Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
How vampire LARPs signal “slow down” without breaking character
Pretending to be an angst-ridden, blood-sucking monster is a fantastic weekend activity, right up until the psychological horror bleeds into real-world panic.…
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Why Yu-Gi-Oh players buy useless cards
The real war in competitive trading card games isn't fought on the playmat; it is fought in the secondary market economy. When a specific deck archetype…
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Why top Osu! players stop looking directly at the notes
Clicking circles to the beat of anime music is actually a brutal endurance test for your optic nerve. In the rhythm game Osu!, high-level chart designers map…
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This game makes you erase your vampire's memories
Immortality is a curse, and this tabletop game makes you feel the psychological weight of it in real time. Thousand Year Old Vampire is a solo journaling RPG…
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How Magic players turn a random card pack into a strategy
Opening a fresh pack of random cards is pure chaos, so professional card players created a survival algorithm. In limited draft formats where you build a deck…
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The real-money armies of a fake medieval war
When thousands of nerds gather in the woods with foam swords, the resulting bureaucracy naturally rivals modern governments. At the massive Canadian LARP…
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How a blank map turns Dungeons & Dragons into survival horror
Moving a miniature token across a piece of paper shouldn't feel exhausting, but hex grid math changes everything. In the Dungeons & Dragons module Tomb of…
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In Rust, logging off leaves you exposed
Logging off usually means you're safe, but multiplayer survival games weaponized sleep. In Rust, closing the game leaves your character unconscious on the…
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In Dominion, victory cards clog your deck
Buying the points you need to win shouldn't inherently ruin your chances of winning. Yet, Dominion invented the deckbuilding genre by doing exactly that. The…
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How dice bots sped up text-based D&D
Before automated chat commands, playing Dungeons & Dragons purely through text was a logistical nightmare of forum posts and honor-system dice rolling that…
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Why Jackbox gives you barely any time to write
Give a player five minutes to write a joke, and they'll freeze up. Give them thirty seconds, and they'll write something hilariously unhinged. Party games…
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Why Rust servers are regularly wiped clean
Without strict regulatory bodies, digital survival games inevitably decay into hyper-aggressive post-apocalyptic monopolies. In Rust, the player-driven…
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Why Sekiro flashes a red warning before danger
When you are exchanging sword strikes at lightning speed, you don't have time to squint at subtle enemy shoulder twitches. FromSoftware solved the visual…
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How escape rooms nudge you toward the answer
Nobody likes admitting defeat in an escape room, leaving groups stubbornly staring at a fake bookshelf for twenty minutes. To prevent severe bottlenecking…
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The Magic card combo that broke the first turn
Card game metas are supposed to be rock-paper-scissors ecosystems, but sometimes the developers accidentally print a nuclear bomb. During Magic's infamous…
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The hidden geometry behind Breath of the Wild’s discoveries
Every time you think you randomly stumbled upon a cool secret in Hyrule, you were actually just manipulated by geometry. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the…
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Why Mr. X wears a visor in Scotland Yard
You literally had to wear a baseball cap backwards to win. In the classic 1983 board game Scotland Yard, the player controlling the fugitive Mr. X receives a…
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Zork taught computers to talk back to rude players
When given the ultimate freedom of a text-based universe, humanity's first instinct is to hurl expletives at it. In the late 1970s, the interactive fiction…
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The card that can stop a D&D scene instantly
Slaying dragons is fun, but accidentally triggering your friend's real-life phobia of giant spiders is not. As tabletop roleplaying games moved away from pure…
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When a game character became too powerful to balance
Sometimes being too good at math breaks the entire dungeon. In the genre-defining deckbuilder Slay the Spire, the developers hit a massive balance wall with…
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A co-op game that makes players fight each other
Spending ten hours watching your partner's back just makes the knife slide in that much easier at the end. Josef Fares designed A Way Out entirely around a…
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How cats in Dwarf Fortress died from spilled beer
In what might be the most absurd example of code working exactly as intended, the most robust simulation game in history murdered its feline population with…
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The Among Us task that could expose an impostor
Leave it to bored teenagers to turn a simple game of alien murder into a ruthless mathematical flowchart. In the hit social deduction game Among Us, the…
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How Minecraft speedrunners build Nether portals from lava
Mining obsidian takes a painstakingly long fourteen seconds per block, which is roughly thirteen seconds too long for someone trying to beat a sandbox game in…
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