Ludology

We continue our annual tradition of bringing board game industry veteran Stephen Buonocore, now retired from Stronghold Games/Indie Game Studios and focusing on media and podcasting. We explore the bizarre, catastrophic year of 2020, and consider what's in store for us in 2021. Note that this episode was recorded on Monday, November 30, 2020; we occasionally say "this year" to mean 2020 instead of 2021. SHOW NOTES 6m24s: "Travis" is Travis Worthington, CEO of Indie Game Studios. 9m00s: Back the Comeback is a movement to keep comic and game stores alive during the pandemic. 13m26s: Gravitation Games (who did not release their first game on Kickstarter), Chris Solis' Solis Game Studio, and NewMill Industries. 18m58s: More info about the idea of flight-to-quality. 22m04s: You can hear more from Luke Crane and Anya Combs on Ludology 223 - Kick Out the Jams. 27m41s: You can play Codenames online here. 29m13s: Tim Hutchings' 1000 Year Old Vampire, Travis Hill's zine games, Jeeyon Shim's games about nature and survival. 32m47s: Our socially-distanced Gen Con 2020 live show, Gil's blog post about online conventions.  33m46s: Gil's thoughts here were really driven by Jeff Tidball's blog post here. 40m13s: Castle Tricon 42m01s: Board Games Insider 43m06s: Some board game Twitch streamers: The Brothers Murph, Ruel Gaviola, Board Game Blitz 46m17s: Our Family Plays Games, Before You Play 1h04m59s: Stephen's Facebook, website, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Emma and Gil welcome Adrienne Smith, designer of the card game Blitz Champz and wide receiver for the Boston Renegades women's gridiron football team. We discuss the intersection of mass market, kids, and sports game design, the state of women's football in modern America, and serial entrepreneurship. This episode was recorded on November 16, 2020. A couple of weeks later, Vanderbilt brought their varsity women's soccer goalie, Sarah Fuller, onto their men's football team as a kicker. Note: This will be the last Ludology episode of 2020! We are taking our annual winter break, during which time there will be no episodes of Ludology, Biography of a Board Game, or GameTek. We will return on January 10, 2021 with our annual "State of the Industry" episode with the Podfather, Stephen Buonocore. SHOW NOTES 2m05s: Wondering how you can throw a spiral? 3m18s: Adrienne played for the New York Sharks. Here's the web page for the IFAF. 3m56s: More information about Jen Welter, the first female coach in the NFL. 5m14s: Gil wrote a Twitter thread about the history of women in football after the news about Sarah Fuller broke. 5m46s: Women's old-school football pants, versus MC Hammer's pants. 8m03s: The Women's Football Alliance, and the Women's National Football Conference 10m17s: More info about Ultimate, originally called Ultimate Frisbee. 10m42s: More info about Ultimate Hall of Famer Molly Goodwin. 14m00s: Adrienne is correct! The periodic table of the elements was first envisioned by Dmitri Mendeleev. Said he, "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary." 21m56s: You can hear more from our interview with graphic/game designer Daniel Solis on Ludology 204 - The Eyes Have It. 25m23s: Here's a closer look at Adrienne's "Passing TD" card. 27m26s: You can hear more from our interview with mass market toy/game designer Kim Vandenbrouke on Ludology 212 - Inventing Play. 29m47s: Here's a clip of the amazing Kyler Murray "Hail Mary" pass that somehow landed in D'Andre Hopkins' arms. This happened the day before we recorded. (I do not recommend Bills fans clicking on that link.) 34m28s: Adrienne is talking about New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, winner of 6 Super Bowls.  42m46s: More info about Gotham Girls' Roller Derby, the NYC-based roller derby organization. (There are other fantastic roller derby organizations around the world, like the world #1-ranked Rose City Rollers in Portland, OR, and the world #2-ranked Victorian Roller Derby League in Melbourne, Australia, all run by the Women's Flat Track Derby Association.) 44m17s: You can hear more about Omari Akhil's views on the intersection of sports and games in Ludology 233 - A Sporting Chance.  55m26s: The legendary arcade game Galaga. 58m37s: It may not have been a tornado that hit NYC on November 15, but it seems to have come very close to one. 1h07m49s: More info about Title IX, passed in the US in 1972, which prohibits discrimination in education based on sex. The upshot of this is that for most sports, if a school wanted to field a men's team in a given sport, they had to field a women's team as well.  1h09m03s: Pop Warner Football is a US organization for youth football, roughly equivalent to Little League baseball. It's named for legendary coach Pop Warner. Also, more information about Utah Girls Tackle Football. 1h10m51s: If you want to know more about minorities in the middle ages, a great place to start is People of Color in European Art History. 1h13m48s: Here's Adrienne's Instagram page.

