 Now I want to be very clear because the title of this panel, the 40 tabletop games, it sounds like one of those top 40 garbage list panels. Right, usually when you see clickbait on the internet with titles like this, you click on it and then the actual article is nothing, right? We do the opposite. We use the clickbait title which gets people to come, which I guess worked to some extent. Yeah. Didn't fill the room with this 1030, that's pretty good, right? But no, we're not going to give you garbage, right? We're giving you the opposite. It's better than what you think it's going to be. But I want to be very clear. These are not the best 40 games. This is not a top 40 games in tabletop. More importantly, these are not the most important 40 games. A game does not make this list just because it was the first of something. It does not make this list just because it is notable for some reason around the way it was created or how much money it made or who was involved in it. K-List is arguably the first worker placement game. One of them, if not the. The only one that might be it, if it's not this, is this game called Bus. Never heard of it. But K-List is- Oh, I actually did hear of it. Yeah, you've heard of Bus. In the last time we did this panel, you specifically said, oh yeah, I've heard of Bus. I did, I just- I think it's a website spiel by web where you can play Bus by like email. But K-List is a board game and it's fascinating and it's very important to the history of board gaming, but it's not interesting enough to talk about in this panel. These are not our favorite 40 games. I love Initial D, Initial D is garbage, right? So the games that we're going to show you today, right, are not going to be the games that we like. There might be games that we hate up here. There are in fact games in this panel that we do not like at all. Right, and there might be games that we really, really like, but we're just not going to talk about them because they have nothing to do with what we're doing on today. Yeah, don't go to panels where someone plays the woo game and says, hey, I like Mario, do you like Mario? You like Mario's great. And now you think that I made Mario somehow. And now you're cheering for me when really you're cheering for Mario. This list is in a literal random order. I don't care who wins between Batman and Puerto Rico, the board game. We just made the slide. We just go as we make slides, as we think of them, like, oh, this game, next slide, this game, next slide, right? It's the order we thought of them when we put together the slides. Yep, we have definitely missed games. We didn't put too much effort into this. I already got. We did the bare minimum to get the free badge. And also, I do not need to tell you that chess exists. Maybe you do. We don't care if we missed anything. Yeah, you fanboy coming up the end. Oh, have you heard of this game? Yeah, I've probably heard of more games than you. I'm up here and you're down there. Do not be the person you've seen at every panel who's sitting in the back of the room like this. Trying to talk about your favorite game. We're not taking any questions from anybody. Keep your hands down. And if you've seen us give this talk before, which sounds like most of these people haven't, we changed this panel a lot. Yeah, we did this south. We changed like two slides, whatever. I think I changed four slides. Because I added a slide. Big money. Right here, five minutes before we let them in. Is that photo from PAXSF? That photo is from PAXSF. Yeah, okay, great. Who wants to PAXSF? And more importantly, you could, you don't even need to be here. You could figure this out on your own. The only way we figured this panel out is because we played a lot of board games. If you just went and played a lot of board games, you might make the same list. And if for some reason you think you have something better to do right now at PAXS, which you probably do, that camera back there is going to send this straight to YouTube most likely. It looks really sucks. It's going to send it to my hard drive and then to Premiere, and then if all the pieces of audio and video line up, it might appear on YouTube. It might appear on YouTube, so you might not have to be here. Also, isn't the south one on YouTube already? We didn't do it at south. We did it at Magfest. I don't remember. But the real important thing here is that if you play a lot of games, a lot of different kinds of games, this is a set of 40 games that if you play them all, you'll have a pretty full understanding of the full scope of what tabletop games are and what they could be. Yeah, most of the time when I see a new game, I take a look at it and go, ah, I see what's going on here. It's like this and this and this. I always, like, rarely, rarely ever see a game that's really unique to me. And when I do, it's really amazing because I've played so many games, right? And these are like the games that I, you know, reference most often, like, oh, you know, I see these themes in mechanics keep reappearing in new games. So if you play all of these, then as you go out into the world and play new games, right, this will give you that sort of background knowledge to say, ah, I've seen this before. I've seen this before. I've seen this before. So let's get right into it. The best game. I am going to cheat. The first game is our favorite game. And also the best game. Tigris and Euphrates is an amazing Kenizia German style Euro board game. And what makes it interesting is that most board games really only get between four and 12 plays before they're played out because there's degenerate strategies. There's broken mechanics. There's balance issues. The game is so simple there's only so much to explore and then you've seen it all. Tic-Tac-Toe should take you a couple of plays at most to figure it out and you don't need to play it again. It's rare for a game to have a lot of replayability among skilled, serious players who are trying to be good at it. Notice how certain cards in Netrunners, certain cards in Magic, don't get used because people figured out that they're not worth using. This is one of the rare board games that has nearly infinite replayability. We've been playing this game consistently for a long time and we've never gotten sick of it. 2002. We've never exhausted our strategies around it. We're excited to play it every time. I could go to tabletop and just play this all weekend. Coming out with a version soon that's new. It's called Yellow and Yangtze. That's hexes instead of squares. I don't know how it's going to be. That's going to change effort. I feel like you don't need to go that far because this is already enough. Right? But the other interesting thing this game does, part of the reason the game makes this list, if we can say two unique and interesting things about it, this has an interesting scoring mechanism. You got to get green cubes and blue cubes and black cubes and red cubes. Your score at the end of the game is of all the cubes you got, what color do you have the least in? So if somehow you have 100 black, 100 green, 100 red, and one blue cube, your score is one. Congratulations. Dune. Frank Herbert's Dune was adapted into a board game a long time ago before most of the people in this room were born. And now this game is very hard to get and out of print from the 70s. I bought one on eBay and that was in pretty good condition, luckily. But that's okay because it's been reprinted in a form called Rex. So if you find a game called Rex, that's this game only redone a little bit and doesn't have the Dune theme because that costs a lot of money. But a lot of nerds will actually take Dune and just take by another Avalon Hill game and just reskin it and print it out and make the Dune game. A lot of people just print this game out because it's a game from the 70s. You can just make it with a printer. You're good. So point one about this game. This is a better version of diplomacy. So there is no reason to actually play diplomacy. Just play this. You'll get a very similar experience, much more compacted, much more fun, much more interesting. Also, this game very, very closely matches the theme of the world Dune. There's a spice deck and a treachery deck. If you like Dune, then this game is for you. And third, the best thing about this game is that there are six factions. If you know about Dune, you know who the six factions