Think Like A Game Designer - 50 Episodes of Game Design Wisdom

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Guests featured:* Keith Baker* Monty Cook* Raph Koster* Richard Garfield* John Zinser* Elizabeth Hargrave* Eric Lang00:03:06 — Keith BakerLesson: Creating a world that becomes a playable game.Baker explains how he designed the Eberron setting and why fantasy worlds need recognizable hooks that players can quickly understand.00:17:31 — Monty CookLesson: How RPG worlds and systems come together in design.Cook discusses the process of building role-playing games and the interplay between storytelling, mechanics, and player experience.00:23:24 — Raph KosterLesson: Designing games through structured creative practice.Koster explains his ideation process, how he takes notes and prototypes ideas, and why constraints and deliberate practice help designers develop new game concepts.00:33:18 — Richard GarfieldLesson: Spend your “complexity points” wisely.Garfield talks about balancing innovation and accessibility, emphasizing that too much novelty can make games harder for players to understand.00:40:33 — John ZinserLesson: A successful game needs a strong hook.Zinser explains how publishers evaluate games and why clear differentiation is critical when pitching or launching a new title.01:04:36 — Elizabeth HargraveLesson: Passionate themes can unlock new audiences.Hargrave discusses how Wingspan succeeded by pairing a unique theme with mechanics that reinforce that theme.01:17:03 — Eric LangLesson: Great games come from iteration and cutting what doesn’t serve the design.Lang discusses engine design, playtesting, and how cohesion between theme and mechanics strengthens a game.If you’ve ever had a game idea but didn’t know how to turn it into a real, playable design, my Design Labs program walks you through the entire process. With 60+ lessons, practical assignments, and a private Discord community, you’ll learn how to move from inspiration to prototype, playtesting, iteration, and publishing.Learn More at JustinGaryDesigns.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective, whether it's inside the gaming realm or beyond. I have something I am so excited to finally announce.

If you are serious about designing games, not just thinking about games, not just listening to the podcast and dreaming about games, but actually finishing your own designs, then I have created something for you. It is the brand new, think like a game designer, design lab. It is a step-by-step system that I have created and tested with dozens of other creators and other aspiring designers

that includes over 60 lessons to take you from generating ideas to building prototypes to finding playtesters, refining your core design loop all the way through publishing, running a crowd fund, and even getting hired in the industry. You'll also get access to my private design Discord

filled with me, members of the Stoneblade team, and other creators all actively building games. Plus, I've got some incredible bonuses for people who join right now and for longtime fans of the podcast. If you're ready to stop, attending and start actually designing games with intention. Check out the Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab at justingarydesigns.com. I'm very excited to get to present to you this series of

best of clips from the Think Like a Game Designer podcast. Now best of isn't really fair to say because there's so much great content and I try to distill 50 episodes worth of interviews into just an hour or so of content. So of course a lot of great stuff had to get cut. So I really tried to focus on bringing a wide variety of great insights from across the different genres of gaming so that you can kind of get a taste of what's out there. We have incredible role-playing game designers or RPG designers like Keith Baker and Monte Cook. We have incredible video game designers like Raf Koster, who created Ultima Online. We have the best trading card game designers in the world with Richard Garfield who created the trading card game genre, also referred to as TCG or CCG, and John

Zinzer who founded AEG and created a Legend of the Five Rings along with countless other traditional tabletop games. Elizabeth Hargrave, who created one of the most successful tabletop games with an incredibly unusual theme. We talk about that process. And finally, Eric Lang, who is well known as having a wide variety of designs across the tabletop genre. So hopefully these insights are really powerful to you and spark your creativity, spark your

excitement. There's tons more to dig into. but this is really meant to be kind of a survey introduction of all of the cool insights that all these brilliant minds have been able to provide to me, and hopefully that you would enjoy them as much as I do. Imagine creating your own fantasy world and having it selected from a sea of thousands to be turned into a brand new Dungeons and Dragons universe. Here we see lessons from Keith Baker, who did exactly that,

creating one of the most popular worlds in Dungeons and Dragons ever on, Here he talks about what it takes to create a genre like this and how he entered the fantasy search contest. And we also talk about what it takes to turn a fantasy world into a game and how his world evolved as he worked with the people from Dungeons and Dragons to bring his idea to life. So anybody out there that has game concepts or stories and worlds learning how to merge those two. Keith is one of the experts at it and you'll learn that from him now. All right. So let's talk about the fantasy setting search. What was that experience like?

And then the, of course, incredible success from Eberon. What did that, how did that go about? So the fantasy setting search was essentially a lot of people, there's, you know, a lot of people have heard about it, but don't know all the details. One of the common misconceptions is that it was a contest. And technically it wasn't a contest because contest implies that they have to have a winner. and technically wizards could have just decided they didn't like anything that was submitted. So what it actually was was an open call.

Essentially, they said anybody out there, including employees of wizards, including people like me who had done a certain amount of freelance work, including people who had no experience at all, but anybody could send them a one-page description of a D&D setting. And essentially, Wizards of the Coast had acquired Dungeons and Dragons from TSR. They'd inherited all of the existing settings, but they basically wanted something that was entirely unique to Wizards of the Coast. So I don't think initially they were expecting to get that many entries. You know, again, open calls are a standard practice, you know, in the industry.

Send in an idea. You know, if we like it, we'll use it. They got over 11,000 entries. And basically, it was a one page tell us about the world, who are the heroes, what's magic like, what makes it new and interesting. And I personally sent in seven different ideas. And everyone was the last one I wrote. Wow. Almost is an afterthought because I was just like, this seems fun.

It seems kind of essentially too wacky for them to be interested, but it's fun. And I think actually that's why they picked it, is frankly because I had fun writing it. I think it was clear from the proposal, like this is what's fun about this. But I definitely, it was a couple months after submitting it, I was actually on vacation. And this is before smartphones and all of that. So I was on vacation. I was coming back from a trip. I was in an airport.

My partner randomly decided that they were going to check our messages at home, you know, on your home voicemail that we hadn't looked at for days. And there was a phone call from Wizards of the Coast saying, hey, you've made this, you know, the semifinal round, but we need you to, we've emailed you a form and we need it back at what at that time was today. So we basically ran around this airport, found an internet

cafe where we could print out this thing they'd sent and found a FedEx where we could send it off immediately. But it was a pretty crazy sort of experience that would be a lot easier today with all their various technology. Yes.

There's so many problems like half the plots of Seinfeld that no longer exist in the modern day technology. Exactly. But that was pretty crazy. And then basically for the second phase, you had to write a 10-page description of the world. And then when they picked, you know, they picked from the 11 they chosen. They picked three of them, including Eberon, and we had to turn them into a hundred-page setting Bibles.

Now, the interesting thing to me is that for both the 10 and the 200, you know, the whole thing of it is that Eberon was not, you know, a campaign I'd ever run before. It was something that I made up for the fantasy setting search because it sounded fun to me. So when they actually picked it, just going to the 10-page description, it was very much like, oh, wait, oh, wow, you actually want to see this. Like, now I've got to figure out how it actually works. And so it went through a number of evolutions between the 10 and the 100. And then even once they picked it, what happened is I went up to Seattle for a week and sat in a room with James Wyatt, Chris Perkins, Bill Slavasek, and essentially hammered out the things they liked, the things they didn't like.

How can we make this particular element sort of more dynamic and interesting? So, you know, the end result, the world we have now, you know, certainly has come a very long way since that one page. What types of tips or things, lessons did you get from them in that situation? How did they help refine the world and things that were, you know, what principles were they like, you know, world needs more of this or how do we get? Well, there's two really big ones that come out. One of them is remember that you were making a game. And part of the point of that was that the original world that I made was bigger.

It had a lot more countries, you know, because basically the real world has a lot of countries and cultures. And so the original version of it was more. much more complex as a world. The problem is when you've got to describe this to the players and to the game master, you just only have so many words. There's only so many pages in a book. And we, frankly, even now, 15 years later, there's a lot of areas of Ebron that I still haven't had a chance to describe as deeply as I like. And again, I had twice as many, you know, countries and in that first draft.

So part of it is you have to keep things somewhat simple. You know, sort of tons of details aren't necessarily good if there's so many details that no one person could really absorb them. The other thing about it was that in my original draft, essentially the tech level was higher. The whole idea of Abram from the beginning was that this is a world in which magic is used instead of the sciences we use. And the original version was very much sort of a 1930s-flavored sort of level of development.

So you had basically people using wands instead of bows or crossbows. You know, basically they're using guns. They're just magic guns. You had sort of a lot more just sort of magical conveniences. And part of what they said there is the issue is that, They thought it was cool, but they were also concerned that it wouldn't actually feel like D&D when you were playing it. That it was a little too, almost science fiction, if you will. And I think that's a valuable lesson of essentially you have to, whatever you're doing, when you're working with an intellectual property,

you have to think about the audience and the experience they expect. how are you sort of delivering what sort of people are looking for? I think a big example to this to me is Star Wars games. If you look to a lot of Star Wars games out there, there are some that are really good and some that I'm like, well, you've got Star Wars trappings,

but I don't feel like this is a Star Wars experience. Knights of the Old Republic, the old computer game, is me, one of the classics. My favorite RPG of all time, so you got me sold. Exactly. It's fantastic. And part of what is amazing about that from a design perspective is even though it's set a thousand years in the past, they aren't using any familiar characters, they aren't using the empire, you know, they have Jedi. But, you know, even though they don't have any of the actual concrete touchstones to work with, they understand what feels like a Star Wars adventure. This hits all the notes of what I want to be doing.