Scott takes us through the history of Dark Tower, the legendary electronically-enhanced board game, and its modern spiritual successor, Return to Dark Tower. The story's twists and turns include every designer's worst nightmare: a huge company stealing a designer's idea and making it their own. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF A BOARD GAME Wilderness Campaign, the Apple II game that helped inspire Dark Tower: https://www.mobygames.com/game/wilderness-campaign Fan page with all sorts of info: https://well-of-souls.com/tower/index.html Ruling on Burten v. Milton Bradley Co.: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/592/1021/1816724/ An article on the game's original release: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/23/business/new-bradley-game-tests-fickle-market.html Dark Tower commercial with Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3HVCwPp7j0

Emma and Gil welcome Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu to the show to discuss the impact of language on play, and how to design games that revolve around the building, modification, and demise of a language. SHOW NOTES 2m52s: Here's the Kickstarter for Thorny's new game Xenolanguage. 6m45s: Among Us is a social deduction digital game that, after a quiet two years on the market, suddenly blew up on Twitch and is now extremely popular. US congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines when she played the game live on Twitch with several popular streamers (and fellow representative Ilhan Omar, who turned out to be very good at the game).  9m09s: Myst 9m36s: Here's our episode on the Incan Gold experiment, run by Dr. Stephen Blessing of the University of Tampa. 15m43s: Dialect (Watch a playthrough with Hakan here) 20m33s: The earliest instance that the OED has found of the singular "they" is from 1375. 38m47s: Gil, Geoff, and Scott dug deep into party game design in Ludology 190 - The Life of the Party. 45m15s: Sign 49m47s: More info about the fascinating instrument known as the theremin. 52m54s: The instrument called the ondes Martenot (Gil apologies profusely to all French listeners for his poor pronunciation skills!). You can see its inner workings discussed here (video in French with English subtitles). You can hear it as one of the instruments in this absolutely wild Edgard Varése composition. 55m18s: More info on Code Talkers and how they helped transmit encoded messages in wartime. 56m01s: Here's a thread with Magic fans playing the translation game on Jace. 56m35s: Kathryn's GDC talk on artifacts of play. 58m07s: A Fake Artist Goes to New York 58m48s: Fall of Magic 59m15s: Qwixx 1h08m18s: A Buzzfeed article (forgive me) on how red Solo cups are viewed outside the US as a uniquely American symbol.  1h08m38s: Thorny Games on the web and Instagram. Also, you can find Kathryn and Hakan on Twitter.

Geoff discusses the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning, and its impact in board games and beyond. In this episode, Geoff discusses the games Clue/Cluedo, Mastermind, and Zendo. He also discusses dark matter, WIMPs, and Einstein's theory of relativity.

