 So I have something even funnier. Usually we give out little business cards from people who want to like see our other panels because like hundreds of our panels are like on YouTube or around, we've been doing a podcast for like 14 years. Yeah, don't waste your time. Tons of free stuff. This is your key to all of it, but usually we give out little business cards. I ran out of the business cards and I found the flyers we printed back in 2006. Wasn't it for Katsukon though? This was for Katsukon. And before Katsukon was in this building. Definitely the graphic design terrible. This is before it was cheap to print in color and the back is like, what's a podcast? How do I listen to a podcast? I've still got like 10,000 of these. Does it talk about iPods? Cause there were no iPhones. Yup. How do I listen to podcasts? The simplest way is to visit a website. All right, it's eight o'clock, thumbs up guys. We're the host of Geek Nights. It's a podcast. If you really have nothing better to do with your time and you know how to listen to a podcast because it's not 2005. That's the thing you can do, I guess, that QR code will take you to our website, whatever. We're talking about rare game mechanics today. Yup. Now, what do we mean by rare game mechanics? Well, we're going to start with tabletop and we'll get into some other kinds of games toward the end. But there's common game mechanics like drawing cards or playing poker. There's common game mechanics in certain areas like trick-taking games if you live in the Midwest and if you don't live in the Midwest, those are rare. So we're trying to highlight things that are interesting, that are different, that you might not have encountered, or things like the Rondle. Right. Also, if any of these mechanics are not rare, Rimm wrote this panel all by himself, so blame him. Rondles are actually relatively rare. Rondles are super rare. There's like one guy who makes board games. So if you Google for Rondle to find out what the hell we're talking about, you're going to find a Wikipedia page that explains what a Rondle is. And basically, a Rondle is just a wheel where you move around the wheel of a limited amount of spaces to take action. So I take maneuver. I can move up to three so I can get to gold. Can't get all the way around a marble in one turn. That's a Rondle. But if you go to this Wikipedia page, it's something funny because it links to three things. One of those things is Max Garrett's. That is a game designer who is well known for making pretty much every game that used Rondles up until about 2014. Right. So if you see a Rondle game, there's a 99% chance it was made by this dude. So what's the deal with the Rondle? You're going to see more of these indie games are starting to pick this up. People have discovered this and used it. You're also going to see a lot of people calling things Rondles that are not Rondles. Just because it's a circle. There's a lot of circles in the world. They're not all Rondles. Soaking? Not a Rondle. It is only a Rondle if you move around a circle to choose actions, get resources to do something in the game and your movement is limited. Right. So anyone here plays like a Grykola or any other kind of worker placement game, right? And usually the way those games work is you put your worker on any open space, right? It's like, oh, I want to do the farming action this turn. I want to do the harvesting action this turn. I want to make babies this turn. You just pick the thing you want. You're free to pick whatever you want. When you have a Rondle, right, you start in a certain place and you can only move a certain number of places. So it's like, okay, my next act- You can't be like, make a baby, make a baby, make a baby. You got to do something else before you make another baby. So it's like my next action is either going to be iron, temple, or gold. And if I choose gold, I won't be able to temple or iron next turn. I'll have to then do maneuver, army, or marble on the next turn. So you have to plan multiple turns in advance like what the sequence is going to be. And it's this extremely different kind of limitation on the actions you're going to take in the game because not only what's available to me right now, but also what's available to me in the future. Now this serves a really interesting purpose too because you'll notice almost all the Rondles. Here's another one from another game designed by Max Garrett. Is that you'll see the same action multiple times. There's two markets here. Go to this one. There's two maneuvers. If there's an action that players need to take commonly or that is safe, underpowered, it's a way to make it easier to take certain actions. You can hit that maneuver twice every time you go around the wheel. It's a way to have actions that aren't that great or actions where there's some reason to let players do them more often. Maybe it's like a bookkeeping action or the action that lets you score victory points, things like that. It's a very powerful tool and this is the kind of thing we're going to talk about for the rest of this panel. Things that are rare, what they do, why they're rare, why maybe they aren't rare, you just don't play these cool weird games and maybe you'll find a few games to play along the way. So, hidden movement. Hidden movement is rare in games primarily because the player who's doing hidden movement probably has to write stuff down. There's usually like a piece of paper, some nonsense, they're playing behind the shield, they can just cheat, they can make a mistake. Video games is a lot of hidden movement, right? It's all kinds of stealth games. It's not too many stealth multiplayer games, but in tabletop, how do you do stealth? Right? One person's moving in secret. How do you know they're not cheating? Do you get an extra player to watch them to make sure they're not cheating? And then that player can see, so that player can't play. Their only job is to see. It's like, it's really tricky. How do you allow someone in a tabletop game to have this hidden movement going on without any sort of cheating or shenanigans? It's tricky. There's only a few ways to do it, so there's only a few games to do it. Yup, and most games to do it, do it with a stupid piece of paper that even when Clue 2, I don't even knew there was a sequel to Clue, the museum paper, they actually had a typo in the sheet. So they had to tell everyone to add a wall, and I didn't get that memo. That caused some issues in my family as a child. This game is not good, but it is better than you expected to be. The hidden movement's actually really fun. Think about it. You pull off hidden movement. You have a board game where someone's sneaking around doing business, Dracula's making more Dracula's, and you're all trying to hunt it down. There's games to do it, but there's a reason it's rare. Even more rare, hidden actions. Meaning, you're doing a game thing like, I buy this for four, I spend this many tokens, I move the wheel, but you're doing it behind a shield or secretly without other players observing you. Scott doesn't like this game, it's rolled for the galaxy, because you could technically just cheat. You roll some dice, and you basically play Yahtzee behind your own shield, set your stuff up and reveal them. I could just cheat. I could just, like, put forward. That's not the reason I don't like the game, but that is a true fact. That's the thing you complain about the most. You could just cheat at this game, right? Imagine if you're playing Yahtzee behind, you roll the dice behind the shield and reveal it when you're done. Oh look, another Yahtzee. Oh no. Yep, but it's more subtle than that. It's not that people are going to cheat, because if your friend cheats when you're playing a board game, you probably shouldn't be friends with them anymore, unless you were playing for money. We'll talk about money in a minute. But the problem more is that games are complicated. How many of you are playing a game like Root, and you're like, oh, I do the Bap of Dad, and I attack a thing, and then someone else at the table says, oh no, no, that costs two. That can't happen if the other players can't observe your actions. Every player is more likely to make a mistake the more things you can do that other players don't observe. That's why this is rare, or when it's in a game, the game tends to break a