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weird games only

play is sacred


Iteration is the lifeblood of games. Take a concept, make some changes, you end up with a completely new game! It's an amazing process with no real rules beyond "change it enough, and people will tell you if it's too similar". But there's a little less-discussed bit that comes up every once in a great while:

Please, for the love of god, do not just make it worse.

I played a game called Nacho Pile tonight that was very, very similar to another from 15 years ago called Cheeky Monkey. The list of changes were, in their entirety:

  • added superfluous special abilities that were completely random as to when they triggered
  • forced players to move stacks of tiles every time they made a match
  • said stacks could not stack, because the original game's chips were replaced with slick curved plastic "chips" made to look like Doritos
  • all discards went back into the draw bag, meaning the game could literally never end
  • it came in a bag instead of a box which had to be sealed with a ziplock that only mostly worked

Friends don't let friends make or play games like this. I am a bad friend.


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