 Rare Game Mechanics. Now, what do we mean by this? Because this would be a very different panel if I was not at, say, PECS Unplugged, where you're playing some of the most esoteric niche board games that are out there. But tabletop games are a really interesting place to talk about game mechanics. Because tabletop games, unlike video games, don't have a computer to do all the heavy lifting. Any mechanic you design, any mechanic you engage with has to let humans deal with all of the consequences of that mechanic at a table, ideally without a spreadsheet or a pen and paper or an advocate. Though if any of you play 18XX games, often Excel is very useful in those games. The 18XX people all laughed. But what do we mean by rare? We're going to spend the next 45 minutes talking about Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo. There's a lot of different ways we can define rare, and I want to talk about some of those definitions. This is also a crowd, myself included. I'm stereotyping here. We like to be a little bit pedantic about rules, about definitions, whether or not something is technically a game, and I want to head that right off. We're not going to use this definition, because that covers almost everything you're playing at PECS Unplugged. But this one's a little more interesting. Some of the mechanics we're going to talk about today are rare, except in one particular genre, one particular niche. I mentioned those train games before. Some of you might have seen some people sitting at a table for four hours playing a game where it looks like they only took two turns each, and they're moving trains around and manipulating a stock market. Lots of mechanics are super common in 18XX games that no one's ever seen in any other board game outside of that context. A good example I would use here, we're not going to talk about this as a mechanic today, are trick-taking games, like Hearts or Euker, or, I don't know, there's so many of them. Moo! Let's see, Nukosu dice. I tried to mention some modern ones. Until relatively recently, trick-taking games were very popular in America, and then in the late 50s through 60s, they started to decline. They're popular in certain geographies, but they're not that commonly known to just tabletop gamers across the board. Thankfully for all of you, over the past four or five years, a lot of indie tabletop games have started to incorporate trick-taking mechanics. There are a lot of brand new trick-taking games that are as good as, if not better than, traditional games like Euker. So I could make a really pedantic argument that trick-taking games are rare, but it's not because we're not talking about them today. This is the definition I find a lot more interesting. If you sit down at a game, and it's a worker placement game, and you tell your friends, look, this is a worker placement game, that's done most of the heavy lifting for you in teaching that game. But some mechanics, even if they are commonly used in games, have not been solidified into a pattern like that, where I can just say, oh, it's a trick-taking game, you follow suit, you gotta lead, high card wins, there's a secondary trump, there's coalitions. I can just rattle that off and compress four pages of a rulebook. So one thing about these mechanics, and some of the mechanics I'm going to talk about, you will have encountered before, even if they weren't named as such, even if they just happened to have been implemented inside of a game. This one is also very interesting. Some mechanics sound really cool. You think as a game designer, oh, I can make a game like this. You look online, nobody's made a game like this. There's probably a reason nobody's made a game like that. And last, some of these, I just wanted to talk about them in front of a crowd for an hour. So that's my escape hatch, if any of you take issue with my definitions here today. I want to start with my favorite game mechanic. This is one of the most underutilized game mechanics on Earth. It's called the rondel. You have probably encountered rondels in a lot of games, but they weren't called rondels. They didn't look like this. They might have been cards. They might have been little pawns you're moving around. It could have been some ridiculous nonsense. But in the end, they're basically just rondels. So what is the rondel? The rondel is very simple. It's a circle, and there's actions or resources or things on that circle. And what this does mechanically generally is a player on their turn, or when they take an action, will move some limited number of spaces around the rondel. It enforces a cyclical nature in the game. It enforces that you can't just... There's this whole game called Tempest where you can take actions like walk around, found a city, make babies, have a fight, sit and think. Yeah, literally, those are the mechanics of the game. Make babies is an action. So you can't just... Making babies is great in that game. You can't just hammer the make babies button constantly. That's OP. So if you implement something like a rondel, you want some iron? You got to make it all the way around this rondel to get iron again. Maybe you pay extra resources to move faster around the rondel. But there's a cycle for everything a player can do in the game mediated by the rondel. I cannot tell you how many good tabletop games have implemented a rondel, but the game designer didn't know what a rondel was, and they came up with a really complicated way to make that happen. So the funny thing about rondels is they're not even written about that commonly in gaming. That's the Wikipedia article for rondel. And what I want to point out is that Matt Garrett's just happens to be listed at the bottom. That gentleman has made like every tabletop game that uses rondels. So, here's another example of a rondel. See, very similar. Take workers, market. The market exists twice. Another thing this mechanic does, there are often games that have both situational actions and then they also have more common upkeep or maintenance or bookkeeping actions. This is an elegant way to make it easy for someone to take care of the bookkeeping or put the pedal down a little bit, move a little faster, skip the bookkeeping, take a risk. rondels can influence game design so much that if any of you are aspiring, are any of you aspiring game designers? Of course, this is the kind of con for that. I highly encourage you to specifically seek out games that implement rondels and think a lot about how is this rondel making the game progress the way that it is and then try to envision what that game would look like if you didn't use a rondel. You will learn a lot. I particularly suggest looking for games designed by Matt Garrett, which include I think Antique is one, Navigador is another one that I particularly enjoy. So, that's basically what we're going to talk about over the rest of this panel. It's a whole bunch of rare game mechanics. We're going to talk about what they do, why they're rare, maybe they're not actually rare, maybe I just have a weird heart on them for some reason like these rondels. So, the most obvious one is Hidden Movement. If any of you have never played Clue 2, this is the sequel to Clue, not that commonly known, shockingly good game relative to what you expect. I know the second half of that sentence is a load bearing but this game is surprisingly