 So we're here to talk about taking your turn because this is a problem in the tabletop Everyone thinks they're cute going up to the tabletop library five minutes before they're gonna kick us all out and holding a copy of Twilight Imperium you're like can I check this out and every enforcer has to smile and say ha ha no one's ever made that joke before if you go To any board game online community and you look at the top recurring discussions that keep coming up over and over and over again My friend plays slow the game takes too long is like the top five easily So we're like hey, why don't we just do a panel on all those top things? Oh, how about long games? All right, we're good. Yeah do it because that is unacceptable. So no one's got time for that If you're an adult, I mean when I was in college, I already didn't have time for that So when we play a game like Puerto Rico, we play real fast and I feel like now that we're older now There's a lot more games. You want to play a lot of games So you don't waste all your time on just one game Especially in that one game. It's four hours of your very limited packs. You only fit so many games into packs and Humans have been doing this for a long time talk about chess Chess the whole idea of moving upon two spaces That was a rule that was added to make chess go faster because pawn pushing is pointless and boring and meaningless It was just busy work. That's just like building your certain things early Right people don't know that that was a change it was so long ago back and then had similar changes back I'm it used to be three times longer and they cut out most of the yeah As you play back in certain countries the rules every piece starts off the board You're gonna get all the pieces on the board then all the pieces around that all the pieces off again Right the normal way most people play where the pieces like set up originally is like they just decided well That's like the most interesting starting arrangement. So we'll just always do it that way so the game doesn't take forever So they took the grind out of chess think about that for a minute But another thing we in particular we don't just want people to take their turn We want people to fucking take their turn we go fast Puerto Rico will knock that game out in 30 minutes Everdell 45 minutes I always have a hard time when people like well, how long is that game right? It's like I can't tell you how long the game is because you know I maybe I played it with someone who was slow But maybe I played with my friends and it was like lightning and if I tell you the game is 20 minutes And it takes you two hours Right, you're gonna think I lied yep But we were those people so if you don't like to try to win and take your turn and go fast one You would hate us and to never sit at a table with us because we will all hate each other so At the same time we also like train games Train games take between four and infinity hours to play And we spent at Packs West we got kicked out of tabletop because we went over time and the enforcers had to like Kick us out playing this train game. That's what too long This is the eternal struggle right? It's like you don't want to spend too much time on a game But there's a lot of games that are like good and can't be shorter like part of the appeal is that they're long It's like oh, that's such an amazing gaming experience of four hours of intent Right, but when can you actually play that? It's you know, so that's the battle that's going on So let's start about it for a concept that I think we all need to internalize This is something that is starting to be talked about more in the games industry I bought a lot of stock images for this you can see a lot of like really boring white people looking at each other If you go to Adobe stock and type anything you will see a thousand white hands pointing at a generic thing Let's talk about the fun economy if a game is fun, but it takes a long time It's not that good or at least it has a low fun economy like a car has a low fuel economy So while there are games that take a long time and might be worth it to you If you can find a game that is a certain amount of fun But takes like 10 or 20 or 30 minutes to play that game is probably objectively better as a game And you should seek those games out You should reward the games that trust you and respect you enough to not waste your time I was getting this argument a lot with people who are like, you know Especially like TV shows or something right and they'd be like oh you gotta watch this TV show It's great, but it doesn't get great to like episode 10 that may be true It may become the most amazing TV show if I can slog through to episode 10 But you know what there's like a billion TV shows on earth There's a whole bunch that are good from episode one if I just stick to those I'll die before I see all those I'm even bothering with one that doesn't get good till episode 10 right no matter how good it gets yep I was watching all the sale or game all the sale of women Someone's like oh the in this one season. There's like eight episodes. You just got it You gotta watch them, but they suck so watch them on fast forward and I was like what? So let's look at some examples and sort of work through this So deep sea adventure is pretty fun. Like it's an okay fun game. It's not a great game It's not that fun, but it's pretty fun Yeah, you're a bunch of jerks in the submarine sharing oxygen trying to steal treasure So it's not that fun, but it's pretty fun, but it takes like five minutes to play It takes like 30 seconds to teach right now Set up time right yet set up learn playing you can bust this game out while you're waiting for this panel to start So I would say this is an objectively good game because you get one unit of fun in almost no amount of time That's a huge fun economy Meanwhile one of those train games the easiest one 1846 the race for the Midwest which I love and that game is Exactly like the way it looks on that slide there It is objectively more fun. That board doesn't even pieces up No It is it is more fun meaning there is more to do there are more decisions more interactions There's a lot more meat on that plate, but it takes a Long time if you play this game like we can play maybe this game two or three times in one packs day And that's about it. Yeah, and we're fast Now this is not a better or worse game than this game because this provides more fun and it provides different fun It's fun. You can't get in a game That's that short so we can't just say a game is better if it's shorter We really have to think about what does it bring to the table get it bring to the table? So no monopoly Well, here's the point monopoly has some fun aspects There's a little bit of fun in there like you can squeeze this tiny little drop of fun out of monopoly It is there but monopoly takes between four and forty hours to win and even worse most Americans add rules to make it take Even longer. I even heard some security guards talking right because I guess they're not the security guards at this cons today like yesterday They're not obviously deep in the board gaming world at least those ones weren't right and they were talking But they knew this is a board game console must have told them and they were talking about board games They're like, oh remember trouble. I remember sorry and someone was like oh, man. I love monopoly I just never finish it. You can normal non-nervy people are not finishing monopoly We're gonna we're gonna talk in a bit about like mechanically why monopoly in games like it takes so long But think of monopoly like fast food like you don't want to eat a McDonald's burger like you don't want to but sometimes Weird like reptilian part of your brain says yo go eat one of those Yeah, I'm gonna eat one of those and you regret it, but for that brief moment. It was fun Oh Fun can mean different things. This is why this is a hard topic to talk about wizards a pretty good game It's a trick-taking game. We really like it. It's hot. Yeah, but it's only okay fun Like it's okay fun trick-taking game and it takes a while to play But because it's a trick-taking card game It's a game where you can socialize during the entirety of the game So while the game isn't that good and the game takes longer than it would if we just focused on playing the game The socialization and the downtime within the game is why we play the game Your parents in Michigan play Euker because they