Listen to this episode here.
Don't you hate it when one card in a deck gets a little bent? You ever have someone spill their coffee on your cards while you're playing and wish death upon them? What if I told you there was a game that told you to do these things and worse... on purpose?
We're kicking off season 5 of Dice Exploder with two episodes on physicality in games. Today that's Wreck This Deck, and the transgressive feeling you get when the core mechanic of a game is to fuck up a bunch of playing cards. Specifically, we're talking about the revenge demon Flauros and what exactly he demands you do to your deck.
Further Reading:
Audrey’s podcast Alone At The Table podcast and the Wreck This Deck episodes specifically
Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings
Birds Love Dirt by Emily Jankowski
Under the Autumn Strangely by Graham Gentz
This video about a particularly infamous Magic: the Gathering commander deck
Rookwood by Nerdy Pup Games
Shownotes
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to a brand new season of dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop mechanic and tear it in half like a phone book. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host today is Audrey Stolze AKA lady tabletop.
I've wanted to have Audrey on for a standard format episode ever since she joined me back in the 20 23 year end Bonanza. She's a smart voice on Tumblr. She makes cool games with great collage art. She's helped run all the game jams. We've hosted on the dice Exploder discord, and she's got a great solo games, actual play podcast Alone At The Table where you can hear her playing all kinds of solo games.
Including this week's game Wreck This Deck by Becky Annison a game in which you, the player have learned how to trap, demons in a deck of playing cards by mutilating the cards in various intriguing ways. Drawing on them, cutting them up, covering them in honey, burying them in a river and waiting three weeks before you go back to pick them up. All kinds of nonsense. And we are specifically talking about the vengeance demon Flauros, who you trap by slicing up the three of diamonds into a triangular shape.
It's all so tactile. It feels wrong to play this game, like transgressive to destroy these perfect cards. I, and that feeling, and it's connection to the physicality of this act is the thing that this conversation is really about.
There's something about a game that you have to play in person that leaves a physical artifacts of play that can reach into a part of your body that I think an online game just can't do. And Wreck This Deck, I think is a great one to talk about that feeling because it cuts to it so quickly. And because it's just so low game, so you don't need to put a whole group together to go explore that feeling yourself. You can go do that right now and then come back and listen.
I'm actually so interested in physicality and this idea that next week, we're going to have a second episode all about the flip side. Instead of destruction, that one is about creation. So if you want to do some homework and get ahead. of the game on that one, check out Two Hand Path by Mikey ham, and I'll see you next week.
But this week. here is Audrey Stolze with the demon Flauros. .
Audrey, thanks for coming on Dice Exploder.
Audrey: Excited to be here. It's going to be great.
Sam: yeah. What are we talking about today?
Audrey: We are talking about Wreck This Deck by Becky Annison, specifically the demon summoning slash trapping mechanic, even more specifically, trapping the demon Flauros.
Sam: Love Flaros, my boy.
Audrey: He's my favorite, possibly in the text just because a lot of the cards in this game.
Oh man, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta tell
Sam: gotta back way the heck up. So, you love Flaros, I understand, but tell me what the heck is Wreck this Deck?
Audrey: So Wreck This Deck is a game that asks you to do exactly what the title says, which is to destroy, modify, add to, change Bleed on, bury, whatever else a deck of cards, standard 52 card poker deck, although you could play with pretty much any deck you wanted.
This game is, as I said, by Becky Aniston. It came into being over the pandemic and it was one of those things that kind of took off online, like while it was first being play tested mostly because It was something everybody could do by themselves in their home that was, like, visceral and felt really, really artistic, I think, in a way that a lot of people were looking for.
like some people get really into baking bread during the pandemic, some people got really into doing, Like, art stuff.
Sam: some people got into wrecking their decks. I think what you are saying is 100 percent true this and this feels like a pandemic game, but not just the sort of solo experience of it. But the voice of the text is so inviting of community. It is saying to you, I'm a person in this world where you can trap demons in playing cards, and I'm here to tell you what I've learned by experimenting around with the form and to tell you that there's a whole Internet's worth of people out there that are trying out the same things and getting killed in the process. So be careful, kids.
And the I've never read a game that has such a useful and great voice
to the way it's written.
Audrey: It really projects you into the situation immediately and I think that there's a lot of, at least to me reading it, feels a lot of like back in the like early to mid 2000s when you had stuff like Marble Hornets and Creepypastas and like ARGs really taking off. The voice of this game is similar to that and it invites you to be part of it and that's something that's really compelling to me because it's still functional. as a game by itself, but the voice is never deviated from.
Sam: And the voice, like, establishes ground rules, tone, of what that online community that grew up around the game was going to become. And I think the fact that we were in lockdown was a huge part of why the game took off to the extent that it did. That community was wonderful. You could play the game at home, but you could also sit on discord and do the thing.
But I suspect it would have gotten some amount of that community anyway just on the strength of the voice, and the fact that the, the voice of the text is sort of summoning that community into existence in the first place.