okay. But it has Hidden Movement. In Clue, Mr. Body's dead and you're all just trying to solve the crime. What if in Clue, the murderer was one of the players and they were moving around secretly and trying to kill you? That's kind of what's going on here. You are moving by drawing little lines on a pad of paper if you're the thief and everyone else is walking around triggering security cameras, doing stuff to try to catch you. And it's a pretty good game. Why don't we have Hidden Movement? Because Hidden Movement sounds awesome. Captain Sonar is a fantastic Hidden Movement game. You're driving this submarine around, they have no idea where you are. But if you've played Captain Sonar, it's real easy to make a mistake. It is real easy to mess that game up. This is even worse. There's only one thief if I cheat who would know. If I make a mistake, say I didn't cheat, there's no rules. No one is going to correct me. You've all played board games. How often does someone take their turn and you point out to them, oh no, that costs two resources because the Smurfs are in the graveyard right now or whatever, nonsense mechanic causes that. There's a sort of check and balance. It's almost like check sums in Tabletop in that everyone at the table sees what's happening every turn and you can self-correct and avoid problems, avoid mistakes. Everyone to point out if you've made a mistake. This is why this mechanic is so rare and so hard to implement. Captain Sonar is an example of a fantastic use of this rare mechanic, but look at all the mitigating factors they added to make it work. One, the cost of a mistake, not that bad. The game sort of resolves those situations gracefully via some yelling and maybe pausing the game for a moment. There's a team on each side so the team is sort of keeping each other honest and a primary mechanic in the game is trying to listen to what the other team's doing to cheat and overhear and if you catch that they've messed up that's really easy to resolve. So the game has a lot of mechanics that facilitate having hidden movement in a way that very few games have implemented or can implement. So this is very difficult to do well. This game also has another interesting aside. That little bit there, I know that's too small to read. This might be the first published patch to a board game in America. They printed these sheets and the sheets didn't actually match the board because they changed the board so they had to issue a correction to the sheets. Hidden actions, like in Roll for the Galaxy presented even more interesting problem, though it's very similar. If you've never played Roll for the Galaxy it's a lot like Race for the Galaxy. If you've ever played Race for the Galaxy I'm sorry, I'm just going to lose you at this point. But basically you roll these dice behind a shield and then you manipulate them and decide what you want to do. Then you do simultaneous reveals and you all take your actions. It's a pretty typical board game. It's super fun. I like the hell out of it. You're doing all this behind your shield. It is trivial to cheat. Let's not even talk about it. You might make a mistake. A mistake would more likely that not hurt you rather than help you in a game like this. But if you just cheat behind that shield and get caught there is zero consequence to doing it. You can pretty much just cheat at this whole game and be amazing at it. There's no good solution to that other than don't play games with people who would cheat. But it also means this is the kind of mechanic hidden actions you can only bring to the table if you trust the table. Generally we have our table that we trust but also we play a lot of games with people we might not trust that well. I'm sure I encountered someone who was slyly trying to cheat in a board game. This is why hidden actions as cool as they are are relatively rare. This is also why very, very rarely are there tournaments in games that have hidden actions unless you mitigate that by having a third party adjudicator. Real auctions. Now I'm going to call all of you stupid. Myself included. There is something that humans all humans, it doesn't matter how smart you are, how smart you think you are we are terrible at understanding the value of things. We just can't do it. It's like our brains just can't deal with it. So as a result, if there is an unbounded auction, a real auction, a serious auction, an auction that gives you a lot of options, you know bidding on stuff like I'll pay a dollar for that I'll pay three dollars, I'll pay four dollars. We're so bad at that that this game, modern art, fantastic game the game is just auctions. Now to your turn, you pick a painting and then you pick what kind of auction. There's like four different kinds of auctions that you can run and you sell the painting to the rest of the table and you go around in a circle. It's great fun. I have literally seen dozens of times someone play this game they know the rules, they fully know the rules, they are competent at the game, they've even won it before and they have bid more money for a painting than that painting could possibly be worth to them under any circumstances. Why does that happen? Because we just collectively as a species have stupid brain when it comes to valuation. It's just a thing. And then if you've gone to a lecture at say university where some schmuck on stage decides to run a dollar auction to prove a point, I'm not going to run the dollar auction don't worry, but I could auction off a dollar to all of you in the audience and very likely I would make a profit on that dollar. So auctions cause these problems and as a result when games implement bidding, they tend to do it very narrowly, they tend to heavily constrain how much you can bid. You've all played games where you can only raise the bid by one or it goes around in a circle just once and then it ends. The reason the auctions are so simple is because if you put bigger auctions in players will mess them up players will have a bad time, people will make shockingly bad decisions which leads us to my favorite auction game on earth. This game is called quantitative easing it is about quantitative easing you play a sovereign bank of a nation state in the real world like I run the bank of France and you bid on contracts you can bid anything you have infinite money you can bid any dollar any number you want to write down could be your bid as a result the bid tends to be very popular for some reason nobody knows why so the caveat though at the end of the game you get victory points for all the things you want auctions on and then whoever bid the most money loses, they're kicked out of the game then whoever has the most victory points wins this game is unbounded to the point that you have watched people like a deer in headlights just get paralyzed trying to decide what number to write down and they finally decide on like 50 or a funny number or something and then the person next to them literally writes 100 billion billion billion billion so we've all had board games crash right you've had a game that you just had to stop it broke someone knocked the table something happened board games can crash just like video games can however it is shockingly rare to have a board game that has a way to restore itself after it's gotten into a bad state to the point that when I find a game that I'm going to