(upbeat music) - Inverse Genius presents onboard games episode 543, theme change. (upbeat music) - You are listening to onboard games where game industry veterans talk about to the board and card gaming hobby, while exploring topics of interest to gamers, designers and publishers. - This episode, Eric talks with Isaac Silev all about changing themes in his game to turn an ome. (upbeat music) - On board games, sponsored by our amazing patrons at patreon.com/obg. Thank you so much for your continued support. Everything that comes in from Patreon goes to cover our monthly podcasting costs, which keep us running and we greatly appreciate it. And we have a merch store. You can go to inversegenius.com and click on store and see all the fun merch we have. Looking at adding some new products, so if there's anything you'd like to see, let us know. And speaking of letting us know, we live for feedback so you can send us email at onboardgamesmailbag@gmail.com or visit us on Facebook or Twitter at inversegenius or onboard games. And of course, the guild guild 325 onboard game geek. Thank you so much for your continued support and spread the news of onboard games those you think might enjoy it. Thanks. All right, hello and welcome to a fantastic episode of onboard games. I'm your host, Eric Dewey. You can find me at EricDewey.com where you can pick up the big book of everything and document your life and give yourself some peace of mind, hopefully. Speaking of someone who always gives me peace of mind or a peace of his mind, aha, ha, ha. Welcome back to the show, Mr. Isaac Shalove. - Hey, thanks for having me, Eric. It's been a way, way, way too long and hello all the onboard games listeners. If you've missed my voice, I'm back. If you haven't missed my voice, I'm still back. - Welcome. - Anyway, if you want to catch up with me and whatever, I should give the whole thing, right? You can catch me at Isaac@kindfortress.com. I am still on Twitter in the sense that I haven't deleted my account and burned by computer, but I'm not super responsive there, but I am still there at Kind Fortress. And beyond that, I don't know. The whole world has changed. It's all discords and smack groups and WhatsApps and I don't even know. If you really, really, really need to find me, Isaac@kindfortress, it'll get to me. - So, just a minor rant, I still don't get the Discord thing, right? Everyone has their own Discord channel and it's not very conducive to find information. When you set up the forums or discussion rooms or whatever. And anytime I have to go there for my customer support for a company, like, "Oh, I have this question about this game." I know that question has been asked like 10 times, but because of that whole scrolling, the interface just drives me bonkers. Maybe I don't get it. I mean, I don't know, but. - Yeah, I agree with you. It's certainly not a great place to search for old content. The search is not good. And if you're trying to make a knowledge base or a wiki or anything like that, it's totally terrible. What I like about it though, is that the Discord groups that I'm in have much better conversations in them than Twitter or Facebook. So for that purpose, at least, I'm for it. - Yep, yep, I can agree with you there. So speaking of things you're for or potentially against, who knows, have you played anything interesting or noteworthy lately? - Oh, wow, I started playing Arknova on board game arena. And Arknova is not a new game by any stretch, and it's not a gem that anybody may or may not have heard of. But I have resisted playing online. I don't typically like playing online. And my wife recently just said, she's done with Arknova. And it was, we probably played it 15 or 20 times together. And she just reached her breaking point. She feels like she's not figuring out how to play any better and it's just become frustrating for her. And so she's done. And that's cool, I got 400 games in the basement. We'll move on to something else. - Right, right. - But I've got a real hankering to play some Arknova. And so I finally sort of broke and said, all right, I got into a few games online. And it's not through the ages. Doesn't have that same slickness of the interface. It's not as perfect an implementation. But it's very, very good. And one thing that I do notice is that it inspires me to play at a higher level because I can take my time to think through my move and I'm playing Async. So I can take as much time as I like and really think it through and think through all the combinations and try and find my best play. And at least for what I'm looking for in a puzzle, like thinking about comparing it to a crossword game, it's kind of what I want. I want to sit and try and think through and find my best move. So I've been enjoying that. By contrast I played Legacy of You, the solo game. This is a Shem Phillips solo game of the year. And I don't like solo games generally, but I was like, all right, let me try again, this is the best one of the year. It's my designer I generally like. I know the iconography from all of the other stuff that they've done, so let's check it out. And sure enough, I played two games and I was like, okay, I get what it wants me to do and I'm kind of done, I don't want this. And I don't know what it is about the, like when you play online, it's the same as playing solo, right? In the sense that you don't know who's on the other end. You're not interacting with them in any meaningful way. They could be a computer. They could be passing around the turns. It could be like five different people. You'd want to take a turn, you wouldn't know, but there's something that, I don't know rings out differently for me playing digitally knowing there's a human on the other end versus the solo game where I just, I feel like I'm wasting my time in a very unusual sort of way. And I know you love solo games. So I'm curious to hear if your own sort of experience with them has evolved, what does it look like today playing the solo games are, Dewey? - I really just like making the choices, doing the things, right? And so that's a lot of where I, a lot of the reason why I play solo games is because I really want to just see what happens, do the things and see what happens and potentially tell a story if it's a game that has a story in line involved in it. But that's predominantly where I get out. So when you get a game where it's like beating your high score kind of solo, I'm usually a little less into those because unless there's something interesting and unique about what you're doing. Like for instance, I talked about draft and write records. I don't know if you've played this one or not, but it's a rolling ride, except instead of rolling your drafting cards and you're building a band and going on tour and this kind of stuff. And you're basically building an engine. But one of the fun things is each band member has four different colors pointing north, south, east and west. And if you get two band members that are the same east pointing to west with the same color, you get a bonus. So there's this kind of, and I don't know what it is, but coloring in the little sheet to make that connection. It's a lot of fun. It makes the sort of beat the high score kind of scoring mechanism more interesting because I'm, oh, can I, do I play this person now? Or do I wait and hope I get a particular color later that I may or may not get? And so we really just kind of interacting with the pieces and the engine and all that. That's really where I kind of get it at, get to it. - Interesting, interesting. I think butlering the system itself is part of what breaks it for me. 