You know, becoming a Jedi, you know, facing a big super weapon, you know, all of these sort of notes are there. And essentially, that's just what they were saying here, is that they liked the idea, but it was going too far afield from what was still the core experience of Dungeons and Dragons. And you still needed to have that. Otherwise, it's just confusing to people. And what do you see as the core experience of Dungeons and Dragons? How would you define that? Well, basically, there's a lot of different aspects here. What I feel they were looking for from the core experience of Dungeons and Dragons

is that you own the player's handbook and you don't want to throw out, you know, tear out half the pages. So they were saying that basically this should be a world that includes dwarves and elves. It should be a world in which you have wizards, but you also have fighters who fight with swords and crossbows. That, you know, they wanted this to be a world where knights wear armor, you know, as opposed to saying, well, this is a world where because of the development of high-velocity projectile weapons, nobody wears armor anymore. Gotcha.

You know, that's a realistic thing. But we've moved away from just that image. If I say a party of adventurers, a D&D, you're going to sort of fill in the blanks of, oh, there'll be a big warrior with played armor, and there'll be a half-lane rogue, and there'll be elf wizard. What Eberon did is it took a lot of those core ideas and tweaked them in interesting ways. We had elves, but we said, how do we make the elves different? how do we make the gnomes instead of being you know little forest

comic relief you know nomes they're going to be scary assassin spy noms so you know we changed it up but there was still a place for all those core elements and like I said we didn't completely change

the you know what a fighter looks like if that makes any sense yeah no I think it's great I mean I'm a big believer in this especially when you're talking about making games that last and brands and stories that stand the test of time, you have to be true to the core of what it is. You need to know what that core is and you can't,

and if you deviate from that, you're going to lose your audience. And then you need to be willing to make disruptions around the edges, right? And make people something that shakes it up or they're going to be bored and just getting the same thing over and over again. Exactly. And by giving them those little differences, that contrast creates excitement and creates newness

and creates that imagination flow of like, oh, okay, well, what does this feel like now in this world? And I think that finding that balance is something that a lot of people lose track of. And knowing that core principle, here is the thing that makes D&D, D&D, or Star Wars, or these are the home bases that I'm going to stay around, then I can, you know, run around and play. I mean, basically, like three things that come to my mind and sort of creating a D&D world. you know, one is just trying to get in one to two sentences, can you describe to me what's cool about your world? And if you can't, if you can't sum it down to, you know, you've got me in an elevator for 10 seconds, tell me about your world.

If it's too subtle, if it's too sort of vague, or if it's just, well, it's just a fantasy world, you know, basically if it's either too complicated or if it's just not interesting, then you've got a problem. The next thing is about touchstones for people. So that's the point of elves and dwarves. A lot of people are like, do I have to have elves and dwarves? And of course you don't have to have elves and dwarves.

But part of the reason, too, is if you're dealing with something like D&D, comes back to Star Wars, you know, this is a big brand that a lot of people have broad expectations of. and the ability for someone just to say, it's D&D, I want to play a dwarf fighter. And you'd be able to say, sure, okay, but now you're doing that, let me tell you about the dwarves here. You know, let's add, let's draw you into the world

because the dwarves aren't quite the same. But that's easier than me having to say, well, we don't have dwarves. What we have is a whole bunch of different races that are uplifted animals. And it's not that that's not a cool, interesting story. It's just going to take more investment from the player to get into it. And you've got to be prepared for that.

So basically, do you have a core idea that is compelling and interesting and that you can sum up quickly? Does it have some sort of touchstones for people to match onto? Even the uplifted animals. You can say, well, I like pugs. I'm going to play a pug fighter. You know, that's at least a concept that's easy for people to grasp. And as you were saying, you know, at the end of the day, is there something that in the long term is going to keep people interested, be compelling?

In this clip, we hear from Monty Cook, probably one of the most well-known names in the role-playing game designer genre, known best for his work in Dungeons and Dragons, working both at TSR and Wizards of the Coast, before founding his own company, Monty Cook Games, and releasing countless successful RPG books. And here we talk a little bit about what it takes to build these kinds of rulebooks and the process of how to communicate your information in a way that players can understand that they can use to learn the game and they can use as a reference and how you compress that information in a way that's going to be the most useful and the most entertaining for your players.

A game designer named Jonathan Tweet that I worked with on third edition D&D, he made the great observation that every role playing game product is, it is the thing that you read to learn how to play the RPG, but it's also the reference work that you're going to use throughout your time playing that. And so the first time you read through it, you need the information presented in one way. And then for the rest of the time you're using it, you need to present it in a completely different way, right? You need to be able to reference a rule quickly because you know how it works.

You just need to look it up. I think this is, you're right, especially true in role-playing games, but it's also true in all rule books I've found. You want to actually think about things in terms of like, okay, it's my first time encountering this. I need to go through and get everything. But then very often, some new dispute will come up or you'll forget how a little thing works, and you'll

have to be able to quickly, you'll want to be able to quickly sort and find the rule that you want. And so the idea of making something that is appealing and attractive to want to kind of interact with that can give you a clean ramp up to understand what's going on. And then that can become

a reference tool is like a, it's a, So there are principles that you need to almost, you know, you're creating sort of three different books in one. And that is not, you know, it's not easy, as you said. It's not something that just, you know, you could be like, yeah, well, I've done this enough times. It's no problem, right? I don't have quite the tier of experience that you do, but I've been, you know, written real books for 20 years now. And I have found that that same problem. And it's something you have to kind of keep trying to innovate more.

Is there other ways you can use graphics or the illustrations to help bring things together? Or is there areas where, you know, bringing in a story that kind of connects things together and create some narrative hook or changing the fonts so that the crunchier rules jump out at you. And if you're flipping through or indexes or, you know, there's a million different tools that are available. But understanding the principle of what you're trying to go for to be able to is one of the ways that you could reach these audiences, right? The person who just doesn't have time and needs to put something together. the person who really needs a lot of guidance, the person who's even, you know, the super creative that you don't,

that's easier to do, but that you want to give them something, that's why they're going to come and join your, your world and play in your playground as opposed to any other one they could reach. Yeah, yeah. You know, the word that I find myself using a lot nowadays is,

is empathy, you know, and by that, I mean the ability to kind of put yourself into the, the place of, of the person who's reading your material or trying to use your material at the table and figuring out what they need before they need it, right? It's a bit of a magic trick sometimes.

And I think that, like, for example, one of the things that we did in D&D, in third edition D&D was we decided that examples were really good teaching. tools. And so every time we would present a new rule, it would start with an example. And that example would be italicized. And the reason for that was you would learn that once you come back and you're referring to it and you don't need to learn how it works, you just need to quickly reference the rule. You can skip over the example. You can skip over the italicized and get straight to the, you know, what, you know, what, what, what's the bonus for this action or whatever? And, uh, and that's, that's pretty good. And, and you're, you're, you're,

you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, want, it opens up a whole new vista for how, you know, trying to understand how people get information and how they absorb information and how you can present it, you know, in boxes and bullet points. And, you know, the old way of, of, you know, from 1970, whatever, of doing a thing where you get a map that's on a piece of, grid paper with numbers on it and then a bunch of text that's keyed to those numbers, like, just because that's the first way that it was done does not make it the best way.

In fact, I'm going to argue it's not a good way at all to present role-playing game information. And so, you know, just experimenting with that. That's what I would really encourage people if you are interested in getting into this hobby is, is,

you know, learn what people have done but then think of ways that they haven't done it, right? That presenting the information of coming up with, you know, the ideas for your games. Like, like there's a lot of room to just really blaze a whole new trail. In this clip, we hear from Raff Koster. Raff is one of the first people to create a theory of game design. And his book, A Theory of Fun, was one of my first introductions to the subject.

Raff has created incredible games like Ultima Online and Star Wars galaxies. And in this clip, you actually get to see how he thinks about creating a game. We dig through his process for ideating, his process for note-taking, and you can watch him actually create a game live in the clip itself. And we talk about the value of constraints and the different modes of practice. And so it's a great kind of warm up to the genre of game design and how many different creative aspects can come to life. So this opens up a pretty good topic of conversation

when you talk about your prototyping process and what that looks like. What does your game design process look like, more broadly speaking? You first start on a project, whether it's one that you're kind of initiating on your own or one that you're doing for hire as part of another team. What does that look like?

Can we break that down a little bit? Yeah, it's actually, it does depend a lot. on the individual circumstance. You know, I'll do the easy one first, which is if it's for someone else, usually there's some kind of a box that has been defined for, right? Be it a usually actually, it's multiple boxes. There'll be sort of a technology box, a cost box, call it a resources box, right? Of how much can you work with, right?

Often, in my case, in my career, huge amount of the time, there's been a, an IP box, right, where you have to work inside the constraints of an existing intellectual property, a setting or whatever. And, yeah, there may be other kinds of boxes as well. You know, if you've already got a team, what are their strengths and weaknesses? If you've already got a technology platform, what can it do? And so when I'm in that situation, I start out by trying to analyze first what is it that this is actually about, right?

Like I sit down with the IP and try to figure out what is it that makes this IP tick. If it's the technology, I try to figure out what is it that this tech does well? What is it that I can leverage? What are the things that maybe are unexpected things that it might be able to do? If it's the team, if it's, you know, it's about figuring out what's the palette, right? What is it that I can work with? And that's kind of the first step from that side, because usually if you've got a got situation like that, you're answering to somebody who has pretty specific ideas.

Of course, I prefer being in the opposite situation, which is just me. Who doesn't, right? But the interesting thing is that then I have to build my own box. And I usually find that to be one of the first steps is building a box for myself. I'm one of those people that believes that constraints breeds creativity. So I look to impose constraints on myself. So they might be technology constraints, right? Actually, we mentioned the GameCrafter earlier.

When they came out with triangular-shaped piles, I said, fantastic, a new constraint. What can I go make out of triangles? Right. So I like using constraints that way as something to ideate with. and sometimes those constraints might be computational and sometimes they might be physical if it's a physical game. The principles for me for arriving at game system ideas

really it doesn't make that big a difference whether I'm working digital or analog. And often I'll move back and forth between the two, not knowing where the eventual game will end up living. Interesting. So just to kind of restate it back, So you'll, you know, when you're working on your own, you'll try to, in some way, sort of simulate the constraints that you would get when working for someone else or with a team by saying, all right, we're going to build around this constraint or this particular feature. But you'll, even within that constraint, you'll occasionally jump between digital and physical development for a project as you're sort of designing the idea.

