Games Grating
Sliced and Diced and Everything Nice
sweet dreams are made of these Duckstacks
WARNING. READER DETECTED. SOMEONE IS READING THE DUCKSTACK.
🚨 WEEOOOO WEEOO WEEOO1 🚨 sentries are on the way, Reader beware, our new Duckstack Substack Security System™ is in place and you will be surely stopped! Here is the first sentry, there is no way you will be able to read past this.
⁀⊙෴☉⁀
Zounds! How did you get past that sentry? Just slipped through eh? No matter, we have many sentries, and our Duckstack Security Robots™ have never failed!2 Prepare to be deterred, for our second sentry is particularly vicious!
٭(•﹏•)٭
Wretched! You defeated that sentry with ease! It looks like we will have to try something different to stop you from reading further into this Duckstack letter!
٩꒰ʘʚʘ๑꒱۶ ٩꒰ʘʚʘ๑꒱۶ ٩꒰ʘʚʘ๑꒱۶ ٩꒰ʘʚʘ๑꒱۶ ٩꒰ʘʚʘ๑꒱۶
You defeated all of those? Come in then. It seems you have earned the right to enter.3
Welcome to The Duckstack.
EXTRASENSORY SENSOR
Sensitive sensationalism! please no flash photography4.
Duckstack R&D has been working around the clock performing vaguely ethical human experiments, and we are pleased to announce we now have the Duckstack technology5 to double your current senses. Which one will you pick? This is your horoscope for today.
Introducing Touch 2: the feel of a sandwich in your mouth, the feel of the ground beneath your feet, the feel of your organs being pulled down by gravity. We can make all of these disappear, and come back way way more than you are prepared for them to be. If you choose to double your sense of touch, you’ll get a free set of ankle weights. Order yours today!
Introducing Sight 2: Now you can watch television, the antics of your children, the plate turning around in the microwave, and scroll twitter twice as hard6. A word of warning, if you have bad eyes, your current vision problems will also be multiplied by 2, and you’ll need to wear two of your current sets of contacts or glasses to compensate. A dangerous selection, but the benefits of double beauty streaming directly into your eyes is an attractive option! Vision 2.0 is by far our most popular sense selection.
Introducing Smell 2: our smelliest selection, this augment is only for the truly brave of heart. The smells you come into contact with in life is seldom under your control and you are sure to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, especially if you become a parent. However, there is a large group of people who need to learn to stop and smell the roses, and this improvement will certainly be a boon to the philosophical makeup of this type of person. Some smells will knock you out cold, some smells will addict you instantly. Do you have what it takes?
Introducing Taste 2: Advertised as “its like eating, but more so”, this gourmet sense improvement will surely make you the stands-to-the-side-eating-snacks-part-of life of the party! A warning, many have difficulty with spice, mint, citrus, and other intense flavors, but after acclimating, many report a significant increase in the quality of their life. Counterintuitively, many also report an increase in the quality of their diet, as formerly mundane flavors now gain extra nuance and delight.
Introducing Hearing 2: You’ll never have to ask someone to repeat themselves, because you already heard it twice! This buff to your hearing enriches music, chatter, speaking. Unfortunately, there are few audial novelties in life- you may find yourself scrambling to listen to your heartbeat, or crickets, or creaking wood, to satisfy your craving for escape from the ever present tedium of the same sounds times two. A good choice for therapists, both the professional and “friend” type, being a double listener will certainly make your patients feel double heard. A good average pick, respectable with minimal risk.
Introducing Nonsense 2:
Litterbugs: A Public Service Announcement
彡໒(⊙ᴗ⊙)७彡 SURPRISE SENTRY, bet you weren’t expecting to be ambushed after you had made it this far! What’s that? You overcame that one too? Oh well.
Listen guys, actions have consequences. If you eat too much candy, you’ll have an upset tummy tomorrow. If you throw your bubble gum out into nature, it will grow into a bubble gum tree.
You might think, cool, renewable, green bubblegum, but this is not the case. First of all, gum is usually pink, and second of all, the tree doesn’t have bubble gum fruit, the tree is made of bubble gum. Remember school when people would put gum under their desks, and how gross that was7? Imagine doing that to *the world*. Can you imagine how evil that makes you? That’s top tier villain stuff right there. We’ve had multiple bubble gum trees pop up down Duckstack town™8, making a sticky, wobbly mess. This ties up valuable city resources in cleaning that could be better spent patrolling for unauthorized Duckstack readers, causing a tax burden on all our subscribers9, And sending the cleanup crews home to their families looking like some sort of slime monster trauma victims.