are, Emperor, Benejester, or whatever, right? Every six faction has a ridiculous, ridiculous superpower. And like, you'll pick up the first one and read the superpower. I'd be like, I want to be this one. Oh my God, this is so unfair. I'm going to win. They're all so unfair. They're going to win. They're so unfair. I'll tell you what one of their powers is without even knowing any of your rules. So there's this thing called treachery cards. They're a big deal. Most players, you can only have four in your hand at any given time. Harkonnen get eight. Think of your favorite game and think of like the character or the class or the deck that's like so OP, right? Now imagine six different OP decks all fighting against each other at once. That's what this game is. When you buy treachery cards, you don't pay the bank. You pay one of the players. If you want to move guys out of the board, you pay a different player. You're paying the dude that you're about to attack to bring the troops down to attack them. And this game, there's so many unique things about this game. It has joint victory. You can form binding alliances and win together. Only when the worm appears. And more importantly, the Ben Adjesser one of the factions, their special victory condition. They write down before the start of the game, the name of a player and a turn number. If that player wins on that turn, the Ben Adjesser will win. There is no game that is wedded theme and game mechanics so tightly as this. It is a unique and interesting experience. You can almost treat it like a role playing game. Mafia, werewolf. You know, you see a bunch of kids out of packs and they're sitting in a circle and they're making a lot of noise and you really want them to go away. Most people play Secret Hitler these days. Yeah. Secret Hitler was good. We're not saying don't play those games but werewolf is the purest and most original form of this game. It's interesting because one, it is a game that you can play with a nearly unlimited number of people who may be strangers in a convention and you don't need anything but enough space to make a circle and annoy the people around you. The other thing is not a lot of people play this game, right? It's been changed a lot over time because usually the rules spread by word of mouth. Not a lot of people buy rules to Mafia the star, right? You learn from somebody but the old real way to play and then no one wants to play with me is a way that I think people should play and that is normally when people play, right? You go to sleep at night the Mafia wake up and kill someone. Kill him. Yeah, okay, they die. No, no, no. The way it should be is that each individual Mafia or werewolf wakes up at night and tells who to kill and if they don't unanimously decide then no one is killed at night and this means that the Mafia and werewolves need to communicate during the day. I saw Scott looking at JoJo. He is definitely Mafia. So if you're in the Mafia, you're trying to wink at the other Mafias and be like, kill him. Kill him. Right? I mean, while some, you know, citizen sees you winking and looking and they're like, I see Scott winking and nod and he's probably, we should kill him right now. Yeah, okay. Now, we've had a lot of fun playing this game. We don't really play it anymore. It obviously has its very deep flaws as a game but there is another interesting thing it does. The way the rules are written or at least the way people should play it, it has rules of social interaction that inform the game. You can argue and be social and yell and scream forever but as soon as you point, you take an action. You accuse someone of being a member of the Mafia. There are rules about that. Everyone has to shut up and now you go through the process of deciding whether or not to murder them. Simple social rules, simple constraints around the way players interact can have drastic consequences on how a game functions. Codenames. Codenames. It's like the hottest game because it is super accessible like almost anyone can sit down and play this game and it also has a very high skill cap. You can be very, very good at this game. And even if you think you're very good, it's possible for someone else to be better. Yeah. Right? It's also great, you know, you play with someone who you have a lot of connections with, right? If I play with RIM, I can say things that don't even make sense because it's some inside joke and then he'll be like, oh, that card, that one. Yeah, okay, right? And then switch it up and play with a complete stranger and it's like, uh... Has this person read Dune and how clever are they? Like, you know, it says treachery on one of the cards and I'm like, how come it? How come it? And they're like, The other interesting thing about this game is that it can actually, it's like a party game. It can have an, it can have any number of players effectively because you just form two teams. So when it says, in essence, it's a party game that's not Twister and not trivia. It's pretty rare to find a good party game that isn't Twister or trivia. And even if you've got kids and you can't read, they've got pictures now, they've got Disney now, they've got Marvel, they've got governments. Battle Tech. Yes! Now what's interesting is you will be able to play this in video game form soon, following all these old Grognar weird rules. Most of them, they change a little. Yeah, but Battle Tech is a game where you play it by having these mechs and doing sort of squad combat tactics, but it's one of those old school games where you spend a lot of time rolling D6s over and over and over again and then using lookup tables to figure out what happened. Right, this is old Krusty War games. Now you're squad leaders, you're advanced squad leaders. Like that, right? You know, those games are really hard for anyone to play who's not, you know, very old with a beard, right? Battle Tech is like the bridge between the modern game and the old games, right? It's accessible, right? You know, but it's also obviously crazy complicated. Look at all this nonsense. You're gonna be looking up to like, wait, what happens if someone has a Fybro, whatever armor? But in the end, you take 10 damage to the right arm and you fill in 10 bubbles on the right arm and it feels really good to fill in little bubbles, right? Actually, it doesn't because those are, if you fill in the bubbles on your own arm, you want someone else to fill it in, right? But you know, also, big giant robot gear, right? It feels good. But this is where things get interesting. People who know us, like we're really focused on competitive games, fair games, games that could be sports, games where if I win and Scott loses, I have proven that I'm smarter than Scott in this very narrow world. This game is not fair. No. It is very rare. We have seen many Gauss rifle shots to the head in our day. But that means it's more simulatory, it's more emergent. Narratives evolve. You're playing a game and you're trying to win, but this game, because of all the randomness, ends up creating a narrative and that narrative is represented in this artifact, the sheet, as you cross things off. And I had some old battle tech sheets and I remember exactly the moment that my day turned terrible. And since it's so simulatory, even though it's a board game, right, and even though the rules aren't that big, there's still rules for everything. It's like, can I jump on his head? Yes. Can I pick up a tree and whack up with it? Yes. What if I just fell off? Can I pick it up and hit someone with it? Yes. Instead of a mech, can I buy 7,000 jeeps? Yeah. I would like to just have one airplane. Sure. Scott really likes the airplane rules. Scott likes a lot of small lasers, doesn't really work out. You can stand and go, oh, my neck is overeating. Can I stand in the lake to cool off? Well, yes, you can. The lake is now steam. So I bet if you played original Dungeons & Dragons, like the ECMI Dungeons & Dragons, you know, you know, people have the random hoodie and it has the picture of the dragon and says Dungeons & Dragons, that one, like one person. Wow, interesting. Okay. So if you want to experience what a real original Dungeons & Dragons was like, rather than playing original Dungeons & Dragons, which has its problems, play this game called Torchbearer. Right. This is a modern, redesigned, streamlined version of essentially old Dungeons & Dragons. If you play