Probably Designed: Ezra Szanton

Playful Work

— 34 min read

For the first episode, I had a really nice conversation with Ezra Szanton, a game designer and developer who's recent work includes design on Mr. Magpie's Harmless Card Game.

Ezra and I spoke at length about input and output randomness, his views of randomness as a designer, and a number of other interesting topics. The interview is available in all of the normal podcast places, and the transcript follows below.

Here are some links to a few of the specific things mentioned in the show:

Special thanks to Alex Epton for providing the theme to the show!

Conversation with Ezra

hdh: I would love to maybe get to know you a little bit because actually, we're on a Discord together and I see you talking around. We've talked a little bit about the stuff for this podcast, just in terms of like, I think I've posted things and you wrote an article that was interesting. But I don't know that much about you.

I know they do that, you know, they do the thing on the Eggplant where they're like, give us the least humble intro. I don't know if we need to do a least humble intro, but I think it'd be great to hear, you know, a bit of a not super humble intro, but also just a little bit about you. Because actually you and I haven't really met or talked or...

Ezra: I'd be happy to give some background.

hdh: Yeah, that'd be great.

Ezra: So my name is Ezra Szanton. I have been making games for about six years and like three-ish of those years have been like professionally making games. My formal training is in computer science. That's what I went to school for. But my like true love is game design, love coming up with rules and goals and all that stuff that goes with game design.

So I've been sort of floating around doing different mixes of programming and game design. I started a company with my friend Fergus. We make short, weird horror games. We released a game called To the Flame a while ago, and we're working on releasing one called Be Honest, which is a horror personality quiz.

hdh: Mm-hmm.

Ezra: Besides those I've been doing game design, freelance work essentially for other small studios, coming in to do like content and some structural things, sometimes prototyping work. Because of sort of the like hybrid synergy of programming plus game design. I can like go off and implement things to save time and stuff like that.

These days I am working with a guy named Matt Brelsford, with a studio called Giant Light Studios on a game called Mr. Magpie's Harmless Card Game, which is a push your luck roguelike that you play against like a creepy puppet in a corporate back rooms office kind of thing.

And yeah, that's kinda like my career so far, I guess.

hdh: I'd love to dig into a couple of the, just the life things there real quick, if you don't mind me asking, what did you, what was your work before games stuff? What kind of career had you found yourself in and then how did you escape it?

Ezra: Well, I actually got really, really lucky and I basically just started making games right outta school. I, the whole time I was in school, I was sort of making games on the side. The school I went to didn't have a games program, so I basically took every class that was even remotely related to games, like childhood development classes related to play and things like that.

And I got an internship the summer, actually the summer COVID happened. Basically I got an internship with MassDigi SIP, which is the summer internship program. Where we like made a game on a small team over the summer and then an alumni of that hired me to work at a studio called Petricore, which was really lovely to work there.

And I worked there for a year. I basically took a gap year while COVID was happening. Because I was like, school seems really chaotic right now. I'm just gonna do some work.

Ezra: I worked on XR projects and like museum kiosks and stuff like that.

hdh: Interesting.

Ezra: And then I went back to school, finished up my degree. I was like making games on the side during all of that. And then when I got outta school, I worked for a guy named Aro Lamb, who was like a super talented game developer who's been making games for a super long time. And he hired me to do his marketing basically for the games he was about to release.

So I got some perspective that way and was sort of paying the bills. That was sort of my day job while I was like working on To the Flame, which was our studio's first game. And then I basically just met enough people that I was telling about what I was doing, that I was able to sort of start doing this like freelance thing and getting work that way.

And that's where I am now.

hdh: And so with the freelance thing, do you have to spend a lot of time out there hustling or is this mostly, it's mostly coming through contacts or it just work from folks you know, on projects you're already chatting to people about, or are you out there pounding the pavement in order to make it work?

Ezra: I'm kind of, it's kind of a weird middle ground where I really like talking to people and I really like play testing people's games. So I basically just am always talking to people and always offering to play test people's games. And that kind of sort of acts as like a free sample almost. It's like, this is how I think about games.

And if that's interesting and useful, then besides the like one hour of play testing that I do every now and then for you, maybe you could hire me to do core design work. That's kind of how it's been working so far.

