever's the highest gets gets knocked out or whatever so there there are definitely more decisions than just which card you play but the bulk of the choice is in that love letter would probably mostly function if you bumped it up to three cards it would be a a quote-unquote worst game i think i think that two two is is the right number the sweet spot and especially for the limited card

count and the play account that he was going for it works but there is some flexibility there but i think with love letter that is the game so i'm not going to dwell too much on love letter let's look at a game i'm trying to think magic the gathering great okay aj describe to me the the card selection and hand process of magic the other ring so magic you get one new card every turn from drawing it there's other ways to get cards

some different abilities on the cards and when you start with With a hand of... Seven. Seven, thank you. And what happens is when you want to play a card, you have to pay for it. How do you pay for it? Well, some of the cards don't have a cost. So there's basically two separate things. We call them spells versus lands. Lands generate mana to play the other cards. On your turn, you can only play up to one land. And then every turn, you can use that land to generate a mana.

And you can spend that mana to play the cards. And the cards have restrictions not just in the amount of mana that they cost, but also the color that they that they require so if you play a land it's only going to produce one particular color and if the card that you have cost that amount of mana but in a different color you can't actually play it so there's multiple layers of restrictions on playing the non-land cards and the land cards only exist for resources and the

the kind of crux of what we're talking about here with magic gathering is you've got a lot of options seven is so much more than carcassonne or love letter present you and that's seven at the start but they are gated in your hand they are immediately gated by you can only play one land per turn and most of them cost more than one land so in your first turn it's very unlikely that you'll be able to play your entire hand for example i think literally impossible um not literally impossible

but yeah that's a wild game yeah in a typical game i don't think it's ever going to happen and so the the thing the thing that we're talking about here is the fact that you have seven cards which is a lot. But you get one per turn. And so again, that sense of agency and magic moves a lot of that agency into constructing your deck. Like I wouldn't say the majority agency, but a lot of the agency is in how you build your deck.

And then you are given random stuff, but it's random stuff from a pool that you've created. So it feels less bad when you get the stuff that you, when you get less than ideal draw, it's partially your fault. It's sort of handing the responsibility over.

But then the interesting part of magic in terms of what we're discussing is that getting that one free card per turn, which means that at the start of your turn you always have an option you have never got a turn in magic where you have nothing in your hand right again not never i'm sure there's some card that yeah it's the next time you would draw a card lose the game instead or whatever but uh.

Yeah the the very relevant thing though is if you're empty-handed and you're top decking and you draw a land yes you can play the land but it probably doesn't actually do anything right but yes and and then and then you're basically playing carcassonne but again like peter said you build your deck to mitigate that. You have mana sinks, you have lands that have utility abilities you can activate, you have card draw, all these different things.

Cards on the board that you can tap, so even if you have nothing in your hand, you can still do something. Yeah, and actually, interestingly, modern magic design gives you way more cards than you used to have. If you play with magic cards from 20 years ago, you run out of cards. That's a very realistic thing to happen.

And card advantage, meaning going up on how many cards you have versus your opponent is an extremely relevant dynamic and a very important way to win the game and someone actually i think it was a few years back did an example where they just counted the number of times any card in the newest set said draw a card or you know draw two cards or whatever and compare that to the number of times they said that 20 years ago and it was like literally 10 times as many

cards the amount of card flow in today's game is off the charts because they want you to consistently have a reasonable number of options they don't want you just saying cool i only have one card and right do you think that's a shift in their design philosophy or is that them as i guess it's the same question different words is that them reacting to the way that we play games.

I think it's them realizing that the more fun way to play Magic isn't running your opponent out of resources and winning through attrition. It's winning through strategic use of your resources. So giving players more access to resources, more consistent access to the things that they need, makes for a more fun game. I've realized another really big direction that you can go with giving people the agency of which card to pick, and that is a pick-and-pass draft.

