Summer of Math Exposition

Very good

The explanation and animation itself is clear, so I won’t give this a low score ,but I still find the game neither balance nor fun, it feels like you just need to remember a few trick and read the board quickly to win this game. The only strategy being changing lines on other’s board. The lack of deep strategy may led to player quickly feel boring.

Nice and simple game! I love it!

Good idea!

Is this ‘game’ really a game?

Though an interesting idea, the game does not end up being very enjoyable to play. Understanding the mathematics of it also provides little insight in how to play well.

Nice idea! The mathematical explanations were a bit shallow, and the design and math section on the first half could have been interleafed more. Also, I would have loved to see a nice design section about why any of this should be fun to begin with, which problems the palytesters reported and how you resolved them etcm

I wanted to like this video a lot more than I did, and it took me well over a day to finally figure out why. The concept of such math games is awesome, and I love how you managed to put a ton of serious math into a very simple looking design. This gives it that valuable easy-to-start, hard-to-master feeling that can give a game like this at least a bit of staying power before collecting dust (if physical).

And yet the flow of the video bothered me, and I finally know what would have made it better in my opinion. You have some very heavy viewer practice sections in the latter half, but the video takes a long time to get to those. You have an example of a 5x5 board at about the 4.5m mark too, but I think a quick more hands-on hook of a trivial 2x2 board and then a 4x4 board with just a couple not-yet-mathy moves right at the start before diving into the theory would help viewers to survive and digest the theory better.

I found this video to be somewhat slow moving. I admit that I wasn’t overly enthused by the motivation — it felt a bit like an advertisement for the creator’s game. But after that, it seemed like things were fairly basic for a long time, so I was getting bored. I will say that the creator did a nice job of creating engaging images and animations. The video was nice to watch, but for some reason I wasn’t intellectually engaged.

Once we got to the game, I felt like it was somewhat contrived. Unfortunately, while I appreciate the desire to create a game using mathematics, I just didn’t feel like this is a game I would want to play. In addition, the second half of the video felt a lot like an advertisement, trying to hype a game that I just wan’t interested in.

What an amazing entry! It’s so creative of you to come up with a fully-fledged board game that is able to communicate abstract group theory concepts like inverse permutations and conjugation in a simple and organic way through gameplay tactics. Additionally, the inclusion of a playable online demo is great for fostering active learning and transforming viewer engagement into hands-on experimentation. The only possible gripe I have, and it’s quite a minor one, is that the video goes on for a while with a little bit of pacing friction. I think it would be better if it could be made more concise or split by segments into two videos possibly. Overall, stellar work.

My intuition is that this will make a great teaching tool, since it lets players explore and rewards them for finding patterns. I also really like that players have somewhere to start: there are some pretty intuitive strategies, so they don’t have to act randomly to try to figure out what’s going on.

I feel like you could remove any mention of groups to get a shorter video without losing much.

Hello! First of all, happy 40th birthday. Thanks for taking the time to share this story and project, it was a pleasure to watch and I’m definitely going to steal some of these ideas for my 30th birthday, and I can’t wait to get a copy of this game, best of luck getting it out there!

The video offers a great introduction to permutations and groups, and makes it fun with all the fun you’ve clearly had with it :)

With all due respect, I would however recommend a bit more attention to the pacing of the video, and more motivation in putting concepts out there. I found that some parts linger on for a bit too long, constraining the flow of the video. There were not enough previews/motivation while building the concepts up, that might make the viewer feel like we’re playing around with concepts without a clear goal to build towards. You share the plan of the video only once, and that is outlining the main chapters of the video - if you have something like that for each chapter showing that you’ll introduce permutations, then a multiplication, then the group axioms and so on, it would give the viewer more orientation, so that it is clear what is being built and put together at each part. It doesn’t need to be a list on the screen, perhaps just a couple sentences in the voiceover would be enough to clear the path.

For more success of the video on YouTube, I think the intro needs to be stronger too. It’s great to see the story of your birthday, but instead of jumping into it right away, taking a few seconds to have a preview of your game, a teaser of the mathematical concepts that it contains, then a connection back to the birthday story creating a bit of mystery as to how this all originated from a birthday party would give it a much more intriguing hook, making everyone more excited to listen to the story, knowing that it’s going to lead to everything else.

Looking forward to seeing more of your work, and a box of Swaps Battle on shelves soon, all the best :)!

Really good explanation and visuals

Very interesting concept. I think the math was explained in quite a simple way with a good illustration that is interactive. I think it’d might be curious to see what additional advanced rulesets can be placed here (like challenges) by removing certain cards to solve states that are reachable via certain ways, or playing within a much smaller subset (such as subgroups). For the video itself, I think it’s worth exploring some properties of the group that the playset enables like larger inverses if several boards can be linked together and then the goal would be a pair to reach the initial state of another person’s board.