want to hang out with each other not because they like Euker that much No, but one one of them does care about you could that much and the other ones don't you have a little problem? Yep, and there's also this point about there's different kinds of fun There's things that it like a game might actually take a really long time But if you don't feel like it took a long time if you're enjoying yourself the whole time Even though the game like is taking four hours. Maybe that's okay. Maybe you're still getting something out of it Yeah, there's actually a lot of different a lot of this depends on the game design, right? So I always when ticket to ride came out. I sort of had like this revelation It's like, you know, take it to ride It's not a super fast game But you're never bored playing ticket to ride because on your turn you do this much stuff, right? So it's like bad bad bad bad bad everyone's taking really short turns So you never feel like you're waiting around for anything, right? Other games will be like you take your turn and during my and during your turn I can't do anything. I just sit around waiting like say root root is an amazing game But if you're playing four player root you sit there and wait for three people to do their turn Well, you do nothing except think and if you've already thought about your next turn You do nothing and wait and wait and wait and wait and then it's your turn So it can feel long if people are slow Right the best is simultaneous turns or do stuff during other people's turns the game never feels slow And even if the game takes five hours, you might be like, oh man, that was a short game Let's play again, and it's like dude that took five hours It doesn't feel like five hours because you're always doing stuff all the time So root is a pretty good example of a really good sweet spot to be in because room takes a while We're it's not a super short game It is for us and we'll talk about how to make it like that for you, too But root is really fun for what it is because root is a very elegant game Root has condensed the kinds of mechanics that are in super serious grog-narred war games and made them with cute animals and made the game Still long but not too long. It doesn't overstay. It's welcome So root is like an example of the kind of sweet spot you want to shoot for root is brilliant game design because of that and that Not that alone, but that is a big part of why root is so popular as opposed to say some grog-narred war game. I Don't even know what game that is. I just searched for quote some grog-narred war game on Google images I didn't know all of them are advanced squad leader like that's the one I know that has like a giant binder They're all that same No, whatever this game is is more fun than roots now Maybe it's fun in the dwarf Fortress way, but there's more going on in this game You can get more out of this game than you can get out of some theater You can get something out of it. You can squeeze something out of that thing But it takes a long time and you have to decide if that's worth the investment And then if you bust out the advanced rules, you're an even deeper trouble This game is a joke you're not supposed to play it You can play it kind of like hall. There's an RPG called human occupied landfill The rulebook is just a joke like you're not actually supposed to play the game Sometimes we'll try to play it. This game will take you do our entire life to play It's down to the level of individual troops in the entire north african campaign So Let's talk about mechanics now this people when we give talks we just talk about like deep-in mechanics And when it comes to games taking too long, there are only two things we can blame we can either blame the players or We can blame the game Most people tend to blame the players first Right if you look online It's always like kick that guy out of your kick that guy at your game group He's slow or talk to them or make them take their turn. We blame the game first Yep game is number one blame not that the player is no blame game is lame first Yep, and even worse some things could make a game go long if players act a certain way So now it's almost like a risk this game is four minutes or if your friend Scott plays four hundred minutes, right? Like like even if we who think we're fast at games play monopoly it will take long We have to blame the game even if people who are usually slow at games play deep-sea adventure It will be quick ninety nine percent of the time Let's talk about monopoly the problem with monopoly is both the players in the game It's primarily the game One of the problems with monopoly is that the mechanics keep injecting resources you keep going around the board You keep getting money it keeps injecting resources. It doesn't take the resources away at the same rate So there's no mechanic that forces the game to end the games economy doesn't have something that says this is the last Turn you cannot win the game is over It's not like you're paying the tax every time you go right the technical end game condition for monopoly is when everyone's bankrupt Except one person right, but there's nothing pulling people towards bankruptcy It's like it's really it takes a long time for people to actually go bankrupt You might be completely mathematically eliminated, right? There's no way you can win or your probability of winning is so small But for that probability to actually reach zero like you cannot win takes forever So you're forced to play the game even though you can't win the game anymore And that's why you're upset if you still had a chance to win Then you wouldn't be so upset even if you were sitting there for a long time going around and around like all these things I could do I could come back right. There's nothing you can do you've lost well So I keep going you technically have a chance to theoretically you could die You could never land on anything and keep going around and around it's more like football the game isn't actually Technically over this is the wing percentages of some like Seahawks game against the Rams A while ago like 2015 it's the percentage chance each team has to win the game at any point until the end The game isn't over until it's over the game ends at the moment No player can affect the game any further Monopoly actually has a lot of mechanics that force the game to keep going even though while someone technically could win The chance is so low. It's effectively zero But before we can really talk about these two like this graph and monopoly in detail We have to quote a book. We got to talk about Characteristics of games was written by someone you might know Richard Garfield if you read this book You won't have to come to any panel. We've done ever we borrow a lot from this book This is a sort of foundational text of tabletop game design and game design in general But he has this concept in the book of the idea of bushyness a games bushyness He doesn't like to use like a very defined definition because nerds like us and you like to we like to use Fidantic definitions to fight with each other over nothing A game is bushy if you have a lot of options and a lot of things you can interact with and a game is sparse If you don't have a lot of options You don't have a lot of things to interact with so this concept of bushyness is how we're going to evaluate Why some of these games go on too long? So look back at American football or ice hockey any sports You have the same options in the beginning of a football game as you have in the end of a football game If you use your timeouts, maybe you have one less option at the very end of a game You have a few more options because there are some options that are stupid in the beginning of a football game That makes sense if you're losing at the end of a football Like you wouldn't do it on sides kick unless you had to then you would ice hockey the option of pull your goalie Appears at the end of the game. You could technically do it in the beginning. That would be stupid So the game has the same number of decisions Do I shoot the puck or pass the puck throughout the entire game change lines now, you know, whatever Look at monopoly you have decisions to make in the game like the property. Don't buy the product Do I bid on this property don't buy houses how much houses do I buy where do I buy that how much do I bid should I cheat? Do I trick do I break the dice? Should I flip the table should I take $50 to get out of