I never imagined I would ever be the owner of that many puzzle books.

As a kid I thought puzzle books were silly and unserious. The primary puzzle book I saw every where crossword puzzles. These seemed designed to pass time on an airplane by mashing words together not thoughtfully crafted experiences. And the math games, they seemed like fun artwork aimed at the concept that you could teach your child math just by buying them these books. They were beautifully illustrated, but the design pieces were less designed so much as mathematics problems wrapped up in art.

Nevertheless I now own multiple of these things. In part because I have a deep and abiding love of paper and pencil. The through line on my love of puzzles, of tabletop games, and probably even baseball is this idea that thought made manifest on paper is magical.

In an abstract sense it might seem strange that paper puzzles are still not only being produced, but being produced by video game designers, but I think these things are quite linked! At some point the theoretical boundaries between where the rules happen to run. And exploring running rules on the human brain is a different way to think about problems to solve. And, though on a smaller scale, puzzle books have gone through a similar explosion of indie development that tabletop and digital games have.

My naive perspective is that these things are quite linked. Access to cheap publishing tools and on-demand printing spurred on by advancements in computer technology make doing interesting things with paper much more within reach. And the advancements in User Experience can be applied (in more limited ways) to paper products in addition to digital ones.

For the games I own, three are the spiral bound games from Blaz Gracar. Three more are from Adam Bontrager (Two Kartoodles and a Skyways). There’s a Murdle and a Bordergrams (kind of pen and paper Connections by the publisher of Murdle). There’s the Puzzmo puzzle book by Puzzmo. There’s the first Cracking the Cryptic book and the Nikoli puzzle book which is full of all of these strange and wonderful Japanese style puzzles.

Digital Feel

When I play these puzzles I can feel the action and reaction play out in my head. It’s anticipatory play, but what’s on the paper leaves enough connective tissue for it to feel alive and real.

There’s an experience and a progression and an opinion attached to them. They feel like they’re supposed to be fun. Fun is an elusive thing to try to describe but even at a young age I felt very confident that simply declaring something as “fun” wasn’t enough to make it so.

It’s that digital “feel” that attracted me to these games. These were all games that either figuratively or literally feel like they could be easily implemented on computers.

It’s easy to describe how computers shape a game. You can make infinite marks on a computer without ever damaging the paper underneath it, and the computer can tell you whether you’re right or wrong close to immediately. How is it possible that games like these can do similar things?

Size seems to play a huge role. For example the Puzzmo Crosswords are all “Midi” sized. Large enough to be bigger than the 4x4 grid but small enough that each individual solve takes you a meaningful percentage closer to the end. Blaz’s LOK, which LOK Digital I reviewed, also seems to similarly shape the puzzles in a small enough size that any given potential solution is both able to be captured in memory, as it were, and also meaningfully takes you towards the solution once you put pen to paper.

Many of these games also play with themes of teaching and rules interpretations. LOK and ABDec especially don’t layout the rules for you at all. You have to explore and understand them. As Dan Thurot, on a recent podcast, mentioned that Amabel Holland mentioned, part of the exploration of the rules in the paper game is the possibility that you can be wrong. And in fact I’ve had this exact experience. Being wrong about a rule and later going back to learn why I was wrong. There’s a page in LOK that describes “invalid” puzzles and asks you to explore why they’re wrong. This type of thing is nonsensical in a video game.

Each of these things makes me feel like I’m “in communication” with the game while I play, even though there’s no computer to send information back at me. I’m holding the rules in my head and exploring them simultaneously, in a small enough format that allows for fun interplay and exploration. It’s a UX hack that shrinks the puzzle down to a size where any potential input can be easily thought through and feedback can be given. It’s brilliant and clever.

Making a Mark

Ultimately, I think the charm of puzzle books is their permanence. You have a record (in some way) of every right and wrong move. And that ties you to it in a unique way that computer puzzles cannot compete with. When I finish a puzzle on Puzzmo.com the game looks like the way that any number of people have seen (setting aside the less pure puzzle for just a second), but when I finish a puzzle book, the folds, the bends, the way that the book bows open at the page I had open the longest because I was struggling with. Those are all unique to me and it create a memory that lasts a lifetime.

I’m old enough to have some of my primary experiences with trading cards be from the feeling of ripping open packs at a prerelease having no idea what anything did and trying to piece it together on the fly. That act of discovery and problem solving was enchanting and engaging. There are a lot of very good reasons (mostly the internet) why recreating that specific experience is impossible. Card lists are known well in advance, players practice optimal strategies and a set of mechanics get solved very quickly now.

That said, it also feels like the goal of creating that sense of wonder and joy has disappeared just a little bit too. It’s been replaced by a focus on recognition and association. Instead of finding something new you might like, it’s about finding something you already like in something you already know. And it makes Magic feel just a little bit smaller. There’s a disappointment not from the novelty, or from the idea that other IP are “invading” Magic, but from the way that the specialness of it all feels like it got lost, just a little bit.

Instead, I’d like to spend some time shining on a different game. A game that I’ve already spent some time talking about,

but is worth highlighting further: Once Upon a Galaxy.

Once Upon a Galaxy is a quick asynchronous autobattler where you draft and upgrade a set of 5 cards across 10(ish) rounds to out duel your opponents. It’s got all of the interactive combos of strategy of a trading card game in a bite sized (and phone sized) package.

Now available across Android, iOS, and Steam, Galaxy just released it's first major set, Candylar. And that signifies a milestone for a game that is trying to make a name for itself, answering questions about whether or not it can evolve and explore new ideas while still keeping a solid underlying core.

Evolving from Magic

It feels like an evolution of the trading card game design that’s been iterated on for decades now, and it’s designed by Magic pros and game designers. So while I’m not trying to evaluate the games against one another it is interesting to look at how each of them has responded to general trends in player interactivity and lore design. It’s hard not to see these decisions at least somewhat in conversation with one another.

For me, the most important part of a card game is the way that the abilities of any individual card make you feel. Does each card feel like a new possibility space opening up in front of you? Does it feel like its own universe? Or just another component to be dissected and categorized.

The Candylar cards spark that same level of imagination and wonder that Magic used to for me. It’s been awesome and exhilarating to experience each run and see how the new cards and abilities interact with each other, and how the themes of the set play out both in the mechanics and the artwork. It has the fresh feeling the way that Magic used to when a new set would come out. Each round feels like a new experience where I get to try something out or explore something new.

The Comparisons

Galaxy builds upon the drafting mechanism that Magic popularized but it wraps the entire game around it, so that every run is a unique experience. Magic attempted something similar with it’s “Pick Two” variant that hasn’t seemed to catch on. Galaxy is built around drafting so every run becomes a unique experience. Magic has to deal with all of these messy things like deck-building and round construction.1 What’s exciting about the draft construction for Galaxy is that it solves a bunch of problems that trading card games generally have.

Because you have to start by building up a “deck” of common cards first, you routinely have to interact with them and understand them, instead of discarding them for something more powerful (or lamenting their existence). And playing this way makes the later stages of the game, when you finally get to draft the heavy hitters, even more special, with every card feeling like it might have maximal impact.

Secondly, remix culture (to name drop a 2000’s term) is fully part of making stuff now. And Galaxy has that at its core. The IP that it relies on is a combination of fables and mythical storytelling along with references to pop culture like “Battered Star Galactica”. Magic has also tried its hand at its own IP blends with ever increasing Universes Beyond crossovers that attempt to craft entire sets out of a single IP.

The tongue-in-cheek references that Galaxy makes gets to feel like it retains its own identity, whereas Magic’s attempts feel more like wholesale shipping out the identity of Magic in order to capture new markets. What Galaxy ends up doing is having a card like “Battered Star Galactica” sit alongside “Chubby Cheap”2. The experience of having these cards work together feels fun, playful, and silly, rather than like anachronistic clashes between competing visions.

Design and Markets

None of this is really meant to be a critique of the design of Magic. It’s easy to understand why someone would look at Magic and also look at how the media landscape is and see that it has to evolve in order to survive. It feels like there’s a choice in there where Magic could still retain some of its… again… erhemm… magic, and what makes it unique and special, instead of trying to attach itself to other properties.

I’m not trying to say this is an either/or decision where you have to pick one game or the other. But right now, Galaxy shows is how it is possible to create a new experience that has deeply considered design craft, that fits within shorter attention spans, and that still has the strategic depth and interest without trying to find gimmicks or stapled add-ons. But from a company and vision perspective, it’s both hard not to feel like Magic has at least somewhat lost its way, and also not to feel a little bit happy that some spark continues to exist in the world inspiring future iteration and design innovation.

The joy of discovery and the joy of recognition are both powerful driving factors for experience and interest, and both have roles to play. But the joy of discovery is something personal that you get to explore and experience for yourself and then connect to other people’s experiences and discoveries. The joy of recognition is fun but is less robust, I think. It comes with a bunch of ideas that are predetermined. When I recognize something I get to transfer a bunch of ready built opinions on top of it. And while both are important, it is often too easy (especially in our current brand driven culture) to let recognition drive the discovery all the way out.