That's right. So when I start ideating, I usually start thinking from one of two ends, right? And I've found that designers in general tend to have a preferred end to start from. And we might call it the thematic end and the mechanical end. If you are a thematic end person, then you tend to start thinking in terms of an experience. You tend to start thinking in terms of, oh, here's a world or, here's a character and a story or here's a feeling that I want to evoke, right? Here's an experience I want to give a player.

It's an experiential first kind of lens, right? And then the other end is a mechanical first lens. And this one, instead of thinking about what is the experience like, it might be, okay, I'm starting with triangles. therefore I have you know between either three vertices and edges or maybe

at six connection points and I could add more and what sort of topology does that mean I'm working with and so on right and they're very different ways of working and very different ways

of approaching the problem I find that in my board game work unquestionably I find myself biased towards the mechanical end It's very, very unusual for me to start from the other end with the board games, actually. But in video games, it's pretty common that I start from the experiential end.

And either way, my goal is establish something about what I know at one end, that end, and then use it to jump to the other end and try to draw some conclusions. So, for example, if I start from the experiential end, and I know I want to make a game about, I don't know, throw out some random topic. On the experience. Yeah, a theme or swimming? Yeah. Sure. So if we start with swimming, I start thinking about, okay, so the experience of swimming for me, first, there's a whole bunch of different strokes.

There's the crazy fear of drowning that you have when you start to learn. there's the way in which rhythm is incredibly important to swimming. Breath management, and I immediately go, okay, breath sounds like it might be a resource, and it might be something that's consumed on a periodic basis, but there might also be some kind of overall exhaustion meter that goes down over time and starts capping your breath. And then different strokes might then involve different expenditure of breath. So if I'm doing this now, if I say, great, I'm going to do it.

do a tabletop game of it, I'm now thinking mechanically, okay, so I can set up a board, some kind of race structure feels very natural for swimming.

Maybe it's themed. Maybe sharks are chasing you. Maybe there's diving challenges or not, you know, whatever. And I'm going to play a game of resource management over time to get as many strokes as I need by perhaps

laying down cards playing tokens, right? So boom, I now have enough to go start building a prototype of that. If it were on the other side, a digital game, I'd probably lean more towards rhythm. It might be a bit of a timing game. I might still use the same concepts of managing resources of breath and endurance, of different strokes being different trade-offs for expenditure of breath, endurance, distance, traversed. right so I basically either way what I want to do is establish these two ends almost of the you know the two anchors for my rope and I want to move inwards and I try to pay attention to both ends as I go part of the reason to just have them all at hand is also to mix and match um right like if I just had the guitar in the room and I had to go someplace else to grab the mandolin I'm a lot less likely to grab the mandolin.

And the same is true, I think, for everything. I think the same is true for all of them. The other thing is that all of those different things are effectively constraint sets too. So one of the exercises that I often do with tabletop games is I mentioned I have this big pile of pieces. I will grab a set of random pieces. And then I'll say, okay, my challenge today is to make a game out of this.

Absolutely. I have the exact same thing. I do that with my teams too, where we'll just have days. We're like, all right, I'm bringing in a bunch of random stuff. And this group has to make a game with this pile of stuff. And this group has to make a game with this pile of stuff. And then we're going to crossplay them. And it's a really, really fun mind-stretching exercise.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's vital. It's different forms of practice. In this next clip, we talked to the godfather of trading card games to Richard Garfield. I've been honored to work with on our game, SoulForge Fusion. We've worked together for over a decade. And he has, without a doubt, the sharpest mind in the industry when it comes to the nuances of game design. And here we dive into that. With these clips, we talk about the idea of complexity points and how the amount of complexity,

and depth you put in your game has to be spent wisely and how you should think about using those quote unquote complexity points. And we also talk about the idea of balance, another very difficult and misunderstood topic that he can really give some insight into who you're really balancing for. Is it new players? Is it players who are super advanced? And so you can kind of think about when you're building games, you're building who's the audience that you want to reach for. I also, I just want to pause and underscore because I think there was, you said, not only a really important principle, but one that I think divides into two, which is the, there's the idea of complexity points, which I think is important for any designer.

And actually, one of the most common mistakes I see in new game designers is they just try to throw way too much at the project, and it becomes too hard to grok everything that's happening and understand what's happening. And that's true, regardless of even if you're innovating greatly or just have a lot happening within a game. And then there's the idea that innovation is great, but too much innovation is bad. that if you innovate too much, people can't relate to things that they know.

They can't be able to get what's going on, and you can actually be too far ahead of the curve when you're designing, and so that you actually want to really focus on a core innovation or a limited subset that are related in a new project that will bring people along with you and then provide the foundation, like the building blocks we talked about earlier, to then build new things on top of that. No, that's super important.

And it's something, which is one of the, the things we are in danger of these days is losing one of the most exciting things about games, which is that a good game becomes better and better the more you play it, not more used up. So games, I like to think about games as books and movies and so forth, but they're very, very different. Games are more like music, because oftentimes when you hear a piece of music the first time, it doesn't much, but the more you hear it, the better it gets. So when you have a culture of game players where they play a game once, and then they say, oh, this isn't so good, or, oh, this is okay, but I want to go over to this next game.

Then you've got a culture of game players who are not getting what is absolutely the most exciting part of games to me, which is that the better you know it, the better it gets. And so as a game designer, when you over-innovate, what you're doing is you're making it so players can't bring as much expertise into the game so they get into that exciting part where they really know the game all that much slower. And so that really costs you. Yeah, I think certainly a lot about game balance. So what people mean by game balance often changes also. People aren't consistent with what they're referring to when they talk about game balance. Oftentimes people will play a particular game and they'll say, oh, this game wasn't

balanced and what they are saying when you dig a little deeper is that they wanted to do a trading strategy and the trading strategy wasn't as powerful as they thought it should be so therefore it wasn't balanced now it could be that the designer did not tend the trading strategy to be look a strategy unto itself but something which is just augmenting other stuff because you can't actually have it so every single strategy is successful because then it doesn't matter why you do. There has to be some strategies that work better than others. So when you've got this person who criticizes based on the fact that what they tried to do didn't work, I mean, obviously that can also work because it's the first time they played. It's crazy how often people will

say a game is unbalanced because in their first play-through, something happened they didn't expect it. They lost the game. And rather than rolling with it during the game or learning from after the game, the game is unbalanced and then they cross it off. It kills me how often that is the reaction because the thing which makes games wonderful to me is that they are so hard to predict and to understand. And that even no matter how good you are, you cannot get the nth degree into a reasonably deep game the first time you play it. I don't even try in my designs to do that because I make the prototype and play it. I do not try to think about it the first time because it's just 10 hours of thinking about something is worth five minutes of play.

Yeah. I sit down and play for five minutes and I understand it a hell of a lot better and then can sort of iterate from there. But something happened to me recently, which got me rethinking some of my thoughts on balance, which was that I was watching a Dice Tower review of the game Tapestry. And Tom Vassel liked the game and talked about all the exciting things in it. One of the things that he was still on the fence about was balance. Some of the aspects of balance, he said, weren't balanced, but you had some ways to address them in the game. And other aspects, he couldn't tell because he had played it long enough, which are reasonable things.

But I found myself listening to that and getting excited by the fact that it might not be balanced or as balanced as is expected these days. And I think these days a lot of designers overbalance their games. They really try to take such strong control over the player experience that they remove a lot of these things which I like to explore in games. And so hearing that about it made me think, oh, I really want to play tapestry because I want to see, you know, as I play through some of these potentially broken characters and see if I can't make the ones that are underpowered, make them work, or kick some ass with the ones that are broken or whatever. Yeah, I think that there's this, I know, I know because I went through this exact process as a designer.

I came at it from, I started as a magic pro player, and then I started working on designing for the versus system trading card game. And I came at it as a pro player, your job is to break the game, right? Your job is to figure out where the thing is degenerate and then find a way to exploit that strategy as much as possible. And I took my job as a designer when I first started designing as making my game unexploitable, right? That I was going to make sure that there was nothing degenerate ever

and ended up paying exactly the price you're talking about, which is that there was a lot less fun. There was a lot less things you could do. There was a lot less discovery of the many possibilities that are out there. And I learned that I needed to be afraid of my designs to make them fun. In this next clip, we hear from John Zinzer. John was one of the founders of A.EG, the AllDirect Entertainment Group, and one of the creators of the Legend of the Five Rings CCG, or Collectible Card Game.

In this clip, we talk about what it takes to make a successful collectible card game, especially one where you don't necessarily have all the budget and what it takes to build it. How do you differentiate yourself in the market? What is the process for building one? And also we then get into a little bit about what John and AEG uses as a process for how they evaluate games and how maybe if you wanted to pitch a game to them or to my company or somewhere, what does that look like and how does that come together? I will encourage you to listen to the entire episode with John because he's one of the best storytellers I know. And there's a lot of really great behind the scenes stuff.

But for now, we're just going to get to the meat of it. So especially for anybody that's interested in making their own game or their own trading card game, there's a lot to listen to in this next clip. So we left that Gen Con and then we formulated a plan to create Legend of Five Rings. The original meeting where we got a few people that were, you know, part of AEG and Ryan's partners up in Seattle, where we brainstorm what we would do, we ended up with, make a cowboy. game, make a pirate game, and make a samurai game up on the board. When we said, let's make a game about samurai, we had a couple of people working for me at the time who were just samurai nuts. And so that was the game that we were going to do. And most of the people working at AEG Shadis were at a role-playing game background. So telling a story with the card.

game was something we were always going to do. The plan was we would tell this cool story and then we would, and you would get the chapters as expansions that we released. Was it, was the idea of having, you know, tournaments and players evolving the story in there from the beginning, or was it something that came later? That was not. So that was, the fact that we knew that we were going to tell the story was, always there. But then we sat down and said, you know, how are we going to get people to,

you know, engage with this game? We can't compete with, with the games that are given away money. We, you know, we just don't have the budget to do that. And, you know, as sort of a marketing thing, we decided that it was going to be an interactive storyline. And we thought that it would be a few small interactive storyline points that we would let players make decisions, with at events. And when we put that into our advertising and announced it, it just sort of took off. And we had no money. We started doing this CCG, and then, as you know, CCGs are expensive.

