It took me a long time to consider myself an artist. It has only happened in the last five years. And that was such a hard process I didn’t want to to do anything else. It’s a herculean task to convince yourself that you have to break open reality and add something new to it, to justify all of that, to say this is different, this is important, this has to exist. Even now I’ll start working on a game and still end up asking “Is this worth it, even for me? Do I care enough?”. Especially when my health is so often making things harder.
Convincing myself is hard. Convincing anyone else? Sometimes too hard to even conceive of. So I invented the idea of the “art bucket”. I would, against all odds, create a thing all the way to the end and then simply drop it in a bucket. It has a sense of satisfaction: I have done something and proved it can be done. And maybe if people want to, they can come along and look in the bucket. This strategy is not without its merits: what matters most about art, a lot of the time, is getting it done for you. You need to break the universe and stick a flag in reality and pour your pain out into something and then stop and walk away and say “I did that”. Asking it to do anything else is a side issue. Hang the painting on your wall, share the book with your friends, tuck the prototype into your game bag. We should call that enough definitely! Even if you argue that art needs an audience to work – to be an act of communication – an audience of one counts as an audience.
That then however leads to the next battle: given that I have made things and made them good, I now have to convince myself if it is worth doing the rest. The “everything else” that allows me to find an audience and even make money. Every artist who has any kind of audience has to do some of the rest. Mentors have told me that the key is just juggling that ratio, and I agree. Some have suggested that their ratio is about 10% Art/90% Rest – 90% of their time spend on their art is not making art at all, but finding ways to make that make money. Or doing things that are adjacent to the art to get access or funding for the art, although to be clear, the 90% doesn’t include the day job/funding stuff usually. The 90% is just “finding ways so that the art gets to people or doesn’t drive you broke”. But it is worth remembering that even in profitable industries, even when having an audience and constantly “working” in their industry, very very few artists have ever been able to not have day jobs. Most Hollywood directors have day jobs. Pretty much all published authors have day jobs. And then the 90% is on top of all that.
Statistically speaking, the average writer/game designer doesn’t spend the majority of their time working at the keyboard. I wanted to be Steven J Cannell as a kid, because I wanted to be that guy at the typewriter. How dare you lie to me, Steve!
Just kidding. Steve is awesome.
I started in my role of “getting RPGs to people” by posting stuff on forums and blogs. Then I got work as a freelancer, which I did really enjoy, but it is conditional on being really into the RPGs in question, and also being able to get the work itself, which I used to do through contacts online and is becoming harder and harder to stay connected to those folks. I also have an auDHD thing where I bounce around from passions (and my skills tend to rubber-band a lot – being super super strong and then shrinking, or appearing too, after the focus drops off). I’ve spent the last eight years or so with a new approach which has been finding my own voice and publishing lots of my own games. And now I’m wondering – what’s next? Do I keep doing that? Do I alter it, or scrap it?
I have a sense that incrementally, I may be able to do more as a publisher, spending more money – risking more money – to get more of an audience and playing to a popular audience since The Score seems to be popular. But I also know that doing that means more of The Rest and less of The Art. On the other hand, having achieved everything I set myself to do in RPGs, I am feeling uninspired in that area and in non-RPG tabletop I’ve done tons of designs and could use a little break. Two arguments for doing more The Rest. But doing that reduces my % of The Art and deep down that’s what I live for. I DO need an audience. I DO want an audience. But I need to work the typewriter a lot. And another autism thing is we tend to feel things very strongly so when things suck we just do not want to do them at all, because that “this isn’t fun” burns like acid.
But at the same time, if I go back to just the art bucket, I find myself frustrated because I do want that audience. Last year I wrote like a million games (because my brain was doing that hyperfocus, hyperskill thing) and one of them is really good and I’d really like it to be published widely, not just made to look like a nice Word document and put out on my website to hope anybody cares about. That means trying to figure out how much of The Rest I can stand though.
I am trying to get used to never knowing what to do or how to do it, and never knowing what I want, and never really being content. It seems to be the way I am, and I am trying to enjoy constantly being in flux rather than waiting for anything to settle. I certainly don’t expect to have a good answer today. And I think sometimes it’s really hard to tell. Sometimes you have to try things to know, but sometimes, even then, you just can’t tell. Especially when so much of my ability to tell if I like anything has been twisted or muted with mental health issues. Maybe the only thing I can do is talk about it, in the hope that anyone else coming after can at least get that this stuff is hard to work out. Not only is it a puzzle to solve HOW to do it, a puzzle which constantly changes as you change and the industry changes and the art form changes, but it’s also a puzzle to solve the WHY and WHAT DO I WANT and DO I LIKE THIS parts too.
