I think the thing that is missing for those for me personally, for what I like to get out of the game, is little moments of surprise. And that’s fine.īut as anyone who’s played a lot of chess or Go or Othello can attest, the games are very dry, aren’t they? They’re very, uh, they lack flavour there. Every action you make has a predictable outcome, and the game becomes very much a head-to-head battle of wits. The players know exactly what is happening on the other side. That’s that style of game chess-style games where there is perfect information. So, why is randomness important in game design? Obviously not all games have randomness, right? Chess is the classic example. James: We’ve had conversations before, I can tell. Lupe: I’d like you to dive straight in and then talk for the next 20 minutes, and I can say nothing if that’s ok. James: (laughing) So okay, I’m assuming that’s not a rhetorical question and you’d like me to give some detail now. Lupe: So there has to be a point to randomness, right? Because it’s in everything – there’s dice or cards or some random number generator in almost every game. Lupe: So I thought we should talk about randomness because we kind of touched on briefly last time, but there’s a lot to be said about it, like how randomness is used or what randomness is used for in games. James: Just just cut out everything I say. I don’t know who that will be, but probably Greg. Can we say hello to whoever’s transcribing this as well? Lupe: So I thought we could talk today about randomness. Edwin is a freelance game designer who has worked, among many other projects, with Needy Cat Games on Hellboy: the Board Game. James worked for Games Workshop as part of the Citadel studio rules team, before becoming a founding member of the newly created Specialist Games Team. Welcome back to Game Design Discourse where Jam n our Game Design Discourse series we join James M Hewitt from Needy Cat Games and our own Edwin “Lupe” Moriarty for chats about game design theory and practice.

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