 So we are here today to talk about the 40 games you must play, and I want to make it real clear. These are not the best 40 games. Basically it's a bunch of warnings so that all your nerds don't come up and argue with us. More importantly, these are not the most important 40 games. These aren't even 40 games. Try and count them. It's not going to be 40. But think of it this way. There are games like K-Liz or King's Quest that are really important to gaming. But they're not actually that fun in a modern context. K-Liz is fun. K-Liz isn't that fun. King's Quest is not fun. We like K-Liz. Most people do not actually like K-Liz. I don't know what's wrong with them. But also there are better worker placement games. Maybe. Just because something was first in a genre, just because it's the most popular of something, just because it changed the industry in some way, we don't care. We're talking about games that you should play for some reason. These are also not, and I want to be very clear about this, our favorite 40 games. It seems like most people, at least the people I see in the comments section on the internet, can't sort of separate what they like from what is good. So if you don't like something, they'll say it sucks. Or if they do like something, they'll say it's awesome, even if it clearly sucks. I'm the kind of person where I can say, I love this. It's garbage. And also, this is amazing. I hate it. So while I love Aerobiz, which is a Super Nintendo game where you literally call board meetings and run an airline, you're the CEO. Don't play Aerobiz for more than like a couple minutes just to see that it exists. I'm not going to be that internet shouting man who tells you to play my favorite game. We're also not talking about any new or relatively recent games. When a game is new, it hasn't really stood the test of time yet. We don't know how important or awesome or amazing it is. We can sort of guess, be like, oh, this game is really hot right now. But the thing is sometimes things get really hot and go away. Sometimes things are not so hot, but then five years later, they're still hanging around and everyone's still playing them, right? And those are the games that are legit. The games that year after year, they're still being played. They're still being talked about. They're still relevant. Some games are super crazy popular and then you forget about them entirely. That game is gone to history. And also, this list is in a random order. I don't care who wins in a fight between Superman and Super Mario Brothers 3. Right. It takes a lot of effort to try to put them in a meaningful order and we don't have effort here. And also, I just want to head you off. We're not going to tell you you need to play StarCraft. I figure you'll figure that one out on your own. Do not come up to us after the panel and say, hey, you forgot X. Yes, we can only pick 40. There's more than 40 games on Earth. And even more importantly than that, we don't care if we missed anything. We literally don't. We pick 40 because we thought, based on our expertise, our professional experience, our personal experience, these would be the games that if you play them all, it might help you in some way. Be a better gamer. Be a better person. Enjoy games more. Maybe enjoy games less. TLDR, if you come up to us after this panel and say, hey, what about Game X? I'm going to say, did you not listen to me at the beginning of the panel? You nerd boy. Pay attention. And if you've seen us do this talk before, we've usually done it as the 40 tabletop games you must play. That's a lot easier panel to write than games. I had to consider things like football in putting this panel together. TLDR, the truth is this is a really easy panel to put together. It takes like 10 minutes and we've got a free badge to make for us. You've got to mix it up a little bit though. You've got 10 different conventions, 10 different free badges. You can't do the same exact list every time. So without further ado, we had to have one more stipulation because a lot of the games we want you to play personally are games that you can't play. I mean, you can play Tribes 2. There's like a patch you can put on there and like... Download an EXE file from some guy on the internet. Right. But the point is back in the day when Tribes 2 came out, I took the CD-ROM home, put it in my computer, installed it, created an account, logged in and I clicked on the first server and it was 35 on 35 and everyone was playing. You will never experience that in your life. And that sucks. So basically we assume the game will only be on this list if the average Magfest attendee could, with minimum effort, make the game work. You have to be a computer expert and have 70 friends to recreate the Tribes 2 experience. And you have to trust that EXE file on the internet, which... You might want to run that little sandbox or a VM or whatever. So if you play even a fraction of these games, someone out there might have already played all these games. I highly doubt it. Yeah, these people. Someone out up there. We're up here, you're down there. But the point of this is that a lot of people will start playing like the game they're into. Like I only play trick-taking games or I only play Overwatch. I only play Junkrat in Overwatch. But if you play a lot of games, a lot of different kinds of games, even games you don't think you'll like, even games you don't like, you will become a better gamer. You'll get better at all games. And also if you'll have more fun at a con like Magfest, because yeah, you could sit in tabletop and play only tabletop games. Just play scythe over and over and over again the entire con. But there's an arcade there too. There's more than one kind of game. We're going to start with a game called Wizard. Wizard. Wizard is a trick-taking game like old people in Michigan play. Right, so who's playing a trick-taking game like Hearts or Yooker or Spades or Foppin. So Wizard, this is a trick-taking game that's sort of reigniting, reignited trick-taking among our friends. And it's really awesome because it not involves not only the trick-taking and not only awesome bidding mechanics but this awesome artwork on this particular deck of cards. Yep, this is basically a reimagining of an old traditional trick-taking game called Oh Hell with amazing wizard art. Right, do you have the gnar's up there? I don't have the gnar's up there. But anyway, you might wonder why do the wizards have Zs on them because it's a German game so it's not wizard. It's a Zabberer. It's a Zabberer. And they're Zabber-crafting. Right, and the jesters are not J for Joker. They're N for gnar. That's not confusing. It's really confusing. But if you've never played a trick-taking game, you don't want to find some weirdo and play Juker with them. Play a game like this. This is a game you can trick a bunch of people who are suspicious of non-German Euro games into playing a card game. Also, there's a card that looks exactly like our friend Scott Johnson. Well, I just saw it right before I came here. Dance Dance Revolution. So when I saw this game for the first time, I said that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. I will not do that. And I stood next to Scott and said, yes, that is stupid. We will never do this thing. Look at those fools. And then we did that thing as long as we could. I've been playing DDR since third mix, and I'm not stopping. I love this game. There's a lot of rhythm games out there. The thing that makes DDR unique is that it's sort of the best balance between being a game and getting you to move in a way that almost looks like dancing. There is that new dance rush, which I have not played and was very disappointed. I did not see it. They can't all play it easily. I wanted to see it in Megfest. I didn't see it there. I really wanted to. This is real easy to play because you're at Megfest. Arcades don't exist anymore except in this space. You can also find these pads and play this game. But a lot of rhythm games these days tend to be phone games. They tend to be tapping things on a screen. The