Audrey: Yeah, I like the way that you phrased that, like, summoning the community, because it, it is telling you, hey, here's all this stuff about the world, and it's not necessarily good, and that's really resonant, I think, for a lot of people, especially over the last, you know, eight, ten years, and so it's saying, We can do something about this.
And even though that premise is fictional, that is an invitation that I think a lot of people wanted and still want. And so there is something really cathartic about playing this game, even as just a fiction, as a way to help process the things that are going on in the real world that are probably out of our control.
Sam: Yeah. And then the game empowers you to have a little bit of control over that world, right? Like it, it's giving you a set of tools to maybe enact your will onto at least the fictional world. And then, you know, build up legitimate community. Yeah, it's cool stuff.
Other sources of inspiration, there's an interview on the Yes Indeed podcast with former Dice Exploder co host Thomas Manuel interviewing Becky about this game. Pulled a lot of stuff from that people should go listen to that episode in the show notes if this game sounds cool to you. Um, But Wreck This Journal is this Book from like 2007.
Audrey: I have it.
Sam: yeah, there you go, by Carrie Smith, which was this journal, I remember seeing this thing at the time where you would buy this thing and would instruct you on ways that you should wreck this thing, you know, you're like sending it to yourself in the mail and you're setting it on fire and you're folding it in half and like all
Audrey: 200 pages of, different ways to destroy, maim, or otherwise, impact this journal in a way that couldn't be undone.
Sam: yeah. So what if that was a story game.
And then Becky also talks about this moment of playing Pandemic Legacy. And I see two influences from Pandemic Legacy on this. The first is just the obvious of you are permanently disfiguring cards and then they become revised fictional components like, in the game. And that's just how legacy board games work.
But the other was specifically a moment she talks about the person that she's playing with being so unwilling to like, rip up a card, even when the game told them to, and that, I re I resonate with that. I think most people resonate with that, either in a way of like, gleeful, I get to rip up the cards, or in a like, oh no, like the thing is perfect, I don't wanna like, ruin
the perfect Hey! like,
Audrey: It's like a beautiful, professionally illustrated, like, coded, solid card that when you tear apart, like, there's no putting it back together. You know,
Sam: And that feeling is really what we're gonna get into today. But before we do that, let's get into the specific mechanic of summoning demons, and our demon friend Flaros.
Audrey: summoning demons, there is a big chart in the book that, basically tells you what card the demon corresponds you to so that you know which card you are modifying or destroying or whatever and then it'll tell you what you need to do in order to summon the demon. to that card and bind it, right?
And so Floweros specifically is associated with the Three of Diamonds. It asks you to take the three of spades, clubs, and hearts, so the other three suits, arrange them with their corners touching until they make a triangular space in the middle, and then you place the Three of Diamonds on top of it, command Floweros to enter, and then cut the card into that triangular shape and burn each of its three edges.
So I picked this mechanic specifically because To me, it's one of the more severe modifications that this game asks you to do, and it makes a shape that doesn't easily shuffle, and is so obtrusive in your deck. It's so good. I love it so much.
Sam: hate it, hate it. love shuffling cards, a magician once told me I was good at shuffling cards, and I'll ride that compliment to my grave, and I At the Magic Castle event, it was
Audrey: Oh, that's great.
Sam: But, like, it feel, it's so, yeah, he's just always there like poking you while you're shuffling your deck. It's so flavorful,
Audrey: And it's really ominous too, where like, you'll see the corner poking up and you're like, oh man, I only got so many draws before Flaros is my
card, you know? Yeah.
Sam: Yeah.
So, the other thing we should say about trapping demons before we kind of move on is this is the thing you're supposed to do to trap Flaros, but the game really presents this as like, this is what's worked for me. I don't know exactly, like, make it up yourself. and. other people are finding other demons, like, make up your own with their own abilities, like, go online and see what demons other people are trapping and do those things.
It's It is taking the entire act of like, building a hacking community and turning it into Into an in fiction resource that you can
go ascribe to.
Audrey: Yeah. Yeah. It's not just people sharing their cards and sharing like a narrative online, it's people saying, oh, well, what if I made a guide of yokai and I put that online for people to use? What if I made a guide of angels or Greek mythological figures, or if you're me, you're me, an eldritch horror type thing, you know? And, and people are putting those out there. So there's all these other options if you wanted to do something else with your three of diamonds.
And the game is also pretty explicit with like, hey, if you fuck up your demon summoning, I don't necessarily know what goes wrong. Like, you get to decide how this goes wrong, right? Like, I ended up burning my Flaros card down pretty severely which was more of a actual fire problem than a in fiction problem, but, you know, it's supposed to be kind of a certain size because of the triangle of the cards, and that's not what I ended up with, and I'm sure that's different than what other people have done as well.
Sam: So Flaros who's who is this little who's this demon to you? What's their deal? What's the Duke of Hell up to these days? And how did he present himself to you?
