Simple Elegance Variable Player Powers

#74 – Simple Elegance: Variable Player Powers

Patrick: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Indie Board Game Designers podcast. This is the fourth installment of the Simple Elegance series, which is all about myself and Cody preparing for the Simple Elegance contest on The Game Crafter.

Patrick: As of the time of this recording, we have 27 days left, which both Cody and myself are thinking, “That is not a lot of time.” We're going to talk about final playtesting, and we're probably going to have at least one more episode. In that next episode, we are probably going to talk about preparing our game on The Game Crafter to submit it to the contest on time. So if you haven't listened to the series before, I recommend you start at the beginning and listen to Simple Elegance one, two, and three. Then listen to this one, which is the fourth installment. Anyway, Cody, how are you doing?

Introduction

Cody: Good, Patrick. Just feeling the time crunch like everyone else, I'm sure, that's trying to participate in this contest.

Patrick: Yeah, it is– I do a lot of event planning in my day job, and you're always like “This thing is four months out. We have so much time,” and then somehow time evaporates and it's like 30 days out, and you're like “Oh no. We have a lot–” There's always a hidden– There's a large amount of details that you forget about, and it always comes as a crunch.

Cody: Totally. As we talked before the show, that was a lot of my time evaporated, because I just got married this weekend.

Patrick: Congrats.

Cody: So, there's– Yeah. For whatever reason I think that I can juggle between meetings and all that stuff, getting ready for the wedding, “I'll sneak in some design time,” but that just never happened. Then not only that but besides my wedding, which it went well besides the minister mispronouncing my wife's name twice during the ceremony.

Patrick: What?

Cody: Yeah. It was an interesting experience standing up there, and– There was a lot of times where it was like he looked up for you to repeat part of your vows, or whatever, and then when he looked down there was a 10-second pause of him trying to like re-find himself in his script–

Patrick: What?

Cody: And everyone's just standing there awkwardly.

Patrick: Oh my gosh.

Cody: Yeah, so. But it was fun.

Patrick: Yeah. Good. Congrats.

Tariffs on Board Games

Cody: Man. Yeah, thank you. Besides that, though, another thing that's consumed a lot of my time is trying to wrap my head around all the potential tariffs for the board game industry. Because as we've talked I'm supposed to be launching a Kickstarter soon, and now if that happens I need to readjust all my quotes and make sure that I'm not all of a sudden going from breaking even or making money to losing money.

Patrick: No, absolutely. So, Cody, you're in a better situation than I am with my game. I've already collected funds. Now the good news is I have the budget for it, but it means I'm basically losing about $1,000 dollars because– By the way, this is if these tariffs go through and things are not resolved in time. So there's still an opportunity for everything to be fine. Maybe.

Cody: Yeah. I feel real bad for the people that are like a month or two out from delivering their Kickstarters. I have one friend that had a successful Kickstarter, and he's doing 10,000 units for his first print run. He's not going to be shipping all of those straight to the US, but in theory, if he shipped all those to the US, he could potentially be hit with the $20,000 dollar– Just unexpected costs.

Patrick: Goodness gracious. I have a tiny game, and I'm only making 500, so they took me a lot less. For the listeners who might not know, the current administration wants to put a 25% tariff on board games. So 25%, I know maybe in some ways it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you think about it, that means all of your games, instead of costing $4 dollars they are now going to cost five dollars. Like, every single game you make. That cost adds up super quick.

Cody: Then it adds up– It doesn't add exactly, like “Just add 25% onto the cost,” because it adds onto, from my understanding of talking to other people in the industry– Let's say you manufacture a game for $4 dollars– Or, I guess maybe that's what you're talking about, is the manufacturing cost. But it's multiplicative if that's a word. Multiplicative? However, you say that word, instead of additive. So it's not like, “You would have made that game for $4 dollars, now you make it for $5 dollars, so now the customer has to pay one more dollar.” No, that's $5 more dollars that the customer ends up paying.

