Game Mechanics in Tabletop Design: Full panel from PAX East 2025

So, I'm really curious what you all think is going to happen in this room because we're going to be talking about game mechanics in tabletop design. Now, broadly, we're going to talk about what game mechanics are. Then, we're going to talk about one game mechanic in extreme detail. The kind of detail that ruins games once you know how games work. A lot of games are not that fun anymore. And then, we're going to talk about a bunch of different game mechanics and what is notable about them from a design and play perspective. But, we do have to get this out of the way. Because nerds like to talk about semantics and ontology. I feel like that's 90% of all the conversations that happen at this pax other than where are we going to eat? Every place is full. So what is a game mechanic is actually a fairly hard question to answer because you're all going to have different definitions. Many of them are technically correct. However, if I said, "I'm gonna make you a sandwich and I brought you a hot dog," I might be technically correct, but you're gonna think I'm weird. So, what if we go to Wikipedia? What if we go to Wikipedia? Well, Wikipedia is not actually that helpful. >> Wikipedia doesn't fit in Alikard's text box >> because Wikipedia has all these like insufferable definitions, but then at the end of that section, it says these words. There are no accepted definitions of game mechanics. So, we're going to play a little game. I think you would all agree that those are all game mechanics. Whatever a game mechanic is, if we can't make a definition of it, you're going to look at those and say, "Yeah, yeah, that's a game mechanic." So, to test this, we're going to play a game. Is this game a worker placement game? Which is a game mechanic? >> Is it? Does anyone think worker placement is not a game mechanic? >> Because we can get you out of this room. All right. So, let's see how well you do. Just raise your hands if you think every game we talk about is a worker placement game. We will start with an easy one. This is a game called Kais. You may not be familiar with Kais. So, I'm going to show you a picture of Kais. I note there are little mele guys. Those little mele guys are standing on places that look like they spit out resources. How many of you think Kais is a worker placement game? >> You'd better. >> Kalis may be the first worker placement game. We're not really sure, but uh it's one of the early ones for definite. >> It's either Kais or Bus are the first games that were recognized by most people as worker placement games. All right. Yes. Let's try another one. Lords of Water Deep. Now, again, you might not have played Lords of Water Deep. You might >> Looks like some people have played Lords of Water Deep. I saw hands moving already. >> This might be the most popular worker placement game. And if you look at the game, you got a bunch of meuples. You put them on a thing, resources appear to be come out. So I think this is also a worker placement game. So even if we don't have a definition, so far we all seem to agree on what this word means. It's like magic. All right. A gria putting little guys on those things. Resources come out. Obviously a worker placement game. but a fellow or reversy if you came from the wrong part of the world and believe wrong things >> or Iago if you wanted to avoid the trademark problems of Milton Bradley Corporation. >> Now we're going to say it is definitely not a worker placement game. You are placing things on a board. Yes, but if you if you came to me and said, "Hey, you want to play a worker placement game?" You brought this out. I would leave. A carcassone. Little tricky one. Raise your hand if you think Carcasson, where you put the little meeples on the little tiles, is a worker placement game. Two people because you are wrong. For reasons we won't get into, I am confident this is not a worker placement game, but can see why someone might think that. Puerto Rico. You're choosing these actions at the start of your turn. How many of you think Puerto Rico is a worker placement game? I'm going to say no. I disagree, but with an asterisk. So, if we go to Board Game Geek, Board Game Geek has this list of game mechanics, mechanisms they call them, and they say that worker placement is quote a stylized form of action drafting, and that Puerto Rico is in the list of actiondrafting games. So therefore it is an action drafting game. Worker placement games are also actiondrafting games. So there is some intersection there and uh we can transform this game into a worker placement game by just having you put little workers on those instead of picking those tiles up. Change the change the way you physically interact. Now it feels more like a worker placement game even though mathematically they're identical. You know, I think the difference is that in an action drafting game like Puerto Rico, it's like you're getting the one action, a worker placement game, to make it mathematically different than action drafting, there has to be some component of you have more than one worker, right? Or you can take more than one action or you can somehow block someone else's act. Technically, you're blocking someone because you take an action, they can't take it. But still, you know, there's the extra mechanic that comes, not just the physical nature of the game. Board GameGeeek lists a ton of these mechanisms and some of them overlap. Some of the definitions don't make sense and it would be impossible to interrogate all of that and start to dive into like what are game mechanics? What do they do? What would we talk about in this panel? So, we're going to do something fun. We're going to dive into a game that is a game mechanic. We're going to pick one game that has one element in it. We're going to zoom in. We're going to look at that atom and we're going to go as deep as we possibly can. And the game mechanic we're going to talk about, you might have heard of it, is called yatsi. I definitely feel that yatsiing is a mechanic. I will look at a game and say, "Oh, in this game I do these things, but I am also yatsiing at some point." Many of you have played games that have yatsi inside of them. It's hard to interrogate game mechanics if you don't isolate them like this. So, we're going to go real deep on yatsi. I hope you all are familiar with yatsi. Does anyone not know how to play yatsi? >> Okay. Well, your assignment is to go play yatsi. All you need is 5d6 and a piece of paper. >> Yeah, a cup helps. >> But stop cheating. >> So, what is a game mechanic? I'm going to tell you what a game mechanic is from a the perspective of play. A useful way to talk about game mechanics is that they are a set of procedures that players will follow, a series of tests that happen at some point in the process of following those procedures, a series of inputs into this mechanic, and a series of outputs. So, we can teach you basically all of Yasi right now. the procedure. You roll five six-sided dice. You choose how many you want to keep. You re-roll the rest >> two times. You do that again and whatever you got left, you're stuck with. What are we testing? What numbers actually get rolled on the dice? And what decisions you make? Do you lock a dieice or not? What do you write on your score sheet? Inputs. What scoring options are still available in this game? Every time you roll and you finish that procedure, you will mark something on a score sheet. Once you mark that space, which is a very specific thing, like three of a kind or four of a kind or on a straight or just count up the ones or whatever. There's a bunch of different things on the score sheet, you can score each one once, you can never score it again. So, the input into this mechanic is just what is left to fill in on your score sheet. And the output, it just victory points. The game just outputs victory points. The mechanic just outputs victory points at the end of the game. Whoever has the most victory points wins. So, what is Yatsi testing? If you're