I think I have been really lucky also that like I happen to know people who wanted to, who needed that kind of work done. So maybe I will have to do more pounding the pavement in the future, but for now it's kind of working out.

hdh: That's great. I mean, that's really awesome that you can, that you've been able to make that work. I don't know. It's interesting for me because I've been, I am, I've been in my career for kind of a long time, I guess, and doing a lot of stuff in software and in music.

And then, you know, I've always had this passion for games and I'm just, it's really scary. It's a really scary kind of world to step into because there's so many games you hear every year about how there's more and more variety and less and less sales. It just feels like the, everyone talks about how saturated the market is and how hard it is to get your game discovered and all these things.

So it always feels, I think for an outsider, really scary. Of course, I say that as someone who worked in music, which is a total tire fire of an industry, right? So like, clearly it's just more about maybe just being a bit timid about that stuff. But it's really actually cool to hear that you've been able to kind of patch it together.

Ezra: And every step, it was kind of like, well, if this doesn't work out, I'll just go do software somewhere.

hdh: Always more software that needs to be written, right?

Ezra: Great. Yeah. Like me and my friend were starting this company. We were kinda like, okay, we're just gonna do this for a year. We're gonna see if we can make $10,000 and if we can, we'll keep going. If we can't, then we'll stop. And then we got like a contract to work on someone else's game towards the end of that. That was really good. And we were like, okay, that kind of counts. Let's keep going. And also I have the benefit of having a very, very cheap cost of living.

Like I live in a very cheap city and I am very frugal and I don't have any dependents yet, so I'm just kind of using that to my advantage so far.

hdh: Yeah. That's amazing. That's so awesome. You wrote an article on your Substack about input and output randomness, and how they play into fairness or the perception of fairness, at least for players and design.

And I'd love to maybe dig into that. And maybe also along the way we could talk about a couple of the games that you're working on because I think that there's definitely, in Mr. Magpie at least, this element of randomness that's maybe your main opponent. That and the menacing glare of Mr. Magpie. But like, I would love to talk a little bit about that stuff and kind of how you think about it in terms of the design space and the design problems that either it solves or presents.

Ezra: Yeah, so I think that randomness is one of the most fundamental things about games. There are games that don't have it, but at its core, randomness is basically just being uncertain about something. And I think most of the ways that games are exciting are being uncertain about something.

Like, even board games that you're playing against a person, their mind is sort of like a source of randomness because you don't know quite what they're gonna do. You don't know if they've seen something you haven't seen.

hdh: Opponent uncertainty or this kind of this different, like it's an information asymmetry or kind of a uncertainty around the strategies of your opponent or, yeah.

Ezra: Yeah, like rock paper scissors is the perfect example of that. Yeah, so I think single player video games, single player games in general are sort of a weird offshoot of games. Like it kind of sort of comes out of solitaire games. I shouldn't speak with too much certainty about this. I'm kind of half remembering something right now. But like I believe that a lot of solitaire games sort of came out of fortune telling almost, where it's like, let me see if I have good luck. Let me see if I can complete this solitaire today. It was like more of like a ritual thing almost.

hdh: Mm-hmm.

Ezra: Anyway, randomness is very fundamental. I think about it a lot. You mentioned input and output randomness, which I'd like to just define here for anyone listening who hasn't heard the terms before. Basically there's this observation that in games you're doing stuff and then the game is doing stuff in response to that.

And if you do something and then what's gonna happen as a result of that is unclear based on some random operation. So, for instance, Risk is a classic example of this, the board game where you have these armies on a map and you're attacking each other, but whenever you attack somebody, you have to roll dice to see if you succeeded or not.

And that's like pure, pure output randomness, where you make a decision, but you don't know what the results of that decision is gonna be until after some random thing happens. The flip side of that is input randomness, which is a lot more common, especially these days in games. And it's like some random thing happens and then you react to it.

So drawing a hand of cards in a card game is this very random thing. Decks of cards, classic randomizer. But once you draw the cards, you pretty much know what they're gonna do. And so you can plan and be fairly certain depending on the game that when you play a card, it's gonna do two damage or whatever the card says. And it all gets really complicated and muddy because there's this really great article that Isaac Childres wrote about input and output randomness, where he points out rightly that they kind of bleed into each other and they're kind of cyclical. Where your output randomness of the previous turn is essentially input randomness for the next turn.