Recognition can and should lead to discovery and it is amazing to see Once Upon a Galaxy pick up the baton and continue to push game experiences forward by blending old with new.

Back on one of my many jaunts into the realm of Baseball (the sport that seems designed to cause suffering) has me reflecting on the funny and oppositional relationship that play, joy, and pain seem to have with one another. Why should we do things that cause us so much angst?

Playfulness and Painfulness seem like the should be completely oppositional concepts. Play conjures images of childhood, being carefree, existing in a world without constraint or restriction. Painfulness the near opposite: it speaks to the challenges of the human condition.

And yet, on a night when the Mariners ended the most inspiring (and painful) run of baseball in nearly 30 years, it is these two thoughts that sit in my head. Play and pain are never far apart. When we play we invite pain.

It doesn’t matter which medium of game you pick. Video games like Elden Ring or roguelikes like Hades are about the mastery of learning a system and facing the challenge of defeat over and over again in order to overcome it. Even on the a run you might succeed on you will face challenge and possible failure. And board games, even cooperative ones like Pandemic, or party games like Monikers are about facing the possibility of a suboptimal outcome and succeeding at it (together or alone). Athletes push their bodies to the limits not for the goal of health but to push the boundaries of what a health body is capable of.

In that sense games are artifices that let us hold pain and playfulness simultaneously. And when we are playing truly at the heights of our capability, riding the limit, so you say, it is almost to invite pain and to laugh it away.

As a Mariners fan I can attest to this fact. We got to a Game 7 (the first in our history). I went to my first playoff game earlier this year! We spent 7 innings of a 9 inning game ahead, on the cusp of doing a thing the team had never accomplished. Each out dragging us closer to a victory as a team and a fan base we had long wanted.

Only for it to be reset all over again. Yet another year away, maybe.

It’s not a large pain, but it certainly is pain. But true sorrow is only getting enjoyment from the events that went the way we hoped they did. What fun would it be to play games if we only got every outcome we ever dreamed of?

What is play but to stare at the possibility of suffering and feel joy in the face of it? Maybe that’s why play feels so youthful. It’s not because it exists in a world without pain or endings, it’s because to play means to accept that world and to persevere, and above all else, to enjoy it.

It is the thread that ties all games together.

But what’s not there is also ever present, following you around. I couldn’t help but compare the game to Sky: Children of Light, the mobile sequel to Journey released in 2017. Journey, the 2012 game was a beautiful meditation on the relationship between people online and how opinionated interactions could change our relationship to other players. The fact that Sword of the Sea is a game about surfing your own enclosed world, separated out from any other human interaction feels almost oppressive. It also feels like the other end of the spectrum from Sky: Children of Light. One (Sky) is a game on mobile, with microtransactions, events, and monetization. The other is a short, sweet, beautiful game about surfing alone. I suppose, on some level those are the two default modes online now. Most internet experiences are defined by monetization, spectacle, and trends.

Is all we're left with is our own walled gardens where we can find peace, but only if other people aren't involved? The story message of Sword of the Sea is admirable. You're a surfer trying to restore a desert world to it's full water-filled glory. (Themes of Dune? Or maybe that's just because I rewatched the movie recently). You do this by exploring the sand dunes and completing a variety of tasks. The layout of the space also felt like Sable. But the emptiness there, peppered with spots of interaction and dialog felt more intentional, like an explicit question about the loneliness and freedom of adolescence and the journey to adulthood.

None of this is a critique of Sword of the Sea or its designers. I don't think it's on any single designer or company to "solve" that problem. It more feels like a constraint of the moment. It’s hard enough to release any game and be successful, much less a game that asks new things of its players.1 The outcome feels quite indicative of where we're at as a society.

It feels like the possibility of what designs can be explored are constrained by the realities of monetization and online communities. In comparison, the first time I played Journey I remember being struck by a sense of awe of the possibilities that online interactions could be designed. I didn't necessarily agree with Jenova Chen's opinion that arms had to be removed in order for positivity to ensue, but I was ENTHRALLED by the idea that this was an opinion someone could render into a game.

It’s what attracted me to design and board game design in general as well. The idea that you could play with design ideas and ideas about constraining how people relate to one another. It’s part of what’s so interesting about GHQ. Even if the game isn’t particularly excellent, it has fascinating opinions about what mechanics say about relationships.

Over a decade later, even if the territory exists it feels much more relegated to the edges of design discourse. The grooves of online interaction feel well worn and hard to escape from, not dissimilar from the halfpipes in Sword of the Sea that I struggle to land tricks on.

Hitting moves in Sword of the Sea feels great. And the reward, watching an area of the world burst forth with life as a result of your puzzle solving is a great little tickle. The level of craft and care that’s gone into every moment is incredible. You almost feel like you’re flying through the area when you come zipping out of an area you just filled with water and sea life.

Sword of the Sea has truly immaculate vibes. But the fact that this is the place to get those vibes is occasionally quite tough. It's good for a chill few hours. But the loneliness of the experience never really left me.

There’s something joyful and freeing about playing games that don’t have layers of structures or tons of systems to piece out before you can start playing or get into the swing of it. Right now it feels like it’s so easy to hear about games that you can get lost in but relatively few that are to the point. It’s easier to make content about those games because there’s lots more stuff to talk about.

It reminds me on Top Chef when judges talk about simple dishes. When the contestant gets a simple dish right, it’s absolutely incredible. But, every mistake is magnified so it’s easier to pick apart when things go wrong. So too with simple games. There are fewer systems to hook you in so if something doesn’t land you’re going to bounce right off. But the counterpoint, like Shutup And Sitdown says is a “well executed loop of delight”.

Four Well Executed Loops of Delight

The three rules

1. Minimal Complexity

2. No Metastructure or Metaloops

3. Game Sessions are Short and Discrete (the game ends)

Party House (UFO50)

Party House is the game that started this entire conversation. The structure of the game is so simple. Try to generate as much popularity as possible by inviting friends to your house. Expand your rolodex so you can invite more people, and try to avoid getting the cops or the firefighters called your way.

It’s a master class in what it means to create an excellent push your luck game. The economic element of figuring out who to expand your rolodex on, the party invite phase of trying to chance it on just one more guest in the door.

Toy Battle (Board Game)

Toy Battle is a game that takes that “mobile app” adjacent feel and turns it into the entire theme of the game. It’s a game clearly inspired by Clash Royale. Each turn you play a token to the board. It must (in most cases) be connected by other pieces of yours back to your base. The goal of the game is either to capture your opponent’s base or to control enough territory to collect stars.

The game captures the rubber band tension of trying to draw the right tile at the right time. And… like the mobile app it can occasionally feel a bit one dimensional. It manages to dispense the slot machine feel of Clash Royale where you feel inexorably dragged into playing again and again.

Leaders (Board Game)

Leaders is like what if Chess but with the most gentle combos. Every turn (until you have 4 characters) you get to move and then draft a character. Every turn you can either move your character on a hexagonal grid or you can use its special ability.

Special abilities typically involve things like pulling or pushing other characters, jumping over other characters, you get the deal. You’re trying to end a turn with two of your characters adjacent to your opponent’s leader. Like Toy Battle games are really short (mine end in 5-10 minutes). Every game I’ve played has some delightful moment where a series of combos allows one player to move most of their pieces across the board.

Cards with Personalities

Cards with Personalities is an aggressive and absurdist deck building game like Dominion or Star Realms but instead you’re trying to defeat… say… a Seagull Named Number 2. If you’ve heard of deckbuilders, you know the drill. Every turn you draw 5 cards and then you use those cards to get gold (to buy more cards), attack enemies (either the boss or its minions). Then you shuffle up and do it all over again.

The game started its life as a Pico 8 game and it occasionally shows. The controls can be a bit clunky (two buttons is a hard constraint) and I found myself occasionally misclicking in mildly infuriating ways. But the payoff is really special. It’s the best (maybe only?) digital single player game that captures the spirit of Star Realms.

Short Games Are Great

A lot of long games are about the story. Triple A style games are mostly stories wrapped in traversal and shooting mechanics, and base building style games where the narrative arc is about building ever bigger structures. Both can be great, but both “evolve past” the game mechanic and onto bigger things. But it’s fun and enlightening to engage with games as they are, as these really weird bundles of rules that change our brain chemistry the more we loop over them.

A lot

No really

Like cameras, the best gaming console is the one you have on you. And phones are the “consoles” we have on us the most often. But phone games often-times feel like an addictive candy rush, meant to hook you on something that is supposed to make you tap and click forever, instead of engaging your brain. The golden age of mobile gaming is over. It was killed by King Games.

Not so.

Fun, sharp, and thoughtful mobile games continue to come out, even in the face of just how hard it actually is for independent developers to make money on mobile games. I suspect because the allure is too strong. It is literally the most pervasive console there is!

And four more (mostly?)1 brand new games have come out that are absolutely worth your time:

• Stamps

• Is This Seat Taken?

