My stock answer is that playtesting will give you just as much information about balance and costing as modeling. But modeling will get you to an answer faster.

Part of the issue is that building a full model of most games, and developing algorithms to walk through potential strategies can take a long time - and if you make a mistake somewhere along the line (more likely as the simulation gets more complex) the results can be counterproductive, giving you false assurances.

Having said that, understanding the math behind your design choices is very useful and often vital.

There are many formulas and techniques to assist in this. Two examples that I have covered already here on GameTek are the Hypergeometric and Binomial distributions, and Markov Chains.

I’d like to talk about a third concept - Expectation Value - and how me and my kids used that in our latest release DC Breakout.

Defining Expectation Value

If you roll a die or draw a card or time how long it takes you to drive to work, you will get a range of values. It’s not the same thing over and over again.

Expectation Value (EV) is the average of what you can expect over the long term, if you repeat the same activity over and over. It does not predict what a specific die roll will be, but it does tell you what the expected outcome is.

The expectation value is calculated through this formula:

EV = (p1)(v1) + (p2)(v2) + (p3)(v3) + …

where p1, p2, etc is the probability of result 1 occurring, result 2 occurring, etc, and v1, v2, etc are the value of the outcome.

Let’s take a simple example - rolling a standard D6.

There is an equal chance of rolling each side: a probability of 1/6.

The value is just the number on the side.

So the EV is (1/6)*1 + (1/6)*2 + (1/6)*3+ (1/6)*4+ (1/6)*5+ (1/6)*6

which if you run through all the math is 3.5. In this case it’s the average of the die faces, since the chances of each coming up are equal.

Dealing with fractions can often be a pain, so another way to calculate it is to multiply by the number of ways a certain result can be achieved, instead of the probability, and then after adding all those up to divide by the total number of ways:

EV = ((n1)(v1) + (n2)(v2) + (n3)(v3) + …) / (Ntotal)

n1 is the number of ways you can get value v1, and so on.

Ntotal is n1 + n2 + n3 + …

So for our die example, the expectation value is expressed as:

EV = (1*1 + 1*2 + 1*3 + 1*4 + 1*5 + 1*6) / 6

which is also 3.5.

This example is pretty simple, and it’s obvious that on average you would roll a 3.5 on a D6. So let’s look at some real world examples.

Killer Croc

In DC Breakout you play a pair of villains escaping from Arkham. Your turn is simple - roll a die and move that number of spaces. First pair to the end of the track wins the Escape.

Each villain, of course, has their own special power. And part of the fun is figuring out which two villains of the ones you are dealt will work well together.

When designing DC Breakout, we used EV calculations extensively to help us balance the powers. Let’s take a look at a few, starting with Killer Croc:

His ability is straightforward: Any even roll is changed to a 6.

What is the expected value of this ability?

Well, the six possible die results are 1, 6, 3, 6, 5, 6, since two and four get turned into a six.

There is one way to get a result of 1, 3, or 5, and three ways to get a result of 6:

EV = (1 + 3 + 5 + 3*6) / 6

EV = (27 / 6) = 4.5

So on average Killer Croc will move 4.5 spaces per turn. This is exactly the same EV as getting a +1 modifier on your die roll.

Could we have made Killer Croc’s ability simply to gain a +1 on your die roll? Sure. But there are a few other considerations:

• The ‘change even numbers to sixes’ sounds more exciting than a +1 modifier. The brain says - Wow! That’s huge if I roll a 2!.

• It interacts and combos differently with other abilities. More on that later on.

But simply being able to quickly understand that this ability was the same as a +1 made it easy to think about in comparison with other abilities.

Bane

Let’s take a look at Bane:

There are two parts to this ability. First, you roll two dice and then you select which to use.

For purposes of our first analysis, let’s assume you always pick the highest. This is equivalent to ‘rolling with advantage’ in Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs.

The results of this procedure will still be from one to six. But to calculate the EV we need to know how many ways it is possible to roll each value.

For this, let’s make a 6x6 table showing the possible outcomes:

If I roll a 4 and a 3 (or a 3 and a 4), the result will be 4.

From this table, we see that there’s one way to get ‘1’, three ways to get ‘2’, five to get ‘3’, and so on, up to a whopping 11 ways to get ‘6’. So:

EV = (1*1 + 3*2 + 5*3 + 7*4 + 9*5 + 11* 6) / 36

We divide by 36 because that’s the total number of ways to roll two dice (and also the sum of 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 + 11).

If you work through the math, you’ll see that the EV is 169 / 36, which is just about 4.7.

This is slightly above Killer Croc’s EV of 4.5. So again we have come up with a fancier way to give a character +1, although again this character synergizes different than Killer Croc - both because of the die roll distribution but also because Bane can choose the lower die, which can be advantageous sometimes.

Falcone

Let’s look at one last Villain ability - Falcone:

This is a slightly more complex ability, as it requires a choice from the player. Do you gamble with the second roll or not?

For the EV calculation on this character we approach it in two stages. First, we will break down the EV for each of the six possible first rolls.

For this we will assume that we ALWAYS roll the second die.

Let’s start simple - assume the first roll is a ‘1’. There’s no way to ‘bust’ in this case - so the final movement will be 1 plus whatever you roll on the second die.

If you roll a ‘2’, you will move 0 if you roll a 1 on the second die, but otherwise will move 4-8 spaces.

If you roll a ‘5’, you will move 0 if you roll a 1-4 on the second die, but will move 10 or 11 if you roll a 5 or 6 on the second die.

Here’s what it looks like in chart form:

If you roll a 6 on your first roll and always roll the second die, you will move 0 spaces 5 times out of 6, and 12 spaces once.

That puts our EV at 2, which you see in the last column.

This chart shows us that purely from an EV standpoint, we should roll the second die on a 1-4, and not on a 5 or 6.

If you average the EVs, you will get an overall EV for this ‘naive’ strategy (always roll the second die) of 4.08.

If you adopt the ‘optimal’ strategy of rolling the second die on a 1-4, you get this chart:

In this case the average EV is an even ‘5’.

This is higher than both Killer Croc and Bane. So does this mean that this is an unbalanced ability? Maybe - but as a designer there are many things to consider.

First, most players won’t bother going through this math.

Second, Falcone tempts people into making that second roll even if they roll an initial 5 or 6. Sometimes landing on certain other teams is bad, or there are other situational factors at play. Or maybe another player has a reroll ability that can make it much riskier for you to make that second roll.

Third, Falcone’s ability is high variance. Take a look at the row above for if your first roll is a ‘4’. If you reroll (which the strategy recommends), you may move 8, 9 or 10, but half the time you’re moving zero. People don’t like to take that chance.

This is an important lesson: Balance often depends on emotion as much as math. Yes, as a designer you should do the math we went through above (and we did it for this game). But you also need to playtest it and see how it feels in-game, particularly for a light family game like this.

Riddler - Avoiding Disaster

While emotion certainly plays a role, the math does matter. Doing EV calculations and thinking about strategies can avoid disaster.

As an example, here is Riddler:

An older version of this ability had you double your die roll if the opponent said you were bluffing and you weren’t.

Let’s take a look at that version of the ability.

After playing with that version of Riddler for a few games, I came up with this strategy:

If you roll a 1, 2, or 3 always bluff and say that you rolled a 4, 5, or 6 (respectively). If you roll a 4, 5, or 6 tell the truth.

So a third of the time I will say ‘4’, a third ‘5’, and a third ‘6’.

Let’s take a look at the expectation values for this strategy:

No matter whether the opponents call your bluff or not, you still on average will move 5!

This strategy is called invariant or a Nash equilibrium, because it doesn’t matter what decision the opponent makes, and you also don’t make a decision. You just follow the algorithm.

I have another word for it - boring. Very boring. The whole point is to try to bluff your opponents. If it makes no difference what they say, it undercuts the entire purpose.

After realizing this, we went back to the drawing board and came up with the +3 on a successful bluff. This eliminates an automatic strategy and forces players to try to outthink each other, which was what we wanted.

Firefly

I will leave you with a question.

As mentioned, in DC Breakout characters don’t escape by themselves. They are part of a team of two.

Here is Firefly:

You start the game with two tokens on Firefly, and at the start of each turn you can choose to spend one. If you do, your movement roll is tripled.

Which of the first three above characters - Killer Croc, Bane, Falcone, or Riddler - do you think best synergizes with Firefly? Killer Croc has the lowest EV, but 50% of the time rolls a six. Bane only rolls a six 1/3 of the time, but he very rarely rolls low numbers. And Falcone could move you up to 36 spaces - or absolutely nothing.

These combos, even though the EVs are really close together, feel different - which is just as important (perhaps more) than getting the numbers correct.

So do the math, but don’t be beholden to it. Remember that you are crafting an experience, and that should come first.

So which pair would you like the most? Please leave a comment!!

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Is this fair? Does the better player win?

A recent paper says no. Well, not always.

Making tennis fairer: The grand tiebreak is from Brams, Kilgour, and Seven. They specifically look at matches where one player wins more games than another player, but loses the match.

For example, the set scores may be 1-6, 6-4, 6-4. The losing player has won 14 games (6, 4, and 4), and the winning player 13 (1, 6, 6).

The paper authors believe that this is eminently unfair, and propose a remedy - The Grand Tie Break.

Basically, if the winner of the most matches is not the player who won the most games, there would be a special tie break, which would be conducted the same way as a normal set tiebreaker (first player to seven points, must win by two).

Other than perhaps being “fairer” (debatable), the authors say that this will have the positive effect of making every game count that much more. Even if a player is far behind in a set they have incentive to try to win as many games as they can to avoid the Grand Tiebreak.

A Swing and a Miss?

Personally, I am not a fan of this proposal (as you might guess). It just generally makes everything more math-y without really adding much more excitement. A dominant comeback performance in a final set can be just as exciting as needing a ‘Grand Tiebreak’ mechanic. Although I did appreciate the extension Markov-Chain analysis of a tennis match. But maybe that’s just me.

But - why stop at Games? Why not look at how many Points each player scored? What’s privileged about Games? The authors don’t discuss this.

Finally, other sports have this ‘issue’, but the authors don’t address that at all. They act as if tennis is the only sport that faces this.

But any sport or game that ‘clumps’ points into a single victory or defeat will have this issue.

For example, let’s take a look at the sport of baseball. In the World Series, the team that lost the series scored more runs than the winner a bunch of times - most recently in 2025. The losing Toronto Blue Jays scored 34 runs, while the victorious LA Dodgers scored just 26.

That is primarily due to the first game, which the Blue Jays won 11-4. And generally the Blue Jays won their three games by big margins, while the Dodgers just squeaked out wins.

In the 1960 World Series, the Yankees scored 55 runs, more than double the 27 scored by the Pirates. But the Pirates won 4-3.

Can you imagine that if at the end of the World Series or the NBA championships that if the losing team outscored the winning over the whole series they had to play a special tie break? It just wouldn’t feel right. It would also create other weird effects as teams know then need to win by a certain amount to avoid it.

Area Control Games

This feature of “chunking” plays a key role in many games, but particularly in Area Control games like El Grande and Smash Up. (Have you played El Grande? You should play El Grande.) A key ‘experience’ that these games create is efficiency - which doesn’t sound that exciting but absolutely can be. You have limited resources and need to figure out how to deploy those to maximum effect. If you win a province by 8-1 that’s really bad. Yeah, it’s secure and dominant, but meanwhile your opponents are winning other territories by 3-2 and 4-3.

Some of the key considerations that you as a designer can use in area control games are:

• How do resources enter territories?

• How do they leave? Can they be transferred?

• How do you deal with turn order? Going last in an area control game can be critical.

• How do you vary the value of the regions / rewards?

• How do you add uncertainty to resolution (and do you want that)?

When playing an area control game, pay attention to how the designer dealt with these questions to craft an engaging experience.

War Games

War games are also about effectively allocating your resources. Sometimes you want to have a local super-majority, so you can get a breakthrough, while still holding the rest of the line. Shifting resources around to exploit enemy weak points is another example of ‘chunking’, as is the old wargame concept of ‘soaking attacks’.

Soaking attacks were common in older Avalon Hill wargames. If you were next to an enemy unit you needed to attack, so if you just matched up a line of tokens against each other, it was hard to get an advantage. Instead you would concentrate your stronger units at a single point to get a high odds attack, and sacrifice a lower strength unit to ‘soak’ against one or more strong enemy units at very bad odds. That way you can create gaps and eliminate strong enemy units in exchange for weaker ones of your own.

This was an emergent tactic, by the way. There was never an explicit rule that explained that you could do that. Players just figured it out.

I also used the idea of efficiency (in a less-obvious way) in my game The Fog of War. In that game, players secretly prepare offensive and defensive operations. When you reveal the forces, ideally you want to win by as little as possible. New players tend to overcommit to key operations to make sure they win, rather than use intel and do a better job optimizing the use of their forces. In the early stages of the game, which is about WW2 in Europe, the Allies can’t stop the Germans everywhere. They need to bluff the Axis into overcommitting into some areas, winning by a lot, while the Allies muster their forces to win a few battles here or there and throw off the German timetable.

Auction Games

The Fog of War mechanism is reminiscent of a Sealed Bid Auction, where players simultaneous make secret bids and reveal them. Winning can be disastrous if you win by too much and overcommit. You can end up behind the curve for the rest of the game.

Even if there isn’t a sealed bid, understanding the options your opponents have and planning accordingly can be a key tactic. The bidding tiles in Ra are a great example of this. Your opponents’ options are known but figuring out how to force (or at least entice) them into using their tiles inefficiently can be very satisfying.

Other Chunk Sightings

‘Chunking’ can be seen in lots of other places. One to highlight is end game scoring. Often a game will award a fixed bonus to a player that has the most of a certain resource. This presents a challenge to a player in terms of how much to chase after that, and how much of a buffer to give yourself to deter rivals.

Trick Taking games can also be viewed as a form of chunking. If you win a trick with an trump ace or a non-trump 6, it still counts as one trick. You want to win as efficiently as possible.

