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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone and welcome to the Indie Board Game Designers podcast. My name is Patrick Rauland and today we're going to be talking with MaryMartha Ford-Dieng?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yes, Ford-Dieng.

Patrick Rauland: All right. Who is the designer of the Ultimate Clap Back, which is a party game all about comeback. So MaryMartha, welcome to the show.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: What's going on?

Patrick Rauland: You have a super cool game where you get to hurl clap backs at each other. It looks really, really fun.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah, you get to throw a little shade.

Patrick Rauland: Yep. I don't think there's enough games that do that.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I don't think that there is, either. I'm trying to think. Nah, no one throws shade like this one.

How Did You Get Into Board Games?

Patrick Rauland: I kind of want to get into … Normally, I ask people how they get into board games, board design, but you actually have a really cool blog post called How It All Began, and you talk about the inspiration for the game and how you had a lot of negative energy bottled up and you created this game as a form of catharsis. I like for you to tell us a little bit more about that.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Sure. What year are we in? Almost three years ago now. I moved my mother into a nursing home. I'm originally from Pittsburgh. I'm based here in New York and my mother fell and could no longer live by herself. I don't know if you've ever dealt with elder care or seen people deal with elder care. It is very stressful. It's very stressful when you live in the same city and state, but imagine having to take this woman whose lived her whole life, her whole life in Pittsburgh, and to bring her to another city, another state, dump her off in a nursing home, that is hard.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: That was really, really hard to do. I didn't really dump her off, but it felt like that. You know what I mean? It felt like that and it was very stressful and hard for all parties. All parties involved and I didn't realize how it truly was affecting me being a caregiver. I've been some form of a caregiver for my mom for oh my God, 30 years now. That's all always been just part of who I've been, but one thing that was happening is that I kept crying. I was crying all of the time. I was yelling. I would cry every morning before I went to work, dry my tears, come to work, at lunch time I was underneath my desk crying.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: You just couldn't console me and the straw that broke the camel's back, I was in the grocery store buying some food, and my husband wanted baby carrots, and it wasn't on the list, and I had a complete meltdown about baby carrots in the grocery store. He just looked at me and was like, “Babe, what is wrong with you?” Okay, I'm doing this accent because he's from Senegal, West Africa, but that's how he sounded to me. “Babe, I do not understand. Why do you speak to me this way?” I was like, “Oh my God. Who have I become?” And I said, “I think I might need some help.”

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I went and I found myself a good doctor. A good therapist and an even better antidepressant. I take my antidepressant as a public servant for anyone that has to deal with me. I get up in the morning, I brush teeth, I take that antidepressant, and I'm on my way out the door. In working on being well physically, mentally I had to figure out how to manage this because the reality was is that nothing was going to change. My mother is in the nursing home. I can't change that. It's not my fault. I didn't do that. I had to learn how to be kinder to myself through this whole process and I said, “Oh, what are some things that I can do?” Yeah, people say exercise 'cause exercise is good for depression and I'm like I should create something and since I was yelling at people all of the time, and my tongue was really sharp, I said, “Hmm. Well, I like games and I need laughter, so that's fun,” but telling people how you truly feel, that could be fun, too and then the game was born.

