Think Like A Game Designer - Ben Brode — From Pizza Delivery to Hearthstone's Helm: Crafting Digital Card Games, the Essence of Decision-Making, Building Trust in the Gaming Industry, Innovating with Marvel Snap (#42)

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Ben Brode worked for Blizzard for 15 years, working his way up from a low-level position to become one of the lead designers of the monstrously successful game Hearthstone. He is now the Chief Creative Officer at his own game studio called Second Dinner, which created the digital collectible card game for Marvel called Marvel Snap. This episode was super-fun to record, with some great stories and many great lessons about creating some of the biggest digital card games on the planet! 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. In today's episode, I speak with Ben Brode. This is probably the episode I have enjoyed the most, just from a pure laughing and entertainment standpoint. Ben, as you'll see, is quite the character and really a gregarious personality. Ben was one of the original designers of Harstone. I got the chance to work with him back in my old World of Warcraft TCG and World of Warcraft Miniatures Days. And now he is one of the founders of Second Dinner games and that has actually

created the brand new Marvel Snap digital trading card game. And it's got a lot of really fascinating new mechanics. It's a very light accessible game with some really interesting deep dive progressions. And we talk about what it takes to build these kinds of fascinating digital games that have death, but also have a level of accessibility and polish that really is unparalleled to anything else in the market, especially for those of you that have played Hardstone, and you can actually play Marvel Snap right now at the time that this is going live. It has just released. And so there's a lot of really interesting insights. We talk about his origin story and what it's like to be a QA tester at Blizzard

and the skills that kind of helped him to progress along the path and the ways that the design challenges kind of approach taking these complicated mechanics and simplifying them down, but making them more accessible and making them really great. So it's really fun.

There's a lot of great stories in this podcast, a lot of great insights into that process of founding a company and building games and how you build something that can really stand the test of time. So I really hope that you guys enjoy this as much as I did. So without any further ado,

I give you Ben Brod. Hello and welcome. I am here with Ben Brod. Ben, dude, it's so good to have you here. It's awesome to be here. Oh, my God. We have a history that I'm excited to share, but it has been years now since we've really gotten a chance to talk,

especially deep diving on design. And you have been up to some very, very big things. I've recently played the beta of your brand new game. from your company Second Dinner, the Marvel Snap, which by the time this podcast comes out, will be available for download. I'm assuming on all the devices. Yes, iOS and Android. We have an early access on PC too.

Yeah, yeah. So all that stuff, I played it for purposes of research for this call. But as I was saying, before we started talking, I ended up getting hooked for like 12 hours this last weekend. So I definitely recommend that people check it out. And we're going to talk a lot about some of the interesting design decision. and what it's like to start your company and all that. But I always like to start at the beginning, right?

You're a famous internet personality now and designer. And I want to know. I know your Blizzard story, but I don't know your pre-Blizzard story, or if we've talked about it, I've forgotten it. So I'd love to know what got you started in this crazy path that made you who you are today. Well, so I always loved games, and I would make games on like my Ti-82 calculator.

That was kind of my first game creation experience, and I would trade games with other people from my school and from other schools and stuff. And so I think this is episode, I think this is episode like 40 something on my podcast. You might just have had the nerdiest origin story of anybody so far. This was an old website. I had to get like a link cable and upload my games to like TI82 apps.com or something.

Oh my God, that's great. That's great. I actually remember doing the same damn thing back then. I had blocked it out. I had blocked that out of my mind. That's amazing. Okay, great. So wait, so you were programming the games yourself from scratch?

I started downloading other people's games than editing them, like optimizing them to make them faster and work better. And then I started making my own stuff. How did you get the confidence to do that? You never programmed before that or you did and you then just found the calculator and went. How old were you when this happened? I was curious. It's got to be like 10th grade or 9th grade or 10th grade or something.

Okay. 15 or 16. But yeah, you know, it's not like there's not like high stakes. You're just like, you know, the code all exists. That's the thing about these old TI-E2 games is that you couldn't like encrypt them or anything. But if you got an app, you had all the source code for the app. So it was easy to like, you know, mess with it and change the credits to say your name, even though you didn't make the app, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also was super into card games and board games. My dad was a huge collector of board games. And so he had like a thousand board games in the year like 1990 or something. This is before board games were like as huge as they are today. And we used to have mandatory game nights. I wasn't allowed to go out with my friends. I had to stay home and play board games with the family.

Wow. Wow. You would think you'd rebel and go away from game nights. But you got into it. It worked. That's great. We all played magic. We used to do for anyone, if it was a birthday or it was like a holiday,

my dad would get six booster packs for each person in the family where we do like a birthday sealed deck tournament for everybody's birthday. My mom, my dad, my brothers, we all had, we did sealed deck. Yeah, see, this is a way better, like, origin story now. See, I, you don't understand. Like, my aunt when she, she, for my birthday, got me a magic set.

I mean, like a thing with tricks in it, like you put it out of a hat because she thought she heard I was into magic. So yeah, you were doing well. You were doing well. So I also got really into then, like, modding. I did like Warcraft 2 maps and Starcraft maps. Like I really into Duke, Newcomb 3D maps. And so I had this dream of being a level designer.

But when I went to college, I joined this like this little crew of folks that was making cell phone games. This is in the year 2000, and they were making a massively multiplayer online text-based role-playing game for those Nokia phones. But like no one had the internet on those things. So the potential audience was like incredibly small. And we didn't really do it. It was kind of, it was mostly just messing around to play Warcraft 3 is all we did.

And then one guy from that crew got a job at Blizzard on the night crew doing quality assurance. And I didn't realize it, but the school I went to, Blizzard was on that school's campus. It was on UCI campus. And so it was just like, you know, within walking distance of me the whole time, it had no clue. So I, uh, once he got that job there, I worked at a pizza place and he worked the night crew. So there wasn't that many places opened that late. So he would, uh, call me and I would deliver the last, the last pizzas out of there to Blizzard and get to meet all the people who were working the night crew. And that's kind of how I got my inn and got started at Blizzard.

That is amazing. I love that. Just the pizza guy showing up. Hey, I, I can, I can make games. I'm up this late. I'm not going to play video games anyway. I can play games still 4 a.m. Right.

Well, so, okay, so this is, like, your story is probably the closest to the, like, cliche desire of everybody that's out there, right? Like, this is, you literally, like, you've got some, you know, some job that, you know, whatever, paying the bills, you're, you're doing something. And you, you, you play video games for fun. That's what you want to do. And you, like, walk into Blizzard's office. You're like, wait, you could just get paid to do this?

Like, yeah. So that transition must have been awesome. But I want to dig into that role because the QA role sounds awesome. But there's a lot to it that I think people don't know. And I'd love to unpack a little bit. What does it like to make the transition? What does the QA rule do? Like if people, because this is a common route for people to get into the game industry, right?

That's kind of a low level starting job at one of these companies. Like what does that look like? And how does somebody get that job and get other than delivering pizzas, I guess? You can just apply for a QA job. It's unclear that delivering pizzas gave me some massive advantage other than helping me realize that it is a job that exists and I could apply for it.

So it is really fun. I really enjoyed QA. So I was a night crew. So we worked 7 p.m. to 4 a. And they don't have very many night crewed jobs anymore. But I really felt like a detective. A lot of the time, there's some bug.

or they know that they want some area of the game tested. You need to find bugs. You're like, okay, what if I polymorph this unit and then eat it with a Codo Beast and then polymorph the Coto Beast? Like what happens when the polymorph expires? Like, aha, the game crashes. What's up? You didn't think of that, did you program?

And so it's kind of like you feel like a detective. You feel like you're doing, you know, like really interesting work. There are parts of QA that are quite repetitive. So sometimes they would give me a checklist. And they're like, okay, cast every spell in the game against every unit in the game. And like, you know, you just look, make sure the graphics look correct. You know, when, you know, the hit targets are all set up correctly.

When I worked on World of Workraft, I had to run into every building on every side to make sure the collision was set up correctly so you didn't actually run through a wall. Or, you know, make sure you could get into every doorway as a torrent because they had the largest collision boxes. So, you know, that stuff is not like the most, you know, mentally, exciting work. But it was, it was, it was fun to like be productive and create bugs and then watch those bugs get fixed. And it was also really like, you know, fun bonding experience, hanging out with a bunch of other folks, you know, working on the same stuff and figuring out

how to do these test plans and stuff. I really enjoyed it. Yeah. So how much of it is this like detective what I guess breakdown of like, you know, the, okay, let me think of something that they didn't think of and figure it out versus the kind of scripted. This is the test plan. Run through it. Run into every wall, do the thing, do the thing. It depends. It depends on the person, because some people are better or worse at different kinds of QA tasks. At least that was how it was when I was doing it. And there's a lot more automation these days.

So like, you know, my, then there was literally zero automation. I think I made like a map to help me automate some of these things. I was the first person in QA to think about creating like an automated map to run the tests automatically. So now like there's a lot more QA engineers. There's a lot more QA automation. But there's still, you have to go through. then, you know, okay, this bug, the programmer says it was fixed. I got to try and recreate the steps to do the bug.

I verify that it was in fact fixed and then, you know, or send it back up and say, hey, this doesn't fix the way you thought it was. So it's a sum of both. Okay. Okay. And so you're going through this, you know, this QA process. You've got your, you know, in a sense, you've got your in this, in this, the dream job. But you, you're, what happens next?

How do you, how do you move up there? I know you were doing some some custom mods on your own or like. How does that place of progression go? I got really into, like making maps. And they put me in charge of the map editor for Warcraft, the Warcraft 3 expansion on the Mac. So there was somebody else who was responsible for like the PC editor. And so I had to learn, I didn't know the editor for Warcraft 3.

