Messing Up the Rules - PAX Unplugged

Today, at PAX Unplugged 2025, we're here to talk about messing up the rules. You're here at a gaming convention. I imagine you have messed up the rules at some point in your life. So, over the course of the next hour, we're going to explore why that happens, how that happens, what to do about it, what to avoid it, funny things about it. This is all about the space of rules. So, we got to start with something really simple. What are the rules? Like, what are rules? Think about a game you may have played called ice hockey. Just like a board game, it has a rulebook. I actually read this rulebook every year. And they >> only change it a little bit every year. So, once you read it once, you're kind of good. >> Yeah, it's like reading the D&D Player's Handbook again. Like, you know most of what's in there. But, I know the rules of hockey very well as a result. And this book actually contains all of the information you need to play hockey. The rules include the size and shape of the board, the nature of the pieces, the equipment, what happens if someone punches someone. Like, everything you can imagine is covered. Those rules are hockey in a real and material way. Right. A game is defined by its rules. We would argue that at least if you're talking in an academic sense, in a very strict mathematical sense, that if you change even one rule of a game a little bit, that's technically a different game, right? Like, if some people are playing Little League and some people are playing Major League Baseball, we colloquial say, "Yeah, that's baseball, right?" But, Little League is like six innings, right? And there's all kinds of other rules that are different. It's not exactly the same game, right? And in a lot of other ways, you could think about something like, I don't know, Magic the Gathering or any kind of CCG or a multiplayer online video game where they keep putting patches out. Technically, every patch, every, you know, uh nerf to any cards, any new cards printed, anything like that is technically a new and different game if even one rule changes. The rules define what a game is. If anything, Magic the Gathering, the rules are that tiny pamphlet that explains the rules plus the text of every single card that has ever been printed, plus the text of all the different formal tournament rules that exist. Yeah, if you're going to do a tournament, you Yeah. So, a way to think about this, right, is a game, if you have a two-dimensional plane, right? And imagine that every that two-dimensional plane represents every possible state of existence that could possibly be, right? The rules of the game are a border. And I might a box, but it could be a blobby border, just some sort of border. That borderline is the rules, right? As long as you are the game is in a state that is within the border, completely contained on the inside, you are following the rules of the game. You have not done anything. The state of the game is not such that you have broken the rules. If the state of the game changes in some way to where you have now left this space and are on the other side of the border, out in the vast existence, right? Now, you have broken the rules somehow. The game is in an illegal state. You are cheating or you messed something up or who knows what. >> An extreme example, if I'm playing ice hockey and I punch a guy, there's a rule in the rulebook about that and we're still in the state of the game. But, if we're playing Magic at PAX and I punch a guy, the police are going to show up. >> [laughter] >> That is not PAX's problem. That is society's problem now. >> a simpler example, if you're playing tic-tac-toe, right? Okay, we have a tic-tac-toe board that's empty. That's legal. And then X goes first. >> Yeah. X will put an X on one of the spots on the board. We're still within the rules. Someone now puts a second X without putting any Os. Well, that's not how tic-tac-toe works. That is a state of the game, a board with two Xs. If you were to map that out on this two-dimensional plane, that dot would be somewhere outside of the boundary in the cheating, not rule-following zone. Now, what this means practically is that there's a lot of things that can happen to influence games that are not part of the game or the rules. Your society around you, life, your house burning down, all that kind of stuff. And that's really not what we're talking about. We are looking at games from perspective of the rules are the game. Nothing else is relevant to this conversation. And what rules come down to in games is what enforces them. At the Penny Arcade Expo, this is a photo from PAX West a long time ago, the enforcers are enforcing the rules of PAX. >> They're on the back of your badge. I hope you studied them. >> Yep. You know, don't hit people. Don't cheat. Stand in line in the correct manner. Be cool. All that kind of stuff enforcers do. So, the enforcers are enforcing the line here to get into main theater because that line has some rules. That is part of the operational nature of PAX. The enforcers aren't enforcing that no parking sign. If a car is parked there, they're not going to do anything about that because that's not part of PAX. In fact, there's a truck parked quite close to the >> [laughter] >> parking sign. Uh but yeah, when you're playing a game, right? There's if it's a video game, what enforces the rules? The computer. >> The computer. >> The code. You literally, arguably, can't cheat at a video game unless you modify the game itself, right? >> That book, if you haven't read it, is about three people trying to cheat at a computer game. And that is the worst possible summary of that book. >> [laughter] >> Okay. But, if you think about it, all video game cheaters out there are people who have modified the game in some way, right? Like, a Counter-Strike cheat has like an aimbot. It's like adding software. It's not They're not strictly using the software as it is. They've modified it or they're manipulating the RAM on their computer. They're doing something that is literally breaking the rules. They're actually, think about it, it's sort of like if you're in hockey and you just beat up the ref so [laughter] that they can't call, right? The ref The computer is in charge of enforcing the rules. They're taking the enforcer out of the picture when you cheat at a computer game. People who find glitches in games, speedrunners usually do this the most often, right? Arguably, are not cheating and are not breaking the rules because the rules of a video game is the source code of the video game as it was delivered, right? When you bought it, as it's running. And the glitch is just the developers didn't intend it, but that they just wrote the rules poorly and you found a way to do something else. But, have you really messed up the rules? You could argue no, right? In fact, I would argue, and this happened in Overwatch not that long ago. There was a glitch where like one of the characters, Mei, could get out of the map and be invincible and just pick people off from the sky. That is intensely funny to me. You didn't need any cheats or hacks to do that. It was just like a glitch. >> I would argue because the game lets you do that, that's the equivalent of the ref letting you do that. So, as a result, everyone should be doing that and that is now the game. And Blizzard has to fix that by patching the code. But, we're at a board game convention, a tabletop convention. We're not going to dwell too much on video games here because there's a lot to talk about with tabletop >> point to make is that because computers have perfect enforcement like this that doesn't require a human to do any enforcing, this is what enables people to learn video games without having any help from anyone else and without even reading a rulebook. Because in a video game, because you have this digital enforcer, you can just play. And it's basically, remember the graphic of the space? It's sort of like you're just exploring the two You're in the box and you're just exploring, right? You're just trying things out. You're pushing A and seeing that