The Atomic RPG Action

Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about it recently. It comes up a lot when we play The Score but it also sneaks into other RPGs all the time – and I think we probably find ways to do this kind of thing more than we might imagine, but it’s not written down in any rulebooks. And pretty much the entire history of RPGs is thinking of things people are actually doing and turning them into written rules.

First, let’s do an example, and I’ll do Star Wars again because I’m old. Luke wakes up to find his new droid has wandered off into the desert. He goes looking for it, and finds signs of sandpeople. He pulls back to see if he can see them from a distance, and they – having set a trap – ambush him and knock him out. He is saved at the last moment by the appearance of a strange figure using crazy mind powers, who is luckily, a person Luke has been thinking about.

Atomic comes from the Greek a-tmos, a as in not and tmos as in cuttable. Something you can’t cut divide any further..

As a writer, here’s how you might think about this scene: you want to establish some character beats. Luke isn’t as tough as he thinks he is. Obi-Wan has mysterious powers. We can show that by having a nice moment of “plot zig zag” – Luke finds the droid is gone (oh no), Luke finds the droid (hooray), Luke sees sand people (suspense), Luke is attacked (surprise), Luke is saved (hooray). You would write this all as one scene, and the chief purpose of the scene would be to get the two characters together in an interesting way, and establish some character and world building.

Obviously there isn’t and can’t always be a parallel between non-participatory storytelling and participatory storytelling, but here’s how this might look in an RPG: Luke would make a roll to see if he can find R2D2s trail. He succeeds! Then the GM has him roll perception to notice the sand people. He succeeds! He decides he will hide. The GM decides (somehow) that the sand people are setting up a trap so gives Luke some rolls to see if he can figure this out, like say Local Knowledge and Perception. Fail, and fail. Okay, Luke, give me a dodge roll. Fail? Okay they knock you out. But … I guess an old wizard comes along and stops them from eating you? Luke’s player will spend a point on his I Know This Guy stat to say this is an old mountain hermit he’s met a few times.

And at this point someone might go – and it might be the GM, and it might be in secret, or it might not – “oh, can that be the person my character, Princess Leia, was trying to find?”. And that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s a lot like retro-active continuity but done in the act of creation. It makes sense that this thing that we’ve already decided happened and that thing we’ve already decided happened are linked. Perhaps causally or through an heretofore unestablished connection. And like I say, I think we do this all the time.

So often when I’m generating random stuff from tables, I’m putting two or three things together so that they are linked like this. Which has got me pondering: is there a way to make this an explicit mechanic? In The Score I’ve been toying with the idea of drawing two cards at once, so that you can explain the failure of the first by the arrival of the second, or resolve the failure of the first with the success of the second. However particularly since the game is all about drawing cards, it tends to work better at the table if everything is atomic. And that’s when it hit me: almost everything we do in TTRPGs is atomic like this. The example above was something you might call a scene but each roll stood on its own. The GM might have prepared several ways the encounter might have gone, and seen that as a cohesive whole but each roll was “what happens now, at this point” with Luke rolling to see if he gets a yes or a no or a sort of outcome. The story branches around these atomic choices. And that’s fine…

…but if you were writing this scene, you’d write this at the very least as a one-two punch. First this, then that. Luke takes a hit, gets rescued. You’d get the two things at the same time.

There are some systems that can work like this. You could do a scene-based resolution where say, Luke’s trying to “find R2D2” and he gets a yes but, and the player decides that he gets ambushed then saved. In this case though the test is still a kind of an atomic thing – a yes no maybe of “does this happen”. And if you go out to this step, the scene with Obi-Wan is connected to Luke not being at home when the stormtroopers arrive and to Luke finding Obi-Wan and getting some of his backstory.

Alternatively you could have a tug-of-war style system (like in Dogs in the Vineyard or Cortex) where the GM is playing “planetary threats” and there’s a back and forth wagering until finally Luke wins but with a sacrifice (he takes a wound, say). This does get to the idea that we build in connections and outcomes but it does still feel like we’re trying to solve a singular situation. We have a procedural scene: Luke wants to achieve an outcome and rolls to determine if he does. And certainly we can start with that idea and bring in what I’m talking about, because “solving a problem” is a pretty standard core RPG mechanic.

But what I’d like to see is something that steps outside the atomic. Imagine a situation where every roll in an RPG is always two rolls, in the sense of we’re getting two ideas we want to link together. This isn’t the same thing as rolls that produce lots of information, like in the Genesys system, because that still feels to me sealed inside the atomic concept. Although again, that’s probably a good way to come at this problem – it might be that we’ve solved this issue already, with this idea. But I’m curious about what else we might do. Another way to think about this is systems where everyone rolls their initiative at the start of the round so you know that when you finish your action, who is coming next. Similarly the Balsera Initiative system where you decide who goes next is going to prompt into this area as well. What we want is for players to think about connections, and what just happened and what’s about to happen is a start.

But what if whenever Bob the Fighter wants to do X we get Eric the cleric to roll for whatever they are doing next? Of course you’ll say they don’t know what they’re doing next, but we often DO have some idea. Maybe Bob is trying to bust down the door and Eric the Cleric is going to blast some spells. Roll both. Then explain and describe the whole thing when you know all the things coming into the scene. In this case there’s basically four outcomes, but they’re all kind of interesting. Can Bob fail to get the door down but Eric look badass when casting spells? Maybe. If I was writing that scene, I’d have Bob hit the door, hurt himself, have a comedy beat and then a skeleton shoot out of the door a second later and getting blasted. Or maybe the door opens but Bob goes sliding in, looks up and sees a skeleton about to kill him – and then Eric saves his life. If Bob wins and Eric wins, then it’s a moment of two comrades acting in perfect synchronicity. If Bob wins and Eric fails then Bob slams open the door only for the skeleton to shoot past him and Eric’s faith to fail. If they both fail…the skeleton kicks the door open, knocks Bob down and Eric fails to get his holy symbol up.

Of course all of those situations can be achieved with atomic rolls but I hope you can see how starting with lots of information coming into something BEFORE we interpret the roll, we can get different results. And that currently, we mostly do RPGs where each player makes an atomic choice and gets a singular answer back from the system before we move on. And there’s probably a whole other series of things we could be doing that aren’t atomic like this. Games naturally teach us to take turns and keeping things atomic does mean that each player feels independent and in control. Turns, in other words, make sense. But they’re not the only way to play. We don’t take turns in tug of war – we all come in at once.

I do not have the answers here. I only have this question, this start of an idea. I’m putting it here because I want to see someone take it somewhere. Because that’s what I’m talking about – collaboration. Collaboration, like narrative, is rarely atomic. Let’s see where we can go, not just one step at a time, on our own.

Convention Calculus: Is Going to a Con “Worth It”?

Warning: Your Gaming Convention May Contain Nerds

A few people have asked me recently about if they should try to sell at conventions, and what kinds of conventions are there, and how many are there and which are the big ones, the important ones, and the good ones. Those are big questions that are actually hard to answer, because it all depends on what your game is, what kind of customers you want, and what types of conventions and convention spots bring those two things together. So this isn’t a recommendation; rather it is a guide to understanding the con you’re considering, so you can answer those questions yourself.

In 1987 in an effort to get any kind of live music to come down to Texas, an independent music magazine in Austin called South By South West Music had a little festival. Now it’s one of the biggest brands in the world, and it attracts massive film companies and computer game companies to launch their new products, while also gluing on tech, capitalist/startup stuff, and “creatives”. Last year it went global and arrived in Sydney with an event so big nobody knew U2 and the Rolling Stones both launched albums at it.

The point is that “conventions” are big things, in the sense that they contain lots of ideas. Just as there are still small town musical festivals now, the original forms of gaming conventions haven’t gone away. And what it means is that there’s a whole array of conventions out there, and you need to know what kind of con you’re going to, if you’re keen to demo or sell your games. It can also be important to know what kind of convention the convention BEGAN as, because that will usually effect how it grows and how it identifies itself. The original conventions were wargaming based. Wargaming grew out of toy-soldier collectors who were used to all getting together in places and showing off their collections and these kinds of “collector conventions” also still exist, but they don’t have games. Wargaming cons still exist and often other conventions are built around them. Sometimes you’ll get ten wargamers still showing up for their important, yearly-scheduled events angry that the parking lot is filled with cosplayers…

Gaming and gamer are now nigh-meaningless terms, and cons find themselves trying to cater to a massively diverse crowd, sometimes with zero crossover. You might have six year old speed-cubers, chess, bridge or scrabble players from around the world holding tournaments, you might have CCG showdowns worth millions of dollars, cosplayers who spend all year building incredibly accurate tributes to an anime you’ve never heard of (but millions of people have), twitch stars, youtube celebrities, movie and TV celebrities, jedi sword practice, movie previews, arcade areas, crafting tutorials, JANOME selling sewing machines next to the sex fetish booths, strippers and burlesque, freeforms, LARPs with hundreds of people, boffer LARPs, juggalo matches, sword fighting demonstrations…PAX AUS even has a quiet corner for people who want to bring their own machines for LAN parties. And there’s a crazy con in NSW called IronCon which is for professional blacksmiths, collectors of weird old farming machines, steam punk cosplayers and medieval swordfighters.

I wouldn’t want to be a convention organiser and juggle all or even some of that. Most don’t do all of them, but knowing what they do and don’t cover and focus on will help you get your bearings. Broadly speaking, when it comes to games, cons at least start from two positions: as what I will call PLAY CONS and TRADE CONS.

Your play con starts because a bunch of people want to get together and play games. If this is wargames or CCGs, then you often have to have a lot of organising of the tournament, people might to pre-register their army lists or their deck lists, and there’s a lot of structure around who plays whom when. If it is board games there may be tournaments as well but there’s less need to organise quite so much. RPGs are in the middle: they need to typically have some timed sessions, if not all, and those need GMs to pre-register and provide a blurb to attract players. Play cons tend to be focused around these scheduled events which means that although they can have big open areas to play, they are often held in schools and similar places so everyone can run away to private rooms for their sessions. This has a knock-on effect of reducing how much space there is for “general milling” as I call it, and the trade floor. Even though they don’t focus on sales, these cons will still usually have some people selling something, especially as the costs to set up are often very low or free. Similarly game runners/demoers are often given space for free.