jail or should I roll the dice and try to get Doubles to get a jail free. No, there's not that I get in a jail-free car There's not that many decisions But there are decisions to make there's things the player can do to impact the game up until that point Where one or two players have all the money and all the properties and everyone else is nothing then you cannot Nothing you do in the game can affect the outcome of the game You're just rolling the dice forever and ever until you see who wants you're finding out who wants like Candyland at the beginning of Candyland There's no decisions in Candyland. You are literally just finding out who won It's a find out who won game That is the Valley of Despair That is why Monopoly feels a little fun. You're having fun until the fun runs out and then you're trapped I think the game I think what they should do is you just play Monopoly I said the game is over as soon as the last property is purchased or as soon as there are three or less Unpurchased properties whoever has the most money wins plus the value of your property No, the game is over just open the box look at the contents Remember like when you were a kid playing Monopoly close the box put it away. That is how you win Monopoly So let's talk about a thought like a tabletop miniatures fighting elimination war game warhammer Or chess. Yeah, just to Chess and games like it the bushyness Decreases in a linear fashion over time as pieces get eliminated you all Decisions you make earlier actually do matter more mathematically Humans can't engage with the game on that level only AI's can as the game goes on and you get closer to the known solutions to chess You have fewer decisions, but they matter a lot more so the bushyness goes down So as you have to think harder about your decisions you have fewer decisions to make that is why chess actually usually does end There's a reason why chess actually doesn't end now and we have this problem with stalemates and draws But that is way too much to talk about in this panel, but the bushyness decreases chess would never end if that was not true Most table-tapped games follow this basic arc you have some options. Yeah, you're like You don't have a lot of resources There's only so many things you can do right even if there's like 20 different buildings to buy You can only afford like three right so you're going down one of these few roads at the beginning Then it's something you get more resources so you can buy all sorts of stuff, right? You're loading up your board building some giant engine or something then towards the end of the game It's like well I'm only looking for victory points and there's only a few ways for me to squeeze out victory points like those three big Score things So this is the classic game art This is kind of what you're looking for this little bit at the end can usually be a problem You know at the end of a game of like power grid or any of these like Euro games You're like kind of done, you know, you're not gonna win and it takes like one more round before the game's over It's not too bad, but there's ways to get rid of that so Remember this definition remember this concept of bushyness because I want to talk about a game called Everdell Everdell's a really good game. I can crank out a game Everdell in like 45 minutes, but Everdell The bushyness of Everdell Increases as the game goes on. You don't just get more powerful things as the game goes on You get access to different things lots of different things You have so many more decisions to make in the last third of that game You make more decisions in the last round of this game than in the entire two first phases of the game combines That is a problem because the more decisions you have to make that are viable the more you have to think about them The more you have to look at all the cards try to figure out a path through the game You cannot have a lot of bushyness in the end of a game if you want it to end I'm just gonna leave Everdell up because Everdell does something else That's actually a problem and wingspan does this too, but it's not as much of a problem Everdell has a lot of bits to interact with a ton of things and they all do different things They're all unique So if you actually want to be good at Everdell You have to memorize all of those or you have to look at the entire board and like look at everyone else's boards And look at everything throughout the entire game to make sure you are doing the optimal path That'll make the game take a long time But I mostly blame the players for that because you could just not worry about that and just enjoy the game And it'll be done Wingspan this isn't actually much of a problem wingspan has a huge number of cards that are unique In fact every card in wingspan is unique every bird is unique and has a unique power in this game But the powers all do kind of the same types of things so you can predict what they could do with Everdell I can't really predict what they could do without reading them So if I don't look at every bird every round and read all the text I'll still do okay at wingspan It still makes the game take more time But it doesn't make the game take as much time as Everdell Also in wingspan, even though there's a huge deck of unique birds You only have to worry about the ones that have actually appeared in the game You're not gonna use all those cards every game. You only have to use the ones that have been drawn So just read the ones that have been drawn and ignore what could possibly come out of the deck It's not worth your time Yep, and because they do the same kinds of things like draw two more versus draw three or versus draw one Or and one sheep like that kind of stuff if they're consistent in what they do It's easier to predict what cards might come later without having to worry about them Right, there's some crazy card. It's like, you know get a hundred eggs It's like when I have to worry what if the card get a hundred eggs card shows up. I have to be ready That's a lot of eggs Some games the cards are unique and you can't predict what they do Everdell has that problem that is a recipe for a game going a long time But that can be mitigated by a concept of heuristics that we'll talk about in a minute This is this World War two simulation game called quartermaster general It has a whole bunch of unique cards that are super unique like oh troops appear in this country right now If this occurred previously ridiculous crap These you have to memorize. It's the same problem as Everdell Unless you know a little bit about World War two history if you have this external context These cards are all really predictable You know what kinds of things could happen in World War two So outside information or heuristics around that information can make the game take less time so you can either make the cards Predictable or give people a way about birds Well, you know what kind of car thing or something wins. Oh, but the knowledge of birds is not tied to what the cards do I've read those cards. There's no way this game is about like eggs are just a resource I think the birds that have more eggs are birds that lay more eggs In the real world, but there's even distribution of the number of egg bird types So we can blame the medium in some cases tabletop does not have a computer to do all the work for you Sometimes there's busy work. You got to fill in every one of those little dots if someone shoots you with a small laser Yep, it's like yeah, you play battle tech with a computer, right? You can play the exact same game and you don't have to roll 2d6 check a chart roll 2d6 check a chart Roll 2d just be even not the decision-making Which the act of doing the game doing the busy work to make the game happen to figure out the result of your decision Could take a few minutes if you have a computer you could literally say I fire my small laser at the head and it says Not only did you hit their head exploded? They're dead. They're mega slow. It's like it's it, right? So not being a computer as a human being just makes four games slow sometimes now We don't blame the medium entirely because busy work in a game serves valuable purposes It gives people time to cool down. It's fun to fill in bubbles on the map But it also gives you time to like internalize mechanics internalize events that happen in the game think about the score There's a lot of reasons why busy work is both a positive and a negative aspect of tabletop gaming