Blundering into Dead King's Bluff: a board game made of bits you already have

I've been tinkering with a board game lately, and it's coming together! I talk about it on a cold, sunny, noisy day - sorry if it's hard to hear, this was the best noise cancelation could do. I have a plan for a better outdoor setup in future. Will show more DKB when it's ready!

[@Notemug]

Aw, man, a huge fan of your videos, but this amount of noise is simply too much for me. First TomF video I'll have to skip!

[@alienbraincookies]

Perfectly replicates the experience of being in a noisy pub while someone tries to explain how crib works. 11/10

[@StarContract]

M8, please address the audio quality issue in your videos. It always is either too low, too much noise or both.

[@faucetrememberly2399]

to other viewers: don't forget about youtube's caption feature!

[@V-Jira]

Better yet, the transcript feature in the description! I'll try to have an AI clean it up and will post the result if succesful

[@V-Jira]

Audio is quite rough on this one and the captions were a bit too hard to follow, but I really didn't want to miss this talk. I ran the transcript through an AI to clean up the caption issues, I'm glad I did, my favorite kind of video from you! I'll try to share the transcript here if KZbin lets me, I hope the AI didn't hallucinate too much, here you go: ___________________________________ I'm struggling to find a good angle for this because either I'm completely blinded by the sun or there's too much bright stuff behind me and then I become washed out in the video. This might still be terrible, but this is the best I can do. And I want to talk about a sort of board game, a card game I've been making. As you may know, I have been tinkering with chess variants for a while, inspired by playing games of chess with my friend Graham and hating losing at it. Spinning off from that central idea, I don't like the kind of work chess wants my brain to do, and I'm bad at it. These two things are not unrelated; it's not a coincidence I'm bad at it and hate it. But there is something about Chess that's satisfying, and it's obviously very appealing, undergoing a huge resurgence at the moment. I also like simple games and design challenges. You know, I think Ben said that the same way every great chef has to have their take on the omelet, every good game designer should have their take on chess. I don't believe that, but it is a fun thing to ask, you know, what would I like something that sort of embodies the values and opinions I have about this kind of game. The stupid thing is, I spent a long time on various different digital versions and then a couple of physical prototypes, messing around with different rule sets. I've come up with one I think is quite cool, but it's very untested. I've never played it against another human, and it's still a bit prototype-y. Then, one lunchtime, I set myself a different challenge, which was, I wonder if I could make a card game. I had this document; chess has been a weird one to mess with because I made a solo card game, which by some classifications is called a solitaire game. I don't really care if you call it that or not. But it's not one about sorting cards into ascending order; actually, it kind of is, but it's not like Solitaire. That was, I did one bad pass at that. It was terrible, a lesson. Second pass, great, just worked and then required some tweaks and stuff, but other than that, it was very smooth sailing. Chess has been much more elusive because, firstly, I have just thousands of ideas for Chess things. There are so many things I like because it's such a known baseline. Unlike cards, playing cards is not a known baseline. There's no modifying a card game. I'm modifying just a set of cards, a deck of elements. Weirdly, the possibilities seem more overwhelming when the baseline is more figured out. With chess, we know all the rules. You could add so many different things to it, a single twist that could be interesting enough. So, I have a huge list of those, and I kept trying to prioritize. Let's filter by things that make sense with my objectives. I wanted to make a single-player game, have some element of gut calls, which I've done a design talk on before. This is a particular kind of decision that's not completely calculable but also not completely guesswork or random, somewhere in that sweet spot in between. One idea was, what if you had playing cards in there too? Another was, what if you had dice in there too? The last was, what if I had to make a game that just had chess pieces, playing cards, and dice? Like a maximalist game design challenge. Usually, you're trying to make something elegant, pared down to the fewest elements possible. But a lot of my chess variants I've been tinkering with were pretty heavy on elements. The thing that I was most interested in with the variants that were close to chess was adding items to it. Things you can pick up, and then you can cram in loads of different items. It's