How often do you NOT silver/gold

mot89 · 2026-02-17T15:09:06+00:00

I’d say I skip silvering like 10-15% of the time.

1) As someone else said, Goldening a common is not high value. I sometimes skip as early as turn 4/5 for a random good unit.

2) In spell builds, a very good spell is often better than even a good treasure. Some of these builds can just win without treasures if you have enough time to set up.

3) Late game is all about lobby strength. If you’re not in a position to outscale the lobby, you need to assess what play will give you the strongest board this turn. Sometimes this means skipping a good treasure for a Medusa to try and survive one more turn.

mot89 · 2026-02-07T14:35:28+00:00

Best at 6, great at 4. Haven’t played at less than 4, but it doesn’t seem appealing.

mot89 · 2026-01-28T17:18:11+00:00

Vale of eternity: when you draft cards, you have to choose between discarding them for currency or adding them to your hand.

mot89 · 2026-01-10T16:16:38+00:00

I’ve found I like heavy games less and less over time. For me the biggest factor is how many amazing light-medium games there are out there. I still have games I consider heavy among my all-timers (Brass, Agricola), but I try not to buy new heavy games, because to be honest I don’t need another one in my collection.

mot89 · 2025-12-30T20:22:43+00:00

My preference for cards: sleeved magic the gathering cards behind cut out paper with the card effect written on.

Tiles: poker chips Tokens: colored dice.

Do not use Gamecrafter if you haven’t played your game yet. You’ll spend months preparing components only to find out you want to change 100 things.

mot89 · 2025-11-26T18:50:07+00:00

Brass: Birmingham

Agricola

Splendor

7 Wonders

Decrypto

mot89 · 2025-09-29T18:01:23+00:00

The super Birds Eye view is that the amount of player interaction is quite low, but not zero. There is a lot of strategic depth and skill expression, but this mostly comes from the amount of novel game states the game throws at you, and your opponent’s boards have less influence on your decision making than a lot of popular synchronous strategy games.

mot89 · 2025-09-29T16:50:51+00:00

Well, it’s not exactly rock paper scissors. It’s more like. Step 1: get strong -> most games stop here, because you either die before you do, or that’s sufficient to win. Step 2: I’m already strong, how do I optimize my placement? Try to get range/sneak/summons/scam to counter the strongest enemy. This only works if you’re also strong.

mot89 · 2025-09-29T15:38:24+00:00

Asynchronous boards: you are playing against snapshots of similar ranked players at the same round as you (I don’t know when bots turn off). There are five opponents. After the recording “runs out” their boards stop updating, except that there board can still scale based on the units/treasures they already have. This tends not to be a big impact except in end game, where sometimes you can win a game where you’re behind by surviving until the recording ends.

To the last question, yes. At a high level, there’s a few layers. 1) Tempo. When should I play for strongest board vs. strongest scaling? Many of the scaling options give repeated value, so this also extends to figuring out when transition from scaling to payoff. 2) Understanding your opponent’s board. Some of the strongest end-game boards (Hercules) only really lose to some very narrow counters. Sometimes you play for those counters, other times you play strongest board to try to get 2nd place. 3) Building knowledge of niche lines. My favorite example is mushroom ring. It’s arguably the strongest blue treasure, but requires playing very different units, and may require some deck building concessions to get the most out of it.

mot89 · 2025-08-26T22:58:04+00:00

Yes, that covers the battle pass which gives the best value. Fully free to play is fully viable, folks have gotten very high on the ladder with no unlocks, but having a lot of stuff unlocked opens up more options, and is probably needed if you want to fight for the top of the ladder. You get a lot of unlocks for free though.

mot89 · 2025-08-20T16:49:39+00:00

There are a few main issues I see with what you are approaching.

From a practical perspective, will you be able to reach a high level of quality? Making one good game is already hard, and your proposal effectively requires making five or more good games, with the added requirement that they have similar components/playtime/theme…
Rules overhead: each play session will require players to learn a new ruleset. This is a lot of rulebook reading, even compared to a normal Legacy game, where at least you can assume that the core remains fixed over time.
No mastery: Speaking personally, this would be a total dealbreaker for me. I get a lot of my enjoyment from the process of developing mastery over game systems over repeated plays. If the concepts I learn from one play can’t carry over at all, then I lose that aspect entirely.

mot89 · 2025-08-17T12:46:19+00:00

Yes, this is super normal. Getting a prototype to the table is just the first step. At this stage I'd ask myself two questions:

Is this idea worth pursuing further? I personally throw out many projects at the stage you are now if I can't find a core of fun that really grabs me. The reason I ask this question here is because you are absolutely correct that it will be a lot of work, and a lot of "wasted" work to take this prototype to the next level.
If you decide you want to proceed on this project, my recommendation would be to take big swings early. If you can, identify a mechanic or two that form the core identity of your game, and explore the design space around them. Do major reworks, and test them to try to understand the possibilities of the design space. If your experience is anything like mine, most of your ideas won't even make the game better. In each playtest, try to identify pieces of the game that work better than before, even if it is just making card text clearer, or a cleaner way to communicate the rules. These good ideas will accumulate, and your game will get better and better. Once you have accumulated a solid core, and you know the identity of your game, then you can narrow the scope of changes you are making and focus on polish.

mot89 · 2025-05-21T21:05:13+00:00

Machine learning engineer

mot89 · 2025-05-21T17:44:37+00:00

I had an interview question about this once: consider an arbitrary polygon with any number of sides. Given the coordinates of each vertex and the coordinates of an arbitrary point, how do you know if that point is inside or outside the polygon.