But if a game has poorly designed busy work, you're gonna spend a lot of time dealing with it when we play 1846 We need an excel spreadsheet to figure out the dividends toward the end of the game or it takes a while Some games have this political political in games means something different from what you're thinking right now But games that have a stop the winner mechanic meaning there's not much to do in the game But eventually someone's looks someone looks like they're about to win and then everyone has to stop them from winning Then someone else looks like they're about to win and everyone has to stop them from winning That's why munchkin never ends and is a terrible game Because there is nothing to make the game But I want you to look at this graph because if you understand why The thing that happens in munchkin applies to all games Because all games that have more than two players and are not just races where you don't interact with each other They end up being political. This is a return on skill So this is how much as I put more skill into the game. How much return do I get on that skill? I'm blackjack. I'm counting cards and chess. I'm doing strategies But with a game like munchkin eventually you're doing everything you can there is no smarter decision You could possibly make meaning politics is all that's left and politics is I vote who wins I don't want Scott to win because fuck Scott. So I attack Scott I played like this magic conspiracy trap the other day. I played magic in 25 years It was a vote who wins game pretty much right we might be doing all this fancy stuff with creatures and everything We could have just said all right We're gonna see do a secret bow and vote who wins and it's the same exact game mathematically speaking yep It's little bit of luck Maybe one person luckily gets an extra vote or maybe with their skill they get an extra vote or something like that But it's fundamentally voted wins so a measure of a game might be how far out to this bubble go before it hits politics But all multiplayer games are political once everyone is good at them and you got to be ready for that You got to think about that Sometimes a game lets you calculate things that are important But doesn't make it that easy to calculate them and your friend Scott a different Scott I mean sit there somewhere and calculate everything on their turn every turn right the famous phrase analysis Pralysis that people probably have in their hands before they come to this panel and we're surprised it took us 25 minutes to say it This game is the analysis paralysis game if you sit there and you calculate the results of every possible move You could make on your turn you will if you're not wrong make the optimal move and this game and have the highest chance of it No full disclosure he is undefeated at this game as far as I can tell Yeah, but yeah, if you calculate everything you will win this game unless someone else does the same thing Then it will come down to luck now again most games have this kind of problem But you can design games to make it easy to calculate the things that people will want to calculate like put board aids There's ways to make it so that someone who's bad at math or someone who's gonna spend their time figuring this out Can do it more quickly But I mostly blame the players because if you're gonna be that kind of person who's gonna like calculate everything you need to get faster at calculation So the game and the player have to make changes avoid games that make like you if you need to know a number in a game And that number is really hard to calculate the game is just who is better at calculating that number Maybe play a better game But if you can get better at calculating those numbers you can be better than all your friends at those kinds of games Yeah, faster will usually mean better for reasons we'll talk about later All right some games. This is a different train game, but it doesn't look like a train game But it's in space. This is the one that got us kicked out of Pax West's table top when they closed at midnight Because it's a real fun train game. We're really liking it But there's a round we have to calculate how much money your space trains make Well, how much how much or they make when they go around space mining asteroids Yeah, you do a thing right the problem with the thing is that it takes a while to do the thing It's a complicated process to calculate and do and then another player has to do the same thing on the same board They can't even start thinking about what they're gonna do until you're done because everything you do affects what they might do Which or is the humane American? Okay? Well, I have to get the best score I can get from what's left and then the wait So the third person is waiting for two people to do this right and it takes forever in the other train game We showed earlier. It doesn't change too much from round to round right? It's like well last turn My train could get $80 and this turn one extra piece of track was built. So now I can get $90, right? It's like in this game. It's like Everything changes every round you have to re-calculate everything from scratch every time you're spending most of your time Calculating that result not most of the time during the actual parts where you're playing the game buying and selling stocks Building space trains, you know putting out asteroid tokens. So like the small part and then it's calculate small So watch out for that perfect storm of a game where the game state changes radically based on player actions Coupled with players have to take a lot of actions on their turn before another player can act if the game state changes Radically, but you take a really quick action and you keep going around taking actions That's fine But if the game changes a lot and you spend 10 minutes doing your turn the game will take 10 minutes times number of turns Times number of players while at Imperium happens Bounded bargaining Some games have bounded bargaining rules around bargaining bonanza that bean game is like a great example of a good game I still be the best bargaining game there is I like to but if a game has Situations where you have to bargain with people and barter and there are no mechanics to force that shit to stop when it's done Someone's gonna keep trying to make deals and make the game take forever people are gonna ham and hawth You have to have game mechanic incentives to make bartering end or make bartering finish with some sort of deal Radical asymmetry Vass has this problem. Doon also has this problem if the game is radically asymmetric That's really bothering me. Yeah, it was bothering me, too. Why did you move it early? It's going away. I got rid of it. I took care of it for you. I can still see it I'm gonna photoshop that before me So Vass and doon are crazily asymmetric Like if I play the Harkonnen in Dune I have completely different rules about core mechanics of the game from everyone else Vass I actually have a different game board. I like have different actions I can take one person's playing like a knight that's fighting a dragon one person's playing the dragon one person's playing the cave They're fighting in That's awesome, right? That is awesome But it means that to play the game you need to know how to play all those different games And if you're gonna teach the game you need to know how all those parts work, right? So even if playing the game goes fast as everyone has mastered and understands all the rules Teaching the game is slow setting the game up is slow and no matter how fast you are, right? It's easy when a game if everyone's doing generally the same thing you look around the board You can sort of tell what everyone is doing and sort of what they can do to figure out what you're gonna do if everyone's Completely wildly different you need to spend it no matter how smart you are unless you're maybe some super genius Yes, I can look at each player and completely change your mindset, right? It's like all right. What's that player up to? Oh, they're doing this. All right. What's that player up to change my right reset everything, right? It's very very difficult and time consuming to then make the decision of what I'm going to do on my turn with my Completely different game now while it's true that this kind of mechanic Objectively makes the game take longer. There's no way around that it also provides think back to the beginning a unique kind of fun You can't get from