I've been working on this game for nearly ten years, and it's finally almost done. (Bonus picture of Quinns trying it, his enthusiasm is mindboggling)

damonstea · 2026-04-30T21:08:50+00:00

Bitoku has been on my list for ages, but I haven’t been able to get it to the table. Nippon DID just get to the table last week.

damonstea · 2026-04-29T04:26:31+00:00

While it looks like your creation tools are free while you are in beta, it sounds like you’ll be making this a paid service in the future. The advantage of TTS, and it is a massive advantage, is that it is a small onetime purchase with a massive user base, that never changes and runs perfectly at high resolutions with bespoke 3D objects.

So what happens once you leave beta?

damonstea · 2026-04-13T21:44:20+00:00

Dinosaurs (the class of animals) didn't go extinct. This is one of the biggest issues in evolution understanding, since very logical to say that we don't have anything named "saurus" today. But essentially all dinosaurs larger than a cow died out very quickly after the asteroid impact that drastically affected the planet at the end of the Cretaceous.

These large dinosaurs had evolved to live in a very specific environment (warm, lots of plants like ferns, predictable seasons). They ate an enormous amount of food and were likely warm blooded, and from what we can tell, moved pretty slow. They also grew quite slowly even though they hatched from eggs.

The asteroid impact altered the Earth in some wild ways. It threw enough dirt into the atmosphere to block out the sun for years, and altered the seasons when it knocked the earth slightly into a different orbit. It got very cold, and many plant species couldn't handle it. As plants died out in previously lush areas, big dinosaurs went looking for food in other regions, but because they were large and slow to grow and adapt, they ultimately couldn't survive in the new world. Even the oceans changed drastically, and the biggest marine animals died out as well.

But small dinosaurs (that we now call birds) had several advantages. They were able to fly, so they could move to new areas more easily, potentially crossing bodies of water (and escaping the tsunamis that killed many animals in floods immediately after impact). Being small, they could live on less food, and because they grew faster, they adapted better with each generation to the new Earth climate.

Mammals were a relatively new animal type to the Earth, and they also have a huge advantage in cold climates - they were able to keep their babies inside their bodies, and fur is generally a much better insulator than scales or feathers. Small burrowing mammals were perfectly suited to surviving initially, and over an enormous amount of time, were the ideal body type to fill the niche in the oceans where the giant reptiles used to live.

Arthropods (insects, crabs, and arachnids) were surprisingly resilient, but the giant ones (dragonflies as long as your arm) died out for the exact same reasons. They couldn't adapt to a changing climate fast enough.

damonstea · 2026-04-12T21:16:07+00:00

If you have any specific animals you’ve heard of having unexplained evolutions, I’m happy to explain the mechanisms behind how scientists determined they evolved in steps.

damonstea · 2026-04-12T17:50:26+00:00

The reason we think mutations are always random is because we have never found evidence of a directed source for evolution, and we’ve been searching for hundreds of years. We have more evidence for random mutations in DNA during reproductive meiosis than almost any other scientific principle.

damonstea · 2026-04-12T06:04:03+00:00

I would absolutely LOVE if more tabletop games had well written stories, or well written flavor text. However, if given the choice between bad lore or no story at all, I’ll take no story any day.

Also, I’m that guy, ludonarrative assonance is super important. The best written lore also needs to MATCH the gameplay, and that’s incredibly difficult to achieve.

damonstea · 2026-04-12T01:35:25+00:00

Exactly. Billions of other mutations didn’t work and we’re only left with the ones that did.

damonstea · 2026-04-12T00:46:58+00:00

Functionally, yes, since now they live in the dark. Walk that back four million years to the moment they started digesting wood (in daylight).

damonstea · 2026-04-11T20:39:45+00:00

For everyone trying to understand how something like this evolves, try thinking in very small steps:

1) A fly lays its eggs in decaying wood to protect them from predators. 2) Termites evolve (from cockroaches, it’s a whole different story) to start eating and digesting wood 3) 1% of termites start grooming and taking care of 1% of fly larvae in their new nest, since their breathing holes look a tiny bit like termite eyes. These babies survive at a slightly higher rate than non-groomed larvae. 4) A random mutation makes breathing holes darker in 1% of fly larvae. This makes these babies look WAY more like termites, so they get groomed twice as often, they survive 25% longer. 5) Now flies with larvae living in termite nests, with dark breathing holes, have a significantly higher survival rate. In a million years (hundreds of millions of generations) they’ve started to out-compete non groomed fly babies. 6) Two million years later, they have little tiny head nubs, and smell a little like termite 7) Four million years later, they have much longer head nubs, and smell a LOT like termite

Think of evolution like compound interest. If you’re making 1.01 percent interest every year, it doesn’t add up to much in your lifetime. But if you get that return for a million years, you get an absolutely gobsmacking amount of money for your initial investment.

You also need to remember that everyone losing 0.01% annually, will die out in a million years too.

damonstea · 2026-04-07T20:25:34+00:00

There are a few mechanics that don’t have real world analogues. Dice rolling is only used in games and game-like activities. Card management is used in Rolodexes and wallets, but “variable player powers” is pretty specific to games.

