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Patrick Rauland: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Indie Board Game Designers Podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Joseph Limbaugh, who is the designer behind Postcard Dungeons, which is a game you can play out of a postcard. Joseph, welcome to the show.

Joseph Limbaugh: Hello, thanks for having me, Patrick.

How Did You Get Into Board Games?

Patrick Rauland: First of all, thanks for being on here, I'm really happy you're on the show. How did you, number one question I ask everyone, how did you get into board games and in board game design?

Joseph Limbaugh: Wow. I started pretty early, I think, as many people did. I started off, I think, mostly with role-playing games, because it's like, I kind of started all this in the 80s, when I was quite young. Role-playing games is where I got started. Then, there's a lot of board games back then, and kind of branched out from there. I think, I remember, some of the earliest games playing Divine Right, I don't know if you've heard of that game.

Patrick Rauland: No.

Joseph Limbaugh: That's like an old school war game, because back then most board games were called war games, because it was mostly like war simulations, and things like that. But I was always kind of a little bit more interested in role-playing games than board games back then. Yeah, that's pretty much when it happened. I'm from Portland, Oregon, I would go to a place, there was a Western Oregon Board Gamers Club. Maybe is Western Oregon War Gamers, but it was a bunch of old grognards, and they would play. They did Dungeons & Dragons, but they also did all the Napoleonics and all the old school miniatures games. They played all that stuff, Chivalry and that sort of thing.

Patrick Rauland: For people who are not familiar with that vocabulary, what is a grognard?

Joseph Limbaugh: A grognard is, supposedly it's what Napoleon called his generals, it means I think “grumbler” in French. They were his old really experienced generals who would be like, “No, this is a bad idea. Or this isn't going to work.” But he would sought advice from them. But then, when Napoleonics was kind of where Dungeons & Dragons and a bunch of those miniature games out of that … they called the people who played those games, grognards, that was kind of a nickname for those people. They're like older, 30, 40-year-old people who had a bunch of miniatures in their basement.

Patrick Rauland: Okay. I love war games, I play Warhammer. What age range, or whatever do I become a grognard? Like is it … because I'm in my 30s now, am I already a grognard or do I need like a beard at 30, or how does it work?

Joseph Limbaugh: I think yeah, you've got to be at least middle age to be a grognard, I would say. Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: So, it's 40 or I don't know when middle age starts.

Joseph Limbaugh: Probably … yeah, I think 40 is generally what people say is the beginning of middle age. But if you're playing with young people, then you're a grognard.

Patrick Rauland: Oh, no. If I play with the young 20-year-olds and I'm the 30, I'm the grognard?

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah, for sure.

Where Did The Postcard Come From?

Patrick Rauland: All right, it's already happened, it's too late. Okay, let's end this interview. We are done. I am depressed. No. You designed a game that is the size of a postcard. How did you decide? Where did that idea come from?

Joseph Limbaugh: I've actually designed several games on postcards. It's kind of a combination of things. Once again, when I was younger, there was a magazine called Dragon magazine, that was kind of a Dungeons & Dragons, like the original Dungeons & Dragons magazine. There would be games occasionally in that magazine, you could pull them out of the magazine, and cut out the pieces, and play the games. I just always loved the idea of a small space, fitting that game into a small space and the design challenge of that. Then, I've always kind of dabbled in designing games. But as you know, recently, this whole industry has just like blossomed, it's huge with Kickstarter and everything. Some friends of mine did kickstarters, and I watched, I was very interested in it, I was like, “Oh, maybe I can actually design a game and people might want it.”

Joseph Limbaugh: But I also realized like reading all the stories of people on Kickstarter, so many people really did not, it was very hard to, especially fulfillment, like sending the game out was the hardest part, also like sourcing people who make dice, and all the different components. It is a tremendous challenge to fulfill a kickstarter if you're not a game company. At the time, I was doing a lot of improvised shows, and we would always make postcards for the shows, we've had our special art made for the postcards. I always liked the feel of a postcard. I was like, “You know what? I could get these printed up and put a game on them. I could design a game and put it on here.” That would be like I could put a whole game.

Joseph Limbaugh: Originally, it was just like a marketing idea. Because a friend of mine Eliot Hochberg and I have kind of a game design collective called Modest Games. I'm like, We can make some games on postcards and just give them out to people.” And be like, “Here, I just gave you a game on this postcard.” It's kind of the short version of the long story, but it was still long.

How Did You Succeed On Kickstarter?

Patrick Rauland: No, I think that's a really cool story, and I love the idea of small and portable in a postcard. You could put it in your back pocket. I wouldn't, because I don't want it to be bent. But you could fit it in your back pocket, which is really, really cool. Now, your game, you raised quite a bit of money in Kickstarter, I think, because your base pledge is $4. I can't think of a game that had a small, excluding digital files or whatever, I can't think of a game that had a lower-based pledge. I think you had over 3000 people buy your game. That's something like $30,000. Most kickstarters don't get that high, and your base pledge is $4. What do you think it was about your game that connected with over 3000 people?

Joseph Limbaugh: Honestly, Patrick, I'm not 100% sure, I do think the low price point was a valid metric. When I put the kickstarter up, my goal was $1000. The game was finished and I didn't have like a really, I think, a very good description of it, but still people were just like, “It's $4, I'll go ahead and … I'll go in on that.” It's hard for me to say exactly why it was … I'm really grateful that was, I was so excited and amazed by it. I'm don't totally know for sure. I also think, I put it up at a time when there wasn't a lot going on in Kickstarter, there's kind of like known wisdom of Kickstarter is to put your game up at certain times. I did it I think in December, which was, no one puts games up on December, because everybody is spending their money on Christmas, or Holiday times.

Joseph Limbaugh: But, my game is like $4, so I'm like, “People will still have $4 to spend, to do it.” I don't know, that might've had something to do with it.

Were There Component Limitations?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I think it's really, really cool. Whatever the magical reason is, I think it's really cool. Because your game is so small, you obviously had really tight restrictions, you're very limited in space and components, which [inaudible 00:07:46], or bring your own components, I should say. Was there something, there have to have been things you wanted to add to the game, but you just couldn't because of space, right?

Joseph Limbaugh: Yes. I think the challenge with any game is getting rid of things that don't help the game player, don't streamline it, or are not fun. I think that in game design, you have to reach a point where you're like, “I got to cut this stuff off.” But with a postcard game it's even more. You really have to, you know. The game went through significant changes as I cleaned it up and streamlined things. You could literally spend forever fixing a game, and trying to get it perfect. I try to make my games to be good games as much as possible, but I try to avoid making them perfect, because I think you will never finish your game if you do that. You'll never be done. Also, everything with Postcard Dungeons is, I didn't originally have any stretch goals, but since it started taking off, I was like, “Oh, I got to make some stretch goals.” Because I feel like I should give people something for all the support of my game.

Joseph Limbaugh: We created some stretch goals, so I think like most of the stuff that I kind of wanted to add to the game I was able to add as an expansion postcards that people will get as I send them out. There's like a Megadungeon expansion, there's a Co-op version, which is quite different and was pretty challenge to create, like a Player's Compendium, so you can play as different races and classes, stuff like that.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Something else that must have been challenging is when you encourage players to bring their own components, you're obviously pretty limited, right? You can't be like, “Bring out your D77.” I don't have one of those. I'm curious about components, how did you decide what compo- … correct me if I'm wrong, it's just dice, right? Or is it other things too?

Joseph Limbaugh: It is D6s, and tokens, you have to have some tokens, each player needs four tokens that represent them.

Patrick Rauland: Right. Okay. [crosstalk 00:10:01].

Joseph Limbaugh: My previous game, it's for Postcard Empire, and Postcard Cthulhu, the whole idea was you need coins to play them, because we figured everybody would have coins with them at any given time. This was kind of a bit of an experience, because I didn't know like, “Would people want a game if they were supplying the dice and the tokens? Would they be interested in that? Would they support it?” Apparently the answer is yes. I do definitely put a lot of thought to like what will people reasonably have. I wouldn't ask for people to have polyhedral dice for the game. I feel like that might be a big much. I've also like, “How many dice could I reasonably expect people to have?” You need seven dice to play the game, and then four tokens for each player, which I think is … I don't know, I don't know, I could probably push it a lot farther, but to me it's … I also like the challenge of trying to make a game as simple as possible, but still have it have some compelling gameplay. It's kind of a feature, I think, not having enough components.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, I find that fascinating, because it's funny I have so many dice in this house, but they're all in specific games. I play Warhammer, and I have multiple armies, I've like these green dice are only for my orcs, and these yellow dice are only for this army. I'm really specific. When someone asks me to bring out dice, I'm like, “Oh man. [inaudible 00:11:28] I forget to put them back and I lose all my green dice. I wouldn't be able to play as my orcs anymore.” I get really OCD, I don't know if that's the right phrase there, but it's just an interesting decision to like asking people to bring their own components. I think you did the right thing of not asking them to bring only D6s is probably the best, is probably the easiest thing to do.

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah. Even if you have like muggle board games like Monopoly or whatever, it's like-

Patrick Rauland: Muggle.

Joseph Limbaugh: You know what I mean. If you have those, you have some six-sided dice. I think you can rustle up, or Yahtzee, it's like, you can rustle up six-sided dice without an issue.

Are You Going All Into The Postcard Format?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. You've already created three postcard games, this is your third. Do you want to keep designing these games? Or you've been like, “Postcards are my thing, I love the post.” Or are you going to start trying other formats?

Joseph Limbaugh: I do have other formats, and I have actually designed some other games, but I do … I have at least two more postcard games that I have designed, that I'm going to see how they go, I'm going to kickstart both of them and see how they go. Because I like the format, and I enjoy designing for the format. If people continue to like them, then yeah, I'm going to keep doing that. At some point I will definitely want to produce another type of game, but I don't know if I … I like postcard games, yeah, I'm following up on that for now is the plan.

Which Game Design is Your Favorite?

Patrick Rauland: Got it. Of the games you've designed so far, which one is your favorite?

Joseph Limbaugh: I think probably it would be Postcard Dungeons, honestly, but it's a close call, because there's another, there's a card game that you can download as a print and play called Thieves, that's also another dungeon-themed game. But it's like a group of thieves. If you went on like a dungeon crawl and everybody in the party was a thief, it's all about kind of backstabbing the other players and lying to them. But yeah, I think that or Postcard Dungeons. I'm really proud of Postcard Dungeons. The other postcard games, I did not kickstart those games, because although I like them, I feel like, I don't know, they're still not like, they could be better. I feel like they could've been better. Just like the challenge of designing in that space is very tricky. I don't know, but Postcard Dungeons I think, yeah, it's my favorite game currently that I've done. Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: I'm a little bit lost, because I'm thinking about a party full of only thieves, and how like you enter the dungeon. Everyone hides in the shadows, and you're like, “Well, all right.” I can imagine everyone in one shadow in the corner of the room.

Joseph Limbaugh: Actually, you have the option every turn to either hide into the shadows or to stab someone in the back, or to try to steal something. Then, it's kind of a rock paper scissors mechanic, depending on what other people do, you succeed. Then one of the thieves, every turn, is the scout, and they go ahead and they scout ahead to see what's in the room that's coming up. Then they come back and tell everybody. But of course, they're probably lying about that. Whatever they tell you about what is in the room is designed to mess with everybody else.

Patrick Rauland: This sounds great.

Joseph Limbaugh: It's a good game. I'm really proud of that one. It's funny because Eliot and I, Eliot Hochberg, when we started Modest Games, we had this, we were like, “We're going to design a game every week.” That was our thing. [inaudible 00:15:07], “Each week we're going to bring a game, and we're going to design a game.” Was our challenge. That was the first game I designed. Then I just kind of spent … We didn't design any more games weekly after that, because I spent all the time tweaking Thieves, because I was really excited about how it turned out.

What is Your Game Design Process

Patrick Rauland: What is your game process like? How do you get to a game like Thieves or Postcard Dungeons?

Joseph Limbaugh: I usually will come at it from a theme point of view. I think, those kind of the two things are either you come up with a cool mechanic, and then you think of the theme around it, or you come up with the team, and then you kind of figure out the mechanics. I do like starting with the theme first, because I feel like for me it inspires interesting mechanics. How can you simulate this idea of a bunch of thieves going into a dungeon there not being any other classes there? In fact, I have some other games in that series that I'm working on.

Joseph Limbaugh: The fighters, or warriors, is a game. Where it's like a party of all warriors, but the idea for that is that it's all about them bragging about what they could do. It's like, “I can fight this monster with my arm tied behind my back.” It's like, “I can fight the monster with the arm tied behind my back, and with my eyes closed.” It's like, “Oh, you go fight that monster then.” It's like, that is inspirational of like how do you come up with mechanics for have that to work.

Patrick Rauland: That sounds really great. All right, now I need to somehow pitch you to the [inaudible 00:16:42] for Mages, where we just read books together, I don't know.

Joseph Limbaugh: Mages was all about … I think the idea I had for that, it was all about complicated spells. Metaphysical big words, and creating super complicated spells.

Patrick Rauland: There could be like a memory components to that game. You can literally cast whatever spell you want, as long as you remember what the secret word is, or something.

Joseph Limbaugh: Like you have to literally memorize spells. The [inaudible 00:17:09] in magic would be taking to the extreme of like can you actually remember this?

Patrick Rauland: I think this is accurate, but this doesn't sound fun.

Joseph Limbaugh: That is … yeah, that's the challenge, it's making it fun. Yeah.

What Game Would You Like To Change?

Patrick Rauland: Okay. Wow, we just covered a lot of these questions. Is there a game out there that you wish you could change maybe a game made by someone else? Maybe you can want to add something, or take something away from it.

Joseph Limbaugh: That's … I marked this question?

Patrick Rauland: You did. You said this would be a question you'd like to answer.

Joseph Limbaugh: A game that I would want to change. I don't remember what I thought the answer would be.

Patrick Rauland: The other way of me phrasing this question is, is there maybe a game where you're like, “Man, either this feature should be an expansion,” or you're like, “This game is great, and it needs an expansion.”

Joseph Limbaugh: Maybe, and we're talking about just games out there in the world, right?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Joseph Limbaugh: I think like Arkham Horror, I would say I would want it to be more like streamlined. But I think they kind of already did that with Eldritch Horror, you know what I mean? Because I'm a huge Lovecraft fan, I have a ton of, I have all the role-playing games of, you know, Call of Cthulhu, and Delta Green. And I love that game, but it's like, yeah, it's a long slog, and it could really be streamlined. But it's already been done, they did with Eldritch Horror.

Patrick Rauland: Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't all the H.P. Lovecraft stuff in the public domain?

Joseph Limbaugh: I believe so. I think it's a little bit of a tricky legal thing, but for the most part, yes. It's in the public domain in like everywhere else in the world, but America, because of Disney, and Disney kept lobbying to have the copyrighting increased, whatever. I think it's a little bit of a gray area here. But it's also like there's no … Because, Arkham House, I think was publishing his stuff … I don't know, it's … no one's really challenged this. I think everybody creates Cthulhu stuff, and no one is like fighting to [crosstalk 00:19:23] them not do that, but it is.

Patrick Rauland: Okay.

Joseph Limbaugh: That's my understanding. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer, Patrick.

Patrick Rauland: The real question I wanted to ask you is when is your game, when is your Call of Cthulhu game coming out?

Joseph Limbaugh: Postcard Cthulhu is already out, you can buy it on the website.

Patrick Rauland: Great. That was one of the other ones. Awesome.

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah. One of the games, I'm doing another Cthulhu game, which is one of the two Postcard games is a Cthulhu-themed game. Probably won't be the next one that I kickstart, but the one after will be that. Because I love Postcard Cthulhu, that my artist did an amazing job, Kristen Immoor, it is a good game. It is also pretty fiddly, because I literally, I tried to put so much into that one postcard that it's a bit fiddly. There's a video tutorial you can watch to play it, but yeah, it's a tricky to game to kind of wrap your head around, because I really, really shoved The Kitchen Sink and the Elder Gods into that postcard.

What Resource Do You Recommend?

Patrick Rauland: What one resource would you recommend? I like to assume that most of the people listening to this are an aspiring designer, or they've maybe got their first game signed. What would you recommend to someone to get them on the right track?

Joseph Limbaugh: I spent a lot of time on Stonemaier Games website, like their blog. I'm sure you've … especially for Kickstarter. It's literally, for me it was like a how to manual of Kickstarter, if there was one. You can go there and type in, what's going on? How does international mailing work? And it's like, “Oh, here's a ton of information about that specific topic.” If it's Kickstarter related, I would say that … as far as like game design in general, I think just play more games, open yourself up to some different ideas, and find … there's game testing and playing groups near you, find one and start interacting with other people I think. Because getting feedback from other people on your game designs is so important, especially if they're friends of yours and will be completely honest and they have good insight. You know what I mean?

Joseph Limbaugh: Like my friend Eliot, and [inaudible 00:21:46] is our other friend when we first started. I always want them to play my game and then tell me stuff, because they always have such great feedback. That's invaluable, it's invaluable.

What is your Community Like?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I like to ask people about their local communities, because it seems like some communities are on fire, and they have multiple game design meet ups every week. Other communities are like, “We have one thing once a month if someone shows up.” I'm curious, you're in LA, right? What is the community there like?

Joseph Limbaugh: There's a ton of stuff. I generally, I've been doing stuff with First Play: L.A., which is like a board game design collective, and everyone over there is super awesome. I mean, there's also Strategicon, which is like, it is a game con that happens three times a year. It's down by the airport … I've met a lot of people down there, it's a huge city, and there's tons of stuff happening. That's just even scratching the surface. There's plenty of other stuff that I could be doing, that I probably should be doing. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff here, you can-

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. What is a fun idea, a theme, or a mechanism that you are looking into for a future game?

Joseph Limbaugh: I'm a big fan of interactive storytelling. Because I'm also an improviser. As an improvisational performer, I love creating stories in real time, to me that's what I love about it. I like making people laugh, but to me creating a narrative is the exciting part. A few years back, I was kind of just looking around the web, and I found this guy called Chris Crawford. He used to design games for the Atari 2600. He's like this old school video game developer from the '80s. He's really, really smart guy. He's also a super, he's like an curmudgeonly dude.

Patrick Rauland: A grognard.

Joseph Limbaugh: He is a grognard. With some strong opinions, but he founded the Game Developers Conference. Then he left because of political and money issues kind of took it over. His Holy Grail is to creative interactive storytelling on the computer. He has algorithms he's written, and ideas about that would work. To me, I find it very fascinating. I think there are like board games that are doing that now, where there's like narrative hard-baked into the rules of the game. Dead of Winter is an example, I think Robinson Crusoe has some of that stuff. More recently, I think the new Fallout game some stuff like that.

Joseph Limbaugh: I just love the idea … Arkham Horror is the same way, it's kind of like the game is the game master for the players. What am I thinking of? What's the … I shouldn't remember. You know what I'm talking about. It's like this huge game, it's like a role-playing game, it has … it's not shadow something, twilight-

Patrick Rauland: Shadowrun?

Joseph Limbaugh: No, no, no. It's a board game, that everybody plays, and I've played it, but for some reason-

Patrick Rauland: Gloomhaven?

Joseph Limbaugh: That's it, Gloomhaven. Oh my gosh.

Patrick Rauland: Gloom, shadow, I get it. Yeah.

Joseph Limbaugh: Gloom-shadow-haven fall town, yeah, but like Gloomhaven is like once again, it's like the kind of the role-playing elements and the story elements are baked into the … to me, there's a game I've been working on that's a card game that uses that, but it's more kind of story oriented than goal oriented. I think so. That excites me.

Patrick Rauland: I [inaudible 00:25:46], I just want to go back and cut you on Gloomhaven, because I don't have the game, I really wanted to play, because it's like number one on BGG, or at least it was, I think it still is. I really wanted to play it. A friend of mine, he's like, they've may be 25% of the way through the game, and I asked him to come over, and I got to play, I didn't feel like there was any story at all, because it's like, “All right, cool. What map location do you want to explore?” I just randomly picked one, because I don't know. There was like a little bit of a scenario in the beginning, but so much of the game was mechanics that it didn't … you know it's like, “What card you want to play at exactly the right time.”

Patrick Rauland: It's interesting to see when you say that that's for you, you consider at least partially a storytelling game. [crosstalk 00:26:29].

Joseph Limbaugh: Gloomhaven you have to play a few, you have to play it for a while to find the arc. Honestly, I think one of the critics of Gloomhaven is there could be more consequences to the narrative, things that you try to go through. But yeah, it'd be like-

Patrick Rauland: Have you played Pandemic Legacy?

Joseph Limbaugh: I'm not a huge fan of Pandemic. Only because the only times I've played it, one person kind of become like quarterback-

Patrick Rauland: Alpha, yeah, yeah.

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah. I didn't totally understand, and I'm still trying to understand the rules-

Patrick Rauland: [crosstalk 00:27:12].

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah, so I just was like, “Just tell me what to do.” You know? That's [inaudible 00:27:16]. But I know it's a good game, because I know people who like it. I respect them.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, the reason I'm bringing it up right now is I think if you played one game of Pandemic Legacy, it would feel like Pandemic with the rules changed. But if you play all 12 games in the season one or 12 to 24 games in season one, then I bet it feels a little bit more like an arc, because every game basically modifies one thing from the game before, typically. I wonder if … interesting, so yeah, I'm sure there is storytelling, but it requires at least a couple plays for you to get it.

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah, it's kind of the bare minimum of storytelling, I guess, in some ways. I think most of the storytelling games have little cards you read to kind of add story, or to make the players into game masters, like Arkham Horror. Mansions of Madness now has the app that you use.

Is Game Design Energizing or Exhausting?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I think it's a really, really cool cause. I'm sort of on the fence about storytelling games, but if they're done well they're phenomenal. Okay. Does game design in general, when you work on something are you energized? Does it take a lot of energy out of you?

Joseph Limbaugh: Probably, a little from column A, a little from column B. Yeah, I think when I first get an idea, I'm always really excited about it. I don't think this is uncommon, it's like I'm writing stuff down, I'm working on it. Then you get to the part where you're testing, or you get to the part where it's like, “Oh, I have to write this rules out so that they're clear.” Then it's like, “Oh I have to do work now.” Although it still, I think the trick is to kind of keep that excitement going and … I don't know sometimes I actually even writing rules, it's very strange. I'm in the middle of fulfillment for Postcard Dungeons right now. I'm literally, I just took a break from stuffing envelopes to come up here and do this interview.

Joseph Limbaugh: You would think that stuffing envelopes would be a very tedious thing, and it is, but it's also like, “I don't know, I'm so excited that people wanted my game, that I kind of enjoy doing it.” I'm putting the games in the envelopes, I'm like, “These are going to go all over the world to people. Hopefully they will enjoy them.” It's a strange thing. If you're doing something you love, I don't think you ever get completely unenergized, you know what I mean?

How Do You Push Through Low Energy Times?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Nothing is like free energy. I'm excited by anything in the world, a music show, or whatever, but it will take some energy to get into it. The reason I ask this question is I think I have an underlying, the underlying question, the question I really want to ask you is how do you get through those … the times where you don't have that much energy? Because there are times where I'm like super jazz, [inaudible 00:30:11] new idea, and I'm writing stuff down in a note card, and then there's other times where people are like, “Hey, change this thing.” You're like, “God, this going to take me two hours to update all the cards.” How do you get through those phases?

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah. You kind of just have to power through it. It's like exercise. When I first start exercising, I would start, you know, I need to exercise more. At first it's like, “Urgh.” But you have to kind of remember that it's like as you do it for a while, then you actually start to enjoy it, it makes you feel better. I think it's the same thing with this sort of stuff. I'm going to be so … by the time I'm done stuffing these envelopes, my arms are going to ache. I'm going to be sick of it. But I will be so happy that I completed that task. It's the culmination of months and months of work, so I'll be like, “Finally, they're out. They're out in the world.” You have to go, yeah, you have to kind of … you have to get past those. I don't know if there's a good answer other than to power through.

Joseph Limbaugh: I think if people don't go through that stuff, that you end up not succeeding. You have to do some amount of work, even if it's a job you love. Yeah. Even as an actor, there's a lot of … people, I think, see that job and it's like, “Oh, it's super glamorous, and fun and easy.” It's like, “No, it's a horrible grind of going to auditions, and being turned down over and over again.”

Patrick Rauland: Call time, 4:00 a.m.

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Rauland: I used to work in an advertising agency, and I was the web developer. I almost never had to deal with this, then one time I was like, “I want to go out in one of these shoots.” And like, “Call time, 6:00 a.m.” I'm like “Oh. Maybe I'll just edit the website.” I don't want to get up at 6:00 a.m. for work, or be at the office at 6:00 a.m. All right, one more question then the game that you're dreading at the end.

Joseph Limbaugh: [inaudible 00:32:09].