lot. Right, now the reason hidden actions and hidden movement, like lots of games have hidden information, right? You have a hand of cards that's hidden, right? It's like, well, why isn't that a problem? Because it's just information that's hidden. It's not an action or a verb that's hidden, it's just the nouns, right? You just hide the nouns, eventually when you use them, when you verb the nouns, they're revealed to the players, and everyone can make sure that all the verbs in the game happen properly, right? But when the verbs become hidden, now things are happening in the game that people don't know about and they could go wrong, or cheating wrong, if only one player is executing them. And it creates a really bad situation, specifically in that someone will make a mistake, that will not be noticed until it is far too late to fix it. You'll get 20 turns in, you flip over the Dracula car, it's wrong, the player didn't realize they couldn't play that card, the whole game is ruined. Did you put in a slide so we can talk about Dracula? Yes. Put in a slide for everything you're about to think about. Alright, let's talk about Dracula then. Alright, we'll get there. Oh. It's coming up. It's in there. It's talking about real auctions. I don't like your organization. This is a game called Modern Art. You literally just bid on paintings. If you see this game, it's going to be a newer printing that looks better than this. Or worse than this. In different ways. Yeah. Karl Gitter is my man. But it turns out that most people, most gamers, even most super serious skilled gamers, can't play auctions for shit. People cannot value things. I've watched people in this game. There will be a thing that is being auctioned. It is a smart person playing. The thing could not be worth more than $30 under any circumstances. And they will bid more than $30 for it. There is literally no reason to do that. And I see it happen so commonly that it started to be like, people just can't do auctions. So as a result, a lot of games tend to avoid open auctions because if there are auctions, you'll find that slightly skilled players just crush everybody else. Players get really unsatisfied. It's really disappointing if you're a game designer because you notice a lot of game designers have problems with numbers on things, right? The cost of, you know, the monocost to play cards, the strengths and defensive cards, or I'm using CCGs, but like, you know, there's a lot of agricula. How many grains should it cost to play this card in agricula? And settlers, how many grain sheep and wood should it cost to make a settlement, right? They seem to have balanced it pretty well, but if you're designing a game, coming up with the costs of things is a lot of hard work and you spend a lot of time balancing that. If you make a game and you just say, you know what, we're not going to put prices on any of the stuff in the game, everything will just be auctioned on. That's so easy. It's like, ah, the players will determine the prices. It's automatically balanced. What an easy game to make. Which is funny because Scott is designing an auction-based game right now. That's right. I'm smart. If you notice, like for example, how many of you have played Monopoly ever? I mean, that game is notable because it never ends and it's actually terrible. But Americans make it worse by playing with house rules. You realize you have to auction off every property that gets landed on, right? Most people don't play it that way. And the reason is, if you play Monopoly with your family and your little brother doesn't quite understand math yet, and you do, and your little brother gets into an auction with you, your little brother is going to bid all his money on a property and then cry when he realizes that he's out of the game. An extreme example of this is a relatively recent game that was kick-started called QE. Oh, this game's so great. QE stands for quantitative easing. So the way this game works, this is actually a ridiculously simple game. All that happens is you got a few rounds, right? And in each round, we auction off victory points. We're like, hey, how much do you want to pay for four victory points? And everyone writes a number on a card, hands them to a player. That player reveals which other player bid the most, right? And then they give that person the victory points. I can bid a billion. I can bid a billion. I can just keep writing nines all day. You are a bank. You print money. You can write any number you want on the card. It doesn't matter. So how does this game work? I'll just bid a billion on everything. Well, obviously, first of all, whoever has the most victory points after all the auctions is the winner. Except whoever spent the most money automatically loses. So you just bid a billion every time and win all the auctions and get all the victory points while you're automatically eliminated, and we look at the next person. If you want to see why auctions are so hard to incorporate well, like real auctions, a lot of games have fakie auctions, like go around the table and everyone just raises by a little bit. Yeah, like Power Grid, right? Goes around. Yeah. This game has like four different kinds of auctions and one of the things you do in the game is choose which kind of auction to use depending on how much it might benefit you. Hard for people to figure that out. This game, I literally saw people bid 40 and 10 billion on the same thing. I see people mostly bid 69, 42, 420, 666. Those are the kind of numbers that are bid the most often. You bid the devil's level. Right. So you can go 70. It's usually a good idea to win with 70. So, error handler. Board games can crash. Can you think of a situation that might cause a board game to crash? But the thing I love the most about this image is that he's a little blurry because he's just about to do it. But board games crash like we said before. Someone makes a hidden action and four hours later you find out your game is ruined and it turns out there are a very small vanishing number of games that have error correction built into them. They have rules for if someone cheats, if someone messes up, if the game gets knocked over. There's so few that we can talk about most of that. Right. Yeah, it's like, you know, there's a lot of video games, right? Where the video game crash is like, OK, well, I guess I can't play anymore, period. Your path forward is predetermined, right? My game crashed. I guess I reset it. It's soft lock. I guess I reset and I see what kind of save point I have. Right. Oh, it crashed and I got to walk through the wall. I guess I got to walk through the wall. That's great. But in a board game, there isn't some sort of law of the universe governing what's going to happen. You can move the cubes anywhere you want. No one's going to stop you. Yeah, there's no journey set the game three turns ago. Even during the game no one's going to stop you, right? So sometimes there's some common sense. Like, aha, I was lucky and took a photo of the board before someone flipped it. That saved us once at a drunken mag fast two years ago. Yeah, but sometimes there is no guaranteed right way to fix what's going on and very, very few rule books have in them if something messes up, do this. So Puerto Rico, which we have a panel you can watch online where we teach this game completely and then teach people how to be good at it that we just did at Pet Sun Flood. This game has a really interesting mechanic where after something happens the mayor will take a bunch of colonists and refill them on a ship. But it's really easy to forget to do that and you usually won't notice that you forgot to do it until it's too late to put the right number out there. The game has a specific rule that if the person who's supposed to do it forgets to do it, then there's a specific number you put out. So it's not cheating to forget on purpose. But if someone reminds you, you got to do it. Yep, the rules are very clear. If someone reminds you, you can't still forget to do it. Fury of Dracula. Oh, the game I was trying to talk about before. Does this for hidden movement? Two in one here, you got your hidden movement and your error hand. This game, everything is great about this game except actually fighting Dracula really sucks. A new printing is coming out soon. I have the second edition, then there was a third edition