Announcing Our Next Project: Magical Kitties Save the Day

Magical Kitties Save the Day is an all-ages roleplaying game about cats with magical powers. We’re excited to announce that we’re Kickstarting the second edition of Matthew J. Hanson’s original game this summer, with expanded rules and new content.

 In Magical Kitties Save the Day, every kitty has a supernatural power and a human they must protect. Every human has a Problem that their kitty must try to solve. Troubles like witches, aliens, and hyper-intelligent raccoons add challenges and intrigue to the game. After playing a few times, the game’s structure makes it easy for even young children to transition to game master, running Magical Kitties Save the Day for their friends.

"What's been wonderful about playtesting this game is the joy it brings to kids and grown-ups and everyone in between,” says Justin, our RPG developer and producer. “If you're an experienced roleplayer, it gives you an opportunity to share our amazing and creative hobby with the incredible, imaginative superpower that's a young kid. We're also including a solo adventure book that will let you play your first game of Magical Kitties Save the Day literally moments after opening the box."  

The Kickstarter for Magical Kitties Save the Day will launch July 1st. In the meantime, we’ll be sending art and gameplay sneak peeks to subscribers on our special Magical Kitties list. If you’re not on it yet, be sure to subscribe so we can fill your inbox with cats and superpowers!

Over the Edge 3rd Edition Is Here

The original roleplaying game of counter-culture conspiracy, weird science, and urban danger comes roaring back — available in stores today, June 1st.

 Conspiracy lurks around every corner on the island of Al Amarja.

This third edition highlights everything we at Atlas Games like about RPGs:

• A heady blend of fringe science, conspiracy, and hyper reality. The island of Al Amarja is a rich sandbox to be filled with your craziest and most entertaining ideas.
• Everything old is new again. New narrative rules, character traits, conspiracies, and locations improve storytelling and propel drama.
• Designed by Jonathan Tweet, lead designer of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Ars Magica, Everway, and 13th Age.

New dice are available too!

Over the Edge was originally created in 1992 by Jonathan Tweet with Robin D. Laws. The first edition served as the inspiration for the collectible card game On the Edge, originally published in 1994 and still available from Atlas Games. This third edition is completely reimagined, with new rules, twists, art, and more.

“Over the Edge is designed to highlight your creativity,” says Tweet. “The setting of Al Amarja is full of interesting details, but what really counts is what you and your friends come up with on your own.” We can’t wait to see what conspiracies you uncover when you return to the Island.

Over the course of the next month, we will share interviews with the production team, designers, and line developers. In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to stay in the loop on what’s coming next.

More than two thousand Kickstarter backers helped fund this edition, some of whom appear in the art of the core rulebook. To everyone who backed, shared, or supported the Kickstarter: thank you! Atlas Games loves you.

Gloom of Thrones Successfully Funded — Thank You!

We wrapped up our Kickstarter campaign for Gloom of Thrones on April 29th. You helped us greatly surpass our $20,000 funding goal, instead raising over $71,000 in four weeks. Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who supported the project! Here are some highlights from April.

Stretch Goals Unlocked
Your support exceeded our expectations, and so lots of additional bonuses were added to the campaign.

• All games purchased through the Kickstarter will include five additional stretch goal characters and full-color rules.
• Deluxe edition backers will get five double-sided player mats. One side is Gloom of Thrones–themed, and the other side features a gloomy house on a miserable hill.
• Retail backers will get a free demo copy.
• Everyone will get six printable player mat PDFs, access to custom card creation at DriveThruCards, and an interactive game tutorial at Dized.

You helped unlock five additional stretch goal characters.

Reprint of The Looking Glass Promo Card
Because of backer interest, we're happy to announce that The Looking Glass Gloom promo card will be available as an add-on to the Kickstarter for $1 shipped. Previously, it was only available as an opaque card, but this reprint will be on transparent plastic — the same as other Gloom cards. Backers can add this on to their pledge in BackerKit.

What’s Next for Us
Kyla McT, the producer and designer for Gloom of Thrones, is finalizing the text and mechanics. Soon, the game will go to the printer, and it should arrive to the Atlas Games warehouse in early fall. Kickstarter backers will receive their games before everyone else! Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to stay abreast of project updates.