How Many Games Do You Have That Are Unfinished?

Patrick Rauland: How many unpublished, or half-finished games do you have in your brain?

Joseph Limbaugh: I think it's a hard number to get to, but probably somewhere near 100 I would guess. Depends on like if it's something that's just a fragment of a game, if it's something that it's like I've kind of worked out the mechanics to a certain degree, probably less than that, maybe 40 or 50. But definitely, if I'm like, “Oh, I want to make a game that's about cats are fighting monsters” or something, then that's just an idea. I don't have an idea for that game, that game has already been done, I believe, but yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Of the 40, or of the 100 game ideas that you have in your head, what percentage of them are just all D&D characters going into a dungeon? Is there a druids game? Like clerics game?

Joseph Limbaugh: 99%.

Patrick Rauland: Wow, that's impressive.

Joseph Limbaugh: No, I do love dungeon crawls, and I love … I definitely that's influenced … and fantasy worlds. But there's also like science fiction, like the next postcard game I'm working on is a science fiction game sort of like [inaudible 00:33:36], houses fighting each other, political intrigue but with combat sort of thing on postcards. But yeah … yeah, not 90%.

Overrated / Underrated Game

Patrick Rauland: Fair enough. Very cool. All right. I like to end all my chats with a game called Overrated Underrated. Basically I'm going to say a word or phrase, then I'm going to force you to take a position if you think it's overrated or if you think it's underrated. Then maybe like a sentence describing why you think that way. Got it?

Joseph Limbaugh: Okay. Right.

Patrick Rauland: All right. Player elimination in board games, is it overrated or underrated?

Joseph Limbaugh: That's so subjective and personal. I think it's probably underrated, because if you are a good designer, you can make a game that has player elimination, and it won't be as painful, it'll be a fun part of the game. That's what I would say. Yeah, did I play the game right? Did I do it right? Is that how that work?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, you're doing great. Honestly, I purposely pick out very controversial topic, this is fun to see like which side people land on. Because I think a lot of game designers are [inaudible 00:34:50] with the idea of player elimination. If it's done right, I totally agree with you, if it's done right, it can be amazing.

Joseph Limbaugh: But, it is a design challenge, it's definitely hard to do.

Patrick Rauland: Yes. Because your game is called Postcard Dungeons, I was thinking of things that are underground, here's a weird one. Basements, as in your house, are they overrated or underrated?

Joseph Limbaugh: I feel like the obvious answer is underrated, because they're under the house. I'm so sorry. I would say underrated honestly though, because I think basements have a stigma. Like, “You're living in your parents' basement.” Or basements are where grognards are. But hey, the benefit is basements where grognards are. I spent a lot of time playing role-playing games in my parents' basement when I was a kid, and they're also cooler, it's cooler down there, and not as hot. Yeah. I've had some delightful times in basements. I would say if they're anything, they're underrated. Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Love it. All right, this one back to games, meeples, are they underrated or overrated?

Joseph Limbaugh: I love meeples. I love them. But I'm going to say they're overrated only because now it's like you can get the craziest … it's like, “Our meeples have … go up to 11.” You know what I mean? “Our meeples make their own meeples, they have meeples inside of them.” It's like, “Hey, I heard you like meeples, so I made meeples with meeples.” I don't know, it's-

Patrick Rauland: Like designer meeples?

Joseph Limbaugh: Yeah, like the super special, fancy meeples to for our games. Once again, though, I look at those I'm like, “I want some of those meeples.” I'm kind of being a hypocrite, and I want those meeples that can hold swords, I want sword-holding meeples, that looks cool. Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: I think I agree with you, but I can't not … I think I agree with you where meeples can maybe be too cool, or maybe they're too highly valued, I don't know how else to say that, too highly valued, but I still … or got, what's the zombie game with the item meeples?

Joseph Limbaugh: It's Tiny Epic Zombies, right?

Patrick Rauland: There we go. I got it, because of meeples stands on a motorcycle.

Joseph Limbaugh: Yes, yeah, totally.

Patrick Rauland: I got it because of the meeple. I'm a victim of my own something. I don't know where I'm going with it, sorry.

Joseph Limbaugh: I have a meeple on my logo for Postcard games. There's a meeple, so I really probably should not be saying they're overrated, right?

Patrick Rauland: I do think it is like the one sort of universal symbol of board games. Because I think D20 is also role-playing games, and I think the meeple is the closest symbol we have for the board gaming community, so I get it. All right, last one. We're recording this before the 4th of July, but it'll come out sometimes after, what do you think of the 4th of July, overrated or underrated?

Joseph Limbaugh: That's a tough one.

Patrick Rauland: Because it's the day you can eat all the food in one day.

Joseph Limbaugh: I've always loved the 4th of July. I love hotdogs, I love all of the cheesy stuff about it too. I love watching fireworks. I think it's probably underrated, I would say. I think it's underrated. Yeah, there's so much contention in the country of America right now that I feel like … it's we can at least come together hopefully and say, “Hey, we fought against depression once.” I don't know. I would say underrated.

Conclusion

Patrick Rauland: Very cool. Joseph, this has been awesome. Thank you for being on the show. Where can people find you?

Joseph Limbaugh: You can find me at PostcardGames.com, or on Twitter, overdroid is my handle. Like over droid, like over a robot. Also, I'm posting riddles there, every day I post a riddle on overdroid, on the Twitter if you're interested in that, if you like riddles. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good.

Patrick Rauland: Awesome. Thank you again. By the way, listeners, if you like this podcast, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. If you do, Joseph said he'd be willing to send you a selfie from the next dungeon that he enters, whether it be D&D themed or Cthulhu themed.

Joseph Limbaugh: It might just a basement.

Patrick Rauland: Or a really nice basement that are underrated. You can visit the site IndieBoardGameDesigners.com, you can follow me on Twitter, @BFTrick. Thank you all for listening. Until next time, happy designing. Bye bye.

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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone, and welcome to Indie Board Game Designers podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Adam Wyse, who is the designer behind a half dozen games. Now you work for Roxley Games as a logistics manager, which includes game development, bookkeeping, and anything with data. Is that right?

Adam Wyse: That's right. Thanks for having me.

How Did You Get Into Board Games

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Welcome to the show. First question I like to ask basically everyone, how did you get into board games and board game design?

Adam Wyse: Well, I probably played my first modern board game with my brother about five years ago, or so. I got into, I started playing Catan, Power Grid, discovering more and more of these games that I had no idea existed, as a lot of us have over recent years. After about a year of discovering and playing new games … I used to be a software engineer, so I was designing things during the day. I figured I wanted to give a shot at design, myself, see what I could do. Yeah, so that was my first step into it.

Adam Wyse: My first game was kind of a disaster, wasn't great, but my second game was actually Masque of the Red Death, which is now published from IDW Games. I had gotten started in with developing that one. I discovered the local convention here in Calgary, called FallCon. It runs every fall. I encourage anyone who's in the Alberta area — I'm up in Calgary, Canada — to check out FallCon. It's awesome. There's a designer area. I didn't know any designers around, but I brought out my game.

Adam Wyse: Up until that point I'd just been playing with friends and family, getting their feedback, but I wanted outside perspectives on my game, and see if it was anything worthwhile really, to people who knew a little more about the design process. I brought it out to FallCon and met a lot of the great designers. That really got me just rolling in game design. Met with them every week, nearly every week since. We meet every Monday night to play test.

Patrick Rauland: Oh, that's great.

Adam Wyse: Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: I talked to a few people, and so far the only group of people that I know that have a weekly board game prototyping or testing meetup are some people in New York City, so that's really impressive that you have a weekly meetup group.

Adam Wyse: Yeah, it's great. There's enough designers here in Calgary that we've gone to a second day often, as well.

Patrick Rauland: What?

Adam Wyse: We can get a lot of play testing in.

Patrick Rauland: Wow.

Adam Wyse: Calgary's kind of a hot spot. A lot of Canadian cities … I'm part of the Game Artisans of Canada and we have chapters in the major Canadian cities. We network and communicate amongst ourselves. It's a really great, really great organization for game designers. If you get connected with the group you can enter as a apprentice member, eventually becoming an artisan. There's some very well known and great designers in the Game Artisans of Canada.

Patrick Rauland: I want to go back to a previous thing you said. I didn't realize you've only been in this for five years and you have, I think, six published games?

Adam Wyse: Yes.

Patrick Rauland: That's more than one a year. That's amazing.

Adam Wyse: Yeah. I'd kind of built up a pile of really good games. When I finally had the money to get to a convention I got a lot of them signed, all at once, one after another basically.

Patrick Rauland: Really?

Adam Wyse: Yeah. Like, I think 2016 I had four games signed, one after another.

Patrick Rauland: Wow. That is amazing.

Adam Wyse: They're all coming out now, basically.

Patrick Rauland: Wow, that is really, really cool. I'm just imagining you … I just did a publisher's speed dating at Origins, and I'm just imagining you sitting there with a pile of eight games, and you're like, “Which one do you want me to talk about?” [inaudible 00:04:32] a plethora.

Adam Wyse: Yeah.

Which of Your Games is Your Favorite?

Patrick Rauland: This is one of my favorite questions, but I don't get to ask many people this. What is your favorite game that you designed?

Adam Wyse: I think my favorite game that I've designed is called Leprechaun Tractors. It is not quite signed yet. It's nearly there. It's kind of in the handshake thing, so it's not announced or anything yet. But it is a game where players are low-paid government leprechauns building rainbows in the rainbow factory.

Patrick Rauland: Oh my gosh.

Adam Wyse: It's a time track game of hidden goals, where you're trying to complete your job cards that you've been given by your boss, as well as completing bribe cards, because there's a lot of corruption going on in the rainbow industry. The companies that manufacture the materials the rainbows are made out of are bribing players — with pots of gold obviously, because we're leprechauns — to complete certain objectives for them. I love it. I cannot wait for it to become something that I can share with more people.

How Do You Get Games Signed?

Patrick Rauland: That sounds ridiculous in the best way possible. That sounds great. I just want to point out, you do work for Roxley right now, but you, basically all of your games, I mean you've signed your games with three to four different publishers before Roxley. A lot of people, if they do this many games they don't work with that many publishers. You have quite a breadth of experience there. I think a lot of people like myself, I'm intrigued by, “How do I get a game signed? How does it work?” Can you give us any tips on working with publishers or getting your games in front of them?

Adam Wyse: Yeah. My biggest thing for getting games in front of publishers, my strategy … I didn't know anyone. I had no connections, no networking, so where do I start? I saw a bunch of design contests online. There's all kinds of design contests. If you research, you'll find a whole bunch of them. I just started entering my games into contests, because often the judges of these contests are publishers themselves, so they see your name, they watch your video or read your rule book. Oftentimes you'll get an email from them afterwards, if they have some interest in your game.

Adam Wyse: Even if you weren't a finalist in a particular contest, I've had that, gotten an email from a major publisher and ended up sending the game to them for evaluation. I started trying to build a network and getting to know people through contests, was my biggest thing. And then, like I mentioned, going to conventions. The first convention I went to was the result of a contest. I was the finalist for the Ion Award in Salt Lake City, at SaltCon. I had just been laid off my job a couple months prior — the company shut down — so I didn't have any money, it was a big decision to fly, to go present my game at this contest.

Adam Wyse: But my wife was super supportive, so I want for it and it really kicked everything off. I met with the guys from Mayday Games and ended up having two games signed with them, the one that won the contest, called Cypher, and then Poetry Slam, which came out at Origins this year.

Patrick Rauland: Wow, that's such a cool story. I just want to go back to the contest for a second because I, I think in my brain, “Oh, there's no point in entering.” There's GenCant right now, there's a contest with Button Shy, and I've seen so many tweets about it. I'm like, “Oh, man. If I've seen 15 different people on Twitter talking about their prototypes there's another 70 people who are submitting that aren't talking about it. Like, there's no way I'm going to win.” But now it's really helpful to think about, “Hey, even if I don't win, maybe a publisher still might be interested.”

Adam Wyse: Right. Yeah, that was the case with the first time I entered the Ion Award, that instance I mentioned, where I got contacted by Z-Man Games, where I wasn't a finalist but they still were interested enough to get in touch with me. Even if your odds are long, I've entered games in a lot of contests, not always a finalist, because it's very hard to judge something on just five minutes, or this little bit that a judge has to work with. Don't be discouraged if you're entering contests and not making it forward, either.

How Do You Approach the Right Publisher?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Love it. For me, I haven't signed any games. I haven't done anything like that. Is there a publisher you'd recommend for new designers? Maybe that's not a good question. I'm just trying to think. Is there any other tips you can give us about approaching the right publisher? How about that?

Adam Wyse: I would say, if you're going to a convention and pitching, do your research a little bit beforehand. Write out some notes. Know what their catalog is like. You want to have something that will fit. If you have a game that fits the weight of what they do, or a similar theme, something like that. But again, not too similar because they don't want to cannibalize their own market share by doing the same game again and again. It's a tricky line, but certain publishers aren't going to look at a trick-taking game at all. If you have a trick-taking game, maybe you want to look for someone who's more suited for that weight of game.

How Did You Get a Job in the Board Game Industry?

Patrick Rauland: Got it. All right, love it. Now you work for Roxley Games. How did that happen? I think I got the first part of the story. Your company was shut down. But how did you decide you wanted to work for a board game company? And then I guess, how did you meet them? How did they know that you were the right fit? All of that.

Adam Wyse: I would say it was mostly opportunity and luck. Roxley is a publisher from Calgary, as well, run by Gavin Brown. I met Gavin at that first FallCon I went to in Calgary. When I brought my game, I met him, played a game with him. Over the years, played more and more games, become friends with Gavin and Paul, who also works for Roxley now. Just getting to know people, being someone … Over time, playing games with these people so many times you develop a mutual respect and friendship and everything.

Adam Wyse: You want to work with people that you're familiar with, and you know are hard workers and you'll get along with. Developing that relationship, it was just a great opportunity as Roxley has started to grow. I came on as, I was doing contract work at first for Gavin, trying to take on some of the logistics duties from him, not really knowing much about logistics at all to begin with. I still have a lot to learn, but I'm getting it as I go, and just now developing into a full time career at this point.

Adam Wyse: It was a lot of luck, in my case. I know, for other people who have gotten into the industry and gotten jobs in the industry, oftentimes it begins with just those relationships at conventions. If you're up, playing games with people and just meeting people, playing games. I was at Origins until 4:00 A.M. one night, just playing games with a bunch of people, meeting new people. It's invaluable.

Adam Wyse: Oh, volunteering at booths, as well, is another good way in. Sure, you're volunteering your time, but you're getting to know people. You're helping out. Publishers often have a fairly slim profit margin, so if they can get volunteers to their booths it's super valuable to them. Yeah, that's a great way to meet people as well.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, no, I love that. Lots of other people have said the same thing, and it's so, it's so true that it's not what you know but who you know. Right? Even if you have the best game on the planet, which I don't think exists, but if you could make a perfect game, it doesn't matter if you don't know the person who would sell that game.

Adam Wyse: Right. Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: All right. For someone who is thinking about, “Hey, I really like game design. Maybe I'm not meant for designing games. Maybe I'm meant for development or logistics,” other than meeting someone at cons, do you have any suggestions on how to get into that industry?

Adam Wyse: I think I've already gone through my main tips, there.

Patrick Rauland: So, cons.

Adam Wyse: Yeah, cons. Cons, volunteering. I don't know. Or be very lucky and meet the right people.

What Games Do You Like to Design?

Patrick Rauland: Sure, sure. Cool. No, I love it. Makes sense. Okay, I think I kind of know the answer to this, but what type of games do you like to design??

Adam Wyse: I really try to do something really different with every new game I start designing. I have found, overall as a theme I love deduction games. I used to love Mastermind and stuff, growing up. Masque of the Red Death has a strong deduction element. Head of Mousehold, one of my games, has a [inaudible 00:14:21] deduction side to it as well. Cypher has some deduction. So I love that, but overall I just, I don't want to be constrained into any type of thing.

Adam Wyse: Like, my favorite designer is Vlaada Chvátil, and he does something, he's all over the place and I love it. I've designed party games, word games, all kinds of stuff. I want to do something really different each time.

Patrick Rauland: Got it. One of the things I've noticed is, it seems like a lot of your games have a fun, silly pun. I love Gorilla Marketing. I just love looking at the game. I want to play Gorilla Marketing just because there's gorillas in it, not G-U-E-R, that type of guerrilla.

Adam Wyse: Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Is that something you do? Do you like the silly puns? It seems like you take an existing concept and then you just make it silly.

Adam Wyse: Yeah, a little bit. I kind of like the off-the-wall themes a little bit, like Leprechaun Tractors. Oftentimes, with naming a game, I do tend to go to the pun kind of names. I don't know why. I'm not a real punster in life, but it appeals to me, coming up with something clever for the name of the game.

Patrick Rauland: I don't know if this is how you do this, but sometimes I will come up with a funny game title, and I'll try to make a game around it. Maybe I'm doing that in the wrong order, but I'm like, “This is such a great name, we have to make a game for it.”

Adam Wyse: No, that's interesting. Getting inspiration from a source like that is really good. Sometimes I'm inspired by just a component. I want to use this piece in a game. What theme does this speak to? How would that fit into a game? I love coming up with inspiration from lots of different sources, whether it be the title or a piece or a mechanic or whatever.

What Mechanics & Themes Are You Looking Into?

Patrick Rauland: Is there something, design or mechanic, that you've tried to put in a game but you just haven't been able to get it? You just haven't cracked it yet?

Adam Wyse: Yes. I really want to design a game with nontransitive dice.

Patrick Rauland: What does that even mean?

Adam Wyse: If you haven't heard of those, that was actually one of the very first inspirations for trying to design a game in the first place. I came across an article about nontransitive dice. Those are really interesting custom dice designed by … There's a few different types, but I ordered some of them called Grime dice. They're named after the inventor, or mathematician. These are dice that, let's say the green dice have some faces that have fives on them, some that have zeros. The red dice have some faces that are twos and some that are sevens, something like that.

Adam Wyse: Every set of dice, there's five of them in a set, if you roll one of the green dice, on average it will beat one of the red dice, like 75 percent of the time or something like that. The red dice beats the blue dice, most of the time. Every other dice beats every other dice.

Patrick Rauland: Okay, kind of like rock-paper-scissors?

Adam Wyse: Like rock-paper-scissors for dice, basically.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, got it.

Adam Wyse: So we've got this really interesting interplay, and then when you throw in a second dice, it flips. So where, if green would beat red, one die versus one die, if you're rolling green die versus two red die, now red has the advantage.

Patrick Rauland: What?

Adam Wyse: I found the whole concept super interesting. I have tried several times to design a game around them, but … That's my goal. I haven't done it yet.

Patrick Rauland: That's really cool. So all right. Maybe spitball some ideas. What type of themes have you gone for. Like, how can you use nontransitive dice in a way that makes sense? Or what have you tried?

Adam Wyse: My very first game was with nontransitive dice. That's the one that I said was kind of a disaster. But it was about microorganisms trying to evolve in a swamp, or something. So the dice were involved with combat. If you're combating with the other species that is using a certain color of dice, you know you're good against some players and bad against others. You're trying to hit the ones that you're good against and avoid the others. That one didn't really work.

Adam Wyse: I tried kind of a beat 'em up style side-scroller game, like an old Nintendo game style, with these things where you are getting bats or chains or something like that, that'll give you access to the different dice you're trying to use to beat up the thugs, and you're working together to beat them. But that never really-

Patrick Rauland: That sounds great.

Adam Wyse: Yeah. I was hopeful for it, but it never really, it kind of fizzled out. It might be something I come back to, but for now those are the main two I've tried with that, but haven't had enough success yet.

Patrick Rauland: I have to say different weapon armaments makes a lot of sense for nontransitive dice. Right? It's like, “Oh, he has the blue defense die. I better use, you know, which is body armor, so I shouldn't use my gun. I should make sure to use the giant hammer.” Yeah, cool.

Adam Wyse: Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Oh, that's really, really to think, and I literally think you're the first person to say nontransitive dice on this podcast, so congratulations. That's sounds like a really cool mechanic you're trying to work out.

Adam Wyse: It is, because I like the rock-paper-scissors idea, but this adds the extra element that it's not a guarantee, either. You still have some odds in there, as well, like green is going to beat them most of the time but not always. I think it's very cool.

What's The Best Money You've Spent?

Patrick Rauland: Love it. All right, so as a game designer, what is something that you spent money on that you found incredibly, incredibly helpful?

Adam Wyse: I think my biggest recent purchase that was super useful for me is a really good paper cutter. I had one before that was just like one of the big blades that comes down. I got a fairly expensive one with the rolling blade, made by a company called Carl. It's got a green acrylic thing on it to guard the blade or whatever. But it's super useful. I can prototype … I've got a game with 160 cards that I was preparing for Origins, and I can print that off and cut all that, and have it cut and sleeved in 20 minutes or something, now. It just cuts through so many pages, so fast, so accurately.

Patrick Rauland: Oh, that sounds great. Literally, the last person I talked to on this podcast, he mentioned a card cutter. Now, in his specific case, I think it's literally designed for poker cards. Like, the way you print out all the cards side by side, and then you just slide it in, and then like three columns come out. I think you do the same for each, the next thing, and it just cuts them into poker card shapes. This sounds like a similar thing.

Adam Wyse: Yeah. I usually sleeve my cards with the paper printout, with the card in behind, in the sleeve. My printer's not good with card stock or anything.

Patrick Rauland: Very cool. I'll have to check it out. I'll bug you for a link afterwards, just to give people a product that they might be able to find.

Adam Wyse: Sure.

Patrick Rauland: I was working on an 18 card game earlier this week, and I want to say … I made two copies, one for friends and one for me. I think that took me over an hour. And you don't think it takes that much time, but I had to get the print files ready and I made the size wrong. It's putzy. If I can shave off a little bit of time with the right tools, that sounds super useful.

Adam Wyse: Yeah.

What Resources Do You Recommend?

Patrick Rauland: Are there any resources that you'd recommend for a game designer, maybe a book or a blog or something like that, that you find really helpful?

Adam Wyse: I really like a series of articles on a site called Games Precipice. They have a whole bunch of articles. I don't know if they're still posting them, but there's a wealth of information there. Every one goes into, if they're talking about a certain mechanic, really good examples of games that use this mechanic. It's very detailed, super useful for discovering different things that are out there. They give really good reasoning and explanations for their descriptions of what they talk about.

What Does Success Look Like?

Patrick Rauland: All right. I haven't heard that one before. I will have to check it out and add it to my ever growing list. Okay, last question and then I got a little game for you, here. And actually, you've already seen a fair bit of success in the board game world, but what does success look like to you, moving forward?

Adam Wyse: Yeah. I feel success is a constantly moving bar for me. It's going to look different to every person. At first, for me, it was to get my name on a published game. And for me, something that I didn't self-publish. Self-publishing is totally valid, a totally good way to go if that's what you want to do, if you want to start a company and do everything that's involved with that. All the logistics and all the financials are on you. But if you want to focus on designing games, like I did, I really focused on the publisher route. I wanted to get my name on a box.

Adam Wyse: Once that happened, obviously I'm still reaching for more. I want to get games with multiple publishers, so I'm at that point now. I think my main goal at this point is to kind of have a hit. Most of my games aren't super well known at this point. I'm hoping Gorilla Marketing will break through with that. That'll be out later this year, from Roxley. But to have a big hit is my next goal. I think success is a constantly moving bar.

Overrated / Underrated

Patrick Rauland: Oh, absolutely. All right, very good. I do have a little game for you. It's called Overrated-Underrated. I'm going to give you a word or a phrase, and then you need to tell me if you think it's overrated or underrated. Got it?

Adam Wyse: Okay.

Patrick Rauland: All right. One player games, are they overrated or are they underrated?

Adam Wyse: I'm going to say overrated.

Patrick Rauland: Ooh. And give me a one sentence reason why.

Adam Wyse: I play games to experience them with friends around the table. I'm there for the experience of interacting with others, and not necessarily just interacting with mechanics.

Patrick Rauland: Love it. What do you think about puns? Are they overrated or underrated?

Adam Wyse: Surprisingly, overrated. I know I have a lot of games that are puns, pun names, but I'm not the biggest punster, really. I roll my eyes, most of the time.

Patrick Rauland: Okay, so maybe in game titles, but in real life they're overrated.

Adam Wyse: Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Cool. Okay, variable player powers, are they overrated or underrated?

Adam Wyse: I'll say underrated. I think variable player powers give a lot of re-playability to a game. It kind of gets you into the theme. You're taking on this role of a character that has a special thing that no one else has. I like 'em.

Patrick Rauland: And the last one, because of your game Poetry Slam, is poetry overrated or underrated?

