Ludology Episode 124 - Checking It Twice

This episode of "Ludology" is produced by David Coons and Richard Mulholland. Welcome to "Ludology," a podcast about the "Why" of gaming, with Mike Fitzgerald and Jeff Engelstein. "Ludology," episode 124. Checking it twice. Checking it twice, who's naughty and nice. We're into our part two of the game design checklist. Checking it twice. We talked about the first part of the checklist, which was about the experience and the basics of your game and what you're going for. The second part is the mechanics of the game. Questions that you should be asking yourself about the mechanics. Checking for those of you that missed the first round of this, you may want to go back and listen to that. Just in case you don't, what we've done is Mike and I have put together a list of 30 or so questions. We've divided it into groups of three. This is the second part of three talking about mechanics. These are questions that you want to keep in mind or go back when you think your design is done and just go through them. As we get into these, you'll see you're not supposed to necessarily have definitive answers for all of these. But you should at least think about it and at least convince yourself that you've done your due diligence around those areas. Yes, I think the mind has to brush these. It's sort of like you've got to at least have the thought because what I find, just using, now that we've done this, I use this more. And I find myself, I didn't really address that or I didn't really think enough about that. So there's a lot of good stuff I think you can get just by being familiar with the questions. And when you talk about mechanism, we're really opening up the hood here because, you know, theme aside, what is a game when you're sitting down to play the game, you're playing the mechanisms. Now if they, obviously you hope they support a theme, if you've got a great theme, a lot of games don't have a theme particularly or the theme is somewhat paced on. But mechanisms is certainly the heart of what we're doing here. Yeah, and obviously we're not getting into specific mechanisms. I may use them as examples, but the questions you'll see are in a much more general basis because mechanics can be all over the place from what's used as I guess Mike, you took a quick look at the BGG mechanics list. Yes, what I did was right in front of us, each of us have now every mechanism that is noted in board game game every because I went to this little card game the other night. I just, I just got, it's an Alexander Fister game. It was called Royal Goods. Now it's called Oh my goods. And it's a really nice little card game. And I was just curious because we're doing this, this episode. So I clicked on it and they're like six mechanics listed with this game. Now if somebody asked me how many mechanics in the game I wouldn't have come anywhere near six. But looking at this list, I mean, it's really amazing. It's something good to do and you can get it by going to add a board game and you hit, you know, add a mechanism and you'll see the list. So we have it in front of us because you know, I mean, it does cover the things that people believe are mechanics and and in games. I think there's probably actually more than are here, but describing them and figuring out what they really are might be a challenge. Okay, so why don't we jump into it with the first question, which is actually a late addition to the list. I think this is the last one that that you put on here. So, yes, I was just, yeah, it's a question that's very important to me and I realize it wasn't here. And again, it's not that you have to answer in any particular way, but I certainly think about a lot. So the first one here is are the mechanics of your game fresh and innovative. Now this could also be said, does Jeff pointed out are they two innovative? So what we're talking about because I have done this on both sides now some games have come out. I'll sit down and play them and there's nothing new. I mean, I will say to myself, okay, and it's not even done in a new way sometimes. I just had that experience over the weekend and wow, I did not like the game, but it just it just didn't make sense. Now other games will be very familiar feeling, but the elements work together so well. And they represent the theme so well and you're having fun and it's certainly easier to enter a new game when you're familiar with the basic mechanics. So that's so this kind of thing to be a plus or a minus. Now when you get to two innovative, the problem is entry to play. And if you're sitting down and you just have no idea how the mechanics work or very hard to get a handle on them, that's going to be a problem. So I must say that what I try to do with every single design is do something fresh and innovative. And that has different levels. I might just take something that's already familiar with a new twist or like in baseball highlights, I try to do something completely different. Of course that is one of the difficulties of learning the game, but also one of the nice things once you do learn the game. So it's a question that again there's a lot of ways to answer it, but I find it's certainly something publishers ask about. What's new in the game? What's fresh? Is there something that hasn't been done before? That kind of thing. So you might want to at least address what you've done that differs from other games. This is a little bit of a loaded question. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. So that's really what I think you're going to look at. I mean there are some games where people are looking at theme and they have a license or there's a totally new theme that's never been explored. And so they want to fall back on. They don't feel they have to break new ground in terms of the mechanics. That the fact that it's a new license game is basically going to carry it through and make it interesting. Although they tweak to a little bit, you've got all those different flavors of love letter. And when you're sitting down to design Batman love letter, maybe you want to throw a little bit of a twist on it or Star Wars monopoly or something like that. But when you're designing something like that, when you're hired to design something like that, you don't want to go too far field. You don't want to be super innovative. You just want to make it more comfortable for players to jump in and start going. So but if you're designing more for the hobby market or it's a more of a generic theme, then you may have to be more innovative. Whether it's in the mechanics or like I said, maybe in the theme, but something kind of some kind of a hook that's going to be able to go to a publisher and say, why do you want to, you know, why should I make this? Why should people buy this game versus, you know, maybe another game that if it shares all the same mechanics? Yes, I'm really glad I don't get hired anymore to do like love letter Batman or something. Am I in my early years? That was a very common thing. Somebody would call you up and say, you know, Mike, can you knock this out for me quick? We just need another version of someone. So, you know, for me personally, it's just not as interesting when I'm tied into mechanics that have already been done. And personally, I love love letter, but I, me personally, I just don't see the need to have, you know, 80 different versions, but myself. But anyway, that's just a question. But, you know, toys are us to target and all those places would best differ. You know, there's how many there's Disney sorry and all this other stuff. You know, I mean, certainly, yeah, look at look at all the Munchkin products. You know, so, yeah, so I'm certainly not saying that from a business perspective. But I am saying you're from a design. Absolutely. And as a designer, you know, especially, you know, you're doing it for the love of it. You got to be able to wake up in the morning and play the same game for the 150th time. So, you know, there's got to be something in there to discover and to peel back. So, I totally hear you now the flip side of that, which I put in there is is are the mechanics to innovative. And I just wanted to bring out because I have seen this also, I just wanted to kind of bring this out, which I discussed on a game tech within the last year. I don't remember exactly when it was, but I kind of posited in that I didn't have any specific research to back me up other than just kind of anecdotal evidence. But I pretty strongly believe that if you're putting in an innovative mechanic or something something that really truly has not been seen before, not just taking something from Colomay and something from Colomby and putting them together. That's that hasn't been put together before, but but a totally unique mechanic. I really think that you got to limit yourself to one of those new things. In a game. Oh, absolutely. If you try to put in two or three totally different things, you're going to lose the players. It's going to be much, much harder to learn. And, you know, there's games that try to do that. But you're really going to be limiting your audience in terms of the players that are going to get over that hump. And again, this also talks to your target market. Because if your target market is, you know, war gamers that have played, you know, this game in this game in this game. And you, you know, you kind of know what you think they've probably played already. Then you can build on what you expect your audiences played. If you're going for a general audience or it's a simple family game, then you can't necessarily assume that there's certain mechanics. Maybe somebody's never done deck building before. You know, so you got to kind of look and say what what what is going to be new for these people versus, you know, they they have some basis to build on. Yeah, it's interesting because with. the dominion, the innovative mechanic was the deck building, and that's about, then that is all the game is. And I think that's probably a real secret of its success. Once everybody becomes familiar