Deckbuilding (Signs of the Sojourner) with Lady Tabletop

[Intro] Blow and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and try and haggle over its price. My name is Sam Dunnwold, and my co-host today is Lady Tabletop. Their back Lady Tabletop is a designer or producer, a friend of the show, and a vital part of the Band-Aids and Bullet Holes Kickstarter going on right now. Go check out Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, my new John Wick revenge stories kind of game. You just heard LT on the show a couple of weeks ago talking about it, and today she is back for more. Because today, I'm continuing my mini-series all about mechanics that influenced Band-Aids and Bullet Holes. And this is a very special episode, because this is also the first episode of Dice Exploder ever, in which I'm covering a video game mechanic. That's right, today LT and I are talking signs of the Sojourner, a small indie game from Echo Dog Games published in 2020 during the heat of lockdown in which you play as a member of a post-apocalyptic merchant caravan traveling around and talking to people in different small towns. But the way you talk to them is by playing a little card game. Signs of the Sojourner just like Band-Aids and Bullet Holes is a deck builder. Your character is represented by a small and simple deck of cards, and their character comes out through what cards you've built your deck around and how you choose to play them. It's such a beautiful and elegant design. And today we get into how and why the core deck builder mechanics of this game allow for such great expression of character, even when the cards themselves are trivially simple. Plus all the ways the game supports that core mechanic by filling in the blanks around it, with art, music, and story, and propping up that mechanic while leaving just the right amount of space for you to still fill in the details of the story in your head with whatever subtext you feel is appropriate. God, I just love deck builders, I love this game, and good news if you backed the itch.io bundle for racial justice and quality back in 2020, you already own this game. What are you still doing here? Go play it. Come back. It's only a few hours long. You need to pick up poppy still. You can do so on steam. But again, just go play it. And then once you're back here, let's get into it. Thanks to everyone in Sports Dice Exploder on Patreon, and here is Lady Tabletop. Your character is a deck of cards from Signs of the Sojourner. Lady Tabletop, welcome back to Dice Exploder. It's going to have you again. Nice to be here. Sam, thanks for having me. We're talking about something I'm so excited about today. What are we talking about today? We are talking about Signs of the Sojourner, which is a video game, not a tabletop. It's a video game. Yes. We're talking about the first video game Dice Exploder has ever covered. Let's go. Changing the direction of the show forever. No. It's Signs of the Sojourner by Echo Dog Games, and it's basically just like a little deck builder game, but extremely story driven, even though it's a deck builder. And I feel like we've been talking about it for a while, just like in our personal chats and stuff, because you are working on a deck builder game, and I'm obsessed with deck builder games. Yeah. We're going to give it into all that. I want to start with a little bit more context, but first I want to say this is my favorite video game. I fucking love this video game. It's so good. I just, it's so perfect. Every part of this game is perfect. Like thing about this game. And I'll just rattle off quickly the art in this game, phenomenal. The music in this game, phenomenal. The mechanics polished to a scene. Great writing. Everything in this game is just fucking perfect, including the mechanic that we're going to talk about today. Okay. But the premise of this game is that you're inserted this post-apocalyptic world. You post-apocalyptic. It resembles the real world in a lot of ways. I think it is implied to be sort of like after a climate catastrophe, but more climate destiny is coming. The world in our company, I would say. Yeah. It's not set in like, you know, Indiana. There's no like real world analog to where it is set and just kind of operating on this myth or fable level. But you know, they're cars, right? And you are traveling merchant who drives a car from town to town and what you are trying to do in each town you visit is collect items for your store to then bring back to the little mom and pop shop kind of store that you run in the small middle of nowhere town that is sort of on the end of this caravan's route. You're traveling with a caravan. And your mom has recently died. So you're like hitting the road for the first time like in her place. And in part because your mom is down, I'd end up part because of other reasons like the town bar to that you are from is indeed you're being dropped from the caravan, which would probably turn the place into a ghost town and like everyone would move away and that'd be really sad because you grew up here. And so you were trying to save the town by getting enough items for your shop to keep it on the caravan route. It's yeah. And then you wonder around and you talk to people and that's the whole game. But the talking to people is the interesting thing. The talking to people is what we're here to talk about. Yeah. So as you mentioned, this game is a deck builder. Your character is a deck of cards. You got 10 cards. You have five in hand at any given time. And each card is very simple. There's a symbol on the left and a symbol on the right. And each symbol has a color and a shape. The colors and shapes go together. So all the circles are red. All the triangles are green. I'm going to just go for colors. There's a short hand here because I'm a very color brain person. So you got like a bunch of cards. So you got some red reds. You got some red blues. You've got some green