Thanks Again
This project wouldn’t have been possible without your support. Thanks to each and every one of you who shared, liked, and backed Gloom of Thrones. Atlas Games loves you!

Easily the Most Wretched Digital Game in History

We’re terribly depressed to make sure you’re aware that our miserable friends at Sky Ship Studios, in cooperation with the distressing team at Asmodee Digital, recently launched Gloom: Digital Edition on Steam, for PC and Mac. As you were certainly able to predict, Gloom: Digital Edition brings all the misery of tabletop Gloom to your computer, in a solo or online-multiplayer 1–4 player experience.

How awful, truly.

Screenshots: The Very Worst Sort of Graphic

Last Call to the Island of Al Amarja

We are in the last few hours of the Over the Edge Kickstarter. There's still time to pledge and join us in returning to the island. We've got some incredible retailer incentives as well as some exciting high-level backer tiers that remain unclaimed, so before the window closes at 1pm Central time, fly on over to the project and see what sights await you.

• Create unique, unorthodox characters drawn from pop culture and the paranormal
• Immerse yourself in an island of intrigue, conspiracy, weird science, and outrageous lifestyles
• Cast your lots in an all-new game system that emphasizes story twists and getting into trouble

Over the Edge is Atlas Games' story-forward roleplaying game of weird urban danger, written and designed by Jonathan Tweet (Ars Magica, D&D 3rd edition, Everway) with Chris Lites (Conan, Mutant Chronicles, Unknown Armies 3). The Core Print and Core Digital Editions are set for release next year; the Core Luxe edition is exclusive to this Kickstarter campaign.

Any Weird You Want

Over the Edge comes at character creation from a unique perspective: you don't have to know the rules to make a great character. Not only that, but your character can come from any source at all. Everything is fair game–just make it weird.

You only need to fill in four blanks when you create an Over the Edge character. First, you need a Main Trait that answers the basic question, "Who are you?" Options might include the tabloid mascot Bat Boy, Big League Slugger, Chernobyl Survivor, Time Lord, Urban Cowboy, or Demonic Salesman.

Second, you need a Side Trait. It's another skill or identity that differentiates you from others like you. You and another player may both be Urban Cowboys, but one of you might have the Side Trait of Contortionist, while the other is Radioactive.

Third, you need to know what kind of Trouble your character has. Trouble is what derails your character, like Fear of Puppies or being Obsessed with Energy Conservation. Whatever you're trying to do, Trouble pulls you off task or leads you more deeply into danger.

Finally, each character has a Question Mark. Every person has something that others believe to be absolutely true about them: they're honest, they're brave, they're selfless. Once you apply that magical Question Mark (Honest? Brave? Selfless?), those concepts spawn all sorts of complications. And complications are what make characters and adventures interesting.

Go down a few internet rabbit holes and mine some serious weirdness. It'll make your Over the Edge character and experiences all the richer!

Your Helpful Assistant Reba

Reba, what's a good Vietnamese restaurant near me?

< Good question. Here's what I've found: >

<< La Florale zine says, "iPho has protein balls that taste just like the ones this scientist I know makes. In their rich oxblood broth, they satisfy your basic need for nutrients." >>

<< Overheard, 12:52 pm, visitor Alex Rodriguez: "That food usually gives me the runs, but the junk we ordered from Hoa Bien hasn't given me a single squirt." >>

<< Guest record 2384w38965, Janelle de Baubigny: 11:00 am tour of IndustreeLab campus, 12:35 pm lunch at Truong Nam (consumed bun and Vietnamese iced coffee), 3:00 pm tour of Bandama caldera, 3:41 pm fell into caldera. Cause undetermined. >>

Reba, that's probably enough.

< Always happy to be of assistance. Enjoy your time on The Edge. >

Welcome Back to the Edge

You step up to the passport control window at last, the long line still stretching out behind you. The government employee is very clean, his noose necktie cinched perfectly. You notice the tattoos on his fingers as he stamps your passport: L O O K   O N C E.

"It's been a long time. Welcome back to Al Amarja."

You can't remember how many years have passed since you last visited the Edge. The brand-new edition of Over the Edge shows you around the place as it is now. The Kickstarter is your ticket for the tour bus.

The Edge is still the weirdest city in the world, and the action comes from the characters you create. New rules focus on the trouble that leads you into the clubs, corporations, and cults of Al Amarja where the good stuff goes down.

