Ditto Bret Gillan. If someone had said “COIN games are kinda war-story-games” before, I might have paid a lot more attention. Dammit, Paul, you and your infectious enthusiasm are bad for my budget.

Also, I agree that this kind of commentary and self-analysis is really valuable in a rulebook, and it’s sad that it’s so seldom seen. Sometimes I’ll read a rule and do a little analysis of what behaviours it seems to encourage and I’ll nerd out about it to Erin, and she says “I wish I could sight-read games like that” but really, shouldn’t games be advertising those fun interactions between rules and play experience?

Sure, some people might not care about how your decisions to use violence in Monsterhearts are constrained by the fact that “Lash Out” is your only directly violent option, but for those of us for whom that’s really exciting, it’s the sort of thing that could be the “indie” equivalent of “50 playable classes and over 200 spells!”