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This game is brilliant. Thank you for creating it.

my wife got me this for my birthday and it is so amazingly fantastic! I think there may be a typo in the rules, though: on page 🔺, the setup tableau shows both the front *and* back of one of the 4 red/blue cards - the one with the plant in center on the front and "3 city for blue pawn, 1 yellow city for red pawn, two data for six bunny-ears" on the back. since every other example-image in the rules shows a possible coherent board state, I feel like this may have been an Amabel error from not correlating which fronts were paired with which backs (or even from the printing process mis-associating the fronts and backs of those 4 cards, or a balance pass that didnt update the rule reference) rather than an intended obscurity from the alien language. is there any chance I could get a confirmation of whether or not this was printed as intended?

What is art? Your editing choices at timestamp 22:53.

A personal touch, really means a lot. Congratulations on the success of City of Six Moons, a very special game.

Congrats on the success. You deserve it. Does this mean for-ex 2 is backed up? Noooo

Happy for your success and congratulations on 8 years!

I'm going to make more work for you ... and order today! 😉 💸

Congratulations! I am thankful for coming across Hollandspiele about 7 years ago. Not to be dramatic but it changed my life in so many positive ways. Cheers to Hollandspiele’s continued success and looking forward to the many weird and wonderful pieces of art to come

Thank you for all the care and humanity that goes into everything you do. The hobby would be much worse without the two of you!

Congrats on 8 years! Thanks for producing unique games that explore so many different topics (especially Heading Forward and Doubt is our Product, both giving me deeper empathy for some of the struggles my mother went through in her life). Thanks also for the humor you put into these as well. Most importantly, thanks for being you!

Interesting. I've watched a lot of old westerns but never heard of this one before.

From a young age, I've been interested in video game design, and I remember the slight insult and confusion I felt when learning about how much more vaunted the title of game "developer" was than "designer", as one implied that you could "wear more hats" and, more truthfully, make more money than what many seem to treat as just the "idea guy". But for me, the beauty of such games is almost entirely in their design, in the concepts that underlie the systems that produce memorable and meaningful experiences. The technology used to program them and the illustrative artistry that goes into presenting them are entire disciplines worthy of merit, but I have seen comparatively little respect be paid to the curation of those elements so they work in harmony to produce stories that people can share with each other. I have interest in all of those instruments in the orchestra of a wonderful game, but I don't just want to tell stories, I want to provide a canvas for others to tell stories. I remember learning about the shift from when the people who worked on games were not routinely credited (and how they often smuggled their own credit in unorthodox places), and how the value of the art they produced changed when video games started to really take off as commodities. I'm sort of rambling at this point but I wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts and for caring enough about this topic, which is very much a special interest of my own, to talk about it at such length and invite discussion on it. So thank you!

That's kinda sad at the end about the uncredited BG inventors. 😢 Thanks for the video. 😊

Wow I had no idea this existed. We only got the Cartwright Brothers syndicalised here, and that was during the nineties. so while cowboys were popular, most are unknown. This feels miles better than most stuff. On a completely unrelated note, I once read an old science fiction novel about a one armed cowboy, who is teleported to the moon and fights a prehistoric ape dictator and his sabretooth tiger, in his evil harem empire on the dark side. Very strange, and a lot of monologues on self reliance and the virtues of tech skills, mixed with gratuitous old school scifi.

I've been binging through your videos and I have learned so much. You have a really engaging and easy to understand way of discussing game design concepts. Motivates me to make more

My copy just arrived today, and I'm obsessed! It really is like an archeological discovery, trying to infer the meaning through context and patterns. I love cryptography, semiotics, puzzles, and games, so this really hits a sweet spot for me! I think 75% of the fun will be making sense of the rulebook and trying different iterations to see if it starts to make sense for me.

Thoughtful, fun video so naturally I am most drawn to commenting on the brief segment about the most tedious question of all human existence. McCloud's definition of art is surprising and inclusive but it is also practically difficult to cleanly define what behaviors correspond to survival or reproduction. David Graeber has a wonderful essay about evolution, play, and the meaning of life (What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?) that is inspired by how resistant many biologists can be to the idea of animals playing for the joy of it. E.g., dolphins get high on puffer fish to practice socializing for mate selection, foxes chase each other to train for hunting, etc. Neo-Darwinists often have a analogous view of humans that any activity unrelated to evolutionary fitness is deviant or dysfunctional. I guess they would say that according to McCloud, art is everything that is frivolous. All this rhymes a bit with the philosopher Bernard Suit's work to define what a game is. For him, it is about players striving to bring about a state of affairs while subscribing to rules that they obey for their own sake. Like, solving a Yuu Asaka tile game is only a game for you if you would reject someone offering to solve it for you. I can setup a checkmate on a chessboard but it's only a game if my opponent and I pursue checkmate while following the rules of chess. Even if I am given a 100% surefire way to cheat and win, if I am playing a game, I will refuse it. Otherwise Suits thinks it's better to describe me as completing a task. The video made me appreciate how toys' materials and physical design can be wonderful inducements to enjoying the rules of a game. Tic-tac-toe is bad but holding chunky stones under the gaze of whimsical animal statuettes makes the idea of obeying its rules more appealing.

