The Mount Rushmore of Games

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This video was recorded on Feb. 18, 2023.

David Gardner: Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. It's extra, I love doing Weekend Extras usually we've done it in the past when we've had too much fun. The week of that podcast the Wednesday came out and I was like, but there's more I wanted to talk about. Certainly with this week's guest C. Thi Nguyen of the University of Utah philosopher in this case, even more importantly, gamer. I thought Thi lets you and I talk about some of our favorite tabletop games. Now, I guess we could open it up, I mean, this means card games, this means word games, etc. I don't think it means video games, I have a list, my Mount Rushmore games, I know you do without further ado. Let's get started. Thi would you like to start us off with like on your Mount Rushmore of tabletop games, what do you want to talk about first?

Thi Nguyen: Wolfgang Kramer's of El Grande, is this extraordinary early, like in the Euro game explosion piece of brilliance. I think it's a goodness that's gone from this world now like people aren't designing games like this anymore because it seems to them too clunky. But the amazing thing about El Grande was there were only nine actions, the entire game and every single game. It's best played with five people like there's all these pieces you move around there, these rules for moving them around against but the most interesting part of the game is you flip over at the beginning of each turn, five potential actions from the weakest to the strongest action. Then you hold an auction for what order you're going to get to select from the actions in.

You all have the same pot of money from the start of the games. You get this incredibly rich, deep decision about when should you spend your money what's the turn order. When did the moment where you should spend it all because you're going to get a huge amount or when's the moment you where did you spend nothing, because actually you can get more than anybody else out of a lower turn order and seek to get everyone else's head to the game. I often feel that modern Euro games, they've engineered out this thick chunkiness. You get more like microturns where you do like, I'm going to do this little thing, there's more like mechanical system and you lose the glory of that rich, exhausting, overwhelming getting everyone's head decision and I love that.

David Gardner: Really said, I also love games that have multiple mechanisms like, let's say in this case, auctions, but also with a map. There's a dude's on a map aspect to El Grande that you know, and anybody who's played it. I really appreciate that one Thi because for me also, it's a forerunner of so many other games that in different ways mimicked it. But it's the pure quintessence, it's the simpler, doesn't take as long to play or teach so rich, very Kanishia-like in terms of that design. Wolfgang Kramer, just an awesome game designer.

I'm going to stop here on our Mount Rushmore, Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, how could I not. 1985, I still own the first box set that came out. I think maybe came in a few years even before that. But for me, obviously, it opened up, it channeled Tolkien who himself was a geeky dude from a few decades back these days, we can all look back on Lord of The Rings winning the Oscars and all of the games that now mimic in different ways Dungeons and Dragons, I know you're a role-playing gamer. You talked about the quiet year on our podcast earlier this week. I don't really want to say much more about Dungeons and Dragons other than it's just so iconic, I had to put it up there.

Thi Nguyen: Let me respond to that. As a former Dungeons and Dragons player in the indie renaissance of new style role-playing games. A lot of which are trying to fix the problems of Dungeons and Dragons. Once you played a lot of the new stuff, I can't go back to D&D, one of the best criticisms of D&D I heard from this world or something like the system carefully, mechanizes, shopping and killing, and nothing else. I mean, people will respond late-stage, like the later additions have added new things but those are taken from this indie world that I find much richer and more interesting.

So there are tons of games here, but I'll put as my next pick, my favorite indie role-playing game, which is Apocalypse World, which is the extraordinary thing they're all innovations in it. But the most interesting one I think is the degree to which the system and the questions in it are player driven. In Dungeons and Dragons, the way the rules are supposed to be like if you're the dungeon master, you create a secret door, and then your players, if they're near it, they have to roll a perception checking if they get it, they see the door that was already there. Apocalypse World inverts the metaphysics so the player roles this thing that like, there's this move they can do called check the scene.

Then they roll, well, they get to pick a question from the question list and the questions are like, what's the best way out, what's my enemy's vulnerability? If they ask it, the GM has to answer yes, they have to create one, they've to create an exit, they have to create a vulnerability. Some of the characters get special questions, like one of the characters gets to the question instead of what's the vulnerability. What is the hidden sorrow that you seek redemption for? You can meet like an enemy boss and I think they're going to fight and my player instead. Rolls this and says, what is the secret sorrow that you seek redemption for, and I have to make up, I'm like, OK, the big evil villain, is estranged from their daughter who's addicted to goblins and then the story just shifts. That player-driven exploration is just so amazing. Apocalypse World.

