One unexpected game design lesson from Rebirth’s Ireland side for me is this:
The game has random distribution of “Tower” powers and in a two player game, a random eight of the twelve goals will be public and a random two will be available as private goals and two won’t be in a game (in a four player game all twelve will be in the game).
That setup variability doesn’t matter that much.
Now, I’m not saying it matters zero. It does matter. A little. I usually like to start near one of the 2× tiles, for example (since I often like to rush for the 24-point connect-four-castles goal) so it matters to me where that tile ends up. And knowing when to use a “time walk” tower or a “brainstorm” tower is a key part of the tactics in the game. Perhaps the biggest difference caused by the random tower setup might be towers that are next to several citie spaces versus the ones that aren’t, since splitting up your farms is so expensive while splitting up settlements is fine.
But the flip side is that usually most of the players will visit most of the towers especially at 2p. Even at 3p I’ve noticed players take care to at least get most important towers on their itinary. Eventually.
Same with the goals. We sort the public goals after drawing them so they’re easier to keep track of (settlement goals, coastline goals, connection goals, surrounding goals etc) so which eight are drawn doesn’t matter as as which two aren’t in the game (because they’re the two goals at the bottom of the private goal deck).
It’s “false variability”. The game wouldn’t be that different (and the setup time would be shorter but the i18n story would be way harder, at least for goals if not for towers) if the goals and towers were pre-printed on the board. I’m not saying to literally do this. The little variabiilty that is there is fun. Kinda. Even though it feels like it’s much much less than other vartiable setup games like Chess 960 or even Caylus or Star Realms.
Because of the lacklusterness of this setup variability I started worrying a few plays in that the game would feel samey and not have legs.
Then over Christmas I had the chance to play Samurai again. It doesn’t have any variable setup at all. Yet every game feels different—because of what my opponents are doing and how they are playing and the decisions they’re making (along with the luck of the draw throughout the game, just like in Rebirth). When we got back home we brought Rebirth [Ireland] back out and wouldn’t you know it? Same thing. The games started feeling different because my opponent stepped up his game and started becoming more aware of bottle necks and blocking and edge patterns. Some of the thick layer of sameyness that had gathered on top of this game (in just a little over one year since it was released) was cleared off.
And that’s the game design lesson of today: how putting in a variable setup on the Ireland side of Rebirth’s game board kind of hurt the game because that draws the eye, that makes me think “Okay this is gonna matter, this is what’s gonna make each game different” when it’s not at all. That’s not where the variety is hiding. The variety is all in what my opponents do and how I need to react to that and vice versa. I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying it’d’ve been better if the towers and goals had all been fixed, (because once we can see through the illusory nature of their variability, we can appreciate the little variety it does bring without placing undue expectations on it), but maybe. Yeah, maybe a little. Affordance and conveyance is a huge part of game design, and a fixed setup would’ve more clearly conveyed the reality that “hey, this setup is more or less the same as it always is so what matters is what ruckus you are gonna bring so step up.” and not as much “hey, wow, look at these eight random goals that were drawn, can you catch them all, they’re gonna super matter and so is the tower distribution, you’re gonna really be where all those 3s and 13s are” which is only such a small part of the game compared to basics like points from clusters, settlements, and castles.
I’ve said before that the first food farm I play away from my big cluster is -12 points. The second one is -11 points, and the third one is -10 points. It might not look like that if I play away from it in the beginning (“I’m only giving up three points with this play since my existing cluster is only two big”) but that’s gonna be the end result once all your food farms are out, and ditto of course for power farms. There’s not a lot of goals that can compare to 12 points. A castle is a 10 point swing in a 2p game and most goal cards are only 8 points. Now, conversely, this doesn’t apply to playing apart but connecting up later. 1, 2, 1, 4 is correctly read as only two points short of 1, 2, 3, 4. The “away” I’m talking about is a food token so far away that you’ll won’tc connect up to it in time. That’s worth it but only when it results in a commensurately big point swing somewhere else. Like, playing a loose food farm next to the final 13p tile is minus twelve plus fourteen for a 2p gain so it’s better there than in your main cluster. Or, a loose food farm that cuts off and isolates three tiles from your 2p opponent might cost you twelve points but cost them ((12+11+10)-(1+2+3)) = 27 points if they were gonna link them all up, for a net +15 point delta for you, making it worth it to play away. This sort of play is often worth way more than the goal points, tower points, and off-shore farm points. (And yeah not every farm away is gonna be -12. The average value of farms in a big cluster is 6.5. Pretty good compared to playing four tiles in Dublin for 4.25 points per tile. But I like to think of the farm tiles as worth 12, 11, 10, 9… etc, i.e. mentally reversing the order of them compared to the order they’re actually scored just so I can remind myself early on of how valuable they actually are; I give up twelve points with the first played away, eleven with the second played away and so on. If I end up with a cluster of say eight farms, that’s only 8+7+6+… uh, 4.5 points per tile! I could’ve gotten way more if I hadn’t played away as much!
So while I’ve started becoming a li’l suspicious that Rebirth might not go the distance, I’m not counting it out just yet. The comparison to Samurai—a game without any setup variability at all—made me remember how vital the actual interplay of farm placement can be. Real interaction with a real human.
Now, I’m still not happy that the Scotland side has so few of what we’ve started calling “meadows” and too much “forests” where food farms must go and “mountains” where power farms must go. That kind of fixed, paint-by-numbers game play that reduces the game to only a matter of timing and miai values is a much bigger threat to the game variability interest than any fixed-vs-varied setup issue.
Okay before we get into it, for people not familiar with my review style: I’m not really doing good “consumer advice” here on which board game you should buy. I’m doing reviews more for other design nerds like myself who like to pick apart and study board game design in and of itself. For making new games or new editions, or for its own sake because it’s fun to consider how things tick. I’m looking at a design more like “okay what went right here and what went wrong and how can we learn from that?”
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Golem, which I hate, but its problems aren’t unique to it so I’m not trying to say that it’s an exceptionally bad game. Instead, the issues are pretty typical for most new school board games. I’m not trying to say that Golem is an outlier or pick on it especially. Every time you see a complaint below and go like “but that’s not any different from [list of twenty other popular complex euro games]”, I get that. That is the bigger point I’m trying to make here. Not that Golem in and of itself is bad or worse than other games, but that the gaming hobby is in a space where I don’t like most of these games.
I remember when Glory to Rome (which, don’t get me wrong, is a great game) was infamous for having such a complex game flow that a later edition added a flowchart player aid. “Materials go from pool to stockpile to vault, and clients go from pool to clientele, and buildings go from hand to being built”, and… It was known for being such an exceptionally complex game and now every game is like that. Golem is like three times more complicated than Glory to Rome. You need bricks to make golems to get knowledge to buy books but you need study to be able to hold more books and you need gold to improve your artifacts and the way you get them is so tangled.
You’re like “I need [open book icon], where can I get it? Oh I should’ve placed a marble on the other lane three rounds ago before I collected all of these [closed book icon]?”
When we got into more kennerspiel-y euro games, Caylus was so punishing when you made mistakes like going to the castle but not having enough food to build what you wanted after going to the carpenter earlier that same round. We’d stumble and trip up and for some of us that was fun and goofy and other people hated it. My dad was like “I never wanna play this dumb game again” after his first try of Caylus 1301 even though he was like one or two points behind the winner in a close game. He was just that frustrated with getting so “punished” by the game. But even for being as punishing as it is, Caylus has an exceptionally clearly shown game flow. You send out your workers along the road and things happen along the road and the bookkeeping stuff is also part of that same road. And if you want something you know where to find it. You want food? Go to food place. You want wood? Go to wood place. You want workers? Go to workers place. Super straight forward.
That straight-forwardness is not here. At all. The stuff you get and the stuff you need is all over the place in a way that’s not visually clear at all. I was crying halfway through our first game and we ended up actually starting over because it felt like information overload, like juggling twenty mental chainsaws. I needed to remember all the resource types, how and when to get them (you all get them in different, unrelated ways, and some are cardboard or wood while others are steps on boards or trackers and yet again others are abstract invisible intangible ideas), and how to use them. After one or two games, you might be able keep the flow in your head, I’m not disputing that. Clearly people are playing this game and enjoying it, that’s just facts, it’s not literally physically unplayable for everyone. I’m just saying that the game doesn’t show you that flow at all.
And you get tripped up. Oh wow you get tripped up. I should’ve increased my bookshelf before getting more books, improved my golem making process before getting more golems, improved my scholar before letting the golem loose etc. It’s a cruel and punishing minefield of a game where the “reward” for getting better is learning where the broken steps are so you don’t fall down the stairs into a cellar full of claymores.