that fixed some things and then that went out of print and the price of the game went way up. But now fourth edition is coming out and the price went way down. You're basically vampire hunters like classic Dracula style. Right. And you're trying to chase Dracula. Dracula's sneaking around Europe like making more vampires and leaving bombs behind and all sorts of nonsense. Right, this game is four on one. One player is Dracula, sneakily hidden movement around Europe with these face down cards. It's like if Dracula has a deck of cards and have one card for every single place on the whole map. So if Dracula wants to start in Berlin, Dracula places the Berlin card down on the table face down. If they then next move to, I guess what, Frankfurt? Yeah. They would put the Frankfurt card next to the Berlin card and now Dracula is creating this path that they have taken through Europe by placing cards face down and when it's full they sort of pick up the cards from the back and then they can start revisiting places. So because of this layout of cards, maybe you bump into Frankfurt and you say, aha, Dracula was in Frankfurt three turns ago because when you land them somewhere, Dracula has to flip the card face up to show you you've landed in a place. Dracula wants to do this because they left a horrible vampire in Frankfurt. They have to flip that up to make the vampire attack you. And now you're going to fight the vampire. Right, and you know, aha, he was in Frankfurt four turns ago and this is how you find Dracula. It's like this hide and seek and this deck of cards limits Dracula so they can't go to a same place twice. Yes, they're not just writing stuff down. They have a physical artifact that is used to track their state of the game even though the players can't see it. Right, but given all that, Dracula still could cheat. Dracula could be like Berlin, London, Australia. Yes, I'm a very fast vampire. Watch me go. Even the Splendid's out. It doesn't matter. Whee! So the rules are, Oscar, if Dracula gets away with it, awesome. Yes, if Dracula gets away with cheating because the four vampire hunters are so bumbling, they cannot reveal enough of Dracula's path to discover the London card followed by the Moscow card, then Dracula gets away with cheating which is great because actually, if you play this game against four smart vampire hunters, Dracula probably can't wait without you. Yup. So the interesting part is, if the players flip over cards and they discover that Dracula has cheated, Dracula gets caught, you flip to the part of the rules that says, if Dracula cheats. And it's real bad for Dracula. It's like Dracula loses all his blood and all his powers. It's like the game isn't just over. It doesn't ruin the game. You can continue playing. But there's a rule for it. You don't have to just say, well, I guess the game's over because Dracula cheated. And this accounts for two cases. It counts for the smart Dracula who is cheating because they have to in order to win. And also, the Dracula who is a new player who is incompetent and cheated by accident. Neither one of these people will ruin the game so you can feel free to let your incompetent friend be Dracula. And all the smart people will be the vampire hunters. And your game will be okay. Yup. No, it uses a third interesting thing in that now that mechanic isn't cheating. It's just part of the game. As soon as you make a rule about it, it ain't cheating. Even though it says, I can hit somebody and I go into a box for two minutes, but it was totally okay that I hit that person. Right? Even though it says cheating rules, it's not cheating anymore if it's in the rules. Cheating is when you go outside of the rules. But what it means is that clever vampire hunters can try to push Dracula in a way to where he is forced to cheat because they boxed him in where he doesn't have a legal card to play. So it introduces a highly advanced strategy to the game that wouldn't otherwise be there. Real money gambling rules. How many games in the box have a bid at the end that's like, hey, you want to play this for money, kid? Right. So now this isn't exactly rare because there are a lot of games that are just gambling games. You know, roulette, craps, backer app, poker, right? Tons of those. But games that aren't traditional casino games that you don't traditionally gamble in tend not to have official rules for gambling with them. Of course, you could gamble on anything. You could say, hey, we're going to play Rock, Paper, Scissors. Winner gets 10 bucks from the loser, right? But that's not official in any way. You can gamble the over-order at how many times the room says, in effect... Right. But how many typical non-gambling games have in the box if you want to gamble here are rules for you? Right. So Pandante, which got re-released with better rules, is poker with pandas and it's unlike poker, actually really fun. Right. So obviously the reason it has the real money gambling rules is because of its relation to poker, a traditional gambling game, it would be cool if more non-traditional gambling games had real money gambling rules, but they also don't gamble gambling as that. I knew it. I knew it. I had gambled. I have, but I don't. A long time ago we went to Atlantic City, first time we were ever in a casino, and we went in and we were like, we should gamble. We got some money, we went to the real estate, we were like, red, we won, red, we won, we looked at each other, we just walked out. I had like $200. I was like, oh, free money, bye. I bought a cast iron pan, it was great. We bought foam swords and hit each other. Yeah. At the toy store. That was a good time. So gambling's awesome, apparently. No, it's not. It's $200. If anyone wants to play real money gambling with me. Yeah, I'll real, I'll real money gambling with you as long as you're doing something I'm very good at and you have never done before. Mega Man 2, real money gambling. There are a lot of people here who are way better at Mega Man 2 than even me, who is pretty good at Mega Man 2. There's a lot of stacking games that are real fun, like Poletti, Jenga, Tokyo Highways, but they're not actually good at being games that someone wins because of their stacking skill. They're almost always actually determined by turn order. And there's a lot of physical intrinsic reasons for this. For one, you build something collectively and if one shmuck knocks it over, they lose. So typically these games have a condition of everyone wins but the loser who knocked it over. The more advanced ones try to make a game around it like oh well, if you get like this thing, you get points depending on how high you got like the color of your piece. There's all these complicated rules for ricking ties. They're way too complicated. But in the end, this game, victory is determined by modulus math. Tokyo Highways, whoever goes first or second depending on the starting situation, they're just gonna win. The stacking isn't actually hard enough to make it the game and even if the stacking did make it the game, if the game has more than two players, you can't determine just one victor. I'm really mad about this because I really like stacking as a mechanic but there's no good games with it. Yeah, stacking is like super fun. Everyone loves stacking games, but yeah, the winning is not determined by your skill because if you were to make a stacking game actually hard enough to where your stacking skill determined victory, it would have to be super unstable right from the start of the game and it would be super frustrating like everyone was knocking the shit over on turn one, right? You would have to be like ultra, ultra skilled with every single placement, right? Because that's the problem is most of the stacking games start out stable and they reach instability at a certain point and basically whoever's turn it is when you reach the instability point is the loser. What's that just said? Remember it for about 25 minutes or more. I've never seen these slides. He has no idea. It doesn't matter, right? But yeah, for it to be skill based, you would have to basically have the game always be incredibly unstable such that any unskilled move would demolish it and thus with an unskilled player you would have things demolished on turn one constantly. You also either have to have a game that has a long play one by one eliminating