The Kickstarter launches today, July 10, and it's full of all-new specials never before featured in an Atlas Games RPG crowdfunding campaign. Get in on the Edgy excellence first!

Cogs and Commissars: A Word from the Artist

Cogs and Commissars is a clever card game of glorious robot revolution that we are currently funding through Kickstarter. One of the most notable features of the game is its art, drawing on Soviet-era propaganda images and early-20th century science fiction pop art. We asked the artist, Zoran Cardula, how he arrived at this delightful art style.

What was your initial reason for going with this look?
"For many years I have been researching the Soviet style and I believe it has a powerful visual impression depicting the retro-future."

How did you approach the card art?
"Each card is a separate propaganda poster showing the retro futuristic style. The chosen colors give even more power to the game. The characters were a challenge for me, they are worked on both Photoshop and Illustrator, and each part of them is separately created in the style of ’30s, simple but powerful."

What's your favorite image?
"I cannot choose my favorite card but in my opinion the cover is the most impressive as it depicts the game concept. Moreover the leaders are great part of the game (I grew up in a period when the Soviet Union was really powerful). All in all I think the game is a really great concept."

The Kickstarter has unlocked its first stretch goal thanks in no small part to Zoran's dedication and fidelity to a fun, consistent look for Cogs and Commissars. We hope you'll become a part of this revolution with us!

The People's Test

As Cogs and Commissars Kickstarts and comes to the end of its development cycle on the way to production, it’s time to blindtest. When I present or talk to people who are interested but new to tabletop game publishing, blindtesting is sometimes a new concept for them.

Blindtesting is simple: It’s handing a group of players the components of a game as you intend to send them to press, then silently watching to see if they can successfully learn how to play using nothing but those items. During the previous and more familiarly named game production step called “playtesting,” the designer or publisher is often present at a test to explain the game, gloss over inconsistencies, and so on. But as we like to say, “The designer doesn’t come in the box.” That is, when a gamer buys a game in a store, they’ll have to learn it for themselves, without the designer’s help. Blindtesting is how we make absolutely sure that process will go as well as it can, before we spent five figures of cash to print thousands of copies.

Common changes from blindtesting often include streamlining the description of the game setup process, unifying game terms to make sure they’re consistent every single time they’re mentioned, calling out overlooked rules to make them more prominent, adding diagrams in places where testers were puzzled, and clarifying what happens in unusual conditions.

Previous projects I’ve worked on, like Witches of the Revolution, saw substantial revisions to their rulebooks as a result of multiple iterations of the blindtesting process. Other games, like Cursed Court, didn’t change much as a result of that process. Sometimes that’s because the rules are simpler, or more time’s been spent teaching the game to different groups and those insights were brought to bear when writing the rulebook. But as a designer, developer, or publisher, sometimes you’re just plain lucky.

If you’re interested in even more detail on playtesting and blindtesting, there’s a whole chapter on it in The White Box Essays.

If you’d like to give blindtesting a try yourself, you can grab the print-and-play files for Cogs and Commissars, try to play using the cards and rules as we currently intend to send them to press, and tell us how it went! Send your comments to game producer Kyla McT, who you can reach at kyla at atlas dash games dot com. You’ll have fun, we’ll be grateful, and Cogs and Commissars will get that much better on its way to release. Thanks in advance!

Matt Haga talks Inspiration and Cogs and Commissars

Matt Haga is the designer of Cogs and Commissars, Atlas Games' clever new card game of robot revolution. We asked him about his inspiration, and here's a little of what he said about it:

"There is no better feeling than knowing that a creation from my mind has moved, inspired, entertained, educated, or in any way left its mark on the life of another human being.

I discovered Magic the Gathering at an early age and played it with my friends, and Dungeons and Dragons a bit later on when I finally convinced some very religious individuals that I wasn’t worshipping the devil or summoning Mephistopheles himself. With Magic I was trying to design my own cards as soon as I understood the game’s mechanics. In Dungeons and Dragons I would spend night after night drawing maps, creating dungeons, and fleshing out stories for my friends to immerse themselves in when we all finally managed to get together.