'Cause if you're playing a computer game, you're generally playing a solo computer game and the computer handles all that stuff for you and you get to focus on the making the decisions and maybe immersing yourself a little bit more in what's going on or just being in that state of flow that you get in when you're thinking of a plan and trying to execute it. But for me, the, okay, so I'm gonna pay three white guys and the wood and the brick and then I'm moving them from this side of the table to that side 'cause I'm not putting them back in like a cop. I'm just gonna move them to the left and to the right. This is the active, this is, you know what I mean? I guess it's a little bit seeing it, seeing behind the scenes in a way that takes me out of it. - I can get it. There have been more than one time where I've set up a game to play solo and then think, and then I've lost interest by the time the setup is complete. So I just kind of either leave it on the table or just pack it away. So it happens. - Yeah, yeah, for sure. - But that's where you get the apps and you know, board game arena and stuff where you can play them solo. You know, I can't tell you how many, I've probably played hundreds of games of Sentinels of the multiverse on the app just because it's fun. It's easy and you can like, hey, let's try this, you know, combination of heroes and see what goes on. - Yeah, that's a good one for playing on the app. And honestly, it was probably always a better digital game than board game. Just because of how many status effects you have to track and put counters on at tokens. And it's one of those places where I really do think the digital version does a better job of capturing a core puzzle. But of course, interacting with your friends around the table and making a plan and, you know, all that, you do much better at a table and you're willing to kind of live with the fiddly bits. - Indeed. - Indeed. - So one of the games that we've been getting to our table quite a bit is Obsession. My wife and I have been playing a lot of Obsession. And last night, or the other night, I think I had probably the greatest game I've ever had of it. I scored, I can't remember how many points now, but it was like far and away, run away leader kind of thing. And it's just happened to be certain circumstances worked in my favor, got a whole lot of prestige guests, but just have a lot of fun. - Have you played Obsession? Have you seen it? - I have. I've played it twice and I hate it. - I don't know. - I can understand. - I can understand. - I played it once at Leary Account in Portugal and had a wonderful teacher. And I remember thinking, okay, this is exciting. I was on my list. I really wanted to explore it because the theme is unique and interesting and different and something that my wife would be interested in checking out. In also the style of plays, mostly kind of multiplayer solitaire that fits with the kinds of games that we tend to enjoy playing together. And also it was just a passion project by a designer who really was unknown prior and made this thing kind of brought it to life on his own. And so respect, it's a complex game and I kind of wanted to check it out. But man, did it not work for me. And I found that some of the challenges were the competitive aspect. So the issue of the award that, I forget what it is, but at the end of some phase, an award is given to a player who matches some condition that essentially just gets reviewed right then. And it's like, you have no idea what it's gonna be and it just flips over and then somebody just got. - Yeah, that's the fifth for no reason. - Yeah, that's the courtship phase, although it's interesting 'cause there's two different ways to play it. There's one where it's open for the whole time. So you know what you're doing and then there's that surprise one. - Yeah. - Well, and so that's the thing, right? I kind of, I found that one to be irritating and sometimes it just happens that a game plays out a certain way and for us, the second courtship phase played out the same way as the first, which is the same person got it. And it kind of puts them relatively far ahead and it's pretty good advantage, right? 'Cause then you get the more powerful card in your hand. You know, one of the fair childs, right? And so it's got a rich get richer kind of thing going for it. And so when I had the opportunity to play it again, I said, all right, well, let's try it. And I understand that there have been some changes and oh, you could play with the open courtship phase. And so we did all that. And I just wound up with the same problem, which was knowing what was gonna be scored didn't change my opportunity to collect it. Right, if you just, on your turn, those aren't the cards available, then you can't get them. And then somebody else gets them and they get to benefit from them. And you're like, well, but what am I supposed to do about that? So, you know, that was frustrating. And look, you know, I'm willing to live with some imbalance for the sake of theme, for the sake of just, you know, uncertainty coming from different places. But I also just found the rest of the, not the haptics, but the user interface, I guess, is a good way to describe it. I just found that to be really challenging and in ways that we shouldn't be dealing with anymore. So you shouldn't have very important information on the bottom right corner of a card. That's not an accessible place to see it. And in order to manage the sometimes 15 or 20 cards that you have in this game in your hand, you essentially have to just lay them all out, right? There's no other way to deal with how the cards are laid out to see the information on them. And that sort of stuff frustrates me because we know, we already know this, you know, like this is bad practices that we shouldn't be seeing anymore. It's like we shouldn't be seeing, you know, non-colorblind, safe colors for player colors. We know that it's gotta be in the process. So, you know, the frustration of the way that the interface worked compounded with some of the gameplay issues really broke it for me. And like, it's probably a better game than my experience of it. And certainly a lot of people love it. But I find that my tolerance for those kinds of issues has just plummeted to zero. In the richness of games that we have. - It's gonna say, if the interface doesn't work on them. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally get it. There's been multiple games where I've played as like, I get it, I get why people like it, I hate this game, I'm walking away. - And yeah, and it's really rare for me to say, this is a game I hate and will not play, but obsession really falls into that category for me. And I gave it two shots and with a full heart, you know, I really wanted to like it. But, you know, and I even went on board game geek and I, you know, I crawled through the forums and I read about it. And one point the designer was talking about how some of these imbalances were intentional. This is what I want. I wanted a game that had some drama in it. And I was like, okay, cool. This isn't what I want. You know, you've put peanut butter flavored mechanisms in my like, not based Euro. And these are not gonna go for me. You know what I mean? Like, I just, this is not some gum. I don't want these things together. - Fair enough, I get it. So, and yeah, I did play something else. I played, I played Ezra Nehemiah, which is another Shem Phillips title recently delivered on Kickstarter. And, you know, as a game, it's pretty enjoyable and had some clever things going on mechanically, ostensibly you're rebuilding the walls around Jerusalem and also staffing the temple and teaching the Torah to all of the dead as in surrounding Jerusalem. And that's sort of in theory what you're doing. In practice, there's this great mechanism where you've got these cards that give you icons and abilities and you're laying them into a tableau. But over the course of the round, you eventually have to cover some of them. So you sort of lay three of them out. And then on your fourth, fifth, and sixth play, you have to cover stuff that you've laid out before. And so sequencing how to do all the things that you wanna do with the right icons. And then, oh, I covered the wrong one. That, you know, the three blue that I was gonna use is gone. So there's a really neat puzzle there and I liked that aspect of it. But, you know, thematically it did fall apart a little for me because it's like, you know how there are games where there's like that semi-coop element where, okay, you gotta do your thing, but then at the end of the round, a monster's gonna attack. And we've gotta like devote enough to defeating the monster. You know, that kind of thing is not that uncommon. So it's, I sort of expected to see that here, right? We're building the wall around Jerusalem. So what happens if we don't successfully build it? Well, nothing, no consequence, like if you choose not to, it's fine, no, no, raiders show up. Why were we building this wall aesthetic purposes? Like, right, so, and the same thing that holds true for the temple. Well, let's say I don't staff the temple and they do some really great things, by the way, to like, it allied the point that what's happening in the temple is animal sacrifices that are rather bloody and visceral. It's very much like, I don't mention that. You sort of send someone to be a priest and send them with a piece of wood and you get rewarded with a piece of gold or something, right? It's a very unusual kind of, and you can put, you can burn things on the altar, wood or cinders, to keep the flame alive, right? But not animals, that whole part, like, okay, okay, fine. Fair enough, I get it, and fine. But let's say I don't send any priests to the temple. What then? Not much, there's a tiny ding for like not being quite as far ahead as you should be, but really not much. And the same thing with the Torah teaching, right? Yeah, there are end-game points that are available to you if you sort of go up this track and whatever, but ultimately it just, for a moment in history that was really quite dramatic. People returning from exile and rebuilding this land in a difficult circumstance, beset by enemies, but nonetheless, and you've got these wonderful passages in the Bible where they're holding the hammer with one hand and the spear with the others that they can build the wall and defend it. Like, you really have this fantastic thing, and then you play the game and you're like, it's just a point, salad. The story doesn't show up in the way that you'd want it to. So as a game great, as the story that I hoped it would tell, you might turn to the good book itself. The story's in there. Fair enough. Yeah, I've got a friend of mine that got Ezra and Nehemiah through the Kickstarter, and we've been trying to schedule some time to actually play it. So I'm kind of curious about it as well. - Yeah, and it's fun and I think interesting and has clever bits, and I'm not disappointed to own it, but it's almost like, for me, it's like when Battlestar Galactica came out, we were like, ah, finally an IP game that really brings you in, does the fan service the right way, it's a great game, and I'm still waiting for that for like a biblical game to pull that off. Ezra and Nehemiah does the game part, right, but not the story part. - Yeah, I get it. I mean, I don't know if we can compare Judaism and Christianity, but you know, there's a lot of games with a Christian paste on veneer that you're supposed to like just because it's Christian. You know, it's like, oh, it's a theme. And I'm with you, it's like, oh, you know, every once in a while, there's a good game that pops out, but for the most part, it's just sort of like, you know, we'll accept a lesser quality because we need to support our belief system or, you know, something along those lines, so. - Yeah, yeah, well, fair enough. I think my hopes and expectations are probably difficult to meet in this regard. You know, I was pretty disappointed with Golem when it came out, I think we talked about it. So I know that I'm gonna be tough to please on this, I know that there are lots of folks out there saying, oh, this is an interesting like part of history that I never knew about, and oh, that's kinda cool, and it's great to see a game around it. So I recognize that, you know, different strokes for different folks. I, it's sort of like any medical game my wife refuses to play. She's like, this is not gonna be good enough, she's a doctor, and it's just not gonna match her expectations for it. So, you know, I think that's probably where Ezra and Nehemiah fell out for me. - I get it, I get it totally. It's like watching any show or soap opera or whatever, or whenever they're having business meetings. I was like, nobody has meetings like this. There's no business works. - Exactly. - And I imagine cops and doctors and lawyers, they do the same thing with all their respective shows as well. - Right, right. Well, I mean, you could just imagine the automotive engineer sitting down to Kanban going, this is nothing to do with how cars are designed flipping the table and storming out. - Exactly. - You mentioned semi-cooperative, and that reminded me of one last game that I wanna talk about. I got to play New Angeles, which is actually a fairly older game, but it's a fantasy flight, hidden trader in the Android universe type game. And it's, it is actually one of the few games I found that does semi-cooperative reasonably well? Have you played New Angeles by any chance? - I haven't. - Okay, so here's, so everyone's got their own little faction in this cyberpunk universe. One person is kind of a trader faction and their goal is to basically make the, make the bad guys make it all the way to the end of the track and they end up, but everyone else just is trying to accumulate points, wealth, whatever it is. Trying to get VP. And along the way, every turn you have to negotiate and make deals and try and make that happen. But what's real interesting is you win the game by being three points ahead of your opponent. So it doesn't matter how