Trade cons arose out of just that: conventions where small businesses, designers or people across a trade gather to show off their ideas to buyers, who might be regular consumers or perhaps professionals in related fields or people looking to become investors or to start up franchises. In the case of games, you are generally selling games to the public, even if they are still in prototype stage or you are doing pre-promotion. Sometimes you are also testing things, and that is a kind of pre-promotion! The Mecca of game design is the con held at Essen each year called Spiel. It’s always been where the biggest european companies both reveal their new releases and test/preview what’s coming in the next few years. In these cons, the whole focus is the trade floor. There might not even be anything but the trade floor, or just lip service to things. Lip service being a key word: the bigger the trade con, the more it can spend on marketing and the more it wants to present itself as for all kinds of gamers. They can say they support the local industry; that doesn’t mean they do. And of course there are plenty of ways to do that! It’s not necessarily a convention’s duty to let local designers in free, especially when some of them might be vastly more wealthy than some guy operating out of his garage.

What this issue really comes down to is understanding or trying to get a sense of how the event makes its money, and how it spends money. Small, play focused cons often have volunteers, cheaper venues and lower costs as a result, and are generally run with the idea of recouping their costs mostly from attendees. Because they are smaller and – on the surface – aren’t focused on selling, they cannot attract Nintendo or Rio Grande or Hasbro, so they give great deals for people who want to demo games or run game stalls, or both. Whereas, primarily, the main way that conventions make money is from selling booths. There are “whale” packages they will sell to customers, but they aim to keep customer prices down and numbers high. Customers will push through a crowd and see it as a selling point – and indeed, it is a selling point for stall holders. But there’s only so much space to go around, so the prices for booths are set at a premium. In Australia, PAX booths are I think around $3-4000 for just a small one. Now PAX also has some wonderful cheaper options as well, for local designers. Just because their model is around selling booth space doesn’t mean they’re bad to go to for local designers.

The thing about booths on trade floors, though is you are competing against people who may have astronomically bigger budgets than you, to take up more floorspace, pull in more volunteers, have shinier banners. And that’s always going to happen: Booth Envy is real and it will hit you. Prepare for it. But remember that doesn’t mean they’re a bigger success than you, because they might have mortgaged their house to get that art and the booth space. Or they have some way to get stuff for free that you don’t, like they are a graphic artist or something. On the flip side, at a play con you might just have a table with one pull-up banner at the most. Some times even Trade Cons have strict rules about what you can and can’t have as trade dress in these kind of areas. This means you can be on a much more level footing. You and Hasbro are just the same package: a guy with handouts. Maybe you have sweets as well. But that’s a cheaper set up.

Now, in some cases you cannot sell games if you’re demoing, but this is more the case in Trade Cons. Because people have paid a premium to get booth space, you can’t get to demo or playtest in the design area and still make sales. Meanwhile, at a play con, you can probably sell anywhere you like, right there at the demo table even. They don’t even have to stand up and go over to your stall. Likewise trade cons might have rules about having people in the game library or freeplay area doing demos of your stuff, but there are ways to turn a trade con into a play con. Usually at trade cons I have volunteers running the hell out of my games in the RPG area, while I run the booth on the trade floor. That way I’m getting both types of customers.

Which brings us to another vector about cons: who are the customers? Again the kind of con will determine that. If they are aiming wide, they might get a lot of people who aren’t in your demographic which means even if there’s ten times the number of people walking past, you might be getting one tenth of the sales than at other cons. On the other hand, the ratio might indeed be more in your favour – it is okay if you get lower interest rates at cons crammed with people – and if your game is widely appealing you might desperately want access to less traditional markets. Likewise people in your demographic shop in different ways. A smaller con focused on play is full of people who might not be super-motivated to buy and in no mood to browse. But they might be in a huge mood to TEST, and they also have less things crying out to be spent on. How long do they come for? Play cons often run well into the night which means they have more time to sit down and try things. Big trade cons tend to sell a lot of one day tickets and offer too much stuff. Some cons really focus on families and kids run out of steam fast. Others focus on teens who have no budget.

And all of this then intersects with what kind of game you have. Is it long or short? Easy to teach or hard to pick up? What is the play count? Is it loud or soft? Does it attract attention when played and thrive under a crowd? Or does it find its best moments when in a quiet spot? Any of these games can go to any convention but it depends on how you present things. Blood on the Clocktower has been a huge financial success and never, ever had a booth at any convention I saw them at. Instead they focused on finding a quiet space to play for significant time periods, in organized games, because that is where that game thrives so much. They found a way to do that at every con they went to. When I designed Relics, it was much the same, it needed to be run for 2+ hours in the RPG area, but I also found ways that I could get into the demo/designer space and show Relics to folks walking buy. That rarely, if ever led to sales. So I went away and designed The Score, which takes literally ten minutes to play and is dead easy to learn and looks great on the table. That’s my “booth” game. Now it suits some booths more than others – it doesn’t sell itself on the art and heft alone. It works best IF I can get the demo, where I have a high conversion rate to sales. So it’s a game I want to have in a space people are walking slowly, and might spend five or ten minutes. So I probably wouldn’t try to sell it, as is, at a PAX booth. Relics looks mighty and chunky and that helps, but if I wanted to sell it, I would need my whole booth to look super DARK AND GOTHIC with black curtains and massive mockups of the tarot cards and maybe sell t-shirts and jewelry as well. Relics does sell okay in a demo, but at a Trade Con the people coming to play RPGs aren’t making a lot of sales, but those demo games lead to a good impression that often creates a sale LATER. If I was however selling it at a booth I would lean into its aesthetics and it would be about pulling walkers-by with the whole VIBE. of the game. Different cons require different strategies/games; and so do different areas at the con.

Know the con, know the space you’re in and the style of presentation that drives, and thus you’ll know what kind of customers you will get, and what kind of game to bring. Then and only then can you start to figure out the conversion rate of walkers-by to hearing-the-spiel, from spiel to demo and demo/spiel to sale. I do not know how to measure this very well for my own games, so I certainly cannot tell you what your metrics will look like for your games.

What I can say is having been taking product to conventions since 2017, we find it is the best money return on advertisement spent, because people at conventions are there to look at things you are showing them, and because nothing beats the personal touch. Sales ultimately is about building a relationship of trust with the customer. You are not there to lie to them or pressure them or confuse them or get them to buy something they don’t want. You are there to say “this is a thing that is cool and it might be your next favourite thing – and you can trust me that it does everything I say it does”. Everyone gets that they need to present their product as being interesting and cool and fulfilling a need but people often forget the last part of the pitch, that part about establishing trust. And this is best done in person but also? It is best done over time. The people who go to conventions tend to go back, and year after year, your sales continue to work on them. There is an old sales rule that people need seven “touches” – seven encounters of the product or its message before they become ready to consider a sale. Each of those touches is a reassurance to them that you are reliable and dependable, even if it’s just an illusion created by seeing the same advertisement over and over. You can get that effect by being at a convention over and over again, giving of yourself, giving away free stuff and prizes, running demos, contributing to the success of the event and to the happiness of people who pass by.

Which is the other thing about conventions: you’ll probably never make your money back on sales on the day. You might not even on sales down the road. But sales down the road are hard to know where they come from. For me though, they seem to come the most from conventions. Two, three, four years later, I’ll hear “oh we played that a few years ago and now we remembered to get it”. And for me, while I love a sale, I also love being remembered. It’s one thing to have someone enjoy your game, a huge thing for them to turn that into a sale, but to also have people remember you from years and years ago? To come back to see you again? That means you made an impression. Maybe even a subconscious one – buried until they see you again. That’s why I go to cons, I suppose: to turn playing my games into a sweet muscle memory for the players.

Review: Aristocracy

They say there are two types of RPGs: large ones full of options but aren’t really about anything and need you to give them meaning and narrow ones that are really focused on being about one thing the author wants you to play so you only tend to use them once or twice. Generic, setting-agnostic RPGs are the former but even more so. It’s hard – maybe impossible – for them to be about anything without risking their chief goals of being widely applicable and infinitely flexible. It’s hard for them to even be interesting since they’re designed to be so neutral and even formulaic at times. A handy tool to do anything you want has trouble standing out – and outside of the granddaddy GURPS, has trouble selling too. Aristocracy, by Kylan Day, promises “broadsheets” that will provide setting hooks, although none have been announced yet. Also not yet visible is why the game is called Aristocracy. Maybe the plan is to be at the top of a list of RPGs, but then you’d want to be Aardvarks At Home: A Cutecore PAstoral Game of Insecure Insectivores. But I digress.

Actually, no, while I’m here, setting agnostic would mean we don’t know if we have a setting or not. It should be setting absent. But anyway.

Aristocracy works hard to stand out at least visually. For a first game, the layout is slick and attention grabbing with a good use of colour, which helps somewhat with all the page flipping needed. The art is dynamic, colourful and occasionally dazzling but again suffers from being a wide range of styles and genres like the game. To truly catch any attention, however, a universal RPG needs a strong core mechanic that’s simple but powerful. Aristocracy delivers here. Almost everything in the game is a skill roll, and skills are either untrained (d6), trained (d8) or  focussed (d12). A 6 or a 7 is a success, an 8+ is a crit. You always roll five dice, so if you have no points in something it’s just 5d6 (which gives you a 60% chance of success, if you want the maths). You’ve got three main ways of messing with your dice – rerolling as many as you want, nudging a die up by one (but not off a 1, which is a botch), or upgrading a dice up a level from a botch to failure to success to a crit. You can also downgrade the other way. This allows for powers to provide three levels of dice control, but I do wonder if it’s hard to tell the difference. A reroll could at times be way more beneficial than an upshift, mathematically, and they all kind of feel the same? It would have been simpler to just give out one or bumps, say. Especially when we learn that some powers give bumps, some rerolls and some shifts, and there is no rhyme or reason which happens when. Worse, there’s no symmetry: good attribute give re-rolls, weak attributes give downshifts. Also, as clever as the dice pool system is, it’s not intuitive.Is 1/0/4 better than 0/3/2? By how much? What about 2/1/2 vs 1/4/0?

Speaking of attributes they are (sitting beside fifteen fairly standard skills) Brawn, Intelligence, Reflexes, Style, Perception are joined by Influence. This gives us a new kind of duality – we got dummy thic and twink as usual in Brawn/Reflexes, Book Smart and Street Smart in Intelligence/Perception and now we also add a Vader/Tarkin split in who got the swagger versus who pays the bills. It’s perhaps only moments of individuality like this that can set a universal RPG apart somewhat, and its a sign of the dedication behind Aristocracy that it has these touches of flair.

 Another touch of flair is the mechanic where one character each session is the Lynchpin, which means the story is all about them. This is typically combined with the powers that let you alter the story or scene in your favour; by keeping this big showy things to just one person you ensure that the hacker bricking the nemesis’ laptop doesn’t happen at the same time the seductress declares they are secretly in love with them. It doesn’t play a huge part in the game as a whole but it helps communicate an important piece of information to the players (this bit is about Doug’s character) in a sly, unintrusive fashion. I wish it did do a bit more, however – it would be nice to see this have more mechanical weight to bring home what the game is about. 

