Think Like A Game Designer - Alex Watkins — From Evolutions in Mechanics to Shaping the Future of Organized Play, The Journey of Crafting a New Gaming Experience in Soulforge Fusion (#41)

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Alex Watkins is the head of organized play for SolForge Fusion, but before joining our team, he had years of experience running organized play for games like Keyforge and X-Wing. We're super excited to have him on the show today, discussing how organized play systems are developed, the relationship between organized play and game design, and what organized play will look like for SolForge Fusion. 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'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Today we have a very special episode for you. I am speaking with Alex Watkins, who is now head of organized play for Stoneblade Entertainment. Prior to that, he was head of organized play for fantasy flight games, running events for things like Key Forge and X-Wing all around the world. He's based out of Europe and so was organized play manager for all of Europe for Asmode. He has so much amazing experience running organized play events.

And as soon as I met him, I knew I wanted him on our team to help manage and lead the team for SoulForge Fusion and our other games here at Stoneblade. So as you're hearing this, SoulForge Fusion is live now all throughout North America and Australia. We have a little bit longer for Europe, but the product is available. You can go to SoulForgeFusion.com, find our store locator, find stores near you, and you'll be able to play in all kinds of really cool events. And so we dig into that in this episode. We talk about Alex's origin story and how his volunteering and getting involved led to his career. We talk about all of the cool ideas and different elements that have come together to make SoulForge Fusion organized play, unlike anything that's out in the market.

If you want to know more about SoulForge Fusion specifically, you can also listen to the previous podcast that I did with Richard Garfield, who was my co-creator of SoulForge Fusion. We designed and worked on this project together, and it's really incredible. I mean, the gameplay is something I'm so proud of, right? I've worked on this game for over a decade, and I think we've built something that's unique that uses new technology to algorithmically generate decks, that uses that ability of combining those two different half decks together to form your playable deck. There's all kinds of cool things you can do like scan your deck into your online account and play online through tabletop simulator.

You can join our Discord and find friends and find people to play there. Our organized play supports not only physical play but online play. There's ways to level up your deck. There's ways to get extra bonuses for running events and cool exclusives for being an ambassador to the game, what we call Forge Guardians to come in. There's so much cool stuff here and it was great to just get to talk to Alex and unpack it all. So there's plenty of great lessons in here for those of you that just want to learn the lessons and understand what goes on. There's a lot of deep insight about what's important, right? When we're building games like SoulForge Fusion, it can't just be a great game.

Like it has to be a great game or nobody's going to want to play it. But it also has to be a great community. It has to be a great way for you to get engaged and stay engaged and bring your friends in and create a life around it. It's the same way that I did back in the day with Magic, the same that we've done by having Ascension running for over a decade, 12 years now. We want Soul Force Fusion to be here a decade from now. So if you haven't had a chance yet, go to your local stores, check out Soulforce Fusion, or go to SoulforceFusion.com to find out more or join our Discord. But in the meantime, I hope you really enjoy this deep dive to a great person, a great mind,

and a great member of our team, Alex Watkins. Hello and welcome. I am here with Alex Watkins. Alex, I'm excited to have me on the podcast, man. Hey, I'm very happy to be here. It's nice to chat to you. Not that we don't chat much, but... Yes, yes.

So we do chat a lot, so I'm going to tee this up, right? Alex is the head of organized play for us at Stoneblade and has been running and building incredible plans for our Soul Forge Fusion in particular, which as of the launch of this podcast is live. You can get it in stores throughout North America. I think probably Australia is live and Europe and other places are coming soon. We have, if you want to find out where to buy it, You can go to SoulForgeFusion.com and then there's a store locator.

And it's, but selling the game and creating the game, I've talked about elsewhere. I have a podcast with Richard Garfield, who we co-created the game with, and there's tons of really exciting details about what makes the game awesome. But what I wanted to talk about today is, and the reason why I brought you on, Alex, is because you have created some incredible organized play programs for us. And games like SoulForge Fusion, they live or die based on the communities that build around them. And organized play is a huge part of what builds those communities, that ability to get together with friends at a local store or conventions

or even motivations to get around the kitchen table together to play. So this becomes the kind of thing that you really can get joy out of, not just for the day you buy it or the month or the year you buy it, but for years and years and even decades to come, right? This is kind of what's connected us all. So before we get into the details and all the exciting stuff that's happening with SoulForge Fusion, I'd like to introduce the audience to you a little bit. you've been in this industry for a very long time.

I'd love to kind of hear a little bit more, let people know about kind of how you got started and a little bit about your background, and then we can kind of catch up to today and all the cool stuff we're working on. Yeah, that sounds good. I think like a lot of people in the industry, I was introduced through a bit of Warhammer,

a bit of Magic the Gathering back in the day when I was younger. I think it was a family holiday to Greece, and there was a couple playing Magic the Gathering by the pool. and they introduced me to it when I was probably way too young to be playing the game. But this was enough to get me hooked early on. And I guess it's always been a thing of mine. I've always had gaming as a side project. Sports been a big part of my life growing up.

But I still had my gaming friends, played 40K for a long time back when the elder were still called elder, and they were actually good. I was a turnded player myself. So, yeah. Okay. I used to feel the horrible 500-point. built an army that was just stupid. But they shut that down quite quickly.

But as far as kind of the career goes, I think it was about 2013. I joined the industry. Officially, before then I'd been volunteering, helping out events at my local game store. Everything that they'd do, I'd be involved somehow, whether it's an open playday, to running Friday Night Magic and everything in between. I was down there helping out. Yeah, I want to just pause there. I want to pause there for a second because, you know, it's one of the things I try to do in this podcast to sort of tease out these principles and things that people that want to get into the industry can use.

And just, you know, the importance of that, just like volunteering, helping out at your local game store, finding the things you're passionate about, starting to run events, starting to add value to the community and doing the things, you know, for free just because you love them, that then end up creating these opportunities for you to step into a career. I just think it's a great principle to kind of stop on. But then now as you kind of transition to doing this professionally, you can continue with the story. I just like to kind of highlight some points here. It's a great point. And actually, my kind of segue into that into working industry is I was an environmental consultant. I loved my job. It got a bit tedious at times.

But my boss's son was a U-Guio player. And while she was looking for a place near her to buy cards for her. done, she found an event's job in the games industry. And she knew that I did that as kind of a hobby in my free time. And she said, look, I don't want to lose you, but I found a job that I think's perfect for you. So I was kind of blessed with a really good boss there who was like, look, I don't want to lose you, but I can't not tell you about this job that you'd be great for. And then, so I applied, got the job.