Mario jumps and you push left and right and see that he walks back and forth. And you're exploring this space and then you discover what the rules are as you play, right? And that's pretty cool that video games let you do that because tabletop games absolutely do not let you do that. >> Well, you can do that. But, imagine sitting with your friend trying to play Settlers and you're just like, "Can I put the sheep there? Can I take the board? Can I roll three dice?" You're just trying stuff and your friends have to tell you whether or not it's okay. >> the wood? What happens if I eat the wood? >> [laughter] >> But, we're not going to dwell too much on computer games, but there is some big overlap because, for example, some of the rules, even in video games, are rules of the game, but are not enforced in the code. And this is where we get into a very important part of gaming. Many games have some form of refereeing to facilitate the games. In a competitive video game like Overwatch, if you break the terms of service or you break the rules of the tournament, the computer can't enforce those. A human being has to make a judgment call to enforce those. Those are still rules. Those are still part of the game. If you violate the terms of service, you're going to be banned. There are consequences that follow. Refereeing is difficult. Refereeing today requires humans. Things that don't require humans increasingly can become this. And so far, there are very few things in, for example, sports that can be truly refereed solely by computers. >> Yeah, we are adding lots of computers to help judge sports more precisely, more accurately, you know, with less, uh you know, judgment calls. Like, we're doing balls and strikes in baseball now. We got Oh, the best one has always been the tennis one, the the eye system that checks in and out for the ball, right? It's like we're we're done arguing about that. Back in the day, before you had that system, it's like the tennis players would be hitting each other with their rackets. They were like, "Stop!" It's crazy, [laughter] right? Um but yeah, refereeing is requires, though, a human, right, to devote their time and effort to ensuring that a game is fair and well adjudicated for other people. Now, what this means practically for all of you as tabletop gamers is that for most tabletop games, the referees are also the players. You are very lucky if you have a friend who will referee your tabletop board games for you. Uh if you're at a tournament, there might be judges who are paid to do it for you or volunteering, you know, cuz they're so gracious with their time or whatever. But, yeah, it's it's a lot of work to referee pretty much any game, right? It's a full-time job for some people or part-time job, you know, depending on what league or if it's sports, not sports, whatever. But yeah, it's you know, when you're playing with just your friends, you kind of have to share the responsibility amongst yourselves and there's a conflict of interest because you're also playing and refereeing at the same time. And you all play tabletop games. I'm sure everyone in this room is not this person, but you all have the friend who doesn't really know all the rules to the game you're playing and is kind of just like expecting everyone else to handle that for them. Uh being a referee requires having full and complete knowledge of the rules. You have to be a total expert. That's why in NHL hockey for example, most referees are active or former players of hockey. Usually former players who weren't good enough to actually be NHL players, so they decided to go into refereeing. Yep. You don't have that luxury as players, but I want to give you a little bit of an aside because players also being referees is much more common than you would think. And we have an example here. Uh I don't know if you're familiar with this, but in NHL hockey, and I love the way these rules are written. These are the actual words in the NHL handbook. If through misadventure or sickness Let me [laughter] Hockey is nothing if not rife with misadventure. >> [laughter] >> Basically, if the referees and linesmen are prevented from appearing from for any reason, the two clubs, the two teams that are playing, they have to agree on who will referee the game. So so far so good. So they just have to agree. But what if the Rangers and the New Jersey Devils do not agree on who the referees and linesmen will be because of this misadventure? There is a rule for that. The rule is each team shall appoint a player who shall act as both referee and linesman. Each team will appoint a player to be the referee for the game. Even in professional sports, there are situations in the rules where the players will be be the referees of a game where the outcome matters a lot. >> think this has happened. If it has, it's been a very very >> This has definitely not happened at least in the last 100 years. >> lifetime that I've ever known about, yeah. But it is in the rulebook for a reason. That is an aside. If you're reading a tabletop >> reason is there's some billionaires had a hockey game they sold tickets to and if everything else is working [laughter] and just ready to go, the TV people are there, the teams are there, the ice is ready, the fans are in the building, and the only thing missing is referees, they want they don't want to have to refund everybody. That's why this rule is here. But if you're ever reading a rulebook for a tabletop game and you see a section that like repeats something or explains something that seems like a weird thing to repeat or repeat or explain, probably they've determined the designer that there is a very important reason that rule is there. Uh usually some misadventure has occurred during playtesting. But the important thing is that the rules are all you have to go on. The referees are interpreting the rules as written in order to enforce and adjudicate them. Meaning they do not have the authority to change the rules or to make broad judgment calls about the rules. They have to determine whether or not there was a distinct kicking motion. So when you're trying to figure out how to deal with a board game situation, literally the only thing you've got to go on are the rules as written. If you Google around and find someone who says, "Oh, here's how you handle that situation." Who's that person? Okay, it could be the designer or the publisher, in which case, okay, we can believe them, right? You go on BoardGameGeek, you go to the rules thread and you see, "Oh, the person with the rules clarification is the person who made the game. We're good to go." Or "Oh, this is an official errata PDF from the publisher of the game on the game's official website. Okay, we're good to go." Or "Oh, it's some guy who just says what his group did to solve the situation." Well, okay, that's great for your group, but is that right? I don't know. That means nothing to me. And that also is relevant to the main point of this talk. Why do we mess up the rules? That is a game called Hans Teutonica. I'm going to say we're experts because we're up on this stage. PAX lets us talk here. >> I mean, amongst how many people in the world even play this game that much, right? So it's like amongst all the people billions of people on Earth, we're probably quite expert. But we are broadly experts at tabletop games. We take them very seriously, but we if you've seen any of other talks, there are a lot of you may not ever want to play a game with us because of the way that we are. We messed up the rules of this game through three complete playthroughs. First, it came out, it was the new hotness in ancient times, and a friend of ours offered to teach it to us. >> That friend over there? Yep. Taught it to us wrong. >> Through no fault of their own, taught it to us wrong. Not their fault. Another friend of ours said, "Oh, you're playing it wrong." and re-taught us the rules. Also wrong. Not their fault. Not their fault that they got it wrong. So I read the rules and we still got it wrong because these rules are really badly written despite this being a really good game. It