blues, like whatever the thing is. And you sit down and you have a conversation with someone and they play a red red. And then you play a red green. And then they play a green red. And then you play, uh oh, you don't have one that starts with a red now. You have a blue green. Oh no, you've lost the matching game. And now you've stumbled in the conversation with them. And you're trying to like get enough matches in a row here of cards to like progress to the next what next like check point in the conversation. Every conversation has like you need three successes before two failures or something to like get the good ending for the conversation. And that's kind of the whole game. And then typically the way it works is when you have successful conversations with people they give you items for your store. But also sometimes a successful conversation means that the person was able to sweet talk you and distract you and then steal an item from your car. Or you know, there's other kinds of shit that's going on here. But essentially you're just playing this pattern matching game with the cards in order to try to have conversations with people. Yes. So there's like a whole layer to it, right? Because the point of having the conversations, it besides just the story is that at the end of a conversation you get to choose a card that was in their deck and add it to your deck. But you have to, you're not just adding it. You're replacing a card. Yes. So there is, you forget an old card. Yes. So there is like a purely mechanical motivation to have the conversations if you're not invested in the story, but you should be invested in the story because the conversation and the writing is really good. But at the same time, you can, you can get cards even if you fail a conversation as long as you had a success. Yeah. And so there is merit in having a conversation even if you're going to fail because you can get a card still from the conversation to add to your deck. So it might be a horrible failure with this person that you're talking to, but then someone else in town that speaks similarly, you now have a leg up because you took a card. And so your deck is evolving over time. And like already, like, I hope it is apparent how the metaphors are like layering up here, right? Because first of all, like each color, each symbol corresponds to like a certain kind of personality trait. They say like green is like. Yeah. Green is like logical and like red, I think is empathetic and compassionate or whatever, but they're all assigned to two words. They're all assigned to two words and they don't always like line up, right? Like the blue one is like creative and industrious, right? So they're all like these interesting symbols. And so first of all, you can immediately like imagine the conversation where it's like, okay, I play a bunch of red cards and then I play a blue card and then you don't have any blue cards. And that's the, in that moment, I was like too creative for you, you know? And you like, you kind of like lost the plot or some of the cards eventually end up having abilities, right? Like there's a, an ability called chatter where instead of I play a card and then you play a card and then I play a card, when you play a card with chatter, you immediately play a second card, right? So it's easy to imagine the situation where like you play a red, red and I play a red green chatter and then a green, green chatter and then you don't have any greens. And it's like very clear that I just like talked to your ear off, right? Like that's the thing that happened here. And like these things don't actually show up in the writing of the game. The writing of the game is always the same. Like if the conversation goes well, you get the like good path of the conversation and if it goes poorly, you get the bad path of the conversation. But like that doesn't change based on what cards that you play, but you start to read subtext into what has been written based on what cards you play sometimes. And like that's a, that's like a really cool thing that is just happening in your head as you play this game. It's not like a strict part of the mechanic. Yeah. The thing that I think about a lot is that you can get kind of like a lock on your cards called an accord if you and the other person that you're talking to play the four symbols that are the same in a row. And it like protects you the next time that there's a mismatch. So you can have one mismatch where it's like, oh no, just like the strength of the conversation so far, we're both able to move past this. Yes. And it's like doing a lot just in how it names these things and how they play like as you go, it's impossible not to read into, oh, well, I played reconsider, which like rejaws my whole hand. And so I'm thinking about what they said and how I can respond now kind of thing and just like getting into it that way. Yeah, totally. We're like observant, which allows you to look at the other person's hand and then play accordingly, right? And it's. a really helpful thing to do. And sometimes there's this really common conversation that happens where you've just picked up an observant card and then you talk to the person who has all the reconsidered cards. So you look at their hand and then they're like, "No, I'm reconsidering." And it's like, "Why would you do that?" I was being so observant of you and you could like read all of that subtext into what's going on too. And some of the characters that have these specific cards that feels like, so you start reading that stuff into their character and they're writing and the character design is such that it always feels appropriate. Like they've done such a good job of matching those things up. - They have. And so even though like your replies that you're getting on a failure, like they're the same no matter what cards you play or whatever, like they're written into the conversation, but you still are like adding context to