Skills and Attributes are also modified by Abilities, which are the Kewl Powers of the game and like the other two things, are doled out by choosing an Origin, a Species and two Careers, but before we get to those we have to learn about tracks.

Everything is tracks nowadays – what used to be clocks, and before that what we called hit points.In this case, there are bad tracks aka Danger Tracks, counting losses in health, wealth or willpower and good ones aka Progress Tracks which are like “did I find the lost tomb I’m looking for” or “are me and Mateo bros yet”. If you do an action that adds to a track, then at the end of the action you roll a d12 –  roll equal or under the number of ticks on the track and you take pain equal to how many ticks you have, and then drop it back down a ways. Otherwise you keep ticking things off. This creates a very interesting dynamic where if you keep doing dangerous things it might cause you a small injury but it will absolutely assuredly cripple you if it doesn’t do that. Likewise you are generally like to pour damage onto someone until they explode…but there’s some good odds that before then, they’ll take a major injury and get reset back. That’s interesting. I guess it could get weird if you take a whole bunch of tiny near-misses and then when you get one more punch you all of a sudden collapse like a deflating wind dancer, but any loss in “realism” is balanced by being dramatically and numerically interesting. 

Since everything is about successes along a track – and I mean EVERYTHING – success level always matters as a measure of volume. It’s not “oh four successes so you did quite well quite well”, because everything is a twelve-space track, so four is always a concrete number 30% better than three. And that makes all those Rerolls and Bumps and Upshifts potentially quite important. Every roll can be a negotiation with stats and math, and this makes “combat” full of choice and exciting. 

I say “combat” with the inverted commas because combat is any activity that’s trying to make a Danger Track go up. or a Progress Track go down. Likewise, a Weapon is something that does the former and a Tool is something that does the latter, and here is where we get into one of the major problems with Aristocracy: jargon. Weapons are Weapons in italics for unclear reasons and an attack that uses a weapon means an actin is WEAPONISED (which I think is in all-caps because it’s a trait?). That’s fairly straight forward but everything has a tag like this and things start snowballing out of control.

For example, let’s say your group wants to hire a pilot to fly you into a volcano, but the pilot is being a jerk so your character decides they want to leave the group, go off screen and come back with a suitcase full of money and just buy the whole fricking airline. That’s either a Dangerous Combat Action which adds I guess to a Get To The Volcano Travel track, with any Danger being added to the Wealth track, unless it isn’t Dangerous at all, or maybe there isn’t a track. Alternatively, since it’s off screen, perhaps its a Downtime Action which only occurs during Downtime. In either case it might require an Extended check, because you may be doing several things. But it may not require Extended Downtime, it depends how many Downtime Actions it requires. A Downtime Action is usually just one skill roll, but what you can actually do depends on if it is a Short, Standard or Extended Downtime, and that’s a GM call. An Extended check can still happen in Standard Downtime. Now this is me trying to acquire Progress so I’m attacking my Resources Track, and I’m using a Tool to do so (I’ve got a Tool called Mommy’s Credit Card). And if you use a Tool to attack a a Progress track you do double damage, but because I’m trying to get a Big Pay Day, the Extended test acts like it has UNNATURAL ARMOUR. Okay, so let me just check what the ARMOUR ability is…(flip flip flip) and if it is UNNATURAL …okay it means all damage is reduced by 3. Is this before or after I double the damage? (flip flip flip) Not sure. Doesn’t say. And if I succeed, I get a Hoard. (flip flip flip, check index, flip flip flip, oh here it is) A Hoard is a kind of Loot that is ONE USE and can wipe out Wealth Damage or allow you to Acquire Equipment that is Rare at reduced costs. (Flip flip flip) Okay so Rare items can only normally be achieved with a Side Quest, which it turns out is just a regular Acquire Equipment roll, except it is now Extended, and can have multiple characters roll on it, so now we set up a new Progress Track towards Buying The Entire Goddamn Airline, but the Hoard “reduces the cost”, but like, how? Does the reduced cost mean it just wipes out Wealth Damage which is what it already said it did anyway? Or does it just let us roll on the track to begin with? Or does it count as a Tool? Or does it let us do it at as a non-extended task? Is the Side Quest now still Armoured, given my Hoard? Is a small fleet of planes even Rare to being with? Ask the GM. No, look at his eyes. He’s frightened. Luckily he can turn to the equipment chapter (flip flip flip) where the modern day section might indicate what makes something Rare. No dice. It doesn’t list air vehicles at all. Hang on, what if instead of getting the money first I just do a Side Quest to get the airline? Airlines aren’t listed as Rare. Let’s say one helicopter. Still no air vehicles, but we could use a Van and grant it Alternate Movement? Does that change its rarity (flip flip flip)? 

It’s nice that all of this is genericised so I can reskin any item at all into a Tool that grants Progress, or even has Precision that cuts through Armour. That’s actually kind of fun, to imagine like okay, Precision removes Armour and big Pay Days are Armoured, so this person has some power that means his Side Quest heists are easy even when the Pay Days are big – so that Precise Tool might be “A Guy on the Inside”.. If I add three levels of Range to a Brutal Willpower attack, I can make anyone I can see anywhere surrender, even if they cannot see me, a power I call “Hey You Down There, Shut Up”. But if I’m reading through all the cool powers I get as a Fixer and I find out I can choose Resistance (Health) or Inspiration (Hazards) I wish it would just tell me what those things actually are. Resistance in this case means you can change any kind of damage into the brackets type, so my Fixer can turn financial damage into getting beat up. Or willpower damage into getting beat up. That’s actually a fun noir power – nobody can intimidate you, damage your finances or even run down your good name, it always just ends up being a boot to the face. Okay, so what’s Inspiration? Inspiration means I can grant allies a bump, but only during Hazards. What’s a hazard again? (Flip flip flip)

Don’t get me wrong, I think if you have intimate knowledge of this system, you can remember a lot of this. I think the designer could solve the airline problem in a second. But he doesn’t come with the book. 

The other benefit of everything being generic is that you can keep some lists short. You don’t need two abilities, one for financial issues and one for physical issues: if it’s hard to wear down it’s armour, if you can get through defences,it’s Piercing.But  If my raconteur gains Brutal in social situations, then all of a sudden this helpful jargon becomes vague again. Can I add it to attacks? Can I attack Travel tracks with that, even if it’s just me an my mechanic having a chat? Is it a tool or a weapon? Can it be both? And I have to remember that Brutal means more damage, instead of just reading in the stat definition – it doesn’t just say in the power “In X situations, add Y to Z”. And it’s not unified – some power ups give bumps, others rerolls, others flat bonuses. And some things on this list very specific, like Invisible, instead of some kind of Hard to Target power that slowly gets better. There’s also the ability to Portal into other dimensions which isn’t called something more abstract like Long Distance Travel (which should allow Travel tracks to…I guess cover more distance? Add Brutal?). Why is the first level of Invulnerable just being resistant to damage instead of actual invulnerability? Somethings use the jargon, some don’t, and some mix and match. 

And worse: sometimes things have the wrong names, aren’t called what you think they are or aren’t explained where you think they should be. A skill will be called an occupation, characteristics will get Expert instead of Enhanced or vice versa, new skills pop up without definition, and so on. 

I’m not looking for these problems. Making my first character, I decided to create a sci-fi concept which was “what if the alien from Alien was built to attack financial tracks instead of health tracks – the perfect thieving oranism.” My genetic perfection meant I always had an Accurate Tool appropriate to a task (any task? What’s a task?) but it can also be a Weapon, whereupon it counts as Brutal and Deadly. This means that if I’m using a Tool to move a thieving progress along, I have Accurate to those attacks (except it’s not an attack?) meaning I can reroll my dice, and the Tool allows me to do double “damage” to my progress. But if I attack someone’s Wealth, I do quadruple damage (because Brutal is x2, plus x2 for the Weapon) and my crits do extra damage (because of Deadly). But here is the question: when am I attacking someone’s wealth vs progressing thievery towards a goal? Or can I use it on any task related to this general area? Also, does my Poor Eyesight affect the roll, if we never said it was work that needed my eyes? I have no idea. I feel like I might be arguing with my GM a lot about both questions. I feel like my GM would be really sick of this. 

So we have a system that is hard to learn, hard to remember and hard to translate into meaning, scattered across the book in pieces, and all of which are drowning in jargon you need to look up elsewhere, which is sometimes inconsistent, unspecified or unclear, and that wants to be absolutely purely abstract but also constantly relies on “the description” added by the player or the GM to know when and where and how it works..On the other hand, the intent to keep things unified is achieved. When I rolled that one of my Careers was a Summoner, I groaned because hoo boy I did not want to learn more of these rules, but the assistants rules were no longer than anybody else’s – they’re just a kind of tool. Theoretically, in this system, a spyglass and a scouting robot would work exactly the same way, and that’s fine. It was actually more complicated figuring out what a Winning Smile does – I gain Rapid Piercing Weapon to make WIllpower attacks, which means my smile ignores WIllpower Armour and that defensive actions are downshiffed against them. I can imagine what Willpower Armour might look like – the person might not like me to begin with or be on the lookout for a scam. On the other hand, they could have Willpower Absorb, or WIllpower Invulnerable, or Willpower Resistance, in which case, my Piercing is useless. Will the GM choose to give my enemies Willpower Resistance? I think he will. 

And what, exactly, are defensive actions? I do not know. It is never defined. Combat is “always a contested roll” which seems to suggest that you are both attacking at once. Or both defending. And how do you defend against a smile? What Skill do I roll for that? 

That was fifteen hundred words of negativity, which is a lot. But I want to be clear why I’m struggling with the game, because it has a lot of power and passion behind it, and a lot of good writing. But every time I find something I like, I find the good Lord taketh away the next moment. The three kinds of Templates you snap together to make a character – Origin, Species and Careers – are full of really evocative entries that you just don’t see elsewhere. Careers include things like Merchant Princes, World Breakers, Sorcerers and Shadows…but then things get confused when we also have Chirugeon sitting next to Hacker on the same list. Yes, it says not to use Hackers in medieval games, but that information isn’t on the table I chose it from. Species includes “Protagonist” alongside obvious cyberpunk things like Drone, Rebuild, Geneforged and Uplift – if we’re all playing modern day cops, do we all just pick Protagonist? Origin includes Socialite but no clear reason why it’s different to Fixer, or how Criminal is different to Scoundrel. Yes you can grow up On the Streets or Rich and still end up a Scoundrel, but who is born a Pilot? Why is that an Origin? 