And I guess the rest of say is history. I started off very much entry level, kind of took that hit and was like, this is a career change. I'm going to learn as much as they can, work my way up. So it started very much as an entry-level events position, had a demonstrator program in the UK that would go into department stores, into bookshops and demo games to help sell them. And we'd do conventions as well, Comic-Con and things like that, like WorldCon, all the fun, exciting things did a destination Star Trek one year as well. It comes some really cool conventions. But the kind of the emphasis was, let's get into our stores, help our stores sell games. and I built that kind of helped with my boss.

We built that from sort of a demo team of 50, 60 people all the way up to about 180 by the time I left that team. And we had pretty much something going on every weekend of the year somewhere. And it was fun. It was good. It was successful. And it was a couple of years of doing that. And I got asked to step up.

What do you see the success of building a team like that? Like what are the factors, you know, to building a team, that's a huge number of people to grow to, what are maybe some lessons that you learned or, you know, key things that maybe some interesting stories of things that went well or went poorly as you were trying to scale, you know, a team like that for the first time. Yeah, well, it was a challenge. Because a lot of, what we found is a lot of people who heard free time to do this at weekends would be students. We had a handful that weren't and they had their normal day jobs. We even had a few engineers and, you know, fairly well-paid professionals who still enjoyed going to

comic-cons and demo and games at the weekends. And they'd work with us. And that challenge was as a team grew, we kind of had this, I guess, false mentality that we've got more people so we can do more. But you've still got a lot of people who don't really want to work the weekends near Christmas because they're studying for their exams. And Christmas is a big sell point. And that's where we want to run more demos.

So you ran into this kind of false belief that, well, we've doubled the number of people so we can do twice as many demos. And we'd start telling all these companies that we can do all these demos. And when it came to actually booking them in, we realized that. We actually probably need another 50% more in reality to do twice as much work. And so that was an interesting challenge. Stretched us very thin the first year. We had that big growth.

There's a big department chain in the UK called John Lewis. And they loved having us come in. We had a really good relationship with them. And they were also really important for us for an analytical standpoint. Because the way the data is collected in the UK on sales, the data, that buyers look at has, if too much of that sale, too many of those sales is through Amazon, it cuts out and disappears. So it was really important for us to grow our John Lewis sales and our Waterstones, which is bookshop as well sales, because they propped up and reduced

that percentage of Amazon sales. So we were getting quite a lot of pressure on to get those demos in and get them done and sell through those avenues. But at the same time, we never trained our team as salespeople. They were demonstrators. And we didn't want to put them in it. We weren't doing pressure sales, they weren't there to force games down people's throats. So it was just kind of always found I was kind of in the middle ground between the higher up saying, we need these sales and the message we're saying to our team is, make people enjoy the games, sales aren't important, but they are. And that message was important to translate down correctly to the team,

so they were still creating that, hey, gaming is fun, look at these games, you can buy other than Monopoly for Christmas, not feel like you're trying to force them to buy something, because I don't think that works personally in that kind of storefront situation. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. This is, you know, we're talking about a few years ago in this context, but it's something that, you know, we talk about a lot is this,

the world's changed in so many ways where the sales have moved more and more online. Of course, the pandemic pushed that to be near 100% for a few years. But the importance of getting people into stores and supporting that play is something that we, you know, is, you know, I believe it's still unchanged, right? The idea that someone's going to discover and love a game just finding it online, it happens, right? There's some, there's influencers and streamers and people can see a video and or hear about it in a, you know, Discord channel or something. But there's just no, no substitute for the local store and a passionate community and people getting together and playing. And so how do you think about

how that's changed in supporting stores today, even compared to when you were doing it, you know, back then and the, you've been eight, eight years ago. Yeah, well, it's going to change a lot. I think we're still, depending on where you are in the world, we're still in this, like, I didn't book an international holiday this year because I was worried that there'd be another lockdown and flights get cancelled and maybe the destination I'm going to, wouldn't let me in. So even now, the kind of post-pandemic is still affecting how I make decisions in my life.

It's affecting everyone still the decisions they make and how often they go out, when they go out and where they go. And I think this, for game shops, it's an interesting challenge because while your local friendly game store, you're probably going to recognize a lot of the people in there, you may feel comfortable seeing them and you may be like, this is normal now. I can go and do this. There's still people who aren't. And so the game stores are going to have a naturally reduced footfall, not a lack of demand.

The players still want the games. They still want the new hotness. They still be part of that community. But it's not all the way back to. how it was 2018, 2019, yet. And that's interesting challenge. If I was running a in-store demo program now, I think it'd be much more challenging. Twofold, I don't think as many stores would want strangers coming in, who they don't know,

hanging around in the store all day. And I'm not sure many of my people who I had in my team would want to go to a different store every Saturday and Sunday and mixed with so many strangers when they're risking, getting sick during their exams. That wasn't even a thought before. They were just thinking about the extra money they could have and get themselves through the exams for the extra work. Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting.

I haven't spoken to many game stores this year. Owners, I've spoken to a couple. And they're doing well. One was a large game shop in London. I know the owner quite well. He's doing very well and products coming in. Everything's going smoothly again. He feels like it's back there.

But I don't know what it's like in America, for example, compared to here. it's uh i i wouldn't want to be trying to run that demo program now this is for that way yeah well and then this is you know as that's an opportunity i guess to fast forward a little bit to kind of how we're trying to address this problem with with soul for fusion because it's something as you know mentioned we've talked about a ton and we have tried to build a plan that is very flexible for stores and for players right every game of soul force fusion every deck that you buy can be scanned into an online account and played online via tabletop simulator. We have a very active community and Discord, but we also have built

programs that are explicitly for stores that let them run events. Maybe we want to talk a little bit about what that looks like and how we want to drive people to stores while still giving people the option to play and run events however they want. Yeah, absolutely. That was, I think when we first met, I think there was a, I think we were right in the same wavelength of what modern organized play needs to look like going forwards. And there's been a shift. And as a a publisher of a game, it would be ignorant to not realize that you have to make the changes and change how things work and embrace the digital element. And I know that when you talk to store owners, they're like, oh, no, it's going to be a digital game. We're not going to get people

to play. But the beautiful thing here is you still need the physical decks. You still need the sales and the stores are still going to sell product, no matter how the end user chooses to play the game. And so for me, and I think for you as well, Justin, it was important to create an environment where in the old days you had, I guess, this divide between card game players of kitchen table players and in-store competitive players. And you can break it down further than that, but we'll split it to two for now. But you've now got a third card game player who isn't kitchen table. They're not playing with their friends at home. They're playing with their friends online. And to ignore that market and alienate them and make them not feel welcome is

crazy to me. So we wanted to make sure when we were building this for, program that all styles of play and everyone people want to get out of this game is available. So rewards and prizes are available at every stage of that. And I think the big driver for that, I think I think is really unique about what we're doing is our Forge Guardian program. So you bring people into the game. It's an ambassador style program. You bring more people in. They take part in an official event.