Patrick: Yeah. If you want to keep your existing margins, because of the way board games– Yeah. Instead of– It's a little bit complicated, but yes. Basically, board game costs, if this goes through, will increase by about 25% to the end consumer.

Cody: Yeah. But besides the depressing tariffs and other things that have fulfilled or taken up my time, was yesterday the day after my wedding, we tried to play Gloomhaven. Let me tell you that is not an entrant to the Simple Elegance contest. That was the most complex game that I have ever tried to learn. I have zero games in my collection that have a 51-page rule book like Gloomhaven does. So many times through the playing of the game, instead of simply “You do this or this,” it was like “Do this or this, or this or this, or this combo.” Then no matter what you're doing, since you don't know the game, you also now need to go look up what that does in the rulebook. It was just not simply elegant for us.

Patrick: I hear you. As I was saying in the preshow, I was lucky that a friend of mine showed me how to play Gloomhaven. So, I skipped all that. It was a pretty smooth experience as someone who was being taught the game, but learning those types of games is an ordeal.

Cody: Yeah. But besides all that, how is all your stuff coming, Patrick?

Patrick: Things are going well. Work is starting to heat up again, and my parents are coming to visit, then I have a bunch of work trips in the next month. So things are getting busy. I want to get work done on my game sooner rather than later because otherwise I know I'll run out of time because I have so many commitments. But other than that, life's good. Let me give you one update on my game. I had a good playtest yesterday, so I guess I'll save that for a little bit later in the show, but I've had some good personal news and some good game news. So, things are going well.

Cody: Awesome.

Homework

Patrick: Let's talk about homework. You tasked me with coming up with made up names for my game– My metal coin game, and I tried coming up with some made up names. Cody, my brain is too analytical and too boring, and I cannot come up with names. That is just not how my brain works. I talked to the person I'm seeing right now, the person I'm dating, and we did go back and forth, but I couldn't come up with a single good one. But I did do something along the names, and I tested my game name in The Game Crafter chat.

Patrick: By testing it I mean, with no context to any of the people who are in the chat, I said “What do you think of, if I said a game is called Bank of the Realms?” They talked about money, and they talked about fantasy, so I think that is what I'm going with for this contest. I'm just going to commit to Bank of the Realms, and I think that's good enough. I know it's not like a sleek one-word entry that a lot of abstract games have, but I think it's good enough for the contest.

Cody: Yeah. There's nothing saying you can't change it later unless you're trying to go with the notoriety of the contest.

Patrick: Yeah. I'd like to have a really good name out of the gates, but this'll be fine for now. Then the other thing I had to do was I wanted to work on my dwarf coins, and I said “Maybe even the construct coins,” and both of those were worked on. I have some mockups on Twitter, and I will share the images and the wrap-up in the– Not the transcript, the show notes. Those look– I'm really happy with those, especially the Constructs coins that look like these cool gears. Graphic design is moving forward, and yeah, I'm really happy with that. Did you finish your homework?

Construct Coins
Construct coins for Bank of the Realms. These coins are identical on the front & back.

Cody: Yeah, I did not do as well as you did. I probably did worse than you did coming up with names. I was supposed to make a new prototype for Dino Dice, that didn't happen. I was supposed to get more playtests of the coin game, that also did not happen. I was also supposed to experiment with the removable rows/columns in the coin game, that also did not happen. But I think we decided– I decided to keep those on the backburner and focus on a game that me and my roommate had been working on for a while, that I think is probably a stronger entrant to the contest, instead of me trying to slap something together last minute.

Patrick: OK.