ones you push buttons or the ones, you know, a pair of pair of your hands, I guess that's okay. That's close. Pump has the weird five arrows, which I don't like, but it has the K-pop music, which I do like. So I don't know how that one goes. But yeah, DDR is still where it's at after all these years. And it's actually slightly increased in accessibility not only because of Megfest, not only because you can play it at home in various ways. But if you were in the arcade, you saw the white DDR machine, the one that was the hardest to play because people were ganging up on it. That is the most modern, newest DDR machine. And it was actually distributed to the whole world, not just to Japan, like a lot of them were. So actually the most recent DDR world champion is from the US. That was someone who was able to get at one of those machines and actually make an account, get it hooked up online and do all the scoring and stuff like that. So DDR is accessible now. Yep, but that's it. It is the best balance between being a game where someone can win and be good at it and being a fun dancing game. So we got to talk about at least one German board game. I think Tigger's and Euphrates is the one to play. If you want to play a serious, for real, the decisions you make determine who wins game, this is it. Right, we've been playing this game since like 2001 or two, right, when it was taught to us by someone at the American publisher. And of all the games we've been playing since then, we played so many games. We played Settlers, a shit ton. We played Carcassonne. We played Puerto Rico every day for an entire summer. Right, we played all these games so much, but eventually with all of those games we said, ah, I know exactly how this game works and we stopped playing it. We sort of saw through the matrix and there wasn't really much reason to play those games. We moved on to new games. With T&E, we cannot see through the entire matrix even still after 20, whatever frickin' years it is. I don't know. This game is just a very good competition among four players. Infinite replay value. And there's a new version which just came out like this year called Yellow & Yangtze, which is almost the same game crook slightly so, enough to be a different game, but like 90% of the rules are the same, but it's a hex map instead of a square map. So play both of those, but this one more so. Super Mario 3. A lot of Mario games have come out over the years. There's a lot of debate over which one's the best one. I'm pretty sure it's this one. Maybe Super Mario World. It's pretty, you know, it's neck and neck, whatever. Right. So yeah, it was, whatever I think, I don't know what year this came about, 89 or something. So I was a little kid. Something 89, 90. Anyway, whatever year this came out, I'm sitting there. My mom comes out with a present for Hanukkah, right? And it's a Macy's clothing box and I open it up and there's a bunch of tissue paper presumably with like some shirts under it. No, there's a Mario 3 under there. Right? But Mario 3 is like, it's one of the earliest really, really tight platformers. There's a reason why people look to this game when they're trying to create modern like Kaizo platformers. They're trying to look at this control scheme because it allowed a lot with a very limited set of resources within the game. It's an NES game, but it pushed the limits of the NES and it holds up today. It's still super fun. I'll just play it like casually. No woo game. Right? We're not here to play the woo game. A lot of people will try to get free badges. I didn't make Chrono Trigger. There's no reason to cheer. I made Chrono Trigger. You did? It's my made this game. Really? I carry Toriyama, everybody. But a lot of, let's say, mediocre panelists at conventions, they won't actually tell you anything interesting. They'll just have a cavalcade of things. We're not telling anything interesting. We said at least one interesting thing. They will just show you things you like and you'll cheer for those things and then they'll feel like you're cheering for them. Do not let panelists get away with this. Chrono Trigger is the height and end of a genre, in my opinion. No one ever made a game better at this than this and no one ever will for a lot of reasons we don't have time to go into. It's not the Chrono Trigger panel. For me, the most exciting thing about Chrono Trigger is that there's no random encounters. You can just run past the bad guys because I really hate random encounters. I just want to turn them all off. Yup. And I think for me, it's just that this was one of the first RPGs that had the kind of story that would really draw people in. And it really used the fact that you're playing this kind of grindy long game to get you really attached to these characters as opposed to the sequel that added 10,000 additional characters that I didn't care about. Yeah, really, the thing that makes you realize this isn't just another JRPG is once you get to that courtroom. Right? If you never played it, then you don't know what I'm talking about. But you will play it because I'm telling you you should. But it's like you just play the game and you never know anything and suddenly you're on trial and what the judge says is like, oh my god, I can't believe they did this on a Super Nintendo. They're geniuses. But basically, if you never played one of these kind of old RPG type games on an old console, this is the one to play. Even over Final Fantasy 6, this will get you the most feelings and the most fun for the least hours wasted. I couldn't find a more iconic picture than this. Counter-Strike is the reason Steam exists. Yeah, so we were playing Counter-Strike in 1999, 2000 when it was brand new and it was just a free Half-Life 1 mod. And in those days, if you wanted to get Counter-Strike, you had to go to counter-strike.net and download this mod and attach it to your Half-Life 1. But the problem was is that everyone would be doing that when a new version came out and you'd have to go through all these files sites. Like I'd wake up one morning and Scott's on his computer and I'm like, Scott, what's up? He's like, Christ, this is a new Counter-Strike. We got to download it now. Otherwise you couldn't connect to any server because all the server's upgraded overnight, right? So that's why Steam exists. You can auto-update. Do not take this auto-update feature for granted. It's like a miracle that I like it. But the thing about Counter-Strike, it's not that it started the genre. ActionQuake 2 started this genre and Counter-Strike came along later. ActionQuake 2, you dying, don't come back? Oh, yeah, depending on the mode you're playing. But Counter-Strike persists to this day for a reason. It keeps getting re-released and updated periodically. It still is a serious competitive scene. It still is a good casual scene. It's a really fun game and while there's a lot of other games like this, like PUBG and RMA and all these different games, other FPS's, but they're not like this. Realistic FPS's. Counter-Strike is not realistic. Realistic. Counter-Strike fills this nice niche of having a good balance of realism in that guns are dangerous. It only takes a couple of shots to kill you. Maybe only one shot. It only seems to take one shot to kill me and a whole lot of shots to kill other people. What's up with that? What's up with that? But it strikes that balance in a pretty unique way and no other game is edged into Counter-Strike's space. They've always carved out an adjacent space. Yeah, there weren't at the time of Counter-Strike, right? It's like, people now, it's like they saw PUBG and then they saw Fortnite sort of copy PUBG and everyone else is trying to get it on that same Battle Royale mode thing. It's the same thing happening with Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike was like the first big game to have the we play, you die and don't come back until the next round. There were tons and tons of games copying that die and don't come back until the next round thing and Counter-Strike outlived them all. Or 20 years Counter-Strike anniversary is going to be, right? 