#65 - How to make a (DEEP) Childishly Simple Game

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

I'm AJ Brandon. And today, AJ, I would like to quote from the Bible, aka Daniel.Games. The Game Design Bible, yes. I know it's a good book. A finished game should be elegant. It should appear childishly simple and not far from self-explanatory. Coming up with complex things is easy. Coming up with simple things is hard.

That sentence or those two sentences three sentences i feel worthy of a full episode so that's what we're diving in tuesday when any any any maintenance we need to do what's the word follow-up no i think we're good we've been having even better times with the discord than we usually do lots of people having good conversations there i'm making new friends it's it's great hop in if you're not you've made your first friend it's very exciting for you what are you 34 for?

Are you? Well, as of three days from now. Oh, very nice. Yeah, Discord's great. I'm back from England for all of one week, so we're going to try and record like a month's worth of episodes in a week because I'm about to go back to Australia. Also, you're currently up here, whereas normally I put you down here, so if I'm looking up here, I'm actually looking at AJ, even though it might look like I am. I wonder if I can move where you're on the screen without messing things up. I cannot.

So, when you hear, you know, Daniel 341, what does that make you think?

I so strongly agree with this. I'm very glad that you want to do an episode on this. I don't have any notes prepared for it, but I think you and I, for the most part, have very similar design aesthetic preferences. And I think that this is probably the strongest one for both of us and the thing that we overlap on the most.

And I think one of the highest priorities for us where having, I think I've said this before on air, there's almost no problems you can have in a game that can't be solved just by slapping an extra rule in it, except having too many rules, you know? Yeah, yeah. The obvious, the unhelpfully obvious first step is to add a rule to fix it. And yeah, I can't tell you how many times I'll be playtesting with people who are, you know, gamers and stuff and we'll bump up against the problem.

I'm like, hmm, okay, I'll have to think on how to fix that. Like, oh, I know how to fix it. You just add a rule so this can't happen. It's like, yeah, that would solve it, but that is not what I'm trying to do for every problem that I have, Because you do it for every problem. All of a sudden, your rule book is 10 times as long and hard to remember and complex and going completely against all the ideas that we care about.

I agree with everything you're saying. I will also say, and I think I say this almost every episode at this point, my favorite moment as a game designer is when I can remove a rule to solve two problems. Oh, it's so good. Have I told you my Tiny Folk example that I did about three months ago or so?

Don't believe so. So it wasn't even really a problem. them so tiny folk has these okay you've got i'm gonna i'm gonna give slightly too many details tell me when you've fallen asleep you have three workers and the three workers have unique abilities but you can also upgrade these workers so you buy what's called artifacts and you put it on the worker and for the rest of the game that worker has that artifact the three workers are fairly sorry the three artifacts are fairly simple and

you can have like multiple between your baristas and each barista can have multiple artifacts on them so you can have a bunny and a spell book and a wand and they're the only three and they're all relatively simple uh your camera has turned off i know if that's intentional yes i know uh keep going but you're going into the weeds a little bit i can't hear you but i'm gonna assume that i keep talking uh let's let's just edit this out because i'd rather do that than have to cut

it all we are having tech issues today. Do you know what happens when your camera turns off? Like, do you know why? Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear. No. So usually it doesn't work off the bat. And the reason why it doesn't work off the bat is it says that it's in a different program, but I'm not using a different program. And then I just unplug, replug, and it's fine. And right now it's doing the same thing. It's in use by another app, but it's not. It's not.

Yeah. I just uploaded the Tim Armstrong audio, and it's in three parts, because twice his microphone just shorted out. Like he would be talking and I'd be like, you are now coming from a different microphone than you mean to. So we just restarted twice. I've already done the edit for that. I can't switch cameras mid-recording. Do you want me to stop and start again? Yeah, I think we have to. All right, this is part one. See you on the other side.

I'm going to keep my own basket going. Yeah, I was going to say I'll just keep that going. Just because I don't want to upload multiple.

I've worked out what I want to call the Tim Armstrong episode. okay helpful advice as opposed to the unhelpful advice you gave yeah the the principle it is genuinely me like being like tim has the open approach to me and reaching out and he does all the stuff that i don't do and should do and i'm just like this is much much more helpful advice for new designers than anything i say so i want to call that whole episode helpful advice,

that's great uh do you have a new riverside link or am i just supposed to leave and come back with the same one just leaving it so if you look actually except for the one that i deliberately set it to be different they're always the same link it looks like okay i'm just gonna try refreshing the page see what that does and can you hear me can you see me am i good yep yep you're a weird robot but i'm just gonna assume that's on my end,

you're also very low res but again i think that's a yeah my end thing you're usually low res for me for what it's worth cool back into it let me just make this easy for the uh edit i'm gonna just clap a couple times all right carry on i'll just see the big sound spike and be able to edit easily.

The hell were we talking about the baristas but why you're talking about tiny folk as an example of a time that you oh yes yes yes yes solve two problems so you've got these artifacts that you buy at end of round and so the last thing i said was you can have multiple on one and they're all simple enough that like they combine easily and the time that you buy these artifacts at end of rounds and you would also at end of round buy these thimbles thimbles are just basically inventory space so you

could spend your money either on artifacts or on thimbles but they all bought at the same time and that was really obnoxious to write because you had to have the like buy artifacts and thimbles phase and i had to work out how many victory points and it was it was a big old mess and it wasn't the end of the world you'd buy them all with coins so what i did was i just cut coins now instead of coins the currency is thimbles and thimbles as well as being a currency let you store resources and it's

just a really clean like it just it just cuts a whole like transaction and component out of the game and makes writing it all really easily there's no longer a buy artifacts and thimble stage and you'd have to explain that thimbles don't have to go on a worker even though artifacts do and it's just oh it makes me so happy it really makes me happy to just cut a rule, yeah it also sounds like there would be more interesting decision there because

it's costing you thimbles which you can use for something else they have a use besides just the coins i mean exactly you could spend the coins for either one but.

All of it and and then at the same time instead of having like different victory points for everything i was just like every thimble is one victory point every artifact is one victory point so when you spend three thimbles to buy an artifact you are losing two victory points but building your engine without more rules you know what i mean anyway yeah so this this is all very good stuff about rule cutting but i think this is subtly different to the topic of today's episode because childishly

simple or like obviously simple is different so i i just got back from origins where i met some listeners including duncan who is one of the most regulars in our discord a super lovely time i hung out with duncan for basically four days straight, do you know i'm not i'm not just uh gossiping instead of actually doing our topic are you about duncan on air how dare you yeah it's lovely do you know what duncan does at a convention now You're going to love this. Where's the tiara?

Where's the tiara with his name on it? And it's unhelpful advice. And I was just so delighted to see that. It was very cool. And everyone remembered him because of the tiara. And you can take it off, which you can't do easily with this. For new listeners, this is how to stand out at conventions. Peter has a blue beard and blue hair, which you would know if you're watching this on YouTube. But if you're a listener, you might not know.

And that really helps him stand out and be memorable. In addition to his very memorable personality.

And incredible good looks. you always forget how handsome i am ah i did it's just so obvious you know if if you are listening and not watching just take our word on it don't don't do any more research than this just assume i am extremely good looking and do not look into it any further okay gossip section done so, childishly simple is now i i design a lot of party games ever since things and rings took off i've been like you know what i seem to have a knack for that

so i'll do more party games so i've been party game party game party game and party games particularly lend themselves to being childishly simple.

One of my favorite games of all time is Just One, and Just One, you can explain that in two sentences, and that is pretty much every rule in the game, and every other rule is answered by the title. How many guesses do you get? Just one. How many blah, blah, blah? Just one. It's all right there. I was teaching a game that I'm working on with Matt Barnshay, who's an LA designer who I work with. He did Muddy Than Sword with me. And I taught the game. And then someone jumped in and was like,

hey, can I play? And I was like, yeah, I'll teach it again. And 30 seconds later, I had finished the second teach. And someone, I can't remember who, one of the playtesters was like, I really love that you can explain this entire game in 30 seconds.

And that is a really good example of childishly simple. and so just and again party games really lend themselves to this so i wanted to sort of look at this from a obviously that sentence is is all you need to know the the daniel.games quote but i wanted to kind of dive into it with examples so i spent last night going through old game designs and new game designs and some published game designs to find examples because i think that god i just have one one tiny thought

on like the defining the childishly simple so let me know if i'm in the same headspace as you it's not.