Sometimes, all you can do is just put words down and hope it does something, anything, in the act of coming out. And maybe tomorrow, or the next day, it will make sense again, if only for a moment.
I think most of us know and resonate with the prayer of seeking the strength to change the things we can, and the serenity to accept the things we cannot and the wisdom to tell the difference. Few remember that it was coined by Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent 20th century American theologist and political thinker who was trying to construct a kind of middle way for liberal Americans, one that was socialist in its ideas that poor people were not inherently evil and did not need better angels above them in society to direct them, but also one that repudiated the ideas of communism and liberal reforms like anti-segregation movements. You can view him as a fence-sitter emblematic of the worst parts of neo-liberal deference to what they demand is realpolitik, or as an idealist trying to find a straight path in a bent world. I think the fact that he is confounding to some analyses is probably why people like the prayer: stuff feels complicated, and the individualistic sentence of trying to be perfectly moral has never felt harder than today. Our new versions might be “check your privilege” and “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.
Anyway, to get back to games, I think we are always in danger of equivocating and saying “it’s complicated” when it comes to semiotics, and yet often seem to need to. Stuff IS complicated, and never more so than when it comes to signs and signals. Everyone comes to an idea with their baggage and we cannot change that baggage, no matter how hard we wish it were not there. My partner is a lawyer, and Australian judges do not use the term Ms; she cautions her female students that if that is the battle they want to fight, it will be difficult to win, noone will flock to your banner and it will be costly no matter the outcome. She tries to model a positive view but without neglecting the terrain the women will be entering. I tend to have the maxim that you should never believe anyone who tells you something cannot change, they are almost always arguing for their own cowardice. A few years ago I was arguing hard that the term “serious games” was a terrible one and needed to change; a friend of mine said the infamous thought-terminating cliche of that ship having sailed. He was, I was happy to say, 100% wrong, and “games for change” is catching on. He was also the same person who looked at my post about how games don’t have to be competitions and remarked that once again I seemed to be tilting at windmills, and trying to ice-skate uphill, when I should just accept that it do be that way sometimes and it is what it is.
I have another friend who designed a game for the Salvation Army designed to built an understanding of how villages in poor agricultural areas can build themselves out of poverty. I asked him why it wasn’t competitive; his answer was that nobody understands cooperative games. Not in the audience he is trying to reach. He’s right. It hurts me, but he’s right. And I guess that’s what this is all coming back to: we are in a watershed moment in games and that involves dealing with the things that, right now, we cannot change. With the hand we are dealt, to use a gaming metaphor.
Me, trying to explain why everyone else sucks but me
I’m lucky enough to have lived through the revolution in comics when the western world finally caught on that just because a comic had Batman in it didn’t mean it couldn’t be literature. I also have enough historical connection to the 1960s to remember the same arguments being made about rock and roll and stand up comedy. All of them invariably started with a very similar argument: that the art form being derided as not serious was ancient. Ancient neanderthals drew words and images together on cave walls; they played music around the fire; they told stories to make each other laugh. The idea of this was to create a kind of ritual significance with two ends: to help a thing that felt knew seem less new to the mainstream, but also to calm down the academics at the sidelines. Yes we know, academics, that comics aren’t new, and nothing they are doing is new, but we have to PRETEND it is new because to the maintstream audience, it FEELS very new.
The people who remembered the newspaper strips about Peter Parker’s married life and the POW! BAM! of the Batman TV show were having a kind of cultural shock to see people going “no, this shit matters, and is good and is politically and culturally significant”. Some of that was amazement, a wondrous suprise to find more adult depth in old concepts. Similarly, a lot of people’s experience with board games is “we played them as kids and they were kind of … bad?” or “we played them as kids and then we grew out of them”. Wondrous day then, to find games have “suddenly” somehow “grown up” and become “good” or socially acceptable. More and more I see gamers use the term “modern” meaning “good”, with their particular choice of cut off naturally being “a few years before I started getting into the hobby”. Naturally, as someone who knows games have always been here and who has always been here myself, I object loudly from the kitchen. But I get it: for them, the world has jumped a great distance. The first animes (is that the plural?) I ever saw were Astro Boy and Battle of the Planets, the very next one I saw was Ghost in the Shell; that felt like a bullet to the brain and a very silly thing to say they were the same thing, and confusing to me how one got to B from A. Then people tried to “get me into anime” and all failed because it was super hard to get context and nobody inside was very good at giving me context.