playing Yatsi, what's going on in this game? It's testing luck. What dice did you roll? You might just roll six, five, five sixes over and over and over again. >> It can happen. >> And it's testing your ability to do some basic math. That's pretty much it. That's what Yatsi is. That's what this mechanic is. So, let's talk about how to be good at Yatsi. Let's look at this mechanic in detail. You are all gamers. Many of you have played a game called Settlers of Katan. I feel like even if you can't do math, that chart is somewhere in your brain. You know that sevens get more rolled more often than sixes and eights. You know about this like normal bell curve looking thing. That >> we even need the 1d6 chart, right? Everyone knows the probability of 1d6, right? >> So you can do this without doing math. This is so fundamental that this is sort of built into your brains. You play settlers, you get it. You play Dungeons and Dragons making characters, you've got a very similar curve. Notice the curve is a little more subtle. And if we keep going down this line, the curve starts to form a certain shape. And when we hit yatsi, we've got this shape. So you might think yatsi is your ability to do the statistics on 5D6 and then map that to some sort of scoreeet and that's it. M >> Yatsi is actually way more complicated because that chart is only telling you the probability of getting a specific number. >> And if you look at a Yatsi score sheet, there's only one line, the chance line, that is going to score you based on the number. So this chart really only helps you in figuring out, well, if I score the chance line, I should probably get at least 17 or 18 points. If I get less than that, that's not good. If I get more than that, it's good. Every other line on the scoring sheet has nothing to do with this chart. So what is yatsi really? Because it's not just a simple bell curve for babies. Yatsi does require some skill. You can be good at yatsi. In fact, you out there can be perfect at yatsi. It is humans are capable of playing yatsi perfectly. So yatsi has fairly complex probabilities. Every line on that score sheet has a different probability. the mean number of throws, assuming you're doing the locking optimally, that it'll take to get that outcome, to get four of a kind, to get a large straight. The curve is different for each one of them. So, you have to think about the probabilities of all these different curves every time you start your turn. You also have to map it to this sheet, which is not as intuitive as you'd think. This game does some ridiculous crap. like the top half of the board of the map. If you get a certain number of points, you get 30 what? Five bonus points because you hit a certain threshold. If you want to win at yachts, you get the bonus points every time. >> Yeah. Not getting the bonus points is going to put you in a really bad place. So, you're actually mapping a really complex probability space. One that I tried to do this analysis. This is super hard to do. ma giving making a probability graph of yatsi as a mechanic is nearly impossible. It was beyond my ability. So I went to Wikipedia. That's yatsi. That's the entire game. That is the odds if you play perfectly which again pretty easy for a human to do that you will get any particular score. >> So if you play yatsi and your final score is like in the 250 area it's like you did pretty good, right? If it's in the 150 area or, you know, down there, either you were very unlucky or you played poorly. If it's in the 50s, you played poorly because that's just not probable to be that bad. Now, those of you who have played Yatsi and know Yatsi, are any of you doing like a lot of math in your head while you're playing or are you just sort of you got this feel, you got a vibe, you feel the game, and you kind of just ride it. That is the magic of games and the magic of game mechanics. Yatsiing is basically a mechanic that allows the human brain to ride that specific probability curve. And the better you ride it, the better chance you have of winning, but it is still a probability curve. I could play Yatsi perfectly and still get near the bottom of that chart because I just rolled all ones and a two every time. And I could be really dumb and not know how to do any math and I could just roll a bunch of fives all the time and get a bunch of yatsis and end up with like a 300. Even though uh, you know, it can happen. So yatsi as a mechanic if we talk about it from one perspective yatsiing is just the mechanic of interact with a probability curve and try to ride it effectively. That's a feeling you can have in your brain. However, yatsi we said is a game mechanic. You you yatsi you decide if you won yatsiing or not. But if we go to board game geek they say there's a mechanic called re-rolling and yacht and locking. And it says yatsi is like the game that exemplifies this. There's also a mechanic called roll and write. They also say that yatsi is an example of this. But I just said yatsi is a game mechanic. Well, yes, yatsiing is a game mechanic. These two things are also game mechanics. You can look at the same game or the same mechanic different ways. It depends on what lens you're using. what are you trying to understand about the game and about the mechanic, >> right? If you look at, you know, I'm a a software engineer, but if you look at any engineer, people use, you know, abstract thinking, right? So, it's like if you're working on a computer, it's like what makes a computer work? Electrons. But you're not thinking about electrons when you're working and writing software, even though you are controlling electrons. There's layers of abstraction, right? Someone who's designing a car thinks of the engine as just one thing, engine, right? fuel goes in, thing spins. They're not thinking about the pistons and the other parts, but someone who's designing engines is thinking about pistons and valves and all the other bits that are on the inside. And even though you're at a different zoom level and a different layer of abstraction, you're still it's still a game mechanic. It's just is it a big game mechanic? You think of it as one big blob like worker placement or is it really down in there? Is it a tiny really minuscule game mechanic like roll one d6? That's like an electron of a game. Mhm. Right. Whereas a yatsi is more like an engine that can fit into a car of a game which gives us a lot of fun things we can do with game mechanics. So now yatsi is two game mechanics we can interrogate separately. Take rolling and re-rolling and locking outputs of that go into this roll and write score sheet and the outputs of that are victory. We loop through these two mechanics. We could change the order. We could move things around. Game designers think this way. Game designers who are good tend to think in terms of what are the mechanics that make up my game and they zoom in and out through these levels as they do the design and you as players can do this when you interrogate games. So Yatsi is a single mechanic game in the same way that an atom is a unit of the universe. Atoms barely exist if you zoom in far enough. Atoms are composed of these other things. If you zoom into an atom, it's got all these other components that are basically probability waves. See, you didn't think particle physics was going to come up here, but I promise we're not going to talk about quantum chromodnamics >> because we'll be wrong very quickly. >> I've watched several PBS spaceimes. So, that layers of extraction, if we zoom out from the atoms of games, the atoms being these mechanics, what we get is the chemistry of games. Think about any game you like. Is it not just a set of different mechanics that have the inputs and outputs all plugged into each other in some fashion and you sort of just loop through this set of mechanics. So a game is the same as a game mechanic. I can describe a game mechanic as a series of procedures, a series of tests within those procedures, a series of inputs, a series of outputs. I can describe a game using the exact same