I’m back from my first Break My Game playtesting event at MEPACON, and it was a fun time. I was able to get two plays of Ratsail completed, both of which provided a ton of valuable feedback.1 If you were one of the players, thank you so much!

Last week we looked at how Neighborhood Robots adapts a solitaire card game, turning it into a narrative TTRPG about communities.

This week we are looking at SpyNet — a card drafting game from Richard Garfield.

SpyNet by Richard Garfield

I first heard of SpyNet via an interview with Richard Garfield on the Shelf Stable podcast. Richard is the creator of Android: Netrunner (2012), King of Tokyo (2011), KeyForge (2018), and a little game you may have heard of called Magic: The Gathering (1993). The interview is fascinating, and I highly recommend checking out the whole thing.

During the interview, Richard was asked if he plays any of his own games.2 He said that the only one he still plays regularly is SpyNet. This caught me by surprise because I had never heard of it.

It’s a game originally published in 2017 by Z-Man games that is mostly an abstract card game:

“You are a spymaster. Your mission: Dominate the world of undercover intelligence by deploying agents to complete vital missions. To complete your mission, you must first build an underground network of highly trained agents from different branches of espionage.”

It is played in 2v2 teams with 4 players or 1v1 with 2 players.3

The goal is to play cards into four different branches that are set up much like you’d expect in a lane battler — red, yellow, blue, green. If you dominate one of the lanes (i.e. higher value played than opposing players), you can play a mission card to that lane. Mission cards earn victory points (stars) at the end of the game.

Play continues until the deck runs out. Mission points are added up, and the player (or team) with the highest score wins.4

I’m going to use the terms branch and lane interchangeably in this article.

Agents, funding, and missions

There are only three types of cards in the 76-card SpyNet deck:

1. Agent (34 cards, 45%): Add power to branches based on face value. Must be played to a matching branch color (red, yellow, green, blue).

2. Mission cards (32 cards, 42%): Score points if played. May only be played to a branch dominated by your agents.

3. Funding cards (10 cards, 13%): Played with an agent to increase its power.

Players either recruit (draft) cards or deploy (play) cards on their turn. With only one starting card in their hand, it’s important to get cards quickly. And because which cards you get relies on chance (including the mission cards) drafting becomes a very important part of the game.

The way SpyNet handles this is to have players draft from a 3-card shared market if they choose the recruit action on their turn. The way the market works, however, is really interesting.

Drafting cards from a market

There is a facedown deck and a market (i.e. available cards) of three facedown piles of cards. Let’s call them Pile 1, Pile 2, and Pile 3 going left to right. This is already different from most drafts because the cards aren’t visible to everyone.

The recruiting player can look at Pile 1 and decide if they want to take the cards or not. If not, they can look at Pile 2 and take them if they want. If they don’t want that pile either, they can look at Pile 3 and take that pile. Finally, if they don’t want any of the piles, they can take a random card from the top of the deck.

If they select one of the three piles of cards (after looking at it), three new cards are drawn to refill or pad the piles. This means each pile gets one new card on top of it, regardless of how many cards are in it. The pile that was just taken would have one card in it.

This means that less desirable cards in the market begin to accumulate more cards on top of them. That makes them more attractive when deciding which pile to take.

It also creates an interesting choice: Take one card I really want? Or take a pile of 3+ cards that might be helpful in the future?

Is this a Dutch auction without currency?

Over the last few years, I’ve become quite enamored with Dutch auctions in tabletop games.5 I’ve written about Dutch auctions and dynamic markets previously. If you ever meet me in person, there’s a good chance that I’ll work Dutch auction mechanisms into the conversation.

Here’s a quick review in how they work from the BGG Auction: Dutch page:

“A simultaneous single-bid system in which the lot starts at a very high price, and then is gradually decreased by the auctioneer or other controlling mechanism, until someone agrees to claim the item at its current price, ending the auction. The first bidder to accept the current price is the winner, such that there are no ties. A Dutch Auction is sometimes also called a one-bid auction because of this feature that the first bid made is also the only bid in the auction.”

In practice, however, many games use a slight modification of this. The players add coins to less desirable cards, effectively lowering the price of each card. The price (cost) of a card can eventually go negative. A negative cost means the player gains money by taking the card — they gained more coins than they spent.

When I added this Dutch auction style mechanism to Turtchester to unclog the market, it meant that I had to add a currency (coins) to the game.6 I didn’t see a way around it. How can you bid or auction without coins?

SpyNet handles this challenge (i.e. ensure the market doesn’t get clogged) in a similar way to a Dutch auction, but with an elegant difference. Additional cards (not coins) are placed on top of the pile not taken. The less desirable piles gain ever more cards, ensuring that eventually someone will be bound to take the pile.

Is it a Dutch auction? Perhaps not based on strict definitions. The biggest difference is that cards are added to every pile regardless of position.

It feels adjacent to a Dutch auction to me and a really interesting way to implement it without the addition of coins to the game.7 The mechanism in SpyNet prevents the market from being clogged, acts as a timer on the game (i.e. when cards run out), and can be implemented without any additional components.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• There are always games I’ve missed: I consider myself to be fairly well versed in board games. I play a lot of games and consume a ton of board game media. And yet there are always older games from well-known designers that I’ve never heard of.8 I was fortunate to hear about this one on a podcast and able to pick up a used copy for just a few dollars.

• Drafting: In many ways, drafting is simply choosing one option from a set of available options such that others can’t take the same option. For example, you take a card from a hand of cards and pass the hand to the next person so they can choose a card. It’s simple, but has endless permutations and possibilities.

• Dutch auctions are cool: Or more accurately, mechanisms that create increasing incentives to take less desirable options (e.g. cards, etc.) are cool. It’s a good way to keep open drafting markets dynamic and prevent them from getting clogged. SpyNet shows that adjacent mechanisms can be implemented without the need for a currency and/or coins.

What do you think? Have you ever heard of SpyNet or played it? Have you seen examples of other Dutch auction style mechanisms (i.e. incentives for less desirable options) in other games? What are some other examples I should check out?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

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We’ve looked at degenerate game states and a few board games recently, including Hercules and the 12 Labors.

It’s time to explore a tabletop roleplaying game this week!

Neighborhood Robots, part of the Griot Anthology, uses a solitaire card game at its core to tell a compelling story about community care. It can teach us some design lessons about thematic mechanisms and victory/defeat conditions (or lack thereof).

The Griot Anthology

I picked up a copy of Griot Anthology by Thoughtcrime Games at PAX Unplugged last year.1 Edited by Misha Bushyager and Quinn Murphy, it is a compilation of seven tabletop roleplaying games:

1. Black Future by Quinn Murphy

2. Come Out from Your Grave by Basil Wright

3. Intergalactic Teaz by Bluu Smith and BrieAnna Allen

4. Midnight Train Ticket by Laura Simpson

5. Mines by Tyrone Reid

6. Neighborhood Robots by Navaar Seik-Jackson

7. Reich Breakers by Shan Wolf

Neighborhood Robots caught my attention because it is a solo journaling game, has an interestingly mechanical structure, and includes big stompy mechs.

Its system is based on a card game called Clear the Dungeon designed by Mark S. Ball, but with some important changes.

So let’s start with a look at how that game works.

Clear the Dungeon

I’d imagine most people are familiar with solitaire card games: Klondike (Patience or Solitaire), Freecell, and other similar variants. Using a standard deck of cards, you attempt to complete certain tasks or form card combinations to win the game. Most lack any sort of thematic elements. The gameplay usually involves both skill and chance, but some games are simply not winnable from the start.2

Clear the Dungeon (Ball, 2019) is a solitaire card game that fits in into the same genre as the example above, but with a theme.3 The player is fighting monsters in a dungeon, attempting to defeat them all. Granted, it’s not much of a theme, but it does exist.

Here’s a quick overview of how Clear the Dungeon is played:

1. Separate all the face cards into one pile. All the remaining cards go into a separate draw pile.

2. Make three stacks of face cards (face down) and turn the top card of each face up. There will be three face cards visible representing the monsters.

3. Each round, draw three cards from the draw deck. Each card must be played or discarded. These represent your attacks.

4. Cards can be played for their value against any of the visible monsters.

5. The goal is to have two cards with a value equal to or greater than the target (10-12). They don’t need to be played to the same target face card and they will stay there across rounds.

6. If a target face card has two cards played, a trigger card of matching suit must be played as the third card. This triggers the attack and defeats the monster.

7. Play continues until all monsters are defeated or the deck runs out.

This idea of playing cards to beat a target but then needing a “trigger” card is based on the slightly earlier Gridcannon (Francis & Thursten, 2019).

The game creates some interesting choices. If you play an ace (value 1), you lock yourself into needing a 9 or 10 in the future. If you play cards that are too high, you are potentially wasting them. Splitting them up across cards makes sense, but reduces your flexibility in future turns. For a simple game, it’s mechanically interesting.

Neighborhood Robots

Returning to the Griot anthology, Neighborhood Robots by Navaar Seik-Jackson takes the Clear the Dungeon system (with some modifications) and turns it into a solo journaling game about “taking matters of community care, protection, and rebellion into your own hands.”

It’s the 22nd Century and the government has started a war with the Poreau — aliens who were former allies of us. All resources are redirected to the war effort and military, leaving citizens to survive on their own. Help won’t come from the government. Instead, they must build mechs to fight back and solve problems.

Much like Clear the Dungeon, the face cards are separated out. Four face cards are visible at a time, with the first being a thematic key for the remaining three. The face cards represent the sources of threats to the community and the harms they cause:

• Kings: Threats caused by the government.

• Queens: Threats caused by the aliens.

• Jacks: Threats to the community’s resources.

You won’t be fighting monsters, but instead eliminating threats by constructing task-specific mechs. This is done by playing cards that represent mech components:

“As the chronicler of the events, you decide what each component is. If your water tributary is down, you likely wouldn’t meet it with revolutionary violence like you would the encroaching military, for instance. So placing a ten card would mean different things in each of those situations.”

When the components are in place (i.e. two cards with equal or greater value than the target), they must still be triggered by playing a card of matching suit. This completes the mech and eliminates the threat.

The game adds the concept of a salvage pile. If all three threats have two cards on them and you are unable to play a trigger (i.e. you have no matching suit cards), you can discard to a salvage pile instead. Those cards can be pulled out of the salvage pile in future rounds when constructing new mechs.

The continued fight

Victory works the same way as Clear the Dungeon, but with the added step of journaling the narrative when complete. Defeat, however, is perhaps the most significant deviation from the original card game.

There is no way to lose.

In Clear the Dungeon, if the draw deck goes empty, you lose. In Neighborhood Robots, however, you continue to play:

“In the event that you reach the end of your draw pile and salvage pile without eliminating all of the threats, reshuffle all of the number cards back into a face down pile and draw again until complete. For narrative documentation, consider this an extended time of regaining the necessary components to continue the fight.”

I think this is perhaps the most interesting twist and change from Clear the Dungeon. Where Clear the Dungeon exists only to be won or lost, Neighborhood Robots exists to tell a story of community response. What would a game ending in defeat mean in this context? Would it mean that the community and all future generations just gave up?

So instead the deck gets reshuffled.

Narrative time passes.

The struggle continues — indefinitely long until victory is achieved.

The mechanical core of journaling games

Some solo journaling games don’t have much of what I would consider a “mechanical core.” You roll a die or draw a card and read the prompt. They intentionally keep the mechanical bits to a minimum so as not to overwhelm the story being told. Every new mechanism added to a game risks making it feel less thematic.4

It is possible, however, to have a solo journaling game with a mechanical core that leads to tough (or interesting) choices that help develop the story.

Moon Rings and Necromancer Heretic, both from Junk Food Games, are recent examples that comes to mind. In Moon Rings, while it is based on the Carta SRD, it adds limited resources, a push-your-luck mechanism, and ways to mitigate poor luck. Necromancer Heretic uses blackjack as the core mechanism. Only when your hand of cards reaches 21 do you gain one of the five ritual points needed to win.

Lacksmith is one of my other favorite examples that uses a dice game to tell the story of running a blacksmith shop.

Neighborhood Robots uses a modified version of Clear the Dungeon as its mechanical core to tell a compelling story: When you need that last component to finish a mech or when the mech is ready but you can’t seem to get the card you need to trigger it.

Those moments could be frustrating in an abstract game, but in a journaling game, they actually make it easier to tell a story.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Solitaire card games: If you haven’t yet, check out Regicide (Abrahams, Badger, et al., 2020) and then go down the rabbit hole of all the new solitaire card games being developed that use a poker deck. There’s some really interesting innovation happening in that space, and Clear the Dungeon is just one example.

• Solo journaling with a mechanical core: If you’ve played Caveat Emptor, you know that I enjoy solo journaling games mixed with board or card game mechanisms. Providing incentives to have the player choose one prompt versus another is really interesting to me. Taking an existing solitaire card game and turning it into a thematic journaling game can be a fun exercise.

• The struggle continues: Neighborhood Robots removes the ability to lose the game from Clear the Dungeon. It feels like the right decision given the theme of the game. It puts the story first and the mechanisms exist to serve the story.

What do you think? Have you played any of the games in the Griot Anthology? What do you think about solo journaling games that have a significant amount of mechanical grit? Do you enjoy having tough mechanical choices blended with narrative prompts?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we looked at degenerate game states which is when the game collapses into a simpler (and often less interesting) form. The article generated quite a bit of discussion, so be sure to check out the poll and comments at the end.

This week we are looking at the dice-based combat system in Hercules and the 12 Labors. It is simple and yet gives the feel of a dungeon crawl without the dungeon. It could be easily modified for use in TTRPGs.

Hercules and the 12 Labors

In Greek mythology, the hero Hercules (or Heracles) was hated by the goddess Hera.1 She caused him to kill his wife, Megara, and their children in a fit of madness. Regretting his actions, he asked the Oracle of Delphi how he could make atonement. She told him to serve King Eurystheus of Mycenae for twelve years and to perform whatever labors the king demanded.

These labors which include slaying the Nemean Lion, capturing the Erymanthian Boar, and cleaning the Augean stables serve as the setting for Hercules and the 12 Labors (Brown, 2025).

It is a dice game where you play as Hercules and attempt to progress through each of the 12 labors to reach the end of the game. Using a deck of cards that includes a description of the labor, you’ll roll dice, apply damage to the labor, and track your Spirit (health) and Divinity.

To win the game you need to complete all 12 labors and reach the top of the Divinity (yellow flame) track.

How to defeat the Nemean Lion and others

Each labor is represented by one or more cards from a deck. For example, the first labor is the Nemean Lion which is a single card with a single dice track. The Erymanthian Boar spans two cards and has two dice, each on its own track.

The goal is to apply dice to the labor that meet its specific requirements. The Nemean Lion can only be damaged by dice with a value of 5 or 6. The Ceryneian Hind requires pairs of dice with equal values.2 The Augean Stables require dice with a value of exactly 1.

Each time dice that meet the requirements is applied, it reduces the health of the labor. Reduce the labor to zero and it is successfully completed.

This process repeats for all 12 labors.3

The combat game loop

That’s the high level picture of combat, but let’s dig into the actual core game loop.

At the start of each labor, a Mood card is drawn that will apply a lasting effect for the labor. Some are good (e.g. gain an extra die) and some might make the labor more difficult (e.g. all dice rolled are -1).4

Then the player rolls all of their available dice, usually 4-5 total dice depending on the chosen difficulty and bonuses.

After rolling, there’s a chance to mitigate some of the luck by manipulating the dice. There are “blue square” abilities that are usually provided via equipment and rewards from previous labors. Each ability can only be used once and changes the value of the dice in some way: Increase/decrease the value of a die by 1 and reduce Spirit by 1. Turn a 6 into a 3 or a 3 into a 6. Turn an odd die into an even die. Flip a die to its opposite side.

The dice can also be used to block damage, restore Spirit (health), or gain Divinity (required to win the game). Dice used in this way are, however, locked and unable to be used to apply damage for that round of combat.

After everything has been rolled and manipulated, damage is applied to the labor, reducing the labor’s health (tracked by a gold die). If it is reduced to zero, the labor is defeated.