was the rulebook's fault. I don't know if it was the translation cuz from German or who knows what, right? But the the rulebook was written in a way to which there was people who are literate in English, which is already a challenge, uh would read it and could not agree or determine what the correct rules were, right? If you were trying to draw that box, we just had an empty space where we didn't know the shape of, you know, the borderline in that particular area of the box, so we didn't know what was legal and what was not legal. >> Pro tip, don't make something in your game called a merchant and another thing called a trader and they do very different things. Yeah, anyway. But the we all mess up rules. We're like we'll be open about that. Like everyone should just accept that we're going to mess up the rules. We have the humility to admit it, you have the humility to admit it. Let's agree this is going to happen. If this wasn't going to happen, you wouldn't all be here instead of over in tabletop playing games in your very limited PAX hours. So we're going to talk about the six reasons that people mess up rules, particularly in tabletop games. Reason number one, you open the rulebook and it's some nonsense like that. >> [laughter] >> Okay. Now you're you're trying to figure out do you move the provost or not move the provost? And what are you just trying to figure out what a provost even is? Right? A lot of times game designers, right? Maybe they don't playtest enough or maybe they publish quickly or may who knows what the reasons are, right? Not all games have the same production effort that goes into them, right? Some games are made by big companies or the big team of people that are testing the heck out of everything. And some games is something someone scrawled in the back of a napkin and didn't think too hard about and someone else actually decided to play it. Right? And when that happens, it's like, "Oh, maybe there's like these weird edge cases, especially as the game becomes more complex if it has like cards and text and all sorts of things where it's like, 'Oh, no one ever considered in when they were making this game what would happen if this and this or these two things were played together, right?'" And even in big production games when the complexity is very high, these situations arise and the rules do not say what to do. There is no answer whatsoever and the players are just left It's the rules' fault. And sometimes it's hard to determine exactly if the rules are truly broken or not because sometimes, I'd say most of the time, the rules are just badly written. And this happens because game designers in playtesting, one, the people who playtest games tend to playtest a lot of games. So they tend to be very very good at dealing with not so well written rules. And game designers, they made the game up, so they have a clear idea of how they want the game to proceed. So they don't think about the person who has come naked alone from the wilderness, never encountered civilization, and is now being explained the difference between a merchant and a trader and how they interact with the provost. So rules are really badly written and it's actually something that really bothers us. I would say the majority of tabletop games I have ever attempted to play, I would say the rules are badly written to the point that I would not bother to play the game. Or they have at least some kind of flaw in them where we're uh Yep. Now >> It's rare to encounter a rulebook where it's like, "Ah, this is wonderful." I can think of a few and towards the end we can There are some some games >> are some I'm not saying there's none, but I'm saying it's rare. They're very rare. But this can get worse. Board games can crash just like video games. Uh we've encountered this a few times in our life. There's this old game called Hellas. I haven't seen a copy of that game in so long. >> is so but we really liked it. But when we played it, we hit a situation where we could not determine how to resolve the situation based on the written rules and there was no way to figure it out and there was no logical way to assume what should happen, but it felt like a weird edge case. So we figured, "All right, whatever. Let's just call it a wash. Let's play again. What are the odds we'll hit this exact same really weird We hit that situation three times in a row and then we gave up on the game. This happens and honestly, my advice to you, if a game is written to the point that it actually crashes and you cannot proceed, I would say give up on that game. There's a lot of games in the world. You've seen them out there, right? You can't even look at half of them, let alone even learn the rules to any of them. If a game is an issue like this, you can just play another game. It's fine. Now there's a bunch of This is a better situation or interesting situation. This is where Assume the rules are fine. The every situation that could happen is accounted for, but the operations of the rules themselves, the enactment of them, is difficult. An example is Jungle Speed. This is a very simple game. Nobody playing this game misunderstands the rules. You flip over cards >> Somebody might, but it's rare. When a certain situation appears some number of players, two or more, will want to simultaneously try to grab that piece of wood without breaking each other's fingers or with breaking each other's fingers. Uh the problem is if you play this game very casually, it doesn't really matter. Like it's going to be fine. But if you try to win, you're going to hit situations where three people have grabbed it simultaneously and you don't have to determine who truly has control of the totem per the written rules. Just like in ice hockey, did the puck cross the blue line before or after that skater's skates? And >> had a 4K high-speed camera from all angles in your room in your right in your kitchen watching the table, you could try to determine who grabbed it a millisecond before another person. You can't do that. You're just normal people sitting at [laughter] a convention playing a tabletop game with a piece of wood, right? What if somebody has more fingers on it, but then someone uses their strength because they're stronger and they pull it away. It's not supposed to be a test of strength. It's Jungle Speed, not Jungle Strong. Okay? >> [laughter] >> So, it's like if that happens, what do you what are you going to do? Even if you had a player who was just designated as a referee who was only watching your Jungle Speed game trying to judge everything. It's like there going to be situations where they're like um they might have to make a call and that's the call they make, but you are not sure. You're left with an uncertain outcome of we don't know if we actually did what was right or wrong even though we all understand the rules and we had a referee and everything. Another example is games that have simultaneous play like Spot It where you're throwing Buddha Babel, we're throwing cards around. What happens if two people with frame-perfect timing try to put a card down at the same time? In a video game, those cards bounce off of each other. You've got port priority or some sort of nonsense. But in a video game, two cards get thrown down. >> tabletop game. Yeah, a tabletop game and you both look at each other and say, "I threw it down first. Now what?" What if game's perfectly fine, but a lot of fiddly pieces and your friend bumps the table. What are you going to do now? You don't have a replay. Did you take a photo of the board every single turn, every single move? The last time we played this game, I did take a photo of the table every single turn and it was helpful. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, you Some things you can do like that. But yeah, there are situations where just the physicality of your tabletop game can result in situations where you don't know if there was something that was outside the rules or not. You will roll a dice off the table, which I do five times a day. That Pax Unplugged. All of hands. If you roll a die and it falls off the table, but lands in a readable way, raise your hand if you think that should count. Only if it's Raise your hand if you think it should not count. >> right. We're not We can't We can't have this argument all day. This is going to go [laughter] on. See, this is why you mess up rules. You're never going to agree. Right. Sometimes the rules are a little bit ambiguous or are difficult to enforce because of just the nature of the world itself. You're playing Mafia or Werewolf and everyone puts their heads down and you're doing the thing on the table so people don't hear each other, but you clearly feel your friend's arm brush against you ever so slightly as the werewolves are asked to be woken up. Have you cheated if you use this information? Can you even remove that information from your brain? You know it. >> and it's like what do you do? Yep. Uh this also applies to games like Shadow Over Shadows Over Camelot, any of these games where the rules say you can kind of talk about your hand, but you can't explicitly talk about your hand. >> badly written rules. That's number one. Yeah, they're badly written. They have an intended spirit, but they leave enough ambiguity to where judgment is required by the players. >> [laughter] >> This is unfortunately very common. Uh The person behind that uh board game rulebook is actually a person who's very instrumental in making Pax Unplugged happen. Uh if you see them around, [laughter] say thank you. Uh but regardless, right? We talked about situations where the rulebook has a problem. Sometimes the players are the problem. You have a perfect rulebook that leaves no ambiguity with a genius game designer and years of playtesting. It is an absolute masterpiece and the players are illiterate or the players have some other problem that is not I'm not trying to insult the players. Everyone messes up. You miss something. Oh, I didn't read that part. I missed that whole paragraph. >> Think about Power Grid, the third phase. You got to do a bunch of stuff that no one ever remembers how to do. Yeah, or maybe, you know, they use words you don't know and you didn't look them up or, you know, maybe uh a friend taught it to you and you're trusting them and you didn't read the rules yourself But I find the main reason this happens, and I think a lot of us are guilty of this, we are in a gaming culture lately where most people either play one game and only one game like Magic the Gathering or they play a thousand games once. You're at a con, you go to the tabletop library or your friend has whatever game they Kickstarted and you read the rules and play it once and you never reach for it again. And as a result, you are often playing games where you have not yourself read the rules all the way to the end. People playing hockey know all the rules that matter to them. >> Even sometimes they get it wrong. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> Well, when I when the goalie There's a game a while ago where the goalie skated across the center line and that's a penalty. You're not allowed to do that because but no one thought about that rule in a hundred years because no one's tried to do that in a hundred years. But it is a sad truth that literacy rates around the world in the US especially are like going down and we're not talking about just literacy like you can read, you can't read. There's like levels of literacy and especially for complex board games, you need quite a high level of literacy to understand really everything that's being written there. They're not, you know, people writing complex board game rules aren't sticking to like the first grade level, right? So, peo- people who play a game that might be above their ability, you know, for whatever reason, they're going to might get rules wrong. And the particular danger to all of you out there in the wild is that if you one person in your group has read the rules, you have now ceded all interpretation of the rules to them and they are effectively your referee and you are beholden to them because you have no ammo to argue or defend against any misinterpretation they might make. We're not even saying they're cheating. They just might make a mistake and you won't know and you might experience the game poorly as a result. This is especially hard because some games >> had a John Company mentioned today. >> Yeah, some games like John Company have extremely complex procedures where even if you are very literate and very capable and you have all read the rules, the rules are just very complex and as a result, it is possible your group will together misinterpret the rule. And that is very hard to avoid. You often need an external party to notice that you have been playing the game wrong. So, what if you know the rules? The entire group, you fully understand the rules end to end. There is no ambiguity whatsoever. You are 100% locked in. Uh the rules are sacrosanct. You might still just make a mistake. And that happens a lot. But some games exacerbate this. This is a game called Roll for the Galaxy, which is a variant of Race for the Galaxy. And the cool part about Roll for the Galaxy is you roll dice behind a screen and then you arrange them based on some rules, then you reveal and do your actions. Whether you realize it or not, when you're playing board games, most of the time the reason we play games the way we do, we say what we're doing. I'm going to put three sheep here and I'm going to push the provost one and I take three victory points and two gold and I draw a card. We say these things out loud because we are relying on the collective table to point out errors that we might make. It's really easy to draw an extra card in Dominion and not notice right away. It's really easy to overspend or forget to take a point. We rely on each other to help us do that because I ostensibly even if we want to win, we also want the game to proceed according to the rules because otherwise that win is tainted. We don't want to cheat on purpose. But if the game hides some actions that a player may take, nobody else's eyes are on you. I was on a ski trip with some friends. We're playing this game. We played it like four times. One of our friends kept winning. Over dinner, we realized they were just playing wrong. They were just making a mistake. They They were just making mistakes behind their screen and there was no way for us to know. Yeah, there's a lot of different kinds of mistakes you can make. It could doesn't always have to be that you got the rules wrong, right? If you think about most tabletop games that have components, right? You're restricted by the physical limitations of reality, right? In that once you change something, you have no way of knowing or proving what the previous state was without like a video or photo record. So, like if I have a pile of coins and I put some I'm supposed to put three coins into the middle, all right? It's like well, if I don't remember how many I had or even if I do claim however I used to have, right? It's like did I actually put three in the middle? Did I put four by accident? Did I put five by accident? Oh, no. I I accidentally I I put one too many. Am I lying now? Right? As soon as you move anything on the table, everything is called into question. Right? It's like, "Oh, I moved three people from this place to that place. Did that place originally have three? It's empty now. Did it have four in it? Did you move one to?" I don't know, right? Any time And if you drop something, right? Like we talked about with the Sarah, right? Someone [laughter] bumps the table, you don't know. There's so many ways to, you know, you to just physically mess something up and not know what it was. And now the game is in a state of, you know, chaos. And a lot of times it might be as simple as a math error. If you ever play 1846 Race for the Midwest, you might just literally miscalculate the dividends and now the whole game is ruined and you might not even notice. >> the rules. I used a calculator and I just flubbed the button or I forgot I just I just wasn't looking and I I was crossing over all the countries and I missed one and