got lots of richness and lots of substance and gaminess. Chess is very conspicuously avoiding that. It's obviously not fixing chess completely in that direction, so maximalist stuff. Actually, it's not that anathema to me, but what was weird is almost the opposite thing happened. This is the elegant one - well, "elegant" might be too strong a word, but it's the one that just kind of clicked together. It worked really easily, and everything felt very logical. It felt like, well, of course, it would have to work this way. The simplest possible thing I can do with dice is this, and the simplest possible thing I can do with cards is this. The three elements all just kind of talk to each other pretty well. So, the concept is called Dead King's Bluff. You only have three pieces, and they all move like rooks, so there's no difference in how they move. The same goes for the enemy. The main difference is that when you take a piece, instead of just immediately moving on the board and winning, you play a little card game. The card game is literally just selecting a card secretly, putting it face down, while the enemy does the same. You have a hand of like five cards, and then you reveal them. Whoever has the best card wins. The only rule of that is just that the king is the best, except that Ace beats King. Ace is low normally, but the one thing it beats is a king. Not only does it beat the king, but the person who played the king loses the game outright. It's an extremely high stakes thing. There's obviously a rock-paper-scissors thing where the King beats everything except Ace. Ace beats King but loses to everything else. As for the rest, one of the elements is everything else, which you would kind of think would come up most of the time because "everything else" has its own internal hierarchy. But actually, it's very Ace-King heavy, and that's been an ongoing design question. Is it too Ace-King heavy? Aces and Kings are getting played a lot more than you would think. When you play a king, you're risking the whole game, not just this fight. You could lose the whole game on the spot, and that happens quite a lot. It's great for drama. The hidden card and revealing moment is a really nice touch. I think that seemed logical to me because I recently played Fury of Dracula. In the game, you're chasing Dracula across Europe. One player is Dracula, and the other players are trying to kill him. You can also leave vampires behind. Whenever a vampire or Dracula clashes with a hunter, they play this very simple card game where you commit cards blindly and then reveal them. There's a sort of rock-paper-scissors thing going on there. It's very simple, fun to play multiple rounds of, and I quite liked how it played out. There wasn't a lot of psyching people out because the relationships between the cards were so specifically case-by-case. Every card just has a list like, "this beats garlic, fists, and knives; this thing beats eyes and fists but not knives and not garlic." There's no inherent logic to it; you just have to look at the card and see, "okay, this does beat that." Obviously, with playing cards, it's a very obvious way to resolve things, and you don't want one card to be just globally the best because that has a repercussion. The way dice come into it is kind of building on my pickup stuff. And I always wanted, in most of my chess variants, to have stuff you can pick up to equip your pieces. That's just a nice mechanic in video games, and chess doesn't have it. So, dice are also added, and they're just scattered around the board. If you pick it up at one, you have to pay for it with a card. That will just add one to your combat power every time you reveal a card. So now, if we both play Kings, I win because I got a plus one. But if you don't pick it up, at the end of your turn, you can increase its value. It still costs the same but now gives you more benefit, and it could go up to six. Six dice is amazing. That's a lot of value for one card, and you get plus six to all your fights forever. But of course, by ticking it up, you don't know for sure you're going to be the one to pick up that dice. Someone else could grab it. Since everything moves like rooks, it's very simple to see, "Oh, I have a line on that dice, you don't have a line on the dice. I can safely tick it up." Even if you spend your turn trying to get that dice, the best you can do is get a line on it, and then I will still have the line on it and just take it on my turn. That mostly works, but there are some wrinkles. Like, someone can come down and block your line, and now they have a line on it, and you don't, unless you fight them and also win that fight. But when you fight them, they know how important this fight is to you, so you might be more likely to play your king. It's worth risking the whole game to win this fight. But if they know you're going to play a king, it's a terrible idea. If they play their ace, they win the whole game. So, it's got a lot of mind games.