Combat also has some great stuff. Whenever you add to someone’s Damage track you roll to confirm that advance. If someone has taken three points of damage out of twelve, you need to roll a 1 2 3 to turn that into a minor effect. If someone has taken 10 points of damage you’ll convert that to a critical effect 84% of the time. So as mentioned you will rarely deal minor attacks and almost always convert to bone crunching owies. And it’s great that chapter four is full of whole bunches of options for these kinds of effects for players to choose from. Except it probably is going to slow down play to pass the book around every time a hit is confirmed. And some of them have tags that aren’t explained, and some require GM calls (I can do a coup de gras only if the target is prone but no effect causes prone as written. How do I make someone prone? Can I just say they are prone? Is it harder to hit them if I want to do that? How would I or the GM make this rule up on the fly?). 

Some of the tracks are great, especially when you realize there are lots of powers that you can activate by throwing damage on those. Got the Enemeis track? Then you can get Bumps or rerolls by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs or just pissing people off. But it’s sort of misnamed because Health and Wealth and Willpower are positive things, and I guess this is a Lack of Enemies that is being whittled away? Maybe it should be called People’s Tolerance for Your Bullshit. Secrets is another great one. I desperately need to make a character who gets buckets of powerups by running their mouth off when they shouldn’t, but has some amazing healing power to stop it coming back to hurt them (Restoration (Secrets)).. And I love that this can happen just by rolling 1s on your die rolls, when doing a Dangerous action – as in you don’t know when you’ll slip up and make a mistake. Now, which actions are Dangerous? I can’t remember. (Flip flip flip)

I think it’s exciting to have all these wonderful narrative realms to attack, damage and confirm wounds upon. It does mean you have to speak of everything in the abstract instead of the specific but it allows you to model anything you want with the same rules. And it’s exciting to have a system that has all that flexibility about what might be an attack, damage and health but comes complete with crunchy modifiers like Brutal, Accurate and Deadly. I do think games like GYRO and Cortex and Fate do some of the same kind of things with more elegance and approachability and are much easier to read – but I don’t think I’ve seen anything do it with this much interesting mechanical structure. It reminds me, more than anything, of DnD 4e, where everything could be reskinned as an attack somehow. But it doesn’t actually have the satisfaction of interesting tactical combat. 

But as I say, making this interesting abstract shopping list of powers apply to everything is conceptually fun and open to great builds. Having defined powers like Burst, Rapid, and Piercing means I can make every piece of equipment and every super power feel different in different ways – and I can apply that to every thing, every where. It’s like being a gunbunny in Shadowrun except the mods work for your charisma too, or your rugged individualism or your ability to walk a long way in the rainI can give my evil banker Burst financial attacks because he can attack lots of people at once. I can give an incisive reporter Piercing attacks against Secrets. I can protect myself against the wiles of saucy enemy agents by strapping on a device that gives me Armour and Defensive against romance attacks, while my nemesis, Captain Dick Longfellow, has supernaturally enhanced Style, and a Natural Weapon that is Deadly against Morality trackers. And now, finally, I can remember what all of that means – but I will forget, and have to look the damn things up again. Or get into an argument with the GM about how if I fire enough arrows it counts as a Burst not a Rapid attack, and all the king’s guards were absolutely close enough for it to count because Burst doesn’t define HOW near to each other enemies have to be.

Some of this is because of the nature of this book: a universal roleplaying game is not really a game at all, but a toolkit from which to construct an RPG, from which one then constructs a game. This is a resource of lots of rules to use to construct those RPGs. I think what would help the game would be a narrower focus. The design could pick exactly the right list of Origins, Species, Careers, plus tracks and Abilities that work for that setting, and simultarneously strip away much of the generalities, ambiguities and diversions. It would figure out exactly which tracks matter and how much crunch those tracks need and save space by cutting out every possible modulation and variation, and then maybe allowing them not to constantly be referred to with jargon. If it finally picked a cyberpunk setting, we could rob people for money instead of wealth units. And maybe see some more pregenerated characters so the skill system makes sense, or making our own can be smoother. These are in the works, so we will see where the game is in six months.

Until such products come along, I cannot recommend Aristocracy. It is certainly not more than the sum of its parts. However, it is a collection of some clever parts. The dice system is interesting, allowing lots of fiddling without ever rolling more than five dice. The idea of tempering every possible confrontation through the same mechanics and building modifying tags that work for any kind of battlefield is clever, and shows a confident design hand. The use of language in delineating the templates is deft and vivacious. At times, the reach has been audacious, even if some of the execution roughhewn. So while I don’t like the game as it is, I find myself hungry for the next thing to come. That’s worth something. 

How much you like this game depends on how much work you are prepared to do getting across all that style, terminology and complexity, and then tailoring it to the setting and game you want to play, and the game is not super helpful at guiding you through either of those steps. But maybe you like things a little rough. That’s between you and Captain Longfellow.

20 More Modes For The Score

The basic rules of The Score tell you to set up the cards like this: 4/3/3/2/2. That means Act One, when the crew are on track with their early assault, has four cards in it. Then Act Two, when there’s a terrible hitch in the plan has three. But maybe it’s all okay in Act Three, when another three cards fall. Or is it? Things are hanging in the balance! Two cards come out in Act Four when things go awry and then finally it all comes to a head with the last two cards in Act 5.

In early drafts of the game, we actually had the Act cards placed semi-randomly. First we shuffled them into the quarters of the deck, then we just tried slotting them in randomly. Honestly it can be really fun when you have no idea how long an act can be. But we figured out through hundreds of tests that it was better to tightly control the first experience of the game, especially for people who were a bit shy or confused. The 4/3/3/2/2 builds tempo, so that just as the players get familiar with the rules, the game can start increasing the beat. They are having more fun going with the flow right when things start swinging the most back and forth.

The rules say to use the standard set up, for your first few games, and then go random. But then we got to thinking – what if we made a list of other possible structures? You COULD just do it random, but you could also set up a structure however you want. Here’s another 20 options you can try, and what kind of heists they might produce!

Don’t tell Tom Cruise he has a fat middle, but a lot of the MI films do and it’s what makes them great.

• 4/2/4/2/2- Long Plans, Short Trouble 
  This option keeps the two set-ups nice and long, so people can slowly maneouvre things into place, and the hiccups looks nice and intentional because they’re very short. This is a great way to play for players who like it to be mostly smooth.
  
• 3/3/3/3/2 – Keep it Smooth
  This is the most uniform way to lay things out. This gives the thing a nice feeling of symmetry.
  
• 3/2/3/3/3 – Smooth with a Longer End
  A close friend of the above, and it helps people get back on track quicker after a small blip downwards. Keeping Act Two short can be vital to appearing competent. And when Act Four hits hard, you have more time to turn it around and look good.
  
• 3/3/2/3/3 – Short Recovery
  You can make the whole middle section seem like a torrent of disasters with only small relief if you shrink down your Act 3. This changes the feel from experts with a perfect plan to desperate action heroes taking lots of hits and adapting on the fly – and gives them enough time to bring it back home at the end.
  
• 4/2/3/2/3 – Shorter Trouble
  You can fix the feeling of being under the hammer by making sure your two trouble Acts are nice and short!
  
• 4/2/3/3/2 – Drama At the Turn
  This one puts more emphasis on the late second act (act with a lower case a here), with the film having much of its highs and lows in the build towards the climax.
  
• 4/2/2/3/3 – Drama After the Turn
  If the climax is what matters, put more weight there. This is often how Hollywood structures things – a big opening piece with cool dudes and exposition, then a little back and forth, and then the set pieces.
  
• 4/3/2/2/3 – Drama Before And After the Turn
  This is where you want big set up, and a big punch at the end, and just a little bit in between, but you can go one step further and get to…
  
• 4/2/2/2/4 – Swift Reversals In the Middle
  They say that what really makes a movie good are the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes, so put the punch all there!
  
• 4/4/2/2/2 Swift Reversals At the End
  This sets up the crew as bad-assess, throws them off the deep end hard, and then uses rapid fire to bring it home. The long Act 2 makes them seem in a lot of trouble, but the short Act 4 means they come out firing.
  
• 2/2/2/4/4 – Swift Reversals At the Start
  This has a really nice tempo where the early scenes are trading blows back and forth and everything is going well. Then the long dark night of the soul sets in when everything appears to be going wrong, just before the heroes get back up and fight back. Short early acts can be hard for new players who like to build slowly, but boy it can pay off.
  
• 3/3/4/2/2 – The Fatter Middle
  This lets us see the crew somewhat then do a bigger heist plan and attack in the middle. The risk of the fatter middle though is the cards you don’t have make less sense in Act 3 sometimes, as it’s not usually the part in the movie where they explain what they can’t do. Instead you’ll want to talk about how this was easier that one time in Katmandu when we had a Forger. Where is Eve now anyway?
  
• 3/2/4/2/3 – Fat Middle, Short Trouble
  Much like its friend above, but things don’t go nearly so bad.
  
• 2/3/4/3/2 – Fat Middle, Long Trouble (aka the William Shakespeare)
  Your classic Shakespeare play puts all the the key action right smack bang in the centre. This means your denouement can be tricky though, because you have only two cards to get out of three bad ones. But you know – it could be a tragedy, as well as a heist.
  
• 3/4/3/2/2 – Everything Went Wrong
  Again a long Act 2 puts them on the back foot against a tough enemy much like the 4/4/2/2/2 but now they have 7 with 5 good ones cards to kick ass and get revenge instead of 6 with 4.
  
• 2/4/3/2/3 – It Was a Trap
  Just like above but things go wrong so fast because it was a trap.
  
• 2/2/4/3/3 – Reverse Fat Middle
  It was a trap, but we KNEW it was a trap, and we were ready.
  
• 2/2/3/3/4 – Rising Action
  The classic form of the novel and often the streaming TV series is for the stakes to rise and rise and rise to an explosive finale. It can take some skill to handle a long Act 5, because heists often are like a magic trick with an effortless “prestige” moment that happens two quickly to think about it. If you can handle it though, this tends to produce big fun and a big body count as Act 5 plays for keeps.
  
• 3/2/3/2/4 – Rising Action, Short Trouble
  Same basic structure with a Fat Act 5, but less bad stuff.
  
• 2/3/2/3/4 – Rising Action, Long Trouble
  That sounds like an amazing title for a Hong Kong Action Movie. Or maybe for the two characters in said movie. She’s Rising Action. He’s Long Trouble! They fight crime!