Audrey: So in the fiction of my game, I called on Flaros after basically like two or three botched summonings or summonings that then didn't pan out in the way I wanted in terms of how I was like using demon power. I recorded my playthrough on my podcast, by the way, so this is something people can listen to, which is very fun.
But I ended up summoning him to like truly try to destroy I think it was just some rich dude that was, like, stripping funding from this, like, local library program and trying to ban all these books and stuff, and so specifically summoned Floros to deal with that guy. And he did, and all I got was some, like, newspaper headlines. Don't really know what happened, but yeah.
Now Flauros is here and the whole thing with like summoning the demons is that it tells you this is what this demon needs and if you aren't helping them like satiate that need, then they're gonna wreak further havoc on you in any way they can. And so his need is like to take revenge and you're expected to aid him for more power. And that hasn't really manifested in my game yet, but I know that it's going to because it's too juicy of a hook for me to leave laying there.
Sam: Yeah. I didn't sit down to really start playing this game until I learned from you what mechanic exactly we were gonna talk about and I was like oh, we're doing Flaros, great, like this is gonna be the first demon I add to my deck, I'm gonna just be John Wick. Like, that's the thing that we're gonna do here.
But I, I did this thing yeah, I was thinking about the ink that bleeds, which you can hear me talk about on 2023's year end bonanza episode that we did together. And it has this idea of like taking solo games and blending the fiction of those games together. And so I took a lot of details from a couple other solo game sources I was playing at the time, or had played in the past, and like, Put them together, decided I was heading home because my magic mentor had been murdered and I was gonna like murder everyone responsible and then just started like murdering motherfuckers right and left as I got home with Floros.
And I think that was a really fun way to get some direction into my game right away. Like, I actually think this game would have been hard for me to start if I had not had you pick a demon for me to start with. And you know, I think, I guess anyone's gonna read this thing and be drawn to one demon or another, but it definitely felt like picking a demon and kicking things off that way was a great way to kick things off a little direction that the game, maybe wasn't otherwise giving me.
Audrey: yeah, yeah. I think that there is one of the things that I love and also think is maybe a little bit detrimental to the game is how much the voice is like, you can just make this your own. Because that's a great permission to have in the text and really sticks to the fiction that this game is setting up, but it also means that there's kind of like a looseness around anything in terms of starting and anything in terms of like ending like a storyline or like a quest that you set up on yourself or anything like that. It definitely expects you to fill in some blanks and to like make choices in a way that are not guided.
And so for me, starting it, like, part of what helped is that I was playing it for my podcast, and so I just dispensed with journaling altogether. I literally was just recording voice memos to myself on my phone, as I was doing stuff with the cards. And that, for me, worked way better because it It was like, I'm just gonna stream of consciousness, like, what makes sense? What am I reacting to? I decided on, like, what my problem was that I was initially trying to set out to tackle, and I had summoned, yeah, a few demons, and even, like, made one up before I came to Flaros, because I, I definitely took a tactic with mine that was more like subterfuge.
Sam: Mm hmm. Yeah, I think I see this problem in just so many games. Like, this is a problem I have with, like, Dungeons Dragons, is like, this game doesn't function unless you go find or create for yourself a starting point. And I'm a writer by day. I don't want to like, come home and have to like, come up with a whole ass idea on my own to get my story started.
Like, seeing where the story goes, I can handle that. Like, that's fun. Like, moves snowball, they talk about in Apocalypse World. I love doing that thing and that's fun bouncing from one part of the game to another part of the game. But like, starting that snowball down the hill, it's just so much creative work. It's that like classic blue sky problem. And I, I just see so many games struggle with that. Like, even Apocalypse World, I think, struggles with that, and I wish that this game and other games like it had better tools for doing that.
Audrey: And I think that sometimes that tool is just a random table, right? Like, we, we see a lot of random tables and stuff, but I totally get it. Like the creative lift of saying this is like my onset or this is the instigating factor here is a lot more than reacting to whatever the onset is.
And it's part of why in GM games, like back when I was mostly playing Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, I preferred to be a player because reacting was so much easier and more fun than having to come up with all of the scenarios and keep track of all of that and so in like, in solo games too, I love to play them, but whenever the creative lift is too much, I just set it back down, right? Or I say. You know, I'm not going to remember what I did the last time I played this a month ago. Like, I'm just going to kind of pick up where I left off as best I remember. And I'm not going to sweat it, you know, because who's, who's judging my playthrough of a solo game?
Sam: Well, you're recording yourself as a podcast and putting it out there, so people might be judging it, but for those playing at home, like, yeah, who cares? I think that advice is really and also, like, for your podcast, who cares? Like, you know. That's actual play for you, but that's a different subject.
Audrey: I mean, and the other thing on like, tangentially on my podcast is there have been times before where I'll just like straight up not do what the game is telling me to do or I'll change something. And then at the end, when I'm like debriefing, I'm like, Hey guys, you might have noticed I changed this thing. It's more fun for me that way. Like,
Sam: That's a really nice thing about solo games at large, is it's so much easier to do that with them.