with deck building and plays a ton of dominion, well then some of them may say, "Gee, you could probably use this kind of idea in other games." And of course, that's what happened. And then people are adding more into deck builders. But for Donald to do that right out of the gate might have been a huge mistake. Yeah, I 100% agree. In fact, that was one of the big examples I used in that segment. I mean, if deck building had, if the first deck building game that came out had been like nightfall with that chaining mechanic or even thunderstorm, I don't think it would have been as popular, it wouldn't have been as adapted. I mean, somebody would have had to extract that and then piece it together in a different way. So, yeah, I think the purity of dominion that there's no real theme, there's nothing else going on. Everything else is really, really straightforward is what made it as popular because it really put the focus on the innovation. Yep. And an example of the other thing you were talking about, I just got GMT's game Talon, which is a Jim Crowen design. Now Talon goes back and takes the feel of things like Starfleet Battles and of course is trying to streamline it. Starfleet Battles is sort of the advanced squad leader of air combat kind of thing. Right. So Talon really streamlines it and with some fresh new innovative methods of doing it, where you don't have to look at a lot of charts and boy, people are raving about this game. So here's an example of just sort of, you know, there's a fan base, there's people who love war games, they love to get in, you know, a little bit of air combat and stuff and fight a game that's much more accessible and shorter with good scenarios to do the same thing. So he's not reinventing the wheel, but he's really making a better wheel for a large part of the audience and, you know, those people are responding right away. Yeah, that's when I definitely want to check out and I kind of fell into this trap a little bit with our first game, the Aries Project, where it was, you know, the kind of the core mechanic of playing cards behind your screen in a hidden fashion was as far as I knew had never been done before. But then on top of that, we had tons of special powers and different things and the four different factions and all these things that broke the rules and I didn't recognize how that was going to dramatically ramp up the learning curve. I really learned the hard way on that and it's hard as a designer because I had been playing the core game for three years, right. So for me, to add this other little twist on top of it was like not that much, not that much cognitive overload. And you know, a lot of the play testing we did, we kind of did like an introductory game and stuff like that. So we didn't really see it as much. So I learned a lot by going through that process of not piling on the innovations on top of each other. Oh, yeah. I've piled a lot on and stuff gets published. Fortunately, most of the time now and you do the same thing, we just, we just peel off some boxes we can, near the end, to get something that's accessible. Okay. So our second question is, and this is interesting. Somebody brought this up on the guild or one of the areas as something to think about. But we, so it's definitely out there and people are interested in. Number two is, are there moves or actions that players always take and can these be eliminated or changed? Yeah, there certainly are and I'll tell you a little story because very often when I'm designing, especially early in the game, there'll be moves that everybody takes. And I was showing a game once like that to a publisher who said, you know, Mike, since everybody's doing the same thing and it certainly seemed to be the best thing to do for the first couple rounds. Why don't we just just put that already on the board in this case or just make that, you know, making the starting of the game a little bit later where you just sort of do these things automatically. You give the people some resources or you give the people some money and you know, that really opened my eyes to, yeah, why not, right? Yep. Because you'd like people, even from the beginning of a game, to have a little bit of a feel that there's more than one way to go. And yes, if there's something everybody just does by road, then get it in the basic rules, get it out of the actual play and move on from there. Yeah, absolutely. And I've also kind of seen that in design sometimes, you know, everybody is collecting, you know, rocks on the first turn, you know, and that's it. So just give some people some extra rocks, get some rocks and go from there. So yeah, you got to make sure that, or if there's a certain situation where there's only one choice to be made, see if you can either throw in an extra choice or just kind of build that in so that it happens automatically, you know, don't kind of straightjack at the player and that they have to use an action to do it. And try to come up with some way around that. So I think that's a really important one too. Again, you're looking at streamlining things, you're looking at making it more exciting for the players. So you want to get rid of the road kind of treasury. And this is one of those questions. I think we have a definite answer for it because pretty sure that if players sit down and everybody in the game is doing the exact same move for the entire game, not sure that's going to be a good thing. So, right. I think that's a safe one to say. Yeah. And even another way to handle that, even if like maybe player one takes rock and player two takes brick and player three takes wheat or whatever. You know, if that's the way it always tends to go, but it's not always player one takes rock, but those three things are taken on the first round. You know, by three players, maybe consider like throwing an extra card, you know, have three sets of cards and they draw randomly and this one starts with extra rock and this one starts with extra brick and this one starts with extra corn or whatever. And something like that also to kind of just jump past it even if it is a little bit variable, but still somewhat scripted. Yeah, absolutely. So the next one is, do you give players incentives to do interesting things? This is a very loaded area. So, yeah. This is what we could probably do like three shows just on this question. I think so. Yeah. And for this question, I got to give full credit to Gil Hova, design of Battle Merchants and Prolics and. Oh, and here comes Ned. Was it Network? Is that the Networks? Yeah, in Bad Man. Yes. Anyway, Gil's a great guy and talented designer and yeah, he kind of crystallizes and it was something that was always kind of bouncing around in the back of my mind, but you know, the way he phrased it like this was like one of those like moments was like, oh, yeah, of course, you want to do that. And you know, the idea is that if there's things you, you know, fun things in the game that the players can do, make it worth their while to do them. Don't get in the way of them doing that. And you know, just a practical example of that in our upcoming game, Dragon and Flag and we kind of got stuck in a little bit of a rut. And on retrospect, this is going to sound incredibly simple, but you know, we had, you know, there was some basic moves and then there were these really cool moves that you could do, but the cool moves a lot of times needed certain conditions and they were harder to pull off like there was a, you know, the rogue has a pickpocket action, but they got to be behind somebody and they have to be carrying an item and where, you know, there was certain things you got to, you got to do if you're standing on a table or if you're underneath a table or whatever, you know, there was just, it was certain moves that were harder to pull off. And so people weren't doing them in the game. They were just doing the basics, swing my sort of front of me or, you know, moving around and things like that. And so it wasn't as much fun as we wanted because they weren't, you know, we had all these cool abilities that we had put down and we had people just weren't doing them. And so what we ended up doing is you said, you know, we really want people to do these. So we just started jacking up the rewards that you get, you know, if they succeed, you know. You know, maybe in retrospect, it sounds kind of obvious that you would do that, but, you know, we put in less of a penalty if they didn't work in addition to making them rewards much, much better if they did work. And that really changed the whole complexion of the game because all of a sudden the cool stuff was all over the place. And even if it didn't work, it was fun because it usually failed in a spectacular way. So, you know, just again, this was just like, you know, I was just actually, in this example, I was reading through an early version of this checklist and that just popped out at me, you know, incentivized player to do interesting things. Yeah, you know, I'm not really doing it the way that I should. I need to make even more incentives to the players to do the cool stuff. So, right. And I, you know, this is a, this is not such a simple answer, though, because what happens as you know is when you increase the value of certain things, it can have a ripple effect throughout the game. So, because of what other things are valued at. So, when I go that I go through this kind of thing all the time. In fact, the big, including me, I was, I just had a plate test as best weekend of a card, a legacy card game I'm doing. And, you know, I really came up with a fun thing, you know, and I wanted, so I just said, I'm just putting in here, watch people light up. Oh boy, I can do this. And all I got was why in the world would I do this? Because I'm not, I'm not going to get points. I'm not going to, it's not going to develop. I'm wasting cards on this when, when there are other things I could be doing instead. And I just said, well, that's fun, though, right? And so, I real, so, so I do a bargaining. I say, okay, how many points should this be