Excellent presentation! A rare nuts-and-bolts look under the hood, instead of the usual, elementary "playtest/iterate/repeat" kind of advice we get on design talks.
This game is one of the best ever made. It packs an engine building, euro game with lots of depth in a deck of cards. No cubes needed but everything is there...different resources, production, exploration, tough decisions, more interaction than in many euros. Plays quickly but gives in 30 minutes the tactical and strategical depth many euro games take hours to provide.
Race for the Galaxy is one of my favorite games, the design feels so clean to me. Phase selection (with minor bonuses) and using cards in-hand as resources are two of my favorite mechanics. The ability to force your opponent into a suboptimal play since tableaus are face-up and you need to telegraph most plays creates great tension. Huge inspiration in my own game design, so I was glad to find this video!
MtG actually has an official Japanese "sequel" called Duel Masters which implements opportunity cost, since instead of using dedicated lands, all cards can be played upside-down as "land", but you'd abandon their use as monsters or spells that way
@@revimfadli4666 It's not a sequel but you're correct it was developed to be a more casual-friendly version of MTG for the japanese market and was wildly successful there. However, many consider the use of playing cards as resource generators to be a big mistake - because of the higher hand complexity it results in and how painful players find the mechanic - as players put these cards in their deck to be played with and usually end up "discarding" their cool dragon so they can play the game at all (as the most exciting, expensive cards in your hand should be the ones you discard for mana early on).
@@danfelder8062yeah more like a spinoff Having to use a cool dragon for mana so you have a better chance at playing the other cool dragons in your deck sounds better than having those dragons locked away by mana flood or drought
I got New Frontiers (the board game version of Race) and I enjoy that a lot too. It misses the tight opportunity cost contention of the single resource (cards in Race), but it makes up for it with the variable phase order and better immersion in the theme. Great video, great games, great design! :)
40:20 Overall I appreciate him giving his thought process but this strikes me as something that should be learned from rather than excused. The idea that it might streamline things a little for experienced players while creating a known barrier for entry to new players is a huge problem and I don't think it's just the added information as he suggested in the QnA. Those who are dedicated will likely remain so but won't complain about a bigger player base instead IMHO. There has to be a way it could be presented clearly and consistently for both old and new players.
For a game that is designed to be replayed and be a relatively high complexity game it makes complete sense to be as 'low-text' as possible. This shouldn't be your first board game, so they cut the bloat and assume you'll put the effort into learning. (It's not perfect but works)
@@danielsherwood3880 I personally agree but I also have played games with easier to understand symbols that avoid text as well. I think making most of the symbols variations of a white circle is the main thing that makes it hard to remember which is which, whereas a lot of games will make specific symbols that are easily identifiable.
25:29 So my understanding of why Consume is phase IV instead of phase V (when in Roll for the Galaxy, Produce is phase IV and Consume is phase V) is: The bonus for Consume may be considered stronger than the bonus for Produce, because it consistently leads to more cards, or to more of the VP’s that win the game. In contrast, the bonus for Produce is limited by the number of Windfall worlds in the tableau. What I think I understand is that Lehmann wanted to mitigate the unfairness of the following scenario in Race: One player chooses Produce, and is therefore excluded from the bonus for Consume. But those who choose Consume with its bonus are disproportionately enabled by the first player’s choice of Produce. In this scenario, they would get to Produce and then immediately Consume what they just produced, with a 2x bonus. The player who chose Produce would also get to participate in the Consume phase, but with half the benefit. Lehmann’s solution to this question of “who will bell the cat?” is to make everybody chill out and wait until the following turn to consume what they may have produced in this turn. In Roll for the Galaxy, there are no special bonuses for selecting phases. Your benefit in phases selected by any player is determined only by the number of worker dice that you assign to those phases.
Legends of Runeterra has a wonderful mana system with opportunity cost: you can save up to three mana for the next turn that can be spent only on spells, not on champions or allies
Great video, thanks for posting. I'm developing a game and this is super helpful. Also Magic has a "tower" condition - if you draw a card when your library (your card pile) is empty, you lose. There are also spells in magic that give you victory if you meet certain conditions.
Exactly, also you can think of some Planeswalkers as towers because of you reach the top (ultimate ability) you pretty much won. Example: Teferi, Hero of Dominaria.