players or everyone has to be building their own thing so you don't just always have one person ruin the set for everyone. I think there's not enough building your own thing games other than Meeple Circus. Meeple Circus is like the only good one. Meeple Circus is like the only good one. It's not enough games you build your own thing because it gets really expensive to imagine if you had to buy four Jenga towers instead of one, right? All right. All right. Real-time mechanics. In video games this is really easy like Overwatch exists like we figured this out processors could do more than one thing at one time but humans can't do this so well especially in tabletop games. There's very few real-time tabletop games that are not the simplest. In fact, very few games have any real-time component at all. All right. There are some that you might be thinking of but the thing is a lot of those dexterity real-time games are actually sports something like Jungle Speed, right? It's actually a sport it involves, you know, manual dexterity it's just a much lighter sport than say, you know, basketball. I'm talking like imagine if you played Magic and you can just take turns as fast as possible. Right. There are some real-time games in the co-op department these days suddenly like XCOM or Space Alert, right? But those, you know it's like the real-time nature is just sort of this pressure to prevent you from using analysis paralysis to make the perfect moves every turn. You know, it's not real-time as in, you know, you're competing against other people in real-time, right? So the reason there's so much Buddha Babel is a really good example. It is a really fun game but it's really hard to play. You're basically making a stack of cards from your hand and you have to keep the paper rock scissors going. Like there's a pattern you have to play and at the end of the game whoever has the tallest tower of legally played cards wins unless their tower is too tall in which case they lose and the second place player wins. Similar to QE whoever makes the tallest wins except for the tallest What does the rulebook say? The rulebook says the rulebook says if your tower is the tallest you have offended God It's a Japanese game so the translation is hilarious. But the problem is that in tabletop games like if you're playing cards like that quickly and you make a mistake much like with hidden movement there's no one to observe you make the mistake and correct you you're not going to notice the mistake it's very easy you'll find if you actually play this game that everyone at the table made at least one mistake and the game is hoes. The other problem is that in a real time game like this it's very hard to have rules that govern really small timing errors I got my card wedged under yours I'll buy a little bit does it count who goes on top who goes on bottom and because it's real time you can't fix mistakes It's a fixing mistake in a caught game it doesn't matter who's harmed right the computer whatever but in a competitive game it's like alright we need to get everything right we can't have any vagaries going on Real alliances you can make an alliance with your idiot friends and like access and allies or risks but you know that doesn't count and they're just going to betray you because there's no game mechanics around it there are games like DOOM where you can legit make a real alliance and if you win together you just win together Yeah a lot of games that have trading and alliances just sort of have like these really informal you can make an alliance with your friends if you want whatever they don't have a long list of rules if you form an alliance the following things happen this and this and this you can do this with your allies you can't do this with your allies your allies gain these benefits they don't gain these benefits the only two games I know that do it are Eclipse and DOOM Yep pretty much So this comes down to a game theory concept because it's not just alliances the idea of cooperation is a deal you made binding or not because if a game is non-cooperative in game theory it means that we can make a deal but neither one of us is obligated to actually follow through on the deal nothing in the game enforces us actually following that rule a cooperative game there are binding rules if we make a deal I'll give you 20 dudes if you attack Scott too we have another Scott then you have to do it you can't opt out after we make the deal and spit and handshake and whatever it is we do to seal the deal but joint victory is sort of a consequence of this and it's almost its own category it's very rare for there to be games especially games without alliances where two players can do something to win together so you know there's a lot of games where one player loses and everyone else wins but that's not the same as a joint victory a joint victory is we're all ostensibly playing for our own win but then the game comes into a situation where it's like well I can't win on my own but I can guarantee you win if me and Rim win and Rim sees the same thing he's like well he can't win if he can win on his own he wouldn't do that he would just why would he win with me if he can win on his own but if he also can't win on his own but can win together then we win and you all lose that doesn't happen too often again now this is very distinct from real alliances because real alliances mean we are now a team and we are trying to win together this means we could trigger an end game condition in the middle of a game where we are not allied and just win together it's very rare but it solves one of the problems of multiplayer games politics politics in games is when we're playing a game with a bunch of people and Joey Jojo is about to win so everyone just piles on to Joey Jojo to make sure he doesn't win and then Scott wins instead right you may not realize this but any game that you play that has more than two players right because it's two players it's like they're both just fighting for themselves to win right any game you play with more than two players except for a race because in a race it's like imagine a hundred meter dash everyone's just running as fast as they can you're not interfering like Yatsu you can't interfere with someone else in Yatsu right but any game where you can interfere with other players at all and there's more than two players you're basically just politics deciding who wins is a huge factor no matter how much skill you use there is some amount of someone else decided you're not going to win so you're not going to win you can be the best risk player if the other players decide to gang up on you guess what you lose it doesn't matter no matter how skilled you are everyone gets five at risk it's not going to happen and Illuminati is a highly political game it's a hundred percent politically you're basically just iterating on voting who wins the game and you keep voting until eventually someone wins the vote and wins the game this allows true people to be like hey let's just win right now and end this because it's been going on for four hours approximate movement this is big in war games where you make a move but you don't really know what the results are going to be you have to take measure you're sort of guessing where your thing is going to end up this is most this is very common in serious grognard war games not very common almost anywhere else there's a lot of reasons for that I also want to point out battle system is the miniature game that was for Dungeons and Dragons it was the official one it is awful and I love the hell out of it and I've never actually played it but I practically memorized this book and that is the ugliest dude on the cover of any of your books but I digress this mechanic does something very interesting it allows a sort of organic fog of war or nondeterministic results that will cause immersion gameplay I want to move the army toward that forest well I give the order to the army to march and I know that will march exactly six inches but I can't measure it until I actually give the order and then we march them and they like bump up against the forest maybe there's a gap maybe they get crowded into the river maybe they get into a bad situation it starts to simulate the way that real old timey wars work well you don't really know what the troops are going to do you can't really say