now we're five short or something. So, So, five, you're making errors intentionally. This is also known as cheating. >> [laughter] >> Cheating is just when someone is not actually following the rules. It's just on purpose instead of all we've only been talking about accidental messing up the rules. What if it's on purpose messing up the rules? >> And I I think this is very socially situational, but I have a belief, a suspicion, that low-level cheating is pretty common in tabletop. I think there's a lot of people out there who just kind of take an extra victory point and they're not thinking about it that much. They underpay or way more subtle and I bet all of you have done Many of us have done this. Where you made a mistake in the previous round like, "Oh, I drew one too many card." And you just quietly discard a card to make it not that big a deal. You just cover it up. You cover up the mistake. I know my hand touched the soccer ball, but I'm just making it not say anything cuz it was really good for me and I don't want to worry about it. Like I don't want to I think that happens a lot. But, if you're not cheating, you're not trying. >> [laughter] >> But, I don't know how common it is that people, especially in this kind of tabletop gaming, actively cheat intentionally. It does I mean, you have seen some instances, right? In chess community, there's wild accusations going around of people with various electronic implements receiving [laughter] signals from computers. >> If you know, you know. Right. I mean, in other Usually, the cheating happens You know, we've you've seen cheating in Major League Baseball a lot, right? We've seen cheating in football, right? People with cameras on the sidelines. There's a lot of cheating going on, but cheating usually comes when there's something to be gained, right? Like a big tournament with a big prize. If you're cheating at the table with your friends in a game that no one will ever remember or care who won, you're just a really sad individual. Yep. Now, a tricky part. There are some games that have cheating rules. You see that around. Illuminati is one. Uh Cheating Moth. Yeah. The cheating is [laughter] the name of the game. Technically, if you cheat in a game that has rules that say, "If someone cheats, do X." You're not cheating. You're still within the rules of the game. >> [laughter] >> Right? Even though the word cheating has been used. Now, final reason is an interesting one cuz we come full circle. If everyone's cheating consensually, free parking in Monopoly, I assume you all know that there is no special rule about free parking whatsoever. Anyone who does anything special when someone lands on free parking is cheating in Monopoly. However, collectively, American society decided we're all going to cheat at Monopoly in this very particular way. And while I think that's a bad game and that rule makes it that cheating rule makes it worse, that's not what we're here to talk about today. If you're doing it consensually as a group, that's fine. But, this can lead to weird and interesting situations. When we were at the Rochester Institute of Technology, we first started playing these kinds of games back in the year 2000, I saw Settlers of Catan at a table. And I went over and I talked to those people and I sat down to play with them. And when the robber came up, they always did the same procedure. Everyone handed whoever rolled the robber a resource if they had anything in their hand, and then they put the robber somewhere that did not hurt anybody, like in the desert or in the corner of the They're basically bribing the person who got the robber to not rob them. Like, "Don't rob me, robber." And if anyone said, "No, I'm not going to bribe you, robber." Then they would get robbed, right? It's sort of this agreed-upon thing that they would do. They trusted them cuz we didn't read the rules to this rulebook. Yeah. They taught us. >> read the rules of the rulebook and we said, "Wait a minute. There's nothing in here about bribing the the robber. What is this? I can do whatever I want. So, the next time I played with them, I played by the rules in the book. And I was like, "Yo, I'm putting it here. Screw you. I'm just putting it here. Give me your resource." They wouldn't continue the game and they refused to play with us because they preferred to play that way. So, on one hand, that's fine. Different groups can do different things. If you want to play Settlers badly, by all means. Like, the world is your oyster. Even if you don't want to subjectively say it's badly, even though it was. >> [laughter] >> They're just playing a different game. They're not playing Settlers of Catan. They're playing Settlers of Catan plus bribing or like they're they're made-up homebrew bribing expansion or something, right? They're not playing the same game. And if they claim that they are playing the same game, then yes, they are cheating cuz they're breaking the rules of the game on purpose. >> So, this is a long way of saying house rules are fine and they are not cheating as long as you recognize that as soon as you introduce house rules, you are playing a different game fundamentally. And I think it's important to interrogate that fact. All right. So, you've messed up the rules. We already It's going to happen. It's happened for everyone here. Don't try to deny it. It's happened to us. It's going to happen again, right? What do you do after the rules have been messed up? Okay? Well, the most important thing is to consider what is at stake. We've already discussed that all the games that you're going to play with you and your friends or random people at a convention, nobody will ever remember or care who won. Well, I don't know. What if one of you brought a world championship belt and this is your annual time to play your Settlers game to determine who's the champion for the year? >> Even then, people might not remember or care who won. >> What if you got $10,000 on the line for Rama Amun-Ra? >> Oh, then we're going to care. Then we're going to care. >> Yeah, we care a lot, right? If you even if you're in a tournament at PAX Unplugged in like the in tabletop tournament area, and you win and you get a medal, nobody will remember or care. I'm sorry. I thought the of the the Carcassonne tournament at PAX Unplugged 2025. I do remember that you got the medal in the Tsuro tournament that went to double overtime between you and me. >> run, no one will remember or care. >> [laughter] >> Right? Right? If the stakes are low, if the game is not a game that matters for history, then you can find an easier way to just keep playing and keep having fun. Enjoy your time. Okay, asterisk. This game doesn't count. It was a practice game. Who cares, right? When the stakes are high, the it's the Stanley Cup Finals. It's the Olympics. It's a chess tournament with a million-dollar prize. It's the Great Magic the Gathering Grand Finals and you're going to win a bar of gold. I don't know what they give out these days. >> [laughter] >> League of Legends I think they just give out a dual land and a Mox. Right. It's the US Open of golf or tennis. It's something big, right? Then it matters. You have to go through a tremendous effort to make sure you get the rules right. And if something happened that got the rules wrong, we need redress. We need a solution. We need an answer to keep the game back on track and make sure everything is hunky-dory. What we're saying is calibrate your response to your life when you're playing a game. But that said, always think back. If you're going to do this right, and we try to do it right because we care a lot about the nature of games and how we play them. Like, we're more interested in the process than who won. The remember that the rules are the only thing you actually have to go on. Everything else is going to be some form of redress. >> Right. And if it's a high-stakes tournament, usually the rules of the game are buffeted by tournament rules, which will cover and make sure all those other weird situations are taken care of to cover for the importance of the high-stakes situation. If it's