War: The Deck Builder

Cody: So, yeah. We haven't talked about this game at all yet, but it came from the idea– My roommate, he's new-ish to board games. He's a programmer, and so he's a real analytical thinker, but he is actually– One of the parts of getting me into board games was me and him we're going to make a video game together, in that he went through a college for game design. Mainly video game and like software programming and all that stuff, but one of the things he learned was “An easy way to see if something at least has legs before you go to try and program it is to just prototype it down on paper, kind of like in a board game form.” So we started doing that for our video game, and then I looked more and more into board games and ended up finding The Dice Tower and all these other things, and just got enamored into board games. Now about two years later he's now also getting into board games–

Patrick: Cool.

Cody: And board game design. He typically stays– Currently he stays, he doesn't– Like, Gloomhaven is a game that is intimidating to him. Because he likes everything– He comes from playing video games, so not a lot of fiddly-ness and setting things up, he wants to play the game. A lot of the games he gravitates for are just simple. Like Campy Creatures, or like a Sushi Go.

Cody: Just nice simple games that you can play with anyone. So he started, he came to me with the idea for a game that he could play with his family that is even less gamers than he is. He explained it, and it sounded like War, except like a modern version of War. We don't have an official title for it right now, but we're just going with War: The Deck Builder.

Cody: Which is– I don't know if that's an awful title or not, but it plays similar to War where you have a deck of cards, and you play, each player is going to play one versus the other. Then the highest, best card is going to win, and they're going to win another card to add to their deck.

Cody: Except the thing is, it's not– Instead of like War where you have a deck of cards, and you split them up, and each player has half the deck, and then they're just randomly flipping the top card off their deck, you start with a starting deck of 10 cards, and you have 5 of them in your hand and you choose which one to play.

Cody: There's also three cards out at a time that you're fighting for, so based off what you have in your hand and what's out there, you'll play a card and if you win you get to choose one of those cards to add to your deck. You keep doing that until those three cards are gone, then you re-draw, and re-put cards back out.

Cody: Then the really neat part of the game that makes it not just like a modern version of War is there's this thing we have in there called The Kingdom. Which The Kingdom is actually what you score points. In most deck building games, you have an ability to gain cards, and you have an ability to get rid of cards.

Cody: In this one, when you win a card, you have the choice of either putting it in your deck, or you can declare it to your Kingdom. I think in the theme of it like they're going to live a nice life in The Kingdom and they're no longer fighting in the War. So the scoring, how it works is there's like three tiers. There's the peasants, the middle class, and there's the royalty. Then each class is worth a certain amount of points if you have the most of them.

Patrick: Right, OK.

Cody: So if you have two peasants and the other player only has one peasant, or if they have four blacksmiths versus your one blacksmith, they'll score the blacksmith and you won't. If you tie it cancels each other out.

Patrick: So you can– It's like you can put a card in your deck to win, or you can put a card in your deck to score points.

Cody: Yes, exactly. There's powerful cards like dragons and kings and queens and stuff, so you have to balance at what point in the game do you start removing those from your deck, or keeping them so that you can win more cards. It has a cool incentive to like trim your deck and keep your deck nice and lean, so you're getting to your good cards, but also not too lean to where you have nothing left to win battles.

Patrick: I like that. That sounds like a nice– What am I going for? Like, a mechanic where you're torn between two good options. Right? “Do I put in my deck and get more cards to win more battles, or do I score points?” That's a nice dynamic. But before we started talking, is this– I assumed this was a standard deck of cards, but then you talked about dragons. So is it mostly a standard deck of cards?

Cody: Yes. The initial idea he pitched me was a deck of cards, like just so that we could prototype it. I was like, “No. We can make this real quick with my tool that I use to prototype games.” So I just made it in a spreadsheet real quick, and it was just simple cards. You have– That's another thing I haven't mentioned, is that each card has a certain power. It's not just straight, “This number is higher than this number,” like the two which I think is a bard hasn't the ability to draw a card off the top of the deck. It's a two, so it's never– It's typically never going to win a battle. But you do get a free random card off the top of the deck, and then there's a thief which lets you switch cards and stuff.

Patrick: Awesome.

