This Might Ruin Games For You

So what’s going to ruin games for me? I’m 11 minutes and still have no idea what y’all are talking about.

(disclaimer im like 5 mins in srry if this is addressed later) There are a lot of reasons why its silly to complain about "sweaty tryhards," but one that I think is particularly relevant to this video is that, when someone is invested in a game, aka theyre paying attention engaging with mechanics and doing all the things a game designer likely wants them to be doing, they can and will optimize the fun out of it by accident. If your game has one tactic that completely destroys its strategic viability, I cant help if I notice it or not; it will likely be discovered just through playing normally. And once its discovered, even if that player chooses to stay quiet or actively tries to avoid that play pattern, it can ruin the experience. A sword fight isnt going to be tense if I have a gun in my pocket.

Do you think that an entirely different game system would support a "commander" style game better? Perhaps a game with mechanics that would be foreign or unplayable in magic's system. Or maybe the 1v1v1v1 style of game is just inherently flawed.

TFT recently had its optimization schism happen for the 2nd time because Riot decided to obscure the winrate of augments(3 choices you make throughout the course of a game that gives you money, power, items, or intangibles). Before this, the game was turning into "pick the augment with lowest number on your add-on" simulator and it's been really interesting to see the community reactions to it

"Players that play to optimize will ruin the game for players that don't."

As a long time player of EDH, D&D , and various other multiplayer video and tabletop games, I felt this quote IN NY BONES.

I am a very casual player in all games, and I've been trying a long time to figure out how to enjoy playing casual games with people that max out the games potential. I've come to the conclusion after 10 years of trying that maybe it's just better to accept that some people want to play the game much different me, and rather than force them or myself to play it a certain way I should just strive to play those games with people that play it for the same reasons I do.

i didn't knew that designers would consider that optimizing would make it less fun. when i started playing commander I would certainly agree, but now i would say that a great part of the most fun i ever had playing commander was with cedh, and also trying to optimize a deck. i think in the channel fireball case it is really just not a game anymore if everyone is playing mirror matches, its just coin flipping. but in a diverse cenario with lots of interaction it can be amazing i guess.

i always optimize my decks to have the most powerful cards/synergy. why would i play a watered down version of a deck that i made and cherish? i want to make that deck into my identity and i can't do that if i'm playing crap

Hah! Joke's on you. I'm a programmer by trade so I've been taking apart games for years!

In fact it was what led me to clicking on your vids in the first place.

(Though like a program, I find I can rernjoy something even once I understand it because there is beauty in watching the engine work.)

Far as possibly best design ever? Have you guys played decrypto? Favorite party game where the entire challenge is the other players. It has a bit of a learning curve to it, but as soon as the players make it over that "hump" they love it.

I'm down to enjoy some glizzies

Let's relax with the ridiculous clickbait titles and thumbnails

As someone who is that guy and who's play group is just a group of those people I find this perspective fairly odd. Trying to win is how you play a game, no? So having an efficient method for determining optimum strategies is almost categorically how you should approach all games from a player perspective. If you're at least attempting to do that are you playing the game or are you just doing an activity within the game space? I know we're mostly talking about tabletop games but to illustrate my point I will use a video game example. If we're playing Mario Kart and I am trying to win the race, and you're trying to see how many times you can hit things with a shell regardless of if it wins the game I don't know that you're playing Mario Kart - you're just shooting things.

hahaha the spooky episode this ominous should've been saved for halloween xD but yeah I think this was a fitting name for the topic as this is the same attitude I have when watching a movie. The movie 'magic' has to be working like turbo overdrive to get me to not be thinking of each reason a camera was shot from this angle, what the writing is trying to convey, how consistent is the characters, whats the plot pushing forward, are moments contrived, what is the theme of the story etc etc etc.

My wife put it to me beautifully, "You overthink things." And she's correct, the best way to ruin anything pretty much is to overthink things in the wrong way, if you're looking at what could be vs what is in front of you and not cherishing the thoughts, actions, purpose and intent yes you can 'optimize' or 'suggest' out the creative vision of the product and the event you are being presented. So if you want games to be ruined, when you hold a card don't look at the art, the flavor the vision, look at what this resource can do for me, how easy is it to obtain, what systems does this allow circumvention or cheating, what does this action allow me to do to defeat my opponents at all cost, is it the best thing to be doing? Is it worth while to chase, is this luck? Can this be exploited, etc etc.

