 Hello, everybody. If it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly. Joining me as most of the time is true is my co-host Tom. What's up, buddy? Hello friends. I'm here most of the time. I'm just responding to the comments who were, who directly said before the show that given your somewhat spotty track record, I should introduce you slightly differently. But who cares about Tom? Because we have a very special guest joining us this week. I'm very excited to have him on. James Hewitt from Needy Cat Games. Somebody who you know, even if you don't know you know, I guarantee you've played this man's games if you're watching this show. So, James, I'm so glad to have you on, buddy. So glad to be here. And you know what? I care about Tom. Thanks, James. I appreciate that. No, but thank you so much for having me here. Really looking forward to this. Absolutely. This is going to be part two. We're going to break into game design with an expert. Somebody who's designed a lot of games, games I know I love and you probably love and and we will talk that through. But first we're to go through our normal stuff and there might be some things in the news, James, here that I think might be interesting to you given some of your past life experiences. Alright, so Tom, what do we got, buddy? What's in the news? So we have a rumor engine. We do. This is not the part that's interesting. It's a destruction thing. I mean, do you think it's like ogres? No, I think it's a destruction thing. I think it's an orc thing. I think they're all orc things. All that's orc-y things. So, so rather than be elf-y, everything's orc-y now. Correct. Correct. We've switched streams. We're now, by the way, Adam said he cares about you as well, Tom. So Uncle Adam's on your side. Thanks, Adam. At any rate, yes, I think these are all just orc-y things. That's what I think. So... That looks orc-y to me. I mean, I'm, so I'm, for the record, I'm out of the loop completely. I'm so not up to date with what's coming out, but that looks far too fine and little for an ogre, right? That's that's that's... See? I agree with James, exactly. Yeah. The big ogre hands can't tie those little knots. I think two bigs of goblins, though. Two bigs of grots. Exactly. It's gotta be... They are the orcs are the middle bowl of porridge of the destruction world. Okay. They have just... How do you leave on a walk with three bowls of porridge that come out at the same time and you come back and they're three different temperatures? How has that happened? It makes no sense at all. Correct. I don't, I do not understand. The entire story is nonsense from top to bottom, obviously. Yes. Welcome to Goldilocks Chat. Yeah, I've never, I've never seen a story more proudly featured breaking and entering as, as from the, from the alleged protagonist. That's the core premise. I mean, you know, it's not even snuck in there. It's ridiculous. So at any rate, yes, it's an orc thing. There you go. Yep. Okay. Here we go. Staying on topic, Cursed City. Pre-order this weekend. It's here folks. Time to get excited. Woo. All right. We are all excited for Cursed City. James, I'm coming to you. It looks awesome, doesn't it? Because I feel like you might have an interesting perspective on Cursed City. I saw you actually talking about this a little on, you know, Twitter as you've seen some of this stuff going around. By the way, James Twitter will be in the description. You absolutely should be following him. But you might have had a hand in something original that might have had to do with how we got Cursed City. You want to, you want to just talk a little about it. Yeah, sure. It's been really interesting, like watching the development of the core engine of what was Warhammer Quest Silver Tower, which I designed back when I was at Games Workshop back in 2013, 2014, maybe. And, you know, there's this kind of DNA running down from Silver Tower to Shadows Over Hammer Hall to Blackstone Fortress and now to Cursed City. I've not played any of them since Silver Tower. For reasons I've already mentioned, like I've just been so busy, I've not had a chance to look at much Wargaming stuff in the past couple of years. But it's been really interesting looking at Cursed City because to me, Cursed City is kind of, in a lot of ways, there's a lot of things that I wish I'd been able to put into Silver Tower. Sure. Because it's got kind of the expandability. It's got the random, you know, scenario generation kind of thing it looks like. And I mean, this is going off watching the Nick Bacon video from a few days ago. Right, right, right. And there's so much stuff in there that I look at and think, oh, it would have been so cool to put that in. And also, there's so much more stuff in there. It looks like it's got a bigger budget as a product. Right. But more interestingly, I really like the developments to the rules because, you know, as a game designer, you, you know, Hymesite is 2020, right? Sure. So if I had those things, you'd go, oh, if I'd had the chance, I would have done that, or I should have done that better. And there's all these little tweaks, like the way the damage and recuperation system has been tweaked and the way moving and running is slightly different now. I like that. It feels like it's just a developed version of the engine. I would love to kind of see someone take Silver Tower and update the engine. Right. What's new in Cursed City? Yeah, I know I've seen a couple people talking about doing that, just that thing. Like, there was a lot of stuff I saw in here that I thought looked really cool in the way that some of the actions and attacks get triggered through those kind of things. Clearly bringing in some of the, like, conceptual themes from even, like, Underworlds with, you know, sort of the inspired version of the monster. Inspiration, yeah. Love that. Love. Where, like, when the night falls, you know, the, like, the nightfall on the track, like, yeah, what a great idea. And so, so thematically cool, right? I want to know who come up with that and I want to clap them on the back because I love game mechanics that evoke theme and nothing says Cursed City full of vampires, like, tracking when night comes. Yeah, that's just so cool. Exactly. It's one of those beautiful moments where it just aligns. I'm sorry, Tom, go ahead. Yeah. No, you're good. And like, seeing it nightfall and being afraid. Yes. Because you know what's coming. Yeah, exactly. It's that game design that evokes emotion. That's a big thing for me. And, you know, the emotion, the thematic corrective emotion for this game is fear, surely, because it's the Cursed City vampires as undead things. You should be afraid as players. And if you can get a game, it's much better when a game makes you feel afraid rather than tells you to be afraid. Yeah, you know, here's a little thing that I thought was so, so this is such an interesting avenue to just explore very quickly. I know this is the news, but this is just a little preview, I think. So nightfalls, as you follow the track and you get closer and you can see it coming, right? So you're following the track of activations, rounds of stuff and, you know, exploration, and then eventually night falls. So you can, because you know, basically, when it's going to happen, right? That's what allows it to evoke the fear. It's just funny to me, the knowledge of the thing. Back to, you know, Hitchcock talked about, like, you can show the bomb under the table. It's not about whether the characters know there's a bomb under the table in the movie. It's you know there's a bomb under the table and you're afraid for them, right? So we know the thing's coming. Like, they could have made it so night falls on some random situation of dice happening, right? It could have been, like, if A happens and B happens and C happens, oh, nighttime falls and great, okay, then all these things happen. But that wouldn't have felt as organic, right? Now night happens in the world and the fact that you can see it coming lets you build the tension accordingly. Are we going to get it up done fast enough, right? So little, it's funny to me how little things like that are so evocative, right? And so important. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So I think that there's general excitement for Cursed City. The question now we did is to get the price. Basically in the U.S., it's going to be $1.99, I think it's 125 pounds, something like that. I don't know Europe off the top of my head. But, you know, the real question in all of our minds is, will there be enough? That is the question. Right. Hopefully they weren't on the ever given. Hopefully they were somewhere else. So, and we're all good there. I know that I'm going to be, so many people I've talked to that are just super excited about this. Yeah, go ahead. I'm afraid on one hand for the release, because from everything that I'm talking to with distributors, it's tight. Yeah, sure. I think that it's like the initial run is like one case or something like that per distributor, which is like a couple boxes. And then even then it's, it could be weeks for many stores, if not months to actually get the supply that they want. Yeah, so it's going to be, it's going to be one of those situations. And let's face it, we all want to get our hands on it as fast as possible. We do. And get those, and get those minis out because they're amazing. So, yeah. Oh, by the way, yes, we are going to be joined by all my dogs here tonight. Have a good time, dear. Yes, my wife is leaving, so I'm going to, we're in charge. Is she sailing? Does she have a petticoat? Yes, she's about to go sailing, correct. That's right. She missed. And the chaos begins. There you go. Okay. Anyways, oh yeah, what else we got in the news, Tom, while I'm dealing with this. You said I was going sailing. Yeah. Tom wanted to know if you're going sailing, yes. Oh my God, it's a jacket for God's sakes. Yes. It looks like a petticoat. Okay. So, Bellacore is the, the, I will not be interrupted by a dog. You're going to be interrupted by a dog. You clearly will. Clearly. So the Bellacore coin is dropping for April. We know that. And so we're assuming broken realms is coming hot on the heels of broken realms. And so we're assuming that we would see, if they wanted to make the summer timeline for third edition, we would see a rush of broken realms books. And that's what we're, the train that it seems like we're on is all broken realms. Good. I have no issues. Zero pushback on that. Let's throw that, let's throw the hammer down on this narrative advancement. Let's go. Look, one of the great problems of war games in general is because they're tied to this physical product. It can oftentimes be hard to advance the narrative, right? In any meaningful way, because you've got to like, you've got to keep your miniatures being able to be sold. You can't just like turn over stuff and say, oh, your entire collection doesn't work anymore. Right. And nonetheless, in this story, even in book one and now in book two, and this is, there's going to be no broken realm spoilers. You guys can hear me okay, right? I'm coming through. Yeah. Okay, good. I mean, so is your dog. Yeah, I understand. It's, it looks, she's going to do that for a minute because she loves my wife. I don't know what else to tell you. This is, this is the chaos. This is it. At any rate, I was so excited by the, by the advancement we've seen in the first two books. I can't wait to see where we're going from here. Keep this up. You can do, you can do this stuff. This is how it should be. Narrative should inform design, design should inform narrative. It should go back and forth. That's your best case. Right. So, yeah, definitely. I actually, I think the most interesting thing with age of Sigma from, you know, because I was there back at the start of it, I always felt like it was hit the ground running and the narrative was constantly moving, especially compared to like where war hammer had been and to electric extent where 40 K was. There was this feeling of here are a whole load of things. I think it took about a year and a half, maybe two years to find its feet as a setting. But once it kind of picks up, it felt like there was just this constant. Here's a new thing. Here's a new thing. Here's a new thing. And like you say, it's, it's never easy to with it with a miniature's wargame to get that kind of feeling of an evolving narrative that then doesn't invalidate people's collections. But it feels like it's, it's going in a pretty good direction. Right. That's the impression I get looking from the outside. 