it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another just sort of like, I just love like, just throwing out the little things that this game is doing. But like, one of my favorite things is early in the game, there's this woman who runs the caravan. And so you can talk to her in like a lot of different towns. And the towns are such that every town, the residents of that town, primarily are based in two of the four symbols, right? So you start in a red green town and you mostly stay in red green towns for a while, but then you get to either a green purple town or a red blue town, right? And then you start to like branch out a little bit. And then eventually like, if you're growing really further a field, you get to blue purple towns. And like if you went there right away, you would have no way to communicate with those people. But the time you get there, maybe you can. But then by the time you get back home, maybe you can't communicate with your child that had best friend, anyway, right? And like, my friends like favorite story about playing this game is like, coming back home, realizing he had changed so much that he could no longer hold a productive conversation with his best friend and immediately turning off the game because he was too sad. - Well, it's, I think that's a really common first playthrough of this game though, because it's like so tempting to just keep picking up new cards so you can talk to new people in all the places that you're going. And then by the time that you're headed back home, you're like, oh crap, I only have like one red in my hand now. How am I gonna be able to talk to him? And his responses are written as such that you read it that way too, where he's like, oh yeah, you've sure changed a lot or like, oh, I guess you don't wanna talk right now, kind of thing, you know? - Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and he's so sad about it. - He believed it. - He misses you. What's going on? - I know that we've both been like playing this game a lot in the lead up to this episode again. And I had a conversation with him where like, you get home and he's just like, hey, I can't watch over your store all the time anymore. Like that's his response because I like fucked it up right away with him and it was horrible. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really had to go like out of my way to like fuck up some conversations with this guy to see what it was like, 'cause I was a little bit too good at the game for quite a while. Well, I think like my background is just like playing hundreds and hundreds and thousands of hours of slay this fire and magic the gathering. Like really helped me be like pretty good at this game. And I want to get into a larger picture thing in a second, but I got distracted from talking about the Caravan leader. So mostly the different towns have, you're in a red green town to start and the Caravan leader is very red green based. And so the first month and like one month is like one trip around the map, right? The game is five months and then you're sort of like set off into the future and we leave the game behind. But in the first month, you're really kind of just sticking with the Caravan and going to like primarily red green based cities. And then on the second month, you can kind of branch out and do whatever you want. And the Caravan leader, again, really red green based. So you're mostly just playing red green cards with her and blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you get to that second month and you find a way to play a blue or a purple card to her, she's just this whole time been hiding in her hand, this super powerful like blue or purple on the right and blue or purple on the left. It's like this like Rosetta stone for talking to like anyone like further out in the game. But you don't know that she has it until you have the ability and like make the leap, right? Like take the leap to be like, can you communicate with me this way? I bet you can because like you're out there on the road, you know, like you must be going out of these towns of like communicating with them somehow. So let me just like try this out and like jump and find out whether you're gonna have a response for me here. And then you're like richly rewarded for it. It's one of my favorite moments in the game. - That's a really good one. And especially like you said early on, it can be really, really powerful. - We were kind of transitioning into this subject that I think is really like what the game is primarily about, which is the map is too big for you to wander around at actually a productive conversations with everyone. Because the other thing that's happening is the longer you're on the road, the more you get fatigue cards added to your deck, which have no symbols on either side and automatically lose the current conversation when you play them. So they basically just take up space in your hand. And if you get too deep into things, your hand is just entirely fatigue cards and you can't talk to anyone, even the people that you are like really have a lot of shared symbols with. And so given the fatigue cards coming into your deck, it is really, really, really hard to be able to talk to the red green people at home and the blue purple people out there. And the green purple people on the other side of the map and the red blue people in the middle of the map, you can kind of do this thing where you start with the red green place and then go to the blue red place and swap out your green cards for blue cards and then go to the blue purple place and swap out red cards for purple cards and then gradually circle back around. But it's rough, it's tough, it really stretches you. You have to be really good at the game and get really lucky to be able to pull that thing off. And then mostly you're gonna end up like fucked and so you have to make compromises about who are you willing to be able to talk to, who do you wanna communicate