review on Geek Nights or that Scott and I are going to play into a thing with if they have rules to deal with mistakes players are likely to make that is like the biggest opposite of a red flag you could possibly have that the game is probably good so few game designers even consider this possibility they tend to focus on preventing mistakes but if any of you work in industrial or IT or anything like that it is literally impossible to prevent mistakes humans are going to make mistakes you spend a lot of time worrying about how to mitigate mistakes not necessarily how to prevent them so how do you recover from a situation like this what I love about this photo is how you can see the motion blur of what he's about to do you can mitigate this in a tournament by having an adjudicator cameras like all the things you could use to figure out what the state of the game was at the moment of disruption and restore it to that moment but most of you playing magic at home with your friends do not have three cameras from three different angles and two adjudicators watching everything you do so magic cannot gracefully survive this situation Puerto Rico which has a complex history in terms of theme I do want to address that in a later slide but we'll talk about that in a bit but this is a game the mare you get some colonists and you follow some math and you pull colonists off a boat and you put them in places and then you have to refill the colonists boat and you refill the boat based on the state of everyone's boards you count how many open spaces there are in buildings it's very easy to forget to do that if you forget to do that by the time you remember the state has changed you've broken the game you don't know how many you were supposed to put in the boat at the time the game has broken the rule book actually has a specific rule called if you forget to refill the colonists ship and the rule is very simple it's very elegant one, if you are reminded to refill it before the end of your turn by another player you must refill it you can't still forget if someone reminds you but you're not precluded from forgetting and hoping no one notices I've done that on purpose many times it works it ain't cheating if it's in the game in hockey, if you cross check someone you go to a peddly box for two minutes but that's kind of part of the game you can cross check someone on purpose and agree that the two minutes is the punishment you get but two what this does is it means if you have a rule to fix this if you forget so as a result if you forget earnestly or this happens you look at the rule and the rule says official rule all the players know it and thus if this situation happens the game can continue I think they implemented the error handling for this mechanic because it is the easiest mechanic to make a mistake with in the entire game and I've read that during play testing it was very commonly forgotten to do a game that does this to a ludicrous degree is Fury of Dracula Fury of Dracula is interesting because it is a hidden movement game and I said those are rare this game uses error handling to correct for situations when the player makes a mistake so that the hidden movement will not cause a problem there is a chapter of the rule a lengthy one called when Dracula cheats and it sucks for Dracula you lose a ton of blood and like you're just like you're back at your castle like it's bad news for Dracula but again you can totally cheat on purpose I'm trying to find the other Dracula's you've left around and deal with your crap but along the way you're trying to avoid them until that crab grows up to be big vampires and takes over the world or whatever Dracula's trying to do in this game it's been a while but as you're playing the game one the way Dracula does hidden movement isn't just writing things down on a piece of paper Dracula has this ridiculously complex deck of cards where there's a card for every location in the game you're laying them out on a track and the players reveal them as they find you so if the players discover that you have cheated like they go to Lisbon and they're like wait you were in Russia like yesterday now you're in Lisbon I call BS well you go to the rule book and you look at the section if Dracula has cheated and you follow that procedure and everything's great I have cheated on purpose as Dracula and won as a result if Dracula gets away with it he gets away with it so implementing error handling in this game unlocked the ability to have really complex hidden movement in this game as a result this game is fantastic except fighting Dracula is terrible and sucks at the end of the game everything about this game is great except the fight with Dracula so here's one full disclosure I'm not advising that any of you gamble money in games however it's relatively rare to get a tabletop game that has a section in the rule book about how to gamble in that game with real money but I have encountered it more often than you would think over the years Pandante is a good example of that I do approve of the idea of including those kinds of rules so that if someone wants to do this you've given them an official or a semi-official or a balanced way to do it Pandante is interesting because Pandante is basically if poker was designed by someone in this room because if you play real poker not to super disrespect poker you fold 99% of the time poker is super boring 99% of the time and every now and then you get to do the fun card you get to bluff you've actually got a royal flush and you're fucking with your friends there's all sorts of fun you can have in poker one out of 100 poker hands Pandante is poker but it's designed to have every single hand be that ridiculous exciting hand you got two people bluffing one person's got a royal flush you're using panda powers but at its core it's just poker and as a result because it's just poker you're playing for poker chips and the game is balanced in the same way that poker is balanced so there's a whole section in the rulebook that explains if you want to play this for real money just like you would with regular old poker here's how to do it the slight changes to the rules to make sure that it's fair and you can gamble for money but it's really rare for a lot of reasons don't really want to encourage kids to gamble I really want to encourage you to gamble seriously don't gamble but if you're gonna follow the rules at least so I like stacking games I like Dixcarity games like balancing games but they're almost all terrible because of one simple problem if a game has more than two players and it's a game where you're trying to not knock something down doesn't matter what game it is there's a million of these games and the first person's gonna eventually knock it down and then how do you decide who wins Joey Jojo knocked it down, there's four other players who wins I don't have time to go deep into this we've done other talks about this specific problem the terminator of who wins almost every stacking game like this on earth Jenga, Vipletti, everything is just simple modulus math based on who started and what order you play that's generally how all these games end up working in practice you can literally predict who will win from the start and the only time that gets disrupted is if someone really sucks at stacking so there are ways around this there are ways to design