• Mindset Go

• Merge Maestro

Stamps

The game stamps is a single player puzzly tile (err, stamp) laying game. You’re trying to match the stamps you play out onto a 3x4 grid against certain patterns set out by the rules. Some say you need to lay out a row in ascending order. (1 to 4, for example). Others say you need to construct a 2x2 grid of stamps that share the same country.

The twist? Every country has its own special ability, which you must follow. And each of the special abilities changes the way you play the game. Some let you draw other stamps, others swap places or shift the grid, others still force you (allow you?) to remove other stamps from the grid. Every turn you’re dealt out three stamps that you have to place before you can draw the next set. Once you match the requisite number of rules, the tiles that satisfy the condition are removed and you move on to the next round, until you’ve completed all of the rounds and win! Or… until you run out of space and lose.

It’s a game that starts cute and becomes shockingly brain burning as you try to map out the sequence of moves that will get you closer to your goal. Stamps and their varying abilities will feel like hinderances until they unlock the perfect move. I, personally, have a love/hate relationship with the Australian stamps. They are so cute, so innocuous. They let you draw an extra stamp! What could go wrong. That is until you have a board full of tiles and what you really need to lift and shift or to remove and there’s a koala staring you in the face saying “best I can do is a new tile”.

The art style is so organized and the finishing touches are beautiful though. I really love the Daily Puzzles this offers.

Is This Seat Taken?

I played this for the first time at a Steam Next Fest Demo, and I was absolutely smitten. It’s a game about trying to organize people with a variety of seating requirements into a space like a Bus or a Theater or a Dance Floor. The puzzle is about trying to make sure the people (really shapes, we’re talking shapes) who want to sit together, sit together, and apart from the people or situations they want to stay away from.

That by itself might be enough to sustain a game, but I suspect it would be a challenge to sustain it for very long. What makes this interesting is a two-fold combo. One, the requirements feel real. Some people want to avoid dirty seats or loud noises. Not blocking people’s line of sight in a movie theater creates challenges. And secondly, each space evolves over time, so a single level will see you rearranging and dealing with the leftover shapes after each successful solve. This makes it feel like you’re both dealing with your own solutions, and also telling a coherent story rather than merely moving logical concepts around.

And the art and UI design is spectacular.

Mindset Go

When Connections first came out I immediately started thinking of ways to iterate on the concept as a small daily game. Rather than relying on the player’s ability to intuit the opinion of a NYT editor, what if they were trying to categorize different groups, like… a Venn Diagram. Lo and behold Mindset Go comes along to answer my prayers, with one smart switch: Instead of being about vague things like “concepts” it focuses on shapes and items with real, verifiable facets. Like being solid or empty. Or having a specific color.

And then it also did another couple of smart things. Firstly it changes up how many items fit on each side of the diagram. Secondly, many (most?) levels give you more shapes than you can fit in the grid, meaning you have to select the right grouping that is both inclusive and also exclusive to the requirements of the Venn. This adds a layer of depth to what otherwise might have been a relatively straightforward experience.

Merge Maestro

And finally… Merge Maestro

What if an auto-battler joined forces with a game like 3s or Triple Town with a sprinkling of Luck Be a Landlord? Well I imagine it looks something very much like this. That and the fact that it’s built on top of emoji is just… chefs kiss.

There’s some level of you might have to be incredibly gamer-brained to even begin to be interested in this experience but the level of interplay here is really spectacular. Each round you’re tasked with playing combining items on the grid in front of you to deal increasing amounts of damage to the enemies in the row above you. If you can’t defeat them in time you lose a heart. Lose all of your hearts and you lose the game. Each round you get the option to replace a basic number (1-8) with a new emoji with new abilities that trigger when they appear or when they’re destroyed. The goal is to build the right set of emojis (and merge to upgrade them) at the right time to deal massive amounts of damage.

I’m quite positive I’ve lost at least half of my reading audience at this point. But if you’re still with me you should absolutely give this game a shot.

The weirdest part of the game is probably the part I adore the most. In the large majority of autobattler or comb style games the game does the comboing for you, turning into this orgy of lights and sounds after every move that rings up gigantic numbers. Merge Maestro does no such thing, instead asking you to operate your own game and make your own decisions, and doing things like letting you merge pieces from the other side of the board. Truly the horror. It’s a numbers go up game except you’re the one operating the crank.

The Game Really Do Exist

Enough time has passed (and the onslaught of Pop Games continues unabated), that I should probably revisit my Top Pop Games list. But beyond that, there really are phone games that come out year over year. Ones that are real, interesting, and that you can still play in 15 minutes or less.

More To Come… Trails

I was hoping to time this came out Trails would have released for mobile, but I’m fairly confident it’s on its way soon so I want to shout it out here.

I think it’s supposed to capture the idea that if you buy this game you can play it a bunch and still discover new things. But it implies something altogether different. It implies that two play experiences will be completely different. and that got me thinking about all of the different ways a game could be different, beyond just literally being a different game.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• The sequence of moves

• The options that players have to take

• What happens as a result of those options

• The narrative that gets told over the course of the game

• A role I might play

• The types of actions available to my opponent

• How long the game takes

• The components used in the game

• The people I play with

• The way the people I play with change the experience of playing the game

• The decisions you make during the game

Two at One Extreme

Dungeons and Dragons is the obvious example of a game where no two experiences are alike. The narrative changes, the role you play can change, and the same for the other players. The players you play with can change over time (within a single campaign). Players aren’t constrained by the limits of rules for their move either. Only what their imaginations can come up with.

Magic: The Gathering (and other card games) that share historical roots with DnD also share the penchant for variability. You can come up with different decks to play that can do any of number of wild and crazy combos. There are different formats, play styles, and from game to game or turn to turn the plays that are available to you change endlessly.

And yet… both of these games often fall into predictable narrative flows. Magic players group decks into similar archetypes like tempo, aggro, control, and midrange. Even though the cards might change we see patterns come back up over and over again. Same thing with Dnd, I think: patterns emerge. None of this is a critique, mind you, but it does kind of show the limits of what “no two games are alike” actually means. We want games to have similarities with one another.

The Other End

But let’s imagine the other side of this. What about games that exhibit minimal variation? Tic Tac Toe and War come to mind.

War is interesting because the shape of the game will be different from game to game. There will be a dynamic tug of war that changes for the players over time. But there aren't any decisions to be made. Which seems important. Every "turn" you're flipping over cards as fast as possible, mostly to see what happens. It's kind of a random generator that turns into an experience. You don’t get to make decisions but you do get to see things happen!

Tic Tac Toe is the type of game that you would fairly obviously say "every game is pretty much alike" and you could probably extend such a comparison to something like Connect 4 as well. This reveals something kind of interesting because there are two components of "same-y-ness" that they have. Namely the action you choose to do on your turn is the same game over game. I think this is the crux of “different every time”. It seems like the heart is that every turn you can do something different than you did last game. What’s interesting about both Tic Tac Toe and Connect 4 is that they feel “solved” for most people. and by that I mean, there’s no variation in the outcome of any given move. So not only do you not have much difference game to game in what you do, you don’t have much change in what happens after, either.

Playing with Variation

Are there things we can take away from this?

Variability is a spectrum and what we’re actually interested, I think is what types of elements of the game change and how they change over time. One of the magic tricks (laudatory) that Roguelikes and Soulslikes play on players is that they ask players to do similar moves over and over again, but they change the shape just enough to make it feel novel and not repetitive.

Both Magic and DnD offer players changing ideas concepts on a cadence that allows for refreshes with consistency in between. Within a campaign of Dnd or a set rotation of Magic the play experience might be rather similar between sessions. But when new sets or campaigns come into play, it shakes things up and offers new opportunities for variation.

While we might move on from games once the variation becomes too predictable. For most adults Tic Tac Toe and War are “solved” and offer nothing exciting for us. But even simple games like Ticket to Ride that are mostly the same play to play can offer enough variability (in the way that train routes appear across the map) to keep players interested even if secretly not too much changes.

Humans Really Like Doing the Same thing Over and Over and Getting Different Results

To be a game is to play with variation (even to the point of pointing out you’re not playing with variation). What variation a game chooses to play with and how it chooses to play with that variation is what defines. So in one sense “no two games are alike” is a trite statement of obvious truth akin to “this is a game” and also something a blatant lie. Every game worth its salt

Part of the fun of games is actually that we get to do the same thing over and over again. Part of the fun of games like Black Jack is the thrill of choosing to “Hit” in a risky spot, or in throwing a card into the middle of the table in a trick taker. What’s unique is what happens after we take that action. The game state changes and it changes what the outcome is.

The hypocrisy is this idea that such variation matters for the most part. If you’re someone who doesn’t play a ton of board games you’re aiming for a classic that you can bring out again and again and if you’re buying games off crowdfunding it’s particularly unlikely that you will play it enough for a lack of variability to even be noticed. Instead it’s selling a world where you’ll play this game over and over again.