You earn a point for that happening. And as you accrue more points, you unlock more rewards. and you may never even step foot in a physical game store because you can play on their online events and trigger all these prizes. And you can even get your likeness in a future card. What is normally like a World Championship star prize, that's now accessible to a kitchen table player

and someone who just plays online. It's unlocked that traditional, I have to go and win prizes. I have to be good at the game, otherwise I won't get any cool prizes and changed it and gone, no, if you're part of this community and you're getting involved and you're playing the game, however that is, you're going to have an opportunity to get these cool things as well.

And that was important to me. I think it was important to you as well, Justin. And I'm excited to see that in our program. Yeah, it was, it was really an exciting thing to build out. And I, you know, before you came on the team, you know, it was really, you know, this, within this last year, then, you know, I had a lot of big plans. And we had a lot of these visions. But having you here has really helped to make things concrete and your extensive experience, which we can get back into. as well in running these events and building programs for multiple different games really came to bear

and just made the programs better, cleaner, and have executed in phenomenal detail. So, you know, as we're recording this, right, this is not, the game's not out yet. And so a lot of these programs are still waiting. And so I can't wait to see this. You know, we're going to be at launch events on the weekend of release. And, you know, we were able to run some early events at GenCon. We did some preview events. And the Forge Guardian program has been live for,

little while now. But I think like, you know, really trying to get that message out about what we're doing that's never been done before. You know, it's one of the reasons obviously I wanted to have you on the podcast and some things I'm really excited to see how players respond to, right? So for stores, they are going to be able to get these, you know, get hobby kits and exclusive promos and cool stuff that nobody else gets to make sure that people want to drive to stores. But if they want to run their events online, we have tools that anyone can use on soulforetruition.com to run events to, stores can register with us so that they'll be sanctioned events at the right tier levels. And people can, they can charge entry fees. They can invite people from all over the world if they want. They don't have to just keep them in their physical store location.

And so the ability to run those tournaments and have them all feed into the same system, I think is really cool. The ability for someone who doesn't have a store to just be a ambassador to the game, become a forge guardian, get rewarded directly with cool stuff, just build their own community however they want, whether it be at your school, at your kitchen table, at your gaming club, you know, the world has changed and every community is different and trying to build a program that supports, you know, a great game, but more importantly, supports great

communities and you playing the way you want to play is something that, you know, it was clear when we first met that you had a similar passion about as I do because as much as, you know, to me, like a great game is the precursor, right? If you don't have a great game, you're not going to get, you know, people are not going to stick around. They're not going to come for it because you know, you're wasting your time. But that's just the, you know, the entryway that gets you into the door, which is really community, right, that ability to get together and build lifelong friendships and have these great experiences together. That's the real payoff in the long run. And that's what we're really building here. And that's what, you know,

organized play and games and content and all of it comes together and hopefully to build something that's going to be around, you know, a decade or multiple decades from now. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's, and that's what's been so fun about work on this game. And with like-minded people who have that vision yet, the game's great. The game's fantastic. I'm going to say when I first met Justin, the most annoying thing for me about getting involved in the game now is I can't play it competitively. Because I was really looking forward to picking it up and playing it. So obviously still play it, but I'm not going to be able to go to the events because my team's running them. But yeah, and that community building is absolutely the amount of stories I can think of,

times that I look back on at magic events or Warhammer events that I still, to the day, talk to my friends about. That's what gaming is to me. And I think that's what it is to a lot of people as well when you break it down. Yeah, yeah. So there's some cool other aspects here. Sorry, so we've talked a little bit about the Forge Guardian program. We've talked a little bit about store hobby kits. And maybe you want to unpack that a little bit because I know there's a lot of stores that also listen to this program. Or maybe if players, you have a local store that you want to get involved, they can contact their distributors and start getting out. access to this. But let's talk, we'll talk a little about what the, what the hobby kit and

hobby store support program is like these days. Yes. So the, the, the essentially, what it comes down to for stores is there are going to be two kits, and you think, and over a season. And a season is approximately four months. It's from when a product comes out till the next set comes out. So when the product hits, so as a time of this live, so it's out now, stores have access to the launch kit. And that hobby kit is a bundle. of prizes, stores can order as many as is reasonable. Obviously, if they start ordering a number that seems a bit odd, then that might be questioned by the distributor, but as many as they feel is needed to support what they have

planned for the game. And in there, you're going to get participation-level events. So each kit has prizes for 24 people, so you can double them up and have 1-48 player event. You can spread it out over multiple events in a league and hand those prizes out over weeks rather than a single day. Again, however, the store wants to run it in person or online. and that comes from alternate art forge cards,

minions, all the way up to playmats, and every kit's going to have playmats in as well at this day. We think they're a cool prize, players love them, it really helps to lay out of the game. So the first seasonal kit, which is out as of now, we'll have 24 minions, has eight alternate art corrochs, forge-borne. It has four alternate art forge cards,

and then two playmats. it also has support for the judges and the tournament organizers in our arbiter decks. So we call our judges and our tournament support staff arbiters, and they get a very exclusive deck with an alternate back on. It's only available in these kits. And that's our way of saying thank you for being involved in support in the game from an organizer standpoint. You get this pretty cool item, which I'm really excited.

I want one. I'm going to have to go and volunteer at my local store, I think, to get one. Yeah, yeah. It's another aspect that just reflects this philosophy here, right? So my, you know, my background is probably most people listen to the podcast. No, as a pro-magic player, it's kind of how I got into the industry and paid my way through college. And, you know, so I love the high-end competitive events. And we built SoulFort Fusion to have that deep competitive gameplay and strategy.

But we don't want to just reward high-end competitive players. We want to reward all of the parts that build a great, healthy community. And that includes the people who are the organizers and the judges. We want to give them specific rewards. It includes the players who bring other people into the game, right? The ambassadors, the fordorneying, the people who help grow the community. And making sure that there's something for everybody and you can play the game the way you want to play. If you just want to, you know, buy a couple packs and play a sealed event or you want to go deep and have a deep collection

and try to fuse the perfect deck and win our world championships, right? There's something there. Or if you just want to run cool local events or build a community around you, like we have something to reward every player to enable them to do the things that they want to do best and the ways that they want to contribute. to the community. And so that's been a big, it's been a big goal of ours. And it's, it's reflected in a lot of the different ways that we're, we're building this program.