[@V-Jira]

"The Princess Bride" gets quoted by almost everyone who learns this game. It's like, "But of course, you would know I'm going to do that." It's interesting, and I think it's an interesting question of whether that's good game design. The mind game of "if it's likely I will do this, you should do this to counter me. But because you know I'm likely to do this, you will do that. Therefore, I know what you're going to do, and therefore I shouldn't do this, and I should do the other thing. Which makes it more likely I'll do the other thing, so therefore you should counter it," and so on and so on. There's always a kind of ellipsis at the end of that, just like, "And of course, that just goes on forever." But in practice, it doesn't go on forever. You stop, I would say, after one or two iterations - either you think they'll do the likely thing or the unlikely thing. It sometimes feels like that's just 50/50. I think in isolation, that isn't great game design. It doesn't feel like anything more than chance. There's no real way to look inside your mind and know that. It's really just going to be chance. But what I found is this game gets better and better the more you can signal what you're going to do. Of course, you shouldn't signal, but if you do, then doing the other thing can be more surprising. To turn that from random chance into a gut call, which is the kind of decision-making I like, you need more stuff to go on. So, two mechanics that have really worked out well for that are support cards. Before you play your hidden card, you play some face-up cards that just get you one point each, just for this fight. You'll lose them at the end of the fight. Cards are very precious, so it's a big thing to play a support card at all. By playing a support card, you are signaling what you might or might not do. You always have a king and an ace, at least you have one at the start of the game, and you never permanently lose them. But when you use them, this is the other mechanic, they stay in your graveyard. So, everyone can see they're face-up in front of you. They can see your king is down right now, so if I attack you, you cannot play a king unless you just drew another king. In a one-versus-one game, I've got the King and Ace of Spades, you've got the King and Ace of Hearts. There are two other kings and two other aces in the deck somewhere, and the chances of you having another are just low enough that it usually makes sense to assume they don't have it. But then if they start to signal, like if you play your king or your ace as support, it's this crazy move. Like, what? Because that's a really important card. And it's yeah, you'll get it back eventually, but it's going to take a while. Because you not only have to spend time to get it back, but you also have to spend a card of a particular suit to get it back, which you may not have yet. So, it could be several turns before you get your king or ace back. In support, you still only get one point, but if you're in your territory, you get two points. So, there's a nice little smokescreen for, "Well, I'm playing them because it's my territory and I get two points. They're very high-value cards right now, and I'm not playing them to make you think..." Like, if you play both, that's one thing, but if you just play one of them, it strongly signals you're going to play the other. It's like, "Well, I can afford to put my king down because I'm going to play my ace." And then, of course, the person is not going to play their king. It'd be crazy to play your king in that situation. But the other person might be false signaling, and actually, they're going to play a second king that they have. Because they put their king down, there's no chance they'll be playing an ace. Playing an ace when someone's played their king as support is crazy, because the chances they have another king are low enough. And like, Ace loses to every single other possibility. But at the same time, why would they put the king down, especially if it's not their territory? They only get plus one. Why would they put their king down? They're signaling that they are going to play a secondary king, or maybe they're just going to play their ace. Play something to beat that, then you can mix it up. So, the more you can signal, the more you can communicate what the possibilities are, the better it gets. As long as those are not hard and fast rules. Like, "His king is down, he could have another king." One thing I like about that is early in the game, if neither of the spare kings has come up, there are two different ways to get a king, especially if you don't have one. But then, as the game goes on and the spare kings and aces do come out, if you have used them, it's such a good trick. Then, as the game winds down, you're like, "Well, now both of the spare kings are gone, one of the spare aces is gone, there's one way he can have a second ace." And that's a really fun kind of thinking. You get the whole spectrum from like, "Yeah, with two spare ones out there, it's not unthinkable." I shouldn't think, "His ace is down, so he could never play another ace." That's bad logic early in the game. Playing your king, you risk the whole game by doing that. There are two different ways to get an ace. It's unlikely, but it's not that unlikely, especially if he's signaling that he might not play an ace. But then, later in the game, it gets more and more reasonable to actually start making conclusions about what's in their hand, both in the negative way of like, "They've all been used up, so you can't have that," and also in the positive way of like, "None of them have come up yet, and there's only like four cards left in the deck. Someone's got the spare aces." That stuff is really fun. That whole spectrum is fun, and actually, yeah, I corrected myself a little bit there. When I was about to say it wouldn't be fun if it was certain, it actually is quite fun if it's certain. Sometimes, like the spare king and the spare aces have all gone, someone's got their king down but not their ace. You cannot play a king there; there's no way to play a king, which is, if it's exactly an equal fight and I've got my king, great. I just play my... well, not great, because you can't play a king, but he can play an ace. So, you get these funny little things of like, "Damn, there is certainty here, but it's still uncertain what to do." And it definitely has a lot of thinking in it, this game, which is a nice property. Like, it's always a bad sign in your game if like, "Oh, the only thing I can do here is this," or "I just can't do anything in this situation." There are a few little situations like that, but the situation like that which we have is like, if you get a six dice, you've ticked it up turn after turn, after turn, and you've successfully secured it, or maybe you sniped it from the enemy who was trying to level it up for themselves. You've got this huge advantage. You go into a fight, and you have a queen in your hand. You play a queen, queen plus six is a crazy score. If they have, depending on attacker or defender advantage, let's say they have a four dice, which is decent, but against a six, there's nothing they can play to beat the queen plus six. I think that's right, the math might be off by one. But regardless, there is a situation where they have the better dice, and they have the better card, and they attack, and there's just nothing you could have done to win that fight. At various times, I considered reversing that. Maybe if you play your king, it should always win if they didn't play an ace. But I think it's just good. I think it's like the inherent promise of the game.The implicit promise of the game is that the strategy, the board strategy, should matter. You know, gaining dice, leveling up dice, and then securing them, drawing lots of cards and not wasting your cards, keeping them. If early in the game you have a queen in your hand, you don't play it; you play something else, you play an eight because you're sure they're going to play an ace, and any old number will just beat an ace. And that works, well done, that's great strategy, and that strategy should pay off in some way. If there's always a way for them to beat your card, no matter how much of a strategic advantage you have, it kind of feels a bit like a waste of time to have good strategy in the first place. So basically, there are some dead certain things, and it's a slight bummer, there's a little moment of like, because I'm an inherent overthinker, as I've been just thinking about it, people have very different mental strategies to this game.