I think, more than most folks, I need that context and a sense of a critical language to understand a medium, so I tend to want to offer all of that to those newly arrived. I have always prided myself on being what I call a dragoman. The term is one I stole from colonial history: a dragoman was the man you, a European, hired when you went to the Middle or Far East, who understood the local world and could introduce you to it safely. (A near equivalent is the term indian agent but it has historical problems.) I often remark at conventions how people from one fandom are totally lost when they encounter another, and I love to be the person stepping up to fill that gap. I love being a teacher and an explainer – not least because that’s how I interact with the universe myself. But it is also worth noting to myself that not everyone needs this. The kids are alright going straight to Ghost in the Shell or Wicked City, and it does not matter to anyone that they think the board games now are COOL because they have HOT CHICKS (or I guess trick taking mechanics, in games) and the old ones are FOR BABIES because they don’t.
But it DOES matter as a game designer, because our audience is vast, and expanding, and shifting. But also because games, even more perhaps than comics and cartoons, depend on interpretation. Games need to be swiftly understood and internalized which means the symbols and signification we use has to work with the software available, and that software is the human brain. It is true that a lot of people react violently to the idea of a cooperative game, or any other kind of ideas outside their view of what a game is. We can change that, but slowly; we have to acknowledge a lot of where we are to begin with. I hate that people think games are competition, and I am driving hard to change that, but I also (grudgingly, with no serenity at all) accept that this is a long ongoing process.
At the same time as our audience is opening up, there is also going to be an urge to not have to keep starting from scratch. Previously the game industry was so small and broken up it was difficult to have a conversation about games in game design. It had to happen instead in a critical space or the academic space. I’d argue that Friedmann Friese probably created one of the first real salvos of games about games with Copycat, so-called because he wanted to acknowledge that he hadn’t invented anything in making it. 504 was then the natural extension thereof, a game that was 504 games in one, just add your own theme. I’d also argue that the problem with both games is they didn’t really make sense to anyone but someone deeply immersed already in that conversation about innovation and euro-game mechanics. Games, because they are so dependent on understanding a shared language, are at great risk of iterating ON that language, until it becomes indecipherable to the new player. Of course everyone knows that red is life points and blue is mana points, and so on.
Here’s the thing: although all art exists in conversation with other art and its time and its context, I’d argue that really great art can and should transcend that and be universal and timeless. It’s true that Watchmen is about superheroes as they were as a storytelling medium and corporate property, but I wasn’t reading comics at the time and I can understand Watchmen perfectly without that context. It operates on many many levels. Shakespeare doesn’t always translate but so much of what he writes does, even when he was flipping scripts and commenting on other works around him. Compare that to Undertale: a video game where when you get stuck a kindly character comes and helps you pass a level. That joke only works if you’re immersed in what video games are; worse still, I could not get to that point of genre-interrogation in Undertale because I couldn’t get past the earlier levels. As interesting as a critique as Undertale was, it was not just unintelligible to the average person, it was unreachable. And that’s with nearly 50% of people regularly playing video games.
At one point I spent a few years checking which games explained that AWSD were how to move around. Almost none of them did. That had become assumed language. I wonder if we’re really close to making the same mistakes in board games.
And that – at last -brings us to why I hate Cole Wehrle. Cole, amazingly, brilliantly, is having a deep conversation about wargames and dudes-on-a-map games, and history games. But the problem I have with him is with each new game he makes, he goes further down a line of conversation that started with some central assumptions about what a war game is and why it exists. And every time he iterates on that, the conversation gets further and further away from me, because I don’t have the experience OR ABILITY to keep up with the kinds of games he makes. (Ability is of course something for a whole other column, but I need to wrap this up at least for this instalment). None of it is approachable or accessible. All of it feels like it’s about things I barely understand. At the same time, I love that he’s asking these questions and iterating over and over further down into those questions. I just wish it was about some other part of gaming that I could relate to understand. It’s frustrating to see someone clearly doing great work in this space and not being able to go with it; but more than that it makes me fear that we might, like video games did, end up in a world where we are so busy congratulating ourselves on subverting the dominant paradigms that we’ve forgotten that those paradigms have become walls that the outsiders can’t get over.
