September 13, 2023

Balance, Pt. 2 (What We Talk About)

59 minutes

Decision Space is the podcast about decisions in board games.

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Episode 138 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Balance, Part Two

...And we're back with part two of the balance what we talk about episode. This time we dive into questions of perceived balance vs. objective balance, and do we really want an objectively balanced game? If so, who is that really serving? We talk about the ways designers might choose to balance the game, and *gasp* how they even use players to do this dirty work for them. Of course we give examples, and wrap up with a discussion of so what, why is it that we even care about balance, and what are the consequences of an under- or over-balanced game. Sheesh! That's a lot, we hope you enjoy it as today's in flight entertainment aboard the Interdecisional Spaceship!

Pre-Planners

Santa Monica, Torres, Food Chain Magnate, and social deduction games et. al are coming up in the relatively near future!

Timestamps

Intro - 0:00

Discussion Start - 2:53

A Few Acres of Snow - 8:45

Citadels - 12:24

BattleCON - 13:39

Findorff - 15:16

Player Balance vs. Designier Balance - 17:30

Root - 18:00

Cosmic Encounter - 20:43

El Grande - 23:49

Zoo Vadis - 25:44

The Castles of Mad King Ludwig - 28:50

Isle of Skye - 30:33

Keyflower - 31:14

Bruges - 34:16

Magic: the Gathering - 35:10

Why do we care about balance - 36:10

Innovation - 44:10

Imhotep - 47:47

Diplomacy - 51:51

Freedom: The Underground Railroad - 52:58

Music and Sound Credits

Thank you to Hembree for our intro and outro music from their song Reach Out. You can listen to the full song on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQuuRPfOyMw&list=TLGGFNH7VEDPgwgyNTA4MjAyMQ&t=3s

You can find more information about Hembree at https://www.hembreemusic.com/.

Thank you to Flash Floods for use of their song Palm of Your Hand as a sting from their album Halfway to Anywhere: https://open.spotify.com/album/2fE6LrqzNDKPYWyS5evh3K?si=CCjdAGmeSnOOEui6aV3_nA

Rules Overview Music:

Way Home by Tokyo Music Walker https://soundcloud.com/user-356546060 Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/tokyo-music-walker-way... Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/pJThZlOuDtI

Contact

We can be reached individually on Twitter at @jakefryd and @burnsidebh. You can also follow Decision Space on Instagram @DecisionSpacePod and talk to us there! If you prefer email, then hit us up at [email protected].

This information is all available along with episodes at our new website decisionspacepodcast.com.

Byeee!

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By Jacob Frydman, Brendan Hansen

4.8

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