Rare Game Mechanics - MAGFest 2019

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website whatever we're talking about rare game mechanics today yep now what are we my rare game mechanics while we're in start with tabletop but we'll get into some other kinds of games toward the end but there's come and game mechanics like drawing cards or playing poker there's Tom and game mechanics and certain areas like trick-taking games if you live in the Midwest and if you don't live in the Midwest those are rare so we're trying to highlight things that are interesting that are different that you might not have encountered or things like the ROM oh right also if any of these mechanics are not rare Rimmer on this panel all by himself so blame them I think roses are actually relatively rare those are super rare there's like one guy who makes board games so if you google for ronald to find out what the hell we're talking about you're gonna find a Wikipedia page that explains what Arundel is and basically ironical is just a wheel where you move around the wheel on limited amount of spaces to take action so I take maneuver I can move up to three I go hang it all the way around that's a Rondo but if you do this Wikipedia page is something funny because it lets do three things what are those things it's max carats that was a game designer who is well known for making pretty much everything that used rumbles up until about 2014 so you see a Rondo game there's a 99% chance it was made by this dude so what's the deal with the Ronal you're gonna see more of these indie games are starting to keep this up like people have discovered this and used it you're also gonna see a lot of people calling things rumbles that are not honest like this because it's a circle there's a lot of circles in the world they're not all Rondo's yep joking not around oh no it is only a rumble if you move around a circle to choose actions hit resources to do something in the game and your movement is limited right so many when you're played like Agricola or any other kind of worker placement game right and usually the way those games work is you put your worker on any open space right it's like oh I want to do the farming action this turn I want to do the harvesting acts in this turn I wanted to make babies this turn just pick the thing you want you're free to pick whatever you want when you have a Rondo right you start in a certain place and you can only move a certain number of places so it's like okay my name is Daphne like make the babies make a baby make a baby that was you something else before you buy the base looks like my next actions either gonna be iron the temple or gold and if I choose gold I won't be able to temple or iron next turn I'll have to then do maneuver army or marble on the next turn so you have to plan multiple turns in advance like what the sequence is going to be and it's this extremely different kind of limitation on the actions you're going to take in the game because not only what's available to me right now but also what's available to me in the future now this serves really interesting purpose too because you'll notice almost all of Ronald's here's another one from another game designed by max carrots is that you'll see the same action multiple times there's two markets here go to this one there's two manoeuvres if there's an action that players need to take commonly or that is safe underpowered it's a way to make it easier to take certain actions you can hit that maneuver twice every time you go around the wheel it's a way to have actions that aren't that great or actions where there's some reason to let players do them more often maybe it's like a bookkeeping action or the action that lets you score victory points things like that it's a very powerful tool and this is the kind of thing we're gonna talk about for the rest of this panel things that are rare what they do why they're rare why maybe they aren't rare you just don't play the school where your games and maybe you'll find a few games to play along the land so hidden movement hidden movement is rare games primarily because the other play the player who's doing his movement probably has to write stuff down who's usually like a piece of paper some nonsense they're playing behind the shield they could cheat they can make a mistake like video games there's a lot of hidden movement right it's all kinds of stealth games it's not too many cells multiplayer games but a tabletop how do you do stealth right one person's moving in secret how do you know they're not cheating do you get a next an extra player to watch them to make sure they're not cheating it's like and then that player can see so that player can't play their only job is to see it's like it's really tricky how do you allow someone in a tabletop game do you have this hidden movement going on without any started cheating your shenanigans it's tricky there's only a few ways to do it so there's only a few games that do it yep and most games that do it do it with a stupid piece of paper that even when clue - how do you even knew there was a sequel to clue the museum caper they actually had a type in the sheet they had to tell everyone to add a wall and I didn't get that memo and that caused some issues in my family as a child this game is not good but it is tighter than you expect it to be the hidden movements actually really fun think of like you pull off hidden movement you have a board game where someone's sneaking around doing business trakula's make it more Dracula's and you're all trying to hunt it down there's games to do it but there's a reason it's rare even more ferrer hidden actions meaning you're doing a game thing like I buy this for four I spend as many tokens I move the wheel but you're doing it behind a shield or secretly without other players observing them snap doesn't like this game that's role for the galaxy because you could technically just cheat you roll some dice and you basically play Yahtzee behind your own shield set your stuff up and reveal just like that's not the reason that I like the game but that is at your fastest things you'll clean them out the most you could just eat at this game right and imagine you're playing Yahtzee behind you roll the dice behind the shield and reveal it when you're done oh look another Yahtzee Oh No yep but it's more subtle than that it's not that people are gonna cheat because your friend cheats when you're playing a board game probably shouldn't be friends with them anymore unless you're playing for fun but we'll talk about money in a minute but the problem or is that games are complicated how many of you you're playing a game like brute and you're like oh I do the math for dad and I attack the thing and then someone else the table says other than oh that costume that can't happen if the other players can't observe your actions every player is more likely to make a mistake the more things you can do that other players don't observe that's why this is rare or when it's in a game the game tends to break a lot right now the reason hidden actions and hidden movement like lots of games have hidden information right you have a hand of cards that's it right it's like well why isn't that a problem because it's just the information that's sitting it's not an action or a verb that's hidden it's just the nouns right just hide the eventually when you use them when you verb the nouns they're revealed to the players and everyone can make sure that all the verbs in the game happen properly right but when the verbs become hidden now things are happening in the game that people don't know about and they could go wrong if only one or cheating wrong if only one player is executing them and it creates a really bad situation specifically in that someone will make a mistake that will not be noticed until it's far too late to fix it you'll get 20 turns in you'll flip over the Dracula car it's wrong the player didn't realize they couldn't play that card the whole games room did you put in a slice to make it talk about dragon yes okay I put in the slide for everything you're about to think about all right let's talk about Dracula all right we'll get there realize coming up it's in there some are real options and I like your organization this is a game called modern art you literally just bid on paintings you do see this game it's going to be a newer printing that looks better than this or worse than this in different ways yeah Carla Gator is my man but it turns out that most people most gamers even most super serious skilled gamers can't play options for people cannot value things i watch people in this game there will be a big news being auction is a smart person playing the thin could not be worth more than $30 under any circumstances and they will bid more than $30 for me there is literally no reason to do that and I see it happen so commonly that it started feeling apparent that people just can't do actions so as a result a lot of games tend to avoid open auctions because if there are options you'll find that slightly skilled players just crush everybody else players get really unsatisfied it's really disappointing if you're a game designer because you know there's a lot of