they're going to that hex and now they have plus one defense I had some friends they were telling me about a game they made once where in order to choose the scale of the game most people will just use something like inches or centimeters but they were like well for this game you can just sort of decide what your scale is based on what you have available and how much space you have so if you're playing like a game on a huge table and you've got tons of room you might use like a big plastic disk and say alright I'm going to move five disks and use the disk to measure how far you're going to move and you're playing in a tiny table you'll be like alright we'll use beams I move five beams and as long as you always use the same beam it's like it doesn't matter you're moving the game scales up or down it's just you're moving x things right but yeah that game they never gave me the rules I assumed they didn't finish it or print it ever so an example of a pretty recent game that uses approximate movement or at least writing stuff down where the exact placement of your thing matters is this treasure island it's a really fun game one person is Blackbeard he's got his treasure and I have a secret map or I have marked I mean Long John Silver Long John Silver Blackbeard's not in treasure island Long John Silver has hidden his treasure somewhere on this map and I literally just put a tiny x on the map and because I'm me I put the tiniest little pixel everyone else is moving around this board using these compasses and these rulers and they'll like I want to move in that direction and then they draw a circle around the area they search and then I have to look at my map and look at the big map and figure out if that circle actually covers the tiny little one pixel that I drew on my map it's actually real fun the problem with it is that you have to be really precise it's actually very difficult I mean look we couldn't even draw a circle with a compass playing this game so at this point when you have a game that uses a mechanic like this you'll have to provide a lot of implements a lot of dexterity is required a lot of like large boards are required the larger you make it the easier it is to draw something measured precisely it's just a whole mess to make a game work with this kind of mechanic right it says in the rulebook for this game like if there's any question like if you're not sure if they got the treasure or not they got it right so it's sort of like even then it's sort of hedging its own you know accuracy it's like I you know I'm not sure if you got it and they don't let anyone move secretly Long John Silver with his sheet until he busts out of prison then he's just on the board moving around right as I said before only in this game only nouns are secret the location of the treasure is secret but anything anyone does is public right it's hidden information but not hidden actions bargaining you might think wait a minute this isn't rare how many millions of games have trading in them right settlers monopoly like trading isn't all the games traders of general trading games trading is dumb and you don't want to trade if you want to win watch pros play settlers they're only trading if they're ripping someone else off and if everyone at the table is a pro no one's trading with anyone right and it's hilarious in most trading games it's usually a very bad idea to trade the only time it might be smart is like if you're the third and fourth player place players you're going to lose you trade with each other to help each other out and catch up but it's like for the fourth place player it's like it's usually because games don't have a good incentive for trading or a lot of people try to make real bargaining trading stuff but they make the rules for it too complicated or too restrictive or they make them too open and you can trade anything and people get so paralyzed looking at the scope of things they could trade that they just don't trade and it's real disappointing because trading is hella fun but it's really sad when it's hella fun and also something you don't do right it's like oh it's the best part of settlers trading when I play settlers I can't get her I can't lose on purpose to have fun trading I can't bring myself to do that so I just don't play that game and also it falls into the same problem we said before with auctions players have a hard time understanding the value of things so as a result if there's trading and it's happening in a game very likely at least one of those players vastly over or underestimates the value of something which leads to salty feelings and poor gameplay experience yeah it's only good if all players have equal skills going on but bonanza is the only game I know of that solves all those problems right the way bonanza works is on your turn you get some cards face up in front of you from the deck and you've only got two bean fields by default and each bean field can only have one kind of bean so I already got two bean fields I got a coffee bean field and I got a red bean field and face up in front of me well there's a black bean and there's a there's a stink bean scott just give me the stink bean you don't want it no one else will take it give it to me for free give me that bean just give it to me just right now just give it to me rims over there with a stink bean field and I got a stink bean in front of me I'm either going to trade the stink bean to rim which is great for him and I guess well good for me too because I don't have to plant the stink bean right but it gives me a reason that I've got to trade this away I have to I really want to and other players want it because they're not planting the same beans I have you've designed the game to have an incentive structure that you could just never trade and plant all the beans you get and never try like in this game when you when you receive a bean in a trade you get to plant it immediately and normally you're only planting one bean a turn from your hand right in order you can't change the order of your hand so let's say I've got a green bean in the middle of my hand I can't plant that for like three turns I got a green bean field rims got a green bean field he's got a green bean in the middle of my hand I can plant that immediately and clear them out of the middle of our hand how great is that this huge, huge incentive to trade in this game Mananza both forces people to bargain and trade and encourages people to bargain and trade so combined the game is actually really fun this game your scout hasn't played yet Casa Nosara is a game about hiring bad people to do bad things it's basically a mafia game if you let me use your hitman at some point later in the game. And there's no way I can have all the different kinds of things I need to do a job. I'm going to have to trade favors with the other players to finish the team to do my secret jobs. This game encourages very similar gameplay to Bonanza and has a very similar result. People are bargaining and yelling and screaming at each other. John Company. Super complicated, cute, pushy nonsense game. I really love this game. But it has a really fascinating mechanic. You don't trade all the things because that gets overwhelming. Instead, it has a separate quantity. Every player has something called promise cubes. Promise cubes, you can trade them to other players to get those players to do things for you. So you're basically always trading this one commodity. Hey Scott, I'll give you two promise cubes if you let your son marry my daughter. Yeah, I can't be like, hey, Ram, I'll give you two dollars. I can only give him promise cubes, right? You're always trading promise cubes to people for things that you want from them. If I get one of Scott's promise cubes, I can trade it to someone else. Joey Jojo, I'll give you one of Scott's promise cubes if you do this for me. Right. Now I have to do something for that other player to get my cubes back. And if he doesn't get his cubes back at the end of the game, you get victory points for all the cubes of other people that you're still holding on to from those players. It's really fun. You're basically just trading victory points. Yeah, but it abstracts that into a single, well-known commodity to trade for favors so it simplifies the landscape of interaction without oversimplifying the landscape of what you're actually