Adam Wyse: Underrated. There's not many games about poetry. I think Poetry Slam is super unique. If you have any interest in poetry or word games, I would check it out. It's a very unique thing. I haven't seen many games about poetry. You're coming up with rhyming couplets in Poetry Slam, and I think I haven't seen that kind of thing before.

Conclusion

Patrick Rauland: Wow. No, that sounds really, really cool. All right. Well hey, thanks for being on the show, Adam. Where can people find you online?

Adam Wyse: Well, I have Instagram, that's adamwyse83, W-Y-S-E. Adamwyse83 on Instagram. Or I have a Twitter that I don't really use very much, but I'm LoanWolf_, L-O-A-N wolf underscore.

Patrick Rauland: I'm thinking of a loan shark, but the land version.

Adam Wyse: Yeah, exactly.

Patrick Rauland: Awesome. Well, thank you again for being on. By the way, if you're a listener, if you like this podcast, please leave a positive review on iTunes or wherever you listen to this. I forgot to talk about this with Adam ahead of time, so let me know if this works. If you leave a review, Adam said he'd personally help you train your gorilla. That sounds really cool, right Adam?

Adam Wyse: Yeah, I'll do it.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, great. All right. You can visit the site at IndieBoardGameDesigners.com. You can follow me on Twitter. I am @BFTrick. Thank you for being on, Adam. Until next time, happy designing. Bye-bye.

Adam Wyse: Thank you.

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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone and welcome to the Indie Board Game Designers Podcast. Today we are talking with Joseph Z Chen who is the designer behind Fantastic Factories, which is a game about building a manufacturing empire and it is blowing up on Kickstarter right now, and we're definitely gonna talk about that. Joseph, welcome to the show.

Joseph Z Chen: Thanks. It's great to be here.

How Did You Get Into Board Game Design?

Patrick Rauland: So first question I basically ask everyone, how did you get into board games and board game design?

Joseph Z Chen: Well I can't say that getting into board games is a particularly exciting story. I think I got in the same way a lot of people did, kinda started with Catan. So like after college, I had a bunch of roommates and someone owned a copy of Catan and we used to play night after night of Catan. Eventually led into Dominion, 7 Wonders and kinda opened up that world of hobby gaming. And actually for a while I kind of took a little bit of a break when I moved out of that apartment and in with what … who was at the time my fiance, and kinda stopped playing board games for a while. And eventually a group of friends and I, we were just looking for a new project to work on, and we had played a lot of board games together in the past. And we figured, “Let's try our hand at making a board game.” We had a lot of favorites, but every game … There's no such thing as perfect game and we thought we could combine together a lot of those great mechanics that we liked and tried to eliminate a lot of the things we didn't like in order to make what we thought was an ideal board game, which turns out to be a little harder than it sounds.

Patrick Rauland: No, it's definitely challenging. So it sounds like board game design revitalized your interest in board games in general.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah, definitely. It's one of those things too … It's a different perspective when you're creating something versus using that thing. But in order to be a good board game designer, you have to play a lot of board games and actually it's funny, I wasn't buying into the whole cult of the new until I started designing. And then it's almost a necessity that you have to keep up with the latest trends and figure out what people are doing and what the latest kind of innovations are in board games, both from components and mechanics and even marketing and a lot of stuff.

Patrick Rauland: So I don't know about you, but recently I found that when I'm playing games, I can't not critique them, like even fully published games. Like I'm just … I think I'm so used to like playing prototypes and doing stuff like that that I just … I can't not say, “Well, I don't know about the drafting mechanism and this part of this game, I think they could've put that in an expansion. It doesn't need to be in the base game.” And it's kind of hard to turn off that designer part of my brain when I'm playing games now.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah, definitely. It's … And everyone's a critic you know. But I find actually I … For most published games, they go through the same rigor that I've gone through with my game and on the flip side, not only just being able to point out the flaws of the game, you actually start seeing also how they've solved certain problems with a certain mechanic. A lot of times when you play a game you're like, “Why is that little detail there?” And then from a designer's perspective, you understand like, “Oh, they put that in …” Sorry, “To solve that one particular problem.” And you're like, “Oh, that's actually a very clever solution.” And so you kinda get a little bit of both. You see the flaws, but you also see kind of the tool set that other designers have used to solve certain problems. So it's kind of you're getting a little peep behind the curtain in that sense and you get a little more understanding on why things are designed the way they are.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. There's definitely a couple times where I'm playing like a published game and maybe I'm playing with someone who's just a friend and they don't do any game design at all and they're like, “Why is this there?” I'm like, “Ah, I've run into similar situations. Here's probably why they did that.” Yeah, it's kinda fun to have that knowledge and kinda know why people are making certain choices. So looking at your Kickstarter page for your game, it looks like you've been working on this for a long time. How long exactly?

Joseph Z Chen: I think it's a little over two and a half years now and I think a lot of is this continual process of redesigns. I think … So this is my first design and I think that I would like to say I have a general sense of … a good sense of what a good game is and for a while I would keep saying, “Okay. Is this quite where … up to standards where I think it needs to be?” And a lot of times it's like, “Well not quite.” And I think the trouble was as an inexperienced designer, finding the right solution took a bit of time. Like I said, expanding your experience of various games, especially ones that are in a similar category as your own. And then being willing to re-haul your design, pull out a big piece of it, be willing to kill your darlings, and then going back to the drawing board and then play testing all over again.

Joseph Z Chen: So I wouldn't say all designs need as much time as Fantastic Factories has gotten and I think that with more experience under my belt now that the process would be much faster. But it's one of those things where while certain designs just needs more time and it depends on the approach, depends on what problems you run into. And that's why a lot of people have multiple designs running at the time, and sometimes they'll shelve one and take another one off the shelf and let it rest for a bit. And not to mention, this is not a full time gig for me and life still happens. During the whole process, my wife and I had our first kid as well and that put things … delayed the schedule a few months as we kind of got our life in order and took a break from designing. And so there's just a lot things involved in bringing a game to Kickstarter.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, there's definitely a lot … One of my favorite things as I was scrolling through your Facebook page trying to come up with questions for you … or one of the things I appreciated scrolling through your page was there's a picture of you playing the game in a park from like what, two, two and a half years ago. And that was … And I think that's really cool to like show and like there were some printed cards, some cards that were written on … or some text written on index cards. I think it's really cool to see the game evolve slowly over time.

How Do You Kill Your Darlings

Patrick Rauland: So you mentioned killing your darlings and I think that's something that lot of game game designers struggle with. They love that auction mechanic, they love this thing over here, they like the extra little fiddly bits over there. How do you know what stuff you need to … I think I wanna say how do you know what stuff you need to test removing? I mean you don't need to kill it right away, but you like test a version of a game without it, see if it works better then decide to keep it or not. Does that make sense?

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. So I think there's a few parts to it. I think the key … The largest … The biggest key to that is display testing and it's one of those things that if you have a darling, it unfortunately just means you're gonna have to spend more time play testing it and spend more time having people tell you that you're wrong before you're willing to listen. It's like almost a numbers thing because as designers, we have certain intuition as to what we think is the correct decision or not the correct decision and that carries some weight. But then play testing is kind of empirical data that tells you whether your intuition is wrong or right.

Patrick Rauland: Sure.

Joseph Z Chen: And if you feel very strongly about your darling or whatever mechanic that you feel should be in the game, but play testers are reacting negatively to it or it's causing more problems than it's solving, things like that, that takes time, that takes iterations. It takes a lot of play tests for players to basically give you that feedback and then for you to collect that feedback in a consistent enough manner that you get that message and say, “Okay. It's clear now. We've got a big enough sample size. People are not enjoying this particular part of the game or it's causing problems.” Things like that. I think the really tricky part is understanding when you can do better because not every game can be perfect and some designs just will have certain flaws.

Joseph Z Chen: Take a look at Splendor. Splendor's a really, really popular game but a lot of people say it's a very theme and there's not interaction yet it sells really, really well. So are those flaws or are those things that that particular design just has to live with? Can you improve on that part of the design or is it something that you've pushed to the limit? And I think understanding how far your design can go and recognizing its flaws, recognizing what you're trying to target as well, I think that's the challenging part and knowing whether you can kill a darling or there … it's something that is core to your design, I think is something you have to evaluate. And I think that's one of the trickiest things about design.

Did You Remove Something From Your Game?

Patrick Rauland: So … So I think maybe what would be helpful for me … well definitely for me, but I'm hoping listeners is, what is something you did remove from your game? ‘Cause I think it's really … It's easy to talk about in abstract and I think it's much more clear when you talk about a thing you really wanted and then you saw this problem and then you decided to take it out.

Joseph Z Chen: Well there's been a lot of changes. I'm trying to think what the best example might be. I think one of the biggest changes was … And this was something that was present at the very beginning of the game, is to … In order to build a factory … turn a blueprint into a factory, you required a matching pair of dice and that seemed intuitive to in the sense that oh, like we can't just … There needs to be some kind of requirement necessary. Thematically, it kind of made sense. You have two workers that are in sync and working on building something. But it created in some issues in the sense that well what if you never rolled a pair can never build. The chance of rolling of pair of four is about 72% chance, which is still … It's pretty good but you still run into situations where people can't build for the first two turns and it's one of those things that even if it's rare, if enough players play your game, they will run into these bad situations and that can set them back really far. So you just wanna reduce the chance of those kind of scenarios from happening as much as possible.

Joseph Z Chen: So I introduced a single die build where you can place one worker to build, you just have to pay double the cost of the building. What … That kind of solved the problem and now all the buildings had to be costed in a way that made sense so all … There's a particular mechanic in the game where you can building training facilities that allow you manipulate your dice rolls. Those are cheapest buildings to build in the game. They were initially designed specifically so you could pay double to build them, thus would help you create pairs in the future. But as I [inaudible 00:12:29] game, it became clear to me that this rule of like a pair of dice, the solo build double cost was a huge … spending … taking a huge amount of my time explaining the game, thus introducing a huge amount of complexity to the game compared to the rest of the game, the simplicity of the game. And so I ended up removing it and replacing it with this other system, which actually … what conveniently solved a bunch of other problems at the time.

Joseph Z Chen: So what's great is when you have a solution that kind of improves your design overall, ended up doing this thing where instead of using dice at all, you discard another card of the same matching symbol. And what that ended up doing is freeing up your dice to do a lot more cooler things than building 'cause in order to build, you use a pair of dice. That's half your dice for the … that's half your turn and in resources, that's basically your whole turn. So by freeing that up, letting your dice do more cool things as well as creating this card economy where you can start filtering through cards because you can discard cards that you don't need in order to build other cards that you do want. And so at the same time, solved a lot of other problems as well.

The Part That's Hard to Explain

Patrick Rauland: I really like that. I think I wanna focus on one thing that you said. I think you said something along the lines of like it took a long … it took a lot of explaining … like the rest of my game is pretty simple, but this one part took a lot of explaining. I wonder if that's a really good … I wonder if that's a really good tool to use for other designers. Like is there a part of your game that takes way more explaining than the rest of your game? If so, that's probably an area that's … that could be refined.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. I would definitely say so because [inaudible 00:14:21] layers of complexity in the game. Like if you know the rules and you still think it's … If you've played the game a whole bunch and you know the rules and you think it's complex, then it's probably complex. If you are teaching the game and you feel like it's hard to teach, then it's probably too complex because the other layer is most people are gonna be learning the game from reading the rule book. So if you're having trouble explaining the game verbally in person, imagine how hard it is for someone to learn the game from the rule book. And as designers we don't usually have people learn the game from a rule book until much, much later on during blind play-testing. So if you are having trouble teaching the game in person, then you can only imagine how much problems … how many problems that's gonna cause when players are trying to learn from the rule book.

Patrick Rauland: No, that's an excellent, excellent example and I was just in a play test last week and the person was having a hard time explaining the game in person. And like there were four of us around the table and the designer was explaining it to us and we were just not getting it. And I was just trying to imagine what would this be like in a rule book and like how many … how many times would I like flip between the pages before giving and either putting the game away or trying to find like a how to play video on YouTube.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. Explaining the rule book is infinitely harder than in person.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Joseph Z Chen: And it also is a skill. Teaching a game is a skill that is different than designing and fortunately as a designer, you kinda have to pick up both skills. And teaching a specific game is also a very different thing. Different games have different ways of teaching and throughout this two and a half year process, I've gotten pretty good at explaining the game and teaching it. And it really is interesting to just understand and see how different people will learn in different ways. Often times … Well one key thing to note is that if you overload people with information, then they won't retain it. So doing it in bite size parts and doing those actions at the same time help kind of reinforce that … those instructions and I think one thing … As a designer who's teaching the game, one thing to note is like when you see people's eyes glazed over, that's when you know you either have something too complex or you're giving them too much information at one time and you might think of a way to break it up in pieces. And that's less of a design skill and … Well it's partially a design skill and it's partially a teaching the game skill, which is necessary for successfully getting play tests and everything like that.

Where Did The Theme Come From?

Patrick Rauland: No, it's great. So your game is very much like an engine building game. Like I think especially if you look at the Kickstarter page, you'll see like there's dice, you roll them, you get resources, you can get cards, you can use those resources to buy more cards, all sorts of fun stuff. What I think I wanted to point out is that we hear about engine building games and I feel like your game is literally … you're literally creating factories, you're literally researching new idea with your cards and you're literally producing resources from these factories. … Or I shouldn't say … like in the game you're producing, not [inaudible 00:17:48]. But why haven't other engine games used this theme because it seems perfect for an engine building game to like make factories?

Joseph Z Chen: Well if you think about it on a surface level, it's … the theme is factories-

Patrick Rauland: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Joseph Z Chen: Which is maybe not the most glamorous theme. I think it's … If you look at it at a surface level, it is kind of a dry theme in terms of, “Oh, it's factories.” It's a little too obvious in a way I guess.

Patrick Rauland: Sure.

Joseph Z Chen: I … When you say a theme is factories, it's not very inspiring.

Patrick Rauland: Sure.

Joseph Z Chen: But that's why we kind of took that as a challenge and [inaudible 00:18:33], “Well how can we make this more interesting, have this fantastic twist to it?” And it's … I mean you can't tell from the podcast but Fantastic Factories is a very colorful, bright, vibrant game.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Joseph Z Chen: I think another one of the challenges is that no one … It's not a theme that people are very familiar with in the sense that what are different kinds of factories, what does a concrete plant even look like. And that's a question I didn't … that's an answer I didn't know. Like what does concrete plant look like? How do I do the art for a concrete plant for something that I don't even know what it looks like? And if I don't know what it looks like, what are players expecting to see? And I think that's kinda where that imaginative, whimsical part of the game comes into play. If you look at the art for a concrete plant, it's actually a giant stand mixer, like a KitchenAid that's mixing concrete. So the fact is no one knows what a … Well very few people know what a concrete plant looks like. I now kind of know what it looks like, but … because I was doing a little research for the art, but that almost doesn't matter as long as you convey something that people might imagine it looks like. A giant stand mixer, which realistically is not the case, but it's a fun little way of thinking about it, and I think that helps kinda strengthen that theme. It's a combination of this dry theme and this kind of fantastic way of approaching it and I think that kind of creates this overall feel.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Well it's interesting that you say factories is a boring theme. I get where you're coming from. I think I … I think if you just said, “Do you you wanna play a game about factories?” I'd be like, “What?” But on the other hand, there are so many games that are like trading in the mediterranean that are actual engine builders. I played one last week where basically we're going around, you're making cities, those cities produce things. You can use those things to buy more cities, to make more things and eventually you get cards at the end of the game … or you get cards and you get points at the end of the game. But that's like an engine building game and I don't … It just seems it's more incongruent to have a game about factories than about building cities in the Mediterranean. It seems like it's a ripe area and I think it's really cool that you did focus on factories instead of trading in the mediterranean.

Joseph Z Chen: I think one of the things about trading in the mediterranean is a lot of those games are very like resource management heavy and when you're trading stuff, you could come up anything. Like Century Spice Road has a bunch of spices and then Catan has just a plethora of resource types. For Fantastic Factories, we limited ourselves to two in order to kinda make the most. I guess in a way … I don't wanna say basic. We're very like elegant most … pure kinda version of the game. Like you think about … to step out of board games a bit, Star Craft. Star Craft is a great game that only has two different resources, whereas a lot of other games like Age of Empires has a bunch. And I think we took that as a challenge like how can we … how compelling and complex of a game can we make with just two different resources. I think that's trading in the mediterranean might be more popular than factories 'cause as a resource management sort of perspective, it's a little more obvious how to do the theming for the resources in trading in the Mmditerranean than for factories.

Tell Us About Your Design Diary

Patrick Rauland: No. That makes sense. Now one of the things that I'm really impressed with and one of the things that I've wanted to do for my own game but I haven't, is you've kept a design diary while creating this game, and I stumbled across a few of the posts and they're really really interesting. I'd like to know how a … Well first of all, maybe just explain what a design diary is and how it's helped you.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. So a design diary is just kind of a blog or whatever, a diary of posts that you write as you're designing and developing the game, explaining kind of the process that you're going through. And I think for me, it … I have maybe a different approach than maybe most people do in the sense that it's not strictly a design diary. A lot of people will do design diaries on a weekly or a daily … Well daily's pretty ambitious, a weekly basis and a lot of people do it as a way to keep themselves accountable and progressing on their designs, and I think that's a really great way of doing it. For me, it's been a little different actually. I have not been very consistent. I think there was a period of time where I hadn't made a post for a month, but I've been making posts once or twice a month these days. Covering topics not just strictly about design, but also about marketing, about Kickstarter, about [inaudible 00:23:46] simulator, things like that as a way of just sharing the knowledge I think. I spend a lot of time on the Facebook groups with the design groups, Kickstarter, publishing and I … Once you spend enough time, you start seeing the same questions come up-

Patrick Rauland: Right.

Joseph Z Chen: Again and again and again.

Patrick Rauland: Right.

Joseph Z Chen: And having been someone who's gone through that process of basically answering that question for myself, I decided, “Hey, I'll tackle what I believe to be the most common questions.” And I'll write a post about my experience and then when it comes up again inevitably I'll just post a reply of, “Hey, here's what I found. Here's what my experience was.”, and basically just trying to be as helpful as possible. And I think writing out these kind of things also help you kind of expand on the idea and really understand it from all angles 'cause it's one thing to learn it as a student and then it's just another level to teach it or to explain it to someone else.

Patrick Rauland: Totally.

Joseph Z Chen: You know you have a subject mastered or maybe not mastered but down really well when you're able to explain it somebody else. And so I think by writing these design diaries, these blog posts, it basically ensures that I really know that subject and it helps me get into all those fine details.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. No, part of my day job is teaching people and I learn more by teaching than I do by doing. Like when you are … When you force yourself to teach it someone else, you have to know it inside and out. And yeah, I think you become very articulate in explaining it, which by the way I can … as a reader of your design diaries, I can see that. Like I can very easily see like big, big ideas being broken down into little bite chunks. “Here's an image. Here's a little bit of text.” And it's all very relatable and understandable so I think to maybe pull out a little bit of a … bit of advice for someone would be if you're struggling with a thing, maybe try to teach someone else how to do that thing and you'll probably figure it out along the way.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. I think that's a really interesting approach and I think it'd be a pretty good way to learn something.

What is the Runaway Leader Problem?

Patrick Rauland: So there's one post that I really liked. You talked about the runaway leader problem and I think you … going back to what you just said, you're like, “Heres a game where there's a run … Here's one way of solving the runaway leader problem. Here's another game and how they solved it.” And you talked leader headwind, which I think is a really elegant solution. Can you talk about … I mean so maybe just give us … Yeah, give us the specific case of how did this come up, how did you discover it and how did you know that it was the right solution.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. So this is one of those cases where teaching or writing about it is one way to like really understand the topic, and it became a design issue for Fantastic Factories where we had a runaway leader problem. And for me, one of the best ways of uncovering a solutions besides playing a bunch of games, is analyzing what those games did to solve that problem. And that's I think playing games can be valuable 'cause you can borrow different tools and tricks from different games. One of the things that I discovered was this kind of concept I like to call leader headwind, which I didn't coin the phrase. I think someone else did, but it's this idea of … a way of slowing down the person in the lead. But not in a … In a way that it's a perception thing. So the leader is perceived to be slowing down. They've got this headwind slowing them down.

Joseph Z Chen: You'll see in games like Dominion for instance, it's a … Dominion's a deck builder where you're collecting points into your deck and the points themselves don't do anything. So as you are collecting points, your engine actually slows down and you're scoring fewer and fewer points with each turn in theory, because your deck is less and less effective because of all the points that are clogging it up. And I think what happens is it's perceived that you're able to catch up to the leader because they're slowing down, you're still picking up momentum and scoring points. The cool thing about that is that it's only a perceived slowdown of the leader because once you catch up with them, you're running in the same issue as them as well. Your deck is full of points and your whole deck slows down as well. So that's what leader headwind is. It's this slowdown of whoever's in the lead or whoever has the most … whoever has a certain amount of points, but it can affect other players as they gain those points as well. Sorry. That's kind of a … maybe a long winded way of explaining it, but it just psychological … a thing of making it look like whoever's in the lead is slowing down, allowing you to feel like you're catching up. In reality the point scores are potentially narrowing, but the number of turns away from winning are still the same.

Patrick Rauland: But I think you … And I think that explains it pretty well. I think you do an even actually … an actually better job explaining it in your post because you bring up so … I mean the post is long and we don't have 10 minutes to talk about all the examples you brought up in your post, but you bring up a ton of games and sometimes there's like a take that mechanic, where like you're the blue shell from Mario Cart. So I … Yeah. I think if you wanna really dig in, there's the post. I'll make sure to link that in the show notes.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. There's so many different ways of tackling the runaway leader problem. Most people think catch up mechanic, but there really are a lot of kind of more subtle ways of doing it. And yeah, the blog post is great because it goes through concrete examples of various games and I don't wanna go through all the effort explaining all the-

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Z Chen: Different games. But the post kinda covers it and how each game uses it and why it works and what situations it's good and what situations it might not be so good.

What Are You Working On?

Patrick Rauland: Love it. So we actually are running out of time, so I'll try to skip to the best questions here. I think I'd like to know what type of games maybe you're gonna start designing in the future. What type of games do you like to design, and once this Fantastic Factories is all done, what are you working on?

Joseph Z Chen: Well I don't have anything specific quite lined up yet. We do have a bunch of stuff that was cut from the game 'cause it was maybe too complex or unnecessary that we might throw into an expansion because we'll have a little bit more breathing room to add in mechanical complexity and things like that. So that's something we'll probably be working on. But as for like a new project, I think I'd like to get my hands on maybe something completely different. I guess having gone through this journey, there's a certain audience that Fantastic Factories just isn't really designed for and I kinda wanna try my hand at maybe a design that is more highly interactive, very contentious, that sort of thing. But I also gravitate towards designs that are very elegant, both component wise and mechanically. And I might try my hand at something a little smaller 'cause as a first time creator, I would have to say like Fantastic Factories is a fairly ambitious project that took a while and trying something as simple as maybe like a hundred card … a hundred card deck card game of some sort, or something simpler I think would be a really fun idea. And Seattle design community is really great. I think there are few designers that I'd love to collaborate with and maybe try something out.

Patrick Rauland: It's funny you mentioned a hundred card deck. My … I have two designs that I'm working on right now and both of them are 18 cards. So …

Joseph Z Chen: That's even better. There's the GenCant Button Shy competition.

Patrick Rauland: I will be submitting my game to that. I have no idea how it'll do, but it is getting submitted.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. Nothing quite like a deadline-

Patrick Rauland: Yep.

Joseph Z Chen: To really push your design forward.

Patrick Rauland: You know it's funny … Just speaking about it very quickly. I actually … It's funny, I had the idea for this game but the previous iteration had like a hundred tokens and … I think I had like 100 different tokens and then the GenCant's Button Shy thing came out and another contest came out before that. I'm like, “Wait a second. I think I can get the core of this game with 18 cards or 18 tokens instead of a hundred.” And I don't know if it's better, but it's definitely … like it wasn't playable with a hundred. You know what I mean? Like no one wants to move a hundred pieces around a board. So it's funny, those design constraints helped me realize an actual game as opposed to just … it was … 'cause it was just rolling around in my head and I had to just simplify it way, way down for that contest. So yeah. Yeah. Sorry. A little aside in my brain.

What's The Best Money You've Spent on Game Design?

Patrick Rauland: So what was the best money that you spent on your game in the last two years?