So I, I, I, I really want to shift to another aspect of this that, uh, I realized kind of I didn't let you go back to your, your kind of background, the rest of your background narrative. So I've got a ton more things I want to talk about. So let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, I don't want to step over your, your extensive experience here. Let's, uh, because you've worked on a variety of, of games. So maybe we'll talk a little bit more about your

history and then we'll come back to some of the other cool things we're doing with our programs and stuff that we're working on together today. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I guess the first game I had any sort of loose input on was actually the Final Fantasy Trading Card game. I got to meet

Biscronix and talk about all the things I reckon they should do with that game and watch them do the complete opposite. So that was an interesting first take. I think I remember saying to them, look, you're not going to help players if you're first promos are only available as promos. They should be built in art. And the first three promos were only available as promos. Went for a fortune. Upset a lot of places. So that was an interesting

kind of, oh, at least I think I know what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's a great. That's a great thing. I'm going to keep interrupting your story because part of the fun of the stories is to pull out these lessons because this is something that's a lot, it's like a hotly debated topic and has been for a long time. And, you know, there's some games offer exclusive gameplay promos as prizes. And some games will just offer cool, you know, more cosmetic, whether it be alternate art or cool little tokens or other things that are, you know, cosmetically differentiate you, but don't differentiate you from a gameplay standpoint. So what is it that you and I are, I know, think very similarly about this, but just to tease it out for people that are trying to make that decision, you know,

for their own games, what do you think so, what do you think of the upsides and downsides are that exclusive gameplay element? So I think if, when done right, the exclusive gameplay element can work. The problem you've got is most companies, most people when they go that, they go down that route, they go, it has to be cool, it has to be exciting, it has to be powerful, has to be a cool price. And if you make a, let's say a card, for example, it's only available if you win a certain event. There's a limited number of them. And you make it very powerful in the game. You're now creating an environment where the best get better and everyone else can't. And they're artificially hampered by the fact that they didn't win that event while it was available.

They don't have access to this tool that everyone else says. That, to me, creates a couple of really nice positive experiences for those who got it, and a massive wave of negative experience that hugely outweighs the positive. If done correctly, I believe it can be done in a way where it doesn't, if it's done in a way that doesn't create an overpowered item or something that becomes for gameplay, it just comes chase for rarity, I can see some value to that. But then you're going to have to know exactly what that is. and the amount of designers I've spoken to who have no idea which the best card is in a set

until six months after it's been played, even after all they're testing, they can get that wrong. So that's why I'd shy away from it. And I'm much more in favor of enhancing items that people already have. So let's take a play mat for an example. Everyone's going to sit down, and pretty much everyone's going to bring a play mat to an event. If you sit down with a store champion playmat, you haven't gained an advantage by having it, but you've been able to basically flap it down and be like, look what I got. How badass am I? Without saying anything, you know, kind of that intimidation,

kind of wow and jealousy, this kind of, and it's a talking point. Suddenly you got a conversation. Oh, which store did you win that? And I came second to mine. And suddenly you're sharing a story about your store championship experience just because someone put a play mat down. And that to me is far more valuable than accidentally giving a small number of people an advantage.

Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, I think that this, this, this, there's this interesting, you know, tradeoff of collectible style games, right? And Soul Force Fusion's a little different, a hybrid deck game, so you're not like collecting individual cards in the same way, but you do have these one-of-a-kind half decks that you can combine together to play.

And so there's this element of like looking for the perfect deck combination and chasing after things. But there's also a piece of integrity, I feel like, that you want to make everything within our spectrum where everyone has a fair shot at either getting things that they're looking for and that the power levels are within, reasonable bands. And when you make a exclusive gameplay item so rare and so hard to get and so that only these, you know, X people can get it or people that win the, then it, then it, it, it, it's,

it sort of undermines the kind of integrity of the sport, right? Integrity of the game to a certain degree that I think is the main thing that I feel like hurts it. I think there's some interesting things that could be fun, like giving access to preview cards early, right? So you can get access to it before anybody else by winning. event, but then everybody gets access to it, you know, a month later or something. You know, I think there's some, some space there that could be fun to play in. But I think in general, making something that's just really, really cool visually, you know, really cool, like story point that people can have, that people can collect and get excited about,

but not so much impacting gameplay is exactly where we want to dial in our rewards. And I don't know how many of them we want to even reveal now, but I have seen some of the stuff you've been creating for some of our future kits and plans and programs. And they are freaking awesome. want some. And so, you know, I think we got to make, I think we got to find, we haven't made this yet. We need to make a, you know, SB team can play series. We're allowed to play at some tournament. We kind of do one of our online events we're allowed to play, but we'll circle around to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So anyway, so I, so you were, so this is great. We'll go back to,

back to a video story. So you gave the, Square, Inix and Fantasy Flight a bunch of advice they didn't follow. You realize that, hey, they probably should have followed your advice. And then how did things go from there? So I then, I had to stop working on the Final Fancy game because I started working with Fantasy Flight specifically, because whereas before I was working for the UK distributor of Asma Day, which meant any title they distribute I could work on, I was now working for the studio. So I couldn't really touch the Final Fancy game anymore because that would have been a conflict of interest. So I didn't get to do much more than the very, very early conversations that the person. who's running it now based in Europe, a good friend of mine, great guy, they're doing some

really cool things. I hope the game does well. It's got the right people and right passion behind it now. And so, yeah, I ended up working with Fantasy Flight Games Organized Play. So that was quite a vast catalog. It was here you go, here's nine competitive games to run organized play for in Europe. And so it was anything from Game of Thrones card game. We had Star Wars Destiny, which is another card game. Runner was in its twilight then. I got to do a bit with that before it went. And then the minis games of Star Wars X-Wing Armada,

and then Legion came along, and then Key Forge came along. It was this constant conveyor belt of lots of different games, all wanting some form of organized play, all needing a different organized play, really, all trying to be packed into this one condensed program. And that was a fun challenge. I got to, so my first, it was, I think it was in November when I accepted the job.

and I had to run the first European Championships in June, which had never been run before for eight different titles. Yeah, that was kind of a ego. Go figure this out. Wow. Yeah, thrown right into the defense. That's impressive. Yeah, at the same time, run some X-wing events, yeah.