So I had to learn it and then test every feature of it. So in order to do that, I had to make a bunch of maps and really learned the tool. And so I started making a bunch of maps on my own time. I made a map called Worm War, which is like 12 player snake. that the folks who worked on Workgraph 3, liked enough that they turned into a map of the week at the time. And I got really into it. I made a ton of maps.

And I thought, hey, I could be a level designer. And so I applied as a level designer on the StarCraft 2 team. And they said, look, we're going to hire three people, or two people, but we have three finalists. And your finalist number three, sorry, you're not going to get the job. I was pretty bummed. And so I started working on some more submission materials. So the next time the job opened up, I would have like a bunch of stuff to show that I could really do this job.

But then a new opportunity came up. And I was at the time, I was like, look, I've done a lot of QA. I want to try something new. And the job was taking screenshots of the Burning Crusade expansion for World Warcraft and StarCraft Ghost. Because the people who worked in the dev team were like, you were tired of spending all our time taking screenshots for magazines. And so that was my job. It was taking screenshots of StarCraft Ghost and Birdie Crusade. Wait, wait, you're basically like a on-site photographer inside of Stargrap Ghost is the worst job, by the way.

So you have to set up a multiplayer game and everyone's like, okay, you stand over here and you fire now. Everybody shoot. And then you hit the screenshot button. And it takes, actually, because it's not like a time, like a normal TV is not high reds enough for a magazine. So it renders the top left corner, then the top middle corner, then top right corner. It does this nine times and then stitches them together into a high-risk screenshot. But it takes so long that the game lags and it disconnects everybody. So you get one shot to take a screenshot.

And if the guy didn't fire when you said to fire or like you didn't take the screenshot in time, you got to start all over for the beginning. So it was hours and hours of like setting up these screens. So anytime you see a screenshot of Starkout Ghost in a magazine or whatever from way back of the day, it's likely I took that screenshot. Wow. Okay. So, so these, these stories are great, uh, entertaining on their own. But I also like to, I like to, uh, pull out, you know, principles and things that, that people can can leverage here. And one thing that's coming clear to me is, is your, like, your work ethic and tolerance for a lot of this grind, uh, seems exceptional. Yeah. I'm known for this. Sometimes people are like, oh, we could do that, but someone's going to have to like manually enter all that data. And I'm like, yo, I'll do it. I actually love this kind of task. I love repetitive. tasks, I get to zone out and, uh, it's not glamorous, but I do enjoy it. Yeah. Is there, yeah, it's, I mean, that's a, that is a superpower. I mean, it's like, and, and I think it's just one of

those things for people that, you know, if you finding the areas where you have strengths, right, where you're, something is fun for you that is painful for other people is the secret to like, really, finding great niches for yourself. Like, there's just, those skills are really, really important. So even if it's like, yeah, that, that, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, actually it's been the secret for me as a as a CEO is like recognizing that that's out there like the parts of the job that I hate somebody else will love to do yeah right I need to go find that person yeah you're really good at then you find you find you find someone else who loves the stuff you hate and it's a it's a incredible partnership yeah yeah super super valuable um okay cool so you're

you're in i didn't actually know that that part of your story i knew the rest of it the the the you're you're the the starcraft goes screenshot guy. I'm definitely going to go look some of these up and I probably attach them to the email that comes with this when I promote this podcast. And then and then what happens next? Well, so that department created development was also responsible for license products. And so we found out that the role playing game books for World Warcraft that when they've been sending them for approval, like the artists, the art directors had just been looking at the pictures and not reading any of it and just approving it. And so it was. We're like, oh, hey, hold on. Let's just make sure that, like, Blizzard's actually happy with these products. And so, and that the lore lines up with the lore of what we're doing here. And so we started to grow our licensed product approvals process

to make sure that when people submitted stuff, and we actually looked at it and reviewed it. And pretty soon after I got involved with the approving of the RPGs, that was when we got the pitch for the World Workoff Trading Card Game. And obviously, as a huge card game nerd is like my, absolute dream come true. And that's, that's, that was my first taste of gaming and, uh, at Blizzard. Right. And this is, uh, this is where we get to meet, uh, since, uh, I was, uh, I was working on the World of Warcraft trading card game there. And, uh, at the, at upper deck at the time. And we get

to start working together. Uh, and then, uh, and soon thereafter, uh, on the World of Warcraft Miniatures game. Yes. And, man, what? I, that was so much fun. I. I, I am so sad that that minis game doesn't still exist because it was awesome. I, dude, I'm so proud of that game and we had so much fun working on it. I mean, like, to the finest, like, details. And I want to, I want to dig into some of that process. But, you know, I actually brought, I ended up, you know, now I made a new minis game recently with Ascension Tactics because I missed, I missed World of Warcraft.

It didn't have a game so much. I was like, I want to do another minis game. I got to come back. So I actually, yeah, just. recently brought it back because I was so much fun. TCGs are still like, you know, card games are still like,

like my heart and soul. Like that's the best. But I love minis games. You just can't like replicate that feeling of like looking across the board, having all these badass characters like we would do each other. Like, dude, I still have all my old armies from the wow, the wild media game, man.

Oh, me too, buddy. Well, we got to get together in battle. I got them right. I got them right here. I'm ready to go. I am ready.

Okay. We got a new plan after this. Oh, man. So I want to, you know, it was, so when I, you know, just kind of to reflect there, like, yeah, your, your enthusiasm and you're like, you know, just willingness to kind of dive deep on every feature of what was going on was something that really stood out to me. And we started working together. We just had just the best, the best time working through stuff. And, but I will say that the approvals process with Blizzard coming out of from the other side was very difficult. Yes.

It was a lot of uncertainty. Yeah, we were a nightmare. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, I'm glad you said that, not me. And so, yeah, so maybe let's talk about that from purposes of, you know, kind of learnings, right? So like the things that went well or didn't and how you think about it.

Because right now you're making a Marvel game, right? So you're working on the, as a licensee having to get approvals. And you've been on both sides of it. So maybe let's talk about what that looks like. Marvel's so much better than we were. Oh, my God. I don't know if Marvel's the same because we did, we did a, we did a, we did a, We did a TCG, you know, we did the versus system.

Versus, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Marvel was, like, the easiest approvals process of all the time. Oh, yeah. Here's all the stuff. Go ahead. Everything was fine. And then working with you guys, it was just like, oh, my God. Like, we just bashed our head against the wall.

I remember, I don't know if it was the worst share of the story, but like the one a time of our art director, I'll keep all the names out of it. Boy, you comes into the room with like six different pieces that had all been, like, rejected. And it's like, can you tell me what the latest one is? Like, can you tell me, how do you even know why these were rejected? Oh my God. So, yeah, so one of the lessons that we took away from that and that I'm a big believer in is, you know, brand Bibles and having the ability to like be very clear about what of the things that are important in the brand, what are the things that are non-negotiables, what are the assets and references.

We didn't have any of that stuff at that time. Oh, I know. We had to make it for you. Yeah. We had to work with you to help make it happen because we had nothing. Yeah. There was no character turnarounds. Like, how big is a gnome?

I don't know. Yeah. Play World Warcraft, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, we had to make them for the minis. We had to make all of the different scales of everything and put them next to each other based on that. It was crazy. Oh, God, I can't even.

It's like, this is some great memories and registered. I remember just bashed in my head. Can you imagine how easy it is to work with them now that they have all that stuff? They, like, I'm sure they have like a super professional licensing stuff now. Yeah. Yeah. We were just, we were scrappy back then. You were starting that division, right?

It was originally like you were doing screenshots and someone was like, hey, why don't we have someone actually some kind of process and approval system for our license things? It was like, yeah, that's a great idea. It's a great idea. So there was a great, you know, that was a great time and a great process. And I, you know, I certainly learned a lot during that window of, you know, working on World of Warcraft, you know, the World of Warcraft brands and trying to make them come to life in these other forms, right? makes this an authentic expression of World of Warcraft but in a trading card game or in a miniatures game. How do you think about that sort of stuff now?

Again, you can speak to it in terms of your Blizzard experience or the stuff you're doing. What are the things you think are the recipe for success or how do you approach these kinds of questions nowadays? You know, it's so interesting because so many of the things that I believe strongly in working on at least a World Warcraft training card game, I came to realize we're just like wrong We had this moment at the beginning. I remember somebody asked, hey, is it okay if armor blocks like nature damage?

Because in World of Warcraft, you have to have nature resist for that. You can't use armor to block elemental damage. And I remember us thinking really hard about it. And there was a concept we were using called the earflick system, which was like, hey, you know, you're on a bus, and the kid behind you on the bus like flicks your ear. you're like, hey, come on. And then they keep flicking your ear.

And eventually you freak out and just like you have a battle with the guy behind you flicking your ear. And so the concept was like one little difference is just an ear flick. But you have too many of these things. And it's just people are like, this is a world of Warcraft. You know, and they get, they get upset. And, you know, I'm not sure I, in hindsight, believe the earflict system. I think like players aren't like, wait a second.

Armour shouldn't block nature damage. It's like not a thing that pierces their consciousness. If you declare something with confidence and say, look, yeah, armor blocks all kinds of damage, players are like, okay, yeah, anything you say, sir, I don't, it doesn't even, it doesn't feel, I remember us thinking, is it okay if you can cast bloodlust on totems? Because they don't have any blood. Isn't that way? Nobody cares.