Joseph Z Chen: So I think getting the right tools is really helpful and I've shown this tool on Twitter before. It's this card cutter, which unfortunately I think the company went out of business. But there … You can get similar tools. Getting a good paper cutter is really useful, but I have this thing that's specifically designed to cut out poker sized cards and it's really expensive. It's like I think a couple hundred dollars. But it only does one thing and it cuts poker sized cards, and it does it really, really well, really, really fast. It's one of those things that like at first I'm like, “Oh man, a couple hundred.” Actually to be honest, my partner … co-designer Justin bought it. If I knew how much it would cost, I probably wouldn't have bought it. But now after having used it for like a year or two, definitely worth the money because in terms of how fast I was able to make new cards and just kinda iterate on the design. And the other thing I would mention if you like the … If you're doing a card game and you do print out a lot of cards, I actually use something called HP Instant Ink. This is gonna sound like a LL ad, but they have this interesting subscription service for your ink. So you pay a certain amount of money, for me it's $3.00 a month-

Cutting some cards! #gamedesigndaily pic.twitter.com/1cDHudVS40

— Joseph Z Chen (FantasticFactories) @ PAX West (@fanfactories) January 27, 2018

Patrick Rauland: Oh, yeah.

Joseph Z Chen: And I think I get like 50 pages.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Joseph Z Chen: So they charge you by the page, you can only print 50 pages, but they don't care what you put on the page. So if you're doing full color, like [inaudible 00:35:30], so that's why I've been using … So it's actually quite economical if you're doing full color pages all the time for $3.00 a month.

Patrick Rauland: So tell me-

Joseph Z Chen: [crosstalk 00:35:43].

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about that. Like do you order and they send it to you? I'm a little bit confused. How is it only 50 pages?

Joseph Z Chen: So they have a really ink cartridge they send you and then it's … Here's the kind of the annoying part. It requires the internet because they basically connect to your printer. So you have to have a HP printer that supports it and the printer basically counts how many pages you print, and then if you print more, they'll charge you like a dollar for each additional pages. And if you unsubscribe, they deactivate your ink cartridge, so-

Patrick Rauland: I had no idea there were like internet accessible ink cartridges.

Joseph Z Chen: Yeah. They're trying to turn everything into subscription services, but the thing is if you print full color pages, it's … you're actually saving money and they're probably not making a lot of money off you.

Patrick Rauland: And I'm just [inaudible 00:36:35]. This is me, I'm browsing through their site right now. There is it looks like 15 pages a month for free, which might be a good way to get going. Cool.

Joseph Z Chen: Oh, as like a sign up bonus or something?

Patrick Rauland: I don't know if there's a sign up bonus. It just says there is a free printing plan. There is a little asterisk, so I don't know where the … maybe the asterisk is not really free. But free printing plan, 15 a month. Anyways, I won't read all the stuff right now but there is a free plan, 15 pages a month. So check it out. I'll link to it in the show notes. And sorry, what was the card cutter? Did you say that was on Twitter? I can try to get the link from you afterwards.

Joseph Z Chen: Oh, I don't think … I think that company went out of business. So unfortunately not a thing anymore-

Patrick Rauland: Well is there a picture 'cause it still might … ‘Cause it still might be useful if there's like a picture of it.

Joseph Z Chen: I'd have to dig it up, it was quite a while ago.

What is the Best Way to Market Your Game?

Patrick Rauland: All right. Well I'll try to … I'll bug you afterwards and see what we can do. Two more big questions here. So … Two more questions. So what is the best way to market your game?

Joseph Z Chen: So I'll know the data for sure after the Kickstarter, but I think there are a few ways. I think … So for me, my strategy before the game launch was to … I guess a few approaches. Building up a mailing list I think is really important. So I've always funneled everyone through the mailing list first and foremost and I got the most emails from conventions, where I have a table or a booth. And applying to things like indie showcases can be really helpful for getting booth table space for cheap or free even, and focusing your pitch to collecting emails. So for us, we did a 10 minute demo and so like at PAX South or PAX West, we were part of [inaudible 00:38:24] mega booth. We were able to get like two or 300 emails-

Patrick Rauland: Wow.

Joseph Z Chen: In a weekend. It depends on the con, so … And traveling can be expensive, so if you have a lot of local conventions like we do in Seattle, I would recommend trying those first 'cause those are also usually easier to get a cheap table. And you won't have to pay for a hotel and flight and all that stuff.

Patrick Rauland: Definitely.

Joseph Z Chen: The other thing is just to engage with people in the community and I think Twitter is a really great way of doing that. There's a lot of designers, a lot of content creators on Twitter that connect and promote each other and like it's a really nice, welcoming and positive community of people, and it's also a great way to connect and network. When you go to a convention, it's funny how like a lot of conventions turn into what I feel like a Twitter meet up. You're like, “Oh, I know you. We connected on Twitter. We talked about that one thing.” And these people … If you post progress of your game, people get interested and they become invested and they become … they lend you their voices. They become signal boosters for you, especially … certain people are basically local celebrities. Some people call it influencer marketing-

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Joseph Z Chen: But that sounds really markety, really like … I would say more of connecting with people-

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Joseph Z Chen: You're not trying to push your game on them, you just know them. You play games with them and throughout time, they become familiar with what you're about and your game. And I think that's the most natural way and the way that gets the most buzz and loyalty and like … and a genuine kind of response from people in your network.

What Does Success Look Like?

Patrick Rauland: I love it. I mean, yeah. So be connected in your community and go to conventions. I love it. Last question and then a game, what does success in the board game world look like to you?

Joseph Z Chen: So I'm fortunate enough to have a … Well used to … I'm actually between jobs now, but I usually have a great paying day job being a software engineer. So financially like boardgames have never been about … Designing a board game has never been about making a lot of money. For me, it's a creative outlet at first and now I feel like it's a way to connect with other people. And I think for me, success basically is just getting a game out there that people recognize, that people enjoy playing and getting it into as many hands as possible. And so I think if there are hundreds of thousands of fans out there with the game, then I think that sounds like success to me.

Underrated / Overrated Game

Patrick Rauland: Love it. I absolutely love that answer. All right. Last little bit, there's a little game I like to play called overrated, underrated. And basically, I'm gonna give you a phrase or a term and then you need to tell me if you think if it's overrated or underrated. So if I said tacos, you might say underrated because delicious meat or something. Got it?

Joseph Z Chen: All right.

Patrick Rauland: All right, cool. So first one, output randomness. Is it overrated or underrated?

Joseph Z Chen: Overrated, I think. I prefer input randomness, which is kinda how Fantastic Factories is designed. I know there's definitely a lot of like drama with output randomness, but I like being in control when I'm playing my games.

Patrick Rauland: Sure. Sure. Yeah, 'cause you roll the dice and you choose what to do with them as opposed to choosing what you do, rolling the dice and then not being able to do that. Got it. All right. So this one I stole from your … or I go the idea from your Facebook page. Hardhats, are they overrated or underrated?

Joseph Z Chen: Underrated. I think that it's a silly gimmick, but I wear hardhats at all the conventions and places where I demo, and it's always a big hit. Also makes it really easy to find the person. So I've been at really crowded conventions and my partner will be wearing a hardhat and I'll be able to spot him all the way across the room. So definitely underrated.

Patrick Rauland: That's awesome. All right. First player tokens, overrated, underrated?

Joseph Z Chen: I think underrated. I think … Have you played Evolution?

Patrick Rauland: No, I haven't.

Joseph Z Chen: They have the most ridiculous first player token. It's like a dinosaur meatball that's like … I don't know, like four inches tall or something. It's just excessive. You could literally use anything as a first player token, but I think the creative way that some games do it and it's a little fun little component that you can do whatever you want with it.

Patrick Rauland: Cool. And self driving cars, are they overrated or underrated?

Joseph Z Chen: Underrated, I think. Imagine all the time you spend commuting and then self driving cars can drive so much more efficiently and potentially with fewer accidents. I think there's a lot of potential there. So I really look forward to the day where I can just climb into my car, tell it to go to Safeway and I'll take a nap, and then wake up I'll be there.

Patrick Rauland: That sounds amazing and by the way, I'm in total agreement with you. I cannot wait to never drive again.

Joseph Z Chen: I mean not only that, just think about how many cars on the road and how many cars are in garages. So if we had self driving cars that were a public resource, we wouldn't need garages anymore. All the cars that we need would be on the road and-

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. That'd be cool.

Joseph Z Chen: Just think about how many fewer cars we would need.

Wrap Up

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, that'd be super cool. Well Joseph, thank you for being on the show. Where can people find you online?

Joseph Z Chen: I'm on Twitter @fanfactories and you can also find our Facebook page. We also have a website, www.fantasticfactories.com and after the Kickstarter, I think we'll also be taking pre-orders, which you can find either on the Kickstarter page or on the website as well.

Patrick Rauland: Awesome. Thank you again. By the way to your listeners, if you like this podcast, please leave a review for us on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you leave a review, Joseph said he'd be willing to audit your factory and give it a gold star if it's good enough. So there's that incentive. You can visit the site indieboardgamedesigners.com, you can follow me on Twitter. I am @BFTrick. Until next time, happy designing everyone. Bye-bye.

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Hey everyone just wanted to share some more progress on my journey as an aspiring game designer. Two days ago I submitted a game I’m working on into the Solo Game Design Challenge on The Game Crafter.

Now I’m not really into solo games. I tend to like playing games with people so I didn’t think I’d submit anything into this contest.

Then another contest had really strict rules. And I pulled up an old idea and dusted it off. And took it from 100 cards down to 18 cards. And that’s when I realized I could actually turn that idea into a game.

The game is called Bias. And it was inspired by this incredible blog post called Parable of the Polygons. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

And in Parable of the Polygons they do a really good job showing you how when everyone has a tiny bias it has really big effects.

One of the reasons it’s so powerful is you don’t think a tiny bias can have much of an effect. And that’s actually one of my favorite things about games. They’re very good at showing how complex systems interact.

You can find the game Bias on The Game Crafter. I have a video showing you how to play it and it is really easy to replicate on your own if you want to make your own copy.

Check it out and let me know what you think of it in the comments or on Twitter. As per usual I’m @BFTrick on twitter.

That’s B as in board games. F as in Fun. And Trick like trick taking games.

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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Indie Board Game Designers Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking with Pat Brennan, who is the designer behind Complicated Board Game the Card Game, which seems like a pretty silly game, which we'll be getting into during the show, as well as Status Report, which just wrapped up on Kickstarter. Pat, welcome to the show.

Pat Brennan: Hello. Thank you for having me.

How Did You Get Into Board Games?

Patrick Rauland: Cool. Let's jump in. How did you get into board games and board game design?

Pat Brennan: All right. I think I probably got into board games the same way that everybody got into board games. I've listened to some of your episodes and stuff like that, and I love that just about everyone I've listened to, everyone starts with, “Well, I started with Magic: The Gathering.” Or, “I stared with this or that.” And yeah, I was kind of the exact same way. Growing up through middle school, I played Magic: The Gathering, I also played a bunch of Munchkin and Risk, and I just have a ton of friends who were really interested in playing board games all the time. So we just played everything that we could get our hands on, and as I got older and I got into college and stuff like that, I think that started the transition to making games. At first, it was kind of just for myself, but eventually, we hit an idea, and we looked around and saw that there was this growing and thriving indie game scene with the self-publishing through Kickstarter stuff when we decided to give that a try and see if we could actually get one of these things made in a professional way, and it worked.

Continue reading “#14 – Pat Brennan”

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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone and welcome to the Indie Board Game Designers Podcast. Today we're talking with Emma Larkins, who is the designer behind Heartcatchers and Confabula Rasa, and a bunch of other prototypes that she's always showing off on Twitter. Emma, welcome to the show.

Emma Larkins: Thanks for having me.

How Did You Get into Board Game Design?

Patrick Rauland: So how did you get into board game and board game design?

Emma Larkins: I think this is always such an interesting question because a lot of people I come across, a lot of other designers, just have almost intimidating years and years of just playing board games, or like, “Ah, I remember 20 years ago, I was playing Twilight Imperium,” or … I don't even know if Twilight Imperium is that old. But for me honestly, as far as … I always played video games, but as far as tabletop goes, you know, it was your traditional family Monopoly until college. And as with most other people, my intro into modern game design as a player was Catan, and played that, enjoyed it. It kind of like … Going from Monopoly to that is like, “Whoa, this is what tabletop games can be!” And then kind of nothing.

Emma Larkins: So I dipped straight back into digital games and really only did that until honestly a couple of years ago when I started getting more into a community hangout with more people who are into the hobby. The hobby was really growing a few years ago, especially at that time, so it was really easy to find friends who were into playing tabletop games and get introduced to it.

Patrick Rauland: Awesome. So after Catan, was there a game that pulled you in?

Emma Larkins: Oh my gosh. That's a really good question. I would say yes.

Emma Larkins: Okay, so I went straight from Catan to like, years and years later, my boyfriend introduced me to Lords of Waterdeep. And so it's, again, you're talking about orders of magnitude of differences in like level of design, and interesting-ness of mechanics, and that was really my first worker placement game that I played. And as I felt many times, getting more and more into the hobby, I was very intimidated, you know? Because like oh my gosh, there's pieces, there's cards, there's the board; there's so much stuff.

Emma Larkins: And it was great. It was so accessible and so easy, and it's one that I always recommend to people as well because of that, because … You know, obviously having someone to teach that game helped a lot, but just playing it felt so comfortable and fun, and it was really at that point where I was like, “This doesn't have to be intimidating. I can do this.” And you know, if I can do it, then anyone can do it; can get into this, and play, and have a good time.

Patrick Rauland: That sounds very much like, “I want to do this, so I'm doing it.”

Emma Larkins: Yes. Yeah. It's weird, that's kinda been a trend for me, both as a designer and getting more into playing games. Because it's gonna sound weird to some people who are really into the hobby, but I've been forcing myself to play some of these scarier, heavier games, or at least to not be intimidated by them. So things like Scythe, Rising Sun, even Gaia Project, you know? I've in the past been really intimidated just looking at these games and now I've been like, “You know, it doesn't really matter. I'm gonna do the best I can.” And every time, it's like as soon as you get into it, it's fine, it's fun, it's lovely.

Patrick Rauland: I really like that. There's definitely some games that I'm … I don't tend to like things that are over two hours; like the game has to be so good for me to want to play it, an over two hour game. Like I'd much rather play two one hour games. But every once in awhile, like when you settle in, it's not a bad thing at all. I was actually dreading Terraforming Mars and then it was like I got with the right game group, I sat down, it was my first game and I loved it. But it was just this mental block of like I don't tend to like, you know, a game that could be two hours, so I just won't play it.

Emma Larkins: Yeah, I've had maybe one or two not great experiences, and I think after the experience I actually posed the question to Twitter, and the game will remain nameless because it's a lovely game and I'm sure lots of other people really enjoy it, but I said, “Is there a polite way to like bow out after a couple of hours and just say, you know, ‘I've done everything this game has to offer. I really don't think I need any more.'” And everyone's like, “No, you can't do that. You can't ever do that.”

Emma Larkins: But that's the thing, right? That's the thing about these bigger, heavier games, especially … I was with a new group, I didn't really know people there, so it is scary to think that you're locked into this experience.

Being Active on Twitter

Patrick Rauland: Well I'm glad you brought up Twitter because that's sort of how I originally found you. You basically have this cool little hashtag called #GameDesignDaily. Can you tell us about it?

Emma Larkins: Yes, absolutely. So about … How long? It was about a year and a half ago I moved from New York City to Seattle, and in the process … We were moving, my boyfriend and I, because my boyfriend got a job at Amazon, and in the process, my life was kind of … I wanted to do it, but my life was turned upside down; like I ended up leaving the job that I had there, I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do next. I wanted to do more board game design stuff, wasn't sure in what capacity.

Emma Larkins: So in this floundering period, I turned towards the idea of daily practices. And it's the kind of thing, you know, everyone will tell you to do; it's like you don't know what you want to do with your life, journal and meditate and exercise, and the stuff you're always like, “Yeah yeah, whatever.” Like I don't have time for that. But when you're trying to figure out your life path, you do have time. And it works. And it's like oh, maybe this is why everyone says to do it, because it actually helps to do like a little bit every day.

Emma Larkins: And eventually, I turned the idea of these daily practices towards the idea of game design because I was also feeling a little stuck with where I was … Wasn't sure how to move forward with game design. I was like, “Well what if I just do something every day?” But the big part of this is like making it so easy for yourself, you can't fail; like for exercise, two minutes. Like jog for two minutes or like do five pushups or something. Just set the bar so low.

Emma Larkins: So for game design, I allowed myself basically … Like do some doodles, come up with an idea for a game, make a list of game names. And I started doing that, I started sharing it on Twitter and Instagram to hold myself accountable, and it really worked. I found that as I was doing this, all the games I was stuck on started to flow and I found myself, because I was in this mind state, able to move forward on a lot of projects and ideas that I hadn't been able to before because everything kind of became unlocked.

Patrick Rauland: I really love that. I guess a year and a half ago, I decided I wanted to run every week because, I think the year prior, I was like, “Oh, I ran so much. I'm so awesome.” And I used my Fitbit, so I'm like how many times did I run? And it was like 26. I thought I ran every week, sort of like on average I thought I ran every week, and then I counted, I'm like oh, it's literally every other week when I … You know, I didn't run in December, I didn't run in January. And I switched to a once a week period, like you have to run in between Monday and Sunday, and now I run twice as much just from that sort of rhythm, I guess.

Patrick Rauland: So I'm guessing you get something similar. You're just always moving forward with your game design by forcing yourself to work on it every day.

Emma Larkins: Yeah, exactly.

Patrick Rauland: Cool. So I'm curious, have people been … I'm also curious, in addition to motivating yourself, you're also sharing this on Twitter or on Instagram or wherever. Like have you gotten really good conversations with other people that have also moved your game forward?

Emma Larkins: Yeah. It's funny, having this daily thing, it really helps … It helps for staying motivated to work on games, but even starting conversations. Like it turns out posting regularly on Twitter and Instagram is also a great way to build your presence on those platforms and make yourself more accessible. So it's this beautiful snowball sort of a thing where everything combines and works together.

Emma Larkins: And the posts that I've done really resonate with people. For example, one of the tasks I did was writing a list of alliterative game names. And I did it on the bus, I wrote like 20 or 30 of them, and took a picture of it, posted it, and people are looking at it as like, “Oh, Abandon All Artichokes. I would buy that.” I'm like, “That's not a … There's nothing. It's just words in a list.” They're like, “No no, it's great. I want it.” So that became one of the games that I did for my week of prototyping a game a day, and the game turned out to work really well. And so I pushed it, I prototyped it, I pitched it to publishers at PAX Unplugged, and now I have a few publishers who are looking at that game.

Patrick Rauland: Wow. So-

Emma Larkins: And that all happened because someone on Twitter said they would buy it.

Patrick Rauland: That's so cool. And sorry, I want to go back to … You just said you published a game every day of one week? Tell me about that.

Emma Larkins: Oh, well, prototyped.

Patrick Rauland: Oh sorry, sorry. Sorry, I meant prototyped.

Emma Larkins: Yeah. So that was another part of the daily practice. As I got into the rhythm and I became more comfortable with just like being able to do a little something every day, then I was like oh, I should do a challenge; I should push myself a little bit. So I created my first challenge of prototyping a game a day for a week. And I set myself up beforehand, I had kind of ideas of the things that I wanted to work on, and it was a bunch of projects that I'm like oh, this would be cool, this would be cool. I have a Trello list that's just so long with all these ideas I want to work with, but it's hard to find time to get those projects in.

Emma Larkins: So this challenge really focused me. I'm like I'm gonna get these done, I might be able to work on it for half an hour, I might be able to work on it for three hours, but I'm gonna get something playable. And you can do that with tabletop, you can make a game in half an hour or an hour. It's not done, you know, it's maybe more of a mechanic, but it's something you can test and play. And seven days, I was able to get seven prototypes in. At least three or four of them were pretty good and stuff. I was like, “I want to move forward on this.” So it is a lot, for sure, but it's just like a hugely, hugely helpful practice.

Patrick Rauland: So at the time of this recording, I had just came back from Tabletop Network, which was a game design conference, and I am so jazzed on game design right now. However, I am realizing that my ideas are not hitting the table fast enough; like I just have a backlog of a million ideas, and they all sound really fun and I want to try them all, but I'm not dedicating the time to prototyping and … I'm not dedicating enough time to prototyping. So I love the idea of a game design every day, because I also like stay-vacations. So maybe this summer, I will have to set up a little stay-cation for myself and try to get … That sounds amazing and just a really effective way to actually test your ideas.

Emma Larkins: Oh yeah, for sure.

Patrick Rauland: Cool. Okay, so you said you moved to Seattle. Now first of all, I'm slightly offended you moved to Seattle and not Denver because I'm a big, big fan of Denver. Obviously you said you moved for your partner's job, but you should consider Denver next time.

Patrick Rauland: But it seems like-

Emma Larkins: I'll add to the list.

Patrick Rauland: Yes, please. You know, I hear Amazon might open an office here, so you can …

Emma Larkins: Yeah, there you go.

Patrick Rauland: So if they do, you can move to the sun with me.

Building a Game Design Community

Patrick Rauland: So in Seattle, it seems like you have a really active game design group. Like it seems like every … I see a picture from you or from Gold Nugget Games, and it's always like a table and you're all … It seriously looks like happy. I can imagine you're like hobbits and dwarves sitting around a table, drinking and eating hobbit and dwarf food, and you're playing games, and it looks like so much fun. How did you create such an active group?

Emma Larkins: It's really funny, actually. I gotta think back to what exactly was the seed of it. So I was here in Seattle, like I had … There's other groups; there's like Playtest Northwest, is a pretty active group, and they do stuff on the weekends, usually Saturdays or Sundays, where you can go and test publicly. Which is really cool too, you know, because it's important to get feedback from public-facing in addition to designer-facing.

Emma Larkins: So I'd done that a few times, but in the interim, I had gotten a job working for Mox Boarding House, which is a local board game store, and my weekends … Like I didn't have as much time to work on the weekends, or to do game design on the weekends. So I'm like, “Oh, I'm free on Wednesdays, so I want to be able to do design on a day where I have some free time.” And there was an existing group in Seattle, like a Facebook group, so I kind of just … Like I joined the group, I'm like, “Oh, we're not really doing events. Let's do an event every Wednesday from now on.” And people were … You know, there was like 150 or something people in the group, the group wasn't super active, and people were like, “Okay. I guess I'll come out and check it out.”

Emma Larkins: And I managed to get Sean Sancovich, and Chris Gline, and a few like core members who, right from the beginning, were just so excited about this, like unlocking their potential and just like … It's like the floodgates were opened; like they just had so much stuff they wanted to do. They just had never realized how passionate they were about this, so I was kind of in a position where there was … The time was right. Like there was people just aching to have something like this and, you know, I started doing the event and people just latched onto it in an incredible way.

Patrick Rauland: It seems like … So I had this a long time ago with … There was like a WordPress meetup. This was like six years ago. There was a WordPress meetup that was just sitting there and no one schedules an event, and like the organizer wasn't doing anything. And I kind of just asked the organizer, like “Hey, do you mind if I schedule it?” And then it launched into this thing and that meetup group is still going today just because … Basically there was like a potential and no one was sitting there, and it seems like you saw the potential and you did something with it.

Emma Larkins: Yeah. And it really … Again, I can't emphasize enough how much everything is connected together. So I think some people look at a particular instance and they're like, “Oh, how did you do this one thing?” or this one thing is like really big and impressive. It's like all these little, tiny things are just like building and building. So having already done game design daily for like six months at that point, the idea of doing something on a regular basis was feeling very natural to me. And I was lucky to have a space to … I mean, I think that's a big thing that can deter people, especially in a city where it's harder to find … Like sometimes people want you to pay a lot of money to find somewhere that's like big enough for a group. And the apartment building that I live in actually has this semi-public/private space that I just started using.

Emma Larkins: So having that place, having the dedicated core group of people, and knowing I wanted to do it and that I could commit to it … It was scary, like I wasn't sure I could commit to it, but just like making that choice to commit to it every single week, is really what makes it grow. Because once you see people … Like that's the friendship … Like if you talk about mechanizing friendship, the minimum bar is like seeing a person every week and that's when you start to develop a stronger bond. So the bonds that we've made just individually within the group is really what ties it together.

Like if you talk about mechanizing friendship, the minimum bar is like seeing a person every week and that's when you start to develop a stronger bond.

Patrick Rauland: I don't know about you, but making friends as an adult is surprisingly challenging, and meeting someone once a week is … You have to be like really close friends to sort of … Sort of like a … What's the phrase? A catch-22. It's like if you want to see them regularly, you have to already be good friends, but to be good friends you sort of have to see them regularly.

Emma Larkins: Yeah. And honestly, that was a big part of it too, is moving to Seattle, you know, not really knowing anyone out here, but even just like reaching a point in my adulthood where I'm like I don't really have a lot of good friends and I want to change that, and I want to have people who I really care about and am connected, to because that makes life better.

What Type of Games Do You Like to Design?

