Think Like A Game Designer - Cole Wehrle — Cute Creatures, Brutal Games, Asymmetric Design, and Subverting Expectations (#88)

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

About ColeCole Wehrle is one of the most innovative minds in board game design today. Cole is a partner at Leder Games, but best-known as the creator of Root, the woodland war game that redefined asymmetric play. Cole’s work reaches far beyond cute meeples and clever mechanics, with a background in history and a career in academia, Cole approaches game design as a way to explore systems of power, narrative ambiguity, and the complexity of human behavior. In this episode, Cole and I dive deep into the tension between control and chaos, discussing how historical research fuels good design, and why the best games ask players to grapple with uncomfortable truths. Whether you’re designing your first prototype or searching for deeper meaning in your work, this conversation will challenge you to think differently about what games can do. 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 Cole Worley. Cole Worley. Cole is the creative director at Leader Games and one of the leads on Root, Oath, and a variety of other games that really push the boundaries of narrative storytelling and game design that is honestly too difficult for most people to pull off. He identifies the sweet spot of leader games as games that are too expensive and challenging for small companies and too risky for large companies, creating

this really ideal zone. And we dive deep into a lot of the nuances of design. We talk about Cole's origin story and how his historical knowledge and building these weird historical games that sold 500 copies got him started. We talk about how his skill sets of learning how to make yourself useful turned into a deep understanding of graphic design. And we talked for a while around how visuals and artistic design informs game design and vice versa. We talk a lot about Root is probably his most popular game. We talk about the interesting design complexities that come from asymmetric starting positions, meaning different players have very different play patterns and very different abilities at the start of the game. We talk about oath and legacy gameplay and the upsides and downsides

of having games that survive traits from one game to another and the different ways to do that. We talk about the process of launching games and how the business of games influences the types of games you can make and the idea of crowdfunding and the idea of how different future designs and future progression of the industry might influence you as a new designer or a new publisher. There's a ton of great content in here. We get really into the weeds. So if you are really enjoying the kind of deep dive into the nitty-gritty of game design, Cole's mind is wonderful. We originally had a deep conversation over dinner at GDC and we continued it here. And I'm sure we're going to continue it again next time we see each other. But I was really grateful to get to

share his insights with you, my audience. And so without any further ado, here is Cole Willie. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Cole Worley. Cole, man. It's great to get to chat with you. Good to see you, Justin. Yeah. So we, you know, we kind of met and had a great little dinner at GDC a couple months ago.

And it was instantly intrigued. And I'm pretty sure I asked you right away if you wanted to be on the podcast because I had many questions for you that I wasn't able to finish getting discussed at dinner. So thanks for making the time. Hey, it's my pleasure. So I know I've got a definitely at least a short hit list of stuff I know I want to get to. And you're one of the people who has experience on all the different sides of the equation as a designer and a developer and a publisher. And so I'm sure we'll touch on all of those things. But let's, I always do like to start with an origin story here.

So what kind of got you into the gaming industry? I think I've read you had like a PhD in English, if I'm not mistaken. So walk me through a PhD to game. game designer or anything that's before that or notes. It's a funny thing. I mean, I think one thing about this industry that is mostly charming is that no one studies to be in the tabletop industry. You, you stumble into it.

And I certainly felt like I stumbled into it. I was very happy. I think a lot of people get through graduate school and they come out with a lot of baggage and trauma. I actually had a very nice time. It was hard. It was stressful. But I thought I was going to be teaching Victorian literature my entire life.

At some point, though, I started designing games as fan products. I've played games kind of all my life. I've been really interested in different communities around play. I used to play a lot of competitive Starcraft and very different sorts of games. And I grew up in a family where we played a lot of sports and a lot of board games. And so games and making up games was always just kind of a part of who I was. And then when I was in graduate school, I stumbled into this very strange, corner of historical gaming where basically people had started kind of like right before

Kickstarter. They started running these like little pop-up game companies where it was pretty easy to publish a game. So I published my first design through this company called Sierra Madre Games. And they had a very simple business model that mostly relied on its founder, printing some games, having them shipped him before Essen, he'd send some out as pre-orders. And then he'd print 500 copies. I mean, it's sort of like if you've ever played the old game, Coo, that game was also run by a center of similar company where it's like, look, I want to print 500 copies, maybe a bigger publisher will pick it up, and then I'm going to move to the next project. And I was so taken with this way of doing work because it allowed people to publish games

that were almost non-commercial. You could design a game about sort of any subject you wanted. And I remember I was playing this game called Pax Spiriana about the Mexican Revolution, and in the back at the rulebook of Paxchruiana, there was this funny little note that said, like, hey, if you have an idea for historical game, you should send it to us because we'll look at it. And there was even an AOL email address or something on it. And I wrote the founder of the company a message and started chatting with him. And in those early days, I mean, I did what, the same thing I tell a lot of younger designers and developers to do,

which is I just try to make myself useful. You know, I found a publisher I liked. And then I did they need someone to do graphic design? Okay, I'll teach myself graphic design. They need someone to work a convention. All right, I'm going to go to the convention. And as I did, the longer I did that, you start picking up skills and then pretty soon, I was finding myself getting more traction with those weird historical games than with my PhD research.