Appendix

If you’ve made it this far, I have a couple of groups of recommendations for you. Games at either end of the spectrum, generally,

Games with Lots of Variation

• Slay the Spire

• Slice and Dice

• Lacuna

• Eternal Decks

• Illiad

Games With Less Variation

• Cipher Zero

• Wilmot Works it Out

• Go Mecha Ball

• Toy Battle

• Jungo

I really like square clicking games. It might be related to my love of the Stargate universe, a series I devoured as a kid. Or, it might be related to my love of pen and paper puzzles and the tactile feeling of penciling in marks.

Cipher Zero satisfies both of those loves at once somehow.

Thinky Games describes Cipher Zero as a Grid-shading game. It's very similar to something like Picross where you have set rules about how many squares you're trying to shade in and you're successful when you satisfy all of the conditions.

Cipher Zero also shares lineage with nebulous games like The Witness because it never explicitly explains the rules to you. Instead you learn by checking your work when you think you have a correct answer. Levels start easier, introducing concepts, and then get more complex over time so you never feel overwhelmed.

There are lots of games that fit into this puzzling niche. Rule learners like this genre like WorkWorkWork1 or Gridspech. Box filling games like 14 Minesweeper Variants or Liquidum. I love all of these games for the vibes and the challenge, but the challenge scale always escalates to a point where the brain burning turns a delightful and easy romp into the sort of feeling of a doing a mental hyrox by the end.

I like Cipher Zero because it feels far gentler. More like a Zone 2 run up a gentle slope than interval sprint on a hot day. The background aesthetics help with this. There are pleasant animations, lovely music, and the processing of checking a result is both helpful and pleasing. One way Cipher Zero attempts to this is by minimizing overall knowledge of just how many puzzles there are to complete, less it turn into some sort of rush to end the game. Areas (if you can call them that) are made up of multiple levels which are made up of 8 or so puzzles. Once you click into a puzzle, there's a bar at the top which will show you just how far along a level you might be. If you happen to complete every puzzle in that level, the game will zoom you back out show you a window animation like you're on a train ride across a countryside.

But the amount of “this is how far you are information is kept to a real minimum. The combinatorial craziness of 14 Minesweepers feels overwhelming. Cipher Zero feels more like a paper sudoku book you might pull out on a morning commute on a subway. And then put away. And pull out again.

Once upon a time I might have asked why this game isn't available on a phone. Outside of a few gems…

most phone games are, quite frankly mush right now. If this game had come out on phone it would've had a daily version, been the type of thing you might whip out while you were on the toilet or idly watching TV and I suspect it mostly wouldn't have made any impression.

Instead, this feels like the type of gentle puzzle game I can recommend to people who love LinkedIn style games, but that also offers a complete experience. I highly, highly recommend Cipher Zero. It’s an excellent experience.

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I actually quite enjoy the spectacle of it all. It was wonderful watching Oneil Cruz absolutely destroy the ball. That said, I think the Home Derby kinda drags along. Not because it's boring, but because the format is somewhat poor for creating a lot of tension. I also think it's turning into a bit of a "lock into one spot on the stadium and just do your best to hit that spot over and over again", which... isn't really why it's fun to watch, I don' think. So here are the changes I would make.

Scoring

It's super clear that MLB wants to show off just how fancy their Statcast technology is. If we're comfortable differentiating on .08 of a foot, let's use it to score!

I would update the scoring so that you scored based on how far you hit. A home run is still worth 1 point of course, but hitters should score an additional .2 points for every 50 feet beyond the wall you hit. This would make a 500 foot home run close to twice as valuable as a normal home run. Which feels right. If that math is confusing just make a home run 10 points and the additional points 2. The point is to mash the ball here.

Aside: I guess the argument against here is we’re trying to track how many home runs they hit. But I’m not sure if that’s even true. The only thing I remember is Julio Rodriguez hitting an absolutely ungodly number of home runs in the first round a couple of years ago and then flaming out because he was exhausted.

First Round

The first round is exceedingly boring, takes a long time and mostly seems to tire the best players out before the actual challenge rounds take place. This is absolutely silly. Why is the first round the longest?

I would make the first round batting time 1 minute1, no limit on pitches and no bonus. Top 3 move along to the next round. Bottom 5 compete in another 1 minute competition with the top scoring taking the final spot.

Aside: This would've definitely hurt Cal's chances this year, and as a Seattle Mariners fan I guess I'm happy these purely hypothetical rules would only go into effect next year.

The players in the top 3 get rewarded for mashing the ball, the bottom 5 still spend less (or equal) time hitting overall.

Second Round

The Second Round I would mostly keep the same as it is (head to head) with two minutes, a pitch limit and the three bonus “strikes”. I would get rid of the "hit it past 425 feet" thing though, it's silly. (And I think everyone easily cleared it this year?). Just give them more points for hitting it farther Keep at at 3, use the time savings to make the final round great.

Final Round

Here are my most aggressive changes. Keep it at 2 minutes, but alternate after a set amount of time. I want to see a hit off, not one guy waiting to see if he wins or loses. This is almost certainly the most logistically challenging, but it would create the most tension. Everyone loves lead changes!

I would do something like:

Player One: 30 seconds

Player Two: 60 seconds

Player One: 60 seconds

Player Two: 60 seconds + Bonus

Player One: 30 seconds + Bonus

This would give the higher ranked player a distinct advantage, while limiting the overall number of pitching changes. I'm quite positive the players would hate this (and thus it would never happen) because it means warming up and getting out of their rhythm, but it would be nice to see a closer head to head and more dramatic tension at the end.

Bonus

I loved the side chats with the "teams". I think we gotta make that more exciting if they had a role to play. What if after the huddle a team member got to pick a section of the stands and if their guy hit it to that section they got double points?

Double Bonus

I would also give players a bonus for the longest distance between hits. Let's reward guys who ding it to every corner of the park.

That’s all

Basically I want to make this more fun and silly. And if I were given a chance that’s what I’d do.

Next week we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled fair talking about “concise” games!

But what spoke to me most about the show was the way that the world that the world that Wort and Gregory entered was both dangerous but also completely disinterested in them. There was the plot with the beast and the huntsmsan who were ostensibly on their trail, but each episode was focused on Gregory's curiosity and Wirt's desires to keep him safe in a dangerous world.

The first time I saw Become the Moon it was the aesthetic that got me. It’s like a combination of Hearthstone and Over the Garden Wall1 in a roguelike deckbuilder. This is aesthetic Peanut Butter and Chocolate for me. Two great tastes that taste great together.

Aside: Before we go too much farther, I should mention that I had the opportunity to playtest the game and received a key in the process, so there is some potential bias here.

I should also say I've never actually beaten the game because it is quite hard. I'm still incredibly charmed by it, which I think should say something.

The Game

The structure of the game is a single player roguelike deckbuilder autobattler2. Before every battle you are dealt a hand of cards that you can play spells and creatures from that will then do battle with the opponent. Your leftover creatures deal one point of damage directly, and if there is remaining health you and the opponent damage each other until one dies. The goal of course is that you have enough creatures that you never directly compete with the opponent at all.

Each time you run through your deck you get to draft more cards that get shuffled in and you redraw. The creatures on the board stay though, so you can improve them over the course of a run. The point of the game is build up a deck and a board that can take on all enemies.

The Progression

While I expected the aesthetic to be where the similarity ended, I was surprised to find that this game, like *Over the Garden Wall* was similarly indifferent to my own success and failure. Bosses weren't mere progressions in challenge but zany zigs and zags. One boss might have endless hordes of small quick attackers, while another might be focused on reviving its own pieces, while a third was full of cannons that wouldn't get damaged when they attacked. So over the course of a run I wasn't just trying to make a deck roughly "better" I was trying to make it robust and concrete. Enough that it could withstand a variety of attacks.

At the same time, the card drafting has no skip functionality. You have to add cards to your deck every time you run out. This adds to the feeling of indifference because the game doesn't care about your puny desires. Now, it gives you cards and abilities to discard or exhaust (remove completely), but it's up to you to figure out how to use them, it's never a given.

At its hardest moments the game can feel unkind and unforgiving, but the moments when I felt like I unlocked progression felt all the more earned and meaningful as a result.

The Creativity

All of this combined to create a really fresh and exciting feeling in a game. A similarly fresh and exciting feeling that I got watching *Over the Garden Wall* (ten years late...). It feels rare and special when a game so fully understands what it wants to be that it's willing to use tropes without succumbing to them, and that's what Become the Moon does here.

Most deck builders are about skill curves. You’re trying to build a deck that can escalate appropriately so that by the final boss you can come with such overwhelming force you win.

Become the Moon isn’t like that. It’s this beautiful mess of a constant stream of new cards you don’t want, enemies that seem to zig and zag once you have your head on straight it all changes again.

I don't think it will be for everyone.

I think it’s brilliant.

This is heretical (and probably somewhat old fashioned) because these are far and away the most dominant forms of games on the market (both culturally and financially).

It’s old fashioned because it’s this view of art about communicating meaning from one person to the other. Now there are lots of different conversations about why games communicate meaning differently, but it’s possible for lots of games to communicate ideas, and that’s what I’m here for.