Patrick Rauland: Love it. All right, let's change gears a little bit. So you have a process, you want to do something, five minutes, every single day, you have a weekly playtesting group. Now that you have all that set up, what type of games do you like to design?

Emma Larkins: I like to design games that are … I want to say accessible, but I think that some people, within the hobby and designers, kind of … There's a little bit of tension between accessible games and casual games, and whether they're good for the hobby or bad for the hobby, and there's kind of a lot wrapped up in there. And really, the most important thing for me is like it can be a more complex game; it doesn't have to be casual. Like I have a lot of levels of games that I'm working on, but the big part is you can get people into the game; like something that I can play with my friend group, some of whom might not be gamers. And it doesn't … Like people are smart. You don't have to have something super casual or super easy. There's things you can do in game design to make really interesting, strategic, thought-provoking games accessible. I mean, Azul really is like one of the best examples of … Like that's a fun game, that's a fun game for designers, it's a fun game for heavy gamers, but it's also super, super fun and accessible and satisfying for new players.

Emma Larkins: So that's really a goal for me as a designer, to make these more interesting mechanics and mechanically interesting games appeal to a broader audience. So for example, Abandon All Artichokes is a deck builder reduced to its simplest components. And there are a few games out there that are like simpler deck builders, but the idea behind Abandon All Artichokes is like you don't even really know that you're doing a deck builder. It's like, “Oh, I have this stack of cards and I put stuff in the discard pile, and then that becomes my new stack of cards and I'm just taking stuff from it.” So it's natural, but then if you were to play a deck builder after that, you're like “Oh yeah, I already kind of know … ” Like it's a new concept. If you've never done it before, it's a little confusing, but going over that barrier, it just opens up so many different types of games to you.

Patrick Rauland: So I really like that example and I think we as board gamers tend to be like, “Oh, this is a deck builder” to sort of explain what the game is-

Emma Larkins: Yeah, exactly.

Patrick Rauland: … and that totally works when someone knows that jargon. But when someone doesn't know the jargon, it's like, “Hey, do you like worker placement games?” “What's worker placement?” And I know people use jargon … In every industry, in every facet of life, we use jargon to like communicate complex ideas in a simple fashion, but if someone doesn't know that, people … Also people rarely go, “What is that?” right? Like most people are very bad at that. So I kind of like the idea of explaining complicated game mechanisms, like deck building, in a … You just add to the card to your discard pile and then when you shuffle it, it's just in your new deck; without the jargon.

Emma Larkins: I think Gamewright does some of that stuff really well. So for Sushi Go!, it's a drafting game, right? And for anyone who's played Magic or who knows about the jargon, you know it's a drafting game. But when I … I've been practicing pitching the game at Mox Boarding House, because we have a library so I like try and find people games that they'll want to play, and at first I was pitching it as a drafting game. People were like, “Uh.” And so when I actually talked to the Gamewright people, they're like, “Oh yeah, we don't like to call it a drafting game. We like to call it a pick and pass game.”

Patrick Rauland: Oh my gosh.

Emma Larkins: Yes! Right?

Patrick Rauland: That's great.

Emma Larkins: I know. And hearing that, I just felt like … And this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, where like pick and pass, I take it and then I pass the hand? That's kinda cool, that's fun. Like that makes sense. But then later, if you realize like “Oh, I did a drafting game,” and if you see drafting again, it's like “Oh, I do kinda understand the concept of this”; it can like be a stepping stone to more complex experiences.

What Games Inspire You?

Patrick Rauland: So what sort of games are out there that inspire your designs? Something, either a theme or mechanism or both … Yeah, what inspires you?

Emma Larkins: Definitely things like Sushi Go and Azul. I mean, again Azul's like a [inaudible 00:23:06] nominee or something; like these are the pinnacle of simple, accessible but still really fun and interesting and strategic game design. So definitely that concept of, you know, like I can get lots of people into it. Dixit is another great example where I've played that with gamer/non-gamer friends and everybody's had a really good time. Nice components too, I would say. Like that's definitely something Azul has going for it, is just you open it up and you hand someone the pieces, they're like, “I don't even care how you play this; I just want to play around with these little starburst thing.” They're just so juicy and satisfying.

Emma Larkins: And I would say, last but not least, games that are exploring … Pushing the bounds of what a theme for a board game can be. So like the one thing that has just been … Like I've played heavier games, I've gotten into different games. The one thing I'm still so resistant to is any sort of like train game, coal game, oil game, like historical representation; it just all seems to dry to me. And even if it has good mechanics, it's just like … Just the box art just makes me kind of sad inside. So when I see games, like the … Is it Villagers One? Villagers something? The Kickstarter that just came out. Just the design of that, it just pops, and I'm like that's a cool theme.

Emma Larkins: I have another game I'm working on called Sofas for Sale, which is like a worker placement game, but you're in just this like rundown discount store with these grandma sofas that you're trying to buy. And that's something … Like that flavor I haven't really seen, so I want to see more of that.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Yeah, I think … I totally agree with you on themes. I'm a little bit burned out on just like werewolves and zombies, you know, that type. And don't get me … I literally got to, what is it, Tiny Epic Zombies? Like if it was a good zombie game, I'm still gonna get it, but I think like dazzle me with a new theme. Yeah, I really like sort of like alternate …

Patrick Rauland: And I really like alternate takes on existing themes. There was the goblin game they just finished up on Kickstarter. It was like a … Instead of the heroes going into the dungeon, you were the goblin merchant that sells the heroes good, and then you also like buy the treasures when they come back from the dungeon. It was just like … You know, it's the same fantasy feeling, but at least you're the goblin merchant, which is like a cool new take on it.

Emma Larkins: Yeah. And I think … Sorry.

Patrick Rauland: No, go ahead and finish.

Emma Larkins: There's a lot of space for things that are just people … Like garbage trucks or like kindergarten classes. There's just so many things that haven't been done yet, you know? People are like oh, there's not really space for new games, but I think there's just a lot of territory to be explored.

What Mechanisms or Themes Are You Looking Into?

Patrick Rauland: Cool. Okay, so I kinda want to change gears a little bit. So I know what type of games you're designing, but what sort of fun ideas or mechanisms are you like actively looking into? If there's anything that you can share.

Emma Larkins: So like different … For some of the prototypes that I'm working on?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, just … How about this? How about what are some fun ideas that are rattling around your head right now?

Emma Larkins: Oh gosh. They're all … Like I try and shove them down because I just … They're just so much stuff. I wake up almost every other morning with something that I've dreamed about and I'm like, “Oh, this would be so cool.” Just to go down the list, I have a game where you play as a cat and you're knocking stuff on the floor, because our cats just love knocking stuff on the floor. But the idea of this is the absolute opposite, like this is a gamer's nightmare; knocking things on the floor, and then if you lose them, you get extra points. And someone was like, “Oh, it could be a legacy game where you kind of … ” Like the game has fewer and fewer pieces over time. But then if you find them later, you have to like retcon your score, so you have to like lose them real good. And this just … Awful. But, you know, it's something like … Maybe there's a seed of something that's actually a good game in there somewhere.

Emma Larkins: I also … So for Confabula Rasa, it's a storytelling game with word fragments on non-linear cards that makes this kind of branching tableau on the table. And when I first came up with that, I didn't want it to be words, I wanted it to be pictures. So I've been talking about it a little on Twitter recently, this idea of like seeing, visions, and this kind of Googled deep dream landscape. And again, I'm not sure exactly how to mechanize that. I feel like I would need to work with a really creative design-focused artist to even come up with the pieces for that. But like just seeing visions in a mechanical way for a game, I think would be really cool.

What Does Success Look Like?

Patrick Rauland: Love it. Okay, so I kinda want to change gears a little bit because we're sort of running out of a little bit of time. So one of my favorite questions that I ask everyone is what is … You're in the board game world. What does success look like to you?

Emma Larkins: I'm excited about the variety of potential in this industry. I always try to tell new designers who are coming in … You know, they come in, they're excited, they're like, “I'm gonna make games, I'm gonna make money off of those made games,” and that's what it means to be a designer. But if your idea of success is like making a ton of money specifically off of games that you have produced, it's such a narrow line and there's not a lot of room for play in there.

Emma Larkins: So for me, I see it more as a journey where you don't know exactly where it will lead, but it's all good directions. So like this, you know, doing podcast, doing articles, doing books, doing talks, teaching, getting people into the industry; even other industries that you can take game design into, you know? You might do game design for NASA. I know there's a person I follow on Twitter who does that. He might do game design for like Microsoft or Amazon. Yes, there's just like … Game design, I feel like, is a concept that has the potential to break apart a lot of industries and like take things to the next level by making them fun and encouraging play, whether it's education or the auto industry. There's just so much room for this concept of play to be explored.

Patrick Rauland: Wow. I really, really like this answer, and I … No, I think I really like the idea of exploring play and … Because I do think that play can be elaborated on, it can be explored; it doesn't have to be a board game as we imagine it today, it doesn't have to be a video game as we imagine it today. I think there's a lot of … And I think maybe we can also teach things with play, right? It doesn't always have to be super hard and boring, and I think we can … There's some cool … Like prisoner's dilemma, you know what I mean? Like we can explore cool psychological concepts through play and it doesn't always have to be like … I can just imagine like a paragraph explaining a prisoner's dilemma in a psychology textbook and that just sounds super boring and I don't think you actually get it until you go through it.

Emma Larkins: Right, exactly.

Patrick Rauland: I think that's a great answer.

What's the Best Way to Market Your Game?

Patrick Rauland: Okay, so sort of a last question is just what is the best way to market your game?

Emma Larkins: Community. It's something that I come back to. People are always looking for the tips, and the hacks, and the shortcuts, and the easy way out, but really it's building those human connections with people. And Joseph Chen, who's doing the Fantastic Factories Kickstarter now and really blowing that out of the water, he's really embodied the ideal of marketing mixed with community. He worked, and continues to work, so hard on just going to conventions, connecting with people, getting the email addresses from there, making those human connections, like networking with podcasters, and he just cares about people; he cares about what you're working on. He's just so lovely and nice and such a wonderful person, and that reflects back on his success because, you know, he's a good designer and his game is excellent, so that helps of course. But for the marketing aspect, it's just connections.

Patrick Rauland: That's a really … I appreciate that because I think I'd say about 50% of the people answer this question by like oh, it's Twitter, oh, it's email, oh, it's … And it's nice to get answers like that where it's like a very specific technology or something that sort of … I can't think of the word. But sort of like practical, hands-on that you could-

Emma Larkins: [inaudible 00:32:30]

Patrick Rauland: Actionable. There we go, actionable.

Emma Larkins: Yeah, actionable.

Patrick Rauland: That's the word I'm looking … But what you're saying is like building a community, however you decide to build that community, is how you actually create authentic human connections and that's what ultimately will sell your game.

Emma Larkins: And it's fun too, and that's something … Like you don't have to differentiate between making friendships and networking and making connections that way. I mean, my board game designer community are my friends, you know? I do care about these people, and the people I meet at conventions, I care about them and I want to see them succeed. So it's something you can just naturally do and enjoy. So that's kind of nice, you know? It's not like typing out marketing emails all the time. Part of it can be fun as well.

Underrated Overrated Game

Patrick Rauland: Love it. All right, so I like to end every episode with a game called Underrated, Overrated. Have you heard of it?

Emma Larkins: Oh, yes. I've heard of it.

Patrick Rauland: Yes? Okay, cool. So basically I'm gonna say a phrase or a name of something and I'm gonna force you to take a position, if you think it's overrated or if you think it's underrated.

Patrick Rauland: So the very first one, tile laying games; are they overrated or are they underrated?

Emma Larkins: Overrated as implemented. I think a lot of them get reductive and I want to see people blow out the space with like different shapes and ideas and that kind of thing.

Patrick Rauland: So like you want to … I guess you want to see more innovation there?

Emma Larkins: Yes.

Patrick Rauland: Cool. Love it. All right, so Wrinkle in Time, and I'm specifically saying the movie.

Emma Larkins: Oh my gosh, so underrated. I loved the book as a child, I saw the movie come out, I saw not great reviews and I was a little sad about it, and I finally watched it on the plane. It is just so luscious and the characters are amazing, it captures the feel of the book. So I can't talk it up enough.

Patrick Rauland: Unfortunately I did not have the same experience.

Emma Larkins: Oh no!

Patrick Rauland: I didn't ever read it as a kid, and so for me, it felt discombobulated and I honestly gave up halfway through.

Emma Larkins: That's fair, yeah.

Patrick Rauland: But I honestly gave up halfway through, so maybe if I pushed through the second half, I'll figure it out or I'll enjoy it more. Maybe I should … I'll go back to it now.

Emma Larkins: All right.

Patrick Rauland: Game design contests, are they overrated or underrated?

Emma Larkins: That's a tough one. I would say just a little overrated. I love the fact that they can inspire people to do game design, to like take on the challenge, to finish a product to completion, but if you're looking to get your game kind of out there and seen and like produced, there's potentially better ways to do it. Also, I feel like the ones I've seen tend to trend the same territory a little bit; like I haven't seen really innovative things come out of them, is kind of my frustration at the moment.

Patrick Rauland: All right. I like that answer. Lastly, macaroons; overrated, underrated?

Emma Larkins: Okay, macaroons or macarons?

Patrick Rauland: The adorable French cookie thing.

Emma Larkins: Cool. Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Which one is that?

Emma Larkins: Macarons. So macaroons-

Patrick Rauland: Oh no!

Emma Larkins: … is the one that's like shredded coconut in the like egg thing. But yeah, no, I didn't realize this either until very recently when I began my obsession with macarons. And despite the fact that they are rated so highly, I would still say underrated because I discovered Lady Yum's macarons in Seattle and it's been like a religious experience for me with the deliciousness of those very expensive little cookies.

Patrick Rauland: They are very expensive, but my god, they can be delicious.

Emma Larkins: Oh my gosh. I can't even explain. It's like eating a butter cloud with just these flavors. Like how does this taste like an actual strawberry? It's made out of almonds.

Patrick Rauland: Love it. I totally agree and I love it.

Thanks For Being on the Show

Patrick Rauland: Thank you for being on the show, Emma. Where can people find you online?

Emma Larkins: Well thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun. So you can find me pretty much everywhere Emma Larkins is sold. So that's the brand I use to tie everything together. My website is EmmaLarkins.com, Emma Larkins on Twitter and Instagram. I have Medium and Twitch as well under the same name that I kind of need to buff up a little bit because I've been slacking on those, but yeah. That's pretty much the best places to find me.

Patrick Rauland: And what was that dope hashtag?

Emma Larkins: #GameDesignDaily.

Patrick Rauland: There we go. Yeah, because I think that's really, really cool. I really enjoy seeing those posts.

Patrick Rauland: Thank you again for being on here. For the listeners, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this. If you do leave a review, Emma said that she would come over to your local meetup and high-five every member to get them excited, so that seems like a pretty good deal to me. You can visit the site at IndieBoardGameDesigners.com, you can follow me on Twitter, I am @BFTrick.

Patrick Rauland: By the way, I'm starting to look for questions, so if you have a question for a specific designer or designers in general, go to the website. I'll have a contact form up soon and you can just send in a question and let me know, and I'll try to ask some of those questions to the speakers. I guess that's all, so until next time, happy designing, everyone.

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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone and welcome to the Indie Board Game Designers podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Carol Mertz who is the designer behind Pass The Buck, which is the bluffing game where you're trying to get out of doing work.

Patrick Rauland: Carol, welcome to the show.

Carol Mertz: Hi. Thanks for having me.

How Did You Get Into Game Design?

Patrick Rauland: So first question I like to ask everyone, how did you get into this crazy world of board game design or game design in general?

Carol Mertz: Well, I started out actually in digital design. I had a studio in Saint Louis, Missouri for a little while called Happy Badger Studio with a handful of friends from primarily university, so college. We all just kind of decided that we wanted to play around with games, start messing with game design as a medium, as a hobby, and that got me really excited about working on games in general. In that studio, we had sister studios. We had Rampant Interactive, which was a client facing studio. We did all kinds of interactive work, websites and things like that for clients. Then we had Happy Badger Studio, but while we were working with clients, I started getting really frustrated with a lot of the stuff that I was seeing in corporate America, and I made a joke saying I was going to make a game called Pass The Buck, a game of corporate responsibility management. Like that joke went on Facebook, and I was thinking in my mind, “I'm going to make this a video game.” Then I was like, “No, really. I'm going to make this a game and I want to make you look at each other in the eye when you lie to each other.”

Carol Mertz: I had never made a card game before, and I had always kind of wanted to try. I'd been playing a lot of Werewolf and Coup and things like that. I was like, “This is perfect.” So that's kind of where my forte into card game design started.

Patrick Rauland: I was going to ask you where did the idea of Pass The Buck come from, and it literally came from your experience working with or adjacent to the corporate world. That is an amazing story.

Carol Mertz: Yeah. I just kept getting all these emails that said, “That's not my problem. That's this person's problem. Oh, that's not my problem. That's this person's problem.” “I'm sorry. I'm not in the office this week.” You're trying so desperately to get work done so you can just get paid and feed yourself. Meanwhile, this culture was just preventing that from happening. I was getting so frustrated that I knew if I didn't turn it into something fun, I was just going to have to deal with it.

Patrick Rauland: So this was like a … What's the word? Catharsis? Is that right? Where it's like you're sort of complaining but in a fun way to sort of make yourself feel better.

Carol Mertz: Absolutely. That's one of my mantra is I design games for fun and catharsis. So a lot of the games that I make are kind of in that vein of this is something that I'm going to turn into an experience that I can share with other people so that I can either laugh at it or process it or just share my experience with others so I don't have to just stew in it.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Oh, that's great. I mean, it's way healthier than stewing.

Carol Mertz: I'd like to think that.

Patrick Rauland: Okay. So I kind of want to ask you since you said this is all about corporate stuff. I'm just curious like because you ran the Kickstarter three years ago, two and a half years ago?

Carol Mertz: Yeah.

Who Are Your Customers?

Patrick Rauland: Like I'm curious, were most of your customers people who have corporate jobs? Was the theme … Was there a strong connection between the customer and the theme of the game?

Carol Mertz: In a lot of cases yeah. I think a lot of people also played it as catharsis but there were a few times when I demoed it and people were like, “This is too close to home. It's too real. I'm not comfortable basically doing what I've been doing all day.” They had a hard time seeing the joke in it because it's so raw, I guess. Then on the flip side, I played with some artists once who had never worked in corporate America and never had any experience with corporate culture, and they didn't get most of the jokes. Because every card in the game, every task card that you get is a joke about some dumb thing that happens in corporate America. Like schmooze the distributor until they're distributing more than they know what to do with and that sort of thing.

Patrick Rauland: That's amazing.

Carol Mertz: Yeah. When you're not in that setting, a lot of those corporate buzzwords just totally go over your head.

Patrick Rauland: Sure, sure. I imagine and I think I've seen there games do this where almost like the title of the card or maybe just the flavor text of the card is half of the enjoyment, right?

Carol Mertz: Oh yeah.

Patrick Rauland: In this game, it sounds like the theme is so strong and maybe the mechanisms aren't super important, but it's like you play the … We're going to talk a little bit later. The nepotism card. It's like, “Ha ha. I don't have to do it now.” Like just the name nepotism and like I think people might find that funny or horribly upsetting when someone plays it against you.

Carol Mertz: Yeah. Well, in my case, I mean, like I said, I try to design for catharsis so that includes the mechanics. I try to really incorporate the theme and mechanics in a really unified way. So in a lot of cases, like I said, I wanted people to look each other in the eye when they're lying, things like that. So like while the theme is really strong, I wanted the theme and the mechanics to support each other with just as much strength. So there is the mechanics are a really important part of the game, right? There's this kind of corporate espionage happening. There's this feeling of I don't care if you get screwed over when I do this, this is my right to do. It kind of the mechanics really feed the emotion of the game, which all kind of ties into itself. I know that that's a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to make sure that it was a …

Documenting The Process

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. So you wrote up this really, really cool, detailed post called The Dirty Details of Self Publishing an Indie Tabletop Game, and I was looking over this post. First of all, I slaw. I'm always impressed and there's lots of numbers. It wasn't just like a rambling. It was like very long. Your entire process of publishing this game, and you talked about the process, right, which a lot of people don't know. But you also talked about the costs for each step, which I think is really, really cool of like, “This is how much shipping cost. This is how much the manufacturers charged.” I guess I want to ask you why did you write this post?

Carol Mertz: Because I didn't have a post like that when I was doing my research and I wished I did. So I read … I dove deep into the Stonemaier Games Blog on Kickstarter resources and everything. Jamey Stegmaier is actually also from Saint Louis. So I was able to actually get insight from him even on my Kickstarter page and everything. But I was having such a hard time finding the actual numbers of how much can I expect to pay for a production, how much can I expect to pay for shipping. All of this research I had to do myself, and while I was happy to do it, I know it would've saved me a lot of stress and anxiety if I would've just been able to compare it to anyone else's numbers to have some concept of what I could expect to pay and what I could expect overall, how much money I might be able to make on a run of 500 versus 1500 versus 5,000, which there's all these existing publishers who are like, “Oh, you can't do a run smaller than 5,000 and still make money.”

Carol Mertz: But first of all my goal was to learn, and second of all, my goals was to just publish something. So I took a big risk and ran the smaller run of games, which I felt was more realistic for a standard … For a hobbyist designer or for a designer just entering the same, and I was very careful to just record every single cent that I paid so that I would have that moving forward for future projects and so that other designers could have that just as a some sort of a baseline, some sort of an idea to know, “Okay, I'm not going to make bank on my first game. I'm not going to become wealthy if I publish a single card game. I have all of these expenses that I can look forward to and plan around with my Kickstarter, but it's possible.” You can break even. I can make this game and not suffer too hard as long as there's good planning. So that was a big motivation behind writing all that out.

Patrick Rauland: I love that you added that resource to the community. So I know I read a lot of blog posts for my day job, and not many blog posts get comments. But yours had like 12. People are actively finding that article, they're talking about it, they're … A lot of them are so grateful that there's basically a case study, right? Like here's how we did this and if you do something similar, you can probably expect similar results. I think it's a really, really valuable asset.

Carol Mertz: Thank you. Yeah. I'm really pleased that I recorded everything so carefully for myself and was able to share it.

Board Game Design Process

Patrick Rauland: So what was the most surprising part of that process for you?

Carol Mertz: The entire production is just so much. I mean, getting it manufactured and then getting pallets of games delivered, having to haul them, having to figure out how to store them, having to figure out how to fulfill them, having to print out shipping labels, all this stuff. I did everything by myself. It was so much. It was beyond a level of effort that I had anticipated, and I was happy to do it because, like I said, it was intended to be a learning experience. But moving forward, my goal is to work through publishers now because I absolutely see the value of having somebody else do all of at research, have somebody else do all the heavy lifting literally and figuratively, having somebody be responsible for distribution. I didn't have a distributor. I didn't have connections to distributors. So I only sold on Amazon and to what retailers I could have access to in Saint Louis.

Carol Mertz: So it was a huge, huge learning experience for me to understand the value of tabletop publishers more than anything really.

Patrick Rauland: I think it's great you're doing that, and that's something I want to do. I want to self publish basically just to learn about it, and even if it's a miserable process, then at least I know why I don't want to do those things.

Carol Mertz: Yeah, well, my warning for you with self publishing is just to keep in mind that warehousing is a thing, and if you don't sell all your games, you're going to have to keep them somewhere. I live in New York now. I keep mentioning Saint Louis because that's where I grew up. That's where I spent the first 99% of my life, and now I'm in New York. All of my games are in a storage unit in Saint Louis. I have to pay for that storage unit. Yeah, I've got other stuff in there, but it still just kind of this thing that's always in the back of my mind. I've got a couple hundred copies I still got to unload.

Carol Mertz: I was talking to one of my professors, Eric Zimmerman, who wrote Rules of Play, and he was like, “Yeah. One day you're just going to go to an event and just give them out for free just to unload them.” I'm like, “I hope not. It's so important to me. I'm so proud of it as a game.” It's just I'm only one person and I only have so much marketing and distribution to cover.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a shame. I think the board game world moves so … There's so many games published all the time and I think there's a little bit of the cult of the new, right? So I think it's really hard to sell a game that's two and a half years old. Not really hard but you have to … You can't just do it accidentally, you know what I mean? You need to put effort into it.

Carol Mertz: Yeah. I mean, unless there is some sort of an accident blog post or it gets featured on some thing here or there, it's unlikely to get picked up magically. Yeah. I've been trying to consider the idea of maybe doing a second printing with another publisher, but most of the people who I talked to are like, “You should just move on and look at the future,” which I am. But it's still kind of sad because I love that game so much. I'm really proud of it. But I know that it could do a lot better under a publisher. So there's always going to be that kind of well, what if sort of scenario when you self publish like that.

Patrick Rauland: Well, I mean, at a minimum, you now see the value in going through a publisher, right?