Gerrymandering

There’s one hot-button issue that this idea of Games vs Sets directly relates to - Gerrymandering, the political math of dividing up voting districts to give an advantage to one party.

This is a whole other topic that is actually mathematically fascinating, while having major real-world implications. I do plan to do a future GameTek on gerrymandering, but I think this column is running long already. So soon!

So what types of chunking have you seen in games, and how well do they work? And what are your thoughts on the tennis proposal that started this all? Let me know in the comments!

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Every year creative works enter the public domain, which means you are free to incorporate them into your game designs.

Last year I selected a few items that will be entering the public domain over the next four years as possible inspirations for your projects. I’m continuing that tradition again by adding items going into the Public Domain in 2029. (I’ve done it two years in a row, so now it’s officially a tradition).

Games can take a long time to design and publish, so I don’t think it’s too early to start looking at what is coming up. And 2029 will see King Kong entering the public domain - I can see that being a monster IP that you’ll be free to incorporate.

But please look far afield! 2025 saw the release of the game This Is Not a Game About a Pipe (rules here), which is based on the Magritte painting The Treachery of Images (pictured at the start of this post). I have not yet had a chance to play the game, but I’ve heard nothing but good things. Rules are available here.

So take a look at art and music and other things that may inspire your designs!

HOWEVER - and this is important - you need to consider the countries in which you want to sell the game, and also the specific characteristics or versions of characters that have entered the public domain, and which are still protected.

If you decide to use one of these works it is a good idea to confirm that they will be in the public domain, and any caveats that may exist. Don’t just take my word for it!

UPDATE: After posting this I was advised that there is a dispute about whether The Treachery of Images is actually in the public domain, and that BGG received a takedown notice for the game and it is no longer for sale:

This just underscores that you should do due diligence before incorporating any of these IPs.

Entered Public Domain In 2025

• Popeye

• Tintin

• The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

• Singin’ in the Rain (movie)

• Skeleton Dance (Disney)

Entering Public Domain In 2026

• Betty Boop

• Nancy Drew (Carolyn Keene)

• Maltese Falcon (novel)

• Dick and Jane

• Pluto

Entering Public Domain In 2027

• Universal Frankenstein and Dracula movies

• Dick Tracy

• The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali)

• The Good Earth (Pearl S Buck)

Entering Public Domain In 2028

• Conan the Barbarian (Robert E Howard)

• The Mummy (movie with Boris Karloff)

• Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

• Horse Feathers: The Marx Brothers (movie)

• Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

• Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie)

• Goofy

• Popeye’s Spinach!

Entering Public Domain In 2029

• King Kong, Son of Kong (1939 films)

• The Invisible Man (Claude Rains version for all you Rocky Horror fans)

• Duck Soup (Marx Brothers)

• The Thin Man (novel)

• Various Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts

• “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” (song)

The Popeye theme song - “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” (I’m including this both because I’m a Popeye fan, but also because it shows how you need to be careful about particular elements. Popeye as a character entered the Public Domain in 2025, but his eating of Spinach won’t be PD until 2028, and the theme song until 2029).

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It was actually a little more complex than that, to disguise the fact that the coin flip was actually the part the researchers were interested in. But that’s the core.

Of the people who flipped tails – which meant they got nothing – about half cheated and told the researchers they had actually flipped heads and were given their $5.

This is actually pretty much in line with other experiments of this type. They’ve been done for many years, and with lots of different types of populations and conditions, and it’s always about half that cheat.

What this experiment looked at, which is where it gets interesting in my opinion. Is that they looked at how people cheated.

One group flipped the coin, and when it was tails told the researchers that it was heads. This is the most straightforward method of cheating.

The second group never even flipped the coin. They just told the researchers that they flipped heads and got their $5.

The third group kept flipping the coins until they got heads. Two, three, four, times – however long it took.

I personally find this endlessly fascinating. These all cheat, but they are such different takes on ways to cheat. The researchers did not actually interview people about their thought process after the fact. That hopefully will be done in a future study. But they do speculate on the psychology based on other research.

Let’s start with the last one first – people who keep flipping the coin until they get the result they want. One thing that has become clear in research on lying and cheating is that people are excellent at justifying their own behavior to preserve their self-image. No one, well almost no one, wants to think of themselves as a cheater. It seems that the people in these groups are creating a story for themselves. When asked if they flipped ‘heads’ they can truthfully answer yes. The rules are clear about only flipping one time, but they can justify bending that rule, even if they can’t justify to themselves that they can lie about what they flipped. They are exhibiting “the ends justify the means”, where the end is flipping heads – and it doesn’t matter what rules they trample to get there.

The people that never flip at all are coming at this from a different perspective. They’ve decided they want to win and get that $5, so they don’t even bother going through the motions and just short cut to the end. The researchers called this group “radical liars” – they are lying before they even have to. Remember, they have 50/50 chance of flipping heads and being in the right – but they don’t even bother with that. They know what they want, so what’s the point of doing anything? Perhaps that actually gives them mental cover. They can always say that they might have won anyway, so they didn’t really cheat.

The researchers did a second study as part of this paper. The setup was similar, except the participants rolled a die instead of flipped a coin and reported what they rolled. If the rolled a 1 they got $1, $2 for a 2, $3 for a 3 and so on up to $5 for a 5. If they rolled a 6 they got nothing.

A similar breakdown was seen. About half the people truthfully reported. Of the people that cheated, some gave a different number than what they rolled, some rolled multiple times, and some just said a number.

Interestingly, though, most people who cheated did not report that they rolled a 5. They said they rolled a 3, or most commonly, a 4. Did these people report below the maximum to make it easier for them to think of themselves as good people? Or did they think it would make it less likely they would be caught cheating? Unfortunately the study doesn’t say, but I think it’s more likely the former. I mean, if you lie and say you rolled a ‘4’, at least you’re better than the people who said they rolled a 5, right?

So what would you do in this situation? Is there a particular style of cheating that you think you would be more likely to commit if, like in this case, the stakes and chances of getting in trouble are very low?

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I thought it would be fun to put together the definitive, completely 100% accurate list of the Top 10 Unnecessary Components - and see if we can learn something along the way.

Let’s jump right in!

#10: Nuclear War: Spinner (1965, Douglas Malewicki)

Flying Buffalo released the card game Nuclear War in 1965. The theme is very dark: at the start of the game each player is dealt ‘population cards’ representing from 1 to 25 million people. You then use propaganda, events, and the titular nukes to knock your opponents’ population to zero.

When a player gets eliminated they get a ‘final retaliation’ strike, where they can launch everything they have in their hand at anyone they like. If that eliminates other players, they get final retaliation, and so on.

Often games end up with no winners. I played in a tournament at Origins in the 1980’s where we had to play over ten games until someone finally won.

Each warhead card kills a certain amount of population. But after launching you use the Nuclear War Spinner to determine what actually happens. The results range from Dud Warhead (No effect) to Bomb Shelters Save 2 million to the dreaded Explodes a Nuclear Stockpile: Triple the Yield.

This spinner could have been easily replaced with special dice, or a chart. but the choice underscores the satire in the game. The spinner immediately puts the players in the mindset of playing a children’s game, which is a stark counterpoint to the subject matter.

#9: Shogun: Turn Order Swords (1986, Mike Gray)

Shogun (later released as Samurai Swords and Ikusa) was part of the Gamemaster Series from Hasbro that started with Axis and Allies. They were filled with tons of plastic, styrofoam, and other non-biodegradable components - including complete ship models for Broadsides & Boarding Parties:

While that deserves consideration for this list, the swords in Shogun hold a special place in my heart.

The game comes with five swords, and they have from one to five raised diamonds along the blade. These swords are used to determine - player order. That’s it. And they weren’t great at that function, as the diamonds were difficult to see on the black swords.

They are so unnecessary that they were not included in the later “Ikusa” version of the game.

Yet, there is such joy in pulling those swords and placing them in the little Styrofoam sword block so the other players can see the current turn order that I would never play it any other way.

#8: UBOOT: Three-Dimensional Board (2019, Bartosz Pluta & Artur Salwarowski)

I considered putting the aforementioned Broadsides & Boarding Parties into this slot, but UBOOT had to take the slot for board-that-is-complete-over-the-top. Just feast your eyes on this 3D sub diorama:

The initial construction of the board is a whole project unto itself. But the ‘dollhouse’ factor here attracts people immediately. Any discussion about games with table presence must include UBOOT, which has not just the 3D sub model but also instruments, gauges, dials, and more. Just take a look at the protractor in the left side of the picture above that you use to plot your course. How immersive is that?

#7: The Mushroom Eaters: 3D Glasses (2013, Nate Hayden)

The shaman is old and fading, and their successor must be chosen. The players all embark on a psychedelic journey to determine who will be selected as the new shaman.

Not your average theme. And not your average game. Of particular interest here is the board. It has two unique features. First, it starts out folded and gradually unfolds and twists on itself as players advance along the path. It reveals new vistas as players advance through it and different panels are opened and closed and folded back against themselves.

It’s very difficult to describe, and I was unable to find a video clearly showing how the board works (and lacked the ambition to film one myself). This is the closest, with the board being shown around the halfway mark:

This video has the advantage of featuring people opening the box who had no idea what the game was about, and being baffled, and then amazed and intrigued as they realized what was happening.

But while the clever folding of the board serves a somewhat mechanical purpose, the other feature is unnecessary. The board is printed in red/blue anaglyph, and the players wear 3d glasses while playing.

While mechanically unnecessary, wearing these glasses is intensely immersive, and immediately transports the players into a world where they are literally working their way through a drug trip.

#6: Thing Ding: The Thing Ding Machine (1966, Marvin Glass)

I will be surprised if anyone reading this is aware of this game - if you are, please let me know! But it was a staple of my childhood.

There are six robots - robot mom, dad, baby, dog, cat, and bird, each of which is made up of six pieces. The pieces were mixed up and seeded into the Thing Ding machine, in the center of the above picture. It consists of a conveyer belt broken up into slots, and you put one piece into each slot.

On your turn you rotate the crank, which moves the conveyor belt, until the bell rings. You then see what color is shown on the wheel, and you have to swap a piece of that color for one that is showing on top of the machine (if there is one). The first person to complete a robot by getting all six of its pieces wins the game.

As a game, there is very little going on. But the magic is in the machine, particularly since it was clear and you could see the gears and pieces inside. We could play with the toy for hours, watching all the pieces move around the interior.

#5: Scotland Yard: The Visor (1983, Burggraf, Garrels, et al)

An early winner of the Spiel des Jahres Award, Scotland Yard has the well-deserved status as a classic. In this one-vs-many game, one player is the elusive Mr. X, who is trying to evade the detectives.

While it’s a lot of fun playing Mr. X and trying to outwit the detectives, the best part is that you get to wear this neato visor:

The visor ostensibly does serve a functional purpose in the game. Theoretically it disguises exactly where you are looking at when you look at the board, so you don’t have to worry (as much) about the detectives trying to get information that way.

But really, it’s just cool to wear.

It became such an iconic part of Scotland Yard that the 20th anniversary edition came with actual baseball caps to replace the visor:

Donning the visor immediately puts you into the headspace of the dastardly mastermind.

Were there other ways to accomplish what the visor and hat do? Yes. Would they have been as cool? No.

#4: Billionaire: The Analyzer (1973, Marvin Glass)

Second game on the list from Marvin Glass! Billionaire is another game many of you may not be familiar with. It is a class roll-and-move game that has you moving around a track buying properties, but there’s a lot more going on than in Monopoly or similar titles. There’s a robust auction section where you write secret bids on those carbon pads that you lift to erase - now replaced with boring whiteboards:

Those were fun to use. But the best part of the game was “The Analyzer”:

I think you can literally pinpoint the year this game came out from the font used on “Analyzer”.

At certain points you could try to ‘analyze’ an investment that belonged to an opponent. To do so you spun those two flippers that had green and red ends. Depending on the combination, various effects happen.

The order of the colors matters - red / green is different then green / red - so this is essentially a needlessly elaborate D4. There are a zillion (billion?) ways to do this other than this complex plastic contraption,

But they decided to go with that, and thank goodness they did. As you can imagine, when you spin the Analyzer it can take a little while to come to a stop, so it amps up the tension. And for kids that didn’t know anything about how high finance actually worked in the real world, it seemed like we were doing something high tech.

#3: El Grande: The Castillo (1995, Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich)

El Grande is one of the pinnacles of the European school of game design. Simple rules, tight game play, and vicious competition. It often feels like the proverbial knife fight in a phone booth, but it offers plenty of opportunities for clever plays.

For those of you who have not played El Grande (and shame on you), it is played on a map of Spain. It is basically just cubes and cards, except for one feature that towers (literally) above the board - The Castillo.

At certain times you can place cubes into the Castillo. And during scoring rounds each player secretly picks which province they want to deploy their cubes to. It leads to tremendous feelings of yomi as you try to outguess the other players.

As an aside, the castillo was one of the instigators of the debate about ‘hidden but trackable’ information in the gaming community. It is always public knowledge how many cubes of each color are going into the castillo. But you can never look in there, and just need to remember them. But should people be allowed to take notes?

I wrote about my take on “hidden but trackable” information in the GameTek book, so I won’t go into here. But if you’re interested let me know and I can reprint it.

There is no reason the castillo needs to be as large as it is. Yes, it makes it basically impossible to see the cubes inside, but there are other less imposing ways to do that.

But I can’t imagine it any other way. The size of it adds to the joy of throwing cubes in, and its dominating presence makes it a constant reminder that those cubes are coming back into play to mess up your plans.

#2: Los Mampfos: Pooping Donkey (2006, Rudiger & Maja Dorn)

Los Mampfos is similar in concept to the El Grande Castillo in that you are putting different colors into a hidden container and need to remember what’s in there.

Except in this case you are feeding different colored pellets to a donkey and need to predict what colors will be pooped out.

Yes, pooped out. At certain points the donkey’s tail is lifted up and the pellets shaken out. There are three donkeys moving around the track, all eating different pieces, so the memorization can be a bit challenging.