The other heavy game my friend bought when he bought Golem was Black Angel; a game with an equally (or even more?) muddled and unreadable game flow but which came with a player aid that explained everything. What order you do things in, what the phases are, what you get where. The player aid in Golem is this one little card and it’s the stingiest li’l list of icons that I’ve ever seen. It serves as a reminder if you already know all the steps by heart, not as an explainer if you don’t or even a refresher if you mostly know. It doesn’t show in what direction things go. If the aid card shows you marbles you don’t know if that’s the step where you retrieve your marbles or get them or get the reward from them or place them or replace them. All stuff you need to do over the course of a turn but you better learn that elsewhere because the card is giving you zilch until you’ve memorized every icon rebus on the helper card means. Which brings us too…
I don’t hate all iconography (hieroglyphics rebuses) in games. I know that when I reviewed the Race for the Galaxy iconography, I got misunderstood as if I was complaining about the phase icons but I actually think those are really good (some of my complaints about other parts of RftG’s iconography were maybe a little unfair, so maybe I on-the-balance overall deserved the backlash I got for that review, but if I do, and that’s a big if since I still stand by a lot of the complaints I had for some of the other parts, that’d still be like getting fined for stealing tomatoes when you actually stole peaches since the one part that I got the most flak over was a complete misunderstanding because the phase icons in RftG, I tried to say, are good).
RftG discussion will be set aside because the gold standard for me for clarity and usability right now is actually a super recent game (see! Gaming isn’t going to heck in a heckbasket!) called Moon Colony Bloodbath which mixes icons, and keywords, and plain text in a straight-forward and clear way. That game also has super clear game flow: how you get every resource type and what you use it for is utterly straight-forward. The polar opposite of Golem. Yes, Moon Colony Bloodbath does have a little bit of a trap that you’ll sometimes get tempted into using basic game actions to get say apples while the much better way +o do it is to first build buildings that improve your apple getting action. I’m not gonna make excuses for Moon Colony Bloodbath there and instead am actually gonna ding it for that, but, the basic game actions are all super crisp and clear and self-evident and upgradeable rather than replaced. In Golem they’re as clear as mud. But that was the previous section (“Flow of the game”), we’re in iconography now so okay, back to the point of this rant:
Iconography has two components. The nouns (the icons) and the syntax (the way the icons are put together to explain abilities). I’m gonna slag both.
While the icons here are beautiful for those with a magnifying glass, the concepts are too similar and the icons are hard to tell apart. Open book vs closed book for example, or how the knowledge icon, which is the letter א is a very similar blue hue to the close book. And while you don’t need open books (which represent sitting at your desk and studying so that you can have more books and get more out of each books) before closed books (which represent acquiring new books), if you are gonna get both in a single turn, it’s often better to get the open books first so that you can put more of your new books on the same shelf. And you upgrade shelves with the knowledge icon א. The icon that means “non-black book” is also very similar to the icon for “the secondary cost on books is discounted”. A crossed-over black semicircle. While part of the problem is that the facets of the game (the schul, your study room, your golem slab, your actifact forge, and the streets of prague) all require different things but with a lot of coupling and entanglement from those separate parts. You go to schul to study which you need to better understand the books that you get by having your golem steal them from bookshops in the streets of Prague.
Now if the noun part is bad the syntax part is way worse because while ideally you see a triggered ability that gives you clay, that means you take that amount of clay, and that’s normal and straight-forward and that’s how some but only a few of the abilities in this game work. Clay, gold coins, gold ingots, and knowledge does work like that. Other icons lets you do upgrade parts of your workshop by flipping tiles or moving along a track or sending your scholar or golem out to mess around in Prague.
One especially inconsistent “resource” are the menoroth where yellow, red, and blue are distinct. (Don’t worry color blind people, you find them on different parts of the board so that’s how you can distinguish them even if they look the exactly same.) So let’s say you unlock a triggered ability that for example give you two VP, a gold coin, and three blue menoroth. The three blue menoroth aren’t a resource you “get” in the same way that the others; every time that ability re-triggers you get the VP and the gold coin. You don’t “recieve” menoroth. At the end of the game you need to find all the abilities you’ve unlocked that have a menorah reward and that’s when you count them. So they are an icon type that syntactically are presented in the same noun context as resource rewards and VP rewards but function completely differently.
But that’s not even the worst part of the iconography. This game like many modern games from Monopoly on has special abilities, both in the schul and in the shops of prague and even on some of your workshop upgrades. But instead of saying in plain text “go to jail” or “everyone pays you $200”, there’s a rebus often with completely new syntax and a bunch of one-off icons that appear only on that particular ability space. You have to look them up in the rule book and read what they do. My friend and I would both guess what they did and he’d guess wrong all of the time. All of the time. And he loves the game because he has more patience for this kinda stuff and also he bought the game so he has sunk cost reasons to love it but if they would’ve just taken the text in the rule book and put it directly on the tile or schul space, that would’ve been so much better. “All triggered abilities from purchasing non-black books are triggered twice” is instead written as a lightning bolt, a crossed over black semicircle, and an x 2. “Take the resources from each of your scholar steps” is written as three hands in different colors carrying stuff. And these aren’t even the worst ones, which are all in the rabbi spaces or in the marble schul and I don’t even remember them and the next time I play the game I’m gonna have to look them up again because the hieroglyphics sure don’t make it easy to figure out what they do.
Now, the good thing about hieroglyphics, and why it became such a standard in the board game world, is language independence. Which is a worthwhile goal. Not only do you save on printing different language versions, (even though all of these board games are ultimately doomed to the landfill since we’re all trapped on a garbage planet hurling towards a sharp and unyielding sword), people who don’t speak the same language can play the same game together. That is good. That is worthwhile. But if you can’t do it really well (which is really hard), an ability that is written in “icon-ese” is at least as hard to read as a language you don’t speak. I don’t speak a word of Czech but I was longing for some actual words in an actual language over the complete gobbledygook on these rabbi ability tiles. If it had been in Czech I could look it up, used a crib sheet, used Google translate, tried to remember it with words that I could at least try to fit in my head better than a Mort Walker character’s grawlix rebus. Sarge cussing out Beetle Bailey is clearer to understand than some of the stuff in this game!
The other good thing about icons is when they are used together with text for conciseness and consistency, like how Moon Colony Bloodbath mixes text and icons together perfectly. So I’m not saying banish icons completely. I am saying that some of the time, plain text does it better.
Roger wrote in, saying:
I understand the urge, when designing a game for a multilingual market like Europe, to avoid having to have any text on the cards which would need to be translated. But language is hard, and expressing complicated concepts in an invented language is hard, and having a translatable sheet of paper which tells you what all the icons mean may make the game cheaper to internationalise but does not improve the play experience. (Also, as the usual game teacher in my groups, I want to be able to read something out aloud and have the player know what I’m talking about.)
The point I started crying when we first learned the game, crying out of overwhelm and brain fatigue and feeling stupid and feeling like this game has too much to learn to even get started, that was the marble colors. You use marbles for worker placement and the red, blue, and yellow marbles each come with a reward of your scholar walking along that street, and the white marbles come with no such reward but counts as any color once the marble has become golem eyes (which yes is also a thing) while the black marbles come with no such eye color wildcardedness but gives you two street rewards of your choice (I think they need to be different but I’m not sure).
You get the marbles from a dice tower sort of thing that is supposed to randomize the marbles along five separate lanes but it doesn’t work. If you pour them to the left they fall to the left. If you pour them to the right they fall to the right. If you pour them in the center they fall to the center. If you drop one or two in (which you can do when you use the pass action) you can drop it into any lane of your choice. Now none of this is intended, and so to fix the game we’re probably gonna get red, yellow, blue, white and black dice to roll instead (rerolling sixes).
Am I gonna comment about the whole you are rabbis in search of gold and א and more gold and menoroth and you’re making monsters wreaking havoc in the streets of Prague in order to steal books and clay for your lab and glossing over the antisemitic context the Jews of Prague suffered under? Not really, because I’m more into talking about game design than themes! If people who know more about this stuff are gonna bring up complaints I’m gonna listen, and some already have. I’m a game design nerd, not a historian!
The good part of this game is how you can try to engine build across a couple of different dimensions. The bookshelf, the golem properties, your artifacts, your town lanes, and your burial (but also how super un-halakhic it is to bury golems in a cemetery! In the folklore they should be resting on the Altneuschul attic or be absorbed back into the ground).
The good part of that is how it creates a more-ish flavor, how after a game you’re like “okay wow I really got things to work together and got some good synergies going, let’s see if I can do even better next time”, or you’re like “ugh nothing came together at all and I just floundered and died with a whimper”. That’s actually also a not-so-good part, how sometimes you can get these extreme combos and ça plane pour moi and the next game you’re doing a whole lotta nothing while the track your opponent went for is incidentally giving him a bunch of free rewards in the very track you deliberately have struggled to improve all game long. There’s an overly big disparity between doing well in the game and just coasting, and struggling in the game and getting absolutely nowhere. But that’s how engine builders are, and why I kind of don’t like engine building games.
