I think creating a game is the ultimate art form. I used to play a ton of chess growing up so I had a particular fascination with solving games (checkers, the clearly inferior game had been solved since computers could play games). I think it’s beautiful to think of a game created as early as chess was - with a unique combination of pieces that all move differently yet maintain a symmetric nature. With one side starting before the other, it’s rare in a turn-based game to have a game that can’t allow someone to win fully purely on the basis of the intense computation we have available today.
A few years ago, I listened to Alan Lee’s podcast on building great games where he talks about making Exploding Kittens as a game that should be focused on the people, more than the game.
The first time I played Spot It!, for example, it felt like love at first sight. The defined number of interesting objects (zebras, dinosaurs, yin-yang symbols, bombs) within 55 cards shuffled together, everything mapped out so perfectly that you could pick up any 2 cards and exactly one object would be in common between them — that’s the kind of eloquence worth living for. The first time I deciphered how this game worked was incredible (ref here: https://youtu.be/VTDKqW_GLkw?si=HXO9gqojrCXjjCwO).
Then, it’s the arch-rival Ghost version of Spot It!, which is the game embodied equivalent of running out of versions to play of “the country game” and claiming that the next person must state a country that ends with the same letter your country started with. In less words, way more interesting.
Games that require you to be fast on your feet - and make split-second decisions incredibly well become fun to play with a younger sibling.
This love letter’s probably getting a bit too long but I wanted to share a game I spent a few days thinking about and have now probably played this with at least 20 people. It’s a version of tic-tac-toe.
You start with a tic-tac-toe board as usual - 3x3 but make it bigger than you normally would. Every single square is going to get its own tic-tac-toe board inside of it, so now you have 9 mini-games.
The first player to start can place their symbol anywhere on the board. Let’s say, for example, you put it in the top-right board in the bottom-left square of that board. Now, the next player must put their symbol somewhere inside the bottom-left square of the big board. When a game has been won in a square, you can draw the symbol of whoever won that square on top of it, creating a massive tic-tac-toe board. If a square that you need to go to (because your opponent is sending you there) is already claimed (by either you or your opponent) then you can go anywhere on the board!
It’s a simple game. I might write a note at some point about the different kinds of strategies I’ve seen for playing this game and which ones I think are intuitively not as good as other ones.
It’s also worth noting, not for any particular reason — but I’ve lost only once, but I can’t pinpoint a formula for winning. This game is well made for the purpose that I don’t think either player gets an advantage by starting first (I tried pitting two agents against each other to play this game and a) there doesn’t seem to be a consistent good strategy for this and b) the order that you play doesn’t seem to matter in this version of tic-tac-toe although it clearly does in the normal version). The other interesting thing I’ve found is that it’s difficult to tell when things could completely fall apart which I find to be an interesting feature of the game.
(If anyone would like to challenge me - my email is always open.)
I’ve made and played many games in the past, but this is by far the most eloquent and simple one. I find it hard to describe games. You can get good at them. Really good (as anyone who has ever played one of these games with me would know). But it’s hard to encapsulate the feeling of things just clicking together and working out.