Managing Our Emotions

Patrick Rauland: That one of the best origin stories for a game that I have heard. I really, really like that. I don't normally go into this normally where like, “What mechanisms and what theme do we go into?” But I think it's a nice opportunity to explore a couple of different topics. Number one is like emotional bandwidth like being able to … It seemed like you were low on emotional bandwidth and you just needed to do something so you had more bandwidth so when someone asked you to pick up baby carrots, you don't explode.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Exactly. Exactly. That is important. It's important because we have to function. Like I said before, there are things you have no control over and you have to choose as I said to be an active participant in your own wellness. In my choosing to be active, I chose creativity. My background is theater production and management. That's how that started with being creative. Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. How would someone know that they don't have … 'cause it seems like for you the carrot moment was like, “Oh, there's a problem.” How do you know that you're low on emotional bandwidth and you need to do something to change in your life?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Well, you start thinking about okay, am I doing a lot of the same things that I used to do? For example, if you were someone who always hung out with your friends, are you finding yourself not wanting to do that? If there were things that generally you found joy and pleasure in. If it was exercising all the time and now you're not doing it. Are you sleeping habits changing? Are your eating habits changing? Are you eating more or are you eating less? Let me just full transparency, I would hope that I would be eating less, but MaryMartha was eating more.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I was in pints of ice cream like it was my best friend and I was okay with it. I was definitely okay with it. My pants weren't necessarily okay with it, but I was perfectly fine. You have to take a moment and take stock within yourself and say, “Are things changing?” Are things changing with me? I did a quick research, a little search thing, and I was like, “Signs and symptoms of depression,” and as I did that I was like, “Oh, I think I might be off the charts a little bit.”

Patrick Rauland: Oh wow.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah, I should probably contact someone and I'm very fortunate that I have health benefits. Not everyone has that, so I was able to get to where I needed to go.

Being Kind To Yourself

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. You also mentioned be kind to yourself. How does that relate to your … How did that come up in your life?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah. We had these ideas of what life is supposed to look like, right? That could be I'm going to graduate high school, then I'm gonna go to college, and once I'm done with college, I'm gonna get married when I'm 25, and then I'm gonna have three kids, and I'm gonna live here, and I'm gonna do this because this is what the world says that you have to do, right?

Patrick Rauland: That's a good life plan.[crosstalk 00:07:34]

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Right. This has to be your life plan and then things happen and it's not what it turned out to be. In this particular instance with my mother, I knew that there was gonna come a time where she was going to possibly need to be in a nursing home. My grandmother was in one. These are the things that happen. I just figured that I had a little more time. I would have a house, right? I would have been more secure financially. I thought that there was more time and because I couldn't do that, I felt bad. I also felt bad because I was the one that made the decision. Well, myself and I have an older brother who's here with me, and we made the decision that this is what we had to do. I felt horrible for this because I was also looking at how this was affecting here.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: She cried all the time. My mother was crying all of the time and there was nothing that I could do that could change that for her.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: And it wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault until I had to really just own that and sit with that. I didn't do anything wrong. This is what the new normal is and how do I work through the new normal, so that we could be okay. Now, we have our new normal, and I've had to train a whole nursing home team on how they were gonna treat my mother. Yeah, that was something, but it's okay. It's okay. It was a lot of me talking and hand clapping at the same time.

The Difference Between Responsibility & Fault

Patrick Rauland: We will get back to that. I wanna give you kudos. Before we move on, I just wanna give you kudos on separating responsibility versus fault, right? That's like a subtle, but important decision that I'm really lucky that there are a lot of things that happened to me that are my responsibility and not my fault. Most of the problems in my life are things that I created. Shame on me, but it seems like you had a lot of stuff fall in your lap that wasn't your fault, and you just have to like, “Hey, this is throwing off my life plan. I just need to move on.”

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: You gotta move on.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah cool.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: But I've been doing that for a very, very, very long time. Not everyone is able to kind of separate themselves and figure out … Assess the situation and move through it. I guess that's a blessing and curse within itself.

What Skills Did You Learn?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I think you said you need to be a participant in your own life. You learned Illustrator and InDesign to make the game. You acquired new skills. What was that like?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I had to. Okay, let me tell you what was going on. I said, “I'm gonna create this game. How do we do it?” I get online. I'm seeing what the kids are doing out here in these streets and I said, “Oh, I better pull myself together.” When you don't know what to do, you go find people that have the better … They're just better suited for it. I actually started with my friend Brandon who is in Pittsburgh and I said, “This is something that I wanna do. Can you help me?”