Compared to the aforementioned Black Angel, the interplay between the strategies here is more fun. Black Angel has three “types” of other aliens to interact with (gray, green, and yellow) and you really get hosed since if you interact with one of them you need to interact with that same alien even more to get your rewards from it, it overly rewards you for sticking to one color while simultaneously demanding stuff from the other colors; that’s much less of a problem here where you similarly get really rewarded for getting deep into a track (do not neglect books since they are the best) but the tracks help you on the other tracks instead of like in Black Angel saying “okay now you’ve gone to a green planet so you need to do the green action again and again in order to get anything out of your investment in that green planet but whoops you can’t because the resources you need to get to green planets you only can get from yellow actions so it sucks to be you” a problem that Golem also has but to a slightly lesser extent which feels makes Golem feel like the nicer game.
That’s why in spite of this overall negative review of Golem, I don’t think I’ve played it for the last time. There are still strategies in it that I want to explore and my complaints are mostly about readability and learnability and usability and clarity. Problems that you can get over and work around. Even when the problems are this huge and this bad. People are gonna say that “you just look up the rabbi abilities in the rule book and then you know them” or “you get used to the flow of the game after a while” and that’s fine for smart people but A. I’m probably not as smart as you are then, and B. Okay the problems go away once you’re used to them but that doesn’t mean they’re not problems.
My current apartment is utterly stupid in a way that permeates every corner of its layout and features. You can only open the fridge when the bathroom door is closed (and vice versa). You can only pull out the knife drawer when the cupboard door is completely open. You can only open the cupboard door when you’ve moved out all the chairs from the kitchen. Actually pretty far from the entire kitchen area because the cupboard door needs to swing far into the living room in order to pull out that dumb knife drawer. And every single corner of the living room has a door or a window so you can’t put any furniture in any of the corners. It’s a complete nightmare. And after living there for like three or four months I got absolutely used to all of those things, got used to working around them, and I started loving my home and feeling really comfortable there. I’m telling you all this to illustrate the following point: you can learn to work around problems but that doesn’t mean they are good design.
This game was pitched to me as “you only get twelve actions for the entire game” but not really because while you do only get eight marble actions and four rabbi actions, those actions are each spaces where you take multiple sub-actions, and can trigger other things like your golems which can trigger buying books which can trigger even more actions like a whole combotastic cascade of stuff. It’s pretty fun.
To console myself, I’m gonna have to try to put all of these complaints into the following perspective: the kinds of simpler games that I love are not endangered. They’re not scarce. They’re thriving; all my favorite classics are still around and more are being made and even improved. I need to remember that a game like Golem isn’t a threat to Carcassonne or Scrabble or Acquire or Hearts or Gin Rummy or Othello or The Great Dalmuti. Instead, the niche these heavy euros are going after is the old seventies SPI, Avalon Hill style of super complex games full of of chits and tables. Your Blue Max and ASL and 1830. Yeah, the production value of these newer games are nicer and probably more expensive. But I need to remind myself that this isn’t my precious simple nostalgia euro games dragged kicking and screaming into a quagmire of complexity. It’s instead the rich and replayable simulation hobby games given color graphics, more components, a variety of interesting themes from history and fantasy.
I can still dock this particular one for the hieroglyphics and poor UX and hidden game flow because even for what it wants to be, a heavyweight sim game, it could’ve executed on that a lot more clearly with better hieroglyphics (and less hieroglyphics and more text), but what I don’t need to do is lament “the state of modern board games”. Plenty of games being made that I absolutely love or old classics I can thrift for or dust off from my own shelves.
This video is three years old but I just found it. A lot of board game reviewers talking about if they are a “thinker” or a “themer”.
And by themer they mean “theme appreciator”, not “theme creator.”
Fun video!
Here’s where I am with this. To answer the question they’re looking for, I’m a thinker. I love abstract games, traditional playing cards, numbers and colors and vertices and nodes and emergent properties of systems. A good theme won’t draw me into a game while a bad theme will put me off a game.
But then to add some nuance to that: I’m much more of a “Mel” than a “Spike”. I don’t need “meaningful decisions” to have fun with a game and I don’t need the game to be a test of my puzzle-solving skills or be a vehicle to prove myself. I just want the game to have a variety of outcomes, of unpredictable, emergent outcomes.
And if a game does have a theme, I do get into it. I do read the flavor text and look at the art and keep up with the lore and story. And I love to “play pretend”. We were playing Betrayal at the House on the Hill last year and when I started like “play walking” my character from room to room and really upping how much of a dollhouse I was treating the game, at first the other players scoffed at that but quickly they got into it too. So I do appreciate and love a theme when it’s there. We play Caylus all the time and I’m like “Okay we need to go to the fairground, then the carpenter”, I really do want to know the theme behind each tile and I incorporate that in my headspace of the game. If the game has a good mapping of thematic ideas to system process magic, that’s a home run.
And as y’all know I also love RPGs and story games much more than I love board games!
There’s a bit of a sliding, fuzzy border between what’s “content” in a boardgame. A Magic card that’s really world-specific and flavorful and has set mechanics is “content”. But maybe to some extent, so is “this chess piece moves in an L-shape and can jump”. It’s a sliding scale. I’m gonna propose that the more atomic and endlessly recombinable a game component is, the less it is “content”. The more it is just a game.
It’s not just about complexity either (but it is about tight vs loose coupling), and here’s an example that illustrates that: A jigsaw puzzle is content. Playing the same jigsaw puzzle a couple of times is fun but playing new jigsaw puzzles is even more fun. Contrast this to a tile-laying game like Dominoes, Scrabble, or Carcassonne. The “puzzle pieces” in those games fit together all kinds of ways, always new, always beautiful. So a jigsaw puzzle is more “content-driven” than those tile-laying games. You always wanna get new puzzles with new art, is the idea.
These days, board game expansions often just come with more content. “You like Luke and Leia? Well, here’s Jyn and Cassian. You like Liliana? Here’s Vraska.”
In the 00s when the board game renaissance was first blooming, they hadn’t quite figured this out yet so expansions often made games more sprawling and complicated and overwrought and eventually collapsed under their own weight. Once this got a little bit hammered out it was like a collective sigh of relief across the board gaming hobby as expansions could just provide more content, fits rights into the rest of the game, doesn’t make the game more complicated, just more varied.
But here’s the thing: the game should’ve been more varied from just the game play components alone. We shouldn’t need any expansions.
I’m getting the impression that composition is the culprit here. Baduk is the shining example here of a good game that doesn’t need any “content” expansions. With just two kinds of pieces you can make elephant eyes, tiger mouths, monkey jumps, clamps, iron pillars, stone pagodas, dumplings, sandals, ladders, tables, crane’s nests and all kinds of other shapes, and all those shapes in turn recombine or overlap in a million ways.
As soon as you encode movement patterns into coarser-grained ludemes, like Onitama does with each card showing four or more spaces a piece can move to, then bam, you have content to sell, you can start up the expansion mill and start printing money.
So for me these days when I see that a board game has lots of content and “room to expand”, I see that as a huge red flag. I don’t want each scenario to be a separate box of cards. The game should’ve been replayable out of the box. I want what happens in the game to be fun in and of itself, and that is something a good game can do that comics or movies can’t. What happens during the game, that’s what should be fun. Not “oh, I have a Vraska” but “oh, I can’t believe I fell for that bluff” or “OMG what are the odds of rolling three Yahtzees in a row!”
I don’t mind as much on digital but when tabletop has become the business of shipping an endless stream of boxes across the world, we have a 🌎🔥 problem.
Guide of Soulsis an example of the opposite, of a more coarse-grained ludeme. A Magic card that does like four things.
By doing many things each ludeme can tell its own little story. An even coarser-grained ludeme is an entire deck or something like a D&D module hardcover book.
A game like Parade where the cards are just numbers and colors, those playing pieces (cards, in this case) are more broken down and the “story” is more about how they fit together.
Chess isn’t even a “content” game but compared to go… Chess has these pieces that all tell their own stories or have their own “canned” qualities, whereas go pieces are just trinary states in a grid and the “story” becomes about their relationships, like how an ogeima shape has such-and-such properties. And new ones can be discovered because the game is a whole language, not just one text. It’s a living system, not just a framework for expressing factory-sold, upstream-designed events.
Majority means more than everyone else (combined).
Plurality means more than any one else (more than any one single other).
If Alice has four, Bob three, and Carol three, that means Alice has the plurality. No one has the majority.
If Alice has six, Bob two, and Carol two, that means Alice has both the majority and the plurality.
Many board games (and other systems) care about plurality rather than about majority.
Rebirth is the new Knizia tile layer that just came out. It’s a tile laying game in the vein of Samurai, Through the Desert, Blue Lagoon, and Havalandi—I’ve also seen comparisons to Kingdom Builder, Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne.
It’s great.
I mentioned on BGG that it had easy rules.
Someone said that Blue Lagoon had more straight-forward rules which made me reply:
That’s true. We had an issue in our first game when my friend didn’t know whether the wood pieces counted for majorities like longest coastline or surrounding cathedrals (they don’t—only cardboard counts).
