Board Game Design Day: White, Brown, and Pink: The Flavors of Tabletop Game Randomness

I'd love to see more board games talk on the channel, they're going through a new Renaissance with crowdfunding making so many new games possible. Please include more talks like these.

This description of pink noise reminds me of another board game lecture on flow and fiero. The concept there describes the steadiness of gameplay as desirable (flow), which however needs to be able to produce surprising moments every once in a while (fiero).

I think Root's combat would qualify as violet noise to an extent. The odds of double zeros being rolled (meaning no change in the board state) is 1/16 while the odds of at least one 3 being rolled (meaning the attacker does a lot of damage) is 7/16.

There's also something to be said for randomness that the player induces, versus randomness that is induced by the game. The most obvious aspect of this is in deckbuilder style games - you often have significant input randomness on each turn (from a drawn hand of cards), but the pool from which that randomness is drawn (your deck) is something you have a lot of control over throughout the game. Similarly, trading card games which have you build your own deck give you complete control over the initial contents of your deck - you will only ever draw cards that you personally put there in your deck - and the specific subset of those cards you're seeing available to play at any given time is somewhat pink-random (your hand is unlikely to change significantly from turn to turn except in predictable or small-random ways, but there are events that can uncommonly happen that can create large changes in that input randomness), additionally, the act of stuff that draws additional cards, while seemingly 'pure randomness' feels less random because of that initial control: you're not just drawing a random card that exists, you're specifically drawing one of the cards you know you put into the deck, even if you don't know which such card exactly you'll get. Players like to feel like they can influence fate. Candyland would not be a hugely different game if everyone got to pick what cards they wanted to include to the deck of movement cards before it was shuffled for play, but it would definitely feel like you made some choices that are going to matter - sort of the opposite of brown noise, where you still lack short-term predictability but can influence the general trend of the game in the long term.

Thank you, this is a subject that doesn't have a lot of coverage

Quacks of Quedlinburg I think has the best representation of pink noise with that damn bag thing it has going on.

Love seeing the board game talks uploaded. Thanks!

Geoff Engelstein is a national treasure.

23:48 First use of exploding dice I know of is in Full Thrust (1992)

I wonder if the player agency/decisions are placed both before and after the random process, what possibilities would it unlock? Perhaps an agency-based view to randomness would br a nice complement to the input/output one? Adam Millard's controllable/reactable split is also another complement to consider

Great video Geoff! Loved the whole thing and will be using some of these elements in my class going forward!!

Some really good analysis here.

29:00 Ask a question, don't make a speech..

This guy is awesome

All the questions were the same basic question: How do you attain pink noise in a game with player randomness.

Mansions of Madness has an ap that can track events and time so it could in effect lead to something bigger happening as time progresses. Not sure if that's programmed or just a countdown but it could be violet noise.

As I am trying to design a 4x style board game that is in a way a combination of catan for resources, risk for war mechanics, and a casino table for monetary economy. I found this great because I can draw inspiration from other mechanics to make the game more unique and fun. Thank you for your research young man. Grand strategy gaming like 4x I find is a sort of making white noise by combining brown and pink noise mechanics. Anything is possible but with proper strategy implementation and tactics, it is possible to take over the world.

you can pair up pink vs violet noise for opposing players or conflicting in-game systems

Wow; this was good!

Design Games really Good Idea，much fun during these, you can share speical games with your friends.some times i do this with my daugther.But most time we produce large quantity Games for the designers. Really Fun.