other kinds of games That's why I also blame the players if you want to play really asymmetric games like root or vast or Dune You have the responsibility to learn the game fully read the rules yourself and learn it before you play Maybe even refuse to play it with people who haven't done the same because you can play Dune and fast Really quick if everyone actually knows all the rules I think that's a thing that you know doesn't happen too often right people tend to you know They learn a game they teach it to some people and unless you you keep playing of the same people over and over and over And all master it well then you can play fast But if you keep having a new person every time even one new person makes the whole game slow Right no matter how smart they are even if it's the fastest best most genius player in the world, right? They're gonna be slow the first time they play any game All right, if a game has an Everdell has this problem too not to get back to Everdell If a game has a lot of systems and a lot of things to interact with but they either Don't work the same way that those systems work in most other games Or if they aren't consistent with each other like if you interact with this area It's majority of pieces takes the bath madad, but if you mess with this thing It's whoever has the least takes the bath madad when the mechanics are inconsistent Then you're gonna have to keep context switching depending on what you're interacting with Everdell has a really bad example of this Everdell is mostly non interactive You only interact with players because you built something they wanted you got in their way But there's a few cards that interact with other players and steal stuff from them The fact that those exist means everyone has to worry about them for the entire game Because they're inconsistent with the rest of the game It's sort of like how you play Dominion if there's any curses in any of the 10 cards you play completely differently than if there are no curses It's a completely different game. It's one witch. That's it. Hold hold it for Dominion Yep a big example of this too is you'll find games will just take a thing that everyone knows like a draft or Like a mechanic like a draft a draft is a good example, but they'll do the draft weird If they do the draft weird your players are gonna get messed it up because they've done drafts before you're gonna have problems You're gonna have to keep like another game a card pass to the left But this game on my game We have to take a card pass to the right then take two past the left to take three and pass across And it's like well if you do a weird thing like that people aren't gonna remember it because it's different from what they're used to Take one pass to the left So if you're doing a weird thing with a mechanic that is common to many games that better be the focus of your game Your game is about that draft that is the the main feature of your game is this funky draft Then it's okay, but all the mechanics that are not the main feature of your game There's some like sideshow they're just there to support the main feature You need to do those in the standard way that every other game does them so that people are used to it Don't need to think too hard about it if they're gamers who know what's up Yep, if you're a game designer stand on the shoulders of giants There's a reason why the concept of taking a card and turning it 90 degrees to just to show that you've used it Is a really widespread mechanic because that is a really good consistent mechanic Don't make a weird one looking at you Chuddock where you have to like rotate it all the way around and then splay it So we're gonna get into heuristics in a second. It's a good segue But really abstract games have a problem like looks look at chess first chess is an abstract game But ostensibly it's two armies fighting. There's like knights and trying to kill the king So if you sit to someone down who's never played chess before and say your job is to kill that king They'll naturally think okay, I want to move my dudes toward that king so I can kill it Yeah, there's been the most beginner player some idea of what to do And that will help them make decisions faster and play faster hockey take this biscuit and get it into that basket over there But go all right. Yes, if you play go and you know how go works go is like a really deep Amazing game, right? It's like okay, but what you're around stones by going like this you'll have a very bad time In fact the real-world things you might think would make sense on a go-board if you've never played go are terrible ideas So we're gonna spend the rest of this panel We're gonna teach all of you how to play fast, but I gotta warn you if you do the things We're about to tell you you're gonna hate all of your friends Like So Number one You have to recognize arbitrary decisions if decision a and decision b are effectively the same you need to recognize that shit and just pick Right, so don't worry about it. I see a lot of players I've played with ham and ha and spend time thinking and deciding between two options that are identical There's no just one random. Do I pick paper? I don't know, but scissors feel pretty good me. No, I don't know paper It's just the paper and scissors if you can't pick one and they're equal randomly pick is the best move Oh, yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit. So I'm gonna give you an example You don't even need to know the rules to this game All you need to know is this game is called erosion of hex and to start the game You need to put your starting tile somewhere on the board. How many unique decisions do I have? How many you think there is one decision? two three options Four options five off good lord. Okay, so therefore there are only four options Because it's a symmetric board every other place you could go is a copy a functional equivalent of some other thing on that board So if you sit there trying to decide between one of the twos and one of the other twos It's a non-decision. They're the identical thing look for symmetry in games and you can eliminate decisions and honestly We're humans one of the things that makes humans like crazy good at stuff and the reason why AI is not beating us at most things Humans are really good at naturally Figuring out what is a bad idea? We're not good at figuring out what a good idea is but like I could do if I'm playing like run the panel the game I could stab myself in the eye with this. I could get naked. I could jump off this. Those are all options But I know they're bad ideas just naturally and the really hard problem is you get several good ideas Which one's the best idea? That's the hard. That's the hardest level of all. Alright say I went there Now how many options do I have if I'm the next player and I have to put something on this board? Three all right. They're learning. Yeah, you're the first audience who has ever gotten them, right? Thank you facts. First time we've done this channel ever and this keeps going You're ruined it for them. They were feeling good. They were feeling confident Even when the game gets less symmetric, you can still do this even here. Look you think I have all these options No, almost half of them are still arbitrary. They're still functionally equivalent. You can always find symmetries in games So these is stolen from other panels. They've done on how to be good at games But it just so happens a lot of the ways to be good are also ways to be fast We're not gonna go too deep into heuristics, but heuristics are really important and we're gonna talk about why they're important This is how you get both good at games and fasted games We're not gonna talk about how they make you good because that's a whole other talk But heuristics very simply are you have a rule that is not a full stimulation of the thing That helps you decide what to do about the thing if I take this clicker and just hock it at one of you you'll probably be able to catch it and The reason for that is that you can't do like quadratic equations and ballistic you're not sitting there calculating the physics of oh He threw it with these many jewels of renewtons of force at this angle with this arm speed It's gonna go there and it's gonna land in this spot and then by the time you've thought that that's hit you in the face Right. Yep. You mean how the hell do you catch it? You have another method of getting close enough to the right answer very very