Nobody cares. Yes. Yes. No, well, this is great because I think it's like, it's a really important thing when you're, the way I look at it, you have to. to sort of capture the essence of the brand, the essence of the feeling when you're transitioning over. Yes. But especially when you're moving from something like a video game to a tabletop game, but even like, you know, transitioning from, you know, PC to mobile or whatever, like you need to

simplify and you need to abstract out. Otherwise, you're going to lose people, right? You just can't. It's too much bookkeeping. It's too much challenge. And so a lot of those little things, right? Like, you know, in magic, you can put equipment on a snake. And it's like, what the hell? Why is this snake holding a sword? It doesn't make any sense? What's going on? You know, and like, and it's just like, all right, you know, we're just going to let that slide because we need to, you know, we need the game to function, right? You don't have to, but if you want it to be very broad, you do. You need to, that's an important consideration. Well, yeah, it's a trade off of like the rules, elegance versus the flavor, kind of authenticity. Yeah, right. Yeah. How much is it, how hard is it to onboard to this

system? Do you have the, you have the different kinds of pains of like, okay, well, this is weird that a snake's holding a sword. But then another thing where like somebody just doesn't know that they can't use their equipment on their reptile. And it's like, oh, well, that was dumb. And now my cards don't work. And now I flip the table and the different, right? There's all kinds of different things that you have to balance in these situations. So I find that really, yeah, it's like, it's fun. Like having worked on a variety of branded games for, you know, Marvel DC and World of Warcraft and a bunch of others, like this process is always like an interesting thing compared to when you're starting and just doing your own thing. Yeah. At the beginning, I was like, let's make it really authentic.

And now I think, like, the stuff that's the most authentic, like the World of Warcraft board game is like a six and a half hour board game, incredibly authentic World Warcraft experience on a board game. That's the stuff I like the least, actually. I like the more abstracted stuff that gets right to the essence of the thing. Yes. Right. Well, you have to ask to the question, you know, why am I playing this and not the original thing? If I want the authentic world of Warcraft experience, congratulations, go play World of Warcraft.

Right. But if I want something that's like a fun tabletop experience that had, you know, inspired by World of Warcraft. It feels kind of like World Warcraft. That's great. And I think it just kind of like I always talk about this kind of, you know, you need to understand what the core of the core, emotional core of your product or your brand is, right?

The core tension in a game or, you know, emotional core. And if you can stay true to that, your audience will go with you very far in a variety of different directions. If you lose that, then you're off and you've got to fix it. But the details of, you know, nature damage being blocked by armor and things like that, it's definitely, yeah, yeah, definitely a different space. So, okay, so we, you know, we got a chance to work together. We got to be able to really, you know, dive into the license or licensee relationships.

We got to bring the big things. I forgot, did you come out with us when we went to when we went to China to do the minis inspections and the paint-top stuff? No, I didn't. I went to the TCG packouts, but not the minisps. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we were literally like pouring over. I wasn't, you know, pouring over like, okay, do we need extra, you know, dots of red on this

shoulder paltron, right? Because they have these red dots for the trolls. And if they don't have it, I'm like, dude, We can't afford it. We got to cut something. Come on. What are we doing? It was the most expensive prepaided minis in history.

I'm not kidding. They were the most expensive prepaided minis in history because you've got to have this extra red sigil on the back of the freaking cauldron. Okay. Anyway, it was great. They're beautiful. And we should definitely battle. But all right. So let's let's fast forward them because obviously, you know, the World of Warcraft TCG was a key kind of starting point and inspiration towards what became.

the monster that is Harstown. Yep. And I'd love to hear the origin story of that and how you kind of got that ball rolling. Sure. Before we go into that, I was thinking about the minis game just recently because I was, I guess it wasn't that recently, but when Routera came out because Andrew, right, wasn't he like, didn't he work on the minis game with you? Yeah.

Yeah, he was on our team, yeah. He was in charge of, he was the design director on Routera, right? And I noticed that the templating that we argued so much about. out on the minis game showed up in Routera, the first person templating. Did you notice that? Yes. Yes. I wondered if Andrew was just like, I'm waiting. Someday I'm going to use this thing.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe explain a little bit to our audience what we're talking about. In normal card games, like, you know, it says magic does this thing that I think is a mistake, but they say like lightning bolt deals three damage to target, you know, creature or whatever. And then Hartston just does deal three damage. But like a lot of, you have to often write about things in third person, right? Like, this card does this, right? Or do this thing.

And we tried for temp, I think for like brevity of text, just using first person instead saying, I do this. I have, you know, when I am, you know, see this card, I gain flying or something like that. And it's much simpler. But for some reason, this was just like a, we had, we had all out battles on this. This is the thing I remember most about the mini's development was this particular topic. Right. Yeah. So, you know, those were like personifying those characters saying ideal, you know, you know, spend, spend four ticks because we had a tick system, timing system and everything was spent. You know, ideal five damage to five magic damage to, you know, at range three. Yeah, right. You know, there's like, it does that make sense, you know. But it's, it's, it's, it's templating, man, we could talk forever about template because I love that topic. It's so important. Yeah. It really is. It really is. And it's like, it's some of the nitty gritty stuff of design because you, you have a lot of, the different factors to come into play, right? The version, or, you know, even if you're just playing traditional card games, the version just says, I do this to this, right? It's as though you're

reading it to your opponent and there's something clean about that. Yeah, right. The targeting language and stuff for magic can be very precise, but reads like complete jargon nonsense to newcomers, right? Like, you know, just what the hell does that mean? And then the simpler, simpler versions that are much cleaner and more approachable, less scary, less verbose, they can leave a lot of open questions, right? So you're not sure. So, you know, one of the things like when you're, it's a great, great things to contrast because when you're dealing something like Harstone, like a digital game, you need a lot

less precision because the cards are just going to do what they're supposed to do. The rules engine is going to enforce itself. So simple is way better. I don't know. Let me play it. Okay, yeah. Got it. Got it.

Done. Right. So the burden is way more on concordial. and simplicity and like approachability versus completeness and, you know, comprehensive kind of, you're sitting around a table and the card doesn't make sense. You just have to stop playing. You know, like, it's just that. Right, right. But a lot of these things are just conventions now. Like I find myself in this trap all the time. So for Soul Forge Fusion, which will also have just released by the time this podcast

comes out. So everybody can go check that out, which is, you know, this sort of, you know, algorithmically generated card game I did with Richard Garfield. We went through a lot of these questions. and we got rid of the targeting concept. We just, we just let, you know, just, you know, deal three damage. You can figure it out. Deal three damage to a creature or whatever. Like, you can figure it out. Like, people know this stuff.

But the drive, especially from my team, but a lot of the people who are our target audience, that their instincts have been trained by magic. They expect certain kinds of terminology. Even though if you have not played magic, it's nonsense. You know, they, they, it's an interesting tradeoff now. We're just the norms that have developed people, you know, you cater to, to those or do you try to do the thing that's more new player friendly? It's really fascinating. Yeah. These are such interesting decisions to make when working on games. There's so many of these

really small decisions that like together in aggregate makes such a big difference. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you will spend, I mean, people do not realize how much time we spend on this stuff. Like, so much time debating these things. Like, oh my God, we'll find templating meetings. And then, you know, when you have to do comprehensive rules and you need everything to function, I mean, in your digital game, like, it has to function a certain specific. way. And so I always try to like build even my tabletop games like, okay, how would I make the rules for this so that I could program it so that it could actually have a digital part if I wanted. Really important. It just forced you. Yeah. Okay. So Harstone, how did that happen? So, you know, we were

working on, you know, making a digital version of the World Workout Training Guard game at the time. And we took the judge test. And the game director on Harstone, Eric Dodds, failed the judge test, really understandably because the totem rules for the Wow TCG were like were horrendous because we're doing that thing we're trying to match Wow and we didn't want totems to be Aeable but we did want you to be able to target them with spells and so they were like spell cards that had health that you could target like spells but couldn't be chosen when it said choose a choose a minion or something it was just it was super complicated and so Eric Dodd said, we will never make a game with these rules.

And I was like, what does that even mean? There's like a whole team of people making the World War Gap for any card game over an upper deck. Like how are we, we're just going to not have the same totem rules? Like the number one deck in the meta right now is a totem's deck. I don't know. I don't know what's happening. And at the time, it was like, it was like pretty scary for me to not kind of know where we were going to end up. But it was like really smart, I think, to realize like what the opportunity is.

opportunity space was for for card games to just not like not have any rules that were like I don't understand how does this work and just to like hey let's make totem's minions right let's just make them like everything else that you can aewee them down nobody cares uh and uh that was kind of nature damage nature damage blocked by arm it's fine yeah it's fine nobody can't and then the other big moment was uh i went to gen con and played a game called battle spirits did you ever play battle spirits it sounds familiar but I do not remember it. It was by Mike Elliott. So it's a...

Oh, no, no, I did. I know. I do know what you're talking about. So it had a mana system that I had never seen before. You had literal blue manor crystals and you got one every turn. And then when you played your card, you actually like, like the manor crystals stayed on the cards and then damage was also manor crystals. So if you took a damage, you got an extra manor crystal.

If you hit your fun three times, then you win. But the moment of like, hey, I could just get a manna every turn. I don't have to shuffle these resources into my deck. we played the Wow TCG with manor crystals. And we just said, look, take all the quests out of your deck, because that was one of the resource types, and just play it like this. And we realized a couple things.

One, the games were much faster, because the hardest decision you make is deciding which resource to put face down, which is like how resources work. You choose a card to put face down. It would become a resource in the Wow DCG. And we just got rid of the hardest and least fun decision. So games were double the speed. And also the game still totally worked.