[@V-Jira]

I've playtested with a bunch of different people, and me and Graham will both spend forever thinking about our moves, which is great because it means I don't get impatient about him spending a long time, because I know I spend a long time and I've probably got things to think about too. In fact, most of the time, you're both thinking at the same time, which is nice because you're both trying to figure out what hidden card to play. But then my friend Greg, every time he has to commit a hidden card, just like, "This is my card." He didn't even think about it, you haven't even seen if I'm going to play support yet. Just very sure of himself. I had a fight with Greg where I was trying to win it, and he was trying to lose it, and he won. I thought, "Oh, this really matters to him, so he's gonna play a king, so I'm gonna play my ace." And he thought, "I don't care about this fight, because if I lose, there's actually an advantage to losing sometimes." So he played like a three. A three beat an ace, that's damn it, neither of us got what we wanted from that. Yeah. I like that these different strategies are fun, and the type of thinking the game wants you to do is, I could absolutely see someone disliking it. I could see people finding it frustrating. I did see one player, in an early version of this game, I could see from the way he was sort of, you know, his demeanor around picking cards, there was a bit of a "well, you know, it's just one of these. I just play one of these." In fact, he would sometimes take the two cards he was considering playing, shuffle them, then play one blind so he doesn't even know what he's played, so that he can't be psyched out. And that's interesting. I think that's a cool strategy because, yeah, if you think someone's got your number, if you think they're playing mind games with you, you can avoid that. No one can outthink pure chance. So, if you think you have worse than 50/50 odds by choosing yourself, then you can do that. I also wonder if there's an element for some people of like, it's not so much that I think it's likely I'm always psyched out, it's that I'll hate it if I get... I'll feel so played. There is a nasty feeling in that inherently. I've never had it playing this game. I don't like... I think there are some games where people can apply sort of psychological pressure in a way that's just kind of unfun for me, that just feels nasty. But this doesn't feel that way to me. I don't know if it's because it's my game, or just the particular nature of the gameplay. I think I never feel truly figured out. When someone... I know there's an element of "You didn't know I was going to do that," or "You didn't know I was going to play that game." Also, I think I have a pretty good track record, do I? For not getting assassinated. I don't think I do, actually. I think it's just because a lot of the time I'm playing with someone who has never played it before. The risk of playing a king, the likelihood the enemy is going to play an ace, is something that you have no experience with, and so it's very common for new players to get themselves assassinated. Oh, I've been assassinated. So, I anecdotally feel like I'm better at not doing that, but I probably am better at not doing that, but just because I play it more than everyone else. So yeah, I don't often feel psyched out in a nasty way. Just in case you're curious, the game I'm thinking of when I say some games can apply psychological pressure in a bad way: I really didn't like "Coup," which is a social deduction game where everyone has two roles. The roles have different abilities that you can use. You can use a role's ability even if you don't have it; you just have to say you have it. One of them is the Captain, who can sort of bully people for money, just like, "You have to give me two now, because I'm the Captain." They don't show you they're the Captain; they just say it. Your only recourse, well, there are two things you can do, but one of them is to say, "No, you're not the Captain." And if you're wrong and they are the Captain, you lose one of your two lives. You basically come close to a mortal wound. It's a really serious thing, and that just feels horrible to me. It's like, "You're just taking my lunch money, and I can't challenge you on it because I might die if I do." That's such a nasty feeling. And I know, I don't want nastiness in it, but it puts you in this deadlock of like, "Well, my choices are a small shitty thing happens to me, or a high chance for a massive shitty thing happens to me." That just sucks. And there's been versions of Dead King's Bluff where that has had that feel sometimes. There was a version where someone was in a situation where they felt like they had to play their King, and then they got assassinated. And that, that sucks, like you have to take this risk. I don't think I felt that with the current version. Basically, once you've played it a few times, you know that having a decent hand of cards is like your lifeline. If you start laying down cards such that you only have your ace and your king left, you are absolutely, what's the word, what'd you say, dancing with death? I feel like there's a really common phrase for that, but you're taking your life into your hands. You're becoming so predictable. If you have only your ace and your king, everyone knows it's your ace and your king because they can see your ace and your king are not down. They have to be there; that's what your two cards are. Sometimes it can actually be, if you just need to spend a card and you have your ace, your king, and like a four... Four's terrible. God, it might be worth putting down your, let me think, your king. If you have to get rid of your ace or king, your king's the better one to get rid of, counterintuitively, because if you get rid of your ace, it signals their safety to play a king. I think that's the right round. I don't know, there's some logic to it. One of those cards, they sound kind of symmetrical, but they're not. There is one that's much better, a card that does more for you even when you don't play it. The risk of the ace in your hand means they can't play their king, or they can't play their king safely. If they know for sure you don't have an ace, then being able to play their king is so powerful because they'll get it back eventually; it beats everything except an ace. You know, there's still some jostling about. They need the advantage in the fight. If it's a tie, the attacker wins. Attacker wins ties. Obviously, if they have a higher dice, then that factors into it too. But, yeah, it's fun to think about cards that have better value by their uncertainty. And yeah, what I was saying is, if you have an Ace, King, and a four, sometimes it's worth discarding your king, the best card in the game, and keeping the ace and the four, just because they don't know what the four is. It could be another king, it could be another ace, it could be anything. And there are lots of situations where, you know, let's say you go into a fight with just the ace and the four. If you play your four as support, they know you're going to play an ace. So they can beat it trivially. Almost anyone, in almost every situation, can beat an ace. So, you would want to put down your ace and just play a four, because there's every chance they might play an ace. There's every chance they might think you have a king left or something like that, and the four might win. And the alternative is just to be completely known. Your hidden card is known, and that's death. So yeah. I'm really enjoying working on this game and figuring it out. I'm going to, at some point, I feel like the correct way to sort of release it is to do a video of it being played. I'm a little bit torn on how to do that. Like with Grid Cannon, it was easy because it's a solo game, so I just played it by myself. This game, I have played against myself. It is fairly testable that way. It's obviously not a true playtest, but I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing. I can, at a hand of cards, make a decision based on that, put it down, pick up another hand of cards, and pretend I don't know what's in the other hand. It's ridiculous, obviously, I can't fully unknow it, I don't actually forget it, but I can simulate not knowing something. Which is probably just a really ordinary skill, probably everyone can do that. But if it sounds ridiculous that you can play a hidden information game against yourself, it's not entirely ridiculous, it can be done.