If the labor still has health, the gold labor die is moved along the Labor Impacts track. Each space on the track has an effect which may include losing Spirit, restoring the labor’s health, reducing Divinity, or losing a die. When the gold die reaches the end of the track (marked by a skull), the game ends in defeat.

This system creates a nice visual tension as the tracking die moves with each round. You can see what type of damage is coming next and how many rounds you have left before defeat because it’s printed on the card. While the player’s actions are heavily impacted by input randomness, the enemy’s actions are deterministic.

Progression

The player begins the game with the Bow of Hercules card which allows a die to be modified +/-1 at the cost of reducing Spirit.

With the defeat of each labor, the player gains a reward in the form of a new card they can add to their tableau. It’s the reverse of the labor card that was just defeated. The Nemean Lion yields an Impenetrable Hide card that can both modify dice and block damage. Defeating the Hydra gives the player the Venomous Blood card which allows for two re-rolls.

Gaining cards with new abilities, losing Spirit, and gaining Divinity creates a game arc so that each labor encounter doesn’t feel exactly the same.

A dungeon crawl sans dungeon

Thinking about Hercules and the 12 Labors reminded me of the articles on dungeon crawls that I wrote in 2025. I identified some of the common elements of dungeon crawls, calling out five of the most important ones:

1. Character progression

2. Combat encounters

3. Loot, equipment, rewards

4. Puzzles and environmental challenges

5. Randomization and replayability

It’s interesting to view Hercules and the 12 Labors through this lens. It definitely has combat encounters, as that is most (if not all) of the game. The player is rewarded with loot, equipment, and rewards with the completion of each labor. There is character progression in the form of Divinity.

On the other hand, there are no puzzles or environmental challenges to solve. It is simply one labor after the next using the same mechanical combat system.

While there is randomness in the form of the dice rolls, the world in which Hercules operates is not random at all. The labors are always the same and always presented in the same order. The Mood card at the start of each labor is random, but doesn’t really change the world of the game.

Is this game a dungeon crawl?

I’m not sure and I’d offer that the specific answer may not be important. The act of thinking through the question to arrive at answer is, however, useful. It allows us to wonder how far we can strip a dungeon crawl down to its bare essentials. It raises interesting questions like whether or not a dungeon crawl requires a map — something I would have said yes to prior to playing this game.

Trying to make a dungeon crawl sans dungeon can open up some really interesting and creative design spaces.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Greek mythology as a theme: You’d think that eventually we would tire of games with themes based on Greek mythology, but we don’t. There is something eternal about the stories that continues to captivate us — especially when combined with beautiful art and spot foil on the cards.5

• Dice combat: There are endless ways to implement dice combat mechanisms that are far more interesting than a simple opposed roll. The dice requirement plus labor effect track in Hercules and the 12 Labors is a good example.

• Dungeon crawls without maps: While I’m not convinced that Hercules and the 12 Labors is a true dungeon crawl, it can be fun to ask the question. Stripping a genre of game down to its bare essentials can often serve as the base for a new and interesting game design.

What do you think? Could you see this dice combat system being used in a TTRPG? How would you modify this game to make it more like a roleplaying game than a board game? Does it need a map to be a dungeon crawl?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

I first heard the term degenerate game state on the So Very Wrong About Games podcast. It made sense in context even if I didn’t exactly know a definition of it. It seemed to imply the mechanisms of the game were poorly designed, but in a very specific way.

Lately, I’ve been thinking more about degenerate states as they relate to tabletop game design in both TTRPGs and board games. This led me to go hunting for a clearer understanding of the term and perhaps where it came from.

What follows is what I found and why I think it’s an important concept to understand when designing games.1

We need to start with a little geometry, but stay with me.

Every square is a rectangle

There is a concept in mathematics called degeneracy that is either the root of the term in game design or at least adjacent.2

Here’s how Wolfram MathWorld describes it:

“A limiting case in which a class of object changes its nature so as to belong to another, usually simpler, class.”

First, it is important to understand a limiting case but to understand that we need to think about special cases.

A special case is where every instance of A is also an instance of B but not vice versa. The classic example is that all squares (A) are rectangles (B) but not all rectangles (B) are squares (A). A square is a special case of a rectangle.

Similarly, an equilateral triangle (three equal angles) is a special case of an isosceles triangle (two equal angles).

Pushing it to the limit

A limiting case is a special case where one or more of the properties of the original are taken to their extreme. It’s a special case pushed as far as it can go — often to zero or infinity. As Paul Stephenson says, “If an object is defined in terms of a variable, it’s worth seeing what happens at the very ends of the range of values it can take.”3

A circle might be considered a limiting case of an oval or ellipse. This is because an ellipse is defined as “a plane curve surrounding two focal points, such that for all points on the curve, the sum of both distances to the two focal points is constant.” Under normal conditions you get a nice egg shape, but what happens if we keep decreasing the distance between the two focal points?

When we reduce that distance to zero (i.e. the two focal points have the same location), it becomes a circle — the limiting case of an ellipse.

Extreme results and degeneracy

In the case of the circle and ellipse, they still sort of look the same. One could easily agree that while the circle is less “ellipse-ish” than a more egg-shaped one. The circle still follows the rules of an ellipse, but it is a very special ellipse.

Other times, when we push the variables to the extreme, the very nature of the original object or concept changes. The result is qualitatively different from the rest of the class, making it a degenerate case.4

Let’s look at two examples from geometry:

1. Circle with radius zero: The degenerate case example that makes the most sense to me is a circle. As we reduce the radius ever smaller, eventually the circle becomes a single point. Is it still a circle with radius zero (r=0)? I guess, but it doesn’t qualitatively look and feel like other circles when you do that.

2. Triangle with a 180 degree angle: You can do something similar with a triangle, where you make two of the angles zero and one of them 180 degrees. It meets all the rules for a triangle, but it no longer looks like a triangle — it looks like a line.

While it is not always the case, many times degenerate cases “belong to another, usually simpler, class” as noted above. Pushing the variables to an extreme, past a special case into a degenerate case makes the final form something simpler, less complex, and sometimes less interesting.

But, for now, let’s hold that definition and think about degeneracy another way.

Hacks, exploits, and degeneracy

In “The Coming AI Hackers”, Bruce Schneier notes that “Everything is a system, every system can be hacked, and humans are natural hackers.”5

He then gives a few examples of what he considers hacking:

“Airline frequent-flier programs are hacked. Card counting in blackjack is a hack. Sports are hacked all the time. Someone first figured out that a curved hockey stick blade allowed for faster and more accurate shots but also a more dangerous game, something the rules didn’t talk about because no one had thought of it before. Formula One racing is full of hacks, as teams figure out ways to modify car designs that are not specifically prohibited by the rulebook but nonetheless subvert its intent.”

While I think the mathematical definition above is at the root of the modern usage of the term in game design, Schneier’s idea of hacking appears to be mixed in as well. Specifically, the idea of people technically following the rules while at the same time exploiting a weakness in the design is critical.

Browsing the BGG forums and articles on the subject yields multiple related definitions that mix degenerate strategy and degenerate game state. Most of them seem to touch on the idea of hack or exploit:

• The abuse of a single mechanism within the game by repeatedly taking the action. While the action itself isn’t a problem, choosing it over and over is.6

• A dominant strategy that, while following the strict rules of the game, always leads to victory.7

• Actions taken to exploit a weakness in the game design and yet do not violate the rules of the game, making the game less fun for other players.8

• A flaw in the design itself that allows a player to gain an unintended advantage.9

• Playing in a way that ignores the unwritten rules of the game. Not playing the game in the proper or intended manner.

More than just a hack, however, there is often a focus on an exploit that is not prohibited by the rules. I found this analogy from a Reddit comment about “take that” mechanisms and degenerate game states to be helpful:

“Consider sports: There are sports that permit physical contact, and sports that do not. Even the sports that permit contact have rules about how far you’re allowed to go. One of the reasons for this is because if you don’t reign in physical contact, violence can become the most dominant way of playing the game: if you physically cripple your opponent, you’ve effectively won. So it no longer ends up being about the actual game, the focus becomes winning on the physical contact aspect.”

Although I am not a game theory expert, all of these ideas seem very close to the concept of strategic dominance, where “strategy A dominates another strategy B if A will always produce a better result than B, regardless of how any other plays.”

Is strategic dominance an example of degeneracy in games?

I think it can be, but perhaps not always. Let’s look at three possible examples.

Ex 1. Black Lotus in Magic: The Gathering

The most commonly cited example of degenerate play is from Magic: The Gathering, a game I have surprisingly little experience with.10 The exploit is described in Rules of Play (Zimmerman and Salen, 2003):

“In early editions of Magic: The Gathering, certain card combinations were simply too powerful and could destroy a player on the first turn, before a match had a chance to develop. Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of the game, declared certain cards “officially” illegal, most notoriously the Black Lotus card, in order to keep this kind of play experience in check. In regulated tournament play, the outlawed cards were not used.”

Again, we see that the game has been “hacked” or “exploited.” While the rules (as written at the time) are followed, a strategy or method can be used to ensure victory and presumably reduce the fun of the other players involved.

Ex 2. Big Money in Dominion

Some examples are less clear if they are degenerate strategies or not.

The Big Money strategy in Dominion (Vaccarino, 2008) reduces the game to a simple formula: “Buy Province with $8, buy Gold with $6-$7, and buy Silver with $5 or lower.”11

Big Money appears like a degenerate strategy against novice players. It almost always wins and it collapses the game decision space into an easy and obvious strategy. It reduces the fun for the other players and potentially for even the person using it.12

But Big Money is not invincible. Adding a Smithy to draw more cards can enhance Big Money in a way that improves it versus the basic, vanilla Big Money. Adding cards from expansions creates even more Big Money beating strategies. One could make the argument, as the Dominion Strategy website does, that, “Studying a board to figure out how to design a deck capable of beating Big Money: well, that’s what Dominion is all about.”

Zimmerman and Salen are careful to note the same idea in Rules of Play, stating that “there is something exciting about having players explore the space of possibility in your game, rooting around for new strategies and new ways to play.” This creates what they call degenerate strategy ecosystems in which players continue to find exploits that invalidate the earlier ones and improve the game experience overall.

Ex 3. The three-player problem and turtling

I’ve mentioned Lewis Pulsipher’s three-player problem a few times before:

“In a three-player conflict game (e.g. a historical wargame) if there are three players, the two players who are behind will generally team up and attack the player in the lead.”

In itself, three-player conflict game designs aren’t the problem. Problems can arise, however, if all players decide to turtle — focus solely on defense rather than offense.

The strategy becomes one in which you wait for the other players to be weakened by fighting each other so you can swoop in and win. When everyone does this (i.e. everyone turtles), this creates a potential degenerate game state where play collapses into simply waiting for someone to attack.

It is notable that this is not a dominant strategy because it may not reliably result in victory for the player using it. Instead, it collapses the entire game state.

Adjacent concepts

Before we settle on a working definition of degenerate strategies and game states, it is important to note some adjacent concepts. I’ve seen all of these referred to as examples of degenerate game states, but that categorization could be debated:

• Soft locks: In video games a soft lock (or softlock) can occur when the game remains playable, menus can be accessed, but progress is halted due to a design flaw. For example, the quest item to spawn the boss monster is lost or you are trapped in an area of the map with no exit.13 I think this is very close to the three-player turtle problem noted above.

• Excessive garbage time: We previously explored garbage time in games in the context of closure and conceding defeat. Excessive garbage time in a game also collapses the strategy for players in a way similar to a degenerate strategy. There are few decisions to be made and instead it’s just playing it out to the end.

• Kingmaking: I’ve seen oft-hated kingmaking brought up as an example of degenerate play. I’m not sure I agree with that, as it feels more like a value judgement or kind-of-fun preference than a true degenerate game state. Has the game been reduced to something simpler that is qualitatively different from the original? Perhaps.

• Fragile game design: All of these examples and discussions seem to go back to our exploration of what Cole Wehrle calls fragile game design. Fragility is something different than victory points and the written rules. It is the unspoken and unwritten rules that are just as important (or more important) than the rules themselves. Some of the examples of degenerate strategies seem to violate the unspoken rules of the game which is why players may frown upon them.14

It is possible (and seemingly common) for people to describe things they don’t like in games as being degenerate. I understand this because it is a messy concept to try to define.

That said, I’m going to try to describe it in a way that makes sense to me and is useful when analyzing games.

A collapse into a simpler form

Let us return to our original definition of mathematical degeneracy: “A limiting case in which a class of object changes its nature so as to belong to another, usually simpler, class.”

To me, this is the most helpful starting point for understanding degenerate strategies and degenerate game states in games. Degenerate not in the sense of a “declining” or “worse” state — just a simpler class that is qualitatively different from the original.

Just like the ellipse that can be exaggerated until it is a circle and eventually just a point, games can retain their original rules and yet become something different — something simpler.

A degenerate strategy or degenerate game state is therefore one in which the game, while following its own rules, collapses into a simpler form that is qualitatively different from the original.15

I like this definition because it removes the value judgement from it. While this collapse into simplicity is often associated with a reduction in fun and interest it doesn’t always need to be the case. I’d argue degenerate game states are almost always bad, but it leaves a tiny bit of room for exceptions. The game is different, and often that means worse, but perhaps a counter example could be found.

It also doesn’t rely on the use of a hack, exploit, or loophole for a degenerate strategy or degenerate game state to occur. That implies player intent which can be messy. Instead it focuses on the results.

The key elements are a (1) strict adherence to rules, (2) a reduction to a simpler form, and (3) the simpler form is qualitatively different from the original game.

A degenerate game state is when there is some inherent part of the game’s design that allows the play to collapse into something simpler and different than the original game. It’s when a wargame turns into a game where it makes no sense to start a battle or an economic game where repeating a single action is the best path to victory. All the rules are still in place, but some variable has been pushed to an extreme.

Degeneracy is when your elliptical game collapses into a single point.

We are loophole exploiters

In the AI hacking article above, Bruce Schneier notes: “Hacking is as old as humanity. We are creative problem solvers. We are loophole exploiters. We manipulate systems to serve our interests.”

This is true and unavoidable. If there is a way to exploit a game design, someone will eventually find it. Players are looking for ways to win, trying new strategies, and exploring the decision space. In that process they may very well find a degenerate strategy.

So how do we handle this? In Rules of Play, the authors are direct in their opinions:

“Try to find degenerate strategies and get rid of them! We learned in the previous schema that positive and negative feedback systems can emerge unexpectedly from within a game’s structure and can ruin a game experience for players. The same is true of degenerate strategies. A close analysis of your game design can sometimes reveal them but the only real way to root them out is through rigorous playtesting.”

This is solid advice.

In the end, it is only extensive playtesting that can prevent degenerate strategies and game states.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Degeneracy as collapse: I write Skeleton Code Machine articles as a way to learn and to organize my thoughts. Writing this has helped me think about degenerate game states as a collapse into a simpler form that inherently changes that game — not a way I thought before I started. I hope this is a helpful piece of vocabulary and a tool for you to use in game analysis.

• Value depends on context: It is very easy to blend value judgements (i.e. “this is good” or “this is bad”) with technical game terms. Degenerate game states are often bad, but we can create a more objective definition at the same time.

• Playtesting is the way: In the end, as with most of game design, the only way to sort this all out is with extensive playtesting. Having recently run playtests at Unpub, I can confirm that nothing finds flaws like public playtesting.

What do you think? Were you familiar with the concepts of degenerate strategies and game states or is this new to you? How would you define it? If you can think of more examples from games, let me know in the comments!

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we looked at how Thief’s Market turns the fair division problem and the ultimatum game into a dice game. I learned from the poll at the end that 75% of readers (N=48) would rather get nothing than allow an unfair proposer to gain anything. Read that one and answer the poll at the end if you haven’t already!

This week we are exploring the stealth mechanism in what the So Very Wrong About Games podcast has called “The Only Game that Matters” — Seal Team Flix.