Sangai, Sushigo is the example. i realize there's more but that that for me is like the most pure version so everyone at the side of sushi go draws i don't know eight cards let's say six cards it's some number of cards it's really better and you are going to choose one of those cards from your hand and you are going to play that card and then you're going to hand the rest to your left have someone hand you one less card than you had at the first play one of

those repeat until all the cards have been played and so this is a this is a really interesting one because the drafting process is sort of its own huge level of interaction like you want to be looking what other people are doing but let's pretend that it wasn't for some reason let's pretend that you're all playing your own little siloed game this means that you get a fresh set of cards each time without having to have everyone draw like it it would it would work very similarly to draw seven

cards play one discard them draw six cards play one discard them draw five cards play one discard them but that's obviously worse because now you have to shuffle the deck or have 600 cards or like all kinds of nightmarish things so that that's another way of really elegantly limiting players options to like what they have in their hand without making them sequence sequencing being like ah i'm gonna play this one the next time

i'll play this one oh actually maybe i should play this one next no you know what i'm gonna start with this one then like that is a there's a hugely complex way to play and again it's it's kind of replaced by the social element of of i'm seeing what you're playing and deciding what i hand you and that's that's a great little tech. Just inherently, it's a really elegant way of being like, hey, put the whole deck into people's players' hands and just pass it around until they've all been played.

Just for the sake of completionism here, there's also a lot of other types of drafting games that you draft the cards and then have an action selection based off of it. For instance, Inish, you're drafting cards that don't do anything immediately. You do have them siloed face down. And then at the end of the draft, now you're playing troops on that game. And every turn, you simply play a card. and that card will move your troops or gain your troops those sorts of things yeah and.

And Tsukuyumi does a sort of similarly interesting thing where I know this game it's really really cool game tons of really interesting design decisions in Tsukuyumi what happens is you draft one card and you have that card for the well you draft a hand of cards and then each turn or each round sorry keep saying the wrong thing you play a card and that card is your round it's like when you get resources this is how many you get when you move troops this is exactly how many you get to move and

how you get to move them when you do combat if you get to do combat this is how you get to do it all these sorts of different things and so you might have around where it's like listen i'm not like a programming game almost yeah it's that's so interesting it's cool as heck funny as as you're describing that i misunderstood and designed a whole different game in my head so i'm like the choice is being a game designer it also does another interesting

thing while we're talking about action selection from cards where when When you get into a fight with someone, what you do is you have a hand of cards. This is an asymmetric faction game. So each faction has their own types of thematic related battle cards. What you do is you choose one, you hand it to your opponent and it says, this is what I do to you. Now here are your options for how to respond to me. Love it. So for instance, it's like, I'm going to nuke you.

Everything here is dead. And you're like, well, okay. But the wind blows the radiation back into you and takes out your gun. or you shield your one most important unit but everything else dies or all these different things. Really interesting system. I have a system that I don't think is relevant to this conversation. I want to say it just to be a completionist.

And also in case you're like, no, Peter, that is directly relevant, which is the deck building mechanism in that you start with a deck, you have five cards in hand. You will often play either all of them or like Dominion. Dominion is actually weird within deck building because it has like one action and one vibe. Let's say in a typical game, you play all the cards in your hand and you draw another five. You play all the cards in that, you draw another five.

And when they run out, they shuffle. I don't think that really relates to what we're talking about, but I just thought I'd mention that in case you were like, no, Peter, it does. I think it's worth bringing up in the conversation of card selection stuff like that yeah so another another very common one is you have a hand of. Cards and then an open market which you can add to your hand or play a card and and.

Again i'm just i'm just trying to like the thing i'm trying to discuss go ahead can you give a game example ticket to ride oh sure yeah ticket to ride there is a a selection of cards available on your turn you can either add it's it's two but i simplified to your hand or you could take an action that plays cards from hand or there's other actions blah blah but it's this it's this hand management or hand you know what what options do you have available to you

that i'm finding really interesting so i apologize this is so rambly i came i came in with a thought and it normally it structures as i go but i think it's still fruitful well the good news is i've never had a rambly incoherence conversation in the podcast that i then had to make a retraction for i'm just glancing at my at my list of games in case there's a i mean i've got a bunch more you want me to start going oh yeah yeah hit me yeah yeah i played race for the galaxy yeah and i

played san juan same thing same thing in terms of this conversation so that one you have a hand of cards and when you take your turn you choose which card to play and the cost for playing the card is the is a certain number of cards from your hand and obviously there's there's other parts of the game too this is a subsystem within it yes but that's effectively let's just apply that as a general disclaimer because i think yeah the thing we're

talking about is just different ways to get cards into and out of people's hands which i think is is genuinely a really interesting like deep like not deep dive it's a mini side but a topic to discuss.