So he recommends calling them like clockwise and counterclockwise randomness, which I don't love his terms to actually use because I find it confusing which one is which. I like input and output because it's like really clear which thing's talking about. But I think it's good to keep in mind that they are very cyclical and oftentimes when there's a game that has input randomness, once you get to a certain level of playing it, you are kind of playing it as if it has output randomness because you're thinking ahead a couple steps and you're thinking, okay, if I do this, then what are the odds I draw another card that'll help me with that or whatever. But it's kind of more accessible to get into basically like input randomness feels a lot more fair.

hdh: Because you get to make decisions based on it, right? I mean, that's the thing, is that it's almost like pre and post randomness might be a way to describe it, where one is pre-decision and the other one is post-decision. And like from my perspective, the classic example of output randomness in games actually is like, it's like D&D, right?

And it's there to simulate the fact that life isn't a hundred percent certain. Like you try to do something and it may or may not succeed. And if you're playing something like D&D where you could just decide anything you want. If there wasn't some sort of gate on that, something to keep it from happening, then the game gets really weird, really fast, really boring, really fast.

And if everyone's just like, I am in a spaceship or whatever. So it's like, I feel like that's a kind of a classic example where it's like it's like a skill test or, we need to mix this up to make it less certain, which is post-decision that kind of randomness.

There's this pre-decision randomness, which I've always kind of called variance, I guess. There's a great Richard Garfield article about variance. You have a strategy, you choose the cards that go in the deck, but then you shuffle the deck and what you draw is just this input randomness. Once you have the cards in your hands, you know what you want to do with them or there might be an optimal set of decisions that you can make.

And it's a skill issue of whether or not you make those decisions optimally. But the randomness happens before you draw the cards.

Ezra: Yeah. My understanding of variance, I might be wrong, but it's a term to describe not relating to randomness of a turn, but how random essentially the whole game is. Like to what extent does skill play a role versus this other thing that's called variance. That's like even if you're better than me at the game, what are the odds that I win anyway.

hdh: I mean, I think that's actually correct, right? Like, statistically, you talk about a spread is its variance. So if you think that something is 80% likely to happen, but how uncertain are you? Is it gonna be 50% or is it gonna be 95%? So I think that you're technically totally correct in the statistical sense also.

Ezra: The other thing that fascinates me about randomness is that it is inherently subjective. Even though it sounds very objective, especially when people start talking with percentages, they're like, I'm blank percent sure that something's gonna happen. Or even with dice, like, this has a 0.16 chance of happening.

Randomness is essentially things that you don't know exactly how they work. Like, if you think about a random number generator on a computer, it's not actually random, it's just sufficiently complicated that no one's gonna figure it out. And you can make some assurances about if you do this x number of times, one sixth of the time, it's gonna be whatever it is.

It becomes especially murky with things that don't actually repeat that often because the definition of randomness kind of presupposes this idea of like multiple universes or like repeated action at least where if I repeat this many times, it will happen this way, this many times.

And there's all sorts of weird ways that it's like both literally subjective and then also people's perception of how fair something is or just like how they see it relating to what they're doing also very subjective.

hdh: And I think that's a super, super interesting topic maybe to dig into a little bit because, from a game design perspective, game designs are so much about kind of setting the scene for the players' psychological state and how they're gonna make decisions and what they think about the information that they have and what they think about the decisions that they're making. Where it's often the case that it's maybe more about what the player feels is random than what actually is random.

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah. And like one just really clear example of that that I ran into recently is, if you have something that is random in your game, let's say you enter a room and it says either like A, B, or C. The first time someone enters that room and it just says B, let's say there was a one third chance of that happening.

But they will assume that it is always that way until they see it again. And then, you know, maybe they see A and they're like, oh, okay, it's either A or B. And then they come back a third time and then they see C and they go, oh wow, okay. Actually it could have been any of those three things. So like that's just a very literal example of like you are experiencing this thing, and your mental model is being updated in real time about what is actually happening.

hdh: It's the Bayesian thing, right? There's like multiple ways to think about statistics. And the one that's really been hot for a few years because of machine learning and a few other things, is this Bayesian idea where basically you have a prior, you have a belief set of beliefs that you're taking into a situation and then you have, basically it's like a probability, but the probability is based on what you believe to be true and what you observe. It's like, how likely are my beliefs correct based on what I observed? And so like, and then the example you were giving, for instance, after I go into the room the first time I see A, and so my belief is that A is what's behind the door.

So I open up the second time and I see B. So I have to update my prior, or update my previous belief to say, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. That thing I thought was completely true, my belief about the door always having A behind it maybe wasn't right. And I have to rethink this and have to readjust the probabilities.