But the use of the wooden donkeys-that-poop is the delightful heart of this game. Yes, it could have been any theme and just used boxes or some other container. But then no one would remember the game decades later.

#1 The Inventors: The Incredible Patent Picker Move Maker Machine (1974, Jeffrey Breslow)

Seeing a picture of this relic of my childhood started me on the path of putting this list together, so I had to put it at #1.

I present to you The Incredible Patent Picker Move Making Machine:

This gadget performs two key functions in the game. First, it acts as a dice tower. You put the dice in the chute on the upper right, and push the lever. They drop through, hit the bell, and end up in the tray.

You can also use it to put ‘claim’ clips onto patents that you acquire. You load the clips into the chute on the upper left, and when you stick a card on the slot underneath a clip is attached to it.

This is from the game The Inventors, which is about zany patents through the years, so it is not only fun and toyetic, but is perfectly thematic. How fun is it to have a wacky invention in a game about wacky inventions!

Conclusions

So what have we learned?

When mentoring new designers, and working with people on their pitches, one thing I always stress is the importance of having a hook. How will the publisher sell your game? Why will a consumer buy your game over others on the shelf? Why will a reviewer want to cover it?

There are many hooks, including a unique theme or take on a theme, a mechanic, the artwork, the size or component count, or even the name. But it can also be a unique component.

And that’s what all these examples have in common. Here are games that have lived in my memory for decades because of unique features that made them stand out.

Obviously doing something like this isn’t the only way to stand out from the crowd. But it’s one that you might consider. And don’t be bashful about putting that front and center in your publisher pitch - assuming, that is, that you have some idea of how much it will cost to produce (or generally how it would be done), to show that you’ve done your homework and are not just being outlandish.

Plus keep in mind that it doesn’t need to be tied to the core mechanic. It can just be an unnecessary-but-cool extra that elevates your play experience.

Your Turn

In spite of my foolproof, completely objective selection process, it is slightly possible I’ve missed some of your favorite unnecessary components. What has made an impression on you? What makes your heart sing with joy? Please let me and everyone else know in the comments!

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Dogs of War!

First up, because it is somewhat time sensitive, is the crowd-funding campaign for Dogs of War. I am an investor in Play To Z (and on the board) and am thrilled that we will be publishing what I think is the definitive edition of this Paolo Mori classic (Paolo is the designer of Libertalia and more). This new version includes streamlined rules (three rounds instead of four, for example), improved player powers, and more. I was involved in the playtesting, so I can say from firsthand experience that I think this is the definitive edition of this game.

We are also excited to be publishing this as the second entry of our Shut Up and Sit Down Presents line, with games developed in conjunction with the fine folks at SUSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSSfzWw6lCw

There are about two days left in the campaign as I am writing this, so please check it out!

A partial playthrough that gives an in-depth view of game play is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcaKo_gpIlw

Two New Books!

Two new entries in my CRC Press Guide To Tabletop Games have been published! Both of these are available through the publisher or at your retailer of choice.

First is World Building for Game Designers by Steve Dee. This book is an in-depth exploration of world building and includes a huge number of hands-on exercises.

Features:

• Covers every step of world creation from getting ideas to seeking publication

• Comprehensive analysis of the field

• Inspirational tricks to break blocks or find new angles

• Practical exercises at the end of every chapter

• Simple and accessible material for every kind of game or game designer

The second is Playtesting Best Practices from Chris Backe. This book is broken up into four main sections

• Getting ready to playtest: Establishing goalposts, brainstorming, self-playtesting, getting organized, how to design a prototype, and writing rules. The focus here is starting good habits and establishing best practices, whether this is your first game or your hundredth.

• Playtesting in the real world: How to find playtesters, how to teach your game, what to do during the playtest, how to take notes and collect feedback, and being a great playtester yourself.

• Playtesting online: How to adapt to digital platforms, the best practices for playtesting online, how to use these opportunities well, and cautions about playtesting online.

• What to do next: How to iterate, additional ways to playtest your game, knowing when you’re done with playtesting, and choosing how to get your game out there.

Both of these authors have tremendous experience in these fields, and I learned a huge amount when editing these volumes. Bonus plug: Chris has just launched the next iteration of his publisher database: Tabletop Publishers.

If you’re interested in contributing a volume to this series - or just have an idea you’d like to see someone else tackle - please reach out to me! I work with many prospective authors to help refine their ideas and put together an outline. These books are typically 100-150 pages, which is a great length for an aspiring author to approach.

New Game! DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum

The latest game from Team Engelstein was just announced by Wizkids - DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum!

It was a delight to design a game together with the kids. The last one we did together was The Dragon & Flagon back in 2016. Since then college and Sydney’s job at Indie Boards & Cards have gotten in the way. But the stars finally aligned - and special thanks to IBC for allowing Sydney to do a design for another publisher.

This is easily our most approachable game - it’s a basic roll and move! Roll a die, move that many spaces, and be the first to reach the end of the track. But you control a pair of villains each race, and each has a special ability. The fun (and chaos) comes from finding sneaky-but-devastating combos to be the first to escape! There’s a lot more here than meets the eye…

Break Out should be available in January or February. And check out the amazing artwork by Ryan Goldsberry! More details are in this Bluesky thread.

Appearances

I will be presenting at two upcoming conferences in November:

At Metatopia (Nov 6-9) I will be giving four presentations including game design, contracts, and pitching. If you’re a game designer it’s a can’t-miss event.

I will also be giving a keynote address at the GALA conference in Utrecht November 19-21.

If you are attending one (or both!) of these conferences, please say hi!

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The standard method for dealing with this is bringing up the music to drown out the speech, or sometimes just cutting away from the winner.

At last night’s Emmy Awards they tried a different approach.

At the start of the broadcast, host Nick Bargatze announced that he would make a $100,000 donation to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. However, the amount would be decreased by $1,000 for every second that a presenter went over 45 seconds. And he would increase the donation by $1,000 for every second the presenters were under 45 seconds.

Part gimmick, part joke, part serious attempt to control speech timing - the stunt ended up taking over the whole broadcast.

Some winners got visibly agitated when they started to run over 45 seconds. Some just said ‘thanks’ and ran off so they would increase the donation. Some just intentionally ran long and didn’t worry about it, or some, like Hannah Einbinder, said they would ‘make it up’ later out of their pockets when they wanted to go over the time.

This broadcast was one of the shortest Emmy Awards shows on record. So does that mean the stunt was a success?

Well, everyone universally hated it. The winners, the other people in the theater, the viewers - every review I read about the telecast had nothing but bad things to say about this donation gambit.

A podcast I listen to (Decoding TV) described the stunt as setting up a ‘bad vibe’ for the entire broadcast, one that just got worse and worse as the show went on.

So why was that? What was the problem?

It’s a psychological phenomenon called Loss Aversion. I’ve talked about it before, in some GameTeks (like this one), and I wrote an entire book about it. It’s a really, really important concept for game designers to understand.

For those who haven’t encountered it before, here’s a tldr: People feel good when they gain something, and they feel badly when the lose that same thing. But the magnitude of the emotions isn’t the same. You feel much worse losing $20 than you feel could be gaining it.

If you want to maximize stress and anxiety in your players, give them something and then taking it way. Several classic board games - notably Monopoly and Risk - follow this arc. Players start with a little, build up more and more, and then lose it all (except for the winner). This is a recipe for bad feelings and grudges that can last years.

That’s exactly the situation that the Emmy team set up with this ‘donation’. They ‘gave’ everyone $100,000, and then they gradually took it away. Yes, there was a way to add money back in - but Loss Aversion tells us that the bad feelings will outweigh the good.

At one point in the broadcast the incentives really went off the rails. The donation actually went negative - down to -$50,000. What did that even mean? There was certainly no more reason to keep speeches short. No one thought they were going to demand that the Boys & Girls Clubs give money to the Emmys! Obviously, this had not been thought through at all.

In the end (as many predicted), CBS, Bargatze, and the Emmy Organization announced that the whole thing didn’t matter and they were donating $350,000 regardless.

But the damage had been done.

So as game designers, what lessons can we draw from this experiment?

Don’t just incentivize for the behavior you want - incentives should also generate the emotions you want.

The designers of this system got what they want - a shorter Emmy Awards. But they did not focus on the experience this would create for the winners and the viewers. The goal of an awards show is to celebrate the winners. This directly undercut that, by shifting focus away from the winners and their achievement, and onto this artificial measure.

When you’re designing a game, incentives are a very powerful way of manipulating player behavior. But you need to make sure that they support the entire experience of your game, not work against it.

Don’t be afraid to pull the plug on a playtest that is going awry

Bargatze and the show producers realized as the show as progressing that the donation bit wasn’t going in the direction they wanted. They could have pulled the plug on the bit. But they just kept coming back to it, over and over again.

Similarly, when you’re playtesting don’t be afraid to change things midstream. If the rules aren’t working change them to something else. It makes better use of valuable playtest time, and is actually more respectful of your testers’ time.

Look for game design lessons everywhere

Whenever you observe a system or an activity think about what the incentives are and how they are impacting player behavior and emotion.

Did you watch the Emmy broadcast? If so, what were your thoughts on the donation gambit?

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A new poll from YouGov was just released, surveying what Americans pick in various ‘chance’ situations.

These charts break down some of the data, and they are GameTek-Catnip. Hence the EMERGENCY POSTING. They are taken from the article How To Win At Games of Chance.

When calling a coin flip are you more likely to call heads or tails?

Why is heads so much more popular? I don’t know. Maybe there’s a clue in the cross-tabs:

Heads is the most popular across different demographics. However, one thing seems clear - we are more likely to pick heads as we get older.

If you subscribe to the theory that we get more conservative and ‘safer’ with our choices, I guess you could posit that ‘tails’ is the choice for rebels.

Rock, Paper, or Scissors?

70% more people choose Rock than Paper. Rock is clearly the ‘safe’ choice, comparable to ‘heads’ in the coin flip scenario.

Once again The Simpsons was right on target.

Here’s the demographic breakdown on RPS:

All categories pick Rock most often, but the age difference we saw in the coin flip carries on here. As you age you tend to pick Rock more often.

And if you’re playing Rock-Paper-Scissors with a Republican, you now know what to do.

One final scenario:

Pick a number from 1-10

Almost 40% pick 7! Lucky number 7 indeed.

We are all really bad at picking a random number, and also at deciding whether a sequence we are looking at is random. We tend to think that odd numbers are more ‘random’. It seems intuitive that people would think and that 1, 3, 5, and 9 seem more ‘normal’ than ‘7’. The 7’s multiplication table is almost certainly the hardest to memorize.

Given this question I would have predicted that 7 would be the most popular choice. But 40%? That’s mind boggling.

Here are the breakdowns:

There are several interesting points to highlight here:

Again, older people are more likely to move towards the ‘mode’ - the most popular choice. You see this with 7 moving from 37% to 44%. But you also see it dramatically at the extremes. 2% of under-30’s picked ‘1’, but '0%’ of those 65+. I actually checked the underlying raw data, and zero people out of 88 surveyed age 65+ picked 1.

Similarly 3% of under-30s picked 10, but only 1% of 65+.

So as we get older we move away from the ‘rebel’ choices and more into the ‘normal’ picks.

What do you think about this data? How would you use this to inform your design choices? Post your comments!

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But a few weeks later he calls me and says - do you want to actually design that? Never one to back down from a challenge and a cash grab, I huddle up with my kids and we design what would be released in 2015 as Survive: Space Attack.

As an aside, I’m really proud of this game. The original Survive is a brilliant design, and we struggled to come up with meaningful changes to game play that didn’t just make things worse. But in the end, I think we nailed it.

As part of the release, Stronghold requested that we design a few mini-expansions. This was pretty late in the process, so we put together some quick ideas, including a small deck of one-use powers called The Crew Strikes Back that can be integrated into the game. They are themed as the crew of the space station, kind of a combination between the folks you’d find on a cruise ship or star base.

It was a fun little extra, and we had a good time developing the different roles and figuring out thematic powers. We turned it over to Stronghold, and they quickly banged out some artwork since - as mentioned - it was really late in the process. The three of us each individually looked over the cards, corrected some typos, but otherwise gave the thumbs up.

The game was launched in 2015, alongside the mini-expansion.

From a game-play standpoint it was well received (mostly 7’s on BGG), but the artwork was generally derided as being terrible, and not fitting with the vibe of the main game.

Here’s a link to a discussion: Terrible Artwork | BoardGameGeek

Here’s one of the cards:

Hardly any copies sold.

That would be the end of the story except that a few months after launch someone (I wish I could remember who) reached out to us and gently pointed out that on the twenty cards:

• All 20 were white

• 18 were men

• The two women were on the Maid card and the Aerobics Instructor card.

Yikes.

I was appalled. My son and daughter (both about 20 at the time) were appalled. Stronghold was appalled and quietly stopped selling them. There wasn’t enough of a demand to warrant a redesign and new printing.

There was no malice here at all. We gave no instructions to the artist as to what to draw. We just didn’t notice it when the art came back. Part of it was because we were in a rush, but that’s not an excuse. We all looked at it, and nobody saw anything out of the ordinary.

This is why awareness of these types of boneheaded moves is so important, and why people should loudly declare when it happens.

This is why showing your art to a diverse set of reviewers, or cultural consultants if you are focusing on a particular area, is critical.

Not because of bad intent, but just because we are often blind to these issues. We don’t perceive the water we swim in, as one person described it to me. To us having so many white male characters wasn’t ‘out of the ordinary’ because it was just… ordinary.

Shockingly no one called us out publicly at the time. They should have, honestly, and the fact that no one said anything either says something about how few people bought The Crew Strikes Back or what the game environment was like a mere ten years ago - or maybe both.

On our next game, The Dragon & Flagon, we put a big emphasis on making sure we had a diverse set of characters.

Our mage, Asma, was depicted as a young woman in a hijab, and she was on one of the large banners at the Stronghold booth in Gencon that year.

At one point a young girl in a hijab came into the booth after seeing Asma on the banner. She sat down and played a demo - playing that character of course - and I can still remember how incredibly excited she was to be represented in a game like that. It really moved me.