definition and the exact same structure. You can even chain games together. You've heard of this. It's called a tournament. >> It's called chess boxing or those randomizers like play Zelda and then jump into Metroid and then back into Zelda. >> Oh yeah, the archipelago situation is going, right? >> So, don't quibble over like precise definitions of game mechanics. You'll go insane. And if you don't believe me, look at the comments in Board Game Geek. Do not engage with that. find the level of abstraction or the zoom level that helps you interrogate a game. What if we go the other way? What if we zoom in? What if we zoom all the way in to the quirks inside of that atom? What's going on in there? Well, we did a whole talk about that that's on YouTube that you can find called uh every game is the same. Those tests, procedures and tests, the tests are what make games. The procedure of Candyland is draw a card, do what the card says, you know, move to the spot, take turns until the game ends. Like that's the procedure. The test in Candyland. The test is you find out what card was on top of the deck. That is a test. There are very few tests that exist in the universe. Uh we're not going to talk about those in detail. That is way beyond the scope of this talk. Find that other talk we did. But what these tests are really doing is they are probability functions. Some of them are very easy. Roll a dieice to determine whether or not you win or lose a battle in risk. Well, that's 1d6, 2d6 kinds of odds. It's a very simple probability curve. Uh play patty cake. The probability is nearly one that you will in fact touch hands. That was the test. Some games get more complex, but really they are very analogous to quantum physics. As you zoom in, these tests are just the probabilities that are the only uncertain parts of games. The procedures are certain. The tests are uncertain. And even though there's only how many in that talk, we said 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. We said there are eight kinds of tests. That's all that exist in the entire universe. Meaning every game mechanic, if you can come up with a ninth one, you're a genius. And we'll bring you up on this stage. Every game mechanic in the universe is made up of some combination of those eight tests. And every game is made up of some combination of all the game mechanics. And that is a multiplicative explosion of complexity from a very small number of mechanics and a very small number of things. Meaning if you understand these things, you will understand a lot about every game in the world. So why do we name game mechanics? Why? Like why are why did we have this little debate at the beginning? What is worker placement? Is this a worker placement game? Some of you even disagreed. Game mechanics having names is a big part of how we just bucket things and understand the world. It gives us intuitive expectations. A worker placement game. I put a guy out there and he does something and he brings a cube back to me that like analogizes to the real world. I can know a little bit about how the game is going to go before I read the rules. We start to have a common lexicon. Play a trick-taking game. I got all these words to describe the different things that happen in trick- taking games. Play a deck builder. You have a sort of common lexicon of trashing things. You you can you have words that are specialized to that mechanic. And thus, it's easy for people to talk about and understand what that mechanic is and all the games that might use that mechanic. >> Yeah. It's not just when you're teaching someone a game, you can use the common words that everyone understands to learn to play the game faster without having to describe every single step, right? If it's the first time you've played Yatsi, you're going to have to describe every single step of the whole thing. If there's a big game that includes Yatsi in it, and then you say, "Oh, yeah, and then you play a Yatsi and then you do this." You don't have to explain the the rolling and the locking if people already know what yachs means. But at the same time, forget about learning games. If you're just trying to talk about games, oh yeah, you might like this game. It's a lot like Yatsi or hey, this game is, you know, Puerto Rico plus something else. And it's like now people just understand what the game is because you've encapsulated, right? Like I was talking about before, you know, you abstract the idea of an engine. You don't say, "Ah, yes, here is eight pistons and eight valves and eight spark plugs." It's you say it's engine. You just say one word to communicate a large idea quickly. And people just understand that. They also share common characteristics. If you get good at yatsi, you will be good at the yatsi part of every other game you ever play. If you get good at trick taking, you'll find out trick taking is hidden inside of a lot of games that don't look like it has them. If you learn mechanics, the characteristics that are shared within those mechanics are also shared by all the games that include them. That is a little bit out of scope for this talk as well. If you want to be good at games, we gave a talk a long time ago called Play Dirty to Win. Uh there are things you can do to be good at all games, and they basically boil down to learning these common characteristics and getting really good at the mini games, the little mechanics that make up the most common games people actually play out there. The design side, we said inputs, outputs. Game mechanics are modular and thus they are funible. So if you're designing a game, you don't have to tune the entire game. You can tune each one of the mechanics and you know where the boundaries are between those mechanics. That way you don't go insane because it is impossible to tune a game that is just one big game. Just like it's impossible to fix a car if you think of it as one big car. You got a brake specialist, you got an engine specialist, you got an electronic specialist. So this is also how you can come up with new games. Uh, what if we played Yatsi, but the outputs are the troops that we put on the board in Risk? We're playing Yatsi to then play Risk. That sounds kind of cool, right? That's how you come up with game ideas to flesh out. Take some mechanics and just like shake them up, line them up in a row, and see if they make sense. Another generally good piece of game design advice is that, you know, if you have multiple mechanics you're connecting together to make a game, right, you should only make one of them weird. All the other ones should just be normal, right? Like if you include a yachtsi in your game, if you're going to twist that yachts and make it a different yachts, every other mechanic in your game should be non-twisted because, right, if you got two twisted things now, it's like people are confused, right? But if everything else in the game is standard and people understand it, then they just say, "Oh, this is the game with this one special quirk that makes your game easier to design and it stands out and it's easier to learn. It's easier to play." And I think if you look at most of the successful games out there, that's what they do. It's like, oh, it's a pusher luck game with this one twist and then it sells a bunch of copies. >> And you've all been there. You've got that that Kickstarter game you're really excited about and you start reading the rules and there's a weird way to determine player order and then there's a weird way to get resources and then there's a big board that doesn't seem to do anything. You're trying to figure out what it does. That is where people fail. And last, this one's subtle. If a game designer makes a game and they describe it as a worker placement game, you have insight into what was in their brain about how they thought about the game as they designed it and about how they expect you, the player, to interact with it. If you frame a game as a worker placement game, then your audience now will think of it as a worker placement game. And that helps you engage