And it could be, you know, a hundred different things behind it or it could be like 99% likely that it's A, but it's gonna take a few more tries in order for that to sink in. But the psychological effect still exists after the first door opening or whatever for the player.

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah. This kind of relates to another thing that I really love thinking about about games, which is that I have this metaphor in my head of a game is sort of like climbing a mountain with a playground at the top where like climbing the mountain is learning all of the stuff about the game.

And then once you've kind of learned everything there is to learn, there's this playground where you play around with what you know about it. And it's sort of fuzzy where like there's actually little mini playgrounds all up the mountain. I think it's really useful to separate it out that way because as game designers, we tend to live on the playground at the top because we already know how everything works. But especially for really hard games, a lot of the experience of playing it is more about climbing the mountain and the shape of the mountain is important and like, it is kind of important that you kind of look, see up and see that people are having fun up there and you want to get there.

But different genres of games have different ratios of those things, like puzzle games are basically all mountain climbing and zero playground, whereas roguelikes are a lot more playground and less mountain. Because the point of it is you kind of learn how it works and then knowing how it works and playing with it's very fun as opposed to like the whole thing is learning how it works.

But of course they're a lot, most games are in the middle.

hdh: That's really beautiful, I think that's a very beautiful way to think about it because it's really easy especially when you get a pet design to just kind of be so focused on all the cool things in your system that you're having fun thinking about as a designer and just bouncing around and there's so much context that you need to get there.

Ezra: It's also about like a player is not actually playing the code in the game. They're playing the game as it exists in their head and they're updating their model based on what they're experiencing in the game.

Ezra: I feel like it was tempting for me earlier in my design process that I would be like, yeah, well you don't understand how it works, but that's okay because it actually works the other way. And so in some pure sense, the game is fine, but actually if they believe it to work a different way, it kind of, that's like the way it is for them when they're playing it.

hdh: Right. Maybe we could segue a little bit because I played some Mr. Magpie today, and I think it's a real, so I only played through one day. But it's definitely a game where like I was trying to decide, what was I thinking about? So there's a really nice like psychological kind of table setting when you're sitting there, just kind of the feeling of between the sound design and the lighting design and just how fast the Jerry's, they're called Jerry's, right?

Ezra: Yeah, the cards you're trying not to flip over that like hurt you.

hdh: Like that feeling that you get as a player when you get the buzzer is just like really like a shock. It's like, you actually are getting shocked in your chair like bzzzz, you know? It's like a really strong feeling and I was trying to decide because you're so in this psychological state when you're playing the game that I was like, am I actually strategizing or am I just flipping cards?

Yeah.

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah. It's been a really interesting design process because basically the, in a weird way, this game actually came out of that article that we were talking about earlier where I shared a really early version of it with my collaborator and we were also playing UFO 50 at the time. And we had just played Party House and both really loved it.

And Party House is this game about inviting your friends to a party and some of them are trouble. And it's fun to have a little trouble at your party, but if you have too much trouble, the cops come and you don't get any of the popularity or money that you earn from your party.

Ezra: And so Party House, basically you click on the door when you want to let someone else in, and then you can stop whenever you want. It's like a really classic push your luck game. And Matt, my collaborator and I both felt like we really, really love the system. We wish that there was a little bit more variety and we wish that there was more that the things did. And obviously UFO 50 like is an amazing collection. They made 50 fricking games. So no shade to them at all. It's an amazing game. We love it. But we were like, what would our take on this be? And so I had just written this article and part of one of the things that we were thinking about was this section about how there's sort of a way to trick people's brains into thinking that output randomness was actually input randomness.

Which is like dealing things face down because it, in the story of what's going on, what those cards were has already been decided and you're just choosing which one to flip over. So in that sense, it is input randomness, but mathematically it's actually output randomness because again, it's subjective. You don't know what it is yet. So by that definition, like it is random which one, and it kind of, it also tickled us that like you start getting into like Monty Hall problem kind of stuff, which is fascinating to me that it's so deeply unintuitive when it's so simple. I'll just describe quickly for the listeners.

Basically, the Monty Hall problem. The Monty Hall is this like TV show and in it you could get this reward, where you would choose one of three doors and two of the doors have behind them a goat, and the third one has a car. You want the car theoretically and you don't want the goat. And so you pick a door and then the host opens up one of the doors that you didn't pick, and it always opens one that has a goat and then you're asked if you want to switch to the other door or if you want to open the door that you'd originally chosen.