[@V-Jira]

So, I could do that as a video. It just looks a bit pathetic, which is not... I don't actually care about that, but I guess I care more about, like, is that just a distorted view of the game, to play against yourself? But then playing it with another person is a little bit awkward in other ways. Like, I've never really filmed a video with another person in that way, of like, we've got to orchestrate this and plan it out. I think probably the best thing to do, if I could do it, get enough playtesting games going on, is just record a whole bunch of them and just tell everybody, "Hey, if this ends up being a good game to show the game off, I will check with you and let you see the video and make sure you're cool with it, and if you want to say no, that's okay." That way, I get a good game. I do have one clip of my friends, Andy and Kim, playing it. They have the perfect photo finish of revealing their hidden cards and a huge reaction to it. That really gets across what works about the game for people. And yeah, it's had really positive receptions. It's definitely had some games where people are like, "Okay, yeah, that was cool," and other people are like, "Oh my God, I want to play that again." So, it hits differently for different people for sure. I've had one playtest that was, I think, just kind of got some vague positive comments, but I was testing a new concept for it that really, I think, didn't work. It kind of robbed all the numbers of it. I was trying to get rid of some of the math that you have to do, and if you take that out, a lot of the strategy just kind of collapses down into nothing, and I think the whole thing feels a bit hollow. So, that was the least successful test I've done. And yeah, a lot of my tests are for four players. Because usually, if we're... I don't know, it just works out that way. Often you have more than one person who wants to play. And four-player mode, I decided it should be teams because the problem with a free-for-all is everyone has their own ace and king, so no one will ever have a spare ace or king. And that little uncertainty bluffing thing just is no longer in the game, which is a shame. In 2v2, the way it works is, when somebody starts a fight, their ally can hand them a card secretly. So obviously, the person receiving the card sees what the card is, but the enemies don't know what you handed them. You could be handing them another ace, so they could have a spare ace. But also, you could bluff, and you could hand them just a bad card, so that the enemy can't call out. Like, this hasn't happened yet, we haven't played a huge number of 2v2 games, especially not with people who have played before, but I could see it, if it was me playing in one of these, I would love to set it up so that you pass your friend just a card, and then they put their ace down as support and just say, "Yeah, come at me." That signals strongly that I just received an ace. Did I, though? You can't really assume I didn't. That stuff is really fun, I love that kind of bluffing thing. And yeah, now I'm just kind of diving a little bit over little rules there. I'm really trying to keep it as simple as possible, to teach the basics simple. There are all kinds of weird, wrinkly questions about like, this rule is conceptually simpler, but it's slightly harder to write down, so it looks more complicated on the page. Trying to prioritize that is actually quite difficult because I want you to look at the rules of this game and think, "Oh yeah, I can do this." There are two sheets right now, not including setup. But setup could just be a diagram, and that is nice. I've just made a change to it that I think is simpler. When you play it, like, there used to be different conditions under which you would draw a card, and now it's just, you draw a card at the start of your turn, no matter what. In some situations, you discard that card, one situation. But you don't have to think about when you draw a card. And it's got this nice feel to it, where the card can sort of... it feels like that's the start of your turn, and the card can tell you what to do, or inform your decision at least. Which, I don't know, just feels kind of fresher. It feels nicer, it feels more generous