20 years, counterstrike.com, counterstrike.net. So I thought we were doing new games. So I think it is, we're already at this point where we can agree that Zelda Breath of the Wild is the best and most complete Zelda game ever released. I don't think there's any way to disagree with that. Ah, I'll play Zelda 1. And the reason I say that is that Zelda 1 is a really important fun game, but Breath of the Wild does the things that Zelda 1 wanted to do, the technology just didn't exist yet. This game is about exploring this giant world. It basically changed the open world genre forever. You go into most open world games that came out before this and they feel empty. They feel barren. They feel like nothing. This game, there's something everywhere. Core Oxygen's usual. This is Scott's favorite game. This is like the best game there is, right? It's like people don't appreciate when they watch like all these speedruns online. It's like Super Metroid is always like the highlight at the end, right? It's like, why is Super Metroid the highlight at the end? What game has like such perfect platform and control, right? We see the same Metroidvania tropes of like, okay, get an item, go to, now you have access to new areas. We call the genre Metroidvania. It's 50% of the genre right here. Right, well I think it's called Metroidvania. I don't, not the Symphony of the Night isn't incredible. But it's mostly because you had some people at the time who were playing Super Metroid and some people a few years later who were introduced by Symphony of the Night, which is maybe second best to Super Metroid, right? And that's why, but it's like, if everyone had been Super Nintendos, we would just be calling it Metroid Likes, right? But yeah, you know, there's tons and tons of Metroidvania games coming out these days. People are, you know, it was a genre that had like, was like a huge genre in those days and then was abandoned completely and then saw a resurgence maybe starting five to 10 years ago. Yep, but there's a lot of old ones. You don't need to go play all of them. Play this one. It's really only two good old ones. The two I mentioned. So, Sumer. You put Sumer on here? Sumer is unique and I think everyone should play it because most of them, has anyone here played a game called Mule in all caps? Yeah, handful of people. I need to put Mule up here. Because Mule is kind of hard to get going. Mule is not hard to get going. Sumer is sort of a modern Mule. Imagine a cross between a German board game and a real-time multiplayer video game. Right, so you've probably played some board games that are worker placement games, right? It's like you take turns, you're putting your workers out there and usually it's like, okay I choose the harvesting spot. Now no one else can choose the harvesting spot this turn, right? Sumer is the same kind of thing. You have this big sort of pyramid and you have dudes and you move them around and you select rooms that are to place your workers in. But real-time worker placement. It's real-time. You're jumping and running and platforming to get your guys into the spots and then once they're in the spots then you play a board game. You get that frame perfect jump. You're going to start talking about frame perfect moves in a board game with this. So it is unique in that way. Also, we beta tested this. Yep, it is super fun. It's out now, I think. You can just buy it. It's out. I've seen it in a lot of conventions. They got a little boost. Dig dug! Oh, dig dug! Controversial opinion, most old arcade games aren't actually fun enough to play in the modern era. Like they're fun to poke at but then you kind of get bored and feed her out. Also most of them are just like really, really frustrating to play, say Asteroids or really, really pointless to play. Or they turn into NIM where if you get good enough at them it's not like, oh, I can play for 20 minutes and I die. And then I get better and I play for an hour and I die. No, if you get better you can play them forever. Your body stops you, not the game. Right, yeah. In those games it's about how long can you play or right, but in dig dug it actually gets to a point where a human can't really play perfectly a dig game. There are a few humans who can. I've seen some people who are good at this game. I've seen people who are about a thousand times as good as we are but still there's a point at which the dig gets dug. I think dig dug is the best old school, simple, like Atari looking arcade game to play if you want to like get good in an old game like that and see what it was like to play a game like that until the point you've got good. The curve is easier on this one in terms of how you learn it than a lot of other old arcade games. Right, let me, a lot of the old arcade games it's like it's just, you can, there's only one thing to do like Space Invaders. Shoot the guys, don't get hit. The game doesn't really go beyond that. It just gets faster and harder and there's more things to dodge and more things to shoot. Dig dug, there is so much going on. When you start playing, it's like, all right, I just pump all the bad guys. I don't want to die. Then it's like, ooh, I learned I can drop rocks on bad guys. Ooh, I learned I get more points if I drop a rock on multiple bad guys at once. I can pump a bad guy to keep him in one spot and then drop a rock on him so he doesn't run away. A lot of emergent techniques and emergent gameplay from really simple mechanics. If I kill bad guys lower in the zone, I get more points. If I shoot a fire guard in the face, it's risky because you might breathe fire on me, but I also get more points. There's so much subtle, clever stuff going on in Dig Dug that you got to explore. And you can learn them on your own. This isn't inscrutable like most of those weird old games like Pac-Rat. What the hell do you even do in Pac-Rat? You've hit start and you die and you don't know what happened. Burning Wheel. A lot of people out there that play tabletop RPG and 99% of them play D&D and the other 1% play Pathfinder. I play D&D longer than I've done anything in my entire life. Right. But the point is, a lot of those people, since RPG, it's mostly because RPGs, tabletop ones, have such a huge investment in learning rules and reading and getting a group together that you're not going to bother to play any of the other thousands of RPGs in the world. People don't even know they exist because it's like they're not in bookstores or anything, right? They're only in the darkest corner of your local gaming shop if you have one. Right? But Burning Wheel is perhaps the premier hardcore fantasy role-playing game that is nothing like D&D. If you want to play an RPG that goes a different way, takes a different path, a game where if you hit someone with your sword, they're in the hospital for like six months. There's a hospital? Well, there's a hospital. Yeah. This is a game where if you want to get better at sword fighting, you've got to lose a sword fight. That's true. This is a game. And live. Yep. This is a game where you don't have money. You have a money stat. Money is a skill just like everything else. So you want to buy a sword, roll some dice. Yep. You had the money to buy a sword or nope, you didn't have the money to buy a sword. Also, it's a game where when you get into an argument with someone and D&D, you argue with someone. It's like, let's go left. No, let's go right. I want to go right. Yeah. Okay. What do we do? But in Burning Wheel, there is our rules for arguing that are as complex and used more often than the complex rules for fighting. I hit you with my sword. I cast my spell. It's like, I hit you with a rebuttal. You hit, give me your rebuttal. No. I didn't get to roll. There is a skill in this game called Ugly Truth. That's my favorite skill. It does exactly what you're imagining it does. Try that. There are a lot of indie RPGs out there. There's a million different RPGs. We can't talk about a bunch of them. If you want to see a bunch of the stuff that happens in indie RPGs, like 80% of them are in