Just so unbelievably simple that it's easy to teach and like very simple to play and everything like your turns aren't complex but i think that there's also an element of deceptiveness you know like where it's like the childishly simple i think this comes from the quote where it's like you the depth comes from interactions in the game system not from the rules themselves and so like if you just taught someone the rules that their initial reaction might be like what that's it

how is there a game here but then they start playing like ah because this goes here and then this goes here i have to think about it yeah and and my examples i think it's hard to display childishly simple it's hard to do childishly simple i mean that's again in the quote it's it's incredibly incredibly difficult to design something non-complex can i do can i do one more element yeah please i think another thing that stands out to me is when you

when you explain the rules and it's almost like how else could you possibly yes other than the way yes so the word i was about to use is self-evident and i think that's maybe this episode is more about self-evidence than childishly simple but it's this idea of yeah of course it happens like that like obviously and there's a million ways you can do this we've talked in the past about ludonarrative cohesion and stuff like that where it's like yeah obviously the tractor.

Token weighs more than the mouse token i mean i mean critic kitchen you know small medium large fast fast medium speed and slow you you want you want stuff to be intuitive you want stuff to be as as rules light as possible but you want stuff to be self-evident so i didn't want to oh go ahead can i jump in for one more thing yeah please um you don't have to ask you you co-hosted i know but i don't like entrapping a train of thought when you when you're in a role you know i

i lose my train of thought so easily Yeah. So I'm wondering, is this conversation structured around games as a whole, or are we also going to be talking about individual mechanics or something? So for the most part, I think my examples are about components, but I want to tie it into games as a whole. So this is almost a counter to, so I just went to Origins. I sat in a room and played prototypes for four days straight. As you know, my favorite thing to do, you've seen me do this many times.

You've done this many times with me.

I just love sitting there and playing prototypes. and one thing i identified this time and one reason i want to do this and i'm not going to name any particular games or anything like that but i definitely noticed when a game was put in front of me i was like i mean i mean perhaps cruelly perhaps unfairly a part of my brain was like this is not going to get published like when something just has so many moving parts and bits and obviously i don't know i'm not i'm not a suit what's

the word soothsayer is that someone who tells the future? I think so.

I'm not clairvoyant. I can't tell the future. But I know that it's easy to, it's very, very, very easy to pitch a simple game, regardless of the depth of the game. And depth and simplicity are not two sides of the same spectrum. Are we agreed on that? Yes, absolutely. I was talking about this with Alex Cutler, friend of the podcast, this morning, actually, we had a call. And I was saying, I was telling him that, like, one nice thing about designing simple games is that a publisher knows.

At this point, a lot of publishers will look at a lot of my games, partially because I've had success, but mostly because if I've pitched to them before, they know within a minute they'll be making interesting decisions.

And I talked about a little bit, Tim Armstrong and I in the previous episode talked about this, we touched on this, but I really wanted to dive into this idea of like, when I'm pitching a game, typically, and I'm talking light games again, like I'm sort of unfairly biased towards party games. I'll give you a really concrete example. On the last day of Origins. A game that Alex and I had been working on came together.

Like it had been kind of working kind of working it just really clicked i was really happy with it so i just walked over to joe from all play who i know i have a relationship not other people can't do this unfair advantage etc unhelpful advice and i was just like joe can i show you something and he was in the middle of something he was like yeah because he knew within two minutes he would be playing the game and within five minutes he would have made his decision as opposed

to within five minutes he might have finished hearing the exclamation within half an hour he might be playing the game and within you know the the and and again i realize it's biased towards party games but i have some examples that kind of illustrate why this applies to all games all making sense i'm on board okay so like i said this this this is largely i'm just going to share my screen this is largely in response to some

prototypes that i saw which i'm not going to show so instead i'm going to pull up some of my old prototypes so which i assume were all flawless and elegant they were so this was this was a game called timeline and okay sorry you're showing me just you hanging it with our close personal friend alex horn for a minute there what no no i'm showing you a game what are you talking about so this is a game that was called timeline and it was an absolute disaster

it never worked i i played it way too this was literally like one of the first 10 games I ever made. So it is... So this game was a piece of trash. It didn't work. Played it a bunch of times.

Played it too many times, frankly. But... The reasons it didn't work were many and varied, but at a glance, AJ, tell me what you can see here on each card. So each card has a name. Some of them are duplicated with different abilities on them. So I guess that means the technology could be different from thing to thing. There's an icon that seems to represent the specific named thing. So if there's two space flights, then there's the same one.

Oh, but there's some with different names too. okay so like a placeholder art icon you've got some squares with icons on them you've got a type invention and then you've got subtypes technology or financial stuff like that and you've got an enter playability and a while it's in playability and both of those.

Some of them also have exit abilities too you've numbered each card which is nice to keep track of and then there's something at the bottom that's a little hard to make out i think it's a another subtype or something yeah i i honestly couldn't tell you aj from what you can see of these cards how does this game play i assume that it's something along the lines of you play the card you do what says on the enter ability and it stays in play giving you the passive and some of those

effects are going to advance a cube along the track and when you hit the bonuses, that are the icons are on the track you take those actions and then you get something for going to the end that is a completely reasonable and utterly incorrect guess um this game this game was absurd you you had i think at least four possibly 10 decks of cards in front of you and you constantly had to shuffle them every time you added a card to a deck you had to shuffle that deck and the idea was

that it was a timeline and so you were trying to like go to a certain part of the timeline so those icons that the the castle and the the little guys meant to be the renaissance than the industrial age than the space age those were the eras in which that card could exist, and it was it was a mess all kinds of stuff happening so i'm going to contrast that with a very very recent game of mine and and again i just want you to describe what's on the card.

So I see the entire thing is covered head-to-toe in text and iconography. It's self-referential. There's a flowchart overlapping the text. This is called things in rings in rings, in rings, in rings, in rings. And it's going to set the world on fire. So what I see is what looks like cards that have four of the same icon on it or some sort of scoring icon on it.

So maybe the front is a certain number of insects of a given type, and the back is one slash a Grado version of that, so probably one point per those things that you have, something like that. Here's another one. The red outline is one card. This one literally has a bird and a bee on it, so this is a not safe for work game, clearly. And then on a different card, there's two butterflies, so I'm guessing... That's two sides of the same card. Oh, gotcha.

And it's a little unfair to ask you how this one plays, because you literally don't have possibly have enough information but is it like a captain flip type thing i've never played captain flip but probably you should play it so good yeah it's on my list i saw a lot of people playing it at origins the the way this game works is you draw a card and you put it either so that in this case the butterflies are facing you and the bee and the bird are

facing your opponent or the other way around and sometimes like you said there is scoring on the card so it's either i get four b's and you get one point per b or i get one point per b and you get four b's and that is 90 of the game and and again this is not really fair because the other one was like meant to be a mid-weight euro instead it was a mid-weight disaster and this one is a fairly light game but i i found increasingly and this this is kind

of a rubric that i use in my design now i'm gonna give you two different examples when the get when the cards are getting simpler the game gets better and and again that sounds so obvious but let me give you a really clear-cut example. Is this the right one? Yes. Okay, so I had a game come out from Button Shy last year called Ransom. And I'm just going to set it up so that there is one card on the screen. AJ, what can you see on this card?

So the corners of the card have letters. There's an X and a TH. And they're on the left side and the right side mirrored. As in, if you fanned out the cards in your hand, you'd be able to see the X and the TH. And then the middle of the card in much larger font is the X and the TH. So I'm going to see you play it to create words. and you can tell what the letters are without having to worry about them being in your hand because you'd be covering them up.

And there's also two stars in the middle, which I'm guessing is how many points you get for using the letters successfully. Am I in the right ballpark? Yep, absolutely. That was draft one of the game. This is what the final draft and also what I pitched looked like. I can't make this have one card on it, but again, can you describe what you can see here?

There's one letter with the reference on the left and the right corners again in case it's pain in your hands so all there is one letter now instead of two letters and the scoring i kid you not exact same game no mechanical change except the other one when you drew a card you would choose whether it was the x or the th, either way it was worth two points this is the exact same game but i cut that choice i cut the alternate points every card's just worth one point now and

exact same game but but You know, which one of those two AJ is going to get signed? Yeah, for sure. For sure. And it's worth knowing that in both of those cases, they were both on the childishly simple end of things. I could tell you how to play just by looking at one component. How many games can you say that about? Right. But like you said, as soon as you have just the one letter, that's so much less complexity and so much more focusing on the doing of the thing instead of how to do the thing.

So this is, this is one of the things that I consider myself as a designer, very good at is just being like, okay, this idea that we have, how can we boil it down? How can we simplify it, simplify it, simplify it? And the first step that I take is just removing information. Because I think we've talked about this before. If I get a big pile of information, I have to process it. I can't just be like, well, I won't worry about that for now.