with? - Yeah, and realizing that on my first play through the game, it was really powerful, I think, because there was this part of me that was like playing kind of casually and just being like, oh, this is an interesting story and I'm talking to these people and then hitting a point where it's like, well, man, I fucked up that conversation and I don't have another chance. And now I have to decide, am I gonna try to talk to that person again in the future or am I just abandoning their storyline? You know? - Yeah, yeah. - Because this game is especially with the fatigue attrition really tough towards the end of the month and then it's made even harder because there's like, an event that happens after month three, I think, where there's like an earthquake. And so everybody who's in any of the towns that was impacted by this earthquake gains another symbol, a pink spiral, because it's like your emotional and distressed because it's like the sign of your shared trauma or whatever, but then there are still towns that you can go to where nobody, they weren't affected. So they don't have that symbol. So having that in your deck doesn't help you and it becomes this like, am I trying to relate to the people who have been affected by this earthquake or am I just going about my business like some of the people in other towns? - Totally. And like some of those people are in the same towns, right? Like this game is really, really interested in like, nimbism, I think like a, and class, like, there's this town that hosts a cookoff and there's like a music shop owner who lives there. And if it weren't a small town and like a post post apocalyptic kind of world, it would feel like the gentrified neighborhood, right? - It does, yeah. - Like that is the vibe that they're going for. And after the earthquake, they start getting refugees, one of whom is like really traumatized and they all treat that guy like absolute fucking garbage, right? - It's hard to have a conversation with him too. - It's hard, yeah, because he's got so many of these fucking spirals in his deck, you know? And so when you show up, if you already have an existing relationship with the people in this town, you can either commit to continuing to have a good relationship with them and like getting trade goods from them, which you need to keep your store alive or you can like take pity and kindness on this guy who is like showed up and is trying to live here. But if you do one of those, you are worse at the other, you know, and like putting your livelihood against having compassion for a very traumatized man is like not something that I thought I was going to get to when I started the like pattern matching like conversation game, you know? - Well, and it's like a very bright art style to it, has kind of a like drawn in oil pastels feel to it or like chalky feel to it. And so it definitely gets into a heavy subject matter that isn't necessarily indicated when you first start playing and you're like, cool and exploration deck builder. - Well, and the writing is so good that it's like those things hit emotionally, but it also, I never feel like I'm not having a good time. - Yeah, yeah. - You know, like they're able to keep it at a level and like have conversations, like tell these kinds of stories without it just being like horrifically depressing. You know, like while there's still like a lot of levity, a lot of like lightheartedness and optimism and hope throughout all of it. - Yeah, yeah. And they, they're touching on a lot of different things too, right, because like there's one city that's kind of hard to get into because it's basically, it's not necessarily a police state, but it is like a extremely class divided city. - It's owned by the mob. - Yeah, basically. And so it's a tough one to get into. And as you're up in that corner of the map, there are like towns that are basically ghost towns now or like there's a lone Android here, still doing the farming work that it was told to you by the mob, but it's the only one there anymore. And so it has a lot of stuff like that to be discovered. And it also really begs for multiple playthroughs, which is nice. - Yeah, yeah, because you have to make choices about which part of the world, like who are you willing to commit to talking to, it rewards, multiple playthroughs because you can commit to different people, right? My dear Estilisena, have I got a secret? Or you? Bitcherton is an improvised comedy podcast inspired by the stories of Jane Austen that tells the tale of a wealthy family's secrets, scandals, and shenanigans. Lady Bitcherton has unwed daughters, nosy neighbours, awful country cousins, and now a body to hide. Will the Bitcherton be able to keep their secrets off the pages of Lady Bigwethers gossip sheet? Or will her pen skewer their good name forever? Oh, bitch, what a predicament. Featuring the voices of Katie Marovitch, if a wody way, Carolyn Page, Alex Songsharp, Brian Fletty, and Cassie Wilson, plus a dance card filled with guest comedians of the very finest quality. But for us to help the seeds of rumour ripen into the juicy plum of scandal, we'll need your help. Bitcherton is heading to Kickstarter on June 13th. Go to Bitcherton.com to pre-save the campaign and help us bring this story to life. Tata for now. This episode of Dice Exploder is sponsored by Hero Forge. Hero Forge offers fully customizable tabletop miniatures, with dozens of fantasy species and thousands of parts to choose from, all within your browser. And these mini's come in a variety of materials, including bronze, color standies, and color plastic options, or download model files for your mini's and 3D print their unique designs right in your own home. Hero Forge also has custom printed dice, where they'll stick your favorite mini floating inside a die, or put that mini on a keychain. Hero Forge custom acrylic keychains are printed at the same scale as the rest of Hero Forge minis, and arrive already