The women in the photo were clearly mesmerized by it…

@gamefaery.bsky.social Did you see I wore the fish you made me?!?

I tend to get lost in those types of games.

How did it go?

For me, it’s mostly whether or not the more opaque aspects of a game seem like a development miss. I expect each game I engage with to take the onboarding wins that it “should have.”

I come across a lot of well-designed games that have been underdeveloped.

One of my favorite movie exchanges. People want to be the thing that doing a thing represents, but they don’t want to actually do the thing.

I've definitely dealt with publishers who would listen to literally anyone else other than the designer. One playtester in one playtest out of thirty? We'd better get on that. Reddit? Absolutely. Someone who wandered in off the street? Tell us more, oh wise one! Game designer? Pft, what do you know?

I have worked with 5 different marine biologists on Finspan. This pressure is real.

Yeah, this sort of groupthink is common in boardgaming too. Players often hear an opinion voiced at the gaming table, and that becomes the truth for that table. They'll ignore or miss built-in tools to handle a situation, they'll experience a weird statistical anomaly, and then that's it.

This is deep wisdom. I think the most pernicious is when the opinion comes from an external source, and it infects many, many tables. Like a whisper campaign.

Some close friends to be get a little frustrated in my tendency to priortise luck in my own career, as they know how I work. I try to explain that work just is buying a lottery ticket. It's necessary, but certainly not sufficient. I know many folks who've worked as hard but the dice have been cruel.

I still don't have everything shelved. I need to keep stripping down. And, yeah, I pick up a lot of games with giant boxes. But they go over well with my family.

I've started just leaving games at my local game stores' game libraries. I get too many new games to reasonably sell old games as needed.

Yeah, that was fun! Did you sell what you wanted to sell? And buy what you wanted to buy?

Nope.