You'll find enjoyment in solving a puzzle once, but you'll enjoy a game with deep systems forever.

This has become one of my favorite channels. A lot of the things I’ve picked up on while playing Magic have been covered and elaborated on here in great detail and I always recommend the channel to those who have a little bit more awareness of what’s going on and show interest in the design of what’s happening

I ruined games for myself years ago, when I got into Skyrim modding and started thinking about how games could be better, and therefore what I would do to make them better. I only really enjoy most games the second time I play them, a few years after I play them the first time, when I've come to terms with the ways the game is worse than it could have been and can accept it for what it is.

There is a silver lining though, which is that when I do enjoy a game the first time I play it, I have a solid metric for knowing I've found something very special. Looking at you Nier Automata.

Sick giant growth shirt Forrest!

I am thankful we have so many games to optimize the fun out of. I am also thankful for you two sharing your thoughts. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Great vid! Keep it up 🎉

Thanks a lot for your TCG and Magic-related content!

I really enjoy the way we are talking about these games: Not by a players perspective only. As you tell us from your view as designers as well! 👍

I mean, the game of magic is complex af but there are aspects of it, if played out correctly or stayed hidden well enough provide you with a better execution of your game plan > in is basic form: Reduce lifetotals to 0.

Yes, it's in another video of yours were you talk about information. How to get it ( > someone casts an Enlightened Tutor now information becomes known), how to hide it ( you play a "Snarl" themed tapped land turn 1 but don't need the mana > don't reveal 1 of the lands needed, if you like or bluff about possible interactions if you like to 😅) But you basicly helped me become a better player by figuring out how to handle information and therefore I'm pretty thankful! 😅

I played a game of commander yesterday ( Mono Green Nemata from Planeshift > ramp, ramp, ramp, double or triple your mana flood the board with some tokens and overrun opponents), with "Mirris Guile" in play since turn 1. No one considered it a problem but it was able to safe the "Triumph of the horde" card layed on the top of my library, hidden and ( not by all means) uninteractable by my opponents. One of them try to bully me with some bigger trampling creatures and I revealed to them ( took a bit of mathing around), I'm going to kill the whole table. The were shocked and tried to interact with my hand by wheeling. Which was funny as I knew that the one hand in my card will not ruin there game but the second card from the top will...

Long story short: I talked about information I have and stayed as it's in my hand but it wasn't which they aren't able to know about and they started to do "wrong" things, cause they drew another conclusion from the information given to them!

Ty by improving my managment in this specific, niche topic! 😁

In Altered, you need 7 "points" to win.

Standard is the best way to play Magic! Preach it brother!

Can you guys cover Narrative Based Games? How designing that is different than, say, a TCG?

For the comments below that are taking from this discussion that players that optimize will ruin the game for player's that don't. The player's that optimize are playing the game correctly. The game is ruined by the designers who failed to see any exploits or paths to winning that take away the fun from the less optimized players. This is why game designers need to have their game tested and broken by the best players. Spikes methods are what make sure a game is fair, balanced and ultimately fun for a majority of its players.

i need this kind of content injected directly into my veins every day please and thank you

An interesting wrinkle is that many games have different layers of what it means to 'win'/different Essential Games. For example, in games with a competitive ladder system, there may be one strategy that you have a 55% winrate with, and another strategy that you have a 54% winrate, but if you use the second strategy each game takes half the time. The first strategy is better at winning individual games, but the second will climb the ladder faster (it's better at winning the metagame of getting the highest ladder placement). Similarly, if you're playing a multiplayer free for all game, the FOOS for a player with a "first place or bust" mindset might be different from the FOOS for a player who wants to place as high as possible on average; if it's a point scoring game the FOOS for scoring the highest average number of points might be different from both of these.

Ideally, all these different interpretations promote different strategies that mutually support each other, giving another layer of protection against strategic collapse. On the other hand, sometimes they can interfere with each other, or even lead to strategic collapse despite the fact that in theory your game has a variety of viable strategies.