game designers have problems with numbers on things right the cost of gut you know them the mana cost to play cards the strengths and defensive cards or I'm using CCGs but like you know there's a lot of game valid Ricola how many grains did it cost to play this card in Agricola and settlers how many grain sheep and wood should it cost him a settlement right that you know they seem to have met balance it pretty well but if you're designing a game coming up with the costs of things there's a lot of hard work and you spend a lot of time balancing that if you make a game and you just say you know what we're not gonna put prices on any of the stuff in the game everything will just be auctioned on that's so easy it's like ah the players will determine the prices it's automatically balance what an easy game to make which is funny because Scott is designing an auction based game right now that's right I'm smart but later but if you notice like for example how many you play Monopoly ever I mean that games notable because it never ends and it's actually terrible but Americans make it worse by playing with house rules you realize you have to auction off every property that gets landed on right most people don't play it that way and the reason is if you play Monopoly with your family and your little brother doesn't quite understand math yet and you do and your little brother gets into an auction with you your little brother is gonna bid all his money on a property and then cry when he realizes that he's out of the game an extreme example of this is a relatively recent game that was kick-started called QE this game so great duty sense for quantitative easing so the way this game works is this oh actually a ridiculously simple game all that happens is he got a few rounds right and each round the auction off victory points really okay how much do you want to pay for for victory points and everyone writes a number on a card hands them to a player that Claire reveals which player which other player bid the most right and then they give that person the victory point I can fit a million I could bid a billion I just keep writing nine-year-old you are a bank you print money you can write any number you want on the card it doesn't matter so how does this game work I'll just bid a billion dollars obviously first of all whoever has the most victory points after all the auctions is the winner except whoever spent the most money automatically loses so you just bid a billion every time and win all the options and get all the victory points well you're automatically eliminated then we look at the next person if you want to see why auctions are so hard to incorporate well like real auctions a lot of games have faked the auctions like go around on the table and everyone just raised this by a little bit and usually the net like power grid right goes around yeah this game has like four different kinds of auctions and one of the things you do in the game is choose which kind of option to use depending on how much it might benefit new hard for people to figure that out this game I literally saw people bid 40 and 10 billion on these I see the most really mostly bid 69-42 2014 six one one now those are the kind of numbers that are bid the most often to bid the devil's level right so you can go 70 it's usually a good idea with the so air handler board games can crash can you think of a situation that I caused a board game the trap but the thing I love the most about this image is that he's a little blurry because he's about to do it but board games crash so as we said before someone makes a hidden actions and for hours later you find out your game is ruined and it turns out there are very small vanishing number of games that had an error correction built into them it rules for if someone cheats if someone messes up if the game gets knocked over there's so few to me to talk about most of that right yes it's like you know there's a lot of video games right where the video game crash is like okay well I guess I can't play anymore period I you your path forward is predetermined right my game crashed I guess I reset it it's softlock i guess i reset and i see what kind of safe plan i have right oh wait crashed i got to walk through the wall I guess I got to walk through the wall the hill great but in a board game there isn't some sort of law of the universe governing what's gonna happen you can move the cubes anywhere you want no one's gonna stop you yeah there's no journey things you get the game three turns ago even during the game no one's gonna stop to you right sometimes this some common sense like aha I was lucky and took a photo of the board before some inflicted that saved us once in a drunken Magfest two years yeah but sometimes there is no guaranteed right way to fix what's going on and very very few rule books have in them if something messes up do this so Puerto Rico which we have a panel you can watch online where we teach this game completely and then teach people how to be good at it but we just did that pets unplug this game has a really interesting mechanic where after something happens the mayor will take it with your colonists and like refill them on a ship but it's really easy to forget to do that and you usually won't notice that you forgot to do it until it's too late to put the right number out there the game has a specific rule that if the person who's supposed to do it forgets to do it then there's a specific number you put out so it's not cheating to forget on purpose but someone reminds you you got to do it yep the rules are very clear if so it reminds you you can't still forget to do it surely of Dracula oh yeah the game oh let's try to talk about before does this for hitting movements we go to in one hand you got your hidden movement and your airheads this gate everything is great about this game except actually fighting dracula really saw a new printing is coming out soon and i have the second edition then there was a third edition that fixed some things and then that one had a print and the price of the game went way up but now fourth petition is coming out and the price went way down you're basically vampire hunter is like classic fat dracula style right and you're trying to chase Dracula Dracula sneaking around Europe like making more vampires and leaving bombs behind it all sorts on them right this game is for on one one player is Dracula sneakily hidden movement are at you know around Europe with these facedown cards it's like if Dracula has a deck of cards and have one card for every single place on the whole map so Dracula must to start in Berlin Dracula places the Berlin card down on the table face down if they then next move - I guess what Frankfurt yeah they would put the Frankfurt card next to the Berlin card and now you Dracula is creating this pass that they have taken through Europe by placing cards face down and when it's cold they started pick up the cards from the back and then they can start revisiting places so because of this layout of cards maybe you bump into Frankfurt and you say AHA Dracula is in Frankfurt three turns ago because when you land them somewhere Dracula has to flip the card face-up to show you you've landed in a place dracula wants to do this because they left a horrible vampire in frankfurt they have to flip that up to make the vampire attack and that gonna fight the vampire right and you know how he was in Frankfurt four turns ago and then and this is how you find Dracula's it's like it's hide-and-seek and this deck of cards limits Dracula so they can't go to - same place twice they're not just writing stuff down they have a physical artifact that is used to track the very sing of the game even though the players can't see it right but given all that Dracula's still could cheat Dracula could be like Brendan a London Austria yes I'm a very fast vampire watch me go even the Sun is that it doesn't so the rules are if Dracula gets away with it awesome yes Dracula gets away with cheating because the four vampire hundreds is so bumbling they cannot reveal enough of Dracula's path to discover the London cards followed by the Moscow card this interactively gets away with cheating which is great because actually if you play this game against four smart vampire hunters Dracula probably can't wait without you yep both this so the interesting part is if the players flip over cars and they discover that Dracula has cheated Dracula get spot yeah you've lived with a part of the rules that says if Dracula cheese yet and it's real bad for Dracula it's like Dracula loses like all his blood and all his power is it's like yo Fang you know right the game isn't just over it doesn't ruin the game you can continue playing but there's a rule for it you don't have to just say well I guess the game's over cuz Dracula cheated and this can accounts for two cases it counts for the smart Dracula who's cheating because they have to in order to win and also the Dracula who is a new player who isn't confident and cheated by accident neither one of these people will ruin the game so you can feel free to let your incompetent friend be Dracula and have all the smart people be the vampire hunters and your game will be okay