a stacking game that can be good, it's rarely done one example of that would be just to make the game two players then it doesn't matter at all Catch the Moon is one of the most elegant implementations of these kinds of stacking games I've ever seen the way the mechanics work you're trying to put these ladders in this ridiculous contraption to stack it up and stack it up and eventually you're going to mess up you're going to knock a ladder off or something you're going to knock the whole thing over the way the game works is if you mess this thing up the game just perceives and you basically get a star you get a negative mark against you and you keep going around until eventually the game ends and whoever played the best wins the game if you knock the whole thing over the next player just starts building it again so as a result of this module's math from who started first the game literally is can you manipulate this structure in a way to make it easy for yourself and hard for everyone else the thing we actually want Jenga to be Real Time in Tabletop is shocking it's not shocking, it's obviously hard to implement Real Time games have so many problems but I want to talk about Bouta Babel because it is such a good example of this one, it has a really fun mechanic Real Timeness it echoes of another game we talked about a little while ago Bouta Babel, you're trying to do your thing and make the tallest tower but at the end of the game if your tower is way too tall way taller than everyone else's towers the book says something like then you have offended god and you lose and the second place player wins the game, I just find that great but it's a real time game you're basically just playing cards down playing Paper Rock, Scissor is in a pot real time, do it as fast as possible, super fun it is impossible to play this game without making a mistake every single time I have ever played this game if you take the decks as they were played and flipped through them you'll find every player made 2-3-4 mistakes along the way and basically cheated because again there's nothing enforcing that rule and you're trying to play quickly in fact the only person, the only thing that's going to enforce the rule is the person who has the least interest in enforcing that rule the person playing the cards is going to win the game some games do it more interesting with jungle speed I have had 2 different friends break their fingers playing this game so be wary of it the game basically boils down to when a thing happens, whoever grabs this totem wins the point the rules themselves don't actually do a very good job of making that a reasonable mechanic that does not lead to injury but what I recommend this changes the game, if you have a house rule, you're playing a different game you're not playing the game that has design but in this case that's cool I urge you if you play a game like this to agree among your friends or table how you will decide who has control over the totem or who won whatever the punching, fighting, dragging scratching deck, scary game there is there we came up with a whole complicated set of rules of whoever is holding it with the most fingers if it's a tie, whoever is higher on the totem, etc we came up with the system one of our friends, their rule is somebody has it and they're the only one touching it and there are no other rules one time at magfest we actually knocked it off the table and it fell down the escalator and there was about a two second pause and then all hell broke loose another way to approach this is to make the real time component solitaire and make the real time component only interrogate the end state you basically gotta follow puzzle rules to stack these balls in this ridiculous thing and then when time runs out you see who did it the best you can't really cheat during this you can just play however because the state of your pile is only interrogated when the timer goes off and at that point we can look at your pile it's public to everyone and see if you cheated or not if you followed the rules or not the problem with games like Buddha Babel is you have to interrogate that state over the course of the game it's possible because the player who's interrogating and is also the player who's playing a lot of games have alliances everybody likes to make a deal with whoever's got Australia in risk but guess what they're gonna betray you one round before you betray them meaning you should betray them one round before they're gonna betray you meaning they're gonna betray you one round before you betray them before they see how this goes very few games have codified formal alliances meaning you trigger a mechanic and now you and one or more other players in a formal alliance that gives you powers gives you privileges or in some way affects the game directly these are super cool where they exist and this Dune game just got re-released you can totally play it though it doesn't have the amazing 70s art of the original but it's still a really good game this game has a couple things going on one thing is that it's super unbalanced but everything's unbalanced if you read the rules for any one of the factions like the Harkonnen you'll read them to yourself that seems really overpowered there's no way this game is fair what the hell but then you read like the bed of Jesuit they're just as overpowered everything's overpowered so the way the game ends up working is a nexus will happen in an event and then players can negotiate alliances just like in the movie Dune as many of you might have seen recently so the game as a result encourages you to put yourself in a position to then make an alliance with someone or a strategy to try to win together this real alliance is in games avoid the attack the winner problem that so many games have where the game's going fine it's super fun and then Juju is about to win and everyone has to gang up on them to prevent them from winning but now Sharon is about to win so everyone's going to gang up on Sharon now I'm about to win everyone's going to gang up on me and the last few rounds of the game just kind of suck and kind of beat her out and all you're doing is delaying the inevitable so this allows players to form an alliance and try to win together there's so much we can unpack here that we don't have time for seek out games that codify alliances because that leads to my favorite mechanic on earth other than the rabble actual joint victory it's rare even in the games that support it in Illuminati which is a great game I do encourage you to play it even though it's a little bit it's a little bit crafty mechanics wise if you play more modern games but it's still a good game this game usually you win by yourself and usually it definitely has the attack the winner problem as you're going around but the rules are very clear if you take an action that causes you to win the game and it just so happens to cause another player or any number of other players to reach their victory conditions and also win the game the rules are you win together screw everybody else it is hard to express how good it feels when you pull that off out of nowhere joint victory avoids all these problems but it also gives you a more incentive to do more interesting things in games stepping a bit away from tabletop if you've ever played civilization games by mail or with humans as opposed to