attached to a high quality zinc alloy lobster clasp, so you can take your favorite character wherever you go. Hero Forge is constantly expanding its catalog of customization options, adding new parts every week, so check back in and see what you've missed. Visit Hero Forge.com to start designing your custom miniature and dice today. This episode of Dice Exploder is brought to you by the Wild Sea Sour Down, an all-new expansion to the any award-winning game of being pirates on an ocean of trees, ever flourishing and triumphant, until you reach the whitewood of sour down. All pale tides and quieter grettes, and you learn that the wilds can die. But death plays different on rustic waves, through silk and honey, through spores and sacrifice the lost reach of sour down might be dragged into summer once more. Sour Down is a new expansion for the Wild Sea featuring 50+ pages of new content, including factions and hazards, background options, and a local bloodline, an adventure of adjustable difficulty for those wishing to brave the pale groves. I'm also told that sour down is the home region of my favorite thing about the Wild Sea, the Chelecrae People, sentient colonies of spiders in skin suits. What could be better? The Wild Sea Sour Down expansion is launching soon on Kickstarter. Follow it today. We've talked about how much the mechanics of this game allow you to read additional and different subtexts into the writing, depending on what's happening and how things are going. And I think that is in part also a huge testament to the strength of the writing. The writing is very clearly written to leave room for all that interpretation, and to leave room for, like, are you kind of failing with this person? Have you talked to them before? Have you talked to their brother? Like, all these different things where, like, the conversation holds up and holds up well under all these different circumstances. And then the individual sentences are just interesting and good. And we'd like our interesting to read their compelling. They make you want to keep talking to these people, right? They absolutely do. And because you're like a silent protagonist and you're basically filling in the blanks in your head, right? With the things that your protagonist is saying in these conversations, it makes the replay value feel good from that perspective too, because you are the same person, but you're not the same person, right? Like, you're always a person whose mom has died and who's going out to try and save your town, but like, do you continue trying to save the town? Is that only ever a pretense? And you just want to explore and see what's out there? Like, there's a lot of endings in this game and the way that the protagonist responds to people based on how you've built your deck impacts that hugely. And yeah, I don't know. I think a lot about how this feels like playing a solo journaling game sometimes because of the multiple endings and kind of the faceless protagonist. And also the first time I played it, I like went off the caravan route and Nadine, the leader of the caravan is like, hey, I can't have you on here if you're going to take risks like that. Like, you have to go home. And it like didn't occur to me, the player, because I was like, so into it that I could keep going around on my own at that point. So I just went home and I ended my month in like, too. And I was like, oh man, that was like a huge, huge waste in terms of like, I could have been talking to all these people, you know, but it was like that speaks to the strength of the writing to I think just that it draws you in in that way. Yeah, yeah, the people feel so alive. It's really testament to how a little bit goes such a long way in terms of the character design. It reminds me of like, city of winter or fall of magic where like those games have such such like a small amount going on mechanically, but each piece is so deliberate that like everything feels so evocative. And then the same way the characters in this game, it's like, the art is like gorgeous. All these characters have like such an effect. You like see the portrait of who they are and you're like, I know who that is. I know all about Nadine from the way she's looking at me from behind those sunglasses. And then you get to layer on top of that like, okay, the dialogue that's coming out of their mouth, but also like what symbols are on their cards, primarily. So, you know, you have that creative and industrious thing going on or whatever. And then also what special abilities are on the cards that they're playing, right? Nadine plays observant cards to look at you. Your childhood best friend plays accommodate cards. Love accommodate. They're so good. A accommodate is like overpowered and there's like a reason that your hometown buddy has them so you can like stock up as many as you can. But also like it's it's so clear who he is because he's got way too many accommodated cards and stuff, right? Like like all of those things just it's that's that's kind of it. Yeah, right. Like it's just like there's not a ton there. There's so many open gaps for you to read in whatever you want, but the the each peg in the board is just strong statements. It's so evocative that it really gives you a whole picture really quickly. It does and it's really deftly done, I think, because it's just all these like little suggestions of what is going on and what you can infer is going on without having to hit you over the head with it. And I just think it's a real is a really well designed game to be able to create a full picture that way without like slapping you in the face and being like this is what we're doing. Okay, so we love this game. So how did this game lead me to create a John Wick style tabletop role play game? Yeah, like I feel like we could have like really easily done this episode on like slay this buyer instead like slay this buyer is this other deck building video game. That is much more