well everyone is doing. It only matters how well your rival is doing. And so that puts in a real interesting little twist because when you're starting to do these negotiations and stuff, it's like, well, if I do that, you're gonna gain points. And it's like, well, as long as I'm not your rival, you don't care, right? And I thought that was, that piece right there was what made the game kind of a chain. You have multiple winners. I could have the person at the top of the chart wins and then two or three down wins because they beat their rival as well. So I don't know that it was particularly revolutionary, but it was interesting and it certainly made negotiations a lot more fun. - Yeah, I can imagine that. I really have seen some innovations in that semi-coop space and different ways of handling some of those shifting alliances and different wind conditions. But I really, I feel like just biting the bullet and accepting multiple winners opens up the design space so much, which makes it so much easier to implement mechanisms and keep everyone's incentives clear. I have a prototype that I haven't gone back to years that's around the core idea is that one group of players is playing humans and the other group is playing aliens making first contact with humans on earth. And you've got split alliances. So some of the aliens are there because V-style, they just want to be humans or whatever. And then there are the ones who want to be friends and we come in peace and same thing with the humans, right? There are those who are opposed to the aliens and think that they're the worst threat and they're those who want to make peace with the aliens and think that this is the root salvation. And you can as a designer inject weird incentives by making, for example, the alien who is really on the human side have missions, have things that they need to complete that seem really aggressive, right? That seem really like that the humans should not like and it becomes a game of do you trust me that I'm doing this for our good or not? You can really, you can screw around a lot with how people perceive each other and their intentions. But it ultimately boils down to, well, what makes me win? And if that's super binary, there's one winner and everyone else loses, it's hard to maintain that real sense of shifting alliance or do I trust you, do I not trust you? And at some point resolves into, okay, now we know who's on whose side and now we just play out the mechanisms. - Right, right, right. - When you leave it, how many people can win open, it really changes that dynamic. So I'm gonna have to keep an eye out for war, no more whispers of New Angeles. - New Angeles, yep, it's out of print, unfortunately. It's an older FFG game, but yeah, I'm kind of convinced that the semi-cooperative doesn't necessarily need to be a thing. There's not that plenty of cooperative hidden trader, whatever type of games that, but in this case, they ended up doing it pretty well. So I was pleasantly surprised. - Yeah, fair, it's not a nut that I guess I feel compelled to crack, but if somebody doesn't in the clever way, I'm sure I will appreciate it. - Yes, excellent. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and see what happens when our plans change. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hey, this is Eric. I just wanted to let you guys know that since 2020, we've been using Zencaster to do all of our recording, which has been a huge help to us because what it allows you to do is to have your basic website where you can connect with one another and communicate with one another, you know, like your zooms and your teams, but it also records everything in a separate track, which is critical when editing time comes around. So hey, I encourage you to check out Zencaster z-e-n-c-a-s-t-r.com and use keyword on board games, all one word. Thanks. (upbeat music) All right, and we're back. I'm still Eric, he's still Isaac, and Isaac, you've got a game coming out. It was actually quite a hit in origin, sold out at origins. We played the prototype of Ternanog. Is that right? - Ternanog? - Ternanog? - Ternanog. - Back to the left one. - Not that one, either one. (laughs) - Exactly. And so first of all, congratulations on yet another game out and publish and being gobbled up. So always fun to have. - Thank you. - But when we had talked about offline, it originally wasn't an Irish themed game. And so I thought it would be an interesting conversation or we thought it would be an interesting conversation to talk about what happens when your themes change and how important is theme in the game itself? - Yeah, it's, I think, an interesting story. I hope it's an interesting story. If not, folks, you may want to skip to 40 minutes ahead. - No, so Ternanog was a great story because it was really born out of friendship. I had years and years ago, when I was kind of really first just getting started, I had been listening to a podcast that Jason Slingle and Rob Crouch did. It was called Building the Game. Still around, Building the Game podcast, Jason still does it and it's a great podcast if you are interested in designing and interested in learning about how do you take next steps on the journey? But at the time, it was what they called a documentary podcast. They were documenting their own journeys into game design and figuring out how to do it all. And one of Jason's earliest titles was picked up for publication by friend of the podcast, Mark Spector of the Grand Gamers Guild. And because I was, by this point, I think doing onboard games, I had gotten an early copy to review, to cover and played it some. And I was friends with Jason at this point, just through the Building the Game podcast. And so I was excited to see his game and we played and I played with my son and basically had such a good time with it with this game called Unreal Estate, which probably mentioned the name of the game. - I was gonna mention it. But Unreal Estate was the name of the game. And it's a family weight intro to stock type scoring games. And I did a little bit of development work it ended up because playing it to players, I found there were some issues and I made some suggestions that were ultimately incorporated and became part of the game. And really much more importantly than that, I really solidified friendship with both Mark and Jason and really had been hanging out with them for years doing conventions together, occasionally doing some booth volunteering. And I volunteered to help Mark out and Grand Gamers Guild out at UK Games Expo, which was like a great opportunity. They were gonna cover a lot of my costs. So I get to go to UK Games Expo and I love working booth and I love teaching games and I teach big heavy games. And so I was teaching like Endeavour and the Artemis project. And I really had a great time. But we would have breakfast every morning. And one of the things that I noticed was that here we were selling these heavier kind of mid-weight high interaction euros. That's what was flying from the booth. Everyone was coming to get a copy of Endeavour. Everyone wanted an Artemis project endangered, I think was around them as well. And it was sort of in that medium-weight category. And the stuff that we weren't selling were some