100%. Yes. Yeah. For the most part, that is the overwhelming success, whatever you can say about AOS and, you know, the armies or balance or anything like that. And, you know, we'll talk about balance a little more later. But the narrative to me, I have been so loving because it has moved. Things have changed. The ages, the epochs, whatever you want to say of the game have moved along. You know, things rise and fall. Like stuff happens. You know what I mean? Like you feel like you're, it's actually a real world that's alive. Not like some picture. No spoilers for Broken Realms. But as many of you will find with Broken Realms Seclus, things change. Yes. Which will do the Broken Realms show. Just so everybody understands how the shows are going to go over the next couple of weeks. Next week will be Illumineft with no Broken Realms, other stuff at all. Just the... How are we going to do that? Because we're just going to talk about the rules. And then the week after that will be the narrative and everybody else in Broken Realms. So there you go. That's how this is going to go, folks, over the next two weeks. Okay. Okay. Right on. That's fine. We also got Tom. Okay. So White Door 463 is dropping. We have a narrative battle path between like Chaos and Order and Shimon. Do you want to talk about that, Vince? How do they pronounce that behind that? How do they pronounce... How is Shimon? This is what I want to know. Here we go. I'm not interested in any goss or anything like that. But I am interested in how that word is pronounced inside the halls of GW. If you had to say Shimon, how do you say it? Inconsistently. Okay. Perfect. I never found a good answer to that question. That's the best answer you can give me. That's the best answer. I would want no other answer. Yeah, absolutely. What are you the answer, would I tell you, you know, or is it the best kept secret? Yeah. So yeah, so you've got Chaos against Order and a narrative battle path in that White Dwarf. We're getting a demon anvil of apotheosis, which is cool. It's not a demon focused anvil of apotheosis. And it's Seraphon against the forces of Bellicor, which tells us that hopefully Seraphon will get some focus and love in Broken Realms 3. That's the number. Which, you know, I mean, they really need it. Look, Seraphon, they've been struggling as an army for so long. It'll be good that they can finally get some extra rules maybe. Have they had anything since the battle time? Or is it just the all the same old Warhammer kits? No, that's it. That's all they had. And even then they didn't get any new kits. And realistically, my joking aside, because they're like the most powerful army in the game right now. Like, I generally am interested in them. Like, I know we're all angry because of a stupid dead frog being able to do too much magic and hurt us with his bad magic touch. But, but like, Accurate summary. Yes, but like they're legitimately an interesting sort of character as a force in the story, right? Like these weird ancient beyond times eldritch lizards who can summon magics and flow through the heavens and remember people back into existence. Like they're cool. Like it's a cool force. And so having them in the narrative, I think will honestly be interesting. A lot of my favorite stories from the end times were the Skaven Lizardman stuff. That was such a fun. The ending of that, that story thread was just amazing. It was amazing. Right. Because both sides were getting wins. Both sides were doing cool things. And it was just one over the top play over the next, right? Just like firing giant rockets, pulling in the moon, protecting entire continents with magic bubbles. Like, what can't they do? It's great. Yeah. It was awesome. So, yes. Maybe Kroak will, will receive a treatment like other characters in Broken Rones. Give him a new fig, put him up to 600 points, problem solved. An even bigger, even deader frog. That's what we need. He's been the same dead frog for like time immemorial. He was dead when I started playing in like 1995. You know, if there was ever a case for literally one to one recreating the exact miniature in plastic, you know, or redo the whole like the Powering Queen, but keep him exactly the same. Right. Right. He gets a bigger, much more elaborate, ridiculous chair, but he's still the same tiny dead frog. My favorite thing with Kroak, the miniature, is the little skink sat next to him. It might not even be Kroak. It might be the regular slan. Is there's a little skink with a dagger sat on the arm of the chair. And from a certain angle, it looks like a joystick. I've always thought it looks like he's kind of driving the star commandering. So just get that canonical. Get that on the kit. We'll be happy. There you go. Done. X-Topset, the new Kroak model is just a grave. It's just a gravestone. A piece of dirt. Easiest thing to paint ever. Done. One can only hope. 600 points. All right. So, Tom, what else we got? I don't think we have anything else, right? Pretty much. There's a quiet news week because it's all Cursed City this week, right? I mean, let's be honest. What else are you talking about? You mentioned it in passing James, but I do want to call it out. Nick Baton did a great, you know, how to play Cursed City video. So I do recommend people check that out. I will throw that link down in the description as well. This isn't like a pick of the week or anything. We'll get to that in just a second. I just thought it was a great video. It does show you the mechanics. If you're not familiar with Silver Tower or Shadows over Hammer Hall or Blackstone Portraits, and this is all new to you, that'll be a great way to get going. If you are familiar with, like, Silver Tower, because I didn't play Blackstone, but I played Silver Tower a bunch. We played through most of a campaign. I don't think we ever got it fully finished, but we, I mean, we went deep into it. We still play that regularly. Silver Tower, me and the kids do. Like, it is a very favorite thing we'll break out and roll dice on. So, like, when they heard it, Cursed City's coming out, they're like, ahh! Yeah. What I love about Silver Tower is because it's so random, the narrative forks so many ways. Like, I have discussions with people and they'll say, I've played it loads. I'll say, oh, what do you think of this thing? And they'll never have seen it. There'll be encounters and events. Like, key moments they never got to or they never saw. Yeah. And I kind of love that about it. It feels very, it matches the theme, you know? Right. This Chaos Tower. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I love discoverable moments or something really cool. And that one has so many interesting discoverable moments. It just pop up. Right? Yeah. It's wacky. It's astonishing we got away with it, you know? There's no way. Because it was, there's so many things that are out of, you know, the fact that in the very first quest, you've got a mission, a challenge, sorry, where you're stacking dice. Yes. Someone like anything else. But that was kind of the idea was just make it, you know, make it different, make it wacky. I love that challenge. I really do. Like because when I got to it, I was like, I guess this, I wasn't expecting it. You know what I mean? You're like, wait, what? What are we doing? Okay. Well, let's see what we can do. So without wanting to get into spoilers, did you drink the potion? Did you find the potion? Yes. Did you drink the potion? Yes. The potion that affects how you interact with the game with the rest of the quest? Yes. Yeah, there we go. That's a fun one. That's great. Yeah. And generally when I'm playing those games, especially because I want to experience something, right? Like, and so if that's an option, it's like, yeah, let's do this. Yeah. Absolutely. Because why would you not? Right. Exactly. Like, well, we can have fun or not. That's the choice here, right? Yeah, exactly. Precisely. Okay. Yeah, I won't give anything away because it is fun if people are still like, if people are playing that, I don't want to ruin that moment for them because it is too cool. Okay. Let's get into some pick of the week. Yeah, I think we're going to talk about today. Yeah. What do you got to share with everybody? So I, so since I set up needy cat games back in 2017, and I left games workshop, myself and my partner Sophie, who's the other half of needy cat, we've been kind of trying different things out to find out what it is we want to do. So primarily we designed games for people, but also we both have a long standing love of teaching people things. And so we started doing some game design courses a couple of years ago, and we initially ran them in person to like a group of about 12, 12, 15 people. We put on lunch. It was lovely. And then last year lockdown happened and we ran it again online. And so we've, we've kind of, we had like a six part course that's been on the website now for about a year. But then about a month ago, back at the start of March, I ran another seminar called designing miniature war games. It's literally a zoomed in laser focused look at kind of what goes into designing a miniature's war game of some kind. So like, you know, you're a war hammery game because you know, miniatures games, war games, there's a whole lot of terminology that can overlap with different things. But this is very much how to make your own miniatures, war games, skirmish game, that kind of thing. And yeah, it's on our website. There's a recording of it that you can download from needycatgames.com slash tickets. I think the links are going to go into the show notes type thing. And yeah, basically it's a condensed edited version of the seminar that I ran. And I'm running a follow up in a couple of weeks time, which is called developing miniature's war games. And that's talking about like once you've got your core engine, how do you develop it? How do you troubleshoot? How do you play test well? How do you run demos? Because that's a massive thing. How do you show off your game in a cool way? And for anyone who would like to get a ticket to designing miniature war games, that's the edited recording. If you use the discount code warhammer weekly or one word, you get 10% off. Hooray. There you go. See? A polished plug that was. There you go. That was great. All the links will be down in the description. And here's what I'll say. A lot of us talk a big game about how we could do better. This is the most common thing. I see. Right? But the reality is, is that maybe you could maybe get a discount. But there is a design language. There is a lot of people who have a lot of experience doing this thing. People like James. And so if you're at all interested in designing your own war games, of dipping your toe in these waters, as certainly designing games something I, you know, I love and I love doing and I'm doing right now in various ways, then this is something you should absolutely check out. So link will be down there. All that will information with the code and stuff will be down there too. So check it out. Tom, what's your pick? A friend of the show. Two plus stuff. Tough. I knew you were going to pick this. I knew you were going to pick this and ruin my pick. I should have went first. Go for it. He is doing a wonderful series on Broken Realms Techlass. And he has three videos in and I encourage you to check it out. Yes. So just so we all understand what he's doing, he's going like, you know, beat by beat over the week, sort of breaking it into the five acts right of this story. He did it with Marathi and it was just a wonderful series and I would encourage you to check out his run through Techlass. Yes, I 100% agree. It is really good. And for those of you who