Uh century spice road has one of my all-time favorite mechanics and you've got your hand of action cards each turn you play a card one of the cards picks up your cards that's the only way that you and oftentimes uh it varies from game to game when you play the refresh card that's when you get another one sometimes it's a different card you play that will scoop up card and add it to your hand century spice actually is different because you can

just one action you can do is just take a card from the market into your hand okay sorry i was thinking more uh concordia or aquatica but Yeah, Concordia is more like that, yeah. But yeah, so I love that system. Part of what makes it so good is it's an inherent pacing mechanism and encourages different play patterns. Because even if you have the best card in the game, you can't just play it every turn. And even if you're like, well, it's really good, all right, we'll play it.

Play a whole turn just to pick that card back up. Probably not worth it. And that tension between efficiency and getting the exact thing you want, I think, is so juicy. Yeah, I love that. I love that mechanism.

My next one is Bonanza. bonanza is a absolutely classic so in that one you have a hand of cards but the order of them is stuck you have to play the card that's been your hand the longest and when cards come in they come in from the other way and you must play your next one so in that game there are no decisions in terms of your hand order you must play the next one technically you can play up to two that's the that's the one decision you can make with

playing your cards it's one or you can do two but it's a trading negotiation game so the idea is you've got a card that's stuck in front of the card that you actually want to play if you have to play that means you have to possibly get rid of a set that you were trying to collect that makes you really really incentivized to get this card out of your hand and give it to somebody else even if you're not getting the best deal that really greases the wheels

in a negotiation game great system i'm going to talk about my first game my first published game which i've i don't think i've ever talked about in the show before because it's just not that interesting but.

In retrospect uh very very simple core mechanism you've played scuttle or ninjutsu right at some point on your turn you either play a card or draw a card and that was where i started in game design so i forget that that was not like that's that's not a common thing that you see in a lot of games.

And people i remember people really were like oh wow that's so simple i was like yeah it is i'm amazing at this the game's not good but you have i think five cards at the start of hand game and on your turn you either play one for its action or you draw a card and so you have a lot of agency in terms of your hand size some cards let you draw more some cards let you attack other people's hands etc etc but that core of you have x cards and you can choose

to add to that or play one in later revisions i changed that to draw two or play one because draw one play one sucked but.

In either way that that completely self-controlled economy is quite different to magic where it's draw on each turn or san juan where it's play one and spend a bunch of others but yeah draw or play on your turn it just gives you like a surprising amount of agency as to what options you have available yeah actually my favorite video game fairy there's now a shadow of its former self i've talked about this before i won't go into it but in that game

you have action points and two of the actions you can do are draw cards or or get currency to play cards and so becomes a really interesting decision whenever i play this with my friend brent he would always spend all his actions to draw cards so he'd have a huge mitt full of cards and have a ton of different options on his turn but i like to play close to chest and be super efficient and aggressive so i would just basically play off the top of my deck and just make as

much currency as possible and swarm the board and both could be viable options it was a very cool system yeah i'm looking at my published games or my list of games that i've worked on and i don't think i have many more so anything else that you've got oh yeah gloom haven have i accidentally stumbled into a category you have notes full no no i just uh hand management is one of my favorite things in the world so.

This works well so gloomhaven you play sets of cards and you choose the top of one bottom half of the other and you that's really cool and you get to be the initiative of either one and because it's now got two cards in the mix you also have like tiebreakers for initiatives which can break up some of those things it's a big heavy game so those sorts of things are a bit more acceptable in it this isn't a published game but there's one that i was working on that had a similar system

to gloomhaven where you pair up two cards but the two interact with each other so use the top half of one bottom half of the other and then the text combined creates your turn so i think you can do with them there's fugitive have you played that one yes uh tim fouls yeah so that one's interesting in that it's if you're playing as the fugitive you're playing cards out and you can play i think it's just one card on your turn but the card

has to only be within three numbers of the previous card you played except you can discard extra cards to increase that possible range and the other person is playing a deduction game so you don't have to even necessarily use the full amount of of the movement if you want to try and trick them a lot of clever stuff you can do with that system. Another really, really dead simple one is simply play X cards of a turn or play one of one kind, one of a different kind.