Cody: All sorts of ways the abilities interact.

Patrick: So, we have 27 days left, Cody. Have you playtested this yet?

Cody: This has been playtested a lot.

Patrick: Great. OK.

Cody: It's pretty refined.

Patrick: OK, awesome.

Cody: Yeah we're at the point now where we need to get it all finished with art and do minor ability tweaks, and it's essentially almost done.

Art for War: The Deck Builder

Patrick: Awesome. Art's tricky, are you going to commission art or are you going to make it? Are you going to find it? Or what are you going to do?

Cody: Yeah. This is the tough part I'm in, because when me and him started on this deck– Or, on this game, it was with the intention of me publishing it under Gold Nugget Games. So I'm torn in this weird spot of, “Do I pay someone to do quick, not very good art? Do I try to convince my wife to try to do some art real quick for it, that won't be super good either, but it'll be free? Or–” Because I don't think we have time to commission it to get the final art in 27 days. Because it never works that way when you're trying to go through all the process.

Patrick: Do you think it's possible to maybe hire someone to do the box cover or a logo or something, like by a professional, that you can keep for forever and maybe get free art for all the individual cards? Because if you're going to make the game eventually, maybe you can get just the box art done, or just the dragon card done? Just like one or two key pieces, because I think with one or two key pieces, I think your game will stand out among– As you predicted, like over a hundred entries.

Cody: Yeah, so that's an interesting angle I haven't thought of. Like start the process, and maybe we only get one or two pieces done, and then have the rest as stand-in. I don't know how– I guess, how would you think of that if you were a judge seeing it? Would you, in a contest setting, would you understand, or would you be like “It's weird they have these two pieces in this nice style, and the rest is garbage?”

Patrick: That's tricky, yeah. If 50% of the cards look great, and 50% look like garbage, like let's say you put no effort into them. That would be weird. But I think if you just had a nice box cover, then that's totally different than the individual cards looking weird.

Cody: I see what you're saying. So like a nice logo and box cover so that you can like have it as your thumbnail.

Patrick: Exactly.

Cody: So that people will go, “That looks cool.”

Patrick: I think that might be a good middle ground for you, so you can start. This way, at least you can start making the game that you want to make anyways, and the box cover is probably not going to change that much. That might be a good way to do it.

Cody: Yeah, interesting. I will definitely talk to him and see about that as well because we still also have to find an artist.

Patrick: Oh, boy.

Cody: Yeah. I have an artist that I enjoy working with, but he's also busy on my other project, getting ready for a Kickstarter early next year.

Patrick: For homework, I might assign you to find an artist.

Cody: Yeah, I think that's a good idea.

New Components

Patrick: All right. So I did want to give– Just in case anyone is still making their game, The Game Crafter recently released the medium six-fold board, which looks amazing. It's a huge– When you fold it all out, it is really large. I don't have the link in front of me, but it is a very big board, and it fits perfectly in the medium stout box. The one downside for this particular competition is it's $12 bucks. So out of your $30 dollars, almost half of it would be the board. If you don't have that many pieces maybe it'll be good. But I think, Cody, we're going to see a lot of games with cards and a lot of games with cardboard tokens like Carcassonne. Because it's just really hard to get a board and a box and components, and everything else, in under $30 dollars. It's just really tricky.

Cody: Yeah. I completely agree. Because if the board is– I did see a little preview of that, I haven't looked into it much, but it did look nice. But if that's $12 dollars and then this box is like $10 or whatever, like that leaves you $8 bucks to fill out the rest of the components. That's not much.

Patrick: Exactly. So it's a great, and if you need a board and you don't have a lot of components, it might be perfect. But for me, I looked at it, Cody. It's just a little bit too expensive. Even though maybe after this contest maybe I'll change the game and add a medium board or something. But for me right now, I think I'm going to have to pass on it.

Cody: So do you know any games that uses that large of a board that doesn't have a ton of components? Because I can't think of a single one that does.