If I see text, I have to read it. so those cards i showed you earlier the utterly revolting where were they the the my computer's frozen up so i can't show you but the cards i showed you earlier here we go like if this is in front of me i'm reading everything here at all times and i get overwhelmed and people i play games with a girlfriend and she she she loves like me i kind of icon driven games because same thing if she has this text i

read it all at once i glance at this i'm trying to absorb every single word at the same time which is insane but also why i read so fast aj has a running sort of would you call it a peeve an observation about how fast i read observation i'm not annoyed by it's it's just shocking and impressive i'll literally spend like five minutes typing out a big long multi-paragraph thought on one of our games hit enter i start typing like a one literally a one sentence

like oh and also this and before i've typed that one sentence i'm not a slow typist peter has already read it and sent me a reply yeah i i am i am just very very fast with reading whereas my girlfriend who is smarter than me doesn't read as fast as i am so this she still has to absorb but she has to do it word by word and this is just crazy overwhelming for her.

It's overwhelming for me for different reasons and and even this so i the one that i was saying with the letters i made this game i pulled it into tts and as soon as i drew like a hand would look like this so a hand would have in this case vkjx or thndstnt and immediately i'm just i'm overwhelmed like it's so busy busy yeah so maybe this maybe there's more about busyness but i'm just going to keep going through examples and we'll

pull stuff out of it as we can yeah i think There's an element of it where it's like visual noise. There's an element of it where it's the rules complexity that you have to keep in your brain. There's the processing power required, yeah. Yeah, basically what we're talking about here is like how much effort, how much work is there in order to play the game?

And you want that to be as close to nothing as possible because the less brain space people waste on having to do the work, the more they can spend on the strategy.

I was just talking to someone recently in the discord about how I found how I find in general heavy euros take up tons and tons of my brain space just keeping all the complex and abstract rules in my head and it means that I can't really enjoy the game whereas something like Twat Imperium is you know longer and you know not a simple game by any stretch of the imagination but comparatively to a lot of heavy euros I find that the.

Parts that are elegant about it do so much of what you have to consider that it frees up my brain space to be able to strategize in this also heavy game. Yeah, and that's sort of the crux of it, is that you want people's processing power, and we're making generalizations, and I'm actually going to name some exceptions, you want people's processing power to be in playing the game, not understanding the game.

You want the game elements and the goal, et cetera, to be childishly simple, so that people can then skip processing that and get straight to the meat of it. I'm going to give you a really recent example from one of my games. This is a game I'm working on called Tiny Folk Cafe. AJ, what do you see here from this very adorable little deck? I see some very cute little animals with nice big eyes. I see they've got, many of them have big icons on them that are like coffee or coins, stuff like that.

And then there's some text, end of game, end of round, gain VP, do this action.

And then there's also occasionally an icon beside those ones which i'm guessing is like if you do this here or if you also have this card in your tableau something like that then you get that bonus very close it's actually when when you activate this space or at the end of round just has its own little icon so you you've described like i mean sorry not you've described so this is the same game i was saying earlier with the artifacts that you buy for the for the little characters you

know you you can tell from this card sort of what it does the icon in the top left is actually the cost per round which is not obvious from the card but and so different different bugs and different little mammals have different costs per round i made one very minor update to this game recently and again similar to that to that letter example i was giving earlier i just immediately liked the game more and found it easier to pass so you'll see what the difference is straight away,

I was really hoping it would just be art and literally nothing else. So the coffee and the coin icons are no longer on the cards. It is just the cute animal and then their ability at the bottom. I don't know about you, but this makes this somehow like twice as easy to read for me. There's just something that like cleans it up and makes me understand it better. And I'll explain the real difference, but I want to hear your thought first.

Yeah, I think there's also something to be said about just aesthetics. It is very beautiful looking at a nice piece of art and then separately at the bottom, the ability, and you don't have to look at anything else. As soon as you have icons and other little things popping up all around it, it gets very visually busy and less pleasant. I think this is something that happens a lot on magic cards. If you look at a magic card, it's like, here's the trademark.

Here's the artist, here's the creature type line, here's the mana cost, here's like five different elements of the frame, here's the...

Again, to go back to my other example, that's what it feels like exactly exactly whereas looking at something like this it's just visually very pleasing to me and doesn't trigger any of those the responses of like oh look at all this text and look at all this busyness that i have to process so the rule change is just instead of having to pay that specific thing you can pay anything so it it's such a it's such a minor change but the second i.

Took that off the cards i felt like like a layer of pressure had been taken it off me it's such it's such a visceral feeling for me i don't i don't know if you get this too i know i know in our game the game that we never stop talking about pesticide that's the new code name for the game i unironically want to use that it's it's silly but it's so fun um the the bug game by the way i wanted to i've got more gossip do you remember like two years ago

where i was every example was critic kitchen and i was like aj you you will understand when we get there i think we're there like it's it's so much of our brain space it's impossible to talk about games without bringing it up it's true but to be fair i think you're the one who keeps bringing it up again i don't know if i'm bringing that up but maybe i maybe it's just me i'm not very so who knows so in in our game uh which i've actually got some examples of we we we just i i work so hard to

just cut cards from text straight after this call we're going to do a play test and it's a brand new change to a bunch of stuff where i haven't gone through and tidied up the text yet so i'm looking at it i'm like oh it's so ugly there's so much text but i. Just i just want to i just want to get it to the table as quickly as possible and know we can deal with it but then i will meticulously cut as much text as possible whenever i can hey i'm gonna i'm gonna skip to a published game have

you played far away i have excellent game i love it i 180'd on that one so hard oh really that's me in istanbul i i didn't like istanbul for a while. I guess I 360'd. I loved it, then I hated it, then I loved it again. So Far Away, I would say, is a decently crunchy game. I think you'd agree. Oh, yes, certainly. It is a brain burner. And again- That is why I bounced off of it initially, because it was too crunchy. Do you want to describe the rules quickly?

Yes. So people like- Okay, I'll describe the very basic, which is that every turn you're just going to play one card until you have eight cards.

So on the screen right now, there's an example of eight cards. then the last thing that happens at the game is you flip all you play them in order sequentially so one two three four five six seven eight at the end of the game you flip all the cards you've played face down and you score them in reverse order so you flip up the eighth card and that scores only considering the icons it can see at that moment then the seventh card that one's only the

icons it can see which includes the eighth card so normally you build up resources and then get a goal that achieves those resources this game says get a goal then build up those resources and it's it's it's trippy like it is a mind-wrecking game i love it it was my game of the year last year that that and fromage are tied for my game of 2024 i really liked both of them and so i i was trying to think of like crunchy small box games and i i realized that that one is such a perfect example this

is let's let's go with this one this is about as complex as a card gets this one right here aj what can we see on this card there's one two three four pieces of information five five pieces of information what what can we see here i was about to say how dare you say there's four there's there's six there's technically six so piece of information number one we have what the number of the card is which is initiative value for order of

picking your next card when you play a card you also get to take a new card and add it to your hand for a future round that's also relevant because if you go up in number then you get a bonus which is the reason why you wouldn't just play all the point get.

Or the all the objective cards first so anyway it's got those it's also a negative card you yep i know you would play the objective cards first it's it's so it's so backwards it genuinely threw me well it pulls you in both directions right because yeah yeah a lot of the the resource cards are low numbers so you want to play them early and build up to the yeah to the ones that do things anyway so it's got that number it has a suit on it that is nighttime which is very subtle it's just like a

highlight around the number but it is a thing that some cards can't. It's in the art too. Once you start to look for it, it's very clearly differentiated in-game between day and night. There's also a resource it provides. I don't know if you know this, but that resource is also in the art in every one of these cards somewhere. Oh, look at that! I did not know that. That's so cool. There's a requirement. Oh, there he is! He's hiding!

There's a little requirement, which is if you have these particular resources, then there's an ability at the bottom and that ability turns on so then there's the ability that turns on and then there's a suit for the card which is just the the color of it red green blue whatever, And what's really clever here is that, firstly, at a glance, like, AJ had to describe it with lots of words because that's the, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words.

But at a glance, like, this is immediately processable. If you can understand that this, that the, you know, the resources you need before you unlock the other thing, which I think they've graphically done very well. Like, I think this game is sublime on pretty much every level. There is nothing here you don't need to understand at a glance that you can't understand at a glance. Go ahead.

Exactly. So I think, just building off that point, the icon that tells you it's nighttime that I said, that is just the circle around the number has a different thing on it. When you glance at this card, if you don't know how to play, it doesn't register in your brain as information you have to parse because you don't realize it's information until something tells you it. Same with the color of the card. That's exactly what I was going to say.

It's green. And that doesn't matter until something says it does. So again doesn't take up any information so realistically if you're just sitting down and taking a look at it's got four not six like you said in the beginning you know.

And and even then like those are those are four simple pieces of information that feel very uh intuitive and the thing is like with with some of these like like i was saying before heavy euros you have to keep so many different things in your mind with this game if you play down a card and it has a requirement you don't need to really care that much about that's future use problem to figure out how to get the resources down eventually um you know what i mean yeah it's it's so clever so

this card on the left actually does oh no it's still five isn't it but like there are cards like this one has one two three four pieces of information i suppose but it's like this is about as simple as a card as you can get and the complexity of the game comes not from understanding what a card does which i really think you can just do at a glance but from.