maybe don't want to read the whole book. Right. There is it's like Doug does such a good job of breaking down not just the story, but also the thematic elements going on behind it. So check it out. It will be linked down below. I'll actually link episode one, not the most recent one and then at the auto place just take you through the series. So that way you're doing it in order. So awesome. Mine, I knew you were going to pick it. So I had a backup ready, which is we recently talked about and it's you know, what's going on with it with its new release and our good buddy AOS coach just did a talking daughters of Kane episode with Michael Clark. It was a great episode. I would recommend you check it out. It's a fun walkthrough of the army and some of what's going on with that. If you have interested in the daughters of Kane, then you can go check out that video. So that will be linked down in the description. Shout out to coach who's making great content as always. Okay. So with that, let's talk about a little hobby time. So here's my question. James with as busy as you are writing everything. I know you said you're you know, getting getting back into maybe some some war game design here you're hoping. What have you had a chance to do for your hobby for your personal self, not for your professional self? I'm sorry. I don't understand the question. What's the personal hobby you speak about? Yeah, no. Yeah, it's difficult because I work so much. We've got a five year old daughter. We've got you know, all sorts of things going on. I haven't had a chance to do much personal hobby stuff in a while. Also, I'm currently dealing with hilariously crippling carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists because again, too many too much typing too much work. So I can't hold the paint brush to save my life. The last thing I did was I dug through the Trail at Calph, which was one of the games I did back when I was at games workshop because I've had it on the shelf for a while. I was looking at it for a while. Someone sent a question about the rules and I always like to go back to the rule book rather than trying to remember it. And I was like, actually, I really want to paint this. I really want to have because it's self-contained, it's achievable. Also, it's space marines and they're easy. I could do that. And so that's kind of on my list. So I've got them all lined up. And the next step is to kind of overcome the laziness barrier and actually undercoat them. So we'll see. Ask me in five years time and they'll still be in the same place. I believe in you. I believe in you. I think you can get them done in five years. At least at minimum, a colored can of spray paint. Yeah. I'm saying. A colored can and a wash, you know, and. I mean, that's basically a space marine, right? You're done. Yeah. Exactly. Back in the day, I was pretty quick. My best was a unit of 30 Skaven in half an hour using some crazy spray gun techniques. But yeah, unfortunately, I feel like Jean Wilder and Blazing Saddles. You know, I paint with this hand. Right. I love it. No, that's that's totally understandable. And you know, space brains are the good fallback. Like when you're because they're just like, well, blood angels are red, dark angels are green, altruines are blue. These are easy. Yeah. Like, yeah. There you go. Tom, what about you buddy? What do you been working on? Night Haunt actually. I've had some folks send me some bits and help out. I'm doing a set of conversions for a my my hollow hearth. Night Haunt slash Dark Elf City. And so I'm converting a bunch of ghostly boys to all be the remnants of Druchy souls. So nice. Cool. I love it. Okay. For myself, I finished up my shard speaker and I'll I'll post her up here in a couple of days. Once I get a chance to take some good pictures and with her done, that means it's now time to work on these guys. We're betting heavy on the twin souls. I got 10 of them ready to go. I did do some head swaps on some of them. I used some of the weird heads because some of the weird heads look cool. And then I switched for this is like a canari head. You see that? Right. Which I think actually looks really awesome on there with the head prongs. So yeah, it looks very demonic, right? Some of that stuff. So got those ready to go. Hopefully I'll get those done this weekend. And then there's only one unit left in the new slanesh that I have to finish. That's it. It's just big old fatty boom, fatty glutos or scallion. Although mine is not going to be a chunky boy. He's going to get replaced with something more luxurious. But that's all right. I do love that that exists in that that character exists. Is that different facet of slanesh? Yeah, absolutely. It was always talked about but never shown in the miniature. It was so nice to see that. Absolutely. Like the gluttony thing has always been there in slanesh. A lot of the stories featured characters like that. But you didn't have any actual miniature representation of it. So no, it was great. I just want to do a slightly different character. So nothing, but I'm not, I'm not against it in any way. I love it. I say roll them out. I mean, that guy looks more like me than what the big guy is going to replace it. It does. Let me say that from talking about personal representation. I think Glutus is probably a little closer. So there you go. Story of my life, yeah. All right. So with that, let's actually get into our main segment here. Let's talk about designing war games. And I just realized this whole time, I haven't been taking the time codes, which means I'm going to need to go back afterward and watch and figure out what the time codes are. But that's okay. Whoopsies. That's fine. Okay. So I'll pick up this. So I have at least the rest and I'm only watching the beginning. So let's talk about designing war games. And I actually want to start out and James, not that you need to prove your bona fides or anything like that, but I thought just it might be fun to start out by having people just talk about, you know, how you're going to define why you're into it. Some projects you've worked on that you particularly loved or what you loved about them, just that kind of stuff, right? What draws you to this profession, right? It's, yeah, it's a good question, isn't it? It's like, I was trying to, I think it was for, I did an interview for something recently and yeah, the first question was, why do you design games? And it was really hard not to just do the the Sir Edmund Hillary, you know, why did you climb over Everest and it's like, game design really works for my brain. I've got a very, I don't know, analytical is the wrong word, but I like seeing patterns and things and I think game design for me fulfills that, it gives me lots of like challenges and puzzles to solve, but also, I really enjoy making things that I can then watch people have fun with and that is such a rewarding experience. Nothing quite matches for me, the experience of the game I've written, especially if it's one that is out, you know, they're playing it at a shop or a club or a convention, I've had nothing to do with them playing it. They're just organically playing this game, especially because that means by that point, generally it's out in the wild, I can't tink with it anymore, so the pressure is off for me to fix it, you know, but like, I love that kind of ability. I've always likened it, like designing a game, I see it as it's like composing music in the, what I'm doing is I'm effectively creating a thing that then people will go and put their own spin on in the act of playing it and will enjoy it their own way in the same way that when you compose a piece of music, you'll hand it off to an orchestra or to a pianist or whatever and they will give it their own flair, but you've kind of built the framework for that. And so yeah, I just, I adore that about game design and also I like experimenting, trying out new things, bringing in interesting mechanics. It's like, I'm full of, oh, wouldn't it be cool if little mechanical ideas that I've written down? And yeah, that's just, I think, I wouldn't know how to not design games. I've always done it. It's just these days I'm lucky enough to get paid for it. Nice. Is there, is there any particular thing? And I don't mean whole game. I literally mean like game element, right? Something that you created that you look at still to this day and you're like, like that one, like that was a good one. So I think the, so going back to Silver Tower, which is one of, I think I did three games in the main studio. So I did Silver Tower, Gaucho's number, Trail at Calf. Then I went down to specialist, specialist brands, as it is officially known. And I did Titanicus and Necromunda and then did Blitzball on a freelance basis after I left, but going back to Silver Tower, for me, the, everything around the Destiny dice system is, I'm really happy with that because it does so many things in one go. To me, I like games that are quite frugal on components and use things in multiple ways. Because I think it's, it's a lot easier to design a game where you have no constraint when it comes to components, but working in the design studio, the focus of course is always the miniatures. And so we're always very lean on additional components. So having hammered away at this system and then realizing that I could fold several other things into it and make it work. So for those that don't know what happens is in Silver Tower, you roll each character gets four action dice, they get to roll and then they spend those dice in their turn to do things. But also there's a collective pool of five Destiny dice, which I think are called fortune dice now in Cursed City. And at the start of the round, you roll those and you remove any duplicate numbers. So if there's a pair of twos, you remove those and whatever is left becomes a shared pool that the players can use. And so it gives you many things. It gives you that little mechanic for if you need to push that little bit further than your four dice, because it's always nice to give the players the option to do it at a cost, the cost being someone else now can't use that. But then also the way it plays in by the dice that you remove with the doubles has another impact that, you know, in Silver Tower it means the Gaunt Summoner's familiars pop up or you get random events happening. And then the way the random events worked was you had like a book, the adventure book with numbered passages and you rolled a d66. Yeah, and you look up that numbered passage in the book and it just felt like in hindsight it feels so elegant. I'm really happy with how it turned out, you know. And I don't think anything I've done with that complex and elegant and it feels like almost like clockwork the way it kind of all just slots together. Right, right. No, I, yes, I truly love that mechanic and I think that the other great thing about it is it creates moments where one person gets to shine by the will of kind of the whole group. Yes. Right. Like every, because generally you go like, all right, you know, I would really like to see you get to shine by the will of kind of the whole group. And so everybody else is like, yeah, you should do that. You should use the dice to do this cool thing. Right. And so then it's this moment. We're all sharing together, but then one person also gets to feel like a hero in the middle of the moment. Right. Absolutely. It's. So an interesting thing about that as well is that we talked last week about designing at a 45 degree angle. So creating cross as you lose those resources. So when you roll those dice, you want it technically as many dice as you can get. Right. As bonus dice, but at the same time, sometimes there are benefits to like, not have to, to not having all of the dice being individual numbers. There are actually benefits and some of the encounters are going to be beneficial to you. Or when you roll those double sixes or double ones or whatever and or you roll all all the dice as matching numbers that then triggers like level or not level ups but you heal and you gain an ability content. Yeah. So yeah, you're right. It feels like