Oh so now you like dice... Lol, I remember the videos where you discourage their use... XD

That was painful and necessary. Thank you for setting up the worst pitch with the most patient publisher in the business 😂

I'm a Frustration Fantaic... and I would complain... but I haven't rolled a 6 yet.

Actually, this is not a good list. I agree with some of the points, but a lot of points are "popular old mechanics, which have prominent examples of bad employment", some are "popular old mechanics, which were the only feature of a game or dominated the game too much" and some points really are "intrinsically bad mechanics". But being careful to avoid a certain mechanic in a specific context is something else to getting rid of them entirely.

The point about how games should be fun even when you are loosing I think is really important. There are so many games that just become straight up not fun halfway through as the loosing player because your opponents advantage just keep snowballing and you have no chance to recover.

14:25 the mistake that you are making is that there is a _desire_ for players to become "immersed" in the game. Some might, but I suspect that just as many do not care an iota about "immersion". Games like poker, roulette, blackjack, etc. are primarily random events with an _illusion_ of choice or skill. Randomness is not bad, in spite of what modern game design might whine about. Randomness is good because it acts as an equalizing event to allow less competitive, less serious players, to have a chance to catch up _by_ chance. The only reason that premise doesn't seem appealing to some is because there is a presumption of a _desire and demand_ for strategy. Games can be simplistic, gimmicky, random, and still still be enjoyable precisely because a great deal of attention isn't needed. The only reason why this point isn't more pronounced is because casual players don't buy niche boardgames - they buy *fun* boardgames, like Monopoly, Risk, Battleship, The Game of Life, etc. They enjoy chance, because chance is exciting and enjoyable. Because strategy and deep concentration _are not_ fun, _are not_ interesting, and _are not_ pleasurable to play casually.

okay but like, bro u mantioned EVERY single game i know kkkkkkkk, what are board games even about now a days

Monopoly isn't supposed to be fun, its a lesson in the shortcomings of capitalism. Its supposed to make you realise landlords are the devil.

Thanks for this overview! I'm wrapping up a design for a trick-taking game and came here to see how unique of a scoring mechanic is that I'm introducing, and I'm leaving with a lot of respect for designers in the genre.

You have Mana Man instead of Mana mana in the description. I love your videos. Thank you.

I dunno man, that road trip sounds kinda good...

There is a range of mechanisms that could be considered "take that". Take that, aggressive mechanics, and otherwise player interaction are important game mechanics. But what I can't stand are "nope" mechanics that just allow you to say no to whatever (unstable unicorns as an example). There are so many better ways to address this. Counterspells in Magic the Gathering is a example of a "nope" that is at least interactive and able to be signaled. In exploding kittens, the one who has the most nopes is generally the one who wins.

@34:40 haha, i wanted to design a memory game.. :-D let's try

I've been working on a worker placement game for fun. Thanks for your video. Do you have any suggestions or videos on how to determine the values of actions/cards in a game? I know balancing is fine tuned through playtesting, but is there a good method to start from? Right now I feel like I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall. Thanks!

Thanks for your videos. They are great, informative, well referenced, inspiring. Never give up!

Lol I can't watch anything witch mentions "Skip a turn" without thinking of the game Android. You only get 5 or 6 turns in the entire game, and it can be 40-60 minutes between turns. We had one player forced to skip 2 turns in a row ensuring he spent more than 2 hours between turns.

I hate your videos. They introduce me to more things that I'd like to try than my bank account will allow me to buy or my schedule will give me time to play. Now i have to plan which of these games I can sneak in tonight without my wife noticing.

I was out of the house on vacation when this video came out but I... remembered... to come back to watch it.

I disagree strongly. I'm incredibly tired of how many games consist of everyone doing their own thing and then points are counted at the end. Direct conflict and player elimination can be incredibly important for giving the players an actual feeling of competiton and success.