Sequencing and chaining and stuff like that and so this this is a good example of a game that isn't itself as a game childishly simple like you bounce off this because it is so, inherently unintuitive but every element of it is yeah and and so yeah go ahead i i call this type of game designer porn where it's just so unbelievably clever but in like a yeah you know in a way where everything connects to each other in in so i guess like the baba is you

sort of a way where you can just tell that the designer at the end is like cracking their knuckles and like oh yeah look at look at how every single piece ties into each other and stuff and you're just so clever every little thing oh there's tension here and tension the other way and tension this way, Okay, I don't remember what this one is, so let's open it up and find out. Oh, okay. So I said that I didn't want to bully any particular games.

So this was by someone who I met 10 years ago in another country, and I don't think he does game design anymore. Because you bullied them. Because I bullied them. So he had a game that... Okay, AJ, you're... I'm going to embarrass myself a little bit here. He had a game that I really liked, but I didn't like how complex his arrangement of information was.

This is me cleaning it up this is the cleaned up version yes there we go that that's the reaction i was expecting so he had a game where i was like this is great and this was literally 10 years ago i was just like this is amazing the problem with this game said confident idiot young peter is that the information isn't presented clearly and so i cleaned it up aj what what without going into detail at all because this is not a soul sheet episode what can you see right now a

nightmarish amount of information there's text there's icons there's five different rows with two different lines of abilities and a chaining an arrow between them on the left in the middle there's three different sections with different actions on them and then on the right there's some sort of reference with like eight ten more lines of that that's all the different units you could you can have oh this is dizzying we need a nap yeah so so i'm i'm

i'm bullying myself more than the design i think the design was just way too convoluted in the way that most first designs are but i thought this is a really good example of a game where had this been sat down a room it had this been sat down in front of meat origins at a glance i'm sort of like this is not getting published which is maybe unfair but but you see what you see what i'm talking about right yeah yeah for sure.

So we i we did a mini-sode once about zebras and horses do you remember uh yeah i was wondering if you'd bring that up this conversation if you weren't i was going to yeah so basically this game and again i i only really remember what you can see here had all these different units that were just subtly different so like there's a pawn p-a-w-n i have an accent that when you put a ring on it it got one more health and one more defense and two more attack and one

more movement and it's just like just just pick a number and do that like oh it's got a ring on it cool every number is increased by one like all its move is increased by one all its attack or just one thing but don't don't make every little part of it subtly different to every little part and then there were there were scouts and towers and barracks and huts and sorry towers barracks huts and mines and those were all different types of buildings that do these subtly different things and it's

just it's just so much it's just so much and this is what i mean when i say like and and he wasn't he wasn't. You can create so much depth and strategy without going to complexity. I mentioned earlier that I was going to give an exception. There is a type of gamer, and I definitely was like this in the past, who passing something complicated, P-A-R-S-I-N-G, I have an accent, passing something complex is very satisfying.

When I was in high school, I was in a play and I put in my little audition form, because apparently we filled out audition forms, that I liked learning lines because I did. It's satisfying to me to, at the end, have a bunch of lines memorized. So I got not only a role, I also got understudy for the main role. I really, I really shot myself in the foot there. Yeah, it was, it was great. Brag time. Are you ready for brag o'clock, Brandon?

Heck yeah. I was so good as the understudy, they actually gave me one of the main performances. So that was, that was nice for me. And so like, there is a satisfaction in being like, oh, this is a horribly overwhelming system, but I'm going to learn it.

Uh virgin queen was that for my playing group back in melbourne we bought and learned virgin queen after seeing the shut up and sit down review where they were like we tried this game three time we kept on bouncing off it it was just too much and we were like oh a challenge you say, i wouldn't recommend taking that as a design challenge but there is definitely a type of player who likes the challenge of that i just don't think it's the best way to publication or the best move for most

games that that's all my disclaimers i'm gonna i'm gonna risk alienating a bunch of our audience here i think that the type of gamer that is interested in like the the really big heavy super complex games i i'm painting with very broad strokes it's in everyone but i just had a dead bug in my water that's that's why i made that face.

I thought he was just like oh he's talking about a lot of dead bugs oh my goodness what's going on away for a month and so my water has apparently become a breeding ground for bugs you just leave the water there the entire time i might have it's in a bottle like it's it's in a seal oh that's really weird yeah that is strange anyway lots and lots and lots of bugs so.

That's what our game should be called bug problems okay sorry please start your thought again and i will not be consuming that in six as you do so i think with i just found one in my mouth okay i i can hear you i'm gonna go wash my mouth out while you talk, This is all just him trying to get away from responsibility of me making fun of people or whatever.

So I think with really heavy games, people who tend to really like heavy games, I think they put a bit more value on the complexity of the game, making the game more deep. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. And I see often that same type of gamer, again, being very broad and general here, and not everyone, obviously. But I see a lot of those types of gamers playing lighter games and they'll be like, oh, this game is so simple there's no strategy to it, whatever.

But I think there's a lot of micro edges you can get in games. And that's something that comes up a lot in childishly simple games. Games where you're playing something and you're like, how is there even any decisions to make or how is there even any depth here? And then if you look really closely, you start to see, oh, there's all these little threads I can pull out.

Uh pokemon pockets a digital ccg that i i tried a little bit of and most of the time the game plays itself it's once you have the deck built and you're actually in game there's very few meaningful decisions you make but there are some of course if you can take out an opponent's sky you want to do that but if you have a bunch of cards in hand your opponent might play a red card and that will take away all your cards basically and if you have a

weak pokemon in the back then they could play i think it was a jessica to like swap it out and take the hit off of them so sometimes you want to hold the cards in hand and not play them out because then they can get swapped and instantly killed and those types of little micro edges of being able to say this is a really simple system but there's.

Something else in here that i can find is something that i i typically find heavy gamers don't look for and what they want and it's fine you know you can play whatever you want but what they want is something that's got a lot of different systems to mess around with and i i understand the appeal of trying to mess around with these different systems and see how they interact there's definitely a satisfaction in that but yeah

just just try and tie it back into the childishly simple i think yeah yeah for sure well that actually leads perfectly into another example i have so let me share my screen again so you you you might not remember this but we played this together once you might recognize it i have perfect memory and that is why i remember this game, Tug's Collar, Tug's Collar.

This is one of my top five games of all time. This is Feast for Odin. And a Feast for Odin is a two hour heavy Euro, I think it's fair to describe it that way. It's sort of almost like famous for being wide, not deep. Like, it's in some ways the epitome of what you're describing, where there's just a bunch of different systems that interact.

And so this game has a trading subsystem, a hunting subsystem, a gathering subsystem, and a farming, animal breeding, creating goods from farms, like a raiding, and then separate to the raiding, an exploration, and separate to the raiding and exploration, the hunting kind of has some overlap and not full overlap.

And on top of that you're playing like this is the game that patchwork was spun out of because he started he has this like polyomino game that he was like this could be its own thing and made the absurd the childishly simple patchwork out of this game so patchwork a much more complicated, version of patchwork is one of the subsystems in this game right and then and it's worker placement game where every every space is either one two three or

four workers and if you use three or four workers, they have different bonuses that they give you, and, and, and, and. This is, this is, so on screen right now is the main board. It is, I believe, 70 spaces. It is a worker placement game where there are 70 worker spacements you can go to. Now, I'm actually not using this as a counter to childishly simple. I'm using this as what I think is a good example of the principles being executed.

Obviously, A Feast for Odin is not childishly simple. It would be absurd to call that do you remember much of your playthrough of it a little bit not much i remember you won.

But what it does and i'm just going to zoom in on some spaces here, is let's go down to where i know you can't use all of them like there's restrictions on it to some extent and that uh you you only have x workers and the first column costs one the second cost two the third cost three and the fourth cost four so it's not that you can't use all of them it's just that you i mean you literally can't not because of some second rule just because you don't have enough workers for it so you you

say like 70 spaces that's absurd this space is take a two by two orange and a coin that space in isolation is childishly simple the next one is take a three by one orange and a three by three three by one red and a coin the next one is take a three by three orange a two by one green a coin and a four by one red like those spaces are dead simple they get a little bit more complex this is take one two or three milk if you have one two or three cows this is take two reds

and one and two coins etc like yes this is this is as a game not childishly simple but all of these spaces that i'm describing are and i see some people trying to make including probably past peter trying to make a feast for an game where they're like okay the trick to feast for an is that it's very complex so everything you do has to be very complex i'm sure you've played prototypes like this as well. I'm going to try and find like the most complex space on here. It barely exists.