Even with the Dragon & Flagon, though, I feel we made a misstep with Teo, the monk character (centered in the image above). In retrospect I think it borders on orientalist stereotypes, and I wish we had had someone from that culture take a look. We did not, which is on me, although no one has ever raised it as far as I know.

I bring all this up, of course, in response to the game Ace of Spades from Devir, which was released at Gencon and included several offensive and racially insensitive portrayals on the cards. I won’t reproduce the images here, but you can read the full story on Board Game Wire.

I narrowly avoided a similar backlash on Crew mainly because no one bought the expansion, and it was ten years ago. But we all deserved it.

But I took the opportunity to learn and (hopefully) grow, and that effort continues with all of us.

I rarely bring up this story, as it’s embarrassing as hell and does not paint me in a good light. I do so now to illustrate that we are all vulnerable to making this mistake, and it requires vigilance. And also to recommend that we assume incompetence over malice when these issues (inevitably sadly) reoccur, until proven otherwise.

Here are the take-aways I took from my own incompetence, and I hope they prove useful to you as well:

• If you are a designer or publisher, have a diverse group of people review your art, and use cultural consultants if warranted.

• Make sure you give detailed instructions to your artists about ethnicities, body types, etc. Diversity doesn’t just ‘happen’.

• Continue to raise your voice loudly and publicly, when you see something inappropriate.

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For those unfamiliar, the WSOP is a series of tournaments varying in entry fees, rules, and prize structure. They range from $300 low stakes events to the $10,000 Main Event, which last year had a first prize of over $10,000,000. Unlike most world championships, anyone can enter an event at the WSOP, as long as they’re willing to pay.

One of those events is called the “Millionaire Maker”, which had a $1,500 entry fee and over 12,000 participants.

After five grueling days of poker it was down to two players: Jesse Yaginuma and James Carroll.

The winner for the event would get $1.2 million, and the second-place finisher $800,000.

However, there was a wrinkle. Jesse had gotten into the tournament under a special ‘golden ticket’ promotion from another poker organization, the WPT. If James won the tournament he would get an additional $1,000,000, for a total of $2.2 million.

To recap - If Jesse won the tournament, he would win $2.2 million, and James would win $800K. If James won, he would win $1.2 million and Jesse would win $800K.

When it was down to ‘heads up’, with just the two players, James had 90% of the chips, and Jesse only 10%. It is highly unusual for someone to come back from that far back - not unheard of, but unusual.

But come back he did. James folded hand after hand, and Jesse built his stack back, ultimately winning the victory, and the extra $1 million prize.

At the final tables of large tournaments like this the players’ cards are visible through table cameras. So spectators could see what players had. And James’ play was immediately called out for being suspect. He folded decent hands and stayed in with bad ones.

Immediately people began to accuse Jesse and James of colluding to make sure that Jesse won, and that James must have been cut in for a piece of the extra $1 million, taking home more than he would have if he had just won the tournament outright.

Would the WSOP let the results stand? Would the WPT pay out the extra million dollars? They both recently announced their decisions but think about what you would do before I let you know.

Personally, I think the results should stand, even if Jesse and James did make a deal, and that both should be paid.

Collusion

Here’s an excerpt from the WSOP rules about collusion:

Collusion is defined as any agreement between or among two (2) or more Participants to engage in illegal or unethical acts against other Participants

In this case I think it’s clear that no other participants were harmed. All other players had been eliminated before they cut a deal.

In the end, the WSOP agreed to split the prize money between the two players (so $1 million each instead of $1.2 million and $800K), and not award the ‘bracelet’ that is given to the winner of an WSOP tourney. The WPT said that they would award the $1 million bonus to Yaginuma. There are rumors that one or both players may be banned from future events, but that has not been settled yet.

Incentives

I wanted to write about this not just because it’s an interesting story, but because it underscores a key element of game design - how we incentivize players.

Game design, at its core, is about creating incentives for players to act in the way that you want. If the incentives are at odds with the behavior and gameplay you want, things will break down.

In this case the incentives were not aligned with the goal of a tournament - for all players to strive to win. Uniquely perhaps, the poorly structured incentive in this case was from an external entity, not the tournament organizer. The WPT placed a ‘metagame’ on top of the normal tournament structure by offering a special ‘bounty’ if a particular player wins.

In The Dragon & Flagon we had two issues with incentives that we grappled with. For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s basically a tavern brawl, where each character has a deck of actions they can do - some actions that were not-so-exciting but necessary or easy to land, like moving or slashing your rapier. Others were flashier - like swinging from a chandelier and throwing mugs of beer.

When you connected on a move you would stun or damage your opponent. If they took too much damage they were knocked out. But the ‘knock out’ rules did not lead to the game play we wanted. We played with a few other systems before landing on the Reputation system. Each player started with the same reputation. Instead of damage, if you hit another player, you stole some of it. At the end of the game, the player with the most reputation won.

This had a few positive effects - first, if someone got down to zero (or very low) reputation, there was no reason to target them (and no player elimination). Since they didn’t have any reputation to take, there was no benefit. Second, given a choice it was always better to go after players that had the most reputation, as it brought them back to the pack.

The other issue was that the basic moves were easier to land, so people ignored the ‘flashy’ moves, particularly beginning players. The game just wasn’t as much fun without the shenanigans you gained from chandelier swinging and table flipping.

We dealt with this by just continually cranking up the VP reward for the flashy moves in our testing until players started doing them. I am convinced that the reward is too big for the actual difficulty in pulling them off, but it feels right to players, and incentivized the behavior we wanted to see.

If your players are not choosing the tracks or tactics you would like, take a look at your incentive structure. You need to change it to guide players in the direction you want.

Tournament Follies

There is a long history of tournaments structuring things so that the incentives are at odds with the desired behavior. I enjoy collecting and examining examples to learn about how things can go off the rails.

There was a scandal at the 2012 London Olympics in Badminton. It was structured similar to the FIFA World Cup, where there were groups, and two teams from each group advanced to an elimination round.

In an early round the Danish team defeated the Chinese, the team favored to win the entire tournament.

During the last games of the group stage two other teams (Korea and another Chinese team) had already qualified for the eliminations, but they realized that the winner of their match would have to face the incredibly dominant Chinese team, who had slipped to a lower seed. The loser would get to play a now higher-seeded team that all were convinced would be easier to beat.

Of course, both teams decided that if they lost their last group match they would have a better chance to win the tournament. And they both played to lose. It is quite the spectacle, to see who could lose faster.

In the end, both teams got suspended from the competition for violating the ‘spirit’ of the competition.

But just like with the poker example, I dispute this. The Olympics aren’t about “winning” every game (yeah, sportsmanship, yadda, yadda). They’re about winning a medal. And they were playing to maximize that. The incentives (better shot at winning a medal) did not align with their desired behavior (try to win each individual game).

Professional sports teams often run into similar issues with ‘tanking’ at the end of the season to get a better draft pick. Leagues try to hard to police it, but it’s tough. The NBA instituted a draft lottery to try to combat this.

And then there’s one of my favorite stories of this ilk - The Caribbean Cup Golden Goal Fiasco of 1994. The story is too long to explain in this already overlong column, but suffice to say that the tournament was structured in such a way so that one team’s only chance of advancing was to score a goal in either net - and the other team realizes it and has to defend both. Hilarity ensues. Here’s a video if this has piqued your interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbuD-6BbnQw

Bottom line: ALIGN YOUR INCENTIVES WITH DESIRED BEHAVIOR. Players will (and should) do what they think will win, not what you think thematically or otherwise makes sense.

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New Books!

Two new books have been published in my Guide To Tabletop Game Design series from CRC Press:

Playtesting Best Practices from Chris Backe

Worldbuilding for Game Designers from Steve Dee

Please check them out!

I sent this email to members a few weeks ago and wanted to share it with you here as well. If you design games, I ask that you consider joining TTGDA. As the industry faces new challenges, we need solidarity more than ever, and the more members we have the more clout we have, which will benefit everyone.

If you have any questions, you can reply here or email us at info@ttgda.org.

Members of the Tabletop Game Designers Association,

As President, I am excited to reach out to you with the first “State of the Association” message.

It’s hard to believe it has been a year since we launched in May 2024. Like most intense activities it feels both longer and shorter since our founding.

Before we launched TTGDA, we set targets for membership. Our stretch goal for our first year was 500 members. I am pleased to report that we have exceeded our goal, with 551 members as of today.

While we were originally founded to focus on North America, we have attracted members from all over the world. While the majority are from the United States and Canada, our membership spans 25 countries around the globe.

We are all building TTGDA on three pillars:

• Advocacy

• Education

• Community

I would like to share our accomplishments in each of these areas and update you on plans for the future.

Advocacy

• We performed over 80 contract reviews, and members have let us know that they generally get the enhancements we suggest from publishers. Doing these contract reviews has also enabled us to develop and push certain standardized terms and language across the industry, and cause change in a more subtle fashion. For example, a clause we have been including in all reviews is that the rights to the ‘as-published’ title should revert to the designer, even if the publisher has trademarked it. This helps you sell the game again, as you can leverage the name recognition.

• We assisted in about ten contract disputes and other issues. This ranged from having conversations with members about options they might have, to working with them to craft email responses, to TTGDA directly contacting publishers. The designers in question ranged from new designers to veterans, and all expressed that they were happy that TTGDA had their back.

• Several publishers asked us to review their standard contracts, both existing publishers and new imprints. We are happy to help publishers have a strong starting point for an equitable contract with designers.

• In response to our urging, Barnes & Noble changed their website to include designer names in game listings. This makes it possible to search for a designer and have their full works shown, similar to authors. We reached out to Amazon and other online retailers to follow suit with less success but will continue to push this.

• The initial launch of the BGG Hall of Fame and Origins Awards did not include designer names. We reached out to them and had that corrected. We recently had the same issue with the Mensa Select games and have reached out to them to add designer names and have been assured they are updating the website.

• We rolled out our Member Marketing benefit. if you launch a crowdfunding campaign or retail release, we will post about it on our social media accounts.

• TTGDA participated in a multiday strategic planning conclave with sister organizations SAZ (Germany / Italy / Netherlands), SAJ (France), and Ludo (Spain) to determine ways to work together to advance the causes of designers. A lot of great ideas came out of this and will inform our future planning.

• We sent out several statements of concern to members about publishers who were having financial difficulties or otherwise had issues that called for caution on the part of designers.

• Reporters and academics have reached out to us looking for information, and we connected them with appropriate people.

We have a number of initiatives in progress:

• We are working on a model contract for work-for-hire projects. Currently we only have a model contract for License Agreements. We are also looking at other agreements, including partnership and art commissions.

• We are partnering with GAMA to actively lobby for reduction or elimination of the current tariffs on Chinese imports to the US.

• The Publisher Directory is slowly being expanded and is going to be a focus for the upcoming year. We started to ramp up the effort just as the US Tariffs hit, so we put things on pause, as publishers are adjusting their business models.

• Reaching out to the Library of Congress to include board games in their collection

Education

• Hosted six webinars over the last year on a variety of topics. Note that all are available to members on demand.

• Ran two full days of educational seminars at BGG.Con

• Ran seminars at PAX Unplugged, GDC, Conjugar, Unpub, Metatopia, and GAMA Expo.

• We believe our website features the most comprehensive collection of resources for tabletop game designers in the world, and we are constantly adding additional content.

• Released a white paper on tariffs, with extensive information for designers and publishers.

• Worked with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to present tabletop-oriented webinars on trademarks, patents, and other IP protection.

• We include the Missing Pieces and Ask an Attorney regular newsletter features

Upcoming initiatives:

• White paper on key clauses for Licensing Agreements

• Expanding and increasing the frequency of the webinar program

• We have now prepared several premade presentations that can be given more widely at conventions globally by TTGDA leadership and members.

• Partnering with GAMA for the Trade Day Pitch Development Workshop

• Partnering with the Gencon Game Design Academy and Writer Symposium to offer several classes

Community

• Launched a Discord server, which started active and continues to grow

• Had a member meetup at PAX Unplugged

• Member directory for locating other members that have experience with specific publishers, or game types.

Community is one area we most need to expand on. Future plans include:

• More meetups at various cons, both formal and informal

• Virtual meetups via Discord

On the administrative side we have made progress on setting up responsibilities and procedures but still have a way to go. There are many policies and procedures that need to be formalized and (most importantly) documented. We are starting up committees and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) on a variety of topics, that need to be defined and staffed. And we have hired a part-time administrator to assist with day-to-day operations.

The other members of the Executive team and my co-founders – Elizabeth Hargrave and Sen-Foong Lim - have worked exceptionally hard over the past years to bring TTGDA into existence. The Advisory Board has also been invaluable in providing support, feedback, and advice.

But most of all the success that we have had to this point is due to you, the membership of TTGDA. By joining in numbers exceeding our goals you have given us the resources and power to create tangible and positive change in the industry for designers. Just today, as I am writing this, we were able to successfully recover over $2,000 in back royalties for one of our members.

We hope that you see value in the Tabletop Game Designers Association, both for you personally and for the entire industry. And we hope that you will continue your membership and become more involved in the organization.

There are many ways to increase your engagement and help us:

• Join and participate in the Discord

• Join a committee or SIG – or start one

• Give one of our pre-made presentations about game design at your local convention, library, or other event

• Run for a position leadership position

• Talk about TTGDA to your friends and colleagues

• Email us with ideas and feedback

Together we will keep making a difference.

Thanks for a great first year!

Geoff

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Here’s a quick overview of Finca. There are two parts to your turn. First, you move one of your farmers around a windmill. This uses a modified Mancala mechanic. Your farmer moves a number of spaces equal to the total number of farmers in that space. Each space is marked with a type of fruit. You gain a quantity of fruit equal to the number of farmers in the space you end up in. If you cross between the upper half of the windmill to the lower, or vice versa, you gain a cart token.

For the second part of your turn, if you have a cart, you can make a delivery. There are stacks of tiles on the board, each of which needs from 1-6 fruit to claim, with the specific combination of fruit required shown on the tile. Those tiles are worth 1-6 points at the end of the game. There are also various bonuses that you can earn during the game, which are based on the tiles you have claimed so far.