of the earlier games that Grand Gamers Guild had made, which were lighter and more family-level games, including Unreal Estate and Like Stroop, which has since been re-released with a different cover or pocket ops. So, you know, and I love the art of Unreal Estate. The art is like pink and purple and whimsical. And, you know, the game is called Unreal Estate because it's set in like a fantasy land. It's unreal. So, you know, all the art is like of The Wizard's Tower and The Dwarf's Mine and The Halfling's Hot. And it's really, it's very tweev. We're still using that word. And-- - I don't know that I ever use that word. - It's delightful. (laughing) Well, and I said to Mark over breakfast, you've got all this great art. The game is probably at the end of its life. You're gonna sell, you know, the copies that you've got. Why not make a game that maybe reuses some of that art and reuses this world, but in a more medium weight and more interactive style that would appeal to the people who weren't buying your other games, right? You know how to sell to this group. Why not sell in this game and reuse some of those assets? - And Mark said, that's a great idea. I love it. And you should design that game. You should design that game. I'll put you in touch with Jason. And I was like, yeah, I know Jason is good. (laughing) But we're tired, I'll figure it out. But sure enough, like I went to bed after a full day of work at the Expo. And I just, I woke up with the baseline of what this game should be there. And I literally sketched it and I brought it to breakfast. And I said, Mark, here's the idea. You're building your city. You're gonna have all these cards. They have numbers on them. They'll be in this grid. You're gonna build a three by five, three neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has its own scoring conditions. The way the cards interact is gonna be related to that. Maybe some special powers on them. That's the game. It's like this tableau building style game. And he said, yeah, absolutely. Go do it. Thank you. No. And so I did. And I reached out to Jason and Jason was, you know, fully into it and said, absolutely, let's do it. And, you know, we spent a few months working on it. And we built the game and actually it was sort of funny because the, I remember we sat down to test it together. We had come up with some content. We hadn't yet figured out how you would acquire the cards. But I was like, whatever, it doesn't matter. We'll come to that later. Let's just make sure that the cards do the cool things that we want them to do and that the puzzle is right. We'll figure out the acquisition mechanism later. And so we met up at, I think it was origins to look stuff over and to test it a little. And I was like, all right, we need some kind of acquisition mechanism. How about like this straddle draft? We'll lay the cards out in the grid and we'll put a marker between two cards. And so everyone will put out their markers and then we'll draft and you take one that's touching your, you know, take a card that's touching one of your markers. So you're, when you're putting out, you're sort of bidding on any two of them. And it took literally playing one round of that for us to be like, oh, this is really good. I'm putting in that immediate, oh my goodness, you want both of those or which one do you want? I don't think you want that one. Maybe you want this one, you definitely stop. Don't look at that one. That one's not for you. That one's for me, right? And it just immediately was like, yeah, that's great. So that's basically how the game came together and Mark accepted the prototype and hired a developer. And so he brought on John Brieger from Riga Creative to do some balancing and testing and just, you know, the kind of development that you need to get a game into shape. Along the way, John, who did a really good job on a lot of that, also came back and said, and here's a whole different theme that I think might work for the game. And so he did, you know, I guess if it were a movie, I guess you'd call it a treatment. But he basically mocked up this Celtic theme, which, by the way, it's an enormous amount of work, right? There's like 100 cards in the game. He has to like rename every single one of those in a consistent and thematic way. Make sure that the powers match like what the things do. It's a huge amount of work, plus all of the scoring cards, which for us were neighborhoods, because he turned everything into creatures, he had to turn those into quests. And so each of those scoring cards that sort of define how you're supposed to lay out your tableau is now an actual Celtic myth. And so just a ton of research and work and love to offer this treatment that nobody had told him you should do. Nobody asked for it. And that nobody promised that would be used, right? So really just an exceptional thing, I think, for it's kind of interesting, because when you play something, when you play, whether it's a prototype or a published game, sometimes it ignites something in you, right? Sometimes it just catches you in a way, and you want to engage with it more. And maybe if it's a game like Arknova, you're going to go and play digitally a bunch or go on the forums and argue about strategy. And maybe if it's a prototype and you start finding yourself thinking, oh, maybe an expansion, maybe more content, maybe whatever, it was just so unexpected and incredibly flattering for John, who is a seasoned professional, to have kind of caught fire in this way from the game and decided to make this whole thematic alternative. And so, yes, then he presented it to us. And to Mark's credit, Mark had been, of course, gotten into this, the idea that he already had the art assets, maybe not to pay for a couple more pieces, but whatever, all of a sudden, a card game with this many illustrations, it's expensive. And again, who asked for this? But to his credit, he saw it and he said, you know what, there's something here. This is not a well-known theme. There's not a bunch of Celtic games out there. And there's something that captures that same sort of whimsy that we were going for, but that brings it, I guess, a little bit more gravitas, a little bit more weight, because it's a real story. It's not just sort of generic fantasy with a really nice and adorable art style. Now it's connected to something a bit more than that. And so we all kind of said, OK, maybe this is the way. So I'll pause for air here. Maybe you have some questions, but that's the origin story of how Unreal Estate became Tiana Nog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So once you decided on switching over in the theme, did that then require reworking of parts of the game? Or was it really just a matter of just getting the thematic events to tie into what had already been designed game-wise? So when we first looked at it, we said, oh, yeah, sure. This is-- it's a cut and paste, right? No problem. It's a different coat of paint, but everything will still be the same. And inevitably, it's never like that. Inevitably, it doesn't work that way. And some of it comes out in funny ways. We had written all the cards and all the rules and everything on the assumption that the cards were buildings. And then in the initial