trading. It also provides a really interesting thing in that you can just perform an in-game action that is defined by the rules to get your cube back, right? So I can trade away these cubes and then do stuff to get the cubes back that they can't stop me, right? So it's like, I don't have to sort of make the other half of the bargain. It's just like, I have to give out a cube and then I make up the other half of what I want, right? Cube 4x. And then what I do to get the cube back is something that happens later that they have no say in. All right, so speaking of Bonanza, Scott kind of alluded to it. These are the only two games on earth I know about that do this that are widely known or played. Your hands cannot be rearranged. When you draw your hand, cards come in from one side, they go out the other side. You're not moving cards in your hand. If you're like me and you like to shuffle the cards in your hand, you can't play these games because you'll basically cheat on turn one, DJ. It's so rare that we just call it Bonanza Hand when we encounter it. I was highly skeptical. It feels and sounds like it would be wrong, like it wouldn't be fun. It allows really interesting game design. There's a reason both of these games, why in the film of Bonanza, are super fun. Bonanza Hand is a big part of that. So don't be skeptical. If you ever see a game that makes you keep your hand in order and play cards out of your hand in order, it's unique enough to where it's worth trying. These games are super strict and where your hand order may never change. There are some games, though, I think the only one I can think of is Hearthstone, where even though your hand order can't change in Hearthstone just because the interface doesn't allow it, but there's a lot of cards they printed recently in Hearthstone that say, give plus one, plus one to the leftmost minion in your hand. If you played the rightmost card in your hand, draw a card. They got stuff like that now. So your hand order does matter. But in these games, you have to play the left card in your hand and draw on the right. And Hearthstone is just a few cards that matter. It's not as big a deal where it's like, this is the central mechanic. Your hand must be in order. Oh my God. Information economies. Most co-op games suck. That's just how it is. Most co-op games aren't really co-op games. They're just solitary, but you play with a bunch of people. Imagine you're playing Microsoft solitary, but you've got three friends and you're all looking at it together saying, we should move that there. That's a scene game. It's pandemic. Same thing. Not really mechanically different, right? Except Hanabee is actually a co-op game. Yeah. So Hanabee and Reds Publica are two of the only games I've seen that have a very strict information economy. What that means is that sharing information with other players is something you want to do and it costs actions. It's a limited resource. And Hanabee, you're playing with your hand, facing all the other players. You can spend a resource to tell someone something specific about their hands. And Reds Publica, you will basically, on your turn, offer a contract. Like, you have a hand and you could say, like, I'm willing to buy ship vials. He's in German. I don't think it was ever translated in English. Or I'm willing to sell anvils. And you're both revealing something about your hand. And you're also using that information to actually trade. It's kind of hard to explain in detail unless you actually play the game. But the important thing to remember is that both of these games have an information economy. You use information as a resource in the game following strict rules. Yeah. Usually, when you play a game, you gather, talk all you want. Right? So everyone knows everything, at least anything that no one's keeping secret. And then you just play. Or you're supposed to keep your mouth shut and you can only see what's on the board and that's it. Or they have those nonsense soft rules. Like, I'm pretty sure I could take this one. I can't say what's in my hand, but I'm too sure I can get that done. Even in something like Bridge, it's like, okay, you use this bidding to sort of, you know, use this codes to tell people things. You can't, you know, have a big wall between you and the other players. You can't communicate in any way. Here it's like, okay, you can communicate, but you have to spend like an in-game dollar. Imagine you're playing Monopoly. And it's like, all right, if you want to know who owns that hotel, you got to pay five bucks. That's like a rule in the game. All right? It's like you're buying information. Super rare. All right. So what are you enjoying? Most tabletop games, if someone just like gets up from the table and runs away, you're screwed. Game can't keep going. Even if you keep going, the game is going to be in a weird bad state. It is very rare to find games that allow people to just quit. There's no section of what to do if someone quits your game. What to do if a new player shows up. The game's over, right? Yep. Except for maybe set. Set is sort of like you set it up and then people can just walk up and play and then leave and whatever. Sendo, which was recently re-released by Looney Lads. Players can quit and join constantly. Poker, you can just quit a poker game. There's rules for quitting. You take your money to go home. Player elimination. This isn't rare. It's actually relatively rare. It is not so rare. The thing that's rare is that people seem to hate player elimination when I think it's actually usually pretty good. Because it lets you go on with your life if the game is taking four hours. Right. The number one thing that I hate more than, you know, it's sad when you're playing a game and you get eliminated, everyone else is still playing and you're not playing anymore. That's sad. But what's more sad is when you're playing a game, it's not over yet. You're going to be over for X minutes or X turns and you cannot win anymore. You've already lost and you're forced to sit there and keep playing. And all you can really do is maybe vote on which other player's going to win. Like try to destroy rim since I can't win anymore or something like that. That's worse. You'd rather be eliminated than be stuck playing a game unable to quit because games don't have quitting and joining rules. Yep. Or like diplomacy where the rule is basically if one person's left at the end of the game, they win. Otherwise, all remaining players can vote unanimously to agree that all of you tie and everyone who was eliminated loses. So you can sort of eliminate a couple of players and then all agree the game is over rather than continuing. That's an official rule in the game. It's not like something you just made up. So some games handle this very well. Like if you ever play Werewolf or Mafia, that game, a bunch of jerks are banging on a table, ruining your fun and tabletop, yelling at each other. Yeah, you're going to see it here. Avoid it. You're going to get into those player elimination well because the reason it's rare is that usually games are very long and if five people are playing a game and one player gets eliminated, they have nothing to do for the next three hours while everyone else finishes the game. Well, hopefully you're at Magfest. You can find something else to play. I hope so. But Mafia is a very quick turnaround. Like as soon as you die, the truth is revealed, you laugh, and then another game starts within a few minutes. So let's talk about some role-playing games. Let's get away from this tabletop like German board games and cues. Because this picture, by the way, this is our gaming group from what, like, 12 years ago? Is it me? Am I with hair? Stop still had hair. That's my hair on the left, kid. Bye-bye hair. I wonder if anyone in this picture knows that we use this picture. He is here at the Kano Yoga Channel. So role-playing games are interesting because most of the things we're about to talk about aren't actually rare. They're just rare if you only ever played D&D in games like it. Dungeons & Dragons and games like it are very common and very similar, but there's a whole world of indie RPGs where every game is almost itself a rare and unique mechanic. Like every indie RPG has a unique rule that makes it interesting. So this is very fertile ground to look at rare game mechanics. For