You told me this a long time ago, I think, but in the meantime I became a huge DeForge fan so it makes me extra happy now

I recommend Mind Bug!

Yes I did!

Oh, I've seen a video on this game! I've been wanting to get a copy. So people are choosing to just randomize the tokens without looking at them? I guess I can see that.

Very true! I imagine that's how folk games evolved over the centuries as well... Forgotten rules are like the genetic mutations of board game evolution.

You're talking about rules that are rarely needed. These are tricky to get right! Must be easy to skip on a first read & yet easy to find when you need them. And you need to know to look for them in the first place! And since their existence is probably a surprise, being funny/delightful helps a ton

Some might argue that if forgetting a rule causes only a minor loss in quality, then that rule shouldn't be in the game at all. But I think that's needlessly reductive. Every additional rule is a cost-benefit analysis & a rule that fails gracefully has a dramatically lower cost.

You raise a great issue but I think that having players aim for a tie as a gameplay pattern could be fine. I also think "draw" and "tie" have different connotations. If a tie just means players end with equal points, then a player who is lower on points simply trying to get enough to tie is fine

Yeah, that alignment issue is a big factor for me as well! There's no point shoehorning a bad tiebreaker into a game

Yeah, that's a good point too, which is that not every game has a good, intuitive tiebreaker option. Sometimes there is clearly a second resource that is closely tied to the victory condition. But other times, there's not, and revealing the tiebreaker after the game is over just feels like a gotcha.

Glad you enjoyed those and came away with things to think about! Good luck with your designs!

There's definitely no (easy) or short answer to this question & a lot of it is just intuition built up from working on lots of games. It'd be a good exercise to try to articulate strategies for this though...maybe I'll try to do that some time in the future.

It doesn't make too much difference, but generally buying direct from the publisher is good:

For Hot Streak: cmyk.games

For ALS: arcanewonders.com

But also support your local game store if you can!

🙌

Stay Puffball Mushroom Man