Yeah, so, okay, so here's, this is another interesting area to dive into. So, you know, you had eight different games, all with eight different needs and eight different things, and you have to build programs for all of those. them. And so how do you think about teasing those elements out and what each game needs? And I'll make it a little more relevant to us all in the sense that like, hey, we have, right now we have Soulforge Fusion, which is we've built extensive organized play plans. And we're obviously unpacking here and people can find out more on SoulForgefusion.com or in our Discord. There's a Discord link on Stoneblade.com. But we also are, we've already announced that we're

going to be doing a new Kickstarter for Ascension Tactics sequel, which is a, you know, deck-building miniatures game and that has its own different types of needs and so when you think about the difference between how you build an organics play program you can either reference your your previous examples from the fantasy flight or you can reference our modern ones and how you might think about these things differently well yeah absolutely it's it's it's um it's interesting really because lots of people from i think this is a good time to talk about kind of different stakeholders in all guys play um And you can kind of abstract out as far as you want. But I think the simplest thing to do is to say,

let's split it into publisher, store owner, and player, and say, what do they want out of the game and find the common denominator? I mean, you could go all the way up to going having fun or being happy, being a common denominator, right? But then organized plays the same as a Labrador. So that doesn't really help us. So if we're going too far up and saying that being happy is the thing we're trying to achieve, that's pointless.

So you kind of go to the common denominator. And the journey you go through is, okay, so let's say I'm the publisher, I'm making this game, what do I want out of organized play? Well, I want to sell more products. Ultimately, I want to make sure that I'm gaining more players that I'm losing, because every game's going to have a natural drop off of players. So as long as I'm gaining more than I'm losing, the community will grow, we'll keep going. So that's kind of what the publishers in my mind is looking for.

And as a store owner, ultimately, you're only going to support games that sell, because you walk into any game store on a Friday night, and there's going to be a majority of the tables being used for one game. And if we're as a publisher going, hey, we want you to put tables aside for our game, there needs to be a justification, a reason for them to give up the tables for other games. So for a store, they're looking at that game and going, okay, how do I fill seats?

Is it filling seats? Is it selling me product? Am I happy that way? And the players, you can split up multiple times, as many other game studios have done into the spikes and Timmy's, But fundamentally, you can simplify it and say that they want a community, whether that's a competitive community or a social community and everything in between, they want a community in a game they can enjoy and love and they're happy to invest their money and timing. And so when you kind of extrapolate up, everyone invested wants more sales because that helps everybody. It helps the store, it helps the studio and helps the players because more sales means more people are playing the game.

And that sounds nice and clear cut. But it doesn't necessarily mean the same for every game. So if you then go back to the store owner and you say, okay, how much space for eight card game players versus how much space for eight minatures players, traditional minatures game players, that's going to be about four times as much space needed. So the incentive is going to be different. The time required is going to be different.

Profitability is probably going to have to be different. it's a delicate balance. And so the store has to be able to know that they can have enough people in to charge the right amount for the table to play their game. So when I'm thinking about the difference between games and what the program should offer, I need to take all of those things into account and ensure that the sales bit is ultimately what we get, but it keeps everybody happy. There's no point us getting lots of sales and no gaming space because the game will die.

Hence, you know, that's why we focus on in store play. So, kind of a step back again to what's different. Well, with a miniatures game, more than not, even the most competitive players aren't there for winning. They're there for the story. They're there for the experience. It's normally a longer gameplay period. They're normally going to be more sociable and chatty with their opponent than say a card game player who might only be playing 30, 40 minutes. And they're more likely to share their story with their friends they came with rather than with their opponent.

And so you want to create different interactions. So let's take a competitive card game. You want quick, snappy, fun formats that are going to get the players' focus, thinking, and try and out-stratage each other in a quick, impactful way. With a miniatures game, I'd be looking more for a slightly more campaign drawn-out-style scenario where you get to tell that story with your opponent, whether it's through, I'm beating you, and we're telling I get to tell the story because I won, or whether it's we had this crazy interaction and this all happened

and then everyone piled in whatever this story becomes and we have a fun story to talk about that then affects the story of the game even better like it gets passed on and affects the actual future product then I think that's really valuable in a miniature's game versus a card game. I realize I've just said that while creating story for a card game but Soul Forge is very different.

It's not that kind of, it's not magic. It's a different card game there. I might have waffled beyond saying what I meant to say there. No, yeah. Okay, so there's a couple things I'll unpack here. So, right, the one hand, there's an interesting thing that the business model of the game dictates a lot of what organized play can be and should be, right? And so a, you know, repeat purchase model game that takes up limited storage space to play is going to need a lot more, you know, organized play in butts and seats to move the ball forward and have something happen. A higher, a repeat purchase model, but that's a higher per unit cost game that takes up a lot of space. like a Warhammer 40K type thing, would need less number of people, but they need longer and more involved experiences. Right.

And then there's games where they're more boxed games, like a traditional board game where you're gonna buy it once and then you're kind of done or waiting for another expansion to come out, where you really just can't support as much organized play by default, because there's not enough incentive for the stores to run it because they're only gonna sell so many copies. The players can drive, you want to drive those players more towards,

whether it be home experiences or conventional experiences or or rarer kind of gathering type experiences at the store. And so there's a, there's an interesting interplay between business model and, and organized play support and what's going to support those kinds of players. And then you talked a little bit about what players are looking for, right? Like what is it that when I come into a game, what's the promise of the game? There's a certain promise that a game makes to me. Some of that is sort of culturally expected, what I expect from a TCG, what I expect from

an interest game. And some of that is explicit or implicit with the way that the game. is marketed and presented to players. And so this is one of the things where SoulForge Fusion has been kind of an interesting challenge for us to market and set up because there's no game really like it. So you, we didn't get to this part in your history, but you ran organized play for KeyForge, which of course is one of the closer parallels, right? That was algorithmically generated game.

So every deck was one of a kind, which was one of the key inspirations for SoulForge Fusion. But also there was no customization. And in fact, the cards themselves weren't algorithmically generated in the same way we do. And there's a whole different model for how we have main characters that are named, right, or are forged born, that you personifies. You can be Oros or Circe or Korok, as opposed to in a game like that where there was a more nebulous arcon that wasn't, you know, kind of a made up figure that was different every time. And so the fact that we have a story that players get to tell in Soul Force Fusion is something we've emphasized in the way we market our game. and the way we market our organized play and the way people engage with it. So let's talk a little bit then, since we've already opened that door,

about what storyline play looks like in Salfordshire. Yeah, that's a bit I'm most excited about. So one of the great things about Salfordch Fusion is this living story that's unfolding as you play the game. And there's going to be multiple opportunities throughout the year to have a direct impact on what happens in the story. So to use Jen Conn as a good example, that was our first story-based event.

The storyline event essentially decided what happened to the forge. This is an important part of solace. This is what's essentially keeping them all alive. It's an important force on solace. Just to give a little context for those that don't know, right? So the world of Soul Forge is called Solace. It is functionally an ice planet, a very inhospitable. And the Soul Forge itself is the kind of, you know, the soul, S-O-L, it's like sun.