a newer Dungeons & Dragons, you know, pretty much second ed up, right? The thing you get XP for is killing dudes, right? So usually most D&D, third-ed, fourth-ed, fifth-ed, pathfinder, all these sorts of RPGs, they all focus around fighting in combat, right? Okay. We're going to move our miniatures and I'm going to cast my fireball spell and I'm going to cast Lightning Bolt and a guy with a sword and you're all figured out your maximum DPS, hoping to roll a 20, all that sort of nonsense, right? And all the, like even modern MMOs just borrow from that and they're about combat. People don't know that that old D&D, fighting dudes did not get you a lot of XP. It was not a good idea and you would die easily, very easily, right? The way you got XP and old D&D, gold. Give me the gold. You would go into Dungeon and all you wanted to do was get gold and get out. There's one XP per gold and you can get a treasure chest with like thousands of gold in it. Oh yeah, right? So Torchbear is a modern RPG that's not crusty, old and out of print and hard to find, but it's the same thing. It's very easy to die. You manage your inventory the same way you do with like XCOM, right? Where you have a little... Inventory Tetris. Yeah, and also you can't carry too much stuff. You find that tapestry that's worth a lot of gold and therefore worth a lot of XP. So you leave your... You love carrying your tapestry out of the dungeon. You leave your armor behind to carry the tapestry and then Skelligeant's attack and you drop the tapestry and rats eat it and now you have no armor and no tapestry. Play this game? Yeah. Zendo got re-released recently but Zendo was interesting in that in the old days Zendo was a game you could play with these physical pieces called... Well, Looney Labs made them. They're ice house... There's a game called Ice House and it uses these... Ice dice. Well, it's... They're ice house pieces. Ice house, yeah. They're very pieces, whatever. But those like a zillion games you can play with these pyramids of various shapes and colors, right? I think there's three sizes and a whole bunch of colors. And the cheapest way to get lots and lots of these pyramids was to buy a game called Ice Dice and just get lots of copies of it together and then instead of playing stupid ice dice you play Zendo instead. Luckily, Zendo got re-released and you can just buy Zendo now. Now, Zendo is different and has different pieces and a different theme but the gist is the same. This is a game where one player is the master and all the other players are the students. I'm the master. You're the student. The master makes a sort of structure here like a set of these pyramids and another structure of these pyramids. One of them has the Buddha nature. One of them does not have the Buddha nature. And the students take turns making their own constructions of pyramids and asking the master if they have it or not. It's kind of like mastermind. You're trying to figure out what the rule is that the master has in their head that they're following. Yeah, the master has decided, aha, any cone that contains a red pyramid will be good and the ones without red are bad. And then you start making you have to figure out that that's what the rule is, right? That red is good and no red is bad or whatever just by looking at examples. And then you make examples. You force the master to make examples for you. You get the master to tell you which examples are good and which ones are wrong. Sometimes the students guess which ones are right and which ones are wrong. And then the first student to actually figure out what the rule is is the winner. This game is interesting because it has a scale of infinite complexity. You could make a rule like it has the Buddha nature if it has exactly one red pyramid. You can also make a rule like it contains the Buddha nature if the number of pips on the pyramid times two is, I don't know, greater than 100. Or if the number of pips on the pyramids is prime. If there are three red pyramids X or four blue pyramids parentheses and there is a yellow one on its side pointing at a black one. Right. But the most fun thing is to come up with a simple rule that drives people insane because they can't tell them that's what I like to do. The other notable thing about this game is that if you bring it to a convention set it up on a table and start playing it it creates a spectacle. People walk over. Especially if you get one that has a lot of examples going on. And they really want to know what you're doing. People can hop in and out, right? You can become a new student. You can give up to this student and quit school because you're not smart enough. Yeah. So, you know, here if you're playing some like four-hour Twilight Imperium and a player has to go to the bathroom or has to go to a panel like your game's over. People can quit this game constantly. It does not affect the game at all. You can even bring in a new master as long as the old master's like there. So, if a stranger comes up and says hey, what are you playing? You can say sit down. Let's play. So, we gotta sit. You can just sit. Fast food franchise. Oh my God. So, why did you put this in here? It's a chicken surprise. This is an indie board game from before we had the term indie board game. Is it from the 90s or something? It's from the 90s. Yeah, good luck finding this. The 90s, ancient times. Two, that is an abstracted map of the United States of America. Shockingly accurate. It kind of is once you play and understand it. But anyway, this game is just freaking garbage monopoly, right? There is nothing to this game. Except, it ends. It ends real quick. This is like, you kind of play monopoly in like under an hour. This is a fascinating example of monopoly as a terrible game. Literally all you do is you roll the dice and you move around the edge of the board to land on stuff. You buy it fast through a franchise. But sometimes you feel that you kind of want to play monopoly. Like, you feel this urge to play a game that has the... You know, you talk about food, there's mouthfeel. With games, I like to say that they have a brain feel. The brain feel of monopoly. Like, there's a read. Sometimes you want to eat some garbage. This is that garbage distilled into its purest form. This is so appropriately named. So appropriately named. This game is worth playing. You will enjoy it. And just at the moment you think, oh man, this is getting boring. It's over. Spotted. We got a friend. His name is Chase. He's not at this patch, but he's at most of the other packs. He hasn't gotten to packs in a long time. He switched to Joko Cruise. No, yeah, yeah. But at packs is... Not that Joko Cruise is bad, I want to tell you. His superpower is that he would take this game and wander around the con. And by the end of the con, he would have a thousand new friends. I mean, he made a thousand new friends with or without Spotted. But Spotted is his magic weapon. Spotted is the simplest game. It's a little baby game. You've got these little discs and they have symbols on them. Like a cute spider and ice cream cone. Can you get a themed Spotted if you want? They have hipster Spotted. I have Halloween Spotted. So like bats and stuff. There's NHL Spotted. That's a good one. That is a real good one. Yeah. But the deal with the game is that it's got a bunch of little game modes. But basically, you've got all these little discs and every disc has exactly one symbol that matches every other disc. See, if you pick any two discs at random, there will be exactly one symbol that appears on both discs. No matter which two discs you pick. So the game comes down to, basically, standing around with a bunch of strangers holding these things in your hands and trying to find the match. Bad. Ah, crap. Ice cream cone. Ice cream cone. I'm out. And then one person's left holding on the discs. Watching people play this game is fascinating because it can take almost an unlimited number of players. It takes two seconds to teach someone how to play this game. You can just hand them all out in a panel room. One time we headed one to every person in a panel room and made them all play out of packs. And what happened was, after a few minutes, it all coalesced and this one... What did we do this? We did this at PAX East 2011. I don't remember that. There's video of it. Yeah, okay. Eventually, it collapsed into this one really flustered dude just