quickly so fast that you can catch something being 100 miles an hour Yep, and the rule is really simple. It's something humans naturally do we instinctually will look up at an object That's flying toward us and now we can move our body forward and backward without changing the angle of our view and the thing will naturally fall into our hands But it's not a perfect rule because if I hook this at someone over there None of you can figure out who I hooked it to until they catch it you can only calculate this if it's coming directly at you It's not a perfect simulation, but it's good enough to win a game of football Unless you're the Detroit Lions All right, so Scotch from New York, and he really hits Philadelphia. I'm sorry Well Yeah, you don't feel like Boston we're like weirdly mutual like the cat Washington we like mutually respect each other in a weird way No, that's no fun. We're gonna fight There are two kinds of heuristics positionally heuristics are how you know how well you're doing in a game And they get complex because the blue shell means that whoever's in first place isn't actually in first place Let's look at the tabletop example in settlers really easy to know how well you're doing how many points do you have? How many places could you still build a place or upgrade to a city and could you get longest road or largest arm? It's really easy to figure out who's really winning a game if you figure out a simple way to calculate that You're not gonna waste your time calculating that over and over again every time you play a turn Directional heuristics are how you decide what to do next These are the ones that help you go fast Do I pit take the safe bridge or the really dodgy-looking bridge with snakes? For example in card games in trick-taking games poker hearts or anything You could count every single card someone played for the entire game and keep that in your head and calculate odds Very few humans are capable of doing that and even if you are capable that sucks That is not fun to do and if you try to do it You're gonna spend a lot of time keeping your mental state consistent. So use a heuristic only count the face cards Only count the cards in the suit That's bad because you're playing a trick-taking game and you don't want to take this particular suit keep a soft count Right you try to memorize every card in the deck. It's like maybe some genius can do that But no, I cannot like Tigger's new fradies are yellow and yanksy. I don't count every victory point anyone got I just remember what everyone is low in scops low in blue. My friend Joey Jojo is low in green I see when an external conflict he's got 20 red points and I'm like, I don't like it after a member But rim has 25. It's like rim has a ton of red points. He definitely doesn't need red Oh, Rims wants to score some red points. I'll let him have that red monument. I don't care Right a lot of times directional heuristics can come down to a simple if this then that decision For example, if I don't want to be made fun of I will never wear that shirt But as anyone played the game of you Yeah, the people This is a trick-taking game where like to make something trump in the game You have to pick up a card in that suit So a pretty good heuristic in the game of you Kerr is if you see a bower Which is the strongest possible trump card in the game? If you see it sitting there always pick it up no matter what if I see a bower I will pick it up. It's not the best strategy, but it's way better than random And it took me zero seconds to make that decision because I came into this game saying I'm wearing this shirt And if I see a bower, I'm picking it up How about wrist heuristics can get pretty complex I actually have pretty complex heuristics for some games risk Has actually a very simple model you can follow to give yourself the best possible chance of winning risk That's why we don't play risk. I'm not gonna tell you what that is You know look this up on your own, but there's a pretty simple model if you just memorize this black line here You can win risk way more often than your friends, right? It's still a game of luck It's even dice even if you follow that line You're gonna lose sometimes when the dice are not in your favor, right? You know the dice cast but if your friends aren't following the line Your chances of winning are very very high. We'll win like 70 80% of risks against people not following the line If everyone's following the line, just roll a d6 so you roll highest and go home And the way the way you develop these heuristics sometimes is just if you don't understand the game Just start doing stuff and if some stuff you did did okay in a game Start doing that instead of whatever you're gonna do before and then start looking for what could you do better? Narrow the scope of what you're looking at with a heuristic and then try to make a better heuristic among the remaining options I have it's a heuristic for playing power grid that used to determine how much will I bid in the auction for power plants, right? And I developed it over the course of several plays of power grid. It's kind of complicated It's not so simple. It's like a list of rules I go through in my mind and I'm like will I bid up or will I pass right? But I had to build that it's not written anywhere You can't learn it online you will do a video about it, but that's not today The more complex a game gets the bigger game gets the more the heuristics become more like the things you do to decide things in your real life Because you are not calculating most of your interactions in the world You're not thinking about how much foot pressure you put down step by step. You're using heuristics already It's what you're good at as a human So if you play really complex games and try to use the kinds of heuristics you would use in your real life You'll get better at both games and real life Like in quartermaster general I have heuristics like if the southern coast of Europe looks weak Italy should actually get really aggressive in the early game. I based that on reading a lot of World War two history books There's a concept in sports of fast and frugal heuristics because you play an ice hockey I mean your simple thing is should I try to get the biscuit into the basket like yes Always try to get the biscuit in the basket do it as much as possible But you need more complex heuristics like when should I shoot versus when should I pass? How do I figure that out in a game of hockey you have half a second to make that decision if you're playing Puerto Rico with us You have half a second to make that decision You can actually Google fast and frugal heuristics and you'll find like a lot of studies and examples of heuristics people write books and essays on applying these to real life like one of these here the Recognition heuristics if you see a bunch of options and you recognize one of them And you don't recognize the other ones pick the one you recognize this happens a lot to me in new games, right? I got new games, especially complicated ones. I don't understand all the options There's like a I see a bunch of symbols And it's like why I don't know how any of those maybe you're learning races the galaxy You haven't learned all the symbols yet, but you remember the military rules You learned how those work and you see some military cards Well play the military cards it may not be the best move But it's the best move you can do because you don't understand the other ones if you try the other ones You're just gonna mess up because you don't know how they work yet If you stick with the military one the one you know you'll do the best military You could do which will be better than if you maybe the other path and more potential for someone who knows the doing But that ain't you right? Yep Not so if you're really like if you find yourself like if you're one of the people You don't have to like identify yourself where you're the one who takes a long time on your turn And you feel like you're bad again. We got one Honestly find this Wikipedia page and start doing the things on this page no matter what the game is you're playing You might not do better, but you'll play a lot faster And it'll help you get past like the hard like early heuristics and you'll start to figure out better heuristics And remember how I talked about how I developed the power grid heuristic over several games If you play fast you can play more and develop your heuristic faster If you take you all