All the fun decisions were still there. So you got to play twice the number of games. And so you could make less decisions per game, but the games are twice as fast. You could play two games at the time you got to play, you know, one game before. And we said, okay, look, we can make a card game that is much faster,

much simpler than the Woutes G. Instead of making the WOTCG online, this will make a new game. And that's kind of where. And then we took the, we took the rails off. We just kind of went crazy. We tried some crazy stuff.

We tried, you know, like really, really out there things were, there was like castles that you had to blow down and then like a hero would jump out of the castle. So we tried a lot of different stuff. But that was kind of the genesis. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that's, I mean, it's such a powerful realization, right?

This idea that like, look, we can just make things simpler and get to the essence of the fun faster, right? That there's so much baggage that comes with the assumptions of you. And it's the one thing I advise new designers that all the time is like simple is better. Like always try to simplify. The default assumption of designers is always just, oh, I'll just add this other cool thing. And this is cool and this is cool. And like, you need to get rid of things that are cool that don't serve your core tension, that don't serve the things at the most fun that get you out of the thing that's most important.

And so it was really interesting. At the time, we took a lot of heat because Harstone was so much simpler. People were like, oh, this is just like magic for babies. You know, like there's way less decisions per game. I think people at least at the time didn't realize that it's not about the number of decisions per game. It's the density of decisions and how fun those decisions are to make. And so, you know, I could play a game of Hardstone in seven minutes. And it's just like hard to do that in a game of magic.

It takes much longer. So I am making more decisions per game. But like, am I making more decisions per minute? I'm not sure that I am. And I, and that was like a thing that I think really served Carstone well. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that the, yeah, the value of like how you're targeting your market too, right? I think Harstone just captured this whole space of people for whom like, yeah, I don't have 20 minutes to play a game. And I don't necessarily want to learn all of these arcane rules for a system that wasn't designed to be native digital.

And I want to be able to just, but I want to be able to have that fun. Like, is Harstone as deep as magic? I don't think so. But it's plenty deep to people that want to get involved and get into it. And then it has all these other advantages of, you know, just. of onboarding and accessibility and, you know, like, I mean, I know, I know, we, we were going through because we built the original version of SoulForge back during the same time period, and we launched, and we were, you know, like at the time when we were coming out was like we were the first

real kind of game that was trying to be like native digital TCG. And we were way simpler than magic in a lot of ways, but we were way more complicated and clunky than Hardstone. And that definitely, when Hardstone came out, it just, you know, it definitely dominated the space. And it was a really fascinating. a lot very quickly from what is possible in polish and getting at the essence. The way you guys did the draft format of being able to just pick three cards, pick from three cards. I think that's the biggest impact Hardstone has had on the games industry is the arena mode.

Both that, you know, the way you draft and also the format of, you know, win, you know, nine before or 12 before you lose three. So many games have picked up that. like feeling of a run in that way. And I don't, I don't think that was done before Harstone. Yeah. No,

I mean, we just, we straight copied that for sure. It was just better. It was just better. So, so the, so the,

so the, explain them both in a little bit more detail because not everybody listening will, so, uh, well, so at the time we,

we knew that, uh, drafting was just like one of the best experiences in, in, in card games. And so we tried to figure out how to do a draft, but, but like,

you know, the normal draft experience. And a draft is when you don't, you get the cards as part of, the game experience. Like you're opening a pack. So yeah. So everyone opens a pack. They take one card from the pack, pass the pack to their left, take another card, pass the back to their left, and so on until you have a limited pool of cards that you build a deck from. So you don't like, you know, get to choose from any card in the game. It's like a more, it's called limited,

because you have a limited card pool. And like, you know, in our experience drafting the loud DCG or magic, it takes like four hours. It's an hour to draft and like, you know, 30 minutes of deck building. And then you got to play three rounds. So like, you know, it's a long time to do a It's a huge time commitment, but super fun. And so he said, can we, can we do this? This was actually Hamilton's challenge to the team. He was the executive Bruce Ron Hartstone. He's the CEO of second dinner of the company where we started together.

So he said, hey, can we do an asynchronous version of draft? And so one of the things we tried at first was we said, okay, we're going to tape up envelopes on the wall and we'll number them like 15 to 1. and you can open a pack and take a card out and then swap it with the envelope that shows how many cards are left in the pack. And then you can just go down the wall kind of swapping cards like taking a card from each pack on the wall. And then you can, in that way, draft a pack. And then the person who comes behind you can draft the packs that you've picked from. And so you can kind of do an A, we had like three sets of packs.

You could do three packs at once. And so in that way, you could have a draft experience alone without anybody else there and see packs that have been pre-picked by other players and kind of seeded by those players. And it was pretty fun. We were like, hey, this is, this works. This is like an asynchronous experience. You could do the draft whenever you want. And then maybe you could play against, you know, somebody who has the same record as you,

you know, at any time, you know, because it doesn't really matter about this. You know, you lose some stuff about like signaling and some things that are, you know, people like from drafts. But you don't lose that much and you still have that experience. And when we were doing that, we realized, you know, there's still a couple things that could be better. The first is, the very first pack you open is overwhelming. You have 15 options, you've got to choose one. And it is a lot of implications, like which class am I going to go?

Or which colors are going to go? And it's just hard to make that choice. And then at the end, there's no choices. They're like, okay, there's only one red card. So I take that. And there's only one red card. You know, it's just like not interesting anymore. And so we said, look, at what point do we find it the most fun?

And we said, I think the most fun is when I have three or four choices. That's when I'm really enjoying myself. And so we said, what if we just curate this? and show you three to four choices that are of your class. And so that's where we got the idea for Arena. And we prototyped it up. And it was super fun. And we're like,

oh my gosh, this is way faster and like more fun moments, like less overwhelming and less auto picks, more just like interesting choices again and again. Yep. No, that's right. It was just such a great insight. And it just speaks to the same core that we've been talking about this whole time,

which is that, you know, how do you get to the essence of the fun as quickly as possible and get out of the player's way with everything else. Like that's just the heart of really great, widely accessible game side, right? Of course, it's a place for the deeper, more complicated experiences. But if you really want to be able to reach a large audience, and I think just as a designer, it's one of the most powerful skills you can hone. Because even if you do want to make a more complicated experience, knowing how to get people

to the fun and get the most out of every extra rule or component or nonsense thing that you throw in there is really, really critical. Yeah. Okay. So I think that there's this also. Also, other narrative, I want to draw out from this, which is like you, I mean, there's tons of phases and I don't want to spend all the time on Hardstone. But during this period, you come out as an outsized personality, I think it's fair to say. And I knew you already.

So I'd already seen, you know, beats from the brood. I'd already like, I knew you and who you were. I didn't think I was going to bring that up, did you? I scrubbed all my old reps from the internet before people found them. that wayback machines still got my old website but it doesn't have they don't back up mp3s so i was oh my god because that stuff you know it was from a different era man it was uh yeah a lot of raps about uh about booty you know like it wasn't yeah it's not who i am the day oh my goodness uh so what what what was the process like of putting yourself out there and becoming you know many ways

you were the face of of harstone uh it's certainly you know a major one if not the one and And how did that role come about? What was that like? What do you, you know, and how did you become the Ben Brode? Everybody knows and loves. Well, you know, it's, it's, I love community. I love talking to the community. Like when I would go home, I would, you know, to relax,

I would go on Twitter and Reddit and stuff and talk about, you know, Harstone. I just, I loved it. So it's something that I get a lot of energy from. So I did it a lot. And, and I was really passionate about it. I was living and breathing in Harstone all the time. I go home and play Harstone, talk about Harstone, and I go to work and work on Harstone.

So I really enjoyed it. And, you know, I just, you know, I got a background in the improv and acting. I like being in front of the camera. I like doing these kinds of announcements and stuff like that. So it was something I really loved. It also had a weird effect because, you know, this is true of, you know, Steve Jobs. I don't want to compare myself to Steve Job, but, you know, Elon Musk, these guys who are like public faces of companies, is that they get all the credit for the work that goes on the thousands of.

the people are doing, they don't deserve me, they don't deserve really close to that much credit. And the same is true for me. I don't deserve, like, you know, I was one of 15 original Harstone developers. It was not like my, I wasn't even the game director originally. I wasn't the lead designer. I was like one of the designers on that team. But, you know, I get a lot of credit more than I deserve for, for my role in Harstone. And, you know, it was really a team effort.

So that, that part's weird. Yeah. But it is fun. I mean, yeah, you, well, that's the thing. It's so clear that you love it and you have fun doing it. Like, that's just, it sums through. I mean, it's, you know, I, I, I, I've, whatever, I have a similar experience here, right? Like, I tend to be the face of my company and do a lot of the public stuff.

And I have a team of amazing people that do a lot of the hard work. And so it's, it's important to credit them and acknowledge that. And it's also just, again, it's leaning into your strengths, right? Yeah, yeah, you enjoy this sort of thing. I mean, there's people on my team who are phenomenal designers and they would hate to be doing interviews. It's like, the worst nightmare they could think of it. Yeah, sure, let's go. Let's go.

Let's go hang out. Yeah. Sweet. Okay. So I'm curious if there's other, before we leave like the Harstone piece, like there's got to be, you know, any other, you know, great lessons. Because again, I try to, I try to, you know, for people out there that want to make their own games and TCGs or get their things, you know, any great lessons or fun stories or anything that you want to share from that time before we start shifting into, let's call it second dinner. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So when we were first working on things, there was like a thing that we just used to all. always ask ourselves, which is, what if we remove this rule, does the game still have enough depth? It has, it has, you know, every, you can add depth by adding complexity, right? It's just like, you know, it's easy to add depth. But we thought, like, is this, is the skill level for this game above what humans can achieve? If it is, you have enough depth. If it's not, and people can actually master this thing, then it doesn't have enough depth yet. We've got to add more depth.