But with Rebirth you can just start playing and explain the rules as you go (on the Scotland side) which isn’t possible with Blue Lagoon because since there are two phases, you need to know what you’re going for, and it’s even more point salady which, while that adds to the game’s depth and replayability it also means that it’s hard to do your best right out of the gate without having gotten a feel for the relative values of things. Basically you need to understand the entire game, both phases, the four different placement rules, and down to the detailed multi-step scoring sheets before you can start playing. I love Blue Lagoon, I just like Rebirth better.
I do have an OK teach for Blue Lagoon, but with Rebirth it’s way easier since all I need to do is give someone their supply, tell them to remove two pieces and say “you don’t have these but you can look at them”, then as everyone pulls pieces one by one you can explain the three types of pieces as you go, and explain castles and cathedrals as they get activated, and soon enough you’ll have explained all three types and they know the game.
The problem is how tie-breaking inside the game works—something you do all the time when playing, for scoring castles and settlements.
This one is on the dev team for explaining it weird.
It would’ve been more consistent and easy if a farm (whether energy farm or food farm) was worth ten houses. Then you’d just tally up and you’d only need the “playing first is good” tie breaker. That would not be isomorphic with how the game works currently because in the game as released, a 2-house is the same as a 4-house for castles but not for settlements.
Also instead of ties being broken in the order of who played there first, which would’ve been great but introduced memory state, it’s almost-but-not-quite that since it’s “last loses ties so being clockwise next after the last player is good”.
This means that if Moira, Charles, and Max are playing and Charles plays first, then Moira, then Max, if they all used the same house-amount, Moira will win the tie since she’s clockwise next to Max even though Charles played first. This is really bad. It’s worse than Samurai’s end game scoring.
So the tiebreak system I’d want is instead:
So if beige has an energy farm, a food farm, and a 2-house settlement, that’s 22 houses worth for controlling a castle and if blue then has three food farms there, that’d be 30 for the win of that castle.
This is a huge flaw in the game. 😔
What’s good is how easy it is to understand where I can play and how I best can use the tiles I draw in a multipurpose way that feels like I’ve got options. There’s no camels-and-leaders system or huts-and-settlers system, just random tiles but only three types (and the Ireland side has many more either-food-or-energy-can-go-here spaces) and instead of a rule like camel riders or huts (or ice holes like Hey That’s My Fish or Meridians) to promote go-like grouping, it’s the chain scoring system (you get more points when placing your new farms next to your old farms of the same type).
This is my favorite new game so it’s too bad about that clunkiness around ties. 😔
All eurogames ever made have a tipping point where you go from building up your power to start cashing in victory points. For example Splendor where you can buy cheap cards to get going but sooner or later you need to pivot to buying good cards that give you points.
I wish there was a game for traditional playing cards with that same property. There are some games that have two phases; first you play to grab cards that are gonna help you in the second phase. But here I want those decisions throughout the game: do I grab that card that helps me get better at grabbing cards, or do I grab that card that gives me more points at the end?
So I’m thinking a fishing game like Casino as the base.
54 card deck.
Deal four cards to the players and four face up “in the lake”.
You can do one of three things:
To catch a card, reveal one or more non-face cards from your hand—if more, it has to be a suited straight, like the four-five-six of spades. Again, you can’t catch with royals. The caught card needs to be of the same suit and strictly lower than the sum of the cards you played. So four-five-six of spades can catch any spade since 4+5+6 = fifteen and the highest card is king which is 13. Aces are always one in this game. Put the caught cards in your catch pile.
To recruit a card, same thing except the recruited card doesn’t have to be same suit, it can be any suit, but it can’t be a face card (JQK), and all the cards go into your hand instead. Yeah, you just get back the recruiting cards straight up. Again, when you use multiple cards to recruit, they do need to be suited and sequential just as with catching.
To dump cards, place one or more cards from your hand face up into the lake. For example face cards since you can’t use them for anything else. “Why would you–” if you can’t catch or recruit, this is your only option. You can only pass if you don’t have any cards in hand at all.
When everyone has had four turns, deal out four new cards but don’t replenish the lake. Keep playing like this until the deck’s empty. Then after those four last turns, all cards in hand are worthless, all caught face cards are worth three points each and all other caught cards are worth one each.
So recruited cards go back to your hand along with the cards that recruited them. Caught cards go to your catch pile along with the cards that caught them. And face cards can’t be recruited and can’t catch or recruit (royals are lazy in this game).
I keep having to dig up this geeklist.
I’ve said before how I used to hate this kind of game for how kingmakery they are. But these days a lot of boardgaming is dominated by games that are just as kingmakery, but also:
I realize that not every game can be Baduk or Turncoats, who are both almost magical in how every single game feels different even though they have very limited components and moves. Or maybe because of that; the Unix philosophy in action? The more general your ludemes are, the more varied the emergent experiences can be?
I mean, I’ve said in the past how Bottle Imp was great fun, but “only” for the first 100 plays compared to the modern classic tricktaker Ninety-Nine which has endless replayability and challenge (and with a Ninety-Nine deck you can play millions of other games since it’s just a normal card game).
Well, those 100 plays are still a heck of a lot better out of what you can get from one kingdom of Dominion, which most people would only wanna play a couple of times at the most.
Now, Old-School Euros are never gonna be my very fave compared to story games like Fiasco or Untold, or to hidden role games like The Resistance, or to basically any game with two or fewer sides like co-op games or 2p games.
But they’re a lesser evil than new-school board games. Many of these Old-School Euros are nostalgic, they’re interesting, they’re emergent. Knowing me you’ll guess that I like games to be as simple as possible while still being difficult. Not every game can be Baduk, and Baduk is no Euro, but it is a platonic ideal, a beacon to strive for; one corner of design space that I truly appreciate. I want games to be clean, simple, endlessly replayable, and a shared experience.
There’s another reason I’m giving Euro games a second chance these days: I’m not as spiky as I used to be. A “spiky” player is a player who wants games to be as skill testing as possible. Well, the entire kingmakingness of most boardgames are a disaster for that! But now that I’m valuing other aspects of gameplaying more highly than just trying to win, I’m looking at Euro games more kindly.
A new multi-purpose deck is the “Heckadeck” that I finally gave in and got! And it’s great!
It has some pros and cons:
I love this. When these multi-game decks first started coming on the scene it was so tempting to make the cards so overloaded. “Oh, for this game you need to look at the number in this corner, and ignore these blue numbers but treat these red numbers as if they were black”. Heckadeck doesn’t go anywhere near that. Each card is one thing. A jack of diamonds is unambigously a Jack of Diamonds. A Queen of Clouds is a Queen of Clouds. Easy to use and a joy to play.
Sometimes “extra info” can be good like how in The Bottle Imp the money cards are marked. That’s the flipside here, this doesn’t have that. But it’s hard to make extra info work well for a multipurpose deck.
The li’l booklet for this and the community is less about the “Oh if you turn the cards upside down and squint you can sort of play Battle Line” and more about expanding traditional cards and making them more goofy and lucky. It’s less “this is for prototyping your own games or pirating other designer games” and more “hey kids! You know how to play Hearts? Here’s ‘Hearts and Clouds’!”. Fun approach and if this helps the deck I’m for it. We prototypers & DIY:ers can still have our fun.
The houserule-affirming approach taken in the booklet and in the deck design itself also lends itself to houseruling and changing up proxied designer games! We can play “Lost Cities”… Or “Lost Cities with Travelers and Hunters” as multi-suited handshake cards! We can play Parade, or “Parade with Darkness”! There’s so many weird and fun li’l extra arrows and talismans and travelers and conjurers and all kinds of adorable fun.
One thing that the Proxy Suit Deck did right but none of the others get right is that a lot of designer games and home made games make good use of duplicate cards. Cards that are exactly the same! That’s what makes it possible to play Skull or Time Bomb II in a way that isn’t really with Everdeck, Glyph… or with Heckadeck since the “duplicates” here aren’t really duplicates. There are two red arrows but they’re slightly different, and same goes for the two red talismans. Too close to be meaningfully distinct in almost any game, but still different enough to make the “relies on exact duplicate” games like Skull and friends unplayable.
But games where it’s OK that all the duplicates are distinguishable it can still be useful to have these pseudo-duplicates; it can be good didactics, you never have to be like “OK, threes, twos and ones are all Frobnicators”, here you can just use the arrows or the talismans for that.
It’s also just plain flavorfully adorable to have this mix of some cards with a number, some with a letter, and some that have neither. It just looks good on the table, curious enough to be alien but familiar enough to be haunting. I love it. It seems like you could play Pratchett’s “Onion” game with this easily for example. Sounds like something straight out of a fantasy novel. “I capture your three of hearts with my queen of clouds”.
This card back is a little bit dizzyness-inducing, but thanks to the thick borders it’s not nearly as bad as the Proxy Suit Deck or the Heiko edition of Glory to Rome. Those games are out right criminal in how seizure-triggering they are when you’re fanning the card backs where this is for the most part fine!
But there’s a bigger problem!
We find that card backs that are aaaaalmost rotationally symmetrical 180˚ but there’s a tiny li’l detail breaking the symmetry is the worst of all worlds. Completely symmetrical is great (I used to collect Bicycle decks) and completely asymmetrical decks like Radlands are also OK. But here there’s only a tiny li’l difference in the center of the card back making it easy to cheat.