If games are about slicing off pieces of the mathematical universe and exploring them. Sandboxes are like slicing whole galaxies and then telling players to find their own pieces.

This can be interesting, in its own way, I suppose, but if I can be opinionated for a second, these experiences do very little to expand horizons or push players into interesting situations. It’s about doing things that you already want to do.2

Lots of games are either quasi-social experiences or quasi-gambling experiences. Habitual wrappers that pull players along without asking much. And it’s fair here to say that lots of players bring a lot to those games to make them more interesting.3

What’s interesting to me is the alchemy between that math and the player. Seeing what’s possible, what’s likely, and turning over an idea into its iterations and variations until you can see the depths of what it can communicate. If I’m playing the game I want it to be a ruleset that’s worthy of exploration, that has a POV and that I ant to figure out and understand.

The Judgementalness of It All

It’s probably hard to not read those words without some implicit judgement or understanding. Why can’t you just let people enjoy their games? Or some implication of “things would be better if only people put in a bit more effort”. The argument always seems to be this is a demand problem. But, it also seems like a supply problem, just like the fact that processed food is twice as cheap per calorie, freemium content is plentiful, pushed and ubiquitous. The platforms that make up our social experiences are so yawning and ubiquitous that escaping them can feel a bit like having to launch oneself like a rocket out of their gravitational pull.4

The processed food metaphor is apt here for me. It’s not that I believe these platforms are bad, it’s their centrality that I think is at the very least warping. cultural reality. I don’t every experience to be That Dragon Cancer, or Train. It’s that most experiences have gone the explicitly other direction, to be so shallow that they provide the barest amount of button clicking to propel the content forward without really engaging your brain.

Find One Game, Let it Be Rough Around the Edges

I’ve been bouncing around this idea about what it means to be well read (or well played5?) in an age such as ours, where small independent games are plentiful but the large games are all-encompassing. At times it can sound like I (and others) are suggesting a sort of pseudo-digital asceticism, forgoing popular games for indie gems. But that’s not my aim, and that’s not even what I do.

I think, however, if I had one piece of advice, it would to be to find a small game, a cheap game, that’s in a genre you enjoy and to just play it, regardless of its rough edges, regardless of if the design doesn’t wrap you up in a ball of warmth immediately and if there aren’t the cultural references you love and can note. And just let that game bounce around your head a bit.

I’ll leave you with a couple of very quick ones I’ve enjoyed recently:

Jetstream

Cards with Personalities

Lucky Hunter

Throne of Bone

Dawnfolk

Rift Riff

Shadow King

Death Kid

Maze Mice

Addendum

If you’re looking for a place to start, maybe check out CA Brown’s Youtube channel:

So that was a cop out.

And the truth is, I’m honestly not sure.

This got me thinking about Racko, a game that I really enjoyed playing with family when I as a kid. Racko is a game about ordering a set of 5 cards in your hard from lowest to highest without being able to move the position they were dealt in your hand.

Here are their relative Board Game Geek rankings:

Games aren’t like other art

What separates games from other art forms, for me is in your ability to appreciate other art whether or not you like it. It is possible for me to understand the technique, the challenge, the craft of a piece of written or visual art. I can learn about its history and I can appreciate what it meant for the creator to put together such a work even if it doesn’t speak to me.

It is much harder to do that with games. Harder to the point of being nearly impossible. Games feel more like chiseling off a piece of the math of the universe and capturing the magic inside a box.3 And maybe, when you take a peak inside that box maybe that piece of the universe speaks to you and maybe it doesn’t.

And if that piece of the universe doesn’t speak to you it’s much harder (maybe impossible?) to see the artistry behind it. Which makes evaluation… much harder.

Ok, but like, what about the actual games

I liked and played Racko way before I knew about games like Bohnanza or Scout.

Racko feels like the simplest implementation of those hand management games. It has absolutely zero pretension. All you have to do is shuffle and deal and you’ve got a game going. Every turn you pick up a card like Gin Rummy and replace it with one of the cards in your hand. You… barely have to think while playing it.

Does that make the game bad?

Conversely, My City is a game that builds on top of a rich tradition of tile laying and tetris-style tile layers (like Barenpark or Patchwork or New York Zoo). It adds all of this stuff on top of it like the legacy style game, and the different criteria for tile laying.

Does that make the game good?

The answer to both is no. Racko is this really simple set of ideas that gets obviously outstripped by other newer games and My City is a game that feels built for people who really enjoy the narrative of the story that evolves over the course of multiple sessions.

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How I Think About Games

I think there are two primary ways of interacting with games. One is because you choose to play them and the other is how you remember them.

This is important, I think, because unlike other types of media, games can and will replace each other. Types of art might change with fashion or opinions, but the Impressionists didn’t “replace” Naturalists. They iterated and evolved. But, in a lot of ways a game like King of Tokyo replaces Yahtzee. They are very very similar slices of the universe to cut off from one another, and it’s very very unlikely you’ll pick both.

Choosing to Play Them

Would I choose to play either of these games again, or recommend them? No.4 In both cases, as I’ve mentioned, there are other games I would recommend. Bohnanza instead of Racko and New York Zoo instead of My City.

Opening those boxes again I would suspect I just wouldn’t feel the magic again as it were, if I had to guess. So in this sense are they good? Probably not.

Remembering Them

Racko ironically I do have stronger memories of. I can remember game nights with my family, the sky dark outside sitting around a table at a couch playing the game. I remember feeling like there was much more strategy and skill involved than I do now. And I remember the clack and creak and slide of glass on plastic as the card holders shifted around. I wouldn’t say that part is a pleasant memory, but it certainly sticks. But more than that I’m not sure Racko lent itself to any memory. I certainly don’t remember exciting interplay that led to moments that wedged themselves in my mind. Unlike Boggle, where I had several distinct memories.

And for My City, the answer is also no. Both because the narrative of the story (the individual mechanics that changed as the game evolved) wasn’t particularly interesting and it didn’t lend itself to moments that made me feel especially clever or especially appreciative of a move my opponent made.5 For all of the stuff going on it resolves down into a relatively smooth and easy experience. I suspect, as a player, if I brought more to it I would’ve gotten more out of it, but I also wasn’t compelled to do that.

So Are They Good?

For me, right now. The answer is no. Am I allowed to say no? I’m sure hordes of people on both sides of the casual or complex gaming spectrum. But that’s also a deeply personal no. There isn’t enough about either game that feels personal, unique, or evolutionary to make me feel otherwise.

More and more I’m becoming convinced that the craft of game design of game recommendations and of game appreciation is less about understanding the skill of the artistry and more appreciating the entire lifecycle of events that led to the creation of that experience and that game. It’s not that because everyone comes from different perspectives it’s impossible to say if a game is “good”, it’s understanding the why behind what makes someone appreciate a game.

And maybe that’s how it’s always been with art. But I think the fun part of games is getting the chance to explain that thing, to walk through and understand why a slice of the universe speaks to you in a particularly interesting or inspiring way. And maybe, hopefully, to understand each other just a bit better.

The animation, the build system, and the art style all really work together for me to create an enchanting experience reminiscent of Tim Burton. (Like a chibi Tim Burton style) This is funny, because I never really liked Tim Burton films.

I love the mechanic of throwing the die and having it change what happens based on the number you throw. It creates an awesome rhythm to the experience that makes fights interesting and dynamic. You get to choose between attacking with your weapon, your spell (represented as a card ability) and your die.

I also really love the build system. After every enemy you’re presented with rewards, some of which are relics that can power up your spells and abilities. If you match three relics of a similar color in a row you’ll receive a permanent buff. The matching system gives a general purpose to the roguelike nature of the game and makes playing around with each run really unique.

There are two areas that I’m struggling to enjoy however. The storytelling in the writing is minimal at best and the structure of the levels in the world, doesn’t offer much in the way of helping the player build a picture of what’s going on, outside of the vibes.

I’m also really struggling with the length of individual runs, especially when it comes to practice and the difficult curve of the various elements. I’m starting to understand why more modern roguelikes have introduced the “skip forward” mechanisms that let you jump forward to specific areas without having to crawl all the way back through the levels.

The game tries to teach you the skills to overcome these things (by exposing you to similar concepts earlier on), but for button mashers like me, the skill curve spikes increasing in intensity and speed is a huge challenge.

I’m starting to understand why Derek Yu talked about making difficulty curves smoother over time when he talked about the design of UFO 50, because you will naturally see the later bosses significantly less than the earlier ones.

Design Experimentation

If there are ideas (not critiques) in the game I’d like to play around with, it’s probably probably twofold:

I think I would try a mechanism where after failing a previous run, you could retry the area you died at starting with the same build. Even if this only gave you one retry (without being able to jump levels), it would help someone like me to build the skills necessary to move on.

From the other direction, the collections and build system feels like an interesting area for play and design exploration. What if instead of single squares you were setting out tetromino style pieces that could overlap to supercharge each other?

I Think I’ll Keep Going

That’s all for now, but this is the type of game I think I’ll finish, if not for the story, but for the enjoyment and satisfaction of winning.