Like these aren't that self-evident to look at. So it kind of defeats the self-evident point. But like once, like I've taught this game and you can teach this game in, I don't remember how long it took me to teach you, but like maybe 20 minutes, which is again, not 30 seconds. But for the amount of playability that this game has, like a 20 minute teach is not bad. And it really helps that the first thing that happens is you look at this board, you get overwhelmed.

And then I teach you and the hunting has a subsystem. That is definitely complicated. Almost everything else that is currently on screen is just take the thing that it says. If it says like, pay your money, then it's pay your money and take that thing. If it says one, two, three milk from one, two, three cows, it means you have to have the cows.

But like, they're all very, very, very simple conversions. And similar to the point that you're making earlier in the episode, the complexity doesn't come from the complexity of the actions. The actions are all really, really simple. It's about the sequencing and the interaction and the like, okay, I really want to maximize this space, so I should try to have three cows. How can I get cows? Oh, this space is just buy a cow for three coins.

Okay, how can I get coins? Ah, you know, it's that backwards layering where no step of the process is particularly complex, but by sequencing a bunch of them, then you start to hit complexity. Is this making sense? Is this helpful?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's just very important for us to differentiate between when we're saying we're looking for something that's a childishly simple game or a childishly simple mechanic, and when we're talking about a game that isn't childishly simple, but is elegant for its weight class. Yeah and and i think that the reason it's elegant for its weight class is that it's taking that principle not for the game as a whole but for specific elements.

And to use Twine Imperium as another example, this is something where I've taught a lot of people Twine Imperium, a lot of people Twine Imperium, and whenever they sit down, they're always really intimidated at the complexity of it. I'm like, guys, I promise you it is not as bad as you think.

On your turn, do one action. What's an action? Well, you can spend this action token, you can place it on the board, and then just move anyone you want to to that space, as long as they have the movement for it. Or, you know, you can put it down and build something. Or if your card says As an action, do this. That just means do what it says on the card. Like, so much of that game is so simple. And yes, there's, you know, a bunch of different types of units with different powers and stuff.

But in terms of a lot of the mental space that takes up with players, they don't have to memorize every single stat of every single unit at all times. They're just like, okay, I'm into combat. What does this guy do again? Oh, yeah, he hits this thing first. And so I feel like there's absolutely an element of childishly simple to Twatum Piram, at least the fourth edition.

No, I absolutely agree. One of the cleverest little systems is that you put an action token on, you move everyone in, and it also traps them there. You can't move out of a system that has an action token. And what that does is it stops you from doing multiple moves without ever having a rule saying, hey, you can't do multiple moves. It's so clever. I'm going to compliment Alex Cutler, which is horrible, and I apologize in advance.

He's got a great brain for coming up with the systems. like he he's just he's way better than i am at coming up the system where you're like oh that's really clever and simple and intuitive that's one of the reasons i love working with him okay let me give you some more examples because i pulled off a bunch of them oops that was the that's the after.

I've got some too if you if you want at some point but happy to keep yeah i'm just gonna go i'm just gonna go from the top of my little thing here so this is this is my three hour euro this is this This is coming out from Carbon Alchemy at some point. And this is like the, one of the main boards of the three hour Euro. And yet, at a glance, AJ, you've never played this game. Oh, maybe you've played this game once. I don't think you've ever played this game.

Is this Baba Yaga? No, no, this is... I was like, okay, I think no. I was like, unless it changed a lot. But it's not like you have feathers and hats, witch hats and stuff like that. I wasn't sure. I will tell you this is the goal board and you start here. From that alone, explain to me how this game works.

So I assume as you complete objectives or score points, whatever the equivalent type of thing is, you move along a path of squares so there's uh squares with different things on them gems feathers hats gold coins stuff like that i'm guessing for each one of those points that you get you get to move along the the pathways that are connecting those ones and you get whatever bonus you land on and ultimately you'll win the game by gain

all the way to the other side how'd i do almost this is the gold board so this is what you pay but yes other than that like exactly, So what's the difference between, say, this space here, which has two star, two water and two hands versus this space here, which just has two leafs? I can't see where you're gesturing on the computer. So just skip to telling us maybe. So these ones are have. If they have a hand, you have to have them to enter that room.

Otherwise, you have to pay them. And that's it. This is the crux of the game. This is where most of your attention is going to be. And it's very directly that thing I was saying from Feast for Odin, where it's like, okay, well, I want to have these three red, but first I want to have the three, the two green. And, or I could actually skip paying the two green by just having two spells.

And if I get, you know what I mean? Like it does exactly that thing in what I think is a very beautifully simple way. The other half of your board is this, and this one is admittedly more complex.

I'm not saying that this is like a zero, a zero thing, but similar to what you were saying with far away all of these spaces right at the start of the game are covered up and so only when you build these buildings oh uh can you describe what we're seeing for the listeners yeah is this your roguelike by the way no this this is a three-hour euro that alex and i have been working on for a few years okay so it looks like there's sort of a town here with some houses at

the bottom with some circular looks like kind of worker placement spots there's some castles in the middle with some various icons it says adventurers guild start the game with one randomly drawn thing uh and and then it's got some some reference of you can spend i assume whatever that is blue fire in order to take a few different actions uh whatever you advance on that you can spend rope to do that okay so yes i would not describe this as childishly simple by any means no no and i'm

definitely not trying to but this is similar to what you were saying with far away where at start of the game, everything except for the bottom left four circles and the top text is covered up. So you just don't have to worry about any of that at the start of the game. And then as you go, you start to unlock more abilities and more inventory space. All these circles, they're just inventory space. So that's where you keep stuff.

All these icons in the middle row, that's just what you get when you build that building. Sort of like Scythe, where when you build something, you get a thing, or Terra Mystica. You build it, you get it. That's all those are. And then the top are the most complex thing on this whole sheet, which is they are spells and you put a wizard there and you get to turn rope into resources or fight a monster or get a rope.

And so this is another example of not childishly simple at a glance, but partitioned in such a way that you can ignore most of it. And the bits that you do have to understand are like, yeah, you put a wizard there, you get a rope. Like, I've never had a player confused by like, but how do I get a rope? What do I put there? Like, it's just very, very simple. Again, for the weight class. And sorry, again, context. This is a three-hour euro.

This is not far away. i've got i've got a few more examples this is a game of mine called da vinci's workshop you draft a card each turn oh where is it and the cards look like this so they're very busy with the art a little bit but if you know the art it's got a cost up the top and then it's got what it does let me find a different page yeah it's got a cost and then it's got what it does and it has these two like little gentlemen at the bottom

and that's it and again this is this is a 40 minute euro it on your turn you take one of these cards and if you can pay for it you pay for it if you can't you pay for it later and it's just very few elements on a card yeah i have you know this one.

So this is this is our this is our game do i have the page that i want so these are the cards for oh yeah i want to bring this up because this is this is not in it anymore this particular faction but, These are just pure text cards that have more text than I would like them to have. And in fact, I don't think any of the cards of the game currently have this much text unless I'm misremembering something. Definitely not as much as Royal Jelly. That's pretty verbose. Yeah, that is very verbose.

But these cards, and this was a very conscious choice, and this ties into what you were saying earlier. These cards are all, you do exactly this. You fly, then attack with the Warrior B. There's no take three action points.

And with those action points you can do this this this they are just like if you play drone strike, you fly then attack with a warrior b and that's it we actually formatted this differently so that now nowadays it would be it would be even shorter but i think that's an important thing with with the childish simply is like just when you can cut choices now you and i have been in the process putting a bunch of choices back into the game because we

need them i don't love that we're doing that at one point we should do a pass and see if we can cut any of those but for sure the. Simplicity of a, what does a card do? It does exactly this and nothing else. These are the action tiles of the game. As soon as you can offload rules from structure onto the content, that's a great way to make it childishly simple. Yes, the rules are still there. Yes, someone will have to read it at some point.

But if you have to explain all these different things that go along with playing a card, that's a lot of extra brain space to spend on it. Whereas if you say, play the card, do what it says, they just have to do what it says.

And we also didn't put any iconography on the game or anything so there's nothing you have to cross-reference uh there are keywords for sure but the keywords are also i would argue childishly simple what does fly do you pick up your person you place them anywhere you want what does jump do you jump over a space what does move do you move one space like it's it's very intuitive abilities yeah this is our this is our two-player dueling game and again

i think today it's a little bit less complex than this but even this isn't that bad and what you're seeing on screen by the way i'll just read out one example here play any number of cards then draw two cards that is an example of an entire player turn or i'll give you the most complex one i see here move each unit to drones with no pollen may fly to a flower instead oh you know what that tells me aj but this is this is pre-jump.

Well, I don't think it's pre-jump, but I think it's pre-the bees having jump by default. Right, right. No, no, but the fact that we have move two, we don't have move two on a single card in the game anymore. We did have jump and move two at a point, but then we were like, oh, let's just cut that. Which is a great example of childishly simple. Moving is always just a move. Jump is always jump over. Oh, yeah. Is your computer falling apart? No. Oh, no. Now we have to see you and Alex Horne again.