against the AIs it's way more fun if you agree on a way to jointly win rather than the game having to come down to domination or one of the other single victory conditions if you peek out games that afford this to you directly you will often be very pleasantly surprised so some games mostly grognardy war games like to have approximate movement meaning you are not allowed to measure you're going to move an army you got a bunch of little pieces sitting around you say I want them to march forward one mile then you get out your tape measure and see how far that actually is in the train and if you messed up they might drown in a river you might not actually reach those orcs you're trying to attack it can get bad fast because it simulates that sort of fog of war and approximate fuzzy nonsense of the real world of real warfare armies in the real world are just red bricks that are slowly marching up to then intersect with other blue bricks this is rare because it requires tools this is a branded tape measure for this purpose doing light of sight when I was playing battle tech in college we had multiple laser pens that we used to try to figure this out this is rarely used because it requires a lot of the players it requires a lot of time, effort and energy and it is a common source of arguments in fact it's such a common source of arguments that I don't recommend trying to implement this in any games unless you are extremely clever so this blackbeard game presents it extremely cleverly in this game you've got a treasure island you've got a treasure island you have a tiny little map and you draw a little dot where the treasure is the tiny map is just a tiny version of the big map and all the other players are using pumpuses and rulers and drawn stuff over the big map to try to find your treasure the only person who knows where your treasure is is you and you know because you put a tiny dot on a tiny map and you have tiny miniature versions of all those tools on your board the way the game avoids the argument you're all anticipating is very simple it says if there is any doubt as to whether a player has found the treasure they have found the treasure the end Sellers of Catan does not actually have bargaining we like to think it does this is almost like a collective fiction or hallucination but the reality is if you watch pros play Sellers of Catan they only ever trade so if they are in last place and they've somehow convinced the person in second to last place to trade with them so you can try to boost each other up toward the end or if they know they're ripping the other player off you really don't want to trade otherwise there's almost no incentive to trade bargaining in games is often tacked on as an afterthought and those games are usually to be avoided or if you're a sharp player you want to win games more often if you see a game that has bargaining that looks like it's kind of just tacked on and bargaining don't bargain just ignore it don't wall everybody most likely you will win that game more often than you would if you actually bargained some games influence bargaining very well but why is it so rare why does bargaining not work out remember that auctions thing it's the same problem people are bad at assigning value to things it is very difficult for people to really understand the value of something they want to trade how many coffee beans is it worth on soybean or on whatever bean you have to figure that out and you're probably wrong so bargaining tends to take a lot of time because people don't understand valuation and if people are good enough at a game to understand valuation they often find that the only winning move is not to play but Nanza is a game that influence bargaining extremely well I was skeptical of this game when I first played it many many many years ago we sat down at the table and my friend just looks me in the eyes as I say I know you want it show me what you got and she got into it we all got into it and we were yelling around the table for an hour it was a fantastic game because the valuation in this particular game and the way the mechanics work is simple enough to where the micro like value of individual cards doesn't matter that much it's more about who trades with whom and when and as a result the valuation factor doesn't ruin the game other games like La Casa Nostra just abstract the bargaining we can bargain like hey I'll give you 50 bucks or whatever to do a thing but it's abstracted to the point of all you can bargain for effectively is a token that you put on like the drug dealer saying hey let me borrow your drug dealer at some point in the future so there's a mechanic around the bargaining a specific bargaining mechanic that is integral to the game by abstracting it instead of worrying about the valuation of all those things all the valuation of all those things orbits around the value of one thing that is very easy for people to understand so you sort of slot everything you're bargaining in terms of that one thing in this case those promise tokens the extreme end of this is an earlier edition of John Company this has since been tweaked because this mechanic did not work as expected this is the trial the dangers of trying to fix these kinds of problems in games is something called a promise cube any deal you want to make the deal would always be for promise cubes and at the end of the game you get victory points for all the promise cubes you have from other people or you can try to buy back promise cubes with things later in the game so there's almost a bargaining currency that you're doing all bargaining with and that currency translates into all other things in the game so this game that is the title of this game so you're real confluence of the negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant this game is trade 10 different kinds of cubes for all their different kinds of cubes for 3 hours just cubes and cubes and cubes I'll give you 3 yellows for a black one then I'm going to take a black one and a blue one and trade it to him for a brown one it's that kind of game the whole game is bargaining when a game is about bargaining the bargaining tends to be better but this game does something so clever that shows the cubes and shows how you can interact and trade with cubes it shows the relative values of these cubes on an abstract scale it basically tells you what the relative rough value of a yellow cube is versus a grey cube a yellow cube is roughly worth about 2 grey cubes a blue cube is worth around 1.5 yellow cubes it has that just written down all over the game so rather than trying to calculate this as a player leading to analysis paralysis which leads to a topic of a different panel we've done called Take Your Frickin' Turn this avoids that because it's giving you a cheat sheet on how to bargain it avoids the valuation problem so you can get to the fun part of yelling at your friends about yellow cubes trivia games really only exist in the trivia genre whenever you try to put trivia in a game that is not a trivia game with a capital T it tends to be terrible and even trivia games have a problem because you either know the answers or you don't if your parents get out that trivia game they've got laying around from like 1974 and try to play it with you you don't know who was playing tennis in 1974 but your uncle does and as a result the game