Some might look at that and go well, we’re not designing for those people, and that’s fair enough. It is what it is, and some people can’t be convinced to like a thing. I will never be able to understand the games Cole makes and I’m sure he’s okay with that, and certainly I should be. I also don’t mind when people miss the subtle levels in my fiction or game design writing…but I also want to make sure that, to some extent, they have a way in. I pitch high, but I also don’t want to be very careful not to push away. Not that setting a game at any giving difficulty is inherently pushing away! It’s also probably fine to make games where people attack other people with dudes on a map. I’m only worried about going down the silo too hard. And that designers might occasionally forget that not everyone “gets” the idea of a war game. I tried to play Arcs and immediately I was hit with the idea that the setting didn’t give me any reason to attack anyone. The mechanics did (although not strongly), but I still didn’t want to do it. Shut Up and Sit Down talk about Arcs makes its own lore for you; but at least when I’m being the space turtles I know that I’m supposed to hate those barony guys. Of course, not everyone cares about setting as much as I do, either. Twilight Imperium isn’t a better game because of this element. I think my point is, we should always remember that our audience may be seeing this thing for the first time. We can’t always design for that, if we want to go deep, but, like a memento mori, we should keep it in mind. And maybe I’m weird because I don’t want to attack people in games, but I can tell you like I said in the first article in this series: THE MAIN REASON PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO PLAY GAMES IS LOSING MAKES THEM FEEL STUPID AND WINNING MAKES THEM FEEL MEAN.
And I bring that thought to every game I design, and try to design with that as the hand I am dealt. That doesn’t mean I want Cole to stop being Frank Miller; it just means I think we need some Scott McClouds as well.
And of course I don’t actually hate Cole at all. The fact that he’s talking about this stuff in his games is amazing. I just used that title because although I hate clickbait, I also have to deal with the internet as it is. I don’t have the strength to retrain your brains not to click on outrage, and I hopefully have the serenity to forgive myself for playing to it.
There was an old joke in the 1980s when the conversation turned to overpopulation. It went “everyone thinks there’s too many people, but nobody wants to leave.” In a similar way there are too many tabletop games but nobody wants to stop designing.
This week the great Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower became another critical voice adding to this call and he hit the same notes most of us have: the problem is not really how many games there are but that there’s too much consumption and conspicuous consumption. As I said a few months back, we can start by buying less and playing more. We can use libraries and build groups; focus on experiences not things. But I don’t think we should end the discussion there – especially when companies and publication and marketing aren’t part of that solution.
Also, let’s be clear: this is a problem for everyone: for companies, for designers, for players. The average time a player gets to play a board game is plummeting. It was under two four years ago and for some hobby gamers its probably going to go below one. People are buying far far more than they can ever play. Then they go to gaming groups where, in my experience, they form a queue, waiting for the rotation when they will be chosen to get one of their games on the table, one time. Then the fancy car has to go back in the garage, hardly driven, onto a shelf of shame that tells the world they have failed. To paraphrase RS Benedict: every game is beautiful, and nobody is playing.
But nobody wants to stop. So I have a different question: if this is the new normal, how do we make it work?
Let’s set up some background and talk for a moment about Robert Cialdini’s six pillars of persuasion. Like a lot of pop psych books of the 70s I’m sure much could be done to debunk Cialdinis work but the CIA found it useful enough so let’s assume for now it’s got some usefulness. Cialdini basically identified six reasons why people will agree with or be persuaded of something, besides just the quality of the thing itself. Here they are:
Reciprocation. If someone does something for us we are likely to do want to do something nice for them in return.
Liking. Do people that I like like this thing? Is it a thing that is like other things I like?
Authority. Has some authority decided this thing is worthy or high quality?
Scarcity. Is this a thing that I might miss out on? Or am I vulnerable to some effect of not having it?
Commitment. Is this a thing I am already into? Is it my brand or identity?
Consensus. Is everyone else doing the thing?