Yeah, they're very excited. That was going to be my follow-up question. How do you start doing a TCG with no money? Because I get people all the time to tell me that they want, you know, they're just starting in game design. They're like, I got this TCG, I want to make it. I'm like, okay, well, that's a big budget project to start with. How were you handling?

Yeah, so we had cash flow from AEG. And then Ryan and I both got our parents to invest in Five Rings Publishing Group to, you know, to help get the game printed. And Ryan got his, Ryan's company in Seattle. going to be the financiers of the game. So we had just enough backing to do the basics, like to get all of the art ordered and to get the game ready for press. Yeah, no, I want to just sort of highlight a few of the things because, you know, the idea of sort of picking a theme that you guys were passionate about, right, samurai, focusing on a way to differentiate yourself, which is sort of we're going to tell a great story, right? I mean, magic is great and it's got a

a flavorful world, but especially at the beginning, it was more of an open-ended world with a lot of characters and you tell your own story. And here, you guys were focusing on this communal storytelling in a very public way. And that engagement as the hook was the thing that everybody knew about. You know, this is what, this is what, 95, 96 is happening? Yeah. Right. So yeah, I'm, I just start coming into this community around then. So I started playing magic in 96 and and won the U.S. National Championships in 97s, and then I start going to, you know, conventions and things. And all I hear is the L5R people just like cheering and doing their little chance at the other table.

I'm playing for like $20,000, and they are way more excited than anybody at any of my tables. And it was amazing. I was like, what you guys had been able to build an enthusiasm was something that has stuck. And it is, it remains the thing that we reference all of the time, both in my company and elsewhere, whereas the icon of that community building, immersive storytelling, like that incredible hook and magic that you guys were able to create is something that has just made an indelible mark on the industry. And so the fact that you were able to do it with, you know,

borrowing money from your parents and, you know, just kind of hoping for the best as you were building this thing out is amazing. Well, the funny thing is that when we finally, so we did a, um, Peter, I was friends, with Peter Atkinson, but friendly with Peter. And we asked Peter for his one piece of advice if we were going to do a collectible trading card. And his piece of advice was, print a practice sheet.

Like, print a practice sheet. Learn that process. You'll save yourself a whole bunch of headaches and a whole bunch of money. So we built, we basically built one practice sheet that had a different. demo deck on it and some promo cards and and we and we printed that and so um prior to the game releasing we had these demo decks and we were we were handing out demo decks to people and we were we were running demos of the game and teaching people how to play the game which um was and this is before you you don't actually have the main game printed at all you're just demoing just to build but

yes we that was all it was really all we could do at that point because we were um we got one of the copies of Scri and 95 to the offices. And I opened that thing up and the Shadow Fist four panel ad fell off of that cover, right? Like they had that girl that was flying through the air. And you know, you opened up this magazine and I was like, that's a $10,000 ad. Like that's nuts. We can't compete with that. Yeah.

And we can't compete with that. There's absolutely no way. And, you know, we were very dejected at that point. We thought, wow, we are likely in over our head. But we were so far in, we had to stay in. So our only play was to demo the game. And so we demoed like crazy. And then when we finally released it, we had people come by the booth and learn how to play.

And they would say, can I play some more? and we would be like, well, if you put on this AEG shirt and teach people how to play, you can stay at the booth and play. And so that is the magic. That is the magic moment. That's exactly the thing, right? Like when you get that point where you show the game to somebody and they just want to keep playing and we'll start sharing that with somebody else, that's when you know you've got some. In a collectible trading card game, it is everything. Everything. Yeah. We even without that, I had the exact same story as what happened to me. my first year on Ascension. We had the same little dinky booth and we had just a couple staff and we were just hoping for the best and we started showing it off and people just start like sitting on the floor around the booth demoing to people around them and it's like, okay, this is it. It's an amazing feeling. And it's the main thing that I try to advise people, a lot of people will go first and they'll print an entire game or printed entire TCT before they have that moment, before they know that people will share it, will independently play it. And until you get that magic, together, you have something that people want to share and play without you pushing them to do so, you don't have anything. And so it's an incredible thing once you do get to experience it.

Well, we launched L5R into the first CCG crash. Like, the CCG crash was happening while our product was at the printers. And prior to the crash, we had all 2,000 cases that we were printed. printing sold. And every week, two or 300 of those cases would disappear. The fax machine was working, but it was working against us. People were like, you know, we're going to take a little smaller, you know, thing. Instead of buying 40 cases, we're going to buy 35, and then we're going to buy 30. And then we're going to. So we watched 60% of our pre-sales disappear when the CCG crashed happened. Wow. And we had no money. All we had was the product. And so our only move was

to give away free decks and demo. We couldn't run ads. And so we, we just hustled. Like you said, we went to every game store we could possibly go to. They set up a war room in Seattle. the people who had become fans of the game during its first four months had, you know, we're all wanting to go out and get new players and build a, build a player base for it. We had the, we got sort of the anti-magic crowd early on. It's like, you know, we were Pepsi to Coke, right? So there were people who were probably, we had some really good people. players play L5R.

And after five or six years, I think we saw some players who I would think were probably, you know, probably would have been professional CCG players at any level. But early on, I think we, we had a bunch of players who were good, but we were the small pond

where they could be the big fish. Right, right. They can't be at the top of the magic pile. So they could, they'll jump to this and they could be at the top of this pile and then that makes them more excited and then grow the commuter. Yep. So yeah and it's these these are these are these are all just examples though that just again to highlight the universal principles here like turning weaknesses into strengths right you're broke and you can't advertise okay we're going to demo the hell out of this and we're going to get our you know our army of enthusiastic people to come and go I don't have the budget or the prize pool or the you know the size of the audience that magic has okay well I'm going to attract the people that don't want to be in that pool and they want to be in a different pool like using those things and flipping them around I think is just a key part. of succeeding in business and really being able to resist yourself. You know, it's better to be Coke, but being Pepsi is not a bad thing.

Without a doubt. Can you say more the experience that they had gotten used to in what way? What does that mean? It means regular storyline events. It means, you know, quality, quality fiction. It means demos and special deals at stores. The amount of energy it took to manage those communities was awesomely hard. Yeah.

Right. It was it was awesomely hard and we slowly stopped doing our best work. I mean, you know, I haven't said it very often in very many places, but there were definitely periods of time. We weren't keeping our promise as a publisher. Like we had shown you this, you know, this, this, this amazing place, this amazing experience with our storyline games. And then we just, I don't know if we were working hard enough or if we weren't inspired, you know, to have unique new ideas. But it was really, it was really difficult. I appreciate you sharing that because it, you know, I often wonder the same thing, right, why the flip side of like why L5R, you know, sort of stays in everybody's mind is this icon of this storytelling, community building and interactive fiction. is that nobody seems to, at least in my experience, nobody's done that since then. And I think it's part because it's really, really hard.

It's a really huge burden. Even though everybody wants to be able to do this sort of interaction well, it's incredibly difficult. And I can imagine it was wearing after years of trying to pull this off. It was wearing after years of trying to pull it off. We were older than, like we were all young and single when we were doing all of that stuff. And the L5R playbook was work all week. do some demos in the evening, then go do demos all weekend, go to as many conventions as we could go to. It was a young man's game, without a doubt.

What is it like the process for being able to take in pitches and how you run that through your company or the other way around if you'd like and what makes a good pitch and what makes those things successful? Okay. So I think that you will agree with me that one of the hardest things, to do once you are a game company is to play your games. It still feels after 28 years of doing this like I am screwing around when I am playing games. I can't get, well, I have gotten over that feeling, but it took me 25 years before I realized that that was, that we would buy a game and play it. four or five times, and then we would publish it, and then we'd be surprised when that game wasn't successful.

Yeah. Right? Like, it was literally just a product that we put out. So we have learned that for a game company, we believe the most important thing we do is picking the products that we're going to publish. So there was a day when playing games was not, like, I am my father's son. And I have tons of great stories about my dad, but he helped with the company all the way up until he died in 2001.

And he would come to our offices in Ontario and a truck would show up and it would have, you know, it would have a bunch of boxes that we need to take out. And I remember specifically this day when a truck arrived and it was me and him and Dave C. and there was a big L5R meeting happened. And we had to walk past the L5R meeting with boxes. After like the fourth trip, my dad was like, what are those guys doing? How come they, don't they see us lifting these boxes?

Shouldn't they be helping us unload this truck? And I was like, they're filling the truck, dad. Like, their job is more. important than what we're doing right now. If having them help us unload the truck would feel good for us, but we're paying them to think and to put ideas on that whiteboard and to end up putting them in a box. We're not paying them to move boxes into the office. That's what we get to do. And so I think that three years ago, I guess it was three years ago, we decided that I wasn't going to be the running the company anymore. My job was going to be the head of development,

finding new games. And we put Ryan Dancy in charge of running the company and Nicholas Bonshu in charge of running our international business. And my job became working with the developers to make the very best games that we could make and finding games that we could publish. and we rented a house in Orange County on a street called Larkstone, and we call it the Larkstone house. And it is basically just, but the rule is no business in this house, just gameplay. So we would just show up every day and play games. We would invite designers to, when we would sign a game or we wanted to sign a game,

we would invite designers to come down and stay at the Larkstone house, and we would wine and dine them and we would play games for, you know, two, three, four, five days that they were in town. And what we found was not having the gameplay happen, an environment where work was the most important, having it happened in a place where play was the most important. And then most importantly, having almost everyone that was interacting, staying under that same roof, we have had so many inspirational conversations over a bowl of Cheerios in that house in the two years that it was operating, it was unbelievable. Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. What a great process. I mean, being able to learn that lesson

of separating, you know, creating that separate space for creative work, valuing the creative part of the process, being able to, you know, actively, you know, work with designers and cultivate that, both fun and effective for actually building things that are going to be great and they're going to be worth doing all the business side stuff for. Yep. And it makes the business side that much easier. We have a great salesperson. We have a great marketing team.