there's different, it pulls in different directions. It just feels like the tides of fate, you know, for you or against you. It has this interesting feel of literally like the fates pulling on the strings up and down, right? In ways you can understand. Yeah. It almost like, sorry, go on. No, please. No, it kind of, it creates that emergent narrative. So for me, with one of the big goals with Silver Tower was to go back to Warhammer Quest. Interestingly, when it was first being designed, it wasn't, we didn't know if we had the Warhammer Quest branding, but whatever the case, we always knew it was going to be compared to Warhammer Quest, right? And I was a massive Warhammer Quest nut growing up. And so I wanted to go back to that and look at the way that Warhammer Quest told a story in two different ways, many of how you played it. If you did it with a game's master and a pre-planned scenario, then the story was kind of planned out for you and the story was a, you know, a set in stone thing. What was more interesting to me was the emergent narrative that came when you're playing a random game. And it's the stories that develop around your heroes where, you know, as people, we are natural storytellers and we fill in the gaps. So when your barbarian keeps rolling one of their attack rolls, that becomes a thing. And whenever the barbarian misses again, everyone goes, oh, Ragnar's been drinking or something, you know. Right, right, right. And so with Silver Tower, the chance was to kind of combine those two and have it. There is this kind of roughly guided narrative where it forks a few weird ways with generally heading one direction. But also there is this emergent narrative and that comes from having like the Destiny Dice and, you know, what you roll for your actions in the turn and how the events come up. And you do get this kind of ongoing narrative at the table. And I love that. That is one of my favorite things in a game. Yeah, it lets you capture the lightning in a bottle moment you couldn't plan for. Right, when it's when it's a pre-structured thing, then the story is as good as basically whatever the story was written could be. With this, sometimes it's going to be, sometimes it might end up like, okay, well, that didn't really, it's nothing memorable happen. But then you also get these big spikes where things just like you couldn't have ever foreseen it and yet it happened, right, which I suppose in that case is also very zingy. Yeah, absolutely, all right. Awesome. So now I want to start digging into some individual elements of just kind of game design principles. So let's go because I have images for this. So I want to talk first principles. This is something that I don't think it's talked about enough, right? So like guiding principles, first principles, the very basic things. I know one of the things that's always been critical for me anytime that I was working on any kind of game design was literally writing down three to five bullet points of this is the heart, the beating heart and soul of the game. What it's meant to be about, it's theme, it's concept, and then having that inform every other decision you make. It's constraints and inspiration and guidance all in one. So I just thought, maybe tell a little bit or talk a little about how you've used those or what you think about that kind of approach and how that operates for you. Yeah, so I mean it's, what's really interesting is I wasn't familiar with the term first principles until quite recently. This is true of much of my game design stuff. It's because I've just kind of always done it. I've picked up my own way of doing things and I've never really taken the time to sit down and learn decent words for a lot of these things. And what I realized though is that I've been using first principles as long as I've been designing games professionally because, it's like a butterfly. You know, I will meander and do all sorts of different things. So I kind of have to lay down some constraints initially and lay down like a framework for a project before I get started on it so that I can focus myself. And so I always start out with like a design brief, like a very brief, you know, brief being upon there, a very brief set of the game is this, the target audience is this. It needs, the table space is roughly this. A lot of the time I'll go like the rough price point is this. Even if it's something which might change, it just gives me an idea because if I'm designing a $50 game, that's very different from designing $100 game. And for me as a commercial game designer, it helps to have that delineation in from the start. And I think the most important thing for me is that designing a game is a huge undertaking. I can't overstate that really. It's something that is so nebulous that it's possible. And well, it's likely that you'll get lost in the weeds and the detail. And if you don't have some kind of guiding light, then you will falter and you'll end up kind of giving up along the way. And so, yeah, part of our design process, we always start off with that brief and then we come back and we refer to it and we review regularly and say, right, is this game adhering to the things we set out for it to be? And so, yeah, it's definitely something which is absolutely integral to how we do things. But I just find it quite funny that I didn't know the name for it until recently. Sure. Well, that's one of the things that we do and we always leave ourselves room to say, it's not, it's actually a different way, but we prefer this or this is better. But having that guiding light makes that a conscious choice rather than just a general meandering, well, that's one of those things. It's, you know, because there's not a lot of, one of the reasons I was excited about you putting up the talk you did and the sort of the training course really was what it is. Yeah. Is because there is a lot of this out there, but so much of the knowledge of game design is very sequestered into the heads of the people who do it. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot of distinctions between how to design a good war game versus how to design a good board game. Right. And then again, you're going to want to access a lot of different stuff depending on just like you said, what's the audience, what's the size of the game, what's the price of the game, right? Like people are going to expect different things. What's the duration you expect the game to run, right? Is this meant to be like a fast, quick party game that people can literally knock out quick rounds in 15 to 25 minutes or is this like meant to be some kind of settlers of Katana to be the defining thing we do for the next seven weeks of our life, right? We will only look at wooden cubes and pastel colors and that will be all, there'll be no explosions. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think the first time I kind of approached the game in that way probably would have been Gore chosen, which it's such a razor sharp concept for a game. Right. There's so little fat on that design, you know, it is for me and it's going to an arena. It sounds like a joke, but it's not, you know, for which I'm going to arena and one of them will be left standing at the end and that's that was like the pitch and what was interesting was I was given that it was in my last like month in the studio before I moved down to specialist games studio and it was like we have this space for a game we have we want to include these four miniatures what can you do and I'd been toying with the idea of like gladiatorial combat games for years and always I've written one years ago and it's like, oh, well, obviously it needs to be a pit fight and but because it was this design for this small format box there were really tight constraints and what it had to be and so I sat down I was like, right, what is this it's fast it's bloody it's brutal it's quit it's it doesn't out stay it's welcome, you know, because players by nature of the game will be eliminated in the game so it can't last at that point right and just the the mechanics kind of fell out that game was written in about two weeks which is unthinkable I can't imagine how that happened but it just it was so it was so clear the concept was so clear and but if I hadn't sat down and come up with those first thoughts that wouldn't have worked out that way I think yeah, that's fascinating I cannot believe that game was you did that I can't believe any game was written yeah, I I don't quite believe it myself looking back but it definitely happened I think I drank a lot of tea he didn't sleep much and I only had like four weeks until I was leaving to go to my next job and then I had other things come in so I only had two weeks and somehow it happened but like I say I think because I'd already had a lot of ideas for pit fighting games I kind of borrowed liberally from past projects but yeah, it worked out on first principles I mean you and I have done a lot of games together where this is a concept that we use pretty you know pretty regularly, right? like so yeah, I mean so because I sit more in a development space for me what I end up doing is taking what Vince has spun out and then throwing it out and saying this doesn't adhere to what you wanted and so for me it's a lot of me pointing at what he's written and saying you also wrote this these don't work figure it out like what's the what's the what's the bigger priority here right I think that that's so important I think it's why it's a really good thing as a designer whether you're an amateur designer whether you're doing it professionally in a commercial class to whatever to have other designers who are like you know your contemporary so you can go and talk to and say here's a thing I've done how does this look because when you're zoned in on a project it's very hard to have a good view on whether it's good whether it fits your brief you can get very attached to mechanics that you don't deserve being attached to you need to take a chainsaw to those occasionally so much of game design is removing things you know killing ideas well not killing ideas but putting them into cryostasis so they can be used later but removing them from that particular project yeah I think a lot of people think of game designers as quite additive like you keep adding ideas but I think the real skill is taken away yeah being subtractive no I agree especially as what Sam said like in the development phase you're gonna like when somebody else comes back to you and says this just doesn't work you need to remove this like listen yeah yeah you can't have an ego when you design games I mean don't get me wrong there are plenty of designers who do and I'm sure I have my moments but you really have to work to get past that because no idea is worth ruining your game right you know no idea is so sacred that it's worth your game sucking yeah I think that's that's a that is a perfect summation for that right there yeah there's an extra question in the chat from Tristan that he says does GW do that often reflected with other designers in the company so the way I can't speak to how it works now when I was there the rules team was four people and everything we did would get passed everything had multiple hands on it and I love that because it meant that you immediately get loads of good feedback you get good at giving feedback as well sure and it just kind of turns into this kind of collaborative thing also it means that there's a general house style because it kind of you know things get brought back towards the middle the wackier ideas maybe get curtailed slightly again don't know how Silver Tail made out the door but you know it means that nice and I'm sure it's all the same because I know that that kind of collaborative thing exists as a culture across the board I know like the heavy metal team works in the same way right just from a painting side like they you know one of them the other painters are constantly critiquing and giving advice to each painter who's working on something right so it's like I think that that in general is a collaborative environment which is good that is how you want to be