before you'll do it? And so, so we had that discussion. And I certainly came away, at least with an idea of, but it is going to have a ripple effect through other things, too. But yeah, it's It's very important. And as a designer, I'm always thinking, oh, this is the fun part, right? But if I don't make it obvious that, you know, or some good incentive to do it, a lot of gamers are there to win the game as they should be. They plan the game and want to do the best they can. So they're going to evaluate things on that basis, whereas I'm usually evaluating them and how much fun they are, you know, when I'm first making the game. So we really need that balance, you know, we need somebody to say, hey, you know, this is a really cool way to play, but you're never going to win if you take that path. You're never going to win if you try this or that. So those kind of things are important. Right. Or just rewarding players or potentially rewarding players in, you know, it doesn't have to be victory points. It means there's other ways to do it. But to try to do, you know, crazy stuff and interesting stuff and things like that, you know, you know, like they get, they get powers, they get some cool effect, but, you know, something that makes them sort of excited and they can see it in game terms. Exactly. Yeah, reward your players for doing fun stuff because that means they're going to do the fun stuff. Yes. Question number four, will a new player have an idea of what a good play is early in the game? Another really important question, I think. Yeah. And this goes back to the show that we did on heuristics and this concept of a heuristic ladder in that, you know, when somebody sits down, especially with a new game, it can be kind of intimidating and people also can sometimes just, you know, you don't want to have it so people can just bone themselves right out of the gate that also in their hose and they've made, you know, the bad move on the first turn because it's there, but nobody should ever do it. You want to make sure that you have some indications of the direction that you kind of want to go in early in the game. Yes. So it's a big area. I'll never forget playing H esteem for the first time and I'm playing with some of my good friends who were just cut throat gamers and there's no way they're giving me any clue. Right. So they start off making some connections and turn three, I am bankrupt. So I am out of that. I can't do anything. I'm out of the game and they're, "Ha ha ha. We'll watch this. We'll show you how to play." So they do the rest. Which is fun. It's an unforgiving, heavy game. That's what it's for. But to have a little bit of forewarning is an ice idea. Something Mike Ray says comes to my mind here. Mike is a big believer in rule books of having little sidebar quotes or little sidebar reminders, maybe from the designer or from some character he got in the game. So it can come in. You know, you can have your rules going on and you can come in and say, "Oh, you know, a little tip on your first game. Try to at least get to this. Have this and this and this by the end of your first turn or something." Those kind of things at least give you something. Now most simple games just in the object of the game will tell you something. Right. Like you're trying to get the most points by completing the most roots in the ticket of ride. And so you could see, "Okay, I got this big ticket. I better start building from here to there." So those kind of things are really helpful. And certainly ticket of ride has some depth in how you're exactly going to go about that. But at least the person has sort of a clear idea. Well, here's sort of the overall. Right. Giving them short-term goals is a terrific way to deal with this. Ticket of ride is a really good example of that. Another is, you know, and it doesn't have to be an explicit, like handing the goals to the player. It could be like in splendor. You've got that whole row of like level one gems that you can buy. And it's really, you know, and when you have a first-time player, you say, "Look, here's the first row. You're going to want to go from one of these initially." And it's really clear right there, "Okay, you get this one. I need one red and two blues." And so there's my short-term goal. And so at least I get some passos for a couple of turns and then they're kind of off to the races from there. Yeah, I know you're right. That's an excellent example of that. And I have played, you know, even some simple games that don't do quite enough in that area. And you're sort of, you know, people are saying, "Well, what should I do?" You know, and that's probably a problem. Yep, yep, absolutely. And I've pointed to this example before about one of the poster trials for this in my mind is the Martin Wallace game and I love Martin Wallace. But the Martin Wallace game struttle is Struggle of Empires, which has at the very beginning of the game it puts out like these 172 special power tiles that you get to pick from at the beginning of the game. Oh, yeah. You have no idea. No idea what you're doing. What's really what's good and what's bad and what's anything. And so it presents you with the most possible choices at the first thing. And your choice is actually less than as the game goes on because the tiles go away. So it's kind of reverse of what you want. You want fewer constrained choices early on until the player is kind of get their feet under them and then you open it up. Yeah, you would certainly think so. If you want the game to be somewhat accessible, now there's different groups of players, right? I mean, you look at stuff and fell design, maybe a tragion or something and, you know, how to try to know what's really going on on that first couple moves is not really there. So but an experienced Stefan fell player will figure out, well, I know sort of the ways to get points out just big one. And so they're comfortable with that. Whereas other people might be a little intimidated. Okay. Question number five. Can any mechanics be eliminated or simplified? The answer by the way to this question is always the same. It's yes. It's always the same. You may not think it's there, but I guarantee you it's there. Yes, is the answer. Yeah. And we've talked about this a lot, but it's, yeah, you know, you want to always go back and constantly look at it about what you can do or the ways to deal with it. You want to look at the mechanics in light of your target audience. You want to look at the complexity of the mechanics in terms of the theme. You know, you want to look at all that stuff is all of this supporting what you're trying to do and making the game fun for the players. Anything that you can take out, take it out. And you know, you know, when I find this stuff out the most is when I'm writing a very late version of the rules. I always keep sort of notes of my rules as I go and I try to make the make some sense along the way, but it always gets down to when I sit down. Now I'm going to try to really structure the rulebook. And I'll find every time. You know, because of this little exception I made here, I got to put three more sentences in this rulebook. Yep. And I'll say to myself, is it really necessary? And I'll always say no. So I'll just take it out. You know, that's kind of the real test. Am I able to explain the game without, and for me especially, I'm always, you know, I tend to go for little exceptions because they'll enhance the theme or they'll deepen the strategy. But boy, that drives players crazy. If you have, you know, a nice, clean rule system and yet you have all these little, but in this case, you do this instead and that and all that stuff will just gum off the works as it goes. Yeah, absolutely. If you're having problems writing a rule, that's usually a sign that there's a problem with the rule. Yeah, absolutely. But that is your canary in the coal mine. Yeah, and I think this, this is one of the most important things. Because that final product, right, we're trying to make in the end of product that people are going to sit down and enjoy that final product is going to be dependent on how smooth all this is. So the next one is which mechanics are not intuitive and are you taking appropriate steps to explain or ease players in? Yeah, so it's okay to have mechanics that are not intuitive, you know, especially, you're trying to do something that's innovative and fresh kind of by definition that may be a little bit more challenging for people to understand and wrap their heads around. But you got to try to do everything that you can to make it easier for people to understand that. And, you know, and the first step, obviously, is just recognizing that it's not that this one is not going to be intuitive for people. And that's one of the, you know, one of the great things you'll get at a play testing, of course, is see where people get tripped up and you got to keep your eyes open for that and see what rules people are missing up, what things are stumbling. Yeah, and I think the goal is to make those things, those mechanics end up being intuitive, you know, with the learning experience. So I think it's a little more than even that they're not intuitive to start because I think you really do need them to flow at some point. I mean, if the guy's playing for the eighth time and still can't. Oh, yeah. Well, then you got to problem. That's yeah, problem. Big problems. But yeah, and there's a lot of ways to tackle that. I mean, one is just the way it's presented in the rules. Do you know what kind of examples do you have in the rules to try to show what it is? Another is the graphic design on the components. You know, you can have symbology. Sometimes it's the physical nature of the components themselves as a way to try to ease in. Just a quick story, which is probably not going to make any sense because nobody's seeing what I'm trying to do. But I'm working on a new game right now about, which I may have mentioned, but about quarks and subatomic particles because physics major and sure why not. And kind of the core mechanic is this