Rattle rattle rattle

Tap tap tap

A game night, or at least a game, was about to begin in the household. The game in question was Boggle, and the start of every game involved randomizing a set of 16 cubes.

The sound of that shaking rode that aggravating line between pleasant and discordant.

Boggle is a game where 16 randomized letters are placed in a 4x4 grid. Players have the goal of making as many words (at least 4 or more) as possible by using adjacent non-repeating letters with 3 minutes. No points are scored for words you shared with someone else.

Word games are funny things. Spelling games in particular are almost pure knowledge and memory. It’s not about making a connection between concepts or ideas. It’s about knowing what letters pair well with w-i-nand looking for them, over and over again.

This type of knowing is not the type of knowing I have ever been good at. I am good at (or at least I enjoy) making connections between ideas, or trying to play the challenge of uncertainty. This, for example, is why I love Fibble but am resoundingly meh about Wordle. I do not love games about knowing. I love games about finding.

And this is why by the end of the three minute timer there would be a single 7 letter word that no one else had found, ten or so other words and a shockingly small score compared to the word fiends in our family: my sister and father.

My sister and dad are knowers. They are very very good at collecting a bunch of facts and then knowing what to do with those facts once they’ve collected them. And as a result, they enjoy the types of games that reward that ability to know and the ability to focus and concentrate and use that knowledge efficiently.

Growing up this was a challenge. A challenge that I did not fully understand. I perceived a lot of confusion and sometimes frustration on their part1. How this disorganized brain in front of them found a word they could not but failed to find all of the other words that were there. I think they always saw me as a wayward and undisciplined genius. Someone who could never seem to put it together. But that was me.

And for my part I would always marvel at their ability to be so precise. The same precision that eluded me in basically every other area of my life also eluded me here. I had the same creative impulse to make art that the rest of my family seems to thrive at but never the knowing, the precision to follow through and make it happen. Whether it was crafting sentences, printmaking, or any of the other myriad projects we would take on.

It’s why, playing Boggle my brain would spend all of this time straining to find that seven letter connection. While they were confidently, precisely moving along their knowledge trees:

w-i-n

w-i-n-d

w-i-n-d-s

t-w-i-n

t-w-i-n-s

Playing the game was fun but scoring the game was absolutely brutal for my ego. The spark of discovery would quickly get torn to shreds as the remainder of my words were calmly picked off by one of them while their reams of words were waiting in the wings to pick up points.

This might sound absurd but games like that were one of the few areas where there was a level playing field for me. I think on some level it was about trying to prove that I could be as smart as they were. There was no world where I was stacking up when it came to artistic pursuits or my writing skills. Some bad combination of youngest child syndrome and probably undiagnosed ADHD meant there were few avenues that I could succeed in a way that was comparatively interesting.

And the one skill I do have, the one I got from my grandfather, is my ability to throw myself at a problem (happily) over and over again until I win. And that’s part of why I enjoyed and have fond memories of games like Boggle. Even if I never really had the comprehensive knowledge, I could throw myself enough at the problem to make it enjoyable.

Looking back on Boggle from a design perspective, it’s funny to compare it to “modern” games that just have fewer rough edges from a player experience perspective. There’s Wordle and Bananagrams, that are really games about being personally expressive with letters put in front of you, and not very much about interacting with other people. Or there are games like Paperback (competitive) or Letter Jam (cooperative) that are more about the other mechanics built around the words, and not so much about the words themselves.

All of these games are, in one way or another built to lessen those stings of defeat. To make each individual game more about a personal striving and less about comparison. They abstract away those sorts of differences and make them less transparent. Those games, if we’d played them at all, probably would’ve protected my feelings at the end, or at least made them less transparent. But I think the connections and comparisons were important. The challenges were present throughout my life but playing games was a place where those differences could be understood and appreciated.

But word games weren’t all we played. There were also the card games. And next time, I’m going to talk about those!

There are various Eternals cards, their decks, your decks, the slots of each stage, the adventure cards, two rulebooks (there are actually four, an additional set in Japanese that I took out from my edition for my lack of ability to fluently read Japanese), the tokens, and your starter decks. All of them are beautiful, but the pieces alone are enough to overwhelm.

Luckily, once you get it set up it all falls into a predictable location and rhythm. There's really only one location on the board that you have to focus on, the center, and it's defined by only a couple of rules. You get started on your first game, a practice game of sorts. The rules are easy enough to follow. Turns are quick, play a card, draw a card. No duplicate adjacent colors or numbers, and then maybe ascending or descending. Try to complete a row. You've done it! The game shifts but you make your way through and, as a team, you win!

Congratulations you've managed to complete Stage A. There are 6 more!

Me and Cooperative Games

Eternal Decks is a cooperative game for two to for players (we played with four). It has all of the trappings of cooperative games. You can't communicate about the cards in your hand, you're trying to work together on a shared board against a shared goal. As the game progresses there are increasing opportunities and challenges. This feels like the right moment for me to say I typically hate co-op games. I find them quite boring and lifeless. There's no competitive tension in the game because there are only inefficiencies of other players not playing optimally.

Eternal Decks is nothing like that. There are some games with few rules that are incredibly complex, other games with many rules that are incredibly simple, and other games that seem complex but are shockingly easy to operate. This is the latter. Eternal Decks is combinatorially complex enough that each individual player has a lot of leeway in how they want to play their turn. But conceptually it's easy enough to understand that the team can easily build a general strategy together.

Most cooperative games start out slow, with players groping to figure out the optimal move without much feedback, pick up the pace, and then also end slow when the end result is all too obvious, and you find yourself walking through the motions.

Eternal Decks is way too metal for that. It starts with your backs against the wall, scrambling to find a foothold, and it ends with your backs once again at the wall trying to complete the objective in just the nick of time.

The Rules

The game is a cooperative deckbuilding/card shedding game. You are trying, as a group to lay out rows of cards following a given rule, like play in ascending or descending order. Once you lay out the correct number of cards, the player who last played gets a fresh deck (corresponding with the Eternal that's been defeated).

The catch? If at any point a player can’t take their turn, you all lose. There’s no creeping sense of defeat or slow march that other coop games feature. The abrupt cutoff means you’re always on edge. The start of each game feels like a race against death. You each only have 5 cards and you're trying to chart a path to get each team member their first deck (first real deck anyway) without sacrificing too much. As the game evolves towards the conclusion you will once again find yourself with relatively few cards, more restrictions and desperately trying to find a way to win before time runs out.

The Eternal Decks (the namesake) is one of the most interesting and exciting part of the game. Each Eternal has a bonus (the deck the player unlocks when they defeat it) and a challenge (the cards they shut down). This means that picking the eternal is as much about balancing positives and negatives. There’s none of that deck building optimization explosion at the end where you can do everything all at once. Instead the endings to games feel like a mad dash. Eking out the final points for victory as the last cards in your deck slip away.

The deck will open up new options and the curse will make specific restrictions about cards that the entire group cannot play while that Eternal is active. You can deactivate the Eternal for a cost of your cards. This is challenging because your cards are your life and spending them on anything other than meeting your goals or making progress towards collecting a new deck is painful, visceral almost.

The Experience

This feels like one of those games that learned from the legacy experiences without needing to fully recreate one. You play over seven stages, with each stage introducing a new twist or concept. You can replay each stage as much as you want. We ended up playing through 4 stages (losing on the last one) and are eager to pick the game back up.

You're not destroying cards or adding stickers or creating a "unique" play experience. What you are doing is layering on and varying concepts so each set of goals as you move through stages gets harder and more interesting. I don't want to spoil too much here but there's a delightful variety of puzzles, enemies, and adventuring, in a way that feels almost video game like.

This games feels maximalist in a really great way. The surplus of components gives way to a simple core idea that the creator is playing around with, and you get to experience all of it. There are so many different components and ideas flowing around, but they way they get presented made them easy to understand and reason about. There were never moments where we forgot what to do. While we had a couple of rulebook questions for the most part the rulebook just confirmed what we already intuitively assumed about the game.

Card games are all about the fun of reacting to new information and watching a board state develop as things change. The relationship between the values of the cards, their position on the board, and when you happen to draw them is a core conceit of the game. So it has a real card game aesthetic. You're not just using cards as an abstract representation of something else.

Should You Play?

If you have time/energy to dedicate and can get your hands on a copy, I would absolutely recommend it. It's a really impressive game where a design with big ideas feels approachable to people who don't play a ton of games while having the sort of novelty and hooks that draw in people who've played a ton.

The One Downside.

The one downside to this game is that it just cannot be called colorblind friendly in the slightest. Not only are the colors not combined with patterns or other markers, there are so many extra symbols that it would be confusing even if they did.

I found myself confused why the various colors couldn't have symbols assigned to them. I realize it would've reduced flavor minorly, but it would've helped from an accessibility perspective, and also added clarity to the functionality of cards. For example, there were times when people asked if "all purples are special or just the ones that you can purchase?" The rules never really differentiated, but having them be a different symbol only added to the confusion. Consistency would've been a big help here.