with what the designer intended. That is another way to get very good at games because designers usually usually not always they have an idea of how they want people to play their game. You ever see some games that like seem really simple but then there's one weird mechanic that doesn't feel like it makes sense that like hits the guy at the top or like somehow does a sort of rubber band or like gets in the way or limits you in some way. Usually that fiddly little mechanic was added because in play testing they found people played the game a way they didn't like and they wanted to reduce the chance someone would win by playing the game the way they didn't like. They want to encourage people to play the game a different way. So now we're going to step through a bunch of game mechanics and talk about them in some depth. Uh this is a semi- random sampling. Don't worry, we're not going to talk about like turn taking the act of rolling a die. That stuff's all baby stuff. You're at PAX. >> We're going to we're going to keep our abstraction level zoom at interesting levels, right? Might be high levels, might be low levels, but we're going to stop at interesting places >> and common common ones you'll see a lot. Yep. Push your luck. This Yasi is also a push your luck game to a degree. Pushing your luck is definitely in there. What is push your luck? These are the kinds of games where you take some action, you do something, and now you have a choice based on the output of that. Do I keep going? Do I push harder or do I back off? Do I set my gains or do I risk them for further glory? Do I risk consequences that likely increase in order to get rewards that likely increase? And you'll notice can't stop is suspiciously shaped like something we saw before. Can't Stop is maybe if you haven't played Can't Stop, you have to play Can't Stop. And once you do, you literally cannot stop. It's not a lie. Uh but the thing about the push your luck mechanic that is so great is just the way that not only is it a challenge for a player to make decisions, right? I'm behind in the game. I have to take more risks to catch up or what are the odds? Is this a good idea? Is it right? this there's things to think about as a player, but there is also just drama, right? It's just entertaining. It's because you have this feeling that like, you know, you're up against the cliff, you're right, it's like, should I go? And it's like, oh, when someone goes bust, right, on like a big roll or something, it's like, oh, or when someone hits something really unprobable, like, woo, right? It's it's so thrilling when you have uh any kind of push your luck mechanic. >> They also mean you're never out of it. You're not, you have not lost. You could come back from behind making maximum risks and win the game in one glorious turn. >> Some games you can, but push uh can't stop is a game. You could win can't if you're the first player and can't stop, you could theoretically roll amazingly and just win the whole game in one shot. It's possible. >> You could also be like a friend of ours earlier in this >> even gets a turn >> who couldn't even get on the board for four rounds. They were uh they took a lot of unnecessary risks, >> but you can't stop. Stop. >> They pushed it and they couldn't stop. >> The game's not called Stop. It's called Can't Stop. >> They could not stop themselves. >> But so we played Can't Stop, which you should all play. It's in the library. Like go play it at this pack. >> It was a Can't Stop tournament last night. You missed it. >> It takes like 10 minutes to play this game. But there's another game we played that's also in the library called Flip Seven. >> We played that yesterday, so it doesn't have a slide. So, we compared and contrasted them and it was interesting because can't stop is a game where one person, everyone at the table watches one person ride that wave and likely crash. And it's the drama of is he going to keep going? Is he going to keep going? Eventually, he blows up or maybe he's a coward and he stops. But flip seven, it's more like going around. Imagine playing, I don't know, group blackjack where you go around the table and every round is just do I lock in my gains or hit me. So, you want to hit, you want to hit, you want to hit, oh, you blew up. That sucks. And you just go around in a circle. So, instead of one car racing toward a cliff and you want to see if they stop in time, this game was everyone takes a step toward that cliff and we keep taking turns. You going to go further? Oh, he did. Well, I'll go a little further. I'll go a little further. You're like ratcheting around. The math works out the same, but the physical the way it feels to play is very different. But they are both the same push your luck mechanic. Ultimately, game mechanics are very tunable. You're choosing a lot of variables in how you implement the game mechanic. So even though push your luck and can't stop are both pure mathematical push your luck games, they play radically differently but have very similar probability curves in the end. Trick taking. I grew up in Michigan. I played games like Uker. Uh, I think a lot about Bowers. Trick taking has had a resurgence, I think, in the last five, six years. >> Among us, I don't know, amongst the world. >> There are so many new trick- taking games out there. Like, when I was a kid, all the trick- taking games I'd ever encountered were the ones that use a standard 52 deck of cards or the ones that are weird and use two decks of cards or a Uker that uses half a deck of cards. >> Knock where you remove most of the cards. >> Yeah. But they were sort of like these traditional games that old people played at the lakehouse when I was a kid. And I would play like in the parking lot in the school. Like we'd sit there and play Uker for money. Well, Reubel played hearts for money. But tricking wasn't that popular in like this board gamey packs going set until I'd say the last five or six years when suddenly you start to see a lot of new games that are just trick- taking games, but they've gone beyond what the 52 card deck could do. Yeah, I think there's there's a community mostly in Japan, but also in other places of people developing new interesting twists on trick- taking games and then the nerds in this country and others going there, getting those games, translating them, publishing them in really small operations. And so now you have these like these tiny communities of like intense trick taking with like tons of games and tons of new ideas. Um, and but it's not I don't think it's spread wide. >> Definitely not. It's like you go to a pack, you see like one corner where people are way into it and the rest of the packs has no idea what's going on. >> There's also a weird divide. I find the people I know who play traditional trick- taking games have never encountered any of these new ones. And a lot of the people who play Cat in the Box, Noosu Dice, many of you probably played these games. The people who play those games, I find have never played Hearts or Spades or Uker. There's like this weird divide. But I've also found I can take and many of you who have relatives who play those old games. This is how you bridge those communities because these games share a common mechanic. You go to your aunt who plays Uker at her lake house in Northern Michigan. >> Grandma who only plays bridge. >> Yep. And you bring some trick- taking game from a PAX. She might like, "Oh, I don't want to play that. It looks like a weird nerd game." But as soon as she figures out it's a trick-taking game. I've had relatives get really into these things and we've bridged two worlds over a shared love of a kind of game mechanic. >> Bridge two worlds with bridge. >> You see what I did there? Nobody laughed. >> Nobody laughed. >> Yeah. >> Hey, grandma. This cat in the box. It's bridge with cute cats. Let's play. >> So, I'm curious. Any of you out there, have any of you never played a trick taking game? Like, you don't know what we're talking one person. Literally one person raised there. Two