this one game. You can also just go to the internet and type in indie RPGs. Yep. Stop playing stupid D&D and Pathfinder. So you got to move your body, at least a little bit. And I wanted to recommend, like, Ice Hockey isn't really accessible to most of us. Too much money. Yeah. Skiing, Scott is just he's like, look up. Too dangerous. Don't ski. It's not that dangerous. Don't ski is dangerous. But you've got to play a professional Olympian skiing people, like break their legs and die. So you should not be doing that. I broke two ribs at Magfest four years ago. And a mosh pit. Yeah, that is true. That's good. That's not skiing where you break your legs. I broke two ribs at Magfest four years ago. That's not skiing where you break your legs. That's just a rib. As an adult, or at least as someone who is in college or later, like many of you appear to be in this room, if you haven't played a competitive sports. Doesn't have to be tag. Yeah. Play a competitive sport at least once or twice to remember what that feels like. But more importantly, we recently were at a party and a bunch of kids were at this party playing tag. And a few of us, you know, 30-year-old weirdos are like, oh, tag. We can play tag. And it turned into a really hardcore, kind of difficult game of tag. And the kids got crushed out and we played tag for like an hour. Tag is harder than you think. Tag is hard and way fun. You probably haven't played it in a while, so you probably don't remember. Seriously. Play some tag. Hear it. Uh-oh. How to be, unlike the pandemic, is actually a co-op game. Right. There's a lot of co-op, you know, you're probably playing a lot of co-op games out there. And the thing that they're trying to hide from you is that all of those co-op games, they're just solitaire. Right? Imagining Microsoft Solitaire and you got four friends sitting at the computer all deciding together what move to make. Right? And this is why that quarterbacking happens that everyone complains about. Why is one friend just telling everyone what to do? Because you don't need four people to figure out what move to make in Solitaire. Everyone else can just chill. Right? But Hanabi is a game that has an information economy, right? And everyone has their cards facing away from them. So you don't know what's in your hand, but you're responsible for all the cards in your own head. Playing the right cards at the right times. And so all of you, you're depending on all the other players, right? You literally cannot physically quarterback Hanabi without cheating. Right? You must cooperate and you will be limited to the weakest link in the chain. If any player is weak, you're going to fail at Hanabi. You need everyone to contribute to succeed at this game. It is true co-op. There aren't a lot of true co-op games. That's why this game deservedly won Game of the Year and you should play the best. Yep, you basically either play a card out of your hand blind or you spend a resource to tell someone else something about their hand. You have two blue cards. Those two. It's real fun. And now I know the other two aren't blue and I have to remember this because I can't look in my hand. WarioWare Inc. You can play this. There's a lot of WarioWare games. None of them did multiplayer right except this one. A lot of people might like those, you know, the VR, the DS or whatever. And those are fine. Those are nothing wrong with those. But the game we are telling you to play is the GameCube WarioWare multiplayer specifically. No other multiplayer WarioWare or single-player WarioWare. The GameCube multiplayer one is the one to play. And inside of that game specifically Turtle Mode. Turtle Mode is the best mode. Dance Club Mode is like number two, but Turtle is the key. Turtle is high quality. It's a multiplayer game that gave you all the feels and fun of playing Mario Party but it takes like ten minutes instead of an hour. And was somewhat skill based. Not just luck. It is in fact mostly skill based and it can get pretty vicious. If you want to see micro games done right for a group no one's done better than this. Like literally no one has made this game better. The one that came out on the Wii was worse objectively. A lot worse. So trivia games tend not to be popular with this crowd. Trivia games tend to suck in general. It's like I've got two copies of Trivial Pursuit Genus 3 which is for my parents generation. And it's all questions about famous people and events that you don't know because I'm not 20 years older than I am. And maybe some people in this room would be really good at it but most people won't. And most trivia games have this problem where it's like you either know it or you don't. And if you don't know it the game sucks and if someone in that box is Friedman Fries who also designed games you might have played like Power Grid. Right. So this is actually based on another game Friedman Fries made called Flora or Fauna. Fauna? Flora? It's one of the two. It's either Animal Trivia or Plant Trivia. I can't remember. But they took that same exact game and they remade it as America Trivia. And I imagine most people here know things about America. Some international people maybe but you know America's evil and colonial so people somewhere who's worked like a German board game you're like putting cubes down and there's a game there. Right. So what comes out in this game will be like all right we're going to do M&M trivia now M&M's an American thing kind of. Right. All right. Tell me what year M&M's were invented. Tell me what state there most M&M's are eating in and how many M&M's are eaten per year. Right. In the US. And so there's three different trivia questions and you guess on these tracks. Right. And you put your cubes out on the track that you're guessing for the three different trivia questions and so what do you take turns. So Rym puts his guess on like 1920 something. Yup. And I'm like well that's what I was thinking I'll go on 1930 something and if you're close guess what. It's horseshoes you still get some points. Right. So you can still get all this trivia fun and make educated guesses and lean on other people's information and also try to make way out guesses. You know and it won't be completely pointless if you don't know anything about M&M's baseball or whatever comes up. Overwatch. If you want to play a competitive multiplayer FPS today I want to tell you to play weapons factory I want to tell you to play tribes to all these games don't exist. Yeah. Yeah. Overwatch exists today and Overwatch uniquely many people don't realize that it's not really based it's kind of based on like the Team Fortress 2 style of game Team Fortress Team Fortress Classic but it shares a lot more of its lineage with games like weapons factory and action Quake 2. The hardcore old FPS is where you bind a million keys. You think we'd get the museum to play action Quake 2 instead of Quake 1? I'll try to make that happen. Try to make it happen. Yeah, action Quake 2 would be really popular here. Weapons Factory or Mega TF Either any of those three I would play. Overwatch will let you experience 90% of what those old games were like without you having to deal with the pain of getting an old DOS game to work on the internet in 2019. We had to put one and only because VR VR is not mass market yet. It's still sort of niche market and it's starting to expand into the expanded market a little bit. I'm going to be the VR poopoo head. I say until VR is like really tiny as long as I got to wear a big freaking thing on my head screw it. It's not worth it. I have a lot of fun with VR. If you haven't done VR at all yet and you want to try it and you want to play it Superhot VR is one of a handful of fully realized VR games. You can also play this game and not VR and it is this game in VR is transcendent. It's one of the few peak VR experiences that exist so far. So the way it works is an FPS solo FPS where all these kinds of dudes are coming to kill you, right? And the thing is unlike other FPSs which are super fast and you're running around shooting and ninjaing and whatever. This