quantum mechanic worker placement thing. Oh boy. Where you actually put two workers, every time you place workers, you have a pair of workers and you put one on one action and one on another action. But only one of them will actually be real. The other one will be virtual. So when it's your turn, if you want to activate one of your workers, then you pick which one of the pairs is you're actually going to do. And that can also set up a chain reaction of other workers triggering depending from other players, depending on who's sharing some of those spaces with you. Oh, so you can go where other people are too? Right. and trying to piggyback off of what other people are doing. If you say, yeah, you know, you have Oppa to workers down, but I'm pretty confident that that's the one that he really wants to do. You can per one of your workers there, which is gonna give you basically a free action. So that's kind of a form of panic. But following that chain around the different actions has been difficult for people sometimes. And once again, usually once you get to your second game, it makes sense or by the end of the first game, it's making sense to people, but I've been spending a tremendous amount of time just working on the physical presentation of how you do those chain reactions. Do I have a giant pawn that just moves from one to the next? I even experimented with workers that were connected by a string. - Oh, oh, it is. - So you could visually trace out the connections of how the particles were entangled with each other. And that looked really cool. And I like the, it was a lot easier in a way to visualize how things were gonna jump around because you could just follow the strings. But the strings got all tangled up and it just became. - Just a actual mechanic, except it just became kind of hard. And you jostle everybody else's workers and stuff like that. But I went to, - But you tried. - Tries in the arch and craft store and I bought beads and I bought strings. And now I'm looking at a system that's got little arrows and you kind of like can point the workers towards each other. So you can remember which ones are pairs and things like that. - Okay. - So I'm spending a lot of effort, not, you know, the mechanic is the same mechanic, you know. The mechanic hasn't changed for a year, right? But I've just been working on different physical representations of the same mechanic as a way to make it more intuitive for the players because I know that that's, that's, you know, everything else at the game is simple. You know, if you can get your head around that, the rest of it is following my rule of only one innovation. The rest of it is just, you know, set collection basically. - So, I have a, I have a, I have a similar story from a different angle, but you know, the card game I'm doing, I have one card that you play and two, I thought it was very clever to, to involve all the players on this particular card play because that reduces downtime, you know, people are not just waiting around with their turn. Somebody plays this card, everyone's gonna be involved. So, so there's a lot of things to it and they get involved and, you know, they're doing things and then I discovered when I'm watching groups play this, at the end of that, they have no idea whose turn it is. Like, as then somebody does have to finish their turn. It's just, it's sort of this interruption in the turn. - Right. - Yep. - They get, well whose turn wasn't anyway? Well, I don't know, we had no idea. We all did these cool things. (laughs) So, I've been working on that, whether, you know, I have reduced the number of crazy things that happened when you play the card, I put them somewhere else and then I've got this huge meeple that like a start player, right, and so, or the turn, the person on turn. So, you just sort of have to remember. You got to remember to pass it around the circle, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - But that's something I sort of hate to have to do that, but, you know, players do appreciate the absence of downtime, but, you know, you gotta look at those little things. Are they gonna know, you know, are they gonna be able to hold on to the main structure of the game at that point? So. - Right, and another thing to look at is just the thematic representation of what it is also. - Yes. - You know, sometimes you can recast a mechanic and just call it something else and that'll make it click for the players too. - Yeah. - So definitely something that you gotta look at and say, have I done everything that I can on this tricky mechanic to make sure that it's easy for the players? Okay, question number seven, it's the one that I always loose sleep over. Or are there, are there, are there, - This isn't the lightning round. - Are there any degenerate or extreme strategies? Is there a dominant strategy? - Yeah, this is all, this is, of course, this can have different answers in different categories of games. But I mean, the one thing you wanna watch out for is one dominant strategy, right? That just becomes so, you know, the Halifax hammer from Martin Wallace's few acres of snow. And I don't even know how to do that, but very soon everybody was sort of showing it online. And that's seem to be dominant. So those kind of thing. And sometimes you can't catch them in game design because you could only play that so much. If it's a complex game. But those kind of things, if it's obvious that there's sort of one way to win, you know, players lose interest very often. - Right, and you're gonna look for things like somebody just doing basically one extreme thing the whole time. Like what happens if somebody only takes this one resource? Or what happens if somebody only pursues, you know, building, building, building, building, or just tries to discard cards as fast as they can or whatever your mechanic is. You know, what happens if somebody takes just one little corner of it of your multifaceted game and just tries to do that massively? Is that gonna break stuff? 'Cause sometimes it does. And as a designer in your head, you say, oh, this is the way it's supposed to be played. So you kind of play it that way and you think about it that way. And then sometimes you'll get, then you're gonna get players that are gonna go to one extreme and, you know, do some kind of edge case and are gonna literally break the game. - Yeah, and I also find out this is, what I'm gonna say is a little bit related to a later question. So I won't go into too much detail, but it's also related to this one. And that is, there can be a strategy that can, what I call, freeze the game. And I was just the other day playing one. And I, you know, maybe it's this an evil streak in me, but if I see that in a game, or I think I see it in a game, I'll do it. And the designer will always say to me, but Mike, you're not playing to try to win the game. And I said, you know, but I'm playing by the rules, right? - Yep. - He says, oh yeah, you're playing by the rules. Well, I said just a note, I said, I mean, I would think about whether or not you're just allowing a rule to completely stop the game. I mean, there was no way the game would ever finish. There was no way anybody else would be able to do anything. And I said, you know, I just, I'm just saying, it's a little dangerous, I think. - Yeah, I totally agree. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And I think another relating issue with that is, you know, sometimes you'll get infinite loops. I know there was, I think it was Glass Road, maybe. It was one of the reasons that had an infinite loop where you could produce this resource, which is this resource, which should go back and let you produce the first resource again. And you could just go around in circles forever. So, you know, you wanna look for those kind of combos, you gotta be careful about how things feed back into each other and just make sure that you've, you've looked at these extreme edges. And some playtesters will look for that. Like you, that's why you're a great playtester. 'Cause you know, you're always looking for it. And I look for that too. I mean, that's, you know, I'm always looking for the cheap and easy way to break the game. - Messing up the game for some way. - Yeah, and, you know, whereas, but I think most playtesters and most players, when they sit down, will kind of get a feel for, oh yeah, I gotta do a little bit of this a little bit of that and they'll, they'll, they'll purchase it that way. And so they may not uncover immediately your, you know, any underlying issues in the mechanics of the game. - I play Glass Road a lot and I like it a lot. I got the app now too. I think the app is well done. And I never saw that combo. The combo is, it's pretty rare. I'm not sure, you know, you would have to do so much playtesting to play with every combination of buildings in that game. And I think that's, you know, that's a task. Like we used to have in trading card games. As she said, "Have you looked, no, "we can't look at every single combination probably, "but you have to sort of look at the groups of types "and figure out is there anything here that you think?" You know, but I think, you know, some really, I mean, players will find it. Players that are smart will sit there and they'll find it. And I think there was, there's an easy fix suggested where they did, I think they redid the building actually, or they removed it or something from the next edition. So there's easy fixes for some of that. So that doesn't bother me. Those little edge ones as much as sort of the main, you know, the main ones do. That could be more of a problem, I guess. - Okay. Number eights are the start positions sufficiently balanced. And this is a very interesting question. Now, do you always check, "Jefferance is the basic one to be first player. "Is there a first player advantage? "Do you think about that in your game design?" I'm sure it crosses your mind. - Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, fortunately, you know, I mean, it depends on the game also. You know, like, you know, most of the first