And it's this really deeply unintuitive thing that confuses people. It still kind of confuses me to be honest. But there's this insight that actually you always wanna switch doors. Because at the beginning you were choosing between one of three doors, one of which could be a car, and if you switch, you're kind of basically choosing between two doors. So you've gone from like a one third chance to a one half chance.

hdh: Um, and it matters that Monty always picks a goat because it's new information, right? So, there's a door that has been eliminated, that's a goat door. And so that's part of the, it's still unintuitive, but that's part of the, that's the bit that matters actually. Because there's additional information that's somehow added into the system.

Ezra: Right. So anyway, you get some of that flavor. There's also, one of the main design problems of this game has been since we first prototyped it. We were like, this is a push your luck game. And we put it in front of people and they were like, this is minesweeper. Because it, once you put things on a grid, and some of them are bad, some of them are good, you're like, this is Minesweeper.

And we were like, no, it's not Minesweeper. It's a push your luck game on a grid. And so we've just had that tension in the game since day one basically. And our current way of sort of resolving it or being in the middle or a compromise, is that there are these hint cards that tell you some information about where the Jerry's are, where the bad cards are on the board. And they really try hard to give you hints that you can't totally know exactly where they are, but there are enough information that you know a little bit. So the goal is that it informs your push your luck decision, and if you're using the hints to your advantage, you are able to like push your luck farther with more success, more of the time.

But you never know like exactly where they are. You wouldn't mind.

hdh: I think that's interesting, because I think that those cards are like, totally, for me, those cards were totally core to the gameplay experience because I think that they made it, I don't know. They made it a lot more interesting. Right? Because then it's like, well, but there's, I know there's one in this row and there's three left.

Or you just start feeling like you're making decisions, even if you're not, I think that that's what I found. Because otherwise I just don't push my luck past the shields, and I make sure that I make what, whatever my ante was on the thing back, and then I guess I'm kind of even, I don't know, or, you know, like that, just a rough, basic strategy or whatever. But with the cards that I'm like, well, I know that there's one in the corner and I already saw two, so I think I'm gonna, you know, like, I think I'm gonna go for one of these corners.

It's just like, it's a whole different, it might just be like bad ideas that I'm getting from the cards.

Ezra: No, it's good ideas. Because you're recognizing that you maybe have an edge over just, and if you have enough of an edge, then it might be good to push your luck more than you would otherwise. It also matters because, one thing that I've learned from making this game is that all decisions in games kind of fall on the spectrum between being obvious and being arbitrary, where an obvious decision is so clearly that one of the things that's correct, that it's not even really a decision at all.

But on the other side, something that's arbitrary is there's such a tiny, minuscule, or maybe zero difference between choosing different things. It feels as if it didn't matter which one you choose. And I've learned that people will tolerate obvious decisions and they hate arbitrary decisions because it feels like you made me do something that didn't matter.

hdh: Yeah. Interesting. Or, you get punished for just playing somehow, right? Yeah. Which is like that output randomness in some sort of way. It's just, it's just, okay. Like I have to pick one and then I got buzzed. Right. But it's not just the output randomness because Party House has output randomness and doesn't feel that way because it's focusing you on the part of the decision that actually does matter, which is do you flip another one or not? Which our game also has. And that kind of was the decision like, okay, well do you flip another one or not?

Ezra: But by making a player also decide which card to flip. When there wasn't really a reason to flip one or the other, that's when it got into arbitrary territory where players felt bad about it.

hdh: Interesting. I felt, I found myself when I was playing, Magpie, I found myself in situations where I probably could have calculated odds, but I just didn't.

Ezra: Yeah.

hdh: Where I was just like, no, I'm just gonna grab one. Kind of impulsive in a way that I wouldn't have expected, which I thought was interesting. And I haven't, I don't know if that has to do in a way with how the information is being balanced and just being a little bit too complicated, your brain doesn't wanna do that work, you know, so you're like, ah, well it's roughly, it's good enough. Right?

And so you make a guess. Or if part of it also is a little bit like the atmosphere of the game kind of makes you want a certain pace to it. I want card card, card card, pause, card card. I don't know. I don't know. If that has to do with just the mood lighting or the psychological effect music or something.

But I feel like there's a little bit of a mood setting with that, that actually influences how willing I was to just kind of like free wheel it rather than calculate some of this stuff.