working over, OK, so they weren't buildings. They were lands. They were areas and regions and territories, except some of the ones with special abilities were like creatures. And all of a sudden, you have to change-- I mean, even-- I see it up close because I write the rules. And I'm like, oh, everywhere where I said, like, region or territory, everywhere I said, building is now something else. But I don't have a generic word to describe all the things they could possibly be. And also, some of them are singular, and some of them are plural, so that's annoying, right? Like, this is grammar stuff. But it makes you sort of take a step back and say, hang on, the entire idea of what we're doing is different. We thought we were building a town. We're not building a town anymore. What are we doing? What is the story of the game? And that's when we realized that the story of the game was the story, that you were telling stories, that these were bards that you were sending out on adventures, and they were coming back and telling their stories. And the work that they were compiling, those three rows of cards that you were putting together, were essentially three sagas. And so once again, instead of that neighborhood card defining the characteristic of the neighborhood and the scoring, you had these geese cards, these quest cards, that were modeled on a story from Celtic mythology. And then you say, OK, well, which story works with which scoring condition? Sometimes it can get a little abstract. I mean, even in the original, I remember we had-- there was the Tower District. And the Tower District wanted you to play cards in ascending order. And it's like, oh, yeah, that makes sense, right? It's the Tower District. And then we had a district that was intended to be like the poor part of town. And so it rewarded you for playing low cards. But like the player who had the highest sum of low cards would get a special reward. So like there was still a neat interaction there. And all of a sudden you have to translate that into quests and into these existing stories that you have, much less flexibility. Like the quest is what it is. You have one story about the salmon of knowledge, which is that if you eat from the salmon of knowledge, you learn everything. You know everything all at once. And you're stuck with that. It's not a tuna of knowledge. And it's not a salmon of courage. That's the story. How are you going to turn that into a scoring condition? So there was a lot of work to rebuild some aspects of the game to model it better. But it also opened new opportunities because it opened up some opportunities for like there's the subplots expansion, which has some icon matching mechanisms. But it gave us some more room to suddenly say, OK, well, this is a story. What else can we do with that? Where else does that go? And so in the end, I'm glad that we went that way because it pushed us into a more challenging space. Like it was harder to do this. But we came out with something that was stronger and richer. One of my favorite cards in the game is the-- it's called the Cusi Kennel. It's basically a card that is ostensibly about a dog. So you can even see some of the origins, right? Like, why is it the Kennel? Shouldn't it just be the dog? Well, the Kennel, because originally they were all buildings. So a Kennel was a building. But it's this dog that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And mechanically, the game allows this dog to grow and rank larger and larger and larger based on how many other cards you have. So it's sort of like the Kennel gets bigger and bigger and gets more and more stocked with more and more large animals. So you get to do some fun stuff like that, which-- I don't even remember now what the original building version of that card was, but it was more boring. Without a doubt, it was more boring. No kidding. So one of the things that I find real interesting is taking that initial-- and I'm thinking art style more than anything else-- but taking that initial Unreal Estate art and putting it in Tyrna Nogue creates a different feeling game, even if the mechanisms are entirely the same, right? You mentioned it gave it more gravitas. It seems to be-- I don't want to use the word heavier because that implies something else. But there's more to it just by sort of taking some of the whimsy, I guess, out of the art, as it were, or the theme. I think that's right. So years ago, I read a book by Maryn Zimmer-Bradley, who did a lot of books that rewrote traditional stories from a feminist perspective. So Ms. Savablon is probably her most favorite, where she rewrote the Arthur story from the perspective of Guinevere, but she wrote another one called Firebrand, which was a retelling of the fall of Troy from the perspective of Cassandra. And it was one of the first books, I remember, where I actually bothered reading the author's note introduction, which now is my favorite part of the book, right? But she talked about using or how to transliterate Greek names and the traditional style that most of us are probably familiar with is Cassandra is spelled with a C, right? And Cassiopeia would be spelled with a C, but that hard sound is these days more commonly transliterated with a K. And she went with that approach because she wanted to sort of be part of the modern trend of this is what the academy says is the right way to do this now, and so fine. But she wrote about how it was hard for her to come to grips with it, because as she put it, a crow is not a crow, a CROW, CROW is not a crow, and a cow is not a cow. And you feel it in a way that you sometimes can't explain, but it's obvious to you that a crow with a K is a ridiculous thing, right? And a crow with C is a brooding and dangerous and kind of Omen, who's also really annoying at times, right? Like there's something about just those little things. So yeah, I think when the game was based on art that sort of looked a little smurphy, right? It kind of was like a mushroom village a gnome, you know, encampment kind of art. The inevitably you approach a game like that with a lighter touch and maybe a little bit less investment in each play and each decision, because the game is telling you, hey, this is for fun. This is light, this is, you know, right? But then when you put that Celtic theme over it, which is definitely more primal, right? And the colors that the color palette is phenomenal. I just want to shout out Bridget and Delacado, the graphic designer and art director who set the color palette in Marley's Barons, the artist who executed on it. But there is something about it that says, hey, this counts, this matters, this means something. There's more here. And then they did some cool things. So this is like an Easter egg that players will have to pay attention to to see. But so let's say you have the red cards numbered 1 through 8. If you lay them out in order next to one another, they form a panorama. Oh, wow. So they connect to one another, right? And you can actually see not just a panorama, but there's almost like a story in that panorama, because the earlier cards are sparser and then the later cards have more on them. And so there's almost like a story of journeying from the outskirts of this land into its