one's super hot. This one's super hot. Nothing moves. It's just everything is still you see the bad guy right there with his sword just like eh. So if you're not moving they're not moving in your face and you're like and they move at the rate you move they only move when you move so if you go grab the gun and get him in the face if they go eh they go you see you guys shoot the gun and you just freeze and you see the bullet coming at you and you're like but as you go he's coming like the bullets like it's really good it kind of messes with your brain to play it in VR and when you come out of VR it's kind of a problem but as much I got to kill as many guys as I can and not be killed with this much movement I want a fighting game like this yeah that'd be great alright battle tech so there's tons of crusty old war games out there we're not telling to play the video game no no we're telling pen and paper battle tech on a table little you know with these pieces of paper right and the thing about battle tech is compared to all those other crusty games it seems complicated and just as hard as the Scantron cheats like me battle tech is the game for you it's like oh 10 damage on the left whee I've never been so happy to get hit with a missile whee filling in the dots alright the other thing about battle tech is that when you play it most of the rules are roll 2d6 look up on a table read what happens oh and it all makes like common sense like oh I got shot in the left torso the armor is gone it hit my internal torso that's where my missile rack is it hit the missile rack roll some dice alright my friend wants to pick up the arm and bludgeon me with it he does you can just do anything that makes sense for a giant slow robot to do and it happens in a simulatory yep and the simulatory aspect makes it super fun I shot you in the face I eject it lets crazy stuff happen emergent narrative gameplay happen weird crap happens and it lets you experience weird old complicated war game without actually playing like the battle of the marn 8 hours of hell and if you get your friends way into it you can do custom stuff which is actually part of the legit rules I want a mech that just walks on all fours we got rules for that can I make a mech that's just two railguns no arms no legs yes you can do this I don't want to use mechs I want to just send a million helicopters okay we got submarines we got boats we got tanks we got little dudes with armor and you can technically it's an RPG you can play it like you play D&D I just want to shoot the planet Civ games are real important these 4X games did you put a picture of Civ 2 and then write Civ 5, 6 in the title? yes I did I think I've played more hours of Civ 2 than any game I've ever played maybe I played a lot of Civ 2 because I was in high school what else was I going to do but really right now civilization games are very good there's a long history in them Civ 5 was the first one that was streamlined and Civ 5 is really worth playing to see what Civ is like yeah Civ 3 and 4 were sort of like this dip yeah Civ 2 is not worth playing in the modern era like don't bother with it you can play if you can get it to run you might as well just go check to see what it looks like but you don't need to invest hours into it play civilization 5 to see what happens if you turn a Civ game into a serious competitive almost board game play Civ 6 if you want to see what happens when Genghis Khan gets nukes and it's hilarious quartermaster general is axis and allies if axis and allies were good and designed by Genghis Khan and only took like an hour quartermaster general is way fun it's simplified and abstracted and it's more like the real experience of managing logistics in a war you're not saying like I attack Ukraine with 18 units and this roll a bunch of dice I'll say things like I attack Ukraine it just succeeds one unit goes there it's very simple all you do on your turn is play a card one card that's pretty much it it's like it's a card game it's like you go around and the other thing is 3 on 3 right you have 3 ally players and you take turns going back and forth right it's like a specific order it's like what US is last right whatever anyway but all you do on your turn is play a card it's super simple it's like navy battle I remove a navy from the board your turn really straightforward not complicated no big setup and takes way short amount of time but is just as fun if not more fun than say axis and allies which takes forever and has a million pieces also fun fact Scott is banned for life from ever playing this game again so I was complaining because like I said it's a card game and I got bullshit draws like every time I played and couldn't do anything like well I got no battle cards guess I lose well World War 2 went very differently this time and that was funny let's play again right he was so salty this went on all night so I said hey we should change the game to where we like draft the cards and we don't have this problem and they were like no no no can't do that meanwhile an expansion just came out the expansion implements the two rule changes I specifically suggested exactly as I suggested them it's a shame you got yourself banned before that came out yeah alright Hearthstone so there's tons of card games out there these days right you got your artifact just came out which doesn't seem to be doing too well magic is on the rise and has it's new arena version right and did just card games keyforge just came out we got more card games you know what to do if you could just live card games your whole life the reason I say play Hearthstone is two reasons well a few reasons number one is free right you don't have to pay nothing free actually free it only costs money if you want to win if you don't want to win you don't have any Hearthstone cards you can just play Hearthstone with your friends have a good time it's way fun number two Hearthstone unlike every other card game that's digital as a user interface it doesn't suck that's pretty much the main reason I still play it right it's like I can get the sum of iPad whether a game can you get in your iPad as good as Hearthstone as multiplayer nothing Civilization 6 baby and number three Hearthstone Hearthstone knows it's a digital card game right and this makes it truly unique there are cards in Hearthstone that do things a lot of them in fact that are absolutely impossible to do if you were playing a card game with cardboard right create a random dude just from anywhere in the whole game of Hearthstone it's like what are you going to do if even Magic had a card replace this with any artifact made before 1998 it's like you'd have to have a card for every artifact before 1998 and shuffle it and draw one and put it on the table right Hearthstone does ridiculous things they came up with a card destroy half your opponent's deck it's not a very good card but it's hella awesome right it's incredible right it's super fun and even if you don't play Hearthstone you can watch it on Twitch which I do a lot also because that's just super fun inheritance gotta have at least one LARP on here have any of you ever LARPed I'm curious live action will play only hands up now alright non actually hitting people with foam swords LARPs the numbers dwindle there's still a few so LARPing gets a bad rank cause of vampires and people hitting people with foam swords yep sometimes at the same time but there's another way to LARP some people just play D&D but they kinda just LARP it and that's fine but there are games that are designed to be LARPs meaning they have mechanics to facilitate role playing and acting and they are lightweight because you can't act out a big scene and then like sit down and roll a bunch of dice to see what happens that's not the point of LARP you live in the moment you live the character it's more like improv theater there's this Scandinavian LARP tradition which is called that because it comes from the Scandinavian LARP cultures and in recent years has been exported to the rest of the gaming world but you know only a few people know about