An elite force of special operators

Seal Team Flix (Ruth & Thomas, 2018) is a “tactical dexterity game” that is likely inspired by first-person and tactical shooter games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012), Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (2001) and Insurgency (2014).1

The rulebook begins with “The story so far…” which sets the trope-filled and cliche-packed tone of the game:

“The year is 2018, and FBI and NSA sources have intercepted chatter between a violent, fringe eco-terror group called “Gaia’s Hope”, some seedy financiers, and international arms dealer “Mal” O’Dorus. Gaia’s Hope is one of the most dangerous terror groups in the world, with the doomsday philosophy that “man has become a blight upon the planet and must be exterminated”. Supported by satellite imagery that has determined force numbers and patrol patterns, an elite force of Special Operators has been tasked to discover their plan and disrupt their operation.”2

The game includes many of the elements you’d expect in a tactical shooter game:

• Counter-terrorist vs. terrorist factions

• Modern, floorplan-based maps

• Weapon and equipment loadouts (e.g. MP5 and M1A SOCOM)3

• Medical kits that restore health

• Armor that reduces damage

• Flashbangs, grenades, bombs to defuse, hostages to rescue

The twist is that it’s a dexterity game, specifically a flicking game, which is a genre I don’t usually play often.

As many readers may not be familiar with flicking games, it’s worth taking a short detour to explain how they work.

What are dexterity and flicking games?

While it’s a broad and poorly defined class of games, dexterity games usually include some type of physical component of play that relies on reflexes and/or coordination. Most modern board games include elements of strategic thinking, making choices, memory, and visual pattern matching. They don’t, however, usually include things that make players move quickly or try to carefully stack items.

Crokinole (1876) and Klask (2014) are examples of pure, abstract dexterity games. These games can feel like tabletop versions of air hockey or billiards in how they are played — flicking or moving things toward a goal or target.

Other dexterity games are more thematic like PitchCar (1995), Junk Art (2016), and Rhino Hero: Super Battle (2017).4 Kabuto Sumo, for example, has players competing as sumo wrestling insects trying to push their opponents out of the ring using a slide/push mechanism.

A subset of dexterity games include flicking games — games where players must flick a token with their finger as part of the game. Crokinole, Catacombs: Third Edition (2015), Flick ‘em Up! (2015), and ICECOOL (2016) are perhaps the most popular examples. Players place a flat disc/token on the board and (without moving their hand), flick the disc to hit a target.

How to flick a disc

Seal Team Flix includes a very detailed explanation of how to do this:

“HOW TO FLICK: While shooting or performing some other tasks, you will need to Flick a Disc. To do so, simply place the Disc on the map, curl your index finger, and line it up with the rear (or top, if you’re really good) of the Disc. Line up your arm so that the Disc will slide in the direction you want, and then simply extend your index finger. This is only one of many ways to propel the disc, but the only rule with regard to legal Flicks is that your HAND CANNOT move. You may move your fingers all you want, but your hand must remain stationary.”

The Seal Team Flix board has little cardboard walls that are matched to the walls printed on the map. Cover boxes (brown cubes) are added to block some shots. Enemies are cardboard standees placed throughout the map.

When a player shoots, they take the appropriate number and size of discs (e.g. the MP5 SMG gets 1 medium disc in single fire mode or 2 small discs in burst mode) and flick them at the intended target. If the disc touches the target, it’s a hit and damage is applied.5 Because the enemy targets can’t flick back, dice are rolled to determine return and reaction fire.

The part of Seal Team Flix I found most interesting, however, was how sound is tracked to create a sense of stealth — a concept notoriously hard to implement in an engaging way in tabletop games.6

Simulating stealth and noise

When a player shoots or otherwise makes noise (e.g. grenade) in Seal Team Flix, they place sound tokens at the location of the sound.

Each gun has its own sound level with larger guns making more noise. The springfield 770 sniper rifle is one of the loudest, generating 5 sound tokens. The HK MP5 submachine gun is one of the quietest, generating only 2 sound tokens per fire. Optional suppressors can be equipped which reduces the sound tokens placed by 1 and there’s a dart pistol that makes no sound.7

Let’s say you begin the mission and there’s an enemy sentry or patrol right at the start and blocking your path. The team is spotted and an alert marker is placed which adds +4 sound to the area. The first player shoots and misses, adding 4 sound tokens to the player’s area. The second player shoots and hits, but they need to add another 2 sound tokens to the same area for a total of 10 sound.8

The players can move and continue their mission on future turns, but the sound tokens stay in place. This governs how the enemy units move:

• Sentries: Enemy sentry units never leave their starting area, but will always move closer to the sound. Once alerted they stay alert and will shoot if they ever have line of sight to a target.

• Patrols: Enemy patrols will move one area closer to the loudest sound on the map each round. This might not be toward where the players currently are and instead might be where they generated the most sound.

In addition, the amount of sound determines how many new patrols will be spawned on the map. The sound tokens for each area are added up and divided in half, rounding up. A ten-sided die (d10) is rolled that many times and each roll has a chance to spawn another patrol on the map.

Thematic stealth mechanisms

The sound mechanism in Seal Team Flix feels thematically integrated into the game. Player characters start the mission concealed. Sentries and patrols aren’t alerted yet, meaning the team can move without drawing attention. Eventually, however, someone will need to take that first shot — generating sound and alerting nearby patrols.

From that point on, the mission escalates with each new shot generating more sound which generates more patrols and more reason to shoot again. Similar to how missions in Cyberpunk 2077 or Ghost Recon: Wildlands may start as stealth missions, but at some point always seem to turn into a wild gunfight by the end.9

Sound can also be used as a distraction using this mechanism because tokens are placed where the sound is generated and not at the origin. Tossing a flashbang can make a different area the loudest on the map, attracting patrols until those sound tokens eventually fade away.

It’s not a perfect system. Without a “game master” there is no hidden information in the game, meaning that the location of all enemies is always known. There is no “fog of war” either, so the full map is known from the start. This allows players to avoid (or try to avoid) many of the enemies as the move through the map. Is this a bug or a feature? Hard to say.

Extraction Point

Stealthy tactical shooter games are something I’ve thought about before. Tumulus 03 “Kick open the door.” includes a mini-game called Extraction Point. Based on the Carta SRD, the player uses cards to create a house map with three floors. They then take actions including Advance, Peek, and Breach & Clear that each require different amounts of time.

The idea I wanted to try to capture was that fast actions save time but are more risky, while slow actions burn more time but are safer. It doesn’t use a noise/alert system, but playing Seal Team Flix makes me think one could easily be added.

Like many of the playable mechanisms and games in Tumulus, Extraction Point is intentionally “incomplete by design” with a number of exercises at the end focused on improving the game. One of the exercises mentions how enemies never move or patrol the house, a challenge solved quite elegantly in Seal Team Flix.

Issue 03 is available as a Tumulus back issue while supplies last if you’d like to check it out.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Dexterity and flicking games: I’ve played Jenga, Kabuto Sumo, and Jungle Speed previously, all of which qualify as dexterity games. Other than Crokinole, however, I think Seal Team Flix might be the first flicking game I’ve played — certainly the first thematic one. It’s an interesting genre, and I’d be curious if some of the concepts could be integrated into TTRPGs.

• Stealth mechanisms are tricky: The easiest way to implement stealth in a game is using a hidden movement mechanism, but this almost always requires two opposing teams or a GM running the game.10 You often need a way to track undetected vs. alert status. Noise tracking can become fiddly and burdensome quickly if extra care is not taken.

• A stealth puzzle to solve: When designed well, stealth mechanisms almost feel like puzzles to solve: Should I toss a flash bang over there to draw the enemies so you can move the other way? Should I wait for a patrol to pass before crossing a hallway? It is a careful balance between making the enemy AI predictable enough and yet not so predictable as to be easily avoided.

What do you think? What are some of your favorite stealth or noise tracking systems in games you’ve played? I’m particularly interested in thematic ones that don’t just abstract it away into a single stealth roll. Also, if you love a flicking game, let me know!

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

I’ve returned from Unpub Festival 2026 filled with ideas and creativity while also being utterly and completely exhausted. The playtests of Ratsail and Epsilon went really well. My notebook and rulebook are filled with notes and feedback that I’ll need to process this week.

While there, I won two board games as part of the raffles. One of those games was the new edition of Thief’s Market designed by Dave Chalker. I was able to have a very brief chat with Dave about the game and its interesting “pie cutting” mechanism.1

Thinking about this game led me to game theory, something called The Ultimatum Game, and an old mathematics article about pirates. All of that might teach us something about how players make decisions at the table.

Thief’s Market

In Thief’s Market (Chalker, 2025), you play as a group of thieves who just pulled off a big heist. The time has come to divide up the loot and then head to the market to make some purchases.

The game is played over a series of rounds with each round being divided into two phases:

1. The Loot Phase

   1. The first player rolls all the loot dice (10-16 dice in total) to the middle of the table. They also add the first player token to the pool of dice.

   2. On each player’s turn, they can either (a) take as many dice as they’d like from the center pool of dice or (b) steal all the items from any player, returning one to the center. The first player token can be taken and stolen as well.

   3. This splitting/stealing continues until every player has at least one item.

2. The Market Phase

   1. Each player takes turns using their collected dice to purchase cards from the market. The cards represent characters, markets, heists, and relics that allow players to modify dice and gain points in future rounds.

   2. If any player has obtained a total of three relic cards, the game ends.

This is not a full rules teach, but should provide enough detail for use to explore the core mechanism of the game: the choice to either take dice from the center or steal from another player.

Cutting the pie

When I briefly spoke to Dave Chalker about the game, he described it as “cutting the pie” which I think is a good description. We looked at fair cake cutting (i.e. “I cut, you choose”) mechanisms in the past in the context of Pacts (Brin, 2025):

In Pacts, each round one player will draw five pact cards and divide them into two piles of their choosing. In addition, they will also add a 2nd Player token to one of the piles, increasing the desirability of the pile — there’s an advantage to going second. Then the other player will choose one of the piles. Finally both players will resolve their actions — 1st player and then 2nd player order.

In Pact, this fair division optimization problem is upset by having items that are extremely hard to value. It is almost impossible to create two piles of truly equal size or value, making it a really interesting (and sometimes agonizing) choice.

I wouldn’t call Thief’s Market a pure “I cut, you choose” game.2 The difference is that in “I cut, you choose” games, the player is making a split of a pool of items and allowing another party to choose one of the pieces. This strongly incentivizes equal distributions, as the other (rational) player will take the largest piece available.

Thief’s Market instead has the player “cut the pie” with the looming risk of their entire piece being stolen. In Pacts, if you make unequal piles, you still end up with a pile. In Thief’s Market, if you take took many dice, you may end up with no dice at all.3

In some ways, this makes the decisions during the Loot Phase even more complicated. A player must decide if they should take dice from the center, and if so, how many they should take. Or, they must decide if they steal, and if so, who to steal from.

The ultimatum game

While trying to find similar mechanisms in experimental economics or mathematical games, I came across the ultimatum game first described by John Harsanyi in 1961:

1. The first of two players (Proposer) is given a sum of money and is asked to decide how to split it between themselves and the second player (Responder).

2. The Proposer makes an offer of a split of the money to the Responder.

3. If the Responder accepts the offer, they both get the agreed upon amounts. If the Responder rejects the offer, neither gets anything.

I think this touches on something happening in Thief’s Market, but it requires some explanation.

You’d expect that experiments involving the ultimatum game would show that the Responder would accept most offers because their choice is between the offered amount ($X) or nothing at all ($0). It’s almost a Hobson’s Choice.

And yet, experiments have shown this is not the case as Lauren Strano describes at The Decision Lab:

“What actually happens: In real-life experiments, low offers are usually rejected by Player 2 because people value fairness, even at personal cost. Additionally, proposers often offer 30-50% of the money because they assume that completely unfair offers will be punished, and they want at least something out of the proposition.”4

One possible reason proposed for this is that “people tend to reject an unfair offer, even if it means sacrificing their reward.”5

When presented an unfair offer, it would seem that people are quite likely to cut off their own nose just to spite their face.6

Working backward to a solution

So if our thieves are unlikely to be fully rational when making decisions, how can we know what to do in the game? Is there an optimal play that maximizes gain and reduces the risk of being stolen from?

That’s where I came across the “A Puzzle for Pirates” by Ian Stewart in Scientific American which describes a variant of the ultimatum game.7 It directly involves splitting a shared loot pile between multiple pirates:

“Ten pirates have gotten their hands on a hoard of 100 gold pieces and wish to divide the loot. They are democratic pirates, in their own way, and it is their custom to make such divisions in the following manner: The fiercest pirate makes a proposal about the division, and everybody votes on it, including the proposer. If 50 percent or more are in favor, the proposal passes and is implemented forthwith. Otherwise the proposer is thrown overboard, and the procedure is repeated with the next fiercest pirate.”

Much like Thief’s Market, multiple players are involved and the consequences for being too greedy when splitting the loot are harsh. It’s a two-page article that is well worth reading, but here is the bit that I found to be most interesting:

“The secret to analyzing all such games of strategy is to work backward from the end. At the end, you know which decisions are good and which are bad. Having established that, you can transfer that knowledge to the next-to-last decision and so on. Working from the beginning, in the order in which the decisions are actually taken, doesn’t get you very far. The reason is that strategic decisions are all about “What will the next person do if I do this?” so the decisions that follow yours are important. The ones that come before yours aren’t, because you can’t do anything about them anyway.”

So to determine what to do, you need to start with the very last two pirates who are making decisions. Once you figure out what they might do, you can ponder what the one before them would do, given the decision of the first two. This continues all the way up the chain until it reaches you whether it is 10 pirates or 100 pirates.

The actual conclusions in the article are fairly complicated, but it illuminates the exploration of the game in an interesting way. On a player’s turn they need to not only assess the current game state, the value of the loot pile, but also if the next person in line will steal from them.

The player’s choice must involve working backwards from the end.

Additional complexity

Two other factors are worth noting that are important in exploring the gameplay of Thief’s Market:

1. The dice do not have equal value: Each die has multiple faces. The value of each of those faces depends on what each player is trying to purchase and what cards they have that might modify certain dice. Like in Pacts, this inability to easily tie a value to each “pie slice” makes the decision incredibly difficult to just “math out.”

2. There is a player order token: Just as Pacts includes a 2nd Player order token, Thief’s Market includes a 1st Player token. Almost by definition, these tokens do not have a quantitative value (i.e. one that can be expressed as a fixed number).

Putting this all together, optimal play involves making plans about which cards to purchase, trying to make choices that don’t seem too unfair, and making your best guess at assigning a value to the dice and first player token.

This creates an interesting self-balancing mechanism that has significant dependence on social cues, without being a “social” or “party” game.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Fair division optimization problems: In game theory, fair division is when multiple parties are all entitled to a limited resource and need to divide it in a way that is agreeable to everyone involved. These problems are simple to explain but deceptively complex, which means they are fertile ground for game design.

• Players are not always rational: As the ultimatum problem may show, some players may be fine getting nothing (rather than something) if it means they can cause someone perceived as acting unfairly to get nothing too.

• Make the loot pile hard to value: Both Thief’s Market and Pacts ensure that the limited resources to be split are hard (or impossible) to accurately value. The addition of a non-resource like a player order token compounds this. It switches the game from being “mathy” to being a tough “gut” choice.

What do you think? Do you enjoy fair division problems in tabletop games? How could something like this be used in a TTRPG?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

It’s a busy week!

I’m preparing for Unpub in Baltimore where I’ll be doing the following:

• Publisher Diaries Panel (Thursday 3/12 @ 4:00 PM): Tony Tran has invited small publishers to a Q&A about what made their games successful and how others can learn from their mistakes. I’ll be on the panel with Xoe Allred and Heather O’Neill.

• TTRPG Speed Dating (Thursday 3/12 @ 6:00 PM): Check out TTRPGs from 10 different designers in quick 15-minute sessions. I’ll be running the first public playtests of Exclusion Zone Botanist: Epsilon — character creation and exploring a location or two.

• Ratsail playtests (Friday 3/13 @ 5:00 PM): Running playtests of Ratsail (“Turtchester”).1 Sail ships and spend influence to compete for control of the Rat Isles in this area majority and open drafting game for 2-4 players.

Also, Tumulus Issue 06 “Hammer a nail in the coffin.” is shipping to subscribers this week! Watch your email for a shipment notification and check your spam folder if you don’t see one in the next few days.

But for now, let’s talk about tabletop game mechanisms.