standing there holding this pile of cards and going, what happened? If you, since it's getting a little warmer, hopefully soon, right, they make Sponance Flash, which is made of plastic. It comes in net for your future enjoyment. It's a simple game that looks like it's for kids and it'll make you feel really stupid when you play it because it's way harder than you think it's gonna be. Jungle speed is a... Jungle speed is not jungle slow. It is a tabletop sport. And I say that you're... It's basically that game where you flip over cards and eventually something matches and then two people have to grab a wooden totem. So this game tests two different skills. The first skill it tests is your, you know, visual recognition of patterns, right? It's like, so there'll be two cards. There's basically a bunch of crazy shapes, as you can see, right? And some of the shapes are really similar. Obviously on purpose, very, very similar, right? And there's no two cards that are the same shape and the same color. It's a completely unique deck. But whenever two cards of the same shape appear, right? Then there's a duel between two people and now we test your other skill with this manual dexterity. Grab that wooden log as quickly as possible, right? So good things to do. Number one, put that log in another room. Bad things to do. Accidentally knock it over the balcony at Magfest. Good things to do. Drink heavily before playing. Bad things to do. Break someone's finger playing in. I want to point out I did a Google search for this panel for jungle speed injury because it happens. Like we know someone who broke their finger. Right, the cards, if you go to the table top library, there's a bunch of jungle speeds in there, but they all have the rubber totem, which is the made for America totem. They're bringing back the wooden one. Just wait a few months before you buy jungle speed and you'll bring back the wood. But this is very important. I did my Google search for jungle speed injuries and that's what came up. But that's Jason Morningstar, the designer of fiasco. Another good thing to do is like, you mess with people while you're playing the game. You be like, it's a match, it's a match. Right? If someone puts their hand too close to the totem, you smack their hand right into it and now they foul because they want to build the totem. The important thing about this game is that there are table top sports. The line between sport and game can be heavily blurred. Puerto Rico is the game. In terms of euro style machine building, like action taking games. No luck games. This might be the perfect one. Right, see nowadays that number one spot on board game geek just keeps on changing over to like the latest totems. What's up there now, Bloomhaven? Yeah, that doesn't look very good to me. I mean, Twilight Struggle was up there for a while. Yeah, that piece of garbage, right? But before those games started rotating on that VGG number one slot, Puerto Rico had that spot for years. Unopposed. No one even, it was like unthinkable to rate something higher than Puerto Rico. We have good reason, this is the best. Except for TV. The notable thing number one about it is that it is so tightly designed, so well designed, so balanced. When you lose this game, it is the fault of the series of decisions you made and there is no randomness to blame. You made your brand. This is what turn order is at the very beginning of the game, but they balance that out by giving you different numbers of corn and indigo or whatever, and which, you know, plantations get turned up randomly, but that affects everyone equally, so it's not a big deal. It illustrates another point, it illustrates the tightness of game design in that three player, four player, and five player in this game are all equally good games that are completely different. Yeah, we mastered third three player, but then we went and we added another person and we're like, hmm. I don't know if you can guess. Hanabi was probably the first real co-op game I've seen get popular. Yeah, most of the co-op games out there that people really love, you know, have fun with them like pandemic and etc. Shadows of a Camelot or Battlestar or all these games, right? They're actually solitary games, most of them, right? It's like, imagine me and rim and a whole bunch of other people sitting around Klondike solitaire, Microsoft solitaire, and working on it together, like, uh, move the eight over to the nine. No, move the eight there, that's obviously better. Oh, okay. Now do that. Now do that, now do that. You don't need help to figure out pandemic, right? One smart gamer can figure out everything. You don't need help from other people. Hanabi is a game that is actually co-op, right? You are playing with the other people. It's a weakest link in the chain. You know, if you have three excellent people who are great at Hanabi and one person who's not, you can't help them out, right? Because you can't see your own hand of cards. You play with your hand facing out and you play blindly. The only things you can do are play cards blindly or spend a resource. There is an information economy in this game. None of that, like shadows over Camelot. You can't talk about what's in your hand, but you can hint at what's in your hand. No, no, you can't say nothing. I'm sure I can handle that challenge. I'm too sure I can handle that challenge. Yeah, no. So in Hanabi, when you want to tell someone something about their hand, you have to flip over one of these limited number of disks and say, you, these are, you have two twos. And now they know that these two cards in their hand are twos and these other cards in their hand are not twos. Now they got to remember this. And it's up to them to remember because you can't tell them again without spending another disk. Now the act of communicating with another player is an action in the game with rules and consequences. Information economies are shockingly rare in games. This is a beautiful implementation of that concept. A better, another one that we didn't want to talk about because it would take too much time is another Kenizia game, same guy who designed Tigris and Euphrates called Res Publica. Vinci, how many of you played Small World? You know Small World? Yeah, okay. Small World was actually a remake and redesign of this game, Vinci. And the reason they redesigned this game is because, well, look at it, it's kind of ugly. Small World's way more fun with skeletons and stuff. Also, this game had a lot of typos and stuff in it and like the rule book was a little messed up, right? It needed a fixing and they gave it a good fixing but they also changed some very important rules that I think make the game less fun. The two major changes from Small World are, number one, in Vinci, the game would end when someone hits 75 points. You don't know how many turns this is going to be, right? In Small World, the game ends after X turns. I forget how many it is because I don't play Small World. The second thing is in Small World, you get the two stats, right? So it'll be like skeleton wizards or something like that, right? And you can only get one of each. In Vinci, it's just a big bag of little squares. You can get barbarians, barbarians, right? You can get times two, well, there's only one times two thing in there, right? But you can get like navigation navigation. There are two times two things. I like you can get times two, times two. Times two, times two, yeah, okay. What this game really illustrates is that Small World is a more refined, more polished version of Vinci that cleaned up a lot of mechanics and made the game simpler and more straightforward and more balanced. Adding all that balance and cleaning kind of ruined the game. This game is just as skill-based but it was messier and had a lot more emergent gameplay. Very unbalanced combinations could appear but because of the way the rules are written, this game, the players had to deal with that and work around it. So this game is still highly skill-based but it's a much more engaging and varied experience. Small World is a very constrained experience and there is, in the end, Small World is a limited number of plays before you find perfect strategies and there's no reason to play it again. So the moral of this is that just because you made your game better doesn't mean you made it better. So there is a whole class of games that most people at PAGS do