Universalis - effective anti-kitchensinking tenets?

[Mike Holmes]

It's notable that this designer didn't stop kitchen sinking in playtests until well after the game was published. The whole idea of playing "tighter" games didn't exist until after the game was published.

In fact, we didn't really realize that we were kitchen sinking until later. In fact, I think what tipped me off was the zombie phenomenon. They were always getting into games that seemed like they'd do fine without zombies. It was my tongue in cheek tenet's banning them that really got me, at least, thinking about ways to keep things tighter overall.

Mike