Considering deck-building is one of my favorite board game mechanisms, I’ve surprisingly never directly covered it in a Skeleton Code Machine article.2 That changes today! We will be exploring how Shards of Infinity (a deck-builder) uses red-bordered mercenary cards to add more options during play.

What is a deck-building game?

Donald X. Vaccarino released Dominion in 2008 and forever changed board game design.3 The game introduced (or made popular) many of the elements that we now associate with deck-building games — games in which players use individual decks that they create during the course of the game.4

Specifically, three elements stand out:

1. The game has a currency (e.g. coins) that players accumulate and then spend to acquire new cards into their deck.

2. There is a common or shared market that contains cards that players can choose from when spending their currency.

3. Players draw X cards from their personal deck each turn, play each card, and then discard them all. Their discard pile is reshuffled to create a new deck when necessary.

Since its release, there have been many games that have iterated on the idea of Dominion or outright copied it. Donald has cited both A Few Acres of Snow (Wallace, 2011) and Eminent Domain (Jaffee, 2011) as examples of completely new games inspired by Dominion.5

Games like the very clearly titled Ascension: Deckbuilding Game (Gary, et al., 2010) introduced a dynamic market (i.e. the available cards change over time) to replace the static market style of Dominion. Ascension is also an example of adding multiple currencies (Runes and Power) to the game versus the single currency (Coins) of Dominion.

The deck-building genre has matured and the mechanism is now present in games like Dune: Imperium (Dennen, 2020), Spirit Island (Reuss, 2017), Tyrants of the Underdark (Lee, et al., 2021), Undaunted: Normandy (Thompson & Benjamin, 2019), and Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure (Dennen, 2016).

Shards of Infinity (Gary & Arant, 2018) continued to iterate on the deck-building genre in some interesting ways.

Shards of Infinity

The Shards of Infinity description gives you the theme of the game:

One-hundred years ago, The Infinity Engine was shattered and its reality-bending shards have destroyed most of the world. Now, it falls upon you to gather your forces, defeat your adversaries, and rebuild the Infinity Engine! Will you survive?

It’s a head-to-head game that I feel is best at two players. It does a few things that depart from most Dominion-derived deck-builders:

1. It has a six-card dynamic market like Ascension.

2. Players don’t compete for victory points. Instead players attack each other to reduce their opponent’s health from 50 HP down to 0.

3. It has two currencies (Gems and Power), but they are used in different ways. Gems are used to purchase cards from the market and Power is used to attack other players to reduce their health.

4. The game uses Mastery as a way to gradually increase the power of players over time, with cards gaining new effects at higher Mastery levels.6

For a small box game, there is a lot going on.7 This article is not a full rules explanation, but it is worth mentioning a few of the card types.

Allies and champions

Ally cards are the most common type of card. They have a name, cost (in Gems), faction, and effect when played. For example, the Shardwood Guardian is a member of the Undergrowth faction and causes the player to gain 2 Power and draw a card. Zara Ra, Soulflayer has the player gain 4 Power and 1 Mastery, but at a Mastery level of 10 it also allows two cards to be trashed out of the player’s deck.

Champion cards are similar with a cost and effects, but unlike ally cards, they remain in play. They are placed on the table to create tableau of Champions all of which can be used turn after turn.

In both cases (Ally and Champion), the cards are purchased from the market and placed into the player’s discard pile. They will eventually get shuffled into their deck, and then drawn. When played and/or destroyed, they go back into the discard pile to start the cycle again. The cards become a permanent part of the player’s deck for the rest of the game.

The twist that I find most interesting is the use of Mercenary Ally cards.

Mercenary ally cards

Ally cards with a red border are identified as Mercenary Ally cards. While these can be used in the same way as any other Ally card (as noted above), they also have a special ability called fast-play:

In addition to having the option to recruit a Mercenary just like other allies, you may fast-play a Mercenary instead. To fast-play a Mercenary while it is in the [market], pay its [Gem] cost, gain its effect immediately, and put it into the Play Zone. At the end of each turn, all fast-played Mercenaries move from the Play Zone to the bottom of the [market deck] (NOT your personal deck).

This means you can pay for a card in the market, play its effects, and not put it in your deck. This is really useful for a couple reasons:

• Fast-play doesn’t clog your deck: Cards aren’t worth victory points at the end of the game. So there’s no reason to accumulate a large deck in Shards of Infinity. In fact, the opposite is true: a winning strategy is to prune the deck down to just a few key cards. The smaller the deck, the faster the powerful cards will cycle through the deck to hand to discard and back.

• Get the effect before it’s too late: Normally a purchased (i.e. recruited) ally card needs to go to your discard pile first. It will take time to deplete your deck, reshuffle the discard, and then hope to draw that new card. Toward the end of the game, there might not be time to even see it get played. By fast-playing, you get the effect right now when you need it.

Of course, there are downsides to fast-playing a card. You spend the full amount but only get to use it once. It doesn’t become part of your deck to be used again. By fast-playing too often and too early in the game, you have no chance to build an engine to supply more Gems and Power later on.

Tough decisions

I’m constantly looking for player agency and tough decisions in games. I’ve found that most games that I enjoy and keep coming back to, they always seem to excel in both of these areas.

Adding the ability to fast-play cards in Shards of Infinity makes the decision space and choices even tougher than a normal deck-builder. Without it, the choice is to purchase one of the six cards in the market and put it into your deck or not. With it, now you need to choose to purchase or not, but also to either (a) fast-play for a benefit now but lose the card, or (b) put it in your deck, but it will take time to see it played.

I’ve played enough to know the answers to those questions depends on your deck, the progression of the game, your opponent’s deck, and many other factors.

Tough choices are fun!

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• It’s OK to be inspired by a game: There’s nothing wrong with taking a game you love and trying to make something inspired by it. That said, consider how different it is to ensure it’s not just a copy. There are so many ways a game can be changed, enhanced, and modified to make it feel special and unique.

• Deck-building is awesome: It’s one of my favorite mechanisms. No matter what the game is, if it has deck-building then I’m interested in trying it. Check out some of the modern examples listed above and see how the genre has changed and continues to mature over time.

• Identify tough choices: Look at your design and try to clearly identify each time a player has a choice to make. Then list out how many different options they have while noting any Hobson’s choices. For each one, is it possible to make the decision space smaller and the choice harder?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

It’s March! That means that limited copies of Tumulus Issue 05 “Step into the fairy ring.” are now available as individual back issues.1

It also means that subscribers will soon be receiving shipping notifications for Tumulus Issue 06 “Hammer a nail in the coffin.”2 This issue is all about vampires, ghosts, and the dangerous dead. It includes a haunted house generator, an article about vampire mechanisms in Blood Borg, a playable game called A Place for All My Corpses with exercises to improve it, and more.3

Please consider supporting Skeleton Code Machine with a Tumulus subscription. Be sure to select the issues you want when subscribing.4

This week, while you are waiting for your next issue of Tumulus to arrive, we are looking at a solo journaling game called We Shall Be Monsters.5 It’s a Frankenstein-themed companion creator that uses an interesting circuit-based attribute selection mechanism.

We Shall Be Monsters

I picked up a print copy of We Shall Be Monsters at the Good Luck Press booth at last year’s PAX Unplugged.6 The cover is unassuming — almost all black with white title text. The pitch for this 17-page solo journaling game designed by Seb Pines is what drew me in.

Using a very Frankenstein-esque setting, in We Shall Be Monsters you are a reclusive scientist endeavoring to build your own perfect companion:

“Shape their body as you shape your futures together. Infuse them with vitality and see what you have created come to life and take their place beside you.”

Of course, you can’t exactly just stop by the local market and pick up a new body for your companion. Instead you’ll be creating them “from parts harvested from the dead” and you’ll stitch those parts together using an unnamed machine.

Starting with the legs, you’ll add some body parts, imbue them with life, and then move on to the next parts. Arms, torso, head, organs, brain, heart, are all required components. By the end, you’ll have a complete companion.

We are told that these parts come with a mixture of desires and ideals that are both our own (as we provide the vitality) but also from the part itself as “even dead flesh holds memory.” It won’t be simply a pair of legs, but legs that have a bit of our own personality in them as well as the personality of the former owner.

What I found interesting was the way in which the attributes are selected.

Creating attribute circuits

While many solo journaling games rely on either dice rolls or drawing cards to generate prompts and outcomes, We Shall be Monsters takes a different route. It uses what it calls circuits.

Each body part section has a matching node framework of varying size — connected green dots within a thick purple frame. Each green dot has an attribute word and description written on it. For example: “Lithe: They move with a smooth gracefulness, each step a languid movement.” or “Fragile: They are delicate and prone to breaking.”

The player selects attributes for their creation by starting anywhere on the outer purple frame and following the green connection lines until they exit the frame at another location. In the case of the legs (the first body part to be activated) the grid is a 3 x 7 matrix of attributes — wayward, nurturing, boney, poised, adventurous, entitled, manicured, and so on. Selecting two circuit routes through this matrix, the player adds some number of first attributes to their soon-to-be companion.

After answering some additional leg-related questions (e.g. Will they follow you wherever you go?), the process is repeated for the arms.

The torso matrix is particularly large, a 13 x 3 grid of 39 unique attribute names and descriptions. This continues to the final components.

Into the chest and skull, you place the heart and brain. The things that make them the most of who they are instilled into their reanimated flesh. With this, they will think and love. With these two final pieces, your creation is complete.

After a short epilogue, your new creation becomes your companion.

Open but structured

What I found interesting about the circuit mechanism is that it is completely zero luck — there are no dice or cards. The player acts with full agency in selecting which attributes the route takes as it crosses from one side of the circuit frame to the other.

Notably, players must follow the connected lines but otherwise may proceed how they wish. The circuit can flow in either direction. They can be short or long. The circuit line can even cross over itself. The only true restrictions are that you draw the number of circuits indicated and that you end when “the number of attributes your creation has equals the number of years you’ve lived.”

Having a list of attributes and asking the player to select X number from the list would be almost mechanically equivalent. Using a simple list would, however, be different in two important ways:

1. A list wouldn’t have any structure to it. The player would need to look at the entire list at the same time and make a choice.

2. A list wouldn’t have any thematic connection to the game. The concept of building Frakenstein-style electrical circuits to jolt your creation to life would be lost.

The grid forces players to look at only adjacent attributes while building circuits.

Take for example the torso. If you chose Lofty you need not (indeed can not) consider all other 38 attributes. Instead the mechanism forces you to only consider the three adjacent: Optimistic, Harmonious, and Grounded. Choosing Grounded means only Petty is available next. While you certainly could double back to grab a desired attribute, the mechanism creates a sharp focus on just a few.

In addition, once your circuit has made it most of the way across the frame, it is hard to go back and pick just one specific attribute. Gaining Adored might also mean picking up Violent along the way.

It’s a mechanism without randomness, but the thematic structure of it creates interesting, focused choices.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Zero-luck journaling games: We Shall Be Monsters made me realize that many (most?) solo journaling games choose the prompts randomly.7 Rarely, in my experience, is the player simply provided with a list of prompts or questions and then asked to choose. Using the circuit mechanism allows for player choice in a way that feels thematic and satisfying.

• Public domain settings: I’ve written before about adapting public domain works for use in board games and TTRPGs. Frankenstein, while not heavily used in We Shall Be Monsters, is clearly an inspiration.8 From Alice in Wonderland to Dracula, public domain settings are there to be mixed and remixed into new and interesting games.

• Thematic mechanisms: Not every mechanism can be made to be highly thematic. Sometimes a die roll is just going to be a die roll. But there are times we can we make a mechanism feel like what it represents. Keep an eye out and don’t pass up those opportunities.

UPDATE: This article originally said (incorrectly) Tumulus 07 was shipping soon. That was in error. It should have said Tumulus 06 is shipping soon. The issue number was wrong. The SCM editor (Murphdog) has been sacked. — E.P. 3/3/2026

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we looked at limited communication in Glatisant, an Arthurian-themed game for two players.

This week we are exploring how the Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients board game uses an interesting roll-and-move mechanism that includes some tough choices.

Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients

The dark, weird art of designer and illustrator Rob Lemon is what attracted me to Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients (Lemon, 2022).1 The over-the-top description of the game is very fitting:

In a dark, destroyed world ruled by chaos, hordes of otherworldly creatures battle against one another for dominance and survival. Amidst the shrill call of battle horns, the ground rumbles as squadrons of mutated abominations rush into combat!

The game is a dark sci-fantasy skirmish game that supports solo, cooperative, and competitive modes on a grid-based map. Players move their units, attack, gather resources, acquire items, and capture objectives.

For the basic competitive mode, the goal is to gain victory points to win the game. In the scenario modes, players need to complete specific objectives detailed in the two included scenario books. For example, getting specific units to a location on the map, killing a leader, or building structures.

It’s a highly asymmetric game with five playable factions — each one with its own rules and powerful Ancient.2

• The Bohmerk (blue): Amorphous, gelatinous, shapeshifting creatures able to split into multiple units and then fuse together. They absorb enemies to grow stronger.

• The Dhargon (green): When their Elder dies, another grows from an egg to take their place. More resources means more eggs to spawn more units.

• The Orpal (yellow): They use rift crystals and a bag-draw mechanism to transport units around the map using portals.

• The Alderkang (teal): The gene-splicing Alderkang can capture units and perform an extraction on them. Once extracted, they can fabricate identical units.

• The Varpen (red): Marauding demons that can mutate. Units get progressively stronger over the course of the game.

The combat system is very straightforward. Roll a number of six-sided dice equal to your faction’s strength or defense value, add the results, and compare. The complexity comes from all of the faction abilities and rules that can bend the core rules of combat.

It is the action system, however, that I found particularly interesting.

Roll the action dice

At the start of each player’s turn, they roll six action dice. The red dice have four possible faces that dictate movement:

• 1 x Move Orthogonal (2 spaces)

• 1 x Move Orthogonal (1 space)

• 2 x Move Diagonal (1 space)

• 2 x Skull (no movement)

For each die rolled, there’s a 33% chance of orthogonal movement, a 33% chance of diagonal movement, and a 33% chance of getting nothing. With six dice rolled each time, chances are slim that they would all be skulls.3

Each die can then be applied to units on the map. For example, the Alderkang can use a Move Orthogonal 1 die and a Move Diagonal 1 die to move their Kangsbrute unit two spaces on the map. Any number of dice can be used for each unit, but each die can only be used once.

It’s an interesting system because you never know exactly how far or in which direction you will be able to move your units. It’s not quite roll-and-move, but it is something a little similar.

It also means that while the factions are highly asymmetric, the movement for each faction is basically symmetric — it is the same for all factions. Everyone rolls six red dice at the start of their turn. A bad roll is equally bad for all factions.

Movement and terrain

Terrain on the map works similarly to other skirmish and wargames like Burning Banners. There are rivers, water, roads, and other obstacles.

Crossing into a river costs an extra movement point (MP). If a Varpen warrior wanted to cross a river and come back out the other side, it would cost 2 MP to move into the river and another 1 MP to exit on the other side, for a total of 3 MP.

Some factions have the ability to convert resources (e.g. wood and stone) into new obstacles on the map. The Dhargon can build fences and walls that add 1 MP or 2 MP penalties to cross. In a game that has such variable and limited movement, this can create a significant advantage for the Dhargon.

Thankfully, Dark Venture has some luck mitigation built into the game in the form of genetic memory.

Genetic memory

Thematically, genetic memory exists because “the magik of the Cataclysm has left a temporal imprint within the cells of the creatures of this land.” Mechanically, it acts as a way to store actions for a future turn.

Each player has a Genetic Memory card that they keep near their faction player board. After rolling the red action dice at the start of their turn, they can store unused actions. This is done by placing a red token matching the die face stored (e.g. Move Diagonal). Up to three actions can be stored in this way, to be spent at any time during their turn.

This allows players to control the tempo of the game to some extent. They can choose to take fewer actions on some turns to bank actions for a big later turn. It also helps mitigate the luck of a particularly poor action dice roll by pulling from saved actions.

It’s a rather clever way of adding some player agency and strategy to an otherwise random action and movement system.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Roll-and-move is valid: I’ve called roll-and-move an outdated game mechanism in the past, but even then I noted that “in better cases, the roll might be mitigated or modified in some way.” Dark Venture mitigates luck by allowing actions to be banked for later use via the genetic memory mechanism.