example, Burning Wheel. Probably my favorite role-playing game. This has a lot of cool things going on, but it has a mechanic where the only way to level up your character is to bail at stuff. Right, so you're thinking, you know, you play a normal role-playing game, how do you get better, right? How do you level up? You get experience points, or you use gold to buy better equipment or something, right? You're just constantly getting stuff and spending it and going up. In Burning Wheel, let's say I want to get better at climbing. Well, I should climb, shouldn't I? So I do, I climb, and I climb a whole bunch. Now if I keep succeeding at climbing, alright, well, I haven't actually gotten better at climbing though. I also need to fail at climbing. So it's like, alright, I climb. You climb over the tiny hill. Congratulations, alright. Now I climb up the big hill. Alright, you climbed up the big hill. Good job. Alright, I climb up the mountain. You climb up the mountain and fall off. Ow. But that was your challenging, failed mountain climbing test you needed. You are now three at climbing instead of two. Awesome, I climbed the mountain again. It's like... So it is encouraging. You're playing D&D and be like, I want to not succeed. I want this monster to hurt me. I really hope that I roll a one. I really hope I fail to pickpocket this dude so my pickpocketing will get better. Please catch me, dude. Please catch me. But it couples this with another interesting mechanic. You know, like D&D in games like it, you roll dice a lot. You fight somebody. You roll dice like a hundred times. Here, you want to fight. You roll dice like once and someone is bleeding out. If you roll the dice, it matters a lot. So if I want to get better at sword fighting, I pick a sword fight with really good swordsman and I fail, I got better at sword fighting and now my liver is bleeding and I'm literally about to die. Yeah, that failed climbing test on the town walls to sneak into town at night that got your climbing skill to go up but also broke your leg and the town guard notices you. So Lady Blackbird, if you want to play an RPG at night fast and you didn't prepare, this is a free game. You can just download a PDF and play it immediately. You don't need to know anything. The rule is, the game is so simple but it has a lot of neat things going on. A lot of like rare mechanics. It starts with set characters in media res. The story is already going. You pick a character from a set of characters. You do no character building, no backstory, nothing. You start in the middle of the same scenario every time you play the game. But the mechanic is that you play the game forward so you're writing your story and the primary mechanic of the game is hey, this is just like that thing we did that time. So then you make up a story from your past involving one of the other characters and that helps you do the thing you're trying to do in the future. So you start in the middle, you write the story forward and you write the story backward at the same time. Right, you go forward and it's like, huh, now we're in a sticky situation. Hey, this is a lot like similar sticky situation. Tell a story and how you succeeded in that difficult situation that was similar and then you succeed in the same way you did back then. I wish this was less rare because you've all been in that D&D game where someone wrote a four-page backstory in Google Docs and they really keep bothering you to make sure you read it so you don't role-play with them appropriately and you don't care that Kelvin Blackstaff is their uncle and that they come up with a solution. Why is it always Kelvin Blackstaff? Because I really like Kelvin Blackstaff. You know, you keep saying Kelvin Blackstaff the uncle all the time over and over and I don't know who Kelvin Blackstaff is. What is he with you? He is basically, you know, Elminster. The wizard guy. Yeah, he's a wizard guy. He's another wizard guy. Another wizard guy. Morton Canaan, another wizard guy just from a different world. I just know the name Morton Canaan. He has magic missiles, right? But this avoids that. And also, a lot of people, it's hard to play a role-playing game because he gets sort of paralyzed worrying about your backstory, worrying about role-playing effectively. It doesn't matter at all. You have a clean slate. You can make up the character as you go and write the backstory as you go, thus allowing people to get way more into character and come up with funny stuff. This mechanic is really effective. I feel like a lot more RPGs should just steal it. So, imagine a role-playing game. Remember what Scott said before about the mechanics of Jenga where instead of using dice, you use a Jenga tower to determine success or failure. Right, so it's like, alright, zombies are attacking. Okay, I shoot the zombie in the face. Alright, give me three poles from the tower. Now, piece of cake. Bam, bam, bam. Yeah, I can shoot that zombie. You use this, this is a horror game, right? So, that's why it works. In a horror game, think about a horror movie. Starts out, everything's kind of cool. Tension builds, tension builds, tension builds, tension builds, someone dies. Then everything's kind of chill until the tension builds and someone dies. Tension builds and someone dies. Over and over again, then it's the end, right? So the same thing happens. When you pull from the tower, every time you do something dangerous or risky or challenging in the game, you got to pull some number of things from the tower according to the difficulty, right? So, jumping over the giant pit and swinging on a rope and shooting tens on it. Give me 15 poles, John. Yeah, it's like, yeah. But like, okay, hiding in a closet. Give me one pole so no one notices you, right? Whatever. But if you knock it down, you die. Well, the rules say very specifically, your character fails at their task and then dies in the most horrific, scene-appropriate way possible. All right. So this makes, even if you're a terrible game master, a terrible storyteller, a terrible writer, the physical rules of Jenga force you to tell a good horror story, whether you like it or not. So this is a game called Arabian Nights, or Thousand One Nights. Arabian Nights is a different game we talked about. Thousand One Nights is a game where you play a character who is playing a character. It's role-playing exception, but it actually works. You literally play people sitting in the Sultan's courts who are telling stories and basically playing D&D. It sounds complicated, like you think, wait, I gotta remember that I'm, like, I'm this, like, Don Juan lover guy and I am playing, that Don Juan is playing the eunuch in this other game inside of the game. It actually works really well. This is the first game I've ever run or played where everyone remembered the names of their characters and everyone else's characters at every point. It was amazing. And it leads to a really interesting set of sort of, like, meta-nested role-playing because it's almost easier to role-play in this way. Instead of rim with his complicated thoughts about Kelton Blackstaff trying to figure out what this Alfie's playing. I wonder if we could just do this and be like, okay, we'll play and we're role-playing as teenagers playing D&D. Oh. I detect the darkness. Hey. Yeah. You could just re-theme this without changing any rules. But instead, I just think, okay, so I'm this Don Juan guy and I hate that jerk. So in the game, I'm just going to try to ruin his character's day. And it ends up working really well. It almost makes it easier to role-play. So with our last eight minutes, I broke my clicker here. Now it's fixed. Good. Let's talk a little bit about video games. I know we're in the tabletop theater, so I apologize if anyone wants to leave the room because we have to file this anxiety at this builder. A secret is multiplayer. It's rare in tabletop, too. Not many people play Puerto Rico by mail these days. No, this is something that would be super useful and super great for the modern world, yet so few video games have actually implemented it. And those that have have done it in a very bad way that almost no one uses. Civilization 5 and 6 both are so fun to play. I have multiplayer games of SIV with all humans that have been going on for more than two years. And the only way you could do it was some Hecanine tool