it the cool people you can be the cool people you can do it these are often very serious games like people cry people break down you get a little physical this is like really really hardcore role playing one of the games we've seen is just called Thanksgiving you role play three successive Thanksgiving dinners with a family and you sit down you eat the real meal you eat a meal and after the first night like you've all role played like you got your characters everyone learns something new about the family and then you role play the next Thanksgiving people are seeing where this is going it goes dark inheritance is a relatively recently released game by the same person who did Burning Wheel that you can just buy you can buy this game and you would be can you? yeah you can just buy it some more copies? yeah this is a LARP that has all the rules all the materials everything you need to play one of those Scandinavian style LARPs it's amazing I've seen people cry ugly cry playing this game basically there's a Viking funeral going down and you're one of the people at the funeral ranging from like the wife of the deceased to the master to the princes to the odds the prodigal son who murdered the other son and fled into exile who has returned and you're fighting over the inheritance at the end of the game you read the will it's good stuff the will is really good yeah the game comes with the will at some point someone busts the will out and starts reading it the lore master guy has it right? yeah and at some point he opens it Captain Sonar not that many real time board games as many of you were talking about also you know even though we've already mentioned a team game quarter master general those are like the only two team games it's like they mention all the team games because team games are great it's not enough of them Captain Sonar is like the only real time team table top game I know about so you ever seen gone for red October you have two teams of eight each team is four people sitting at a table on the opposite of the other people you're in a submarine with all the teams based on the orders the captain's giving one of the person's jobs is to listen to what the other team's saying and try to figure out where they are so your captain can go f**king up but meanwhile your captain is moving and they got someone listening and so forth it's live it's real time so literally the gate will just be sitting there silent and then Scott the captain is like move north move east and suddenly someone on the other side is like Move west, move west, move west, move west. Use this, use this stealth, use this stealth. Use our special ability. This game is ridiculously fun. Find an excuse to play it. You can also put mines around the board. Yeah. Jungle speed. Is a sport. It's a tabletop sport. So when I was Googling to get a picture of this game to put in these slides, I found a really interesting image. Fun fact, it's even funnier. Jason Morningstar, the first new post of this, is the designer of the game Fiasco. Right, it's a prominent indie RPG personality. Jason Morningstar broke someone else's finger in 2006 playing Jungle Speed. Jungle Speed is a real-time sport. You flip cards over, you do a thing, and eventually there's a duel. And among two players, or maybe more than two, someone has to be holding that piece of wood. Yeah, the modern Jungle Speeds you're going to buy come with a rubber thing. It's a lot safer, to be fair. You want the wood one. You want to break some fingers? Let's go. This is a tabletop sport. Try a tabletop sport. Don't break too many fingers. If you want to have a lot of fun, you can play Jungle Speed and put that totem in a really fun place, like another room, the roof, the swimming pool, the ocean, the toilet. At a magfest before it was in the Gaylord, we had a Jungle Speed game where the totem ended up getting knocked into the air, flew over the balcony and landed on someone else's game. Camel up! All right, so who likes gambling? Yeah, gambling's bad, don't you? Gambling for fake money. All right, so if you want to sit around, all right, and there's a little camel race going on, you're going to bet on those camels, come on green. All right, that's what this game is all about, only it's super family fun, even though you're gambling. People who know us or you see the kind of games we're talking about, you assume we like super serious, like brains banging against brains, the smartest person wins. This game is random, random wins. This game is some random BS because it's just as fun as a super serious game. And also it's not Camel Cup as many people erroneously believe, it's Camel Up because the camels stack up. The orange camel, if it moves before the yellow one or the green one, might just carry them to victory. So we're older, so I'm going to say Fortnite, but you could play PUBG if you're even older. You got to see what the deal is with these games. The, remember we talked about how important Counter-Strike was, how a Counter-Strike like Maid's Steam exists. Fortnite is that all over again. Fortnite is the game. Literally everyone else is playing it. You got to at least see what the deal is with these Battle Royale games. At least it doesn't cost you any money. Yep. Maybe you play PUBG instead. Maybe you play, well, don't play the Counter-Strike Battle Royale because it's kind of garbage. But play one of these games. You got to know what the deal is. Also, side note, everyone was always calling these like Battle Royale mode. You should go see the movie or read the book, Battle Royale. If you can stomach it. Do not, however, read the manga, Battle Royale. Do not see Battle Royale 2 as helpful. Like we talked about those other free games like the Hearthstone and the Fortnite, this game is not free. But you can, I'm not saying to go become a magic player and spend money and do drafts or whatever it is. I'm saying at least go get one of those free learning magic decks and play it against your friend, like Green vs. Red or something like that. You need to at least know the rules of Magic the Gathering. So I played Magic in the earliest days. Beta Unlimited Revives. Because the anniversary of Magic came up recently, they had a timeline on their website that showed which year each set came out. I played Magic from the year 1993 to 1994. When Fallen Empires came out, I thought it was a BS expansion. I felt like the game was in decline. I really didn't like Ice Age and I quit when Alliances came out. So despite having played it then and not played it for decades, I can sit down and play it today. The rules are familiar. The rules work. There's so few things I don't know about modern Magic. It is amazing that a game that has evolved so much, lasted so long, has so much love and so many players, I could just sit down and play it today with the rules I learned in middle school. And because I played Magic in 1993 and 1994, in 2014 I was able to install Hearthstone and play it with no instructions whatsoever. There's so many games today. Or I open them up and play them and thanks to my magic knowledge from my middle school days, I am now able to play all these other games because Magic basically invented half of the things that every card game does forever. And none of those things existed before Magic. Yeah, do you know what we did before tapping? It was not pretty. I was like tapping in 1993. I didn't know that meant turn a card sideways. There's a reason why every game uses a different noun or verb to describe these things. Well they don't want to get sued. Yeah, but it's summoning sickness. We all know what summoning sickness is. I can tell someone, oh yeah, this game has summoning sickness. There's a lot of walk sideways and hit things games. Yep, they're kind of cathartic, they're fun. They're usually not that skill based. And this one, you should play this one because it has the best music. Yeah. I mean, all the walk sideways and hit things games are pretty much the same. River City Ransom's a little different. Yep. Has a little RPG action, it's cute. You know, Final Fight just as good, but