This comes at the right time, after I had an argument on Facebook's BGG page today, where I claimed that 7 Wonders Duel—without any expansions—is borderline unplayable. I said that the number of times the game ends in a Zugzwang situation where the winner is determined after revealing the 3rd age's cards is pretty high and that there are - even before - not many, even if any, significant decisions to make.
The game is a bit like chess but on a significant lower level. You try to get an advantage in the midgame, so you don't have to play the late game because it's simply the conclusion of the situation you put yourself in. And I mean a significantly lower level. If that is the game experience you like, go for it, but I think there are a lot of people who don't like not having any decisions in a lot of games.
Ofc. the other person claimed that he played over a thousand games of the base game and doesn't feel the same way.
Well, he's entitled to have his opinion.

"It's inevitable and the game system needs to be what solves it"

YES. My biggest jams are Warhammer Fantasy, Mordheim, and more The Old World.

However I have often found myself struggling with a playgroup or a wider community that doesn't want to recognise that there's a need to introduce house rules or "composition systems" to patch over some flaws in the rules that make optimal (and inevitable) play quite degenerate and a non-game.

There's this bell curve of understanding where games start fun, get unfun, then get way more fun. At first, games seem to exist miraculously and you accept them passively. Then you understand that they're designed by fallible humans who often leave gaps in design that can be exploited. Cynicism sets in. Then you recognize exactly how hard it is to not leave those gaps, so when you find something really smartly and tightly designed, it feels miraculous all over again. You appreciate it much much more than when you just played the game without thinking about it.

Hi, a comment

On the note of Balatro, I haven't played in a while so I am now aware of updates in the past 6 months, but for a long time, Flushes were only dominant on lower stakes. The higher stakes added a lot of pressures on your hand space, largely by limiting discards and limiting your hand capacity. This made flushes much weaker, since the main weakness of a flush is you need 5 cards to make it work. As such, if you were aiming to maximize probability of winning on gold stake (which is not the only way to play Balatro but is a prominent way of playing), you were generally better off augmenting hands that didn't require as many cards in hand like high card pair, or two pair. You'd do this by scaling chips, since the weakness of lower card hands is less in the multiplier and more in the low chip count.

I think the key point here is that, from the designer's perspective, checking the critical pathway to success is important for several reasons.

1) Finding the critical pathway to success should be fun in and of itself. Figuring out a cool rules interaction in Magic or a clever maneuver in chess is itself an exciting thing, and also makes you better.

2) Your critical pathway to success should be something that you anticipated as being the core mechanic. Oftentimes games have ancillary mechanics that can eclipse the core: Using alchemy in Skyrim to bootstrap your stats up, for example. That one would have been relatively easy to solve: No ability in the game that the player can control the timing of can increase any stat that can then be used to bootstrap some other stat. Failing to do that means that, once you have that exploit, the game rapidly becomes "Click menus" rather than what they wanted, and then the actual interactions are largely trivial. The same is actually true of the stealth/archery builds in Skyrim and many games like it: The games aren't actually designed for meaty stealth and/or FPS elements so there's no fun left if that's the only axis that matters.

All that means that, when a designer encounters a mechanic that can be used to circumvent the intended critical pathway, they need to think about either eliminating or nerfing that mechanic or changing their game (in the latter case if the new mechanism of interaction with the game is itself fun).

3) You need to know your critical pathway to success so that you can teach players how to play. I've never actually been convinced by the "Magic needs bad cards" argument from a pedagogical (or several other) perspectives, but it is true that a big lifegain mythic that isn't very good teaches you quickly a) don't always expect cards of rarity to necessarily be what you need, which is a valuable lesson even for very good draft environments and b) that lifegain is purely defensive and doesn't win you the game on its own.

So your materials need to be good enough to get players to the point that they can organically figure out how to advance the board state.

4) The critical pathway should have enough uncertainty, or risk, or social dynamics, or something into it that the game is not trivially solvable.

5) Knowing your critical pathway to success means you know where the exciting moments of the game are going to be (e.g. the moment everyone is waiting for a big roll in a team game) and therefore know how to maximize the drama of those moments.

Why isn't rotation set up to keep X sets in rotation and every set released bumps the oldest legal set, keeping the same number of sets always legal?

I would be absolutely fine with standard rotating every year if boxes were cheaper. ie if Wizards supported that rotation in a better way.