yep no it's just for a third interesting thing in that now that mechanic isn't cheating it's just part of the game it seems to make a rule about it and each cheating someone even though it says I hit somebody and I go to a box for two minutes but it was totally okay that I hit that person right even though it says TV rules it's not cheating anymore if it's in the rules cheating is when you go outside of the room but what it means is that clever vampire hunters can try to push Dracula in a way to where he is forced to cheat because they boxed him in where he doesn't have a legal card to play so it introduces a highly advanced strategy to the game that wouldn't otherwise be their real wedding everyone how many games in the box have a bit at the end it's like hey you want to play this for money right so now that is exactly rare because there are a lot of games that are just gambling games you know roulette crabs baccarat okay right tons of correct tons of those but games that aren't traditional casino games that you don't traditionally gamble in tend not to have official rules for gambling with them of course you could gamble on anything you could say hey we're gonna play rock-paper-scissors winner gets ten bucks from the loser right yeah but it's not official and anyway you guys gamble the ogre owner and healthy time brim says in effect right but how many you typical non gambling games have in the box if you want to gamble here are rules for you so peg Dante reached out whose release with better rules is poker with pandas and it's unlike poker actually really fun right so obviously the reason it has the real money gambling rules is because of its relation to poker a traditional gambling game it would be cool if more non-traditional gambling games had real money gambling rules but they don't also don't gamble gambling is that I don't do it I just got I had gamble I got have but I know a long time ago we went to Atlantic City first time we were ever in a casino and we went in we're like we should gamble we got like some money we went to real estate we're like rent we won right we want me looked at each other we just walked out I had like two - Alice I was like oh three money's by I've got a cast-iron pan it was great did we bop ba-bop own swords and meet each other oh yeah at the toy store I was a good taster everything's awesome apparently no it's not if anyone wants to play a real money gambling with me yeah I'll reel all real money gambling with you as long as you're doing something I'm very good at you have never done before Megan banks do real money gambling a lot of people here who are way better at Megaman 2 than even me it was pretty good at Megaman 2 there's a lot of stacking games that are real funky Apple any Jenga Tokyo highways but they're not actually good at being games that someone wins because of their stacking skill they're almost always actually determined by Turner and there's a lot of physical intrinsic reasons for this for one you build something collectively and if one schmuck knocks it over they lose so typically these games have a condition of everyone wins but the loser who not then over the more advanced ones try to make a game around it like oh well if you like this thing you get points depending on how high you got like the color in your piece there's all these complicated rules for breaking ties they're way too complicated but in the end this game victory is determined by modulus math tokyo highways whoever goes first or second depending on the starting situation they're just gonna win the stacking isn't actually hard enough to make it the game and even if the stack you didn't make it the game if the game has more than two players you can't disturb you just one victors I'm really mad about this because I really like stacking as a mechanic but there's no good games with it yes stacking is like super fun everyone loves tagging games but yeah it's the winning is not determined by your skill because if you were to make a stacking game that was actually hard enough right to where you're stacking skill determined victory it would have to be super unstable right from the start of the game and it'd be super frustrating like everyone who's knocking the over on turn one right you'd have to be like ultra ultra skilled with every single placement right because that's the problem is most of the stacking games start out stable and they reach instability at a certain point and basically whoever's turn it is when you reach the instability point is the loser once I just said remember it for about 25 minutes from now so I've never seen these slides he has no idea it doesn't matter right but yeah for it to be skill based you would have to they have the game always be incredibly unstable such that any unskilled move would demolish it and thus with an unskilled players you would have things demolished I turn one constantly you also either have to have a game that has a long play one by one eliminating players or everyone has to be building their own thing so you don't just always have one person ruin the setback I think there's not enough building your own thing games other than meeple circus people circus is like the only good one most areas like the only good one it's not enough games you build your own thing because it gets really expensive just imagine if you had to buy four Jenga towers instead of one all right real-time mechanics in video games this is really easy like overwatch exists like we figured this out processors could do more than one thing at one time but humans can't do this so well especially in tabletop games there's very few real-time tabletop games that are not the simplest in fact very few games have any real-time component all right there are some that you might be thinking of but the thing is a lot of those dexterity real-time games are actually sports something like jungle speed right is actually a sport and green balls as you know manual dexterity is just a much lighter sport than say you know basketball I'm talking like an either you played magic and you can just take turns as fast as possible right there are some real-time games in the co-op department these days something like XCOM or space alert right but those you know it's like the real-time nature is just sort of this pressure to prevent you from using analysis browses to make the perfect moves every turn you know it's not real-time as in you know you're competing against other people in real time right so the reason to do so are goona Bebel is a really good example it is a really fun game but it's really hard to play you're basically making a stack of cards from your hand and you have to keep the paper-rock-scissors going like there's a pattern you have to play and at the end of the game whoever is the tallest tower of legally played cards wins unless their towers too tall in which case they lose the second place player wins similar to QE yeah however makes the tallest wins except for the taller the rule books in a rootless 'god's the rulebook says if your tower is the tallest you've offended God it's a Japanese game so the translation is HIGHlarious but the problem is that in tabletop games like if you're playing cards like that quickly and you make a mistake much like with hidden movement there's no one to observe you make the mistake and correct you you're not going to notice the mistake it's very easy you'll find you can actually play this game that everyone at the table made at least one mistake in the game is hoes right the other problem is that in a real-time game like this it's very hard to have rules that govern you know really small timing errors you know I got my card wedged under yours I'll buy a little bit cuz there's a cow who goes on top Google's on bottom right and because it's real-time you can't fix mistakes right it's a fixing mistake in a caught game doesn't matter who's harmed right the computer whatever helped but in a competitive game it's like I we need to get everything right we can't have any bakeries going on real alliances you can make an alliance or their idiot friends and like access and allies are risks but you know that doesn't count and they're just gonna betray you because there's no game mechanics around it there are games like doom where you can legit make a real alliance and if you win together you just win together yeah a lot of games that have trading and alliances just sort of have like these really informal rules like yeah you can make alliance and dear friends if you want whatever they don't have a long list of rules if you form an alliance the following things happen this is this and this you can do this as their allies you can't do this with your allies your allies game needs benefits they don't gain these benefits nearly two games I know that do it aren't eclipse and doom yeah pretty much so this comes down to a game very concept because it's it's not just the Lion Society of cooperation is a deal you made binding or knots because if the game is non cooperative in game theory it means that we can make a deal but neither one of us is obligated to actually follow through and you know nothing in the game enforces us actually following that rule a bound up cooperative game there are