people. Okay, you're not alone. >> Go play Microsofts on your computer, right? On a website. Just type in hearts and learn hearts and then you'll be you'll understand. >> So what is trick taking doing? Fundamentally it's a series of little battles. Like arguably war is a trick taking game >> kind of. >> It's just a really simplistic one with two players. >> But you're you're playing a game where you have a lot of sort of complex mechanics that take a little while to learn. But once you learn them, you've basically learned the full concept of trick taking. And now to learn a new trick- taking game, someone just has to give you a twominute explanation of what's different about this one and you're good to go. Like a cat in the box, you got to follow suit. But when you play a card, you choose what suit it is at the moment you play it because it's a quantum game. I could explain that to anyone who's played a trick taking game and they'll figure it out. But what they're really doing when you play is you have this world of think about all the parameters we have. For one, someone has to leave. So someone is deciding here is the battleground on which we are going to fight. Today glory will be found in the field of hearts and then we go around and depending on the game maybe you're trying to win that trick. Maybe you're trying to lose that trick. Maybe you're trying to make people think you wanted to win the trick but you really wanted to lose it. Maybe you're trying to get rid of all your diamonds because you want to be desuited because you want to use a trump card in a later hand. Not the bad kind that's ruining the world, the good kind that's in trick- taking games. A lot of these games have the concept of bidding. A lot of trick- taking games make you you look at your cards, you look at your partner. If it's a partnership game, you're not allowed to talk. You kind of look at each other very knowingly and then you've got to tell the world whether or not you're going to win. We're about to have 14 mini battles and I have 14 cards. Each one will fight one battle. I have to in order to win this game, I don't have to win 14 battles or lose 14 battles. I have to predict exactly how many of the 14 battles I will win before the first battle begins. I will win six of them. And if I win seven, I lose. If I win five, I lose. I have to win six cuz that's what I said. Mhm. Uh these games also have a lot of bluffing involved in them. They also have this concept. They have a lot of downtime and they have a lot of rituals of reshuffleling the cards, dealing cards out. That's why these games are so popular. It's not just the mechanics. It's that once you learn the mechanics, you can play them without a huge amount of thought, unless you're getting really sweaty, which or you know, if money's on the line, get sweaty. So, these games are social. I picked that picture for a reason. People play these games as a context to have a conversation. The downtime, the ritual, the shuffling, the drawing, that is a part of the mechanic of tricktaking, right alongside all the math behind the scenes. You ever see people playing ma jang with all the clicking and clacking on the table? Same thing. >> It's not trick, though. It's not tricktaking, but it's the same thing. That mechanic, that ambiance, that feeling, that physicality is part of the mechanic. Don't discount that. Don't be a nerd who just focuses on the math. Focus on the environment. Why are trick- taking games popular? Bag drama. So, bag drama is really just dice, right? It's just a different way of it's no different than drawing cards, rolling dice, or any other kind of randomization mechanism that you might have, right? But the thing that about bag drama that makes it more exciting is that you can usually, right, when you have a whole deck of cards, it's kind of hard to remember every single card that's been drawn cuz you have four 52 unique cards. If you have a bag, it's like, okay, in the bag, there's only three colors and there's 10 of each and you can see what's already out of the bag. So, you can just count and know what's in the bag and you're like, "Oh, there's only one black cube left in the bag." and someone reaches in the bag and it's like, oh, if they pull out the black cube, I know there's like 11 cubes in there and only one is black. You can understand the probabilities more intuitively and also just the physicality of so, you know, compared to rolling a dice and seeing the result that can be dramatic, but reaching into an opaque bag and pulling something out like a like a magician with a hat, it's like what's it going to be? or even like the physicality m in tigers and Euphrates there's a bag and you draw tiles out of the bag in the course of the game and what comes out of the bag matters a lot says you're not allowed to count how many tiles are left in the bag and the game ends when the bag runs out of tiles so you can't count them but when we're playing a lot of times someone will pick up the bag and be like get a little light game's coming near >> you can just you're not allowed to open it and like count the tiles but you can feel the bag >> if you want nothing against that >> so if the parameters ers we tweak in a trick- taking game are things like is there trump do you have to follow suit are there partnerships do you bid those are like the subcomponents here it's is it one shared bag or does everyone have their own bag it's is stuff just coming out of the bag or is stuff also going into the bag games where you are putting stuff into a bag and taking stuff out of a bag if that bag is shared those are some of the sublime games deck building I think was invented by Dominion. I cannot think of significant examples before Dominion. It kind of made this a thing. And I think it's noteworthy that Dominion still is, in my opinion, the best deck builder that is a tabletop game where its sole mechanic is deck building. >> Well, I mean, if you think about it though, you put the deck building slide after the bag drama slide. Isn't deck building basically the same as bag drama? It's like you start with what in Dominion 10 cards in a bag deck, right? And you pull things dramatically out of the deck the bag and then you add things to the deck just like throwing things into a bag. It's a different physical shape, but it's sort of essentially the same thing, right? Your deck is a bag and you pull things out of it. Yep. Well, partly because, and we like to talk about this a lot, every tabletop game that is not a sport that has like flicking or other sort of physical nonsense could be remade as a card game. And one of the main reasons you might make a game a deck builder instead of a bag drama is solely that you got a bunch of text that you got to have on the card. But any game could be a card game. Take any bag drama game and replace it with a deck of cards. >> We could make Yatsi into a card game, right? You would the score sheet would be on cards. We would replace every d6 with cards numbered one through six. Shuffle cards numbered one through six and draw one that's rolling a d6, right? You don't need you can remake componentwise any tabletop games using only cards. Cards are the universal component. But I think where there's a meaningful difference between these two is specifically around the fact that one, there aren't that many bag drama games. But deck builders, you are really focused on the game is fundamentally or the mechanic is there are a set of ways to manipulate the contents of my actions, the world, the the universe of things I can do. This is the cycle I'm going to follow. And you're trying to tune it. This is why when this game came out, everyone who got good at it realized that trashing is overpowered. And think about Bellantro. Trashing is overpowered. Any game where you're tuning your deck and you can get the trash out of it, good players tend to focus on it and good designers are trying to figure out a way to have trashing without it being the sole way to win. So tile lang in a totally different direction. Even though Carcassone