couple games I did were either simultaneous, cooperative, or you know, they had so many turns that it really didn't make as much of a difference. But, you know, really, the biggest one was survive space attack and survive has a huge advantage for the first player. But, you know, because of the nature of the game, it's kind of a family game and, you know, it's not perceived, I guess, in that way, but that we just kind of let it go. We didn't bother trying to address it, because anything we would have done to address it would have just made things much more complicated. And again, you gotta balance then, you've got extra rules versus, you know, how much it's gaining. And so, you know, again, you don't have to answer every question, you know, positively and say as long as you're aware of it and you've made a conscious decision on what to do. - Yeah, there are a lot of, I noticed that's one of the common things for gamers, serious gamers to adjust. I've found every post and stuff about games. I'll say, well, you know, we think there's a first player advantage, so we just do this. We give a little more to the last player on their own. They just make that. Now, they may be wrong or right. I don't know how many times they play until they come to that decision, but there are usually fixes. And of course, a lot of games will do the second, third, fourth player will get more resources to start than the first player or something. So, you know, there are a lot of ways to adjust that. The tricky games are the ones with powers, and a start position on a board, you know, some more. games and stuff. Now of course when you're playing scenario war games I never find that an issue because I'm loving unbalanced scenarios of actual historical battles for instance. I don't find that at all. But if you're trying to do sort of a quote unquote balanced war game where everybody starts in a certain country whatever and they can choose or whatever. So it's hard sometimes to make sure that all those positions are balanced. Yeah and I think honestly it's impossible for it to be perfectly balanced. I think every game because you're kind of quantized in what you can give people. Maybe you give somebody an extra resource. Well maybe that you know it's it's very unlikely that giving them one extra resource or extra resources going to exactly balance it out. Right. So that is 50/50 chance or whatever. So you know you're always a little over a little under or something. So it's you know you just want it to be that's why we put in there kind of sufficiently balanced is the way the question reads. Yeah and I think that's a good one. Question number nine. This is an interesting one I think. Is the winner end out until the end of the game? Is your win curve? I'll define that in a second. Appropriate for the game and is there a snowball effect? So these are all kinds of sort of related questions about whether you know they reach as a point where just the winner is is just no longer endowed and although sometimes that may not be bad thing. You know certainly in chess people resign all the time. You're still very few very few games of chess go to the very end. Well you know when you reach a tournament level. When I first started designing games in the early 90s the if I was going to a mass market game company the first question was can any player win until the last turn and if I said not really because you could build up a pretty good business. Well then we're not interested. It was this was the really this this was like every player has to feel they could win until the game is over. Now that that makes it that's a tough challenge to design something interesting. Yeah. That has some stuff to it so yeah so I I sort of dismissed that well I'm probably not going to be doing a lot of those kind of games it just doesn't doesn't seem to be that interesting. So so I tell us what a win curve means. Well I kind of define that as and it's it's it's it's basically impossible to actually draw a picture of it but just conceptually it's let's say you have a 10 turn game okay if I have a lead after the first turn you know what are my chances of winning the game is basically what it is so you know as you get closer to the end you know on turn nine if I have a lead do I have a 90% chance of winning or do I have a 100% chance of winning you know if I have a slight lead on turn one is that giving me a 90% chance of winning you know I think that's a problem if if a little lead can snowball into big things I mean even like with chess you know if if people are really good if you get a tiny lead that can sometimes that can be enough to start you know you snowballing and gain stuff there's games like outpost from Tim Jim games which you know has a the original version had a had a big snowball problem is once you got money it was easy to get more money and so if you got that early lead you had a much higher percentage so you know so there are some games where early lead snowball and go to you know and after turn one you have a 90% chance of winning if you're ahead then there are games that are the opposite where you know the first eight out of 10 turns don't even matter right yes that's right you know and and after turn eight if you have you know it's if it's a four player game you know and you you have a lead after turn eight you know maybe you only has still only have a 25% chance of winning you know just the same as any of the other four players because things escalate and can get so crazy or maybe it's 27% instead of 25% you know it's just a teeny bit of an edge whereas I think you know on turn eight if I'm ahead on turn eight out of 10 and it's a four player game I would hope I would have maybe a 40% chance hit you percent chance 60% chance of winning at that point something like that so that's my concept of the win curve yes and you'd like to have your play like if you played really well for a certain number of turns you'd like to have a little bit of chance of winning the game by the end right the um I have I have a couple of interesting comments on this a couple of games to to quickly talk about that are in the opposite ends of this scale and work for their audience um but there is one thing be careful in in designs that there is a maximum number of points you can get per turn or there's kind of a best you know like you can easily count because I've seen gamers do this all the time they sort of calculate well I need x number of points per turn to be able to get sort of the number that you need to win or or be ahead and they're really good at that and they can really predict you know very easily so if the game is kind of um closed in a sense or really controlled I'll say controlled that can be an issue the first game I mentioned is oh my goods by Alexander Fister which is a race for the galaxy San Juan kind of game except that in both in both race for the galaxy and San Juan crazy things can happen and somebody can have huge leads and combos right so I think Alexander wanted a more euro feel and you know your game is certainly like this more is where it's controlled so the pace of the game is controlled so I notice we were playing play several games and every game was within two or three points because you can only do one building a turn basically and the building spread on points was very limited two three or four and it was fun it was a lot of interesting things in the game but I found myself sort of feeling like all the the first seven eight turns were kind of well I'm I have to stay with the craft you know I have to keep doing what they do just to stay in it and then you hope something happens late to get a few extra points now the opposite of that and and that's a good game by the way oh my goods is very good the audience you know those euro gamers alike that kind of stuff will enjoy it the opposite is splatters game uh food chain magnet have you played this yet Jeff I have not played it but I've set it up and pushed some pieces around this this game is the is the epitome of critical mass games I always considered settlers a guitar and a game about critical mass because when you get to a point where you're getting x number of resources basically every turn around some of the obvious numbers you pick critical mass and you can I mean it's just when in two turns whatever three turns fast this this food chain magnet has the combos in it where sometimes we'll be in the fifth turn and somebody's monopolized soda or something and he's monopolized the advertising and he's selling it to all the stores and I mean it's just the money just starts piling in and everyone else realizes we have no foothold we have no way to get enough employees to get enough traction going right and it's it's an interesting thing I'm not sure it's a bad thing the game is so dynamic and exciting for those few you know those first few turns somebody hits it okay we just say okay you know we're done and and we move on because if you do play it out it gets a little dull but it even says in the rules if I remember correctly an introduction or the strategy tips or something it says that you can set yourself up to be like nowhere but win completely just win on a single turn on like the last turn game yes it can be any turn yeah and and I you know so I think there's an appeal to that is just the complete opposite you know right there's this critical mass base of sort of keeping everything closed to the end of the game that's that's very likely not going to happen right there's a lot of ways to approach this yeah and you know and it depends on the effect that you're going for and we go back to that experience question you know again there's no right answer to this but you should look at your game and say you know if somebody's ahead early does that mean it's that the other players are going to have a huge uphill battle or or you know on the other side are your first couple of turns disposable and if they don't impact the game at all maybe you should get rid of them or short circuit them in some way or something so you know that's that's something that you want to that