why not play the one with the bump in music? I would say this one has a tiny bit more skill input than Final Fight. Barely. Just a little. I will often go to YouTube and just type Streets of Rage OST, play. I mean, it's just like the X-Men game or the Simpsons game. These are games where you're just gonna play through the whole thing because it's kind of fun. It's an experience, kind of like Castle Crashers. This is how to see what those games were like in the old days, and it's still pretty fun. So, roguelikes are a thing. Roguelikes are, like, increasingly, like roguelike is a genre that's continuing to bust out. You could try to play Rogue, the game that roguelikes are named after, but that really kind of sucks actually. You could try to play Nethack, which doesn't suck, but good luck. You could try to play Dwarf Fortress. You'll need even more luck. Good luck. You won't have fun. You'll have fun. Right, but thanks to more modern game design techniques, we have applied the roguelike, you know, scheme of playing till you die through a procedurally generated world that's different every time to other genres besides aschic text in a dungeon. And the best of those so far is maybe FTL. Yep. It's just, it's a real-time game. You play the game. You make your actions. You evolve your ship. It's not real-time. Yeah, well, it's real-time until you pause it. I guess so. Yeah. But it's emergent gameplay. It doesn't have to be balanced. The cool thing about roguelikes is that emergent weird things happen. You might get a really OP ship one time. Sure, you just get to experience that. Maybe one time you just get creamed. Sure, that's fine. Oh, great, a bunch of rock guys attack me immediately. Yeah, but you'll have these experiences winning big, losing big. Roguelikes, because of the emergent gameplay and the procedurally generated content, will give you a wide range of experiences that are not constrained by the type of balanced things you have to do in multiplayer games. The game does not have to be balanced. It only has to be fun. I guess we will tell you to play Starcraft. Yeah! Right, so there's a lot of RTSs out there. I suck at all of them, because I can't click faster than like a few times a second. Because you also suck at turn-based strategy games. No, I suck way more at real-time strategy games. I too suck at real-time strategy games. Right, but I mean, I guess you should play one of them and Starcraft is the one, so play it. Yup. So, there's train games, meaning they have a train theme. But then there's train games. You know a train game, because it looks like some of this nonsense. Or it involves crayons. Yeah, it involves crayons, it involves stock certificates, it involves having a company that has money and a player who has their own separate money and maybe one player has two companies. So I just played 1889, two days ago, one day. I don't remember, but I played at a magfest and basically the operating round, which is the part where you actually run the trains and get money and put out the hexes on the map, that took like five minutes. And then we spent like 30 minutes in the stock round buying and selling stocks between each other, going round and round and round and round and round. It's like, okay, can we operate now? Okay, operate, operate, operate. Stock round! Here's the deal. A lot of scary people like train games, kind of like war games. Or a lot of people have never encountered a train game before or they've seen the scary people playing the scary looking game and just avoided it. Right, they think, oh, that's the kind of game scary people play, I will not go near it. I advise all of you to try 1846 to find out what those train games are like. Because I- This is the entry one. There's a whole series, 18, whatever. It's like people call it 18XX, 1846, 1889, 18XDX, whatever, right, there's tons of them. But this is the entry one, right? The first one you should play, the most accessible, the easiest to learn. They're all crooked slightly different, right? Like this one, you can see the stock market at the top is a straight line. The one I played yesterday, the stock market was like this big diagonal thing. But much like Dance Dance Revolution, which we thought looked stupid and then we got addicted to it, I always avoided these games. And then I played 1846 and I discovered something very dark about myself. The best thing I can say about these games is that I'm very not upset when I lose. Because I pretty much assume I'm gonna lose from the get-go. And I just have a whole bunch of fun making companies and running trains. I went bankrupt and came in last place this weekend. I'm just like, whatever, that was good. So, a turn-based strategy game. It is hard to overstate how well-designed the Advance Wars games are. A lot of people think it's easy to clone an Advance Wars game. Right, and we've been like, ah, Nintendo won't make any Advance Wars. Why doesn't someone clone this? Well, a lot of people have. There's one on iOS, it's called like Warbits. Yep, it's okay. You got Tiny Metal, you got some other one out there. Into the breach is adjacent. Like it's in that space. It's like that fantasy-looking one. They all suck compared to Advance Wars. They can't do it, it's really hard. Now, Advance Wars, a turn-based simple game. You're moving military units around, like the artillery attacks the tank or whatever. Every Advance Wars game is different. They're pretty much all worth playing. At least all the ones from Game Boy Advance onward. But the reason why I say these are worth playing over all other games like it, the reason they're so good is that they took a ton of time, a ton of headcount, a ton of money to make. They're such curated experiences that there is no economy in making another game like this ever. You will never recoup your money. There's no way. So play all the Advance Wars games and then there will never be another game like this. There might be one. Not anytime soon. There's no reason to spend that much time to make a game this small and this simple-looking. A lot of Mario Kart's out there. There are a lot of Mario Kart's out there. And I've played this one more than the others and I can, with objective measure, tell you this is the best Mario Kart game there ever was. This is the third Mario Kart game. There was SNES, then N64, then GBA. This includes the circuits from the SNES one plus some new circuits. And why is this Mario Kart better than all the Mario Kart's that came after? It has less characters, it has less total tracks. You know, it's not Super 3D. Not selling me on this so far. Why is this one so great? And the reason this one is so great is because this is the only skill-based Mario Kart that has ever existed. Most Mario Kart's, the winning and losing, is, oh, you got some item, you got the blue shell, right? Or your Fox Only Final Destination is. Right, and there are some ways you can dodge the blue shell sometimes. In this game, if you drive perfectly, if you drift around every corner, if you never slow down, if you never go off-road, if you never tap the brake, if you drive absolutely perfectly on every track with your perfect driving skills, red shells, blue shells, any attack whatsoever will hover behind your ass and not touch you. And if you keep driving perfectly, even the blue shell will go, ah, fuck it, and give up. And I was good enough at this game that the blue shell always fucking gave up, right? So if you care about racing and don't want to just lose to your friends because they got lucky with the blue shell, you should play this Mario Kart, and not the other Mario Kart. So if you just love a Mario Kart, they're all the same, pick whatever. Xendo. Xendo. Xendo just got reprinted so you can just buy it. This game is pretty simple. The problem is we played Xendo before you could just buy it by buying a lot of these Ice House pieces from Looney Labs. You could play Xendo really with any collection of lots of similar pieces, right? You just need lots and lots of the same pieces over and over again, but enough different pieces, whatever. Yeah, basically