Murraculous1

Haha! I try not to ask them open ended questions when their mouth is loaded with dental tools, if that's what your asking ;)

Some patients do better with us distracting them with stories, one-way conversation, or the TV on the ceiling with pet/animal videos.

Haha, I love Seinfeld! It blew my mind to go back and watch it recently only to realize that Bryan Cranston was the dentist.

As you know, us dentists have tall mountains to climb when it comes to anti-dentites. Hopefully us putting out some killer fun games will help to show others that we're not just sadists, haha.

I'm a HUGE fan of his work. I think he's one of the best in the industry at designing elegant games, or games with simple rules and emerging interactions and strategies. I find complex/fiddly games can sometimes detract from the core fun, and I prefer games where player interaction/influence can have a strong effect on the experience, so Knizia Games hit the sweet spot for me. Here are some of my favorites of his published games: https://bitewinggames.com/top-10-reiner-knizia-games/

I've also learned a lot from the Board Game Design Lab! That's a huge rabbit hole of resources and information to help learn about publishing and design. https://boardgamedesignlab.com

There's an interesting YouTube video called "Everything is a Remix" that talks about how nothing is ever really 100% new but creativity is more a process of remixing, recombining, reimagining, etc. https://youtu.be/nJPERZDfyWc

But when you combine two individual things that have never been combined before, or in a unique way, then you do end up with something "new".

As far as how that actually works in real life, that may be Reiner Knizia asking the question "What if the second highest card was the winner of the round?" and that question leading to Pumafiosi. Or for my own future design "What is interesting about constellations, and how can we convert that into a game" and coming up with Con Artist where players draw constellations related to a topic and try to deduce who was faking it (who had no clue what the topic actually was but constellations are so fiddly and abstract that just maybe they aren't lying).