What do you mean by traction? Well, they were selling out, which I never, that's always like a funny brag and it's not meant as a brag. They were selling so few copies that it was easy for them to sell out is what was happening. So, you know, they're doing a run of a few thousand copies to an extremely dedicated audience. They sell within a calendar year. And then the publisher says, hey, if you have another one, we'd be happy to publish it. So they were kind of like pre-signing me for the next game even before it had even been conceived. And your, just orient me a little bit, what on what years is happening?

So this is around like 2014. I started working. So the first title I, like, worked on properly was called Greenland. I think it came out in 2013. And when you said learn graphic design, so I learned graphic design, I just didn't want to gloss that over. That's a pretty big step there. What will happen there? Yeah. So I was working, I had a funny university appointment where I had to manage all these essentially computer labs. And as part of that, they give you a computer with a bunch of software on it. And so I had access to the Adobe suite.

And it was a pretty boring job because a projector would break. You'd go and help fix a projector for a class. And so you're kind of serving as essentially tech support for other teachers. And during my downtime, I just started learning how illustrator and indesign design worked. And then eventually that led me to actually find some textbooks on principles of graphic design. And the very first products I started working on were fan redraws of board games, which I liked, but I found were either ugly or like not functional. So I was sort of using them as like, well, I want to teach myself visual hierarchy. So can I lay out a magic card better than a magic card is laid out? Answer, no. Later, there are certain, there's certain. Spoiler alert, no. Some systems are very proven. Instead, what would happen is I went,

and I found games that, you know, were published in the 90s and were very, very scrappy. And I just kind of gave them like a little bit of a facelift. And it was such a good way to learn the fundamentals of visual design, which actually like informs even how I do game design. Like I really do the visual design at the same time as I'm doing the game design. Okay, great. So there are so many principles here, and I'm just going to, I'm just like tag a few of them. And then I want to dig into this idea of visual hierarchies and graphic design informing game design. But the phrase you used of just make yourself useful, right, go do the things and find ways to

add value to the thing, to the community you care about, a publisher you like, common refrain from amongst all the successful designers here and something I recommend also very strongly to anybody that is looking to get into the space, this willingness to kind of like learn a variety of different skill sets that are, you know, to kind of move down that path and make yourself more valuable, incredibly useful. And this really interesting little subset,

which probably requires more more conversation maybe we'll come back to is this idea of like the ability to produce at small scale and be able to get things out there and serve a small audience and just test different things, right? You were doing your PhD work. you were doing some couple little games and the fact that you could test and get traction and find, hey, people actually want this thing and people want more of this and I can move down that road to let you kind of continue to invest further. And I think those are all like pretty tried and true principles of how to succeed in whatever industry you want to succeed in. And so I think those are

all worthwhile things. Yeah. I add one thing to that last part about like finding a community because it's one of the things that I'm most alarmed by when I talk to people who are just starting out where they have this very full, fully formed idea for a game, but kind of don't have an audience. Like they don't know who they're even speaking to. And they then will spend like months, even years sometimes, like cooking in their own sauces. And it was so nice to be like, okay, well, I know precisely the publisher. I know what kinds of games that they like, that their audience likes.

And so I want to pitch them a game that already seems like something that they should publish. and you kind of get to start on third base as opposed to, you know, being at bat. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Like the, the, the, and what I hear is kind of two sides to that,

right? One is like, you know, pitching two, like been building to the audience that you want to serve very specifically, right, and knowing that.

And two is like, don't, don't stew in your own sauces for too long, right? Make sure that you're, whatever you're making gets tested against reality as soon as possible, right? Like,

don't just kind of, the, one of the most corrosive myths, in all of creativity is this idea of like the lone genius that like goes off into a cave for like months or years or whatever and then comes out with a fully formed beautiful perfect thing like that is the exact opposite of the way that this works and so yeah i want to kill that kill that idea dead so yes thanks for for double emphasizing that um all right i want to dig into the uh to the idea of uh of graphic design informing game design and vice versa

um loved your concept of just taking old games and improving the the the visuals as a way to kind of learn and understand. I think one, I'd like you to define a little bit the idea of a visual hierarchy because I think a lot of people won't necessarily know it's somewhat implied in the phrasing, but I think a lot of people won't know what we're talking about. And then let's talk about how your understanding of visual and graphic design and forms game design and vice versa. Sure.