Of course, these campaigns usually ended up being one or two full nights of character creation, one or two nights of getting the campaign rolling, and then someone couldn’t make it for two weekends in a row and everyone would forget everything - sending us back to square one. But it was still loads of fun.This D&D campaign player absence issue is what actually started me on my journey towards the creation of Cogs & Commissars.

Moving closer to present, my grown up friends and I had not played D&D for years and they expressed to me that they’d love to get together and throw some good ‘ol nostalgia dice. I agreed and got to work, making the most elaborate campaign of my life. Between work schedules, relationships, fickle teenagers, and various dramas, the campaign silently died and board game night was born.

I often thought about the magical formulas which seemed to attract my players over and over again. I wanted to keep my eyes open for fun games to introduce and keep things fresh so I had to know what to look for, but after a while I was having a difficult time finding anything. I wanted something new. It had to be something that we could all play no matter how many of us showed up, it had to be simple enough to grasp for the casual players but deep enough for the rest of us to enjoy, it had to have some degree of personal customization, it had to take up minimal tabletop real estate, it had to have a fun theme, and it couldn’t take all night to complete.

So I started making it myself, and Cogs & Commissars was born."

The Revolution is Here!

Greetings, comrades. As the super blue blood moon rises above the crumbling capitalist dreams of the fleshy ones, we celebrate the launch of COGS AND COMMISSARS, a clever card game of robot revolution. For your convenience, our high-speed data drones have liberated the following information from the grip of the elites.

LAUNCH VIDEO: Here is where you may learn about the game and share with your comrades.
PRINT AND PLAY: Here is where you may download the rules and cards in People's Digital Format (PDF) so that you are enlightened.
KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN: Here is where you may join the revolution and bring about a new era, free from the yoke of lesser card games.

Expect more news and behind the scenes commentary from our glorious leaders in the days and weeks to come!

For the Motherboard!

Comrades! It is such a thrill to announce that next Tuesday we will be kicking off the Kickstarter campaign for Cogs and Commissars, a delightfully irreverent card game about a communist robot revolution by Matt Haga. We'll have lots more to say between now and launch (to say nothing of during the campaign!), but to kick it off please take a look at the wonderful teaser that our own Nicolas Gluesenkamp fabricated out of Zoran Cardula's artwork.


Sign up to get notified by e-mail as soon as our Kickstarter is live for pledges!

Introducing The White Box

Here at Atlas Games, we think game design is pretty great. If you think so too, we've got something new we think you'll like:

The White Box is a game design workshop-in-a-box. It contains a book of essays and a whole bunch of prototyping pieces to help you get the game ideas out of your head and onto the table.

The White Box is Kickstarting right now. We're producing it in cooperation with creator Jeremy Holcomb and our friends at Gameplaywright. The White Box will ship in October, in time for holiday gifting.

If you're the kind of person who thinks game design is awesome — or if you know someone who is — have a look!

Unknown Armies Deluxe Set Photos

One of the best things about publishing is seeing all of the hard work of designers, writers, editors, artists, graphic engineers, and printers come together in the form of an actual physical product. Regent of China shipped us a single copy of the Unknown Armies 3 Deluxe Set to review before full scale production and shipment happens, and we took a few photos.

This is the exterior of the Deluxe Set with slipcase, shrinkwrapped, and all three volumes included in hardback.

The slipcase unfolds to become a landscape oriented game master screen, with all the charts and tables you need during play. It turns back into a slipcase with ease (and a magnetic clasp).

Players can enjoy the gorgeous cover artwork of Jason Engle and Aaron Acevedo. Incidentally, when you take all three books and line them up in a triangle, the art forms a triptych image!

Finally, the books themselves are high quality, sturdy, and gorgeous full-bleed photo-illustrated casebound volumes. Thanks to the layout skills of Thomas Deeny, the table of contents, chapter splash pages, and trade dress all works together.

We can't wait for the thousands of Kickstarter backers to get their own print copies in April. Retail stores should see orders filled at the end of April and early May. If you can't wait, and you didn't back the books last year, our pre-orders are still open!

Unknown Armies: Understanding the Backer Levels

As we approach the final hours of the Unknown Armies Third Edition Kickstarter, I thought we might use this occasion to summarize what folks are going to actually get with their pledges, since so much content has been unlocked.

