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Rob Parker

Rob Parker

Rob Parker is a game studies researcher and roguelike game developer who appears regularly on the Roguelike Radio podcast and writes on interactive fiction and roguelike design.

Sep 23, 2026

11:33
But I think Conquest isn't really considered by the best players to be a game mode that's worth investing a huge amount of time in.
11:42
Yeah, before we hop on draft mode, there's one thing that I kind of wanted to – because I had this toxic relationship for a while – like a very normal person i sat down and wrote like half an essay on it it's because i needed to unpack why i was like this right um and one of the things that i thought was really really smart was um through the the location system like the way that i'm not by nature typically like a really competitive pvp sort of game and i found it really interesting that like snap hooked me by kind of tweaking how that worked.
12:14
And I think it was because of the location system where you have randomized locations that reveal themselves throughout the first three turns of the game.
12:23
And those can have wild different impacts on how your cards are shuffled around or what your strategy winds up looking like by the end of the game.
12:34
And so it introduces a lot of uncertainty to even just where you're placing stuff or how things are going to interact.
12:40
I went back and reread Jesper Juul's Art of Failure book on uncertainty in games.
12:46
I don't super love that book because it's very, very surface level.

32 MINS LATER

45:11
Rob, did you just want to jump in and make the point you were going to make earlier? I think it was about long-term play.

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