binding rules if we make a deal I'll give you 20 dudes if you attack Scott - we have another side then you have to do it you can't opt out after we make the deal and spit and hatch and whatever it is we do to seal the deal but joint victory is sort of a consequence of this and it's almost its own category it's very rare for there to be games especially leaves without alliances where two players can do something to win together so you know there's a lot of games who are one player losers and everyone else wins but that's not the same as a joint victory right a joint victory is we're all intensively playing for our own win but then the game comes into a situation where it's like well I can't win on my own but I can guarantee a win if me and rim win and rim sees the same thing he's like well he can't wait he could win on his own he wouldn't do that he would just why would he jump being with me if he can win on his own but if he also can't win on his own but can win together then we win and you all lose that doesn't happen too often against now this is very distinct from real lions real alliances me we are now a team and we were trying to win together this means we could trigger an end game edition in the middle of a game where we are not allied and just wing together it's very rare but it solves one of the problems of multiplayer games politics politics in games is when we're playing a game with a bunch of people and Julie jurors about the win so everyone just piles on the Joe Joe Joe to make sure he doesn't win and then Scott wins instead right you may not realize this but any game that you play that has more than two players right because the two players it's like they're both just fighting for themselves to where alright any game you play with more than two players except for a race or guys in a race it's like imagine 100-meter dash everyone just running as fast as they can you're not interfering with the other player like the option you can't interfere with someone else and dotson right but any game where you can interfere with other clearance at all and there's more than two players you're basically just politics deciding who wins is a huge factor no matter how much skill you use there is some amount of someone else decided you're not gonna win so you're not gonna win you'd be the best risk flair if the other players decide to gang up on you guess what you lose it doesn't matter you you no matter how skilled you are no matter how smart you are no matter how lucky you are with the dice if you can't win one against five and risk it's not gonna happen yep is a highly political game it's a Honduran f-father I think you're maybe just iterating on voting who wins the game and you keep voting till eventually someone wins the vote and once again this allows two people to let's just win right now and end this because it's been going on for four hours approximate movement this is big in war games where you make a move but you don't really know what the results are gonna be you're pulling up tape-measure maybe a brand new tape measure you're sort of guessing where your things get this is most this is very common in serious crognard war games not very common almost anywhere else it's a lot of reasons for that I was going to point out battle system is the miniature game that was for Dungeons and Dragons it was the official one it is awful and I love that hell out of it and I've never actually played it but I practically memorized this book and that's an ugly ass dude on the cover but I digress the this mechanic built something very interesting it allows a sort of organic fog of war or non-deterministic results that will cause emergent gameplay I want to move the army toward that furnace well I do be ordered to the army to march and I know they will march exactly 6 inches but I can't measure it until I actually give the order and then we March them and they like bug up against the forest maybe there's a gap maybe they get crowded into the river make the into a bad situation starts to simulate the way that real old-timey Wars work we don't really know what the troops are gonna do you can't really say they're going to that hex and now they have plus one defense I had some friends they were telling me about a game they made once we're in order to choose the scale of the game right most people will just use something like inches or centimeters but they're like well for this game you can just sort of decide what your scale is based on what you have available and how much space you have right so if you're playing like a game on a huge table and you got tons of room you might use like a big plastic disk and say alright I'm gonna move five disks and use the disk to measure how far you gonna move and you're playing a tiny table the guy will use beams I move five beams and as long as you always use the same beam it's like it doesn't matter you're moving the game scales up or down it's just you're moving X things right but yeah that game night I've never even they ever gave me the rules I assume it whatever all right so an example of a pretty recent game that uses approximate movement or at least writing stuff down where the exact placement of your thing matters it's this Treasure Island yeah really fun game one person is slack Baird you see it's got this treasure and I have a secret map for I have money long time so long john silver Blackbeard excited yeah yeah Long John Silver has hidden his treasures somewhere on this map and I literally just put tiny X on the map and because I'm me I put the tiniest little pixel everyone else is moving around this board usually this compasses and these rulers and no like I want to move in that direction and then they draw a circle around the area they search and the highe feel like if I'm at and look at the big map and figure out if that circle actually covers tiny little one pixel that I drove my map it's actually a real fun a problem with it is that you have to be really precise it's actually very difficult we couldn't even draw a circle with my compass playing this game so at this point when you have a game that uses a mechanic like this you'll have to provide a lot of implements a lot of dexterities required a lot of like large boards are required the larger you make it the easier it is to draw something measured precisely it's just a whole mess to make a game work with this kind of mechanic right it says in the rule book for this game like if there's any question like if you're not sure if they got the treasure or not they got it right so it's sort of like even men it's sort of hedging its own you know an accuracy it's like I you know I'm not sure if it you got it and they don't let anyone move secretly long guns silver isn't moving behind this sheet I'm still the boss out of prison then he's just on the way around right as I said before only in this game only nouns are secret the location of the treasure is secret but anything anyone does is public right that's hidden information but not hidden actions bargaining you might say wait a minute this isn't rare how many millions of games have trading in them right settlers monopoly liked reading isn't all the games James of Genoa is a game about trading though right it's like how is this rare it's rare because in most trading games training is dumb and you don't want to trade if you want to win watch pros play Settlers they're only training if they're ripping someone else off and if everyone at the table is a pro know it's trading with anyone right is for area in most trading games it's usually a very bad idea to trade the only time it might be smart is like if you're the third and fourth player place players you're gonna lose you trade with each other to help each other out and catch up but it's like for the fourth place player it's like you're basically just making the third place player win do you really want to do that it's like and it's usually because games don't have a good incentive for training or a lot of people trying to make real bargaining trading stuff but they make their rules for it too complicated it's a restrictive or they make them too open and you can trade anything and people get so paralyzed looking at the scope of things that get trade that they just don't train and still disappoint me because trading is hella fun but it's really sad when it's hella fun and also something you're not you don't do right so what's the best part of Settlers training when I play at least I don't trade anymore though because I want to win yeah and I can't get her I can't would lose on purpose to have fun trading I can't bring myself to do that so I just don't play that game and I look it falls into the same problem we said before with auctions players have a hard time understanding the value of things so as a result if there's trading and it's happening in a game very likely at least one of those players vastly over or underestimates the value of something which leads to salty feelings and poor gameplay experience yeah it's only good if all players have equal skills going on but Bonanza is the only game I know of that solves all those problems and training all right wait Bonanza work design your turn you get some cards face-up in front of you from