It's like basically this kind of magical sun at the top of a tower that provides light and magic and is the kind of main source of for each of the factions to try to survive and kind of conquer and dominate the world. So, yeah, continue just giving some context for those that aren't already familiar with our awesome story, which they can find on SoulForgefusion.com and there's a story link. But anyway, carry on. Yeah, that would have been useful information. to start up with.

So the forge shifted, it changed shape based on the results. And so the players could see the four artworks of what the forge could become, what the Soul Forge could become. And then whichever faction had the better results throughout the event, earned the right to have the Forge. And so it's now a Tempest Forge. So everyone who played in that event got a promo alternate art of the new forge to use in their game.

and there's a story on Salfordrusion.com of what happened and why the forge changed, all based on the results of that event. So all the players at Jen Con had a direct impact already on the story. We're gearing up for Pax Unplugged

where we're going to kick off another story element, which can't talk about just yet. It might be public when this comes out, but I don't want to risk it. So we'll say not for now. And the plan is that not only people who go to Paxonplug, but people who play in the local store for this trigger are going to have some impact on

the what happens next and set up potentially cards that are going to appear in future sets, which factions have access to those cards, how they interact. And so you're not just sitting down and playing a card game. You're actively engaging in the world and your choice of which factions you play and which forgeborn you choose to be a forgeborn and who you represent is going to directly impact the story as well, which is really cool. Yeah. It's something I'm super excited about.

It's like something I've, it's been a dream of mine to make a system like this. I mean, the only game I've known that did anything even close to this was, was the old Legend of the Five Rings game. And it, you know, had these elements where people could change the story.

And I thought that was just so cool to do. And now because of the digital printing technology that we use with SoulForge Fusion, we can change cards more quickly. We can have, we have cool, rare drops of flavor text that reveal different parts of the story that people can hunt for and share online and try to piece together elements of the story. The story continually evolves. So when you go to the Soulforgefusion.com story link, there's already extra entries in there for what happened

at Gen Con. It becomes part of our lore. We have a cool animated video that shows off the story that catches up. We have a whole next chapter of the story that you were alluding to that comes with our second set release, which we're not talking about yet, but has some cool elements to it. And And individual players have the opportunity to make an impact in the world that is long-lasting. And I will tell you as a designer, this sounds super cool. But man, oh, man, did me make our jobs harder? Because we have to create all of these branching stories and branching card paths and different card designs, most of which will never see the light of day because we have to wait to see what the players decide and what they end up doing.

But it's also really cool because it gives us the opportunity to just play around. So where we have our championship events where they're more competitive and we have a pretty kind of straightforward rules enforcement and you want people to bring their best decks with the storyline tournaments, we got lots of fun surprises that we throw at players and lots of things that can happen based on the story that will change up the game and do kinds of crazy stuff. And so it's just one of the most fun events to do. And so if you are, have a chance to come out to Paxonplugged, it was December 2nd to the 4th. Alex and I will both be there as well as the rest of the Stoneblade team.

and we will be having the storyline event there as well as a championship event. And then as you alluded to Alex, we're going to have more storyline events, not just at big conventions, but also ones that will be happening at local stores that will be able to impact the entire global story. And so more of details of that are coming. But again, this is just one of those opportunities, right? For some of you listening, this may not be appealing to at all. You may just want to play competitively.

You may just want to play at the local store. You may just want to be the person that gets all the cool Arborativex for running events. But for some people out there, I know this is true because I'm one of these people, right? You're like, oh, my God, that's amazing. Like, that's what I want to do. Like, I want to get involved in really deep dive into the world and the lore of the story. And so, you know, we're creating something.

This is kind of the underlying philosophy of organized play for me is, right? You create the ability for people to play the way they want to play. You create the ability for people to get immersed in the world to whatever degree that they're excited about and interested in. You know, because that's these kinds of games, it's a, it's a big tent and a lot of people. Some people are going to be wanting to go and just, you know, be collectors, right? This is all of the decks, not only are, is every single deck and Soul4 Fusion numbered so that you know where in the print run that deck is, but every card is numbered. So you know how many of that card have ever been printed when your card got

printed, right? Which is nobody's ever done that before. It's like because we have over 15,000 possible cards and set one alone and they, because of the way the algorithm works, that number just exponentially increases. I know that with over, you know, well over a million decks printed, there's still a bunch of number ones that are still out there, you know, And so there's this really cool discovery process. And other people are going to be like, oh, that's cute and don't care about that at all. Right.

So trying to really build something that's exciting and appealing for everyone has been a big goal. And so, I mean, look, you know, we've been working with us for most of the year, Alex, but I've been working on this on Soul Forge in one form or another for over a decade to build the lore, to build the world, to build the gameplay, to build everything that comes to this. And so I can't wait. I mean, literally, you know, we're having this conversation like a week before launch. This is live now when people are listening to it. at the launch, it's like, I'm freaking out.

Like, I'm excited to see how people react to this stuff. So, yeah, if you guys, you know, you guys are playing, like, share your stories with us. Please, like, come to our Discord, post on social media, like, show us, tell us what you love. Tell us what you don't love, right? That's the other thing. That's the other piece that I think is really important is this, it's a community. And when I say it's a community, it just mean, like, it's a community of y'all, right? It's a community with us.

Are you, if you have ever seen us at a convention, you know how welcoming our team is and how much we take feedback. If you want to join onto our Discord, we're super engaged. age and superactive because we're going to get some stuff wrong, right? So actually, you know what? Let's highlight some examples of things that didn't quite go the way we thought they were going to go. The things that we were excited about it didn't quite work.

Let's talk about maybe season zero. Yeah, because I think it's easy to talk about all the exciting stuff and things that are great. Like the Gen Con experience was amazing. The storyline was amazing. But let's talk about season zero. What were we thinking? What do we try to do? And what kind of, how did it actually play out?

So I think when we describe season zero to everyone who's involved, everyone thought this is amazing. a great idea, let's do it. So what season zero was, was an attempt to get stores engaged with the game and players involved with the game before it comes out, utilizing the fact that we have tabletop simulator so that everyone can play the game now. They can play competitively against each other. We could set up a Discord, host a tournament. And our plan was to get demo decks out to as many stores as possible in North America,

get them to run in-store demos, even run an event if they want to, whatever they wanted to do to select three players. represent their store. And then those three players would join us on the Saturday, we'd play like a March Madness style single elimination team event where the end would have one final store, be the champion store before the games even come out and we're going to send them some extra prizes. The top eight stores get some extra prizes to give out to their players at their store, the top 16. All in theory sounded great. We had the demo decks go out. And then nothing really happened. no one was really coming back to us

and when we started talking to store owners and to the distributors and saying, hey, what's going on? What's happening? Why aren't we getting people signing up? We know the demo kits have gone out. We were hearing some really interesting conversations.