In Smash Up, if I recall correctly, it's you can play one unit and you can play one spell. So it's always up to two cards. Hopefully you have one of each of those ones. If not, you can only play one. But that's a very, very simple, elegant system for how you get the cards out and while still being a pacing mechanism because the guys in play actively contribute to you winning different zones.

And the spells will mess with things but usually they're a little bit more support oriented or indirect and so having it structured in that sort of different setup is is interesting there's also mage wars are you familiar with mage wars i'm not it's one of those ones that's been on my list forever so in mage wars you have spell books and so rather than a deck of cards you literally have like a binder a plastic binder with

like plastic slots for your cards you deck build between games you have your spell book full of spells and on your turn you don't draw a card you pick which one you want you flip through your spell book you're like i want to cast this spell you pull it out that's right and that's what you get to do with it have you played forest shuffle.

I think so i think so let me just be g2 forest shuffle is is really interesting it has a row of of 10 slots in the middle of the board yeah on your turn you can basically various costs require you to various cards require you to pay other cards into that discard area and that's also where other players can draft from so every time you discard a guard you're making it available to other players trees i think require you to flip the top card of the deck into that so almost anything that

you do in that game gives other players more options but then and the thing that makes it work is once it hits 10 or once it hits 11 it clears so you sort of want to like not give people stuff that's good for their engine into that central space or wait until you can like do it at a time where the whole thing's going to clear it's really clever i love that mechanism i mean the dell has something similar with like the the commons i think it's called you know what i'm talking about yeah it's

been a little while for me so i can't quite remember it though, there's a there's a big open display of cards and i i haven't played it for about a year now but i remember that like you can put cards in there and at some points it wipes and at some points you can like take all the cards from the commons but it's this idea of like a big pool that you as a player at interacting what goes into it.

That's another really interesting way of just creating a huge amount of dynamicism between you and the other players at a very low complexity. Yeah, Glory to Rome does something similar, where when you play cards, they just go into the middle, and now they're a different resource. Based off of a card type, they can now contribute to your buildings.

And so, which one you play could change, because you're like, well, I don't want to play this, because then it puts a brick in there, and I see that they really want a brick. A lot of extra depth, like you said, for no complexity.

Going back to something else you were saying, Ethnos is also a similar hand-mask.

Oh, yeah, that's an interesting one. each turn you either pick up one from the common pool at your hand or you top deck at your hand and or instead of picking up a card you play a set of them all of the same type of of species or all of the same color and when you play them they'll like get you on board for an area control game but also you have to discard the rest of your hand so it discourages you to like hoard too much right it's

it's actually kind of similar to the concordia thing where it's like an efficiency puzzle of like i want to i want to have exactly this number yeah other ones sakura arms that one has no cost for playing cards but certain cards are very strong the very strong ones require you to spend your entire turn just to play that one card and the game also has a very tight hand limit which encourages you to if you're going to be playing that card set up

for it because if you already had your hand full of two cards and then you draw your other two and you choose to play the one that takes your whole turn well now you have to discard something so often you're like well that's too inefficient i want to use it for something else adds in some interesting trade-offs again in a in a very subtle very simple elegant way it's been it's been a while since i played ah yes yes wingspan wingspan

is another like either take from the market into your hand or play from your hand right. Sorry, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I don't know if there was a twist to that, but yeah, I think that's how it works. Go ahead. No, finish what you're saying. Oh, no, no, that's all. It's not new. I thought it was going to be like a new different system again, but it's not. So then there is Daybreak. I really love this system. I'm really sad you haven't played it yet.

I'm so sad you haven't played it yet. Don't worry, I'm going to make a faction in our game about it. It's one, it's, as soon as I played it, it was one of those, why didn't I think of that moments?