Audrey: think so. Although I do think that that maybe brings us nicely around to kind of why we're talking about this mechanic because there's a lot of people that I have played with and people that I know who feel that if the rules are not explicitly giving you permission, then you're transgressing in some way.
And so that's not necessarily what we're here to talk about because I think that's silly and the rules are just words on a piece of paper and you can do what you want because you're a living, breathing person, but
Sam: Yeah.
Audrey: tearing up a
Sam: Well, I think, I think that breaking rules is transgressing. Like, I think if we're sitting down to play Dungeons and Dragons and we decide that we're gonna roll d12s instead of d20s, like, that is transgressing. But, like, transgressing is fun, right? Like, that's the thesis, I think, of Wreck This Deck. Like, that's truly the origin story of this game, is Becky being like transgressing is fun, please come do it, like, just get started fucking up your deck of cards, and like, seeing how that goes.
I have this deck of cards over here right now, sitting on my desk for weeks, and it's just like, covered in a little thin layer of honey. And, I hate that shit, that's so bad, it's so I hate touching it, everything about it sucks. But it's just like, here, that's it's cool, and like, it's so charged and memorable to me because I engaged with this game and engaged with that transgression of taking this beloved old deck of cards that I've played hundreds of hours of bridge with and also written on for a playthrough of Void 1680 and like started wrecking. Like that, that whole thing is just cool.
Audrey: This game gives you a tactile artifact of play that is, to me at least, incomparable to the artifacts of play generated by most other games that are intended to do that. Like this one is just It's a mess. You're gonna have a mess at the end. And it's awesome. I love it. I'm like, you know, and then I'm like walking past my craft desk with the king of hearts with push pins through his eyes and mouth and stuff. And I'm Like Oh, yeah, what was I doing with him? Like, you know,
like found found a jack of spades on the sidewalk. I was like, I'm just gonna add this to my deck. Just seems fun. Now I have two jacks of spades in there.
Sam: Yeah. And one of them's got the wrong back And like, what does that mean? And yeah, yeah, I, it's such a call to action, not just like, this is a fun thing to do here, but like, Hey, maybe you can do this with any game. Maybe you can do this in real life.
Like, I really feel like this game is trying to say, like, you don't have to get married. Why would you have to get married if you don't want to get married? Just go live the life that you want to live. Like, fu transgress. Do the fun thing out there, you know? Here's, here's a small scale, like, place to practice.
Audrey: Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, if you can't rip up a card, when you like hex someone, or you can't stand to paint over a card with like gold ink or something, and just to mess up this card in an irreparable way, then how can you stand to possibly ever challenge any sort of authority, or do any sort of thing outside of the social norms?
And think it's especially significant to me with Wreck This Deck because the tactility of it makes the transgression feel so so satisfying. Because you have a physical result for the thing that you just did. And there's games that play with tactile space, but there's not a ton of games that play with, like, don't be precious about your art and don't be precious about the things that you own because they are things, you know?
Sam: it, feels visceral is how I would say it. Yeah.
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So, we're talking about transgression, and how each of those things kind of amplifies the others, but I feel like there's kind of two feelings at play here. There's the thing we were kind of talking about of in some way like challenging authority with it. And on the other side is the feeling of I don't want to ruin something beautiful.
So I have a lot to say about this but I'm gonna start here. I want to start with Tim Hutchings and his game Thousand Year Old Vampire. So it is a game in which you play as a thousand year old vampire who's sort of slowly, like, losing your memories as you go through the centuries, and it comes in this book where Tim would like you to write in this beautiful, beautiful book and, like, write your playthrough in there and, like, really mess up this book, and I've never heard of anyone actually doing that because the book is so pretty.
And there's another game of his, a collection of improving exercises, which is sort of a similar thing, it's like a, it's styled as a learn how to do perspective drawing manual from the 1920s but in practice it sort of devolves into chaos and it's this like meditation on breaking the rules and and taking, again, this gorgeous, gorgeous book and drawing your ugly ass little scribbles all over it.
I think people have a really hard time playing those games in the way that they're intended to be played because the objects are so beautiful. And I've talked to people who are like, I don't want to play a collection of improving exercises because I don't want to ruin the thing.
And I think Tim is out here saying that's the point. Like that feeling of transgression that you and I have been talking about, it's actually better and more beautiful and more powerful and even more of a fuck you to authority when you are destroying something beautiful. And actually, the object becomes more beautiful when you bring your self to it.
Audrey: I agree completely. And I think that Tim Hutchings has a lot to say about art that he doesn't always explicitly say, and you've hit the nail on the head, like, part of the point is that people who don't want to write in Thousand Year Old Vampire probably also don't want to stick their stickers on anything. And it's meant to be used, and it's meant to be enjoyed, and that doesn't mean that it has to be preserved forever. And, so if you're not going to write in your copy of Thousand Year Old Vampire, fine. Your choice. That's how you're going to play the game. It can sit on your shelf and it can be beautiful.