Lots of store owners going, I don't get it. How can I run a tournament when the game's not out and not understand that they don't have to do anything. They're not running the event. We are.

Not really understanding that this was going to be an online thing. What we kind of ran into was, and I think this is the best way I could summarize it, is we have a new game with new concepts, new ways of playing it, unique decks, but a deck building element to it as well. There's a lot of new cool things being involved. On top of that, we've got an O.P. program that goes, hey, we're happy for you to play online. In fact, we encourage it. You know, this is, you're still, you know, still going to buy your decks at your stores, but come online and play. Run events online. This is all

part of our new organized play of the future where we're embracing every style of gameplay. And you mash that together, and it was just far too much information. for the stores and tournament organizers to get their head around because the game wasn't out yet. Had we tried to do something like that a few months after the game had come out, and all of our new exciting things were somewhat normal and become normal to the tournament organising the stores, and I think we'd have had more success for something like that. But I think we ran into way, what to us was all very straightforward and very simple, because as Justin alluded to, this is 10 years' worth of his life.

and it's easy for me to sit here and map out an organized play plan. I go, yep, this makes perfect sense. This is super simple. But when you put it into the hands of people who are also worrying about the next magic launch, the next Pokemon launch, and all these other new games coming out, they're coming out of COVID. They've got all these other things going on. And they've got a completely new style of game and a completely new style of organized play.

And they're being asked to run an event before the game comes out. It was just too much. I think would be kind of my summary of it, Justin. I think maybe somewhat the same for you. Yeah, I think it's another great lesson. This is a lesson I reinforce in, you know, design and game design, right, that less is more. In fact, too much innovation can be a problem because people can't understand and access what it is that's cool about your game. If there's so many cool new things going on in the game design, then it can be very hard for people to get to it, right?

Whereas opposed to you can just say, hey, it's like this game meets this game with this cool new hook, then people can get into it, right? And so I think Soul Forge Fusion is in some sense, there's just so much cool new stuff happening, especially when it comes to the events and the organized play and the ways that you can interact with the game, that getting that message out has been, I think, the biggest challenge that we've had. And so season zero in particular in the way it ties in also because stores don't, yeah, they don't have product. They don't have, they don't really sure what their upside is yet. It's kind of like a pre-investment in building the community and building the excitement in the store. it was a lot to ask.

And then, you know, there's just these channels, this challenge of communication, right? We're working with a few key distributors to really count on them to interact with the stores and support the stores because we can't call the, you know, many, many, many hundreds of stores that we would need to do directly. And that now becomes a game of telephone to get the messaging down. So it becomes even harder, right? I can explain the concept to you directly or you could explain it to another person directly and it can be fine.

But when you've got to, like, go through these layers, it gets harder and harder. And so it was a key lesson that we learned and it allows us to learn and move better, right? We're investing a lot into this game and into this community, into this organized play. And some of that, just like, again, relating it to the game design lessons I talk about all the time, you go through that iteration loop. You try stuff. You don't know if an idea is good until you try it. I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how much experience you have.

A lot of you want to try something new. You're not going to know if it's good until you try it. And so we try to run these iterations, run these little experiments. And there's also these other cool variant formats and stuff that we want to try. and different kinds of ways to play that, you know, we don't know if they're good or not, but we're gonna try them and see how they go. And then the more that people adopt them,

and also vice versa, right? Like we have the players can actually bring those things to us, right? We encourage players to experiment. And actually there's a whole thread, there's a whole channel in our Discord about alternate play formats that players are proposing to us and seeing how they grow organically. And we're happy to support those, right?

The ones that players, we're here to provide a service to the community to let them play the way they wanna play. And so, you know, we're definitely keeping an eye out for what, what seems like it's working that fans come up with as well as the stuff that we try that works and doesn't work. And we're going to keep adjusting and building accordingly. We've got a lot of a lot of big plans and the, you know, the need to be adaptive to what's working. What is it? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And it's like, like, well, here's a good example. We want team play, right? We think we're both agreed that, I know Richard was keen to have team events. And I love team play. I think the idea of having a team of three and going to have. event. It's very sociable. It can be competitive without being competitive because you're having fun. The stories you generate exponentially more because you're sharing it as you're playing it. And I love that. But at the same time, in my mind, and I guess this is maybe me making sure we don't

repeat what we've done is I also don't want to alienate a bunch of people. If we go, hey, first store championship, go find two friends. And that the guy who wants to come to a store championship has only played online at home, suddenly he's going to feel a bit, oh, hang on. I haven't met enough people from the game yet to take part. So we will absolutely be doing that. And I think it will become more and more part of the game as we go forwards. But we're going to kind of hold on that just a second. Make sure we get the game out, get people playing it first,

and then go, okay, okay, here's this cool team format. We're going to roll out in this next door championship, next league of champions. It's going to be a team event. You've now got a few months to find your friends, build your team, test your decks. Let's kind of go from there. Yeah, yeah. A lot of formats are really exciting and we're excited about them, but they need to wait, you know, until there's a more established community before they

become appropriate. So I want to shift to another one of the cool things. As we talk about, there's too many unique things going on. There's another thing that's really unique with what we're doing in the sense that, you know, many games have this idea of player rankings, right? The more you do in an event, the better you do in an event, the higher your ranking goes, and you can earn status and everything. And, of course, we have that as well.

But we also have a new concept that, as far as I, No, nobody's ever done before, which is your deck can actually gain ranks and level up as well. Maybe we want to talk a little bit about that program. Yeah, the renown. Yeah, I'm excited. I love this. So it kind of serves two purposes as well. So I guess let's talk about what it is and then serve the purposes it holds.

So as you play with a fused deck and you start to do well in it, you'll earn renown. and when you hit a certain level of renown, your deck levels up. So at the start, all decks are bronze. If they finish in the top two of a bronze tier event, because there's different tiering events based on their kind of hierarchy in the OPE ladder, if you do that three times, then you'll level up to silver. But if you went to a silver event with a bronze deck and came top two, you'd instantly level up to silver.

And the same goes for silver going up to gold. And what that does is it's kind of like I said, serving two points. Firstly, it's cool. Like, everyone wants to achieve things. There's a level of achievement there. You could never win an event and level your deck up because you only have to get to the final table, right? The top two. So you could be that guy who's a bad beat story of your life.

You always make the final, always a bridesmaid. Like, you never quite win an event, but you've taken a deck all away from bronze up to gold because you're still getting there. You're doing well. And that's cool. and people like to have that ability to stretch somebody to achieve beyond just a result of the event. The other thing it does is it's going to help balance local games. So with this procedurally generated system we have, there are going to be arguably better decks than others. That's just the nature of it.