day to play one game you didn't develop much did you? But if you played the game ten times a day, you're gonna be really good at the end of the day So like Scott said like we're not joking if you're not sure what to do do something random Because it's not the real world if I do something random up here I'm probably gonna put my pants or something But if I do something random in a game, there's only so many options in a game There's only so many things I can like do in the rules of the game All right, so the game we have picture here is a game called Citadel's It's basically a complex version of which cup as the poison in it. Oh, ha ha, right? So it's like you look at the way the board is like well the best one for him to take would have been the merchant because he has several green cards And that would get him a lot of money But he would never take the merchant because he knows it I would assassinate the merchant to stop him from getting all that. Well Scott's wasted his time with all that I just take the cards. I shuffled him behind my hands I play one randomly and I fold my hands and just look at him and wait It's random. All your thought is meaningless now. Exactly. So I will also randomly pick one and there you go We have now done the best possible move. You can't use a psychology on me If I didn't use psychology to make the decision in the first place. Scott? Scott was the one who figured this out. We loved this game and one day Scott did that and I was like, oh, oh Shit, and then I did it and everyone did it and we're like, well this game's ruined But that's not just that game that's ruined. The game ending random poison cup game has not been ruined for this entire crowd of people and YouTube Cockroach poker. I'll play randomly most of the time. I'll be like, this is a cockroach didn't even look at it Here's the more sophisticated way. Here's the galaxy brain way. Well one way Shuffle your cards behind your hand that like pretend you're acting randomly, but don't actually act randomly But here's a better way and this is much more important to going fast as opposed to winning if you've eliminated all the stupid options And you've got a few options left, but you're not sure which one is better Don't waste your time trying to figure it out You've already made a better decision than just acting purely randomly by narrowing down the odds Right, so rim has a bunch of blue cards Which means the bishop notice how it has a blue symbol under the five That's why blues right so there's a bunch of blue cards the bishop is strong Assassin's always strong. Maybe thief is not a good choice. Maybe he's got thief in his hand He could choose it, but it's no one to steal from so it's a worthless card, right? You don't want to accidentally pick the thief randomly get that thief out of there Randomly choose between the bishop and the assassin now you're guaranteeing yourself a good move But still no one else has a better than 50 50 shot of guessing your good move In fact, they have a 33 chance shot of guessing because they might stupidly guess me So feel these build on each other first you try to eliminate bad ideas And then you start to figure out which good ideas are better Then you eliminate more bad ideas Then you figure out better ideas that are better and if you just keep going back and forth like this You'll be really really fast at games If you're not sure what to do look at whoever's in your left and just do whatever it is they're doing Right, so most games go clockwise not illuminati Illuminati goes counterclockwise in which case do what the player to your right is doing Thank you, Steve Jackson. Yes, so In games there's usually like resources, right? Like I'm going green. I'm going blue. I'm going yellow, right? But if the game is clockwise and you do what the person to your left is doing You're going to get all of like your rims doing yellow. I'm to remember right. He's to my left. I go first I do yellow. Hey, I needed that Well, you're taking my yellow I'll get all the first good picks at yellow stuff except for when rims the first player and the rest of the game When rim is not the first player I'll get the first pick on all the yellow stuff and all these other people aren't doing yellow They don't care, right rim now wants to right do it the player to his left is doing and so forth But there's a point at which you can't really change because you've sort of already gone all in on a certain road Right, so look at the different paths to victory that the game has this gives you victory points That gives you victory points and that gives you points pick the road to victory points So the player to your left is doing if it's a clockwise kind of game And you'll steal all that good victory point before they get them and they're screwed now Your chance of winning is increased by one over the number of players percent Now even better if you're playing with a game It looks like one person just like knows what they're doing is doing really well Just do exactly what they're doing They'll beat you in there's there's a concept in war Like war war like real fighting war of defeat in detail And that person will defeat you in detail if we're playing Puerto Rico and you just copy what i'm doing Yeah, you'll come in second place and we'll you'll do really well But i'll beat you by a little bit because i know all the subtle nuances of my complex galaxy brain strategy But if you want to learn how to get good at a game Figure out who's really good at the game at the table and do what they're doing anyway to learn the ropes of that strategy Right if you're playing like a collectible card game, for example, right And you may not want to play the decks the pros are playing right But you should even if you don't bring that deck to the tournament as your deck You should play all of those decks understand how they work understand how to beat them See what the frustrations are when you're playing as them and then when you're playing against them Now you know the frustrations are you can exploit them like even overwatch video games. I play a lot of overwatch I'm really bad at genji. I play genji a lot in the arcade just to understand what it's like to be a genji Now i'm literal here. There's an old game called yatsi. Just play it a lot and get good at yatsi If you get good at yatsi you get good at the world Yatsi will teach you so many fundamental calculation skills Odd skills dice skills you'll learn a lot in a hurry and you can play it solo So if you're slow you won't torture anybody and in fact there's an app on i hope it's still around There used to be a website you could go to where you would just play yatsi on this website over and over and over again Solo yatsi for free just play it and roll the dice for you and super fast and after every game It would tell you how close to mathematical perfection are you playing right because it would look at your roles And then it would have another computer right you'd have the ai whatever That's perfect. That's mathematically perfect at yatsi play the same dice you got And then it would make its decisions and compare your story Now this expands into just sub games in general a lot of games have a game But there's little sub games like there's a trick-taking component of this game There's a yatsi component of this game You're playing this big game, but actually this part of the game is just bush feel this part of the game Is actually just a dragon yeah, you sit down with us like we sit down at any new table and we'll literally be like Oh, this is just a kernel blotto with settler's placement I see what's going on here and I already have heuristics for those sub games So I don't have to worry about the sub games now I can focus on what the output of those sub games is in the broader game It's like when you exercise and you exercise one particular muscle that muscle is generally useful in the rest of your life now Just don't over exercise that one muscle Seriously guys like we got to talk about this People don't know how to play games People read the rules and still don't know how to play games People say they love a game and have played it 10 times and don't know how to play it If you want to be fast at a game you have to know how to play it You have to memorize eventually not immediately right, but at least the basic rules the basic structure of the game You better be damn sure about it Right, and then when you play you don't have to stop to constantly read the