Patrick: Great question. Boy, the only thing is coming to mind, I'm sure there are. There is a super old game called Cashflow 101, which is about managing money. It's like a roll and move game, but it's basically just a board with a lot of spaces, your pawn, and then stacks of money. So there's not– Stacks of money, like paper money, are pretty cheap. That one might qualify. I'm sure there are games like that, but it would feel very Monopoly-esque to use that board without many pieces.

Cody: Yeah, definitely. I agree.

Bank of the Realms

Patrick: Let me give an update on Bank of the Realms. So as I mentioned, I iterated on my coins for the Iron-born Dwarves. The first version was good but a little, maybe cartoony? A little– I don't know what the right word is here, but it just wasn't quite the right look. I iterated on them, and they look a little bit more like, they're a little bit more line-drawn now. I know this is a podcast, so it's really hard to describe graphics, but they're a little bit more– Gritty isn't the right word, but a little bit more– Less line-arty and more, I don't know. Like a pencil drawing. Does that make any sense, Cody?

Iron Borne Dwarf coins for Bank of the Realms

Cody: Yeah, I think so. Have you posted those anywhere? I know I saw your–

Patrick: Yeah. They're on Twitter.

Cody: Oh, OK. I'll have to–

Patrick: But it's a little bit tricky, because of the way Twitter threads things I posted it as a reply to myself. So find the first picture of the dwarf coins, and then you can click on it and scroll through, and you can see basically the update to it. Just for the people listening, I will make sure to post these in the show notes.

Patrick: But I'm really happy with those. They all look like shields now, which looks cool. [I started] on the coins for the Constructs, they all look like little metal gears. Those look good. Then for the last race I finally narrowed it down to the Kitsune, and basically I looked through this giant list of fantasy races on Wikipedia, and there's these cool– I think they're called black tortoises or something in Japanese folklore or something, and they're– I was thinking “Giant turtles sound awesome, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I think I can make cool shell coins,” so I'm going with Kitsune and the tortoises.

Patrick: So, I need to keep working on all those, and what I want to talk about is I had a great playtest yesterday, Cody. I know from some feedback from maybe a week ago, people definitely said “Patrick, you need to have these public objectives, so I know how to block my opponent.” I'm like, “OK. I got it. But you don't want to have–” It was tricky about which objectives to be face up, should they all be face up, should only one of them be face up?

Patrick: Cody, I don't know about you but I have this belief that when you make variable player powers, you should be able to test the game without the variable player powers and it should work fine, then you add the variable player powers in. But in this game specifically what basically I did is, number one, you have variable player powers that each use the actions in the game a little bit differently.

Patrick: Each of them has an ultimate pattern card that's worth a ton of points, and that one is always face up. So if you were the dwarves, you have this pattern card that you're trying to make on the board that's one gold coin in each of the corners.

The “Four Towers” pattern/objective card for the Iron Borne Dwarves player

Patrick: What's cool about it is people are, in the playtest I did yesterday, people are blocking you immediately. If they see you get a gold coin in the corner, they're going to swap it. They're going to move it around. They're going to block other gold coins from going in the corner. So I had this belief Cody, that a game should be the exact same game, and then you add variable player powers, and it adds a little spice. But in this case, the variable player powers, they modify the actions but also they give you “This is what this race is going for, and if they get this action and if they complete this pattern, they're very likely going to win.” So I'm really happy that the first playtest confirmed that.

Cody: Interesting. I haven't heard too much about that theory, because it instantly made me think of Root, and what if Root didn't have variable player powers?

Patrick: Yeah. Let's use different terms here. I think in a lot of games you can be overpowered, but in Root, I would say you are asymmetrical. Because I think it's so drastic that you are literally different roles, but I think in a lot of games it's like– In some games, what am I thinking of? Lords of Waterdeep. You get a character in the beginning, and it's like “You get plus one point for every red building,” and someone else gets a card that says “You get plus one point for every blue building.” They're very minor differences, and maybe this is a step towards a little bit more of a symmetry, as opposed to having a slightly different power.