focused on like gameplay, right? You have cards that you're playing. You're trying to deal damage. You have like a number of actions that you can play every turn. There's it's you know it's like turn based combat kind of thing basically there's very little story to it, but it's also very clear who the different characters are based on what cards they're able to add to their deck, right? So be a character whose thing is like taking damage themselves to deal a ton of damage to their opponents, right? And you like kind of that guy's just like walking around with a huge hammer basically right and then the next person is really good at playing like a lot of little fiddly cards. So they're just they're like a ninja is they've got sure akins right there like play play play play I'm gonna draw a bunch of cards. I mean discredible cards are going to like jump this way in that way and you can feel the fighting style of them right. And then the third character is like a robot with orbs floating around and you're sort of like channeling these like robotic technologies that are floating around you and the art is conveying that but the actual mechanics feel like they capture the flavor of who this person is in the same way. And that that made it so clear to me like I love love deckbuilders since dominion right the first deck builder I love deck builder since magic the gathering like the first deck builder right like drafting magic cards. But like all of these games make it so clear that it is possible to in capture the personality of a character in a deck of cards within an existing set of rules right. And I I've just been for years trying to bash my head against like why not role play eggbell like why why are we not doing this for role play games. And it feels like part of that has been logistical, like making lots of cards is really hard and or expensive and or just like annoying, but it doesn't feel like that should be an instrumentable hurdle, right? And so I sat down, I was like, I just wanna make a deck builder 'cause that's what I like doing, but I wanted to be an RPG 'cause it's the other thing I like doing, well, how can we do that? And let's bring signs of the Sojourner deck builder into the real world. Let's use playing cards, right? So I just like took the basic idea of, I wanna make a character who's flavorful through dealing in the hand of cards and let's use just like a regular deck of playing cards. And that's like the fundamental basis. I don't even remember how I got to John Wick, but the John Wick thing was like second to like characters made up of playing cards. - I think that you started talking to me about this after we like first talked about wreck this deck because that is a good game that does a good job of kind of creating a character through a deck of cards. Although in that case, it's just a single character, right? Like the cards aren't represented. - Yeah, and that one feels to me like a spell book. It is like, you know, any wizard spell book is gonna be reflective of who that wizard is, but it feels different in a way. - It does because you're opening up your inventory, right? And a video game for wrecked this deck, your card deck is your inventory, right? If you're demons and your spells and whatever else you have. So it's adjacent, but it's not quite like capturing a character the way that Bandit's and Bulldogs doing. - Yeah, and you know, I really wanted to pull from signs of the soldier there, right? Like, okay, so when I sat down to try to do this, my first thought was like, we're using a deck of playing cards, how can we take each suit in the deck and make it mean a different thing? And I think this was directly coming out of signs, right? Because signs of the soldier has these like four different shapes. That's four different suits. Let's like take those suits and like name one of them industrious and creative, right? Or like whatever the thing is. But I got to more of like a logistical difference pretty quickly. I lined up like, okay, we're gonna have spades be shit that you own, clubs be shit that you're borrowing from other people, diamonds be like an amorphous, like desperation, like sort of a mental hit points kind of thing. And hearts will be wounds, like a physical wound that you're bleeding out kind of thing. And then you have this nice like dichotomy too where like all the black cards are positive and all the red cards are kind of negative. And I think the other thing that really clicked at the beginning of Bandits and Bulletin Holes was the idea of calling cards. And I don't remember where this came from or who came up with it. I might have stolen this from either my friend, David Block, who's put on the show before or maybe I came up with it myself. But this idea of like take each card and associate it with a tiny little pithy phrase, like a little detail about who the character is, right? So Barf is our protagonist of Bandits and Bulletin Holes and Barf's calling cards are like the stench of cigarettes and bloody knuckles. And you kind of know who that guy is, right? Yeah. And he's also got some art in very much, I've, this is another thing I think I really pulled from science of the Surgeoner is like you get that like little iconic piece of art in there and it can tell you so much about how to play this guy, even like the rest of him in his stats, like kind of can't. But like cool, we're gonna give all these people some details, these calling cards and like shuffle them together and I don't know, what do you do with them? Let's do John Leck and fight each other and just play war? Sure, that seems good. It was almost an afterthought to the actual like, let's build a deck of traits and like have a little thing I can have in my hands and like shuffle while I'm playing role playing, you know? Like, but yeah, it's interesting to me to like think about the through line from science of the Surgeoner to Bandits and Bulletin Holes because it does feel