is super unfun unless everyone at the table is an expert in the area of trivia or no one is an expert the game won't be fun it's just like Street Fighter you're one friend who practice a little more beats everybody and no one wants to play some games fix this a trivia game designed in part by Friedman Freese you may know from Power Grid and it solves this very elegantly the way the game works really roughly is that every trivia question don't try to read those we'll have three questions and the board has three areas to publicly give answers you can guess a year a US state or a number or you can guess and I don't think anyone else is going to know the answer you get points for guessing correctly about putting your cube on the right spot you also get points for being adjacent to the right answer so one there's three different questions so close encounters the category do you know when it was released do you know where the Devil's Tower is and do you know how long the movie was originally someone's more likely to know or at least have a good guess and one of those three as opposed to a traditional trivia game so they'll have more reason to play and two even if you have no idea if your friends are putting this stuff near Wyoming maybe you trust that it's Wyoming maybe your friend the film bus like immediately zooms in and locks in an answer you trust that they're probably going to be right maybe you say that your friends are all clearly guessing wildly you say that you don't think any of them know anything this is a clever way to make a trivia game accessible and interesting but I don't see many good ways to incorporate trivia into what are effectively non-trivia games if you'll find a game that does that well you probably found someone who's very rich over bonanza we're going to talk about it again bonanza and this other fantastic game called wine the film have something that is so rare Scott and I on the podcast we just call it bonanza hand you get a hand of cards cards come into one side of your hand and they come out the other side of your hand you are not allowed to move cards in your hand at any point this is very difficult to internalize if you're like me and you're constantly shuffling your cards sitting there this is easy to mess up as part of why it's rare it's difficult to explain and if you're not used to it and you don't trust that these games are good if someone like me tries to teach you this game and explains you have to hold your hand a certain way you're probably going to think this game is stupid and walk away from me you don't want to deal with that weird mechanic but these two games are phenomenal because of that mechanic you almost innovate a new mechanic because that is the core mechanic of your game I would never say that you should implement bonanza hand in a game that isn't about bonanza hand these games are about the fact that your hand is in an order and that you cannot move them around and that you're playing cards in a certain order if the game is not about that never ever ever force people to keep their hand in a particular order because they're going to do what I did and immediately shuffle their hand in a game this is a really fun set of mechanics so most co-op tabletop games are also terrible because either the game is actually just a single player game or an escape room but you have the fiction of taking turns or the original pandemic has this problem if one person knows the best option they're going to say point it there do the thing and if you don't know the right answer you either say sure you're playing stupid and there's the game for everybody there's a right answer on every turn and pandemic most of the time sometimes these games go around that by giving you rules where you can't just say everything that's in your hand you can't share all the information you have but they give you vague soft fuzzy bullshitty rules about what you're allowed to say like you can't say what cards you have in your hand so I look at my hand I got a bunch of twos I look at my friend and say I'm not too sure we could take that challenge like what exactly is the lie those fuzzy rules are nonsense they just cause fighting at the table and also they kind of make the game broken pardon me usually I have Scott to do half the talking but since he's not here I have to do 100% of the talking these two games one of them is a co-op game Hanabi one of them is a non-co-op game where it's public up by Rayner Khadizia famous board game designer they both have an information economy sharing information is an action you can take in the game with specific rules Hanabi you're trying to play a deck of cards out onto the table without blowing up the fireworks the incredible way like playing in a certain order but you're playing cards blind you hold your hand facing the other players and you play cards blind on your turn you either play a card blindly discard a card blindly or spend a shared limited resource to tell someone else something specific about their hands and it's very simple you can say things like you have one two it's a very specific set of things you are allowed to say and you can convey one piece of information to that other player and if you don't have any more of that resource that lets you share information you're playing a card whether you like it or not so suddenly the game is about having an economy of information which is very rare in all games but especially tabletop RezPublica basically lets you make contracts you either say I would like to sell like shift boughs or anvils or whatever it is you're selling or you could say I would like to buy shift bombs or anvils you basically say what you're willing to buy or what you're willing to sell and then around the table the other players either agree with you and make an offer and then you maybe seal the contract or they don't so as a result you have to share information about your own hands to give other people the opportunity to then maybe trade with you or not trade with you share information or not you generally don't want other players to know that much about your hand so as a result this information economy becomes the core mechanic of the game I've seen so few games like it that if you see it copy this game buy it immediately play it you will definitely appreciate this game poker those something blackjack casino games that very few tabletop games any of you are going to play at this convention do you can just walk away from the table and the game keeps going three new randos can sit down and the game keeps going there are board games that do this they are rare zendo is one of the few I've seen that does this the original rules of zendo this should be more common especially as conventions happen sometimes you sit down at a table and four hours in you realize that you really didn't want to play twilight appearing for more hours but if you leave you made some people very angry similarly player elimination very few games are willing to tell a player you know what you're just done there's no way you can win just leave and I see that as a problem if I can't win a game if I have mathematically excluded myself from victory I gladly have the game give me the opportunity to stop playing the game it's rare for a lot of reasons and sometimes it's implemented poorly the place it's implemented most often are social deduction games look