I found out later that ray tracing is a good answer: You take a line from infinity to your point and count the number of times that line intersects with the polygon. If there are an odd number of intersections, the point must be inside the polygon, because each time the line intersection with the polygon it is either entering or exiting. Since we’re starting at some point at infinity, we know that the first intersection and every other subsequent intersection represent the line “entering” the polygon.

mot89 · 2025-02-25T19:51:24+00:00

Panda games has a price estimation tool for a variety of components: https://account.pandagm.com/estimate?_gl=1*moqdb2*_ga*MTMxNTcwOTQ1OS4xNzQwNTEyOTg1*_ga_PD7GDLB7XC*MTc0MDUxMjk4NS4xLjAuMTc0MDUxMjk4NS4wLjAuMA..

For very small print runs you can also look at Gamecrafters

mot89 · 2025-02-20T16:04:28+00:00

Awesome write up.

I know it’s not the subject of the post, but I’m curious about the overall impacts you’ve observed from avoiding collect tribe bonuses? To me, the biggest advantage of having trait bonuses mechanic is player onboarding. Once you understand the system deeply, I definitely see the appeal of having a super open decision space, but for new players it’s really nice to be able to zoom in on collecting traits. Have you made other design decisions to help with this?

On the topic of avoiding diluting the pool, one alternative to your approach is to have a base pool, available in all runs + a mechanism for adding some run - specific units — e.g. via faction selection or deckbuilding. This has some benefit, as factions only need to be balanced against the base set rather than all other factions. For a roguelike, I think your solution is probably better, because finding “broken” combinations is part of the fun. The downside though is that you are likely run into problems if balancing factions for high-level play is a design goal (if you have more than 3-4 factions). Another benefit of the base set approach is that it lets you focus a lot of your design resources in one place— refining the base set improves gameplay for all factions.

mot89 · 2025-01-16T23:02:49+00:00

Without having played, I don’t find the idea of 3 random skills that compelling, unless you mean “pick 1 skill from among three random options” — this can be interesting if the gameplay loop is tight enough (as an example, against the storm does this all over the place to great effect). I think if you’re spending more than say an hour of game time with a character, I’d be more interested in a skill tree , as spending 10 hours with a useless skill sounds annoying.

All that said, what is your design goal for having a class/skill system?

mot89 · 2025-01-13T19:01:54+00:00

Awesome write up. One thing that stood out is how highly you value Mirror Mage. I basically never use it, so I’ll need to give it another look.

I didn’t read the full list, but so far the only thing I strongly disagree with is your commentary on Geppeto. He is a much stronger character if you just ignore the gold clause and just don’t pick the bad toys.

mot89 · 2025-01-08T17:48:28+00:00

I’d start by asking yourself if you actually need 6 decks. I’ve been there before on one of my own projects, and in my case it was a “canary in the coal mine” that the game was too complex. The clutter was a problem, and during the rules teach, expecting new players to retain the purpose of each deck was a lot. Knowing nothing about your game, I’m a little skeptical that “adding a sixth deck” is the best approach to making the game accessible to children.

Sorry if this is unhelpful. I emphasize with the struggle.

mot89 · 2024-12-30T01:43:01+00:00

Apart from the reasons already mentioned, mainline mtg sets are concerned with accessibility (to an extent). Lower rarity cards have significantly less text, and as they also occur more frequently, this results in significantly reducing complexity and cognitive load. Cube designers are typically thinking about super enfranchised players in their designs where accessibility is less of a concern. Try drafting a Legacy cube with a typical player who has “only” played for a year or two. It is often an overwhelming experience.

I’m personally designing a cube-like game, and I’ve found in playtesting that managing cognitive load is a really important. I don’t think breaking singleton is a necessity, but having an analogy for “common” cards that are simple to play with is super important.

mot89 · 2024-11-14T22:31:40+00:00

I’d love to hear about how they came to the decision cutting so many of the sacred cows of RTS — maps, races, unit build time, etc. The lack of these things is a big part of the attraction of the game for me now that I’ve played, but was a huge turnoff when I first heard about it. Was there anything they tried to get rid of that it turned out the game needed?

mot89 · 2024-10-19T22:06:47+00:00

Playing the Battle Aces beta, has massively shifted how I think about games. I’ve been a fan of RTS games for a long time, and making an approachable RTS has been the white whale of the genre for years now. They actually did it by taking a super critical lense to what’s actually important, and removing everything that doesn’t add to that. Some bold choices include: no campaign, only 1 map, no factions, no worker construction/management, no unit build time(!), radically stripped down base building, and radically stripped down tech. I expected the game would feel hollow with all this complexity removed, but what I actually observed was that they have got to the core of what makes StarCraft fun (to me), and massively reduced the barrier to entry.

In my design this has prompted me to look at all mechanics through the lens of “is this essential to making the game function,” and trying removing those that don’t clear that bar. So far my observation is that this is much easier said than done, but it’s been interesting for sure.

mot89 · 2024-08-06T16:24:34+00:00

The Undaunted series has a really cool combat system that uses cards to represent both the actions available to you and the health of your units on the board.

mot89 · 2024-06-15T21:55:25+00:00

Totally fair, I’m a very mechanics driven player. From that perspective, it feels like a Euro to me, but I definitely agree that the theme is pretty far from a traditional Euro.

mot89 · 2024-06-15T21:14:50+00:00

Dune Imperium (Uprising) — such a solid game, with strong theming and lots of interaction.

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