working right you shouldn't be you can't sit in a vacuum like you need other your blinds blinds to your own picadillos of of your design yeah 100% alright cool so next up I wanted to talk about methods let's jump into sort of methodology so let me do my time stamp here so for methods alright so when I say methods you know we talked last week I kind of introduced the idea and went through and gave some examples of bottom-up design linear versus modular design right and I think in war games all these things have really easy to spot reference points right and my supposition was that GW and especially when you look at something like AOS is a very like top-down game because the miniatures designers make a miniature and it comes over and the rules writers you know make some rules for it it's quite natively when you go like I've got Archeon as the picture for this because this is like the most top-down guy ever right he's the lord of the ever-chosen the grand marshal of the apocalypse the chosen of the four gods of chaos right like the the bringer of the end times we can keep going we can get the idea right so he's this big giant dude he's got the slayer of kings we need to write cool rules for that he's got three big monster heads we need to write cool rules for that you know door guards this big impressive thing to all feed into it and then and as you look at that um linear is another one of those things that like linear design sort of naturally lends itself to a war game especially the current way a os battle tomes are written because it's like here's this thing and they go in this sub faction and then in this battalion and they have this commander who commands them and those can all be like some kind of linear stacking abilities that are all working on each other right by taking this sub faction and this battalion and this commander and this unit and they're all synergizing and that kind of thing right so how do you think about these methodologies do you think about them as an upfront thing do you think about them later on in the process like how does it factor into there if at all um yeah I think it's it's interesting because a lot of as I think I said earlier a lot of what we do is we work with licenses and you know existing IPs as need to get games and that is as you say it's very much true from when I was a games workshop I mean I I wrote the first set of certainly this was draft of the rules for Arcade ever chosen so I got to have that that fun and kind of go oh my goodness how do we take this amazing miniature because it was it's pushing the boundaries of the word miniature isn't it really but like how do you make that have rules they're as awesome as they should be um but yeah I think so I've always kind of carried that with me the idea of you start with the miniature and you look at what that says and what it conveys and what all the details and how do you get every part of the of that representing the rules in some way but then you know moving on from there with other projects I do I do like to try to emulate that in some way so I like to think I design rules in a very thematic way I start with the theme and use that as a guiding principle and then kind of move from there but interestingly when it comes to the the actual the core mechanics of the game I think I always go bottom up because I start as small as possible um so when I'm designing a miniatures game these days I start with what when it's my turn what are my miniatures doing how does my turn look what mechanics am I using you know what how do they interact with each other with the battlefield and then once I've kind of and I won't write miniatures and some dice and whatever else and some cards and just start playing around and then start gradually folding more things in kind of a it's a top down bottom up sequence because I mean the middle effectively yeah exactly I kind of build up from the from the ground really it almost sounds like what you're describing is like your the way you start is with the core gameplay loop right the current player doing a thing right where I am being active in the game that's going to be your primary gameplay loop right so how do I move or attack or interact or cast a spell or summon a psychic power or do whatever right yeah be any of a myriad infinite number of things right but that core gameplay loop being decided first I think is an interesting place to start with the core mechanics because then it becomes much easier to build all the rest of this stuff on it yeah right well that is the majority of your experience right like that core loop is the majority of the game and conversely if you get that wrong not only or the game not feel right but anything you do from that point onwards if you go back and change that core mechanic everything else tumbles you have to start again you know it's like you have to even before I look at round sequence you know is it an I go you go type game or is it an also activations or something the first thing is what diminishes do on the table because that's the core experience and that follows through into other kinds of games I do so I'm going to do a board game it comes back to on the player's turn what does the player need to be doing what are their considerations and I think one of the things is holding mechanics so because a gate as I said before game design is a big nebulous thing we don't try to design the whole thing at once we have a system we call the ignorables so at different stages we go we ignore these things we ignore these things till here and we ignore these things and so on but what it means is that I might say I'm going to use a placeholder round sequence for now so I'm just going to move my stuff shoot and then do something else in a board game it might be I know I'm going to write a rule later for how many resources you get on your turn for now I'm just going to roll a dice and say you get that many and it's almost like a scaffold that you put in so you can examine that core gameplay loop and work with that and not kind of get distracted by trying to make everything else work really well as well and then later once you've got that yeah once you've got that nugget then you work out and you gradually it's like everything in one go you gradually do it and that when I kind of hit on that that was a massive development point for me as a game designer because before I was doing it professionally before I mean you know going to work in games workshops design studio to learn the craft is fantastic because you can imagine you know you're working with these amazing minds not just people in the design team but there are people who have been game designers previously and so I really learned all the skills there before then I would go in and try to write an entire games rule book before even playing it and it's impossible you know you'll never do anything good working that way I think and you have to kind of do it a little bit at a time and so yeah I've kind of it's sort of the methodology that's developed really it was never a thing that I set out to kind of make but we ended up with this process that we use what's happening is like I know the ground I need to be sure I'm standing on solid ground right now and I picture myself like standing on a coastline in the fog and I don't want to fall in the water right then I die and drown so I know where I'm standing is solid at the moment I know that's rock everything else in the fog I can't see yet right so we take like one step at a time through the fog and we ignore everything else it doesn't matter what's off in the distance it doesn't matter what we can't see we're just worried we can't step through the fog right until we get ourselves back off the edge of the cliff onto solid ground right I'm kind of building it up yeah that's fascinating I really like that concept yeah just if people are interested in finding out more about that the games on online which is the six hour course we did last year that goes into this in quite a lot of detail very nice plug plug plug there you go hey absolutely yeah six hours of me talking with a massive I many of us had this is the one thing look I think here you and I at least like when it comes to haircuts the lockdown haircut was probably not a problem for either of us so that's nice no absolutely absolutely got a pair of clippers you're good to go I had regular haircuts throughout the whole lockdown never a concern so take that rest of the world with all your hair that's the we found the one benefit there we go yes man this is all just been biting my time that's it yep okay fantastic Tom any other thoughts you had on methodology or anything you wanted to to think about there no I think it's good I think we covered about a bit yeah no that was great okay so next one let's switch our image here to the next thing oh I am excited about this one oh boy oh boy oh boy that's right yep so now it's time to talk about balance the concept of balance in a war game oh here we go so obviously I'm just going to go for 10 minutes okay sure okay I see we're going to go chase chase this dragon right exactly so I really like I tried to pick art that thematically in my mind aligned with all of these different concepts and I picked balance because of storm cast and the idea of the game being balanced around the liberator and having this broken shield kind of a statement on where the game sits right now as to whether or not it's balanced around the four liberator but anyways also this is just a truly fantastic piece of art like I don't I don't know who did this but whoever you are you're doing the Lord's work anyways so yeah balance like is there anything talked about more from a user perspective in a war game right this is the thing that no matter what you do as a designer you know you're going to hear an earful about for the rest of time so I am very keen to hear how you think about balance James so hit me I've got no opinions whatsoever that's a lie that's an absolute lie I've got strong opinions and I'm going to now tell you all of my strong opinions yes that's what we want so yeah I think the weird thing with balance is that as you say it's the thing that is one of the easiest things to talk about online you know when a new book comes out as a customer it's really easy to look into it and go that's broken that's broken that's under pointed you know to get a feel straight off the bat and it's almost like it can reduce the discourse down to that thing okay but actually I think that's just the way it gets discussed beyond that there's so much more to the game that balance kind of fades into the background a bit once you get past that I think that as a designer it's really possible to kind of lose your mind chasing the concept of like perfect balance and I think it's a mistake that a lot of designers make it's a thing that I go into I've got a whole section in the designing miniature war games seminar about the myth of balance yeah you shared a little hot take tweet from that point that I really love yeah yeah which as I said at the time I'm hoping it gets taken out of context and posted all over I don't know 1D4 channel wherever it will be but yeah it was like the fact that balance in a war game doesn't matter as much as you might think from the way it gets talked about it does still matter I have to say that very like I always want that scrolling on the screen it does also matter still matters just not as much as you think yeah because the thing is in a game like that's got very little theme or no moving parts chess or go or any kind of abstract puzzle game balance is really important because the game is it's a contest it's very clear cut if it's not balanced it's solvable and then there's no enjoyment in playing it right the more complexity a game has so the more moving parts the more expandable it is the more difficult it is to balance it also the more difficult it is to gauge balance so it's kind of harder to notice when it's not working you have to get a bit more granular with it but you think in a war game the number of variables a game of Age of Sigma you've got not just your army you've got the opponent's army so you're