Note that none of these have Acts as short as 1 card or as long as 5. These 20 are just from playing around with the 2s 3s and 4s. Once you open up even shorter or longer options, your heists can be anything you want (especially when you also start changing the total card count!). One early playtest had a seven cart Act 4 that left us falling off a building into oncoming traffic and waking up handcuffed in hospital, beaten and bloody. But then the last card was an Act 5 Deep Cover: it was all an act so our friend who was infiltrating the security team of the bad guy could prove he could catch even the most dedicated heist crew. And now he had proven that, our real heist could begin…

What Makes a Good Roleplayer? Duty, Honour, Glory, Verve

Back in 2002 I met an amazing game designer whose name escapes me, because I only remember his online handle. He was working on a game I’ve still never really seen anything like: a game of competitive storytelling. And look if you know or remember the game, do chime in. Players took on the role of great legendary figures facing terrible crises and would compete in describing how their figure would solve such a thing, and then the facilitating player would literally mark the players for how good their story was.

Now, generally, in games of shared storytelling we’re not here to make it an issue of quality because we’re trying to encourage wild creativity, radical acceptance and strong buy in, so as to create the best shared experiences. But having set up that this was an actual competition, the game was kind of amazing. A bunch of really talented story tellers trying to outdo each other produces incredible effects. But what I also never forgot was that the game had criteria. Of course it did: it wouldn’t be fair to just leave everything up a judge to use their personal opinions. Players deserve to know how they are being judged. The four primary criteria in the game were as follows:

• Tradition, which was about embodying who your legend/god was and their vibe
• Honour, which was about making sure that you showed respect to how big the problem was, not punking it out like it didn’t matter
• Glory, which was being crazy awesome in how you defeated it
• Verve, which was a placeholder for good writing and presentation, but also engagement and intensity.

These are excellent criteria for what makes good roleplaying too.

Much has been written on what makes good improv, of course. I cannot attempt to add to that discourse; I don’t know enough and there are very good books about it. From my brief improv training, finding your voice, trusting it and listening to it, and following others with full buy in were the two things I remember being taught. There wasn’t really a way to evaluate how good the dramatic material the improv was producing though. And again, some might argue there should not be such a thing. RPGs, unlike the game described above, aren’t competitive. And yet, don’t we all want to do them better? And if so, shouldn’t we measure not just enthusiasm, honesty, engagement, collaboration…but also how good our words and stories are? And try to make those things better? If so, then criteria is going to be vital.

I have a fearsome supervillain in my supers world called Yes Andrew who encourages your darkest impulses

Of course, Tradition and Honour overlap a lot with what makes quality improv. I renamed Tradition into Duty because Tradition felt a little bit too much about mythology. The Duty is to the setting, to the character you built and the characters of those around you. You want to not just treat them as real but also that they are consistent. You want the choices the other players have made to matter and leave an impact on the world, so it is your Duty to acknowledge them and be effected by them. That is something you’ll find discussed in improv skills, yes. If someone mimes a car, you can’t just mime riding a horse inside the car. Or walking next to it at walking pace. You kill their established truth. So I’m not really making new ground there.

Honour is also similar. Although good scenes can be built around status reversals and games of hierarchy – classic improv tools – improv also is about recognizing that you can’t just imagine the machine gun to kill the imaginary serial killer. That’s not interesting. Glory I think does come up in improv as well, although I’m not sure it’s quite expressed like that. The idea is the counterpart to Honour: you can’t just imagine a machine gun but you can also imagine anything you want. The right answer is the answer within you, and like any artist the key is listening to yourself and letting it out, as big as you need to be. Some players of course always try to go too big, but a lot of others need help. I built Relics around the idea that you really can be as powerful as a God and run the universe if you want to, and I’ve been interested to see how many folks are reluctant to let loose both on the small scale of their abilities and the large scale of accepting responsibility. We actually expect RPG rules, most of the time, to tell us “no”. That’s what they’ve done for so long, on the assumption that if they didn’t, we’d just go straight to imagining the machine gun. We’re also told not to throw the campaign off. To be so into following tropes we follow the predicted pathway. And that means we have to unlearn the tendency to think small. Being allowed to do things. Which is part of that improv teaching of not feeling judged or constricted by the wrong answer.

And even Verve is part of improv as well, because part of learning improv too, because you learn about how to act, how to impart real meaning and strength behind every action and syllable, how acting is about broadcasting energy, as well as understanding how to use body language and space work to communicate the imagined reality. If you’re using your words to describe things then you do also need verve, and you need to understand that’s got nothing to do with being long-winded or over dramatic.

So I get no points for just rebranding good improv rules. Maybe half a point for expressing things in a way that don’t just feel like improv rules, because these are both good rules for writing as well. Things that your buddy who wouldn’t even think of calling RPGs improv might consider. In writing have a duty to your readers to keep things consistent and treat your art like it matters and the world as if it is real, and you have to honour the conflicts you create and not just flick a switch and solve everything. Bad things have to happen to innocent people in stories, and as much as that’s your fault, it is also your responsibility.

Which brings us, sideways, to that ongoing question of what are we doing when we roleplay? Some are absolutely not intent in making a story, except by accidental by-product; and many who create a story are doing it to live through it, not perform it. And yet, we are saying things that exist in a fictional world. We must therefore work within that sense. We can – and should! – follow the rules, and even consider them the first and most important thing. But we also know, even though it’s not really written down in any part of the rules of DnD, that if the GM says there’s a dragon in front of us, we have to act as if the dragon is there. So we are telling a story, or at least building one. We can’t get away from the fictional nature of it all. Some people prefer story-maker to story-teller. That can take the pressure off. And yet, unless this is purely solo, and even then, the story is being expressed somehow. As we think about the elements, we imagine what they might look like, sound like, feel like – that is communication, that is taking the story and giving it a sense of itself. That is telling the story. So I think it is fair to always bring these elements forward.

As I say, no real points for the new nomenclature (and it’s a very masculine, ancient Rome kind of word choice, I know). But these four things are easy to remember. THAT might be useful. If you don’t have time to read a whole copy of Improv for Roleplayers, or need a quick handy guide, you’ve got these four principles to fall back on. Duty, Honour, Glory, Verve. We could add an mnemonic device, too, like Game Violence Doesn’t Hurt.

Anyway, these four pop up in lots of my games, explicitly or implicitly. Maybe they’ll help you with how you play or how you create games or guide players to doing cool stuff. That is always the goal – and that’s true whether you’re designing RPGs, facilitating them or playing them, your job most of the time is to help everyone be incredibly cool. Maybe these four things will help.

The Seasoned Gamer Challenge

I love learning new games. In fact, it might be my favourite thing about games. I think learning the rules is not just part of a game it is a kind of game in itself. One I’m great at and love. A big part of gaming is exploration and that’s what learning is: finding out what you can and can’t do, what you want and don’t want and how to get the former and avoid the latter, and seeing how the game communicates all of that and gives it meaning. It’s like diving into an ocean: a whole new world of physics to grapple with and levers to pull.

For the young people, this is Salt-n-Pepa, the world’s greatest rap trio. This is a pun on “seasoned.”

But I also like exploring games further. I may not be a gamer who plays something on BGA two hundred times in a week so I’m absolutely sure on the win to pay ratio of cards x and y. But exploration isn’t just the first dive in. Exploration is also the languid wanderings and deeper longer looks. The whimsical experiments down winding paths and the mistakes and getting lost. It’s a conversation with the rules, the designer, the art director, with yourself and with your players. It’s also a feature in your life. I remember the years we we played Warhammer and Shadowrun every week, that one afternoon where we played Settlers of Catan four times in a row, that period where we couldn’t wait to get Dominion back to the table with new people and new combos. I remember the year we got Pandemic and cards like One Quiet Night and Airlift became part of our language and thought processes, shorthand for good things we craved and things we felt in our blood and bones when they arrived. Likewise we played Arkham Horror so much we had our own in-jokes and barely had to think about our opening moves. We built up our own mythologies about how hard it was to get a job on the newspaper and why the Woods were so dangerous

And meanwhile I don’t remember the day at a con when I played six new games.

We all have too many games. We know this. It’s why terms like Shelf of Shame exist and why someone invented the 10×10 challenge (aiming to play 10 games 10 times each in a year). Both of those don’t address the core problem though: we’re BUYING too many games. No matter how much we try to keep playing, more games are coming in. I’m in a weekly gaming group now where we never play the same game twice. Why not? Because it’s unfair. Everyone has a shelf of shame ten feet high and wants their games to get to the table. We can’t circle back, it would be special treatment.

And here’s the real talk part: the fact that we buy so many games is bad for the hobby. It’s bad for design. Kickstarter and crowdfunding have been amazing for access and getting more games out, but it created more and more a trend where buying is more important than playing. Because with crowdfunding we can never try before we buy, and that means, inevitably, companies focus on what gets you to buy, not what gets you to keep playing. They know the average number of times a game is played is creeping closer and closer to 1 and might even be below 1 now. So they don’t need it to be good. Or different. Or robust. I’m not saying design is getting necessarily worse. But there is a lack of pressure on it to be better.

Meanwhile, the sheer volume and the need to appeal to the familiar means games are getting more homogenous. Since you aren’t going to play 100 games of your favourite trick taker, and find all its wonderful variations, you can play 100 different trick takers…but each one ends up feeling the same. I don’t mean variety for the sake of variety but every thing I play is starting to feel the same.

Or worse: just very middling and uninspired. Homogeneity means we keep reusing tools that work, but we’re not actually choosing the exact right tools, nor are we shaping them to fit. We’re just cutting things up and putting them back in, like a movie made only of cliches from other movies. This can get the job done but it’s not really good. And so so many games I find just leave me hollow. They are workable, but not great. Not quite finished or not quite playtested enough with enough different people. Mistakes haven’t been picked up. Rough edges aren’t smoothed off. Fiddliness not resolved into elegance.

I know some people won’t care, or think I’m an old man yelling at the cloud. In the same way I know most people don’t care about bad movies or bad books. They just want them to be there and take up space and maybe have a cute dragon in them. And that’s fine. But I do care. I care very much. And if nothing else, I think we should talk about it, which is what I hope this post encourages.

So here’s the challenge: I think every game worth its salt should be played at least fifty times to get the most out of it. I think I’d like to see the average for every game get up to fifty. But when I actually think about it, I’ve probably only played Ticket to Ride 20 times and that seems a lot. So let’s halve that. 25 times. Actually, you know what? Pandemic Legacy, if you won every chapter, was only 12 times and it was a masterpiece. So let’s say I want you to play every game you buy 12 times. Not every game in the world, mind you: JUST THE ONES YOU BUY.

And let’s assume you’re a seasoned gamer. This is something of a hobby for you. So we might assume you play games once a week. You might skip a week now and then, but you also might play two or three or four games on a night. Or a whole bunch at a convention. The average of one a week seems fair. So this means if you buy a game every three months, you can play it for twelve weeks then buy a new one. And therein lies the name of this challenge: you, the seasons gamer, can buy a game once per season.