I am of the opinion that there is nothing inherently wrong with making people aware of your product. In fact, I think it can be a thing of great moral good! But that said, marketing has always been driven by anxiety. As Don Draper says, you create an itch in your market and then offer the product as the balm. The itch tends to come in three flavours: it solves a problem you have, you’re vulnerable to something without it, or all the cools kids are doing it. Cialdinis list are the most common ways the itch can be created. An authority will tell you that it’s cool, or good, or dangerous to be without. They will associate the product with values and ideas and celebrities you already like, so the message is intensified. They’ll create limited time offers and price “drops” to create scarcity and false reciprocity. And once you’re on board they’ll give you reasons to buy in with commitment and you’ll organically bring in your friends.
And all of that is a monstrous evil that makes me sick to my stomach but but but the six pillars remain in play even if we get rid of marketing. We do and should look to authorities, our friends, standards, comparisons and repeatability as metrics for if we should investigate and hence own/do a thing. That makes sense! And as soon as there are more things than we have time to evaluate we turn to the voices of the reviewer and the critic (which aren’t the same thing). Even, indeed, to the influencer. These things are necessary and important elements of pretty much any aspect of art and culture. So is consensus and liking too. Sorry, mum and dad, but if all my friends jumped off a bridge I might suspect they had a good reason to do so. My friends are wicked smart and have good taste.
My point is these are systems we tend to use no matter what. They have been inflamed by marketing, and they may just be habit, but they make sense. So what happens when those things break down? The truth is a lot of this is happening everywhere – more and more people want to buy experiences, not things because the entire western world is in a grip of stuff-malaise. We all have too much stuff, and we even need to pay people like Marie Kondo to get rid of it for us. So we can look around us and see how other entertainment forms are dealing with this. And the truth is they too are struggling.
The dangers are clear from that. In the 1950s and 60s rock music got big but it also had a lot of churn. Individual artists could become big but often it was the producers who made the real money, switching from hot new client to hot new client. Ultimately though, they depended on huge tentpole stars like Elvis and The Beatles to make reliable money. When those vanished and the industry diversified in the 70s, nobody knew what to do. When the Bee Gees were the last big stars left, they were played so much on radio that this triggered the DISCO SUCKS movement. But the radio was running on the old rules: play what was visibly popular. Music was fragmenting into scenes that were invisible to a larger audience and difficult to turn a profit from. The industry eventually found the solution by making themselves into a kind of automated factory – companies like Stock, Aitken and Waterman made themselves in a factory. They found young artists, wrote them their songs, gave them their look and then moved onto the next artist when the fad was over. Only a precious few like Kylie Minogue or Madonna managed to gain some kind of self-mastery over this process, by doing it to themselves. Now, of course, Taylor Swift made sure she did it herself from the beginning; her success is as much because of her sheer business acumen as her song writing and voice. She is Vertical Integration made flesh.
Stock, Aitken and Waterman in their heyday. What a bunch of douchebags.
Of course, music scenes retaliated to this through punk, garage, grunge and indie movements, trying to recreate authenticity. Over time, though, the goal of the indie was to become mainstream. And that model now is also gone. The indie has grown tinier and tinier until it is a cottage industry, and the giants have become gargantuan. Spotify, the factory at the top makes billions; indie artists that might have cut an album in the 1980s and made a few grand can now reach the entire planet to make a few cents. The same thing is currently happening to movies. Martin Scorsese has talked about how movies now are made for 5 million or 500 million, and nothing in between. Anthony Mackie has explained how there are no movie stars any more, only franchises and characters; and the only movies that can be made are for “16 year olds or China”. Again, the indies are shrinking and the giants are behemoths, and the giants are machines. (Here’s a link to A.O. Scott talking about the same thing in the NYT but it’s paywalled.)
Will this happen to board games? In a small way, these trends are there, with big companies like Awaken Realms running two gigantic kickstarters a year and smaller games now struggling to be seen on crowdfunding. Likewise brands and franchises are way more important than ever. But it’s not quite the same just yet, because board games have less money behind them and are less transferrable. A better comparison is to television, perhaps: not only do both of them go directly into our lounge rooms, but gamers like TV audiences are fickle and easily bored and are ready to change channels. Streaming has certainly put a lot of new terrible pressures on television but the quality has only gone up along with the quantity. The only thing that is threatening TV right now is too many streaming channels locking off content, but people are willing to pay. The cost though is it is easy for great stuff to be missed. Every single TV show is reduced to a tiny rectangle in a long strip of rectangles, and few survive the first episode. If you’re very very lucky people will watch the whole series, which is now the most important measure of success, what the industry calls “completion”. TV therefore is now full of shows with mystery that NEED to be watched all the way through. Board games have done the same thing: more legacy games, more campaign games, more story games. The appeal of something like Gloomhaven is for once, you know what you are playing every Thursday night. That’s exactly what people like about television: the choice hurts. They want to just go “oh it’s Thursday, the show I like is on” – or at least a new series has dropped for me to binge.
