Here is a guest post by Charles Beauvais.

It’s GDJ about his designs. Find them on KS here!

To appreciate the following stories, you’ll need to know a bit about the mechanics of the game, Smoke and Mirrors. There are three suits, each of which has a different distribution of cards. Each player gets one card from each suit as their hand.

Star:  1 1 1 1 1 Mirror
Spiral: 1 2 3 4 5 Mirror
Skull:  5 5 5 5 5 Mirror

In playtesting, most players pick up the pattern after a round or two. Stars are (usually) 1, Skulls are (usually) 5, and each Spiral card is unique. So, if you’ve got the Spiral 3, and someone puts down a single Spiral card claiming a total of 3, you know they are lying.
Mirrors, by the way, copy one or two of the other (non-mirror) cards it’s played with.

MAGIC PLAYTESTING MOMENT #1: Manny’s Impossible Bluff
In an early version of the game, everyone (not just the next player) had the option of calling your bluff. Manny claimed a total of 4, and put down a single Skull card.
Consulting the chart above, you’ll see that no Skull card has a value of 4, so he was clearly lying. Watching the game silently, I expected the next player would call him out, and that would be the end of it.
However, the next player was too preoccupied with figuring out his turn to notice Manny’s mistake, and he played without challenging. The following player likewise didn’t challenge Manny. There was only one player left before it would be Manny’s turn again: Gabriel.
Gabriel has noticed Manny’s misplay. He knew that it was impossible. And yet… he had just seen two other players decline to call him on it. Gabriel paused, took a deep breath, and accused Manny of lying.
After the game, I asked Manny why he had played a Skull, when he knew that it was impossible. He admitted to simply grabbing the wrong card from his hand! He was as surprised as anyone to see his Skull card (instead of his Spiral card) on the table, but felt that it would arouse too much suspicion to pick it back up. His audacity almost paid off.

MAGIC PLAYTESTING MOMENT #2: Loser’s Revenge
Weeks later, Jim and Brian were losing badly to Gabriel (who had won five rounds in a row). Jim puts down a Spiral card and claims “2”. Brian doesn’t call Jim.
Brian puts down a Star and Spiral card and claims “3”. Gabriel looks at Brian and says, „The only way to form a total of 3 with those cards is if the Spiral card had a value of 2. But, if you were holding the Spiral 2, you would have called Jim when he claimed to have the Spiral 2. You’re obviously lying.”
But Brian was telling the truth! Even though he knew Jim was lying about having the Spiral 2, he didn’t call Jim in order to set a trap for Gabriel.

DIGRESSION ON GROUP-THINK
On the one hand, Smoke and Mirrors is open to analysis. There are 216 possible hands, but that includes a lot of duplication. There are only 24 unique hands. You have a great chance (93%) of being able to produce a 5, and not a very good chance (33%) of producing a 3. But this doesn’t matter.
Your group might arrive at the (mathematically justified) conclusion: “Never claim a 3, unless you have it” is a good heuristic for the game. You all smile and nod and agree, yes, 33% is far too unlikely, you should never bluff a 3. Then you deal out the cards and, suddenly, the player before you claims to have a 3. Is she lying?
The mathematical analysis, the theory, the discussion, the sensible agreement all go out the window. Certainly, she knows that bluffing a 3 is always a bad play, so she’s not bluffing. But, maybe she’s counting on you using this logic to get away with bluffing. She’s won the last two rounds, so she wouldn’t risk throwing it all away on such a transparent bluff, would she?

MAGIC PLAYTESTING MOMENT #3: Pride goeth before the fall
The dialogue in this story speaks for itself.
Manny: (calling Jim’s bluff) „You’re lying. You know how I know?”
Jim: (revealing his winning hand) „You don’t know.”

Smoke and Mirrors is one of three new games in the ButtonShy wallet series. All three are on Kickstarter right now!

You probably noticed I was super stressed before Gen con. I was terrified, I had huge pressure on me and it was really hard to cope with that. I felt tired all the time, couldn’t focus at work, my only dream was 'Let this Gen con be over.’ Yeah, there was a lot of stress. Or to be more precise – I put all this crazy pressure by myself. Anyway, this was horrible few weeks.

And it’s over.

All games arrived (although we had many adventures with that), games were selling like crazy and games got very good feedback. On my FB and Twitter feed I see more and more pictures of people playing and enjoying Rattle, Battle. That’s my first family game, I was really afraid about the feedback.

I am no longer afraid.