Carol Mertz: Of course. Yeah.

Distributing Print and Play Games

Patrick Rauland: Okay. So you did an interesting thing with your print and play. You used a service, and I'm hoping it's Itch.io.

Carol Mertz: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: So why did you use this service to share your print and play? Yeah, why'd you use it?

Carol Mertz: Yeah. So, like I mentioned, I actually come from a video games background and Itch.io is primarily a video game distributor. So it's similar to if you've heard of Steam, which is run by Valve. It's a storefront for digital games. I knew that they allowed you to upload anything you want, any kind of file, whatever you want to do, and there's a lot of other people who have PDFs of RPGs and print and plays and things like that on there. They have keys that you can download. They give you a 90% cut of all of the purchases. So it's just basically just this platform that's designed to be super creator friendly and really accessible to anyone making anything.

Carol Mertz: So for the Kickstarter, I knew I wanted to have something that was trackable and the keys allowed me to do that. So I was able to give every single backer an individual key. I was able to charge for the game and be able to log all of my purchases. Everything was super, super easy to do, and it just gives me a really nice digital storefront for doing a print and play like that. I already had actually my digital games up on there so it was really easy as opposed to doing something … I know there's other like print and play resources out there for tabletop designers, but I already had my account through Itch and I was really happy with how it worked.

Patrick Rauland: So is this the type of thing where, let's say, it's $5.00 for the print and play, and when someone backs your Kickstarter, you manually send them a key to get it for free, or how does that work?

Carol Mertz: Yeah. That's what I did. I just generated as many codes as I needed for the Kickstarter and just sent an individual email to every backer. I could've probably done some sort of mail merge thing or something, but I liked being able to write in my little personal notes to each backer as well. I was able to do that as soon as each person backed the campaign also instead of waiting until the last minute. So people as soon as they backed anything, they immediately got a print and play that they could play around with, and then some people actually upgraded their pledges to the full game once they did the print and play and they really enjoyed it.

Patrick Rauland: Really? What percent of people did that? Like 5%-10%?

Carol Mertz: Very small percent. 1%-5% I would say because I had 300 backers. But it was enough that I felt like it was worthwhile to have done.

Patrick Rauland: Wow. Were there a lot of people that just get the print and play or is it … I mean, do a lot of people get the game and the print and play, and it's sort of an extra?

Carol Mertz: Well, the game automatically came with a print and play, but there was a good percentage of folks who just got the print and play, especially international folks where shipping would've been really costly. But I also don't blame folks for not wanting to add to their giant library that is just constantly growing. I know that I'm kind of suffering from that now having moved to a tiny apartment in New York City. I'm like, “What do I do with all of these Kickstarter games?”

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. When I'm looking at a new game, there are two very important factors. One is the price, of course, but the other is the amount of space it takes up. If you're a pretty good game but you're massive, I would much rather have four or five smaller, great games.

Carol Mertz: Yeah. I love A Fake Artist Goes To New York and Love Letter because I can just pop them in my bag, take them anywhere. They're great games, and it's just they're so accessible because they're so small. That was part of what I really wanted to do with Pass The Buck as well. It's in a small box about the size of Hanabi. It's just super easy to carry around with you and it's made my life really easy when I go to events and things because now I can just throw like 60 into a small suitcase, as opposed to four.

Recommendations for First Time Publishers

Patrick Rauland: Yes. No, totally. That small box, I'm sure, is a great … Is that something you'd recommend for first time creators is to go with a smaller game?

Carol Mertz: I mean, yes. If you're self publishing, you're thinking about cost, you're thinking about warehousing space, you're thinking about weight. Like how many times are you going to have to lift a case of these boxes, how many places are you going to be traveling with these things? I'm really conscious now whenever I'm designing physical games if I'm planning on publishing, I'm constantly thinking about what components are going into it, how much those components cost, what kind of space they take up, that sort of thing.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Can you give me an example of … So I totally agree with that on principle, but like … Or abstractly, but like can you give me an example of where you've made a decision. Like, “Oh, we could do this, but the cost isn't worth it.” Is there like a concrete example you can give me of something like that?

Carol Mertz: Yeah. There's a game that I've been working on with a couple of folks in my cohort at the NYU Game Center. We started it out as a simple card game with just very few cards, and we wanted to keep pushing it and trying to make it feel like a more fulfilling experience. So we started thinking about maybe we can include a timer, maybe we can include resource chips, and all these things. Constantly, every time we talked about adding in a new component like that, I always had to remind the group, “Remember, if we plan to publish this, that is one more thing that we have to think about how we're going to incorporate that, how it's going to fit into the box, how much extra cost that's going to add, how much extra just thought in general space that's going to take up,” and so as the game stands right now, it's back to just cards just because of the conversations that we've been having about, “Well, is this viable? Does it make sense? Does it add that much of an experience to the game that we really need to include a sand timer in every box, or can people use their phone?” For example.

Patrick Rauland: Got it. Man, that's a whole extra level of stuff I can't even think about right now, but at some points, when I get closer to publishing, I will definitely have to think about that.

Carol Mertz: Yeah. It's definitely … I mean, it's easy to at least get quotes on that sort of thing because a lot of manufacturers are used to strange components, and they're happy to give you quotes on stuff like that. But you also have to think if you want anything custom, there's just a baseline cost to any custom pieces because they have to make the materials and stuff for it. So it's just a lot of people aren't thinking about that with their first games because it's so easy to prototype even with a laser cutter or a 3D printer. You can make pretty cheap examples of what it might look like, but then you start thinking about the set up cost for mass manufacturing and things like that. It's just, “Oh, that's not what I expected.”

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Carol Mertz: But it's something to think about for sure.

What Do You Want to Design Moving Foward?

Patrick Rauland: So let's change gears a little it. I'm curious. You've done one game. Moving forward, what types of games do you like to design and what are .. Are there any mechanisms or themes you're looking into for some of your next games?

Carol Mertz: Well, I consider myself a multidisciplinary designer, but my primary goal, like I said, is to make games for fun and catharsis. So I either want to make games that just bring joy or I want to make games that really help to express an emotion in some capacity. So right now the games that I'm working on are group projects primarily. At least the tabletop games where I have one that's a really beautiful strategy game that is made on a custom back lit board. Speaking of custom components that are going to be extraordinarily expensive, we actually custom laser cut and custom built this LED lit board for these back lit, translucent colored pieces to do a really fascinating strategy game. I'm very excited about that because it's just plain fun and just plain beautiful.

Patrick Rauland: So I saw a picture of that on your site. It looks really cool. I think I want to give you kudos on … I'm so used to people coming up … There's so many people coming up with card games and worker placement games, and it seems like … Maybe it's just because you've had some training or education in game design, but for me and for a lot of the designers I know, we always come at it from a army of cards. We have meeples. We have this board. How do we make a game? You like custom cutting like a back lit board with like these really cool colored, angular colored tiles on top, that is something I would've never thought about. I think its really cool and really out of the box.

Carol Mertz: Yeah. Well, it was an evolution from a previous project. So that is a game … It's called Kroma. We're currently talking to different publishers about actually making it possible because that is a game I do not want to self publish. But it evolved out of an earlier prototype that I had worked on that was a more simple two dimensional strategy game that was … I don't even remember the … I think it was just intended to be an abstract game of some sort, a theme-less abstract game, and I was working on that project with a woman who's background was in architecture. So she was very comfortable with the idea of laser cutting custom pieces, and we started working with this idea of a triangle grid. It all just kind of fell into place from there. We loved that game so much that we decided to make a new game based on that same idea of the triangle grid and the strategy but really pushing what we could do in that space.

Carol Mertz: So we made this whole new game called Kroma that is more focused on color blending. It's kind of like territory capture through primary color blending. As we were researching it, we couldn't find anything that was similar in any capacity in the tabletop space. There's of course color blending games digitally, but it's much more difficult to find something like that in tabletop. So we were really excited to just explore this totally new territory. Every time we demo it, people just stop and start drooling practically. It's so great to photograph. It's so great to watch. It doubles as like a coffee table lamp. So it's a really fun project and we're really excited to have found a publisher who's as excited about it as we are. So we may see that coming out eventually. No guarantees of course but it's a hope that we'll be able to get that on shelves eventually.

Patrick Rauland: It looks very, very cool. I'll have to try to find a … I'll steal an imagine from your blog maybe and put it in our recap post of this because it just looks so pretty.

Carol Mertz: Yeah.

PixelPop Festival

Patrick Rauland: Okay. So one of the things here, in addition to all this game design, you do video game, you do board games, you're also putting on an event called PixelPop. What is PixelPop and why did you create it?

Carol Mertz: PixelPop Festival is an annual festival based in Saint Louis, Missouri, again, where I grew up and spent most of my adulthood. We made it. I made it with my team at Happy Badger Studio, like I mentioned, and a friend of ours who runs the Anime Convention in Saint Louis, Anime STL. We put it together originally just because we wanted to see more resources available in the Midwest that were affordable and accessible and supportive because we felt really disconnected from the national industry for game creators. We would go to stuff like the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and people would hear that we came from Saint Louis and giggle a little bit because they couldn't imagine a game creator coming from Saint Louis. Now we're of course seeing folks like Jamey Stegmaier and Greater Than Games and all kinds of great companies coming out of Saint Louis. But at that point, it was much more uncommon.

Carol Mertz: So we really wanted to provide a space where people could get together, where people who love games could meet people who are making games, and maybe get inspired to start making their own, where storied game creators could teach new game creators, new game creators could help inspire older creators, where tabletop creators and digital creators could share their experiences and lessons because there's so much to learn from everyone. So we built this space. It started as a single day festival and has evolved into a two day festival. Now we're about to put on our fifth annual PixelPop Festival on July 28th and 29th of this year. It's just gotten bigger and better every year. I love how much we get to showcase so many different kinds of projects and we've really gotten to see beautiful relationships come out of it.

Carol Mertz: This year, we're actually hosting a gallery exhibition called Rules To Play by, which was concepted by one of the professors at Lindenwood University at Saint Louis, and a woman who was showing her tabletop game Mom & Me, Brianna Shuttleworth at last year's PixelPop Festival, they met and decided they wanted to do art things together as they related to games. So they're putting on this art exhibition of artful game rules at PixelPop Festival this year. It's just so cool to see all the different media come together and really just be an opportunity to inspire one another and to really showcase the interesting work that comes out of design and play.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I don't think there's enough of that. I agree with you. There's so much stuff on the East Coast and on the West Coast, but in the Midwest, it's a little empty I guess.

Carol Mertz: It's hard to find for sure. There's events like Bit Bash in Chicago. There's GDAX in Ohio. But a lot of times these events are single days or they're difficult to get into. They're highly curated or they're expensive. There's all kinds of reasons why someone in the Midwest who's not making a ton of money, who doesn't travel much, if at all, wouldn't go, and it's a shame because I think events are one of the best ways to really connect with the industry, to really learn a lot in a short period of time, and to get really inspired. So that was really the goal is to just make something that's financially affordable, that's geographically accessible and that's exciting enough that it draws from all over the country, which we do.

Patrick Rauland: I think that's amazing. We'll get to sort of … At the end of the interview, I'll ask people how they can find you online. But just for right now, if someone wants to go to PixelPop, they can just go to the website and get a ticket?

Carol Mertz: PixelPopFestival.com. Yeah, tickets are actually available now. It's July 28th and 29th in Saint Louis, and it's only $30 for the weekend. Like I said, we make it financially accessible. So it's like as if you've paid to go see a movie on each day.

Patrick Rauland: Wow. That's amazing.

Carol Mertz: Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: That's really, really cool.

Carol Mertz: Thank you.

What Does Success Look Like?

Patrick Rauland: So you do a lot of different things. Festival, board games, video games, and I'm sure a bunch more. What is success look like to you? Where are you going?

Carol Mertz: That's a good question. I mean, that's part of why I went back to school because I'm not sure, right? So right now I'm studying for my master's in fine arts from the NYU Game Center, and I still have another year left here. I came here just because I really wanted to push my skills even harder than I could in Saint Louis. I was starting to kind of feel like I needed to explore other cities for other industry opportunities and found this opportunity at the Game Center and came here because I got to study under people like Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lance and Bennet Foddy and Naomi Clark and all of these really wonderful experienced designers who are doing things that I've looked up to for years. So it's been everything I wanted it to be and more.

Carol Mertz: Once I finish up here, I really just want to design games and make people happy. So I'm not really sure what that means. I love to design games with a studio that is working on projects that I believe in. I love to start my own studio and continue working on my own projects, but really, ultimately, I'm looking for sustainability, being able to feed myself, clothe myself and house myself while working on really cool stuff.

Patrick Rauland: I think that sounds amazing.

Carol Mertz: Yeah, thank you.

Underrated / Overrated Game

Patrick Rauland: So we're getting near the end here. So I like to end this with a little game called Overrated/Underrated. Basically I'm going to give you a word or a phrase and then I'm going to force you to take a position on if people think it's overrated or if it's underrated.

Carol Mertz: Oh no.

Patrick Rauland: So let's say Patrick and clearly everyone would say he's underrated because Patrick is amazing in so many ways. So something like that.

Carol Mertz: Okay.

Patrick Rauland: Does that make sense?

Carol Mertz: Okay. I'll try to hold this harsh of opinions as I can.

Patrick Rauland: Okay. So dexterity games, are they overrated or underrated?

Carol Mertz: I personally find them overrated. I'm not a huge fan. I have shaky hands and I don't like things that make me feel like bad at stuff. I like games for relaxation and not for skill and challenge necessarily.

Patrick Rauland: So maybe a relaxing dexterity game if those exist.

Carol Mertz: What is that? Is that …

Patrick Rauland: I don't even know.

Carol Mertz: I don't know. So I mentioned Bennet Foddy is one of my professors. He just released this game called Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy, which is a dexterity game, but like he has this voiceover throughout the entire game that's just like trying to calm you down as you fail over and over. So maybe that could be considered a relaxing dexterity game. I don't think it's particularly relaxing though.

Patrick Rauland: All right. How about the HR department, overrated or underrated?

Carol Mertz: Oh, underrated. Well, okay. I guess it depends on what context. I guess in most cases, the HR department is there just to protect the company. Oh no. This is getting deep. So I think if the HR department did what employees actually thought that it did, which is protect the employees, it's underrated. If the HR department does what it actually does for corporations, which is protect the corporation at the expense of the employees, it's very much overrated. Please don't hate me HR friends. But yeah, I think it's important for companies to protect their employees and to respond with very much seriousness to complaints.

Patrick Rauland: Love it. Makes sense. Kickstarter in general, overrated/underrated.

Carol Mertz: I think it's well rated. I think Kickstarter is important. I don't think it needs any more hype than it has necessarily. I think it does amazing things. But I do think that there's other ways for people to create work and to make it viable. I love what the folks at Kickstarter are doing and I think that they provide phenomenal support for creators. But I by no means would say that they are underrated. I think that there's a lot of people who are turning to Kickstarter who maybe haven't researched it well enough. So maybe researching Kickstarter and researching the process of funding your projects is a little underrated.

Patrick Rauland: Sure.

Carol Mertz: But I think that it's right where it needs to be and that it's doing really good work. It's supporting the community and it's also leaving space for other opportunities for people to create games.

Patrick Rauland: Great answer. All right. Last one, public speaking, overrated or underrated?

Carol Mertz: Underrated. I think it's so important to get out there and share your thoughts and get that experience of like sharing your experiences. I think a lot of people think that getting talks and stuff feels maybe like it's something that's outside of their … They haven't done enough to merit standing on stage and talking with people about what they've gone through or maybe they're afraid of it. But I think it's just such a good practice, it's a good habit to get into of sharing … Because everything that we go through is unique to us, right? So we've all experienced something that no one else has experienced, and the best way to share that is through industry events and things like that, through podcasts, things like this where we can really just go out of our way and make sure that people gain some understanding of the experiences that we've had so that they can apply that to their own life, take the lessons that we've learned maybe some times in a hard way and apply it to their projects and to their lives. I think it's a really, really special thing to be able to share your experiences and your knowledge with everybody else.

Patrick Rauland: I love that. All right. Well, thank you for being on the show, Carol. Where can people find you online?

Carol Mertz: You can check out all of my work at carolmertz.com. That's C-A-R-O-L-M-E-R-T-Z.com. You can also find me on Twitter @CarolMertz, and like I mentioned you can check out PixelPop at PixelPopFestival.com.

Patrick Rauland: Thank you, again, and for those of you listening, if you would like to leave a review of this podcast on iTunes or wherever you're listening to it, Carol said that she'd let you play the nepotism card from her game to get out of work. So you just got to get a copy of her game, play the nepotism card, and you don't have to go in anymore.

Carol Mertz: Yep.

Patrick Rauland: That's how it works.

Carol Mertz: Yeah, that's exactly how it works.

Patrick Rauland: So you can visit the site at IndieBoardGameDesigners.com. You can follow me on Twitter @BFTrick. Oh, I forgot to mention I'm kind of looking for extra questions. So if there's any questions that you want to ask a designer, go to the website. There will be a contact form, fill out the contact form. So if you have questions, send me some questions through and I'll try to ask them.

Carol Mertz: Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: Until next time, happy designing everyone. Bye.

Carol Mertz: Bye.

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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Indie Board Game Designers Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking with Eduardo Baraf, who is the founder of Pencil First Games, a game designer himself, and a prolific game reviewer, and is one of the developers behind Herbaceous Sprouts, which just finished on Kickstarter. Ed, welcome to the show.

Eduardo Baraf: Thanks for having me. Yeah, Herbaceous Sprouts will have wrapped by the time this goes on.

Patrick Rauland: I guess I first saw you on Kickstarter reviewing a whole bunch of games. But before you were famous on Kickstarter and game reviewing, how-

Eduardo Baraf: [crosstalk 00:00:43].

How Did You Get Into Board Game Design?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Well how did you get into board games and game design?

Eduardo Baraf: That's a good question. I've had the fortune of being into video games and video game development my entire career. Starting in college, I had an independent campus organization called Wolverine Soft, which is actually still around today for making games. Then essentially, I moved into QA and production and design and studio management in video games. I was at a company called Mind Control Software, and at the time, Thomas Denmark was the art director. Thomas Denmark was famous for a game called Dungeoneer among other stuff. He does a lot of fantastic art and magic cards. He was working on a game called Murder of Crows, but was struggling with the hook and just making it tight.

Eduardo Baraf: He brought me on to co-design, and we worked together on that title, and that was the first game that I … board/card game that I designed and sort of got me into the hobby. It wouldn't release for many, many years later because the art took so long to finish, but that was a start. Then later on while I was at Blue Fang Games, I kicked off a work on Lift Off Get Me Off This Planet, which was the first Pencil First game. So it was sort of a transition from video games and designing in video games to taking on the board game design.

Isn't There More Money In Video Games?

Patrick Rauland: So I imagine there's more money in video games. Why did you decide to go into board games?

Eduardo Baraf: Well, I mean, from a salary perspective perhaps, you know, you could get jobs making video games more so than the board game industry. But no, I mean, I think for me it's a creative endeavor. And in particular, making a board game is a much more confined, approachable effort. I'll often say board games don't have engineers, and mean that in a … No. Nothing against engineers. Actually, you know, a lot of engineers are designers.

Eduardo Baraf: But just the amount of work you have to put in place to have a functioning video game is far less to have a functioning prototype that you start putting art on and get going. So, it was a great opportunity to be creative, but not be bound to having large expansive teams.

Patrick Rauland: Got it. Got it. By the time this posts, Herbaceous Sprouts will have just wrapped on Kickstarter.

Eduardo Baraf: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Why Design a More Lightweight Game?

Patrick Rauland: Now, this is what I would say sort of a little bit more of a lightweight game, and it's actually like a follow-up to the Herbaceous, which is a bigger, more complicated game. Why did you decide to make a more lightweight version?

Eduardo Baraf: I can understand that impression from the fact that it uses dice, but it's actually the reverse. So, it's atypical. Herbaceous is about as light as it gets. So Herbaceous is this ultra-light, simple card game that's a mixture of push-your-luck and set collection. It's easily Pencil First Games' most successful title in terms of fan interest and just units sold. With that team, Beth Sobel, Steve Finn, Keith Matejka, Ben Shulman and I worked on Herbaceous. We'd go into that story, but it was an awesome experience. We then rolled into Sunset Over Water, which is also on the lighter side, but we really wanted to do something more with Herbaceous.

Eduardo Baraf: And because Herbaceous is such a light game, going and doing, like a dice game with Herbaceous that was what you typically would see. A lighter game would have been like Batman Dice. It would have literally been, like grabbed dice out of a cup, roll them, pick and push your luck to see if it … you know, click, sets and push your luck, which isn't … I mean, it's fine but it wasn't interesting to us. What we really wanted to do was take dice and push it out further and have more of a fuller experience with Herbaceous Sprouts, albeit still very light.

Eduardo Baraf: I mean, Herbaceous Sprouts is absolutely a gateway game, whereas … I mean, Herbaceous is gateway for, like somebody who's only played Gin Rummy and Hearts, like super, super entry level. But that was the approach though.

Patrick Rauland: I think that's really interesting because I agree. Most games, when they make the dice version, it's almost always a lighter version of the game. So, that was the impression I had just from looking at the kickstart. I'm like, “Oh this is like Herbaceous Sprouts.” I'm like, “Oh that looks probably better for me,” because from what I've heard, Herbaceous sounds heavier. But it sounds like I got that totally wrong.

Eduardo Baraf: It's fine, man. Yeah, and I think that's always a challenge. We talked about that creative endeavor. But for me, when I'm designing or leading a project, it's all about the creative energy and work that we're doing. Sometimes, we went down the dice path with what we were doing, and it just going super simple wasn't interesting enough. We've played those games and this was … Herbaceous Sprouts was just much more of a wonderful experience going the other way a little bit. Again, it's still pretty light.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, yeah.

Eduardo Baraf: Okay, so, you have a lot of different things under your belt. So you've been a designer. You've done developments, game development for games, and you also do reviewing and you're a publisher. So that's like at least four different hats.

Patrick Rauland: Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

Eduardo Baraf: By title, it's probably 15 different hats, when you add in other stuff.

What Job Role Do You Like the Most?

Patrick Rauland: Which of those is the most exciting for you? The reason I'm asking this is I think there's a lot of designers who are thinking about becoming a publisher or doing development, but they don't know which route to take, and I'm just … Which one of those for you is your favorite?

Eduardo Baraf: It's interesting. I mean, at a high level, I consider myself a game maker. And so, for me, what's the joy is working with other people to create an experience that then we share with a larger group of people who enjoy that experience, right? And so, it's really the entire creative process that I enjoy and I'm excited by rather than any specific piece, and you talked about designing. If I'm working on a game and I'm really excited I want to do a game, I really want to do, like an epic war builder 18X game, because I'm really excited about whatever. So I've got air blowing and people doing gardening work on the outside of this building.

Eduardo Baraf: But I want to do this 18X game. Well I'm not necessarily the best designer for that. I don't play them that much. I don't know why I'd want to do it, but I don't play them that much. I don't know how to design them, so I'm just not a natural fit for that. I'd much rather find the perfect … I would, like everyone in their role to do an amazing job. And so, I have no problem with using somebody who's better than me at any specific part of the product work.

Patrick Rauland: I think that's really cool to look at yourself as a game maker because that's a little bit more abstracted, and it's kind of like, “How can I help?” as opposed to “I want be the lead,” or, “I want to be the designer or doing development of the game.” I think that's a really cool distinction. It's just, “I'm a game maker and you figure out what works best for each project.”

Eduardo Baraf: Yeah, and sometimes, it's even to the extent of Heroes Welcome, which is going to ultimately be a Pencil First Games, but it was a Kickstarter by Marc LeBlanc that was earlier this year. He was the head of the project and running it and working with art, but they just needed development and Kickstarter and product support, and they're good friends of mine and I wanted to help them. And so, that was really just me coming in and facilitating the process, right? Getting the people we needed to succeed, pushing them to get it done, and moving it through the process. And that was satisfying for me, even though it wasn't a situation where I was driving it forward.

What is the Difference Between Game Development & Game Design?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. So with Herbaceous Sprouts, you did developments. Can you just describe, like what is the difference between game developments and game design?

Eduardo Baraf: Sure, sure. It's different for every title. I mean, ultimately, in many ways, it's partnership. But from a practical level, coming to Herbaceous sprouts and knowing that I wanted to work with Steve again. I said, “Hey Steve, what do you think about moving and doing more Herbaceous work?” I was thinking about, “Wouldn't it be cool to do a dice game? We could make these really fantastic looking dice and drive forward. What do you think about that?” He was excited, and so, he went off and started designing and coming together with essentially his prototype, which is on paper, standard-looking prototype from a designer.