not play. Traditional card games. I'm talking trick-taking games like Euker, Hearts, Pinnacle, Spades. These are games that people generally do not think of as in the same world as these games. And those are all the games that I started playing for the earliest days, right? My grandpa was like, Hey, here's how you shuffle cards. Yup. My dad taught me how to hustle people for money in Hearts. Let's play some backgammon. Let's go. Right? Trick-taking games are having a resurgence. There's a lot of indie games being designed now and being released that are actually trick-taking games. But most modern gamers have never played trick-taking games. So wizard, fantasy wizard in particular. With this deck of cards, you can play with just normal decks of cards, but this one is way more fun. Well, because this art is both amazing and terrible at the same time. I mean, you can already get a feel based on the four wizard cards. I imagine you put the gnaws on the next slide or you put Scott Johnson on the next slide. The game is in German, so it's a Z because they're sauberers and not wizards because it's in German. The deal with this game is a trick-taking game. If you don't know what a trick-taking game is, play wizard and you'll find out what a trick-taking game is. The best thing is unlike, say, bridge or anything, you don't have to worry about these weird bidding systems and things. This is accessible to anyone. You can teach this to someone as their first trick-taking game, but also even someone who's very good at trick-taking games can go deep on this one, right? This isn't one that you give up on. It's just a baby version, right? It's like, it's a real deal. Oh, you didn't put Scott Johnson or gnaws on the next slide. Oh, no, I didn't. We have a friend, Scott Johnson. Have you ever seen him? He looks exactly like one of these cards. It is terrifying. Bonanza, you know all these games where you trade stuff? Yeah, like in Settlers. It's like, I'll give you one wood for two sheep. Hey, hey, hey, hey, right? Everyone loves trading stuff. You ever played Genoa? Genoa is a game where all you do is trade stuff. It's great. And people love to trade things, but a lot of times when you're playing games, trading is not a good idea. You don't want to trade one wood for two sheep. You're just giving the other guy a road and you're going to trade two sheep. Watch a pro play Settlers of Catan. Watch like the qualifiers and the championships. People are not trading. They're trading if they're ripping someone off. That's about, and you're not ripping someone off as good at the game, right? Bonanza is a game in which every turn is going to be two cards in front of you, and you can either plant those cards in your bean fields or trade them. And a lot of times, if you don't want to plant them in your bean fields, you better trade them, right? It's a game that forces you to trade, right? You get more trading action, which brings all the fun of trading, right? But without any of the, oh my God, if I trade, I got to lose because you're still, I have to give someone else points. But then when it comes to their turn, well, they're going to have to give you points. And the other interesting thing this game does, and it's so unique that when I see it in other games, we actually call it Bonanza Hand. And it seems weird. I was very dubious of this game when this was explained to me. You have a hand of cards, right? You can only play cards out of the front of your hand. The card's closest to your human body. You can only add cards to the back of your hand, and you can't ever rearrange your hand. Yeah, if you rearrange your hand, well, game over. Don't do that. If you're like me, you're like shuffling cards in your hand, but at Bonanza, you gotta be like, meh. I've only seen one other game ever that does that, and it's a Japanese indie game called Wine the Fill. Oh yeah, that's right. Glory to Rome. This is the game to teach you if you like Carl Chuddick games. If you like this game, you'll like Carl Chuddick games. If you don't like this game, just pretend you never heard that name. Right, so he's a guy who made Innovation and he made Motinai, and they're all pretty similar, but this one is the best one. The interesting thing about this game, like the reason I'm bringing it up, because we don't have time to explain the rules of all these games, this game has hard and fast game-ending conditions. This is the opposite of Power Grid, where you're having a good time, and then the thing happens that triggers the third phase. You're like, oh crap, what do we do? Let's remove 3Ds and move this, and every player gets two more turns, and then we do final scoring, and then final, final scoring, and then we look at the bonus scoring. This game has rules like, if someone builds this building, the game ends immediately. That's my favorite thing to do. There's catacombs, you just go build, build GG, I mean. If someone builds the last site. If we're three points, you can build this so fast, no one says any points yet. The game ends immediately, mid-turn, the second the card hits the table, the game is over, fuck you. The other thing about this game is that it has all these crazy unique cards, the sewer, the walls, right? And you look at some of these cards, when you put them together, you say, wait a minute, if I do this card and also this card together, isn't that a crazy OP combo? And in the rulebook, there's actually explanations for every crazy possible combination of cards. And 100% of the time, when you say, does this really do that when you work this thing together? It says, yes, yes it does. There are so few games where logically reading the rules and following the like what cards imply to their fullest extent is always allowed. This is the first game I've ever seen where it is always the correct answer. It is so tightly designed. Camel up. You ever play Street Fighter and there's that level where, you know, a Balrogs level, right, the boxer, right? Everyone's standing off to the side with money in their hands like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, they're trying to bet on this foxy fight, right? If you want to role play, be in that guy, only betting on a camel race. This is the game for you. This game is mostly random and it's still super fun even to us jerks who like these super competitive games. You're just betting on this camel race. The other interesting thing is that see how the camels are stacked up there? So let's say that that stack moves across the finish line. Green wins. Let's say the stack moves and then the yellow one moves and then the green one moves. The last place camel might suddenly be in first place. Right, there's one die, right? It's like a D3 for each camel and they go into the pyramid and you shake the pyramid and push a button and a die comes out. You don't know which camel's gonna move in what order and each camel only moves, you know, one to three spaces but the order in which the camels move, right? Oh, the white one could move two and then the red one can move three and that white one that looks like it's the last place can be all the way in the front, right? Basically, order those dice come out of that pyramid. And you're trying to bet on this. Tension and drama that comes out of this game with camels is amazing. And if you're wanting to, if you don't get enough of the camel up, camel cup, there's a super camel up cup as more, as more track. So tales of the Arabian Knights, I'm gonna full disclosure, I do not like this game. I don't like it either. I never want to play it again. Everyone in this room should play it at least once because it is amazingly built. This is a board game. I think it's more of a book. I mean, not the old book that gets... It tells a story. You'll land on a space and look through a book and read a section that's almost like a choose your own adventure. You encounter a genie. The genie says this and this and this and this and this. Do you do this or do you do this? It's like a multi... It's like a choose your own adventure book but everyone's moving around this map choosing their own different adventures all the time, constantly. It's not a role-playing game. It's a storytelling game. What narratives emerge while you play? You're ostensibly trying to win but what winning means is even sort of complicated. Right. Even though each of these little pieces of the story is like pre-written