I can't play Race anymore. I've played lots of it with cards but that required having people to play with and was slowed down a bit by shuffling. Then I've got the PC version and that was pure crack. I've played thousands of games on it. Sure as hell I'm not downloading it on the phone, I'd probably sink back in.
Going to disagree on the symbology not being the problem for entry, many games such as Imperial Settlers, Underwater Cities, Dune imperium and Lost Runes of Arnak also use cards with multiple abilities, and are much easier to understand than the symbology within Race. I think RfG is a great game, lots of fun, but those symbols make learning the game a struggle!
Yeah, road sign-style symbols seem to only be clear once you get what they mean. But more specific & detailed symbols tend to communicate them better to beginners
I think accessibility is a big issue on some of these games, and the way he talks about it and the way they dealt with the color-blind thing by not changing the shades of the colors as well seems to indicate he doesn't really care much for it
Looking at Ark Nova(where cards can have even more powers per card) being more accessible in terms of understanding the cards, perhaps not accompanying those symbols with text was a bigger contributor to RftG's learning spike than they thought Edit: Underwater Cities seem to confirm this. Intuitive pictograms do beat road-style ideograms for newcomers(experts don't seem to mind)
@@ZoidbergForPresident I disagree completely, the UX is absolutely excellent, you just need to get used to it. Give it a few games, after a while you don't even think about it, which very few games have.
This is one of my favorite games of all time, but the graphic design on the cards makes this game really hard to understand. He tries really hard to justify it here, but I can't help but wonder how much easier this game would be to teach if they had more graphical clarity around things like halo vs production worlds, or military vs card costs. Color coding different borders is not great visual clarity.
The 2nd edition (haven't checked the 1st) comes with thicker player reference sheets and a dedicated booklet for running through a few example turns, in addition to all the normal documentation in the manual. The example turn thing is a nice idea that I assume was added in 2nd, but they opted to add irrelevant numbers to the cards to identify which to pull out for the demonstration. So they took something meant to help explain the game and just wound up adding more confusion to the cards to do it. All of that coupled with the the bizarre colorblind fix and how the manual detours into tables with card odds and percentages reeks of a designer that's unwilling to let an external voice come in to clean up the visual language of the game. Even in this talk Tom seems to be defensive to the criticism, as if it's a perfect product towering atop all others. Just a few more words on the cards might be enough to really elevate the experience and make it less of a chore to learn. The game is great and it absolutely does play well with experienced players, but getting someone new to commit to a dozen games to get to that stage is rough.
If I understood correctly, the point is too have gaps between card powers. That way, in any given situation, there won't be a "perfect fit" card for it, and you'll be forced to make a decision. In his example, you either overspend on big military (thus partially committing to a military strategy) or play a one-off card (thus missing further advantages from that play). If there was a "perfect fit" card, tactical play would consistently be the best option, with low rewards for strategic thinking. Does that make sense?
That was a very good presentation, but it's worth noting that MTG has multiple win conditions besides losing 20 life, you lose when you run out of cards, and many of the cards have specific win conditions.
12 mins in and everything is interesting so far. tho, I just came across my first issue. Generally, I think, discarding hand cards as cost/fuel to play other cards is bad design. Unless there's another value for discarding cards, merely discarding cards means you aren't playing those cards. People like playing their cards. "opportunity cost" is not a justification for this. everything in a card game has an opportunity cost. even paying mana, like in MTG, is an opportunity cost coz you couldve used that resource for something else as well.. tl;dr: Discarding hand cards to pay for cost is bad design.
For long time i didnt buy games with abysmal visuals and i think this game has one of the worst artworks out there but im very glad i gave it a chance. Terrific game design
I mean, they can't just give you an immediate answer? That's not how game design works. Of course he'll have to use a card game as an example, and talk about that, since it's what is proven. It's up to you to find a way to incorporate that knowledge.
I was more perturbed by his "imagine if MtG had multiple victory conditions" thing. Duel of Wits? Barren Glory? Any of the many, many "If X, you win the game" effects? Decking your opponent? Poison counters? Etrata, the Silencer? Approach the Second Sun?
Yep, an interesting action selection system, but it seemed to create a number of problems that were fixed by adding more complexity. Deep, but not elegant...
*Drinks water, crumples bottle, and smacks loudly into the mic* It's not an issue that people need to drink, it's an issue the video editors didn't do anything about it in post production.