David Gardner: Ground-up organic, I really appreciate that. I think my list of Rushmore games is sort of the iconic thing that touched off the thing that lead to better things. I think I can go next with Magic The Gathering, which for me again, 1993, I think Richard Garfield who's previously been on this, but I just think so many games have now borrowed deck-building and taking it to just that innovation that hey, this is a new card game and you're playing with your deck and I'm playing with my deck, but they're actually different decks. Not only are they different decks, instead of just playing for the same deck, but you get to design your deck. Talk about giving agency to players even before they sit down to play the game, of course, an entire industry has grown out of this, and so I deeply admire it. I still have some old Magic Cards that I think have more value today than they did before, I even like that about magic.

Thi Nguyen: Magic is incredible at, like a lot of the games I play at home, are deck builders in the post-magic space. For my next pick, I will go a recent refinement of a long-known system. Colwell is one of the most interesting game designers I know and his game Route. Do you know this game?

David Gardner: I sure do. Yeah. Totally asymmetric, a war game that doesn't look like a war game because we're woodland creatures.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. There's this old series of asymmetric war games called the coin series, a counter-insurgency series that we're like, it's the U.S. versus the Taliban versus the Afghanistan government. They would have different sides at totally different motivations and different ways of playing. Colwell took this 50-page rulebook, eight-hour games and boiled them down into this cute one-hour learnable game. But the sides are totally different. One of the sides of the mark keys to cats is the industrialist who's playing this classically Euro game resource game. In another side is the Woodland alliance with basically communists rebels trying to get together and get sympathy. Another side are these military birds that are incredibly powerful but incredibly dogmatic and have to stick to their plan. Another side is an arms dealer trying to make.

David Gardner: The lone dude.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah, I mean, the fact that you play, and you change positions through people that have, through sides have totally different mechanics and outlooks, is this incredible manipulation of the medium of agency. You're shifting through different agencies on each play and seeing the same conflict from a different angle. I think that game is unbelievably good.

David Gardner: It is number 28 all-time on BoardGameGeek. We should briefly, and it's going to be brief, just talk about the system for rating games. BoardGameGeek is the magnet site that I know you use. I certainly have used it for a couple of decades now, I'm big fan of it. It's really my second favorite website after our company's own. But how we rate games, the system that they use, I think it's perfectly good, but you're really good at looking into rating systems in questioning them, do you approve of how BGG rates games?

Thi Nguyen: I mean, it's about as good as you could hope for, for a monolithic rating system. I always worry about monolithic rating systems. Actually, one of the ways I got into thinking about metrics as a person that has philosophy of art, was I started looking at the history of worries about wine scoring systems. In general, one of the things that you get when you could transition to these aggregated scoring systems is a evening out and monolith, an evening out of what, instead of asking different people what their taste is and getting different approaches, there is this apparently objective list and the worries that actually decreases the diversity of people's experiences. I find that worrisome. By the way, there is a similar effect that I'm really worried about. I think we're losing a lot of culinary heritage because so many people, instead of cooking things differently the way they learned, Google and they get either the New York times or the serious eats recipe. It is both true that Kenji Alt Lopez's recipes are amazing and that it is, I think.

David Gardner: Conformance.

Thi Nguyen: Replacing this massive richness of variety.

David Gardner: I totally hear you. It's ironic because in a lot of ways with globalization, we are now experiencing more things than we ever would have before. There were large periods of human history where it was very unlikely you were going to go more than 15 miles away from your home, marry anybody outside of that diameter, etc. Yet, here we are also talking about how you can actually create conformity when you create mass, simplified rating systems and simplified scoring systems for humanity, how you can actually iron out all the interesting stuff.

Thi Nguyen: Zenif Tufecki is one of my favorite thinkers about New Media, has this great wired piece about free speech. One of the things she says is, "you might have thought that you get this massive democratic decentralization through Twitter and social media, but the fact that it's all filtered through a small number of raking algorithms, actually narrows the world's attention." The same things tend to rise to the top. I think there's this worry we have access to every recipe in the world, but as a matter of fact, it seems like half the world now is making the same Ratatouille dish, which is just the New York Times version. 

