Over the past decade or so, I've found myself getting more into board games as video games require more technical resources; updating my computer every year or two just to play games with increasing requirements is not within my budget or best interests. I like when video games get board game adaptations and I make it a point to get some of them. Regarding transparency, it's one of the things that has long bugged me about games like Final Fantasy and the like; it would help to know how much damage I could do to the opponents ahead of time.

I'd like to start by saying this is one of the most interesting game design talks I've ever came across.

One of the best talks i've seen. Thanks!

As someone who has played Civ 4 since release (it's 19 years old now!) I felt touched that Soren announced it as his career highlight, even though the vid is 8 years old now.

Very, very, very good talk- thank you.

To the question at 41m: Micro is not, in and of itself, the "inner game" of an RTS. Micro helps to create the inner game because it takes time to perform; the player's attention becomes a resource that he must spend wisely. This is the inner game. This wouldn't translate well to a turn based environment because the things that make this interesting and fun; like multitasking, quickly parsing a situation, and staying calm under pressure; come directly from those real time elements. However, the underlying strategy of choosing where to spend this "resource", and many of the other underlying aspects of RTS's, would translate perfectly well. Similarly, Yomi doesn't translate everything that makes a fighting game a fighting game, but it doesn't try to either. Yomi is primarily interested in creating the same kinds of mind games that you see in fighters, attempting to read when your opponent will take a risk and when he will play conservatively, and this translates quite well to a turn-based environment.

33:29

Brilliant. Demonstrates that great game design can be independent of medium.

Dune 2000 had no fog-of-war, but a shroud which regrew VERY slowly.

I really liked the idea of color coding damage based on damage intensity. Some games do it with crits, but the color changes based on how strong your character at that point in the game.

Amazing talk Sören. I am watching this for the 3rd time, and I am still learning things

The pre-luck/post-luck thing was new to me. Apparently I got rid of all post-luck games in the last year, and only got pre-luck games, for example Heroes of the Mists, Santa Maria, One Deck Dungeon, Diceborn Heroes. For me, pre-luck generalizes working with a random sequence of cards from a deck and dice allocation and the random factor kicks in every round.

When he started talking about Magic I thought his point was going to be how the different formats artificially reduce complexity (by drastically limiting the available cards), thus making it easier for new players to play a game without jumping into the deep end.

I see the guys that developed Anachrony in the future forgot to send their game back through time so this guy could cover it. Lol, but seriously, at the part where he started talking about lots of rules text and then Race for the Galaxy’s language, I immediately wondered what he’d say about Anachrony (99 percent of everything is spelled out in icons.)

in powergrid, brown cube is coal and black cylinder is oil.

This gives me an idea for a board game

Boardgames can improve memory and strategy thinking

I love the distinction between Pre-luck and Post-luck. I've always enjoyed games that allow me to make the most of a bad situation (Pre-luck) as I am given awareness of what I have to work with, even if it's suboptimal. It feels like I still have a good degree of control and enough information to make strategic decisions off of. Meanwhile, Post-luck games often frustrate me, as I feel that the variance doesn't add much to my strategic considerations and takes the control away from me.

When every word is phrased as a question, it is hard to understand if you are asking a question or making a statement.

Quite disagree on how Innovation doesn't really have a system to be understood; there are some effect patterns such as card draw, splay direction, era skipping, melding etc, that become stronger as the eras progress.