Gil Hova

Living here, I can attest that Europe isn't locked in some kind of isolated pocket dimension, we have the same internet as everyone else. The grace period for Europeans treating indigenous peoples like they're from a fucking Tolkien book has long expired.

I will never unsee "Phillies phire" 😀

Certainly a strong possibility. Maybe they felt they had some "bigotry carbon credits" from publishing a design from a woman last year. How progressive! But back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I started using cultural consultants in Weird Stories, and I'll use them for future games. It's just good business to have a backstop like this.

"Why should I hire a cultural consultant for my game? They're not going to tell my anything I don't already know."

as a mastodon user, nothing culturally interesting happens on there. they took too long to make it easier to join and understand, and it cultivated a community of mostly highly technical people who seemingly want to be left alone. if they want the audience bluesky has, they gotta reinvent the brand

The space theme is SO much better for it.

Right? And the flowchart, and the weird way they handled discounts.

Also, check the errata on BGG. Converting coins to cards and back works very differently than I expected!

I'm working on a card game design at the moment, in which players are magicians trying to steal the secrets of their illusions from each other.

It's a trick-taking game.

There are also all sorts of really weird decisions about how the game presents info for its tech tree. It's done in a very confusing way.

So this was an opportunity for me to mess around with an improved UX. I'm curious to try it soon. Will I be able to polish this diamond? We'll see! /🧵

For example, there is money in the game, represented by physical coins. Fine, that works.

But the icon for VP is… ALSO A COIN.

So if someone says "I get 2 coins," you don't know if they mean money or VP.

I got to play Phoenicia a few weeks ago. It's actually a very good game mechanically. But it was hampered by some horrendous artistic, graphic design, and UX choices.

Arriving next week will be Outnecia Sector, my retheme of Tom Lehman's game Phoenecia, which itself was a retheme of the classic game Outpost.

And yes, I think this too plays better with a space theme! Also, dual-layer boards work really well for this game.

A game of Ago Sector in progress. Tiles arranged in a 5x5 grid. A few dual-layer boards are visible in the background and periphery.

Tonight, I got to play Ago Sector, my personal retheme of Goa.

I made a couple of silly misprints in the expedition cards, and I neglected to include the main board. Thankfully the main board isn't strictly necessary; it just helps organize the cards.

🧵

A photo of Petrograd Sector, my personal retheme of St. Petersburg. (I’ve improved the look of the cards since this photo was taken. You may see areas around the black border where I stupidly didn’t add enough bleed to the image.)

I call the games my "Sector" games, and they all have a pretty generic space futurism theme.

I've already made Petrograd Sector, my retheme of St. Petersburg. I think it actually plays better with the new theme.

You may recall that I've been retheming some older games as a personal project, for fun.

I won't be selling these games, but I'm enjoying making them for myself. It's nice to play a game that had a big influence on me, but with a theme that doesn't make my skin crawl.

No other call has left as deep an impression on me. Scully's tone of disbelief was so perfect.

We “cheated” one more time in this fashion. It wasn’t a competitive game, but those students got to see how the game could end in multiple ways. So that turned out to be a valuable tactic.

It’s not even kids. When I was an adjunct at NYU teaching game design, I taught a few students Power Grid.

I was about to win by making a certain move. I pointed this out, and then told the students I wasn’t going to do it, so they could see more of the game.

Oh yeah, playing with kids, sometimes cheating in a way that keeps the kid’s interest is a valid thing to do. I’ve heard a few parents point this out

And in their defense, learning rules from a rulebook is _hard_. It's a big ask, especially with a big rules-dense game. Those alternatives, like video, are often more effective (but harder for a lot of independent creators to make)

So yeah, splitting up can work if done with careful strategy and consideration. But I don't think a copy-paste automatically works, if there's too much overlap between the two shows. Maybe 2x revenue, but too close to 2x expense to make it worth it.

And then if you have the different events do different things, you pull a different crowd towards them. Unplugged pulls in a ton of people (myself included) that probably would skip East or West, because we're not as interested on the digital side (though East has an excellent TT section).

I think it's why PAX is working with West and East, and the dearly-departed South couldn't unlock enough "locals" to make it worth the expense.

The good thing about an East Coast/West Coast split is that you get more "locals", so your overall attendance may increase. That's one way to unlock >2x revenue.

I definitely agree with you that Gen Con is at a point where they're trying to do *everything* in one show, and that's a reason they're hitting a breaking point.

So I feel like the calculus there is the same, even though it's technically not rules-breaking.

Sorry for the overlong response, but this is really cool stuff to think through!

Getting a clue often breaks the immersion (depending on how well the room is designed), so while it's not strictly rules-breaking, there is often a moment of dissonance where players realize they have to step out of the game world and treat their environment like the artifice it is.

And not to make this a rambly overlong thread response (too late Gil), but it's similar to getting a clue in an escape room. Players request clues because the fun has stopped. They can't progress in the room. No new puzzles, no new narrative.