A while back, AC took a deep dive into the many different ways you can modify Kings Cup to serve your drinking game needs. And while that is still an awesome compendium, it got me thinking: what if you don’t like Kings Cup? What if you prefer games like Among Us, Killer Queen, or hell even Captain’s Gambit? Is there a way to transform your favourite game into a drinking game?

Today, I’m going to walk you through my 4-step process to turn any game into a drinking game. Once we’ve gone over how to do it, I’ll also give some examples to help you out. Let’s get started!

Last week I wrote about game jams and why you should give them a try. Though I still love game jams and think that every game designer should try them out at least one, most game jams are far from perfect. While they can be a great opportunity to meet new people, refine your design skills, and inspire your creativity, those benefits come with some notable drawbacks. Not everyone has 24-72hrs of consecutive free time available to make a game. Even if you do have the time, making a game within such a tight deadline is super stressful. Some people certainly thrive under that kind of pressure, but for people like me I wish I had a bit more breathing room. So how can you make game jams less stressful? Slow them down.

In case you’ve never heard of them before, a Game Jam is basically a hackathon for game developers. The goal is to create a full game from scratch within a very limited amount of time (typically 24-72hrs). Often you’ll create your game in a small team, but you can also work solo if that’s more your style.

Most game jams will have a creative theme that participants must adhere to, such as “Occult Classic,” “Lost & Found,” or “Evolution.” Game jams might also have technical constraints for participants that want to spice things up, such as building the game in a specific programming language, only using sound effects you recorded using your voice, or making all the art in the game monochrome.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably in a similar boat. Between new releases, Steam Sales, and Humble Bundles, your library has grown steadily over the years. But when it comes time to pick something to play, you find yourself playing to the same ol’ games. Don’t get me wrong, the games you keep coming back to are likely really good (believe me, I’m very happy with all the time I’ve spent playing Hades, Hearthstone, Slay the Spire, Spelunky, and The Binding of Isaac). But playing the same things over and over again does nothing to chip at your ever-growing backlog of games.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of incredible games out there, and if you keep yourself limited to only a handful of them you’re missing out on so many amazing experiences. Especially as a game designer, I want to play as many different games as possible so that I can make the best games I can.

So, how can you actually start playing your unplayed games?

When I look back at the games that I played in 2020, a lot of them didn’t actually come out last year. Sure, a couple of them did, but most of them were either older games I finally got a chance to play or games I grew to appreciate more while stuck in lockdown. So for this year-in-review list, I’m gonna take a bit more of a personal approach. Rather than just limiting myself to new releases, I’m going to highlight the games I played that mattered to me. Some of these games have been out for quite some time, but I believe each one of them deserves to be on this list for helping me get through this wild year.

A few weeks ago, I broke down some of the many ways that designers can classify their players. I purposefully kept that post broad and mainly focused on what some of the different typologies are. But this week, we’re going to focus in on how a game can appeal to different types of players using specific features and mechanics. For this case study, we’re going to break down Supergiant Games’ Hades using Nick Yee’s Motivations of Play. Keep in mind that this is not going to be an exhaustive breakdown of every single mechanic in the game, but rather a highlight on some of the game’s key features and their effectiveness.

Ready? Let’s go. In the name of Hades!

We all have our own unique motivations for playing games. Maybe you play games to make friends and meet new people. Maybe you play games to get immersed in exciting new worlds. Or maybe you play games cause you like making things explode. Whatever your motivations may be, as designers its our job to make sure that all types of players are engaged with our games. But what are the different player types, and how can we make sure that all of them are having fun? Let’s take a look at the many different ways of classifying players and see what we can discover.

When you get information - fictional or not - your brain calculates what elements are plausible, given the contextual parameters of the story. Then, for all matches, your brain files away those plausibilities for later use.

It’s not necessarily about making the game more difficult, rather it’s about making it the right difficulty for that player. When I was playing through my Nuzlocke Challenge, it wasn’t just about making the game more difficult. It was about making it feel new again. It was about changing the Pokémon experience entirely. While there should certainly be self-imposed ways to make a game more difficult, maybe there should also be self-imposed ways of making a game easier as well.

There’s an assumption in the film and game industry that a sequel to something you like should be equally-good or better than the original. Which… is definitely a fine hope, but a self-sabotaging expectation.

Just like how there are plenty of reasons to play a game, there are plenty of methods to enjoy them too. Today we’ll explore some ways we enjoy games outside of an actual play session. which ones can you relate to the most?

Compared to the deep and robust modding community for videogames - especially games like Skyrim or The Sims - boardgames tend to be a lot less popular to mess with. We swap components and make house rules for scoring often, but don’t often go mechanically deeper than that for the majority of our games. Only in tabletop RPGs do custom classes, custom enemies, custom storylines and scenarios get created and shared. Why not other boardgames?

It may seem like you wouldn’t learn as much by playing like a fool, but by making incredibly short-sighted and baseline decisions, you make a great control group for yourself. You’re free to experiment, you’re free to take risky moves, and you’re generally able to see what the ‘default’ progress looks like before layering on strategy. That way, once you actually do start using strategy in future games, you can compare to your original fool-game to see exactly how good your strategy fares compared to before.

Think about it this way: when should we be rolling dice? In my opinion, there are two conditions we need to meet to justify a die roll:

1) The action has both a chance of success and failure; and
2) The action’s success or failure carries consequences.