Hahaha oh man someone who gets it! It’s not even a crisp “noice” smack but a drawn out sloppy groany struggling-to-breathe kind of smack. Like when someone slowly pelts u with a wet fish. Fuck man Sucks coz I’ve got my own little board game side project and I’ve had to listen to this a few times just to soak and process every bit of info, and every fucking time it gets me without warning and I shudder wondering why tF fellow humans have to do this to us
What a weird comment. Any game which is widely played is a good game for the people who choose to play it. You might not like it, but that doesn't make the game poorly designed. It just means its not the right game for you. Is this not obvious?
Excellent presentation! A rare nuts-and-bolts look under the hood, instead of the usual, elementary "playtest/iterate/repeat" kind of advice we get on design talks.
This has given me a greater appreciation on how many deliberate choices the designer makes in a game! Huge respect and great talk!
This game is one of the best ever made. It packs an engine building, euro game with lots of depth in a deck of cards. No cubes needed but everything is there...different resources, production, exploration, tough decisions, more interaction than in many euros. Plays quickly but gives in 30 minutes the tactical and strategical depth many euro games take hours to provide.
55:14: Dune: Imperium also has multi-phase powers, but is still accessible
Ark Nova also managed to fit multiple texts for multiple powers
Race for the Galaxy is one of my favorite games, the design feels so clean to me. Phase selection (with minor bonuses) and using cards in-hand as resources are two of my favorite mechanics. The ability to force your opponent into a suboptimal play since tableaus are face-up and you need to telegraph most plays creates great tension. Huge inspiration in my own game design, so I was glad to find this video!
Tom is such a natural presenter. I wonder why he is so good at it?!
He's actually talking instead of reading slides.
Natural talent maybe?
MtG actually has an official Japanese "sequel" called Duel Masters which implements opportunity cost, since instead of using dedicated lands, all cards can be played upside-down as "land", but you'd abandon their use as monsters or spells that way
Why it's "official sequel"? Many CCGs also have various similarities to MtG.
@@mmorkinism Duel Masters was co-developed with WotC wasn't it? Did I say it was simply due to having similarities to MtG(like many Japanese CCGs)?
@@revimfadli4666 It's not a sequel but you're correct it was developed to be a more casual-friendly version of MTG for the japanese market and was wildly successful there. However, many consider the use of playing cards as resource generators to be a big mistake - because of the higher hand complexity it results in and how painful players find the mechanic - as players put these cards in their deck to be played with and usually end up "discarding" their cool dragon so they can play the game at all (as the most exciting, expensive cards in your hand should be the ones you discard for mana early on).
@@danfelder8062yeah more like a spinoff
Having to use a cool dragon for mana so you have a better chance at playing the other cool dragons in your deck sounds better than having those dragons locked away by mana flood or drought
@@revimfadli4666 It sounds better to your logical mind but it feels worse in the moment when you're actually playing the game
This was very interesting, thank you Tom!
One of my favorite card games.
I was just going to comment this. Haha.
I got New Frontiers (the board game version of Race) and I enjoy that a lot too. It misses the tight opportunity cost contention of the single resource (cards in Race), but it makes up for it with the variable phase order and better immersion in the theme. Great video, great games, great design! :)
Would def want to see more of these from board game designers.
40:20 Overall I appreciate him giving his thought process but this strikes me as something that should be learned from rather than excused. The idea that it might streamline things a little for experienced players while creating a known barrier for entry to new players is a huge problem and I don't think it's just the added information as he suggested in the QnA. Those who are dedicated will likely remain so but won't complain about a bigger player base instead IMHO. There has to be a way it could be presented clearly and consistently for both old and new players.
For a game that is designed to be replayed and be a relatively high complexity game it makes complete sense to be as 'low-text' as possible. This shouldn't be your first board game, so they cut the bloat and assume you'll put the effort into learning. (It's not perfect but works)
@@danielsherwood3880 I personally agree but I also have played games with easier to understand symbols that avoid text as well. I think making most of the symbols variations of a white circle is the main thing that makes it hard to remember which is which, whereas a lot of games will make specific symbols that are easily identifiable.
25:29 So my understanding of why Consume is phase IV instead of phase V (when in Roll for the Galaxy, Produce is phase IV and Consume is phase V) is:
The bonus for Consume may be considered stronger than the bonus for Produce, because it consistently leads to more cards, or to more of the VP’s that win the game. In contrast, the bonus for Produce is limited by the number of Windfall worlds in the tableau.