you definitely want to look at yeah and and and my my ideas are always well you know spice it up with sub randomizers some luck in there and you know give everybody sort of a feel they they have a way back right or on the other side you know I put in a a fuse breaker which is kind of what we did in aries project that you could reach a situation where it would be basically impossible for the other player to come back and win the game but when that condition was reached we put in basically that triggered one of the end game conditions basically that's so you know which we didn't have we specifically put that end game condition in there to to deal with that situation so that one player just wasn't you know sitting there smack in her head against the wall while the other person solely granted granted them down yeah because a member in sports like softball there's a mercy rules sometimes yep team gets that 12 that's it you know you're gonna you're gonna end the game now question number 10 will a new player occasionally beat an experienced player how often and of course is the appropriate for the experience if you're making chess you know you certainly want that to be occasionally if at all right and then in another game you'd want everybody to have a chance it wouldn't be you know the skill level or the experience level would be that if it shoots in ladders then the the skill level makes absolutely no difference so there's a huge range there and again you got to decide what how heavy this is how long it is the types of players you're attracting and stuff like that so I will tell you it makes a big difference when you're doing a legacy game because you've got to take care of the person is falling behind now in a game like pandemic legacy they take care of the team that's losing a lot but that's cooperative but in though in the one I'm doing and watching Rob Davio C-Full develop you you really have to be aware of somebody has has an insurmountable lead by the fifth game and you're respecting everybody to play 20. Maybe there's a problem there. All right. So finding some ways to sort of keep the pack somewhat close and that kind of experience is a different challenge. OK. Question 11. Is anyone actually eliminated from the game? Is this appropriate to how long they may have to wait until the game ends? And this is something that fortunately is less of an issue now than it was back in the 70s and the 80s. But there still are games that feature player elimination. King of Tokyo. Yep. Now and it's interesting because that that was the problem in getting that game published several companies weren't interested because of player elimination. But in that game, the collapse after that is pretty quick. Yeah. And that's really I think the key is that you want to have you don't want to have a five hour game where somebody gets eliminated in hour one. So diplomacy, of course, famously has that issue. It gets it done. So yeah. Number 12. Is there player downtime? And if so, is it appropriate for the target audience and experience? Is downtime ever appropriate for the target audience and experience? I mean, a lot of downtime. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm certainly curious about, but I don't know the answer. Well, you know, I maybe tastes have changed now, but I mean, you know, look, when I was in college in the 80s, we were playing these massive war games, war in Europe and stuff like that. Where one side would take like four hours to play. And you would sit there and kind of watch them and chat and, you know, or you just let them come in over the weekend and make their move. And then you would come in later, they'd let you know when they were done. So, you know, yeah, there's games that get like that. So it can be all over the map. I've seen players in games with what I've considered normal downtime, maybe a minute or two minutes before it should turn again. And they're on their phones and their iPads playing some other game. So I think the, you know, the expectation for the audience now is to have themselves involved in something. And if the game isn't involving them, they'll go find something else at that time, which I think like if you do, I do a game now with a lot of downtime, you should provide some side entertainment in the game, like maybe another game each person. And actually, a little mini game, fresh versus a lot of waiting for Bob to take his turn. That's right. I think that would go well. Okay. Question, question number 12 is 13 now. This is the final question. Yes, it is. And it is appropriately about the end of the game. So what in the mechanics drives the game towards a conclusion? Very, very important question. Yes. And every, I mean, almost every design I do at some point, I'm saying, wait a minute, how am I going to move this game along? I do like to have a part of the game system driving this because I just can't 100% depend on players to do that. So I like them to sense the tension that, oh, this game's going to be over whether it's turns, whether it's how many things you do, you know, whatever it is, the deck running out or something, something that will actually be an important conclusion. Yeah. And I, I, you know, I play test a lot of games and, you know, I go to these conventions and things that, you know, have a lot of designers coming in and, and pitching stuff and some are more polished than others. Typically, these are not. A lot of these are first time game designers. And this probably more than anything is one of the biggest issues that I see is that there's nothing that's necessarily driving something towards the end that you know, for sure the game is going to finish. I had one where like there were these combinations of dice that needed to happen in order for things to trigger that would move it towards the end. But if you actually did the math, it was like crazy. It was unlikely that these things would happen. Whatever. You know, and after like an hour and a half, I was like, you know, we just got in this now. Well, you know, that's pretty good. You're that, you're, you know, you're that patient. Yeah. I was involved. I mean, I just was involved one that was so bad this weekend. I mean, oh, that, that, that, that, I mean, there was some good ideas. But as one of these games were your damage where everybody is damaging these robots and the person who does the last piece of damage gets the points and takes the robot. Kill still. Yeah, it's supposed to be a light filler game. But I'm sorry. I expect more now, even from my light filler games, because I'm sitting there in any role I get if it's 12 damage, if I get six, I'm just setting up an explorer or the guy up to that. There is no sort of idea of, you know, being the person is actually going to finish the robot off. And then all they did to add strategy was they had a bunch of cards that all the cards do is extend the game. And they were telling me, no, no, no, it's just, it's, it's playing a reaction. You can, you can mess that guy up. He can't do any damage this turn. He can't roll a dice this turn. This and that. I said, but yes, but if you look at the cards as an aggregate, every card extends the length of the game, every single card. So, so I went back on, on one of Mike Ray to mention Mike again, he's such a great guy, but who is the head of Hasbro games for so long. Mike has a, has a rule at his house when you're gaming that you can pick has a big dog bone sitting by the gaming table. If somebody is done with the game and this can happen on any turn, like I, I wish I had a bone after about the third turn of this game. I was in Saturday. You can pick up the bone and put it over the board and say, I'm done. Now, if any other player grabs that bone as well, the game is over. But if nobody else does, you have committed to play the rest of the game. And I think that's, that's what you, that's a good idea to drive a game to a conclusion sometimes. Just put the bone in every box. That's right. The bone's got to be in every box. Yeah, but, but you've got to think about that and you got to think about the length of the game. It's the length of the game appropriate. I think we talked about that more in the experience section, but you know, that's kind of tied into this is, is something's got to make the game end. And don't rely on, we talked about edge cases and stuff like that and people trying to break your game. This is one of those areas where if you're not paying attention, somebody's going to break your game and can make your game go on forever. And people are going to want to hunt you down and kill you and you want that. So, yeah, you've got to, there's, there's got to be some positive thing that makes it go. You know, I was testing a game just Saturday, just a couple of days ago. And we were, you know, it was a really neat little game and we decided to tweak the rules. Even though the designer wasn't there, just we were just playing testing another game. And we decided to tweak it, but we realized that with our tweak, one of the kind of the, one of the things that needed to happen to make sure the game ended wasn't always necessarily how it was much less likely to happen. It was never guaranteed to happen, but it was less likely to happen. So we had to make another tweak to make sure that a certain resource always came into again. Just make sure there was a constant push towards making the game. Having some forward momentum in the game, you've got to have that momentum. Yes, you do. And here's another thing that I think has gotten better over the years. On the box, make sure that length of play has some connection with reality. And there was, there was a big time in gaming where the box would say 30 minutes and you were in for two hours, you know, either way. Now I think they're a little closer. Yeah. And one of the reasons is a lot of them will go to this time per player. So as you're testing and stuff, really take note of how long it takes to play a game. I mean, it's just a nice thing to do so that people can say, okay, we need this much of time if we're going to give