center. And those touches, you don't necessarily need to know that they exist when you're playing. They do their thing to your brain, whether you know it consciously or not. It's the same thing as the K and the C on the cow. Right, exactly. And so it did change how I think people approach the game and what the reaction I get consistently with folks playing it now with the final art is it feels like a competitive Sudoku, right? Like it's engaging and compelling and I'm trying to like puzzle it all out. And there's a way it's going to work, right? There's a way to solve it, to make the move that I want to make. But that other player is trying to prevent me and it's-- yeah, so it's really been cool to see how the tone change translated into I think a better gameplay experience in a way that I didn't know how to design for. But like I feel like is maybe that's what makes the Eric Langs of the world, the Eric Langs of the world. We know how to make those things, whereas some of us are just like accidentally discovering and falling into it. Stumbling into it, yeah. So that makes me think on a designer viewpoint is like, oh, there's this area of my game that's just not working right. Mechanically it's sound, but it's just not doing what I want it to do and then do you take that pause and say, well, maybe I just need to reskin, maybe we're not trading, maybe we're writing contracts, whatever. You just kind of end up-- nothing changes gameplay wise, but suddenly you do that. I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, I think I've seen that happen in prototypes, where I do a lot of play testing of other designers' prototypes. I'm very, very lucky to live in North Carolina as part of the game designers of North Carolina. There's always play test nights happening, and you see designers experimenting with just that, right? Well, maybe this is just the wrong theme for this. What does it feel like if the theme is different? And I've done it myself. I have a game that was initially designed to be a Missile Command the card game, right? It was part of IDW's Atari lineup. We were going to do Missile Command the card game. And then IDW folded, and I was like, OK, but this game is still really good, and I can file the serial numbers off. I'll call it doomsday and whatever. And played with it a bunch. It had good parts, it had bad parts, just the normal development cycle. But at a certain point, I saw this really cool word game at PAX Unplugged. I'm going to try and remember the name of it, but maybe you've seen it at some point. Every player has a plastic banana peel in front of them, and there are balls that go in that banana peel and that sort of hammock. And the balls each have a letter on them. And you're trying to make words by putting letters in the right order, but that physicality made it really easy to rearrange things, right? You can imagine if it was like Scrabble tiles. It would be OK, but it would be kind of annoying, whereas just lifting a ball out and then putting it somewhere else and it just drops in and pushes everything the way it needs to be pushed, and sort of that hammock keeps everything contained. And I thought, wow, my game has a lot of cards sliding and needing to slide a bunch of other cards down and slotting things in and in between. And I don't know if this is quite what I need, but what if I did it with plastic tiles in a tray where you could just much more easily slide things left and right and the tray restricts them from going up and down? And so what does it look like if I do that? And so I mocked it up with some foam core and a bucket of plastic tiles that I literally took a paint pan and rote numbers on, just to try it. And I played it with my son. And my son's like, it's like bubble pop. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, it's like that app. It's like an app game, right? You're talking these tiles in and then you're popping a bunch of them out. And it's just this super fun, light, fluffy puzzle with this cool hook. And I thought, wow, I've been getting all this feedback about, I really like this game, but I don't really want to play the end of the world. And all of these nuclear bombs running around, and maybe that's not. And I tried to lighten it up. I tried to make it a little bit more war game zest in your computer crashes. And so you've got to reboot and while you reboot some of the missiles full, I tried to make it into a sillier. It's bugs in a computer program, and you're the IT team, and you're swatting the bugs. And what turns out that what really, really worked was just lean into this app-like feel that came from changing the components because they were more tactile and were fun to slide around. And the core thing that everyone was getting hung up on in the game of having to slide the cards went away. That wasn't annoying anymore. That was actually fun to find. And all of a sudden, the whole tone of the game changes. I want to do the fun thing where you get to slide and then take a bunch of stuff off and then slide the whole row back to the beginning. So satisfying, right? So yeah, it's incredible because the rules have barely changed. Like barely, there's no difference in what the game is and what the puzzle is. But the tone of it is entirely different and it's just much more fun. - Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. If you need to add a step in your design phases, I was like, stop, reflect on theme. See if we need to adjust theme. Is theme limiting me? Because, for instance, if you're in a fantasy environment and you needed to do something technological, that would just fit with this thing and like, well, we can't because it's a fantasy world. We've got elves and whatnot. So then you pause and... But I think, especially if it's your own design, throwing away or adjusting the theme can be a bit of effort, a bit of work to, because you've sort of invested in the theme itself, initially. - It's an enormous amount of work and it's always more work than you think it's gonna be. And I can't say that I necessarily recommend it. I probably recommend holding your theme much more lightly up front. But I did this with another game recently. The game was called Daimyo and it was, you know, Feudal Japan and houses competing against one another. And it's one of these games where you take two cards, the two cards are represent different actions. If you do, you execute both actions and then you keep one card secretly and you discard one card secretly. And the stuff that you keep is gonna score later, right? And like, so there's a lot of tension and intrigue and it kind of fits into that sort of Feudal Japan theme. But our publisher said, what about the cards that you discard? What do they do? And we're like, well, they're discards. The end of the game and put them away. Like, what do you want? And they're like, well, what if they did something? And that's the worst thing to say to a designer. What if this did something? It's like, oh God, I mean, it could do a million things. But they're like, yeah, what if it like controlled how things scored or what mattered in the end or if there was like an end game phase or... And at a certain point, like we were talking it through and they're like, and by the way, we