What I think I understand is that Lehmann wanted to mitigate the unfairness of the following scenario in Race:
One player chooses Produce, and is therefore excluded from the bonus for Consume. But those who choose Consume with its bonus are disproportionately enabled by the first player’s choice of Produce. In this scenario, they would get to Produce and then immediately Consume what they just produced, with a 2x bonus. The player who chose Produce would also get to participate in the Consume phase, but with half the benefit.
Lehmann’s solution to this question of “who will bell the cat?” is to make everybody chill out and wait until the following turn to consume what they may have produced in this turn.
In Roll for the Galaxy, there are no special bonuses for selecting phases. Your benefit in phases selected by any player is determined only by the number of worker dice that you assign to those phases.
This is just gold
Great talk! got to drink more tea for my balancing :) Thanks for the sharing.
I wonder if the "Former Penal Colony" Card is Australia, based on his "Iceland" comment.
Lovely and fascinating talk, thank you!
Love Tom and Race. He’s a genius!
Legends of Runeterra has a wonderful mana system with opportunity cost: you can save up to three mana for the next turn that can be spent only on spells, not on champions or allies
Never heard of this game until today. Now I know the next game I'm getting ;)
Great presentation, thanks for sharing your design experience
This video was eye opening to me, thank you very much
Great video, thanks for posting. I'm developing a game and this is super helpful.
Also Magic has a "tower" condition - if you draw a card when your library (your card pile) is empty, you lose. There are also spells in magic that give you victory if you meet certain conditions.
Kris Sicari Yugioh as well
Exactly, also you can think of some Planeswalkers as towers because of you reach the top (ultimate ability) you pretty much won. Example: Teferi, Hero of Dominaria.
Really candid talk with some good insights.
I can't play Race anymore. I've played lots of it with cards but that required having people to play with and was slowed down a bit by shuffling. Then I've got the PC version and that was pure crack. I've played thousands of games on it. Sure as hell I'm not downloading it on the phone, I'd probably sink back in.
Wise choice
Excellent talk. Thank you very much for sharing.
Going to disagree on the symbology not being the problem for entry, many games such as Imperial Settlers, Underwater Cities, Dune imperium and Lost Runes of Arnak also use cards with multiple abilities, and are much easier to understand than the symbology within Race. I think RfG is a great game, lots of fun, but those symbols make learning the game a struggle!
Yeah, road sign-style symbols seem to only be clear once you get what they mean. But more specific & detailed symbols tend to communicate them better to beginners
I think accessibility is a big issue on some of these games, and the way he talks about it and the way they dealt with the color-blind thing by not changing the shades of the colors as well seems to indicate he doesn't really care much for it
Looking at Ark Nova(where cards can have even more powers per card) being more accessible in terms of understanding the cards, perhaps not accompanying those symbols with text was a bigger contributor to RftG's learning spike than they thought
Edit: Underwater Cities seem to confirm this. Intuitive pictograms do beat road-style ideograms for newcomers(experts don't seem to mind)
51:14 - Design Strategies
Amazing, Tom! Thank you very much!
a fascinatimg lecture!
At around 49:11, after he says the word "arcs" does anybody else hear a very low "NOM" that sounds just like the Heavy from TF2?
Yes
on point
This game sounds fun
It is
It is, but I really do not like the UX they chose, really not readable enough...
@@ZoidbergForPresident Agreed, but after you get used to it, it really cuts down on reading time.
@@ZoidbergForPresident I disagree completely, the UX is absolutely excellent, you just need to get used to it. Give it a few games, after a while you don't even think about it, which very few games have.
This is one of my favorite games of all time, but the graphic design on the cards makes this game really hard to understand. He tries really hard to justify it here, but I can't help but wonder how much easier this game would be to teach if they had more graphical clarity around things like halo vs production worlds, or military vs card costs. Color coding different borders is not great visual clarity.
The 2nd edition (haven't checked the 1st) comes with thicker player reference sheets and a dedicated booklet for running through a few example turns, in addition to all the normal documentation in the manual.
The example turn thing is a nice idea that I assume was added in 2nd, but they opted to add irrelevant numbers to the cards to identify which to pull out for the demonstration. So they took something meant to help explain the game and just wound up adding more confusion to the cards to do it.