Here's what I did, AJ. So I got a little treat for you. Actually, no. First of all, I'll just quickly show you this one. So this is Scythe, which I assume you've played, most people have played. So this is an action board on Scythe. And this is, I would say, like a 90-minute euro, two-hour euro, something along those lines. Maybe a little bit shorter. Isn't it 113 minutes exactly as per the time? Yeah, that's right. 112 minutes. I'm sorry. How dare I forget that.

And now, the complexity of Scythe comes from the fact that... So I'm showing you a player board from Scythe where at the top it has pay and then the action that you do. And at the bottom it has pay and the thing that you do. So it's split into four columns. Each column has a pay action at the top and a pay action down the bottom. And on your turn, you just activate a whole thing. So you pay, you produce, you pay, you deploy.

And the complexity in Scythe, I think, almost unnecessarily, and I think if you do it together, you'd do it differently, is that each of these four things at the bottom work Zebra and Horse slightly differently in a way that's really annoying to teach.

But this is this is so simple go ahead just because we didn't i don't think explicitly define it earlier oh yes yes zebra and horse or zedbron horse as peter says just means two things in the game that are very very similar and have one tiny difference that is very easy for people to miss generally speaking do not try and have zebras and horses like we just said with the move to versus jump is jumping moving to but over people those are two extremely similar

things it's confusing to players it's reasonable to cut the the reason to avoid it is is you know the the metaphor is that like oh i know how horses work let me jump on this stripy horse no turns out you don't know how horses work well sorry it turns out you know how horses work and this thing that looks very very very very similar to a horse you assume you know how it works and that's unfair as a game designer to be like ha ha

you thought you knew what you were doing well i have trick ed you so in in scythe you just pay the thing it says to pay you get the thing that it shows in icons and then you pay the thing it says to pay and you get the thing it shows at icons and it's.

It's really like so clean this is this thing that impresses me about scythe the most is that on a turn like i'm going to do exactly this string of things and yet it's such a such a deep game or such a such a replayable game anyway it is very visually busy going back to that sort of metric these cards especially but yeah yeah it is a very simple thing you pay what it says you get what it says once you learn the iconography it's not so bad for.

The worst thing about it is that upgrades work differently to deployments work differently to builds work differently to enlist and i again it's it's a 10 year old design i'll cut it some slack okay aj i went on to bgg and i worked out how to find the heaviest games did you go by weight i did do you want to look at uh now i haven't played this game have you played this i can't see it yet i have definitely not played this no this is this is literally the top end and

i don't know it's literally the heaviest but it's like in the top it's it's in the top one percent of most heavy games easily uh of all games ever designed and yet this from what i could tell i haven't played this game this is the central board it's pretty clean like it look it definitely looks busy but once once you start looking at it like it's just it's just tracks and and here's the thing that that young peter did i have

i thought i saved this one but i don't have it anywhere no i don't have it annoyingly this is what i was going to show you earlier the earlier version of this was so much more complex i'm annoyed that i don't have it i might pull it up later.

So in arc right like it's just tracks and the tracks go up by one each time and it's so tempting as a designer for me anyway maybe maybe i'm alone in this to be like this track will go up by one but then it'll have like a few you know it'll be hopped low weighted or high weighted and have them go up at different numbers and this is like just in its own way very very clean is that making sense yeah yeah i'm bored i don't know how to play this game oh

the heck just happened can you still see me hear me yep cool my computer is set to go to sleep mode if i put my mouse in the bottom right corner and i put my mouse in the bottom right corner so everything's shut down for a second i don't know how to play this game but at a glance like i'm not i'm not intimidated by it i know it's going to be heavy because of the of the rating but it's not like terrifyingly heavy and then the these are the these are the tokens that you get

again i have no idea how they work but considering this is among the heaviest games in bgg like that's no heavier that's that's no more complex than a faraway card yeah and i want to i want to really zero on this i'm glad that you were bringing up of heavier games that also have elements of being childishly simple, because that's something that really sticks with me. Oftentimes, I'll play games with gamers and they'll be a very heavy game. It's used as an excuse.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. They'll be like, well, it's a heavy game, so it can have all this stuff. And it's like, yeah, but does it need to? Would it not be a better game if it had all the depth and simply less complexity? And there was, I think, a great example of that is Cole Worley's, what is it called? Arcs? Arcs, yeah. You're just bringing up Arcs, right? Arcs. Comparatively to something like... That's the trick. That's our main trick of the episode. Put Ark in your title. Done. For sure.

So in root they're both good games by the way i'm a big fan of both of them but in root it's got so much complexity on every one of the factions and it's it's really really dense to the point where if you're an opponent playing against someone and you haven't played that faction before you realistically have absolutely no idea what they are capable of or what's going on over there they could just as easily have nothing or be about to explore all

over the board and win the game it's it's really really dizzying and comparatively to arcs which is also an extremely well-reviewed game by cool worldly and also a fairly on the heavy side of games like it's longer it's it's not super lighter i think but it's so elegant it's so easy to get into and so much more accessible and i. Don't think it came at a huge cost now i've heard from a friend of the show jeff fraser that the some of the more complex systems or things are in campaign

or advanced content or whatever but that's a great way to do it if you're gonna have it that's where you put it exactly exactly i i learned this lesson with that time you killed me where originally i had everything in the box everything was just in the starting game and it was impossible for humans to understand i found what i was looking for so this this is a very early version of a game that was called agricultist that i was working on i worked on this for so long and this this is this

is fine it's just a lot of bits and a lot of numbers and a lot of stuff like i just i just don't i just don't like it that much and so in different versions i was just tweaking numbers and moving stuff around and and trying different things and then i eventually ended up here now this game never worked so this is this is not this is not the key example but i just cut all of it and all that you needed was numbers one through five and this.

Is actually just a turn reference so on your turn you do a b c if i was making this today i would i'm interrupting just for a second for audio listeners it went from oh thank you thank you yeah no problem went from a bunch of different versions that had a, pentagram on it with a bunch of text and a bunch of different icons and and tracks and stuff like that to basically just the pentagram very little else on there yeah and part of this was just cutting

mechanics cutting mechanics and mechanics and if i was doing today i would actually do it like this and it's just it's just so much more immediately at a glance understandable you know yeah or less overwhelming or or. I feel like we've been talking a lot, though, about high level. We want to do this. It is possible. And we're running a bit long on time. I want to machine gun through a bunch of examples of games that have at least an element of the childishly simple.

So you can just have a bunch of tools in your toolbox. So, Nova Luna, the big takeaway from this one. Are you familiar with that game? Haven't played it. This is a multiplayer solitaire game. It's just drafting for interaction. But it's one of the best ones I've played. And part of that reason is the tiles that you draft are both recipes and used to fulfill recipes. So when you place it down, whatever suit is, whatever color, it's giving that color to adjacent tiles to complete their goals.

But it also has requirements to complete its goal. And then there's more mechanics on top of that. But it's a very, very, very simple, elegant mechanic. And it does a great job of coupling together these two things. And just the concept of recipe and fulfillment being the same thing.

Excellent, I think, example of childishly simple. an example i'm just going through a bunch of random things i've been pulling up the stream so for blood rage we talked about this a few times but the monsters in blood rage what do they cost what was their strength in combat it's the same number you don't have to keep track of two different things so in terms of actual advice for people here couple together multiple things make them.

Mean the same thing and it's going to take up much less mental space for players another example of that in a very different way is air land and sea. One of my favorite games one of the most elegant games i've played and. In that one it's got a lot of similarities to poker where.

Each turn you're playing a card and you're doing a area control effectively over three different lanes and of course the the highest number of two lanes wins the the thing whoever goes first wins ties and the and and then the thing is is you can retreat any turn instead of playing a card every card you play makes it more costly for the loser and every and if you retreat early then it you know you might you might have had a chance but if you thought that you were really far behind really quickly

then you then you can leave and not lose so many points and there's also an element in that system too where because you know that your opponent can retreat early and lose less points that you want to push them into staying in early so you might play differently so that you don't give away that you're winning but that might also cost you some of your strength by not playing it out in the proper sequence and i'm just going to keep machine going so feel free to interrupt me if you uh i i

have a thought but i can share it once your list is done it doesn't relate to any specific examples so i want to get through your list uh so hive is a game so i picked up my water and had this moment of like checking for bugs checking for bugs checking i'm good okay so hive is a game where it's a it's an abstract strategy game and the board is also the tiles the tiles that you use to move around and attack with like you would in say chess is also the board imagine hex shaped pawns and knights

and everything and as you play them you are adding to the board and adding to the units that you can use on the board.