Cody: Yeah, that makes sense. Where Root, you're fundamentally all the different factions have different mechanics in the game.

Patrick: Yes, completely.

Cody: Where variable player powers, you are playing the same game, and you have slight advantages in certain situations.

Patrick: Exactly. Yes, so that's my update. Basically because of yesterday's playtest I'm super happy, and I think I just– I'm going to keep playtesting and tweaking and adding pattern cards, and I'm going to keep doing tweaks, but I think my game is finally where I want it to be. Because I've struggled for the last two episodes.

Cody: I have a question on your playtest. You mentioned you have that ultimate goal, and so you notice players trying to block each other from getting that when they see, they're getting close. Have you found that then opens– Like, can you fake out “I'm going to make my ultimate pattern,” but then that transitions into getting this minor pattern because you diverted all your energy to try to block me over there?

Patrick: Exactly. You can feign– Yes, you can do that. You can feign. So it's like, “I'm definitely–” You just put a gold coin, as the dwarves, they have to put the four gold coins in the four corners. You can just put a gold coin in one corner, and your opponent might go, “Oh boy, I got to watch out for the rest.” Then they might try to block your other gold coins, and they're not paying attention at all to what's going on in the center of the board. That can absolutely happen. I'm really happy with that.

Patrick: Literally, I think in the first, maybe the second turn of the playtest, the guy didn't know what to do. He's like, “I'm adding a coin to the board, but I don't know where to put it. But since you need to put a coin here for your ultimate power, I'm just going to block you.” Like literally the second turn of the game, it gave him direction to block his opponent. Keep in mind you have two other pattern cards that are secret, so it's still very easy to get those other pattern cards off if your opponent is only worried about the super pattern card.

Cody: Interesting. Yeah. I can't wait to try it, it sounds interesting.

Homework for Next Show

Homework #1 – Ordering a Prototype for Bank of the Realms

Patrick: I'm making a lot of progress. I might have to send you some print and play files or something, just because I think– Because I'm really happy with it. Cool, so let's talk about homework for the next show because we're coming up at the end here.

Patrick: So we have 27 days, I just took a quick look at The Game Crafter. Listeners, if you don't know, TheGameCrafter.com/status will show you how long it takes them to ship your game. If I ordered a game today, it would ship in nine days. So this content, and let's say shipping is another 3-5 days and I'm just going to round up to five. That's 14 days. Let's see if I can do any math here.

Patrick: So that means I have 13 days to make this prototype, order it on The Game Crafter, ship it and hope it arrives on time, and then basically see the prototype and go “Yes this is what I want.” Or, go, “Oh no. The pieces are too big, or the pieces are too small, or the board needs to be the bigger board, not, the smaller board,” and then make last minute changes and then submit it.

Patrick: So that's what I'm doing, is I'm ordering a prototype with hopefully a couple days to spare to make sure that it looks good, and everything is good to go, and then submit it to the contest. But of course in that whole time, I'm going to be like tweaking cards and probably editing the box some more and making The Game Crafter page. I'm going to finish all the art, and I'm going to have to order my copy from The Game Crafter probably in the next– I'm going to say give me a couple days. The next 7-10 days.

Cody: Yeah. I think that's a very accurate timeline.

Patrick: The timeline is so short.

Cody: Yeah. When you add on, if you want to get a copy to have time to make any last-second change, you have to be ordering it soon. I haven't asked you through the process what board and box is this all fitting in?

Patrick: Good question. The short answer is I can't fit it in the small stout box, I love that box, but I can't fit it in there. But there is– I think it's called the quarter board, or it's the one slightly bigger than that. There's one board that's 5×5 or one board that's 4×4, and I think I got the one that's 4×4. But the way it's priced is you get six of them, so if you get one of them you can get the same amount– You can get six of them for the same price. So I'm getting basically four of those, which will make a 16×16 board. But it's like four individual tiles that you place on the table. Does that make sense?

