Solitomb by Jakub Wasilevski is a roguelike deck-builder based on solitaire and using poker hand mechanics. That’s a lot of concepts, and while I don’t unpack them in this episode, I just ramble about what it means to have concepts.

Why are they so important? We try to shoehorn games into specific niches and most reviews start by comparing a game to some other well-known games. The key is “well-known“ because knowledge (previous experience) is what people base their understanding of new things on. We use metaphors to quickly map new things and make them less scary and more familiar as fast as possible. This helps live life efficiently. Mark Rosewater calls this piggybacking, and he talks about the many advantages of using it, go check it out for an in-depth article.

Get full access to zivan at zivanovic.substack.com/subscribe