23:35 oh, "RPG" is a real weird one. What it means is "this game reminds me of D&D", and how it got that meaning is a real corker, told in full in Jon Petersen's "The Elusive Shift", but if you want the Cliff notes: the original version of D&D rules were for "fantastic medieval wargames" and barely even brought the words "role" and "play" into the same sentence, but Gygax brought it out as a clapback in some early 'zine banter as a thing that D&D _wasn't supposed to be about_. It was supposed to be about solving the puzzle of the dungeon in front of you. It wasn't about pursuing power and agency in a fantasy world, creating a role that you would enjoy playing. But after that, the phrase caught fire in the discussion community, and games whose play was intended to be a social activity like D&D would label themselves "role-playing games", and so in 1977 the first edition of Basic D&D is now for "fantastic medieval role playing". But as a socially adopted term of genre, its strike zone is just as wide as the audience it reaches. Maybe as more people play games that are social activities like D&D to explore questions of identity and foster relationships, more visual novels will be called RPGs. (Well, that's the descriptivist take, anyhow. The prescriptivist take doesn't explain why people call Pentiment an RPG, but might explain why its developers only call it "a narrative adventure": a computer RPG has elements of character identity separate from player interaction and there are interesting decisions pointed at those character elements. In Disco Elysium you're there to solve the crime, and you can make decisions to pursue that end or to define Raphael Ambrosius Costeau; Pentiment centers its narrative much more in that all the decisions you make to define your characters are part of it.)

Great new channel to binge!

it was really cool subject for a video, and love the progression of the chapters. I wish it was a little less of a review for some parts, but still a really strong message.

Really enjoying these videos, Amabel! Your ending question about what art could look like without the constraints of capitalism made me think of a local, modern art museum called Glenstone. It was privately funded by an incredibly wealthy couple, and it has free entry. The museum showcases lots of really thoughtful pieces, and spares no expense when using space to help convey meaning. Efficiency is not remotely their goal. And there’s no need/desire to make money from it. Kind of fascinating. We need more super rich people supporting artists!

I want to like this video--I am interested in various types of games and puzzles, but somehow, to use your own term, the video is just not very "compelling". I get what you mean by the physicality of a game. There's a game called Shuttles, which is an interesting physical form, but the game itself isn't all that fun to me. At an estate sale, I found a solitaire puzzle called Magnetic Square Puzzle, where these different sized blocks of wood are supposed to moved around from the starting position to another position, without removing them from the board--you have to simply slide them around. There are variations of this game, and the solution (TWO solutions, actually) can be found online. It probably wouldn't be too hard to simulate it on the computer, but the puzzle goes back decades before computers were around. I'm always a bit frustrated by computer adventure/mystery games because the puzzles usually seem unrelated to the storyline of the game. Not always, there's some good ones out there. But often enough to make me one of those complainers. I want to be part of a story and uncover the mystery, OR I want to work out puzzles, but I usually don't want to do both at the same time. And if you really want to talk about the physicality of a game, what about miniature golf? I just love the wackiness of some mini golf designs, which are of course much more fun in real life, with actual golf balls and putters, than on a computer screen.

Wow, just wow. Thanks for doing this Amabel. It was really well put together and I learnt so much.

Prima material! Thank you for this wonderful tribute to tactile media, the art of design, and the design of art! As a puzzle designer myself (even though primarily in a not-so interactive style of books/PDF files) this was a treat to watch and I will love to share this with other people.

High quality content, just scrolling through recommendations

Looking forward for the Immersion & Alienation video, as I have a talk (recorded on video on my channel) against immersion myself.

I never expected my music to be playing in the background of a Slap Chop commercial. And to have it to be relevant to the topic! Impressive stuff. Also, I’d read an Amabel pop-up book.

Really good essay. ❤ I love these. To me, all games/puzzles/toys are art objects. I also enjoy the physicality of games and own a few I may never play because I get enough out of studying their physical existance.

This was an instant subscribe to the channel! I'm so glad I got reccommended this video this is right up my alley!

I think that your videos, about these deeper game subjects (and within a historical context), are the most compelling types of content in the board game RUclips landscape. I'm always thinking about and attempting to understand what it is that I like about board games, so I appreciate your commentary on this.