the deck and you've only got two bean fields by default and each bean fields can only have one kind of beans already got two bean fields I got a coffee bean field and I got a red bean field and face up in front of me well there's a black bean and visit this is stinky Scott just give me the stinky no one else will keep on giving me for free if I keep fighting those beans I got a car vist one of my bean fields completely to clear out I got you backed into a corner give me that bean just give it to me just right now just give it dreams over there stink bean field and I got a stink bean in front of me I'm either gonna trade the stink bean the red which is great for him and I guess well good for me too because I don't have to plant the stink mean right but it gives me a reason that I gotta trade this away I have to I really want to and other players want it because they're not finding the same beans I know you designed the game to have an incentive structure that doesn't just encourage people to trade it forces them to train unless you just want to lose you can just never trade and plant all the beans you get and never tried it like in this game when you trip when you receive a bean in a trade you get to plant it immediately and normally you're only planting one being a turn from your hand right in order you can't change the order of your hand so let's say I've got a green bean in the middle of my hand I can't plant that for like three turns I got a green bean field rims got a green bean field he's got a green bean in the middle of his hand I'd trade him a green bean from my hand for the green bean in his hand we both plant green beans immediately and clear them out of the middle of our hand how great is that right it's huge huge and sentence to trade in this game bonanza both forces people to bargain and trade and encourages people to bargain and trade so combined the game is actually really fun this gamers that hasn't played yet Casa Nostra is a game about how hiring bad people to do bad things it's basically a mafia game it's highly political but it is a very nice mechanic where we can make a deal like hey will you give me a favor I'll give you five bucks if you let me use your hitman at some point later in the game and there's no way I can have all the different kinds of things I need to do a job I'm gonna have to trade favors with the other players to finish the team to do my secret jobs this game encourages very similar game played a bonanza and has a very similar result people are bargaining and yelling and screaming at each other John company super complicated cube pushing nonsense game I really love this game but it has a really fascinating mechanic you don't trade all the things because that gets overwhelming instead it has a separate quantity every player has something called promised SKUs promised cubes you can trade them to other players to get those players to do things for you so you're basically always trading this one commodity a Scott I'll give you two promised cubes if you let your son marry my yeah I can't be like hey rim I'll give you two dollars I can only give him promise Q's right you're always trading from those kids to people for things that you want if I get one of Scott's promise cubes I could trade it to someone else Jewellery Jojo I'll give you one of Scott's promise cubes if you do this for me right now I'm going to now I have to do something toward that other player to get my cubes back and if he doesn't get his cubes back at the end of the game you get victory points for all the cubes or other people you're still holding on to from those players it's really fun you're basically just trading victory points yeah but it abstracts that into a single well-known commodity to trade for favors so it simplifies the landscape of interaction without oversimplifying the landscape of what you're actually trade it also provides a really interesting thing and that you can just perform an in-game action that is defined by the rules to get your cube back all right so I can trade away these tubes and then do stuff to get the cubes back that they can't stop me no right it's like I don't have to sort of meet the other half of the bargain it's just like I have to give out a cube and then I make up the other half of what I want right q4x and then but I do to get the cube back is something that happens later that they have no say in all right so feed bonanza I kind of alluded to it these are the only two games on earth I know about that do this that are like widely known or played your hands cannot be rearranged when you draw your hand cards come in from one side they go out the other side you're not moving cards in your hand right or is it from you're like me you like to shuffle the cards in your hand you can't play these games because you'll basically cheat on turn one GG it's so rare that we just call it Bonanza hand when we encounter it I was highly skeptical it feels and sounds like it would be wrong like it wouldn't be fun it allows a really interesting game design there's a reason both of these names why in the film and Bonanza are super fun bonanza hand is a big part of that so don't be skeptical Debra see a game that makes you keep your hand in order and play cards out here hand in order it's unique enough to where it's worth trying right now these games are super strict and when your hand order may never change right the only get there's some games though I think the only one I can think of is heart seven even though your hand your hand order kids are so just because the interface doesn't allow it but there's a lot of cards they printed recently in hearthstone that say like give +1 +1 to the leftmost minion in your head if you played the rightmost card in your hand draw a card they got stuff like that now so your hand order does matter but in these games you have to play the left card in your hand and draw on the right and hearthstone is just a few cards that matter it's not as big a deal where it's like this is the central mechanic your hand must be an ordinary oh my god information economy's most co-op games suck but just how it is most columns are really cop games they're just solitaire but you playing with a bunch of people like imagine you're playing microsoft solitaire but you've got three friends and you're all looking at it together saying we should move that there uh-huh that's the same game as pandemic same thing not really mechanically different right except Hanabi is actually a card game yep the Hobby economy and Res Publica are two of the only games I've seen that have a very strict information economy what that means is that sharing information with other players is something you want to do and it costs actions it's a limited resource and how to be you're playing with your hands facing all the other players you can spend your resource to tell someone something specific about their hands and rest pública you will basically on your return offer a contract like you have a hand and you can say like I'm willing to buy ship files even the German the--whatever translate in English or I'm willing to sell angles and you're both reviewing something about your hand and you're also using that information to actually trade it's kind of hard to explain in detail unless you actually play the game but the important thing to remember is if both of these hands has an information economy you use information as a resource in the game following strict rules yeah usually when you play a game together talk all you want right so everyone knows everything at least anything that no one's keeping secret and then you just play or you're supposed to keep your mouth shut and you can only see what's on the board and that's it or the other nonsense my rules like I'm pretty sure I could take this one I can't say what's in my hand but I'm - sure I can get that done and it's something like bridge it's like okay you use this bidding to sort of you know use this codes to tell people things you can't you know have a big wall between you and the other players you can't communicate in any way here it's like okay you can communicate but you have to spend like an in-game dollar imagine to play Monopoly and it's like all right did you want to know who owns that hotel you got to pay five bucks it's like a rule in the game all right say you're buying information super rare all right Twitter you can join me most tabletop games if someone just like gets up from the table and runs away you're screwed they can't keep going even if you keep going the game's gonna be in a weird bad state it is very rare to find games that allow people to just quit there's no section of what to do if someone quits your game what to do with a new player show so the game's over right now except for maybe set set is sort of like you set it up and then you people can just walk up and playing and then even whatever vendo which was recently re-released by Looney labs players can quit and join constantly poker you can just quit a poker game there's rules for quitting you take your money to go home play your elimination it's as if this isn't rare it's actually relatively rare it's not so red the thing that's rare is that people seem to hate flaring elimination