comes with a big bag that you draw the tiles out of, it's about placing the tiles. I think this game mostly like tile laying games a big part of the mechanic is you build the structure of the game over the course of the game and that is a really I think that is a common attribute of a lot of games that we all enjoy. Uh by doing that you don't have to worry as much about certain kinds of balance. Like you don't have to worry about the shape of the map because the players are going to together semiconentually build the map, but it also means you're sort of interacting with each other indirectly. Think about a fighting like a war game where like I have my troops and I attack Scott. I think with a game like Carcassone where you're laying tiles, I can only attack indirectly. The way I attack someone is by building a nice city next to their city and then trying to connect them together at the last second. It's like this abstracted form of combat. Carcasson is just as brutal and vicious as any war game out there. But that viciousness is hidden behind this extra step of you have to move in first and then attack. I think I could make Carcassone as a war game and you wouldn't realize it was Carcassone. >> Yeah. I think the thing about tile laying games is that you you're usually playing one tile at a time, whether it's Carcassonne or something else. And there's usually some rule constraining where the tile can go. So, it's really about like, you know, in most games, your your options of what you can do on your turn are sort of restricted. If you think about the worker placement games, it's like here are the defined actions, choose one, and you're making the same choice every time. In a tile laying game, your choice isn't a set of predefined things. It's a place, right? Which place am I choosing this turn? And then you might really want to choose this place so badly, but the back, you know, you have the tile you have determines you can go in this place, this place, this place, this place, and you have to evaluate which of the available places is the best. And because it's such a shifting world of tiles and no predefined map, it's different every single time. tile game, the different every single time is really important because Carcasson would not be fun if the tiles were in an order. This gives you that infinite replay-ability. The other thing I think that tile placing does specifically where you're putting a physical tile out there is that those games tend to have fast turns. It's not one person does a big old turn and someone else does a big old turn. It tends to be that placing of the tile is the important decision and then you do some ephemerra around it. So you get this structure of play a tile, move on, play a tile, move on. So the game feels like it's moving faster even if it takes the exact same amount of time. I think tiling games, tiling mechanics that fail are the ones that are primary, but where you place the tile and the placement of the tile then triggers a whole other game. Like Tempest does that to a degree. Drafting. Lots of flavors of drafting here. >> Yeah. So I mean people think of the word draft as you know sports drafts right it's like there's a set of things and we're going to take turns each choosing one right and obviously what you want to do is on your turn you want to choose the best one available but drafts don't just come in this form right you know you obviously have a magic the gathering tcgs people think of those drafts because the word drafting is used there but you think seven wonders you have a hand of cards you take one and pass it to the side sushi go it may be the simplest card draft drafting game. Cards are used for drafting a lot because you can take one and pass them along. But like we talked about how before worker placement is action drafting, right? In Puerto Rico, there's if you have five players, there's eight actions to choose from and you choose one of the actions, right? Um you know, if you're placing actual workers, it's like here's the workers. Well, when you put your worker, you're just drafting the place that you chose. >> So, what is drafting doing the an interesting thing of drafting? It's usually balancing in some way. They if you want to have a game that has unique things or specialized things or things that act differently in a profound way from each other, then once people have played a game a couple of times, they might figure out like in uh a gricula, the potato diver is a little bit better than some of the other ones. So, you can't just distribute those randomly necessarily. Some might be overpowered. You make players make the decisions and rank how important those things are. Some of the best drafts will do things where some players early on get fewer choices, players later on get more choices. They balance it in a way to where people can prioritize getting the really good thing they want versus having a variety of other things or making some sacrifice to choose the good one. >> I think the way to think about a draft is just to think about it as one specific type of auction, right? And an auction is all about knowing, right? How valuable is that thing? You go to the auction and they put up a painting and it's like the guy goes 1 million. It's like is it worth a million? It's up to you to know. No one's telling you what it's worth. There's no right answer to what it's worth. It's like you have to be able to with your knowledge and skill correctly evaluate how much it's worth, right? And a draft is a little bit easier because you don't have to throw out a number, right? But you do have to look at the available choices and say, "Here's five paintings. Which one is the most valuable?" Right? It's still an auction. It's just an auction of many items at once. >> It's a stack ranking that achieves balance. A few variations of this. We talked about action drafting. Puerto Rico, the game is just that game is deterministic other than the randomness of the plantations that came out on the side. Also, total aside, Puerto Rico's theme is super racist, and we should all acknowledge that. It is one of the best design games in the world, but it uncritically interrogates a horrible thing. I recommend you check out a game called John Company. That is an example of how to correctly interrogate a horrible thing in the context of a game. But in this game, the choosing of the actions is the entire game. Everything, every other mechanic is pretty straightforward. Who chooses which is the game, the draft is the game. The drama is around what action is Scott going to take. And depending on what Scott takes, I might have to change my plan as opposed to action points. I haven't seen this in a lot of more recent games. This was more common, I think, in the late 90s, early 2000s, where say you want to give players a bunch of options, but some of those options are just better than other options, >> right? Worker placement games, you're always putting out one worker, right? To do every single action, no matter what action it is, even if one action is really strong, it only costs one worker. And an action is really weak, still costs one worker. It's not worth it. You b you figure that out by doing action points. It's like, oh, this action is really powerful. If you want to do this, you have to use five points. If you want to do this action, you only have to use one point. Yeah. Imagine a game where there's one square. If you put a worker there, the thing happens and the worker dies. Lean into the fact that there's a worker that you physically placed. Use the mechanic to make the feeling you want to happen happen. And that'll drive the feeling of how the game plays. These are rare. They shouldn't be. Rondles are amazing. This is one of my favorite game mechanics. And it's sad how few games use them. Though they actually do exist inside of a lot of games, just not in the form you think they do. You don't see them, but they're technically there, right? A randle is basically it's obviously involves a cycle, right? You're always going around in