Spectacularly you you're almost you're almost rapid firing elegant mechanical hooks yeah like i i think of a child childishly simple in more complex games as elegance would you say that's uh not how you're thinking oh no i'm i'm not i'm not saying you're doing anything wrong but like that hive one that that's a that's a amazing hook it's a component hook it's a mechanical hook like the the pitch i i watched a youtuber called wheezy waiter and i was watching a vlog from god 10 years ago now and

he said that he's going over to his friends with carcass on which he just discovered in 2015 or whatever. And he was so excited to show them because he was like, it's a board game where you build the board as you go. And I got introduced to Carcassonne so early that that's not how I think of Carcassonne. But in terms of hook, and especially at the time it came out, that's absolutely why Carcassonne is the hit that it is.

And so again, I played Hive without ever thinking like, yeah, that's the hook. The pieces are the board or Carcassonne, you build the board as you go. And it's just, it's so simple and so clever. And now that they've done it the rest of us like can't do that as our hook but it's it's just brilliant carry on.

Yeah no great example it's it's so interesting going back to older games and trying to view them through the lens of which existed when they came out it's like our aliens would make go episode almost yeah uh jenga is absolutely a childishly simple game a lot of dexterity ones are but jenga is like i think the simplest pull out one put on top knock it over you lose right yeah Doesn't get cleaner than that. Blockus. Blockus is childishly simple. Play each turn, play a piece.

Can't touch anything of your color except corners. Can't play a piece, you're out. Amazingly childishly simple. 100%. Onitama, I think, has a little bit of complexity, but just a tiny bit. I think the Onitama, basically, you choose one of two cards, make the move that it says on the card, swap that for the one in the middle, and then your opponent is going to do the same, picking one of their two and then swapping their card for the one that you just handed them.

Spectacularly elegant and absolutely childishly simple. When you compare this to something like chess, obviously there's a lot of cultural baggage with chess. Not baggage, but scaffolding that comes along with chess. Some familiarity. But try teaching a child chess versus trying to teach them Onitama. It's night and day. Absolutely night and day. And Onitama does the thing, too, of like, on the card, there is one thing you can do.

And a lesser designer would have been like, okay, so this card has two options. And it's just like, no, just everything is one thing. And it's so obvious when you say it and start doing it.

But, like, I just really want to hammer that home. if you want your games to be easier to understand make every card every action everything just one thing that you do so we were speaking about earlier captain flip in captain flip you draw a towel from the bag you can flip it haha that's the name of the game and then regardless of which side it's on you're going to just place it in the lowest of one of your columns that's it the the content of the game is equally simple and the whole game and

that's another one of those ones remember how i said earlier about how heavy gamers can often play light games and dismiss them this is one with a lot of micro edges a lot of people would sit down to this game be like well it's just random right just like oh i got the thing i need or not but there's so much of the game that's setting you up for success on future turns seven wonders architects exactly the same thing and you go on bgg right now into seven wonders architects and

see a bunch of people being like oh yeah i played it's just luck and then people who have played like 500 games being like what are you talking about like play against me and i will destroy you it's clearly not just luck that's awesome this is an interesting example i think i'm curious if you'll agree inhuman conditions has a bit too much rules cruft around the edges of it but ultimately 99 of.

The game and 100 of the game once you've started is just interviewer ask questions if they do something weird stamp them robot if they seem normal stamp human the other person their side you have a card it either says human in which case just role play or it says robot in which case it will have a restriction or an objective do the thing on the card that is a game which like i enjoyed a lot but it feels self-published it feels like it didn't have a developer yes i mean and to be

clear everyone This is my favorite game tied for my favorite game. I love it to pieces. But yeah, the opening bit is...

There's a lot of steps for something that is so simple and and so childishly simple in so many ways this is one that i think a lot about when a designer comes up with something brand new there's two ways it can go either they do the the cool new thing on top of all this other junk or they do the childishly simple version and you know if they don't do the childishly simple version usually what happens is someone else makes it and that's the one that

becomes the hit uh you see this with video games too if you see like what was it pub g that came out that was like super hardcore and then the accessible version fortnite came out that's the one that exploded obviously lots of people still play pub g first mover advantage and all that but i think dominion is a really good example of this where they had a deck building system and they're like let's just do deck building let's just focus purely you get cards you

play cards you get well it was part of a bigger game and he pulled it out he was like oh this is good enough to stand alone i will say that the the sort of flip side of that is i think i've mentioned this i might have told the story before matt barnshay and i have a game that's got a really cool weird concept that i'm not going to talk about right now and i alex came to town and he played it and he was like okay so you've got this really

great concept and i feel like you're going to get this game published because the concept is so great and then someone's going to make the better version of it you should try to make the better version of it and we're like yep yep we can see that we've sort of done like the least interesting version. And least interesting and simple, almost synonymous. So we were going for the simplest version, but we'd end up doing kind of the least interesting version.

And he was like, cool, do this, but do it better. No oh what a guy i know right friend and bouncing off of that in the. Opposite way i want to have at least one example of when you want to. Go more complex so i think similarly to.

How dominion came out and correctly was the childishly simple version and then other people were like oh cool so what if dominion but also there's a board what if dominion but racing what if dominion but and then you see deck building is now just like at worker placement it's something that you can have as part of your recipe for a for a full game doing lots of our stuff and of course there's still just pure deck builders and that's just fine too but i

think there's nothing wrong with building off of that for sure and making the more complex version of the thing i find that usually when i play games i'll find oh there's this really cool thing and then you have all this extra stuff i don't care about and so i'm usually trying to say what's the childishly simple version of that for games that i really like that are they're a little too overdone you know there's there's a thebes is a great example of a game where the

core mechanic is childishly simple on your turn literally go anywhere do anything and then just pay time equal to the cost that's that's so childishly simple but there is a lot of other stuff around it yeah and i think i'll i played that at your house with henry and just uh he was five or six at the time and so i was just quietly like removing mechanisms as we went one of the joys of being a game designer is that you can very quickly be like okay i'm just going to

cut this and it's not going to be perfectly balanced but i'm playing with a five-year-old it really doesn't have to be yeah but as an example of a time that i wanted to do something to add to it lanterns designed by our friend chris chung i think lanterns is a spectacular game i i really love that core mechanism i think it's so interesting.

And i wouldn't call it childishly simple there's like one thing too many you know it you you play tile and then whatever direction is facing you you get the card of that color and you cash those in for points in set collection but there's also like you can match up to these special tiles that give you tokens you can spend the tokens to swap your cards for other ones there's just it's simple it just didn't hit childishly right and so i went to that and i was like okay if i was doing a spinoff of

lanterns and not not copy pasting here but i was like if i'm trying to do something different if you if you're inspired by lanterns yeah. To do something different and hit the childishly simple and i realized you know what it's it's so close i really can't and so instead i said you know what i've never seen a game use that lanterns. Mechanic for something else i'm going in the opposite direction i'm. Going to add something to the system but i'm.

Going to keep it childishly simple so i made a 4x game where you play the tile and whatever action is facing you you get that action and once the tile's on the board not only is it something that you can attach tiles to it's a board you can move troops around it you can area control it and so that's that's a way i think that you can look at adding something to a game that looks childishly simple and have it be like the next weight class up while still keeping to that core platonic

ideal of childishly simple critter kitchen is almost an example of what you're talking about where it's like the thebes version because that that core that is so clean you know your three goes last and takes three your one goes first and takes one your two goes in the middle and takes two and because it's carbon alchemy they they deluxified that into like it's it's a it's an hour-long game which i think it's it's been a very well received hour-long game i

like it a lot we made it for us but you could absolutely take that mechanic and make a 10-minute game and make a 15-minute like childishly simple version of the game i want to give some unhelpful advice my my trademark which is ideally like the dream is to come up with those childishly simple mechanics like if you can come up with a childishly simple mechanic that carries a game so like my 30 second explanation game i had three of those at

origins i had a really good time because i was able to be like hey let's play a game here's how you play and now we are playing and it's it's almost like oh we're done with the explanation okay whereas every other game was not every other game but many of the other games we were playing that weekend was like okay so you do this to do this, do this, do this. And so my, my, my two pieces of unhelpful advice are like, look for those search for those.

What, one of the reasons that I, again, love working with Alex is that he calls me sometimes and he's like, Hey, I've come up with some mechanics and I'm like, Oh yeah, that is, that is a published game that we just haven't made yet. Like, game will 100% be published because that idea is so good. And just from your teaching it, I can tell you what the finished product looks like. Now we just need to make that finished product.

We need to actually just put that into a game. And then the second piece of unhelpful advice, and I think that we've talked about this already, is that like, get those reps in on trimming, trimming, trimming. I do a lot of co-designs and a lot of my job, and you've been on both ends of this where you've known me and I've known you, is just saying no to stuff where it's like, yeah, we don't need that. Like, yeah, that's a very cool idea. We don't need it. Like,

yeah, absolutely. We could do that. We don't need to, like just, just cutting everything down. So I took one of these 30 second games to Origins and sort of like you were saying, every suggestion was like, you could add this, you could add this, you could add this. And I was like, cool, but what you're suggesting is rules. And I don't want to add rules.