David Gardner: Let's go with one more each. I'm going to pin up Agricola because for me, Agricola, I see now I've played the game 58 times, as somebody who tends to play lots of games once or twice, that I've actually given any game the attention, usually about two hours or so 58 times probably says something important. But for me, worker placement as it relatively new mechanism first showed up, I think in Caelus, which is another game I own. I think there was a 2005. Agricola showed up a couple of years later. Uwe Rosenberg, who's a brilliant game designer, has so many deeper, longer, wonderful designs. Agricola for me anyway, is the iconic game that combines relatively new concept of worker placement, which we won't explain.

Because if anybody is listen to this weekend extra, they're probably already a gamer. We're not going to break down things like deck-building and worker placement in our Mount Rushmore conversation. But blending that together with resource management and especially with some card play where you're dealt a hand of 14 cards at the start of the game and choiceful, you have to decide, should I play that? Should I build a brick wall? Should I hire somebody to come sing at my farm? These are choices that affect your end game victory points. It's a victory point game. Thi, I assume you've played Agricola.

Thi Nguyen: Of course. I mean, I think you could tell a lot about a person by their favorite worker placement game. Let me think about my last game so I could in some sense, the correct one would be GO, which is the game I played unbelievable amounts of time. I think my favorite worker placement game is Dominant Species, which is just pure slab of unbelievable chaos that I love. But I think I'm going to go from my last one. One of the most interesting, indeed, tabletop role-playing games I've ever played, which is Microscope RPG. Have you played it?

David Gardner: I have not. You are obviously very well versed and studied and playing role-playing games. Whereas I tend much more toward just like resource management, etc., Euro, I'm trash Euro, but not as much RPG, do tell.

Thi Nguyen: I've actually probably played more Euro resource management games than RPGs in my life. But right now this world of indie tabletop role-playing is the most artistically exciting to me. That's the one.

David Gardner: Love it.

Thi Nguyen: It feels like the '90s felt in Euro board games. That's the indie world feels like right now. In Microscope RPG, you are collectively and fractionally building the history of a place together. You decide on an endpoint, beginning point, and then you build it in stages, you build higher level like arrows, and then you build the siege or whatever. Then you have these scenes and the way you build the scenes is you can move back and forth through time, filling in history.

The way you build scenes is, when you have two events that you don't understand, you can say, well, how is it that the elves and the dwarves were friends here and at war there? I think it happened because of a failed wedding arrangement. Let's have that scene and then you all act and jump into a scene in history and act improv together until you have an answer to the question. The most interesting thing is that Microscope was intended as a way to collectively build out the history of a campaign before you campaign in it. You can use it as your campaigns starter and collectively build an entire thousand year history for your campaign world.

David Gardner: Yeah, world-building.

Thi Nguyen: It's incredible. It's also just ludicrously fun.

David Gardner: In closing, obviously mentioning the world of indie role-playing games, is there a magnet site that anybody listening who's interested, for example, I have not encountered Microscope RPG. In fact, when I type that in at BoardGameGeek, it doesn't bring up anything. Where's the magnet site to find some of the games you're talking about?

Thi Nguyen: Well, first of all, you can't be on BoardGameGeek. You have to be in the RPG geek site, which is right next to us.

David Gardner: Of course. Okay, got it.

Thi Nguyen: They're actually sadly isn't one right now running, but there's an old archive site that was the heart of this called the Forge run by Ron Edwards, who was one of the originating people. Actually, I should just give a shout out, the articles on this site were some of the most influential for me in thinking about games, because he's so good and the people on that site are so good. There's a little archive of all their thinking.

But thinking about how different points systems shape and influence how people interact. Some of the people coming out of this trend is struggling against D&D. Fate has the system where you can spend your fate points to activate your character traits to give you bonuses. But you get fate points by acting out of your personality characteristics in a way that you and your party into trouble. It incentivizes narrative, building from the characters out of their characteristics. That stuff, there's some clever point systeming.

David Gardner: Thank you. You have reminded me, of course, there is RPG geek.com, which is in fact just almost a subset of BoardGameGeek. That is where Microscope and many others I see are there. Well, Thi, again, thank you. You've been so generous with your time this week and most important, I've made a new friend. Thank you so much for generously sharing who and what you are and what you think and helping us be more self-aware, among many other things, especially as gamers, whether or not we know we're in the game we're playing.

Thi Nguyen: Thank you so much. It's been a delight.