when I think it's actually usually pretty good because it lets you go on with your life if the game is taking four hours right the number one thing that I hate more than you know it's sad when you're playing a game and you get eliminated everyone else is still playing and you're not playing anymore that's sad but what's more sad is when you're playing a game it's not over yet it's not gonna be over for X minutes or X turns and you cannot win anymore you've already lost and you're forced to sit there and keep playing and all you can really do is maybe vote on which other players get away like try to destroy rim since I can't win anymore something like that that's worse no would rather be eliminated that'd be stuck playing a game unable to quit because games don't have quitting and joining rules yep or like diplomacy where the rule is basically if one person's left at the end of the game they win otherwise all remaining players can vote unanimously to agree that all of you tie and everyone who was limited losses so you can sort of eliminate a couple of players and then all agree the game is over rather than continuing it's very that's an official rule in the game it's not like sudden use made up so some games handle is very well like you've ever played werewolf or mafia that that game a bunch of jerks are banging on a table ruining your fun and tabletop and yelling at each other yeah you're gonna see in here a boy this is a game that those player elimination well because the reason it's rare is it usually games are very long and if five people are playing a game and one player gets eliminated they have nothing to do for the next three hours while everyone else then hopefully you're at Magfest you can find something else to play I hope but mafia is a very quick turnaround like as soon as you die the truth is revealed you laugh and that none of the game starts within a few moments so let's talk about some role-playing games let's get away from just tabletop like German board games views does this picture by the way this is our gaming group from what like 12 years ago no me just my with hair stop smell that hair that's not that's my hair on the left Kim I don't have any anyone in this picture knows that we use this picture yes here at the con doing a panel so role-playing games are interesting because most of the things are about to talk about aren't actually rare they're just rare if you only ever play D&D in games like it Dungeons & Dragons and games like it are very common and very similar but there's a whole world of EB RPGs where every game is almost itself a rare and unique mechanic II like every indie RPG has a unique rule that makes it interesting so this is very fertile ground to look at rare game mechanics for example burning will well in my favorite role-playing game this has a lot of cool things going on but it has a mechanic where the only way to level up your character is to Palin stuff right so you think you know you play a normal role-playing game how do you get better right how do you level up you get experience points so you use gold to buy better equipment or something right you just constantly getting stuff and spending it and going up in burning oil let's say I want to get better at climbing well I should climb shouldn't I so I do I climb and I climb a whole bunch now if I keep succeeding at climbing all right well I haven't actually gotten climbing though I also need to fail at climbing so it's like alright I climb you climb over the tiny hill congratulations alright I now at climb up the big hill alright you climbed up the big hill good job alright I climb up the mountain you climbed the mountain and fall off ow but that was your challenging failed mountain climbing test you needed you are now free at climbing instead of too awesome I climbed the mountain yes so this encourage you ever played D&D and be like I want to not succeed I want this monster to hurt me so I'm really hoping I'm a little one I really hold one I really hope I fail to pickpocket this dudes and my pickpocketing will get better please catch me dude please catch me but it couples this with another interesting mechanic you know like the Indian games like it your roll dice a lot you fight somebody you roll dice like a hundred times here you want to fight your roll dice like once and someone is bleeding out euro if you roll the dice it matters a lot so if I want to get better in short fighting I pick a sword fight with a really good swordsman and I failed I got better at sword fighting and now my liver is leaving and I'm literally about to die yeah that's that failed climbing test on the town walls to speak in the town at night that got your climbing skill to go up but also broke your leg and the town guard notices you so late Blackburn if you want to play an RPG at Magfest and you didn't prepare this is a free game you can just download a PDF and play it immediately you don't even know anything the rule is the game is so simple but it has a lot of neat things going on a lot of like rare mechanics it starts with set characters in media res the story is already going you pick a character from a center characters you do no character building no backstory nothing you start in the middle of the same scenario every time you play the game but the mechanic is that you play the game forward so you're writing your story and the primary mechanic of the game is hey this is just like that thing we did that time so then you make up a story from your past involving one of the other characters and that helps you do the thing you're trying to do in the future do you start in the middle you're right the story forward and you raise the story backward at the same time right you go forward and it's like now we're in a sticky situation hey this is a lot like similar sticky situation tell this story and how you succeeded in that difficult situation that was similar and then you succeed in the same way you did back then alright which this was less rare because you've all been in that DV game where someone wrote a four-page backstory in Google Docs and they'd really be bothered need to make sure you read it so you don't roleplay with them appropriately and you don't care that Kelvin black step is their uncle and that they come otherwise and always kill them flag steps I really like Kelvin black star I don't you know you keep saying Kelvin like stuff the uncle all the time over and over again I don't know what Kelvin black staff is he's basically you know elminster the wizard yet yeah he's a wizard guy grandmother was another weighs more than cane another wizard guy just from a different world I just know the name worden cannon yes magic missiles right but this avoids that you don't need also a lot of people it's hard to play a role playing game because he can sort of paralyzed worrying about your back start worrying about the role playing effectively doesn't matter at all you have a clean slate you can make up the character as you go and write the backstory as you go thus allowing people to get way more into character and come up with funny stuff this mechanic is really effective I feel like a lot more RPG should just steal it so now you're rolling in remember what Scott said before about the mechanics of Jenga where instead of using dice you use a Jenga tower to determine success or failure right so it's like alright zombies are attacking okay I shoot the zombie in the face all right give me three pulls from the tower piece of cake mm you use this this is a horror game right so that's why it works in the horror game think about a horror movie starts out everything's kind of cool tension builds tension builds tension builds tension till someone dies then everything's kind of chill until the tension builds and someone dies engine builds and someone dies over and over again then it's the end right so the same thing happens when you pull from the tower every time you do something dangerous or risky or challenging in the game you got to pull some number of things from the tower according to the difficulty right so jumping over the giant pit and swinging on a rope and shootin 10 zombies fifteen poles yeah but like okay hiding in a closet give me one clothes no one notices hey whatever but if you knock it down you die well the rules say very specifically your character fails at their test and then dies in the most horrific scene appropriate way possible so this makes that you can you're a terrible game master a terrible storyteller a terrible writer the physical rules of Jenga force you to tell a good horror story whether you like it or not so this game called Arabian Nights or a thousand one nights already next a different game with Rob thousand One Nights is a game where you play a character who is playing a character its role playing exception but it actually were you literally play people sitting in the Sultan's courts who are telling stories and basically playing gaming it sounds complicated like you think wait try and remember that I'm like I'm this like Don Juan lover guy and I am playing that that one is playing the eunuch in this other game inside of the game it actually works really well this is the first game I've ever run or play where everyone