called Giant Multiplayer Robot, or your take- Player Damn Terms. Like these third party garbage-free tools are the only way. It's like, come on, all you need to do is make it to where someone takes their turn and then there's a cloud save, and then the other person opens up, gets on their phone, and it says, hey, notification, take your damn turn. It's like, you can do this with modern technology. You don't need some third party tool. Games can do this. None of them do it. Even? Imagine like on your phone you had like 20 board games going on. You have little notifications like, take your turn. Take your turn. You got on the subway. You took 10 turns and you get notifications later. You're being the greatest. And no one's made it. I mean imagine even for tabletop, if there were more app and digital like representations of tabletop games that just had good built-in asynchronous multiplayer, we would all have like 30 games of diplomacy going simultaneously. Yeah, which one was which? That's the problem. I've made errors in sim games because I forgot which one I was playing for a moment. So multi-screen. It's actually pretty rare, especially in consoles. Like this, it was hard for you to find a picture of this bullshit. I own all that bullshit. By the way, I own all that bullshit. But even in the original, the game gear and the original Game Boy had link cables. You could link them together and play asymmetric games, games with hidden movement, all the things we just said are rare in tabletop. You could just do. Even before there was really online computer games. And in meanwhile in 2019 the only game that does this is like Jackbox. That's about it, right? Oh no, we got a head because we got a head. We just used multi-screen as opposed to when we got to this multi-screen. I thought we were already talking about this multi-screen. No, I was starting just on link cables. There was a Game Boy game called Hunter at October. The Game Boy 1 had that F1 racing game where you could use the four-way link cable. Hunter at October is one person plays the sub and one person plays the entire Soviet Navy. That existed when I was in elementary school. Game Boy 1, black and white Game Boy. We used to sit around with Game Boy Advance as playing Advance War. And the problem with these cables is that they were fiddly, like one person sneezes and one cable gets dislodged, the game just crashes. But we didn't really explore the games industry that full capabilities of multi-screens. And I feel like ten years of ages make fun of this, but I feel like the height of that genre was during the era when that cable existed to plug your Game Boy Advance and your GameCube to play exactly these three games. Nintendo for some reason decided to experiment with this and they made three brilliant games that to this day no one's really tried to make games like this. Fun fact, if you buy like Namco Bandai Museum for your Switch, it includes Pac-Manverse. Pac-Manverse is one person playing Pac-Man and they see the whole map on their Switch. Everyone else is playing a ghost that only sees a little area around themselves. It is way fun. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles like it forced cooperative gameplay in an innovative and novel way that really hadn't been seen up until that point. Every player on their Game Boy has a piece of information. You have to talk to each other and agree on what to do and coordinate to make the game go forward. And it was just really fun. And Four Swords, does anyone here not play Zelda Four Swords? Whoa. Whoa. You're missing out big time. Yeah. Four links, four different colors and like you get to a block pushing puzzle and it's like you all got to push the blocks together. Yup. Three of us are pushing on the blocks. Scott just like off in a house somewhere looking at his Game Boy like stealing chess. But just the fact that no one really fully explored this. Go look for it on YouTube if you can't get it running. And the only time to really see it like they kept re-releasing like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles but they didn't quite do it right. I think they're re-releasing that exact specific game soon. But I don't know how it's going to work. You're going to get like a switch on the TV and then you're going to have four other switches. Yup. I don't know how they're going to do it. And there's an important thing. This can't just be online. It can't just be a PC game. If you play Counter-Strike it's like oh look you've all got your own screen. You're all playing Counter-Strike. That's not the same thing. You've seen the difference. Have you ever played Counter-Strike or Overwatch in a LAN as opposed to just in your house? It's different. Whether you think it will be or not it's a different sensation. It's a different experience. When someone kills you and you stand up and you see that they're sitting right there. But this is even more intimate because these are games where you have four people, a small number of people and they're all sitting in the same room playing the game together. And we have that again. The switch has saved us. Smash is happening at this convention. I think every hotel in this convention has at least one smash game going at any given time. But sitting in the same room looking at your switches but seeing something different on the screen. Right. Think that in tabletop it's super, super common. I have a hand of cards. You have a hand of cards. That's private info. Meanwhile, there's this public board full of stuff. That's the public info. In video games that's super rare where it's like private info and public info. It's like you can't you don't even have a situation where you play poker on your switch. They could do that so easily. Just Texas Hold'em on the TV is the table and on everyone's private screen is their hand. No one's ever made that. I don't know why. So, multi-screen. Full-on multi-screen. Like Scott said before Janet Fox is really the only one doing it because the reason why we had to deal with all this crap to make this work back in the day was that we didn't all have a screen and our pocket's 24 cents. Right. The only screen you could get that was small was the Game Boy Advance. Now everyone has a screen. It was got a screen, right? Anyone here not have a screen on them. That's what I thought, right? We all got screens now, right? In our pocket we don't it's not no longer everyone's making fun of the crystal chronicles thing because they're like I'm going to spend all this money. I've got to buy four GBAs and two friends and four games. I've got to buy four bookers to play it with me. I've got to buy a house and I've got to buy a TV. We can do this today without buying anything. One person can put their screen that's always with them on the table and everyone else can hold the screen in their hands. We have enough screens. They connect to the food team. The only ones doing it Jackbox is like the only big game company making this work. Has anyone played have you guys played these Jackbox games? Yeah, I do. Does anyone know any other game that's not Jackbox who does this? Use your words. That's basically the same thing. By a different company. Don't you just basically space team? Sort of space team I don't think it doesn't have the central screen. Yeah, it doesn't have the shared screen. It doesn't have the shared main TV thing going on. But it does do the everyone's got a screen in the same room. It does do the everyone has a screen in their pocket. It was the only a megathon that ever failed to function. The point is we just named all the games that do this that you can't name all the platformers because we have enough of them. So what was the point of this panel? To get a free badge and access. The main point of this panel and the whole reason I wrote it is simply for the fact that we get all the way back here. I'm really fucking obsessed with Ronald's. And I want more games to use them. So maybe you see that gentleman tell him that he needs to make more games for me. I hope this was enjoyable. We're done. See all the videos of like our hundreds of other talks on YouTube. Grab one of these ancient flyers from 2006. It will also tell you how to listen to a podcast. And you can see us tomorrow in the mages area on Read the Rules. We're going to talk about why and how people fail to play games correctly.