But still, we need ways to navigate TV, and board games. Music used to use the hit parade to keep people informed of what was “hot”. Movies had big critics and reviewers (now completely broken by review bombing and youtube manosphere lunatics). And note: there hasn’t been a time before when there were so many movies that you felt even the reviwers were behind. But nowadays, this is the situation with both TV and with board games. TV critics are mostly ignored and just pointing to things as they drive by. Community sharing has evaporated. TV used to be about the water cooler moments, as they said in the 90s – people would gather at work to talk about the thing on TV last night. Every now and then a show drops bit by bit and for a brief moment the world feels a shared connection: there was some kind of beautiful moment of community I felt when a lot of my friends were watching Wandavision. This is also I think why people have reacted so strongly to Taylor Swift tours: it’s a shared experience. But quickly it faded away and TV no longer has this. It’s not a shared hobby any more. Few people are enjoying the same thing at the same time. So there’s no social proof in the medium. No authority because of the death of reviewers. And no scarcity at all. Although the new fear of deletion is real, we still think like we have been taught to: everything will be online forever. That’s why DVD sales are so low. Who needs to own things?
This means there’s no commitment either. There’s a lot of internet memes about how thing X has been completely forgotten by culture, so it must suck, but we can’t commit to a thing if it burns out in eight episodes but is simultaneously always available. I’m old enough to remember the need to circulate VHS tapes to see our favourite shows: that kind of desperate scarcity created commitment. You HAD to be a fan or you couldn’t even see the show. This is why again big companies know they can’t sell you on character X or film Y: they have to sell you on a franchise that maybe they can hit you with on every single platform. If they don’t, you’ll lose interest. Star Wars is fucking everywhere, but it has to be, or you’d forget about it.
The exact same trend has occurred in board games. We’ve gone from around 250 games coming out a year to 5000 in the space of ten years. Reviewers and critics cannot keep up. Tastemakers who were the kings two years ago are fading already. And although prizes matter, the Spiel Deh Jahres judges recently admitted that they have to play games five days a week to even get through 10% of the releases of a year. So slowly awards are failing to be useful. There goes authority. Since people aren’t playing the same games with the same groups, there’s no commitment and there’s no consensus. Since there’s so many games, it’s even becoming hard to follow your favourite designers, so Liking is drying up. And scarcity is a joke: the whole problem is owning too many games.
So here’s the problem: our six usual ways of finding out what we might like do not operate well inside this new environment of total abundance. When there’s a ton of money it turns into the minnows and whales option like movies; when there’s a different financial model it turns into a sea of rectangles like television. So far, TV hasn’t really solved this, except by going back to word of mouth. We ask each other what’s good – our friends being the only Liking and Authority that we have left. TV is trying to get us with algorithms which aren’t working well and – as social media has shown – really dangerous, so we tend to distrust them. Board games can’t use the algorithm as they are now, because we have to go out and buy a box. And while word of mouth is good, only a few of us play in-house with our families. But I certainly think that is the dream now, and where the biggest games tend to succeed. We want that TV experience in things like Gloomhaven: this will be for me and my significant other to play regularly, reliably. (In this area, I think RPGs can do really well, too.) We can see what products are good – but we don’t know how to solve the problem of finding them.
That’s what I mean by a different question. Since this keeps happening, since abundance is changing mediums so that Cialdini’s principles aren’t taking off, what comes next? Is there a way to navigate a cultural scene that works in this different way, without it turning into silos of cultists doing their own thing, or minnows and whales? If TV hasn’t solved this, it’s unlikely board games will soon. So I don’t have the answer. I just want to make sure we’re asking the right questions. The question is not “do we have too many games”. The question is: yes we do have too many games, just like we have too many TV shows, and we need to figure out how to navigate that. Let’s see what we can come up with.
D-Constructions 