There’s a bit more to the game, but that’s enough for this discussion.

Finca’s Flow

While I was explaining the game, I had a bit of an epiphany about why it was a relatively easy game to grasp for new players. The basic structure of the game is that you claim resources, and then you use those resources to get the tiles, which are what actually scores for you. And certain combos of tiles may give you bonus VP.

The flow of the game is only in one direction. First you get fruit, then you use that to gain tiles. The tiles give you points.

There is no backwards flow. There is nothing in the tiles you gain that changes the way you get the fruit. Yes, the Mancala system is a clever mechanism that you need to figure out how to use to your advantage, but it never changes. None of the tiles you gain give you a special move on the windmill, or anything like that.

The flow is just one way.

Finca is a clever mechanic - getting the fruit - coupled with a reasonably straightforward second part - buying the tiles.

This compartmentalizes the actions and allows new players to easily focus on the different pieces.

Widening the Circle

So that got me thinking - what’s another game that has a clever resource collection mechanism followed by a placement task?

Well, Azul is one. In Azul you gain tiles and then place them onto your grid. The mechanism to take tiles makes for interesting choices, as you balance what you need with what you are leaving for other players.

When I made a diagram for Azul it looked suspiciously familiar:

Well, gosh.

Like learning an unfamiliar word, once I noticed this pattern I started seeing it everywhere.

Here’s Ticket to Ride:

In this case the “Get Cards” action isn’t where the clever mechanic is. It’s in taking routes and the tickets. Still, the action is only one way. Nothing you do on the map helps you get more cards or better cards, or whatever. It’s a one-way flow through the actions to the VP.

I am proposing that this design pattern is the framework for what we often call “Gateway Games”.

Light Feedback

There are slight variations on this pattern for games that most would still find simple. For example, here is the diagram for Splendor:

There is a little bit of a feedback loop in Splendor. Buying cards generally will make it easier to get cards in the future. However, it applies it as a discount to the cost. Nothing you do in Splendor makes it easier to gain more gems. It just makes it easier to use them to buy something.

Here’s Patchwork:

There’s a light feedback loop in Patchwork, but again it’s contained within the same circle. There are actually two ‘steps’ in that first circle. First you move your time marker and gain buttons. Then you use your buttons to buy a tile. However, I don’t think I’m cheating by putting those two steps into one circle. The “Gain Buttons” step has no decisions involved. You must move your time marker until you are one ahead of the next lowest player. The only choice you have is which tile to buy.

The feedback loop I’m showing is created because there are some tiles that give you extra button income. So there are actions you can take that will increase the amount of resources you receive.

Let’s turn our attention to Catan:

Now we’ve got the first real feedback loop that we’ve seen. You gain resources from dice rolls / trades. You then spend those resources to buy stuff (Towns, Cities, Roads, etc). However, now, some of those items do directly impact the quantity of resources you receive.

This “backwards” arrow increases the complexity quite a bit for new players. This is a new interaction they need to consider, and until you get some experience it can be hard to judge the value of different paths. Should I focus on Cities or Settlements or a blend? If I try to get the Longest Road VP or VP from development cards, am I going to put myself way behind the economic curve? Or is that a viable approach at this point in the game?

I think it’s clear how this increases complexity and consideration for players.

This backwards feedback arrow between gaining resources and gaining what you need to win is what turns a game into an ‘engine builder’. The idea of the “engine” is that you can do something to increase your resources or otherwise make your turns more efficient. It’s also broad enough that we have not (as of yet) included it as a specific mechanism in Building Blocks of the BGG Mechanism list.

You will also note that all of these examples have a bonus VP mechanism. I think this is particularly important in these one-way flow games, as otherwise it might simply feel like “wash-rinse-repeat”. In Finca, once I spend my fruit to by tiles, I am back to where I was a few turns ago. However, the Bonus Tiles create a ‘meta’ goal that gives a different texture to the decision about which tiles to go after. So I have to solve enough of a different problem to keep me interested.

Similarly, Azul, Patchwork, and Ticket to Ride all have ‘meta’ puzzles that you are looking to solve, that change over the course of the game. With Azul you want to form groups of tiles on your grid. Patchwork the empty spaces you are trying to cover constantly shift in shape. In Ticket to Ride you may get new tickets or routes may get blocked off. The Bonus VP circle is actually pretty important.

In contrast to the “Gateway” we have more complex games like my favorite Through The Ages. Here’s a similar system diagram for TTA:

Basically every resource and system is interconnected and flows back to the others. You need to put people on buildings to generate the various types of resources. You need food to get people. You need tech to get better buildings. You need Actions to take cards and everything else. Governments give you more Actions.

The complexity here is obvious. If you pluck a string in one part of the game, everything else vibrates.

It is a common design adage to make games simpler by cutting out rules - or, in general, to eliminate rules wherever you can.

That’s still good advice, but I now believe it is perhaps more important to look at rules that create linkages between different systems within your game. Yes, feedback loops can give players intriguing choices and ramp up their feeling of mastering a system. But each feedback loop that you add builds complexity. You may be after that, but you may not be.

In particular, if you are looking to make the next great gateway game, try to eliminate any feedback loops at all. Create a game ‘loop’ that is a straight path from actions to victory points.

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For many years, corporations in the US (spearheaded by our friends at Disney) successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending copyright protections for their intellectual property. At last, though, they said enough was enough, and now IP is typically released into the public domain 95 years after publication.

Using characters that are in the public domain can be a great way to get the advantages of an IP without having to pay a licensing fee.

HOWEVER - and this is important - you need to consider the countries in which you want to sell the game, and also the specific characteristics or versions of characters that have entered the public domain, and which are still protected.

For example, Popeye entered the public domain this year, but not the spinach part. He didn’t start eating spinach until 1933, so you can’t use that aspect until 2028.

Games take years to design and publish, so I thought it might be fun to take a look at things that will be coming into the public domain over the next few years, so you can begin working on ideas.

Here are a few of the characters, novels, paintings, and movies that will be coming into the public domain that I thought might make for interesting games. There are many others, so if you’re intrigued by the idea, there are way more works to explore.

But if you decide to use one of these works it is a good idea to confirm that they will be in the public domain, and any caveats that may exist. Don’t just take my word for it!

Entered Public Domain In 2025

• Popeye

• Tintin

• The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

• Singin’ in the Rain (movie)

• Skeleton Dance (Disney)

Entering Public Domain In 2026

• Betty Boop

• Nancy Drew (Carolyn Keene)

• Maltese Falcon (movie)

• Dick and Jane

• Pluto

Entering Public Domain In 2027

• Universal Frankenstein and Dracula movies

• Dick Tracy

• The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali)

• The Good Earth (Pearl S Buck)

Entering Public Domain In 2028

• Conan the Barbarian (Robert E Howard)

• The Mummy (movie with Boris Karloff)

• Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

• Horse Feathers: The Marx Brothers (movie)

• Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

• Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie)

• Goofy

• Popeye’s Spinach!

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• It is the last perfect-square year until 2116

• 2025 = (20 + 25)^2 (^2 means raised to the second power, so squared)

• 2025 = (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)^2 (the sum of the numbers from 1-9, squared)

• 2025 = 1^3 + 2^3 + 3^3 + 4^3 + 5^3 + 6^3 + 7^3 + 8^3 + 9^3 (each number from 1-9 cubed, and then added together)

The last two are actually equivalent. Here’s a nifty visual demonstration:

Also, if you’re not familiar with ‘proof by induction’, this is a great example of how to do one. The way a Proof by Induction works, is that you prove that a fact is true for some number (usually zero or one), and then show that if it is true for n it is also true for n+1.

So it’s like a ladder. Since it’s true for 1, it has to be true for 2. And if it’s true for 2 it has to be true for 3. And so on and so on. Truly neat stuff!

In this case it’s easy to show that it’s true for 1. 1 squared = 1 cubed. So all you need to do to finish the proof is do the n → n+1 part. Here’s a video that goes through the algebra:

The sum of the numbers from 1 to n has a name. They are called Triangular Numbers.

The sequence is 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28…

You can see that the difference between the numbers gets one bigger each time.

Triangular numbers get their name from the fact that they can be arranged in a triangle, like bowling pins.

You see this sequence in many games. In Coloretto it is used for final scoring – if you have 3 cards of the same color you get 6 points. Four cards nets you 10 points.

In the game Thebes you are an archeologist trying to find artifacts to score victory points. But you can also get points by collecting Congress cards as you travel through Europe. At the end of the game you score based on the triangular numbers – 1, 3, 6, 10, 15 etc for 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 cards.

In Sushi Go, the Dumpling cards are valued at triangular numbers based on how many you collect.

This same mechanic is found in the winner of the very first Spiel de Jahres – the terrific Hare and Tortoise – In that game you are racing other rabbits down a track. It looks like a ‘roll and move’ game – On your turn you move forward and do an action based on the space you land on. But rather than rolling dice you get to choose how many spaces forward you will move – but the further you move the more carrots you have to pay. And the cost in carrots is – you guessed it – a triangular number based on the number of spaces you want to move. So if you want to go four spaces, you pay 10 carrots. The reference card in my version goes all the way up to moving 44 spaces, which takes an epic 990 carrots! Here’s a card from another edition that goes up to moving 24 spaces:

In Knizia’s Amun Re there are two features that relate to triangular numbers – the first is purchasing resources. Like Hare and Tortoise, the amount you pay is based on triangular numbers. In addition, when you bid on provinces you can’t just bid what you want -- you have to bid fixed amounts based on a triangular number sequence.

So why are triangular numbers so popular with game designers? When used in a positive way – the scoring in Coloretto, for example - it is an easy way for designers to make the same resource worth different amounts to different players. This introduces complexity and tough decisions into what otherwise might be a simple mechanic. In Thebes, for example, a Congress card may only be worth one point for you, but if your opponent can take it she may score an extra 7 points. So you need to consider putting your own plans on hold to grab it just to deny your opponent. If all of these cards are worth a fixed amount of points that decision would be much simpler to make.

On the negative side, like paying more carrots to move more spaces in Hare and Tortoise, the designer is able to make you decide between distance and time. The most efficient move from a carrot standpoint is to move one space per turn and pay one carrot per turn. But you can’t win by doing that. You need to balance carrots and time – move fast enough to stay ahead, but not so fast that you run out of carrots. Same thing in Amun Re. The increasing cost of resources forces you to balance your purchases and plan ahead. Four farmers this turn is a lot more than two this turn and two next turn.

While not strictly triangular numbers, a similar sequence is used in the classic game Civilization, to very elegantly make resources worth different things to different players. There are a variety of resource rated from 1 to 9 – oil, for example is a 4, and textiles is a 5. In the important trading phase you try to create sets of the same resource. The value of a set is equal to the value of the card times the square of the number of cards you have. So one 4 is worth 4, but two 4’s are worth 4x2 squared – or 16. Three 4’s are worth 36. The great design feature here is that the rapidly escalating values make it worthwhile to trade low value cards for higher cards, while creating a win-win situation. But it also means that you’re never totally sure who is actually getting the better part of the deal.

Oil and Textile cards from Civilization showing the set values on the bottom

I’d like to wrap up this discussion by talking about one more game – Ticket To Ride. In that game you score points when you claim track segments. The sequence of points for claiming segments from 1-6 spaces is 1,2, 4, 7, 10, 15. This is suspiciously close to our triangular numbers sequence of 1, 3, 6, 10, 15. So I was wondering if the design originally used a more traditional triangular number sequence but was changed through playtesting.

I contacted Alan Moon, and let me just quote his reply:

I like to tell people that I don't use mathematical formulas when I design games. But of course, that's not completely true. I know there are designers out there who start with a formula and create the game around it. I think that results in a dry game. I start with a mechanics/theme/bits/whatever and then use formulas only if and when necessary. During playtesting, I'm trying to see how much fun the game is, and not if the math works. So the scoring system of TICKET TO RIDE was made to fit the game, not the other way around. Any relation it has to any sequence is purely coincidental.

My thanks to Alan for taking the time to reply.

So the next time you’re playing a game that uses a triangular or similar sequence, think about what the designer was trying to do, and what impact that has on your strategies and options.

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Powerboats was published in 2008 by Cwali. A few years ago, publisher Rebellion Unplugged (“Rebellion” for the rest of this article) reached out to designer Corné van Moorsel about doing a reprint. They were unable to come to terms and a few years later Rebellion published Joyride, which is clearly based on Powerboats, but also clearly has some new elements added.

Several people reached out to the Tabletop Game Designers Association (of which I am the current President) to ask if we have a response or formal position. We are still formulating one in consultation with our board and members, but I wanted to share my own thoughts.

I have not evaluated the rules of both games to see how similar or different they are, but even if I did, the question of ‘copying’ another game vs ‘being inspired’ by one is a continuum.

The growth and innovation we have seen in the board game industry has been driven in part by designers building on the work of other designers.

Regardless of whether designers or publishers believe they should be able to own or protect a specific mechanism, the US court system has already ruled that mechanisms are not protected by copyright. In 2016 a clone of Bang was published by another company, with no license or compensation to Bang publisher Da Vinci.

Court rules in favor of cloned tabletop game - No protection under US copyright law

Art, the game title, and specific rules wording or terminology can be copyrighted, but not the underlying core of the game.

Protection of ideas is still available via patents, but that is an expensive route and can be difficult to obtain for game mechanics.

So Rebellion Unplugged is legally allowed to do what they have done, at least in the US. I’ve started conversations with knowledgeable folks in the EU and other countries to see if there are differences in the law.

Now whether it’s morally acceptable is a separate question.

Joyride definitely adds some elements to Powerboats. Whether that is ‘cloning’ or ‘inspiration’ is going to be a decision for each individual. It is impossible to quantify how ‘different’ a game needs to be before it is not a clone. This type of thing arises with patents, and it is challenging for courts to decide whether something infringes on a patent or not. We don’t have courts to fall back on in this case, so it will be up to the public.