And they, they probably would have made the game 7% more balanced, you know, in exchange for being 25% more rules because the game is so simple that it has three rules adding a fourth rule is actually huge but because people are gamers they're like it's fine like you know you could add that rule that's a very simple rule i'm like great except it's a rule and i have a i have a no rule policy i do not add rules to my games

even if it makes the game a tiny bit better it's just not worth the cost any closing thoughts on childishly simple i think we covered it cool uh aj do you have a publisher tip because i I forgot to prepare one. Let me check quick. We stole this idea from Print Run, and I was listening to that last night realizing they call them pub tips. Do you have a pub tip? We have two that I don't understand that I think are yours in our ideas thing.

Box versus bag, print and play, getting protaped to publisher. Is that- Oh, yes. Okay, amazing. So this probably came out of the Tim Armstrong episode that you haven't had a chance to listen to yet because I just uploaded the audio for you. Box first bag. So you're going to, you're going to, okay, you are AJ, role play with me here. Your name is AJ Brandon. Can you, can you get into character? Got it. A little uglier? Brandon Nuchie.

No, no, not even close. You've gone to a convention and you're going to hand out a bunch of prototypes, which is, which is, you know, the goal, basically, if you're doing a lot of pitching. Someone, I think it might've been sent from Lim, posted about this years ago, and I think about it all the time, suggested instead of putting your prototypes in boxes, put them in bags.

It means that you can fit more of them in your bag. it makes it easier to see which one is which i actually i have one right behind me let me grab it just came home from origins so this is three different prototypes that i had two of them are in boxes because i like working in boxes for when i'm designing but this one is in a bag and doesn't it just seem more pleasant don't you just want to take this home more than we'll take these home.

Boxes can get damaged in fact this one's already starting to see some some wear and tear the box can come loose the lid can come loose and things can go everywhere they're annoying to space they're less efficient with space and they're harder to like touch you you have to tetris them in a way that you don't with you know it's solids versus fluids whereas a bag you you can if you know this game you know what you're looking at straight away without

having to like look for the label on the box or anything like that it's fully flexible i hope that's not annoying sound.

It's this happens to be a zip up kind of v-bag uh it's not going to come open get get a nice ziploc bag yeah if you're taking a bunch of games with the intent of giving away save yourself and the publisher a lot of effort by putting them in bags not boxes that's an excellent tip i like that yes i'm i'm glad that we can decipher it uh aj how do you feel about fun i like it i like it how do you feel how do you feel about swallowing bugs not generally a fan but i'm open to new experiences all right

no fine fine we'll do the fun we'll do the fun you're you've you've made your choice you've made a very obvious what you'd prefer so pier professional writer super interested in sitcoms and comedy in all forms and arguably a person who makes jokes what is your favorite joke ever and this could be you know like a physical comedy bit or whatever like what is it the the like punch line or the the joke or the thing that you saw in typical peter

style have like four answers to this but before i start answering i was i was trying to narrow it down before you preemptively asked so do you remember the time that we were on a call, do you remember do you know what i'm talking about and you were very casual at the end like Like, hey, can you explain sitcom structure to me? I don't even remember. Was that a part I just, like, PM'd you once? Like...

It might have been a pm and i was like aj we've done 50 episodes of a podcast about game design and i think more about sitcom structure than i do about game design so like i will do my best but just so you know and then i typed at you for two hours and then you're like okay cool, i i think i think you gave me like a really really really short answer actually and i was like oh sorry i i it feels it feels like a long answer okay so i traditionally was not very good at telling jokes i

i'm a funny i'm witty i'm witty in that like i can say something quickly that's funny and i can do improv and actually telling a joke is not something i was good at so i made a concerted effort over the last like decade or so to get good at telling jokes so i have a little other little store of jokes so i'm gonna give you my favorite short joke to tell my favorite long joke to tell this is different to what's my favorite joke from

a sitcom or what's my favorite joke from like anything like that because again i could answer every one of these differently so i'm going to give you a lot a short joke and a long joke and you might have heard both of them why did the blind man fall in the well why because he didn't see that well.

I love it that's my favorite short joke it's just so dumb i'm gonna i'm gonna add a bonus third one in because this is what i do i taught my son to tell a joke and so when we were meeting a bunch of people for various weeks i was staying with them for three weeks every time we met someone new i got him to tell the joke and it was so good so imagine imagine i'm a six-year-old because it's much more adorable than a six-year-old knock knock who's there interrupting cows.

Interrupting how to moo the the lag made that particularly difficult but that's part one are you ready for part two sure knock knock who's there interrupting turtle interrupting turtle who, because he's moo and the thing that tickles me is you still say moo even though turtles don't say, okay here's my favorite long joke a frenchman a british man a young hot blonde and an old woman are all in a train carriage going across europe and the train carriage that the train

goes through a tunnel so everything's completely dark and you just hear this slap and they come out of the dark and the frenchman is rubbing his face and the the old woman thinks man while we're in that tunnel that Frenchman must have groped the blonde and she slapped him. And the blonde thinks, oh, while we went to that tunnel, the Frenchman must have tried to grope me, but accidentally groped the old woman, and so she slapped him.

And the Frenchman thinks, ah, while we went to that tunnel, the Britishman must have tried to grope the blonde, and she assumed it was me, and she slapped him. And the Britishman thinks, I hope we go through another tunnel so I can slap the frenchman again what is your favorite joke aj mine i'm gonna go with a joke that i saw in a sitcom not like a what do you call it just like a joke that you tell people a joke joke.

Yeah so the funniest joke i've ever seen was on a tv show called chuck you ever hear about that one yes i've seen i i don't know the joke you're talking about but i know the show sure sure so the the the whole premise of the show is it's a guy who ends up having to become a spy but he's trying to live like normal life at the same time he works at like a best spy equivalent or whatever so it's like oh no spy world intersecting with normal dorky.

Best by world hilarity ensues and there was one episode where he was having a family dinner and finds out that the food was poisoned so he can't let his family eat the food but he can't just say hey guys i'm a spy the food is poisoned don't eat it so they sit down like oh this looks great and start picking up the knives and forks and he's like guys let me show you a trick and he runs over to the table grabs the tablecloth yanks it and they're

like no what are you doing and he yanks it perfectly and everyone's like wow that was great and reach back down to start eating the food that's very good there was a show called a vicar of dibley it's a british sitcom and in the christmas episode it's played by dawn french who's a larger woman and and so the character loves food that's kind of a whole thing she loves food and she's the vicar so the the priest of the local town called dibley and on christmas she accidentally gets invited to

three christmases that she can't say no to one is like her best friend who's really excited one is like the guy who has all the money who's like really lonely and and so she ends up doing i think it's either two i think it's three i think she does three back-to-back full christmas dinners where every single time the families are like no you don't leave your plate empty like oh do you not like the cooking

oh she doesn't like the cooking so she has to eat three full christmas dinners and she gets home and. The local shepherd, it's like there's shepherds in this town. The local shepherd is at the door and he's like, hey, I'm really sorry to bother you. But since you got here, I have felt like less suicidal and more good about my life. And so for the first time in 20 years, I've made you a Christmas dinner. And so she's just like as full as you can be after eating three Christmas dinners

and cannot get out of eating a fourth one. It absolutely kills me. Okay, I'm going to answer one more, AJ. You've opened up a can of worms here. Do you know the joke club joke?

No i often say this is my favorite joke because it has multiple punchlines and i don't know any other joke that has multiple punchlines and it's a joke about jokes and i used to have more punch lines i've lost them so at some point i'll do a bunch of research and find the missing punchlines, so a guy invites his friend to the joke club and the guy comes in next to him and there's a bunch of people like ready for the jokes someone stands up and says number 62 and

everyone cracks up and someone else stands up and says 104 and everyone's laughing and the guy says what is happening and he says well oh sorry it's your first time yeah we've all heard these jokes so many times that we don't need to tell the joke anymore we just reference the number and then we all remember the joke and laugh and so the friend stands up and says 41 dead silence and he sits down his friend's like mate it's it's not the joke it's how you tell it that's punchline one,

that's good punchline two is someone else stands up and says 206 and everyone loses it everyone is just losing their mind and the guy leans over he's like what's so funny about that one and his friend says we haven't heard that one before anyway that's the that's the joke club joke i used to know two other punchlines and i can't remember them so i gotta go on a quest for them aj how do we end this show by me telling 75 jokes in a row.

And then by saying goodbye, everyone. Bye. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can find us and our incredible Discord community in the show notes, or reach out to us privately at funproblemspodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.