Note you can PLAY as many games as you like. I don’t care what you play. But if you buy any games, you get four a year. One per season. Note this also doesn’t include free games, or games you borrow or games from a library. Only ones you pay money for. You get four of those a year. You get to decide if it counts when you back the kickstarter or when it arrives, but you only count those once. Also? If it comes from a charity shop it doesn’t count. Second hand purchase? You can count that as a half. And if you SELL a game on or give one away, it wipes out a purchase. If you donate it or put it in a street library, it can wipe out two! Because that’s stopping others from buying.

And I know, as a game publisher, I don’t want to be the one not encouraging sales. But I’m going to do it anyway. Maybe this is stupid of me. Maybe I’m missing the point. I’ll take criticism because it might just get this more talked about. Because I do think we’re just buying too much, and I think it’s bad for us, it’s bad for the industry and its bad for design. It’s probably not great for the environment either. It’s a consumerist mindset too, of valuing ownership over enjoyment. I think if we buy less we might actually share more. And believe me, I also know how much I want to be the nerd who owns the thing, so I can take it home and stroke it and feel special instead of having to look on from the sidelines. It is lovely to own things. But that turns this hobby into an endless game of consumership and oneupmanship, a game we can never ever win because there will always be another game that someone has and we don’t. We’re not just not playing our games, we’re robbing ourselves of every part of the joy. We’ve turned gaming as a hobby into nothing but collecting and owning, and then ripping the joy away from that as well because we can never really get enough.

Plus, it can be a whole different kind of lovely to open a game someone else has loved as well, with little notes on the scoresheets and bumps of love on the corners. Having fun with it then passing it back. and talking about how it went. The truth is games were never meant to be hung on the walls like art: they are meant to be like books, showing the wear and tear of hundreds of readers that came before, and will come after. And even if you do love having things to hold and admire, wouldn’t you rather curate that down to the very best? The most meaningful? The things that you really love?

So there it is: the Seasoned Gamer Challenge. Buy one game a season, and no more. If you set yourself this challenge this year, post about it. #seasonedgamerchallenge If you make it, or don’t, talk about that too. Talk about how buying things can end up running and ruining our lives. Because once we talk about this, we can figure out what to do about it.

Review: Daybreak

Much of the modern discourse about board games has finally, gloriously, arrived at the issues of meaningfulness, message and content. We’re starting to take it as read that games create a state of mind and habituate a communication of values, and those values can at the very least teach us insight and empathy and understanding of the world around us. For the most part, however, these discussions have been about things in the past or in potentia. Not that that this makes them less important to learn, just that they aren’t existing in a space where learning is the first stage to actually solving the problem. In this case, climate change has its hands around our throats and Daybreak, by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, with art by Mads Berg is a literal actual step in trying to losing that grip. Billions of lives are at stake, and here is a board game joining climate strikes, marches, gluing people to art work, blocking traffic, starting fires and being a Swedish teenager as things designed to get people to care.

Not that I expect Daybreak to strike a revolution like those other tactics, nor should it be judged for not trying to do so. There are many ways to eat an elephant, and movies and games are a softer way to spread awareness, anger and motivation. But like any political tactic, everyone is a critic. If you’ve dabbled in politics even a tiny bit you know that there is no stance that doesn’t make somebody on your own side enraged. If you over emphasise the threat of climate change you’re an irresponsible doomer, but if you take it too lightly you’re not emphasising the danger we’re in. Try to get people to take local action and you’ll be accused of letting the 1% off the hook. Try to target the rich and they’ll accuse you of trying to stop capitalism (too hard) instead of trying to save the planet. Point out that they’re nickel and diming you instead of just getting on board and they’ll accuse you of not caring about specifics or being blindly tribal. Criticise their methods and they’ll call you a traitor who is encouraging people to despair because they can’t see a united front. 

So far, Daybreak has mostly dodged these critiques, but not entirely. I’ve seen a few accusations that it is too optimistic. We also  have a new kind of political critique: online, the game is accused of being too easy. For the most part this is internet nerd nonsense from hobby gamers who are stuck in a bubble where John Company is just a little bit complicated, but it illustrates the stakes. The game needs to be simpler than average because it wants an enormously wide audience. It needs to be winnable because it is about creating hope. We are in a position where the game mechanics don’t have to just be good, they are rated on how well they might save billions of lives. This is unlike anything else in the history of board gaming. The only thing close is how much chess interacted with the Cold War. 

Expectations, to say the least, were high. Also because Matt Leacock designed Pandemic, which is not just one of the first and greatest cooperative games but also had enormously wide appeal and approachability to the general public and build a deserved empire on that bedrock of reliable relatable fun-puzzle combination. He also designed Pandemic Legacy which so established the high quality of legacy games it caused the first board game box office bomb when it outplayed its rival SeaFall straight into the bargain bin. Leacock famously used his computer game testing background to have hundreds of groups, some under constant video recording, running through the campaigns to identify every possible rough edge or pinch point. The man does not phone this in, and his legend deservedly precedes him. And full disclosure, Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy are two games that I swept me up into the full glory of what games could be and were life changing experiences for me, as well as for the industry, so that raises even more expectations. 

But the amazing thing is, there’s a sense when you look at Daybreak that every one of those expectations has been met. I may be biased since I believe in saving the earth and love Leacocks style, but this beautiful game really did understand the assignment.

For some, games are engineering puzzles and like with the automobile in the early 20th century some believe that as we move from the firehose era to the flood era, design is becoming standardised and perfected; old designs are now obsolete and it is now just about chassis . For these folks there is nothing innovative about Daybreak. I disagree on both counts but there are familiar sign posts here that work very well to walk you into the rhythm m. Each round the board gives you some indication of the troubles ahead; you then work hard to change the situation with your cards and actions and then the board punishes you. You can build shields against the punishment in three suits to hedge your bets but if you do that too much you won’t concentrate on bringing down your dirty fuel and emissions which is how you lose and win. On top of this familiar structure we have ways to decrease bad things and increase the cushion for the carbon using a hand management mechanic full of impossible but clever choices that reminds me of Mage Knight. Pandemic is a legend; adding a masterpiece seems like a win.

To get more specific each player has a board with five slots for card columns and showing their population, which is being provided with just enough fuel to stay alive, some of which is dirty, some clean. Below that are emissions tracked in types like industrial, car, agriculture and so on. At the end of the round carbon cubes equal to the amount of emissions and dirty fuel –  roughly twenty per player – will be added to the board. Then the trees and oceans will absorb what they can, roughly ten per player. Anything left is added to a goal thermometer tracking temperature rise, with every five cubes per player causing a 0.1 degree. If you do nothing you’ll be adding two bands a turn and hit 2 degrees rise in four turns – and lose. Your actions can remove dirty fuel, add clean fuel, remove emissions, add the aforementioned resilience and add trees and oceans to absorb more carbon. Meanwhile crises will take away resilience, pour on carbon, kill trees, choke oceans and also roll the climate dice which tracks the chaos of the planetary chaos of climate breakdown. 

And all of this is interconnected, running back into one conclusion: everything is about carbon. The strength of pandemic was always the multiuse cards creating a single resource yet one that entangled everything. The cards you needed to use to move around and build treatment centres were the very same cards you needed to cure diseases. A small step then to mage knight where now the cards can also be used to power up other cards. For example: in one of my five columns of cards I have two GRID symbols which means I can activate the front card which lets me discard any card to generate clean power equal to the number of grid cards. But the only card I have left to discard would let me convert into solar power. Putting that card on the top of the stack means I can get two clean power a turn without discarding a card, but I can only do it once per turn, per solar symbols I have in the column. If next turn I draw more solar symbols, I can slide them behind the solar power scheme and get ever more free green energy but if I instead get no solar cards and more grid symbols and more cards I can discard I might have lost vital momentum. 

A typical devil’s bargain in Daybreak: you need clean energy, but is it worth losing precious ecological resilience, due to the enormous pressure that giant dams put on the environment?

On the other hand, I only need so much clean energy anyway – each turn I must produce energy to match population growth. A few green energy a turn is easy to do. But if I suddenly gut my dirty energy I need vast amounts of green energy to make it up…but a turn or two later I might get a combo which puts me way ahead in green energy while also stopping my population growth. Now I have to pivot my nation away from the whole solar plan because once a problem is solved you must deal with the other spinning plates. On the other hand I could rapidly boost my population in order to embrace tiny net zero housing, reducing the city pollution emissions but driving up my need for energy. If you like tactical games where you most constantly change horses midstream, this is delightful. But it is also an amazing puzzle because sometimes you’re not quite out of the woods but you have another killer combo you need to start and it has to be in that column. Do you iterate one more time on the old plan or scrap the whole thing because we’re nearly there? Or leave two weak plans in place one more round hoping you can buff them both next turn?

The choices are agonising and never ever simple, because everything is interconnected. You could outlaw coal tomorrow but if you can’t meet fuel needs you’ll gain communities in crisis and too many of them makes you lose the game. But it might be worth it to remove all that dirty energy, if those folks in crisis can hold on just a little longer. But then you’re so busy burning combos on getting out of coal you might not build up your social resiliency and then you’re offered a chance to build up new forests but since those trees occupy farmland for poor people your social resiliency takes another hit. That’s fine if there’s storms and hurricanes but if eco fascists get elected or democracy is captured by capitalists, your communities fall apart. All of this means that m while you’re gaining momentum against the board with combos, you’re never safe until victory. Most coop games you can tell when you have so little momentum you cannot win, or so much you cannot fail; just as in Pandemic Leacock avoids that problem with everything on a knife edge.

Unlike Pandemic, however, you cannot plan much. To avoid quarterbacking, everyone is heads down over their own boards and you can only ever see one of the upcoming crises each round. Likewise because the six kinds of climate chaos are on a six sided die you have to trust in luck that the weather patterns break down before the ice caps melt. You can get screwed by unlucky rolls or a bunch of bad crisis draws. (I’ve also seen some say you can draw a bad hand of local projects but I’ve never seen it – a bad hand is more cards to discard into the engine.) The redeeming factor here is that – like every inch of this game – it is thematically perfect. We can’t see what’s coming, and the collapse is chaotic. It wouldn’t be fair to let us control those things because it wouldn’t be realistic.

But the bad luck can, every ten games or so, feel a wee bit frustrating. Cards with the Regulation tag are 23% of the deck and I needed just one to activate a project and couldn’t find one in drawing ten cards in a row, and that will happen about 8% of the time. But the game is short and a spot of bad luck can be ameliorated by turning to a friend having good luck, in true co-op spirit – but this is balanced out by higher player counts giving you more risk of one player having a weak point. It is a little isolated compared to talkier coops because trading cards is not a given, but you do get a strong sense of camaraderie. I assume this is why the board is bigger than it needs to be, since the map does nothing: so people have a talking point so they keep meeting each other’s eyes. And if you do get bad luck as mentioned, the game is short (under 90 minutes mostly) so it’s no crushing loss – you can just start again (I want to do that every time the game finishes). And because of the titanic nature of the task and the randomness of climate change, you don’t feel cheated – and you feel good about every inch of progress made. It always feels like you did something, and it always feels FAIR.