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah. I'm really glad to hear that because one of my favorite aesthetics in games is the feeling of going with your gut. Like, I think this is good. I'm gonna do that. You can get that with time pressure and there's a clock in the game but it's turn based. It's not real which is another thing people get confused about sometimes.

Ezra: But, I think what is making that happen for you, I could be wrong, but I think one of the nice things about randomness is, people talk about the information horizon in a game, which is how far ahead you can see exactly what's gonna happen. And the more randomness there is, the hazier and closer to you, the information horizon is where you can't plan ahead too much. You kinda have to play more tactically. And one thing I've been pondering recently is that, if you picture sort of like the garden of forking paths or the branches of what might happen in a game with a lot of randomness. There's sort of the node where you are and then there's a bunch of things spreading out from you that are the decisions you could make. And then the next tier above that is like, okay, then what's the random thing that's gonna happen? And then you just get into this very wide space. And if not just wide, but so taking chess as an example, chess, it's like a classic no randomness game.

Some people actually argue it does have randomness in the form of some place past where your opponent could see. But that's beside the point. Basically like what I'm trying to say is in chess it also, the choices fan out very quickly. But the experience of playing chess is I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do and then I'm thinking about what you're gonna do in response to that.

And then I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do in response to what you did in response to me. And you're kind of like walking down this tree of optimal decisions. And if you do that really well, your information horizon can be very long and you can plan lots of turns ahead and you're really rewarded for doing that. That's what you need to do to succeed in that kind of a game. But in a game with a lot of randomness, there still are those trees that you can think down if you want to. You can think, okay, what am I gonna do? And then what are all the options of what the game could do? And then, okay, after all those options, what are all the things that I could do?

But it just becomes a lot easier, a lot faster. Also the rewards are diminishing very quickly where it doesn't really feel worth it to calculate that in the same way it does for chess. So I think that's one of the things that randomness really gets you is it makes it feel more okay to make gut decisions.

hdh: So one of the things that I think is really interesting on that topic about this kind of event horizon is I actually, in the UFO 50, in the Eggplant pod, one of the games that I really liked that was early on was Devilition, and it was a game that in the podcast, like a lot of the folks on the Discord really had problems with this game.

And I don't know if you recall the game, but the way it works is that you have you're given a unit and the unit will explode or move in some certain way and then you've gotta kind of chain them all together. And so it should be possible to just plan everything out because you're kind of laying the thing down and then you can kind of map it out and you can see this thing does a cross and then it hits this other one that does an up and down, it hits this other one that does like a, like two to the left. You just kind of map the whole thing out. And kind of make it work, but at some point our human brains just, it's just too much, right?

It's at this edge of what you wanna reason about and you kind of start guessing a little bit. And I think it's super, super interesting, because it's like, there's this edge of where you're able to totally plan and where it just becomes fuzzy because it's just a bit too much for our brains and the game kind of plays in that space.

And I think that that is somehow super interesting. But it drove players crazy. At least on the Discord, they really didn't, people were really not happy with the game or were upset, because I think it also had some punishing mechanic where you basically lost and your whole run of 45 minutes is over or whatever. But I think it's a super interesting design space. It's kind of another kind of psychological factor where you're adding uncertainty to where people are able to plan to and where things start to get fuzzy that they have to keep in their head.

Ezra: Yeah, and I think it's also to emphasize the point, it's not just how much you can do, it's like where are the diminishing returns? In terms of like per win percentage or something. Like, if I spend another five minutes thinking about this, is it gonna increase my win percentage by like 1%? 0.01% or is it gonna increase it but like 20% because in a game like chess, I haven't played Devilition, but it sounds like maybe in that game also, it's like with the punishingness of it, if you don't plan ahead enough, you will lose. So I think for some players you just get into analysis paralysis where you're like, I need to think ahead as much as possible because I need to win.

Versus like in Mr. Magpie's, maybe some people will choose to plan ahead a whole lot, but it just starts getting really not that worthwhile.

hdh: And it's a different vibe, right? I feel like Mr. Magpie's feels like a game of chance. And you set up the game like that where it's like, okay, I'm in some weird dark room, you know, it's not quite buckshot roulette or whatever, but it's kind of, you kind of get this kind of roulette vibe where it's like, okay, I'm playing a risky game of chance and how's this gonna go? Or whatever. It's funny because I was, I have this pet design or this pet idea that I was trying to work on as a board game or whatever, but it's about this planning horizon and really just pushing it with people. And I was playing with it with a last in first out, so it's like you get the cards, but then the first thing when you put a card on top, every time you play another card, it's gonna be executed in backwards order. Like program movement, but it's in backwards order.