kind of abstract. But like I do feel like you can kind of see where the pieces connect, right? I think it's more visible than you're giving yourself credit for just because the way that Bandits and Bulletin Holes, the interactions that you capture in these cards when characters are talking to each other is like, yes, there's two of them, right? Where the protagonist in Science of the Surgeoner is like faceless and can be kind of whatever. But the back and forth is just really clear when you're playing your cards, you can see each other because it like you lay down the card and you say, oh, okay, I see this calling card, like, how's that coming into play now? How's that impacting this scene? And sometimes it's like a real action, right? Like, we've played a lot of this through the different phases of you developing it. And so sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, like the light up combat boots means that Queenie is kicking you or whatever. But then sometimes it's like, oh, the stench of cigars from barf is just like, oh, you get a whiff of that even though he said he quit last time and now we have to talk about that, you know? So. - Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, and it does feel like something that are really, almost unintentionally, but through all this shared DNA, something I took from Science of the Sojourner is the way you are able to read subtext into what happens when you put these cards down against each other, right? When like barf and Queenie are talking and Queenie's like, I'm not sure what to say. You can like look to barf's calling cards and be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I smell your fucking cigarettes right now, kid. Like, we're having the interaction you just talked about. But then you can also do the like, really when you start playing cards against each other is when you're fighting, when you're in a duel, right? And so when Queenie flips up the light up combat boots and barf flips up the stench of cigarettes, that can go a hundred different ways, but you are sort of being asked, okay, read text into the like very big picture of what's going on here in the same way that it incines. You're sort of like, here's some dialogue from this person. Here are the cards that were just played, read a feeling into that, right? Like, how do you feel about that? What do you think that says about the subtext here? And like, you know, maybe in the fight, the thing is that Queenie smells the cigarettes coming and like, smells, knows that that's fucking barf's brand and then turns around and like kicks him with her boots, right? But maybe, maybe the thing is that like, Queenie's coming at him with her fucking boots, but the like, smoke in the air is so thick. Like, she coughs or whatever, like Mrs. Iver, like, whatever the thing is that you wanna do, like that you can read these a lot of different ways and like, that's the fun of it, you know, that reading in whatever you want to into two cards that are played against each other is really fun. - It is and it changes shape every time. Like, again, there was a time where we were play testing this and we played the same scene with the same two characters like three times and it was different every time because you can just infer different things in each combination of things, gives you a new opportunity to say, well, what do I think this means this time? - Yeah. - I think the other thing that like, signs really brought to this, and this isn't just coming from science, this is also like my taste and, you know, some key feedback from people, but like, signs is such a like polished and slimmed down game. Like, mechanically, I feel like we did kind of spend a lot of time like describing how the mechanics of this game work because we sort of needed a lot of words to convey the like, visuals of it. But when you sit down to play this game, it is so immediately intuitive how it works. It is so easy, it is remarkable that such a simple and easy little game can have this much meaning kind of layered on top of it. And that, I just aspire to that and everything that I do. And like, that inspired me to, you know, eventually take all the suits in Band-Aids and bullet holes meaning different things and like strip all that shit away, right? So hearts still mean wounds, like, they're still special in their own way, right? They're like a Trump suit. But also the spades, clubs and diamonds, like, those all meant different things. And I just like, took that out. Like, you just don't need it. Like, you just get it out of there. Like, we can just layer on more meaning to less things sometime, you know? And when you take out some of that extra stuff that the game was telling you that was a little bit weaker or didn't feel as sort of strong and evocative, that leaves more room for you to come in and bring whatever you want to evoke to the game. It becomes a little bit like doing a roar shack test with this deck of cards, right? Like, let me give you two or three details and see what you make out of it, see what you're reading into it and, you know, what you're bringing to it on this playthrough. And so it's a really nice elegance to the simplicity of it, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And then the less like little comparison to signs here that I like is this pattern matching card game in signs would be completely uninteresting to me to play on its own, right? Like, it's just, it's not. It's not actually dominoes. Yeah, barely. It's worse than dominoes, certainly. If like, like, I've seen old men gambling on dominoes at the park, right? And that means there's enough game there that it's like compelling, but like-- It's dominoes for children, right? Like, when you're fricking like-- Yeah, exactly. I would-- Here's how to match patterns. I would play this game with my five-year-old niece, right? Like, that's the level that this game is offering in terms of entertainment. And like, you