A perfectly sensible policy that we tried to do in Australia but the capitalist class took offence.

Once I got into a heated discussion on Twitter with a Dutch climate scientist who was criticising the movie Don’t Look Up because it was too “silly” in suggesting that people don’t think climate change exists or is important to deal with. I live in Australia where we keep building coal plants and nobody is doing anything. This game is at the opposite end of Don’t Look Up: it exists in a world where everyone cares, is trying to save the planet and taking big steps to do so. It exists in a world where we just know that oil companies lie and cheat, where media collusion is accepted as truth, where we have cards that let us change our governments to not scapegoating immigrants and to invest in solar. Against that has to be the unflinching reality of how hard this task is, and how many millions of people are going to die and have already died. By combining that reality with the fantasy of a world acting for change, I never mind losing. The mechanics are so clean and beautiful I want to immediately play again anyway but also just to spend an hour actually fighting, acknowledging the scale of the problem but also all the things we can do – that is paradise.

And not just a fools paradise. Every card in the game has a QR code to the website page about it, explaining in simple terms what the card means, what we are already doing to get this going, and how you personally can add your strength to those projects. Is that over optimistic? Neither I nor the game thinks so. If we turn off the news and government propaganda we know there’s more power in us than we believe, and more than just despair and surrender. We can change things. 

That’s what this game says. I find nature documentaries paralyse me with fear and political arguments drain me of strength but when I play Daybreak I have hope and I believe. This game changes the human soul in a time when the lights are going out and as such it is a significant work of revolutionary art. It’s not enough of course on its own to save humanity; Goya’s Third of May didn’t stop war and The Tin Drum didn’t stop fascism, but they raised a fist and said “this far and no further”. May all of us game designers be inspired to do the same. May we live in hope, and play to believe.

Bludology, Part Four

An ongoing blog about every single episode of Bluey and the gaming (and life) lessons within

1.19 The Claw

When Bluey and Bingo lose money to a claw machine – a predatory gambling game aimed at children, which is a terrible evil – Dad decides to teach the girls that it’s never worth playing such games by becoming a claw machine. He hopes to teach the kids never to trust unfair games but they learn the lesson too well: they attack their dad when he pushes them too far. That is the right lesson: when a system stops being fun and starts preying on you, destroy that system and get your money back. And don’t play games that seem to just want to mess with you. 

A lot of what we’re talking about on this blog is based in politeness and respect. It is polite to play games you don’t love, and to see them through to the end. But in our drive to teach resilience and determination and skill acquisition, we often insist people stick to things far beyond when it is actually serving them or teaching them. The term “rage quit” has a mostly negative valence for the gamer who does it. But good puzzle games with well designed difficulty curves will avoid the rage quit. The player should always feel that despite how clever the puzzle setter is, they are being treated fairly and given the tools they need; that the setter cares about them and wants them to succeed. Children are natural game designers because they have an instinctual sense of what is – and what is not – fair. They need to temper that with allowing risk, as discussed in Shadowlands, but the core knowledge is in us all, from birth it seems. 

1.20 Markets

A sweet story about how money movement builds happiness evolves when Bluey takes her tooth fairy money to the markets. The gaming lesson here is play is better with friends: Bluey doesn’t want to ride the horse without Indi. So often we get so locked into how we are doing in a game and how we are enjoying it we forget that non solo games are designed to be shared, and to create a thing we could not experience alone. It’s not just about making sure everyone is engaged and having fun but using that spirit to build something between us. There is your fun and my fun but also our fun, a liminal, ephemeral experience in the moment, built on giving of ourselves. A game is a moment in time with others; it never existed before and will never exist again, and that’s amazing.

1.21 Blue Mountains and 1.22 Pool

In Pool, Dad forgets to bring things to the pool to help them have fun because he doesn’t want to do boring stuff that Mum does like remembering to bring things m. In Blue Mountains the family are telling stories as hand puppets and Bluey’s puppet chides Chili’s puppet for being boring in her caution – until a lack of caution puts Chili’s puppet in danger.

Facilitating fun play often requires a bit of caution and forethought and stuff like learning the rules, doing set up, passing out tokens, reminding people of the game state and of course, staying engaged. If you’re the person who has to be told its your turn all the time, or to hurry up, you probably aren’t doing the boring stuff of caring for others. And you should be. 

1.23 Shops

Good storytelling rises above the simplistic. Most children’s shows (and certainly some episode of bluey) have a simple linear plot: a character makes the wrong choice, they face unwanted consequences, they learn a lesson. Bluey is often more complicated, such as the audience being given more reasons to empathise with Blueys choice, or the choice being complicated and multi-sided. In this episode the surface plot is Bluey takes forever to start playing a game of pretend because she wants everyone to have a role to play and do it properly. Her friends will even take less desirable roles if it helps the game start. But Bluey is a perfectionist and Mackenzie gets frustrated and leaves. Bluey must find a way to keep everyone happy by balancing their needs.

The second side to the issue is that Mackenzie has no tolerance for Bluey’s needs. He starts too fast and keeps demanding everyone hurry up. I’ve met many a gamer who get anxious in rules explanations and just want to jump in and start and learn as they go – without thinking that other people find that anxiety-inducing. Many gamers hate it when people are on their phones because it feels like they aren’t engaged; those people often need their phones or they can’t stay engaged. I cannot play with slow players: I lose my engagement with the endless downtime. But it’s no good shouting at them to hurry up because if they can’t think things through they can’t feel in control. Incompatible goals are not really the exception in games; they are the rule. Even if we try to frame our desires positively and celebrate our differences (see the last instalment) we hit conflict. We might even hit an impasse. 

The only thing we can do to help is talk about it without complaining about it. Nobody likes to be complained about. Straight out of the gate Mackenzie is demanding Bluey play better, because he didn’t have fun last time. She naturally insists she will, because she’s trying to keep the peace. These folk are little kids: as adults we can do better. We should be able to express our needs in a way that isn’t negative and have them discussed in a positive way. We don’t have to make everything a game where your gain is my loss. You can play a little faster and I can bring my phone and nobody needs to feel like they are a drag – they’re just different.

It sounds like a nursery parable but since we don’t seem to have learned it, we just return to the nursery. Revision is always useful, especially of the basics. Thats part of why kids tv is so important to everyone. 

1.24 Wagonride

Bluey is bored with how long it takes to get to the monkeybars so she learns to play a different game to pass the time. Soon enough that game becomes more interesting. 

If we are in a game where downtime is killing us, we might be able to find other kinds of fun in the game: observing what others are doing, reading the rulebook, assisting others with their turns, or kibitzing if appropriate. If we get too engaged with activities outside the game we might end up playing something else which could be rude…but it’s also okay to just switch games at any time they aren’t serving us – if everyone agrees.

1.25 Taxi and 1.26 Beach 

Rather than stretch myself to wring tortured lessons out of every single episode, some we can just let slide and make a better blog for it. Taxi is just a hilarious farce. Beach is just a beautiful journey. But on the other hand, Taxi shows how the best shared storytelling involves being able to lose, and to be ready to add chaos. And Beach is about how it’s okay if not everyone plays together all the time. 

1.27 Pirates

Bluey and Bingo play a game of Pirates on a bumpy swing run by Bandit and narrated by Chili; little Missy isn’t quite ready for the scares. It’s right about here that Bluey takes off the not-kidding-around-gloves and starts punching way above its weight class. Like in Shops, you can imagine what a lesser show would have done with a plot about a little girl dog being brave and playing a scary game she’s only just able to tolerate. It would have stopped there. But here we also take a lot of time to remind everyone that Missy can make whatever choice she wants. She’s not being silly if she is scared. Meanwhile, Bandit is equally afraid: afraid to be dramatic and silly in the presence of other men. And like we said about Shops, this is part of why revision is important. We always need to keep relearning the oldest lessons. Sometimes we have to be very very brave and do very scary things. We tend to get lazy as adults and stop pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones, and then we let society and expectation shape those zones into very very narrow places. And toxic masculinity is incredibly strong and loves hiding in places like competitive games where we get to release even more of that famous male aggression, and never talk about how games make us feel and what we want from them. Which is exactly why ludic intelligence is the exception instead of the rule: men, particularly, use games to escape from the burden of having to work out all these big scary feelings. Or to socialise in a way that doesn’t emphasise things like vulnerability and connection.

Male nerds spend endless hours insisting that they are very grown up and their love of certain media or activities doesn’t make them childish. But maybe, like little Missy, it’s time we actually grew up and stopped hiding behind the lighthouse. I said it, Bluey said it: the little blue dog is not pulling any punches and calling all of us out. 

Bludology, Part Three

An ongoing series about the gaming lessons in every episode of Bluey

1.11 Bike, 1.12 Bob Bilby and 1.14 Takeaway

These three episodes are both good examples of the fact that Bluey has good lessons and good lessons apply to everything, including games. Bike is about how hard it can be to learn a new skill and Takeaway is about how to think differently about losing – and just enjoy the chaos.

Of course these days we’re playing more and more games and rarely taking time to get good at them. This rewards memory and awareness of rules elements and natural abilities at certain skills. It also means games can’t teach us important skills about resilience and working harder. 

And Bob Bilby is a reminder that we spend too much time reading or watching about or shopping for the new hotness instead of just playing games. 

1.15 Butterflies

Blueys reputation as a show that hits the emotions like a freight train really begins here. When Judo next door comes over to pretend to be butterflies and butterfly catchers, the more selfish Judo pressures Bluey to be mean to her younger sister. Bluey goes along with it until she realises what she’s done. Everything ends happily but this is a hard episode to watch. I think everyone has been on all three sides of this equation at some point: the cruel leader, the swayed follower and the bullied victim. Recalling the first two leave us brittle with shame; recalling the last one just … hurts. 

Gaming and sports are one of the few arenas in our lives – at least prior to social media – where we find ourselves measuring our abilities against others. It’s easy to want to ditch the folks who can’t keep up, and even easier to feel stupid. Almost everyone I’ve asked about why they don’t like to play board games said the same thing: winning made them feel mean, and losing made them feel stupid. 