Here’s a card trick for kids: rotate the cards so all the card backs are rotated the same way before hand. Spread out the deck and have your mom pick a card. As she’s looking at it, rotate the deck 180° so when she puts it back, that replaced card is the only card with that card back rotation. Then as you’re shuffling the deck keep it that way and then after a while you can pick out her card because it’s the only card rotated that way.
Or for cheaters you can put all face cards one way and number cards the other and all kinds of stuff. It’s not a good back!
The order is diamonds, swords, clubs, acorns, hearts, clouds, spades and planets. OK so the good thing is that:
So much for the good news. The new order is… not alphabetical! For anglophones, the bridge order is also the alphabetical order, and the same is true for the Island Deck’s suit order. Here there’s no such linguistic ordering.
Also acorns and planets look too similar. Way too similar. We’ve mixed them up several times.
My friend already bent a corner on the seven of hearts.
I really like this deck! I was late to the party for I don’t even know why but it really has a lot of fun parts to it!
And I’m still stuck with an ever-growing board game collection–the Everdeck is still my only deck for Hanafuda or Hanabi, and probably the best bet for The Mind or No Thanks, and the Glyph is my only way to play Decktet games, for example. Maybe one of the days I sober up from this consumtion frenzy and end up with just one of these decks–and that one deck might well be a normal tarot or even a normal card deck.
Even some of my favorite board games like Homeworlds, Hive, and Ghosts can be played with cards, using cards as playing pieces. Although all my friends always refuse to do that since using the real version is its own kind of experiental fun.
But for right now I wanna try to keep exploring this deck. It’s way more easy to actually use in play than the other multidecks.
I wanted to come up with flavorful and weird mechanics for all the special cards beyond just “it’s a wildcard”.
So these rules are complicated in a way that’s hopefully fun and interesting. If you want simple & minimal then don’t read on and instead use traditional cards.
These card ranking house rules should work with a couple of different trick taking games. I intend to first try them out with the two handed whist game common here in Sweden and Norway (each player has ten face down cards covered by ten face up cards, and a hand of six hand cards, and as the face up cards are played the cards underneath them are turned face up and made available; this is also a game where trump suit varies over deals) and maybe some other trick taking games too.
Here are the seventy cards used.
Clubs, spades, diamonds: they work as normal. The normal thirteen cards each, plus watcher which counts as all suits.
Hearts: a longer suit which also has zero, beast, and eleven. Beast goes between eleven and jack as in other heckadeck games. Also use the hunter and traveler that’s shared with clouds.
Clouds: a shorter suit that only has two, beast, queen, hunter, traveler, and ace.
Rankings of normal suited cards: I haven’t made my mind up where the king goes (between jack and queen as other heckadeck games, or above queen as in traditional card games) but the ace for sure is high and goes above the traveler and even above the talisman (see below) but below the omnihedron and the watcher.
Hunter and traveler in clouds and hearts: They belong to both colors. Traveler beats hunter, and both beat the traditional set of face cards, which in turn beat the beast and the eleven. It goes “ArHuTaTra”: arrow beaten by hunter beaten by talisman beater by traveler.
The darkness: An unknown card. It does not prevent any other suit from being short suited, and you don’t have to be short suited or follow in order to play it. You never have to play it (unless it’s your last card) and you always can play it, so it’s a very flexible and good card in that regard. Once every card has been played to the trick, determine the suit and rank of the darkness randomly. I’m gonna use the “roll the deck” dice but you can use a poker die or roll a d20 on a list of cards or pull from a secondary, tiny solitaire deck or you can have use the unused Planet cards to pull from to determine rank, and the unused beast cards of clubs, spades, and diamonds, along with an unused red joker, to determine the suit. Important rule: it can only resolve to a traditional, pre-Heckadeck card. So it’s not resolved until all the cards have been played to the trick, and after it’s resolved it acts if it was that card all along. This means it can win or lose. If it is led, any other card can be legally played to it. Like normal tricks, the card that was played first determine the suit of the trick (which in turn can be trumped). So if the darkness was retroactively determined to be say the six of diamonds, well, it beat any lower diamond or any non-diamond played to it if it was led, or if it was followed, it can only win if the other cards in the trick are lower diamonds, or if diamonds are trumps this deal and the six was the highest diamond. Uh. Kinda hard to explain but the general principle is: 1. It can follow any card, 2. Any card can follow it, 3. Then it’s revealed which card it was all along and the winner is determined accordingly.
The watcher: Belongs to all suits and is the highest card in the deck, wins everything. You’re not short suited in any suit as long as you have an unplayed watcher so if it’s your last card in the led suit, you have to play it (and win). When led, any suited card can follow but will lose.
The conjurer: still a pretty good card but strictly a worst-of-both-worlds hybrid of watcher and darkness: counts as all suits in hand and until resolved, but is resolved exactly like the darkness. It’s a darkness that “can’t hide”.
The “whatever you want” card. If you’ve already scribbled on yours, use an unused green joker instead. Like watcher and conjurer, it can only copy one of traditional 52 cards. Unlike them, it’s not random, it’s your choice. Inspired by cat in the box and absurdle but I’ll explain it in a way that doesn’t require you to know those games: You have to decide what you want this card to be but your choice is secret and changeable until you play the card but it needs to be follow these rules: it can not copy a suit you’ve claimed to have been short in. Nor can it copy any specific card you’ve already played or a card you still have (that you know that you have; some games give you more cards as the game goes along). Cards opponents have played or still have in hand? Totally fair game! Unlike conjurer/watcher, you need to say what this card is as you play it and it needs to be a legal play at that time.
Arrows, talisman, and omnihedron:
Arrows: you need to be shortsuited or lead with them (they “wedge in” where your other suits can’t go); talismans/omnihedron: you can’t be shortsuited or lead with them (they “reflect” your other suits).
Rank-wise, arrows go just under hunters, and talismans go inbetween hunters and travelers, and omnihedron beats aces and travelers and only loses to watcher. Suits don’t matter for them once they’ve been legally played to the trick.
Suit wise, arrows can not follow any other suit. They only played when you are short the lead suit, or they can led as the first card to a trick.
Talisman and omnihedron work completely differently than arrows. When following, they make all the suits you already have longer. When voided or led which you can only do when forced to (because it’s your only remaining cards), that’s bad and they’re unreliable. Deets: When following, if you have other suited cards of the led suit you could play, you can play a talisman or omnihedron instead. They copy the led suit in that case but keep their talisman or omnihedron rank. Leading them or voiding them is not good, it’s not even allowed if you have other cards you could lead or void. The penality is that the opponent to the left decides freely whether the talisman / omnihedron card wins or loses the trick (or, in co-op or solitaire game, pick whatever is worse for the mission).
If there are two or more copies of the exact same card in a trick, thanks to the darkness, conjurer, and/or “whatever you want” card, or arrows or talismans, the card that was added last to the trick is a real one and wins over the “impostor”. The special cards don’t get a new timestamp when they’re resolved. They keep the timestamp of when they were played.
If you only add two arrows and two talismans, for example the green ones, this means the deck is… Um… Seventy cards! You can add in any of the other cards (more arrows, more talismans, more suits, elongate any of the existing suits) and still follow these rules for how all the weird cards work. The seventy card deck is also a strict superset of the normal deck so you can play the first round normally and then add the 18 new cards: 0, 11, B of hearts, 2, B, Q, A of clouds, H and T of hearts-and-clouds, C, D, W, whatever, as specials, and both green arrows and green talismans, and the omnihedron.
So in the specific two-handed whist variant I was talking about earlier, instead of ten facedown, ten face up, six hand cards, here you’ll have, let’s say say fourteen face down, fourteen face up, and seven hand cards.
Examples:
Alice plays the queen of clubs! Bob still has a bunch of other club cards so he can safely play a talisman and win the trick!
Bob then plays the ten of spades! Alice is short-suited spades so she can play the arrow and win the trick!
Alice then plays the queen of diamonds! Bob has plenty of hearts, diamonds, and spades, but plays the darkness, which, once no more cards are addded, is randomly rolled and it becomes a nine of hearts. If hearts isn’t trump this particular deal, Alice wins the trick!
Alice then plays the jack of clubs! Bob’s only club left is the conjurer which he has to play. But then the conjurer gets rolled to be another nine of hearts and loses that trick too! You’re not short suited anything as long you have a conjurer and/or watcher. They both count as all suits in hand. Even though the conjurer’s suit is a li’l fluid.
Alice then plays the “whatever you want” card; she can’t say it’s a spade because she already revealed she’s short-suited spades, she can’t say it’s a queen of clubs, a queen of diamonds, or a jack of clubs either. She can’t copy any of the cards she has in her hand either. If she, for example, does not have a nine of hearts, she can say nine of hearts even though Bob already played two nine of hearts cards and might still have the real one in his hand. Which he does, and he plays it, and wins the trick since his 9♥︎ was the last one played.