a low-stakes situation, it's probably not a tournament and doesn't have tournament rules. But, what this means, the one thing you do not have the privilege and duty of doing is changing the rules. If you're going to try to fix a game you played, the rules are what you have to go on. NHL, at the end of a season, they've in the past have been like, "You know what? We got to make sure the goalie doesn't build a little snow fort wall before he leaves the net." >> There is a rule about that. >> There's a rule about that because someone did it. >> [laughter] >> The first question you need to ask yourselves, assuming you've calibrated your stakes appropriately, is can you fully correct the problem that has happened? And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. Fully correct means that you take the game from its broken state that is outside the border and move and change and move pieces so that the game is now at a correct legal state. It also means that no players are privy to additional information that they should not have been privy to. You might be like, "Oh, no, no. The game is fine." It's like, "No, Rim saw the next card. He knows all this and this now." And there's no way he can un-know it. So, there's no way to correct for that. And in in high-stakes games, like in NHL ice hockey, if there's a decision that they can't make, they call Toronto. And there's a whole situation room that's looking frame by frame to figure out what to do and to make judgment calls as to how to sort out penalties or whatever nonsense. I doubt you have that for your tabletop game. So, you have to use your judgment as referees to make a call. An example would be, say I saw a card I shouldn't have seen because Scott flipped it over too early. Mathematically, if we take the card the deck I flipped it from and we reshuffle it, depending on the game. Yeah. Does that mathematically alter the situation or not? It may or it may not. And as players, you have to determine, based on the rules, if that is a full correction or not. And many times, it is a full correction if you know basic statistics and have a basic understanding of like game theory and set theory and the rules of the game. Uh But, you might get into a situation where it's not just an error you're trying to correct. This is a harder one. But, you were disputing the nature of the rules. That is a picture I took at a PAX a long time ago. Uh some of us believed that you collect $5 and bet it on horse number four, and you collect 10 additional dollars if you own horse number four. Some of us believed you get $5, but if you own the horse, you get $10. And the question was, does Rim get That's my fingernail there. Do I get $10 or do I get $15 if you own horse number four? We read the rule book end to end, and there is nothing in the rule book that fully resolved our question. So, we do not have a way to resolve it. We look online to see if the designer of the game or the publisher of the game This is the next step we took. The two official sources we can find, the designer or the publisher. To see, have they issued a errata or a clarification? Have they answered this question in a formal capacity? Obviously, they have not. This is like a horse racing game. There is no like formal errata we could find on the internet. So, now we have to fall into more dangerous territory. We're going to have to make a judgment call. What we did is first, we took all the other cards in the game because the game All All the cards have these diamond bullet points. And we looked at the all the cards where we had never had a dispute to see were there examples where it was an or logic? And are there examples where there is an and logic? The game failed us there as well. There were cards that were clearly interpreted correctly that had both and and or logic arbitrarily. So, we couldn't even fall back on logically based on how the rest of the game has gone, can we make a judgment call that we consensually agree on as to whether or not this was $10 or $5? >> 15. Yes. >> 15 or 10, yeah. 10 15 or $10. Uh we determined that this game is in fact unresolvable. We still This game is actually still super fun. I think the only place you're going to see it is the free play library downstairs. >> It is really good. >> And I think it has the sticker on it at secret at the table at the PAX tabletop free play library. There are stickers on the game boxes that indicates whether it's a game that should be going to all the PAXes or if it's like unplugged only and un- most if unplugged is where we bring out the fullness of the tabletop library. So, this game should be there. Yep. But, that said, there's an unresolved rules problem. So, we've technically made a house rule based on our knowledge of games and our play of this game, we decided based on balance and the way the game progresses, it made sense to only get $10 and not $15. That was a judgment call that honestly required a significant amount of experience and expertise. >> And we could be playing the game wrong. Yes, but it was the best option we could come up with. So, we our group has fully agreed that is how to interpret this card. >> And it's okay if we got the game wrong because the stakes are low. Nobody remembers who wins this horse racing game. It is also okay because as much as I make fun of the fact that the game is unresolvable, this game is really fun and I enjoy playing it. So, I wasn't willing to walk away from it over this one card. >> of the game again? I always forget every time. >> Long shot. >> But, what about when an a full error has occurred in the rules and you are past the point where you can roll it back? I don't know if you've seen this image. This is an image that's on a Wikipedia page. There was an incident in the World Cup a long time ago. The hand of God. If you don't I don't know if you even play football or soccer, but there's one rule that you should know. You I assume everyone knows. Unless you're the goalie, the hand cannot touch the ball. It is football, not handball. >> head and chest ball. >> Yes, but the hand The hand cannot touch the ball. And in the highest stakes possible football game, the hand very clearly scored the goal. But, in those days, the video quality was so bad. Everyone watched the video and it's like there's a router film and they don't know if it touched the hand. But, in interviews later, it is clear that the players on both teams knew exactly what had happened. In practice, everyone knew that the hand of God had given Argentina the win. What do you do when you've made an irrevocable error? In this case, this was a high stakes case. This wasn't just like playing soccer in the backyard. >> The World Cup arguably went to the wrong team. Maybe. Possibly. Yeah, probably. >> That's a big deal. Yeah. Those don't come around too often. Once every four years, one country gets it. That's it. So, for high stakes play, I don't I There are ways to handle this, but for practical low stakes play, like the way we address this, usually what I'll do, let's say I make a mistake during my turn in a tabletop game. I drew too many cards. I'm not just going to hide it and just like get try to get away with it. Usually, what I'll say is, "Hey, everyone at the table, I drew an extra card. I am going to shuffle my hand and discard one randomly into my discard pile. Does everyone agree that is acceptable redress?" And 99% of the time, Scott and everyone are going to say, "Yeah, whatever." But, yeah. That That's fine. Sometimes you can undo it enough. But again, this comes down to your own judgment as to collectively how meaningful and impactful is that to the game. Another example, another way we tend to go. Let's say you forgot to take your extra two victory points two rounds ago when you did something. And now it's way later in the game, you forgot to take your points. >> We trust you and we know this game doesn't matter. Take your two points. It's just two points. Who cares? But, let's say whether or not you had those points in the intervening two turns would have mattered in some other way. Yeah, maybe someone played a card that