in the books. It's hard-coded, right? When you combine them and string them together in different ways, right? The story of your character is now different, right? The context of that meeting with the genie can be very different if you had just say been running away from, I don't know, someone trying to chase you for stealing or if the king had just set you on a mission, right? The answer you give the genie might be different based on that as well. The fact that this game works and is so complex and is implemented entirely with pieces of cardboard and paper is breathtaking. And one giant booklet someone spent way too much time writing. Breathtaking to behold. And the other... Good job, Eric Over. Yeah. But the other real fascinating thing about it is that it abstracts those decisions. It's not like you say I hit the guy or like I run away. It asks you questions like do you respond to this old woman with peaty or violence? It's very abstracted. It gives you a lot of room to imagine what the story actually is. Eclipse is the most complex 4x game you can possibly implement in a tabletop setting and have it still be playable in a reasonable amount of time. Right. There's plenty of them that are playable in a tabletop setting in an unreasonable amount of time. People always try to play them. How many Twilight Imperiums... There's four Twilight Imperiums and over there in packs and every pack someone plays one and finishes it like at the last second that's okay if you want to spend here I don't know how much it's a packs ticket cost. I don't think... If you want to spend your whole day of packs playing one game go ahead but if you play Eclipse you can spend half your day of packs playing one game instead. But the reason Eclipse is no worthy is that all that complexity there are physical things the game does like the simple way of how cubes are arranged and how you represent resources are extremely elegant and they are designed to allow a lot of complexity to happen with a small number of pieces relative to that complexity. Right. You think about a game like Master of Orion on the computer right the digital version of this or this is I guess the cardboard version of that but either way it's like it's so complicated because you have a computer you can have an infinite number of numbers until your memory runs out right you open up menus upon menus and menus all these numbers and stats of everything and whatever but you can't do that when you got cardboard right so here they managed to narrow everything down just like a few rows of cubes and some chits and some plastic pieces but it's still exactly the same game right all those numbers are really unnecessary they extract everything away to the maximum possible without losing the kind of game it was or oversimplifying to the point where it becomes a baby game. Almond Ray is a bidding game bidding games are pretty common but you're bidding meaning you're sacrificing to the Egyptian gods you bid you bid on what provinces to get then you bid by deciding how much money to sacrifice to the gods which might involve actually stealing from the temple instead bidding is a component of a lot of games and a lot of gamers are shockingly bad at dealing with bidding you need to play a deep serious bidding game and start to understand what valuation is and what bidding is and what that means this is a fantastic game to do that it's also fascinating because it's almost an early form of a legacy game you play the entire game you score then the flood comes and washes away all the workers but the pyramids you built remain then you play the whole game again only the pyramids is still there so now you know Abidos might have been an okay territory in the first round but Scott built eight pyramids on it last year right so now after the Nile floods and kills all of the farmers in Abidos and there's still pyramids left oh i've been 20 on Abidos look at all those pyramids oh yeah so it illustrates this very fundamental concept that by allowing players to bid on things in games you can almost ignore balance because the balance comes from the players understanding the value of those components it's like the quickest cheapest way to balance a game that is otherwise unbalanced is of some form of bidding mechanics great thing but you're trying to balance a game it's usually like okay i have this property in this game how much should it cost 10 oh no one's buying it nine oh no it's OP right here you just say okay we're gonna auction up this thing haha i don't have to balance it now how much should it pay for it it's great Elkfest consists of these pieces and that is literally in so there's a lot of flicking dexterity games these days there's like catacombs which is really great like catacombs you're like a wizard and if you take the magic missiles you go peep peep peep and try to hit the skeleton it's a little grand and if you play uh flick them up your cowboys and you flick bullets at the other cowboys try to knock their hats off it's a good time Elkfest is a little different you're a moose which i guess is called an elk in germany do not get into why it's called Elkfest i don't even wanna anyway the moose starts on one rock your goal is to get your moose to the other rock that the other moose started on and you have these six shared stones that you can stand on and you flick those stones and then you move your moose and try to stand on the stones and eventually get to the other side and you can you can just stick in your pocket rust out literally anywhere play it on the floor you can play it on this table you could play it across the whole room you could play it along that entire hallway over there you could play it on an ice hockey ring from one end to the other you could play it anywhere this game is a study in minimalist game design this is an escape room like the ones people pay money to go into and like escape from a room except it's a board game that you buy in a box and destroy you play it once it's an disposable board game yeah i saw these for sale here down in the tabletop deal is a few of them there's like a few of them there's not just the fairies one there's like a whole series and you buy one you get some friends together you open it up you get a tear full of papers and they i tried to spit on something once you know there's all sorts of crazy stuff i thought your spit would work i was really sad that that didn't work uh yeah they didn't go through like the full effort with like you know uv things and stuff i thought it was going to be a star tropics situation but it ended up not being i mean it could have been the notable thing is that this these games the series of games they fully encapsulate the experience of an escape room like the kinds of puzzles that are in escape rooms pretty much just team puzzles 100% accurately it's the exact same experience just without the costumes and the actual physical room so if you just like the puzzle solving there you go good two-player games are actually pretty rare there's more than these days lost cities however is a very excellent two-player game might be the best two-player game maybe patchwork it illustrates for one thing it illustrates this sort of symmetric scenario where you are taking risks how much will you risk and the other player is also making risks but in the context of that you're playing cards every card you play gives the other player information to better manage their risks so this is a game there's like this weird anti-design pattern you don't want to play a card and you don't want to go first games where you never want to take an action are often more interesting than games where you're really excited about your next action because it forces tension so if you sense how old I am I started playing magic when Unlimited came out I started playing magic I looked they recently released this magic anniversary they released a timeline of magic I realized wow I started playing magic in like 93 and ended in like 95 I quit when Fallen Empires came out because I thought that expansion was BS I think my first pack is full no I think my first pack was a revised starter but I got Fallen Empires after that Magic the Gathering is notable for two reasons this is why you should play it if you've never played it one it still exists to this day that's pretty amazing almost completely recognizable if I sat down and played magic today knowing only the