• Adding player agency: While not a strict rule, I think it’s a good design method to look at each part of a game and ask (1) is there player agency and (2) can the player be given a choice.4 The genetic memory mechanism does this by allowing the player to choose not to use the dice and save them for a later turn. This can be a tough decision at times.

• Component bloat: The Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients box contains 358 tokens, including 64 action dice tokens. It should be noted that adding the ability to store actions for later created a need for additional tokens. In a game that supports five players, that’s a lot of tokens. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is good to consider component impacts when making design decisions.

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we asked if lane battlers are actually area control games.1 The poll results at the end of the article were particularly interesting, and I’m not sure what to make of them. If you have theories, please let me know in the comments.

This week we are exploring Glatisant, a GM-less tabletop roleplaying game for two players with an Arthurian setting. It uses limited communication and hidden victory conditions in an interesting way.

Glatisant

I’ve always been fascinated with Arthurian legends and how strange many of them are. Reading through Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table is a wild ride.2 Someone on a horse is always riding into the middle of the feast hall and then they all go off on quest — to retrieve a “white brachet” for example.3

So I was excited to try Glatisant, a two-player Arthurian tabletop roleplaying game, written by Lucas Zellers, layout/design by Emily Entner, and published by Graftbound Press.4

Glatisant is a GM-less, asymmetrical TTRPG that uses the card-based Carta System by Peach Garden Games — the same system as Moon Rings.5 In the game, each player has one of two roles:

“You play as the heroic Knight Errant or the enigmatic Questing Beast, object of their quest. The Knight must capture the Beast, and the Beast must help the Knight become worthy of their legend.”

After selecting roles, 25 cards are arranged on the table in a 5x5 grid. The Knight starts on one side and the Beast on the other. As the knight moves from card to card, they are turned up and revealed. Each card has an associated narrative prompt. For example, the 5 of Hearts:

BITTER DISAGREEMENT: Your quest leads you into a loud or hateful argument with someone you trust. Beast: Which of them is right, if either? Knight: Who do you argue with, and why?

What is interesting about the game, is how it uses resources, hidden victory conditions, and limited communication as mechanical tools to tell the story.

The knight errant and questing beast

The game is asymmetric, meaning that each player has their own rules and abilities, with Root (Wehrle, 2018) being the example most people are familiar with.6 But while Root is a competitive game, Glatisant is a cooperative one. Both players need to work together to achieve the game’s victory condition, but how they do that is a little tricky.

Here’s how the two roles are structured:

• The Questing Beast: A “fantastic Beast of the wild and magical world” that serves as the object of the Knight’s quest. This player chooses the hidden victory condition from a list at the back of the book. They have more freedom of movement, being able to move both orthogonally and diagonally around the cards. And they do not reveal the cards as they move onto them, but may drop “trail” resources to indicate where the Knight should go.

• The Knight Errant: A “protector and champion of the realm” and focus of the Beast. The Knight doesn’t know what the victory condition is, only that they must hunt the Beast. They can only move orthogonally, revealing each card as they do.

The Knight also has a set of resources including Mind, Body, and Spirit, tracked with dice or tokens during the game.

Each revealed prompt will increase or decrease one or more of the resources. Sometimes the Beast will be allowed to choose which ones change. Other times the prompt will dictate the change. The Tempest will decrease the Knight’s Body by 2 but an encounter with Merlin the Magician will increase Mind and decrease Spirit.

These resources are important because they are tied to the victory condition.

Secret victory condition

This is not a hidden movement game. The Knight knows where the Beast is located on the 5x5 grid at all times. The game does not end in victory if the Knight “catches” the Beast.

Instead, the Beast is trying to secretly guide and help the Knight. This is represented by the “Win Conditions” in Glatisant. Arranged into Easy, Medium, and Hard, they are a mix of theme and mechanism. Mechanically, the condition might require the Knight and Beast meet at the center of the grid or that the Knight has more Spirit than any other resource when they meet the Beast. Thematically, the condition might be that “only the strong” may find the Beast or “only when you have reached the end of yourself” can the Beast be found.

The key rule is that the Beast may never reveal the victory condition to the Knight directly. They may only guide the Knight by their choices in the game.

This results in the Beast and Knight working together but in an indirect way. They can incorporate hints into their narrative answers. The Beast can leave trails to guide the Knight to a particular card.7 Back and forth, they move, reveal cards, narrate prompts, and adjust the Mind, Body, and Spirit resources.

The players continue until the Beast and Knight meet on a card at which point the victory condition is (secretly) checked. If not met, the game continues. If all 25 cards have been revealed and/or the Knight has exhausted all resources, then both players end the game in defeat.

Limited communication

I have a complicated relationship with limited communication mechanisms in tabletop games. For example, I find it frustrating when a game outlaws communication but then tacitly requires it for the game to function, as I mentioned in the How fragile is your game design? article from 2024:

Limited communication co-op games: In games like The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine (Sing, 2019) and The Mind (Warsch, 2018) the rules explicitly say that players may not talk and may not openly coordinate what they are doing. Yet the games won’t work if there is absolutely no communication. So players end up developing their own ways to communicate without explicitly communicating, using subtle hints or body language. In this case, the players must almost act contrary to the explicit rules to have the game work as intended.

I also find it frustrating when cooperative games say players can’t discuss cards and specific action details to cooperate, as a strict reading of the Gloomhaven (Childres, 2017) rulebook would indicate:

“Players should not show other players the cards in their hands nor give specific information about any numerical value or title on any of their cards. They are, however, allowed to make general statements about their actions for the round and discuss strategy.”8

But other times, the limited communication doesn’t seem to get in the way of the game for me. I’d include Sky Team (Rémond, 2023) in that category.

Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to see the limited communication structured the way it was in Glatisant.9 The players can play their roles and respond freely to prompts. The Knight has effectively no restrictions on communicating, as they have no information to hide. The Beast can say and do almost anything other than sharing one very specific victory condition.

The limit imposed on in-game communication is clear, precise, and makes thematic sense (i.e. the Beast can’t talk).

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Public domain settings: I doubt I’ll ever tire of classic settings such as Robin Hood and Arthurian legends, but I realize they aren’t for everyone. There are, however, so many public domain settings that are just waiting to be adapted into new and interesting games: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Treasure Island, The Call of the Wild, just to name a few.

• Hidden victory conditions: Glatisant uses a single, secret victory condition that determines if both players win or lose together. In other competitive games like Troyes (Dujardin, Georges, et al., 2010), each player has their own hidden objective but everyone scores all objectives at the end of the game. Two very different applications that demonstrate how hidden objectives are such an interesting area of exploration in game design.

• Limited communication: Love it or hate it, limited communication can be an interesting mechanism in games. I appreciate how the limits are very tight and specific in Glatisant while allowing freedom in responding to the prompts.

What do you think? Do you appreciate limited communication mechanisms in games? Do you think there are significant differences in how The Crew, Gloomhaven, Sky Team, and Glatisant approach limited communication? Which style do you prefer?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Vote for SCM in The Bloggies Round 1

Heads up that today, February 16, 2026, is the last day to vote for two Skeleton Code Machine articles in The Bloggies.

You can vote for each ones in their respective categories of Theory and Critique.

Here are the direct links to the voting forms:

🗳️ Vote: Theory Round 1

Voting link: The Bloggies: Theory Round 1

Everything is pointcrawl!

Exploring hexcrawls, pointcrawls, and other crawls to see if everything is actually just a pointcrawl. How can we reduce the illusion of choice and instead have players make meaningful decisions? Dec 02, 2025

🗳️ Vote: Critique Round 1

Voting link: The Bloggies: Critique Round 1

Playing the Chaplain’s Game

Exploring the use of coins as a divination mechanism in Mechs to Plowshares, a solo TTRPG about war, anxiety, paranoia, identity, and purpose by Anomalous Entertainment. Apr 22, 2025

We Read the Bloggies

Also, check out the amazing We Read the Bloggies project that was put together by the people at the Prismatic Waystation Discord server — a monumental effort to get every nominated blog posted as a podcast episode. I recorded readings of both Playing the Chaplain’s Game and Everything is Pointcrawl.

The podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple and Spotify.

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

I’m happy to announce that Skeleton Code Machine’s “Playing the Chaplain’s Game” has been nominated for The Bloggies, a “yearly celebration of blogging in tabletop roleplaying games.” Unlike most awards, nominated blog posts face each other in a tournament-style bracket. There are multiple rounds of voting, eventually resulting in a single winner. The next round of voting begins February 16, 2026.

Last week we looked at how Moon Rings uses a card-grid to create a journaling game with fingers as resources.

This week we are taking a look at lane battlers, using Air, Land, & Sea as a key example. Then we’ll explore how far you can stretch a lane battler until it becomes a “troops on a map” area control game.

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Air, Land, & Sea

The theme of Air, Land, & Sea (Perry, 2019) is fairly straightforward with art vaguely reminiscent of the Second World War: “As Supreme Commander of your country’s military forces in Air, Land, & Sea, you must carefully deploy your forces across three theaters of war: air, land, and sea.”

Two players sit across from each other with three “theaters of war” cards in a line between them: Air, Land, and Sea. Each player is dealt six cards, each tied to one of the theaters much like a card suit. The cards also have a numerical strength and sometimes have a special ability that is triggered when played. For example, the Transport (Air, Strength 1) card has the ability: “You may move 1 of your cards to a different theater.”

In addition, cards can be played face down into any theater regardless if it matches or not. Cards played this way always have a strength of 2.

After all the cards are played or someone decides to withdraw, the strength of each theater is totaled and the player with the highest value controls that theater.1 Each theater is resolved on its own, independent of the other theaters.

The player who controls the most theaters (2 of 3) is awarded victory points. The first player to reach 12 victory points wins.2

Lane battlers

Air, Land, & Sea is a perfect example of a lane battler game:

• Play is divided into multiple lanes.

• Cards are played onto opposing sides of each lane.

• Each lane has its own distinct battle that is resolved independently of the other adjacent lanes. Although lanes may interact during play.

• Overall victory is determined by winning control of individual lanes.

The three lanes (Air, Land, and Sea) are resolved based on total strength and victory points (VP) are awarded for controlling the most lanes (2 out of 3).

I’ve talked about lane battlers before in the context of Compile, a game heavily influenced by Air, Land, & See and that also uses three lanes.

In the case of Compile, however, each lane has two types or labels versus just one like in Air, Land, & Sea. For example, a Compile lane might be both Spirit and Life which allows either suit to be played into that lane. Also, the ability to shift/swap the lanes is a key part of the game and each card has multiple abilities that trigger based on different criteria.

It’s just one of the 81 games currently categorized as lane battlers on BGG, with the top ones being: Radlands (2021), Hanamikoji (2013), Battle Line (2000), Air, Land, & Sea (2019), Schotten Totten (1999), and Blood Bowl: Team Manager — The Card Game (2011).

Schotten Totten is a particularly notable example by Reiner Knizia that uses nine lanes.3 Rather than total numerical strength, players try to get ranked combinations of cards: color run, three of a kind, matching colors, or a run of successive values. A player wins when they either control three adjacent lanes or any five lanes.

Lane battlers with more than two players

In most cases the lane battlers are for two players only. While not impossible, a three player lane battle would have to look like a triangle on the table perhaps.4 It gets complicated if everyone’s cards are the same (i.e. pulled from a common deck).

Dogs of War (Mori, 2014) supports 3 - 5 players competing for three lanes. It does this by adding player-specific minis (with fancy hats!) which are used to indicate support for the winning side of each lane battle.5 The cards are from a common pool, but the addition of unique components and player colors allows for more than 2 players.

Are lane battlers actually area control games?

Games like Air, Land, & Sea, Schotten Totten, and Compile are all clearly lane battlers, sharing much of the same mechanical DNA. Games like Dogs of War, however, seem to be less like a lane battler and closer to an area control or area majority game.

This made me wonder if lane battlers are just one-dimensional area control games. If we represented the lanes as a map but retained the same basic mechanisms, would that change how we think about the game?

To test this, let’s look at a few different theoretical iterations of a lane battler design.

Iteration 1: Abstract lanes

First, imagine Air, Land, & Sea, but each player had colored tokens representing their strength rather than cards:

That definitely still looks like a lane battler. There are three clearly distinct lanes that are abstract representations of the theme. Each player places tokens on their side of each lane and then each lane can be resolved one at a time.6

Iteration 2: Thematic lanes

Next, let’s imagine that we represented the three lanes as a thematic 2D map rather than abstract lanes:

I think you’d be able to recreate Air, Land, & Sea in its entirety using a map like this. It wouldn’t look like a lane battler, but it certainly would still be one. In the example above, Orange wins Air and Sea while Green wins Land.

Iteration 3: Thematic lanes with 3 players

To continue with this thought experiment, this new map would allow us to easily have multiple players competing for each lane. They would each have tokens in their own color like this three-player example:

Now it looks even less like a lane battler and more like a classic “troops on a map” area control game. This is a three-way battle across three lanes. In this example, Orange wins Air, Pink wins Sea, and Green wins Land. Again, the tokens are shown as being all the same, but they could be different and each have their own special abilities.

Iteration 4: More thematic lanes and 3 players

Finally, let’s expand this one more time. In this iteration, there are still three players but now the Land lane has been split into three separate lanes called Land Area A, Land Area B, and Land Area C. This gives us five total “lanes” and three players:

This looks even less like a lane battler and instead almost completely like an area control game. The lanes are almost unrecognizable because they are represented as 2D areas on a thematic map. The strength being played into each one is no longer shown as values on cards and instead must be calculated by inspecting each token and adding the associated values together.

Is this still a lane battler?

I don’t know. I’d argue that it could be very mechanically similar to one, but it no longer feels like one. Somewhere between the first iteration and the last, the concept of lane battling is lost.

Applying layers of theme

It’s a fun exercise to wonder how Air, Land, & Sea would be different with a thematic map and unique minis for each unit, but there are also practical considerations. By using just cards and a few VP tokens, the game can fit in a small box and be sold for a very reasonable price. It’s easy to set up, takes up very little table space, and could be played at a coffee shop. The lack of plastic components and large map is one my favorite things about the game.

The trade-off, however, is that it feels more like an abstract game. There’s really no feeling of a battle or war game.

It makes me think back to Sarah Shipp’s layers of theme. Specifically how by making the map thematic (i.e. showing the land and water in 2D), it makes them Layer 2 “baked-in thematic elements.” The shape of the land and how it borders the water becomes an integral part of the game that can’t be avoided when playing.

There is no right or wrong way when designing on the abstract vs. thematic continuum, but it is interesting to think about.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• An interesting design space: While Compile clearly takes much of it’s design inspiration from Air, Land, & Sea, it is a very different game. Even when sharing mechanisms like having three lanes and being able to play cards face down into any lane, it has unique a feel and far different strategies. Then consider Schotten Totten where the goal is to get runs and sets vs. numerical totals. There’s a lot of room in the lane battler family for new and interesting designs.

• They are similar to area control games: I can’t help but see some similarities between lane battlers and area control games. Yes, they are different genres and styles of games, but a lot of that is how they are visually implemented.

• Abstract vs. thematic: I tend to prefer highly thematic games rather than abstract ones, but the distinction between the two isn’t always clear. It is also possible to turn an abstract game into a thematic one without many mechanical changes. The challenge often comes in the component complexity that comes along with it.

What do you think? Have you played any lane battlers that you love? Which lane battlers have you played that support more than two players? Is it helpful to think about the distinction between a lane battler and an area control game?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we looked at how Rauha (Goupy & Rivière, 2023) uses grid-based pattern and activation systems with tiles. Since then, I’ve realized it’s available on Board Game Arena (BGA) and have been able to play it a few more times online. Definitely worth checking out if you get the chance.

This week we are looking at Moon Rings, a solo journaling game from Junk Food Games about witches, blood moons, and the inevitable loss of fingers.