Emma, Gil, and Scott discuss the idea of complexity in a board game. We explore 6 types of complexity, and discuss their effects on the games we play and design. SHOW NOTES 0m51s: Pete Seeger was an American folk singer, known for songs like "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn, Turn, Turn," and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" 2m04s: Our list of complexities: Spatial complexity Arithmetical complexity Zone complexity Planning complexity Rules/mechanism complexity Component complexity 2m45s: Barenpark, New York Zoo 3m44s: The SAT is a standardized test in the United States that is a major factor in a college's admission of a prospective student. 4m16s: Number 9 4m32s: Bosk 5m31s: Photosynthesis 6m30s: Treasure Island, Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, Specter Ops, Tigris & Euphrates 7m14s: Checking the rules, an Internal Conflict in Tigris & Euphrates happens when a Leader is moved to a Kingdom where there is already a Leader of the same color belonging to another player. 8m00s: Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game. Check out Scott's Biography of a Board Game on the Flight Path family of games, including X-Wing and Wings of War. 8m25s: The Warhammer family of games is absolutely massive. The flagship game, Warhammer 40,000, is in its 9th edition.  10m18s: The Funkoverse Strategy Game. We chatted with Chris Rowlands, one of its designers, in Ludology 224: Putting the Fun in Funko. 11m01s: Heroclix, Heroscape 13m23s: Set 15m17s: Power Grid, Russian Railroads, and Gil's own The Networks 16m26s: The term "Goumbaud's Law" was coined by Jesse Schell in his book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. 21m12s: Sticheln (the pronunciation of which Gil has completely butchered) was recently re-released by Capstone Games as Stick 'Em. Smartphone Inc. 22m46s: Sushi Go, Disney: The Haunted Mansion – Call of the Spirits Game 25m38s: Search for Planet X, Zendo (Kory Heath's design diary for Zendo remains a fantastic look at how hard it is to design a seemingly simple game.) 26m40s: Mastermind 28m12s: Here's a description of the XYZ Wing solve technique for Sudoku. 28m33s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg21M2zwG9Q (explicit language warning) 28m59s: Hey, That's My Fish, graph theory, and the Traveling Salesman problem. 29m33s: Scott first proposed the 6 Zones of Play in Ludology 209 - The 6 Zones of Play. 32m28s: Formula D 33m27s: Seafall, the Betrayal family of games. 41m21s: Ra 43m53s: A Feast for Odin 44m22s: A Few Acres of Snow 46m45s: Nielsen Media Research is best known for its Nielsen TV ratings, that offer the TV industry in the United States metrics into the number of viewers a TV show enjoys. 48m06s: Advanced Squad Leader, The Campaign for North Africa 50m13s: We discussed the futility of 1:1 models with Volko Ruhnke in Ludology 178 - COIN Operated. Gil also brings up the "Map-territory relation" problem. 50m29s: Food Chain Magnate, Feudum, Cloudspire, Kanban 54m48s: Two designers who work in complex games: Vital Lacerda and Dávid Turczi. You can hear our chat with Dávid about complex games in Ludology 234 - Playing with Time. 55m34s: Brass: Lancashire 57m27s: Fresco 1h00m20s: Gil discussed his doomed auction mechanism most recently in Ludology 235 - Rise to the Challenge. 1h01m45s: Samurai, Steel Driver, For Sale. Here's Samurai's scoring system: If one player has the most figures of 2 or 3 of the types of figures, they win. If no one has won in the previous step, only players who have the most of a single type of figure can win. All other players are eliminated. The remaining players set aside the figures they have of which they have the most of a certain type. The player with the most remaining figures wins. In case of a tie, the tied players re-collect all their figures and count their total number of figures. Highest total wins, all remaining ties are shared. 1h02m30s: Nomic, Fluxx 1h09m23s: Descent: Journeys in the Dark 1h10m45s: Geoff and Gil discussed "tight coupling" in Ludology 172 - Odd Coupling. 1h12m04s: Carcassonne (the type Gil was thinking of is Monk) 1h13m25s: The Betrayal family of games (again) 1h14m46s: GameTrayz 1h16m20s: Mike Selinker uttered this now-legendary quote in Ludology 189 - The Missing Selinker. 1h17m47s: Gil's announcements: BGG@Home, Weird Stories pregen settings, High Rise pre-orders opening soon, Rival Networks 1h20m02s: Battling Tops, and the legendary BGG Battling Tops tournament. 1h20m22s: Tabletopia 1h20m44s: Emma, Gil, and Scott recorded Ludology 215 - Table Topics live at BGG.CON 2019. 1h21m06s: Scott's announcements: Treats, Xeno Command, Comic Book Crisis, The Pitch Project. 1h24m06s: Emma's announcements: Game Maker's Guild panel, Dutch and Hungarian versions of Abandon All Artichokes. 1h25m26s: Our contact info: Emma (Twitter, Instagram, Web), Gil (Twitter, Facebook, Web), Scott (Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook)

Scott goes over the history of Which Witch, a game that's been adapted into many other games, including The Real Ghostbusters Game and the Scooby-doo! Haunted House 3D Board Game. If you're interested in learning more about Marvin Glass and Associates, Scott recommends that you read A World Without Reality: Inside Marvin Glass's Toy Vault. We also discussed him in Ludology 212 - Inventing Play with Kim Vandenbrouke.  

Emma and Gil welcome Karen Twelves, whose straddling of the worlds of gaming and improv led her to write the book Improv for Gamers. What can gaming and improv learn from each other? Content warning: this episode contains brief references to non-consensual touching and racism. SHOW NOTES 01m16s: AD&D is Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the form of D&D most prominent in the 80s and 90s. 02m43s: A kinesthetic learner is one who learns through physical activity. We discussed kinesthetic learning and games (among other things) with Chidi Paige in Ludology 231 - STEAM Engine. 03m35s: Whose Line Is It Anyway? was a British radio show that became a British television show that became an American television show. In the show, four improvisers run through several short-form improv games. 08m25s: The Harold is a structure used in long-form improv.  09m31s: Del Close was a fundamental figure in the world of improv, creating many techniques and co-writing the book Truth in Comedy. Note that Gil misattributed the name of the Harold to Close. While Close helped develop and publicize the technique, improv actor and musician Bill Mathleu is credited with naming it. 12m33s: Kingmaker is an Adventure Path for the RPG Pathfinder. 12m48s: Most recently, we discussed failure in games with Sen-Foong Lim in our previous episode, Ludology 236 - Roll With It. 15m32s: LEEROY JENKINS (note explicit language in link) 31m00s: The story RPG Fiasco. We had designer Jason Morningstar on Ludology 161 - What's the Story, Morning Glory? 40m55s: The board games Karen mentions are Splendor, Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, and Pandemic. 50m58s: Alex Roberts, designer of Star Crossed and For the Queen. 52m50s: The TV show Taskmaster. Wouldn’t Alex Horne be a great Ludology guest? 58m30s: “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful/Everyone dies twisted inside and that is beautiful” 1h01m03s: Burning Wheel, Pathfinder, Fiasco, Monsterhearts 1h02m22s: Archipelago 1h12m03s: Then She Fell, Sleep No More 1h12m57s: Gil is referring to Ludology 214 - Escape From Reality, with Hayley E.R. Cooper and Cameron Cooper. 1h13m32s: Palace Games in San Francisco. Their in-person experience is temporarily closed for the pandemic, but like many escape rooms, they are currently running virtual games. 1h15m11s: Here's Karen's current ongoing Thing & Thing Twitter thread. 1h18m18s: Karen’s Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok. Here are her websites: improvforgamers.com, karentwelves.com, and dtwelves.com.