So when I started doing graphic design, the very first thing I did was I had learned to draw earlier in my life and one of the things, the exercises that you do once you get, the principles. as you go to a museum and you sit there and you try to draw what you're looking at. And it just makes you appreciate these like unwritten rules of composition. And I mean, all the rules that we use to arrange and describe art, they're useful. And you can kind of intuit them yourself, but actually there's no better way to do it than to try to copy something that's already been done.

I kind of applied that to thinking about games. games where I thought, oh, well, you know, this is a deck of cards. Could I design a deck of cards? And in that process, you're starting to learn about like red versus black cards, suits, what separates a face card. How often are you printing those numbers? Do you even need to print the numbers? And you're having to like see how it took hundreds of years for these visual objects to evolve. And so one piece of advice I usually give people when they're learning graphic design is that, you know, there is software to learn for sure, but the software is actually secondary to the theory. And if you pick up any book of graphic design, you're going to encounter like chapter one visual hierarchy.

It's the most important and central character of graphic design. And all it describes is the implied priority of pieces of information in a visual space. Or to put very bluntly, what thing do you see first when you look at something? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, this idea of a visual priority is critical, right? Where does my eye get drawn, right? And then choosing as a designer consciously saying, okay, I want you to have this information. You know, this is the most important thing. So say the casting cost of a card, right? Or where that location is. So maybe I'm going to put attack and defense and all the combat stats in one specific zone so that when I decide, okay, we're involved in combat, I'm going to look in a certain area and I'll have all the

information I need or wallet cards in my hand, all the information I need is going to be in a different zone. And so thinking about those kinds of things in terms of how you prioritize. And I think this one of the common mistakes, and as I'm saying this is kind of, I think, across the board, right? One of the common mistakes is people don't, they want to prioritize everything and thus prioritize nothing, right? And this is true in game design I've seen as well, where it's like, oh, I'm trying to make a game that's for everybody. You're like, no, you're not. You're going to make a game that's for nobody if you do that. because the costs are expressed so beautifully.

I mean, it's almost like a visual proof or something. Because if you want to make something, if you want to give something graphical hierarchy, often the first step is make it big. But when you're making things big, that's taking area away from other parts of the card. So you'll encounter this thing. I encounter this all the time, actually,

when I run into folks. And they're like, well, I want to make these tarot cards because they're larger and they'll be able to hold all the information. And I'm like, don't do that because tarot cards are so hard to shuffle. They're expensive to produce. And you're just excusing yourself from having to make the harder decision about what's actually important on that card. Yeah, that's right. And in defense of tarot cards, I did make a game with tarot cards called Ringmaster from back in the day.

But it was exactly designed as a, it was an aesthetic choice, not a, you know, information. In fact, those cards have some of the least information of any cards I've made. There was no cost and cost, no numbers at all. It was just a short text box. And I was making tarot cards because it was a kind of circus-themed game. And I wanted to evoke like the tarot card readers and those things. Right. So it's a, and I'm saying that in part to agree with you because I think, you know, the, what you're doing, everything, every decision you make has a tradeoff. And so that one purposefully, it's a deck that you don't shuffle very often.

It's a 30 card, you know, kind of simple thing where you're just, you know, drawing occasionally. And so there were tradeoffs from making a game that had tarot cards and what they're. that sizing was. So every single decision you make has these, you know, costs associated with it that I think most people aren't as conscious of. And I think it's really valuable to bring to the surface and, and show how, you know, kind of designers think about the sort of thing. Well, and it's a place where I think starting small and working on some small scale projects from beginning to end, where I'm really touching every part of the project was really important in my creative practice. Because any graphic designer knows about these costs. And if you teach yourself a little bit of graphic design,

you can kind of start to see how a graphic designer is going to sort through this problem when it goes on their desk. I feel the same way about rules editing. Like I try really hard to write my own rule books and to do a lot of like the higher order editorial tasks. And it's because if I can't, if I can't put a rule into a sentence cleanly, then it's true that an editor can probably solve that problem for me. But there's probably something more fundamentally wrong with the rule. And I feel the same way about like a card layout. If I'm struggling with a particular card layout, the visual grammar of the game is running into a problem. And that's probably a design level issue that could be solved. It could be kind of like ham-fistedly solved by a really skilled graphic designer.