Insructions unclear: Didn't say what foo means regarding games. Ended up learning calculus.

W?

With enough variance you could hinder the optimal game.

Players that try to win will always look for "dominant strategies", a good game design makes it so they depend on each game and they're not the same for each situation.
Once you find the dominant strategy, the game is over. That's what most people learn through Tic-Tac-Toe and 4-on-a-row.
Chess most likely has a dominant strategy too, but hasn't been found yet

As someone with 300 hours into balatro, flush is the best beginner early build. However, straights scale the fastest and many more jokers benefit more. Once you get to gold, every dollar counts, so if by chance you think you can make straight flush, that's always better extra money etc.

i dont belive that making an essential game is doomed to be a bad game. the path of optimisation can be the core of the game itself.

That point about the Internet turbocharging the optimization issue is A LOT bigger than most think and probably worth talking about in a full lenght video, because it completely removes a core aspect of games: exploration.

For example: in Magic, you dont need hours of gameplay to find the best deck anymore, you look on the internet and find it, alongside every other good deck and how to beat them. It cuts the time required for a game to be "solved", after which it becomes repetitive, by a factor of 10. This is true for every other game: shooters, fighting games, even single player games that focus on map exploration or getting a certain build going.

It forces devs to either make changes much faster, which makes it harder to keep up and might also stifle excitement if done too often; or make the game insanely complex, which is hostile to new players; or make the skill ceiling insanely high, furthering the divide between casual and competitive players.

I think the opposite can also be true. "Players that don't play the game optimally will ruin the game for players that do."

But, the thing is, the reason that problem exist both ways (not just one way) is simply the mismatch of the definition of fun for the players. In games where the players (in a game) all agree what "fun" is for them, there won't be any problem, everyone will have fun.

That is why watching tournaments is more or less always fun (at least for those that enjoy watching such events). In the games we're watching there, all players agree that "playing the game as competitive as possible" is the definition of fun for them (at least during the event, might be untrue to the truest sense of "having fun"). I guess this is also the reason why most people (myself, at least) somehow also get the fun that the players are having despite being only their spectators. The more apparent the players show that they're having fun, the happier we get. It's crazy that I just realized this now. xD

Tw9 examples, one on each end of this spectrum. I dislike the game Exploding Kittens, it has a very simple game loop and every hand has a perfect play. By the end of my first game i was actively searching for any way i could even make a gambut that wasn't the optimal play and every time it was detrimental. If there are no decisions, there is no game.
On the other hand recently I have been loving Lorcana, the Ravensberg trading card game using Disney IP. It was built from the ground up to be for any number of players, so most of its interactions state they affect all players.

Me going into the video: “Joke’s on you, I already don’t enjoy games!”

I do enjoy designing my own games though. Great vid btw! This channel has been an amazing discovery for my 2025.

Current magic feels unsolvable to me due to bloat on the cards. One card doing so much means games swing wildly, things feel balanced or imbalanced based on very little.

I loved this discussion, I've felt it recently with fighting games and also path of exile 2. In the former it's what you'd expect, in the latter it's people calling an early access game boring or unfun while they exclusively play the fastest clearing power builds that are discovered by anyone in the community. Didn't hear almost anyone even comment on the campaign experience, just end game. Negatives they find are all things that slow you down from literally plowing through a map and looting.

Sorry, venting a little. But I do wonder sometimes where the play went. The one bright side of the fgc are offlines, which I imagine magic feels similar too, where they go a long way in reminding you why you do this.

Really good explanations!

I got realy jaded about magic, tcg's in general, and multiplayer games online, so now I mostly play single player games, with optional online elements, That way I can play at my own pace and just lean back with the experience.

yup...optimization has ruined MTGA for me. Since everyone has a limited number of wild cards to build decks, everyone just builds the same 3 meta decks so they can climb the ladder or just get their weekly wins. It leaves people like me who hate playing high level magic, and just want to play casually with less powerful decks, with very few fun matches. I kinda stopped playing 2 months ago, and now seeing the release schedule I really don't have any interest in coming back.

If you want the full optimization/fun ruining experience filtered down to its essence, just play Dominion. The whole game revolves around figuring out the FOO strategy for a given randomly selected group of 10 cards.