Using card grids in design workshops

I recently taught a tabletop game design class at the Gettysburg Library.1 It’s always fun to chat about games for an evening, but the attendees were particularly engaged and enthusiastic, so it was a really good time. The topics mirrored the crash course I taught at Dickinson College, but I had more time available. This allowed me to have more hands-on activities in each of the four design principles:

1. Know who your game is for.

2. Choose a theme and zoom in.

3. Design for meaningful choices.

4. Think about your game in three acts.

When learning about player agency and meaningful choices, we did what I jokingly call “The Worst Dungeon Crawl Ever” exercise.

Using cards and dice, we intentionally made a really bad game.2

Iteration 1 begins with zero player agency as the player is forced to move to the right each turn. It always results in a horrible player experience (as intended) and quite a few degenerate game states like infinite loops. From there, we do two more iterations to demonstrate how even adding the smallest touch of player agency can (ever so slightly) improve the game.

This exercise always goes over well. At the end I show how after the Nth iteration, you might end up with a game that is quite fun — like Mini Rogue (Di Stefano & Gendron, 2020).

It’s a hands-on way to demonstrate how adding player agency, resources, some graphic design, a story, dice, and other mechanisms can create a really interesting and compelling game.

Moon Rings

It was with that card-based dungeon crawl exercise in mind that I gave Moon Rings by Junk Food Games a try:

“The cursed Blood Moon hangs over this land always. It has brought ruin and despair to everything touched by its crimson light. You are a witch and cannot abide the reign of the Blood Moon any longer.”

As a witch, you must explore a labyrinth to find five moon rings hidden somewhere within — one for each finger. Find all five and the ritual site and you’ll change the moon, breaking the curse. Run out of blood or fail to find enough rings and the game ends in failure.

Gameplay in Moon Rings is based on the card-based grid described in the Carta SRD. Cards are shuffled and dealt out into a 6x4 grid of 24 cards. The player places the Ace of Spades along the outer edge, designating their starting location. Somewhere hidden in the face-down cards is the Ace of Hearts — the ritual site you must find.3

From there, the core game loop has just three steps:

1. Explore: Move to a new, adjacent card and reveal it.

2. Encounter: Look up the card’s rank and suit for a journaling prompt and a target value for the dice roll based on the Aspire SRD.4

3. Journal: Record everything that happened and expand the story of your witch.

Let’s look at how Moon Rings takes the simple card-grid concept and turns it into an interesting narrative-focused game.

Twelve rings and five (or less) fingers

I plan to use Moon Rings as an example in future tabletop game design classes, showing what a card grid game could look like after the Nth iteration.

Which features would I point out? How does it take the simple card concept and turn it into a full game?

Here are four design features that immediately come to mind:

1. Give the player limited resources

Blood is the most obvious resource in the game. It’s your health and life. It starts at 20 and you die when it reaches zero.

Fingers are your other, perhaps less obvious, resource. You have five fingers available at the start of the game, one for each ring necessary to perform the ritual.5 These are more than just slots for rings when you find them, because they are not permanent. It is entirely possible for encounters to cost you a finger upon failure. In fact, I lost two fingers… one of which had a ring on it.6

Rings are the final resource because they too are not permanent. The game begins with an unknown number of them represented by face-down face cards (i.e. Jack, Queen, King) somewhere in the labyrinth’s grid. Failing the encounter with the ring removes it from the game.

2. Force the player to push their luck

Encounters are simple in Moon Rings but add player agency to keep them mechanically interesting. Each one requires a d12 roll vs. a target number — beat the target and you succeed. There might be a benefit for succeeding like getting another spell slot or recovering some blood.

Failure is more tricky. On your first failed roll, you’ll lose 1 blood unless you push your luck with another d12 roll. Fail that one and now you’ll lose 2 blood unless you push your luck a third time. Fail that one and now you lose 2 blood and roll on an extra penalty table. Roll a 12 on that table (like I did twice) and you’ll lose a finger and any rings that happen to be on it.

It’s no secret that I love push-your-luck mechanisms, and this one is no exception. It coaxes you into giving it “just one more try” because the early penalties aren’t too bad. What’s so bad about losing 2 blood instead of 1? And then you might not even lose those 2 blood if you make your third roll. And if you fail that, maybe the extra penalty won’t be so bad.

Next thing you know, you have the hand of a particularly unskilled high school shop teacher.

3. But allow the player to mitigate their luck

As a witch, you have two Magick Abilities that can be used during the game to manipulate the dice: Umbral Shift and Mana Touch. With limited uses, these could be considered resources like blood or fingers.

In practice, they serve a very important role: luck mitigation.

Push-your-luck mechanisms are fun, but can easily veer into pure randomness. With no way to control or manipulate the dice, players can quickly lose interest. A few bad dice rolls and it’s not fun anymore. By giving players a way to mitigate a streak of bad luck, it maintains interest. The number of times they can mitigate bad luck is limited, adding player agency and meaningful choices in when to use the magic.

4. Let the player create a unique story

In a game that is relatively mechanically simple, it’s important to allow the player to create a compelling narrative.

Much like in Necromancer Heretic, the prompts are short but thematic. In just a few sentences, we are confronted with skeletons, creepy puppets, musical animals, blood slimes, and fake rings. Rather than focusing on detailed combat and complex resolution mechanisms, most are a simple d12 roll vs. a target number. Still, there’s enough narrative meat there to work with and create a story.

The arc of the game

Dwindling resources, desperate attempts to push your luck, and responding to the prompts combine to create a game arc in Moon Rings. Although the game loop is fixed (i.e. it’s the same Explore, Encounter, Journal each turn), it feels like the game has a beginning, middle, and end.

At the start, you are at full health (20 blood) and willing to take some chances while the entire labyrinth of cards is unknown. Pretty soon each point of blood matters a lot and using magic to mitigate bad rolls becomes important. Finally, it’s an end-game struggle to get that last ring and get back to the ritual site to stop the Blood Moon.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Card-based grids are a good entry point: I like that both new and experienced designers can find new ways to use a grid of cards to make a game. By using a standard poker or tarot deck, almost anyone can grab a PDF and give it a try. With custom components (cards, dice), designers can make really interesting games with this simple core system.

• Subtle resources: It’s interesting that fingers (5 max) act as a decreasing resource in the game, but they are never explicitly explained that way. Instead it’s a thematic drawing of a hand. You scribble out each one as they are lost. In contrast, blood is explicitly shown as a resource (20 max). This is a concept I’d like to explore in a future article.

• You don’t add a game arc: I’m increasingly convinced that a good game arc emerges from the interactions of the other mechanisms in a game. It’s not a mechanism itself that you just drop in. Sure, you could just say the game has X rounds and therefore it has a beginning, middle, and end, but that just wouldn’t be the same. It’s something that appears when the players interact with the systems.

What do you think? Did I capture what makes Blood Moon a good example of a fully-developed card-grid game? What other games would be good examples to use in future game design classes?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we looked at Before the Bog God by Infinite Citadel, a two-player TTRPG that uses a dice game as a framework for storytelling. And before that we explored how the A Place for All My Books board game split worker placement actions into multiple boards.

This week we are returning to board games with Rauha, but with some thoughts on how its mechanisms could be applied to TTRPGs.

Life has sprung up again on Rauha

While Rauha (Goupy & Rivière, 2023) does have an ostensibly environmental theme, I’d consider it to be almost an abstract tile-laying game:

“After millennia of sterility, life has sprung again on Rauha. As a venerable Shaman, one of its five worlds has been entrusted to you. Your powers are divine and allow you to shape the environment in order to turn this world into a cradle of life energy, keeper of serenity and harmony for the centuries to come.”

The cards (i.e. tiles) used in the game depict various biomes: forest, mountain, crystal, mushroom, and desert.1 In addition, there are other icons for animals: flying, land, and marine.

Over the course of two ages divided into four rounds with three turns each, players simultaneously draft cards and play them onto their player boards.2 Throughout the game, players collect life energy crystals (the currency of the game) and can gain divine powers.

It’s how Rauha uses the grid to trigger actions that I found so interesting. So let’s take a look at (1) how the grid is constructed and (2) how it’s used to trigger actions.

Grid-based pattern building

Each player has a square player board with a 3x3 grid of 9 square spaces. There are starting biomes printed on each space of the board. Some biomes have no actions on them while others have some basic ones such as spending 3 energy to gain 1 spore. Another starting biome might give 1 victory point when activated.

The game uses multiple draft piles with players alternating between the ones to their right or left. At the start of each turn, players draft a card from one of the two piles next to them — either right (stars) or left (moon).

In general, players are trying to choose cards that act as upgrades to their starting biomes.3 Cards are placed anywhere on the grid, covering up any starting biomes or previously played cards. This creates some interesting pattern-building choices:

• Most water icons: Cards with water icons can be worth a lot of points, but only if you have more water icons than everyone else when scoring.

• Matching biome/animal icons: Completing a row or column with matching icons (like tic-tac-toe) allows you to take a Divine Entity tile with new powers.

• Income generation: Most cards have a cost in crystals to play them to your board, so it’s important to have some cards that generate crystals when activated.

• Victory point generation: To win the game, you need the most victory points. So it’s even more important to have biome cards that generate points when activated.

By restricting the grid to just 9 spaces in a 3x3 grid, these competing goals become tough, interesting choices.4 You’ll draft a total of 12 cards throughout the game, discard some, and play others. It’s quite possible you’ll need to cover up a card previously played to try to hit a new, better pattern on the board.

Activating rows and columns

What I found most interesting was Rauha’s grid-based activation system.

After drafting a card each turn, players activate all the biome cards in either a row or a column. Each player has an Avatar token that moves around their player board after each draft to show which one will be activated.

Tokens start at the top left position indicating that all the cards in the leftmost column will activate first. Then they move clockwise around the board so that all the cards in the middle column will activate next, followed by the rightmost column.

Scoring happens every three rounds when the token reaches a corner.

By the fourth round, the top row activates, followed by the middle row, and then the bottom row. Then in the second age, the marker moves across the bottom of the board, activating columns again.

The result is that each row and column will activate just twice in a game. This makes it important to place cards in a way that they will be activated multiple times and in the right order.

Grid-based activation

Although I haven’t played many similar games, I know that grid-based activation systems have been used before. What I found interesting was that in Rauha, the player didn’t control which rows or columns were activated. Instead, it was a fixed rotation controlled by the Avatar token’s clockwise movement around the player boards. The player agency was entirely focused on drafting cards and playing them into the grid.

I could see a similar system being used in other board games and TTRPGs:

• A magic system based on moon phases where you can’t control which grid would activate but you could learn and upgrade which spells would be active.

• A cyberpunk hacking system that blocks certain actions depending on security sweeps or rotating corporate defenses. Instead of activating a row or column, the rotation would block a specific row or column.

While this would make the game feel more like a puzzle, I think it could be done in a thematic way.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Alternative drafting methods: I would have expected the drafting in Rauha to involve passing sets of cards around the table much like Blood Rage or 7 Wonders. Instead it alternates drafts between fixed piles. While I’m not sure it changes much, it shows there is room to innovate when it comes to drafting.

• Use a grid: Playing this game has me thinking about grids in games, particularly tight ones that are 3x3. With just 9 spots, even print and play games could include printable custom cards. The potential use in both fantasy and cyberpunk settings is compelling!

• Puzzle elements: The tight decision space and need to plan ahead makes Rauha feel very “puzzle-ly” and potentially a “brain-burner” as board gamers would say. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on the kinds of fun you want your players to have.

What do you think? Have you tried any games with grid-based activation systems? I’m particularly interested in hearing about examples from TTRPGs.

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we looked at how A Place for All My Books uses both personal and shared player boards to create a cycle of worker placement actions. Over at Exeunt Omnes, there was update on Epsilon and how it will use a pointcrawl map.

Nominations for The Bloggies are open through January 31, 2026. I’d truly appreciate your support by nominating a Skeleton Code Machine article. Anything written between December 1, 2024 and December 31, 2025 is eligible.1

This week, we are making wishes and performing rituals with Before the Bog God by Infinite Citadel.

Before the Bog God

I backed Before the Bog God when it was on Kickstarter, and it recently arrived.2 Written by Andrew Beauman and Matt Best of Infinite Citadel. It’s a slim, 25-page “duet ritual game of cunning, corruption, and cosmic bargains.”3

One player acts as The Wisher who wants to claim a wish or some other unspoken bargain with the opposing player. The other is The Old God, presumably the Bog God of the title, but might also be a “smirking leviathan” or “winged aberration.” Together they will perform an adversarial ritual — almost like a negotiation.4

The two players assume these roles and perform some setup:

• The Wisher rolls six dice and places them in a row.

• The Old God gets three dice to start which are kept hidden, and gets a chance to swap two of The Wisher’s dice.

With that, the game begins. Players alternate taking turns in which they perform one of their possible actions and respond to a narrative prompt.

It’s a back and forth competition using a rather interesting dice mechanism.5 The Wisher wants to seal (i.e. lock in) all of their dice with one pattern. The Old God wants to thwart this by sealing in the wrong pattern.

The Wisher

The Wisher needs to seal all of their dice in a specific sequence. All dice must be within 1 pip of their neighbor: greater than by 1, less than by 1, or equal to their neighbor. Dice are sealed (i.e. shifted out of the line and locked) when they are equal to their neighbor. For example, if two adjacent dice are both sixes, they would be pushed out of line and sealed for the rest of the game.6

To do this, they can perform a few different actions:

1. Nudge: Modify a die by +1/-1.

2. Recast: Re-roll a die.

3. Seal: Seal all dice with matching values.

4. Bargain: Once per game, set a die to a value and seal it.

These actions are not free. Almost all of them increase your corruption. Once corruption hits 3, it resets back to 0, and The Old God gain another die to use.

The Old God

The opposing Old God wants to prevent The Wisher from completing the sequence described above. They win if they manage to seal The Wisher’s dice in any sequence other than the desired one.

Like The Wisher, they have a few actions they can perform to accomplish this:

1. Stir Dark & Generous Hearts: Unseal a die and change it to a six.

2. Bide Thy Time: Modify one of The Old God’s dice by +1/-1.

3. Equivalence: Increase one die by 1 and decrease another by 1.

4. Baleful Transformation: Force The Wisher to re-roll some of their dice.

5. Wither: Decrease one die by 2.

Much like The Wisher’s actions, these are not free. Most of them require spending a die, removing it from the game. Some require a specific value to trigger the action. The only way to gain more dice as The Old God is to wait for The Wisher to increase their corruption.

A dice game wrapped in chthonic ritual

One thing I appreciate in solo (or duet) TTRPGs is when they have a mechanical core that is so well crafted that it almost stands on its own, regardless of the narrative and storytelling elements that make the game what it is. Meaning if you strip the game of its theme, would the underlying mechanical bones still be kind of fun to play.

Inside Before the Bog God is an interesting little dice game. Even if the ritual prompts are ignored, it retains an element of competitive fun. I could see this being played much like the other traditional dice games I described during Dice Week.

This doesn’t mean the underlying game needs to be perfectly balanced and finely tuned like a board game.7 But having a core that is still fun to play when stripped of theme is a really good indication that the overall game will be a good experience.

A more accessible type of game

This can be important because not everyone is going to be willing or able to roleplay at the same level. Some players will easily step into the role of The Wisher or The Old God and have no problem crafting a story based on the provided prompts. Other players may, however, struggle when facing a prompt — their mind going blank at the thought of how to advance the story.

By having a good mechanical core, there is a chance the game becomes more accessible to both types of the player — the seasoned roleplayer and the shy newcomer. They can both feel like they are participating in the mechanisms of the game fully, even if not in the narrative storytelling.

Not every game needs to meet the needs and expectations of every player. It’s OK to make games for talented and experienced storytellers. But it’s also nice when there are games that might be an easy entry point for new players of the genre.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Check the mechanical core of your game: This is obvious and a necessity when designing a board game or card game. It’s less obvious when making a storytelling game or TTRPG. As an exercise, try to see how the game plays with some or all of the storytelling elements (e.g. narrative prompts) skipped or removed.

• Duel/duet games are popular: If you follow board games, you’ve seen the recent explosion of “Duel” versions of seemingly every popular game. It’s hard to get a group together to play, and solo games have filled some of that gap. Duet games expand that player count a little bit, allowing it to be easily played with a partner or roommate.