And our belief was that card games to that point had way more than enough depth, plenty of depth. And then we could reduce complexity and depth, but it would still be like plenty of depth after that kind of removal of rules. And so we would do things like, what about instance? What about like instant responses? If we remove that, we remove a ton of depth. Is there still enough depth? And so we would play with like what we call the basic decks, which is like cards that have no abilities. It was just like chill wind yetty and like a bunch of stuff like that and we'd say are we having fun with the basic decks?

And if we were, we're like, okay, the game is still fun? And then is it, do we still think there's enough, like, are we making enough interesting decisions? If so, then we're okay. Like, the fact that we removed this thing or this thing or this thing is we're still safe and the game is more accessible. Great. Yeah. That's a great, a great rule and principle to live by here. As Ken, if I remove this, is this game still, you know,

fun and deep enough and what what do I need this thing if so get rid of it or at least yeah all right i love it um so okay so this is going to be a great now to transition to uh your new company and your new project and i'd love to know because i don't actually know the origin story of how it kind of got started i saw you know saw the big announcements and everything but uh what what what made you decide to kind of you were ready for the next thing what was that like tell me tell me the story of the the transition out of Blizzard into second dinner. Well, you know, I kind of surprised myself because I'm not a very risk. I'm not a very risky person.

I'm like more of a, you know, like less, less risk-taking person. So when the opportunity, like Hamilton and I, Hamilton's the EPON Hartstone CEO of Second Dinner, when we started talking about the future in this way, I just started catching fire within me, man. I don't know. It was just like my life to that point, I had imagined, you know, my, myself, again, I'm going to compare myself to giants in the industry, not intentionally, but I imagine myself like Mark Rosewater, who has been doing an incredible job shepherding an

incredible game for decades. That's kind of how I imagined myself with Harsstone, was I would just kind of work on Harsstone my whole life. And then when I was faced with the opportunity to do something different, I got really excited. At the time, I was doing a lot of leadership management in Harsstone. I wasn't creating cards anymore. I wasn't creating features. I was helping other people achieve their dreams and doing a lot of, you know, talking with the executives and stuff that wasn't like the most personally satisfying work. And so, you know, just the opportunity to like get my hands dirty and create a new game, you know, it was a thing that I had been at that time years since I was in that phase.

And I got really excited about it. So, you know, Hamilton and I would, you know, we couldn't talk about the new thing at work. So we would go, you know, work together all day. And then we would go home and have dinner with the families. and then we would go out together for second dinner and talk about our dreams for, you know, what could be a brand or company. Great. Aha.

So we got the origin story for things. So talk to me about those, those, you know, what are those conversations look like? And then how does it go from second dinner, you know, just eating it to now, all right, we're pitching, we're raising money, we're making a thing really happen. So, you know, one of the things that Hamilton, Hamilton had done a story. started up before, before going to Blizzard. And he learned some lessons from that because it wasn't like a, I don't think they got even got funding. And I think the, the biggest lesson he learned was make sure you got like a lot of alignment with your founding team. Because, you know, if you

don't, it could go really bad. And so we spent a lot of time talking about like what, what are our hopes and dreams, you know, how long should we try and get funding for? And if our numbers are different, like, and I'm like, I'll try for six months and I'm bailing out because I need to get some money, you know, and his is like, well, I'll try for three years before I'm willing to give up. Then at some point there's going to be like a split, right? How are we going to handle that? What does that look like? Who retains, you know, ownership of the assets we've created so far?

And so there's like, you know, hairy stuff that's, you know, hairy stuff that's, you know, finances and, you know, like what are your dreams long term? Like, so it goes well, what do you want to do then, you know? Like, there's a bunch of that stuff that's, I think, important to talk about up front and be really, really clear with each other on. And so we did a lot of that category of stuff, expectation setting, really exposing our fears and dreams to each other. And that helped us, I think, set us up well. That's wonderful. Yeah, that's such great advice. And I also, yeah, definitely had learned that the hard way when I first taking on, well, you know, taking on investors, right, they have a very, they have a specific expectations of what they want.

Yeah. Right. And if you're bringing in investors that want you to, you know, go big or go home and, you know, put it all in an exit versus or versus a building. a long time brand that you're going to support and shepherd for many years, right? Like that was a, it was a thing I had to figure out with my company because I'm like, I look, I'm not going anywhere. I love making games. I love my team.

I'm not planning to go anywhere soon. So I need investors that are on for that ride if they're going to come along and be a part of that. So this is like with your founders, even more critical because you're just going to be in the trenches together all the time. So surfacing hard discussions early and working through those things and thinking about the worst case scenarios and the best case scenarios and how those play out. This is basically, this is not, by the way, for everyone listening, this is not just startup advice.

This is relationship advice. Side note. The relationship between founders is an important relationship. Yes, it really is. I mean, you're basically married, like, right? You spend more time with your founder working than you do with your spouse for those first, like, at least for those first several months to years. Like, that's just how it works. So, yeah, this is great.

Okay. So you, you obviously eventually get aligned on this. and you're like, let's do it. Let's take the plunge. Do you like, do you give notice to Blizzard on the same day? Do you go, like, trail it out? Like, who are you? Like, talk me through that conversation.

Do they try to talk you out of it? Like, I remember my quitting story. So I just, I wanted to hear yours. Yeah, it was really nice. So they were, you know, we, I was there for 15 years. Hamlet them was there for 10 years. So we had an incredible relationship, but all the people there. So they threw us a big party on the way out.

and they were just, they were really, really nice. They, they're, you know, I have a lot of respect for, uh, the people who were running Blizzard there at the time. And obviously a lot of the people were still there who I got to work with. It was, it was nice. I cried like a little baby on my last, my last day. It was really sweet. That's great.

That's great. Okay. So, so then, uh, you know, I, I really want to spend a tons of time on the specifics of the design, but I'm really interested on the, I'm this whole process, right? So you're, what is it that you're, you're building, you know what you're building out front. How much of this? if you figured out, how much of this is like your fund, how long before you get funded in this

process? Like what are these early days like? Yeah. So at the very beginning, the first thing we did was, you know, set up, set up shopping in, I have this little room above my garage that was originally going to be like a mother-in-law suite, but we didn't end up using it for that. And so we had like, you know, just a couple, a couple desks in here. And actually, the first day, we just had couches. We didn't have, our computers didn't arrive yet. So we just sat on the couch is and kind of daydreamed about like what what kind of games we might want to make. We hadn't come up with any ideas yet because we didn't, you know, at the time we're working for Blizzard, you know, anything we'd make at Blizzard's own by Buzzard.

So we're just like, we're really careful about making sure that, you know, we didn't start thinking about any specifics until we'd left. And so we were like, okay, what could we do? What does the future potentially look like? Do we want to make another card game or do we want to make something else? And there was two really big moments really early on for us. So the first is that while working on Harstone, we got to become really, really, really close with the folks at Nettys who were our eventual investor.

And we worked at them for like a decade. And so when we popped out, they said, hey, look, we'd love to be part of your new thing. We really trust, like we had a relationship built on trust over a long time of working together. They really just said, hey, look, you can run the company the way you want to run in. They give us a ton of freedom and said, hey, here's an investment of 30 million bucks for a minority stake, which was just like really, really, super generous and really, really fantastic of them. They just wanted to be a part of something awesome. And so it's like an

unbelievable relationship. Nettie's just like one of the- I just realized I need better friends. That is, I mean, I got some good friends that they would come through for a homie. Here, you know what? Here's 30 mil. Just we trust you. Go run with the ball. That's phenomenal. They are just the best folks. And they're such like incredible partners. They've just been super, super helpful across the whole thing. Like when COVID hit, they just sent us, like it was hard to get masks here. they just give us this massive shipment of medical masks and like a ton of research on the work they've done to figure out how to work, you know, remotely in an environment where COVID was just popping up. They'd just been like super homies.

They're they're the best. They're fantastic. Well, that's great. And look, and obviously you're, this is, you know, on the one sense of joking about, you know, you get this thing. But like, you know, like, you know, building relationships over a decade or more by being a good person to work with, by doing good work, by consistently like showing up. And that is how you make things like this happen.

Right? So like it, you set yourself up with this position through a long time of hard work and delivering and putting yourself out there. And so it's the thing like, you know, it's a, this is a, this is a 20 year arc right in a lot of ways to get this overnight success, right? And I just, I just, it's really, I just, I really like to reemphasize that for people because it is, it can be discouraging, right?

When you're the pizza delivery guy wanting to live your dream and make your own games, it can take a while to get you there. but like it it pays off. And so it's just, it's awesome. I'm just like, I was so happy when I heard about this. And it's been exciting now to see it all start to come to fruition. So yeah, it was very exciting for us too because it happened really fast after we left. It was, you know, at the time, you know, we had no income.

You know, trying to figure out if I could make my mortgage payment every month. It's a little scary, but it worked out really well for us. And then pretty soon after that, so the guy who runs Marvel games, his name's Jay Aung, He used to work in Blizzard with Hamilton and I. So when he went over to Marvel to run their games division, he said, look, I want to make incredible games. Every Marvel movie that comes out, you're like, oh, I got to see that because everyone's awesome.

You have this expectation. The next one's going to be incredible. And he's like, Marvel games should be like that. Every Marvel game that comes out, people should say, oh, a new Marvel game, I got to play it. And so he was looking for partners that would hit that bar that would make people start to expect great, from Marvel games.