particularly at video games like among us where they give the player who's eliminated something else to do werewolf or mafia depending on where you grew up when you learned this game what it gives you to do is you get to sit back and make that face everyone makes when you see who the mafia really were and then be quiet about it and yell and scream at the end of the game it gives you something to spectate but in general when a game has the courage to admit that to a player that they have already lost and free them from their suffering it's rare, it's valuable and I wish more games did it so this was a little bit of a trick there's no such thing as a catch up mechanism in a board game this is literally impossible to implement and there's one image of the book characters and some games by Richard Garfield or Richard Garfield you may know him, he invented a famous card game that many of you probably play who's winning A or B who's winning this game right now I got a better question in Mario Kart who's winning the person in first place the person in second place because of the blue shell if you could have caught up you were never actually behind you just insufficiently understood the positional heuristics of the game so as a result I can't say oh games need better catch up mechanisms or anything this is actually something that's rare because it is impossible if you want to get good at games what you need to do is look at a game and figure out the real heuristics who's really in first place in settlers it's not the person who has the most points right now look at the person who's one card away from longest road one card away from largest army they're probably actually winning the game the person who happens to have six points from cities someone's got a lot of cards in their hand I bet at least one of those is a victory point that is how you get good at games by understanding who's really winning and you cannot fix that mechanically because this does not exist there's no such thing as catching up in any game and before we get into the final section of this panel this is a I mentioned earlier the game Puerto Rico Puerto Rico has a racist theme a lot of German games a lot of board games have racist themes some of them because they're old some of them because the people who made them were very insensitive some of them because a lot of games are made by white dudes there's a lot of reasons why this happens but very rarely do tabletop games that deal with real history, real people and real lives give those subject matter appropriate gravitas and inspection interrogation Puerto Rico is a game about slavery and plantations but you win the game by being good at that that sucks, right? that is crap a lot of games have this problem games like John Company are so rare and I highly urge you to seek them out this game is about Britain's colonial depredations in India but you play the people in Britain who are working at the company as a job trying to buy fancy hats and bury your daughters off the game is about what is the cycle of resources and society that led to this externality of Britain invading India because spoilers the company was basically a mega-corp there's a whole bunch of nonsense going on but no individual person in the company said we should invade India this was a not natural but a depraved consequence or an anti-pattern that arose from the structure of British society, the John Company in particular, law at the time culture at the time and games like John Company rather than just celebrating or going through the motions or using a terrible chapter of history as a theme this game uses it for you to explore the real motivations behind how and why this happens treasure games like these because they're rare so in the last 10 minutes we're going to talk about tabletop role-playing games how many of you play Dungeons & Dragons how many of you play Pathfinder as in Dungeons & Dragons how many of you primarily play a game whether it's not Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder all I'll say is the first panel we ever did at PAX was in 2008 at PAX West it was called Beyond Dungeons & Dragons we did it again at PAX Australia a few years later and that covers basically everything I have to say on that topic I love D&D, once again I'm done with D&D so what I want to talk about now are some things that everything we're about to talk about is super common in non-Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games and vanishingly rare in Dungeons & Dragons now of course we're talking about that kind of role-playing game I'm talking about Final Fantasy I'm not talking about board games that are stories like Arabian Nights or anything this is my gaming group from many years ago that person is currently one of the enforcers in tabletop tournaments and this is one of my favorite ones this is from a game called Burning Wheel Failing to Advance D&D, you fight, you do stuff, you get XP Burning Wheel, you've got a skill like sword you've got a skill like drinking which is the dwarven form of drinking you've got a skill like lockpicking, you want to get better at lockpicking? do it a bunch succeed at it a bunch and fail at it a bunch you want to get better at sword fighting? you got to lose a sword fight and guess what? losing a sword fight doesn't mean you just lost some hit points in this game, you're in the hospital for 6 months your liver is falling out of your side losing hit with a sword once is terrible and has drastic consequences so think about the most fun things that happen at your D&D table often times the story we go back to when we're hanging out at a denny's late at night is the time we failed and blew up the sewers the time we burned water deep down the time 4 beholders got into our keep for some reason all the ridiculous failures and nonsense are a big part of our storytelling when we play games like Dungeons & Dragons games like Burning Wheel make you seek that out I have had characters where I went and had a duel with someone that I knew I would lose and I almost died because I wanted my character to be a better swordsman Lady Blackbird is a free game you can download the PDF you need to spend 10 minutes reading it and you can just play it it starts with the same characters every time the same situation every time and the same everything every time it's almost like starting in the middle of Star Wars in a particular scene and just do whatever you want to do from there and the primary mechanic that this game has is this is like that thing we did that time so normally you got your friend I was that friend and you're going to play D&D you write your character backstory it's 20 pages of how you were all Kelvin Blackstaff's great nephew and you met Driz Doran once nobody at the table reads it the game master graciously accepts it and proceeds to immediately throw it away and then you play D&D but everyone's got this backstory in Lady Blackbird you don't have a backstory you're doing right now and as you play the mechanic in the game is you can pause the action and say hey this reminds me of that time and then you and Watermore other players in your group tell the story of a similar situation you were in and make up your backstory collectively so you're role playing forward in time and backward in time simultaneously I've seen this game turn into a romcom I've seen this game turn