All of that coupled with the the bizarre colorblind fix and how the manual detours into tables with card odds and percentages reeks of a designer that's unwilling to let an external voice come in to clean up the visual language of the game. Even in this talk Tom seems to be defensive to the criticism, as if it's a perfect product towering atop all others. Just a few more words on the cards might be enough to really elevate the experience and make it less of a chore to learn.
The game is great and it absolutely does play well with experienced players, but getting someone new to commit to a dozen games to get to that stage is rough.
45:55 I don't understand what he is saying here.
What is 'minding the gap'? And how is he promoting Strategic play over tactical play?
If I understood correctly, the point is too have gaps between card powers. That way, in any given situation, there won't be a "perfect fit" card for it, and you'll be forced to make a decision. In his example, you either overspend on big military (thus partially committing to a military strategy) or play a one-off card (thus missing further advantages from that play). If there was a "perfect fit" card, tactical play would consistently be the best option, with low rewards for strategic thinking. Does that make sense?
whatbdoes he mean by synchronization points?
points during the playtime when players have to "synchronise" -- stop and wait for each other to resolve specific actions before doing anything else
In magic you can also mill the other teams deck as a win condition.
Or infect him to 10
It's good
That was a very good presentation, but it's worth noting that MTG has multiple win conditions besides losing 20 life, you lose when you run out of cards, and many of the cards have specific win conditions.
milling isn't a common/regular wincon, like he said.
Magic has too many anti-fun mechanics, mill sucks for exemple
12 mins in and everything is interesting so far. tho, I just came across my first issue. Generally, I think, discarding hand cards as cost/fuel to play other cards is bad design. Unless there's another value for discarding cards, merely discarding cards means you aren't playing those cards. People like playing their cards. "opportunity cost" is not a justification for this. everything in a card game has an opportunity cost. even paying mana, like in MTG, is an opportunity cost coz you couldve used that resource for something else as well..
tl;dr:
Discarding hand cards to pay for cost is bad design.
For long time i didnt buy games with abysmal visuals and i think this game has one of the worst artworks out there but im very glad i gave it a chance. Terrific game design
Reminds me of Arcomage from MM series
Hm thought this was about designing a card game with Race as an example. But feels more howndesign worked just for this game...
yep agreed
I mean, they can't just give you an immediate answer? That's not how game design works. Of course he'll have to use a card game as an example, and talk about that, since it's what is proven. It's up to you to find a way to incorporate that knowledge.
Hearthstone does have a "tower" condition. It's called OTK.
I was more perturbed by his "imagine if MtG had multiple victory conditions" thing. Duel of Wits? Barren Glory? Any of the many, many "If X, you win the game" effects? Decking your opponent? Poison counters? Etrata, the Silencer? Approach the Second Sun?
@Yannick Vanhoutte Correct. Thanks.
or, "Why my game is better than Magic: The Gathering and Puerto Rico"
2 End Game Conditions
Okay but like... it is better... (design elegance wise)
@@danielsherwood3880magic is elegant?
It sounds too complicated to me. I think a game should be easy to learn but difficult to master, like chess.
Yep, an interesting action selection system, but it seemed to create a number of problems that were fixed by adding more complexity. Deep, but not elegant...
well, magic has a lot of different win conditions 🤔
*Drinks water, crumples bottle, and smacks loudly into the mic*
It's not an issue that people need to drink, it's an issue the video editors didn't do anything about it in post production.
Hahaha oh man someone who gets it! It’s not even a crisp “noice” smack but a drawn out sloppy groany struggling-to-breathe kind of smack. Like when someone slowly pelts u with a wet fish. Fuck man
Sucks coz I’ve got my own little board game side project and I’ve had to listen to this a few times just to soak and process every bit of info, and every fucking time it gets me without warning and I shudder wondering why tF fellow humans have to do this to us
Closed-captioning ftw
Pandemic? lmao
I would never be using the word 'design' in the same sentence as 'Race for the Galaxy'.
Why’s that?
Do you also not use the words 'card' and 'game' in the same sentence with it?
What a weird comment. Any game which is widely played is a good game for the people who choose to play it. You might not like it, but that doesn't make the game poorly designed. It just means its not the right game for you.
Is this not obvious?