 Right now, we're getting back to normal as we rebuild and recover from the fire. From the meantime, I invited some guest creators to produce their own project for our channel. First one comes from Adam of his YouTube channel, SpaceDodo, who has some experience with game development. I make video games and little proof of concept games and get them out there. Like currently, I'm working on a spinny chair game where it's a turret and you have a VR headset on and you spin in the turret and get to shoot. What I do for a living is I make VR and AR applications for a company called ARS. The app we're currently working on is a VR dating app called Planet Theta. It's still in a super early stage as we just started to close beta on it. I do lots of design and game design and things on a daily basis. Adam came to us with the interesting idea of trying to design a board game from scratch using just the Iron Age technologies we've unlocked in previous videos. Fun time to try to do this with almost no tools. Cool, it'd be interesting to see what you come up with. The topic of games isn't something we've really explored, but it's something that has existed for pretty much all of human history. People get bored and they need something to do. Games, namely board games, have been a staple of human history since before history even starts. With the earliest form of dice being knuckle bones and etched sticks, which can be rolled for a random number or divination. Early stoned etchman collar boards can be found in prehistoric Africa. Board games quickly become more complex and ornate in their designs and rulesets as games like Senate can be found in Egypt. In Ur, modern day Iraq, the royal game of Ur and proto-checkers are popular in 2600 BCE. The royal game of Ur was another racing style game which was superseded by backgammon in style and popularity around 2000 BCE. Meanwhile, in China, people were playing Go, a high-strategy territory capturing game. In 1300 BCE, we find latest La Tucurium, La Tucularum, and the Roman Empire, a two-player strategy war game which is believed to be a prototype of chess. There are many versions of chess which are found across the ancient world until Mads Queen chess became a popular variant in the Middle Ages, which is the same version of chess that we play today. In today's board games, the tabletop genre is coming back stronger than ever with advancements in game design and the ability to produce large amounts of intricate pieces very quickly and cheaply with plastic and cardboard. But before Adam starts making the game, this video is sponsored by Colby Parker is committed to providing exceptional vision care online and in stores, offering eyeglasses, sunglasses, eye exams, and contact lenses. Glasses start at $95 including prescription lenses, sunglasses, progressives, and blue light lenses are also available. Choosing your frames is super easy with our quiz. Just answer a few questions. You can start choosing a set of frames that best fits you. Let's go ahead and try out a few different glasses online. Even use their app to try them on on my face. And then got five different pairs sent to me to try them on, show them to all my friends, and see what was the best look for me. Ships free and includes a prepaid return shipping label. Their styles range from extra narrow to extra wide, so they can fit pretty much any face shape. Try five pairs of glasses for free at home at warbyparkter.com slash htme. Let's talk about designing a game. So when I first got into this stuff, it really kind of struck me mechanics are what they call the pieces of a game that kind of create the fun. Mechanics and design sounded like weird words to use when you're talking about making a game. The truth is that games can actually be constructed very intentionally with designs, flows, loops, things that make play happen. What we need to do is we need some sort of a tabletop game. I've got limited materials. So I'm going to try to use some good rules and construction, create a game that is going to be fun and enticing, replayable has some strategy to it. But at the same time, a little bit random, a very popular thing to do with the games is to make a race game. And with these race games, what you would do is you just have different pieces and you could just have a randomizer of some sort of spinner top you roll and then you would go around the board. Whoever wins wins. That's trouble. The randomizer being colors. That's life random going up and down that shoots and ladders. Royal Game of the Goose is a very popular historical game. Some race game can have some bits of strategy to them. And what lets you do the strategy? What lets it be more for a broader audience or an older audience is unlike UNO or something. You actually can control the game. You can actually play it and make decisions that influence it. So you can create a strategy. If you have a little bit of randomness that can disrupt the strategy some and make you make counter plans, which is why randomness is still used. If you have a game that is entirely without randomness, you can do that. Go is that way with go you're grabbing territory by placing blocks and the only randomness is what your opponent is going to do. These games are high high strategy, but you don't get a lot of surprises. So there's no randomness in chess. There's no randomness in go high strategy games kind of more of a fun generic games. When you can kind of throw those mechanics together, then you can create strategy and you can make backup plans and things go wrong. Do fun things make interesting decisions. You can make those interesting decisions with a bit of randomness. So the dice, I'm going to have to make a die. I'm going to make the pieces. So I've been looking for some inspiration for making a board game with Iron Age tools. And the good news is it's very possible actually. Good inspiration has been wood. This is a wooden checker board. Wooden checkers also give me another idea since really I'll be either whittling or doing something with the pieces. This is a king from a chess game. Wood would make a very good material to use for this. My tokens for the game will be smaller than this, but this allows me to take a saw, which thankfully has been created already by Andy and saw sections of a stick across to make kind of wooden coins. And these wooden coins can be woodburned to give them certain symbols and the symbols can differentiate them from other pieces. As a viewer of the show, I've always wondered how long it actually takes to do these things. Like I always knew how hard it was watching the show, but when you do it, when you're like, Oh, I'm just gonna make this little scratch real quick. There is no real quick. 