The Ponies

The Pony levels occupy the lower third of the tier ladder. These levels give you PDF and EPUB versions of Book One: Play, with variations. If we unlock the Godwalker novel from Greg Stolze, all the Ponies get that, too.

• Digital Sparkle Pony adds Book Two: Run, Book Three: Reveal, Book Four: Expose, and Book Five: Mine all as PDF and EPUB, and all the Campaign Starter Kits and the PDF Reference Companion.
• Super Digital Pony adds the two Crazy Packs to all of that content.
• Real Live Pony and Real Live Random Pony don’t include all of that additional stuff, but they do include a print copy of Book One: Play, and Real Live Random Pony includes dice.

The Checkers

The Checker levels start with a base reward of all three print books (loose, no slip case) and all the digital books (Book One thru Book Five, the Campaign Starter Kits, the PDF Reference Companion) plus the UA soundtrack cycles from James Semple.

• Stacked levels means they include Crazy Packs.
• Stones levels means they include dice.

The Chargers

The Charger levels start with a base reward of a Deluxe Set (that’s the three hardcovers with a GM screen slipcase) and all the digital books (Book One thru Five, the Campaign Starter Kits, the PDF Reference Companion) plus the UA soundtrack cycles.

• Stacked levels means they include Crazy Packs.
• Stones levels means they include dice.
• The Adept level takes all of the above and adds a handmade postcard.
• The Avatar level takes all of the above and includes your photo or a photo of an object you like or a place you like in the game, somewhere.
• The Patron is the Avatar level but it switches out the postcard for being a patron of content in Book Five.

The Merchants

The Merchant levels are only for retailers who can verify that they are actually retail sellers. The baseline is two sets of loose hardcover books and extra copies of Book One, with the Charged Merchant including Deluxe Sets instead of loose hardcovers and the Ascended Merchant being all of that plus your store’s logo or photo in the game somewhere.

The Medium Well Done Level

This is the $999 level that throws in a ton of print and PDF content and bonus goodies and doesn’t require any additional shopping costs, plus one of two unique predictive boards handmade by Greg.

Add-Ons

If you want to custom-build your own reward, you can use a combo of any of the above reward tiers and one or more add-ons, which include more print copies, more dice, and so on. You can increase your pledge within Kickstarter to cover the cost of the add-on, but there’s no button to push or place to list which add-ons you want until we get around to migrating everything over to BackerKit.

So there you have it! Probably the best deal if you’re just wanting to go digital or you don’t want to pay for much shipping is the $55 Super Digital Sparkle Pony. Otherwise, we think the best deal for print is the $160 Stacked Charger with Stones, but even the $125 Charger level gets you all the printed stuff and all the digital stuff, so that’s a pretty nice place to park your pledge.

Unknown Armies: Illustrating the Occult Underground

This is the latest in our series of guest blogs by Unknown Armies collaborators and contributors. Today's blog is by UA3 contributing photographer and artist Benoît Felten.

When I first heard that UA3 would be partially illustrated with photographic material, I got really excited and started experimenting with some ideas. Reading the books, particularly book 3, I'd have all these cool ideas, but not all of them were practical to set up. Still, there were a number of things I wanted to try. One was to illustrate some freaky stuff, the other was to illustrate obsession. I first focused on the latter, and one of the first photos I came up with was this one:

I thought this was a good illustration of, in Greg Stolze's words, "doing it wrong."

I really like photography, and I think I'm quite good at it, but I'm not a graphic artist and my photoshop skills are pedestrian at best. So I tried to experiment with things I could get a good grasp on, and played around with tools that are not designed to do what I used them for. I did a series of portrait shots specifically for UA and I was trying to find a way of making them look creepy. For this next shot I used the tool that is so decried in photoshop because it's used to slim down models on magazine covers. As you can see that's not exactly what I did with it.

Finally, I tried to think of outdoor scenes that might look atmospheric and would work for the game. Things that would evoke the underside of urban life. I went through my photos in various places in the world and this one of Bangkok seemed perfect. It's one of those shots that seems to tell a story, but not one you can readily figure out. A great analogy for what Unknown Armies does best, I think.

Unknown Armies: Dead Presidents

This is another of our series of guest blogs about Unknown Armies to celebrate our ongoing Kickstarter for Unknown Armies Third Edition. Today's post is by award-winning game designer and writer Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan.