And he signed some incredible deals. Like that Spider-Man game on PS4, so good. That was one of the first deals that he did. And there's been just a lot of great, like the, Guardians of the Galaxy game, it just came out. It's fantastic. And so he said, hey, look, Hamilton,

if you guys started a new company, I'd love to work with you to make an incredible Marvel mobile game. And so we, you know, from the very beginning, kind of suspected that we might have an opportunity to work with those folks. And we were really, really lucky that took a big chance on us,

because, you know, obviously it's our first game as a studio. And they, like, the team he put together is so good. I mentioned before that they're, like, incredible to work with. They're like, they're like, so good. The Marvel team there is absolutely, like, world class. I could not be happy. It feels like we're all one big team. It's a real collaborative thing because they're just, they're just wonderful.

Yeah. Well, that's the thing, man. It's like working hard with great people to solve, like, interesting problems and make stuff you're really proud of. It's like, that's my recipe for a good life. Like, it's just so critical and so great. So yeah, it's, it's fantastic. And again, that those relationships paid off.

So, uh, in so many ways that were unforeseeable back in the day and then all ended up, you know, coming together. Um, okay. So I've, I could, I could deep dive into all these stories forever, but I want to spend a good amount of time talking about your new game and grill because this is a game design podcast. So we're going to get into game design of this thing that you made. that I played a dozen hours of in one weekend.

So let's talk about Marvel Snap. Why don't we give, because again, for a lot of people, it's just, it'll be out now by the time that this airs. So why don't you give a brief synopsis of how the game plays? And then I'm going to pepper you with a million questions. Sure. Okay. So it's a mobile first game.

It plays really good on iOS or Android. It's, there's three locations. And your goal is to win two out of, of three locations. And you play cards to locations. That costs energy. It's like Harstones Manor system. You get one new energy each turn. You got to use or lose it. But you spend your energy to play cards. And you choose which of the three locations do I want to play my cards at. Every card has a certain amount of power. And the more power you have at the location, the more you're winning that location. At the end of the game, if you have more power than

your opponent at a location, you're winning that location. And again, you get it to win two out of three to win. So the key thing here is that you're playing simultaneously. So while I'm deciding what moves I want to make. You're deciding what moves you want to make. And we reveal our choices to each other at the same time. And the combination of these locations and the, like, the simultaneous reveal means, you know, you're trying to kind of convince your opponent, okay, I'm going to go over here. I'm going to go to the right. And then your opponent, like, bites the faint. And they're like, oh, no, I thought it was going to go right. He didn't go right. And so you really need to like, just sneakily get two out of the three. Deploying your cards perfectly to get, you know,

to just edge over your opponent on that last location. It's a lot. a lot of the fun and strategy of the game. Right. There's also the snapping mechanic, which is... Yes, this is my favorite, my favorite thing by far. So I, so just, yeah, the, so the core tension here is that that uncertainty around which of these three locations we're going to play at back and forth and a lot of the cars lean into it.

So that's where the, a lot of the strategy comes from. But let's talk, let's talk about the snap. Yeah, so this was, this was Hamilton's idea. It's one of the first ideas. In fact, it might be the first actual game design idea for the whole project, because, because he said, you know what I would love is I would love a strategy game that used the back game and doubling cube to double down on, you know, whether you think you're going to win a return of the game. And I was like, wow, that sounds really cool. It's really simple.

And it sounds like it had a ton of depth. And so the first thing we did is we actually played, I just logged into Public Harstone. And I played the game. And Hamilton sat over my shoulder and said, okay, would you double this turn? And I was like, I think I would double? And he's like, if your opponent doubled, would you concede? And I was like, no, I wouldn't concede. that stay in. And so we basically played with the snap mechanic just verbally over a game of

Hardstone. And we're like, yo, this is actually really fun. It's like, it adds this really interesting level of bluffing and doubling down. It's really interesting. It's, it's a really different experience and really simple, but really fun. Yeah. So this was the thing that got me, like, for sure. So like the play cards to three different zones have the most part of those zones. Like, I've seen that before. Like, I've seen all of that before, right? Simultaneous play. Like nothing was like, it's cool, it's well executed, but it's like, okay, I've seen it. But the doubling cube is instantly like everything is like fun and awesome because you now as a player, you now as a player, you have a very important thing. Because just the difference is like you get one point for winning this game versus you get or win or lose one point.

You're at stake is one point versus two. Okay, that game is twice as important immediately. Right. And if your opponent thinks that they're winning and you think you're winning, now it doubles to four. And there's an automatic last turn moment if you win in the, if you play it all the way to the end of the game, the game has goes over six turns typically. If you play all the way to the end of the game, then it automatically doubles the value at the end of the round. So you have the option to retreat at any point. And so there's this if as a, as a strategic player who, you know, the basics of the game, like maybe they've already, you know, there's not, it's not as as deep for them.

Now all of a sudden it's immediately deep because you now have to judge at every moment how. much you think you're winning, how much you want to stay in it. And that will very much be the biggest factor in your ranking in the long run, because one game could be worth eight times what another game is worth. And you're way better off running away while it's worth one. If you win 30% of your games, but the games you win, you're winning eight cubes, which is the ranking points in the game. It's how you get higher rank.

If you win eight cubes per win, you're going to, and only lose one cube when you lose because you were treated strategically, then you're going to catapult up the ranks. But if you win 70% of your games, but you lose eight cubes every time, you lose and win one every time you win, you're moving backwards. It's super important to like strategically retreat or bluff or try and get every cube you can at every game. Yeah. So this is another just great little design inside, right? Because this is where you started was you took a classic game mechanic that has existed for centuries. I don't know how long back game has been around, but forever. And taking it and bringing it forward in a new context.

And that is, I think, just like a great strategy in general for people that want to make designs. There's tons of great mechanics out there that just are not, you know, I don't want to play backgammon. I don't find backgammon, but I find TCG is really fun. Okay, cool. Here you go. Now, I take the best part of backgammon, add it into a nice little TCG with a cool brand I love. Like, that's a pretty good recipe for success. Yeah, when we were trying to figure out what to do, often what we do is just play other games.

And there's something, you know, we're not copying other games, but we're like finding mechanics that we're like, oh, you know, this blended with this other thing, create something totally new. Yeah. Well, all creativity is. theft. Yeah. Let's not, you know, don't kid yourself.

Like if we're not, nobody is innovated. It's, you know, you're taking, you're taking different mechanics in different places, but you're presenting it

in a new way and you're genuinely creating a new experience. Yeah. So it's not, I think that that is exactly the way that everyone designs, whether they want to admit it or not. Like you're, you're taking other elements and bringing them together in different ways.

That's, that's what creativity is. So I think it's, I think it's great. And I think that the, you know, I think that the, one of the interesting choices for,

uh, that I wanted to dig in on. because again, the card draw and the card play is all, you know, stuff we've seen before. The fact that each of the locations has a special ability or effect, and they get revealed one at a time over the first three turns. But they're sort of general, like you don't own them. They're not in your deck. They're not in your opponent's deck. They're sort of these general pool of cards.

Talk to me a little bit about that design process and choice because I thought it was very interesting. Yeah, well, the ramifications of this are actually humongous because every game is different. So there's about 80 locations, and there's like three per game. So you just don't know what it's going to be each game. And, you know, card games in general have this effect where you have to make a lot of content because they get stale over time pretty quickly, right? As, you know, I'm playing priest and you're playing mage and I played you like 40 times. I'm not solving new problems.

I know how this is going to go. I know what cards are important to me. I know what cards are important to you. And I'm just executing, right? I'm not solving anything new. And that's why, like, the designers need to continually release new cards to create. new problems to solve in a new meta. And when the locations are totally new and unique each time,

it means that even if I'm playing the same deck over and over and over again, the experience I'm having is different every single game. I have new problems to solve. We play against each other a bunch, but never at the raft and the Baxter building and the sewer system. How do I play my deck differently against your deck in this scenario? every game is totally unique and different with this kind of random seating of locations to start. Yeah, and so I think that then that that seeds well into this,

what looked really interesting to me in terms of the kind of sales model of your game and how it progresses, because it doesn't look like you have traditional booster packs anymore. That's right. So maybe talk a little bit about how that works and how you acquire cards and how you progress and like the, because it's clear a lot of thought went into this whole thing. Yeah. So I'd love to think no more.

Way more thought went into this than the actual design of like the core game play. Oh, yeah. We talked about, you know, creativity is theft. There's not really any other game like Marvel Snap when it comes to the meta progression. So, you know, we look, there's less cards. There's only like, you know, 180 or so cards. And, and they're not, you can't, like, if you have a very few number of cards, the way that other games monetize,

they let you upgrade the cards. They get more powerful, right? Like Clash Real does this. As you get more copies, they get stronger, right? But because of the way our game works, we just feel like you can't really do that, right? Like the numbers, if the numbers are changing,

it screws with the balance in a way that's just kind of untenable. And the math gets really hard. So we said, okay, we can't do power progression. That's not an option. And so there's not really any of the game that has a small number of cards and doesn't use power progression. We couldn't really think of one. And so we had to come up with a whole new strategy for how to, you know, get players to unlock new cards.

None of the other things work. This is fascinating to me because, yeah, I am also like, I'm also just naturally turned off by those games, like the kind of, you know, clash clans and those kinds of class royals where they just like, okay, you've played longer. Your cards are just more powerful than I can play the exact same card and yours is just better. It just takes something away for me as the like kind of pure game spirit. Like I don't care of, you know, variants. I want people to win. I want the worst player to win sometimes. But just that like you just out bought me and just had better cards always feels like bad.