And I think for some people it's just not their game. It's absolutely. They don't want to be thinking backwards and feeling like, uh, uh, it's just like outside of the thing. But then for some people it's just the right brain feel. And so I don't know. It's an interesting space. I don't know if I've got much else to say about it other than I think it's really cool to kind of play around in that area.

Ezra: Yeah, definitely. I think that one aspect of people's taste that has a wide range of what different people like, and different people don't like is how much people are happy doing this sort of quote unquote search thing, like how much people want to be searching through this space.

It can be kind of a relaxing thing for a lot of people and I appreciate that sometimes when I play Sudoku and Sudoku can feel like that a little bit where you're like kind of looking ahead to see, oh, if this number is here, then what else would be true and things like that.

But in games I often find it really frustrating when I feel like the game is telling me, you should spend a long time thinking about this because I can't help but then do that and then I get annoyed with spending so long on something. Dorf Romantik is a game that I really, really wanted to love and I really appreciate it and I think it's gorgeous.

But that feeling of there's the board gets so big and there is probably some perfect spot on the board for this tile to go. I just don't wanna look for it. But if I do look for it, I'll be rewarded. But I'll be frustrated that I spent 10 minutes doing that, and if I don't look for it, then I'll feel bad that there was something better I could have done.

hdh: Did you play the physical version or the digital version?

Ezra: The digital version.

hdh: I think I would recommend trying the physical version if you get a chance. Because I, for some reason it feels better in that it's got a little bit less of this async sprawling thing and it feels more like a cooperative puzzle that you're playing with another person and the board doesn't get as big, or it doesn't get nearly as big. So the search space is actually more reasonable. You know, there's three things you're looking for, and it's really interesting because it was a digital game first, but I think that the board game translates better or it just comes off as a better game, which is interesting.

Ezra: That's really interesting.

hdh: What's your favorite super high variance game? Do you ever play? Gosh, there's a game that I love playing, like hot dice. Do you know Hot Dice?

Ezra: I have not played that.

hdh: Not that, um, I think it's got another name like, Kniffel or something? The Kniffel or something like this. I'm not sure, but it's like basically you roll dice and like Yahtzee basically.

Ezra: Yeah, I really like a lot of classic board games, like Backgammon and Mahjong are both really fun and they both have a huge amount of output randomness. They also kind of, they're maybe they're more in the middle where it's like there is the thing of like the previous turn bleeding into the next turn.

But those are both really fun. Of video games, I mean, I love all the roguelikes basically. I really enjoyed Luck Be a Landlord recently, and I reference Slay the Spire all the time. It has a fair bit of randomness. It's more on the input side, but still, I'm probably missing some, but those are ones that come to mind.

hdh: With regard to like this is just a fun question, like the roguelike genre. I know there's a lot of opinions about it. My take has kind of been, and so I'm old enough to have played Rogue in a basement, on an old 386 or 486 computer or whatever.

And so I always associated Rogue with, it's like D&D random encounters. So it had this, like this role playing game combat sort of thing, which is always this an association that I made. So I fall more in the camp that I don't actually care, but if I was to, you know, have a fist fight over it, I would probably be like the more like a traditional roguelike sort of person.

But one of the things that I think roguelikes as a genre are, is they're really a lot like board games. It's like single player board games and that that's kind of the pocket where I think it's like...

Ezra: Totally agree.

hdh: That's the space and I almost wish they were called board games.

Ezra: 1000% agree with you. It's just a marketing term, in terms of why it's called that, for historical reasons, but I totally agree with you. It's like saying, it is like if we had some term for a game that has levels, like if we called them all Meat Boy likes or something. Or if everything that had levels was a Sokoban, or something like that.

And people, some people were like, no Sokoban's only when you push boxes around. But it's, yeah, I don't feel very attached to like the classic roguelike stuff. I basically just use the term because that's what has fallen into. But I agree it's not very precise. What I really mean when I say roguelikes are games where you have to master the systems and not the content and where the goal is to like win and win consistently. And I totally agree with you they're very similar to board games in that way, where it's like, yes, when I'm playing against another person in a board game, the process of playing that is like learning the rules and the strategies and everything leveling up as a player.