rules I knew in 1994 I could play the game it would work it is basically the same game mechanics have been added but the fundamental core of the game is recognizable to me from that distant age of the 90s that ancient past to today and two there is a reason why it is the one it takes up so many tables at every con there's a reason it's so popular you need to understand the context of this game to understand gaming as a whole Fury of Dracula is hide and seek this is a game called Scotland Yard which is just hide and seek Scotland Yard is pretty good Fury of Dracula is even better hide and seek Dracula plays down these cards of where he's going to go face down and the four versus one which is already awesome the one person playing Dracula puts these cards face down and that is the path that Dracula has taken so they take like the London card and put it face down and they take the Ireland card and they put it face down the Sweden card put it face down there's a line and the other people are exploring Europe and if they bump into one of the places that Dracula has been recently the card flips up aha Dracula was in Sweden two turns ago I know but the fact that it implements hide and seek without someone drawing on a piece of paper by using this complex and elegant card mechanism is interesting in and of itself a problem with this any game where players are taking actions that no other player can observe are rife with cheating or rife with mistakes oh yes I was in London this turn I was in Moscow the next turn yeah no one would know even if you make a mistake maybe you're not trying to cheat though you might be trying to cheat yeah I played the Manchester card oops it was the Moscow this game and Puerto Rico does this too but this game is really notable for it it has rules there's a whole section in the book called what if Dracula cheats if Dracula is hot cheating he loses like half his blood and the sun comes out it really sucks but the fact that the game keeps going there is an error catch mechanism in this game if cheating occurs if the game gets broken rather than just the game being ruined as most games are ruined by someone breaking a rule in this game it's not actually cheating you can totally cheat on purpose if you're Dracula and if you get away with it the consequences won't happen there is a rule about it it's who's gonna call you out on it the four other players who can't look at your facedown cards we gotta move quicker because you keep explaining all the rules to every game that's all right so if you don't want to set your money on fire you should play netrunner which is a much better game than magic all right so imagine if you went to the store to buy a pack of magic cards and instead of there being random cards inside you've got three copies of every single card and that's it every single person who plays netrunner seriously just buys all the cards it's like a subscription sort of right the packs come out every once in a while they're 15 bucks and oh look every card is in there so it's not you play against someone who has this evil deck and normally when you play against someone in magic it goes an evil deck it's like oh you beat me with your evil pal for cards that cost $500 no you play against someone in netrunner who beat you with an evil deck I have those cards boom not everyone plays the same evil deck it's great the other notable thing about this game is you play two different kinds of things you play first you play a hacker busting into the corporation and then you play as the corporation trying to fend against that you go to your netrunner tournament you bring two decks with you some of the cards are red on back some are blue there's two different games you know they're running hacking and the corporation defending you know you can attack someone's hand reach into their hand grab cards and look for points all right and if you see points you take them it's great so Dungeons and Dragons is almost the opposite of magic the gathering in that it is still this like legendary thing that's been around forever but it's modern form is unrecognizable even from a few generations back the theme is consistent shouldn't we put this next to the George Paris the narrative around the game is consistent but the game itself is so fundamentally different every so let's look at this not from a like loot perspective or a game mechanics perspective but from a role-playing perspective to understand the context of all modern indie RPGs all modern role-playing games acquisitions incorporated all these things you should play a few different generations a few different editions of Dungeons and Dragons and try to un-identify what kinds of role-playing happen in those different versions for example second-end D&D has very loose rules and what happened is game masters would make a lot of stuff up and drive a lot of narrative later D&Ds started really hyper-focusing these rules and the game started turning into a wow-ride and you'll just see this evolution studying the evolution of Dungeons and Dragons is a fascinating thing that will teach you a lot about gaming Race for the Galaxy is notable because it has a very complex set of iconography right if you have played Race for the Galaxy you look at this and you understand what all this means and if you haven't you're like what are all these weird symbols but once you understand these weird symbols not only will you know how to play Race for the Galaxy you'll be able to play it in like five minutes on your phone you'll also know how to play role for the Galaxy and every other for the Galaxy game right because they all use the same exact symbols and they all mean the same exact thing right a number and a hexagon is victory points this game showcases the upper limit of the complexity of a language you can expect your players to learn as a barrier to entry to even play your game in the first place more complex than this it's not worth anyone's time and it's so good that none of you probably noticed that these cards are in French also the game is very similar to Puerto Rico which is like the best game we talked about already Lady Blackburn is an RPG you can go right now download for free print the PDF and play this game you can run it as a game master that costs zero dollars knowing nothing about it it starts with the same characters in the same scenario every time its primary mechanic is hey remember that time we did that thing and then you play out a flashback and then that gives you a power now so you start with a character with a sheet and some basic nouns information on it and as you role play you both write the story forward and you write the backstories at the same time and it's different every time it's not like you can oh i got the same characters you can replay this thing it's great pendante poker kind of sucks because if you play poker to win you're gonna fold most of the time very rarely do dramatic things happen you'll play a hundred hands of poker and one of them is that maverick situation so there's two ways to make poker great number one add pandas and two replace the flush with the flush flush and dante is a euro design look at what poker should be imagine if poker was designed by someone who designs games today it's poker where every hand is that crazy hand at the end of the tournament in the movie every single hand is someone bluffing like crazy someone who's got equivalently a royal flush people are bidding it up it is insane the other really fascinating thing about this game is that it's poker right the back of the book the rule book there's a section that says hey we don't advise this but if you want to play this game for real money here are the real money rules don't use those America is a trivia game that isn't bad and it's because if you play trivial pursuit you get a question like oh who starred in this movie if you haven't seen the movie if you don't know the names of actors everyone just goes the same person who made power grid had a hand in this game freedman freest right i saw someone at table top library they returned marvel code names yesterday because they didn't know anything about marvel superheroes they couldn't play right anyone can play this even if they know nothing about america or american history because basically you're big you're placing cubes on guesses or near guesses so if someone else bids like guesses like this thing happened in 1950 you