But, I don't know, I like going to the thrift store and picking up a book and finding out that someone made annotations in the sidebars, you know? I think that that's wonderful and it adds to the experience.
Sam: You've made a new friend.
Audrey: Yeah! Like, I'm never gonna talk to this person, but I'm getting to see what their experience of it was. And so even if in the case of like Thousand Year Old Vampire or Improving Exercises, the person that you are getting to have a relationship with is your past self that played this game already, I still think that's worthwhile and I still think that that doesn't mean you can't play it again or read it again or appreciate it again or keep it on your shelf, you
Sam: Yeah. I think about one of my favorite books is Thief of Time, a Discworld book by Terry Pratchett.
Audrey: Yes, love it.
Sam: I read it in 6th, 7th, 8th grade, something like that. Back then I ran like a Discworld books, like lending library out of my locker at school. And like, I would just read these books. I, every month my family would like go to Barnes and Noble. I'd pick up three more Discworld books, like shotgun them all down as quickly as I could, and then loan them out to all my friends.
And my copy of Thief of Time is just beat to absolute shit. It's, like, falling apart. The cover hasn't quite fallen off, but it's close. And, you know, the color is all fading. It might as well have been dropped in the bathtub. Maybe it was by one of my friends, who knows.
And one year for Christmas, my sister, wonderful, lovely sister, who I love very much, got me a signed first edition copy of Thief of Time. And I looked at it, and I was like, What the fuck am I going to do with this?
Like, like, what
Audrey: it's just gonna
Sam: have to me? Who cares? Like, and I do actually, I do love that. I do love having that sign first edition too. It is beautiful and I'm never going to read it. I'm, I'm just going to have it there as sort of like a totem on my shelf.
But when I read a passage from Thief of Time at my wedding, which of these books do you think I read from, right? Like, the thing that has more value to me is the one that I know, like, touched each of my friend's hands coming out of that lending library.
Audrey: I think that that's a great comparison. I definitely have like my copy of Fellowship the Ring is falling apart and doesn't have its title anymore because I had like an acetate jacket that I pulled off and like, you know, so it, it's a testament to the things that you've enjoyed and you've loved to show the wear on them and the ways that you have explicitly touched them.
And I just think that there is something about making memories that is so much easier And that like sticks in your brain more if there is a physicality to it and if there is, like I'm not gonna go back and read my journal entries that I've written in random journals from past games unless I play a game that wants me to write in the margins, which I might, but like, If I'm writing in the book for Thousand Year Old Vampire, and I'm telling a friend about it, and I'm saying, hey, like, my playthrough's in here, like, you can totally check that out, you know? That, to me, is more memorable.
And Wreck This Deck is doing that, too. Like, a deck of playing cards is intricately designed. There's a reason that playing cards have been around for so long, and that, like, the design of them has been so consistent. Like, Becky's asking you to destroy something beautiful, as well. It just feels less transgressive with a deck of cards because you can pick one up for a dollar at the gas station, you know?
Sam: Yeah. I want to touch on that exactly. Like, cause I heard this argument, we were talking about this episode a little In the discord in the past week. And someone was saying, I'm so much more excited to play Wreck This Deck than Thousand Year Old Vampire in the, like, way they are written to be played, because Wreck This Deck, as you say, I can pick up for a dollar at the airport. And I was like, you don't understand how beautiful a deck of cards is. Like, how dare you destroy a deck of cards like, all the potential in that.
Like, I'm truly still mourning the fact that I took this deck of cards that i have played so many hands of Bridge with with my friends and ruined it by marring it, for Void 1680 initially. And I regret that like i wish i still had the like, perfect artifact of play that was like my communal, like I feel like, I betrayed my friends, you know, by like, hoarding this deck for myself in a way, but like, that's just another, that's, nothing lasts forever, you know, like, everything ends.
And I, I think practicing that by destroying a beautiful deck of playing cards, whether it's brand new or old, or doing whatever kind of transgression, I just think that that's such a healthy and fun thing to do.
Audrey: think for me, because I was like, I have been very briefly in my life, the person that didn't want to put like stickers on anything.
Sam: Mm
Audrey: But like, part of it for me is that when you were a kid, at least for my childhood, like, I had sticker books, I'm using my stickers liberally as they're given to me, I'm putting them on my folders for school, put them all over my bedroom door and my parents are getting mad about it, like, I found literally at my parents house the last time I went there a deck of cards that I had defaced as a kid that was just like one that we used that was like all the cast offs or like a deck that was missing a queen or something that mom was like, you can do whatever you want. And we just like wrote all over it, you know.
And I don't know that that's like, that's just my experience. And that's not going to be the experience that everyone has had. But I think that as kids we have less hang ups necessarily about making our mark on something, right? Like, that's for your parents to freak out about when you draw on the wall, or that's for your parents to get mad about if you tear the page out of a picture book or something, right?
And to some degree, like, there's a healthy amount of, like, you don't want to just destroy things, and you work hard for things and you pay for things and whatever, but also, I think that there is a nice healthy dose of going back to remembering that, like, they are just things. No matter what memories are attached, no matter what you spent on them, no matter how they look, they are just things.