Rejuvenating Games

I absolutely recommend this game. It's a real gem. It's the type of game that makes you want to try designing games for yourself and excited to try playing again to go deeper.

Parlor Room on Dropout TV

I really loved Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop series. I’m really excited something like this is coming back and Becca Scott seems like a perfect fit. Dropout TV continues to find niches and produce great tv to fill it.

Blue Prince

People are absolutely gushing about this game which seems… maybe overwhelming but also so intriguing. It’s a roguelike mixed with a puzzle game, where you get to pick the rooms that you open and thereby change the way the house unfolds for you. Phrases like “Game of the Year” or “One of the best puzzle games of all time” are being thrown around already. Definitely excited about this one.

CMYK Games and… CBS?

CMYK Games sure seems like it’s on a tear recently. They seem to really be ramping things up this year with their Magenta Line, forthcoming Magical Athlete, and now… this? Part of me is nervous about if they’re going to scale so far so fast that they’ll lose the magic that made them special. The other part? More game focused game shows please! This could be really neat and expose more people to the wonders of expertly designed games.

“The Perfect Line” has a fun and easy play along format with a new, visual take on trivia. Contestants will play a series of games where they test their knowledge by arranging events, items, or people in the correct order to create “the perfect line.” Each round contestants are eliminated, leaving the last person standing to play the final round for a grand prize. The format will offer a broad range of topics from world events, to pop culture moments, to sports upsets, to groundbreaking innovations. “The Perfect Line” is hosted by well known journalist Deborah Norville, anchor of the #1 daily syndicated newsmagazine “Inside Edition.”

“The Perfect Line” is distributed by CBS Media Ventures, with Michael Binkow serving as Executive Producer and Chana Shwadlenak as Co-Executive Producer. Jon Barinhotz, Robert Belushi, Justin Vickers and Alex Hague serve as Executive Producers. “The Perfect Line” is based on a soon-to-be released boardgame by CMYK.

That’s All For Now!

Let me know what you think of this format and I might try it out more often!

Donkeyspace

Are Games Good?

In this recent thread Paolo Pedercini raises some interesting questions about my book, The Beauty of Games. After some fulsome praise that I am too modest to repeat, Paolo makes the following points…

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2 years ago · 34 likes · 3 comments · Frank Lantz

There Is No Line

It's fun and nice and comforting to hold the belief that there is a wide dividing line between "bad things" like gambling, loot boxes, and addictive behavior, and good things in games like learnings, logic puzzles, and moments of delight. But these things aren't cut and dried. On a purely philosophical level we know that people play slot machines not to win money but to enjoy the feeling of continuing. How should one draw the line between that and someone putting some money into Candy Crush to continue playing? There’s no easy answer.

Take the loot box for example. We know, definitively, that randomized reward schedules are both exciting for the brain to receive and habit forming. The uncertainty makes us want more. Built in the service of a game like... say... Balatro, and this habit forming signal might seem good, like a way to deepen our understanding of they system. Built in service of slot machines, it might seem easier to make these things seem bad.

This isn't meant as a defense of slot machines, or an argument that all games are slot machines. But the compulsion is part of the beauty and the enjoyment of games. It's not a subtle add-on or a tactic to get us to want to play more. The reason we play more and the reason we are compelled to play more are the same. The combination of problem solving, art, and mechanical actions are deeply compelling to us as players, and that makes us want to do them more.

I think it's fair and reasonable and good for us to sort them into socially beneficial or negative behaviors, but there aren't games without compulsions, or at least the potential for compulsion.

Compulsive Adjacency and Greatness

The compulsion that leads someone like Steph Curry or Caitlin Clark to become the best 3-point shooters in the history of basketball aren't any different from the compulsion of trying to get better at Balatro, to beat all of the chips on every level of difficulty. It's the alchemy of an interesting problem to solve and a behavior that we find especially pleasurable. Whether that's the mechanical motion of shooting a basketball or shuffling a deck of cards and picking which to keep and which to throw away.

But this does cause a problem. It causes a problem because part of the point of art, in many ways, is to be anti-compulsion. It's for us to step back and rise above our habitual behaviors. I think it's partially why game playing is seen as childish. For a long time growing into adulthood meant doing things for a purpose. To set aside your desires and to accomplish something greater than yourself. Game playing, in many ways is the opposite. It's the enthusiastic researching and understanding the boundaries of those desires. The desire for a perfect combo, the desire to solve a puzzle, or the desire to throw a perfect pass.

The Social Sphere

It's also a problem because it means we have to set external limits on when and how we deem playing to be ok. Sure we would say the same thing about other forms of art, I suppose. Reading too much or spending too long in a museum. But those pursuits are often the concerns of a person who is particularly predisposed to that medium or that passion. Games are a medium that, in some sense, demands that sort of engagement. The rewards only get greater as you are more compelled.

It also poses a challenge for people who love games, because the idea that games have to have external/social boundaries seems like it's the antithesis of what the last 20 years have been litigating in the public.

The notion (and danger) of self-control are never that far away from one another when it comes to games. More than that, for many games the interweaving of compulsion and danger is part of the fun. Football and hockey are about controlled violence. Poker is about controlled financial risk taking. As Derek Yu likes to say (I'm paraphrasing here), players get to choose when they stop playing the games.

Intent Matters

But I think it’s possible to do both. I think it’s possible to accept the fact that games, as part of their nature, can be compelling and addictive, while also respecting other values and benefits they can provide. But in order to do so it requires setting social boundaries around what sort of compulsion loops we find acceptable and which we don’t. And here, I think, intent on the part of the designer really matters. The purpose of many loot systems and gambling mechanisms isn't to create delight, it’s to tap into that compulsion loop to efficiently extract money out of the people who play. The fact that some people might enjoy it is irrelevant to that outcome. We all know that playing poker with pennies and playing with thousands of dollars is materially different. We can accept that while there might be fuzziness on the borders, the further you move in either direction (towards or away from loops that are designed to addict) the resolution gets much clearer. And it’s worth it, as game designers, and as players, to call it out.

Die in the Dungeon is a tactical deckbuilding game where over the course of an hour or so you are collecting dice that will give you special powers to attack, defend, and defeat your opponents. Every turn you draw a handful of dice that you have to combine to efficiently dispatch your enemies, and after every battle you will be offered a new dice to add to your collection to level up your collection.

I really like Die in the Dungeon. It’s a great system, the theme and art style are cohesive, and the moments of storytelling feel correctly tuned. Allowing the individual dice faces to be “normal” (digits) and letting the dice color to describe the ability, instead of having wacky dice faces you can trade in and out, seems to offer a simplicity that is fun and dynamic to engage with. This simple concept hides a maximalist design with so many competing ideas that creates a system that’s hard to learn.

Why Deckbuilders (Dicebuilders?) are fun

Unfortunately deckbuilders aren’t just about that gameplay system. They’re also about how the deck evolves over time and how much better you get at making your deck more efficient.

It's hard to explain exactly why deckbuilding style roguelikes are fun. It's the alchemy between understanding probabilities and constructing a collection of items that can work together over time.

It harkens back to the idea of playing cards or trading cards. Opening up packs, building your deck, leveling up your cards and your knowledge in tuen with each other. It’s all of that within a single player package that you can play over and over again.

The Mechanics of Deckbuilding Growth

I think of deckbuilders in physics-y terms. Your deck efficiency is “velocity”, how fast you can beat the enemy. Your ability to improve your deck is acceleration. The faster you accelerate (the better dice/cards you pick for your deck) the further you’re able to go. But there’s one more! There’s also the rate of acceleration, or how fast you are accelerating over time, which is your rate of learning.

This is super theoretical, but is a lot of the secret sauce of these games. They want to create a learning spiral that teaches players how to get better at the game over time! The reason games need to be randomized is it forces players to learn underlying principles about the game instead of copying a successful tactic.

The Complexity of It All

The challenge with all of this is that your rate of change is driven by complexity and players’ ability to understand that complexity.

Slay the Spire is a complex game. As a simplistic representation, it has

• Card Abilities

• Relic Abilities

• Branching Paths

• Character Abilities

• Enemy Abilities

But Die in the Dungeon is even more complex:

• Dice

• Dice Faces with different distributions

• Die Abilities (x2)

• Relic Abilities

• Branching Paths

• Enemy Effects

• Character Ability

On a simplistic level there are 3 more elements of complexity. We can debate whether or not these are accurate representations, but Die in the Dungeon is more complex than Slay the Spire. Because complexity scales exponentially, 3 extra components might make the game 8 times more complex instead! And something being 8 times more complex means it’s 8 times harder extract information from the game.

And that causes frustration. I’ll hit an early decision and I’m not sure what I need to optimize knowing that my choice might not be relevant further in the run. And then even though it’s fun picking between those abilities or store items, it’s less fun knowing I won’t learn about the success of my choice for a while.