rules You might have to look up a card here and there or a special edge case That's perfectly acceptable when you're new to a game when you play the game a zillion times Now you better know all those cards and edge cases just by sight And when you've mastered the rules even the edge case rules You can play very speedily as long as everyone at the table is equally experienced because you don't need to reference rules You don't need to stop you don't need to ask questions that stuff all takes time and slows the game down Now there's a subtly here because something new has come up a lot of games have an app now The apps are great and they're a great way to learn a game because you're not going to annoy anyone When you're sitting in the bathroom and you're playing race for the galaxy on your phone I could play carcassone and like two carcassones like one poop. It's like amazing But if you learn to play a game on an app and you don't play it in real life often Or you've never played it in real life or you don't really like look at the rules in real life You won't know how to set it up You won't know a lot of the like busy work within the game and a lot of the rituals within the game Like when I play carcassone and the app is a little helper that can't put tile here can put tile here Oh, by the way, the tile that people go in this spot is nowhere left in the deck You don't even have to memorize the tiles that have been drawn or right but in real carcassone You're sitting looking at a table. It's like you have to look know how many tiles of that are in the stack total Are they all visible you to track that stuff in your mind? You have not practiced doing it at all because you only played on the app and now in real life We're having a problem. Yep, and you don't know how to set the game up You don't know how to tear the game down. You don't know how many chits to put on the grognard part of the war game in sector 7b So you've got to actually know how to play the game in the physical world unless you're only ever going to play it in the app Only playing an app is perfectly fine We talked before about games that are too slow because it's too much busy work out in the real world The version of the game and an app would speed it up to make it instant, right? But it goes both ways if you've only played the app, your real world play is going to slow it out in two a crawl So some games if the game has a lot of busy work like our friend Chris We love these train games. I don't know how to do half the busy work in that game Chris just does it for me If you have a friend who will do all the busy work in a complicated game to help everyone else play it Cling to them You also must thank and appreciate this friend who's doing selfless labor basically being a human computer for your service Right, they're like, yes, I will make this game easy for you to play by taking care of all the bullshit for you quickly Because I'm the one who memorized it and you don't have to know it, right? Thank this person and do not let them go. So there's our friend scott johnson again But here's scott johnson is doing something very clever. So our friend matt is taking his turn Look what he's doing. He's looking at what's going on. He's planning When it's not your turn Try to decide what you're gonna do when it is your turn. Don't just immediately look at twitter Like most of you do in every game when even a second passes where you're not taking your turn Now sometimes it could be the game's fault, right? Where so much changes on each player's turn that you can't even begin to think about what to do on your turn Until every player is done because you have you everything will change, right? And that's the game's fault But sometimes not a whole lot changes between your turn and your next turn. It's like playing ticket to ride Yeah, I'm gonna build that route and that route and that route if that one gets blocked I'll build this other way or like I don't care what they're all doing ignore the game when it comes around to my turn I've already planned my turn three turns ago. It's boom. There I go. Yep. I don't care what they're all doing I got a tank. I'm gonna use it on my turn As an aside our friend scott johnson, right because he's here Uh, I just want to point out that he looks exactly like the two of humans in the game wizard So this is also a problem I've noticed a lot of you out there the royal you Will get a game play it once never play it again kickstart a new game play it once never play it again You can't get fast at games unless you play them more than once This game is up on the slide because you have played it in nuns I love this game. I believe everyone on earth has also played it in nuns. We all kick started this game It's a good game, but I just it you've never played it. How do you I played it in an app Did you yes? There's an app Okay, it's a pretty simple war game But I just haven't played it But if you play a game more than once you'll get faster at it We've played Puerto Rico hundreds of times because once summer we played it three times a day And I'm looking at you people who played like munchkin arcum horror Play more than one game, right? Even if you go down to that tabletop for you play Which you're gonna have like I guess a couple more hours to do unless you go to the omega fun, right? Magic the gathering players in particular Right when you see some games that look unfamiliar to you and maybe you won't like them And you know what odds are you're right you probably won't like them, but you should at least give them a shot Right. What does it take you 30 minutes an hour? You can always sit down and just leave be like play the game and be like, you know It's not for me, but I learned something and then leave and you take something I've played so many games most of which I haven't liked But even the ones I don't like I learned something and that helped me in other games because I think back to that game I didn't like and then I'm playing a new game and I'm like, oh, I don't like this game either It's like that one. I didn't like So here's the guy to the end of the panel If you're stuck like you don't know what to do in a game like seriously, just do something Just do something. Don't worry about it. You'll learn from failure Right. If you see other players being aggravated just do something Just pick one of the options that you had in front of you. Just do it right away And if your friends are taking a long time on their term, there's a very easy solution to this I think we misattributed this quote to uh, Rainier Kenezia once done I'm pretty sure it was Klaus Toyberg who said it I don't know But it was basically an interview when this game designer basically said to the the question was like, what do you do if the game takes too long? I was like, well if my friends are taking too long We start to chant move or I will hit you move or I will hit you If your friends are taking too long on their turn like puff up up go go go Like put the pressure on use peer pressure and social pressure to make your friends take their turn faster Right only metaphorically hit them Yeah, don't actually physically hit them until you're outside of packs because the badges don't hit people And also if a if there's a game like Monopoly or Arkham horror that takes way too long That's a real version of the game. They just released if it takes too long I don't think it's meant to be played. It's just like a Don't play that game. There's a game called faster franchise It's that same garbage game with the same amount of fun, but it ends when it ends Just like this time. I hope this was enjoyable If for some reason you don't like us you have a complaint of some time come and get this wire So when you complain to the enforcers about how bad we are Right, you they will know who is bad and get the right people and kick us out of packs And if you love us for some reason, I don't know You can listen to us podcast for thousands of hours. You can like use that qr code or something Also, come get this wire We will be posting video of this panel and video of many other panels on the youtube channel Sometime monday, we will link to the slides from this panel as well as a bunch of other information To make all your slow friends that we're not here at this panel. You can make them watch it And I urge you to go to the omegathon finale at 5 30 I will see you there. Goodbye. I think everyone who plays blue and magic should go and listen to the