My thinking on Radlands vs Netrunner is that the limitations of Radlands is what really weigh in its favor. A very simple non-camp card pool with no fancy or weird cards, two copies of every non-hero character and of every event so one quickly learns the pool and what to expect and most games we pull pretty much the same cards but because of how the game works, completely different things happen with those cards. It’s just such an elegant design, it’s genius, I love it.
The camps can get weird and I’m glad that that’s where he put the complexity. That adds fun while still making sure the actual base game is still fun.
What makes it good is what it doesn’t have: deck building, expansions, meta, bad matchups, sideboarding, playsets, millions of different token types (even the twelve water tokes that are there isn’t strictly necessary; it’s possible to use one’s fingers or just remember), factions, ban lists. Just pure fun and resource management and hard choices and top deck luck. We had a game today that I won but he would’ve won if he had a wheel junk card; he got three chances to draw one but didn’t. And then it turned out that the very next card of the deck was one. Fun fun fun.♥︎
And, I love that the simple cards also means huge art boxes on the cards. Cards that are mostly art with just a li’l icon or two.
Putting a pin in that “elegant minimalism” and comparing game vs game, that’s where Netrunner has advantages: bluffing, more stuff you can do without cards, a more detailed economic game with resources accumulated over many turns, interactive rez/jack decisions during runs etc. In Radlands you do have one type of resources, even unknown-to-the-opponent resources: namely junkable cards-in-hand. But most of the time you’re both stretched so thin that that’s not much of a factor, and/or if one player does get a huge lead in junkable cards-in-hand they might be able to quickly win (“here, I play nine burning tires so damage your camps thrice RIP”).
In Netrunner, not all programs can break and in Radlands, not all characters can fight. I love that. I love that you can have a pacifistic li’l Muse or Rescue Team. But in Netrunner the runner can inherently run without programs and just encounter icies on their own or if there is no etr ice just go take a peek in the corporations HQ, R&D, archives or even remote servers. Here, the player can only do stuff through cards. Whether that damage is fast through ‘splosions, or delayed though the car.
I find myself wishing for a “contained” experience, like Radland is, but one that would bring some of the fun from Netrunner back in. And that’s wishing for gold when I already have diamonds because Radlands as it is is an awesome experience with fun characters, thematic interactions, a li’l bit of bluffing, and lots of hard choices and tight positions. Every time I’ve played it, I like it more.
Although I don’t like the theme. Humans on the brink pushed into hurting or even outright killing each other. That’s where games like Pollen have an edge, where players are flowers who want to attract insects. Or even Netrunner with all of its politics and clever satire.
A lot of the alternatives people propose to Scrabble has the same drawback as Scrabble (needing to learn a specific set of words—Paperback and Word on the Street has that issue also) and some of them (like Boggle and Bananagrams) don’t have the fun of Scrabble’s spatial and timing tactics. I think Scrabble does have the “the other half of the game outside of just knowing words is also fun” quality of games like Wordcraft or Paperback. Quirkle, Hippos and crocodiles, Go might be options for a similarly spatial game but without words.
Even Codenames can be problematic in Swedish and German since we glue noun phrases together. So summerholiday is a word for example and someone might say summerholidaybreakfast and be easily understood. The rule for Codenames and Scrabble in those countries is that only “established” compound nouns are allowed—i.e. ones in an arbitrary list to memorize.
I think creating words is fun but I don’t like how Scrabble is necessarily so list-based. How Dixit solved the “judging issue” from party games like Apples to Apples (and many others), that was a revelation. Getting something like that for word games would be awesome, something that solves the “wordlist issue” and instead makes a word game that reflect your own group’s actual jargon and language.
Everyone throws rock, paper, or scissors.
First and foremost all duplicates destroy each other. There can be only one. Then, paper beats rock, scissors beats paper, and rock beats scissors.
If everyone gets eliminated in a round (if everyone throws the same symbol or if there’s a loop), no-one gets eliminated that round. (People eliminated previous rounds do not come back.)
Keep doing it until there’s only one winner.
People tying and reshooting is part of the fun of RPS and I wanted to keep that but a little goes a long way. The traditional way of playing group RPS (everyone keeps throwing until there are exactly two different symbols present among the hands show, the losing symbol gets eliminated) gets pretty extreme compared to Highlander RPS.
I also came up with “election RPS” where instead of duplicates being eliminated, it’s an election:
If all three symbols are represented, everyone who voted for the biggest team gets to stay. If two teams are tied for the majority, then paper beats rock and so on. If all three teams are tied, redo the “election”.
Otherwise, if only two symbols are represented, then scissors beat paper and so on (even if there are more papers than scissors).
Redo until there’s exactly one winner.
Election RPS is faster than the traditional group RPS, but I prefer Highlander RPS, which is even faster and with simpler rules. Some might find the flavor of Highlander RPS weird (why would a single rock beat twelve papers?) which doesn’t happen in the “election” variant, so really hammer home the flavor of the duplicate papers beating each other.
Call it Clone Wars if that makes more sense.
RPS is all about picking the unexpected and Highlander RPS embraces that.
I love rock paper scissors but I wanna make it more fun to play in bigger groups, to quickly find a starting player for a game, for example.
I know about the odds and evens game and how it eliminates ties and is a much better game but RPS is more fun!
There’s also the “modulo” game, where everyone holds up a number of fingers and then you count that sum around the table to find a winner. That was popular here in Stockholm for a while (“fingrarna”, they called it), but there are a couple of misconceptions. Turns out it only works fairly if the only allowed numbers are zero through one less than the number of players. So trying to trot the modulo out in a twelve player group is just a scam unless everyone has eleven fingers.
“Ready Aim Fire” which is an everyone-pointing-at-each-other game can also be fun but mostly I wanna play good old rock paper scissors!
I’ve heard about the “big rock” variant where there’s a fourth gesture, a “big rock” (I don’t know how to make the “big rock” gesture, I just read about the game variant) which defeats everything, but if more than one player picks it all “big rock” players are gone. Highlander RPS came out of that (it’s just a minor tweak on the Big Rock game), and then I came up with Election RPS which made more flavor sense (if there are plenty of rocks out, no way are scissors safe!) but I prefer Highlander RPS, where papers beats other papers before they can start hunting for rocks.
I found out years later that Highlander RPS is similar to Alex Randolph’s 4p/5p variant for Merrill Flood’s game “GOPS”. But it’s a completely independent invention. Unlike that time where I cryptomnesically made a game very inspired by Parlett’s Dracula, which I only realized long after, this time it’s a true independent invention of more or less the same thing.
So in Car Wars “classic” (a.k.a. 1e through 4e), the two main tables for driving is the Movement Chart and the control table.
Here I’ve tried to combine them to one board.
To use this, each vehicle has (in addition to their token on the map) a pawn or marker or wooden disc on something over on the right side of the board, the part with all the “safe” and “XX” and numbers.
The row should match their current speed.
For columns, they start on their modified handling class. They can never go more left than that.
End of each turn, each pawn moves left according to their modified handling class, which could be written on the pawn, or we could use dice turned to that number. Each pawn moves as many steps left as their modified handling class up to a max of that number.
And spending handling status (or “accruing D” or however you wanna phrase it) by doing maneuvers or encountering hazards means moving to the right that many spaces (just “clonking into” the rightmost edge if you’re there, just as you can’t go higher than your modified handling class), and then if you’re on a crash, you go to the crash table, and if you’re a number, you roll to see if you go to the crash table.
Accelerating means moving down orthogonally and decelerating means moving up.
Over on the left side, you can see how many inches you move on the map.
So let’s say you have a modified handling class that happens to be 3 and you’re driving around in 90 mph.
You have your car token on the map and also a pawn on the 85-90 line.
That mean that every turn, you can move your car token on the map nine inches forward (look to the left half of the board to find that nine) and make maneuvers. For each maneuver you make, move your pawn right as many steps as the difficulty of that maneuver.
For example, one single 45 degree turn is a D3 maneuver so you’d move three steps to the right and see if you’re safe or if you’re risking losing control of your car. Now, most results on the crash table are like minor skids and stuff.
Then at the end of the turn, move your pawn three steps left since your modified handling class is 3. You can never go more left than the 3 column (in this particular example, since that’s your handling class) or more right than the -6 column.
So this means in practice you can keep turning 45° or less and still be safe. You can also turn a little bit sharper some turns (making control rolls to do so) and then drive a little straighter on the following turns to “save up” control again.
I said you can move nine inches per turn above but what’s really going on is that a turn is divided in to five phases. You can make up to one maneuver per phase, and each of those maneuvers replaces one inch of movement.
So at 90 mph, looking at the left half of the board, that means that first three phases you move two inches, fourth phase you move one inch, and last phase you move your last two inches.
Most of the time, five phases are good. But if two drivers are on complete opposite sides of the board, no line of sight, no nothing, you can speed up play by joining phases together. Don’t actually change any real rules, you’re just shortcutting the execution of those rules. When in doubt, when cars are close to each other and stuff, do it phase by phase.