this game a fair shake. And not try to rush through something and realize guy really halfway done. And, you know, we still got another hour to go. So that kind of thing. Yeah. And, you know, it's always a judgment call. Do you want to try to do that with experienced players or beginning players, you know, stuff like that? But yeah, you should try to be as realistic as you can on there. Yep. I think it is time, Jeff, for the ludilateral lighting round. Sounds good, Mike. And this time it's for mechanics. Yes. And we start off with a very sort of simple question. What is your favorite mechanic in games? That is a very, very difficult question. I'm sure there's one of you. Like when you know is that kind of game, you just start salivating. Sure. I'm looking over the big list. Yeah. Look at all this of questions. Got to be there. I like programmed actions. Oh, yes. Now programmed actions. Very popular. You know the Robo rally is coming back. I saw that. Yeah. And he's streamed line some of it. He went out and asked players. Yes, he did a survey. I think it was even BGG members. He did a survey, Richard Garfield, of what players would expect and what they would be looking for in a modern version of it. You know, obviously there's some issues with play time with Robo rally in the past and different things. So how can we sort of make that better? And I think he listened to a lot of people and we're going to find that later. But anyway, that's program movement, program movement. Very exciting, right? Because you can have some strategy of picking what you're doing and then seeing what happens. I mean, it's, it's a lot of fun. My, my favorite mechanic by far because there is only one game that I've ever made that doesn't have it. And that game isn't out yet. And I've done, and I've done 70 something games, right? And every one of, and that's hand management. You know, the heart of the game has been, you have a hand of cards and trying to figure out how to proceed. So I love that mechanic. I love the, it puts me in a certain game situation different every time. And hopefully if the game is good enough, you have a, you have a chance to mean. So I think that's what I think is going to be. And I think that's what I think is going to be. mechanics that you would like to use in a game design but have not. Yes, well looking over this list of mechanics on BGG I saw it. I just saw the combination. So it's a singing pattern recognition memory game. I think that's the key. Although I do have a more serious answer, but to me, I guess there must be a game somewhere where you have to sing as a mechanic. Oh sure. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well I just thought that was a good one. But seriously, a song up on it. I mean, there's definitely a good song. That's true. Now the one mechanic I really do want to do is a trading mechanic. I know you've done this, Jeff, so you're way out of me on this. But a game, I'm thinking more of that settler's kind of trading. You know, where you just get stuff during the game and you could negotiate a trade. I really think it's a sweet mechanic, usually for a lighter game maybe, but a lot of fun. When I play settlers at Katan, that's where the fun is for usually most groups I'm playing with. Hey, I got, and I'll give you three weeks for that one brick. Now come on, let's do a deal. That kind of stuff. It could be a lot of fun. Yep. For me, I doesn't have to be this, where was it? Oh yeah. Well, the official mechanic that I pulled off the list was Crayon Rail Systems. But it doesn't have to be rails. I just like the idea of drawing stuff on the board. So I'd love to do a game where you're scribbling stuff on a giant whiteboard or something that's actually the playing surface. Now what you have, now I don't think you're talking about games where you have to draw something recognizable or are you? No, no, no, no, sorry, using it as like, you know, making networks or, you know, putting cities or different things in different locations. I think that's very cool. Number three, name a mechanic in a game that you designed. That was hard for you to eliminate. We were talking about getting rid of certain mechanics and stuff. Can you come up with one that you had a let go of, but you really didn't want to at a time? Oh, plenty. Yeah. More recent example for me is in my World War II game, Fog of War, although it's just a Fog of War now out on BGG. So I may have to change the title off to C. But in my game, Fog of War, for since the beginning of it, we had this strategic warfare system that sort of simulates submarines and bombers where you could actually use them to attack the enemy deck. You basically burn cards off the other guys deck to represent, you know, just degrading his production. And it kind of worked, but it was just like bolted on it. Just wasn't integrated into the system well. And it was just another thing that had to be taught. And in the end, didn't really add a huge amount other than making, you know, other than the fact that there were submarines and bombers in the actual war. So I just kept it in there, kept it in there, kept it in there. And my son Brian kept saying, you got to get rid of strategic warfare for years. And finally, I just, you know, came to, came to embrace it and said, okay, fine, we'll get rid of it. And since then, nobody has ever, I've introduced a game to a ton of war gamers and serious war gamers. And nobody has ever said to me, how come there's no strategic warfare in this? Yeah. Well, I find, I got to play a few times. And I knew I was there and it was interesting. But, you know, there's, there's so much fun in that game for me with the other core, with the other core systems. And I thought to myself, gee, I have to spend some time thinking about this. I'd really rather just stick with the fun of what's happening, you know, on the next turn and stuff. For me, it's in Dragon Island, which is yet to be signed or released. But coming soon, I'll be able to talk more about it. But this is a game that Jeff was in. I was in early play tests, but I used to have point to point movement. You're moving across the silent and you have resources in your wizard. And I, I really got into it first, making the cost of moving into certain terrains different from others. And so that point to point movement, I was really sort of excited. And I even had the wizards leave something behind, kind of a trail to show they were there. And that had implications later on. And as the game developed, other things became highlighted, especially once I got to the Dragon theme and I got treasure maps and different things that people were really having fun with. And I saw that it got to be hard calculation of them to figure out, well, I want to do something at the end of this turn, capture a dragon, it's going to cost me this much. Now I've got to also figure out how I'm going to get there, you know, so sort of like this complicated moving. I need another three or four to get there. So I, in the end, it took a long time. In the end, it sent them itself, you know, I got at least tried this and I just removed the whole thing and said, you go wherever you want to go. So I think I moved across the island, boom. And like you, Jeff, when I started playing it that way, nobody ever said, they're wizards. And I mean, nobody ever said, why am I able to go from here to here? Shouldn't there be like a terrain thing or movement? Not once. They were just having the fun of doing whatever they were doing where they go. Because they're used to that at worker placement, right? Placing the guy anywhere you want to go. So, and that one was hard for me because it was one of the first elements I designed. And so sometimes they can take you a long time to say goodbye to that. Fair enough. Okay. Question number four, of the following games, which you picked the list of. So hopefully you have good answers to these. Which ones do you think do a good job of giving you an early direction of what to do? Well, I tried. Yes, I tried to pick a couple different games to this differently. I believe stick it right is great on this because it clearly shows the goals and the tickets. It gives you short term strategy. It also lets you know what's going to. Going to win the game. So I think that is. That's perfect to doing that. I agree with that. Trajan. Trajan. Yeah, I think most beginning players, certainly not serious gamers have no idea what to do. There's lots of choices and depth. The game is very deep. And once you're playing it and play it several times, I think it's great for those people that like that complex level of game, but there is no help in the early game. I mean, you can play around with. I won't call it a rendezvous. It's really a my callous system. You can play around with that a little bit and do some things, but still I don't think you have an idea how it's going to affect the game yet. Yeah. Trajan, I have not. That's one of the games I got to play. I've not played that one. Yeah, it's very high level stuff and felt. It really is, but I think that's the one area that it that it fails a little bit. Okay. Istanbul. Yeah, I love Istanbul. Clear goal right away at the beginning of the game, you find out the first to get however it is five or six rubies, depending on player cap. And so it's very clear. You got to get the resources. You got to get the money. You got a couple different ways to do it. So boom. And every time the path is going to be different with how the board set up. And so I'm great with that game because I just I understand what I'm doing. And that there's a lot of ways to go about it. So I think that game does also for all time. So you're in. I did because here, you know, we're we're talking about do you have a good idea of what's it a world in the game? Well, yes, you do with. You know, the problem is that's all you do. That's doesn't doesn't necessarily. There is no real choice at any level, but they do get a plus for yes, it's very clear what to do on your first term. So yes, but I love going to throw in a bonus pick for a year. Okay. A