remembered the needs of their characters and everyone else's characters at every point it was amazing and it leads to a really interesting set up sort of like men and nested role-playing because it's almost easier to roleplay in this way instead of written with his complicated thoughts about Calvin black staff trying to figure out what this alkies now whatever we could just do this and be like okay we'll play and we're role-playing as teenagers playing do I detect the darkness just reading this without changing any rules but instead I just think okay so I'm the sound one guy and I hate that jerk so in the game I'm just gonna try to ruin his character this day and it ends up working really well it almost makes it easier roleplay so with our last eight minutes mmm I broke my clicker here now just a good thank let's talk a little bit about video games I know we're in the tabletop here so I apologize many wants to leave the room because we've defile the sanctity of this building any secret is multiplayer is rare in tabletop to not many people play Puerto Rico by mail these days no this is something that would be super useful and super great for the modern world yet so few video games have actually implemented it and those that have have done it in a very bad way that almost no one uses civilization 5 & 6 both arms so fun the play I have multiplayer games of sin with all humans have been going on for more than two years and the only way you can do it was some heck an ID tool called giant multiplayer robot arm your take player damn turn like these third party garbage free tools are the only way it's like come on all you need to do is make it to where someone takes their turn and then it's a cloud save and then the other person opens up gets on their phone and it says hey notification take the damn turn and it's like you can do this with modern technology you don't need some third party tool teams can do this none of them doing even imagine like on your phone you had like twenty board games going on yellow notifications I take a turn right you got on the subway you took ten turns and then you get notifications later be the greatest and no one's made it I'm innovative you for tabletop if there are more app and digital like representations of tabletop games that just had good built in asynchronous multiplayer we would all have like 30 games of Diplo C going simultaneously exotic was which yeah thanks for problems I've made errors in Symphony cuz I forgot which one I was playing for a moment so multi-screen it's actually pretty rare especially in consoles like this it was hard to even find a picture of this even in the original The Game Gear and the original Gameboy had to link cables you could link them together and play asymmetric games games with hidden movement all the things you just said are rare and tabletop you could just do even before there is really online computer games and in meanwhile in 2019 the only game that does this is like jack box that's about it right holiday we got ahead we got ahead scream as opposed to when we got to this multi screen oh I thought you're already talking about this multi skirt no I'm certain just on link cable there was a game board game called Hunt for Red October didn't get the Gameboy one at that f1 racing game reuse the four-way link table hunter around October is one person place the sub and one person plays the entire Soviet Navy like that existed when I was in elementary school nineteen boy one black-and-white Gameboy I have all my weaves to sit around and be with Game Boy Advance is playing advanced war and the problem with these cables in Italy like one person sneezes and one cable gets dislodge the game just crashes but we didn't really explore like it's the games industry that full capabilities of multi screens and I feel like my opinion they just make fun of us I feel at the height of that genre was during the era when that cable existed to plug your Gameboy Advance and your Gamecube to play exactly these three games Nintendo for some reason decided to experiment with this and then made three brilliant games that to this day no one's really tried to make games like this fun fact if you buy like Nemco Van Dyne museum for your switch it includes pac-man verse right then verse is one person person playing pacman and they see the whole back on their switch everyone else is playing a goose that only sees a little area around themselves it is way fun Final Fantasy crystal Chronicles like it forced cooperative gameplay in an innovative and novel way that really hadn't been seen up until that point every player on their Game Boy has a piece of information you have to talk to each other and agree on what to do and coordinate the Mikve game go forward and it was just really fun in force ours is anyway you're not played Zelda for swords whoa whoa you're missing out big time yes four legs four different colors and like you get to a block pushing puzzle and it's like you all got to push the blocks together no three of us are pushing on the block Scott just like often I hope somewhere looking at his Gameboy like stealing chess we're just the fact that no one really will you go look for any uses if you can't get it running and the only time to really see it like every releasing like final mezzo-soprano maybe quite do it right I think they're re-releasing that exact specific game soon but I don't know how it's gonna work you're gonna get like a switch on the TV and then are you gonna have four other switches nope I don't know how they gonna do it and there's this tips just be online it can't just be a piece of rice really if you play counter-strike it's like oh look you've all got your own screen they're all playing counter-strike that's not the same thing you've seen the difference have you ever played counter-strike or overwatch in a LAN as opposed to just in your house it's different whether you like worthy I think it will be or not it's a different sensation different experience when someone kills you and you stand up and you're see that they're sitting right there but this is even more intimate because these are games where you have four people a small number of people and they're all sitting in the same room playing the game together and we have that again the switch has saved us smash is happening at this convention I think every hotel in this convention has at least one smash game going at any ever done but sitting in the same room looking at your switches but seeing something different on the screen right thing that in tabletop it's super super common I have a hand of cards you have a hand of cards that's private info meanwhile is this public board full of stuff that's the public info in video games thanks super rare where it's like ah private info and public info right you know it's like you know you kid you don't even have right a situation where you play you know poker on your switch they could do that so easily just Texas Hold'em on the TV is the table and on everyone's private screen is their hand no one's ever made that out of no one so multi screen full of multi screen like Scout said before I just really know anyone doing it because the reason why we had to deal with all this crap to make this work back in the day was that we didn't all have a screen in our pockets 20 40 right the only screen you could get that was small was the Game Boy Advance now everyone has the screen it was gonna screen right anyone here not have a screen on them that's what I thought right now right in our pocket we don't it's not no longer everyone's making fun of the crystal chronicles thing it's like I'm gonna spend all this money I gotta buy for GPAC friends and again we're a team hookers to play with we're not gonna find each and do this today without buying anything one person can put their screen that's always with them on the table and everyone else can hold the screen in their hands we have enough screens doing it jack box is like the only big game company making this work has anyone played you guys play these jack box games yeah does anyone know any other game that's not Jack boxer does this use your words say the same thing basically space teen star does space team I don't it doesn't have a central screen yeah the shared main TV thing go hotels do the everyone's got a theory on is doing it everyone has a screen in their pocket also the only failed packs of mega thumb it was the only Omega thumb that ever failed the function point is we just named all the games that do this that be able to make any of all the platformers we have enough of them so what was the poison spell to get a free bag to max that the main point of this panel and the whole reason I wrote it is simply or the fact we can all go back here just being obsessed with roffels a lot more games to use them so maybe you see that gentleman tell him that he needs thing for games for me I this was enjoyable they do if you don't like to see all the videos of like our hundreds of other tops because I do to grab one of these ancient Flyers from 2006 it'll also tell you how to listen to a podcast and you can see us tomorrow in the mages area on reading the rules we're going to talk about why and how people fail to play games correct