was like, "Steal two victory points from so-and-so." And that at the time, the person thought they didn't have two points and so they didn't play it on them. They stole from someone else. Something like that. And if they had had the two points like they should have, maybe they would have gotten stolen from. You don't know. Now, this is why sometimes I like to play tabletop games online. We play 18XX games cuz we make an error somehow, we can literally just roll the game back to the state where we then want to proceed from. >> Also, we can't make an error because the computer is refereeing the game. Yep. However, in a tabletop game, it is very hard to roll the state back, especially if there's a lot of wooden cubes. Even if you have the video and you know the state, it's like, are you really going to go through the effort? I'd rather put the game away than try to rearrange all the pieces to make it exactly right. >> Now, what I do, and Scott might have a slightly different answer for what he does. In this kind of situation, what I like to do personally is first, I declare to the game, "Hey, here is what went down." And usually, I will offer a redress that is harmful to me or neutral to me and neutral to or beneficial to all of the other players in an equal manner. An example might be, "I'm just not going to get those two points. That is my punishment for messing up the rule." That's not in the rule book, but generally, if you always err toward if you make the mistake, resolve it in the way that is the least harmful to the game and is the most harmful to you relatively is the fairest way to proceed. >> Yeah, I think a lot a lot of sweaty gamers who forget that they Again, no one will remember or care who won are like, "Oh, I forgot the two points. You got to give me the two points. I'm going to lose, right?" It's like, "I don't care about this game. It's a meaningless game." It's like, "Yeah, okay. The game is technically wrong if I don't get the two points. I definitely miss them. Whatever." But it's like, "Well, if I just don't take them, it only hurts me and it doesn't really invalidate the result, right?" It's like, "I'm only hurting myself." Let's say >> cheating, obviously. Otherwise, I'd be like, "Oh, no. I missed five points. Oh, I missed 10 points. Oops, right?" >> Let's say I saw too many cards cuz I drew too many on my turn in Dominion. I didn't notice till the next go around and like that information mattered in some way. I might just offer the table, "Look, next round, I'm going to only draw four cards and that turn is just going to suck." Like, "Yeah, that's not in the rules." That's a super judgment call. But, that's what judges are for in common law. They make judgments and then the rest of the table is the jury that agrees, "Yes, that is equitable and acceptable." We're humans. We can make these kinds of negotiations. If someone at your table cannot handle that level of adult negotiation, I would advise you not playing games with them anymore. So, sometimes, right? It's possible to fairly correct the error as we've been discussing, right? Oh, we we had a video and we saw that, you know, you were offsides at that exact moment, right? And we know, okay, so we're going to take that goal off the board and that's the correct thing to do and no one needs to get mad about it. But sometimes, you can't fairly correct the error. Yep. What if you can't? There is no way to make the game work. And my advice is very simple. You know, in sporting Hall of Fame, sometimes there's a name and a record and there's a little asterisk next to that record and then there's a note that explains all the controversy around it. Just agree to the table, "Well, we say this a lot. Well, this game's apps There's an asterisk next to the result of this game, but we are going to proceed because we are having fun playing the game." Another perfectly valid path when you cannot correct the error. It's like, "Well, the game has gone out of bounds. We cannot There's nothing we can do to bring it back in bounds and make this a legal game anymore. We will just end the game. Don't need to declare a winner. It's just a board game. Who cares, right? We're just going to pack it up. We're like, "All right. This game is over." >> Uh-huh. Okay. Great. That means we can play another game sooner, right? It's like, "We'll play more games today. We played this one only halfway through, but nobody cares, right? You can't even probably tell me remember who won the game this morning. So, what it Whatever. And let's go. Let's just play a new game and put this one away. Maybe one day we'll take it out again and we'll play it without errors, but we've messed this one up. We've screwed up." When you know you screwed up, right? You're doing a drawing and you've made a mistake in ink, throw it out and start with a new blank sheet of paper. Yep. Be wary of the friend who when you agree to end the game in this manner, insists on saying who would have won. That person is probably the person who was the result of a lot of the other problems at your table. >> [sighs] >> So, in the final section, we have about 10 minutes left. We're going to talk about for both players and then for designers, how do you prevent this from happening in the first place? And the first piece, the most important piece, and I know you're all guilty of this, do better, actually read the rules to games that you play. I know you might hate reading the rules. There's a lot of people who hate reading the rules. People again, I just I have different levels of skill at reading the rules, different levels of literacy, languages, there's a lot of math skills. Some people are just, you know, have trained at reading rules and some people have Or you're at PAX, it's going to take an hour for everybody to read the rules. It takes time to read the rules. You don't have enough copies to hand out to everybody. Whatever it is, there's going to be barriers between you and reading the rules, but the best thing you can do is to have every person involved read the rules cover-to-cover, all the words, don't skip sections, don't skip the side text unless it's pure flavor text. You might be able to skip it, maybe. It might be helpful though to give you an idea, right? It gives you context for what the the rules are and help you remember them better. Um, read the rules. [laughter] It's a tabletop game. The rules are the game. If you're not reading the rules, it's like, what's going on here? And a tiny piece of advice, you know you're at the table and you're playing a game and then one of the players when it's not their turn is like looking suspicious and then they reach for the rule book and they start reading something, but they don't say anything. That's crap. If you reach for the rules and you're not just refreshing yourself cuz you think something's hinky or you're trying to figure out the end game scoring because you want to make sure that you're going to win, tell the group like, "Hey, I'm just going to clarify the rules on bonus scoring at the end cuz I'm not sure how it works." Let everyone know what you're looking at because most of the time when you're looking is because you think you're going to win and you don't want to let on that you figured out how many points the castle's worth at the end of the game. Pretty much every time I grab for a rule book during a game, whatever I'm looking up, I will remind the whole table, "Ah, the rule is X." Even if everyone's like, "Yes, Scott, you're the only one who forgot that rule. >> [laughter] >> Uh, we all knew that." It's like I'm still I'm letting you know, "Oh, yes, I'm clarifying this thing, right?" And mostly clarifying it for myself, but why not clarify it for everyone for the fifth time cuz I forgot it again. And this happens, you're at a PAX, you're tired. I have clarified rules for people at the table and then on my same damn turn messed up the same rule I just clarified. It happens. If you can get someone to referee, one, that's actually really fun. Like we we have friends sometimes who will referee games for us. That is so fun. And if you are the person