Among other things, I grew up playing Titan. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the basic pattern of the game is that you start with a titan and a few other units and move about a strategic board using your existing units to recruit better units. When your units run into your opponents units then they’re moved onto a tactical board where they have a fight. The winner – in addition to having killed some things – gets some points which translate into recruiting special units and more power for their titular titan. A player who loses their titan is eliminated and the last player left standing wins. When my father was winning a game, the closing moves of the game would often look like this:

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I’ve recently been editing the Nightmare cards for Brevity. The game is played in real time and upon receiving a card you have ten seconds to read it, execute the rules on it, propose a trade with another player, agree and swap cads. This is already a tall order and it’s not helped if the wording on the cards is obtuse, so I yesterday I found myself going through it card by card and asking “Is there a quicker way to say this?” Getting into the nuts and bolts of this task has lead me to refine some of the concepts I discussed last month in the simplest rule.

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