That decision might not matter until a long time in the future. It can make even the fun moments in the game feel like being surrounded by fog. The amount of time it takes to go back and learn is incredibly tough. And it feels less like exploration and more like grinding. I don’t want the game to be easier I want more tools to understand what I’m doing wrong.

Finding Ways to Reduce Complexity

Now, it’s possible that all of this complexity is intentional. This could be a high skill game that simply requires the deep time investment to get good at it. I’m skeptical of that because other games that are equally complicated, like Wildfrost or Slice and Dice found ways shave off complexity.

Both games limit how many options so it’s clear what changes you’re making to your deck and what impact they’ll have. And Wildfrost, while it allows you to modify cards, only gives you a limited number of modifiers to select and doesn’t allow you to change or remove those modifiers later.

Contrast this with Die in the Dungeon which will give you dice with multiple modifiers, offer ways to both modify them further and also remove modifications at various points. Or how in Shogun Showdown you can modify the cards extensively, but you only get to pick 4 total over the course of the game.

Streamers and Enthusiasts

Do all these games need all of this upfront complexity? this complexity all need to be present up front? Are the concepts included because they enhance the experience or because they feel like necessary elements for any tactical game?

It doesn’t surprise me this game is a hit with both streamers and also tactical roguelike enthusiasts. The game is incredibly interesting and the tactical complexity is blunted significantly by the heuristics built up by those players over time. But it’s also not surprising why even the excellent ones can occasionally struggle to find a broader audience.

The reality, by the end of my playing experience, was much different. Slight inconsistencies in the power level of cards combined with the existence of the internet meant that, for the most part games were played out over very minute tweaks to mostly settled decklists. This can certainly be fun, but it’s a far cry from the clash of ideas that Magic sold itself on.

I ended up giving up because the idea behind the game didn’t match up with the play experience I actually had.

Enter the Deckbuilders

When deckbuilding came along, in the form of games like Dominion they promised to change this by making the game about building your deck as you go. And digital games followed, with the emergence of Slay the Spire as the dominant tactical deckbuilding roguelike. Slay the Spire is a game that combines deckbuilding, computerization and dynamic gameplay to incredible effect.

But the metagame, how these experiences get stitched together, often gets overlooked in single player deckbuilders. Because, well, it’s not the game.

But a recent release, Die in the Dungeon has me thinking about how and why the metagame is so important.

For Die in the Dungeon, "the game" is a tactical strategy game about placing different 4, 6, or 8 sided dice in relationship to each other to maximize attack, healing, and defense to defeat opponents.

The game, each battle, is really solid. It eschews the complexity of other Slay the Spire style games by using simple dice that do simple actions.

And after each fight, just like Slay the Spire, there’s a branching path for you to take, offering a variety of options on your journey.

Unlike Slay the Spire, there are… a lot of options. So many options in fact, that it gets hard to understand exactly what optimal even looks like. So many options that it had me questioning whether or not branching paths are the optimal metagame.

While I was playing a bunch of games in the Next Fest, it started to feel like many games defaulted to these branching experiences which created an experience that felt decoupled and disconnected from the “real game”.

Where We Came From

Branching paths have existed in video games since what feels like time immemorial. Even before tactical roguelikes (like FTL or Slay the Spire) existed, PC games like Civilization or Age of Empires1 were using branching trees to shape players' experiences and give choices meaning. And roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons use them to shape what powers are accessible to the characters you make.

The rough idea of branching paths is it forces decision making. From an "evolution tree" perspective, when you pick a certain path you are forgoing other pathways. If you want to improve diplomacy you have to move down that path instead of military, for example.

But these evolution or choice paths don't map perfectly onto roguelike style games. Roguelike paths are generated programmatically from one of a few options like rest, enemy encounters, and events.

For a game like Slay the Spire, these branching paths represent skill evolution. As you start out you might spend a lot of time stopping at rest camps to regenerate. This denies you resources you will need later, but as you grow in skill you can forgo those rests to pick up valuable resources to tune your deck or so on.

In FTL this happens on two levels. You're jumping to various planets within a system, which is much more freeform, only constrained by how close the various planets are. And at a system level, you jump between branches, but there are only a few choices, basically between safer, more dangerous, or more unknown space.

Branching Paths are The Metagame

These pathways can seem like add-ons, ways to shape the experience with variety so that players don’t get bored. But the actually serve a deeper purpose, they define the metagame for the player. The branching decisions (typically leading up to a final boss), shape what moves are possible.

In FTL this looks like a starmap, communicating the idea of non-linear exploration, encouraging you to jump around and explore.

In Shogun Showdown the game communicates rival clan territories you are navigating through, offering simple choices about the style of deck you would like to create.

In each of these games, the overworld defines the style and shape of the experience the game wants you to have, and ultimately how much replayability you’ll get out of it. The branches are a helpful way to create forward momentum while also constraining what’s available to the player.

But are they the only way…?

Next week I’m going to dig into the other options and some of the benefits and challenges that come with each of them.

Pairs and Perils, a game by Little Horror Studios and published this year, roughly is what happens if you mashup Concentration with Slay the Spire. Instead of building a big deck of cards, you have a small deck that gets dealt out in pairs, concentration style.

Each round you get dealt out 10 cards in your deck (5 pairs), and you have to remember which cards match with each other in addition to avoiding trap cards that are also dealt. The idea is that you're supposed to remember which cards you want to aim at which enemies.

This, mostly, was not my experience. I did my best to simply remember which cards ended up where, slowly lost my grasp on the reality of the game as cards were added to the deck, and ended up hanging on for dear life by the end of each game.

I kinda love it?

The game has two mechanics which basically don't functionally work with each other. The point of a deck is to refine it, by adding and removing cards over time you can shape how you play. And the point of memory is to basically use those linkages between cards and references to do something. This is a game about operating the system, for me anyway.

If Pairs and Perils was a game I wanted to master. If I wanted to climb the difficult level and get better at it, I think I would hate it.

Is Pairs and Perils a good game? The cynic in me would love to say no. I feel minimal desire to master or understand the system and the compulsion for any given loop is fairly minimal. The typical space for games like this is “toyetic”, or an experience which has enough interactive elements that feels delightful. And while I think the game has some of that, it’s not blowing my socks off, or something.

None of this is a critique of the game. It’s an observation that the typical ideas of what “make a good game” are a fairly narrow path defined by the sorts of mastery habits and experiences that we generally know to be pleasing to play around with. Pairs and Perils doesn’t have many of those (for me anyway) and still succeeds.

Memorization Doesn’t Feel Like Other Skill Development

I know how to memorize things. Spaced Repetition is a fabulously excellent system for memorizing. I do not know how I memorize things though. Not a clue. This is decidedly different, and weirder, for me than other things. When I learned how to throw a baseball, I could feel the different ways my shoulder moved. I could test out arm slots (the angle I threw a baseball at) and grips, and come to an understanding of how my body worked through playing. I was developing skill.

I do not actually know how to make my memory better. I know how to commit things to memory in the same sort of way that a magician might know a series of incantations to execute a spell. And I would suspect that the act of memorizing things probably improves my memory generally. But these are not the same things. I do not feel my memory getting better. I just enjoy the results.

So, as a memory game, Pairs and Perils is a game I enjoy operating, like I think most memory games are. I really enjoy that runs are quick. I enjoy derping around with the different character abilities, even though most of the time I forget to use them because my brain is intently focused on trying to burn those things into memory. If it were any longer, if there were more cards I think my tenuous relationship with it would disappear into something more akin to rage and disappointment, because in all likelihood this game would just be reminding me about my own fragile mortality.

And I think that's why the memory games that have come out recently focus so much on the experience around memory more than the experience within it. There are plenty of ways memorization pops up in other games and players, for the most part, view it with distrust and not a skillful element of play. Things like memorizing Chess or Scrabble openings, counting cards, or memorizing collectible cards so we can predict or prepare for an opponent's play. But these sorts of memorization (outside of maybe counting cards?) feel like imprinting. They're a side effect of playing the game, something that will just magically happen. Every time I've tried to get a group to play Wilmot's Warehouse (the board game), I have to start with "Ok so this is a memory game but I promise it's so so so good you're gonna love it", because people hate memory games.

The Wilmot's Warehouse board game is about crafting stories and basically doing a magic trick on yourself and your friends via mental connections. The video game (the first one) is similarly about trying to create logical groupings, but the fact that you're moving around all the time (and the story) kinda cleverly hides that all from you, and Weather Memoku uses Sudoku as this clever backstop to turn an otherwise infuriating game of concentration into a deduction puzzle where you can use your memory to go fast if you want to a beat a time.

Operating Games is Fun, Actually

Indie games, strategy indie games especially, really seem to be built around this idea that mastery should be the primary goal of all gameplay. The point is to get better at the game while you play the game, and build mastery.

And... that's great. In general, I like getting better at the games I play. But that might be something I focus on for 1, maybe 2 games a year. A lot of the other games I play, even the strategy games, I'm looking for something different. It's not that I don't want a challenge, it's that my relationship to the challenge is way looser. I want to get better, but I also just want to enjoy moving things around and moving the story along.