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: He actually created the logo based upon my drawings and things like that. Unfortunately, he couldn't move forward with me in this process and I didn't wanna stop because once I started, I was having so much fun, and so much joy and there was something that was really shifting in my spirit, and I was smiling all of the time, so I threw myself in, and I'm like, “Well, I mean, if he can't move forward, then what am I gonna do?” Then I have to do it myself and that was me assessing my situation and figuring out what I needed to do.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I went and I said, “Well, how do I get Adobe on my MacBook? How do I do this?” I figured out how to get Adobe. Lynda.com and anything that you wanna do, somebody on the YouTube has a way to do it. Somebody on the YouTube has a way to do it. Now, because I really didn't know how to use this software, it took me a really long time where maybe someone else who is more proficient they could make changes and do it rather quickly.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I mean, graphic design, designing in itself in time-consuming, but it took me definitely what I felt was a long time because I didn't know how to do all of it.

Patrick Rauland: Definitely. Just to give people perspective. What is a long time? We talking like two hours or like two months? Or two years?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Right. Well, I thought for something that I was doing on a card, I said, “Okay, I'ma go in here and I'm gonna move this dot,” and I started moving the dot and then something else happened, and then before I knew it, I had messed it up 'cause I didn't know what I was really doing to begin with. What I felt should have taken me an hour, that was like three days because I was like, “I don't know what. What is happening?” Well, let me stop and go back and research. What steps did I miss?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: How could I do this and then calling on another friend. “Can you help me? I'm trying to do this. Can you check my work? Is this straight?” ‘Cause I can't tell what a straight line is with a ruler, a T-square, and a computer. It's still always off.

Patrick Rauland: That's amazing. I didn't tell you this ahead of time, but part of my day job is I make courses for Lynda.com.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Okay.

How Long Did You Work On Your Game?

Patrick Rauland: You're the first person that brought it up, so I think it's cool. A lot of people bring up YouTube. It's nice to hear people use. I don't make design courses, but some of the courses on Lynda.com. That's really cool. Okay. Changing gears a little bit. In terms of total time like how long did it take you to make this game? Graphic design, the idea, and then your initial manufacturing.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: A little over a year.

Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That seems a little fast.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah. Okay. That's what people told me. People were like, “You did what? You're already where?” And I said, “But doesn't everyone do this?” That's when I learned. That was me being naïve and having no idea what this world was. I had no idea that this was like this subculture of all of these gamers. Yeah, I was like, “Who are you? Who are you people? What is this?” I had no idea, so when I showed up, people were like, “This is your first game?” I said, “Yeah.”

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: “This is the first game you've ever done?” “Yeah.” “Really? “Yeah.” I didn't know that I was moving very quickly. I also didn't know how expensive this thing was, either. It took me, I would say, six months to really figure out what those mechanics were, and then I said, “Well, I need to play it with people, right?” You have the play testing part and I had to figure out what was play testing going to be. This is where the research came in.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Well, how do other people play test? I figured out I could just use paper like those trading card, plastic like sheet protector kind of things? Who knew that they were all of these tools that I could get. So I went on over to the Amazon and I purchased what I needed to purchase, and I started cutting up paper and writing. That's what I did at first for the play testing part and to really figure out what those mechanics were. I had an idea, a basic idea of what I wanted the mechanics to be, and then I had to test with other people.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: The bulk was really writing the game.

Patrick Rauland: Sure. I mean, yeah. Basically, a lot of content like a lot of cards.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah. Yeah. The game has 550 cards in it. I had a lot to say and I pulled a lot of it from my own life. A lot of it. Yeah. There's a few in there for a couple of cousins. Absolutely. Because your family, that's a lot of material that you can have. It took me a little over a year. I basically had the game completed in nine months and then it was, “Okay, how much is this going to cost me?” Finding a manufacturer, getting bids for that, and then figuring out where I was going to get the money to do this 'cause I had used a lot of my own money.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Are you familiar with Indiegogo?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I did an Indiegogo to help me along, as well. Then I found someone to really help me out and give me what I needed, so that I could do my first print.