facing off against any number of different combinations of units you've got however many units in your army you've got all different synergies you've got different scenarios different battle plans you've got different terrain setups different deployment areas different distances apart how can you say with certainty that unit X is always worth Y points you can't all you can do is cast the net Y do as much research as you can as much play testing as you can and give the average value because if you think in terms of in a 1000 point game each point is 10% of your force you know so like is that unit if it's a 20 point unit is it doing I've said maths now is it doing the correct amount of stuff for the proportion you've given it and all you can do is run the numbers as many times as you can and try to get it about right because there are no completely true answers when it comes to balance in a war game and also on top of that not to kind of get on my soapbox or anything imbalance is actually not a bad thing in a lot of way yeah yeah this is what I'm keen for the feature out of bug of imbalance yes yeah absolutely especially when it's circumstantial yeah precisely because the thing is that imbalance it kind of it works you know as a narrative player I love narrative games imbalance feels narratively correct you know you don't get completely evenly matched battles in history or in the story in the Black Library fiction that doesn't happen so it recreates that you know two sides are really evenly matched as a competitive person the things that you get joy from and you get a challenge from is finding the little imbalances and working them to your favour surely you know that's the thing like list building and that is all about exploiting the best to kind of push it because if everything was perfectly balanced that wouldn't be possible right every army would be exactly as good as every other army so there wouldn't be any skill in finding the good combinations and finding the things that work and one of the things I didn't talk about here that I didn't have queued up in our thing but we talk about psychographic profiles a lot on here like often through the lens of the classic magic the gathering Timmy John's psychographic profiles and like that slight imbalance if it's there in any degree the Johnny psychographic profile draws a huge amount of like value from the game and remains interested in the game by being able to find those elements right and quote-unquote exploit what they see like oh if I use this thing and this thing and then push with this thing as well I can create this situation that's very advantageous for me and that needs to be that needs to be there if you don't have that it's not a war game as far as I'm concerned you need to have that but also I mean if you have a perfectly balanced meta to use the terminology how do you introduce anything new to it without breaking it in some way so in order for a game to be expandable and to have an interesting arc then you need to have things in balance because what you need is a situation where army X is slightly overpowered so then army Y gets released and that maybe topples that from the thing everything shifts around a bit and whether that's the case of releasing new rules adjusting points values you know just adding new things there are all different ways of doing it but they're all things that keep the game alive and all of them come back to slight imbalances the massive caveat is that the game can't appear to be obviously broken right there's like this tolerance level right like it's you can I think of like skyscrapers okay so like if you've ever worked in a big skyscraper and you work up on the upper floors like for a long time I worked on like the 35th floor of this building and yeah I mean it was great it was beautiful view but when it was super windy it was this crazy building it was real long and like a rectangular skyscraper okay so it was an additional square so it was not a square it's not a square yeah exactly and when the wind would be shearing in that direction you could literally go into the bathroom and you would see the water in the toilet doing this okay because the whole building was rocking back and forth a couple inches yeah from the wind shear right so that's and that's good that's not bad like the building was built design that's design that's intentional design the building was built with the ability to rock a couple inches because if it had to say still it would eventually like too much stress would happen in the building would just snap and break right and then would collapse and that would be a very bad obviously right so there's this tolerance level that it can that it can have where like if it just totally imbalanced the building never stands up it's obvious that that's an unsafe building that should be condemned we don't want to go in that right if it's too rigid then it doesn't move at all and it just breaks when any slight piece of sand gets in the machine right yeah yeah that's it absolutely and I think you know you just need to have that kind of you find that that that principle and the skill is knowing when your game is balanced enough knowing when it goes past that I mean I say skill it's a case of hard work and play testing and listening to your feedback and all that sort of thing you know but yeah it's just you know I think especially in like newer less experienced designers they they view perfect game balance is like this holy grail you know we must make the perfectly balanced game I've not gonna name names but we know someone in the industry who has a small skirmish game and he was getting someone to do a second edition for him and the guy who got to do it said to him I haven't started designing the game yet so I haven't worked out the points calculations yet and I was like red flag red flag right this this guy doesn't know his stuff because you can't you can't base your game around it it goes back to what we were saying earlier about methodology you start off with the core gameplay loop right the one of the last things when we look at our process the ignorables one of the things that we ignore latest is perfect is fine balance right we deal with general balance does the game work as it feels it should are there any horribly broken moments but we don't try perfect that like perfect that balance until the very end of the process yeah especially because again if you change anything balance goes out the window again right you right it's like when you're doing a nice if you're doing a nice sculpture you start with a chainsaw and you end up with I don't know a toothpick or whatever it is they do right you don't start with the toothpick and end with the chainsaw yeah yeah some killer analogies tonight I'm loving it this is metaphor show absolutely so here's the thing I want to as we just exposed his balance is so fast and there's so many different takes in this I think that it's also interesting to me that there are multiple avenues to balance so when we look at something traditional like chess and go and those types of those types of you know tightly competitive simple moving parts puzzle games right you can tightly balance things by having by having effectively mirrored yeah what I want to say like sets of game elements yeah yeah right so much that the symmetrical game yeah thank you yes perfect exactly right Tom right okay so then if you but at the same time as we expand out then you can do things like lots of testing and QA and development to refine a mathematical outliers that's fine that can also be a direction as games that grow in complexity but again as you said you have to hit the average there's another interesting path the sort of the path of less trot I think which when I look at games I look at a game like more time so more time is this classic game people love it right and obviously held in high regard by a large swath of the community both in nostalgia and in actual play still and that game is horrendously unbalanced it is it's a hot mess that we love it right it is wildly off the rails when it comes to balance and in fact I remember I made a video about this like years and years ago why I thought more time was such a unique and interesting game and Thomas Tomas I probably mispronouncing his first name but one of the gentlemen who created it he reached out to me and we had a nice conversation super great dude and he said that like one of his goals was just to make things so random that it was impossible to ever bank on a game plan which was its own form of balance when almost everything you're doing is writing on an RNG and the RNG swings so wildly right from like nothing happens to your dead instantly right suddenly like things just sort of balance because in the chaos it just becomes kind of balanced right it's like the cells in your body are actually these crazy wacky moving thing all going and pulling in different directions and doing their own stuff but yet we're still a human being walking around right you don't have outliers when everything's an outlier right yeah absolutely I mean like in a sense and so like you don't have to because from a competitive standpoint and you know like competitive obviously wanting to angle towards balance one of the challenges that you're looking for is consistency right and when that consistency is not there balance is achieved because you can't guarantee results anymore right yeah it's like there's a fantastic chat by Jeff Engelstein who's a really good board game designer and he did a really interesting talk at GDC game developers conference a few years back and it talks about nature of randomness in different ways like how there are different axes you've got random like randomness also predictability and there are all sorts of different you know uses for different types of randomness in different ways and to summarise his key point it's that one of the most useful types of randomness in a in a in a board gaming in a sense is what they call pink noise randomness which is where there's it's predictable but there are there are these chances for massive spikes yes and things where you get the the the the the unexpected result occasionally generally you can predict what's going to happen but you know that and the thing is when you get a game where there's loads of dice rolling the stats even out like that you know you get this rough curve what you can expect but then suddenly oh wait I've managed to critical hit their leader with my absolute scrub of a henchman and kill them in one shot and that leads to go go back to what we said earlier that leads to emergent narrative amazing story moments which means you forget the imbalance because you having too much right right right yeah I think that's such a good point to close on it's like in the end if that primary gameplay loop as you mentioned is solid and it's providing for those memorable moments as we talked about earlier right that that emergent gameplay in the end that is what you will remember the things we remember in the games that the games we love are those moments where something probably abnormal happened right yeah like if I if you could play a whole game of Warhammer of any type at any point in Warhammer's history I don't care like pick either either flavor and talk about anything since the game was created right and if you finish the game and then I turn to you and said what was the attack role of the dice in this of this unit in round three you'd be like I have no idea what you're talking about I don't I think I hit maybe pretty well I guess I don't know right but if I said to you but like if there was a moment where you ended up using Archeon speaking of Archeon to like and you put somebody in the sword you remember that moment for the rest like you're like the cool moment was when I put the person in the sword that was fantastic it goes back to when I was working on Silver Tower the first thing I did was I went back to loads of forum posts and reviews and things like retrospectives on the quest and what were the things that people liked about Warhammer quest not one person mentioned any of the mechanics it was all the story