Sam: I think as a kid you also don't have a sense of time in the same way. That it's just sort of like, you know what would be cool right now? If this picture book page got ripped right out of there. That'd be, that'd be fun. The sound that it makes, like, that's really satisfying. Gonna do that.
And I I think, I think that, like, coming to realization that actions have consequences is an act of growing up. And I think, The step past that, that I think you and I are, both so excited about here with this game, and the like, lesson, is like, yeah, but like, sometimes it's worth it to pay those consequences.
This is actually like, a a pretty personal thing. but um I think a lot about having Crohn's disease and not being able to eat, I love chocolate donuts. Like, back in the day, that was my, I just ate in high school, I ate so many chocolate donuts. And it got to the point where I realized, like, these were really bad for my Crohn's disease and I should not eat them anymore.
And like, I don't, now. But also, sometimes, I do. Because they're delicious. And it's definitely bad for me. And I immediately, like, am in pain. And, like, you know, it's the same thing of like, friends who have lactose intolerance, and they're just like, eh, I'm gonna pop a lactate and have a pizza. You know, like, sometimes we do do the thing.
But I think that there's I think that that attitude of like, just sometimes it is. Sometimes it's worth it, though. Sometimes it's worth paying the consequences, or sometimes the consequences aren't as real as You think they are. You know, it's
Audrey: that's the flip side of the coin, right, is like, sometimes how much of the consequences just in your head, you know, how much of the consequences just a thing that you think is like an expectation, but it's not?
Sam: Yeah, they like don't pull people over for going 75 on the highway, you know? Speed limits are, like, an illusion. Laws at large, kind of an illusion. We just kind of like, you know, punish the people that we're racist against and, otherwise don't like you
know?
Audrey: if you get caught, you
Sam: Yeah, or if you get caught, right? Like, I'm making a Golden Cobra game right now in which you're supposed to play it while streaking through my hometown, so,
Audrey: Oh my god, amazing. I'm never going to be in your hometown, but I would play that game if I was there.
Sam: Yeah, great, great. I just, it's just all fun. I don't know, it's fun to play, it's fun to be a little, uh, cheeky.
Audrey: Yeah, I think that there is, this dopamine hit or like adrenaline rush of being like, oh, I just did that, you know, and like feeling like, you know, You are not supposed to do that, or that you know that, normally you wouldn't do that, which to me is the thing that happens in the fiction of Wreck This Deck is like, you are immersed in the fiction and doing it, but like, as you start playing, you're like, Oh, normally I would not do that. Like, that is not normally how I would treat a deck of cards.
I also think that like, if you're someone like us, like you played a lot of Bridge, I played a lot of Pinochle and other games with my family growing up. So like, I have a very longstanding relationship with cards and card games and how you treat cards and how you shuffle cards and what you do not do to cards and like, it feels extra good to play this game because of that to be like, you know what, grandma, I'm gonna rub my greasy chip fingers all over these cards. Like, who cares?
Sam: yeah. There are a few other examples I know you were interested in getting to,
Audrey: Yes, I feel like I have to talk about my favorite solo LARP, which is Birds Love Dirt by Emily Jankowski. It's a game where you're a bird, you love dirt, go outside and dig in the dirt. Anytime you find yourself thinking about something else, remind yourself that you're a bird. And you love dirt. And like, that's the whole game.
But that one to me feels transgressive because again, part of the like whole growing up thing is like cleanliness and like who has time to just go dig in the dirt, just go poke a stick or a rock or whatever in the dirt and also sometimes like who has access to a patch of dirt that they can just dig in and play in and things like that?
And so that one to me is one that feels really good because especially when I'm like overworking myself or I'm burning out or whatever, like I should just go in my garden for just a little bit and just like put my fingers in the dirt. It is the literal definition of like touching grass, but I think that that's like the permission to check out and the permission to think about nothing that that game is asking you to do feels transgressive in a similar way to me because it's things that like, not that we like forget we can do, but that maybe we don't think of. The same way that like, you know, destroying something or just painting all over something or just doing bad art is like not always something we think of that like, you can just do that, you
Sam: Yeah. God, that, that really feels like the Wreck This Deck ethos, too, of you can do a bad job and it's fine. You know? If you think you did a really bad job, then like, say what went wrong, I guess, but like, it's on you. Just go forth and have fun.
Audrey: Yeah, yeah. Wreck the deck is very much the vein of like you can't do it wrong. Like just do it.
Sam: Yeah. Okay. and you've got one last example in here too.
Audrey: Yeah, so, Under the Autumn strangely is the last one I wanted to touch on. It's by Graham Gentz. It's pastoral horror, GM less, group play. The mechanic in this one is like, tactile in the barest sense of the word, in that you are expected to be passing little trinkets to one another. And the game is pretty explicit in that like, you don't need to be using uniform tokens. These trinkets can be anything. It wants you to be like, oh yeah, I have this acorn, or I have this shell, and I'm just gonna do that, right?
