weakless universe - Beyond Five Minutes Transcript

The cover of weakless universe by Deric Bindel, Arlyn, Giovanna and Rat With Scarf

Transcript

DANIEL COPPER: Welcome to Beyond Five Minutes, where we delve a little deeper into the games discussed in Five Minutes, Not 5e. My name is Daniel [Copper], otherwise known as The Copper Compendium, and I'll be your host! On this episode, we’re expanding on my chat with Deric Bindel about weakless universe!

Let’s begin with a simple question: why is the game called “weakless universe”?

DERIC BINDEL: So, the creation of weakless universe was a group process between myself and a few friends. We toyed around with a couple different ideas for names, the first one being “Maximum Lore-verdrive” which we didn’t end up going with for, you know, obvious reasons, but I still have a joke game cover based off of that, inspired by the Evangelion title cards. Rat With Scarf, one of the other designers, she suggested weakless universe based off of the physics thought experiment about a universe that lacked the weak nuclear force, one of the five fundamental forces of the universe, something that would radically change everything that we know. It sorta stuck after that – we all liked how elegant and esoteric it sounded: definitely something that could come up in one of the games played.

DANIEL: I loved the examples you give on the itch.io page for the game–they read like mad-lib answers, for example: “The position of Cutlery was created in response to the tragic failures of The Respectful Small Talk.” Do those come from actual play?

DERIC: Yes! All the examples provided come from actual games played during the playtesting – that particular instance came from a game where the main theme for the board was all dinner table items and manners. The more outlandish and strange connections get, the more bizarre the definitions can get, which really help create a fun and unique world and make such a delightful play experience.

DANIEL: What drew you to gameplay structure?

DERIC: So, I personally had been wanting to design a game where the players construct some sort of stringboard-style conspiracy for quite some time, but I’d been lacking a real hook or mechanical framework. Then my tabletop group and I watched all the Evangelion Rebuild movies back-to-back, shortly after the fourth and final film came out. For those who don’t know, the Rebuild movies go even harder on the nonsensical or out-of-pocket terminology than the original show did. It was immediately after watching the fourth film that we launched into designing a very early prototype, quickly settling upon a token currency and a pins and connections system.

The idea behind the tokens came very quickly as a means of limiting the scope of maps that players would build but we had to test quite a bit to figure out what a good number is – too many and the board gets way too unmanageably big and play kind of starts getting a little boring, but too few and the boards don’t get enough stuff on them to make it interesting or get those really weird definitions.

The definitions requiring connections before they could be made arose during one of the early playtests as a further way to refine the scope in a more subtle way and also help create a sense of progression over the course of the game, where at the start you have all these mysterious things that are being put on to the board and slowly, bit by bit, those mysteries get solved.

DANIEL: What’s the strangest combination of connections you’ve seen in play?

DERIC: The strangest connection and one of my personal favourites was the connection between “Elderly Grandmothers” and “Vampires” during one playtest, where one of us declared, “When an Elderly Grandmother dies, their body decomposes into multiple Vampires.” It was just so absurd [that] we all stopped and laughed for a while, reading what had been put on the board.

DANIEL: Thank you again, Deric, for chatting with me about weakless universe! Where can people find you and your games?

DERIC: You can find me on Bluesky and Tumblr, both @dericbindel, one word on each. This game and my own games can be found on my itch.io page. I also wanna give a big special thanks to my friends and fellow designers Arlyn, Giovanna, and Rat With Scarf, without whom this game would not have come together.

DANIEL: You can find those links, as well as links to the transcript of this episode and links to the game, in the video description [below, here]. If you want to find games with similar themes or gameplay to this one, there will also be links to relevant playlists.

And that brings us to the end of the expanded interview! Beyond Five Minutes is an expansion of Five Minutes, Not 5e, so if you’ve not heard my previous discussion with Deric about the game, you can find it linked in the end screen and description!

Thank you for listening, until next time!

[End of transcript.]

Links

The Game and its Designer

Get the game: https://dericbindel.itch.io/weakless-universe

Check out Deric's games on itch.io: https://dericbindel.itch.io/

Follow Deric on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dericbindel.bsky.social

Follow Deric on Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/dericbindel

Relevant (YouTube) Links

weakless universe - Five Minutes, Not 5e: https://youtu.be/S0oRI_nqZJ0

weakless universe - Five Minutes, Not 5e Transcript: https://thecoppercompendium.co.uk/weakless-universe-five-minutes-not-5e-transcript

Single-session: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLJ-CI8A8CCvMCwKjot2cwDzU1vDw35U

Without A Guiding Player: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLJ-CI8A8CAd6O-NXiFRkooGlQ-cMieR

Worldbuilding: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLJ-CI8A8CBwyCBtcb7E_zzCXcc9fNez