I mean, that's, board games are in this really remarkable place right now where the graphic design has improved so much. You have these professional graphic designers who, are amazing. I think about ENOTools work, who's an unbelievable graphic designer, and who can build a visual syntax to describe any currency conversion and any euro game. But what happens then is he is so fluent in his visual language that I think it's making it easier for designers to not do the hard work of development and actually simplify things when they need to be simplified. Yeah, that's an interesting thing where the skill of one part or the process can, can allow for a lack of skill or a you know cover over some errors in another in another part of the

process um yeah that's interesting i hadn't thought about it in that way i think that the um you know and there's a lot of uh other things that come to mind when i think about this design of the of a specifically a card in a game like this right like how much information you're you're putting out there um like you know i used to work at upper deck back in the day when they were publishing ugeo in the u.s and those cards like the rules of you go are actually pretty simple like the baseline rules but the cards would have this like block of text with all of these little exceptions and custom things and then when you have different games where there's you know 10 stats on a card it just becomes very difficult to plot to process and play and so the question of like who your audience is and

what their tolerance is for those things matters a lot and then the medium matters a lot right if it's on a card if it's based on a board if it's in an app if it's in a you know there's all these different areas of like what types of information can be processed, which dictate what type of game you're able to be able to build. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to jump forward because I think, you know, probably the game, I mean, the game probably knows most well known for is Root. And the, that game is actually pretty complicated for the wide audience that it has reached. And I think part of that is the visual design, right? It's a very friendly, very welcome visual design. And I'm curious how you got to that place with that scale of mechanics and

complexity and I guess just understanding the design and kind of we could bounce around a few different topics here. But I'm interested in that marriage of aesthetic and design. So Root was a very funny design because Patrick had hired me as a developer and it offered me this prompt that basically said, we made vast the crystal caverns, which is an asymmetric dungeon crawler, could we apply that style of game to a strategy game? And that means dramatically asymmetric factions. And I had a lot of thoughts about this, and many of them are kind of housed in Root. So Root was basically trying to answer this premise. But the reason I like to start by mentioning what Patrick gave me is Patrick gave me both a design sheet. It was kind of like a

half page. Here's what I would love the design to be able to do. someday. And then he also offered me kind of a house style because fast the crystal caverns had come out. It had found an audience. And it kind of established the level of complexity that I knew that I was going to be able to deal with, which is to say a 3,000 word rule book, maybe like a proprietary 500 to 1,000 words for each faction in addition to kind of sitting on top of that, kind of in the medium to heavyweight category as a hobby game. So I'm not making Twilight Imperium here, but I'm also not making Catan. When we were working on the game, one thing we found out about it was that the design was

exceptionally mean. It was just a very kind of mean-spirited game. And as we were talking about the design, we didn't want to necessarily make it nicer because when Root was at its best was when players were playing like at their scrapily. It was kind of an old, it was an old-fashioned design in that way. We wanted to find a way for players to be kind of okay with the fact that they were going to be playing this old-fashioned. design. And Kyle had done some illustrations for these animals for a different project, and we had

kind of, I can't remember even who first suggested it was either myself or Kyle, I think, that these, that the animals could actually be very well suited to the game, and we found this very puzzling output. So usually when you do a game with modern sensibilities, you take away these things that get called like Feel Bad moments, which I hate that phrase for a ton of reasons. I think it's as a design principle, it can be useful for a lot of designers. It's not useful for me. So when you take away these things,

if you want to make a game about war without feel bad moments, you need to convince the players it's still about war. So you use this very brawny, blood-soaked art to kind of get them in the spirit of the game, even though the game itself is like a drafting game. My favorite example is Eric Lang's Blood Rage, which has this great Adrian Smith, art, these Vikings are just cracking each other's skulls.

But the game is closer to sushi go than it is to like any war game. And with Root, we actually found this weird opposite thing, which is that the art is so whimsical and charming that it allows the game to be even meaner than a regular war game because it is couching it all in like the aesthetics of like a cartoon or a piece of children's lit. And that led to this very odd product. So when we kind of had the whole thing assembled, we talked about it as a team. And we looked at it and said, boy, there are a lot of people who are going to buy this and not know what they're buying.

And they're going to sit down to play it with their family. And they're going to be horrified to discover that they've accidentally bought a war game. And the argument that I offered the team then and that I still believe in now is that the vast majority of games and play, that exists in this world is confrontational and pretty aggressive. And that is actually very well-suited to play. If you have ever played a game of spades with your grandparents, they will ruin you.