And so the fact that you stayed away from that, it was a bold choice that I respect a lot. And so so but as a business, you need to get people to, to, to Ben, you know, to actually want to play and spend. So how do you solve that? It's in everyone's best interest, the players and the developers that like it's worth making this game, right? Like if you don't make money, the game shuts down and nobody gets to play. So yeah. So we tried a lot of things, actually. So, you know, one of the big inspirations was Pokemon Go.

Because Pokemon Go, I think, proved that you can have a game that's entirely focused on collecting. And has, you know, very little actual gameplay. And it's still incredibly fun. And so we said, okay, how can we create a system where, you know, you could make, like, a Pokemon Go, you can buy more incubators. You could buy lures and incense. And, like, that's fine. Because you never meet somebody else who plays Pokemon Go and say, oh, did you, like,

just buy all those Pokemon? Like, no, you earned them, you know, you may have spent money to earn them faster, but you had to put in the work to get those Pokemon. And that was kind of a model I felt like, you know, could really work for us, which is that, you know, yeah, you can get cards faster if you spend some money, but you can't just skip. You can't just get to the end. You can't buy a package and say, okay, here's all the cards.

You got them. You got to, like, work to get the cards. And so that was kind of like our imagination. We didn't have to solve for it yet, but that was the kind of platform we were looking forward. How do we make it? So you have to work to get the cards. but you can pay to speed it up a little bit. Okay, great.

And so then, so then that, you know, it ends up coming through with like, you know, the UIU expert is really slick and, and moves through. But it comes through with like a lot of little pieces, right? There's a bunch of different resources. There's like a, it's like a kind of a boost resource for the specific cards. There's resources you use generally. There's like, you know, a few, normally it's pretty common to have like two currencies in a game. You have a thing at least three or four.

Like maybe just unpack that a little bit. How did that design process go? Because I just find it really fascinating. So, when we first, we went through so many iterations of how do you earn cards. That was like the hardest problem we went to solve. We had something that worked a little bit like Warcraft Garrisons from the expansion that had garrisons where you'd send, we had like heroes you would level up and then send them on missions. And then they'd bring back cards for you. And you would like spend all your time like leveling up your heroes to go on these missions.

We had a sphere grid at one point where you were like slowly making progress over a. your grid to unlock all the cards. There was something cool about that. But there was also some problem. And unpack for me a little bit like what this process, because I like the iterative design process is something I reinforce all the time when, you know, on the podcast and my book and everything. And like, how are you iterated? Like walk me through what it's like when you're like, okay, we tried this. We had this idea. You actually like program it. Do you do like, you know, you talked about in the Harstown story, you were testing this drafting mechanic using folders on the wall. Like, how do you know when you're on the right track? Like, I'd just love to unpack some of the

nuts and bolts of working through. Like, what is, yeah, what I identified right away was like the hardest, most interesting part of your game of getting this done right. Well, the trick is to learn as much as you can as quick as you can. So if you can, like, you know, use paper prototyping to learn a lesson, you know, quickly because it's really easy to cut up some paper and write some things on a business card or something, then, yeah, start there. But, but, you know, if you can't, because it's more complicated than you can achieve with paper, then, yeah, you would code something up or do something in Unity or, you know, draw something myself or, you know, ask for help to get something done as quick as possible.

And then the thing about game design is you cannot tell if a design is good or bad by talking through it. You must play it. And then it's immediately obvious to everybody who has played it if it's good or not. And then you can, you know, decide to move forward or, you know, go back into the drawing board and retry again. Yeah. Well, and when you're talking about these progression trees, in a sense, it takes quite a while to get that feeling, right? Because we're talking about now designing the game around the game in a sense, right?

We spent a little time on the heart of the like, what does a match look like with an opponent and why is that interesting? But this is a whole other level of, okay, what is the game of collecting cards and leveling up in the feeling of progression? And that of necessity, you needed to take a certain amount of time to get the feelings right. So is it literally you're testing it over days or weeks? or are you just accelerating the timetable and kind of gut-checking it? Like, what does that feel like?

Yes. So this was one of our biggest kind of learnings on the game is we started out just doing like weekly play tests where we would just play all the time ourselves. And we realized we needed help. And so we started doing like friends and family tests where we invite some players in and we would run the test for some number of months. We would load a lot. But like the rev on, you know, just like a new, like doing something new and trying something else when it didn't work. It took a long time because it was like months.

every rev. And so once we got, we built some, some AIs that were fun enough to play against, we just started filling the pool of matchmaking with AIs. And that led us like have really, like, you know, there's someone to play against all the time. So just like as the designer, we could go in and say, okay, I'm going to pretend like this is a real, you know, a new account and like, how does it feel to collect cards? And I could do that over the course of a week with no, I didn't need to schedule a playtest or have a bunch of people, you know, chime in. And that will let us increase the pace of iteration much, much faster. And that's where we made, I think, most of the progress towards the model we ended up on

is through this kind of AI-fueled multiple playtests-a-day thing. Got it. So the AI, you have AI opponents available at any time that allows you to go through the emotional experience of playing and completing your quests and moving from seeing what the different progression trees are. Exactly. But you did that at the normal pacing. So I would just go through, try to feel what it's like hypothetically in a normal first week of play experience.

You kept that pacing the same, but you just accelerated by creating fix. We tried the other thing. I actually had like a system where you could like hit a button to skip an hour, you know, so you could see like how timers felt and stuff. And it just didn't, it never gave us the same feelings that doing it at the normal pace did. And so we would just play like the first three days over and over and over again. And then sometimes we play the first week or something. But it, you know, it took real time to do. that. Yeah. And so yeah, so your so your primary focus is what does it feel like during this first

whatever three to seven days and exactly. If it felt good there, then then you know you're on the right track. Exactly. Great. Okay. Awesome. This is this is really great to dig into because I think that it was it just felt really good. I mean that part to me felt really good and interesting and I agree with you. I don't think I've seen a game that that progresses like this. And and it's and it does something that also was kind of interesting. I found that your progression is like turning your cards into alternate art cards or into frame breaks or 3D cards and that that might not be something you care about as a player, but you do because that's the key to progression also. So you get this like the kind of collector that just wants to see their cards be cool and then the collector that wants

to move up the track and the progression guy and all ties into the same system, which most games don't do either, right? There's two different tracks, typically. There's like, oh, I care about pretty cards and oh, no, I want the most powerful thing or I want to complete the story or whatever. So how did that come about? Yeah, at the very beginning said, look,

cosmetics don't sell well in games. It's just not like a thing that most, like there's exceptions, right? Like, you know, all people point to Fortnite or League of Legends. But for the vast majority of games, it's like a huge exception. People just don't spend money on cosmetics. So we said, if we sell cosmetics,

let's have them have a gameplay impact. Let's have it be a thing that actually matters to your gameplay. And then it's not foolish to invest in cosmetics. And so we didn't get there all the way with some categories of cosmetics, at least not yet. But I think it's for this upgrading path, we really thought it was cool to hook it into the core loop. So the core loop is you play with a card,

you get some boosters for that card, use those boosters to upgrade the card. That gives you collection level. And then all the cards in the game are on the collection level. So if you want more cards, you just kind of up your collection level, get new cards. You upgrade those with boosters. You get more collection level. You get some more cards.

So it's kind of like a virtuous cycle. But it takes you through the path of upgrading cards. And it gives you some small sub goals. And you feel like you're making progress. And you feel like your cards look bad because they do. They look credible as you upgrade it. Yeah, yeah. Definitely.

It's a cool thing. It gives you a visual hook as you're moving through because I agree. I'm not the kind of person that's going to spend money or time. specifically on the cosmetic piece, but I was like, if I can just get it as part of my normal progression, and that feels really good. So I thought that was a really interesting choice that was really cool. And so, and then the other thing, it seems like everything, you know, the sort of mission progression and these kinds of things, and this stuff has been done before, but there's, there's a degree of like, you know, lots and lots of different little missions and quests and

things that you could do and win games with this card or play this many four-cost cards or do all these things, right? So that seemed to be a pretty deep well of little achievements and little mini goals. And so how do you think about those kinds of designs and making something that's like enough stuff for people to do, but not so much that it's overwhelming and pacing it out over time? And like, how do you think about that piece? That stuff is just, we went through so many iterations of that stuff because it's, you know, you can really easily end up in a space where there's not enough stuff for players to do. And you can also end up in a space where the game's overwhelming. And so some of these systems, you know, are designed to make sure that, you know, players, you know, make a lot of progress.

And like, you know, hey, if you don't get enough credits to upgrade your cards, you're just not going to be, you know, it gives not fun, right? You need, we need like a certain pace of content. And then we also need, you know, something to spend money on, which in this game, you could spend money on getting more credits per day if you want to. So, you can move a little faster than their players. So, you know, we need to make sure what, what is the daily amount of credits you can get? What is the amount you could spend? having, you know, a refresh daily mission system allows us to tune those things pretty effectively. It also allows us to be really kind of careful about how often you come back to the game and have no goals

because you completed all your missions, right? If we refresh missions every eight hours and, you know, very likely every time you come to the game, you got something, something to do, some goals, you know, some short-term goals to achieve, some medium-term goals to achieve, some long-term goals to achieve. So, yeah, we just like a lot of, a lot of like little polish, right? We start out with this, and like, what if you have this many missions? What if they refresh this time? you know because it's easy if we could we could have the same system drop the same number of credits but like every mission gives you half amount of credits but you get twice the missions right so like or we have one mission but it gives you six times the amount of credits so you know just it's all feel it's all

just kind of gut like does this do i have the right amount of goals or should I add more goals okay well so then that's that's another great piece of this like the because as you develop digital games you have a lot of tools available to you that are not so much in the tabletop gaming world where you can get lots and lots of metrics, right? You can get lots and lots of data, but you just, you know, you made the comments like it's all gut here. How do you, how do you get data on? Right.