moments all the time that we killed a bloodthirster and then a snotling killed my barbarian or you know we were level one characters but we accidentally rolled on the monster table and were swarmed by level seven bad guys or whatever it might be right none of it was to do with and then I rolled a three right right and then the modal outcome happened okay yeah like again that's not to say that those the point being is that there's it there has to be that tolerance level as we said because you do need a lot of modal outcomes right because if again if everything is just wackiness and randomness roles like then there can be a problem where nothing becomes memorable anymore right you need a baseline to reflect against I think that pink noise point is such a good point I know the talk you're talking you're mentioning I'll link it down in the great talk fantastic alright I think that's good Tom did I miss anything on balance no I mean what I would say is it's interesting because balance is such an illusion right in like in every like at every stage of the game and what I mean by and I don't mean like the game itself but in the every stage of development because it doesn't matter how close it is you can't you can't like points will never capture what a thing is and and for you know to speak for the Johnny's like I want there to be those hooks and those at that unevenness because it gives me space to play yeah the sharp edges let you grab one right right yeah right like I like in balance but that's different then systemic problems right okay there's a difference between balance issues that like points can adjust for and or whatever can adjust for and or we can write this one new scroll or rule set for this one game piece right yeah right but like if you had for example like choosing a mechanic or like um you have systemic issues with the way that certain mechanics fire or function you know the one that I'm thinking about that like it was corrected eventually but it was in early AOS on a on a six plus X triggers yeah sure um that has been that course has corrected because we don't do stacking modifiers triggering effects anymore right everything is on like you'd get three three plus ones and then you're getting on a four plus every time kind of thing yeah yeah right yeah yeah like I like the one that obviously stands out to me is the the tomb kings uh the snakes who could trigger mortals on like two pluses they uh they could they had a mortals on sixes but they had the ability to stack wound bonuses in the army itself and so what would end up happening is that they would uh do lots of damage and lead on obliterate people because they had they had tilted so far outside of the expected norms right what was meant to be like maybe a sixth maybe a third chance of happening was suddenly happening like 87 percent of the time and it's just like whoa right right that's a systemic issue right like that's how that's how those rules were being designed that has nothing to do with those individual units right that was an approach and and what I would say is like I have like that frustrates me more than like points values and those other things because other like those are systemic problems and those aren't balance issues in the traditional sense those are system those are design problems yeah yeah absolutely and again that's why you get your core design sorted and then you deal with balance later that that's what I would say yep 100 percent all right great stuff okay let's keep moving because it is late and James does have a child who is not going to be as respectful of his time all right so design versus development so this is something that I think you know you mentioned having the separate talk on this is something that Tom and I are obviously very keen on as anytime Tom and I have worked on games we fill the two separate roles Tom's a great developer I'm a garbage developer so there you go so yeah tell me about how you think about oh sorry go Tom I won't look at rules until Vince has a finished product for me right and then I will go through it means that whole right yeah like a whole package and because because I don't want to influence where he wants to explore but at the end of the day like you know work still has to be done yeah I mean from my point of view I see obviously there are two very different skill sets designing a game and making a game I mean one of the big things for designing a game is designing a game which if you want it to be expandable you need to have enough hooks and levers for the expansion to carry on making the game feel like it's got additional potential for more stuff but also I think for me weirdly I'm not as good as I'd like to be at developing my own stuff I think I love it when I can design a game and give it to someone else to develop and I really enjoy developing other people's games but it kind of comes back to what we were saying earlier like you get blind spots in your own work it's like adding your own novel yeah precisely and also when you design a game and then give it to someone else to do things with they'll do things you never expected and they will make it work in ways because you have your own inherent biases they will make it do things and I mean it's my favourite thing in playtesting again anecdote silver tower the destiny dice we talked about earlier there's a system in silver tower where whenever you use one of the destiny dice you also lock one of them I think you lock half of the remaining dice something happens basically you can't use all of them the next highest that's it yeah and that came from the fact that the in playtesting what I had pictured it's a cooperative game one group of playtesters sat down and they're like no I'm gonna win and they just like the first person I'm gonna use all the destiny dice thank you very much and it was it had occurred to me at all and any of all my little internal tests had all been everyone buying into the premise but this group rejected the premise and actually made the game better because it tied into the theme much better which was this is a random group of heroes that have been pulled into this place together and some of them are actually kind of bad guys you know they shouldn't be working together and so it was interesting like how that if I had kept the testing just to the internal team we wouldn't have had that piece of complete blindside inspiration which improved the game and so yeah like you say you can't develop your own work anywhere near as well as someone else can and yeah go on no finish your part I don't know where I was going so you go for it no I was just going to reflect on I remember an RPG that Vince and I worked on one time a long time ago and he handed me a set of like some subsystems and I remember writing him back okay do you want me to always choose X because if you want me to always choose X keep it how it is the incentive structure you have created always points me this direction yeah um and you just don't always see that because you see the options you're like oh I've given you options right this is my excuse for why I suck so much of all the games I've designed because I don't see the exploits and the things that are going to be advantageous plays I played so Titanic is a game I've played a bit of I haven't played as much of it I only played two games as it came out played a lot of it during development of course sure but when I played it I suck my tactics are dreadful my strategy is dreadful because to me I'm looking at it in a very different way from someone who's trying to play it well you know right I think it's part of the same you know the same thing is that I'm looking at a whole different set of stuff when I'm designing a game when I'm developing a game and yeah trying to do it for my own thing is difficult because again inherent biases yeah exactly I think that the point about the Destiny Dice and Silver Tower is so well stated right because you had this inherent way that in that was sort of the subconscious bias you weren't even clearly aware of that this is a cooperative team we're all playing this together hence we will act in this fashion right I think the example of AOS that people that got out there was when we think of conga lines right like when you can like okay so that's how coherency works cool so like that's a valid way to set up my unit with two people towing into a bonus giving the bonus to the person over here on this other side of the field right and that's perfectly legit because the rules didn't tell me I can't do it right and in my mind I don't have the bias of thinking like some little unit going across the table right yeah I think about removing casualties was the one that I really monopolized on where like you could remove anywhere so I just was like I'm not going to move this unit that I've taken up most of the board with so I'm going to leave it spread out and leave my one model in the back and then remove everybody so that one model the unit is within range and the rest of the unit is just you know like there's like 20 guys it's fine it's fine hey we're still getting plus one to hit don't forget hey guys I think the best example the best example of that for me was with Aged Sigma again was the do you remember the strange times when bases didn't matter and you measure to the closest point in the model which I don't think anyone actually did I think everyone just went we'll use bases but it was a design kind of direction and the thing was it assumes that people will build their models sensibly so to speak in a way which matches the thing and the problem is that well people are going to see that there's a thing that I can take advantage of so I'm going to have all my models with an arms sticking out forwards they can get a little bit of extra range or something and it was that was an inherent thing because the environment in which it was written everyone of course who's working in the design studio who's testing the game they've built their armies in a sensible fashion you know like they look thematic they're built on brand so to speak so there was no consideration it was never considered presumably that that was ever going to be an issue and then and things like stacking like there was nothing about how saying models couldn't overlap each other's bases because bases don't count then you can just kind of do that and it looks horrible but it was totally possible within the rules and I'm so glad the bases came back yes absolutely yeah because I think it's different when you if you think like okay here's my book to assemble my things and I'm going to look at that yep I'll glue them on the base just like that exactly as these steps a step step step then I put a little mud on and there we go and now everybody's the same thing but that's not how we do it right like yeah you you've got all this craziness going on out there and so I think that and by the way it's not a bad thing that's a good thing absolutely not a bug people personalizing their stuff bring like yeah forget the game exploit just people want to make the beautiful part of this hobby is that it contains this physical thing we make our own right that's why we're doing this right otherwise they just play a computer game version of this but I don't want that yeah exactly 100% yeah I mean to me development is so important because it is that chance where somebody is going this is out of bounds this isn't this doesn't fit with your original guiding principles this does your incentives are at a cross here right somebody who's the simplest way to talk about it is someone trying to break your game right and did you and you can't like I think this is something that people often get caught up on I think sometimes designers try to write in rules to stop bad actors bad faith actors and it's not that you're not trying to stop bad faith actors like people who are sort of openly acting against sort of the core tenants of the game you're just trying to stop normal players who are going to respond to incentives from doing something that is clearly bad right and there's a very different line there you can't stop all the bad faith actors but you can