might think that they're probably smarter than you or they know something you might bid right next to them and you'll still get a point or two so you're looking at this physical board and moving cubes around the mechanics are elegant it's a trivia game that isn't bad and it's worth playing for that alone i love this game it's really good so there's this genre of game that is called train games about chuchu trains ticket to ride is not a train game no train games involve corporations crayon and stocks you're drawing train lines they're usually an exploration of some very particular year in america usually the game some people actually care about the history of trains like if you put the wrong engine on the car they're like hey that car that train didn't exist in 1846 it wasn't invented until 1848 the two reasons to play these games are one if you've never played the train game this is a huge area of gaming that you know nothing about and you should at least experience it i'm not saying you like it you know what people mean when they say train game right i don't know i've played this game four times i still don't know if i like it but i want to play it again so the point is there's a whole series the main series of train games is called the 18xx series which is a lot of them but 1846 is the gateway one that's the first one you should play and maybe the only one you should play but the other interesting thing you play a person with money you invest in corporations and get stock in those corporations you run the corporations and their money separately from your own money but the winner is your eyes is most of their own money dominion was the first modern deckbuilder it's the best deckbuilder it's the most elegant deckbuilder there's so many things going for this game all the other games that try to be a pure deckbuilder if largely failed or largely had fundamental design problems there's some other games that incorporate deckbuilding right you get a clank in there or something like that but even though after all these deckbuilders try to copy dominion dominion is still the champ dominion will teach you what makes a deckbuilding mechanic work what doesn't what's balanced what's interesting and what isn't it does not matter which one this image is i typed some grognard ass board game into google images and that was there and i stuck it in the slide find one of those like musty looking games that looks like it's from the 70s it has a bunch of cardboard chips with numbers on it it's called like the battle of the marn or something just play one of them once because you think the train games are this weird world holy crash don't don't play these at a convention where a person with a beard might be seeing you do it at home with your friends so that you don't get them coming up to you and say oh my game these games are not not games are starting to win if we talk about simulatory experiences these games simulate war to the point that random crap happens because war sucks and war is random this these are games about managing that randomness if you want to see what it would be really like to be a commander on a ship in the battle of midway this is their kind of game i don't know if you like them i do not like them particularly you gotta know about them risk is a terrible game shogun renamed to samurai swords now renamed to ikusa is risk but good or at least as good as risk can be the two fun parts of this game we don't have time to go into detail anymore you're going way too long why can't i go too long because we got like i want to talk about hiring the ninja to kill you nope so this game you bid for turn order you might want to go first you might want to go last and also the combat like when armies fight are actually complicated and engaging and it uses d12s that's true it's only game with d12s el grande we just played this the other day is a fascinating euro game that you should play the main rule is wherever the king is can't touch him can't go there if you like wooden cubes this is like the first best wooden cube game it also incorporates gops the game of pure strategy as the mechanism for choosing who goes first and who goes second between two cities the fundamental thing about this game you're building a city with tiles on your left you're building one and you're right i'm collaborating with my player on my right and my player on my left my score at the end is of my two cities which one had the lowest score think about that really think about it but your friend is also sharing that city with you and your opponent is sharing this too good pandemic legacy i do not like pandemic games but pandemic legacy if you're going to play one you want to see what the deal is this is almost more a role playing game than a co-op game it is a co-op game but it's more a shared experience it's something to enjoy it's the best legacy game it's the best of this genre deep sea adventure you're a bunch of jerks and a submarine that's leaky sharing the same air trying to get treasure go to the bottom of the sea grab a treasure come back up let your friends drown it illustrates shared resources you're all drawing from the same pool how deep are you gonna go captain sonar was in the omega games are on this thing i told you you kept going slow why you put so many there's 40 you knew how many there were captain sonar you are two teams of four moving submarines in real time the mechanic is one of your teammates is listening to the other side trying to figure out where they are based on what they're saying and doing quarter master general is axis and allies but good don't play axis if you want a game that has the same brain feel as axis and allies but is actually an interesting game this is the one to play notable about both captain sonar and quarter master general they're team versus games captain sonar is four on four quarter master general is three on three there's not a lot of board games that do this team versus team situation vast vast is fascinating because every player is playing a completely different game i'm the dragon scott is literally the cave that we are in and our friend matt is the goblins who are trying to steal something i didn't it's fun but the real thing to see about this game is just the fact that it exists is amazing and it has an expansion and added like an anger unicorn so we just played this game this is a game where you can bid literally anything so i might bid one and scott bids two billion so you're trying to buy victory points basically when you're bidding right so whoever bids the most gets the victory points at the end of the game the most victory points wins except whoever bid the most total money is automatically eliminated and then we score among everyone else so you can just bid a billion every time and win but then you won't win so we're out of time so the last game and this taiko tweeted about this beginning of packs this is a game called inheritance this is a lark there are three kinds of larks larks scary vampire kind creepy vampire people trying to make out with each other creepy vampire people again people hitting each other with with foam swords that's also the creepy vampire people and weird Scandinavian larks that are real this this is an experience you need to play it you need to see what larks are like this is the one to try no foam swords involved and we are out of time i hope you enjoyed it please grab one of these on the way out and check our website there may be video of this panel on our website soon if this sucks why did you not leave earlier but also take the flyer and report us for sucking there is also a video i'm cheating of this same panel when we ran it with a different list of games at magfest not that long ago it's already on our youtube channel i used to play wrestling rules jungle speed where it doesn't matter who grabbed the totem but if you have the totem last you're still with the duel we play that way and that's right got kicked out of a shopping mall once that's how we got a finger broken yeah yeah i also broke my neck a little bit we came up with a very specific rule of how to determine who's got control yeah you got it on the bottom but yeah yeah yeah yeah yep yep it's a good game okay when you say scott johnson do you mean frogman's smoke dumps or something else it's different scott johnson all right there are like there are four different scott johnson's between comics and games