PS. Not hating on Carcassonne even remotely, the tension as people draw tiles in the endgame and you find out if your plans succeeded or failed is, like, the best part of the game. It took the change in feeling of input randomness over the game and used it very smartly

In conclusion: the feelings of your players are always more important than following supposed "good game design". Best practices will betray you if you don't use them wisely. (Also, "one type of randomness is good and the other is bad" isn't even a good best practice.)

Trick-taking games also handle this well by having a few big sources of input randomness (dealing initial hands) rather than many small ones. The moments of input randomness are also completely disconnected from other ones, preventing lucky combos over time.

And there are games that use it without losing any agency. Cascadia avoided this trap by only increasing opportunities to score points as the game goes on, rather than making the play space tighter as many other spatial puzzle games do. It leaves every turn feeling puzzly up to the very end.

If you're making a game, and you're using input randomness because you want to give more agency to your players, be sure to use it thoughtfully because it might be doing the opposite in your endgame.

Somewhere in the game, the moment of drawing a tile went from feeling puzzly and thoughtful to creating feelings of desperation and that you're at the mercy of the tiles - input randomness is often used to increase player agency, and in this case that agency has nearly disappeared.

This is especially felt in the cities, which are worth half if you don't finish them. So at the start of each turn, you reach into the bag, often hoping for a specific element to let you finish your cities and bank a large sum of points.

But by the end of the game, you've usually placed all your meeples and are committed to how you're scoring points, and now you just need to maximize that potential with whatever you draw.

Take Carcassonne: drawing a tile at the start of your turn is input randomness. At the start of the game, every tile drawn is a puzzle to figure out how to best place it. Do I build many roads, one big city, or lay down some farmers?

Sky Team has them. A few games from Kosmos have rounded wood dice with numbers, the picture is from A Column of Fire.

Thank you Jeff!! I hope to try Branching Out someday, the table presence is amazing!

Thank you so much!! Your and @jonathanbovee.bsky.social 's feedback and enthusiasm for the game was the fuel that gave me the motivation to finish the design in its rockiest moments :)

Also I want to play Invasion!! Let me at it!!

Thank you so much, and congrats to you as well! Pip It stood out to me among the finalists, it looks super fun so I hope I can try it sooner than later :)

Tip for anyone who wants to get a contest submission together: set aside a couple of weeks to make the video, then get the flu for those weeks so you end up with only three days to make the video, then when the video comes out 30 seconds too long just speed it up until it fits the time limit 😉🙃

Burning through cash in real time in Dot Com by Sammy Salkind. Finalist details at cardboardedison.com/award