Cody: Yeah, it does. That's actually–

Patrick: OK, I'm sorry. I did the math wrong. They are 8×8. There we go.

Cody: OK. Yeah. I ran into that when trying to price out my Dino Dice game, or even my Homeworld game when I was putting together components. It's like, “For Homeworld, for instance, I only need two player mats. But like the player mat size I wanted was like $4.” So it's like, do I try to come up with the thing to where each player has two player mats so that I'm not wasting money on the components? Because it's all based off a sheet, so if you're not using that whole sheet you're just not maximizing your cost.

Patrick: Yeah. It's tricky. Again, if I didn't have– I also hate the idea of having to– Because there is four tiles, I don't know if I want them to be double-sided or not, and I need to pull them out of the box and order them in the right way because they might be slightly– Not asymmetrical, but they might be slightly– What's the word? Like, the drift might have happened, so you have to organize them in a certain way. If I had the money I would have gotten a bigger board, I might have gotten that medium board that's $12 bucks because then you unfold it. By the way, the medium board is like 16×8 or 16×16, and it's huge. So I could have the entire rules on the side of the board on that one.

Cody: Interesting.

Patrick: But this one will probably just fit the board, and maybe a couple of pointers or something like that. Maybe the logo. But yeah, it's not optimal to give you four giant tiles to make the board, but it's what fits in the box, and it's what fits my price point.

Cody: Yes. That's completely reasonable.

Patrick: So, Cody, you're in a bit of a bind because it sounds like your other two games are on the backburner, and maybe you'll do the War deck one?

Homework #2 – Finding an Artist for War: The Deck Builder

Cody: Yeah, I think I'm going to put my best foot forward and try to get the This is War, the deck builder or whatever we're calling it, get that one to at least presentable contest-ready thing. My homework is finding an artist and trying to get that done up in very short notice. For your listeners, Jamey Stegmaier has a list on one of his blogs. I don't know if you've seen this Patrick, but it's of a bunch of different graphic designers and artists that he's compiled. He hasn't worked with them all, but they're all like artists and stuff that he likes their work. I think there's like 200-some odd artists on there.

Patrick: Awesome.

Cody: I might go digging through that list and see if I can find someone I like.

Patrick: Because the timing is short, right? You need to find an artist and negotiate price, and it all has to be done, literally done and uploaded to The Game Crafter in 27 days. So, get going on that.

Cody: Yeah. I think combined with– I'm going to go with the method you were talking about and try to get some professional pieces done, and then maybe get my wife to put together some place-holder art and call it good.

Patrick: All right. We got a lot of stuff to do. Cody, you've had an incredibly busy last couple weeks, with your Kickstarter, the tariffs, Gloomhaven, and a wedding. So, I'm impressed that you did anything.

Cody: Yeah. Don't forget, and I also have a day job.

Wrap Up

Patrick: Yes, and work. So Cody, where can people find you online?

Cody: Just on all the social medias @goldnuggetgames.

Patrick: And on Twitter?

Cody: Yeah, on Twitter @goldnuggetgame.

Patrick: Awesome. I think I almost accidentally linked to gold nugget games on Twitter, and I'm like “Wait. That's not the right Avatar.” 

Cody: Was it just like Guy with the– Those little cartoons that are all line-arty with the guy with the angry face, or something?

Patrick: I don't even remember, but it was definitely wrong. So listeners, if you're following along, use the hashtag #simpleelegance. Thank you again. You can visit the site BoardGameDesigners.com, you can follow me on Twitter, I am @BFTrick. Lastly, I hope that I see your game in The Game Crafter contest. It would be great. So just let us know, and I'll see you there. Bye-bye, everyone.

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