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Wild to think that there are new (fairly simple) ideas being discovered and popularized in just the recent past. What a time to be alive. The 80s through early 2000s really have such a range of ways to play digital and physical games. Also a little sad that there are so many forgotten and unsuccessful games. Hopefully people had fun with them!

You’re a really excellent presenter Adam, fantastic. Well done!

I think a good angle for this kind of thing would be doing something awkward but appealing. Like holding another players hands while staring them in the eye without blinking. The game told you to do it so it's okay. You even get to potentially get to hold the hand of a crush and pretend that the game made you do it. Or just have a funny experience of just having to hold your dad's hand while he stares at you.

Other games to consider: pangaia, chai, steam up, agueda, abducktion, beez, leaf

Probably my favorite board game is Rail Baron, which has got a quite large lookup table for both determining where a player must go next and how much the trip is worth. There is a mechanism for eliminating players (if they can't pay their rail fees and they've got no properties left to auction), but by the time someone's eliminated someone else generally will be very close to having enough money to win (this doesn't necessarily mean that they DO win, though, there's a condition they have to meet first, and it can be interrupted by the other players).

Yeaaaah, as a Magic player from the ninties I can most definitely tell you, that Donald Vaccarino most definitely didn't invent deckbuilding!

A really key lesson that you danced around for a lot of the video is end on a high note

Top Trumps is not completely random. In theory, card memorizing will give you an enormous advantage. If you memorize the card order during the first deck traversal, you know when the opponent's strong cards come up - and you also know their particular weak stats (a well-designed Top Trumps has cards with weak points). This gives you an enormous advantage.

I have never been able to vocalize why I love dice placement so much. I love this video. It’s as if you have taught me how to fish. A bit dramatic I know, but this is the first resource that I’ve come across that so brilliantly defines why I love dice placement. Input randomness is actually what I enjoy. Thank you for helping me better understand why I enjoy the things I do. Fantastic video and I can’t wait to watch the other ones.

TIL that the UK calls "Clue" "Cluedo" and it was the most shocking unaddressed difference in this video.

Modern games don't make these mistakes? Have you not played ...Munchkin? Exploding Kittens? Or ANY games from Unstable Games? There are tons of modern games that are crap with no player agency etc.

Yep board game design docs is what I need

monopoly and the wrestling game are actually both great pieces of art through their use of player agony as metaphor for the real world scenario they model. it might not be fun to play long term, but I think you can credit them for this instead of citing them as negative examples really your whole video so far is very slow paced and uninformative. Any explanation of random events in games must include the hearthstone performance triangle, or else be irrelevant. a certain amount of randomness can very much smooth a gameplay experience

I would disagree with the lookup table being seen as a bad thing. Personally i think a game that has a lookup table that will point you to the page in the book of tables to tell you what the rng means is appealing.

The biggest reason is one you touched on but didn't explore: time. Any work of art has the potential to sit around for years or even decades before anyone cares about it for some reason, and designers have to look at what they're creating as 'art'. But for anyone to care about it, it has to be available to purchase, and a lot of these games simply aren't available to purchase for long enough to gain traction. Catan, for instance, came out in 1995, but it wasn't until years later in 2008 that people really paid attention to it, and people forget when they talk about it that it was essentially a throw away design for more than a decade after release, and it never would have sold the 40 million units it has sold if it wasn't available for purchase when people started paying attention to it.

You like the life spinner? The component that has a whole rule written into the game because it breaks so often?

As always: fantastic video, Adam! 👍

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