Geoff compares the design process of the video game Diabolo to… the invention of calculus? Yes, there are surprising similarities, and seeing how the two dovetail leads to a stronger appreciation of both game design and mathematics.

Emma and Gil welcome Sen-Foong Lim back to the show to discuss the differences—and similarities—between board games and roleplaying games. We go through the perspectives of playing them, designing them, and examining the culture of play between both. Sen originally appeared on Ludology 134: There's No "I" in Team with frequent co-designer Jay Cormier. SHOW NOTES 0m41s: Board games Sen has designed or co-designed: Junk Art, Belfort, D&D: Rock Paper Wizard. RPGs Sen has designed, co-designed, or written for: Jiang-Shi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, Kids on Bikes, The Curse of the House of Rookwood, North Sea Epilogues 3m39s: If the comparison between RPG and improv intrigues you, wait till you hear Ludology 237... 4m47s: An example of a crunchy old-school RPG: Traveller 5m10s: Chainmail was the game that D&D evolved from. 5m20s: While Gil agrees with Sen that encumbrance as implemented by a game like D&D tends to bog down gameplay, a nice counter-example is Torchbearer, a dungeon-crawling TTRPG in which encumbrance is a central mechanism. 7m44s: You can see one Emma's chats with Peter Adkison (who founded Wizards of the Coast and owns Gen Con) here. 11m34s: Sen is currently watching Black Sails. 12m31s: RPGs where your character is likely to die: Fiasco, Paranoia 17m55s: The RPG Masks: A New Generation. 19m14s: Gil and Sen's friend and beloved loudmouth Errol Elumir. 19m40s: This is literally Errol's first rule of escape room puzzle design. 20m36s: Critical Role (with GM Matt Mercer) is the most popular of the vibrant active play scene. 21m46s: The party game Cranium. 22m25s: Save Against Fear, a convention about gaming in therapy. 23m01s: Roll20 is an online platform for playing RPGs, as is Role. Tabletop Simulator can handle crunchy RPGs like D&D as well. 28m21s: Formula D (née Formula Dé) 30m00s: We had Mike Selinker on the show for Ludology 189: Missing Selinker. 31m13s: Sen's favorite D&D module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks 31m30s: Star Frontiers 33m05s: You can hear more from Jiang-Shi co-designer Banana Chan on Ludology 228: The Roles We Play. 35m51s: Emma's storytelling games ...And Then We Died (...And Then We Held Hands is a different game) 45m02s: "Jay" is Jay Cormier, Sen's frequent collaborator. "Jesse" is game designer Jesse Wright. 45m30s: Jay and Sen's tabletop escape game Scooby Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion. 47m20s: The TV show Bob's Burgers. 48m50s: Itch is an online platform for digital games, but has a lot of downloadable PDFs for tabletop games. DriveThruRPG offers PDFs and PODs of many RPGs. 50m12s: RPGs that Emma mentions: Burning Wheel, Paranoia, FATE Core System, Ryuutama, Over the Edge. 51m58s: For more about safety tools in RPGs, check out Ludology 227: Respect the X. 53m04s: You can access all these tools via the TTRPG Safety Kit. 56m05s: Gil's board game safety tool Check-In Cards. 1h07m06s: Board games that allow for relaxed conversation: Sagrada, Lotus. 1h08m27s: More about the semiotic function. 1h09m57s: Sen mentions psychologist Lev Vygotsky. 1h10m30s: Emma is a Mythic-tier Magic player! 1h11m55s: More info about the D&D Adventurers League. 1h14m13s: Jay and Graeme's game In the Hall of the Mountain King. Jay also created the Fail Faster playtesting notebook. 1h19m31s: Sen's web series, the Meeple Syrup Show, with Jessey Wright and Erica Hayes-Bouyouris.  1h20m59s: Sen's licensed games: Batman: The Animated Series - Rogues Gallery, Legend of Korra: Pro-Bending Arena, and the Scooby Doo and D&D games mentioned above. 1h22m01s: The manga and anime My Hero Academia. 1h23m08s: Follow Sen on Twitter!