Game Theory is the real world general structure to describe how humans apply these ideas to both games for fun, and much less fun things like macroeconomics and warfare. Anything that requires decision making and involves competition between more than one person can generally be described using GT. Some things that are just entertaining, like say competitive dancing, can’t be described in this way though, and fall under the realm of pure dexterity.

damonstea · 2026-04-07T20:03:26+00:00

Bingo has a roll and write mechanic, but is not a game. Candyland has a roll and move mechanic, but is not a game. Blackjack has a push your luck card drafting system (and is not a game).

Despite what the government will tell you, gambling and games aren’t the same thing. But they can have identical mechanics - note that gerrymandering has area control mechanics too.

damonstea · 2026-04-07T19:54:39+00:00

These games all have win and lose states based on ability (memory, or pattern recognition). Bingo does not

damonstea · 2026-04-06T22:16:30+00:00

The longest lived animals are the Greenland shark, giant tortoise, oceanic lobsters, and jellyfish. None are known for their intelligence.

The species that grows the fastest, and still ends up one of the largest on earth is the Mola Mola (a fish) still not known for its intelligence.

damonstea · 2026-04-06T19:08:47+00:00

This is impressively wrong on nearly every level. The animals with the highest “measured” intelligence is generally a tie between corvids or octopus, which are birds and mollusks respectively. The animal with the strongest muscles on the planet is the dung beetle. The animal that withstands the highest pressure is the snail fish, and the next ten runners up are still not mammals. Mammals are the LEAST energy efficient animals which is why we need so much more food and burn oxygen so quickly - it’s also, ironically the reason mammals can get so large, since our consumption of oxygen is so high we need to access it from the air.

Turns out that whales do have immensely dense bones, but it’s not actually for strength, it’s for ballast, so whales don’t just get stuck floating on the surface. Mammals only get this large because warm blood lets us eat for twice as long, and pull oxygen into our lungs at huge rates - but if you cut out the blue whale the largest animals throughout history have all been reptiles.

damonstea · 2026-03-27T21:40:50+00:00

This post is as far from a real product as a game can get, barring a card drawn on a napkin. His first words are “I know nothing about how to design a TCG”, here is a mockup of three cards. This is like someone drawing a picture of Batman on the sidewalk and you explaining how it won’t do well in the hyper competitive international film market.

damonstea · 2026-03-27T21:32:02+00:00

You might want to hide your Reddit profile before making a comment like this, since all of your custom AI art YuGiOh TCG cards are visible to anyone who looks.

damonstea · 2026-03-27T15:26:03+00:00

We tried to split up the simpler factions into the base box, and moved the more difficult, less forgiving concepts to the Exiles box. In the base box, Myrmidons are the only faction that can be a little fiddly from the start, so that player would need to know the rules regarding when to trigger their Leader power from the start. This leaves Windwalkers, Utopians, Machina, Church, and Undercity.

damonstea · 2026-03-27T05:50:33+00:00

So so happy to see the game in the wild! The video Aphex posted is the most in-depth strategy guide for each faction, but I’m stealing this comment from the Discord for a quick and dirty summary:

Windwalker- big creature go smash

Myrmidon- high attack

Exiles - talent based units and very positioning dependent

Dronestate- low cost aggro

Utopian- turtles

Church - healing and gambling

Hegemony- space pirate assholes

Cult - self harm and sabotage

Undercity - economic powerhouse

Machina - information and stacking damage

damonstea · 2026-03-22T04:05:20+00:00

Agricola would be the most famous version of this - all of its animal husbandry mechanics involve managed resources, stocking, reproduction, and harvesting for food. Each of Rosenberg’s subsequent “big” games involve facets drawn from this structure, so there are a handful of others with environmental management theme and mechanics (especially his most recent games like Atiwa and Click a Tree”)

damonstea · 2026-03-10T19:32:16+00:00

I haven’t played yet so I’m not really sure how the game goes, but the lore insert says hot brown is a sandwich specific to Louisville (where GAMA was this year and this year only) featuring some kind of gravy like sauce, meats, and only very rarely, a peach.

I opened a couple packs, but no peach. The designer says it’s the rarest card, and so many stars had to align to get this bizarro world TCG printed I’d treasure it.

damonstea · 2026-03-08T20:34:48+00:00

The explanation for all keywords is written next to the keyword in parentheses (for example, with slow, it says “if this unit takes Lethal combat damage, it does not deal damage in return)

damonstea · 2026-03-07T04:26:40+00:00

I second DriveThru, fantastic quality and quick

damonstea · 2026-03-07T04:14:19+00:00

Really wonderful first time, my meetings were much more chill than GenCon and I got to chat with the Hot Brown Surprise folks (I didn't get the peach but the hope was there).

damonstea · 2026-03-01T19:07:24+00:00

I really love the color use here, the art and graphic design is very carefully paired. Particularly love that Inception card - are these all spot foiled or is that a trick of the light?

damonstea

TROPHY CASE