I just started this video but I wanted to comment because the premise and intro sound great so far and RUclips threw this in my recommendations!! Yay!!

Really interesting and thoughtful as usual. The shuffle the dice in the box dance was cute.

This was fantastic, thanks so much for another great video! I enjoys those bits of humor as well. Like your game designs, I appreciate the consideration of the emotional response, definitely adds another dimension of enjoyment.

Fascinating exploration ... thank you!

fascinating stuff. I guess it was "don draper engineer". RIP your GMA. a Welshman writes ..

This video is genuinely fantastic Amabel! 🎉

It's sad that there is no shipping available to Germany. I've heard a lot about it, and I wish you the best of success from around the globe.

I have never even heard about this film before but consider me curious now.

That bit about Max derailing a conversation, where she should provide comfort, with revenge fantasies, hit a bit too close to home for me. Did that a month or two ago, albeit in less severe circumstances >> Much work still to be done. Anyway! Great essay! Made me Feel things! 10/10! :p

The only time I've ever chatted to a publisher about one of my designs. The fact I said the amateur art (original version) would always need to be free to print n play ended the email train. Which I thought was odd because I imagine having a game print n play would have ZERO impact on sales. So good on you folk for providing stuff as print n play as well as production copies.

Great analysis!

queer cinema is a letter from home

a very normal comment supporting you continuing to find your voice and your continued journey toward happiness 😎

Love your games btw...

I'd love to have a Print&Play option for Dinosaur Gauge :) If I want to buy from second chance games to Spain it'll be 120 + €. An European distributor will be perfect. Or you convince UK to revert Brexit 😂 You've got my three options. 😀😀 Take care

I disagree. There is a movie, based on a book, called. "Johnny got his gun." It is a. movie that nobody could say makes war look fun or exiting. "Johnny got his gun." It doesn't have.a single battle SCENE. IT's ABOUT A WORLD one veteran who loses all four limbs, his face, and four of his five senses. The movie starts with him being in the hospital and realizing, as it happens, that he is losing one limb after another. I've never seen a horror movie that horrifying. The rest of the movie is set in a hospital, where he is somehow kept alive in that condition, although he does not want to be. It is all voiceover of his thoughts, since he can neither speak nor hear., interspersed with flashbacks of his memories, none of which are in a battlefield. Eventually, he does figure out a way to communicate, by lifting his head up and down to Morse code. It takes people in the hospital a while to figure out what he is doing. But when they do, they "talk" to him by tapping Morse code on his forehead. They ask him what he wants. He says that he wants to be taken around and exhibited as an example of what war can do to people. They say "No." He says, "Then I want to die." They say "No" again. But soon, a nurse does try to kill him by removing his life support system. He realizes what is happening and prays to God that she have a wonderful life. But she is discovered, presumably fired, and he is saved, against his will. Then he is given drugs and falls into a. meaningless narcotic dream state. It is as bleak as it gets, and if you can find anybody who is inspired to join the military by that movie,, you have found somebody who is completely insane.

Being an old fart, growing up in the 1970s, it was hard to move for movies that glamourised violent criminals - Scorsese was one of the worst culprits. People were going around dressed like gangsters, disco songs were made about the mafia - it was all a great laugh! They were pro-gangster, pro-violence, pro-extortion... and the critics loved them!

Great video, and I definitely agree with the content. I like to define what you describe as the "subjective element" of the gaming experience: our perception, our actual management of the components, our expectations about the game, our relation with the visual interface and also what we gain from the experience itself. All those elements are individual, but at the same time related to the other player's experiences as well... and in that regard, I have another question for you: is the very same game, with the very same components, with the very same rules, with the very same material objects unchanged from one gaming group to another? I can play Supply Lines of the American Revolution with one of my buddies and we will get one kind of experience... I can play the very same SLAR copy with another friend and we would have a totally different experience. Even when I am playing the same solitaire I get different sensations and I put different meanings in the experience: one evening I can play Western Front Ace and have a blast even if I am getting shot down at every sortie, and the next evening I can get totally frustrated and out of the gaming flow even when I am racketing up medals and awards left and right. And, finally, as you say, this is the immense strength of analog boardgames, the one highlighted by Dunnigan himself when he compared analog to digital boardgames, human "mushware" with computer hardware. All of this belongs to the great family of non-linear elements of boardgaming: those aspects that relate to and can even be originated from the actual math at the basis of our games, but which also give its true meaning and elevate to its true form of art pieces. Thanks for the video and keep up the good work!

i like some of the truffaut movies. what the fuck does he know about war?

What a powerful essay. Thank you so much for putting it together. To reinforce your thesis take the D&D Dragoblance saga: those books were written as a result of playing a game!