However, it is clear in this case that the designer/publisher was aware of Powerboats – they tried to license it initially. Given that it was so clearly based on that game, the publisher should have given a credit of some type to the Powerboats designer in the rules and wherever the design is discussed. Powerboats is only mentioned in passing in the Designer Diary posted on BGG. That would have been one opportunity to give credit to van Moorsel. Mentioning it in the rules would have been another.

Celebrating designers should be a cornerstone for both publishers and designers. Rebellion Unplugged absolutely failed to meet that standard.

Tropes and Clones (Clone Tropers?)

I have seen several comments about this issue that say that it is OK to include ‘tropes’ like Deckbuilding and Worker Placement in a design, but not ‘original concepts’.

I feel that this is misguided. Deckbuilding was absolutely an original concept when it came out. It only became a trope because so many people copied it. The first few iterations on deck building after Dominion were things like ‘Dominion plus combat’ or ‘Dominion with survival’. Again, there is no objective (or legal) standard to decide how different something needs to be to be in the clear.

Another celebrated case of ‘inspiration’ flying too close to the sun is David Sirlin’s Flash Duel, which was based on Reiner Knizia’s En Garde. The core of Flash Duel is clearly En Garde. Sirlin added a slew of characters, each with their own special cards and abilities. Was this enough to make it not a knock-off? Again, everyone will need to make their own decision.

Where Sirlin objectively did fall down was in not crediting or acknowledging En Garde in any way. If he had, perhaps the furor that arose from Flash Duel would have been more subdued.

A counter example is the game Witchstone. As a core mechanic it uses the tile placement from Knizia’s Ingenious. Designer Martino Chiacchiera reached out to Knizia to ask for permission to use the mechanic in his game, and ultimately Knizia was listed as a co-designer. I am unaware if there was any financial arrangement.

I have played both Witchstone and Ingenious, and honestly I did not make that connection when I played the former. I have to admit that if I had designed Witchstone, while I would have given Knizia and Ingenious credit, I would not have reached out to him beforehand for permission. Perhaps initially the designer thought that his game would be more of an Ingenious clone than it turned out to be.

Either way, hats off to Mr. Chiacchiera.

Protecting Your Design

In terms of designers being concerned about protecting their designs, there are a few considerations:

The Joyride / Powerboats issue is a case of a designer/publisher using an already-published game (as mentioned, Powerboats came out in 2008). While the publisher and designer did have contact prior to the publication of Joyride about a reprint, this is not an example of a publisher taking a game pitch and publishing it on their own.

This is more akin to the aforementioned Bang / Legend of the Three Kingdoms situation, which has happened a few times. Tok Tok Woodsman and Bamboo Bash, or Deflexion and Laser Chess are other examples. However, it is rare. Legally there is no way to stop this (although Deflexion had a patent, which helped them).

When submitting a sell sheet or idea to a publisher, many designers have concerns that their idea will be stolen. While it has happened, this is exceedingly rare. And any reputable publisher will not do this, as there are tons of new ideas, and publishers would rather have the designer on board than risk bad publicity.

There have been cases of ‘convergent evolution’, where companies are working on a design and a similar one is submitted, or they learn that one is being worked on. An example is The Insider (Oink) and Werewords (Bezier). (more details on this here Bezier founder responds to Werewords ‘copying’ controversy - Tabletop Gaming)

Larger companies, like Hasbro, will have designers sign an agreement prior to a pitch where it says, among other things, that they may be working on an idea internally already, and if so you pitching a similar idea does not give you any claim on it.

Some designers like to do the reverse, and have publishers agree to Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) prior to showing an idea, but most publishers are resistant to this. They see so many ideas, that the extra step of reviewing a legal document before every pitch is not worth the trouble.

Non-Compete Clauses

Here’s another angle. I have seen several licensing contracts with publishers that have a clause like this:

Non-Compete Clause: During the term of this Agreement, [the licensors] agree not to license or develop a game with similar mechanics for any third party.

I understand the intent here. My Super Skill Pinball is inherently ‘skinnable’. I can see that WizKids would be annoyed if I just designed some other tables using the Super Skill Pinball system and published them with someone else, unless we had discussed that possibility in advance (NOTE: The above clause is not from my contract with WizKids).

But the question this raises of course is - what are “similar mechanics”? If we go by Board Game Geek, “Hand Management” and “Dice Rolling” are mechanics. Surely I’m not enjoined from making another game with dice, right? But how far does that go? Super Skill Pinball uses a base system where you roll two dice and choose which one to use. Should I not be allowed to use that in another game?

When I see this clause in contracts I’ve been recommending that it be changed to “substantially similar”. That’s better, but it still leaves a lot of room for judgement. But honestly I’m not sure how to define that. Some contracts say the designer can’t publish other games that “compete” with the one being signed, but all games compete with each other on some level.

So again, I understand what the publisher is looking for, but I have no clear idea about how to express it.

Being a Good Neighbor

The bottom line is that it’s very hard to draw an objective line about what is acceptable or not. There are things that are clearly bad, and others that are clearly OK. But there’s a big gray area in the middle.

We always say that game design (and the hobby in general) are a community. Part of being a community is being a good neighbor, which means being considerate and respectful.

At a minimum designers should cite their sources and inspirations. The Dragon & Flagon, designed by my family, was absolutely inspired by the 1980 game Swashbuckler. If you played both you can clearly see the DNA - programmed movement and thrown mugs hitting people in the head making them fall off a table being two examples. But there are many differences between the two as well, and I don’t think we could be accused of being a clone. I know that whenever I talk about the game I mention Swashbuckler as an inspiration, but I could not remember if we actually cited it in the rules. I went back, and was pleased to see that we had:

The designers would like to acknowledge Thomas O’Neil and S. Craig Taylor. Their 1980 game Swashbuckler provided the spark that launch the design of The Dragon & Flagon.

You should always ask yourself - what would Mr. Rogers do?

Ultimately information, publicity, and the court of public opinion are going to be the best defenses to the very rare cases of bad behavior from publishers and designers.

Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952. While well-reviewed, it did not do well commercially. The Vonnegut’s third child, Nanette, was born in 1954, and they needed to increase their income, as writing was not paying the bills.

So Vonnegut decided to design and license a board game.

This, as any board game designer will tell you, was not the best plan.

He drew on his experiences in World War II and designed a two player semi-abstract wargame which he called GHQ, short for General Headquarters. It was played on a standard 8x8 checkerboard, and featured a variety of units including infantry, armor, paratroopers, and artillery. The objective was simple – capture your opponent’s headquarters.

He looked into patenting the game and sent inquiries off to a publisher in late 1956. Eleven months later, in October 1957, the game was rejected. He put the materials into a box and put them away.

Fortunately for him and the Vonnegut family (and for us, of course), his next novels – The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and Cat’s Cradle, broke through into the public consciousness and he was financially secure from his writing for the rest of his life.

As far as we know he never looked at GHQ again.

Publication

I first read the broad outlines of this story – basically just that Vonnegut had tried and failed to publish a board game called GHQ before he was famous - back in 2013. I tried to find out more about it, to no avail. I just kept finding the same bare-bones details repeated over and over.

Vonnegut passed away in 2007, and I learned that his papers were being stored at Indiana University. I reached out to them to see if they had any materials I could see, but they said I would need to get permission from the family first.

I am nothing if not persistent, and ultimately I was able to get the necessary permissions, and started to receive scanned documents from IU.

To be able to see these documents in Vonnegut’s handwriting, doodles and all, was magical. They contained five different versions of the rules, along with sketches and notes. It was fascinating to see how the rules evolved over the course of development, and how he changed how the rules were phrased and tried to express them clearly.

As Vonnegut said in one of his letters: “I am a professional writer, and the toughest assignment I ever had was writing the rules for this thing”.

As a rules writer myself, I take great solace in that.

I particularly enjoyed reading his pitch letter. It is, as you would expect, delightfully written. Yet at the same time It is uncanny how it hits so many of the cliches you find in first-time game designer pitches (going to be up there with chess and checkers, enjoyed by friends and neighbors, etc, etc).

I’ve showed it to many publishers, and many of them laugh out loud when they read it

The last mention of GHQ in Vonnegut’s papers is this rejection letter, that he received 11 months after sending off the initial pitch (still not uncommon, unfortunately).

This rejection letter was received by Kurt just a few weeks after his father passed away. I can only imagine how that loss, closely followed by the rejection of GHQ, which he had labored over intensely for years, must have made him despondent.

I’m not surprised that he put GHQ in a box and never took it out again.

The Game

When I pieced together what I thought was Vonnegut’s final version of the rules, I tried it out and discovered it was pretty good. Maybe it wasn’t “the third greatest checkerboard game” as Vonnegut declared, but it was certainly worth pursuing.

I brought it to the Metatopia playtesting convention and had some people try it without knowing the provenance, and they all enjoyed it.

GHQ actually has a number of innovative mechanics, particularly for the 1950’s.

• Multiple Action System: Each player gets three actions on their turn, which they can spend as they wish. Tikal (1999) is broadly considered the Eurogame that popularized an Action Point system, but this was forty years earlier.

• Zone of Control: In GHQ if you are adjacent to an enemy your movement is restricted, and you are not allowed to move directly to another space adjacent to an enemy. Also, artillery restricts movement. “Zone of Control” is a wargaming staple first named in the 1960’s in Avalon Hill games, but here it is a decade earlier.

• Reinforcements: You start GHQ with just five of your eighteen pieces on the board. Each turn you can spend an Action Point to bring any of your units into an empty space on your back row.

• Captures: The Infantry and Artillery capture mechanisms are different and innovative. So innovative that explaining the Infantry capture mechanism was the main thing Vonnegut struggled with in the rules. Once you see it in action it makes perfect sense, but it’s hard to express in a rules format.

Ultimately, I reached out to the family and they agreed that it was worth publishing, and that Kurt would be pleased to see it reach an audience at last.

Since this is as much a literary project as a game project, it made sense to reach out to Barnes & Noble about partnering on the publication. They were enthusiastic about the project and are the exclusive retail distribution partner of GHQ in the US.

The Elephant

The elephant in the room for GHQ, and one of the things that makes the game so fascinating, is that Vonnegut was so anti-war throughout his career. Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, is perhaps his most famous work, and is deeply autobiographical about the trauma he suffered during the Second World War, when he was a POW caught in the Allied bombing of Dresden.

The protagonist becomes ‘unstuck in time’ and is constantly shifting between the different periods of his life, including the war. It is a powerful metaphor of post-traumatic stress, and the way the past can suddenly feel just as real as the present. It portrays war as brutal and pointless.

Even his writings that were contemporaneous with the development of GHQ show this attitude about the futility of war. The Sirens of Titan was published in 1959 (GHQ was designed in 1955-1956) and depicts an army from Mars that robs its soldiers and officers of any sort of free will and is intentionally sacrificed for a ‘greater good’.

So why did he design a war game? It definitely isn’t Vonnegut being ironic, as his pitch letter clearly shows. He makes reference to the game being used as part of the curriculum for West Point, or as a way for veterans to show their families what they learned during the war.

There is no trace of irony in any of his work on the game.

GHQ and Sirens of Titan mark the halfway point between the end of the war and the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. We know that he tried to write Slaughterhouse (which he called “the Dresden book”) beginning in the early 50’s. But he couldn’t figure out how to tell the story and kept throwing it out and starting anew.

It would take many years and other novels before he matured enough as a writer – and as a human – to be able to process his feelings and frame them into a literary structure that amplified the meta nature of the experience. I believe GHQ was part of that process and another way for him to try to express his war experiences through a creative lens.

The Cover

So with that in mind, we had to tackle a thorny question – what do we do with the cover? I was pleased to bring Bill Bricker onto the project as art director. I had worked with Bill on other projects, and knew that he was a huge Vonnegut fan, and would bring the right attitude and attention to the detail GHQ deserved.

We decided early on that we didn’t want to have a battle scene, or a specific war depiction. We felt that perhaps while Vonnegut was serious in his design of a wargame, a straightforward depiction of war was not an appropriate reflection of his overall legacy.

At first we tried a series of ultramodern covers. However, they were a little too stark.

After a few more tries that didn’t work out, we hit on the idea of making it look like it had actually been published in the late 50’s, early 60’s. And a key touchstone of that era was the 3M series of games. I thought it could be very cool to have the cover look like a lost 3M game.

Bill rose to the challenge and produced these amazing images:

Those of you familiar with the 3M covers will see the resemblance immediately I am sure. Here’s Acquire, for example:

However, it still wasn’t quite right. It just didn’t grab us, and didn’t really seem to reflect the Vonnegut aesthetic.

We reached out to some other artists to try to get some ideas, including Ian O’Toole. He sent back this book jacket in the style of a vintage 1960’s paperback as possible inspiration:

And it was like a light switch was flipped. This pop, pulp style said both 1960’s and Vonnegut. It really was perfect.

And, coincidentally, I was doing a new (still unannounced) game with WizKids, and the art was being done by Ryan Goldsberry, famous for his 1960’s-style illustrations for Burgle Bros and others. I realized he would be ideal for the cover.

And he delivered. Here is the final cover, which also features doodles in Vonnegut’s style, which just pull everything together.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m sure you can tell this has been a labor of love for everyone involved. And so all the details have been focused on making this as true to Vonnegut’s vision as possible.

During development the family actually found the original pieces in the attic and sent me photos.

We tried to keep the pieces as close as possible to these designs, while modifying them for playability.

We also included a 24 page history booklet that reproduces many of the original scanned notes for the game, along with placing it in the context of Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre.

As we received the first production samples of the game I received the following lovely note from Kurt Vonnegut’s oldest son Mark, who was eight years old when the game was being developed.

The success of Slaughter-House 5 and the other novels is nice enough but I truly believe he's watching somehow, someway, from somewhere and that the success of GHQ will be a greater and purely unadulterated pleasure.

Like a little kid with his brain, a jig saw and paint, he worked very long and very hard on the game which we played over and over trying to figure out what, if anything, was wrong with it. He was discouraged about his writing at the time, but had unshakable faith the GHQ would succeed.

