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Today we'll meet the next finalist, game designer Thomas Gallecier, at his home in Topeka, Kansas. Shut Up and Take My Money! is an improv card game about crowdfunding and game design, so we had a bunch of crowdfunded game designers play it.

Today's Industry Experts were game designers Elisa Teague of Geek Out!, Kelsey and Michael Domeny of Two Penny Games, and Eliot Weinstein and David Munk, co-creators of Cards Against Humanity.

Learn more about Tabletop Deathmatch at http://TabletopDeathmatch.com or learn more about Shut Up and Take My Money! at http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1646 ... e-my-money

Let's be honest here; unless one of the other two mounts a challenge, this isn't just an obvious winner, this is a mismatch. This is the first game in the bunch to get anything resembling that kind of glowing praise from the judges. The other five were getting feedback about 'this needs to improve, that needs to improve'. Here? It was pretty much all 'OMG I had so much fun!'

Which is great for the game. You just wish it had more formidable competition.

I think Mike from twopenny said it best when he said "this was a lot of fun but thats because we are game designers"

Its that Magic deck that does really well at your LGS, or at a Star City open but never performs outside of it, strong in the meta, weak outside of it.

That being said it was the most positive play through/test so far.

It looks like a great game for its target audience, but I am clearly not its target audience. I'm not very good at improv or storytelling, and don't think I'd have nearly as good a time as these playtesters did.

Storytelling games typically do best having few and straightforward mechanics, but the flip side of it is that the game entirely depends on players being able to hold up their side of the game. Someone who isn't creative and quick-thinking is going to be at a big disadvantage in a game like this, which makes the game unappealing to some.

Mechanic-heavy games, by comparison, take more of the human factor away, so they're able to appeal to wider groups of people. Their downside is that every mechanic you add makes the game exponentially more difficult to balance and test; and too many mechanics will limit the audience as well.

Given that the playtesters and judges here are game developers and generally creative people, they're able to readily hold up their end of the bargain in story-telling games; while the flaws of mechanic-heavy games are easier to pick out in a single play session because they know what to look for, and the game lives or dies on the interactions and clarity of those mechanics.

Master Gunner wrote:Mechanic-heavy games, by comparison, take more of the human factor away, so they're able to appeal to wider groups of people.

Different, sure, but wider? I don't think so. I'd claim that more people will enjoy a game where you need to learn only a few guidelines to play, and even more if in the end the game is less about "winning" than it is about "having fun all together with/around it". And you would be surprised how many people you thought uncreative come up with the weirdest ideas while playing (say) Once Upon a Time.

None of that invalidates your points that with these kind of games are harder to find flaws quickly and that this particular game seems targeted exactly at a public composed by the judges.

I realized that my wording actually isn't what I wanted to say. I think "mismatched" groups of people is what I wanted.

Basically, a group of people looking for a game to play is likely to have some really creative people in it, and some not so creative people. A game with just enough mechanics to level the playing field is more likely to be "somewhat acceptable" everyone in a group rather than a game that's very storytelling/improv heavy, or very mechanic heavy, either of are more likely produce divisive opinions in a group.

It's a very hard line to walk though, and there's nothing wrong with making a game that focuses on just one type of interests.

Basically this is all a very roundabout way of saying that it's very difficult to say a storytelling game is "better" than a mechanic-heavy game like some of the previous entries - especially based on the feedback of one group of people after a single play session.


...Also, this trouble in putting my (frequently changing) thoughts into words showcases just why storytelling games like this one don't hold much appeal to me.

Of the games in the show so far, this is the one I have felt like I wanted to play. Like, if I saw this at a table at PAX and they were looking for more people, I would want to join in.

Master Gunner wrote:Basically this is all a very roundabout way of saying that it's very difficult to say a storytelling game is "better" than a mechanic-heavy game like some of the previous entries - especially based on the feedback of one group of people after a single play session.

This is 100% true, maybe TTDM season 3 should have categories. Season 1 kind of did that by crowning two different games.

That being said, and without pretending to tell what you do and don't/should and souldn't/did and didn't enjoy, I've been surprised by how people I didn't expect to have a good time with narrative/improv games have reacted to/within them.