Is this fun, you know, especially because you can get data on retention and stuff, right? Like our players sticking around, right? They like the game. But like, are, is it because of the mission refresh time? Like getting specific information on, on like, something like this is really hard to do effectively. You can do AB tests and stuff to try and, but like, you know, you can't. A, B test the audience that doesn't exist. You've got to start, you know, with some hypothesis and like, you know, just give it a shot.

And that's that, it comes down to gut at the beginning. So what, yeah, so then, you know, you haven't gotten into this phase as we're having this conversation, but you will be when people are listening to it. So what does the, what does that process look like once you're live, right? What is it? You obviously went through this with Harstone. So, you know, when, how much does it shift from, okay, it's just got to be gut because I don't have an audience.

So I got to figure out what's fun to the, okay, no, no, we're going to on day two. We're starting A-B testing on day, you know, here's this, this metric is the target we're looking for. Like, how much of that changes? How much of that is still just going to be gut? Like, what is, what's running a live game look like? And, you know, what pace of change does that come with? How much do you have to drop new content in this system where you've designed? Like, all this stuff's pretty fast.

And you can take any piece of that you'd like. Yeah. I mean, we're going to actually have, I think, the fastest pace of content of any trading card game, which is that we're going to release a new location every week for, you know, We have a ton of locations in the hopper, basically. And we're going to release a new card every week at some point. We know, once we can figure out how we're going to drop new cards. But we want to like have, like, that's really fast.

You know, it's not, you know, most, most games have like an expansion every three or four months. And so we're trying to, you know, have stuff come out all the time. I think it's really important to have, you know, just a lot of new content. Yeah. It should be overwhelming because it's not, it's only one card a week. And it's still only 52 cards a year if you do a card every week, you know. Right, right. So it's way less content than almost every TV.

UcG in aggregate, but it's way faster pace of new stuff getting thrown into the game. Exactly. So that is fascinating. It should feel constantly fresh and exciting is the idea. And when it comes to making decisions on like, what do we do next and, you know, what's working, what's not working? We are going to use a lot of data to refine. So, you know, we have a lot of information about like where do people fall out of our tutorial, right? We don't call it.

It's like the introductory admissions or whatever. So like, you know, people are coming into the game and they're like, okay, I played through six terms. then I'm like, yes, it's not for me, I'm out of here. And so if we can use data to determine like, hey, there's some players who would really love Marvel Snap, but there's like a confusing moment in our, in our introductory mission. Like, data helps us realize that and then fix that and make it no longer confusing. So players aren't bouncing off that turn in the introductory emissions. But at the, like, for for things that are harder to quantify in data, we use a combination

of things. We use our own gut, which is a very powerful tool. It's important to like, you know, listen to. your gut. We use data and we use player set like player feedback, right? Once the game goes live, people are talking a lot about what they hate about the game, what they love about the game.

People love to talk about what they hate about the games. All right, yeah. More what they hate. But, you know, that's a really important thing. And you don't always get the exact solution from players. Sometimes you do. But trying to figure out like where is this coming from and what are the solutions that we can employ

and using data to help inform what are the most important pieces of feedback that we're hearing from players and helping drive solutions as well is an important thing. Yeah. There's a Neil Gaiman quote that I say on the podcast all the time. It's one of my favorite quotes from my favorite author. He's talking about writing, but he's just the same applies to game design. If your reader tells you that there's something wrong in your story, they're always right.

If they tell you how to fix it, they're pretty much always wrong. Yeah, right. And so if you get the feedback, not that one person complains about one thing, but if you get consistent feedback from a lot of people that there's a problem. There's definitely a problem. And the job of a game designer is to figure out how to fix it, right? You have to find a way to bring that solution forward, even though the specifics that your audience is going to tell you to do will often be the thing that destroys your game if you actually

gave them. But it's awesome, man. I mean, I could dive probably for another hour or two into each of these pieces, but I want to, it's just such a fun process. And like it's the thing I love about a lot of the thing that's run through this whole, you know, this whole chat about, you know, really boiling things down to the simplest essence of what's fun. And I think that came through in Harstone relative to anything that came before it.

I think Marvel Snap, I would say is way simpler than Harstone and has that same, you know, that is going for that same thing. Like where, how do I get these interesting decisions compressed together in a way that feels fun that wants me to keep coming back? And it's really, I think, I think you did a great job. I was, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, it's kind of wild. Like, it was hard to believe that we got like, like, a satisfying collectible card

game experience in like, our games average three minutes. And it's like, it, if you have to play marble snap, it's hard to imagine what that actually feels like, but it is, it's pretty wild. It's, it's not something I, I thought we would be able to do. And with a game this simple, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's, uh, surprised. Very, very light accessible. Yeah, somewhere between like what you would expect from a card battler and a real TCG, like a full, full TCG. And it's like this interesting interplay that you, I think you found a great place to land. And so it's like, it's just, yeah, I always, I always just

think about the different kinds of audiences that you want to target, right? Who is it you're going for with these games? And so do you have that, like, you know, what's your kind of persona of the people that you think are like going to love this the most? You know, it's so interesting. People ask me this question all the time. And I, it's such a, It's so antithetical to the way I think about game design, because I feel like when I think, when people talk about what audiences they're like going after, it's such,

it's like the way to never break, like create new audiences. You know, because Harstone, if we had said like, we're going after the card game audience, Harstone would have been much smaller, right? There was no,

like, you know, massively grew the card game audience. The audience was, I don't know, a brand new audience that doesn't exist yet. And, uh,

you know, So when I think about the audience for Marvel Snap, I think people who've never tried a card game before, people who maybe Marvel Snap will be their very first card game or their first video game. And it goes to make something that is both incredibly accessible to people who haven't tried this kind of game before, but also super fun, even people who are hardcore into card games and trying to achieve both at the same time. All right. Well, that's a great and ambitious answer. So let's dive a little bit into user acquisition then, because that's the key.

You're saying one thing to say, okay, I know I'm going to just, I'm going to take all those old Harstone players, bring them over to my new game, right? It's another thing to say, I'm going to bring people that would never think to try a game like this and bring them in. How do you do that? Well, you know, a big part of it is visuals. So, you know, I didn't know what Twitch was when I was working on Harstone, right? It's just like came out of nowhere for me.

It was not a thing I was aware of. But we did talk a lot about the over-the-shoulder appeal of Harstone. We wanted, because we knew that people are just like the impression, for a lot of folks was card games aren't for me. They're too complicated. They take too long. And so we said, we need to subvert expectations.

When you see Harstone, you just think, what is that? That's not like anything I've seen before. And so for Marvel Snap, really the same thing. We made a game that I think looks absolutely stunning. The cards are unparalleled.

They look just like, you know, they have this cool 3D effect that works with your phone's gyroscope. It's just like, it's wonderful. And, you know, I think that hopefully will encourage people who have been put off by other card games.

to give this game a try. But I think, you know, if we had skimped on visuals or something, I think it would be much harder for us to go big here. Got it. Yeah, just so drawing people in with something that looks appealing. Obviously, the Marvel license does a lot of work here too, right? People are going to click on a Marvel thing much faster than they will on something else. So there's a lot.

Yeah, you're well positioned to bring people in in that sense. And I think it's another thing for designers, just they underestimate a lot of times how much. Because as a game designer, you can often just be in the pure mechanics of the game. the interesting decisions that you're making. But the visuals matter, the little effects matter. Like, you know, as we build digital games, like how much you invest in the kinds of animations and the flow and making things feel like intuitive, it makes the game better. It makes the whole experience better.

Way better. Animations and VFX, our VFX team is so, so talented. And it really does make the game feel simpler because you don't like, you know, you've had the experience of playing a card game that has no visuals. And you just have to like understand. every card exactly what it's doing. It's, it's,

but when you, when you, when you play the card and you see the fireball, you know, come out of the card and hit the other card and then it gets destroyed, it's, it's so much easier to understand both the fantasy of what's happening and the actual, like,

rules of what's, what's occurring in the game. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, I'll take an example from your game, actually.

So like, you know, the, uh, Mr. Fantastic has an ability that gives a bonus to the adjacent lanes. And when you play it, the his arms stretch out and like punch the other lanes to

increase the numbers. And it's like, okay, you now, like, it tells the story for you in a way that you, you know, you could have told it in your head before and right, good design does that on the cards, but the visuals and the animation really does, does a ton of the work. So it's really cool. Okay, man, I, uh, I know, uh, I know I could keep going on for a while, but we're, we're running out of time. So I want to let, give a chance. So we've already talked plenty about the cool new game and they could download it on the app stores, uh, Google Play and iOS app. How I'm, I'm, There's got to be fun places they can come see you talk and say things. So where should we direct people?

If they want to see more Ben Bro. They've not gotten enough Ben Brod. Well, I'm on Twitter most. You can find me on Twitter and at B Brod. I also have a YouTube channel where I have some silly raps that are more modern. I shouldn't tell everybody I downloaded all the old beats from the Brod now, huh? What do you think I could get? What do you think I could get for those?

Oh, my God. Okay, Ben, you know, I, I'm so glad that we did this and you came on. I have, I think this is the most I've laughed in any of my podcast. And it just reminded me how much I enjoyed working with you and enjoyed having you as a friend. And so I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to say next time, let's get together and have that Wow, Minis battle. Yeah, I do. It's long overdue. Awesome, man.

Thanks for coming on. It's been pleasure. 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.