• Consider solo play in duet games: I was actually able to run through Before the Bog God as a solo game and it was still an enjoyable experience. The key challenge is when there is hidden information in a game, which there is in this one. So while knowing the values of The Bog God’s dice did change the game a little, it didn’t break it. If you make a duet game, consider what changes need to be made for players to try it solo.

What do you think? Are there any other duet TTRPGs that you’ve played and enjoyed? How do you feel testing the mechanical core of a game separate from the theme? What bargains have you made with The Old Gods?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

With 2025 behind us, I spent some time thinking about how this newsletter and the business as a whole is doing.1 If you missed them, take a moment to check out the Skeleton Code Machine Annual Review and Exeunt Press Year-End Review.

Thank you so much for your support including purchases from the Exeunt Press Shop and taking time to fill out the annual reader survey.

This week we are looking at an interesting twist on worker placement in A Place for All My Books.

But first…

Nominate SCM for a Bloggie award!

Each year The Bloggies celebrate the best blogs and writing in the world of tabletop roleplaying games. Submissions are open now through January 31, 2026. I’d be honored if you took a moment to send in a link to a Skeleton Code Machine post.

Two eligible articles to consider are:

• Everything is Pointcrawl!

  • Exploring hexcrawls, pointcrawls, and other crawls to see if everything is actually just a pointcrawl. How we can reduce the illusion of choice and instead have players make meaningful decisions? (December 2, 2025)

• Playing the Chaplain’s Game

  • Exploring the use of coins as a divination mechanism in Mechs to Plowshares, a solo TTRPG about war, anxiety, paranoia, identity, and purpose by Anomalous Entertainment. (April 22, 2025)

Of course any article posted between December 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025 is eligible. Feel free to submit your favorite!

And now to this week’s topic…

A Place for All My Books

Released in 2025, A Place for All My Books is “a puzzley book gathering, sorting, and organizing game” designed by Alex Cutler and Michael Mihealsick. In the game, players move stacks of colored books around their apartment, complete personal projects, and recharge/spend their social battery to acquire more books.

It is a worker placement game. Players take turns moving a piece representing a worker (in this case your reader persona) to various locations on either their personal apartment board or the shared village board. Each location is associated with an action that is triggered by placing your worker there.

For example, each player’s personal apartment board includes:

• Gather: Take the top book from stacks and combine them.

• Sort: Distribute a single stack to multiple spaces.

• Admire: Complete project.

• Rest: Gain new projects to complete and increase social battery.

• Read a book: Increase social battery and move a single book.

These actions allow you to move the little wooden book pieces around your apartment, stacking them in your bedroom, den, kitchen, and bathroom.2 Gather and sort enough and you can complete objective cards (i.e. “little projects”) such as “Have 3+ tall stacks that have no Blue books.” or “Have a full column where the top book of each stack is the same color.”

The player’s personal apartment board actions can only be used by the owner, and are never blocked by the opposing player.3 This is not the case with the shared village board actions.

Leaving the house to acquire more books

The interesting part of A Place for My Books is the use of a single currency (i.e. social battery) to control the flow of workers to and from personal and shared player boards.

There is a special action on each personal apartment board called Leave the House that costs 5 social battery and moves your worker to the shared village board. Once there, you can immediately take one of the village actions: gain books at the library or bookstore, gain a special item at the shops, or exchange a book. All of these actions cost more social battery, usually in the range of 1 - 9 per action.

After your social battery has been drained, you can decide to return to your apartment. New books are offloaded into stacks in your apartment and play resumes on your personal apartment board.

Because the village board is shared and spaces are limited (e.g. there is only one Bookstore action space), there is a little bit of player interaction. Still, there is no action blocking. Instead players can bump (i.e. “nudge”) a player’s worker to the Town Park where they gain more social battery. Actions are never fully blocked.

Moving to and from the village

In many ways, A Place for All My Books is a pretty standard worker placement game combined with tile laying and stacking. Having both personal and shared worker placement action selection boards in a game isn’t uncommon either. What I find interesting is the flow of the game where workers move to and from the boards:

1. Charge up in apartment: Players need to spend time taking actions on their apartment board: gathering, sorting, reading, admiring. All of those actions increase social battery.

2. Go to village and spend: Once they have 5+ social battery, they can go to the village but would be left with no battery left to take actions there. So it probably makes sense to get your social battery to 11-19 before making the trip.

3. Return home to do it again: Then, after taking some actions and depleting the battery, it’s time to return to the apartment board game. This cycle then repeats throughout the game.

This wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if you had free access to choose apartment or village actions at any time. Nor would it be as interesting if you could easily hop back and forth between the boards. It takes effort to go to the village board, and you are there until you decide you are done.

Both mechanically and thematically, it feels meaningful to travel to and from the apartment and village.

Other applications

I couldn’t help but think of how this type of mechanism could be used in other games:

• Fantasy questing: Players spend time in the town gathering supplies, resting, gaining allies, and preparing. When ready, they spend resources to travel to the quest location (e.g. dragon’s lair) and all actions there are costly. Eventually they need to return home to the town and begin the cycle again.

• Cyberpunk hacking: Players spend time at a safe location (i.e. the bar or safehouse) preparing for a heist — brain stims, credits, gear. After they have enough resources, they launch the heist. Hacking and sneaking is costly, and eventually they need to bail.

In some ways, this is just theme applied to a core game loop. In the context of worker placement, however, it is a way to make a potentially abstract game feel more thematic.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Worker placement is popular: As a form of action drafting, worker placement is a popular, modern game mechanism: Dune Imperium (2020), A Feast for Odin (2016), Lost Ruins of Arnak (2020), Barrage (2019), and Everdell (2018).4 Even if you plan to only make TTRPGs, I think it is worthwhile to understand how worker placement work mechanically and to think about why it is so popular with players.

• Cycles can be satisfying: I found the cycle of moving to and from the apartment to be one of the more satisfying parts of A Place for All My Books. I am, similarly, a fan of cycles in games as mentioned with the token pool in Sakura Arms. These cycles are slightly different than the game’s core game loop.

• Making actions feel meaningful: If it were too easy to take actions in both the apartment and village, they wouldn’t feel important. It is only because the player needs to work and “build up” to leaving the apartment that it feels important. It’s worth considering actions that can only be taken after some time and effort on the part of the player.

What do you think? Have you seen a similar personal vs. shared action selection board in other worker placement games? Do you enjoy having to work toward taking a larger or more powerful action in a game?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Happy New Year!

Thank you so much for being part of the Skeleton Code Machine community. Your love of games, design insights, and thoughtful comments motivates me to post a new article every Tuesday. For three years, you’ve given me some of your most precious resource — your attention. I appreciate it.

As is tradition, it’s time to look at the data from the Skeleton Code Machine Annual Reader Survey and see if we can identify a few things to think about.

A growing community

As of today, Skeleton Code Machine now has over 5,300 subscribers (+49% change YOY), having crossed the 5k mark back in September. That’s a shocking increase considering the site had zero subscribers in January 2023 and about 1,500 in January 2024. If you are new here, thank you for subscribing!

You are a game designer

Over three-quarters (77%) of Skeleton Code Machine readers do some sort of tabletop game design. That design work could be as a hobby or professionally. It might be board games or TTRPGs. It skews heavily toward TTRPG design (46%) vs. board games (13%) which makes sense based on both article content and barrier to entry for board game production. Interestingly, 18% of survey responders design both TTRPGs and board games.

About a little less than a quarter (23%) of readers do not consider themselves to be game designers yet. If you are one of them, welcome. I hope Skeleton Code Machine can inspire you to make weird games sometime soon.

Related to that, I’m happy to share that the percentage of readers who are aware of Unpub and Break My Game has significantly increased. Last year’s survey showed that only 29% of readers were aware of at least one of the two organizations. That has increased to 50% this year and includes a larger sample size. Unpub was the highest with 27%.

I’m sure the articles on playtesting and pitching at Unpub helped.

Every Tuesday no matter what

One of the top themes in both last year’s survey and this year’s survey was an appreciation for the consistency of posts. Readers know that a new Skeleton Code Machine article will go live every Tuesday morning without fail. It’s something they can look forward to each week.

My writing streak now spans three years without missing a single Tuesday post. Holidays and plague could not stop me this year!

The total number of posts is down a little bit from 74 in 2024 to 63 in 2025 (-14.9% change) — still more than 4 posts/month on average. This is due to a shift in how I handle longer articles.1 Previously, I would break up longer posts into a series of smaller ones. Based on feedback, I’ve largely stopped doing that and instead just post the longer articles as a single piece. I’m happy to report that the survey results agree with this change, so that’s how I’ll continue in the future.2

Weekly email is the most popular format

While Skeleton Code Machine is a newsletter, it is available via other channels as well. It can be read on the web, via an app, or via RSS.

Here’s what the survey said:

• Email is preferred: Most readers (66%) prefer to read Skeleton Code Machine via email with smaller numbers using the web (17%) or the Substack app (17%). I did get a few comments lamenting that I did not give RSS as an option! I’ll be sure to include that one in next year’s survey. Otherwise, these results are largely unchanged from previous years.

• Weekly is the way: An overwhelming 78% of readers enjoy the weekly post frequency and would like to keep it that way. And while I appreciate the enthusiasm of the one person who wants me to switch to daily emails, I unfortunately can’t do that. :)

• Most read every article: An impressive 91% of survey responses said you either read every post (53%) or almost every post (38%).

• Don’t miss the archive: Despite my best efforts, only 72% of readers are aware that every Skeleton Code Machine article is available for free in the archive. If you missed one, you don’t have to hunt for the email.

Tabletop game design theory

When asked, “Select the type of Skeleton Code Machine posts that you enjoy. You can choose as many as you like.” the answer was loud and clear. You want to continue to see a mixture of board game and tabletop roleplaying game design theory and mechanisms. The “general tabletop game design theory” option was the most popular (92%) with TTRPG mechanisms (86%) and board game mechanisms (79%) close behind.

There continues to be interest in a limited number of tutorials (63%), interviews (50%), and retro games (46%).

At the bottom are two topics that I try to avoid which include Top 10 lists (41%) and general news and updates (37%). So no worries there.

Text articles, printed books, and game jams

Every year I ask, “When it comes to additional Skeleton Code Machine content, which format would you prefer?” The options always include a few formats that don’t currently exist but would theoretically be added (e.g. YouTube videos, Discord server, puppet show, etc.).

My key takeaway this year is that text articles (70%) and printed guides (like ADVENTURE!) are what people want. I’m really happy to see this. Based on my limited time and resources, I’m shelving the idea of a YouTube channel (33%) until at least 2027.

It’s also interesting that game jams scored so highly this year (44%). I’d love to run one and have an idea of what it would look like. Should I make that happen?

There’s basically no interest in a Discord server (17%) or short-form social media (10%).

More of this and less of that

I asked what you want to see more of and what you want to see less of at Skeleton Code Machine. The results were interesting.

Some say there is too much board game content and not enough TTRPG content. Others say there is too much TTRPG content and not enough board game content.3 But without a doubt, both types are popular. I’ll continue to play, think about, and share both.

Wargames (historical or skirmish) were among the least popular, although still a net positive “want more” vs. “want less.” The real loser of this question was 18XX train games which was the only topic with a net negative score. I’ve never covered an 18XX train game and yet people want even less! Noted.

Tumulus readership is growing

I launched Tumulus, the Skeleton Code Machine print-only, quarterly zine, in December 2023. It’s a project I’m extremely excited about as I mentioned in the Exeunt Press Year-End Review. Subscriptions are growing and single back issues are very popular too.

Last year at this time 26% of readers had never heard of Tumulus according to the survey, despite the launch and many announcements. This year that number has been cut in half to 12%.

Tumulus Issue 05 “Step into the fairy ring.” (December 2025) is shipping now and the upcoming issue themes have been announced:

• Issue 06. Hammer a nail in the coffin. (March 2026)

• Issue 07. Slay the dragon. (June 2026)

• Issue 08. Insert coin to continue. (September 2026)

Be sure to select the issues that you want when placing a four-issue subscription order!

The hot games of the year

I asked what the best “new to you” game of 2025 was for both board games and TTRPGs. Here’s what you said:

• Board games: No clear winner in this category, but Harmonies, Civolution, Arcs, Flip 7, and Compile all received quite a few mentions. Two player games were very popular. What was most striking to me was that many (most?) of the games were older titles, not ones released in 2025. Skeleton Code Machine readers are not part of the Cult of the New when it comes to games.

• TTRPGs: This category did have some winners: Mythic Bastionland, Mothership, and Shadowdark. OSR and rules-light style games were the most popular with titles like Dolmenwood, Cairn, OSE, Pirate Borg, MÖRK BORG, Into the Odd, and Dragonbane mentioned.4 Horror seems to be the most popular genre in a broad sense. Dungeons & Dragons mentions were largely absent.

Other comments and observations

Many of the survey questions allowed for freeform text. Those are a little harder to visualize with charts and graphs, but often provide valuable feedback. I’ve read every single comment and here are a few thoughts:

• Mechanical break downs and analysis: This was the single, loudest signal in the data. Readers repeatedly said they enjoy game mechanisms over reviews and opinions. You like isolating and exploring a single subsystem out of a larger game. Pros and cons of a mechanism with examples. No hot takes. No filler content.

• Consistent voice and tone: Readers appreciate the tone and style of Skeleton Code machine, saying that it’s clear, readable, and a good balance of technical thought and approachability. A bit academic but easy to read. I’m happy to hear this because I’m pretty much unable to write any other way! If you’ve ever met me in person, this is exactly how I talk. So… this is what you get. :)

• I write about my current obsession: From the beginning, I’ve selected Skeleton Code Machine topics based on what I’m currently playing and thinking about. That means that some weeks it might be a board game and other weeks it is a TTRPG. For readers, this provides a mix (albeit an unpredictable one) of topics that is appreciated. That will continue to be how I write in the new year!

• Murphdog is a good girl: I have shared all the lovely comments to Murphdog and she appreciates them all. She’s the hardest working employee of Exeunt Press.

And to the many people who had very kind words about taking a break so I don’t burn out, thank you. Don’t worry. Writing Skeleton Code Machine is a pleasure for me and still doesn’t feel like work. But I really do appreciate the concern.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Consistent survey results: I’m surprised how similar this year’s survey was to last year’s survey, even with a larger sample size. You appreciate the same things and want to continue seeing the same things. The biggest changes were the increased exposure of Unpub and Tumulus — both good to see!

• I assure you we have an archive: Despite putting a link in every article and including it in the welcome email, almost 30% of readers still didn’t know we have an archive of all past posts. I don’t know what else to do!

• Kind and thoughtful readers: Asking for open feedback on the modern Internet is a risky proposition. And yet, you provided kind words and honest, thoughtful feedback. I really do appreciate it, and it makes writing Skeleton Code Machine each week a pleasure. Thank you.

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

The last two weeks, we’ve looked at small, abstract card games — Circus Flohcati and its dynamic market and Soda Jerk with its potentially negative points.

This week we are turning to TTRPGs and how they handle ammunition in games with ranged weapons. Should we track every arrow fired or just when it makes narrative sense? Do we care how many bullets are left in the magazine? Do we even need to track ammo?

But first…

📋✏️ Last call for the Annual Reader Survey

The 3rd annual Skeleton Code Machine Reader Survey is live. Please take a moment to complete it. Let me know what you want to see more (or less) of each week, and also the best new (to you) game of 2025. The survey is open through December 31, 2025.

Ammo in CY_BORG

In MÖRK BORG with its dark fantasy and vaguely medieval setting, much of the combat is melee (i.e. hit someone with something). Attacks are resolved with an ability roll (Test) versus a difficulty rating (DR):

1. Player: “Therg attacks the skeleton with a flail!”

2. Test Strength DR 12:

   1. Roll 1d20 + Strength Ability vs. DR 12

   2. If the result is ≥ 12, it hits and you roll for damage (d8).

   3. Otherwise, it’s a miss.

The process for using a ranged weapon (e.g. crossbow) is similar, but uses Presence as the key ability for the test rather than Strength. There are no explicitly defined rules for managing ammunition in the game.1 It’s up to the GM to figure out when it makes sense to deal with how many arrows or bolts a player has left.