Channel: Rym DeCoster

Views: 20,252

Keywords: Board Games, Tabletop Games, MAGFest, MAGFest 2019, Rare Game Mechanics, Game Mechanics, Game Design, Panel, MAGFest Panel, GeekNights, Rym and Scott, GeekNights Panel, Game Design Lecture, Game Design Panel, Lecture, Tabletop Game Design, Board Game Design, Videogames, Video Game Design

Id: -rj3jm3xxIE

Length: 59min 41sec (3581 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TheRealColdguy]

I was at this lecture in January and they finally posted it online. Wanted to share since it touches on less well known games and their mechanics.

[u/cevo70]

Fun listen, thank you.

I am honestly very surprised that "auction" isn't used far more. Even a standard auction (think fantasy football auction drafts) with a cash cap is obviously fun, to the tunes of millions of annual revenue.

And that's with essentially no additional design chops / interaction.

[u/[deleted]]

MAGfest is great, more games than PAX. I miss DC.

[u/[deleted]]

I was waffling on getting Crusaders but this convinced me to go for it. It's not just a rondel, it's a power rondel!

[u/AllLuck0013]

Is there any rondel styled games where you rotate a dice to select your next action, such a d12 that would give you access to 5 actions?

[u/bizwig]

I don’t recall anybody but Avalon Hill using the empires appear and disappear mechanic of Brittannia/Maharaja. I also cannot recall other war games like these where the players win by achieving objectives rather than bashing the other players.