You know like yeah it's so that was gloomhaven i heard the description of gloomhaven's action selection i was like oh that is brilliant like that is just so amazing i can see why that built into the one of the biggest games in the world so in daybreak you've got cards with a bunch of different scaling effects and each card has one or more icons on it you can have up to i think it's.

Four different piles maybe it's three something like that and each turn you're going to or each round you have a handful of cards and you can play cards on the top or the bottom of the piles if you play a card on top you take its action and it scales based off of the number of relevant icons behind it if you tuck it behind then you take the action on the front equal to the number of icons in the same sort of way so you sort of engine build and and it feels

like you're really getting away with something because you're like cool i play the card i i get all these icons i get this huge effect it feels great but also it has some really interesting little tensions in it because chances are if you played a card there it's because it was a really good card that you want to keep using every turn you want to engine build but if you tuck something behind it you're not getting the new action there so it feels like you're being inefficient and when you

get all the way down for having all the different actions unlocked on it you're like i just want to keep paying that but then you're again not using cards to build up your other things so it has all these nice delicious little tensions and all it is is you play a card on the top or the bottom and do what it says based off how many actions so clean love that system, there's I'm drifting away from hand management but keep going. Am I? That's hand management. Well, no, that's how you play the card.

You're right. You're right. I mean. Still cool. It's getting the card out of the hand, right? Yeah. That's fair. So the Seven Wonders Duel is a version of drafting, but it's on the board. And you have like a grid layout of it. And some of them are face down, some of them are face up. And you unlock new options as you remove cards from it. That's a unique way of getting your cards. Yeah, for sure. And Traitors of Osaka is one. It's like an open market with like two extra interesting steps.

Traitors of Osaka is a highly interconnected game. It's basically, I know I've talked about it on the podcast before, like a gamer's ticket to ride. If you pick up a card from the market and add it to your hand, you just did like seven things. You have now removed an option for your opponent. It can insure goods to protect them in case of storms.

It can be used as money to buy other cards. and it makes it so that if someone wants to buy out the remaining cards, which is a very different type of action to add it to your hand, which then becomes currency, then that color ship will no longer move on its journey and they won't be able to add those goods to their cargo hold to get points. So it's, again, a very simple, slight difference to Ticket to Ride where it has a hugely different payoff.

Hey, give me one more. That was actually my whole list, so I could think of one more or we could just end it there.

So i just want to talk about why why we've just listed a bunch of stuff and like i said at the start it's about having tools in your tool belt when you're when you're prototyping a game when you're designing a game when you're developing a game when you're playtesting someone else's game i tend to be a little suggestion heavy in playtesting which i know is bad form but also i've been doing this for a long time and i'm good at what i do do as i say not as i do it it's just really

useful to have this list to cycle through in your head aj and i will never stop talking about this aeg game that we're working on because each faction has a different way of interacting with the board and interacting a different way of interacting with their with their elements and so within within this one game even just looking at our starting six factions we use probably like four or five of these there's one faction where every time you get a new power you just

slip it off the top of the deck and you have it available there's one where you have a hand of three and when you get to play one you play one draw one there's at least i'm just gonna go through There's a faction where you have a hand of two at the start of the game, and you can play them, but it's a whole separate action to redraw. So you have to control your own hand economy.

There's one which is playing the Concordia Century Road, where you play them, but then there's a separate action that pulls them all back to your hand. There's a dice faction, which doesn't really apply here. Who am I missing? Oh, yeah, the Scarab. So the Scarab, you want them on the board, and there are various options to either build them into your hand and then play everything from your hand, or put them straight into the board and they never enter your hand.

It's just like, within this one game, we have needed all of these different tools. And so when you've, I don't even want to say when you've run into a problem, I would, here we go. Here's, here's my advice to the listeners. Look at whatever game you're working on right now and ask yourself this selection I have, this pros, this system I have for selecting cards and playing them.

Could it be simpler? Like again, the dirt, dirt, dirt simplest is the carcass on just flip the top card of the deck and do that. That's not going to be right for most games. Most games don't do that for a reason.