greek. Wow. Okay. You're now a greek. Is interesting. I haven't enjoyed playing a greek. I am hoping that this new version this summer is better for me. But I do think a greek a it's a really great design. And I can see the elements because you have this element before you do that before you do that. So I think you can approach a greek. I like well, I want to have a lot of cows or I want to have a lot of this to that. But I'm for me, it is tough to know what I should be doing to ultimately win the game. But at least I do see little chunks you could do. Yeah, I think that's a that's a tough one also. I mean, I I enjoy playing greek. I really like the game, but um, and I think that that's why to a certain extent that the minor occupations that you get and the the items that you can build, I forget what they're called, improvements, the minor improvements. That gives you a little bit of direction in the game. So I think that's nice for that. But other than that, it's just because there's so many different past of victory and because you kind of get penalized for not doing stuff, it's hard to really other than those improvements and occupations just sit down at the table and say, okay, this is what I should be doing the first couple of turns unless an experienced player kind of gives you a couple of tips. Yeah, and it can be a tough game. This new version, they're going to, you know, because I just started playing when people were drafting from all these cards and I didn't know what was going on. But I think this new version is supposed to clean that up a little bit and eliminate a lot of cards and just keep the ones the most people use. So we'll see. Um, question number five, Jeff, what are your thoughts? So I'm going to pick on what I believe to be maybe the most popular mechanic ever, certainly in your old games. Maybe. I mean, it just seems to me it is. I didn't do any real research. But and that is worker placement. So I'm just going to ask you what your thoughts in general are on worker placement. Well, somebody's working on a very very antiviric worker placement game right now. Yes, I know. That's mentioned previously in this episode. You know, I, I like worker placement. I think it's nice because it very clearly outlines to the players what their choices are. I think that it's got some inherent difficulties. The biggest one being, you know, the first player advantage, you know, going first in a worker placement game is usually a huge edge. And so that's that's tough to manage sometimes as a designer. But you know, I think there's certainly some things that can do with it. But I think at this point, it just to have straight worker placement as the main focus of the game is not going to excite many experience gamers. So since you're working on one and I never have done one and I probably never will. But tell me about this one. This a lot of them have this space that says your first player. Now some of them say when you're a first player, you can't play on that. Some of them, some of them don't say that. So that first player. I'm playing on on first player next turn. I'm not first player this turn right because I'm playing on that square instead of a square Getting some well except unless you don't do it as your first guy. I mean if you do it as one of your later guys That's what I'm missing the strategy of that. I want wait to see if it's Usually is one big primo space. Yeah, and then if it gets in later you can jump onto it But the problem is if nobody goes there then you just get to be first player again by default Yeah, that's true unless the game does something specific to shift that around the table You know, I do think it's a very solid mechanic. It does it what it does is it integrates Strategy and tactics right because you have usually an overarching strategic goal goal for the turn and then you've got the tactics Of where you're playing and I love games combine those two things and there are so many ways to use it You're trying a new twist look at five tribes. They called it worker displacement whatever right so I mean the the ideas You can certainly do a lot with it, but you know for me personally. I just I don't think I need to see anymore of the typical ones I mean, I'm I'm certainly gonna play yours. Hopefully Soon don't have to throw me do any favors here right? You can say that I'm at the tail end of a washed up trend. No, no, it's not a paper It's not a favor because you don't like what I say about it probably But but no it sounds original So I do think like a lot of mechanics. Look at card games or anything I mean, there's so many different twists you can make on right Yeah, you know what it gives built-in player interaction because there here's a shared area that you're trying to you know Judge to try to predict where people are gonna go and stuff like that But it's it's not like totally in your face player interaction right and you know lord's of water deep for instance took What's really a you're what I always thought of as a your mechanic and brought it into a D&D base game? I mean how interesting was that because now you're getting your resources that way and they really had some fun spots So I think that game was a big success and you know, so there's still a lot left I guess it's just that for me it's it's certainly been used a lot Okay Question number six. What is your least favorite mechanic? You know, it's funny because I'm writing these questions and my wife is sitting next to me and she chimed in on this one right away So I had to put her answer in here. Halein says Take that mechanic. She hates take that mechanic So anything that you're doing that even if it's good for you But it's gonna end up being bad for her directly like something she builds or something she collected She does not want to see that at all The one that the one that I and I don't mind take that mechanic when they're done In the theme of the game and and they're not done too obviously. I like the more subtle ones myself But the mechanic I just can't stand because I can't do it is line drawing I mean meaning that anytime you have to draw a thing like a dictionary games like that so Lodely forget I'm just incapable. I can't even do a good stick figure so it's just not something I want to do Yeah, I mean mine is kind of in that vein which is you know trivia games not a big fan for the most part I mean wits and wagers doesn't brilliantly but you know Be the other questions where you know games are just answering trivia type questions. Actually leave me pretty flat I mean they're okay party games are the right people but yeah, I agree as far as a real game They lack something and now we get to the question everybody is wondering right what could tonight's question number seven possibly be Well here it is because we are talking about mechanics right so when you need your car repaired Do you go to a mechanic at the car dealer or one in a gas station? See this is why Scott Nicholson should get involved this conversation because you know He's on the one man crusade to get it renamed to a mechanism and not a mechanic just for this very reason Well for me and you know this is probably a flaw in my character, but I go back to the dealer I do absolutely and it's not just because of the warranty or anything else But and I think it is a flaw in my too because friends of mine will always tell me oh this is guy down the road He's got a sold gas station or he's the best mechanic ever seen He will fix your car up a lot less expensive all that but for some reason it's brand or something I just feel I owe it to you know to go back to the dealer and maybe that I have more recourse if they mess up I don't know, but that's what I do as well Okay, so um that was part two Coming up in our next episode We're gonna do the final portion of the list when we talk about kind of the physical aspects of the game and production issues and stuff like that so hope that everybody stay tuned for that The list and we will by time you read this it will be up on the site We are actually posting the questions on the cardboard Edison site That is a great website that collects the best game design resources from around the internet and We're honored that they agreed to host our questions up on their site is one of their their featured items So you can go download it there and so we'll be having the part two questions up there And then after we do the third episode in two weeks We will be having the full questions hosted up there for all eternity. Oh check that out there So certainly if you have your own questions that you like to ask in this area You know that that you'll kind of like keep in the back of mind when you're designing Please come on to the guild and share them with all of us and you know We'll be sure that this is going to be a living document and we'll be throwing new questions on there and You know maybe rephrasing some stuff as time goes on so that's a great idea because I happen to know a lot of the listeners You know our very sharp and we'll come up with interesting things that we you know We've very hard to cover everything that's involved in in some like game design Absolutely and before we go we would like to thank our benefactors for this episode auto jensen a Ryan Gabbard and Andreas Irland Thank you guys for helping us keep the show going if you are interested in helping out as well Please go to patreon.com/ludology where you can do kind of an ongoing donation or you can go to ludology.net and click on the PayPal button and that will allow you to do a single or recurring donation through there as well So that is it for this episode and we will see you in two weeks See you next time Thanks for listening. Ludology is made possible by the support and donations of listeners like you We encourage you to visit us at ludology.net to get involved in a continuing discussion on today's topic Ludology is a member of the Dice Tower Network the premiere of board game media network Explore all the shows we have to offer at dice tower network.com Until next time keep thinking keep learning and keep playing You