Patrick Rauland: That's super cool and now, not now, recently you launched an expansion for your game on Kickstarter.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yes I did. Oh my lord. It is very stressful. I don't know if you've ever done a Kickstarter, but it's really stressful because on the outside when you see people that get fully funded for things, you're like, “Oh, so you just put something up there, you tell the people that you're doing it, and all the money is going to come.” No babygirl, that's not how any of that work. It is a lot of marketing. It is a lot of people who are going to do it, you have to like lobby for yourself, right? Okay, I'm gonna do this and I really want it funded. You got your $25? Okay. Like I need you to do your $25 on this day and making sure that the people are doing what they say.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It was very stressful. Would I do it again? I don't know. I don't know. I'm only one person and I didn't have anyone to share that load with me. I'm not really sure that I would do it again, but it did turn out successful, and I am completely funded for the first expansion pack, which is called “Sometimes You Gotta Cuss.” The game does not have any cursing in it.

Patrick Rauland: Hmm. Got it.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I did that on purpose. No cursing. I like to be able to use my words, but I also like to curse. I like to cuss a little bit and I do, and that's how I made the expansion pack.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I really love that and I think it's also really smart from a marketing perspective, right? Separate the [crosstalk 00:18:11] product into it's own. Yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Have more product and people are like, “Oh, so what is this?” You mix it in. You can mix it in with what you have. I did. I wanted to do a detail with it, so that if people didn't want to have that type of content. Let's say if you're playing with your friends, you can say whatever you want to, but maybe there's like an older generation that are going to join the party, and you want to tame it down some. There's a way you can go through the cards very quickly and pull them out. I did that in the design, yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Whenever you are at a place and I remember trying to play Cards Against Humanity with my sister and some friends at Christmas or something, and then my parents wanted to join. There's certain cards you don't wanna come up, right?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Nope. Exactly. Exactly. You don't. Go ‘head.

What Resource Would You Recommend?

Patrick Rauland: What one resource would you recommend to someone else who wants to make their first game?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: The Internet.

Patrick Rauland: The Internet. All right. I mean-

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It is truly a very good resource for you would be the Internet. Not everyone, wherever they live, they may not have a huge gaming community, right? For me, it started with the Internet. By me using the Internet, I used this website, Meetup. I said, “Let me find, are there other people that like game in New York City? Let me find these people,” and then I found them, and I said, “Let me go where they go,” and then that's what started it. It really started with the Internet. Like your fingers? Your fingers are your best resource. The ability to type. That's your best resource.

Patrick Rauland: There's a cool podcast and they ask people like how much do we have to pay you to never use Google or any sort of search functionality ever again? God, I forgot. For one year. For one year and I wanna say it was 13000. Maybe it was 20 or $30000 like searches become so powerful and it's in the background for all of our lives.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It is. I mean, who is going to the library and pulling up the encyclopedia? No one's doing that. The kids today don't even know what an encyclopedia is. They don't know. I don't know how old you are, but I'm almost 40. The encyclopedia when they used to sell it at the grocery store, it was like Britannica or something like that, and then there was also the Charlie Brown version of the encyclopedia, but when the encyclopedia went to a CD for the CD-ROM? Baby, you couldn't tell me nothing. All my book reports were on point.

Patrick Rauland: I am old enough to remember encyclopedias on CD-ROM.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Okay. Okay. You don't know about cracking open the book and buying them at the grocery store.

Patrick Rauland: I do not remember buying them at the grocery store. I do remember books, encyclopedia books, but I don't remember seeing them at the grocery store.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: All the volumes.

Patrick Rauland: Weird. Do people just like pick them up like they're walking down the milk aisle-

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: We did.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: We did.

Patrick Rauland: We need the book on M, yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yes, we need T. Where I grew up, we didn't have a lot of money, so we definitely weren't buying A through Z. It was what do you have to write about? Let's go on over to the Giant Eagle. That was the name of my local grocery store. Go to the Giant Eagle and get you the letter L. ‘Cause what do you have to research? Llamas.