And so first of all, just in like, unconventional materials, that one feels a little bit transgressive, where it's like, oh, maybe I just had this thing that I like collected and it's been sitting on a shelf, but I'm gonna use it as a trinket in this game.
And the other part of it is that those tokens that you are then supposed to use are explicitly just called change and they are only used to say, no, actually that doesn't happen, which I think is a thing that doesn't necessarily get encouraged in games a lot, especially GM less games.
Sam: Yeah.
Audrey: But it is explicitly like there are three roles in the game and each role can only contradict one other role, but you do it by saying actually, I'm gonna give you this trinket. No, that doesn't happen. Here's what happens instead. And it feels really good in play, like in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect.
Sam: Yeah. This reminded me of like, conversation around the X card is often like, Hey, it's cool that we all sort of agree formally that if one person doesn't want something to happen, then we're going to like work around that. But like, it can be really hard emotionally to use the X card. It can feel transgressive to use the X card and to like get in there and to actually advocate for yourself.
And I think that that act of saying no is an act of transgression almost like inherently, especially in like a group setting where like you are the one who is the minority standing against the group and I think that it's, it's nice to be able to encourage people to feel okay saying stuff, you know,
Audrey: I think so, too. And I, think that in Under the Autumn Strangely which does advocate for use of the x card too because it's a horror game but in that game it's explicitly like you know if you're describing hey and then this old lady in this creepy house turns around her hub and she pulls out this like perfectly baked pie or whatever, then I can be like No, actually, what she pulls out of the oven is you know, is a live cat or whatever, like some other thing, right, that happens.
And the way that it starts to synergize and feel like just regular improv where you're saying yes and is really nice because it is explicitly meant to contradict something that you just said. And I, I think this one's fresh in my mind because I played this game pretty recently with a great group of people, but like, it starts to feel like, oh, I'm just excited that you played this so that I can see what you're going to say instead, because clearly you had a different idea than what I did. And I think that that's something that that felt really good in a GM less game, the idea that we could contradict each other instead of always just being like, oh, yeah, oh,
Sam: Yeah. Like, if we trust each other, I'm excited when someone else transgresses, because I'm excited to see where they're gonna go with it.
Audrey: Yeah, and I think that this is something that probably pops up in other GM less games, it just hasn't, in my experience, really, a whole lot, and it definitely hasn't in a mechanized way that Under the Autumn Strangely presents to you.
Sam: Can you think of examples of this feeling of transgressiveness in games that is not attached to the physicality of handing someone a trinket or of cutting up a card or whatever?
Audrey: mean, it's a tough one because I think that there are some games that like blanket statement will be like, if you don't like this, you can change it. But that doesn't feel transgressive to me, right? because I was already going to change it if I didn't like it.
Sam: But I think to me, where I was going to go with this was that everyone feels comfortable doing that. Like, I do think. Like, it's great that you are someone who's like, Yeah, I don't like this, so I'm gonna change it. But I'm not like that. Like, I do want to see how the game is intended to function, because sometimes you change something, and that sometimes there's that meme of a, like, recipe review that's like, I changed the carrots in this carrot cake to kale, and then it was bad. Two stars.
And like, well maybe you should have used carrots, you know? And, like, I, sometimes you don't know what the thing is that you're changing, but I think that feeling of, oh, I'm just getting a bad vibe here and I'm just gonna do something else, like, that isn't easy for me necessarily.
Audrey: I think that that's totally fair. I was a chronic, deferential, Like, never broke the rules person growing up, and so whenever something is completely in my control, especially in like a, solo game, if I don't like it, I'm going to change it or I'm going to put it down and not play it, you know and so if the preference is I want to keep playing, I'm just going to change it.
But I totally appreciate that that's not something that everybody is comfortable doing, or that's not something that everybody wants to do, because I think there's a lot of value in wanting to get the experience as close to like what the designer wrote. were intended in the game as possible. Example wise of things that like give you the feeling of transgression, I think There's got to be a game out there that I have played that has like some sort of secret keeping mechanic. I think that that would be a big one.
Sam: hmm. Yeah. I mean even playing like Mafia or Werewolf or whatever, just like being a werewolf like feels like, eee, like I'm, I'm getting away with something, lying is the thing that feels transgressive.
Audrey: it's lying, it's having a secret, like, definitely the biggest, like, transgressive thing that I can think of like from my own personal gaming experiences is like the final 5e campaign that my group played like culminated after years of playing in the same setting and I played a character that had like, a big backstory secret that didn't come out for a long time and then when it did it came out in this really explosive way.
And so I think that what I would be looking for in like a non tactile way is games that are encouraging you to have secrets and to make them explosive and maybe not to the benefit of the rest of your peers, because I think it's a lot easier to make the choice to have something that's like not beneficial to your personal character, but when it's like not beneficial to your fellow player characters, then it becomes something where you're like, Oh, is this going to be okay?
