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Troy Goodfellow

Episode 199: Some Assembly Required

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Troy and Julian welcome freelance writer and co-proprietor of the Shut Up, Sit Down Show, Paul Dean, to talk about house rules and modding in board games. Why do we do it? What counts as a mod of a board game? And how do you get other people to play them? Creativity, design, drinking - Troy is good at one of these things, but a fine chat is had.

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I listened to this electronic broadcast! I did it because I was sad that there were no new Shut Up & Sit Down things to listen to yet, and then I saw that Mr. Paul Dean was a guest upon your show! I discovered that the show is entertaining even when I have only played 10% of the games discussed! Your brief foray into board games was a sneaky trick to draw me in, and now I have gone back and listened to the first four or so episodes thus far, and these also are pleasant!

I say all of this to highlight the impact of internet celebrities like Mr. Paul Dean, and how they are the most important people in the world.

But also, the podcast prompted me to have a think about board game modifications. I'd seen some suggested mods for the game Citadels -- specifically, the addition of a new card, The Fool, who is not very powerful but takes his turn before any other character. Inspired and emboldened by your discussion, I went on to invent several alternative special powers for this new card, which I am keen to take a vote on if and when I manage to wrangle my family into agreeing to such a presumptuous adventure as Modding a Beloved Game.

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Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I find discussion of game mods to be very rare on boardgamegeek. Especially for popular games... to such an extent that if anyone writes a negative review of a game, people will respond by stating that the reviewer must surely have misunderstood some rules, and therefore was playing the game incorrectly. My interest in the board gaming hobby definitely started up with the ascendancy of Euro games, so I was very interested to hear that for people playing more classic war games that modding was a more commonly accepted approach to boardgaming.

I do disagree with Julian's assertion that re-skinning Agricola as a post-apocalyptic Fallout type game would somehow make it a better game than what it is. I agree that on paper, saying that you have some board game about medieval farming sounds pretty dreadful. But people get into it. Why else would people spend good money on animal meeples? People buy into it, however ridiculous it sounds. I am deeply skeptical of the idea that collecting nuka-cola caps instead of carrots or whatever makes for a better game. I also note that many gamers complain when they feel a theme is merely "pasted-on".

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Love the image of the Ticket to Ride board & Agricola cards used to showcase this episode on this website!

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I on the other hand would love to see Julian's Nukagricola! I like Agricola a lot, but the theme does make it seem a bit boring sometimes.

I loved this episode and in fact it inspired me to rethink how I'm going to make progress with my game project. From the start I felt like I wanted some modularity, but I also wanted to keep the rules simply structured. I had many attempts at slightly different additional mechanics to make the game more interesting, none of which seemed like essential parts of the game. So I've actually added and later removed several variants by now. What if I embrace modularity and moddability fully? I could make the game's core really simple, and try to find a way to split the various additional rules and components into actual separate modules, while trying to keep the rulebook easy to start with and refer back to.

I'm now starting my attempt to do this by converting the game to software, doing some playtests in software and later turning the software back into rules. This makes sense to me because I think I know very well where the boundaries of a software module are and how to enforce them, but it's not as clear to me when writing down rules as text. I also hope to find holes in the rules and ways to simplify them at the software level. Experimentation should also be easier when I don't have to do the physical setup all the time.

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