a circle. So there's a set of things that happen. And you know, they're not necessarily happening one at a time in a circle because that's not really right. It's that you're limited in what you can do next based in your position, right? So, it could be there's a game called seasons where it's like they got a circle divided up into four seasons and based on what season you're in that affects like what you can do, what's you know and stuff like that. This game is one of the first Rondles I ever saw is a game called Antiki and the way it works is consider the blue pawn that is on the arming spot, right? Next turn they can move one, two, or three spaces. So they can next turn they can't do iron even if they want to because it's four spaces away. They can only do marble knowhow or maneuver. And then if they choose marble next turn, not only does that mean, right, it's like, okay, you went one space to get marble, that means next turn you still can't do temple, right? You're going to have to do know how maneuver or iron. So, it's like you're it's like if you really want to do something that's right behind you like gold, it's like you better move faster, which means giving up on something like marble or no hell. Uh, and you just don't see this very often at all cuz it gives you a very elegant way in a game to have a cycle. Instead of having a just a probability, you're enforcing a cycle on the players and that is a very hard thing to do. Very good game designers do it well. Games that are cyclical tend to be easier to engage with. It also solves a lot of those balance problems. So, this is a way of doing that very subtly. And I note even on this NK, notice how there are two maneuvers and only one of everything else. That implies that maneuver is either less powerful or it might imply that maneuver is just really important to greasing the wheels of the game and making the game move forward. Think about the land in Magic the Gathering. Like, you got to get land. Land is not the exciting part of the game, but like the mono curve matters. This is a way to tune the mono curve in a game like this. >> And a randle doesn't always have to be actions. If you think about like the 1970 Dune game, the original one, there's a storm that goes around and blows sand around in a circle and it keeps you moving around the board cuz if the sandstorm lands on you, you get wiped out. So, you have to keep running this way. You can't just sort of hang out on the map wherever you like. A fun attribute of Ronald, you can have players mutually control them. The blind bit of everyone 1 2 3 and they show a number. You add up the numbers and that's how many spaces it goes. Uh there's a game in First Look about an elevator. Go find it. It's that it's just that it's that mechanic. It's one of the most fun games I've played in a long time. It takes a minute to play. >> Auctions we can't go too deep into because we're going to do an entire talk in a future pack just about auctions. >> We already talked about drafting, which is one kind of auction, but there's a zillion kind of auctions. >> Modern Art is a game that is just on your turn, you choose which kind of auction you want to have. That's the whole game. But auctions are great because one, you're all bad at them. Humans are bad at them because humans are bad at the thing Scott mentioned earlier, valuation. Looking at a thing and knowing how valuable it is. We're terrible at that. There's a reason why your parents never played with the auction rules when you were a kid in Monopoly because you will never successfully bid the right amount. I've played modern art in games where people bid more than the victory points they could possibly get back. Like auctions are hard. Valuation is hard. And a lot of games, one of the tests they boil down to is do you correctly figure out the relative value of a thing? Could be an action. It could be a sheep. It could be a cube compared to other things right now. And if you are good at that, you will be good at every game on earth and life. Hidden move. Yeah, the stock market. Hidden movement I mention only because it's rare because it's really hard to do in tabletop. All the games that do it, you're like writing stuff down. You're using a dried out dry erase marker on a stained piece of cardboard. Like it's really hard to make this work. There's a game Fury of Dracula that made it work by having Dracula move with these really complicated cards. Uh and we're going to bring Fury of Dracula up later because the problem with the cards is they don't dry out like a dry erase marker. It's just so complicated. Dracula is gonna mess it up. >> Yeah. What's really going on in most hidden movement games is it's actually a deduction game. And usually the people who are searching for the hidden thing, right, are looking at the information that they have available and saying, "Well, they could be in this spot, this spot, this spot, this spot." And they narrow down, right, what spots the person or whatever it is could possibly be hiding in. And whoever's doing the hidden movement, their only job is to leak as little information as possible. And the information that they do leak, they should leak the least useful information such that the possible places they could be hiding is always as large as possible. And then it just comes down to do the people narrow it down enough in time before whatever happens in whatever game. Most of these games suffer deeply from the fact that there are search algorithms that people who goat paxes might know that make them trivial for the people who are trying to find the hidden person to find them. Scotland Yard doesn't work. If any of you took computer science 101, >> right? It's like you or if you made it such that the people doing the searching, right, could not, you know, use an algorithm to guarantee that the information would get them to a single result in time. Then what would happen is the person who was hiding could always at at bare minimum force the players to like guess at the end, which would be it's like no matter what you do, I can force you to guess at the end. And the other option is they can narrow it down, which means the best you can do is survive to the end. And they're always going to get you if they're smart. What's the point? >> So hidden movement is likely just a subset of something called information leakage, which could be its own mechanic. Think about Captain Sonar. >> Captain Sonar has hidden movement. >> Information economy. This is rare. We played a like third game I can put on this that we played at this pack. This is where, you know, like who's the trader? Well, I don't know what cars are in your hand. We Those games often don't work that well for a lot of reasons. People tend to cheat. People tend to not understand. People tend to like they just don't work. They're not fun. I found games that make that a mechanic where like in Hannib, you spend a resource to have the privilege of telling one other player one thing about the hand that they can that you can see that they can't. In res publica, you offer a trade deal to the table where you have to share something you have and in return you also say what you want. So you've revealed information about yourself which is risky. You don't want people to know what's in your hand, but that is the price you pay to be able to trade. Games that have information economies are extremely rare and games that have it tend to be very good in my experience. Endgame scoring. You see this a lot. Uh we were talking about this before the panel. This is basically all endgame scoring is you know you play a game, you get victory points along the way and then at the end you score the big buildings and the bonus cards. Everyone flips over their whatevers and then you do the final score and then you see there are two kinds of this. One kind is just obscuring who is winning so people don't get mad and continue to play until the end. >> Right? So for example, you might have an endgame scoring that's like every sheep you have at the end of the game is