So for example, if you’re all alone on a race track driving 90, you can move nine, making one of those nine inches a 45° turn, and then end of turn you regain three handling.
Or if your playing with a friend but your cars are a bit apart, you can join together two phases then one then two again or whatever. Or three + two. For your convienence I made the “T” column where you can see your entire turn of movement.
If you’ve played Robo Rally you kinda know the kind of shortcutting I mean here. In that game, everyone executes their card at once unless there’s collisions or stuff that might or might not happen and only then you zoom in, slow down, and look at priority more specifically to resolve things properly. Or in Magic, you’d be like “And then I loop that five times” instead of explaining every step of a combo five times over.
You can join phases as much as you need to depending on what makes sense on the map or in the situation, always taking care to know that the real rule is five phases and one maneuver per phase.
This phase stuff is a big argument among Car Wars players.
The older releases used ten phases per turn, whereas the one I have, the 2015 “classic” version of the 4th edition, has five. Not sure when that happened. Although this version does say that you can also zoom in even further inside the phases and do inch by inch movement.
GURPS Autoduel 1e used one phase per turn, with an optional variant that each vehicle moved in 2-inch chunks until everyone had moved all their full speeds.
GURPS Autoduel 2e also used one phase per turn but with an optional variant dividing those turns into four phases.
Car Wars 6e uses one phase per turn.
Now, I haven’t played a lot of this game yet but it seems to me that five phases, and using human judgement & common sense on when to join them (or even split them if needed! But that would not be isomorphic to CWC RAW) is the best of all worlds. Fine-grained when you need the detail, fast when you don’t.
10 miles in an hour means one inch in a second. But what if you’re driving 85 miles or 82.5 or whatever? You’d have to move half an inch or a quarter of an inch. I marked those numbers with italics to indicate which phase you move a little shorter. Note that except for pivoting, you can’t maneuver unless you’ve got a full inch of movement to swap for the maneuver.
If you wanna see the svg source or send changes, there’s a git repo at
git clone https://idiomdrottning.org/car-wars-control-board
Car Wars is a trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and its rules and art are copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by Steve Jackson Games. This game aid is the original creation of Idiomdrottning and is released for free distribution, and not for resale, under the permissions granted in the Steve Jackson Games Online Policy.
Used to be that I had a really big hangup against Puzzling Multiplayer Epics, i.e. games that were all three of these things:
For example, Uno is fine because it’s not that brainburny, and The Resistance is fine because there’s only two teams. No Thanks is fine because it’s not that long. All coop games are fine if they only have one team, and two-player games are also all fine. Cosmic Encounter was a big fave because it was not that thinky.
Having two of the three things, any two, that’s great. The three traits are good things. We want them in our games. The problem comes when you have all three in one game, and that problem is kingmaking. When Alice is in a position to make either Bob or Carol win. Fine for a short game, or for a long but not particularly thinky game, or for a game that’s more distilled to be a political experience than diluded with a bunch of other puzzliness, but after spending eight hours thinking myself into a headache it sucks to get the victory just goofed out away from me.
A handful of games managed to find their way into my heart in spite of this, and the reason for that is that they made the kingmaking really subtle. A king of the hill type game like King of Tokyo or Nexus Ops can make it feel more like “ever-shifting teams” than a multi-side game, or a game like Caylus can make the interactions really subtle and timing-based, disguising the kingmaking even though it can happen even there. Economic games like Container can also work; economic systems put layers and layers of abstraction in front of exploitation, making them less directly feel bad.
I just decided to really nope out of all games that I thought felt into the PME category. That led me to disliking or missing out on a lot of OG eurogame classics, games that are now being reappraissed as there is a bit of an OG renaissance as people are getting sick of the everyone-has-their-own-engine-tableau games. I’ve been slowly getting into that OG eurogame scene.
And I’m immediately running into the PME problem again.
Since some games from the “separate tableaus” / “multiplayer solitaire” trend featured less interaction, they were less susceptible to PME. They were boring in other ways so I’m interested in seeing other ways we can fix this.
We want a shared board and full interaction, but either:
A card game for two!
You need a 32 card deck; eight cards each of four suits, for example seven through ace.
While the cards are being dealt, there’s gonna be an auction (details below), and it’ll end with both players having thirteen cards each in hand plus three more cards each face down, and one player (the “declarer”) having committed to winning a number of tricks and a trump suit picked, and the other (the “defender”) trying to prevent that.
Players take turns playing one card each to the middle until there are four cards there. You’ve got to “follow suit” if you can; for example, if the first card is a heart, you’ve got to play a heart card if you have one. If you’re all out of heart cards then you can play whatever you want.
Then the highest “trump card” wins, or if there are no trump cards, the highest card of the original suit wins. Uh, I’d better give examples!
Let’s say spades are the trump suit and the four cards are ♥J, ♥8, ♦K and ♠9. The player who played the ♠9 would win that trick since it’s the highest trump suit card.
Or if the four cards are ♥J, ♥8, ♦K and ♣9. The player who played the ♥J would win since there were no trump cards and the hearts were the suit that was “led”.
The “trump suit” is the same throughout the hand, determined by the declarer, while the “lead suit” resets for each trick which is why it’s sometimes a fight to get to lead the trick: the defender leads the first trick, and then whoever wins a trick gets to lead the next trick.
Since players have thirteen cards in hand, the seventh trick can’t be a four-card trick. Both players just play one card each to that trick, making it a two-card trick. Then they pick up the three face down cards they each have and play three more two-card tricks. That’s how there are ten tricks total.
If the declarer won as many tricks as they promised, they get ten points per promised trick + one point per extra trick, minus fifty. So if they promised seven and got eight, that’s 21 points. Seven times ten minus fifty plus one extra.
If the declarer did not make their promise, the defender gets points instead: five points per every missing trick. So if the declarer promised seven tricks and only got four, the defender gets fifteen points (three missing tricks, times five).
Whomever has the most points total after four hands wins the game.
Here is how each hand is dealt! It’s a little fiddly and I wanted to explain the actual goal of the game first but here we go:
Shuffle and deal ten cards each.
Then each player starting with the dealer bids one number from six through ten, or passes. If you don’t pass, you’ve got to bid a higher number than what’s been already said.
Then everyone gets two more cards (up to twelve). If no-one passed before, both players now can bid again.
And then you get two more cards (so you have fourteen cards now). If no-one has passed before, now both players can keep bidding until someone passes. Remember, ten is the highest possible bid.
The person who passed is the defender and the other person is the declarer, having promised to try to win that many tricks.
They get to choose a trump suit (see below) and then you get the last two cards from the deck, so players now have sixteen cards.
Since the entire deck has been dealt, they now can figure out exactly what cards the other person is holding! But now here’s the fun part!
You choose three cards from your hand and place them face down. Those are gonna be your cards for the last three tricks so this is a super important choice!
If both players pass at the start (when they have ten cards each), just reshuffle and redeal the cards. It was a bad hand I guess!
You can choose ♠, ♥, ♦ or ♣, and then that suit will be the trump suit.
You can also choose “sang” (an old word for “blood”), which means there is no trump suit! Only the lead suit in each trick will matter! Very old school.
The sixth possible choice is “misère” (an old word for “destitution”) which first of all plays out the same as “sang” above, but also the tricks are flipped: you’re trying to lose tricks, so give the tricks you win to your opponent instead and vice versa.
In 1951 Sid Sackson came up with “Slam!” (which in turn is based on Bridge which in turn is based on Whist and so on) and this “Slim Tricks” variant is just a stripped down version of that much richer and more interesting game that has different point values for different suits, “vulnerability” where different bids mean different things at different times, “over and under the line scoring” and “slam bids” and so much more richness and variability and joy.
If you’ve learned “Slim Tricks” and want an upgraded version, Slam! is the place to go.
I came up with this “Slim Tricks” variant because Slam! is so difficult & complicated and hard to teach. It’s fun but I also like easy things.
The reason I wish roll-behind-a-screen games like Sky Team or Roll For the Galaxy had found another solution is because I value the shared experience in a game so highly. The moment where everyone at the table knows you need to roll a 16 or higher, and everyone is on edge as you’re rolling that die, and end up you making it, is so awesome. Even Yahtzee can be a fun and good game if you care enough. Or in The Crew or Sail when you’re like “I sure hope you have a nine right now!” and they do, they have that nine in their hand, or they don’t, and they can show you their nine-deprived hand as you all wail and sob like sea-creatures.
In Sky Team, let’s say you’re in a situation where you’ve put forward a 5 and you need your co-pilot to also put forward a 5 and as soon as they see your five, they draw a sigh of relief and slam their five. That isn’t a shared experience. That is a shared claim about an experience since they could’ve so easily put forth any number.
Now, I’d never cheat and I don’t know anyone who would even consider cheating in a game like Sky Team, so don’t trot out those tired “I don’t play with cheaters” arguments. That’s not what this is about.
It’s just about the preciousness and the value and the joy in actually sharing a moment or situation over just sharing claims about a situation.