I would say the most common is you have a hand of cards and you either refill it as soon as you play get one at the start or you control your own economy i'd say those are the three that most games do aj you ever thought uh yeah my only counter argument was to your first comment of not drawing the card and doing the thing basically every roll and write is is that so that is one notable exception oh i see what you're saying yeah yeah a lot of those will still provide a choice it'll be

like draw three and choose one but that's one we haven't even covered every turn draw three cards choose one this is not just an excuse to list mechanics i i really do think it's valuable to have this list in your head so that you can be like okay you know what what's the most interesting game you worked on other than ours aj i'm working on a mad max sort of game okay is there any kind of like card action selection system in that the it's it's secondary

it's like the action cards okay so what what's the system that you're currently using so the system that we're currently using is you have two of these cards in your hand and one of the actions you can take on your turn instead of doing normal, more basic things is you play one of these cards out and you do whatever it says on the top half. That's like a specific, like thematic cool thing that's a bit flashier than a normal basic attack.

And then the bottom half of it is something that on another player's turn. They can use the bottom half of it and then that's when you get your new card back. So it's a co-op game. You play the card out, you do something and then thematically, like they can do something that's linked to that that gets you the new one.

A new one or that one back? a new one okay so it's a so so for instance ally controlled economy yeah so it's like i kick this guy off and he like flies to the back of the car and then if your partner goes to that guy on that turn they can like stomp their feet as they're like trying to climb up they're out of the game and then boom you combo with them you get to draw another card and then there are specific times where you get to refresh

if you didn't take advantage of that while you could so that one's too interesting to be useful for up there it also reminded me that the earthworm that we're working on the other day has a unique system which is you're blackjacking so just slipping cards from the top of the deck until you either bust or choose to stop and then the ones that you activate go away and the rest get shuffled back into the deck so there is a like a weird level of deck control this came

up organically as we were playtesting it this wasn't what we came into the playtest with but like we've accidentally created this whole new system that maybe maybe someone will find useful. But let's say your Mad Max thing wasn't working. It was too whatever. Cool. Well, now you have the option of what if you just flip it, like whenever you use a card, you just flip the top one and that's what you get.

What if you have an open market and every time you choose one, you're recruiting that specific guy for that specific purpose and it replaces? What if you're recruiting it from the market into your hand and then from your crew, you can play one? What if you have four guys, your ally has four guys, every time you play one, you both swap hands, you know?

Like all of these are viable systems. I'm not saying specifically for your game, I obviously don't know enough, but they're all tools that you can pull out when you're like, man, I really need to like, no, sorry.

Again, I keep framing this as solving a problem. i'm talking about simplifying your game with this train game i've told the story a few times now i sat there through the cool part and got excited and then the rest of the explanation and was like what is happening here this is just so over convoluted this is so this is way too much, what's the simplest way you can do carcass on too simple okay what's the next one so with that one we end up trying a few different things i think we tried

like you have five and you play one each turn until the game just goes for five rounds so it's it's a we didn't even put that in our list by the way, it's like what would you call that where like you you are you're diminishing options each term in a way that you're controlling i don't know if i have a specific term for that but yeah that type of thing where it's like round based or something where you play at one card to turn from your hand and then at the

end of that round you drop back up right i don't have a name for it but it happens that that for the entire game was one thing we tried and in the. End for that play test i don't know what he's done with it since hopefully hopefully found either a better system or you know this one worked there were.

Just three options public to all you would play one it would replenish and this did every remember that that very complicated system i explained about the episode this did everything that system did this covered all of it because you you had just enough agency with the minimal possible complexity you could see what counterplayers were available there was a bit of randomness oh the game that does this is calico oh sorry just when you said counterplay i was like oh onitama that's a good one that's

also a very good one calico there's two options out you choose one that replenishes your opponent goes there's two options out that replenishes that that's one that that does this exact system but with two um onitama is a great one do you want to quickly explain that and then we'll wrap up yep so in onitama you have one of two options in front of you your opponent has two options in front of them and there's one option between you two on your turn you choose one of the two options

in front of you and swap it for the one that's in the middle between you and then your opponent wouldn't choose one of their two swap it for the one that you just put in the middle and so it's got this nice ebb and flow of if they win it's because you handed them a move it's also kind of similar to raw if you've played that one where it's an auction game and if you win the auction the the money card you know tile that you won the auction with swaps for the one that was

in the auction so part of what you're bidding for isn't just the valuable stuff there it's also for the next bidding tile that you're going to end up with. Have I told you why I always bounce off on Otama? I want to like it so much and it just doesn't work for me. Why? Because it's, it's going to sound weird because it's asymmetrical in that like some cards are up one and then left. Some cards are up one and then right.