Eduardo Baraf: I had to stick a lot of stickers on dice, but just the basic components on paper. So he brings that to me and then development really begins. So one is I'm playing it. I'm giving him feedback. I'm pushing and pulling it. In many ways, my job as a developer, in that context, and as a product lead, is to say, “Who are we making this game for? And what experience are we trying to give to them?” This was very much always aimed at people who loved Herbaceous and a broader audience, but we definitely wanted to make this a game, Herbaceous game … players would love, because, you know, why use the IP if you're not going to leverage it, right?

Patrick Rauland: And how in describing a lot of stuff … This is very product-manager, product-centric, which is something you get from working in video games in an industry. It's not necessarily how you think of it in that if you're just doing design work.

Eduardo Baraf: So pushing and pulling them on the design, we're talking about the different components and coming up with different ideas on how we'll build it. Then while that process is going on and helping massage the design work with Steve, I'm then starting to run down and look at and talk to Beth about the look and the feel, and the different components, and the managing the schedules, and what everyone's doing. So I'm doing all the coordination work. And then as assets are coming in, I'm pulling them together and helping them get integrated, updating The Game Crafter. Steve will typically do a base rule book, which is just his style of rules.

Eduardo Baraf: And then, I'll move it over, and then I'll start massaging it and then working with Ben Shulman, the graphic designer, to build those rules. I'll interface with Ben a lot. I'll interface with Beth a lot. I'll interface with Steve a lot, as we pull it all together. Then again, as I'm play testing and seeing it in the world, I'm then filtering back that information and results to Steve and making recommendations and suggestions. So there's always going to be something. For example, Steve had in Herbaceous sprouts, there's a die that … One side of it lets you re-roll that die. And so, at the time, the game had your re-rolling and dice manipulation, like you'd expect.

Eduardo Baraf: But I never got the chance to hold a fist of dice and roll it. I'm like, “That's a big deal.” And so, I push back on that and I said, “This is one of a variety of examples.” I'm not trying to take anything from all these decisions, but I'm just trying to give you an example, of where I said, “Wouldn't it be better if when I re-roll this one, I get the option to re-roll as many as I want? What's the drawback from that? It seems like it's about the same impact, but it just lets me risk more and have more opportunity to swing my decisions but in a good dice rolling sort of way.” He said, “Well that's interesting. That might work.”

Eduardo Baraf: And so, then, he goes back, and now, he's doing a little development work where he's trying and design work. He comes back and he says, “I think that works over here and here, but then I want to do something over here.” I said, “Cool.” So it's really pushing and pulling that. I think in bigger companies, sometimes, the developer's really just integrating assets or just running play tests. But from a Pencil First Games' perspective, it's really a very active engagement.

When Does Development Start (and Design End)?

Patrick Rauland: What percent of the game do you think is … I don't want to say done. But what percent of the game would you say you kept when you first got it? Was 70% of the game complete and you were sort of figuring out that last 30%? Or is it like only 20%? What percent of it is sort of done?

Eduardo Baraf: Yeah, well, one thing I would say is if I'm from a design perspective, because if you're just talking about the effort to actually build the graphic files and the work of manufacturing a game, like the design part is a very, very small piece. But if you're talking about the design, one thing I'd say if I'm doing my job right, I'm never changing the last 30%. I'm just convincing Steve to change the last 30%. But honestly, I've now worked with dozens of designers, probably more, maybe dozens of dozens. It depends on the person. Steve, for example, is really good at having a clear vision, nailing it and at pretty much working.

Eduardo Baraf: We're working on a future title now together, and this is one where it's going through a lot of cycles. We're playing it. I'm giving him feedback. He's taking it back. He doesn't usually do dramatic pivots, but he's been doing some dramatic pivots of the design and it's coming together. But Steve is definitely a person who comes at you with a really solid design.

How Do You Design Remotely?

Patrick Rauland: Very cool. Boy, there's just so much stuff to consider there, and I think a lot of people design in a black … You know what I mean? You just design and you just work with your friends. I'm wondering if it's helpful to get out of your head and get out of your local play test group and work with someone maybe like yourself or maybe an outside development group to get fresh perspective on the game. I think one of the other questions I had is, it sounds like you and Steve do, like you don't live near each other or you don't-

Eduardo Baraf: I don't know if I would live near any of the people I work with right now. It's all over the phone or email or Google Docs or that kind of thing.

Patrick Rauland: Is that challenging? Or does that give you more advantages or disadvantages when you work really far away from each other?

Eduardo Baraf: Well, I mean, I think there's a little bit of a challenge on all parts. But once you get used to it, you get used to it. I mean, I love working on in teams together at an office. But at the same time, like if Pencil First Games is actually hiring all these people and housing them in a building, they have to be 20 times the company, right? So no, I think you the new world has distributed teams in many ways, and fortunately, there's all sorts of tools and technology to facilitate that. I mean, again, I have to work regularly with my manufacturer in China. I use Skype and other tools in order to do that.

Eduardo Baraf: And so, there are challenging parts to it. One of my very earliest League industry videos that I did was about distributed teams or … No, it was actually a League article I did about distributed teams. But you sort of get used to it. You definitely should be taking your game outside of your core group, right?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Eduardo Baraf: Like I said, it's easy to get the same kind of feedback over and over again, and you want to go beyond that. I also think, again, one of the unique things here is, oftentimes, the designer is just working on their mechanics. If you go to a traditional mold, where they're handing off their game mechanics to a publisher, they're thinking about their game and their experience, but they may not … not exactly thinking about their audience because the publisher is going to theme it. He's going to change it. He's going to do all those stuff. But I like, you know, one of the things I think you can say about Pencil First Game products is they're very holistic, right?

Eduardo Baraf: I really want … When you pick up a product or that we've created, it really has a clear and strong vision that is both the game, as well as how its presented and how it feels. So I really think having a strong aesthetic is important, and to do that, you need to know what you're making in its entirety. You can't do the first half and then slap on the second half and I think that's a big deal.

How Did You Start Reviewing Board Games?

Patrick Rauland: Interesting. Okay, so, I first heard about you. I'm going to say you're Kickstarter famous. So that's where I first heard about you. I saw just a whole bunch of reviews of you doing reviews for games. So number one, I'm curious. How did you just start reviewing all these games? And how did you become such a big-name reviewer?

Eduardo Baraf: Yeah, I mean, I sort of question that whole big-name reviewer bit. I think I'm a big-name reviewer in the Facebook board gaming community, specifically. From an audience perspective, I wouldn't consider myself a big-name reviewer. But setting that aside, it was actually after Lift Off. Lift Off was my first Kickstarter, and I had to go from zero to 60 in a very short period of time where I wasn't a part of any online community in any way. I wasn't active on Twitter. I wasn't active in Facebook. I wasn't active on BGG. I wasn't a part of the community.

Eduardo Baraf: Up till that point, the community of board gaming were the people near me, not people online. When you're doing a Kickstarter, that isn't enough, right? Because if you just convince the people near you to do it, you don't have enough people. So I had to go from 0 to 60 for the Lift Off Campaign. And afterwards, it was like, “How … ” Making a game takes so long. It's going to be another year more before I pick my head up again and emerge in this group asking for help. But I appreciate it so much and what people have contributed. How can I give back?

Eduardo Baraf: At the time, I was like, “Well I think there's a big shortage of short reviews,” like it's frustrating. Who wants to watch 20, 30, 40-minute board game reviews? And there are plenty who do, but that was my perspective at the time.

Patrick Rauland: Sure.

Eduardo Baraf: So I then went and started my reviews, which were, “Hey, I'm just going to pitch you a game, like if you were at my house for game night,” and I-

Patrick Rauland: Cool.

Eduardo Baraf: … wanted you to play it, and then I just went from there. Then some Kickstarter folks asked me if I could do some for their Kickstarter, and I said, “Sure.” I just kept continued doing it. I'm really good at doing things. My superpower is organization and productivity among other things.

Speaker 3: And cleaning.

Eduardo Baraf: My son said, “And cleaning.” So, for me, building out and being … One of the reasons I'm at least of some notoriety, I guess, is that I've been launching videos over the last almost five years or four or five years, probably four years, consistently, week over week, content over content. I probably have 600 reviews. I didn't-

Patrick Rauland: Wow.

Eduardo Baraf: … stop, right?

Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Eduardo Baraf: I've been consistent.

How Does Reviewing Games Help Your Process?

Patrick Rauland: All right. So I do have a follow-up is, when you started doing these reviews, I imagine it helped your game design. Was there a specific example you can think of where some sort of review you did six months, a year earlier, has affected a game you did today?

Eduardo Baraf: Well I think it's absolutely the case. What's absolutely the case is, being board game reviewer has forced me to play so many more games than I would have otherwise, right?

Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Eduardo Baraf: My depth of experience in just a wide variety of genre of games from prototype stuff to AAA manufactured games is just dramatically different. Like, I was a guy, I'd buy a game, and I'd play it a ton, and we'd buy one more. You picked up a game every once in a while. Now, I'm playing and experiencing 20, maybe 30 games a month. And so, you just have so much more perspective. It's hard to point at any specific, like with this one example, this other … I don't think I can say this came from this. But without a doubt, it just gives you a better vocabulary and understanding of how mechanics work, what dynamics they produce in games.

Eduardo Baraf: You get into a lot of positions where somebody's struggling with a problem. You're like, “Well they sort of had a system like that in Kingdomino. Maybe … ” Okay, here's an example. I'm working on the next game with Steve, and he had a mechanic for selecting your cards or for going was initiatives on the bottom of the cards. He actually has done that in a lot of games and does a very good job of it, but we had done that in Sunset Over Water. I didn't want to do the same base mechanic, and he's like, “Well people will know it.” I'm like, “Yeah, but I sort of want to expose,” like part of this line is exposing people some sort of different mechanics.

Eduardo Baraf: And so, the conversation was around, well how do we determine initiative and action selection? And so, I was like, “Well, you know, look at Kingdomino or a lot of Cathala stuff. He does a great job of your … select a spot in an initiative row, and then that selection sets you up for the next round, and it's dynamic, but it's based on your choice.” And then, also, It was parallel to his system because it gives you the ability to wait … you know, where you fall in turn order as something that's of value, right?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Eduardo Baraf: And that was what he was doing with his cards, but I didn't want to use a mechanic again. So that was an example. I mean, you don't have to play 400 games to give that example, but little things like that all the time.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, I really like that. It's almost like you sort of have … God. To me, I'm thinking of like the Boy Scouts Handbook, right? It's like, you get into a spot. It's like, “How do we make a fire? Oh well, I've already made 100 fires. Here's this bark. There's this tree. There's this knot” It gives you just a whole giant toolbox of things to use versus someone who's only played 10 games. You only have 10 pages of the handbook. You can still do things but you have to figure out a lot on your own.

Eduardo Baraf: Right.

Patrick Rauland: I think that's really cool.

Eduardo Baraf: [crosstalk 00:21:06] gives you, which is super important, and there's this incredible video/audio clip from the guy who does This American Life. It's passing me right now. But anyway, Ira Glass.

Patrick Rauland: Ira Glass?

Eduardo Baraf: Yeah, yeah, about taste and what playing a ton of stuff is, exposing yourself to other experiences is it gives you a sense of taste. What's good, what's bad; what looks good, what looks bad; what's clear, what's not clear. And, having a really strong and fantastic palette and appreciation for all the different parts of a game gives you a lot of superpowers when it comes to delivering some things satisfying to other players.

Patrick Rauland: So I've seen the Ira Glass quote. I think it's like, when you're just getting into something, you dislike everything you do because you have high taste. But you don't have the ability to make a product at that level, and you just have to keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it until your quality matches your taste. It was something like that.

Eduardo Baraf: Yeah, yeah. Actually, it comes from like a two-minute little interview answer he gives. That's about right honestly, but it's worth listening to the two minutes, especially if you're struggling. It's basically, “Hey, don't worry if you look at your work and you think it's terrible. That actually means you know what good is and you just keep working on it,” right?

Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I love that. I will make sure to find it, and I'll link it up in the show notes. I absolutely love it. I think that's really, really cool. Oh, the lawn guy's back.

Eduardo Baraf: We're in a complex, so you never know where they are.

How Can You Contribute to the Board Game Community?

Patrick Rauland: Oh that's funny. Cool. So you said you wanted to get into the community, and you said, “Hey, there's sort of like this type of review that I would like that's not there.” I've heard that advice tons of times like, “Get in the community. Be involved.” Are there any holes in the community that you think could be filled? Is there space for an hour-long review of games? Is there space for … What is a space for in the community that someone can do that adds value that's not just saying hi on Twitter?

Eduardo Baraf: Okay, well, you want me to sell my secrets? No. A lot of them … I mean, you have to discover them. For example, there was a brand new channel about maybe a month old, which is like … I forget the name of it. But basically, they're using one of the 360 cameras where you can rotate and pan it around.

Patrick Rauland: Oh cool.

Eduardo Baraf: They're just little micro, like Instagram reviews, but with the 360 pan camera where you can look everywhere and I thought it was super cool. I don't know that it's filling a gigantic hole, but it was like a piece of content. I was like, “Oh that's neat. That's cool.” I think, “Where do I think content's missing?” I feel like content's super missing in news and punditry. I feel as if there's very little … There are very little channels that are actively talking about what's happening in the industry and news in the industry and sort of like what you'd see from like the Turks and that kind of perspective.

Eduardo Baraf: I think that'd be super interesting. It's a little bit of a challenge because it's just a very busy and active thing. I mean, you have, like a board game, breakfast and that kind of thing. But I feel like there's space there for providing an opinion on what's happening. There's only so much more review stuff you can take. If you're going the review track, I just think you need to have a really super clear perspective, an audience in mind, and you want to be able to communicate it. There's also very little like stunt/experimental stuff around board games like, “Hey, we're going to take this board game and we're going to see how it reacts at 5,000 degrees,” or, “We're going to go out in public and pretend to be … ” Just the type of typical YouTube stuff that we don't see.

Eduardo Baraf: One channel I just saw, Board Game Spotlight promoting, was this woman … I mean, Board Game Spotlight was promoting it because she was promoting The Grimm Forest. But, she makes cakes based on-

Patrick Rauland: What?

Eduardo Baraf: … game IP.

Patrick Rauland: What?

Eduardo Baraf: It's not as if she only did The Grimm Forest, but she's done … It's like sugar hook game or something. And basically, I don't even know … She may have a review or she might not, but she just takes board game IPs and bakes cakes out of them. So it's like, you know, there's plenty of opportunity, as the industry grows, to take content that is existing in other mediums and try to bring it over. I've always felt … I was on Tabletop Deathmatch season two, and I always felt that there's been a lack in the visualization of game development, and I think there's an opportunity to do something there.

Eduardo Baraf: But again, you got to dive in and have the time to do it. I think it'd be really cool if somebody went around and profile board game stores across the United States. I think that'd be awesome. You also then need to drive around the United States and profile board games twice, right? It takes work.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. These are really great ideas. I really like it. The reason I started this podcast is because I was just like, “I just want to hear more designers tell their stories.” I'm hoping this is a need that other people finds … They find some value in it, but I'm not sure. But, it's at least something that I think would be useful, so I'm trying this. I hope people can find something that they find useful, and hopefully, also provides value of someone else to someone else.

Eduardo Baraf: Here's the challenge you're going to face, because I've been in this boat before, man. You got to make sure that you're excited and interested every time you do one of these, and you want to know the answers, because, one, it makes for a better interview. But at the end of the day, your audience is inherently pretty small, right?

Patrick Rauland: Yeah.

Eduardo Baraf: Your audience here is people who play and enjoy board games, but also, to the extent that they are designers of the board games, and it's a pretty tiny audience. There's nothing wrong with making content for a tiny audience. But it's not like it's suddenly going to become hot ones and take over the internet, right?

Patrick Rauland: Right.

Eduardo Baraf: You're going to always sort of … And so, that's just the challenge, right? I have found that as that group … There's only so much that even that small little group can consume. So, as long as you're okay, it's like, “You picked the small pond,” so I don't think you're going to find any sharks in the small pond, but you could certainly go swimming, right? You can have fun.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. So here's my thing. The reason I started this is I thought, “The worst scenario, I'm getting something.” Worst case, like if it's just me and my mom. I mean, I've only had this been live for a couple weeks. It might just be me and my mom listening to this right now, but at least I'm learning something while I do this, and hopefully, other people eventually pick it up. But you're right. I've committed to this without … I'm just going to do this for at least a year and see where I am, and then I'll figure it out from there.

Eduardo Baraf: Yeah. The podcast space is also different. So your audience is inherently going to be bigger on a podcast, and a YouTube video often is the case for this type of content, which is good for you. Again, I think for you to … Like one year, after six, nine, 12 months, and you're like, “Okay, well this has been cool, but I sort of wanted to grow.” I think you need to think about how you can capitalize on the content you're making to create something new or novel that's appreciated by a broader audience than the limited audience. So I don't know the answer to that question, but you'll probably hit it at some point. I'm not trying to be a downer.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah, yeah. No, and you're not being a … Whenever I encounter an obstacle of some kind, it's almost always like, “How do I figure this out?” Not, “I'm screwed.” It's almost always like, “Cool. This is an interesting problem to solve.” So, I look forward to six to nine months from now where I'm like, “How do I make this better?”

Eduardo Baraf: Yeah, and you might be okay with it, right? I still, you know, years and years later, I release videos, and lots of the League videos do 200, 300 views, and I know that it's a pretty consistent audience. There are only a handful of things that break out of that and those things are usually ones where I talk about a topic that's broader than game makers. One of biggest videos I ever did was when I responded to a video from The Dice Tower, where they sort of said, “This is what designers need to stop doing,” and I disagreed with a lot of it, and I did a very complete and full-throated response to it.

Eduardo Baraf: And so, that became … That latched on in a way to The Dice Tower audience, and it became an industry conversation as opposed to just a board game design conversation.

What Resource Would You Recommend to an Aspiring Designer?

Patrick Rauland: Sure, very cool. I like it. I just want to ask a couple more questions before I get to the end here. Totally changing gears. So, back to … You're an indie game designer or maybe you're an aspiring game designer. What one resource would you recommend to those people?

Eduardo Baraf: Honestly, I think it's play games. I think those people should really just keep playing games. I think Facebook is a great opportunity, and having a cheap editor, like on Mac. There's a program called Pixelmator, which is like 30 or 40 bucks. It basically lets you do anything you do on Photoshop, but there's some other resources that will help you lay out pages and put things together. The Game Crafter is a great resource. But really, buy a blank deck of cards and some white paper and a pen. I think it's about the gumption and about the sort of understanding what you want. Jamey Stegmaier has a great blog. James Mathe has a great blog.

Eduardo Baraf: I have some videos on game design and game creation. But I think a lot of it is about doing and less in not talking. So, I think it's really just initiative. I don't think there's one tool that's going to make it or break it for a designer.

What Mechanisms or Ideas Are You Looking Into?

Patrick Rauland: All right. And lastly, what are some fun ideas or mechanisms that you're looking into for your future games?

Eduardo Baraf: Oh well, so I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there's a 40-year-old game called Situation 4.

Patrick Rauland: No.

Eduardo Baraf: It is a two-player, head-to-head, jigsaw puzzle game, where you're competing with each other to fill a board the fastest while scoring different points. It's from Parker Brothers. And so, it is awesome. So whether or not it's really a great mechanic or not, I've been messing around with jigsaw puzzles. [crosstalk 00:30:54]-

Patrick Rauland: That's really cool.

Eduardo Baraf: … find some jigsaw puzzles. So that's something I've been wrapping my head around.

What Does Success Look Like?

Patrick Rauland: I love it. All right. Sorry. I lied. I have technically one more question and then a little game at the end. All right. So, last question. What does success look like in the board game world to you?

Eduardo Baraf: That's a great question. I honestly think you need to define that as a personal … like, what is it to you? What are you trying to accomplish? And that's where you're going to find satisfaction and happiness. It's really, “If you're concerned about the destination, you're going to miss the journey,” right? And so, success for me is being able to work with people to make games that people get to play and enjoy. So, sure it would be great if I sold a hundred thousand, but if I show enough that I need that expectation and then I can make another one. I'm pretty darn happy about it.

Eduardo Baraf: So, I really think when you're kicking off and diving in, you really want to be introspective and understand what you want as a person, and that's going to really answer that question.

Overrated Underrated Game

Patrick Rauland: Love it. All right. So, last little thing. I like to play a little game with my guests called Overrated/Underrated.

Eduardo Baraf: Okay.

Patrick Rauland: I'm basically going to give you a phrase, and you need to say if people think it's better than it is or worse than it is. So, if it's overrated by everyone else or underrated by everyone else. Got it?

Eduardo Baraf: And you say the phrase, but is it phrase or is it [inaudible 00:32:09] games?

Patrick Rauland: You'll see.

Eduardo Baraf: Okay.

Patrick Rauland: So the first one, are roll-and-write games overrated or underrated?

Eduardo Baraf: I think they're underrated.

Patrick Rauland: Because? Give me a one-sentence reason why.

Eduardo Baraf: Sure, sure, sure. They are underrated because the audience for them is way smaller than the overrated people think it is.

Patrick Rauland: All right. Way smaller. Cool. So real, in IRL, as an in real life gardening, overrated or underrated?

Eduardo Baraf: I mean, I think it's underrated. It's fantastic.

Patrick Rauland: Do you garden?

Eduardo Baraf: Not as much as I could, but we have a little … We don't have much space outside of our place. We live in this community, but we have a herb and vegetable plots, so yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's great.

Patrick Rauland: All right. I saved this one for you. I thought of it a couple of episodes ago. Gen Con, overrated or underrated?

Eduardo Baraf: Gen Con is … I mean, I think it's overrated at this point because It's turning very much into E3 where … I mean, it's sort of like you have to be there. It's everything about it, but there's just so much other stuff going on in the industry now, and it's getting so spread out that I think it's now a little overrated. If you miss Gen Con, you'll be okay. That's [crosstalk 00:33:17].

Patrick Rauland: Great. And last one, mechanical pencils, overrated, underrated?

Eduardo Baraf: I think pencils are underrated, both mechanical and plain. Everyone should be working with pencils because you want to be able to erase and redo.

Conclusion

Patrick Rauland: I like it. All right. Well thank you so much for being on the show. Ed, where can people find you online?

Eduardo Baraf: So the best places to find me online is Facebook. You can just look up Eduardo Baraf or Pencil First Games. And then on Twitter, it's @ebaraf and Pencil First. I'm very active on those channels. You can also go to pencilfirstgames.com, but I'm very active on those channels. If you have a question or query, you just ping at me, and generally speaking, pretty quickly, I'll respond to you.

Patrick Rauland: Awesome. Well thank you again. Dear listeners, if you really enjoyed this podcast, if you enjoyed the gardening or the lawn people outside, if you want to leave us a review on iTunes, that would be great. If you do leave a review, Ed said if you would use his vast knowledge of reviews and gardening to review your personal garden. So if you want a professional review of your garden, go ahead and give us a review on iTunes or somewhere else. You can visit the site at indieboardgamedesigners.com. You can follow me on Twitter, @BFTrick. Until next time, happy designing. Thanks. Bye-bye.

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Patrick Rauland: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Indie Board Game Designer's Podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Dan Letzring, who's both a publisher and a designer. Some of the games he's designed are Groves, alongside Steve Aramini, and Dino Dude Ranch, and as a publisher he just lined up The Neverland Rescue, which was on Kickstarter. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Letzring: Hey, thank you so much for having me, Patrick. How are you doing tonight?

Patrick Rauland: I'm doing good, but I've just had a lot of good news today and a lot of bad news today. Overall I'm doing good.

Dan Letzring: At least you got good with the bad right, so that's pretty good.

Patrick Rauland: Yes, it is way better than just bad.

Dan Letzring: Just bad, yeah. Hopefully tomorrow's all good.

Patrick Rauland: Thank you, I hope so. Actually this'll air after I go to it, but I'm going to the Tabletop Network this weekend, which is a little design conference in Utah, and I'm super excited about it.

Dan Letzring: That's excellent. Great, well I hope you have a great time there.

Patrick Rauland: Thank you. Hopefully I sound smarter in future podcasts.

Dan Letzring: I'm sure you'll be great.

How Did You Get Into Board Games?

Patrick Rauland: Dan, how did you get into board games and board game design?

Dan Letzring: I started on board games probably like everyone else. I had a few friends who were really into board games, so they would always talk about it. I had some coworkers who always kind of talked about Settlers of Catan, and I had two different groups who played it separately and they were always talking about it, and I was like, what are these people talking about. So I had one of them introduce me to it, and shorty after that different people introduced me to Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Dominion, all within like a month. I played all these games with different groups of people. Really once you play all those essentials you either love it or you hate it, and I loved it, and we just got into board games shortly after that.

Patrick Rauland: I love that you listed a ton of those intro games, and I just had to ask, which one of those intro games, if you could introduce someone with one of those intro games, which one would you pick?