And so like a game that has that written in, That everyone is aware of that as a possibility. Oh, okay, alright. Curse of House Rookwood does this. Where it explicitly is telling you, like, you have secrets. This person might know it. This person is involved in it. And, like, this other person has no idea, but they found this item that they could use to blackmail you if they figured out what was going on.
And so it sets up this really juicy story. Interpersonal web that to me feels really like key to the game like it would not be the same without it but it also feels like Is it okay to have these secrets that are like gonna screw over the other people? Is it okay if I actually blackmail this other person, you know, because It's not what you normally would want to do like in the spirit of cooperating or telling a collaborative story in the game like, even about scoundrels, that sometimes feels like, oh no, did I go too far?
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Totally.
We've gotten very far off course from our buddy Flaros. Um, I, I sort of have a feeling that this was going to become a little bit of like a survey kind of episode more, but um, I do want to bring it back to our, our guy for the kind of send off here, like, do you have more to say about Floros himself and how the specificity of, of the process there sort of plays out for you?
Audrey: I know for me personally, in the game that I'm playing of Wreck This Deck, I want to keep, like, trimming down his card until it's gone. I think that that's really interesting to me, and the idea that, like, oh, that would, like, set him free to do as he pleases, and then he's, like, an antagonist that I have to deal with or try to trap again somehow, find another three of diamonds that I can trap him in? That might be cool, you
Sam: Are you like snipping pieces of him off when like major things happen or something?
Audrey: So, if he appears, like, in the summoning for another demon, I usually, like, burn the edges down a little bit more. And then I can't use him for a hex. I don't want to use him for a hex, because a hex in this game makes you have to destroy the card. Like, that is explicitly you have to. But I've had a couple rituals that like went poorly and he was in one of them and I was like, ah man, I'm just gonna trim like one side just a little more and he just keeps getting smaller and it makes it all the more likely that he'll slip out of my deck when I'm trying to do something else and we'll just see what happens.
Sam: Yeah. Interesting. My Floros
Audrey: he I don't know. for you, right?
Sam: yeah, yeah, he's, well, I, I keep, like, using him to kill a bunch of guys. I just, like, the, the triangle of him looks like a dagger to me, and so I, like, I always imagine that I'm stabbing him, you know, or stabbing.
Yeah, I made a guy's head explode. That was fine. I did. It didn't, it didn't feel like there was a huge difference between hexes and rituals to me. And I was like, nah, I'm just going to do a ritual to make someone's head explode. Does that count as a hex? No, not for me. I'm making his head explode.
Audrey: Up to you. Who cares?
Sam: It's my vibe. So I like this idea though. This is one of the other demons I like is the Beelzebub every time is drawn, you draw another fly onto the card, and then once it gets, like, fully blackened, the demon escapes from the card or something.
And I like the idea of, oh, every time I make someone's head explode or whatever, I should just, like, snip a little bit off of Floros, like a little bit more off the triangle, until,
Audrey: Using him too much. Yeah, I really love that. I, I think there's a lot you can do. I made up a demon that is like spreading to other cards, which kind of sucks for me. Like, why did I do that? I don't know. It's fun. I love it.
Sam: Yeah, yeah.
Audrey: But yeah, I have considered being like, should I just glue Floweress's card to another demon card that I like have already summoned? Like he possesses and takes them over, you know,
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I'm getting a little contagion demon going on.
Audrey: Would be really gross. I would love that.
Sam: Ah. Okay. Well, do you have any, any last thoughts on Reckless Deck or Transgression or Flaros?
Audrey: Just that I think more people should be open to the possibilities of doing things that feel a little taboo when the game asks you to.
Sam: Yeah. Audrey, thanks for being on Dice Exploder.
Audrey: Thank you so much for having me, Sam.
Sam: Hello, listeners. I am here before the credits because I'm gonna try something a little new here after the episode is over, and before I sign off for the day. I'm gonna give out little homework assignments that are somehow related to the episode. These are gonna be, like, small little design challenges. Maybe you think of them like a game jam that hopefully takes you just a couple minutes to complete. Do them on your own, post about them online, come talk about them in the Dice Exploder Discord, or simply ignore them. Whatever. I don't care. I hope that they get you thinking about how to take this show and actually put some lessons from it into practice in your own game design work.
Anyway, today's prompt is take a game that you don't think of as being a physical game and think about what the physical experience of playing it is like. Like, what is it like to physically roll dice at the table? How does that make you feel?
And, is there a way you could change that game's physical experience to bring that experience more in line with the game overall thematically? How would you do
Extra credit for thinking about changing the physical experience of playing a digital game. That's it. Thanks again
Thanks again to Audrey for being here, you can find her podcast alone at the table, wherever you get your podcasts. And our blog is lady tabletop.wordpress.com. As always you can find me on blue sky at S Dunnewold or on the dice Exploder discord. You can order my design memoir dice forager@diceexploder.com.
And you would find my games at S Dunnewold. itch.io. Our logo was designed by sporgory. Our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray. And thanks to you for listening. Welcome back. I'll see you next week.