Have you made any content addressing accessibility in board games? I see so many games out there that are completely unplayable for players with moderately impaired vision or color blindness, all of which could be fixed with better visual cues. A good example is Too Many Bones: a great game that is utterly unplayable if you can't differentiate the dozens of icons used on the dice and tokens, almost all of which are printed so small that even with my mostly-good vision, I had difficulty.

"Don't use reference tables" Tell me you've never played a wargame without telling me you've never played a wargame.

That Simpsons monopoly is beautiful! As a *video* game design beginner, this was very helpful. It reminded me of a relatively recent game, Triangle Strategy, a turn based strategy RPG. For the magician characters, using magic costs you a "turn point" resource, which gets filled one unit per turn. Usually, the useful magic attacks cost 2 points or more. Therefore, after using magic, you have 2 turns with these characters where you can do nothing. If you want to use the most powerful magics, you have do to nothing for 4 turns. It feels like a punishment for using magic, not like a price. This mechanic of "pay with turns" is very common in Square Enix games for the last couple of years, and I hate it. It's suppose to be a risk-reward thing, but if the price of doing something cool is doing nothing, the player in fact chooses between weak choices and boredom in the next turn. That's not a good choice in a game.

I don't see much in the way of improved materials quality. Plastic still dominates when wood would turn the thing into an heirloom. Tile games like Rummicub would be so much better and more robust. Ticket to Ride could go all out with high-quality trains and carriages - metal, maybe with enamel paint, but no, cheap plastic. Given the pricing of games these days, it seems mean-spirited. Board games are a tactile experience, different from far more sophisticated online games - make it a good one.

Have you played Trio / Nana? It's a twist on pairs. You have to find 3 matching cards, and you can ask to see other players' cards. Very interactive and enjoyable.

I hated lack of player agency even as a child.

It's My first time in the channel, I don't know if You Make it but a Video about "Boss Rush" games could be interesting!

I've enjoyed playing Lords of Waterdeep which is definitely in this genre

This video seemed to only focus on competitive games, so I'm curious if you think event decks are a problem in coop games like spirit island

Guy makes a lot of assumptions about me in the first ten seconds.

Nobody in specific invented chess and it shows

We draw at end of turn unless we are playing with the builder.

Dominion is really too short for that headwind to make an effect You only have to get 4 of those 6 in a 2 player game and you'll win

Language games can be nice but every language needs a different balance for the letters

Personally I'm not a fan of super broad player count games. You never know upon buying if it's basically a solo game that has enough components for 5 players (with possibly lots of waiting for your turn) or if it's a group game with some solo mode that plays completely differently

Worth noting that random chance and player agency are not mutually exclusive. My favorite example is Yahtzee, where not only does the player get to make a strategic decision before the second and third rolls about how many dice to reroll, but they also get to make an informed decision AFTER they've finished rolling about which section of the score sheet to fill in. It manages to be a very strategic, mathematical game while also including the sheer joy of shouting "YAHTZEE!" that can only come from a game of chance. Similarly, while getting a good or bad hand in poker is entirely luck-dependent, the actual substance of the game is in the betting. Ticket to Ride relies heavily on the luck of the draw, but the player is not entirely at the mercy of the deck, and in Gin Rummy, if you're stuck waiting to draw the single card you need, chances are you've done something wrong. I think games that include random chance can be great, but the key is to allow players to strategize around it.

i feel like Mouse Trap checks every box on this list of "Please god don't do this" Mechanics. I'll NEVER forget having to watch everyone else play while I repeatedly triggered the trap and never got a single cheese

Although older games had some bad mechanics, I think that modern games design is getting worse over time. It seems to me that there is a tendency to make simple concepts as convoluted as possible and create thousands of large pretty components, that take ages to set up. I also think that fun factor had been somehow lost.

This was vital for my research, thanks a lot! great job!

Swap Hands in UNO is a great rule! When you have that card, you play as bad as you can to then swap with someone close to winning. Just as much tactics as anything. And it is of course about the emotional social effect of nailing someone or being nailed. It's like a practical joke. Handle it! Get a sense of humor.