In the previous example, neither of these things are really true. While we could fail an individual roll, since we can keep trying over and over at no cost we are guaranteed to eventually succeed. There’s no real risk of failure. Frankly, the door might as well not exist since we know for certain that we will ultimately break it down.

So as a game master, how could we improve this door challenge? I have four suggestions:

Now don’t get me wrong here, cheating is pretty awful. Cheating can very easily ruin the game for everyone and you shouldn’t do it. But there’s a key idea behind cheating that I want to highlight, which is that cheaters acknowledge that the game matters, but choose to disobey its rules. While this is certainly disrespectful to the game and the players, it at least acknowledges that the game exists and has some value. Which is why there’s something I think is worse than cheating: “playing.”

If you’ve played a deckbuilding game before, such as Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, you may have heard other players talk about deck archetypes. Usually it’s in the form of an argument about what archetype a given deck falls under, or which one is the best/most fun to play. But the thing is, deck archetypes can be confusing and sometimes the lines between them are fuzzy. So today, I wanted to propose my way of classifying deck archetypes: The Deck Archetype Spectrum!

Over the past decade or so there has been a massive increase in individuals who enjoy games as a medium for watching rather than a medium for playing. This is evident in the explosion of e-sports, Let’s Plays, tabletop series, etc.

When it comes to specifically board games, though, there’s not much of a viewer culture. And aside from the culture, in my experience it’s just not particularly interesting to watch people play board games most of the time. There’s a few “problems” with existing board games that make them poor subjects for viewing. To figure out these problems, and some solutions, I’m going to do a mock interview.

I love music! And I have a habit of inevitably replacing most in-game music with my own. Do you do this too? How much does this effect the game experience?

After the first 300 hours of Slay the Spire I started to get a little bored of the same ol soundtrack. And at any rate, as much as I love StS, their music isn’t a strong suit. So now, Donu and Deca murder me to the tunes of El Huervo and The Neighborhood, which is a much-needed improvement…

…but it’s not strictly better to replace music, is it? Even unassuming music - especially unassuming music - does its own job of establishing a lot about a game.

Carcassonne is a good game, and as is it’s a fun quick game that makes a great addition to any board game night. It’s simple enough that new players can get the hang of it quickly, yet deep enough that veterans can still find enjoyment after dozens of games. However, as good as it is, there’s one house rule I always play with when I play this game, which I refer to as the “All or Nothing” rule:

Below is the most comprehensive list I can think of for Kings. Mix and match appropriately for your group. Unless otherwise noted, the regular format for all of these is either "the last person to do this drinks", or "the first person to mess this up drinks". First are the rules that rhyme / alliterate, then are misc rules that can go anywhere.

Also, we take no responsibility for consequences of these rules. Select and use at your own risk.

With regards to party games, I feel that in general there are two poles that a gathering can lean towards: beer pong (sportlike, competitive, easy to play vs strangers), or kings (friendly, creative, gets conversation going).

With regards to the latter, I think there's a lot of interesting flexibility in how you construct a game of Kings and I think it's worth digging into. It seems like a small thing, but I do think a well-planned drinking game can be a great way to start an evening depending on the size and type of your social circle.

“Reconsumption” is when you voluntarily “consume” the same experience over and over again. This obviously relates to repeating the same media [book/movie/song/etc] but it also relates to activities like going to the same place at a beach. It’s particularly common with “hedonistic” experiences, AKA fun/good/self-indulgent stuff.

So maybe you find yourself getting in a New Vegas mood every summer, or you tend to rewatch Steven Universe at the start of a new term. This kind of stuff, turns out, is actually good for you!

Why is it good? In the most general sense, it helps your mind sort itself out emotionally and it helps you become a more solid person.

There's a kind of tension for players who are concerned about playing well, and it's this: if you care a lot about victory and defeat, and you're grinding out lots of games to try and improve, you'll naturally start adopting patterns of play. Developing patterns is mostly good: save mental energy by formulating frameworks and strategies to follow, right? You had a great run with a specific card, so every time you see that card, you remember what synergies generally worked and try to replicate them.

But adopting patterns creates problems when you start to accept too many things as a given. For example, "thin decks can be good with certain cards" can easily become "always keep your deck thin". Or "This card combo is pretty strong" becomes "I see this combo is available, so I'll ignore other potential strategies".

Outracing your opponent means focusing more on acquiring cards that are easy to obtain/use (but tend to be weaker). End the game before the opponent's plans come to fruition. You'll likely still invest resources in early scaling, but you need to be able to switch gears before your opponent has time to outscale or outlast you.

Outscaling your opponent means focusing more on acquiring cards that are stronger (but tend to be harder to obtain/use). You must predict how "greedy" you can be with investing your resources in scaling effects before your opponent wins. You must plan to start cashing in on powerful card synergies/effects before your opponent closes out the game on their terms. Some games provide block/heal effects that slow down the enemy long enough to get your own engine rolling.

All of your deckbuilding decisions rely on the fact that your starting deck is absolute garbage. Which makes sense. The appeal of deckbuilders is about seeing improvement over time, so an awful starting point makes buying cards feel way more rewarding.

After playing even a single game it gets pretty obvious that your starting deck is awful - so the big skill curve in deckbuilders is figuring out what you can actually do about that.

My opinion: the game you loved didn’t “become” strictly bad. It's just that there's only so much fun you can get out of any game, no matter how it's changed.