than it used to be. It feels more dynamic because you always gain something each turn, you're never static. But it is slightly harder to spell out the rules now, because it used to be there were two things you do on your turn, and now there's three things you do on your turn because drawing a card is now a thing you always do on your turn. And it's just hard to lay out. This is kind of a very technical point, I suppose, but it's just been interesting, you know? It's easy to say your board game should be as simple as possible, but then "simple" has so many different definitions, and different kinds of simplicity matter in different ways. Things can slot into a player's brain more easily, even if they're more complex to write down. Things can be harder to teach but easier to remember, or they can be easy to teach and hard to remember. There's one really simple rule, like, when you move to an empty tile, it matters whether it's threatened or not. If it's threatened, that's a brave move, and you end up with more cards than if you made a cowardly move. But if you're picking up a dice, which you pay for, it doesn't matter because it's too expensive. If paying for a dice and it being cowardly had this extra cost to it because it's not your choice for the dice to be cowardly, you didn't choose for it to be in this position, you're just picking it up because it's there. So, it shouldn't matter whether it's brave or cowardly. And yet, every player thinks it does, and even I've caught myself doing it. I'm like, "Oh, that's a cowardly move, so I've got to do this." This is my rule; it was never the other way around. And for some reason, the player's brain, including mine, wants it, expects it to be that anytime you're picking up a dice, this matters. Anytime you're attacking an enemy, it doesn't matter. That's intuitive. But when you're picking up a dice, the fact that it doesn't matter isn't intuitive. But it's a really simple rule to explain. It's in the rules very clearly: when you move to an empty tile, it matters, and when you move to a dice, it doesn't. In a way, on paper, it seems like it would be more intuitive that I'm already paying a cost for this, why would I pay another cost? And yet, for some reason, the player always wants to believe it that way. I haven't decided whether to change that. I think I'm going to keep it as it is and just like, tough, you've just got to learn it, because it's better balance-wise. I don't want dice to cost you that much, or for you to be punished for the location of dice, because it's kind of out of your hands. But yeah, it's fun to navigate this stuff, and I'm learning a ton. It's a kind of game zone I've never done before. I mean, I've never made a multiplayer game, really. Semantics had a multiplayer mode, but that was made very quickly and not playtested, except with me and Lizzy. And so, it didn't really dig into a lot of multiplayer game design considerations because it was like the last night of the game jam, I think. And I think Lizzie had gone out shopping, and when she came back, I'd added multiplayer. So yeah, this has been really interesting to dig into, just player psychology. I think, I can't remember when I had this thought, but I do remember thinking, if I ever do make a multiplayer game, I want to make the most of it being multiplayer. Make it very mind-gaming, make it very like, "If you do this, then I should do this." You know, it's crazy to me, not very on chess. Chess is quite a successful worldwide game, but it just bothers me that there is a "best move" in chess. It doesn't matter what your enemy is going to do; it literally doesn't matter what your opponent is going to do. There is always a best move, and that is the best move no matter who your opponent is, no matter what their plan is, no matter what their strategy is. There's a best move, and that just feels dead to me. It feels lifeless. It should matter who your opponent is, it should matter how you think. I think one of the reasons this little clip that I've got of Andy and Kim having such a good time with it is because they're a couple, so they know each other really well, and they were both trying to psyche each other out. And that's the pleasure of it for me.