And to try to beat more and better opponents more often, and that's the same feeling I get with modern sort of roguelikes.

hdh: Totally. I'm glad to hear that. I mean, because it's like, if that's the case, then please, let's let roguelikes get more and more popular. I don't care what they're called or whatever.

But this idea of, it's kind of just like a classic game, right? Brought into the digital space. And I think that people, you know, there's this phase in the early two thousands where people were so enamored of the idea that games were the next cinematic media, it was like a whole bunch of people trying to make movies in a digital format, making interactive movies.

And those games worked really bad. They were like really not fun. And, I mean, some of them were kind of fun, but you know, like, a lot of those games were really, like, they were movies and cutscenes that were written and it's great. I love a good narrative and I'm not going to bag on writers and writing.

I think that's fantastic to have all those narrative threads in a game and to kind of pull the players into the world of the characters or pull the players into the world of the game or whatever. I think that's all great, great, great, great, great. But we seem to be in a much better space in 2025 around making games that are fun and they feel like games and it's like we're playing systems, we're playing board games.

It feels like the things that draw you into playing cards as a kid or draw your family into hanging out at the gaming table or having a board game night or whatever else. It's kind of the same feeling, but maybe one player or whatever else, and maybe a little bit more antisocial or parasocial, I'm not sure. But still the actual feeling you get from the play is a lot more in that pocket, which I like.

Ezra: I mean I also, I think that the other sort of main lineage of roguelike games that we could call something else, like, board gamey games is arcade games. Because they're also also kind of like, you are mastering the systems of the game, not the content. I mean, some games you are actually mastering the content also.

But like a lot of arcade games, like Pacman for instance, technically yes the levels are the same, but you're reacting on the fly to what the ghosts are doing and you're learning the system and you're getting better at it, and that is the feeling that I love in games.

hdh: Totally. Is there anything else that you're playing right now that you're excited about that you wanna mention or...

Ezra: Hmm, that's a great question. I haven't been playing too many video games recently, which is kind of sad, but that's how it is. Actually the other day I was just going on Itch and playing all of the most popular roguelike games. So I was let's just see what Mr. Magpie's sort of neighbors are.

I was playing this game called Get Yoked, which is a very odd game about being a weightlifter and it's like a card game. And I was...

hdh: I love that already.

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah. I think it does a couple of really interesting things. One of them is that your actions are reflected in a physical, like it's kind of half character creator, half game, where like every action you do, like buffs one of your muscles until you're this like horribly demented looking person. And then it also has a lot of really complex stuff that it basically explains with weight lifting metaphors like each muscle can be fatigued and then if you use it too much, it gets injured and you can't exercise that muscle the next turn.

So for a game that looks, and to be fair, like very meme-y, it's also surprisingly deep and I enjoyed playing that the other day.

hdh: Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a minute since I've kind of dug into random Itch games. Like there's just so much on there. It's really hard to dig through and find stuff.

Ezra: Yeah. Dragon Sweeper is also another game that we played actually, right after we made the first prototype of Mr. Magpie. But it is very in a similar space where it's a minesweeper-like game, where instead of just mines, there are monsters. And the monsters have different attack values. And so the numbers you're seeing are not just how many mines are adjacent to you, like the sum of all of the monsters next to it.

So there's all this really interesting deduction you can do and sort of fuzzy deduction almost, where you're like, okay, I'm pretty sure that this is safe, I'm not totally sure. And then the other really cool thing about it is that talking about like the mountain and the playground, it has some really interesting mountain sections of like, you get to learn all these rules about the way that the numbers are allowed to spawn. Because every number is a different type of monster.

And I won't spoil them because a lot of the fun is figuring them out. But when you die, you get to look at the board and see, like, oh, these monsters only spawn in this way. Or, oh, when this monster is looking in this direction, it means something. And so in addition to the main line deduction stuff. You also get to do these weird sideways deduction things. Once you learn all those rules, that game is really fun.

hdh: Oh, that's awesome. Dragon Sweeper. I'll definitely look at that.

So I think that's probably it for us on time. I want to thank you again for coming by. It's been super awesome to have you on the first podcast. And I want to remind everyone who's listening to check out Mr. Magpie's Harmless Card Game.

I also wanna thank Alex Epton for providing the ripping track for the background music, and give a shout out to the Ludokult Discord, which is where this all kind of came together. Thanks Ezra, for being here!

Ezra: Thank you. This was great.

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