Loved the video, it nicely summarizes a lot of what I've always found annoying in older board games. I do disagree with a few points though: - Event decks can indeed be too random, but I think the problem is not in the deck itself, but in the amount of player agency. Pandemic is a great example of a game with event decks that don't restrict player agency: you *know* something bad is going to happen, you just don't know *how* bad. This doesn't prevent you from coordinating and planning ahead, its main purpose is to actually throw a wrench in your plans and force you to roll with the punches. It incentivizes creativity and flexibility. - Swapping places/hands also doesn't seem like a bad mechanic in itself, for me what is really annoying is losing too much progress at once. In a non-linear game it's a perfectly good strategy that still allows everyone to keep being engaged. - For me, the issue with memory as a mechanic is that it imposes a physical limitation that's external to the game. Board games are excellent equalizers, as long as you understand the rules most people have the same chances to play. I understand that some people actually enjoy that (for example, counting cards), but I do think it should be used *very* carefully. - I absolutely love King of Tokyo, it's one of my favorite games to play, but I strongly disagree that player elimination is a valid mechanic. It's "skip a turn" but worse. The worst part of any game is suddenly being completely disengaged from what everyone else is doing (which can happen in a few other ways as well, for example in the case you mention when it's basically impossible to catch up),. It's like you're sober at a party where everyone is high. My suggestion is taking a book from the Bomberman series (not a board game, I know): whenever a player dies, instead of just being kicked out of the game, they can still participate using an asymmetric set of rules. Depending on the version they can cause trouble for the players still in the game (perfect for a chance to enact revenge) or even come back to life.

12:44 really important point. even with movies or series you often hear that the second or third season is really great. I'll just give up and go somewhere where the first season is fun

To sum up, don't put random randomness 😂

Any chance of sharing the cards and tokens to print? It looks like the really would save the game from going in the bin once finished.

I used to have a board game about car racing. As far as I remember, it was 100% luck. You just drawed cards and followed the instructions. Besides the normal cards that made you advance, there were some that allowed you to play a game or lose a turn. There were not even lanes, just a linear track and no special spaces if I remember correctly. As a kid, I used to enjoy the game anyway. Except for the one card: "You crash. You lose the game." We just played the game without that card. But growing up I realized how terrible was the design for the game. Like... can't that even be considered design?

Awesome video Adam, many thanks.

huh, looks like the old pokemon master trainer boardgame actually doesn't run afoul of TOO many of these. Sure, it's pretty heavily luck reliant, and there's a section at the end where you keep going about in a circle, but there's always SOMETHING to do. Item cards to nudge the odds in your favor or help recover from losses, many event cards being pure benefit, etc. Even the loop at the end has you doing SOMETHING. iirc, every time you fail to land on one of the 'battle the E4' spaces, you instead either get an item card, event card, or encounter a pokemon from elsewhere on the map. there's always at least SOME progress. Though a house rule like letting you skip moving in order to retry an encounter might help too.

I think you miss a little thing: Sometimes games are not made to be fun. Trouble for example is call „human don’t be angry“ in Germany. It’s purpose is to teach people how to emotionally handle unfairness. Monopoly was designed to show how terrible capitalism feels. Both of these games accomplish their task pretty well. Fun is not the primary goal of games. It is just a side effect of learning. And learning is the primary goal of games. As I see it, a good gamedesigner thinks about fun, but a great gamedesigner thinks about the meaning. Sadly modern gamedesigners seem to have lost this thinking.

Let new game designers design their game how they like. There are plenty of old, and new, games that use the old mechanics and still fun to play.

Tank battle looks like knock of strategeo

Game designers always push the games they're selling. They just want to make money and they will call any game they can't profit on unfun. The only people I see having any fun are the ones giving love to used and rejected old stuff and second-hand stuff. You Particularly see this in trading cards: only the budget deck players are having any fun. The people spending money are miserable because they spend money. Game companies and designers do not have your best interest at heart telling you what to buy or not.