And it doesn’t come off in the bath.
So please, dispose of your gum properly: Hold it in three fingers in the air, twist your fingers, and use a small portion of your magic power to phase it into the garbage dump realm. Everybody knows this, but we worry some of you may need a reminder.
Honey Bees, What Are They Planning
Bee kind? Bee nice? Bee good? Bee obedient? Has anyone noticed this propaganda targeting kids?
Every time I see a bee they avert their eyes and ignore me, buzzing along their business. They’re very surreptitious about it- sometimes I catch them where their business is, and they can’t just fly away, but they still very pointedly flit around, acting extremely innocent. Now I’ve been around the block a few times, and they’re trying a little too hard if you ask me. I think they’re hiding something, but I don’t know what. They don’t talk10, but they’re not friendly the way for example wasps are. I see a wasp, it says hello immediately. These bees are different. I don’t trust them. I worry we’re all part of some scheme of theirs, all of us just pawns in their game. I called in a game expert11, but he’s either been paid off by the bees, or he really is innocent in all of this. I hope he’ll be spared in what’s to come.
HISTORY
I’m new to kids so I don’t know if its normal that mine comes equipped with a narrator: “I’m picking this up! I’m putting it over here! I’m watching a show!”
The Little one was playing with a little yellow Tonka truck with a drill, and I got him a bowl of grapes and he immediately started drilling into it. He mined so many grapes for his little grape people12
We were a little worried about his appetite but it turns out he can eat an infinite supply of blueberries so that’s fine I guess
He’s also back to his old diaper evasion tricks: “No, you’re poopy!”, he’s starting to get too clever for us I swear
For the last couple weeks, we’ve been doing a lot of yard work, because its stick season. We’ve got to faithfully farm a lot of sticks for the Little one, its what we got the place for after all.
“I have a good idea: candy!”
We called to him that he needed to get his diaper changed, and he called back “no, I’m cleaning my race car right now” and we found him at his race car bed, swimming in a pile of diaper wipes, faithfully dusting off the side. I am glad he is so cleanliness oriented (other than the mess), I think it will serve him well in life.
We had him interact with a dog the other day, a very friendly dog, it came up and sat near him, and he stared at it, frozen. We encouraged him to pet it, but he just stared, frozen. The dog licked him and he stared, frozen. Then the dog left, and he commented to himself, “That was fun…” so I guess he likes dogs? Maybe?
A VIDEO I FOUND
Pong is the first game ever invented
I thought I would share with you all this video that I found
you rn
I’ve never tried deploying Duckstack Substack Security Sentries™ before, we’ll see how this goes, consider yourself an alpha tester, Reader
me rn
These are military secrets and we couldn’t bear if they were leaked to the public, we would be very sad
A very different thing than regular technology you may have noticed
Sight 2 will also render The Duckstack’s sentries twice as deadly, so that is another danger you have to consider.
homeschool your kids
I just be trademarking crap
yes, even you, even if you’re a free subscriber. Even if you’re not a subscriber even, if you happened to break into today’s Duckstack illicitly somehow. (I can’t imagine this with our new security systems but you never know)
Even with a gun to their head they won’t talk. They’re really well trained.
The Duckstack: Yo who up
TishToshTesh: Usually this time of day; best time to do my own side projects and maybe have some fun designing board games or just get some reading in.
The Duckstack: How would you like to be interviewed for a Duckstack Special
TishToshTesh: I'm not set up for calls, but I'm always happy to answer questions via emails/text.
The Duckstack: Ok first question what is the worst move you have ever made in a board game
TishToshTesh: Designing or playing?
The Duckstack: Well if you've ever made a board game move really poorly that would work but I did mean playing
TishToshTesh: Designing: Making too *few* choices in one of my card games. I like simple rules that beget complexity through situations, but Chromaround 1.0 was *too* simple. Also, first player was at a disadvantage, so it makes kids sad if they get to go first and wind up losing.
playing: Trying to build a great military engine without having the right key piece in Race For The Galaxy; counted on getting the 6-cost bonus card that would have been a huge point boost, trusting to fate. Risk/reward didn't work out well that time.