into a genocidal space war I've seen this game turn into an orgy a PG-13 orgy I've seen this game turn into just Star Wars but it gets there from the same starting point every time and instead of trying to come up with a backstory you can naturally evolve the backstory it's a lot more satisfying that way the ultimate extreme of this Blades in the Dark how many of you played a D&D game where you're going to plan some sort of heist you're going to break in and steal a very orb or something so of course you sit at the table for like four hours arguing ostensibly in character but you know you're not at this point how are you going to pull it off you're making a stupid plan you make this whole big plan and then maybe in the next session you actually break into Kelbin's tower that's not that fun the way Blades in the Dark works as soon as you agree yeah we're stealing Kelbin's fucking orb you know what you do you cut to the moment and drop a Kelbin's tower let's go and during the game you can spend stress which is a resource you have to basically go back in time and talk about one of the things you planned in advance like oh yeah I snuck in last night with the January crew and I hit a pistol in the bathroom I've done that for real that kind of thing so you had to get past security well you know now there's a pistol in the bathroom you can go get you make up what your plan was as you're playing through the plan this avoids all that meta conversation it avoids having to actually plan a heist you can just skip to all the fun exciting parts of the heist itself Burning Wheel does this as well D&D you're gonna have a sword fight you get to throw a ton of dice down those dice you bought that you wanted to use you got a new set of them you roll a bunch of mechanics and do a bunch of things big old fun time you want to have an argument with someone usually it's one by roll a lot of tables just roll play that out Burning Wheel it has a whole complex fighting system if you want to have a fight with someone if you want to have an argument with someone to convince like the high up lord to do something it is a similarly complex system you roll play like you're sword fighting in a sword fight I script a strike and then a step back and then a stab and a rebutt whatever in this role playing mechanic I script a point then a rebuttal then an ugly truth then an incite it gives you a guide to role playing because we're not all super charismatic elves even though we play them that's just how we are as gamers so this is a way to give you a framework to role play with mechanics that guide you to or interesting things to do and it means that you don't have this mechanical depth imbalance D&D heavily mechanically invests in combat and certain other aspects of role playing generally invests in other parts more advanced systems or different systems have similar complexity and depth in all of their mechanics so that if you engage in a different way of doing things you still get to have a meaningfully engaging mechanical system Dread is a really interesting game it doesn't use dice if any of you have never played Dread it uses a share jemba tower this is a survival horror game like zombies are coming and the way the mechanics work say I want to kick in the door with my shotgun and shoot the zombie and save the girl well the DM might say give me a pull give me two pulls give me three pulls cool I do it it's fine you both like Jenga how about when Jenga has been going on for a while it's getting more and more rickety more and more rickety later on you're like I want to quietly sneak past the guard he's like alright give me a pull you look at that tottering Jenga and you're like ehhh think about a horror movie builds and builds and builds and then there's a climax and then the tension resets this physically enforces that even if you're a terrible storyteller tension will build and build and build until eventually someone's knocking that thing over if you knock it over your character and I'm quoting the rule but dies in the most horrific seen appropriate way possible then you reset it and play continues so you might be a good game master and you can make that kind of tension and release happen organically most of us are not the reason we use role-playing games instead of just doing stand-up or just doing improv is that these systems help us role-play use systems that help you role-play Arriva, thousand one nuts probably the most not so mechanical talk about this is a game where you play a character who is playing a character you're playing the the eunuch at the court and then at the court you sit down with the vizier and you play a role-playing game together where you're playing other characters this might sound like it's too complex like you couldn't keep it straight talk about the most crystallized role-playing people remember all the characters names in this which I know we struggle to do even in D&D because you're role-playing a character which is simpler than you I hope and now that simple character is playing D&D meaning you have a very simple framework for what that character wants or aggression against the other characters in the game against those characters this game is you will be shocked at the kind of role-playing that comes out of such a simple system so we've got exactly two minutes left I was talking pretty quickly the whole time what did we just talk about today that was a lot in a hurry if I had to leave you anything to take away it's the one if a mechanic is rare like you play a game and you encounter something that you haven't encountered before something novel something interesting really look at it and see if it's actually something you've encountered before in a different skin I am confident every one of you will find at least one thing in a game you know and love that is actually a rondel if you sit and think about it I guarantee that if you start to recognize those patterns one you'll learn games faster two you'll teach games more effectively three you'll get better at games you'll be good at any game that has a rondel get good at trick taking you'll be good at any game that has trick taking in it if you're a game designer don't don't necessarily see a void in the market as an opportunity voids are in the market for a reason and you might be the brilliant designer who's going to fix this and make the first game that does the thing that's very rare probably not but I don't want to discourage you because you are going to do something that no one else is doing my advice to you is make sure that thing is the core of your game and it is the primary thing in your game and cut everything else away and just focus on that don't put a weird complicated mechanic as just like the magic system inside of another game focus on the weird thing you're doing I hope that was enjoyable I'm out of time that's really it go to our website and the podcast is called Geek Knights I'm not going to head out business cards obviously because I don't want you to touch anything I've touched but if you google for that word you will find our website thousands of hours of us talking 40 plus videos of other lectures we've done at other conventions and we do answer our email if any of you have questions from this panel I will actually answer them via email and I know many people say that I actually will and it's on video in case I'm lying