all right well welcome back and today we're going to look at two two different kinds of games each one briefly i think um again it's hard to know whether these are considered mechanics or just kind of their own unique types of games but we'll start off here talking about um puzzle games to start with so what i mean by a puzzle game well unsurprisingly it usually consists of a series of puzzles and these puzzles have a really distinct answer and so a puzzle as a mechanic can be a game in entirety in itself or you can have games that have puzzles as part of them so these puzzles have really distinct answers a lot of times they're based on logical or analytical thinking which can be frustrating for people if that's not necessarily their strength sometimes it includes things like visual spatial thinking as well so an example of a puzzle might be you know here's a to code this cipher to get this clue which will help you unlock a box um that kind of that kind of thing they can get more complicated than that so this is just a picture of a variety of different kinds of things that you might see as ciphers and usually there's some sort of key or something helpful and you've got to figure it out though so there's there's quite a bit of hard thinking a lot of times in in a puzzle game a good example of this would be escape rooms and so escape rooms as a whole as a genre can actually help us with board games too in terms of thinking about you know tension and teamwork and individual individuality and a lot of different kinds of things so what what's an escape room i don't know how many of you have ever done one of these usually it's a room where they allow two to eight people to in a party in a group to come into the room it puts you in this room it's usually got some sort of theme and then they give you a couple of introductory instructions and then they close the door and you have one hour to get out and there's there's always someone watching in case something goes horribly wrong or you really have to use the bathroom or something like that so i mean it's not like you're not like you're in jail well actually i did an escape room that was based on alcatraz and they put us in what it was a mock-up of a jail cell sort of thing but then there's always clues all over the room and you're supposed to kind of run through and look at the room and take things up they usually encourage you to take things apart and try and find clues and so here you can see um in this picture right like here's an old piano well you can almost guarantee that there's gonna be some sign of some sort of code that's based on playing the piano a particular way or hitting certain notes or something like that this guy looks like he's got a black light looking for codes or clues with a blacklight if you look here at the floor there's a series of numbers running around so that's probably going to play into something somewhere so i mean this stuff that's just kind of hidden these have become very very popular um it made an appearance as an escape room that made an appearance on the comedy sitcom the big bang theory and they kind of exploded in the last 10 years ish or so uh enough so that uh they even made a movie based a horror movie based on an escape room this is the kind of escape room you do not want to do where you get locked in and if you don't get out you die don't do that so i think i just saw that they were doing a sequel to this escape room escape room two or so i don't know not for me not my cup of tea um and they they made a series of um exit which is made by cosmos has made a series of escape rooms in a box which are these these little boxes that you get and they have a series of puzzles and codes and things like that that are linked to some sort of story or theme or something like that so the escape room genre has made its way over into board games as an escape room basically so interesting idea so why is this work so well they're very very immersive right so you are in a physical place where it has the dimensions of the place you are in are matching the particular theme the lighting matches the theme all the props in the room match the theme so again going back to i did one that was a sherlock holmes based one right and so they have things from his room on 220b baker street is that the whole place is set up to look like his room compared to the alcatraz one that i did where there was no lights they gave everybody a flashlight so the whole thing was in the dark and we're in this thing it's like a jail cell these concrete walls and very very sparse and so right everything is very immersive it's very physical you have to move around you have to touch you have to take things apart you've got to you got to look you've got to listen you've got to smell sometimes you've got to it you're engaging so much as part of you lots of different agency so you find a puzzle you don't like it you can switch puzzles you can switch to a different clue you can switch your focus you can ask for hints they usually have somebody who's not only watching but will provide you with a limited number of hints if you ask they either limit the number of hints or they'll do something like subtract from your time or i guess add to your time if you ask for too many hints the timing adds a sense of urgency right you only have an hour that's it and there's usually a clock in the room counting down so you see exactly how much time you have and they're all they're very new um these things are relatively relatively new and so that adds a degree of excitement to the whole thing so what can we learn from this kind of thing well if you have a puzzle or you're interested in creating a challenge you want it to be challenging but you want it to be accessible and so one of the things that you'll find with escape rooms and i think a lot of people could benefit in terms of designing board games by doing escape rooms is you'll notice that you don't require outside knowledge to do any they don't they're these are not based on trivia everything you need to know to figure it out is there in the room with you and because of that when you do figure out a puzzle it makes you feel smart and so this is a bit difficult because when you're designing a game sometimes we we want to feel smart we want people to play the game and think wow the guy who designed this the person who designed this was really smart that's not actually what the best games do some of the best games are designed to make the players feel smart even though the answer might have been very obvious or very clear or something like that you want them to feel like they've accomplished something so think about tetris tetris is a puzzle game right it's very simple and simple attempts to attempt to work better with these things you get overly complicated and people just get confused right tetris is what five blocks and yet you've got a game that dominated this genre for years yeah right and people feel smart when they when they successfully get a thing to line up get rose to line up and do all that stuff they feel good about it so uh and so that's you keep it simple as much as possible and you want at the same time you want this to feel like it has purpose like it's moving towards something and that they're feeling rewarded so portal is a really interesting example of a video game made by valve that's it's basically a giant puzzle you go level by level with increasingly difficult puzzles but there's a theme there's a purpose there's a story that links it all together that creates really interesting scenarios there's consistency and you feel like you're progressing through something it's not just kind of over and over okay level one level two level 99 level 1064 right you feel like all right the next level is going to be harder but there is it's going to culminate in something there's a point to this that i'm pushing for and so a lot of these kinds of things you know you could draw inspiration from from real life too so puzzles are really interesting in that respect and you can use these kinds of challenges in some ways a board game is a puzzle right thinking about engine building it's how can i make something that's going to be efficient and effective and you've challenged the player to come up with an answer to that puzzle and so puzzles can be a really good way to think about this you can add individual puzzles to stories or make an entire game into a puzzle there are various kinds of things that do that but that's the puzzle mechanic so that's relatively relatively short so we'll do the next one after this