were like thinking to do this as like a future techno Japan instead of like a medieval kind of thing and we wanna lean out of some of these tropes. And long story short, we ended up redoing the game. The name of it changed to Sion and it's about training and AI to run the universe, right, to run the world. And those discarded cards have now become the cards that you're programming this AI to Sion with, right? And oh my God, it was not easy to like redo the whole game around this. But again, I guess that I think the lesson for me is look at your design and look for the irritable bits, right? Where's the part that this doesn't quite do the thing, you know, this feels extra wise this here or there's an annoying thing that you have to do in order to reset the round, right? And it's like, oh, there's this annoying upkeep piece or even like a physical thing. You keep having to slide these cards over and it gets super tiresome and I have to keep sliding these cards over. When you see those frictions, don't ignore them. I think my tendency was to view it as like a budget and say, okay, you can have a certain amount of like annoying stuff before players are like, I've had it. So okay, sometimes stuff is annoying and making a mechanism work requires like introducing some friction, but there's a friction budget, like it's okay. And I think what I've learned is there's no friction budget. The friction budget is zero. And maybe that's something impossible to strive for, but instead of striving for it by refusing to introduce friction, strive for it by iterating on the friction that exists, right? Like make the game, make the thing and then see where the frictions are and then say, okay, what does this become? What does this, how do you make this work? - Right. - Exactly. How do you make this fun? I mean, look, in some ways, it's like Dominion. You made the deck building the game instead of the three hours I spend before the game trying to come up with the perfect deck. Okay, I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of mechanisms that are doing something cool like that, you know, games that clean up after themselves, games that when you're done, they're all back in the box, that kind of stuff. I think there's a ton of room for creativity there and it creates a unique experience. And I think that when you get it all right and you line that experience up with the theme and with the wave of the game and the promise that you're making to players, you get a really satisfying click. - So you mentioned Eric lying just off the cuff and it made me remind me of the theme issue I had. So as we played Rising Sun not too long ago and, you know, so I've got my faction of these fantastical Japanese people and here's my base and so I'm moving out and conquering territory and getting my points and then someone's coming in to attack my base and then I realize, well, you know what, it doesn't matter. The way the game scores, it's all in what you do, you know, conquer, you don't have to keep any of the land. And that really bugged me while I was playing this game 'cause it's like, you know, it looks like it's a war game. It looks like I need to defend my territory and in a certain sense, circumstances I do, but overall, it doesn't matter. They take my home territory, it doesn't matter. So in my brain, three quarters of the way through the game, I switched it and I said, these are Japanese heavy metal bands going on tour and you're trying to have the biggest shows in the different areas. And like suddenly the game was honestly more fun. I mean, I wasn't not having fun but that disconnect was really throwing me off but just in my brain, I'm like, nope, we're touring, we're bands rock on. So I gotta say, I love that. When you were explaining, you know, the disconnect, it reminded me of Twilight Imperium, which has a similar sort of thing where like, it doesn't really matter if your home system gets taken. Like, yeah, it's annoying in the same way that anything of yours getting taken is annoying but there's no special, you know, thing to it. It's not that big a deal and, you know, you sort of see the underlying engine of, oh, the game is gonna generate a bunch of troops for you each turn and it's about, how do I achieve some local objectives? Not what do I hold over time? And as a space opera story, it's a little unsatisfying. - Just connected. - What's you doing? Right, but oh my God, the idea of Rising Sun as like Japanese metal bands on tour, it's a better theme than the original theme and it clicks better with the production, right? 'Cause the production values of this game are so over the top, right? In the Rising Sun you have all these minis and maxis, right? - Right, giant things. - And the style of them is so extreme and I just feel like, wow, that really is, I wanna play Rising Sun now, you know, but it's like rising sun, you know, metal journey. - Exactly, exactly. Well, that's fun. Well, Isaac, man, it's been so great talking to you. I always enjoy just our conversations. - Thank you so much for joining the show. Is there any other aspect of theme that you wanted to cover before we drop off? - No, before we drop off, I just wanted to tell everybody, it's awesome to be back on board games and I certainly wouldn't mind visiting again on maybe somewhat, you know, like not let so much time go by. And I hope listeners feel the same way, but please do check out Tiernanog is available now. You should be able to go to your favorite online retailer as long as your favorite online retailer isn't Amazon 'cause it's not available on Amazon, but you should be able to find it, it's certainly in stores. And so please do check out Tiernanog and rate it. And if you can do us a favor and you hear this before GenCon, go to the GenCon preview thing and give us your thumbs. This was so important for our sellout in Origins. We really got a lot of support from the community with that. And last I checked, we were fourth overall on most anticipated games at GenCon, which is huge. And like all the other games in the top five had, you know, multi-million dollar Kickstarter campaigns and like, you know, ARCs and whatever. And we're the little engine that could. So please check it out, FAMAS, get Tiernanog, support your favorite local retailer or online retailer. And just thank you, Eric, for having me back on board games. - And you're always welcome. I'm just excited we could make it happen. Well, I'm Eric Dewey. - I'm Isaac Shalav. - And you've been listening too? - On board games! - That's it for this episode of On Board Games. If you enjoy On Board Games, join our Guild On Board Game Geek. You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, hard us on board game links, give us a five star review and iTunes or patronize us at patreon.com/obg. Want to be on the show? Please be in touch with the topic ideas far and advanced as possible, as our schedule does fill up. You can find out more about the On Board Games podcast at inversegenius.com. Email us questions, comments, or snide remarks at on board games mail bag at gmail.com. On board games is licensed under Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, no-derivative works, 4.0 international license. Thanks. ♪ Da da da da da da da da da da da da da ♪