Butterflies is about deliberate cruelty but the same emotions are key, and it is because Bingo isn’t as capable that Judo gets bored. I was a gifted child which meant I was often superior to others but just as often mocked when I got something wrong that I was “supposed” to know. I’m also right in the middle of gaming ability: I completely outclass the average non gamer and am completely out classes by the average strategy gamer. All too often I will sit down with a stranger and be utterly obliterated while they sit confused because they’ve never played against someone who can’t see the things they see without thinking. Despite the Hollywood stereotype, autistic people like myself are often found over-explaining because they are always between two worlds and, because they feel isolation and rejection so strongly, are fixated on lessening these blows to others. 

That, ultimately, is the point of ludic intelligence. To understand how we relate to games so we understand can stop hurting people or getting hurt.

1.16 Yoga Ball

Bandit plays too roughly with Bingo, but Bingo can’t find her voice to say so. More than anything else, consent is complicated. It can’t be protected with something as simple as an X card or a safe word, on their own. That doesn’t mean that someone who violates consent has done a consciously cruel thing. Consent is like politics: everyone can and will make mistakes, and safety includes not just safety rails and warning lights but conversations and check ins and education and apologies and forgiveness. 

And every time we play, any kind of game, consent is an issue and mistakes can be made, no matter how great our intentions. The rules alone will not keep us safe and nor will “gg”-rituals or aphorisms that it’s just a game. Those are all important but we rely on them to be perfect and they can’t be. We need ludic intelligence and ludic vocabulary to talk about these things.

Bluey gives us that, by example. Bingo learns to yip real loud when her dad goes too far. If we can start to learn from Bluey, from the beginning, we can build better gamers. 

1.17 Calypso 

Sometimes Bluey is about life lessons; sometimes Bluey is about game design; then we have episodes like Calypso and Doctor which are about shared storytelling. In Calypso, the titular teacher moves effortlessly between the children at the care centre where each group is playing out a different story or activity. As she does so she adds difficulties to stories that are too simple, adds solutions to stories that have stalled, and links the stories together where they are apart.

When roleplaying games first appeared, the sociologist Gary Fine described them as not unlike the folie a deux, the concept in psychology where a dominant individual pulls a subordinate one into their delusions. The subservient person may not have delusions or hallucinations but they act as if they do. The connection to shared imagination play is in taking everyone else’s stories seriously; behaving as if their fantasies are real and important. That’s what Calypso does: she reacts as if they have meaning and builds meaning by doing so, and by weaving the stories together so the children follow her example. But nobody is forced to engage with any one else: the terriers want to defend things but nobody wants to be defended and that’s okay. But as soon as defence is needed, Calypso calls them in. Likewise the little pug doesn’t want to play for a long time, and that’s okay. Calypso supports that totally. And when he does play she’s in full support for that as well. 

The game master in rpgs is often a facilitator, and this role is also given to the person who chooses what to play and teaches the rules. They look after more than just safety and consent but also (ideally) encourage and support and help each player find the fun, or their fun. But in a world of strong ludic intelligence we might realise that like any joint activity we should all work for everyone’s enjoyment. It’s not usually possible for everyone around the table to play such distinct games but we can move between different games without the idea of making people “suffer” through ones they dislike, when we might instead support them to find fun without pressure, sure in the knowledge that when we move to their favourite game they will be right there to help us get the best from that experience.

This isn’t easy! Not if we want to set up an environment where we also play as hard as we can to win, which is also valid. We don’t want to just be Calypso, always in support and always checking in. But we can’t build any kind of fun by just expecting it will happen because of the rules. Sometimes, no matter the game, we should all put our Calypso hats on and check in on everyone.

1.18 Doctor

Doctor makes an excellent companion piece to Calypso. Whereas the previous episode shows how to facilitate fun for others, Doctor is about what happens when you just don’t seem to be having fun. Bingo is playing doctor with Bluey as the receptionist. Indi wants to play but can only imagine a sore arm. The other kids imagine huge emergencies like being eaten by a crocodile so Indi finds herself being bumped down the list. Not getting any interaction she becomes frustrated and doesn’t want to play any more. Bluey sits beside Indi and notices Indi swaying her feet. Blueys enjoyment of this encourages Indi to find her own fun in doing a dance – which Bingo declares a medical emergency, pulling Indi into the game.

Games, as opposed to play, tend to be rigid structures where there isn’t room for the Indis among us to do our own thing without ruining the fun for others. But the pathway to Indi finding a way in is by Indi tapping into what she loves and does well. Sometimes the key to ludic intelligence is and gaming harmony is self-knowledge but also championing what others are great at. We tend to approach game preferences as a matter of negatives: I don’t like those kind of games; I can’t do that kind of puzzle; I’m bad at the math; I have no fun bluffing; speed games make me anxious. And when we look at positives, we tend to go straight for skill levels which can sound like bragging or become equally isolating: don’t play this game with me, I will crush you. I’m no fun because I’ll shut you down and find the best combos too fast.

What if we focussed more on what we love, what we enjoy and what helps us express ourselves? I love engine builders because it feels satisfying to make a machine. If we play the slow mode I will thrive. If we take care not to get bossy I have way more fun in co-ops. It might sound selfish at first: we couch our language in negativity because we’re taught to apologise for our needs so we have to emphasise that we are miserable for our desires to be taken into account. “I’ll have more fun this way” sounds like a terrible demand if everyone else has agreed to play something they all enjoy. But if we learn to have a different culture altogether about picking a game to play, one where we plan and choose by expressing how we thrive, not how we suffer, we can stop seeing our pleasure preferences as a burden. 

Bludology, Part Two

1.6 Weekend

Bluey is about games and play, but it has plenty of themes, and another big one is wonder. Bingo wants to stop playing a chasing game to show her father a beautiful insect, and he misses it. Our values shift and change, and games can wait.

We also find out in this episode that Bandit can easily lift a six year old and a four year old in one hand each, which makes him incredibly strong…

1.7 BBQ

The Heeler family has a BBQ and Bingo has to make a pretend salad. This episode is important in world history for being the first appearance of Muffin. It also brings up another common theme in the show: imitation. Every time the dogs think about real life salad they realise they need to improve their play-salad. Much of the pretend that Bluey engages in is a direct copy of the world around her, and this theme will be developed more and more as the show goes on. Even at its most abstract level, play has referential elements, if only to how in real life we do win and lose sometimes, and compete and collaborate. Often the referential elements are much stronger though, and the copying becomes more important.

1.8 Fruitbat

Bluey doesn’t want to go to bed, she wants to stay up and be a fruitbat. Her dad uses games to get her to into bed and along the way she discovers how her Dad has sacrificed playing his favourite sport to spend more time with his children. Play is often seen as expendable and the first on the chopping block when “responsibility” calls. Being a grown up still comes with very Victorian ideas of putting away childish things. But just as we know we need rest and self care we also need play. Bandit has not really sacrificed as redirected: his play needs are found with his children, not away from them. 

The larger lesson is that there are many ways to play and we should see them as a continuum with much in common. A tournament of bridge and a high stakes poker game might not feel a lot like playing house nor might the latter feel like a whole day of playing Diplomacy or a game of touch football. What makes something play is a large topic we can’t explore here, but we can suggest looking for similarities and understanding how gaming feeds our needs, whether that’s differently in different modes, or similarly despite those different modes. All play is defined by its nature of being outside reality where no stakes exist; in pretending things that don’t matter do matter. And that matters a great deal.

1.9 Horsey Ride 

When Bluey tries to distract her cousin from playing roughly with Bluey’s favourite toy, creative imagination games don’t work, but racing and roughhousing do. Games, like emotions, can be more or less activating, and even deactivating – Bluey playing in her imagination in Fruit Bat helped her ‘power down’ for the evening, but only a riotous change can distract little Socks from an equally boisterous wrestle with a toy. Even in board games, games can be boisterous or quiet, activating or relaxing, open with lots of opportunities or frustratingly full of blocking and disaster – often regardless of what the theme may suggest! Calico, for example, has a cute theme but is full of frustration and failure, and that makes it often a poor game to end the evening on. Of course, people can react to different mechanics differently – the claustrophobia of Calico can be a shared bonding experience, and others might find the expanding choice space of Guild of Merchant Explorers to be more exhausting than inspiring. Ask yourself how a game makes you feel in the specific, not just the general. Fun is too vague. Look up the eight kinds of fun as a good way to start, but also just examine your feelings closely. Listen to who you are. This, too, is ludic intelligence. 

1.10 Hotel and 1.13 Spygame

These two focus on another common theme in the show: Bluey being bossy, and the usual target of that bossiness being Bingo. In this, they represent a counter-argument to Shadowlands (see part one). There, Bluey demanded everyone follow her rules because they made the game better. But Bluey isn’t always right about what makes a good game. And, what is more, it’s not about being right. 

The improv exercise of “yes and” is designed to teach the skill of following and not to “block” as it is known. Blocking is when you shut down or redirect a scene because you think your idea is just better or funnier and it is easier to do than most people think. It can be done in lots of subtle ways too, without appearing to be a bully. Most of us, even if we think we are polite or good at sharing, care a great deal about what we think is a good idea. In roleplaying and story games a large amount of my design work goes into shutting off or short circuiting this instinct because it really is more interesting when more voices come through and we must actually improvise.

Blueys friend Mackenzie likes to improvise and switch the story around. But just as in Shadowlands this isn’t always the right answer either. In a world of make-believe, rewriting the story too much destroys it. One cannot say yes and to “and then all our problems are solved”. Similarly in strategy games we might fudge the rules to accomodate a younger or weaker player but we must not risk the point of play, in the challenge and the risk. 

Collaborative strategy games often run into the problem of “quarterbacking” where some players who know the game better or can think of faster can, even when they try not to, advise so much they take away the spotlight from others. Reminders to value social goals can only go so far if keeping those social goals means other players don’t feel like they can control their experience, that others are failing at the game and they cannot stop it from happening. 

There is no perfect solution to this but Spygames shows one good response: recognising individual player roles and special powers. This is in fact the most popular mechanic listed on Board Game Geek and for good reason. Not only does it let players feel special and unique it can also let players play to their strengths: a leader player can take a character that can give actions away to others. A follower can be happy to have a power everyone else wants to put in the spotlight. In Spygames Bentley is the best at shouting “PASSWORD!” so she makes the best guard. With a player down the game suffers because the players can’t find a role that suits them – for their needs and to push the game forward. 

Whether competitive or collaborative, often what we mean by “I don’t like this game” is we can’t find a way for our play style to move the game forward, or the play style the game wants us to adapt is just not one we like or are suited for. Weirdly, we often judge people for this, because if three people want to play a certain game it is coloured as being selfish not to want to “lump it” and join in. But with so many games now we have more options (and games often have modules within them) do if we discuss this going in we can often find a way to keep the game but satisfy that player also. Or at least understand when those players are out of their comfort zone and deserve to pick the next game. Ludic intelligence means listening to not just what we like but what others like, and empathizing. Even with your favourite game.