That's part of the fun. And someone's going to find a very good combination of two decks in their local area, which is very powerful. Now, if they win a couple of local events, their decks gone from bronze to silver, and local tier, local events or bronze tier events, and bronze tier events can only have bronze tier decks. So straight away, that deck is not going to continually dominate and hammer new players and make life miserable for everyone because the super competitive player and the local meta's got it

and is trouncing everyone, it's going to level up and be ready to be used at the next tier. They're going to be challenged now go and find another deck or fuse another deck to bring to the game. So that's the second, arguably the more important reason for this renown system is we're not, going to have to worry about an extremely stale local meta that can happen. I'm thinking black to Splinter Twin in modern magic and being miserably stomped by my friend over and over again

playing Splinter Twin. Until it got bad. Yep. Yep. Yeah. The ability to evolve a meta game without having to ban cards, right, or do something like very drastic is a really powerful tool that we have here, right? You want the best players with the best deck? to be playing against the other best players in the best decks. You don't want the, you know, and similarly you want that kind of new player entry and experience in the local communities to be constantly fresh. And this is a tool that nobody's ever had before that I think could really empower that in a way that's really phenomenal.

Yeah, I think what we, lessons I'd say I learned for building this, having worked on Key Forge and the chain mechanic is it was just too slow. It wasn't quick enough, it wasn't responsive enough, and it wasn't a big enough penalty. and it just didn't really work, if I'm being completely honest. Whereas this renown system, the chains felt negative. You didn't feel like you'd achieved something. You're like, now I've got chains. Whereas with the renown system, you've achieved something.

Right, I'm now in the silver deck. That deck I can now take to Worlds because you have to have at least a silver tier deck to go to Worlds, which is a gold tier event. So there is the negative and positive. If you're negative, I can't play at my local, but I've now got a really cool deck, but I know it's good I can take to the world championships. So it's not just a negative, which is what I feel bands are and what I feel chains were, is just a negative.

It doesn't feel like a positive one. Yeah, the perception. And we have, you know, that if you win with a deck at your world championships, you can turn your deck, it can become platinum. There's mechanisms for being rewarded for the cooler and better you get. You know, it's sort of funny for me because it was back when I used to play magic professionally and I won a pro tour with Oath of Druids, after which they banned Oath of Druids.

I felt like I won the game. Like I did. I broke the game. Aha. And so there's this interesting, this interesting kind of interplay that happens as you're succeeding. And it feels like a rewarding experience. And you get prize for it as opposed to just,

no, no, no. That's banned. You're blocked. You're stopped from doing the things that you want to do. So I'm very excited about that. everyone I've talked to has been really excited about it. I think it's a tool that is going to really change the face of the way games are played. And again, it's something that's unique based on the technology of how we build our games.

You couldn't do something like this in a game like magic and a full traditional technology. Because you can't level up a deck because the decks are all individual cards. You change one card and blah, blah, blah. But here, because each half deck has to stay together, they can gain this renown that goes with them. And if I trade you my deck, you know, you're someone that wants to go play in the world. championships, you have to have a gold tier deck or silver to your deck at first, at least. And then you could get that from somebody else and get a chance to play. If you're not a very good player, you're not going to do very well.

But it became an interesting additional way for you to like increase the value and collectability of decks and have this sort of interesting tradeoff that goes on. And again, just to re-cl clarify, right, the same is the same ranking system applies, whether you're playing online or in store at an event. So your deck is registered. you do well in a bronze or a silver tier online event, your deck's going to gain the same renown from it. You're going to gain the same renown from it.

So it really lets you, it removes those barriers where somebody who could, previously only be someone who could physically travel to a location and play in one of these big events. We're going to be having regular big events, both online and in stores and at conventions, you know, all across the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, excited. Yeah. There's so much here.

And again, we're just sort of scratching the surface. Players are just now going to be able to, have their their hands on this. And it's a very, it's just such a wonderful time to be doing this. And I cannot express enough how glad I am to have you on our team and how much you have increased the quality level of what we're doing, brought at a level of passion that is, you know, something we value so much here. And, and also just to highlight to the audience, you know, how much, you know, Richard and I get a lot of the FaceTime and credit for the game. But it is a incredibly powerful, passionate team people that make something like this happen.

And we have done it with a very shockingly small team, all things there, right? You know, people think about it. They think, oh, they must have, you know, dozens or hundreds of people, whatever. You know, we started this year, I think it's like seven people on our team, and now we're up to maybe 11. But it's a very, it's a very passionate, dedicated team of people that try to handle all aspects of the stuff, whether it's the mess of trying to get your product to you, right? We had to push our launch date back twice because product.

got stuck in port, it got stuck in train stations, and getting all kinds of green, moving all that pieces through, getting all of the organized play kits down and sent to stores and communicated to stores and the programs designed, getting the online stuff working at all and getting it all the how your digital database works, how we algorithmically generate the decks and make sure they're all one of a kind and track everything. It's just an incredible team of people who have worked so hard. And so I hope everybody out there gets a chance to at least try the game. Again, if you want to go to your local stores, you can buy it now.

You can find them on Solforgefusion.com, the store locator. You can also play for free on Tabletop Simulator. There's a SoulForge Fusion mod that's 100% free that includes DaxA that we change all the time, join our Discord, come play. So are there other things that come to mind for you, Alex, that you want to share, whether it be about a program or about, you know, organized play in general before we wrap up? No, I think we could talk another half an hour about what's coming. If that was what we're talking about, but I think, I don't think that's really,

really worth the merit. What I would say is, by the time this is live, our organised play, web page dedicated should be live, and that'll be SoulForgeFusion.com, forward slash, organized dash play. And in there, we're going to have video guides for tournament organizers for setting up. So if you're a store owner and you're not 100% sure how the software works, there'll be video guides in there. That's where you'll find the torrent regulations. It's where you'll find all the information you need. And if, for whatever reason, you can't find the answer to something, there'll be an email address there for you to ping. It'll come straight through to me. And we'll get the information you need.

So that's, I've been working on that this week. Should be live, but it should be ready to go live at the end of this week and should be up and running when the product comes out. So it'll be up by the time you guys hear this. So hopefully everything will be all set and going. So fantastic. Alex, thanks so much for being here. And even more, thank you so much for being a part of this team. I cannot express enough how grateful I am and how excited I am to see the world get to see your work.

And for us all to get to be together and hopefully meet many of you all in the audience at Paxonplug, December 2nd to the. the fourth and many more fun events in the future. So thanks, Alex. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast.

Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something.