They have figured out how to sell a good number of copies of a decent game, of a good game. But selling a great game is just easier. right? Like instead of selling, you're allocated. Instead of desperately needing to convince people that they need to buy a game, you're informing people about the availability and how good the game is. The whole company's workload shifts to being easier when you're selling great games. And so, yeah, I feel like in the last few years, we have really loved. up our game and the number of winners that we're publishing is much higher. The biggest decision that we made, Justin, was that we said that we were just going to make fewer games. We still develop about the same number of games, but we don't publish them. Our goal is to be, is to be making one game a year, which is nuts, right? But we want to be so good at picking that one game a year that we are,

that we're making ticket to rides, not, um, you know, not monkey laps. Right. Yeah. It's,

it's a, it's such a hard, uh, decision to be able to make it. Right. You're like, well, okay,

so here's how we're going to make our business better. We're going to release less product. Like, oh, you know, that's that, there has to be some pushback as you were inside internally to be like, wait a minute,

what? Um, but, you know, releasing and spending the time to make something good, uh, is, is worth it.

And it's also, just a more fulfilling way to run the business too. Even if sometimes you're like, I wish I could do more. But being able to do something great is more than a 10x over doing something good. Absolutely. I agree with that. So as far as pitching games to game companies and pitching them to AEG,

I have a tendency to get long-winded about my stories, right? So I believe that most game companies are not super-fileged. focused on looking at all of the, at looking at all of the games that get submitted to them. Like almost every company has a send game submissions to this, you know, game submissions at all direct.com or whatever our email address is, which for the record, it's creative at all direct.com if you want to send games to us. If a lot of those, they're, at game companies and at AEG for a long time,

nobody was spending the time to sift through all of those games to figure out which games we should actually take a look at. Well, and to be fair, it's a lot of work, and most games submissions are terrible. So it is not, it takes a real effort to sort through them and find the good ones that can be cultivated and know something great. Yeah, I, you know, I believe in the you got to kiss a lot of frogs to find a princess, right? Like that's how we do business. I would say I send probably 40 or 50 rejection letters a month out to people. And we only bring in two to four new games a year for development. But I can tell you that we look at all the cell sheets that come in and we contact designers

who have interesting ideas. I can tell you the things that we look at that sort of, that stand out for us with sell sheets. So sell sheets and those little three-minute videos are the first way to reach most game companies now, right? For us, we get a lot of pitches from designers of, you know, this is a game about fantasy fighting and going into dungeons and doing X, Y, and Z.

nowhere in the pitch or on the sell sheet is the elevator pitch. What makes your game unique and different or better than something that's on the market now? Like the chances of a game designer discovering the next deck building, very slim. We don't get, I mean, I don't think we get any pitches from designers they're like, this is a totally new mechanic. Right? Like that just doesn't happen. So what we're looking for is what is the hook that is going to make somebody want to buy your game?

Play your game, right? Like, what's the hook that's going to make us want to play your game? Because even though we're playing more games than we ever have before, our time is still limited. Right? We have to get people to do that first gate and play games that we think that we can then turn into products. In this next clip, I speak with Elizabeth Hargraith. Elizabeth is probably most well known for designing the hit game Wing Span, and she has a lot of great insights into how do you pitch a game.

This was her first game, and it was the winner of the 2019 Kinderspiel de Jarre, a very important and prestigious award. We talk about how you can make good pitches, talking about the importance of marrying your theme to a game and how to think about your theme and how to think about who you want to pitch to depending upon your theme. I never would have guessed that a theme about birdwatching would be as successful as it is. And so she really breaks the mold and lets you see that things you're really passionate about that have a large audience out there can be the source of inspiration for

your games. And so being able to bring that in and how you can present those ideas, Elizabeth is one of the best people in the world to talk about this. So I've cut out that clip here for you to listen to. You know, a few years after that, had been playing board games for probably nearly a decade, and started having conversations with some of my friends about, like, why are the themes all in these, like, very narrow categories it seemed like to us? Like, we were playing a lot of games about trains and castles and, you know, this is the whole zombie genre. It's like, there are these topics, there are not actually that many of them. And

in retrospect, I understand how publishers end up there. But for me, I was like, I love the mechanics of these games, but very few of them are actually about anything that I'm interested in. Right. Yeah. And

so there's a couple of things to break apart here. One is I actually use you and Wigspan as an example almost every time I talk about game design because the the theme and the passion that you have for it comes across so so powerfully in the game design. But if you had pitched to me, I'm going to make a game about birds and people are going to love it, I don't think I would have had the foresight to see that that was going to be a success.

And because I'm the, by default, the cliche of, oh, yeah, I want wizards and dragons and spaceships. And so it really opened my eyes to like, no, not only is it powerful, as a way to kind of market a game and bring in new audiences, but it's powerful as a lesson, I think, and let me know how you feel about this, that it's a powerful as a lesson of, like, if you're really passionate about something, you can bring that to bear in a way that's going to be compelling for other people

and it's going to resonate with other people. So like, no matter what it is that your particular interest is, that it's really worth exploring that and the things that you're curious about and bringing them to your designs. Yeah, I mean, I think it helps that birding is a super popular activity and interest of people more than I think a lot of people realize. But so that created like this whole secondary market outside of the games world. Right.

And then there was like this niche of people who were already both gamers and burghers who kind of lost their minds. Right. Right. And I think that helps too, like having that core set of people that like, oh my God, this is the one game in the world that is like for them. Right. They become your super fans. But yeah,

I definitely had to do a lot of research and sort of think very carefully about which publishers to pitch to. Right, right. Yeah. And so that I'm actually interested because what I hear from that, not only is just research on publishers, but research on market. Is that, was that a part of your decision?

Did you think through like, yeah, there are, you know, millions of, of Birdwatchers and a lot of them play games. And so I think this is a good market. Was that part of your decision when you started making the game? I mean, sort of on an intuitive level, it wasn't like as explicit as the way you just said it. So there's X of these and Y percentage will carry the two. And yeah.

Okay. I think that's, it's interesting. And so I'll give a sort of case study of maybe the opposite. it. I got hired to do a game for the skateboarding as a trading card game several years ago. We're called Super Heat, and we ended up doing, you know, how God is doing a thing with the X games and doing things with all this. And there's a lot of people that love skateboarding, and there's a lot of people that love card games. But the overlap was not as great as a lot as we would have hoped. And so that that blend of skateboarder that wants to play a trading card game did not seem to pan out in the same way as much as a birdwalk.

watchers who like board games. So there's an interesting, this idea of the overlap between the categories is, I think, a worthwhile one to think about when you're, you know, what genre do you want to bring into board games or whatever your designs are. Right. And intuitively, to me, my reaction to that is sort of like the things that people love about skateboarding are sort of the adrenaline of it and the skill and the physicality of it. and that's going to be hard to bring out in a card game.

Whereas people, birding for so many people is about looking at beautiful things, collecting your list of birds that you see. It just aligns with sort of this tableau builder that's got the bird art and collecting the cards. That's great. Yeah. So that really, because when I think about the right way, I mean, we could riff on this for a little while because I think about the right way, when you're taking a theme and bringing it into a game,

game, right? Anytime you're going to try to, the games are the way that we kind of simplify and provide structure to things that are in the world that tend to be more complicated and have lots of things going on and distill it down to its essence. And so when you brought up for wingspan and for birding, right, a lot of the essence of it is beautiful things, looking at beautiful things, collecting things, being able to sort of categorize them. And that is exactly the kinds of stuff that you're doing in wingspan, which I think is fantastic. What makes for a good pitch in your mind now that you've, so the basic, I can, under, you know, empathizing practice, you know, record yourself, wash it back, as painful as it is. It's actually one of

the reasons I started doing this podcast was to force myself to track my own ums and us. And it's so painful. It's so eye-opening to record yourself. I haven't done it a long time and I never listened to a podcast like this, go back. So I'm sure I'm doing it a lot. But, See, there I go. Now we're both going to be super self-conscious. So yeah, that is very eye-opening. Other tips. I mean, so I sort of rehearsed this like two-minute version that ended with, you know,

do you have any questions or we could play through 15 minutes of the game if you want to see how it works. Yeah. And of course, everyone was like, yeah. That's just like... Right. Yeah, that's fantastic. So there's a couple of key things that right, that the initial pitch is very short and that you get,

you know, you try to get to your key bullet points. In my mind, there's usually like, you want to hit three major points that people, you really want them to take away and remember, right? Too much more than that.

People just don't remember. So what are you hammering home? What's important? And this is a really hard and an important thing for people to do because, again, in your game, in your mind, you have all these ideas,

you know, all the details of it. You want to tell them everything about what's so awesome. and that's a mistake. You just need to kind of get the highlights. And then you offer them that opportunity to play, and you bracketed it. You bracketed it to let's try 15 minutes.

That's what you get because that's not, that's doable, right? If I'm at a convention as a publisher and I'm there and I'm waiting, and I can, okay, 15 minutes is not a scary amount. But this game takes an hour to play or two hours to play or whatever, you know, bigger games. Like people don't have that kind of time. And knowing that you've thought through that and saying,

here's a 15 minute experience that will give you the information you need is also great. So these are all like great. Right. And you got to make sure, too, that your prototype is like in the box, in the way that like you can whip it out and start playing almost immediately. And that you've stacked the decks so different kinds of cards are going to come out so that they'll see sort of what's in how it works. Yes. You know, and yeah, just making it as smooth as smooth as possible all the way through. Yeah, yeah.