know what else is a game like that? Is war. Like, the classic card game war where you just, like, each of you has half the deck. You flip up a card, high card wins, baby. Go again. And then you just, like, go through a fucking deck of cards like that. And that's all that, like, the bandage and bullet holes combat system is. Like, the rules of the game are, like, mostly-- Yeah, you just play war against each other. And like, I got bored of war, like, in the third grade, you know? Like, I was too old for it, like, really quickly. But when you add all this, like, role-playing context onto it again, like, it becomes exciting again. Because the exciting part isn't the strategy of the game. It's the, like, layering on of that fictional context. And I feel like that's just an important lesson that I learned from designing this game and playing "Science of the Sojourner." I think that it speaks volumes to the way that you've designed it and to things like "Science of the Sojourner" that the simplicity of the card game underneath is like. crucial to how enjoyable the experience is because if it was more complex and you had to spend more time and energy thinking about the mechanics of the game, then it gives you less space, I think, to be adding that meaning on top of it and to be reading into the things that might otherwise just look like little flavor details or flourishes or whatever, because I do think that's a big difference between science of the sojourner and Slay the Spire is that the mechanical complexity is increased in Slay the Spire and so it's a lot of pretty stuff to look at but it just doesn't carry the same way. It's not a story game. Yeah, it's not like you know like having a big emotion playing Slay the Spire unless it is the emotion of like successfully winning at a game. Yeah, yeah, the emotion of victory. Yeah, or like Balachro is like a pure example than Slay the Spire here, right? It's like Balachro doesn't have this is a deck builder that uses standard playing cards and it's really simple game. It's really fun, but it is there's no story. There's nothing. No, it's number go. It's just a simple game. Yeah, it's just you're trying to make a big number and like that's fun. I like Balachro, you know, but like in a role playing game when I am looking for the narrative game. Balachro would suck because you know, like because I'd be spending all this energy playing Balachro, then I'd be like, there's a story. Yeah, if I can one of our care, like when I want that story, you need to make room for it with the mechanics. I think that that is exactly it. There is room for the story because the mechanics have stepped out of the way and that is I think probably controversial statement to some people in games, but I think that there is always going to be the balance between what you bring to the table, what you bring to the game as a player versus what the game is bringing itself. Well, like listen, if you're playing role playing games, but you're not here for like story first, like if you're here for like Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, like let's play tactical combat and like, yeah, I'm like kind of my guy and I'm running around or whatever, but like really I'm here because I want to like optimize for the combat board game. Like more power to you, you know, like the fourth edition D&D like board game is pretty good. Good draw steel. I bet it's pretty good. You know, like these those games are not what I'm interested in doing these days, although one day I'll have a little draw steel episode of this show I imagine and get someone to talk about it, but like, that's great, but like I think it's it's very different and distinct from the thing that we're talking about here and it is. Yeah, there's room enough for all of those things. Yeah, absolutely. It's it's just a different play style and I think that we both obviously have have through our appreciation for signs of the Sojourner made it clear that this is the type of game that is really appealing to us just in the simplest, the simplest, the mechanics and the way that you can assign meaning on top of it because like you said, you talk about mandates and bullet hole being John Wick themed right and it is because it's it's like a web of assassins and people who have been wronged or done wrong and things like that. Yeah, but I I've joked before about being like, oh, you can make this like Regency very easily like as a social. Yeah, totally right and it's just people talking to each other with the deck of cards right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, or I've talked about doing the the PTA meeting a version of it right where you like every fight is actually just passive aggressive comments being shipped back to the game. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there's there's clearly like a lot of room for for there's a lot of room for all kinds of expansion to what band to it's bulls looks like and you know maybe one day will do that too. It's a great game. It's really good. I'm really proud of that you should back it on Kickstarter signs of the sojourners and even better game you should go check your itch bundles for that. You can also get it on steam or I think it's on switch to as well. Yeah. So Audrey, thanks for coming back today. Thanks for having me. I feel like we just got to spend like half an hour being like, man, I really love this game after talking about it anyway. Thanks to the lady table top for being here. You come back band it's in bullet holes on Kickstarter right now. There's a link in the show notes. Thanks to everyone who sports dice, exploder on patreon as always you can find me on blue sky at dice exploder and you can find my games at estonowald.itch.io. Our logo was designed by sporegory our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray and our ad music is lily pads by my boy Travis Tessmer. And thanks to you for listening. I'll see you next time.