Patrick Rauland: Wow. I'm just thinking going back to the original point of how powerful search is.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah. I'm so glad for the Internet, but why didn't we think of it? You know what I mean? Look, we would have such a different life right now.

Patrick Rauland: It's still pretty amazing.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It is. It is very. Very, very, very.

What Do You Recommend Spending Money On?

Patrick Rauland: All right. I don't know about you, but I'm a fairly frugal person. I try not to spend money when I don't have to, but what is something you do recommend spending money on as a game designer?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: As a game designer? Software.

Patrick Rauland: Okay.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Whatever the software is and that doesn't necessarily, you know, finding the access to the software that you need. I found how Adobe kind of lives in a cloud somewhere and I pay for that monthly. That's been good for me. That's been good for me. That was actually the best money that I spent. ‘Cause that's what I needed. I mean, that was the game. You can't design it if you don't have the design stuff. Now granted, there are things that people can do that find the things that are free on the Internet to do. I didn't know how to do that. I just didn't. I didn't know how to find the free stuff and use it, and then download a whole bunch of other stuff, and I didn't know if it was gonna have a virus. I just didn't have time for that. I just went to what I knew.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it seems like you went with a more establishment like very well-known design programs.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Rauland: I do know of some other designers who go for the free open source ones, but they have a lot less resources, right?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Right.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. InDesign and Photoshop, Illustrator have like untold resources.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Exactly.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Exactly.

Does Game Design Energize or Exhaust you?

Patrick Rauland: You made one game and one expansion, and it came from this place of negative energy. I'm curious now. Does game design energize you? Does it exhaust you? Where are you at with it now?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Oh, it's a bit of both. I would say the designing definitely energizes. It's the other stuff after it, right? Getting into this. Some of the things that I have observed and have learned is you have to really think about okay, what do I want out of this? Am I doing this for fun and doing it for me? Am I doing it because I want to share it with other people? Is this a business? Do I want to be an entrepreneur? Or is this a hobby? You have to decide what it is and once you make that decision, I think that would help you to determine how you move forward with whatever it is that you do.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: For me, it energizes me to do the design part. I love being creative that way. The business side of it, whew. That can be exhausting. That definitely be exhausting, but it still energizes me because it's mine, and I'm having a great time doing it. I decided to make it a business.

What Does Success Look Like?

Patrick Rauland: Okay. Love it. Okay, I think this leads nicely into what does success look like in the board game world to you?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: To me, success would be actually having it manufactured. If that was your goal, right? One, set the goal, and the goal for me was that I wanted it manufactured so other people could share in the joy that I was having. That's what I wanted, but there are lots of successes, so it determines on what your goal is, and for some it's just to have their very first prototype. And I think that, that's great, and I've seen people who were like, “No. I had my first prototype and that's good.” For them, that's good enough because it was just a hobby for them. Yeah.

To Self Publish or Not To Self Publish?

Patrick Rauland: I guess, okay, I'm gonna nail you down here. For you, do you want to keep making your own games or would you be open to working with a publisher for future designs?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I would be open to working with a publisher for future designs 'cause I mean, the reality is it's not all of my money coming out of my pocket. Collaboration is good, but I'm really enjoy doing something for myself, but that's me managing my wellness, right? Going back to what we were first talking about. This is one of the devices. One of those vehicles for myself on how I keep myself well.

Overrated Underrated Game

Patrick Rauland: Love it. All right. I like to end my shows with a little game called “overrated, underrated,” and in this game I'm gonna give you a word or a phrase, and then you need to tell me if you think it's overrated or underrated.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Okay.

Patrick Rauland: Got it? Cool. All right. Are expansions for games overrated or underrated?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Well, oh, that's hard. I mean, considering that I'm just releasing one that I have to say that they're underrated.

Patrick Rauland: Pretend that you didn't just release one.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I would still say it's underrated.