And practicing that in the same way that you practice the pitch, right? And you demo the game to other people. and I actually even advise, like, if you know that there's like a publisher, you really, really, really want, like schedule some others first. Like, schedule somebody that you could at least give one real pitch to a real publisher before you get your dream publisher pitch because you for sure are going to watch it in ways that you're not happy about. And so it just goes to, you know, don't waste anybody's time.

Definitely give real pitches, but don't give your best one first. You give yourself a chance to warm up. It's helpful. Yeah, one of the other things that I'm remembering that I think helped me through this process was not long before I went to Jen Khan. I heard a talk by a woman who published a book called Go For No, which is a very marketing oriented. Like, I don't think people need to go out and read this book. But the concept that she pitches to marketing people who are doing. like sales calls type marketing is like you just have to push yourself through a certain number

of contacts to get to a certain number of yeses right and if you reframe it in your head that getting a no is a success because you have put yourself out there and made one of those contacts um you're going for no you're setting your goal so if my goal was i want to get rejected by 10 publishers, maybe somewhere along the way I'll get a yes, but at least I've put myself out there and I've gotten basically playtests with some of the experts in the industry, right, who are giving me feedback every time they reject me. Yes, 100%. You don't have to be afraid of the rejection at the same level that I think many people

are afraid of it. Even an interaction that results in not getting your game design, it has the potential to move forward. Yes. Oh, that is such gold. I honestly, I think if you could just give that advice, your goals get rejected by 10 publishers.

And that's like you actually just framed it that way when you started trying to sell your game. I think it would be people would come out with so much better. There was some study, I forget what it was. I heard it from Bray Brown, who's the shame researcher. She talked about it in one of her books where there was a one group that was trying to do an art project where they were like,

you're getting graded on your three best pieces, right? And you have to do whatever your three best pieces are. We're going to grade those. That's it. And the other one was, we just do as many as you can. Like it doesn't matter. We just want all you just put as many of these things in. And then at the end, they found out which ones,

the independent judges figured out which ones were the best. and the people that were just putting out as many as they could, all did better. And they had higher quality end results than the people who were just trying to make three great pieces. And so this idea of like putting things out there, getting, you know, getting feedback, having more reps in, right? It's true in playtesting. It's true in pitching.

It's true in all these kind of creative projects. And that the hardest thing that you already underlined, the hardest thing is that emotional rejection, the fear of rejection, the fear of not being good enough, that putting yourself out there and putting your baby on the line and having someone tell you it's ugly and having to come back home and fix it up. And so I just think it's such wonderful lessons to reinforce for people. So thank you for sharing that.

In this next clip, we hear from Eric Lang. Eric is a prolific designer who has made a dozen or more different games that I absolutely love, including Game of Thrones card game, Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Star Wars of the card game. He's worked with tons of huge brands, including silly ones like Dilbert and working with Exploiting Kittins, as well as lots of serious heavy-hitting games. And his insights span the entire genre.

We talk about his process for engine design, and that's kind of the core part of what makes a game hum. We talk about how his music background informs game design. We talk about his play testing processes, which are a little bit unorthodox and was certainly intriguing to me. And we talk about the importance of matching theme to gameplay, how you can make things more cohesive by cutting things out. And we even talk about the logistics of running a Kickstarter.

Because I know a lot of people out there think about crowdfunding and creating their own campaigns. We've done that several times. And Eric has a lot of great insight on it. Some of his games have raised millions and millions of dollars on Kickstarter. So there's a lot of great insight here. So I encourage you not only to listen to this clip, but of course there's a lot more in the main episode with Eric Lang. I'd love to just dig in a little more and like how do you approach, you know, a project like that.

and what goes into your engine design process? Sure. So each one is a very unique and different story. And I guess the biggest common thread you'll find here is that the thing that motivates me is newness. So I never approach any project the same way twice. And I never approach any project going, oh, okay, this is how I'm going to solve following problems. Usually the common thread is I looked for new problems that I haven't solved. solved before or that

or that exciting or that frighten me more likely that and just sort of play in that crazy space right so I mean that's the mechanical that's the mechanics driven up

yeah no I love I love and you know heading face first towards the things that frighten you is a wonderful philosophy for an artist as a general rule so I love that in general Now, I'd love to see how that played out in a few of the specific examples. Sure. So I guess Game of Thrones was my first published CCG, but of course it was my, I don't know, 18th design or something like that.

So that one, that game was a super interesting process. So what happened was everything about that game came up from necessity, and it literally is the most punk rock project I think I've ever put together. Because Fantasy Flight at the time was a board game company, and they had 10 employees of which I was one of them. I was a consultant who was sort of a de facto employee. Nobody at the company had any experience with trading card games, even though they had done discourse at the time.

The charm of that game was their inexperienced with the format. So I was the only person at the company that had experience with flexible card games. They actually hired me to develop a card game designed by Reiner Kinizia which has now become scareboards. So my first day on the job was to look at this game and analyze it and then have to go back and report to them. This game is a very nice mathematically well-balanced game. It's a terrible CCG for the following reasons.

So my second day on the job was to write a letter to Ryan R. Kinziah saying, so I'm a new guy on the job. You've never heard about me, but I'm rejecting your game. Sorry. That was fun. So the way that schedules, of course, for medium-sized publishers at that time, right? They were so cash flow-driven that you have to meet your release, you have to, period. So they were like, well, we need a collectible card game for GenCon.

So the CEO, Chris Peterson actually asked me, I was interested in doing a Game of Thrones Collectible Card game. Of course, at the time, I was reading Storm of Swords. Would it just come out, the third book in the series? Would it just come out a couple weeks ago? So my answer to that was to run back to his office and grab a copy of the book, slam it on the desk and go, hell yes.

He said, great. So why don't you show me a basic engine for the game tomorrow? Tomorrow? So there's a common thread here. here. This happens to me a lot. Design a TCG engine by tomorrow. Well, right. Now, when we say design a TCG engine, right, we mean in like, well, more completely than just a pure than a theory craft, right?

But, but like design, design something that works with some example cards that show that this works. Sure. So, so I did. Now, of course, again, I was a fan of the series. and now Chris Peterson was my co-designer on this game and he actually, he was the one who came up with the idea of doing a plot deck. He was like, what if we just, what if you had a deck of resources that you don't drop?

You could pick out whenever you want, turn by turn. I was like, that's crazy good. Yeah. So I took that and then turn that into a game. So of course, you can tell my, my, love for magic is in that game, right? The core of Game of Thrones is the challenge phase, how the challenges work. And what I was thinking of was, I guess my motivation there was,

the Game of Thrones is a really interesting, is an interesting series because it has elements of military, of politics, and of intrigue. Right? So it's like, well, all right. So what if I basically did a sort of attacking and style blocking combat system? which had three vectors that covered the military side of it, the intrigue in the politics. Now, that ended up after I started testing it on paper with sugar packets.

Splendor sugar packets are my CCG design tool of choice. I just grab a bunch of splendor packets and literally started envisioning the play in my head while playing with them, coming up with stats and my head, playing it out and wading it and playing it and playing it and playing it, changing it, playing it, playing it until I get an emotional reaction out of myself. Like, oh, this is really exciting. Oh, this is frightening. I haven't seen this before. So I came back the next day with that basic challenge system and the dominance phase, we're like, oh, by the way, anything that you keep standing outside of challenges will also get you the victory points

at the end of the game. Now, of course, at the time, I was also a disciple of Euro game. At the time, Settlers Gatan and Carcassona just come out and a whole bunch of Euro games from Rio Grande games. So I've become, I love those mechanics-driven, really elegant, simple, victory point-driven games. I was sort of inspired by that to go, instead of making a game about decimating your opponent, to make a game about collecting points for yourself, for your house. It made thematic sense, and it felt a little different. Yeah, and just to go dig a little bit in. into the, because, you know, this game's been around a long time, but some people may not be aware.

So that each of the phases of combat, if you won that type, that style, then you would get a different type of bonus that would all interact in some way, right? That's right. And that, that, that, I just found that to be such a fascinating, where you could theoretically ignore, you know, one or even two of those channels if you wanted to, but you were going to be at this huge disadvantage. And so you would have to sort of decide what your strategy was going to be. It was just such a fascinating execution to make, you know, story-wise makes sense, right? You don't want the, you know, the sort of Littlefinger or the spy master to be like swinging a sword and fighting against John Snow. But on the other hand, they have their own way of winning victories. And so that I just thought was really both story-wise a huge hit and then, yeah, created all these obvious and interesting mechanical plays.

So it was really, really stuck with me for all these years. Is your writing or music background informed your game design or vice versa? Oh, sweet God, yes. Absolutely. So I was a musician before I was a game designer for well over a decade. I picked up my first guitar when I was 11. I've been playing guitar, bass and drums since then. I'm not great.

I'm not giving guitar lessons to anybody. But I think in music. and I've spent my life developing my ear. And the most, I guess the most cogent analysis I can come up with in gaming when I'm when I'm describing, when I'm situationally describing game design, I always fall back on music. And so the, I throw a lot of crazy analogies in there, right? So I've been telling, I was just talking to a friend of mine, one of my oldest friends,

Kevin Wilson recently who I talked about games on all the time there was a point when I remember I told them like you know I always thought I always thought I was like I always thought I was Prague rock but I'm really like I'm really a punk rocker

who got into Prague for like 10 years and then decided you want to be punk again but you can't take the Prague out of it so the analogy they're holding that I mean I was in my early years I designed entirely by instinct and training my ear.

In game design term, right, that's just the ability to recognize when something is fun or unfun, right? As, I know that's not the most fungible definition, but you still get it, right? Yeah, I mean, player experience is the only metric that matters at the end of the day. Exactly.