The Duckstack: Wow, that sounds like a pretty big mistake! Would you say you are mistake-prone, when playing games?
TishToshTesh: Generally not, I tend to play carefully and win more often than not. It's good to push to see what a game can do, though, I think. Gives me a better feel of how the game works, even if I lose. Learning mechanics is more interesting to me than winning.
The Duckstack: That makes a lot of sense. Have you ever made it a goal, and worked deliberately to make iterative improvements towards achieving that goal, of becoming "mistake-prone", when playing games?
TishToshTesh: I've deliberately made mistakes to see how that settles out, and I've deliberately made tangential or "suboptimal" plays for the same reason. I don't necessarily try to be mistake prone, but I love to explore a game's design space and it's valuable to see how a game can be broken and wind up no fun. So yes, I try different things in a game, but it's in the pursuit of learning how to *avoid* mistakes, either in breaking a game or making a broken game.
The Duckstack: I bet you regret that every day. That does lead right into my next question which I had though, which is do you think designing and playing a game in outer space would be very different from normal?
TishToshTesh: As in playing on the ISS, a sleeper ship or some sci-fi thing? Lack of gravity definitely makes a lot of design changes necessary. Magnetized pieces, careful component design, even component composition (to avoid fritzing tech via wandering pieces), definitely different but at the same time, it's an opportunity to play in ZeroG. Floating game boards, like spherical chess/tactics, other interesting spatial opportunities with things like a full on 3D version of a dogfighting game or all sorts of craziness with dexterity games.
The Duckstack: Okay but imagine just playing a regular board game without all of that, would that be pretty similar?
TishToshTesh: Generally speaking, yes. ZeroG makes for a more difficult time manipulating pieces in, say, Monopoly, but the gameplay wouldn't change all that much if you had a way to reliably roll dice, shuffle, keep things organized and such. I'd imagine it to be generally not worth the hassle for a lot of games with more fiddly components, but we've seen magnetized Chess for decades, and it works pretty well. The general need for game pieces to stay where you put them, though, well... without a way to secure them, I'd imagine most board games in ZeroG wouldn't be much fun, if even playable.
The Duckstack: I bet marbles wouldn't change at all! This leads to my third question: Have you ever, in a fit of mythic rage, flipped, thrown into the fire, smashed, dropped out the airlock into the sun, crumpled, given the cold shoulder to, or otherwise destroyed a game that you had lost?
TishToshTesh: ZeroG marbles would be awesome. No, I've never been more than mildly annoyed that I lost a game, and that's usually self-directed (made a dumb mistake). Sometimes I'll avoid playing a game again if it's poorly designed, that's as close as I get.
The Duckstack: I hate to be a hard interviewer here, but my readers look to me as a source who gets to the bottom of things, so I have to ask. First you said you make mistakes on purpose, now you're saying you get angry and use it as an excuse not to play! Tell me honest: Do you hate games?
TishToshTesh: No. I don't get angry. I just find that some games are boring if they are poorly designed. I make mistakes on purpose to test the game's design. If I don't like how that experiment shakes out, I don't play those games again. Plenty of others to try out.
The Duckstack: What games make the best pets?
TishToshTesh: Depends on what you want in a pet.
The Duckstack: Okay, just a couple more questions. What's the origin of your username?
TishToshTesh: It's from my blog title. I'm fond of alliteration. I go by Tesh in a few places, and sometimes I blather when I write. "Tish Tosh" as a Britishism for "whatever I want it to mean" seemed apropos for a blathery blog. It stuck, I'm happy.
The Duckstack: That's a relief to hear! Last question, is there anything the Duckstack readers are itching to know, that you could tell them, but won't?
TishToshTesh: I have a good idea where a cache of advanced alien tech is, but won't tell anyone. I have to make sure it works first. Which means I need a vacation. So, yeah, buy my stuff so I can take some time off. So I can save the world.
The Duckstack: Great! Thank you for your time. I'll get this interview published right away when I normally publish things. Goodnight!
TishToshTesh: Thanks and good morning!
I assume he has little grape people he’s trying to feed, its the only rational explanation for this behavior