one victory point. Well, it's like, well, you're collecting sheep along the way. You could have just given one victory point per sheep as you got the sheep. What? It's like what's the you know why you you're just hiding that number so that when you look at the victory point track to see who's in first place, the sheep are not included. So, you might not look like you're in first place even though you've got a handful of sheep. They're just not counted yet, right? >> The other kind is where there is you're looking at the timing of the end of the game. It's like, okay, you collected sheep along the way, but there are mechanics that could make you lose sheep, right? And therefore, it's not just you can't obviously can't give the victory points right away because they might lose the sheep later. You're saying get into a state and maintain that state and hold on until the end of the game or at some during a scoring round. Some games won't necessarily endame, but they might have the scoring happens at these specific times. And it's just, yeah, you might have been in a great position, but then you collapsed into a terrible position and then the scoring round came and you didn't get any points for all the good stuff you did because you did it with incorrect timing. We're back to quantum physics. You test the probability curve every three turns or when the card gets flipped over in the middle of the deck. Remember Fury of Dracula? Board games can crash. They can crash the same way a video game can. And in Fury of Dracula, there are so few games that do this. There are rules that are basically if Dracula effed up and then you follow the Dracula effed up rules. Another example of this is hockey. If someone breaks the rules and like elbows someone in the head, there's rules to handle that. Which leads to something interesting. If there's rules to handle it, it's not cheating anymore. Is it really an error? Right? It's like just because you call it a penalty or you call it cheating in the rule book, it's part of the rules. The rules say if you do this then this happens. That's different than any other rule. It's like you if you care about winning and you don't care about being a decent human being, maybe you do elbow someone in the head. >> I can elbow someone in the head. All I have to do is pay 2 minutes. >> I think you might have to pay a penalty and a fine if you hopefully >> hopefully >> you know the Department of Player Safety, you know how they do. >> Yep. But this is also a way to have a complicated mechanic like Fury of Dracula's ridiculous hidden movement to handle the situation of oops, we messed up, now the game's broken and there's no way to fix it. Worker placement we did to death. But I think worker placement is just one more of these ways for people to prioritize what they want and to potentially sacrifice to get the thing they want before other people. Colonel BL. That's a game theory term even though it technically only covers two-player games, but uh I don't think that's important here. This is where you got a a map, a pl there's a bunch of places you can put stuff. Having the most stuff in a place matters and you use mechanics to decide how much of your stuff you put in all the other places while all the other players are doing the same thing. >> A good way to think about it is a combination of the auction, right? How many place thing cubes or whatever you put in a place is what you're bidding for that place. That's how valuable you think that place is and what you're willing to pay to get it. And then the endgame scoring at a particular time. We're going to look and see who has how many in that place and reward accordingly. Bargaining and trading usually not good in games unless the game is about that. Watch pros play settlers compared to like us plebs and you'll see that auctioning and bidding like bargains and trading and like I'm going to trade this for that usually don't matter that much because if you're smart you won't trade with anyone unless you're ripping them off or you're going to just make deals like me and Scott will just trade with each other a ton so that one of us is going to win screw everybody else. Very few games do this well, partly because no one's good at valuation. And if everyone's good at valuation, everyone knows the value of everything. And then every trade is sort of a foregone conclusion. Politics, again, not the kind that is ruining America right now, uh, from the right, but game theory politics. All games that have more than two players where the players interact in any capacity are political in that if everyone's good at the game, ultimately the game is going to be determined by how the players interact. If I attack Scott and then our friend Pete attacks Scott and then our other friend Joey Jojo attacks Scott in a game of risk, it doesn't matter what decisions I made, it doesn't matter how good I am, it doesn't matter how lucky I am, I lose. They voted. That's why it's political. They voted for me to lose, I lose, right? And is if the only way to have a non-political game with more than two players is if it's just a race like a 100 meter dash. It doesn't you're not interacting with each other, right? >> All right, bonus round cuz we're getting near the end of our time. Bonanza hand is a very specific thing. You hold your deck of card your hand in order and you can't change the order of your hands. This is unique and rare. A few games use it and it's really cool. Not many games have real life consequences. Gambling for money. >> Try to avoid games with real life consequences. I feel like you should. I feel like the moment where a game has real life consequences, it is now either a job or a prison >> or not a game. Yeah. >> And of course, the pokers. We've all played Bellantro. Pokering is a game mechanic just like Yasi. Get good at pokering. You'll be good at a lot of games. We met someone today, yesterday, who did not know the order of poker hands. And we had to teach that before we could teach the game we were going to play. So, with the last minute, what happened in this room just now? We got a few takeaways for you. First, don't get hung up on semantics. Don't argue about if it's a hot dog or a sandwich. Use the terminology that makes sense for the conversation you're having. If you're playing games, think about them in terms of mechanics. That is the fastest way for you to understand what games are. Get better at them, learn them, design them. That is the way to think. Don't zoom in too far. Don't zoom out too far. Sit at the level of game mechanics. Practice the game mechanics you see most often in the games you play. It sounds silly, but people don't do that. What if you're a designer? You need to learn what mechanics are good at doing in games. Is this mechanic good at distributing resources or bad? Learn which mechanics are good at doing what things, and you'll be able to assemble the games you design from those mechanics. Learn to connect those mechanics together. Think a lot about the inputs and the outputs and how you connect them together. And last, and Scott said at this beginning, if you're designing a game, you can only have one mechanic that's weird. I hope this was enjoyable. Feel free to email us, come grab a flyer, grab one of Scott's stickers, enjoy the rest of packs on Sunday. And uh that's all we got today. These stickers, which bear our logo, cost us a dollar each. They will cost you $0 if you want one. However, you must be aware this convention center hates stickers. They hate them so much. They are very terrified of vandalism via sticker. If a sticker with our logo is found stuck on something, they will find us and probably charge us like $500 to remove it. >> And then we will find you. >> If you want the sticker, you have to promise me you will not vandalize this building with it. You can vandalize outside the building with it. That's great. you will if you just come and tell me what you will do with this sticker and I will give you one for zero dollars even though it cost me $1. The end. Enjoy Sunday.