And I just don't have a very good spatial brain. I cannot keep track of that. And I just, I hate it so much. I hate it. I just wish that like, it was like, imagine if you had a knight in chess that was only forward to and then left and a knight that was only forward to them right. It just doesn't work with my brain at all. So I want to love that game because it's so brilliant. I like abstracts, but every time I play it, I'm like, oh, right.

I can't, I can't. okay it just annoys me it's an aesthetic thing i'm not saying it's a fault of the game just for me i'm like just don't don't make left and right matter i hate that aj publishing tip uh i forgot to prep one do you have anything if not i'll come up with one now come up with one uh so.

I'm trying to tie it into the episode okay this is a really weak one if you're like peter that doesn't count i will come up with a better one do the work before you pitch and i know how stupid that sounds but this thing that we just discussed now of like hey could your action selection system be more elegant that's low-hanging fruit for a publisher to say no publishers they want to say yes but if you give them any excuse to say no they have to say no so

a weird way to think about pitching is giving a publisher a very good excuse to say yes and no excuse to say no. That that's that's a kind of warped way to think about it but you want a game that they're excited by and you haven't made any obvious mistakes we actually sort of cover this in our sell sheets a lot where it's like man i want to like this game but you've just given me a big wall of text that i have to read if you if you present a

publisher with like again let's use this train game as an example i'll try not to bring this up every moment for the rest of my life but it just it's on top of mind lately i really liked it i really enjoyed this prototype a publisher in an ideal world they can do what i do and be like hey this is convoluted let's replace it with this, don't make him do that work and this guy didn't just to be clear he was not pitching this this was at a place of it where

he wanted feedback and he wanted the game to be better like run at the i i'm sort of now infamous for pitching a game before it's ready but i still make sure that i've played enough that i'm like okay cool this system is as clean as it can be this system is as clean this is going to be the things i don't worry about so much are balance because you know if it breaks in the game yeah that's a huge issue if like oh man this game has

this faction 60 wins 60 times more than others i don't care about that at all that'll be fixed later just don't give them an don't give them a game that is clearly there's a better way to do this and you haven't bothered finding it yet do the work.

There's a game I'm pitching right now, and basically you can play the map multiple times, the same map multiple times, but realistically a lot of the experience is in going through that map without knowing what's going on. And so we had pitched it to this publisher, and they were pretty concerned because they were like, well, listen, it's going to be very expensive to just produce a bunch of maps for this game. And this is after they just played one map as a tutorial level type thing.

We hadn't explained all the rest of what we had going on. And so if I just said, oh, shoot, yeah, it's true. What are you going to do about it? Like, that's your problem. That's an answer I could have. And if he really frigging loved the game, maybe he would solve that. But me and my co-designer, we've thought about this a lot. And we were like, so listen, here's like the three different ways that we see that we can produce maps. And yes, it will take more maps. Like, there's no way around that.

But here's how we can modify maps very simply without costing you more money. Here's how we can stretch the ones that we have in multiple different ways.

Here's the different ways that we've thought about this problem and how it could be less of a burden for you as a publisher and maybe it's still too much but at least i went into that situation being prepared for the issue that he had and being up front with it you know in in the daniel.games episode that we just recorded all right you want to have some fun. Can you not hear me? Yep, go ahead. Okay, cool. I saw a few sentences, so there must be a lag.

In the Daniel.Games episode that we just recorded, we were talking about how if your game has a flaw, it's not done. Like, you can't excuse away the flaw. And I want to make sure we're differentiated between what you're talking about of, like, the flaw of maps are expensive. You're not making excuses. You're not like, yeah, but the game needs them. You're talking about having come up with solutions to the problem.