who knows all the rules to your friends' games, it is very fun to be the one who facilitates other people in playing games so you can get some enjoyment. Well, it's arguable whether that's fun, but it is I find it fun. It is a position If somebody offers to volunteer that labor for you, you should be very thankful and grateful to them and heap praise and honor upon them. But I'm whispering in your ear, if you are that person, it's actually a sneaky trick. If you facilitate and referee games for your friends, you will also teach them how to play these games correctly and then they will be able to play these games with you without messing up the rules. But a big part of tabletop is that it's a collaborative experience. You are all each others' referees. So, for players, say what you're doing Be explicit and procedural about the actions you take in games. If you ever sit down at a table with us, we're always giving this running dialogue of "I'm drawing two cards. I will play the machete. I used the machete six times. Now I play the or. I'm using the or twice. I'm collecting my six victory points." And Scott'll pipe up and say, "No, no, no, no, no, you should take seven. You forgot about the provost." Like say what you're doing and be methodical and pay attention to what everyone else is doing. Don't be looking at your phone during other people's turns. But really, we stopped giving bad reviews of games on GeekNights. We review a lot of tabletop games. We we we don't really If we don't like a game, we just don't play it and I'll Full disclosure, there's a lot of games I read the rules and we decide it's not worth reviewing or even playing. I'll review a game solely from the rules. If the rules are hard to interpret or bad or broken, don't bother with that game. There are so many games out there. If no new board games were ever made, there are more good board games that already exist than you could ever play in the rest of your life. If you don't want to mess up rules, play games where you're going to get the rules right. If you challenge yourself, right, to play a game where the rules are written poorly, the rules are challenging, there's lots of fiddly bits to mess around with and things that are easy to forget, you're setting yourself up for failure. You are going into a game knowing that it is very likely you will not make it to the conclusion without getting anything wrong. Play games where the rules are clear. Nobody has any questions. There's no unambig- There's no ambiguous texts, right? There's no other kinds of weird issues and, you know, you're not going to like fall asleep through all the games going on and and miss something. Then, yes, your chances of success and getting to the end of the game correctly are much higher. So, designers, one, designers, I love you. You are so bad at writing rules. Get an editor. I swear. But the the rules to tabletop games are some of the worst written documents I've ever read in my life. The number of games I have read where the rules are good, it's like a breath of fresh air. It's like the sun shines down upon me and I'm filled with the light of the world. At the very least, find some people and don't teach them how to play the game. Just give them the rule book, force them to read it and play it and then watch silently with your mouth zipped shut. You're not allowed to react or anything and write just write down notes, all the things that they get wrong and you'll see how flawed your rule books are. We did a whole panel about this at another PAX. It's on YouTube. This is an hour of extremely specific advice for how to write rules. There will be a link to this from our website and the flyers and everything. Don't worry about trying to get a picture, but this is very good advice. This is actually our most popular lecture that we've ever given. I am very proud of it and if you follow even a tenth of the advice we give here, uh, your game is already going to be in the 99th percentile of well-written rules. Design elements into your game to make it hard for players to mess up. The Games got really economical with really small pieces of for about a decade and now we're getting weird stuff again, but this game has a lot of extra space on it including this huge area that is just This isn't part of the game. All this is is a place to put some cubes to make it easy to figure out when and how to score everything. Give the players mechanical things in the game to help them score. If who went first in the round matters, you better give the player a who went first marker that sits in front of them so everyone knows who went first. I'm sorry to anyone out there who likes it, but Cribbage, I learned to play it maybe a year ago, is a terrible game. It's awful. It's garbage. It's just random nonsense, but one genius thing about Cribbage is that there's a little scoring track. You have two markers on the scoring track. One is your current score and the other one you use to go forward and you know what your previous score was. So, if you get five points, you're like, "Ah, I can see that I've gotten to five points." A game like this, you just have one cube that goes around a scoring track. If the cube is bumped or goes It's like you never you you have no that physical mechanism is helping you in Cribbage know how many points you had, how many points you gained, and you always move the back one forwards and you can see and you'll never mess up your score on a Cribbage board, whereas cubes going around the edge of a piece of cardboard, it gets messed up all the time. There's hidden countable in this game. You're putting cubes in here. If you put cubes in here, you can't see them. That's part of the game. It's a big device and when you put them in, they make a loud clank so nobody can miss that you have put cubes in there. Fury of Dracula has a whole section of the book that basically says what to do if Dracula cheated because Dracula is taking a bunch of actions with decks that only Dracula can see. No other players can see this. It is really easy for Dracula to royally eff up the game. So, the game just built in a catch-all mechanism to handle that. Puerto Rico, another thing, it's really easy to forget to refill the ship. And if you forget to refill the ship, then you're kind of screwed later in the game cuz the the refill happens disconnected from when you need the refill to have already happened. So, the game has a rule that says, "Hey, if the players forgot to refill the ship, here is what you do right now to proceed with the game." Another game that has this is called ice hockey. If I trip a guy or I punch a guy or I stab a guy with my stick, you go in the box. Yeah, there's rules for what to do about that. >> [laughter] >> So, the game can proceed and you stay in the box. We have exactly 1 minute left, so we're out of time today. I hope this was enjoyable and if you take nothing else away, think a lot about the games you play, learn the rules to them because the rules of the game aren't just these like oppressive boundaries preventing you from having fun. The rules are the game. And if you understand the rules, you will understand the game and the same advice applies to life. All right. So, if for some reason you enjoyed staying in this room, unlike the wise individuals who left to go play games, Uh, there are 20 years of us podcasting and also talking at other 40-something PAXes that are all available for free on the internet with no >> 370 panels since the year 2002. >> Okay, we got a QR code, we got flyers, and we also I made these stickers with our logo on them. These stickers cost me a dollar each. They will cost you zero dollars. They're pretty high quality. If for some reason you like our logo, but you may not put this sticker anywhere that is vandalism, especially not on this building. None of the surfaces of this building. If the sticker appears there, you're in big trouble. If you want the sticker, you have to come here and tell me where you are going to put the sticker. >> [laughter] >> And I will give you one. And thank you all. All right, we're done. >> [applause] >> All right.