20p. Now I got to make a cube. What I'm going to try to do is use the saw to give myself a nice straight edge on each corner coming straight down and then I will saw it down and then I'll use my knife to whittle out the corners. All right, not a cube yet. And then that should give me some sort of a dice that we can have as a randomizer. Evening it out, try to make it more of a cube as long as I got to cut little notches for how much the die is worth on that side. So you buddy, you're going to be one. Could use blood as paint, but I don't think Andy and his team would appreciate getting like a bloody dice but that would actually be really convenient right now. Five, six, one, five, three, four. It's a dice. All right. So I've got my wooden pieces. Let's try this. Hey, we got a mark. So staining and actually is removing some of the soot. So I'm just going to have to stain it, stain them and see what happens. Some of them are turning out. We'll see. This one still looks half and half. I might still go with this method. Oof. Oof though. It's been a lot of oof. A lot of work. That one's good. That one's good. You've graduated to a black piece. You're just going to go the whole nine yards. So here we go. We got all the pieces here. Lots and lots of beautiful pieces you can touch. This is like a standard piece, the half piece, dark piece, the one hit piece. That's it. So I've got all these different pieces here. That means everybody can have their own custom pieces to gamble in the middle. We have a randomizer and it works too. I've been rolling it over and over again to make sure that this doesn't roll like a six every time. I've got a game here. So I got to mail this to Andy. This took blood, sweat, no tears though, to make. You can see why board games and ancient cultures, they were a lot of times buried with their board games and stuff or they carried them around a lot. They really, there's a high social value to their games. And one reason is because they were probably expensive, like rich people probably had games. And so here you have an update on the project. Quite a lot of effort to get this thing built, but I've got a game that should have tokens and a dice that you can roll that we can play this game. And so what you'll do for the game is the first player, you'll roll to see who goes first and the first player will pick an amount of tokens to bet. You can bet up to one token all the way up to five tokens. And if you bet five tokens, the player next to you rolls to try to take your tokens. If they roll a number higher than the amount of tokens you bet, then they get to keep all of your tokens. If any player gets all of another player's tokens, they lose, but you're trying to make sure that another player in the game doesn't get five of another player's tokens that you want five another player's tokens. If you do that, you win the game. Everybody else loses. There's a negotiation segment too. If for whatever reason somebody rolls and tries to and wins this pot, what they could do is try to sweeten the deal for both of them and say, okay, I want to make this trade instead for these particular tokens. If the person agrees that trade happens, if they disagree, they do not win the pile. They've lost it. So taking the game Adam sent, we play tested it a few times. It felt like it had the basis of a pretty decent game, but we found that it had some issues with the strategic aspect after a few rounds. So my biggest criticism is that I basically go down to who can roll six first. Yes. All the incentive is to, if you have enough pieces, put them all in there because then the odds are in your favor and then it's just a matter of who rolls six often. I don't think it's been like any incentive to like try and make the deal. I relayed my experience with the first draft of the game to Adam and gave him an opportunity to try and develop the game a little further and see if you could address some of these shortcomings. One additional issue I ran into is that while Adam's medallion tokens were a decent primitive solution, it ended up being a little difficult to easily identify and differentiate. So I thought I would remake them a little bit more unique in a metal for inspiration. I looked at some of the earliest game tokens that have been found like these triangular pyramid shapes and various animals. So I also use this opportunity to recreate the mold and Elise made way back of a small little lost wax statue of my cat. Dobby never actually cast that, but it did sell in the auction. So if somebody out there does have this original mold, so to make these, I first carved them in wax. Then I sandcast a set of five of each token in two different metals, bronze and tin. Hey again, Adam. So I play test of the game and kind of let you know a few thoughts on it, a few issues I saw possibly in it and yet you've had a chance to kind of adjust it a little bit. All right. So what are the new rules? I did as I went and I changed a lot of the rules and placed a lot of the rules. A lot of the concerns were things like it. The communication wasn't happening. I plan to happen and the randomness was taking over and that's not the kind of game we wanted to make. So there's going to be more than one way to win. The original way is to get five and another player's tokens. That's still a way to win, but also you can have two of every single player's token and that includes the player. If someone gets eliminated, that includes their tokens to two of all the tokens in play. The max bet is now three. So five was too safe of a bet. You have a little less control over if you keep your tokens or not. Instead of negotiating and when you want to pot, everyone has to trade at least one token every round. So when you get back to the original player, you have to do another trade, at least one trade of one token with somebody. If that trade, if someone's eliminated, you'd no longer have to do the trading round. If you bet only one, you have the option to reverse the turn order. So instead of going to the player to your left, it can go now go to the player to your right. We were almost to the final version of the rule and I play test it with my son originally. He's playing it in the middle of the game and goes, this game is actually fun. And I was like, oh, okay. I didn't know that the other one wasn't. So I think we're on the right track at least after having the chance to play with the new revisions. It was a lot more enjoyable and pretty fun game. Our top $75 supporters on patreon will be getting their own 3d printed version of the game. I'm going to be sharing the rules and everything with everybody. Try it out. Game development. It's kind of an ongoing evolution. Jess started out in India and it had like a version in Rome and chess was really four players and had a two player version. And eventually in the middle ages, somebody said, what if the Queen could just do all the moves? And that's called Mad Queen's chest. And that's actually the version of chess we play today. So games just take a long time to iterate. I think the iterations we've gone through definitely improved it. And there's a chance that, you know, maybe some of the viewers will see a thing and they're like, you know what? What if we added this rule or tweak this rule and kind of improved and perfected the game? I'm excited to see if anybody's got something to say about that. So it'd be interesting to have a bunch of people play this game and come up with their own ideas for improvements to it. Try out the game. Let me know your thoughts. Be sure to check out Adam's YouTube channel FaceDodo where he explores the topic of game development in a variety of other ways. I have a couple other guest videos coming up, but if you have your own idea that you want to pitch to us, shoot me an email. Thanks again for watching. Thanks again to all of our supporters on Patreon. Got some new content coming up. So stay tuned for that. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.