[@NevTheDeranged]

this sounds interesting... or it reads interesting, as I can't actually hear much. ADHD brain has poor background noise processing, sorry. I'll catch the next one.

[@DeliciousT0AST]

You could show off the game like the old go pros did: write down all the moves and then when you have a good game, replay the game for an audience. Might be hard to record the cards though, if random draws are involved.

[@matt13579]

Can't wait to play a game of this, it sounds great!

[@Quimbyrbg]

With your card minigame, it makes Queen the most powerful card. It beats all but 1 card like king, but you won't lose the game for having played it.

[@CaesarsSalad]

The isolated princess bride game does not end with having to stop arbitrarily in the infinite regress. You solve the equation and pick a random option with game-theoretical optimal weights. In the princess bride that would simply be 50/50 chances no matter what your opponent signals. (Any signal that does not cost your opponent anything can be ignored). Of course, solving the equation can become intractable in complex scenarios, but this is how it works in simple, isolated scenarios.

[@CathodeRayKobold]

I love games you can play with anything. Another good one is Zendo. It's sold with Icehouse pieces, but since the instructions boil down to "Build a structure that demonstrates a rule" and "try to guess the other player's rule" you could play it with anything from coins to chairs to Minecraft blocks.

[@JayCyrZak]

Maybe the phrase you were looking for was "playing with fire"?

[@aniforprez]

tom, tom, i love you so much tom but please for the love of god find a better place to record your videos or get a simple headset with a mic and connect it to your laptop or whatever you're filming this with. it would make things infinitely better. i'd rather listen to you than the presumably hundreds of animals stampeding across the road next door

[@scrattue]

Dont think this will be for me, I love coup, I think the captain is fine, and any sort of social deducing that takes more than 15 seconds is too long and I lose interest...