Dan Letzring: Actually right now I use Splendor a lot, because I think it's really intuitive, and it's slick in that the progression of building that engine, and when you get to the point of just taking cards for free, it has a very rewarding experience. Just being able to all of a sudden realize what you've built and the cards you can start grabbing. It's so simple and intuitive with it, but the fulfillment you get from it, I find a lot of people really have been loving it when they're not really into board games. I've been using Splendor probably more than anything to try and introduce new people to games.

Patrick Rauland: I love it. Splendor's great. I think I overplayed Splendor. I think when it first came out a friend of mine got it for me, and I think I played it probably 15 times in a couple months, and that was enough. You know what I mean? I felt like all right, I got the gist of the game.

Dan Letzring: Yeah. I don't play it as often any more either, but my wife loves it for two-player. She and I will play it a lot if we just have a quick night, that we're exhausted and we just want to play something, and we don't want to learn something new or spend the time playing games all night. We'll just grab Splendor to play quickly, or like I said, if I'm introducing new people.

What Do You Like About Publishing Board Games?

Patrick Rauland: Great. You have a background in designing games, and it seems like now you're moving into publishing. What is it about publishing that you enjoy?

Dan Letzring: First I like just running my own business and having my own company. I have been wanting to do that for a very long time, and this has just been such a blast to do. I love running Kickstarter campaigns, and the community building involved with that, and the social media involved with having a social media company. You can do that as a designer too, but I love all the aspects that it takes to have my own company. I also love taking a design and bringing it to a publishable game. I love developing it to be a really final and completely game, I love getting artwork and seeing all of that come together and make a final product. I really just love every step of the process of taking a game from a designer, making it something amazing, and helping those designers get their games out there. It's really just been a natural kind of transition for me to do that.

Patrick Rauland: I really like that. I was just talking with someone earlier about being a game creator, and it sounds like you're sort of embracing the whole process. One thing about the process for me that stands out is … I feel like I've designed a game, and it's not published it yet, but I've designed it and I'm really happy with it, and there's a really fun core, but I feel like I'm going through all this pain of dealing with manufacturers. How d you get over that hump? Because it seems like you really enjoy the whole process, and I'm not enjoying the whole process.

Dan Letzring: I think that's the difference. Like I tell people all the time, some people make a game and they're like, “I've got my game, I'm going to publish it or I'm going to put it on Kickstarter.” I'm like whoa, there's a lot that goes into publishing, more than just putting your game on Kickstarter, and for some people it's just not the right step. That's okay, because there are tons of … I think with Kickstarter and the board game boom, there are so many indie publishers too, so it's not just like there are five big companies and they have thousands of submissions. There are small companies too who will help you get there.

Dan Letzring: If you're designing games and that's where you like ending the process, is once you've finished your design, find publishers, or reach out to indie publishers. Go to Protospiels or all sorts of events that you can show off your designs to publishers, and have someone else publish it. For me, I like doing those things. Like you said, I like building the quotes and making relationships with the manufacturers, and handling all the fulfillment and the freighting and all of it. It is a nightmare and it can stress you out big time, but I enjoy doing it. If you don't though, it's horrible, and you don't want to make yourself miserable doing it, so just stop at the points you love and try and find someone you can work with to help do the rest.

How Did You Get Into Self Publishing?

Patrick Rauland: Love it. I think my question … You've already done this a few times now, so it's pretty obvious that you like doing it, but how did you decide for your first game that you wanted to do it yourself?

Dan Letzring: Really my first-first game was a small card game about going to grad school, and I knew it was the kind of thing that no one would want to really publish. It was kind of my thing, like I wanted this grad school themed game I made, and I knew I wanted to transition into having my own company, so basically I just kind of knew I was just going to do it myself, and so I did.

Patrick Rauland: Love it. I kind of want to shift gears into your new game, which is The Neverland Rescue. It's, what is the word I'm looking for here, it's … What is it where two people have very different roles.

Dan Letzring: Asymmetrical.

Patrick Rauland: Thank you.

Dan Letzring: Yes.

Patrick Rauland: I had the word written down somewhere and now I can't find it on the page. It's an asymmetrical game.

Dan Letzring: Yes.

Why Design an Asymmetrical Game?

Patrick Rauland: Why did you look into designing a game that's asymmetrical, as opposed to, I think in my brain it's easier to design a symmetrical game.

Dan Letzring: The game was designed by Scott Almes first, so it wasn't designed by me. The whole conversation started with, we had a theme idea in mind, which wasn't the final theme. He pitched me a game he had that was this two-player asymmetrical game, and I really liked it because we really tailored it so it was two different game experiences in a game depending on which role you were playing, which I thought was pretty exciting. Because you just had this different game feel. You play as, say, Peter Pan five, ten times through, and then you're like okay, I don't really want to play as Pan any more. You switch to Hook, it's like a whole new game you've just acquired without even having to buy a whole new game. I really like that about it, and I love two-player only games, and as I said, my wife and I play a lot of games at night together sometimes. It just really was something I wanted to move forward. There are a lot of two-player games, but I'd love more of them, and I wanted something that really was a purely two-player quick asymmetrical game. So we moved forward with it, and we fell in love with it pretty quickly.

Is It Hard to Balance an Asymmetrical Game?

Patrick Rauland: I really like that, and I think I have to agree, I'm sort of just playing with a lot of ideas right now, and I am kind of liking the idea of a three-v-one game, just because basically everyone is against the bad guy. I think the asymmetrical nature of that would mean it feels like two completely different games. Which I think is just a really cool way to … I'm sure it's really hard to balance. Was it hard to balance? That's an assumption I have.

Dan Letzring: It was and it wasn't. Where it's two players it's easy to get iterations played, and it's only a half hour roughly to play, especially once you know the game. When you're doing these kind of play testing as well, sometimes you don't play through easily. In a three hour chunk at night with two people, you can hammer through a lot of changes quickly and see what works and what doesn't. What we had to do was play test a lot and kind of get win ratios, how it was balancing out, like how often was Pan winning, how hard was it for Hook, what could we change to balance that out? That might be slight changes that didn't really come to us in the beginning of the game. We made those changes.

Dan Letzring: It started with, Hook won far less than Pan. He has [inaudible 00:09:10] and it's harder. It was about 60-40, where it was Pan to Hook, Pan winning 60% of the time. The cards get placed out at the beginning of each round, and it used to go Hook would pick where they go, then Hook, then Pan, then Hook, then Pan. We realized to streamline it, and to give Hook more advantage with baiting Pan and setting the stage, Hook should just do it every time. That simple change just kind of gave him a little more leverage in how he played his game, and more advantage in how he could win to kind of even it out more. It kind of actually made it a little more asymmetrical in that there was a very different feel between Hook and Pan. It actually worked on all fronts for us when we made that small change, but it really just came from play testing a lot and kind of just thinking about it over and over again.

Patrick Rauland: I love it. My question is, what is “play testing a lot”? You said 60-40. Did you play 100 games? Did you play 15 games?

Dan Letzring: I don't really know the number, because like I said, in one night we could play four or five times through and then we'd just do that every other day or so, you know what I mean, for a while. Also where it wasn't just my game. Scott had a version too, and we would both be play testing over a couple weeks. Then we'd touch base to see where we were, what kind of notes we had from it, and where the win ratios were. It wasn't just who's wing, it was how many rounds did it take to get there, how close was the opponent to winning. It was like, Pan won 60% of the time; in these five games Pan won in the 5th round, Hook had guessed three of Pan's hidden locations out of five. It was kind of stats on that, as to how close was the game, how far into the game was it, and what did we need to do to keep it a decent length and a decent win. When Pan wins we want Hook to be close to winning. We don't want him guessing one or two out of five. There was a lot of that. You lose count after a while, but it was a lot. I don't know.

Patrick Rauland: Was it more than 100 games, or was it closer to 1,000 games?

Dan Letzring: No, it was probably like 100 or so. This was a game prior that Scott had already made as well, so we made a lot of changes, but it was a game that he had made. It was published with a quick small print run, it wasn't reprinted, he retained the rights back to it, and then we made it more in-depth and we added more things going on with it. It was something he had actually worked on for a long time anyway, so it actually had a really good core before we even got it, if that makes sense.

What Does Your Design Process Look Like?

Patrick Rauland: Got it, yeah. Let's go back to some of your earlier, maybe some of the games that you designed. What does your design process look like, from idea up to and let's say all the way through development?

Dan Letzring: I've actually had varied designs. I try to think, theme or mechanics first comes up a lot. I think about have of mine have been theme first and half of mine have been mechanics first. I can't really say I choose one over the other, but what I do end up doing is, once I have a theme and I have a set level of gameplay, I use the two to kind of intertwine. Something like my family game Dino Dude Ranch started as a farming game, and it was kind of money-based, but then as we changed the theme into dinosaurs we changed the resources to meat, leaves, and fish based on what the dinosaurs eat, and that kind of altered gameplay a little bit in that there were three resources instead of two. We kind of interwove the theme and the mechanics until we had a working product. Usually I start with one, I build on that, make a game, and then kind of feed the two into each other to make it work.

Patrick Rauland: I totally do that. I still don't know whether it's better to start with a theme or a mechanic, but I definitely rely on the theme when I'm making changes, you know what I mean.

Dan Letzring: Yes.

Patrick Rauland: It's like, how can we solve this problem? Oh, in real life we would do this.

Dan Letzring: Yeah, I agree. I think whatever inspires you is the right answer. It might be like, when we started with Groves, for me it was, I really wanted a worker placement game. I love worker placements, and so the mechanics drove that one. Like Ph.D the game was theme, because I wanted a grad school game, but something like Mint Julep, that Button Shy published of mine, that started as, I wanted to make a really interesting 18-card game with multiple use cards and abilities on them. That was mechanics first, but what inspired me was, when I sat down I was like, “This is the type of game I'm going to make.” And I just sat down and went with it. Sometimes you're like, “I really want to make a game about space ships.” If that's what inspires you, great, but if you're like, “I love pickup and deliver,” then go with that. Whatever you're excited about, I think, is really the right answer.

Are You Looking into Any Themes or Mechanics For a Future Game?

Patrick Rauland: I love it. Are there any things that are especially alive for you, either a theme or a mechanic that you're looking into and you want to put into your next game?

Dan Letzring: I don't have anything really burning like that. I've wanted kind of a more social deduction game, kind of like a Werewolf that doesn't have elimination. Something almost like Two Rooms and a Boom, where some people can win and some people don't, but it varies. Something like that has always been kind of exciting to me, but really the big thing was, I wanted a worker placement game. We did that with Groves, and there was bag building, which is also a super exciting game for me. I love games with tons of dice too, building dice pools. That might be something I want to explore at some point, but really with Groves, that scratched a big itch of mine, that I'm not really burning for anything in particular yet.

Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I have to say, I love having buckets of dice. I also play, do you know Warhammer, it's a tabletop game?

Dan Letzring: Yeah, I don't play it but I know of it, of course.

Patrick Rauland: It's a tabletop game, there's miniatures, and one of the armies I play is Orks, and when a full squad of 30 Orks charge it's 120 dice. There is this magical feeling of rolling 120 dice all at once.

Dan Letzring: That's amazing. I like this.

Patrick Rauland: There's so many dice, I think people build strategies like, okay I have 100 dice, all the dice that fit in this cup is 100, so you don't have to count them out every time. It's a fun thing, so I love that idea. If you ever want to … We'll have to brainstorm some 100-dice games after this.

Dan Letzring: Definitely. I am onboard for that. I am 100% onboard for that.

Patrick Rauland: I think the game will be really expensive, but I think it'll be really fun.

Dan Letzring: Definitely, I love it already.

Patrick Rauland: Cool. All right, love that. I'm distracted by 100 dice. So you've done a whole different … It seems like you do a wide range of games. Do you think you'll ever go back to five years from now, or a year from now you'll go, “Hm, I want to do another micro game,” or, “I want to do another worker placement game,” or do you think you're just going to keep trying to spread out and try more varied concepts?

Dan Letzring: I like varied concepts, in that a lot of times it's really nice when I go somewhere and someone comes to my table of games, and people have different tastes, and if you have something that appeals to someone, no matter who it is, that's very enticing for me, to have games that, basically a broad range. Again, yeah, it's really whatever gets me excited. There's already another Button Shy contest coming up for the GenCant, and I'm like oh, maybe we'll enter this. Because it's just, things come up that get exciting, and you might just make something just for the fun of it that you really … I don't know, wherever inspiration strikes, it's kind of funny how it works. Sometimes it just pops in and you want to work on it.

What Games Do You Like That Are Underappreciated?

Patrick Rauland: Love it! Are there any underappreciated games that you just think an aspiring game designer should try out?

Dan Letzring: Underappreciated, let me think about … For underappreciated, what we were just talking, one of my favorite games that … I don't think a lot of people love it, but I love Kings Forge. Have you played Kings Forge?

Patrick Rauland: I don't think I have.

Dan Letzring: I definitely feel like there are some things in that game that need work, and I think they're working on expansions that do help with it, but you're building dice pols. There are two phases to the round. One, you use your dice to buy more dice, or you craft items with the dice you have remaining. You can't use the ones you buy dice with to craft, so there's balance of how much dice to I spend now, because then I can't role them later. Because when crafting you have criteria to meet, and you only need three black dice rolling a five-five-six to craft the item, so it's better to roll 10 black dice instead of five black dice. You don't want to spend them all to increase your odds.

Dan Letzring: I just love it, because it's that feeling, like you said, of, if you don't spend them all you have this handful of 15 dice at times, and you roll them … There are ways to manipulate your dice and add modifiers to them, so it has some of that mitigation going on. I love anything where you're building pools of things, whether it's bags of chits or dice, and I love rolling lots of dice, so for me that game, I don't know, I just enjoy it. It's a fun guilty pleasure of mine, and I think that it's a lot of fun. My wife and I play that one a lot too.

What's the Best Money You've Spent?

Patrick Rauland: Love it. What is some of the best money that you've ever spent as a game designer?

Dan Letzring: The best money I ever spent as a game designer, I would say, is definitely on probably more games. Because really, learning how things work and playing things … I mean you're working on designing a game and you're like, the scoring on this needs to be fixed, and then you're like, wait a second, the scoring in this game, the style they use here, would be perfect. I think just having experience with different methods of gameplay and different actions that can happen in a game and different types of scoring, they're great for either refining a design you have or inspiring a new design. Playing new games, and just seeing fun things that are out there so that they can spark something inside you that is a really fun game that you make.

Patrick Rauland: And of course they should obviously buy your games, because then they could have more experience with the type of stuff you do.

Dan Letzring: Naturally, exactly.

What Resources Do You Recommend?

Patrick Rauland: Cool. Let's say excluding games, what resource would you point people towards, podcasts, books, blogs, what sort of information is out there that you think maybe not a lot of aspiring board game designers know about?

Dan Letzring: There are so many. There are a lot of podcasts. Breaking Into Board Games is out there with Ian Zang and Tony Miller is out there, and there's the Board Game Designer's Forum, which is a set of forums for aspiring game designers. When I start out, I don't go in there any more, and it's mostly because using it on my phone is terrible, but The Game Crafter, that's where I do a lot of my prototypes from, they have a chatroom, and that's kind of where I started with all of it. There's a great community there, and they're great for answering questions, and I used to be one of those people who it was great for answering questions, but like I said, I don't go in there any more. There and even just Twitter, there are so many people who are so accessible, and if you go there you'll find all the podcasts and the forums. There's so many places that you can find.

Dan Letzring: Then if you're looking to get into Kickstarter and crowdfunding, there are great blogs by Jamey Stegmaier and James … I always forget how to pronounce his name, but from Minion Games. Their blogs are fantastic for getting into crowdfunding. The resources are literally endless, and so coming online and finding these people is … Like I said, social media will point you to all of these things. Yes, those are a few of them.

Patrick Rauland: Those are all great, and I recognize most of them, so they sound great, but what is the Board Game Designer's forum? Where is that?

Dan Letzring: Let's see. Board Games …

Patrick Rauland: Okay.

Dan Letzring: No, I'm searching it right now to get the exact link for it. It's BGDF.com

Patrick Rauland: Okay, great.

Dan Letzring: Yeah, it's great. It's a set of forums that, they have announcements and press releases, a place to just hang out and talk, feedback, game design contests, there are all sorts of … They'll link contests there. It's a great resource, and so I would highly recommend it. It's www.BGDF.com/Forum.

How Many Games Do You Work on at any Given Time?

Patrick Rauland: Love it. So the Neverland Rescue, it's coming to wraps as we're recording, but it'll be done by the time this is posted. I guess that makes me think, are you already working on your next games? And maybe how many games do you have on the back burner at any one time?

Dan Letzring: We have a lot going on right now. We have, let me think … I have one game I'm working on that's kind of in the middle of development, and it's going to be a huge game. The concept of it was based off of Final Fantasy Tactics, the video game. We really focus on the job class advancements. That's the main goal of the game. It's a series of boss encounters basically, is what it is. I'd say we're about halfway through. We have about four boss encounters really well done, but we want about 12 to 15 at least. It's pretty early on in the development of it, but we're working hard on that. I have one game I'm working on publishing with another small publisher that we haven't really announced yet, but we're pretty much in the heat of development, and it's probably going to be on Kickstarter before the end of the year.

Patrick Rauland: Can I pause you for a second?

Dan Letzring: Yeah.

Patrick Rauland: The Final Fantasy Tactics game, you said it's going to be huge. Like there's a lot of components, or it's going to be massively popular?

Dan Letzring: Hopefully both, but no, a lot of components. We have, it's like a thousand cards I think.

Patrick Rauland: Whoa!

Dan Letzring: Because we want a lot of different options for job classes, and it's like building a deck, so if you go this route you get these cards added to your deck, if you go that route … So every way you go there are a lot of different cards involved, so we need all the options open to everyone, so that's just a lot of cards. It's going to be big, but it'll be worth it, and we're going to probably do-

Patrick Rauland: Is it like Legacy?

Dan Letzring: No. You can reset it and go back. We're going to have deck building in that you have a set deck, but you're going to have a box you could store it in, so you could pause it. We want the encounters to be shorter so you could do three or four in a night, like 45 minutes maybe. The first intro one is about half an hour, and then ones after that are about 40, 45 minutes. Then you're just building a deck, and then at the end of it you can redo the decks. We're going to actually have different ways you can branch out for the boss encounters, so even if you play through it a second time it wouldn't be the same boss encounters over and over again. Then depending on which route you go you're going to have obviously different cards in your deck and different ways you play it.

Patrick Rauland: So while it's not Legacy, it's definitely a campaign type of game.

Dan Letzring: Yeah. That's why I say it's big, because it's just a huge endeavor. We have that, there's a smaller game that we're co-publishing with someone else that we haven't announced yet so I'm not going to say too much about it, and then I have another project that's kind of related to board games but it's not a board game. That one we're starting to move forward with heavily now. I have three or four projects that we're steadily moving forward with, which is a lot at times, but that's what we want to do, is we want to put out … We want to grow my company and put more fun things out there.

How Many Projects Should an Aspiring Designer Work On?

Patrick Rauland: Totally. As someone who's new to this world, as I am, should I have four projects, or should I be focused on one?

Dan Letzring: For me, I always have a couple things going until I find the one that clicks. Especially as a publisher, once I know what game I'm moving forward with next, usually that's all I focus on. I can't really be sidetracked with other things. If I'm developing something I need to develop it, coordinate art for it, think about designing layout that we're going to talk to for the graphic designer. Once I know for sure what's next and what's clicking, I pretty much scrap everything else and put them aside into folds, and leave myself notes as to where I was with them, and I just stop worrying about other things. The reason I'm able to do this is, a lot of the projects I'm doing right are with other people as well, so we're kind of tag teaming them, so I can kind of parse myself out a little differently with it. I think, usually with the design especially, I have three or four things going until I'm like, “Ha, this is it,” and then I just put everything else aside till the one I'm working on is fully fledged.

Patrick Rauland: I really like that, because I think I've sort of had that, of “This is the game I'm working on,” and while I have other ideas, they don't go past much more than a drawing in a notebook, and that's kind of where they stop.

Dan Letzring: Yeah, and sometimes if you only focus on one thing, you get stuck with it or you can't move forward with it, but you're like, “I'm going to get through this.” But if you have three things going and you kind of tinker with each, all of a sudden one of them will click and you're like, “Okay, I need to drop everything else,” and you just run with that one.

What Does Success Look Like For You?

Patrick Rauland: Got it. Love it! I seems like you've had a lot of success already with published games. What does success look like in the board game world to you?

Dan Letzring: Really for me, as long as I'm not losing money on it. For me really, every year I want to get bigger and better. I want to put out maybe more games, or if not more games, sell more of the games I'm putting out that year, or have better Kickstarters or more funding. Personal goals like that. Really for me, as long as I'm having these successful campaigns, and the games are being well received, and people are really enjoying them, for me that's success right there. Because as of right now, it'd be great someday to be able to do a full time, but this isn't my full time thing either. You know I recognize it for what it is, as me doing this on the side. If I'm putting these games out and people are liking this then that's a win for me, and I'm happy at that point.

Overrated Underrated Game

Patrick Rauland: Love it. Cool, so let's move on to the last little thing. I like to play this game called overrated-underrated, and basically I'm going to give you a word or a phrase, and then you're going to have to tell me whether you think people think it's overrated or underrated. If I said Star Wars you're going to say clearly underrated, it's the best franchise ever. Got it?

Dan Letzring: Okay.

Patrick Rauland: Cool. First one, asymmetrical games. Are they overrated or underrated?

Dan Letzring: I think they're overrated. I think there are very few popular ones, and I think they're great, I love them, so I think that they should get more hype than they do. I'm not just saying that because I'm running one right now, but I think in general I've always really enjoyed them, and I don't think they get as much love as they should.

Patrick Rauland: Love it. This one's a little bit long. Live action versions of an animated movie. For example Hook, or I think Beauty and the Beast just had one as well.

Dan Letzring: That's a hard one, because there are some that are great and some that are terribly done. I think if they stick to the original movie more … That's not even a thing I could say. I'm going to have to put out some. Hook, Beauty and the Beast, even Maleficent, were fantastic, and they were fantastic for different reasons. Jungle Book I didn't love, and Cinderella I didn't love. They've been kind of hit or miss. I'm going to have to put that one right in the middle.

Patrick Rauland: All right. Next one, platformers, and by platformers I mean those sort of side scrolling video games.

Dan Letzring: Oh, these are the games I grew up with, of course these are underrated, they're amazing.

Patrick Rauland: Last one, T-rexes. Overrated or underrated?

Dan Letzring: They're definitely underrated. I'm a dinosaur lover man, come on! T-rexes are amazing!

Patrick Rauland: But they can't pick up anything with their tiny tiny hands!

Dan Letzring: I know but their heads are huge and their teeth are so big, they can eat whatever they need. They just bend over and grab it with their head.

Conclusion

Patrick Rauland: Love it. Dan, thank you for being on the show. Where can people find you online?

Dan Letzring: My company is Letiman Games, L-E-T-I-M-A-N Games. On Twitter I'm @LetimanGames, Instagram also. On Facebook it's Facebook.com/LetimanGames. And www.LatimanGames.com. From there anyone can find me and contact me, I'm readily available and pretty much always there and available to answer questions.

Patrick Rauland: Is it possible … This will probably come out a week or two after your game, The Neverland Rescue, is done. Is there anyway to link back or anything like that?

Dan Letzring: Yeah, so there'll be a link on the Kickstarter page, and it'll be linked on my website and everywhere else, to pre-order it. Usually what I do is, the pre-orders are typically a little than what the Kickstarter was, but they're still going to be below MSRP with shipping.

Patrick Rauland: Awesome. Dan, thank you so much for being on the show, and for you viewers, if you like this podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this. If you do leave a review, Dan said that he'd spread fairy dust over your next game design so that it's 100% amazing. Thank you Dan for offering that.

Dan Letzring: Yeah, no problem, I just want to make their games magical, that's all. Best I can do.

Patrick Rauland: You can visit us at IndieBoardGameDesingers.com and you can follow me on Twitter, @BFTrick. Until next time, happy designing. Thanks everyone, bye-bye.

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Last week I attended Origins and it was a blast. I had a great time playing games, meeting designers, and most importantly I'd like to share my experience at Publisher Speed Dating where I showed off my game Fry Thief.

• Publishers gave conflicting advice so you have to parse the information. They might not be the right publisher for you.
• They asked interesting questions
  • How would you make your game 100 card game?
  • How would you make this a 3-4 player game?
• Many publishers were instantly interested or disinterested which is good. If they weren't interested they were kind and gave advice on which publishers you should follow up with.
• Two publishers took my game home. I can only assume that's a good sign!

Pro tip: don't forget your sell sheets in your hotel room.