CY_BORG has a futuristic cyberpunk setting where projectile weapons are the norm — pistols, SMGs, rifles, and rocket launchers.2 With more focus on guns, it makes sense to worry a bit more about ammo management. The game still uses Presence tests for most ranged weapons, but adds the ability to autofire and tracks ammo depletion.

Autofire

Some CY_BORG weapons are capable of autofire, noted with an “a” after their normal damage (e.g. SmartGun d6a). Attacks using autofire use an Agility test rather than Presence for up to three consecutive attacks:

“Test Agility D12 to hit and then roll for damage. Hits also allow a second attack, against either the same target or another one nearby, up to a maximum of three attacks. Check armor for each hit.” (p. 82)

I’d imagine this as spraying bullets in a very John Wick and/or Matrix sort of way.3

Ammo depletion

So with guns all over and the potential for autofire bursts, how does CY_BORG stay “rules light” while tracking ammunition?

Ammo is abstracted away from counting individual bullets. Instead, after the end of each combat encounter, players do a single roll to see if they are out of ammo or not. They roll a d8 for each weapon they fired and on a result of 1-3, they are out of ammo and need to reload. This could be a new magazine or some other method of reloading.

If the gun’s autofire capability was used, a d6 is rolled instead. The same 1-3 results trigger an out-of-ammo reload.

This eliminates the need to track individual rounds, but still gives some sense of expenditure of a limited resource. The combat stays fast and fun while it’s happening, but you might be out of ammo at the end.

It also creates a thematic connection between autofiring and ammo expenditure. A regular gun using a d8 for the ammo check has a 3:8 (37.5%) chance of running out of ammo. An autofired gun has a significantly higher 3:6 (50%) chance of running out.

Other methods of ammo management

I’ll save an in-depth look at ammo management alternatives for future articles, but a few are worth mentioning here:

• Every shot: Tactical, simulationist approaches to TTRPGs will often have the player track each individual bullet or arrow. You fire a shot and mark it off, maintaining an exact count. GURPS and Shadowrun are examples.4

• Ammo dice: Twilight: 2000 tracks ammo down to the number of rounds left in a weapon’s magazine to set the maximum number of ammo dice that can be used during an attack. Adding more ammo dice might increase damage, but the sum of the dice determines how much ammo is spent after the attack.

• Light ammo tracking: Mothership has some suggested house rules in the Warden’s Guide including Light Ammo Tracking: “Players only track ammo when it seems relevant narratively. Then assume the players have 1d5 shots remaining.”5

• Usage dice: Perplexing Ruins’ Fallen and quite a few others use usage dice or supply dice to track consumables like ammo. A supply might begin with a d20 that gets rolled after use. On a 1-2 result, the size of the die is decreased: d20 → d12 → d10 → d8 → d6 → d4. After a 1-2 is rolled on a d4, the item is fully consumed and gone. This has the added benefit of being able to start items anywhere along the usage path from d20 to d4.

All ammunition management systems are a balance between tactical simulation (i.e. track every round) and narrative abstraction (i.e. you run out of ammo when it makes sense for the story).

The CY_BORG method of a single ammo check roll with fixed dice (d6 or d8) seems like an elegant solution to a complex design problem. Whether or not that solution works for you and your players depends on the kind of fun you want to have.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Ammo tracking is a design choice: There’s no “right” answer when it comes to ammunition tracking in games. It depends on the type of game you want to make, who the game is for, and what type of experience you want to create.

• See how others have done it: There seems to be an endless number of ways to solve ammo tracking in tabletop games. Most are a mix of styles and methods, trying to balance simulation vs. narrative. Doing a survey of other systems is a good way to start thinking about your own.

• Create thematic connections to mechanisms: CY_BORG’s ammo system is extremely simple and abstract, but it does have a connection between theme and mechanism: autofiring makes it more likely to run out of ammo. It’s not complicated, but it does make sense.

What do you think? Does CY_BORG’s ammo method solve the problem in a simple way or does it abstract away too much? What are some other interesting and effective ways to track ammunition in TTRPGs or board games?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we looked at how Circus Flohcati keeps the card market feeling fresh with a push-your-luck mechanism. It’s interesting because it doesn’t directly rely on the usual dynamic market solutions like incentives or purges (discards).

This week we are looking at another card-based game: Soda Jerk, designed by Chris Yi who you may have seen on The Dice Tower.

But first…

📋✏️ Last chance for the reader survey!

There’s still time to take the annual reader survey before it closes on December 31, 2025. It’s a chance to say what you want more (or less) of and to share your favorite games of the year. In just a few minutes, you can help guide the future of Skeleton Code Machine. I really appreciate hearing from you. Do it for Murphdog.

Being a jerk in Soda Jerk

The premise of Soda Jerk (Yi, 2025) is simple: “Mix matching flavors to make the cards in your hand worth more — or sour the batch for everyone else!”

There are five soda flavors represented by cards (beautifully illustrated by Sai Beppu) arranged in a row on the table: Strawberry, Blueberry, Banana, Kiwi, and Orange.1 These are the five “soda taps” that will act as individual scoring piles in the game.

The cards, each with a flavor-suit and rank, are dealt to players with the number based on player count (10-13 cards each). Then players take turns where they can do one of two actions:

1. Place a flavor card: The player places one card from their hand face down below any flavor (tap) of their choice. For example, they could put a Blueberry 2 card below the matching Blueberry flavor or any of the other non-matching flavors. We’ll see why this matters in a moment.

2. Flip a flavor card: Instead of placing a card, the player can flip a card from face down to face up. This reveals the card for the rest of the game.

When either (a) a player has three cards left in their hand, or (b) all players flip a card consecutively, the round ends.

Scoring is based on the final value of each flavor, but here is where it gets interesting:

• Matching flavor cards (e.g. a Kiwi card below the Kiwi flavor) add their value to the flavor’s end-of-round total value.

• Non-matching flavor cards (e.g. a Kiwi card below the Orange flavor) subtract their value from the flavor’s end-of-round value.

Each player then reveals the cards remaining in their hand and scores points equal to the final value of each flavor tap times the number of cards matching that flavor. For example, if Orange is worth 4 and a player has 3 Orange cards, they would score 12 points.

But with the ability to add non-matching cards that subtract value, it is entirely possible to tank a flavor’s value (i.e. “sour the batch”) and make it worth negative victory points.2

Soda Jerk is a mixture of bluffing, hidden information, and trying to manipulate the value of each of the flavors.

Stock manipulation and speculation

Pete of the Decision Space podcast recently posted a Top 10 Games of 2025 thread which included the following mention of Soda Jerk (#8):

“I keep putting this micro stock speculation-y game on the table and it just keeps delivering. Perfect small box game with brutal player interaction and juicy hidden information. Maybe the best game in Allplay’s tiny line. This almost replaces Startups for me due to easy onboarding.”

What stood out to me was describing it as a stock speculation game, something I hadn’t considered during the times I played it. Looking at reviews, it is quite often described as a simple stock manipulation game. The BGG entry even lists commodity speculation as one of the core mechanisms:

A subcategory of Investment in which players buy and sell commodities of various types and quantities as they change value throughout the game.

Commodity Speculation includes both Investment games in which players have some indirect control over asset values, but have a hard time hurting others without hurting themselves; and Collusion games, in which players have huge direct control in manipulating asset values, forcing players to help others and manage shifting alliances.

And that’s exactly what Soda Jerk is! Players are trying to manipulate the value of each soda flavor — not by buying and selling like a normal stock game, but by playing cards into each of the flavor tap columns.

Each addition of a matching card makes the “stock” (i.e. value) of that flavor go up, while non-matching cards make the value drop. The twist is that with largely hidden information, the true value of each flavor is mostly unknown at any point in the game. The only way to reveal some of the information is to spend your entire turn to flip a card face up.

The cards you hold in your hand until the end of the round are your speculation on which stocks you think will be worth the most. You need to dump the ones that will have negative value before it is too late.

Other commodity speculation games include Clans of Caledonia (Al-JouJou, 2017), Modern Art (Knizia, 1992), Tinners’ Trail (Wallace, 2021), Stockpile (Sobol & Orden, 2015), and Vegetable Stock (Zong-Ger, 2019).3

Soda Jerk and The King is Dead

The other notable part of Soda Jerk is how it uses an influence vs. control mechanism not unlike how The King is Dead: Second Edition (Sylvester, 2020) to determine the victory points paid out at the end of the round.

In The King is Dead, players manipulate three factions represented by cubes on a map of Britain: Scottish, Welsh, and English. No player ever controls or plays as one of the factions. Instead, every action manipulates the game state: adding faction cubes, removing cubes, or shifting them between the various territories.

At the end of The King is Dead, you want to have the most cubes of the most powerful in your court (i.e. play area). This is infuriatingly difficult, however, because pulling a faction’s cube to your court weakens its position on the board.

In a similar way, adding cards to a flavor in Soda Jerk increases the value of that flavor, but at the same time decreases the number of flavor cards of that suit in your hand. You need the cards in your hand to act as multipliers for scoring, but you have to play them onto the flavor taps to have the flavors worth points. Every move both strengthens and weakens your position.

Two other notable games that use this “influence vs. control” style play are Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition (Eklund & Eklund, 2021) and Pax Pamir: Second Edition (Wehrle, 2019).4 Both are much, much heavier games with historical themes, but they too have factions not controlled by any one player. Instead players want to be aligned with the most powerful faction at the end of the game.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• Stock manipulation: You might think commodity manipulation mechanisms only work in games where you are buying and selling cotton, stone, whiskey, sheep, and butter. But the idea of player-controlled, changing value is a really interesting one that can be applied in non-obvious ways with unexpected themes.

• Mechanisms span heavy and light games: It can be an interesting exercise to break games down into their component mechanisms. You start to see that while some games are big and complex (e.g. Pax Renaissance) and some are small and light (Soda Jerk), they can share many of the same mechanisms. This is a skill you can develop over time that will help you both analyze and design tabletop games.

• Both strengthen and weaken: Forcing players to make painful choices can be a valid design goal, depending on the kind of fun you want the players to have. Having a way to make each action both strengthen a player’s position but also weaken it in a different way is a great way to accomplish this. Of the topics in this article, I think this concept has the most potential and application in TTRPGs.

What do you think? Have you played any games with non-obvious stock or commodity manipulation mechanisms? What about influence vs. control games? Let me know in the comments!

— E.P. 💀

P.S. Want more in-depth and playable Skeleton Code Machine content? Subscribe to Tumulus and get four quarterly, print-only issues packed with game design inspiration at 33% off list price. Limited back issues available. 🩻

Skeleton Code Machine is a production of Exeunt Press. All previous posts are in the Archive on the web. Subscribe to TUMULUS to get more design inspiration. If you want to see what else is happening at Exeunt Press, check out the Exeunt Omnes newsletter.

Skeleton Code Machine and TUMULUS are written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. TUMULUS and Skeleton Code Machine are Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press.

For comments or questions: games@exeunt.press

Last week we learned how to make your own TTRPG bookmark, including some mechanisms that use the book itself as part of the game. This coincided with Unknown Dungeon’s TTRPG Bookmark Game Jam that wrapped up over the weekend. I encourage you to check out the 189 submissions to the jam. There are so many creative ideas in there!

This week we are looking at static and dynamic card markets. It’s a topic we’ve explored previously, but Circus Flohcati (Knizia, 1998) has me thinking about it in a new way.1

But first…

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Static and dynamic card markets

With the creation of BEEP BEEP DANGER and the release of the Turtchester MVP, I’ve been thinking a lot about card markets.2

At face value, they seem pretty simple:

• Some number of cards are displayed in a common pool (i.e. market), available to all players.

• Players take turns selecting items from the common pool, pulling cards into their private collection (e.g. hand or tableau).

• The cards in the market are replaced or refreshed in some way after a player finishes. This could be by drawing a new card or removing old cards.

But as we saw when I last wrote about static and dynamic markets, getting an open draft market right is tricky.

As a refresher, there are two major types of card markets that are defined by how cards are cycled through them:

• Static: The cards do not frequently change during the game and/or they only are refreshed when a player takes a card. All cards that will be available during the game are available right from the start. Dominion (base game) is an example of this where the Kingdom Card piles are selected at setup and do not change.

• Dynamic: There are mechanisms built into the game to ensure that the market is always changing and refreshed. There can be a large variety of cards in the game and only a subset of the total cards are available during play. Ascension, Shards of Infinity, Pax Renaissance, and Pax Pamir are all examples of games with dynamic card markets.

Of course, many games mix the concepts of static and dynamic markets. The Quest for El Dorado and Ascension are two that immediately come to mind.

The dreaded clogged market

The danger is that a dynamic market (i.e. one in which the cards should be changing over time) can get “clogged” with unwanted cards. This often happens when the market is a fixed size (e.g. 5 cards) and less desirable cards are not purged from the system. Players continue to take the more desirable cards, leaving nothing but unwanted cards in the market. Eventually players are forced to take cards they really don’t want, just because there are no better choices.

This isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s not something I prefer in most games.3

In the case of Turtchester, I wanted binary choices for most decision spaces — two cards in the market and two cards in player hands. Play one of the two cards in your hand, and then take one of the two cards in the market. This led to the possibility of both a clogged market (i.e. one of the two cards in the market was extremely undesirable) and clogged hands (i.e. players might end up with a card they never wanted to play).

One solution (currently in the draft) is that players can choose to draw a random card from the top of the deck. Then, after taking the card, all cards in the market are discarded and new ones are drawn into the display — a drastic but effective way to unclog the market.

The Circus Flohcati card market

Playing Circus Flohcati, an abstract set-collection card game, I was struck by how elegant of a card market mechanism it had.4 In classic Knizia style, it is simple and creates just a touch of push your luck tension.

Here’s how it works:

1. On your turn, you may choose one card from the card market (i.e. “Circus”) from any of the face up cards. The card goes into your hand.

2. If there are no cards in the market or you don’t want any of the cards, you can instead draw a card from the top of the deck.

3. The new card is placed into the market and expands the available options of the market — unless it’s the same color card as a card already in the market.

4. If the new card is the same color, it is discarded (i.e. not placed into the market) and your turn immediately ends. You can’t reveal more cards, you can’t take any cards, and you can’t form a set to score points.5

This creates a player-driven dynamic market that constantly changes in size.

The market might start with one card, but a player might try to push their luck. If lucky, they might be able to draw 2-4 cards to get the one they want. But this expands the market for future players. They will get the benefit of a larger market without any of the risk.

It also depends on the distribution of colors in the market. With a wide array of colors shown, pulling a duplicate is likely and therefore players won’t want to take a risk. But when only a few colors are in the market (even if there are more cards), the risk might be low enough that a player will attempt to draw more cards.

A simple mechanism, but one that increases player agency without adding a large amount of mechanical complexity.

Expanding options, but at a cost

In Dutch auction systems (one of my favorite mechanisms), undesirable options are increasingly discounted until someone eventually selects this. In some games, this discount can even go negative, resulting in the player gaining money/resources for making the purchase. The amount of discount depends on how unattractive the option is compared to the rest of the market.

Circus Flohcati takes a different approach where “bad cards” aren’t discounted. Instead players can choose during any turn to expand the market. They can draw cards and get as large of a market as they’d like… but only up to a point. Each new pull increases the risk of drawing a duplicate color.

You can expand the market, but at a potentially high cost — effectively losing a turn while at the same time benefiting the next player in turn order!

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• There’s nothing simple about open draft markets: Certainly adding a simple card market to a game is easy. The complexity comes when you decide what type of experience you want players to have. If the market is static or dynamic and the size of the market all impact things like randomness and player agency. It’s tricky if you want to craft the best experience possible.

• Clogged markets can be a problem: They aren’t always a problem, but I personally prefer a dynamic market. It just isn’t much fun when there are unwanted cards sitting in the market for most of the game. Using discard methods and/or incentives are a way to unclog them.

• There are many potential solutions: Circus Flohcati takes an interesting approach to dynamic markets in that it uses push your luck risk management to expand and contract the size of the market throughout the game. It shows that there are countless ways to keep card markets moving and dynamic, beyond the usual methods.

What do you think? Are you OK with unwanted cards sitting in an open draft market or do you feel the need to purge them from the system? Have you seen any other card market mechanisms that keep it moving in ways other than incentives or discards?

— E.P. 💀

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