I hope that you find this peek into Vonnegut’s life and creative process as fascinating and engaging as we did. Thanks to the Vonnegut family, Indiana University, Bill Bricker, and the team at Barnes & Noble for making this quixotic project possible.

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Shadow

I was giving demos of Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ (more on that very soon, I promise!) and got into a conversation about our favorite science fiction authors. I brought up Gene Wolfe, author of the series The Book of the New Sun, which begins with Shadow of the Torturer.

Another Jeff (we were flush with Jeffs) recommended I listen to a podcast called Rereading Wolfe, where each episode covers a chapter of the series - in order.

It’s been a fascinating experience. Each chapter is short - around 10 pages - and yet each podcast is from one to two hours. One chapter took three full episodes to work through!

If you haven’t read Wolfe, his prose is clear but dense, and much of it is allegorical. The protagonist is Severian, who is raised by the Torturer’s Guild and ultimately ends up sitting on the throne. (Not a spoiler, as that is revealed in the first chapter).

I’ve read the series twice before this, and I am still learning basic facts that I missed. For example, the hosts point out that the Torturers Tower, where Severian is raised, is a rocket ship. The walls and floor are metal, the bottom is the ‘propulsion chamber’, rooms are described as ‘cabins’, walls as ‘bulkheads’, and windows as ‘ports’. Somehow I just glossed over that and it didn’t register. I had a traditional medieval city in mind, and these hints are spread out over several chapters.

These details are also masked by Wolfe’s consistent use of arcane or completely invented words. So it is easy to think at first that he is using words like ‘bulkhead’ as part of a literary effect, and not literally.

There are definitely mysteries to be plunged into in The Book of the New Sun. Much is not as it seems, and if any series deserves this type of treatment, this is it.

However, the podcast hosts frequently veer into what they freely acknowledge is ‘unhinged speculation’. Every passing character is presumed to perhaps be another character in disguise or related in some deeper way to the story. Every reference is analyzed for connections to other elements. In the first chapter, a corpse is exhumed from a graveyard. We never learn whose body it is, but theories are discussed for close to an hour.

What I find both engaging and frustrating about the psychology of the hosts is that there is an implicit assumption that there is an answer. That there is an actual truth. Of course, though, the ‘truth’ would have had to be inside Gene Wolfe’s head while he was writing.

It is very possible, for example, that Wolfe never had an identity in mind for that body in the graveyard. The identity is not germane to the plot - that of the grave robbers is what is important. And if Wolfe didn’t know who it was (more accurately think it was important enough to decide who it was), then that body has no identity. Yet that possibility is never considered by the hosts. It is decidedly the least fun possibility though, to be sure.

We know that there is no answer. You can argue about it forever, but there is no experiment or test or anything that can be done to see which theory is actually correct, particularly since Mr. Wolfe passed away in 2019.

My wife Susan has a master’s degree in writing and literature, and she points out that writers - great writers in particular - build layers of meanings and symbols into their work without always being conscious of it. And whether the author intended it or not, finding those connections can create resonance for a work to us personally.

But we need to go into the exercise knowing that there is no right answer, and it’s hardly something to argue about. Disagree, perhaps, but not argue.

Pendulum

As humans, we are pattern-seeking machines. We love mysteries and easter eggs. We see faces everywhere we look, for example. This is called pareidolia. Here are some fun examples:

But this can easily lead us astray, as we read more into something than what is there.

This tendency to see more than what is there is artfully deconstructed in Umberto Eco’s wonderful 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum.

Spoiler alert for a 40-year-old book.

The protagonists are researching the Knights Templar, and they uncover a mysterious document from the 1300’s:

a la . . . Saint Jean

36 p charrete de fein

6 . . . entiers avec saiel

p . . . les blancs mantiax

r . . . s . . . chevaliers de Pruins pour la . . . j.nc. 6 foiz 6 en 6 places

chascune foiz 20 a . . . 120 a . . .

iceste est l’ordonation

al donjon li premiers

it li secunz joste iceus qui . . . pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame de l’altre part de l’iau

it a l’ostel des popelicans

it a la pierre

3 foiz 6 avant la feste . . . la Grant Pute.

They fill in the blanks and translate to:

THE (NIGHT OF) SAINT JOHN

36 (YEARS) P(OST) HAY WAIN

6 (MESSAGES) INTACT WITH SEAL

F(OR THE KNIGHTS WITH) THE WHITE CLOAKS [TEMPLARS]

R(ELAP)S(I) OF PROVINS FOR (VAIN)JANCE [REVENGE]

6 TIMES 6 IN SIX PLACES EACH TIME 20 Y(EARS MAKES) 120 Y(EARS)

THIS IS THE PLAN

THE FIRST GO TO THE CASTLE

IT(ERUM) [AGAIN AFTER 120 YEARS] THE SECOND JOIN THOSE (OF THE) BREAD

AGAIN TO THE REFUGE

AGAIN TO OUR LADY BEYOND THE RIVER

AGAIN TO THE HOSTEL OF THE POPELICANS

AGAIN TO THE STONE 3 TIMES 6 [666] BEFORE THE FEAST (OF THE) GREAT WHORE.

They interpret this as a map to the location of the Holy Grail (“the great whore” referring to Revelations and Babylon), and begin a quest to find it. This is the inciting event for the entire book.

Ultimately, they run afoul of another group also involved with the Templars engaged with the same conspiracy.

However, 90% of the way through the book the protagonist shows the message to another character, who looks at it and says:

The Message is ordinary. It’s a laundry list. Come on, let’s read it again. So here is how your Provins message should read:

In Rue Saint Jean:

36 sous for wagons of hay.

Six new lengths of cloth with seal

to rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

Crusaders’ roses to make a jonchée:

six bunches of six in the six following places,

each 20 deniers, making 120 deniers in all.

Here is the order:

the first to the Fort

item the second to those in Porte-aux-Pains

item to the Church of the Refuge

item to the Church of Notre Dame, across the river

item to the old building of the Cathars

item to rue de la Pierre-Ronde.

And three bunches of six before the feast, in the whores ’ street.

“Because they, too, poor things, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by making themselves nice little hats of roses.” “My God,” I said. “I think you’re right.” “Of course I’m right. It’s a laundry list, I tell you.”

The entire inciting incident of the book is undercut right at the end, because, as Eco says “the simplest explanation is always the best”.

And yet the conspiracy theory, the misreading of the passage, takes on a life of its own and ‘becomes’ true and has real consequences because enough people believe in it.

It’s a wonderful book. Highly recommended.

Our ability and desire to make these kinds of connections also underlies the popularity of Escape Rooms and related board games like the Exit series, and the upcoming Magnus Protocol Mysteries (designed by my daughter Sydney). We go into these knowing that there is a mystery and there is an answer and (if it is well designed) that the clues are there for us to figure out.

Unfortunately, if there’s one thing the internet has brought to us, it’s a flood of conspiracy theories, and those too trusting and eager to believe them.

Moon

Another game that explores the idea of a ‘conspiracy in a box’ is City of Six Moons, by Amabel Holland.

The conceit of City of Six Moons is that it’s an alien civilization game that comes from an alien civilization. There are no rules in a human language - they are presented as pictograms. It is up to you to figure out what the rules are.

This is a fascinating idea that evokes archeologists trying to piece together the rules for ancient games. The ‘rules’ that you read for games like Senet and Mehen are guesses at best, although they are often presented as definitive. It is almost certain there were regional and temporal differences in how these games were played.

I mean, what are the rules for Monopoly? You ask ten people you’ll get ten different answers.

The Digital Ludeme project is attempting to use a process based on archeology, history, and statistics to piece together how rules evolved and spread, and possibly be able to back in to how certain games may have been played.

Amabel wrote an excellent designer diary for Six Moons which is worth a read. It implies that there is an answer - that the corpse in the graveyard actually has an identity.

However, a few months after the game some people thought some of the diagrams seemed ambiguous. In response she posted that:

I can say that everything in the rulebook is intended to be there. Whether or not it's confusing or ambiguous for the people of this planet is another question altogether.

Some people got very upset at that. They wanted there to be a definitive, right answer.

One BGG user posted:

I want to believe there is a great game in there. And I want to believe that the rules we were given are complete and accurate enough that we could get there, or at least close to it.

But I more and more get the feeling that even if there is, the rules have gone beyond simple obfuscation and into deliberate misdirection. IE, the game the rules describe is NOT necessarily the "indescribably great game" that was originally created. That even with the most generous interpretations, it will fall flat because the intentional changes remove key (even if subtle) factors into how it plays out.

Responses like the one above leave me less certain that it's even possible to find the original game.

If the reason for the failure to translate is on us, the "players", trying to make sense of it, fine. If the reason for the failure is that the rules themselves are intentionally ambiguous, meaning that none of the interpretations are correct nor incorrect. That's what I meant when I said "Ambiguous means 'we' are missing something" - the misinterpretation is on us, the player. But if the ambiguity was intentional for the sake only of having mulitple VALID meanings, then there is no "one game" underneath it.

To use the faulty Sudoku example given elsewhere; if the deciphering is like filling in a Sudoku grid, and completing it results in a complete ruleset, it would be as if the grid we were given only has a few numbers written in it, in such a way that there are multiple (dozens? hundreds?) of ways to fill out the missing parts. Even if one of those was the intended answer, there'd be no way to know. And if one of the numbers was intentionally changed to something else, then it would be impossible to get the intended answer.

Later, she even posted that as the game became more popular and she hand-built more sets (all sets are put together on demand) it was possible there were different versions of the rules out there.

In another thread, someone was quite upset about this possibility. I can only say that if two people have slightly different versions of the rules, then in isolation they each have a solvable puzzle and playable game. If those two people wish to compare notes to decide which is "real", well, both are real. If they want to go further to try to synthesize the two in pursuit of an "optimal" version, they can, though that might be a third, different, thing, and does not, as I see it, impact one's ability to experience the version they have.

I absolutely LOVE that the user response above starts with - and then repeats - I WANT TO BELIEVE, which is the rallying cry of conspiracy enthusiasts and X-Files fans throughout time.

One of the dirty little secrets of game design (which may not be dirty, nor little, nor a secret) is that most games of a certain complexity include rules that could have gone different ways without impacting game play. Maybe there's a tie break rule, or how many cards you have in your hand, or a limit on a token, or something like that. The designer needs to just come down with a decision on what it should be, but often there is very little difference in the gameplay regardless of the option chosen.

So I think this discussion - and really the whole concept of this game - is fascinating in that there's this desire for there to be a 'right' answer, when in reality there is no 'right' answer in a very strong sense for just about any game. In Ticket to Ride would the game change if the number of train tokens each player gets is one or two higher or lower? Or if there were a couple of more or fewer locomotive cards in the deck? Not really, no. And did Moon test all the possible variations to find the ‘best’ version? No.

And some players would enjoy the game better if these were tweaked, and some would like it less. At some point the designer just makes the call, but that doesn't mean it's 'right' or the platonic ideal of what the game is expressing.

If there are two or more different interpretations, or games, that come out of the City of Six Moon rules, or if there are different rules sets floating around out there, in my opinion that's fine and cool and totally part of the intent of the project. I don't see this as simply a sudoku with one correct answer. Games aren't logical constructs like that. Even though (if) Amabel has one version in mind, that doesn't mean that's 'right'. What if another interpretation results in a game that is tighter, more fun, more challenging, whatever metric you're looking at?

Isn't that an equally 'right' answer?

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But there are some games that have a twist on this. Getting more of something is good, but only up to a point. Once you go above a certain value, it turns against you, and is bad. I call this a Sweet Spot Mechanism (although it didn’t make the book!). You want to keep something within a range, and not be too high or too low. I guess you could also call it a Goldilocks Mechanism, but I like the alliteration of Sweet Spot.

A great example of this is Josh Buergel’s The Fox in the Forest, which is a trick-taking game for two players. Interestingly, many games that feature this mechanism are trick taking games.

In The Fox in the Forest, there are 13 tricks, and each is won by one of the two players. You score points based on how many tricks you take. So the tricks could be split 7-6, 9-4, or 13-0. In general, getting more tricks is better, but only up to a point. In you get 7 tricks and your opponent 6, you would get 6 points and they would get 3. If you split 9-4, you still get 6 points, but your opponent only gets 1.

But if you get one more than 9-4 – if you get 10 tricks, you score 0 and your opponent scores 6. So 9-4 is the best split for you.

This mechanism adds a tremendous amount of texture to a hand. If it was simply that you scored the most points by taking the most tricks, the strategy would be straightforward – win as many as you can. But by making 9 tricks great and 10 tricks terrible, the players may switch from trying to win tricks to trying to lose tricks, and when you realize when to make that switch is critical to playing well.

The traditional card game Hearts is similar, if you consider the Shoot-the-Moon mechanic. Ending a hand with 25 points is terrible. But if you get the 26^th point, you instead stick all the other players with 13.

In the Stefan Dorra trick taking game Die Sieben Siegel – now published as Sluff Off! – players take chips representing how many tricks they think they can take. If they take exactly that number – great.  If not, either high or low, they lose points.

In Trade on the Tigris, designed by me and Ryan Sturm, players move on two tracks - government and religion.

As you move towards the ends of the tracks you get access to higher level technologies, and higher end-game VP. But each track ends in a pretty bad space. Here’s a close-up of the government track, on the Democracy end:

The key features are circled in red. If you go too far and end up with Bureaucracy you go down from Level III cards to Level I cards, and the VPs (in the coins) drops from 15 to 10.

You only reach the ends of these tracks towards the end of the game. So the last few trading rounds see players trying to make sure that the ideas they bring into their kingdom keep them in that best space. It makes for a tense and exciting finale (at least in this designer’s opinion).

And it also has a fun thematic element. Too much Democracy moves you into Bureaucracy, as you see above. The other end of the track is Dictatorship, which can give you access to fun aggressive technologies, but if you go too far you end up in Tyranny. And the ends of the Religion track are Zealotry and Idolatry.