And I run to this too. where i'll pitch a game to a publisher they'll be like yeah cool but peter we can't do it for this.

Component reason and i'm like well actually you know i've designed it so that yeah there are 10 dice but they're all the same die and that is cheaper or you know you you you can think of a million examples but like if if you if if you've foreseen the problem and solved it that's different to being like yeah but this problem has to exist for the game to work i just want to make sure that differentiation was clear aj fun now what is your longest running in joke okay so

i have two sisters who i'm very close with we talk almost every day um one sister i talk to every day the other one i don't and over the years which one which one is is reversed a few times funny how works and in 20 god 2008 2007 maybe i filmed a bunch of tv pilots i i was like i want to write tv so i'll make i made four tv parts in a year one two i made three tv parts in a year which is too many i wrote started directed in all of them i burned myself out i had

a full breakdown i think we've talked about this in the fall there's like a big chunk of 2008 that i just don't remember what happened because i was so burned out from this testing testing hello hello you you lied on me you talked to your sisters a lot and then it's it started kind of all right i told the whole story about tv pilots so i'm just gonna go from there this is gonna need some editing sorry.

Oh my god lost you again i'm texting you in in discord god i can hear you now cool i saw you open tabletop simulator maybe that's causing the like spike oh i didn't that's weird it's been open the whole time must be my internet dropping in and out gotcha all right well i i guess i'll just jump into mine no i haven't told mine yet.

And so one of these i've filmed a bunch of tv parts too many a year burned out one of these that i filmed we filmed at my childhood home in glenbrook and not glenbrook in Toowoomba and, For some reason, I don't know why, at the end of it, we were like, okay, ma, ma, ma, rhinoceros kisses. What does that mean? Who knows? Why do rhinoceros kisses, ma, ma, ma? But we made this joke as if it was an established joke that we'd been doing for years.

And since then, we always end every call and every conversation with, ma, ma, ma, rhinoceros kisses. It's the most dumb nonsense joke that is still going after, what's it been, 17 years. That's so sweet. What about you so i have a friend named brent yes from from the story earlier he played ferrari with you ferrari where everyone drives cars around in a safari.

Visual listeners on youtube can see that i'm wearing a lovely shirt that says suck it brent as because many many many times over the years we would play games or something and he would get bad dice roll and i would tease him and say suck it brent or various other things and then sort of expanded it from that more and more and more to me just saying it at any time and i started saying so much that con with all our friends and then it like just started spreading,

around with like other people and it got to the point where like i would say it so much other people would say it so much that suck it brent was like a phrase that wasn't that uncommon like i'm not saying like everyone in town was saying it but like people would would use that phrase, and and brent every everybody who knew me would know of brent just through the suck it brent meme and then he worked that's how i heard of brent for the first

time yeah and he worked at a at a gas station so sometimes people would go in read his name tag be like wait a minute are you suck it Brent, Brent. And he started getting that so often. It sounds like they're propositioning him. Yeah. Many, many people met Brent before. Just from reading his name tag and being like, oh, you're suck it, Brent. And it was great. And then eventually I ended up getting shirts made and gave it all of our friends.

That was your gaming handle for a while. Yeah, it was my gaming handle for absolutely everything, including TTS. The only reason I took it off was because I started playing with publishers. I thought that was a little professional. I think I remember having a conversation being like, hey, AJ, if we're playing with a publisher, can you not be suck it, Brent? And you're like, yeah, that's not a bad idea.

I read a sitcom that never never filmed it but there was a character called mitch and like the catchphrase was like oh god uh you're you're a fool mitch and so it never it never caught on but even even today i'm sometimes like ah you're a fool mitch it's just like one of those oh is there's someone in one of our chats who's a you're a fool mitch yeah mitch, aj can i tell you how we end this podcast no now i will tell you how we end this podcast no i'm to tell you.

We end this podcast, as we always do, by going, muah, muah, muah, rhinoceros kisses. Muah, muah, muah, rhinoceros kisses. 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.