this game is interesting because it's a game where it's sort of cooperative, but not really. It can take an unlimited number of players, any player can join or quit at any time. One person is the team. Except the master. One person is the master. They're facilitating the game. They've made up a rule like a coin, a shape. One of these collections has the Buddha nature if it has exactly one red pyramid. If it has, if the largest pyramid is black, if the smallest pyramid is pointing at the largest pyramid. Right, so through the process of elimination, the students are creating collections out of pieces and saying master, is this exhibit the Buddha nature or not? And through the process of elimination of making more and more examples and figuring out, okay, well this one's good and that one's bad, they're trying to figure out what the rule is. Why is this one good and that one bad? And the cool thing is it doesn't require, like when you have a hidden piece of information like that, it's very easy for people to mess it up. The way this game works, it doesn't matter what the rule is that the master thought in their head. The master loses when the student makes up their own rule that is functionally equivalent. The master can only refute the student's rule by proving them wrong on the board. Right, so if you come up with a rule, it might not be the same as my rule, but if I can't create something that doesn't exhibit the Buddha nature that matches your rule or does exhibit the Buddha nature that does match your rule, if I can't create a counter example physically, then you're right because your rule is the same as my rule mathematically. The game is also a great attractor to meet people at conventions because you set up all these pieces all over the table, people walk over and they see all this and they're curious what the hell you're playing. That's a very small zen, though. Usually it's like, whoa, because they've made so many examples and they can't figure out the rule yet. But when someone comes over and says, hey, what's this game? You can say, would you like to play? You hand them a guessing stone and they're like, you're in. They're in, they're in. Five Nights at Freddy's. Just the first one, just the first one. There's a lot of scary games out there and they all do different scary things. Five Nights at Freddy's is interesting because it uses scares in the most effective way I've ever seen. Five Nights at Freddy's gives an adult who is not normally scared of things that haunted houses the brief experience of being a kid in a haunted house because it uses jump scares not as the beats that drive the game but as the punishment for failing at the game at the end, the game is just a trick to get you to lean in, look at that screen really closely, have your attention focused so the jump scare gets you. It is so well designed. It's like, oh, you don't want to put your head in a position where you will be jump scared, lose then. All right, so I'll come and make sure I got this right. It does, like I have a whole video essay that's on YouTube of going into the details. Don't watch it until you play the game because it's spoilers but it does things like you think the game crash, like you're gonna die and then nothing happens and you're just like, wait, what? Wait, what's going on? And eventually you go to move the mouse a little bit. It knows that and it jump scares you right then. Street Fighter II. There's a lot of fighting games in the world. Street Fighter II at least is the first one to have a whole bunch of different asymmetric characters. You could try to play Street Fighter I. It's really bad. It's not that bad. It's not good. It's the reason you don't even see it in the MagFest Arcade, no one wants to play that. Street Fighter II, literally the first ever fighting game where you choose your character and they're all different and the all special moves. It doesn't matter which Street Fighter II you're gonna play. You can get the super one, the champion one. And as long as you're not like super pro at it, it's just as fun as any modern fighting game. Yeah, it doesn't really make a difference unless you're a super pro person. What's the difference between Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III? If you're not super great at fighting games, you don't notice any difference. As soon as you notice the difference, you're one of those people. Right. Head to evil with you. Move, buffer, what now? Cancel something? Fandante is poker but fun. It makes every single poker hand that like the fancy hand where everyone is bluffing, everyone has a royal flush. It's a giant crazy scene. It's also super fun because you can go flush because there's a flush in addition to a flush. Yup, it's panda themed. It's cute. It's fun poker. And this game in the book has legit real money gambling rules if you want to play for real money. Don't do that. Magical drop. You probably played some Tetris. You probably played some whatever, right? Magical drop is the biz. It used to be at Magfest. I don't know why they didn't bring it those assholes but you can get it on Switch. You can get the original arcade Neo Geo one on Switch. Get this game. It is like one of the best Puzzly games. Why did you put one with the world on the left? You could have gotten justice in that situation. So not because it's a Puzzly game. There's a lot of Puzzly games because it is a competitive Puzzly game. Direct versus Puzzle game. That's a whole genre. This one's the best one to play to see if you like that genre. The advanced one is Battle Balls but they can't play it easily. You can't play Battle Balls easily. Battle Balls I think is better than Magical Drop. That's my controversial take. Old timey games. Not that fun usually. There's a reason to at least play one of them. If you've never played chess or checkers or backgammon or any one of those like old games that evolved over hundreds of years, backgammon is the one to try. Backgammon is great. Also maybe Domino's for the one reason is that if you travel the world, you will actually, you won't run into people playing these games on the street, except backgammon. If you go around the world, especially like Middle East, Eastern Europe, you will see backgammon on the street with old guys. And if you know how to play backgammon, you can make friends with old guys and that is very useful. Yup. Last and least. Atari games are better than people will tell you they are and the ATT game in particular is way better than you might think. But Atari games aren't actually usually that worth playing. Maybe one or 2% of them are worth playing at all in the modern era. Outlaw is the one to play. Outlaw, you can still play with your friends and have a great time, especially combat is garbage compared to outlaw, right? All this game is, it's two cowboys, you control one, your friend controls the other one. You can walk up and down, you can walk left and right, and you can shoot and you can shoot straight up or down and they bounce off the walls at the whole game. Yup. Shoot the other cowboy. There's a panel we did at PAX years ago called Atari Game Design. We also did it at MAGFest once where we talk about outlaw in depth and then we play it on stage. The game is so fun that we kind of just get lost in playing it on stage for a while and the audience is like, ah, hey guys. I hope this was enjoyable. We're out of time. I hope I could go home now. I don't know why you people came here on Sunday at MAGFest, but I guess. Enjoy the rest of your economy. It looks good for me. If you don't think you can Google Geek Nights to find videos of all our talks, grab one of these flyers, and also fun fact, these flyers are vintage. These were printed for us in 2006. So the whole back is like, what's a podcast? How do I download podcasts? All right, go home. And we have another one we did at PAX called the 40 Table Talk Games, which was great. It's just at the time of YouTube right now. Yeah, that's the zero website. You'll find our YouTube channel for that. It's up in the description. Oh, awesome. Second question.