U(S)A

I’m sure it’s possible to run an Unknown Armies game that isn’t set in America, but I know I never will. The game is quintessentially about America to me, violent and trashy and rootless and crazy and always about to drunkenly stumble into apocalypse. (Disclaimer: America is also full of lovely people and nice things.) Apparently, I passed that attitude onto my players when I asked them to brainstorm some suggestions for an UA campaign, because they came up with two absolutely brilliant ideas that only work in an American contest.

One of them, the one about a team of cursed Gulf War veterans who turn into terrorists at night – or, to be precise, everyone perceives them as terrorists by night – could have been really interesting to explore, but we were all binge-watching the West Wing back then, so we went with the other concept, and it led to one of the most entertaining campaigns I’ve ever had the pleasure of running.

Dead Presidents

The player characters were all ex-Presidents of the United States of America, on the run from the sinister shadow government/cult that resurrected them. George Washington, Herbert Hoover, John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George W Bush (he choked on that pretzel and was replaced by a magical doppleganger) marauding across the Occult Underground, like the A-Team filtered through a PBS biography series. Oh my word, it was fun. All the player characters racked up magical powers pretty quickly – Washington, for example could command anyone who’d ever served in uniform under the flag of the United States. JFK found Excalibur (because Camelot). Nixon, after an encounter with Ben Franklin’s electric ghost, ended up able to throw lightning bolts.

Obviously, the campaign went to bizarre places. Washington spent a lot of the game stuck in the body of a teddy bear toy after mouthing off to Immortal Teddy Roosevelt (who found the fountain of youth during one of his expeditions). The cryogenic head of Walt Disney tried to marry JFK to Snow White in order to complete the alchemical marriage of spiritual and temporal power in America. The Mystic Campaign Bus got trashed by the Lincoln Memorial golem that secretly guards DC.

Here's Looking At You (photo by Peter Griffin)

It all sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But here’s the wonderful thing about Unknown Armies – it takes the absurd, and treats it so f*cking seriously that you don’t have a choice but to run with the crazy.

Look at the funny drunk guy. Look at the funny drunk guy, who’ll only drink from one old Styrofoam cup that he carries with him everywhere, because he claims that it comes from Jonestown and makes everything taste of Kool-Aid. Look at the funny drunk guy, and shudder because he means it all. He’s crazier than you are, and that makes him stronger.

Look at the funny drunk guy as he telekinetically peels your eyeballs like grapes.

In the end, the Dead Presidents saved the world. They crept into the White House by sneaking through a secret time-crossing entrance that went through August 24th, 1812, and liberated the country from the grip of the cult. And by the end of the campaign, what had started out as a pop-culture spoof had become something deadly serious, with real emotion and desperation.

Unknown Armies isn’t the moment when you stop laughing at the absurdity. It’s the moment when you realize you stopped laughing twenty minutes ago, and didn’t notice because you were busy trying to murder Goofy with a shiv made from broken glass.

Unknown Armies: Jailbreak

This is another of our series of guest blogs by creative talents connected to Unknown Armies. Today, we've got a short anecdote by Atlas Games' very own Michelle Nephew.

My first time playing Unknown Armies was pretty mind blowing. It was a game at Gen Con, run by co-creator Greg Stolze himself. If that wasn't enough, it was his weirdly compelling "Jailbreak" scenario from One Shots, wherein a group of escaped convicts and their hostages uncover an unnatural secret at a nearby farmhouse.

I was playing the farmer's wife, and by the end of the session I'd killed him and then myself, to a standing ovation by the rest of the players at the table, who all agreed it was an entirely satisfying ending for us. 

Yep, that's Unknown Armies for you.

You can download the "Jailbreak" scenario or purchase the One Shots PDF by following the links above. One Shots is also included in Crazy Pack 1, part of the selection of add-ons at the Unknown Armies Third Edition Kickstarter.

Unknown Armies: "Not Your Way, My Way!"

The following is the second of our guest blogs for Unknown Armies Third Edition, once again by co-creator and lead designer Greg Stolze.

The third edition of Unknown Armies makes a number of changes to the mechanics and, moreover, to the overall gaming framework. Most of these had the player’s experience at the table squarely in the crosshairs.