Either it's fun and we're having a good time or we're not. And so that's key. There's no replacement for having that instinct or training that instinct. You don't have to have it to begin with, but you do have to learn it. Exactly right. And so there's a level of empathy that goes along with an essential level of empathy that goes along with both game design and music, which are related as well.

So when you're a musician, you're outperforming, what you're performing for. I mean, yes, you may think you're going out there to perform flawlessly. You may think you're going out to jam with your friends. And those are essential components. But you're there to share energy with your fans. Right. And the, you need a degree of empathy to read the room to adjust your, to adjust your playing, to adjust your performance in order to make the fans happy. That comes, that needs to be an essential part of your motivation, your character. I feel the same way about game design, right? You, when you're designing and when you're play testing, which are the same as far as I'm concerned, you are spending your time reading the room and adjusting. I don't put, I don't put a lot of, you know, I don't put a lot of, of taxonomy behind it, but I used mostly the same skills while in playtesting that I did when I was performing.

And so that is just sort of that awareness of the, you know, the energy, the feeling in the room, the reactions, and then that. And then also just relying instinctually on what it is that caused those and how you might adjust it to modify and get to where you want to go. Absolutely. So I was the, God, I'm going to sound like a hipster here. Before it was the cool thing to say. I was the high priest of noetic experience, right?

So I was the guy back in, I don't know, 2005, 2006, those out there preaching about the perils of data-driven early playtests, right? But your feedback comes from the table, your feedback comes non-verbally and through observation, not through post-mortem. And especially in gamers, more so in gaming, than doesn't use it. Gamers who are generally more,

have a higher, generally have a higher knowledge and higher IQ, I guess, but not necessarily, maybe a slightly lower EQ, tend to, especially the really smart ones, tend to reconstruct their own memories

of what was happening at the table through a lens that, through a much more rational lens than actually what's happening at the table. So that, I mean, I mean, I'm not so like I'm telling you anything you don't know, but like you sit there at the table. The classic example, you're sitting there playtesting at the table and somebody is obviously struggling with one of your, with a part of your core game loop.

They're just completely struggling. They don't know what to do. They don't know what the next step is. They always have to be reminded. They always have to ask. By the time the fifth cycle of that loop has happened, they're like, oh, okay, finally get it. All right. And at the end of the game, that's what they remember.

and if you ask for feedback if that's what you're taking, they'll say, oh yeah, I got it, it was easy. Yeah. And without especially, you know, social norms being what they are and especially if they're playing with friends, it's even worse.

So I got to the point where it took it to the almost extreme and said, like, nope, you watch the table, you read the table. Ideally, you're not even there. Yes, yes. If you can have a, you know, that's sort of, for a couple of games I've worked on, I've been fortunate to be able to have that one-way mirror,

uh, play tests, uh, where I can literally watch them react and not have them see me. Uh, it's, it's amazing, but very rare that you actually get to pull that off.

It's true. I've actually spent a lot of time training my playtesters, though, to treat me as up as I wasn't there. So I actually, I have some testers that I do trust to just play. Um, and that's part of,

by, by making myself as quote, unquote, inaccessible. That's great. That's a super valuable resource. So how do you, what do you, just because that might be a useful skill for people. So what is it, what do you do you do you slowly stop talking as you're hearing them?

Do you make a face, you know, put up a little cardboard sign or what do you turn? So it's a little bit like parenting, actually. It's going to sound so condescending and patronizing, but it's true. So when playing, I use it, I have some old trips that I use, right? So like people play a game and they'll come ask me a question. And then I just turned to a Turing machine. I'm like, well, what do you think? What do you assume is going to happen?

Or even like, if I'm feeling glib, right, I'll be like, I don't know. I just got the game. Let me check the rulebook. Oh, it's not in here. Let's see if we can find it on. I'll see if I can find online. You guys continue. Right?

Stuff like that. Or like even through negative reinforcement. I'm like, well, if you have to ask me, then something's wrong with the game. You've got to stop. Yeah. that's a little bit of a devilish trick because I sometimes do that even if even unprompted because that's one of my tests to find out if people really want to continue playing the game the game that is rather than the game they want it to be because if I pull something like that

and it's like no no no we'll just fine we'll play we'll figure it out oh that's amazing I love that I love that trick I'm definitely going to steal that that's because like I But don't make this too public, Justin, because it stops becoming effective. Don't worry. Don't worry. Nobody's listening to us right now. It'll be fine.

No, because I mean, there's a couple pieces there from, you know, so I always tell people like the key to knowing whether you're, you know, you're actually on the right track or not is do people play independently of you telling them to play, right? Do they just start up another game when they finish? Do they continue to want to play outside of you prompting? but this is even better because this is you try to take it away from them and they stop you from taking it away from them to continue to play that's a that's a that's a that's a very powerful uh positive uh cue for sure and and i will do the i will do the um i've done hey i want this is a somebody gave me this game to evaluate do you guys mind helping me to check it out right whereas like they don't know it's me so they're way more likely to give me real feedback and i can you know kind of see what's going on is a very helpful

channels. Unfortunately, I did that one too many times and now my testers aren't mean to it. Yeah, yeah. This is the problem of us giving away our tricks. Right. Yeah, but I did exactly the same thing. I go into the game store and say, hey, a buddy of mine made a game that looks, I guess it looks fine. Let's see what happens. Yeah.

And often what I would, I would even come into it as a negative guy. Right? And people do that with me too. Like, even with my own games, if somebody says like, like, oh, is this, was this intentional? I'll be like, I don't know.

Or somebody gets glib and says like, oh, is this fun? I'm like, no. And if they, like, sometimes they'll be inclined to defend it. That's cool. But I'm not, but, or sometimes I'll just like,

I'll even troll playtesters in the middle of the game and just start a random argument about something. Just to get them arguing amongst themselves. Oh, wow. You're you're a, you're a far more vicious than I. I'm, I don't know, I'm kind of glad now. I haven't been a playtester for many of games. Again, this is from reading the room, right? Like if, reading the room or knowing the playtesters, but if sometimes I'll just start a debate about, especially among people who love to argue, because then I just select, I listen carefully to what they choose to argue about and what they choose to get passionate about. And that's, I mean, that, ultimately, that's what I'm looking. for, right? I'm looking for something that's going to excite, the type of games that I make. I'm working for something that's going to excite passion.

You know, you want to be pushing boundaries. You want to be answering questions that people haven't answered or that are scary to answer. And, you know, I would say, like, if my design goes out the door and I'm not scared of something in that design, then I fail. Right. Like, I, there needs to be that. Otherwise, you're, you're putting out a boring experience. You're not giving your best, right? I can safely make a B plus game, but that's a fail. You know, if I'm not really trying to go for, you know, going for the A or the F, you know,

either I'm knocking it out of the park or, or it's a big miss. Those are, those are fun, you know, that's what really keeps me and gets me up, you know, really trying to do something that's exciting and different.

And anytime you do something that's exciting and different, you know, you're going to trigger people. Absolutely. And it's cyclical too, right, to a degree. So like, I mean,

like yourself, we're about the same age, I think, right? So I, and I'm usually been a gamer as long as I have. So I've been going back to my route. from time to time.

And I went back and played some old, like, Tom Wham games and some old Peter Olatka games, not Cosmic Encounter, but like Outpost. And just playing these really charming, flawed games to remember what I loved about them. And looking at them today, looking at them in today's context and seeing how innovative they would be treated,

if they were released today. For example, I'm working on a big box board game right now, big box one and a half to two hour board game that features player elimination. That nothing new under nothing new there. But today it's like it's greeted with like, oh, my stars, right? Right. Yeah, something that was sort of a, you know, viewed as a negative, which of course, player elimination has huge downsides.

And then, you know, it becomes common accepted that, okay, well, we're not going to do this ever. And you realize, well, hold on. Actually, we lost some tension. We lost some interesting tradeoffs here. And then to bring that back in light of new contacts, maybe with some new solutions to some of the downsides, is an exciting thing. Yeah, that's right. Exactly right. And so, I mean, right now, one of the current dog muds, right, is that, especially in, it's a reaction to the marketplace, right?

that every game has to have an amazing first play experience. And the dogma around that has become every game must, every player must feel like they are in the game and feel like they can win at every single stage of the game. Every game must be a very evenly paste experience. Don't have your ups too high, don't have your downs too low. I mean, they don't explain it that way, but with the push pull of basic tension in games,

that's how it works out. There's a lot of that, right? And especially in the more modern family or family fuss games. So I started making When I asked people like What are your favorite games? Oh, I love Battlestargo, Africa, right? And I mean, I was one of the developers on that.

I was the developer on that game. That game is all high highs and low lows, right? You can have amazing games of that because you can also have a terrible game of that. The stakes are real, right? The dramatic question is, the dramatic question is actually a real question. Like, is this game going to go off the rails?

Oh, it did this time. Yep. And in a game with a two-hour investment, those stakes are really high. But of course, right, because of the way memory works, right, you tend to, you'll remember your low lows, but in retrospect, it's a story. And now it's part of your, it's a part of your narrative. You're giving the narrative. It's actually enriched your life for being that low of a low.

I truly. Yeah. And in fact, in fact, this is true in games and in life, but, you know, often the sort of worst experiences, create the best stories. I mean, I think about, I think I played, I played diplomacy only one time, and it went horribly. I'll bet. It went horribly. Like, friendships were ruined.

But I'll never forget that game. And I learned a lot. So I'm glad I did it, but I'm never doing it again. Back in 2005, I actually, I designed the game called Midgard, which is a Euro, a pure Euro style Viking game. And it started off as, because I wanted to do a Viking. Viking mythology has always been one of my, I grew up on it. I grew up on a very twisted version of it from children's books in Germany. And I wanted to make a game that was just based on sort of the pop culture idea of what Vikings did.