In my game The Dragon & Flagon, players have a character in a tavern brawl. Each has a core set of actions that are shared by all characters, but there are five that are unique to each. In earlier iterations of the game, you took damage and could get knocked out of the game. To add some interest and texture, we had a mechanism where you started with none of your special character actions. As you took damage, you earned your special actions. So as you came closer to losing you got more powerful. Many players tried to get damaged early so they could get access to their cool cards. The danger, of course, was that if you went too far you could get knocked out. So you wanted to take damage, but not too much damage.

We ended up eliminating players getting knocked out, and that mechanism went with it. But it was really a fun feature when it was included.

So this Sweet Spot mechanism adds a lot of interest to games where it is included. And we see this all the time in science, product design, and engineering. As we are searching for exoplanets orbiting other stars, we are looking for ones that are not too close to the sun – where they will be scorching hot and have no liquid water – or too far away, where they will be frigid. We are most interested in planets that are in that in-between goldilocks zone.

In a similar vein, when creating a product, the designer needs to balance different features. If you’re designing a laptop you need to balance the size and power of the parts with the size of the case – too large and no one will have room for it on their desk, too small and you won’t be able to fit everything in, and it will get too hot.

Situations like this are way more interesting than strictly “more is better” and require expertise and finesse.  I would love to see the sweet spot mechanism incorporated into even more games.

“Moderation in all things”.

Harley Quinnball

The next installment in the Super Skill Pinball series will be releasing at Gencon - Harley Quinnball!

It was my absolute pleasure to get to play in Harley’s world for a little while - and have an excuse to buy her comics!

Some of the fun features of the different tables:

Coney - This table is near and dear to my heart as my family heritage goes through Coney Island. Fun fact: My great-grandfather Samuel Engelstein started the Great Coney Island Fire of 1911. This table introduces the Wonder Wheel minigame, and the Parachute Jump. It also has special Leap abilities that Harley can earn.

Joker Tower - Honestly my favorite of the bunch, but just by a nose. You can see the images for this in the IGN article - it's the first table where the two boards are both in 'portrait', and there are four levels to climb. Each is its own mini table with special challenges, and has its own flippers. When you go up a level you can't go back down. Ultimately you are trying to defeat the Joker on the top level, which actually ends the game. Bonuses on different levels combo with each other, so you need to choose which you want to try to carry upwards. This is a one-ball machine - if you lose the ball you're done.

This table design was inspired by the very rare The Pinball Circus, which I got to play in Las Vegas. There's only two or three in existence. Pics here: https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=4354

Suicide Squad - There are five Suicide Squad members you can recruit during the game. You start with one (at random), and can earn others through the AMANDA targets. Each member has a different special ability, but each time you use it there's an increasing chance that their heads explode. Big points are available if you can take down Starro, who dominates the center of the board. You need to hit all his tentacles before you can go for the eye and get the bonus.

Gotham Gems - If you like multiball (and who doesn't!), you'll love this table. It's very easy to get multiball in this one, and you can get it any number of times. Each time you get it your teammate is chosen by the final target you hit - either Poison Ivy, Catwoman, or Black Canary. Each teammate gives triple points for certain targets, so you need to decide between grabbing points when you can, or switching partners to really ramp it up.

Hope this gives you a little flavor, and you enjoy the game!

I will be at the Wizkids booth at Gencon Thursday afternoon from 2-4 giving demos, and signing. Please stop by and say hi!

Wargames According to Mark

Veteran war game designer, co-designer, and friend Mark Herman has written what is destined to be a vital reference for game designers - Wargames According to Mark. I was a test reader on the final version, so I feel very comfortable vouching for it.

The book is currently available for pre-order from GMT Games.

I was assigned “solar power satellites” that beamed energy to earth via microwaves and wrote an at-best-mediocre story about folks repairing satellites discovering the electronics were being destroyed from nanobots who, I guess, floated in from another star or something.

Like I said - mediocre at best. As were most of the other stories.

However, another student - Allison - was assigned Extra Sensory Perception. And her story was so, so, so good. It was simple - it was set in modern times, but ESP was the norm. And it was framed as the notes of an elementary school teacher who had a young student join the class who did not have ESP - as part of mainstreaming.

The first half of the story talked about the difficulty the student had to adapting. The class was basically silent because, of course, they all just read each other’s minds. It described the changes the teacher tried to make to integrate the new student academically and socially. Ultimately the teacher visits a class of just ‘non-ESP’ students and is amazed at how loud and boisterous the children are.

It was everything science fiction should be. It took this notion of ‘everyone having ESP’ and simply used that as a mirror to get the reader to extrapolate into what it must be like to be a deaf child entering a hearing classroom. It immediately gave the reader empathy for a situation they may not otherwise have had - certainly a perspective I didn’t have. And it was a small, contained story, about a class and a teacher, not some defending-the-earth-from-destruction claptrap. Her story was truly elegant.

I was reminded of that story recently as I just finished reading Babel by R. F. Kuang. I thoroughly enjoyed her Poppy Wars series, but only heard about this novel after an unfortunate controversy when it was excluded from the Hugo Awards held in China (due to concerns about offending the government). Which is ironic if you’ve actually read the book.

Babel is deft and elegant in a very similar way to Allison’s ESP story. It is set in an alternate-history 1830’s England, where magic based on silver bars helps fuel Britain’s colonial empire. The world is very similar to our own, with an overlay of magic, magic however that could stand in for science or technology.

I’ve often viewed science as a form of magic - you sit all day with your head in a book, scribbling on paper, and suddenly figure out a way to alter reality. Much like the stereotypical wizard.

But just this slight tweak lets Kuang approach history and social dynamics from a perspective that is different enough from reality to evoke wonder, but similar enough to let us use it as a prism to better understand both history and the current day.

Which is kind of a magic as well.

Games, Geoff. This Blog is about Games

So what does this have to do with game design?

For most creative professionals, consuming and analyzing other artists’ work is important. It helps you learn about new techniques you were not aware of, a different style, or a creative take on a problem you’ve wrestled with. It has led me to try to codify and share some of those techniques in Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, and Achievement Relocked, as well as in this blog.

And I think that over the years I’ve grown into a pretty good game designer. But the more I learn, the more I realize that some designers are operating on a whole other level above me - the same realization I had about Allison’s short story back in college.

The coda to the Allison story is that my reaction was to not try to write fiction again. After that class I never returned to the form.

But I did not do that with game design, in a large part, I believe, because I had that ‘revelation’ of how good some designs were much further along in my design career. Perhaps I was just having too much fun playing games that I wasn’t thinking that deeply, or perhaps the hand of the designer wasn’t as clear to me. But for whatever reason designing a great game seemed much more within reach than writing a great novel.

Which raises the question almost all of us have to wrestle with - what do you do when you realize that you’re very good but not great?

Amadeus

The Academy-award winning 1984 movie Amadeus wrestles with this very question. It fictionalizes the relationship between Antionio Salieri, court composer to the Emperor of Austria, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. When he meets the young Mozart, he is shocked to see that incredible talent paired with an obnoxious and obscene personality.

If you have not seen Amadeus, you absolutely should. It is a deep and moving film.

Spoiler alert for a forty-year-old movie - at the end of the film there’s an intense scene where the two are collaborating on a work when Mozart is too weak to complete it. Even so, Mozart is racing ahead, with Salieri struggling to keep up. It is riveting, as Salieri truly realizes what genius means and that he will never achieve it. It is particularly heart-breaking because a lesser composer than Salieri would not be able to see Mozart’s genius. He’s great enough to know that he will never be exceptional.

I am Salieri

I have come to terms with being a Salieri of game design. I’m immensely proud of my design oeuvre, but I understand now that they are ‘very good’ (maybe even very, very good) but not great. And I’m OK with that. I think a big part of it is getting older - I’m going to be 60 in a few months, and I have the perspective that comes with age.

Which raises the question of who I see as gaming’s Mozart? There are many designers that I am consistently in awe of, who take a thoughtful approach to design and leap above and beyond. But I will restrict myself to one here - Vlaada Chvátil.

For me, the genius of Chvátil is how he effortlessly masters so many different genres. Through the Ages is a best-in-class civ game. Codenames is a best-in-class party game. Mage Knight, Galaxy Trucker - you get the idea.

Frankly, it’s a little annoying.

While I said above that I am comfortable with being Salieri, I would be lying if I didn’t say that I still believe I have a Mozart-level game inside of me. (I can’t bring myself to say ‘Chvátil-level). After I retire from my full-time (non-gaming) job I want to spend more time designing, and I hope that will unlock a final masterwork.

Honestly, probably not. But as I said, I’m OK with that. As I’m writing this I’m listening to Salieri’s work, and you know what - it’s delightful.

When rolling a die (at various points you roll a D6), you do it secretly. You announce what you rolled, and you can lie. The other players can just let it pass, or they can accuse you of lying.  If you were lying, treat the roll as a zero. If you were telling the truth, the roll counts double. So if you say it’s a ‘five’, and your opponents accuse you of lying, it will either count as ten or zero depending on whether you were truthful or not.

We played a game with it, and it made for some fun moments. My daughter played that ability, and I caught her out a few times, but she also got some big ‘doubles’ in. It was fun but not overpowering. Also, it introduced a nice bit of yomi into the game (“Yomi” is the feeling of trying to outguess what your opponent will do – think the Princess Bride iocane powder scene).

But even though it worked in playtests, something about it was bothering me. Was doubling the right thing to do? Was it too powerful? Not powerful enough?

More importantly, was there an optimal strategy you could use, on either side?

Feel free to think about it yourself before moving on. How would you use this ability?

The Algorithm

I came up with this simple strategy:

If I roll a 1, 2, or 3, lie and say 4, 5, or 6 respectively (so add 3 to the result). If I roll a 4, 5, or 6 tell the truth.

Using this strategy, 1/3 of the time I will say 4, 1/3 of the time I will say 5, and 1/3 6. And 50% of the time I will be lying.

This strategy also makes lying ‘easier’, since I am just using an algorithm (a definite rule). I don’t have to hesitate to decide what I will say the roll is.

So let’s say my opponent never accuses me of lying. What does that look like?

My ‘rolls’ will be 4, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6, or an average of ‘5’ per turn.

What if they always accuse me of lying?

My rolls now will be 0, 0, 0, 8, 10, 12. If you add those numbers together you get 30, so the average is also ‘5’ per turn.

What about if the opponent tries a different strategy? Maybe they only accuse you of lying when you say 6?

Rolls: 4, 5, 0, 4, 5, 12. Average of 5

What if they only accuse you of lying when you say ‘4’?

Rolls: 0, 5, 6, 8, 5, 6: Average of 5

This strategy does the same thing regardless of what your opponent does. It makes no difference what they do.

The Nash Equilibrium

In game theory this is called a Nash Equilibrium, as it was first discovered by the father of game theory John Nash. If a strategy is ‘optimal’, anything the opponent does will either not change the outcome (as in my die example), or make things worse.

Nash strategies can either be ‘pure’, which means they are deterministic, or ‘mixed’ which means you choose different options a certain percentage of the time. My 4/5/6/4/5/6 strategy here is a pure strategy. In the same situation you always do the same thing.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is an example of a game with a mixed Nash Equilibrium strategy. You should randomly pick each 1/3 of the time. If you do, no matter what your opponent does you will win 1/3 of the time, lose 1/3 of the time, and draw 1/3 of the time.

Nash proved that any game where players have a finite number of options has a Nash Equilibrium, although realistically for most games it is very difficult to determine that without serious computing power, if at all.

One area where the Nash Equilibrium strategies have been making inroads is in poker. The new trend in poker is Game Theory Optimal Poker strategy, also known as GTO.

Students of GTO poker study charts like this, that lay out the 169 possible starting hand combinations (treating all ‘suited’ combos the same and ‘unsuited’ combos the same), and what you should do based on where you are sitting relative to the dealer and what your opponents have already done (called or raised).

Red means raise, green means call, black is fold. You’ll see that for each hand there is a certain percentage of the time you should raise vs calling, although a few (like pocket Aces) have you raising 100% of the time.

Let’s say the GTO play in your situation is to raise 25% of the time and call 75%? How do you generate random numbers at the poker table? Humans are notoriously bad at this. One subtle way to do this is to wear a watch with a second hand. In our example you may decide that if the second hand is between the 12 and 3 you’ll raise, otherwise you will call. Then glance down.

But Is It Fun?

Part of the reason I enjoy playing poker is figuring out whether someone is bluffing or not. GTO takes the ‘human factor’ out of the equation. Does it make poker less fun?

In my opinion, no. I don’t believe a person is capable of playing fully GTO poker. There are just too many situations, and ultimately you have to go with heuristics, or go with your gut. So there’s still room for staring into the eyes of the person across from you to figure out if they’re trying to slip something past you, or actually have the goods.

But in general, playing a Nash Equilibrium strategy is boring. By definition there are no decisions. You just follow the plan, randomizing as necessary. And it’s frustrating to play against, because nothing you do makes a difference.

In our game mechanic, if someone uses the 4/5/6 strategy it will still be balanced. You will, on average gain a +1.5 to the die (average of 5 instead of 3.5). And that is actually in line with the other special abilities.

But it’s decidedly un-fun.

However - do we know that people will use that strategy? It’s not obvious. We went through a few playtests, and no one figured it out. They were just playing the ability ‘as intended’.

In my opinion, no. Particularly in the current connected age, if one person figures out that strategy, it will spread like wildfire. You can’t include a time-bomb like that in your game. You can’t have a strategy that’s simple, effective, and boring.

In the end, we ditched the doubling and changed it so that you get a +2 bonus if you are falsely accused of lying. There’s still a Nash Equilibrium strategy - there always is, remember - but it makes it a tough-to-calculate mixed strategy, so people won’t use it. The deadly part of the 4/5/6 strategy is that it’s very easy to understand and execute.

When you’re designing, look for these types of situations. I’ve seen them in published games, where a simple, deterministic strategy is the optimal way to play. It’s not a good thing. The warning sign is when the expectation value (the ‘average’ in my die roll mechanic) is easy to calculate.

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The Universe Explained with a Cookie

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