This weekend I saw many tweets with people playing my games. Here is one of them. Father and daughter playing Rattle, Battle. How cool is that!

@trzewik ok… So my 6 year old daughter just said, „why don’t you just board him?”she’s much smarter than me!

— r0cky143 (@r0cky143) August 8, 2015

Operation Gen con is over. I am happy again. I am energized again. I am motivated like crazy again. I work every day since the very morning till the very late night again. I am back in action. I have so much energy as never before. I think I may explode at some point.

Let’s face it. I missed me. I missed this obsessed with work dude who can not wait for the next day and for these all crazy things he will do next day.

Welcome back Ignacy. Good to see you again.

Waiting for Gen con drives me nuts. I can’t sleep. I can’t rest. I can’t focus. I am no longer this always-focused fucking-efficient Ignacy who works 18/7. I am pre-Gen con Ignacy. Lousy dude who can’t find himself a place. I hate this version of Ignacy.

I hate him because he wastes time doing nothing. I hate him because he can’t think about anything but Gen con. I hate him because he lost creativity. I hate him because he lost confidence.

He wants to get to you and show you Rattle, Battle. He wants to reach you and play with you Tides of Time. He wants to act, he wants to do something, he wants to show you stuff he was working on for the past months.

He can’t. He is here, waiting for Gen con. Closed in a cage.

With Internet, Netflix, YouTube and all those modern technologies our world is smaller – whatever you live in USA, France or Poland you watch Game of Thrones on HBO, you go to the cinema to watch Terminator, you buy your kids Nerf gun and pretend that you are not interested in shooting with it.

It wasn’t the case when we were kids. I grew up in Poland in communism time, you grew up in USA or France and these were completely different worlds. Different toys, different activities, different TV shows…

Let me today show you one of the highlights of my childhood and literally every other kid during communism time in Poland. USA had Looney Tunes or Disney cartoons, we in Poland had 'Neighbors’. It was cartoon created in Czech and distributed in other countries of Eastern Block, like Poland, ZSRR or Bulgaria.

If in communism times we could be proud of something, that most likely would be this TV show! Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5JnsiqO9Fo

Spring 2013, Lviv in Ukraine. I am at board games convention (surprise!). I’ve just played prototype of Mysterium and I am totally blown away. OMG, what a game! I played twice in a row and I have no doubt – I just found a treasure here. Right after game ends I talk with designers and try to convince them to sign a contract with Portal Games. I love the game. I need to publish it. I am not leaving Ukraine without Mysterium. No way. I am not leaving. Do you hear me? I am not leaving without without contract!

'We also have a pirate game.’ Oleksandr says. 'Do you want to see it?’

'Are you kidding? Of course I want!’

There are different port cards, there are different prices of goods in each port, we gather goods, then we sell them in port, we can change ports, we can look for treasure map, we have these pirates cards for role selection mechanism… These are your cards, these are your dice that represent your ships…

They explain me the rules and we start playing. There is a caravan of merchants we need to attack. We are pirates. They are merchants. We attack them. Sounds legit. I can do that, I can sink merchants.

Oleksandr takes all my dice, do the same with his, with Oleg’s and with merchant’s dice, then shakes them all and with no word of warning or any explanation at all he tosses them all into box.

'We battle’ he says with his Russian accent.

OMG. OMG. OMG. He just took more than 20 dice, shaked them and threw into box! OMG. This is awesome.

What a cool idea. These guys are golden.

The idea of tossing dice into box is amazing. It’s fresh. It’s unique. It’s thematic. And what’s most important – it’s fun. Gathering these 20+ dice and throwing them into box… It’s pure fun. It’s like the essence of gaming, it’s like our wildest dreams come true. Take bunch of dice, throw them and see what happened. Brilliant.

I didn’t like the rest of the game as much though. We were struggling with that for couple of months, I was asking Oleg and Oleksandr for changes, but they were pulling project in a different direction. I wanted upgrades, they wanted role selection. I wanted special powers, they wanted port with prices and set collection of goods.

At some point it was clear – we have two different games in heads. Two games connected with this one brilliant idea of tossing dice into box.

This year there will be two pirate games that uses 3d Dice Battle System released. Different games that were born on one common fundament invented by Oleksandr Nevskiy and Oleg Sidorenko. There is mine game called Rattle, Battle, Grab the Loot and there is Pirates of 7th Seas. Both use tossing dice into box. And both take this base idea in a very different direction and game play.

Try them if you have a chance. It’s a pure and crazy fun packed into cardboard box.