And what Viking life must be like. And at first I tried to do a Euro game based on that. I designed it for Z-Man games. And the principal mistake of that game was that he gave me 100% control, the designer. So I was the designer developer, editor. I was even the art director. I directed the graphic design. And of course, which none of these games are one-man shows, right?

even my most O-Ture projects, I always have very strong voices in the room that disagree with me and can push me when I need to be pushed. Back in, I had none. I did everything I wanted to, and I had no, there was nobody opposing me in any part of the process. So the game,

I commissioned this amazing cover by John Gravado, who did a work for Games Workshop and Magic. This awesome Viking with a badass helmet sitting in Ridley Scott pose holding his arms in the air going, oh my God, at the end of the world, and like comets coming down. It was amazing cover. Inside was a Euro-P point solid game based on card drafting.

So the disconnect between product and experience was so high that they just tanked. People who were really, who talked about that cover and got this sort of Euro game were like, what is this? right. Eurogame fans who sort of knew my background who didn't like to take that elements. It just,

it was too middle. What kind of advice would you give to someone that wanted to, you know, run a Kickstarter sort of get involved in this space? Well, so.

Says the guy about to run a Kickstarter. Right, right. Well, so, no, it's, it's really hard for me to give contextless advice,

right? So it's weird. It's almost a nervous tick with me, right? If somebody asks me a general question like that, I'll usually, I will want to know more about the person asking the question, right? Like, where are you from? So I'll give the two cases.

So you can give me direct advice because why not? It's my podcast. Sure. Because I got a Kickstarter coming up as we're recording this in a couple months. And so some, or someone generically that has, you know, has some experience, has some time in the industry and has something that they've developed and want to bring it to

Kickstarter and really try to knock it out of the park. And then we can do another take again with somebody who's more just starting out and doesn't have as much of an audience, doesn't have as much experience. So both contexts would be interesting. Sure. Sure. Well, I mean, so somebody like yourself, right, well, I mean, you're a bit of a unique case because you have so much more experience, I think, than the vast majority of your listeners. So to somebody who is a, we'll come with Justin Gary Apostle, right, somebody who listens to a lot, who's absorbed a lot of your work, like the Mark Rosewater Apostles on the internet, right?

He can recite everything he's ever said and design a Mark Rosewater style magic set, right? To somebody like that, I would probably say, I mean, the success metrics are pretty transparent. I actually do think Kickstarter is one of the most transparent success models out there because everything, every interaction we have is out there. You can see it. You can reverse engineer any SEMON or Awaken Realms or even the Exploding Kittens

just diligently compare their numbers with kick track and it's like the data's there. The thing that you can't do is synthesize it contextually, right? A lot of smart people can come up with a lot of different. different reasons why this bidet spike, why this particular update spike, or this one failed or flop. Timing obviously matters, all that stuff. The thing I would, the, what I would say, what I was just nowadays as the, as the, as the platform is maturing. I believe that Kickstarter is probably a more pure expression of the reputation economy, I think,

than any other platform. You as a publisher, it doesn't matter how awesome you are as an individual. You enter that platform without credit, without street credit. That defines your ceiling, right? Realistically, it defines a ceiling of how success we're going to get from a dollar's perspective.

Nowadays, it's much more important that it's as important to delivering a good game and delivering a great experience that you have a track record of being on the platform, delivering something cool, fulfilling and ideally going beyond the expectations set by the Kickstarter campaign

and really managing the post-Kickstarter excitement. Now, we do that fairly well. We, as in C-Mond, we do that fairly well. We still have a lot to learn. I don't think people understand just how much of SEMON is dedicated to the Kickstarter engine. It looks like it's a couple, like it looks like it's a couple really excited people making comments on our board. It's not, right? We are a giant worldwide fulfillment engine.

We are a, we have a huge, we have a huge multinational data collection and, and process. team. I mean, I can't say too much more about that in detail, of course. But the core, just this, I'm only talking about the back end, not the friend in, right? Once the Kickstarter, your troubles when you're starting a Kickstarter, oh, sorry, if you have a successful kickstaters, the day that your thing is backed on the final day your Kickstarter, that's when your troubles begin. Right. That's, that's why the people like Adam Putz, who did Kingdom Death Monster, one of the most successful dollar-wise kickstarts of all time, almost went broke. He did not have infrastructure to run that thing.

So my advice to you, Justin Gary, would be, are you prepared to run a publisher that is essentially a live team in video game speed to manage both not only the Kickstarter during but afterward and parlay that into your next one? Are you going for a one and done? if you are, I would actually suggest don't do Kickstarter. That's great. So talk more about that. Because the overhead and management and logistical challenge of running something through Kickstarter is so great.

If you're not planning to build for the long term and to be able to run multiple campaigns and build a sustainable infrastructure, you're saying it's not worth it. I don't think so. And again, and this is about expectations, right? And I'm giving this advice to you specifically. So somebody in the industry who has the experience, who has to a sense has priced themselves out of certain brackets, right? Like you, Justin Gary, are never going to make a game for blank and giggles. Yeah.

Unless it's quite with your friends, you're not going to spend the same amount of effort on a game that's going to pull in royalties at a small publisher on a 2000 a 2000 copy of print run, right, right? If that's your expected ceiling. So if that, if your expectation based on your salary, your needs and in your expectation, if it's in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, if you're going to build that engine, you might as well build that engine with the, with an ion sustainability.

Yep. Nope, that makes, that makes perfect sense. And I, you know, I have for me, you know, actual me personally, I have this experience having run, you know, several, you know, multiple six-figure kickstarters and then losing money at the end of the day for exactly that reason that we were not prepared for the execution costs and challenges. Now, those were digital games and that had its own giant challenges too. But, you know, and that's what sort of stung us for, you know, five plus years of not going back to for exactly the thing that you brought up, which is like, no, no, if we're going to do this, we're going to make sure we've got it right. We're going to make sure we've got everything, you know, set up ahead of time. And yes, that it's a sustainable thing that we can for sure deliver what we're saying and make it, make it meaningful.

So it's something I constantly echo that, you know, it's not Kickstarter. It's kick finisher. You need to be ready to go and really have all your ducks in a row before you even be, before you even start planning a campaign. And then I think your emphasis is also really great here, which is forget just the campaign and even the post campaign. But then the next campaign, right? The whole thing has to be a plan if you're looking to be playing at this scale that you need to be thinking at that scale, which is wonderful advice. Right. Absolutely. And of course, it's a semi-mature platform, right? So the barrier to entry is, it's up there. Right. Like if you are, if your dreams are to compete with the monoliths, with the Simons, with the awakened realms of the world, well, that bar is up there. And we've set that bar intentionally very high. So that you, I would, I mean, just like any discipline, even in game design in general, I would say if you're looking to follow somebody through a door to success, almost be better off just, well, almost we would be better off just looking for a slightly adjacent door.

In every very highly successful game I've ever done, there's always been a feature, sometimes a core feature that I've pulled out of the game. not because it doesn't work. That's the obvious. But I pulled it out for a variety of reasons, but I pulled it out against the protests of my playtesters. Blood Rage had a super innovative mechanic that mirrored the way the area majority worked in it. I mean, I've never seen anything like that in the game.

I might turn it into another game, which is why I can't tell you exactly what it is. but it was so innovative. People played them, wow, that's really innovative. It was so innovative. It was distracting. Nobody remembered they were playing a game about Vikings going to Valhalla. They just remember this really cool mechanic.

So I was like, you know what? After watching five or six games of people just loving that mechanic so much, I took it out. And the game was so much more smooth and enjoyable. And of course, the people who had played it before were like, you killed the best part of the game. This is the, like, why did you take the end of this out? The people, I said, I took it under advisement, thank you. But the next group of players who played the game, everybody who started playing the game, it was not smooth.

It was not, it didn't deliver on any of the promises. New players who came in after I took out, took that new feature out, they were, they loved the game, like almost from start to finish. They wanted to play it over and over and over again. feedback I'd never gotten before. Yep. I had the same thing with Rising Sun, the same thing with my current new game. and people hear this all the time. This is the armchair designer syndrome, right,

which you'll get, especially if you listen to much of the internet. It's relatable to the film side when people release special features DVDs, right? And the director's cuts and all the stuff that, they show you all the stuff that off on the cutting room floor. It always looks cool. It always looks amazing. And of course, as the armchair creative, you're like, why did you take that of the film?

It would have been so much better. when you look at, you read an article on magicgathering.com and you see all the cards that they cut from a set. They were really innovative, really creative and special. And like, why did you take that out? Because it went against the cohesiveness of the product. It made the product more mediocre by its inclusion. You can't prove that unless you play it. Right.

And that's tough. Right? If you listen to, if you listen to those too much to those voices in the room, you will always invariably make inferior games, in my opinion. And then you have to listen. After what, you have to listen to the Internet. When people say like, oh, your games are so deliberate,

you're not bringing anything new to the table. Well, I think... It is what it is. Yeah, well, I mean... Yeah, this is one of those things. I use somewhat different language for it, but I echo the sentiments in that, you know, you have to figure out what the core of your game is, right?

What's the core tension? what's the core story, what's the core elements of what's here. And anything that distracts you from that, I don't care how cool it is. I don't care how great the thing is, it's got to go. If it takes away from the core, it does not belong there. And again, you already hit the key point, which is don't think of it as this has gone forever. That mechanic is going to come back.

It's a great mechanic. Whatever it is, this mystery mechanic, I'm sure it's great. But it's got to come back. And you can use it in the future design, but it is not serving you. serving your players. And again, and so that, that's like just a fundamental part of it. And then there's the other part that is, is an interesting thing to highlight, which is, you know, your playtesters are always going to compare what you showed them today with what you showed them yesterday, but your players will never do that. They don't have that option. And so you need to

be able to parse those differences. Well, if you never saw this other mechanic, this will be a common thing that'll happen with us where it'll be, you know, we, we will have, you know, somebody that'll be like, oh, no, no, no, this was, this was great when we did it the other way. And I really, now I keep wanting to play that way instead of this. I was like, well, yeah, that's because you were you were used to it. Other people will never see that. Right. You don't know what you were missing.

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