Patrick Rauland: Okay. Why is that?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Well, because you kind of need them, right? If you play the game a lot, you want more content. We're in that kind of thing. We want more content, but expansions of games especially in terms of like analog gaming, that has always happened. Like Trivial Pursuit? How many times are you gonna get the same card? If you want people to continue to play the game, you have to give them new content.

Patrick Rauland: Got it. Yeah and I think that's especially true for games like yours, right? Each card is like a sassy saying, yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Right, but at some point it all becomes overrated. That's the truth.

Patrick Rauland: Okay. At a certain point, maybe you've had your 10th expansion. Maybe it's done.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It's done.

Patrick Rauland: Okay. Ice cream, is it overrated or underrated?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It is definitely underrated. I love ice cream. It's underrated and people should have more of it.

Patrick Rauland: Favorite flavor?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Oh really? That is so hard. I would have to say it's a Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey, which is a banana puree ice cream with chocolate chunks and walnuts.

Patrick Rauland: Oh boy, that sounds amazing.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It's really good and I used to work at Ben and Jerry's. They had a scoop shop here in New York City. This is when I was like 18. It was so good. So good. I love ice cream. I just had some before you and I started talking.

Patrick Rauland: I might have to have some later. Early bird rewards on Kickstarters. By Early bird rewards-

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Overrated.

Patrick Rauland: Oh okay.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: That's over-

Patrick Rauland: Tell me why.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Because it's more work for people, in my opinion, anyway. People are like, “Yeah, because if I get an early then you're getting something different, but you're really not always. I think it just depends on what the actual campaign is, right? For me, when I did my early bird reward it was to entice people to give. I lowered the buy-in, but you weren't getting anything than the expansion pack. You're getting the same expansion pack, but at a buy-in because I was hoping that people would be like, “Oh, I can get it for $15 instead of spending $25.”

Patrick Rauland: Okay. Maybe you're a fan of early bird rewards when it's like a price discount as opposed to extra special content?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yes. Yeah. Well yes. I have to look at it on both sides, right? On my side as a designer, that's more work for me.

Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Doing crowdfunding is already stressful. I don't wanna do that. I'm serious. MaryMartha was not here for creating a whole bunch of stuff that folks don't need. They don't need all that. I'm not giving you no shirt. Who has the time? I don't have the time to give you a shirt. Give you a shirt? What you gon' do with the shirt? You just gon' run around with a shirt that says “the Ultimate Clap Back?” You're not gonna do that. It's gonna become a dust rag. You're not doing it.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: I decided not to spend my money that way.

Patrick Rauland: Oh, I love it. Love it. All right. Pittsburgh, overrated, underrated?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: It's definitely underrated. Pittsburgh is really a great city.

Patrick Rauland: Ooh okay. I've never been, so tell me why.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Well, I mean, it's home. It's home for me. No, there's a lot of culture in Pittsburgh. There's lots of food there. They have really, really good pierogies in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is also known for the Steelers. The Penguins. There's the Pirates for baseball and I believe we're the only city where all of our sports teams have the same color.

Patrick Rauland: Whoa, that's cool.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Yeah. We're yellow and black, and if you look at the colors of my game, what do you see? Yellow and black.

Patrick Rauland: I like it.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely.

Warp Up

Patrick Rauland: Well awesome. Thank you for being on the show, MaryMartha. Where can people find you and your game online?

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: You can find me on all the social media platforms @clapbackgame and you can purchase the game from me directly on my website, which www.theultimateclapback.com

Patrick Rauland: Love it. Thank you again. Listeners, if you're enjoying this podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you heard this. Now, I heard from MaryMartha that if you leave a review, she will come up with a clap back just for you. That seems like a pretty good reason to leave a review.

MaryMartha Ford-Dieng: Absolutely.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, so you can visit the site at indieboarddesigners.com You can follow me on Twitter, I am @BFTrick. Until next time, happy designing.