There is an old commercial for the boardgame “Connect 4” where the sister wins over her brother by the brother just plain not noticing an otherwise plain-as-day and straight-forward, direct victory attempt.
To the consternation of boardgame snobs everywhere, who never want to win via just a blunder, who not only want to capture the king but actually create a checkmate position where no matter what the other player tries to do, it’s over. (“No, you can’t move your knight there, your king is in check”.)
We’ve seen this in the eurogame scene, where some game groups have a culture of allowing infinite takebacks and even giving advice. “We want to play against you at your best”, they say, “that’s why we have this culture.”
But in this era of AI and bots, where a game like Arimaa that was specifically designed to beat the bots barely made it a decade before getting defeated, and even the multi-millenia stalwart Baduk got defeated, that culture feels like it’s missing some of the just plain fun in boardgames.
I played a couple of rounds of 19×19 tonight against a friend and I managed to win through complete wack blunders like leaving huge groups in atari just because I could keep my pokerface when noticing my own mistakes after making them, whereas my pal was groaning and facepalming even after making minor mistakes, like “OMG what did I just do!” and I could profit off that. I made even bigger mistakes but he didn’t notice them and couldn’t capitalize on them. That’s the kind of stuff that can only happen at the kyu level, pros would never. But that’s why I love the game at our amateur level. It feels like the board is an open ocean and every game is wildly different. It’s just wild creative fun, pictionary in an icon size monochrome pixel grid, a conversation with our hands.
The “I don’t wanna win against just a blunder” crowd, what’s the next step? Using checkmate as the analogy, they could make matemate chess where “no, you can’t make that move, that would lead to checkmate the next turn”, where the goal is to create a forced-mate-in-two situation because you could otherwise “blunder” into a checkmate. And then even that version of the game wouldn’t be enough, you’d have to make a matematemate version where you have to create a forced-mate-in-three to win, and so on. Why don’t you just put the whole world in a bottle?
Blunders are part of the human side of board games. I love ‘em.
A friend wrote in to point out that super leniency, takebacks, time rewinds, card editing, giving out resources etc can be pretty clutch when designing and playtesting new games. If a game doesn’t sing on five doshes a turn, maybe it’ll be more fun with ten or twenty, or with one or two. Taking a sharpie to the cards in the middle of the game to change them to work better, tutoring or mulliganing for specific cards etc you wanna try out and so on.
The Tak rulebook weighs in:
But there in a cultural divide in the game that I rarely see discussed. Two different types of play, which I think of as courtly Tak, and street Tak.
Courtly Tak is typically played for intellectual and social gains. Games are slower. Tactics and strategy are valued. Gentility and courtesy are essential. Player allow each other to take back moves or may give advice in order to feel that they are competing against each other in peak form.
Street Tak is played primarily for a physical gain or bragging rights. Games tend to be faster. Surprise and cunning are valued. Manners are more brash, and it is not uncommon for players to be bullied or insulted. Let me stress that these different types of play have little to do with the setting. I have seen brutal, angry games played in opulent sitting rooms. I have also seen civility and grace play out across an ale soaked tavern table.
The purpose of street Tak is winning. The purpose of courtly Tak is showing that you are the better player.
I don’t want people to be bullied or browbeat. Please play politely.
But this part:
Player allow each other to take back moves or may give advice in order to feel that they are competing against each other in peak form.
That is the one thing from “Courtly” play that I don’t feel a strong desire for, the whole “let’s give each other advice and find the perfect play” when in a world of robots and data, it’s sloppy, imperfect play that’s a breath of fresh air.
Sometimes the conception out there is that people who don’t like takebacks are competitive-minded funhaters. Learning that (after writing this) surprised me since here I’ve tried to argue for the opposite view: that it’s often fun to just let what happens happens including mistakes. I’m sure there are exceptions but I trust you to case-by-case them.
Here’s how to select a boardgame using scoring, then instant runoff.
Give everyone a paper list of the games on offer.
Everyone anonymously scores each game from zero to five stars, zero means don’t wanna play today and five means really wanna play today.
It’s OK to mark a bunch of zeroes and just one five, it’s OK to give all kinds of scores, it’s OK to have several fives or several threes or whatever. It works anyway.
Then gather up these ballots. For each game, count up the stars. For the two games with most total stars, look at all the ballots again but now instead of looking at the number of stars, count the amount of ballots where one of the two games has strictly more stars than the other.
For example let’s say Ticket to Ride has 30 stars, Carcassonne has 25, Uno has 24, Caylus has 18, and Dixit has 5. The two finalists are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. And then let’s say there are three ballots where Carcassone has more stars than TtR, one ballot where TtR has more stars than Carcassonne, and four where they are tied. Carcassonne won.
Here is a simple dice game for y’all.
Everyone needs four pawns or markers, and then you need three dice, and then make a board that has ten spaces numbered four through thirteen, plus a little starting area before the “4” space where everyone’s pawns start out, and also make sure that the “13” space is right next to the edge of the board.
This is a roll-and-move game of the misère variety since you lose when you move your last piece off the board, and you win by hanging on the longest.
When it’s your turn, roll all three dice, then you can have one reroll where you can reroll all or any of the dice, one time. For example, if you roll 1, 2 and 4, maybe you decide to reroll the 4, or maybe you decide to reroll the 1 and the 4, or you decide to keep them all. You reroll all the dice at the same time. So it’s sort of like Yahtzee in that regard, except you only get one reroll, not two. The more immediate inspiration for this dice system is the game “Lost Cities On a Treasure Hunt” by Knizia.
Then you can add any or all of the dice together, ignoring up to two of the dice (you can’t roll zero). So if you have rolled 1, 2, and 4, that can become:
Then you can move any one of your pawns to the number you rolled. You don’t move “that many steps”, you move to that number. And you need to move from a lower-numbered space (or from the “starting area”).
Any sum fourteen or higher (there are three dice, so fourteen through eighteen) means moving the pawn “off the edge of the world” and out of the game. You lose the game if you’re the first to move all four your pawns off (and everyone else wins. They can keep playing if they wanna know who wins more, but, that’ll be boring for the person who fell off).
You’ve got to move, so if your dice can combine in a way that lets you move one of your pawns forward, you have to. For example, if all your pawns are on “8” or higher and you roll 4 4 4? You’ve got to move one of them to the “12” space.
If your dice combine so that you can’t move any pawn? For example, if all your pawns are on “8” or higher and you roll 1 2 3, which can’t combine to anything higher than six? Ouch. This is called “a storm rolling in”. You need to make two new turns in a row. And this punishment is recursive: if a storm rolls in on any of your replacement turns, you need to take two additional turns, and so on. So keeping low numbers is a risk!
Pawns can coexist peacefully on the same space. It’s a race, not a wrestling match. That said, I’m sure you can cook up variants if you want turn landing on other people’s spaces into some sorta interaction.
Reiner Knizia has famously and confusingly said:
When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.
As an analogy, let’s say you wanna get fit so you decide to take a walk. You decide to go to the park. Now, the intended destination of your walk is the park, and the purpose of the walk is to get fit.
Russ has a post investigating the origins of the quote with other variants that make it clearer what Knizia meant.
I don’t like this 2002 version:
It’s not about winning. I mean, I want to win, but winning is not important. It’s about measuring your wits with other people, seeing how you come out, and seeing the reactions of the others.
I don’t agree with that. I play games to have shared experiences with friends and fam. In the walk-to-the-park analogy, the intended destination is to win the game but the reason I play is for the company and community.
Here is a version from a few months later that I think is great:
We all thrive to win - even though winning as such is utterly unimportant. It is the objective, the aspiration that counts.
I like it.
There are players who are super concentrated, focused, power-gaming, using advanced strategy like probability calculations, tracking hidden game state and so on, but are still being friendly and congenial and polite. They make actions in the game that are directed towards winning, but they’re not staring daggers or shouting or being cruel and short. They realize that the reason for the activity is to hang out with friends & fam. Winning is merely the beacon or signpost that directs that activity, and as such, they play the game to the best of their ability, accepting the current limits of that ability while still trying to improve. The never-ending road towards mastery of a craft or hobby can be a very satisfing experience.
I kinda wanna quote the entire “Outcomes” chapter here. It’s chapter 3.3 in Characteristics of Games. It lists a bunch of different endstates a game could have (if any), like “everyone wins”, or “a team or alliance can win”. Some games like RPGs don’t feel like winning or losing; the characters can experience success or failure but a well-played character failure can be a player success at the same time. I dunno.
Y’all know I am a Mel (probably better known as lawful evil) when it comes to most games, even RPGs. The first thing I look at in a game is the rules, and few things makes me as stoked for a session as trying out new rules; sometimes player-facing (“here are some new crafting rules I made for y’all!”) and sometimes just DM procedures. That’s my “mastery”, that’s where I try to find a flow state. The purpose is the shared experiences with friends & fam, and the intended destination is finding, appreciating, applying, understanding, and making good rules.
Karin Boye put it perfectly:
There is a goal, and we see through it,
and yet the journey’s why we do it.