make sure that the expected normal way that when somebody picks up the book and reads it goes okay I see how I'm supposed to play this and then that's the way that it's fun to play right that's what they want I think it's very very obvious when you see a game system that has been written in such a way as to attempt to interact any idea of right uh misinterpreting the rules you know intentionally I think Blood Bowl is a great example there's anyone that's played Blood Bowl the current the before the most recent edition the rules the competition rules pack which was a thing which was developed over almost like 15-20 years of play development and it was development of a game which was primarily played in a competitive setting and it meant that the rules read like you know the the manual for an actual real world sport it was not intuitive it was full of caveats and almost like legalese in places and people could still find little ways to you know reinterpret things or get things wrong because it's like that it's the Star Wars line I always come back to which is you know the more you tighten your grip the more things will slip through your fingers the more you try to close down loop holes the more you'll open up potentially because even just like by a mission well if you are very clear about this thing but you weren't very clear about this thing you can't say I can't do this thing so I'm going to do this thing yep you know yes it's the absolutely oh my gosh this is such an important point I want to move on to the next one but I just want to hone this in because I think this for a rules designer is like such a key element the second in one place in your book you set a different expectation of detail and clarity in what isn't allowed the second you go too far in the text and start changing the way that it is and also you can't do this thing but you can do this okay great now that you've said that's once you've said that's how it is every other place where you didn't say that where you were silent people will just fill the void yeah right like instantly yes so many times where I'm like Vince you need to clarify this you need to add this qualification otherwise it will be misread and he goes no if I added here then we have to add it everywhere else and that adds a thousand words to the project yeah there was something back in when I first joined the studio there was an FAQ that went out for I think the Dark Angels Codex for 40k and it was it was when Warhammer 40,000 had rules for like power swords power axes and power things like whether it was sword action something suddenly matted previously just power weapons now it matted and the FAQ the way it was written was is the lion's sword magic relic kind of the kind of thing is the lion's sword a sword and FAQ that was in there and the answer was yes but that opens a can of worms because now everything with the word sword in the title by extension surely is also a sword and so you get players arguing well my storm sword super heavy tank is also a sword so that gets to have you know you have to squint and turn your head sideways to get to that point but people will do it my storm sword is a sword I love it so much that's the line I'm talking about between bad faith actors and normal players playing wrongly absolutely oh my god that's so good alright let's close this out let's talk about the audience this is I think a good place to leave it because it's one of the things that we all that I I know is really important is you want to keep your audience engaged you want to think about the personas who is this game for who's going to be playing it that kind of thing and I know this seems like this is certainly a first principle type of area as well it's something important to design early but I think it needs to be ever present one of the reasons I put this last is because throughout the whole life of the game it's one of those things that has to stay ever present in your mind right because everything needs to be derivative of that of who your audience is what their expectations are and what they're going to enjoy right you write a very different sort of game like I said earlier if you're writing a game for people to play at a party where they're all getting together you know it's a holiday you just want a fun board game to have a good time with you know couples getting together versus like settlers of Catan it's just like it's the ever present example of like no this is too much I'll just say the cones of Dunshire there we go use the cones of Dunshire yeah it's just a very different example right so how do you think about the audience throughout the life of designing the game and the personas yeah I think a big part of it like as you say you peg a lot of it down during that initial design process where you're kind of thinking what is this game who is this targeted out because you know there is there's only so much wiggle you get within your design once you got your design set here are your parameters you can't kind of push over here without really messing it up so you've kind of established who your core target audience is and then as you develop the game you might go well actually these things we're adding now will appeal to this kind of gamer and we always certainly try to think of that like you know we think within the general set of where our gamers are for this particular game we're working on how does that split up what are the people wanting to do and when you're looking at a war game you want to have things that are the hooky in the Johnny elements that are the cool granular little rules they can play around with but you also want things that just tell cool stories on the table rules that are evocative and big and loud you also want things which are just an opportunity to add lots of cool stuff and you know because you want it as much as you can point something for every release you put out point something to every category of gamer that's going to be interested in your thing you know so it absolutely has to be a thing that you think of I mean I think from where we come at it a lot of what we've done lately is like we've done a lot of dungeon crawler board games because people know us for that sort of thing so we get a lot of the same sort of what we're doing in the west dungeon crawlers and sports games that's like we're going to re-brand our company dungeon crawlers and sports games but like I mean sports games is a great example we're working on a sports game right now which is it's not Blood Bowl it's a similar kind of milieu if you like but straight away you know you've got a particular type of person who wants to play that game and then it's just a case of thinking well how does this game satisfy the subcategories and again it's a thing that what we do is we try to satisfy that by getting playtesters that are very different so we make sure our playtest group is divided up into as many different types of people as possible. When I first joined the GW studio team the playtest team for 40k was only about half a dozen people at the time it was very small scale that's a whole different story but they were all very hardcore competitive right you know pull out all the little tricky exploits and things and my first move when I kind of took over running the playtest team because I was the new guy that was my job was I brought in like half a dozen people I knew around the business who were big narrative gamers or they just loved collecting models on the table because then you're getting those perspectives and if you're not doing that in testing then you're not going to see that reflected in which people want to play your game when it comes out right right yeah I mean Tom I know you've been back into magic in a big way recently sucked down that endless void of the abyss but like that's I think something that they've always focused on right like there are cards that appeal to this thing that people are going to do this sort of like combo stuff cards that appeal to this type of person who like big monsters and cards that appeal to people who want to have like little fast weedy dudes who spin out you like dump your whole hand real fast right like these different types of players that are around there's going to be those kinds of cards in every set for them and I think that's another thing that when you're when you're doing a wargame you think like do I have forces or warbands or whatever your whatever your thing is that somebody's going to get attached to right do I have those representational elements that are going to appeal to those different player types right do I have the smashy smashy thing do I have the careful thinky thing you know whatever right you can decide you can divide these in a lot of different ways yeah absolutely well it's yeah go ahead and say it's just not it's not only magic it's all games like I even think about like RPGs I think about D&D I've been like my kids are on spring break right now and they decided that they wanted to learn how to play D&D and so like I've been running a game for them for the last couple days like them and their friends it's a bunch of ten year olds playing D&D it's fantastic but it's so funny because I could see going in like the different classes appealed to different elements of each of the characters and so one of their friends I'm not going to name his name was like I'm going to do a dragon born rogue and I was like of course you are because because of course like because of his personality type sure like that's what like I just knew that's where we were going where my my son was like I'm going to do an elf ranger and I was like yep it's like character class as psychological profile isn't it right right absolutely right and you get get to see that in like but in that's obviously a microcosm in D&D but that applies whether you're picking armies that applies whether you're doing play styles and magic all of that works itself out as people the way that people relate and engage a game completely agree all right James anything else you want to you want to leave everybody with thanks for having me on it's been really fun to chat about this stuff if people have enjoyed like listening to me ramble about about games come and buy our courses we've actually we've got a live one coming up like say in a couple of weeks time we've got some tickets left it's running twice I think on Monday also Wednesday the 17th or 14th and Sunday the something of April the details are all on the website but basically that is that's a two hour chunk of me talking about game design squeezing in all sorts of anecdotes and things people can ask questions interact all of that if you want more of this come and give me money to tell you things help me feed my child there you go there you go I love it yeah fantastic all like I said all the links will be down below so check it out you know this is I think James is fantastic I love somebody putting out this kind of formal almost education matter because like I said there's so much of this knowledge that's scattered around and I love the idea of having you know having almost like a learning path that people can take to actually understand these things so fantastic all right well for all of you out there who watched thank you so much we hope you enjoyed this this was a really fun show James thank you so much for being on brother absolute pleasure thank you go check out all those links down below don't forget to hit like on your way out we really do appreciate hitting like helps other people find the show and it's so easy to do why it's just clicking a button it's that simple subscribe obviously already if you haven't by the way if you want to hear more about this kind of like design thing and how it's going to apply I promise you we're going to get into this a little bit when we talk about Lumineth next week because I am going to argue that it's the first army that's been designed in a very very different way than every other army we've thought of as this is the first true blue army we'll see what I mean by that next week so hope to see you then but as always thank you so much for watching and we will see you next Wednesday