They will crack your skull. And so we, as a hobby, we're leaving a lot on the table if designers are moving away from those styles of games. So we kind of made a bet that people actually do want these types of games. they just don't usually like the aesthetics that are associated with them. And that's kind of the foundational bet that Root has made.

I love that. And yeah, it ties right back into this sort of visual design and forming the game design and vice versa. So let's double click on the feel bad moments and how feel bad moments make you feel bad or don't make you feel bad. And is this because, so one of my, One of my phrases is that your job as a designer is to frustrate your players, right? Like you're trying to create positive tension, and it's the resolution of that tension

that is part of the fun of traditional games in particular, most games broadly. Is it a similar concept that you're describing, or is there something else to it here? Well, it's a very similar concept. And I think there, so I think frustration is incredibly important because I think that the games that are the most compelling for my own sake are the ones that are kind of like right on the edge of your cognition you like can't quite figure out it it's it's this paradox and it's something that I kind of ran into when I got into competitive play when I really started playing a lot of Starcraft for instance there was an older an older friend taught me how to play and I was I had a lot of interest

in doing laddering and playing in local tournaments and things and he said and I said I really want to learn this he said how much do you like losing He said, because you're really only going to enjoy this whole process if you love losing. And I was like, well, I don't want to lose. I want to win. He's like, no, no, you don't understand. Losing means that you're learning. When you lose a game, the game is offering you all of these lessons.

And when you win a game, you kind of don't learn anything. You learn like a little bit, but it's so clouded by your own biases that you're not really going to pull any like meaningful lesson out of that win. And that framing is really important. And it kind of ties into how I think about design too, because I think you want to be offering players a challenge, a puzzle, a moment of frustration. And then the resolution of that frustration, of course, is going to be tremendously satisfying. But I generally, when I talk to my devs here at Leader Games or working on a product, I usually tell people, don't be obsessed with the player's feelings in a moment. don't like look for fun because if you if you over-emphasize positive feedback when you're doing design

you're going to do like it's going to steer you into this like mushy world of design where the game kind of like loses all of its tension loses its ability to say anything i i have a friend tim fowers who's a wonderful game designer and he he told me i was on a panel with him or something and someone asked him do you ever do a-b testing on your games and he's like the problem with ab testing is that if you're doing, if you're making art and you're doing A, B testing, you're either going to end up with gambling or pornography at the end of the road. And it was just, he was like, the game has to be guided by like a higher order of aesthetic sensibility. And I think, I love the idea of like positioning around frustration, right?

So, I mean, I'll give a specific example in Root. And this is true of a lot of asymmetric games. So oftentimes, asymmetric games have to confront problems of balance. It's the number one thing that people ask about, everyone's obsessed with balance. If you run into a faction that is too powerful and root, usually the first impulse is to weaken the faction or to strengthen all the factions around it. But there's another approach, which is you look at the faction, you say, playing at overpowered faction is in fact not good but boring. And what you need to do is find ways of introducing strategic liabilities that can

create that tension to actually make it interesting because the the the part oftentimes there's nothing worse than using an overpowered character to just like you know curb stop a bunch of nobs just over and over and over again it's I mean it can be fun for a Saturday afternoon but as a strategic experience it's like it's like eating cotton candy for dinner like there's no longer term engagement with with the game if that's how you're that's how you're playing uh interesting I think there are several players that would disagree uh with that experience and the characterization of that experience. But I mean, I agree with you.

But people like to win. And then, but I'll say there's, well, so there's a couple things here. One, for anybody that's interested, Tim Fowers, also, yeah, great. He's one of our first guests on the podcast from many years ago. So look at one of the top first 10 episodes. I think he was on the podcast. Has a lot of great insights and comes out things from a perspective. I really appreciate.

two I think that the this idea I well I got all right let's just dig into it because this idea of asymmetric starting games is this was one of the media topics I wanted to spend time on so since sure sure let's like asymmetric I have I have I have a real love hate relationship with asymmetric starting position games I think I have somewhat to a fault battled against them in my own designs because of my competitive nature. by I find that it is nearly impossible to balance them correctly, right? I mean, and there's, and there's two sides. One is like, is it possible to balance correctly in fact? And is it possible to balance correctly in player perception? And they're both problems that are almost, almost impossible to do correctly because the different player skill levels and there's a million different aspects to it. So what I heard you say is that strategic liabilities could make it interesting,

even if you're not even trying to make them even. But I would love to dig in further. And how do you think about those aspects? Well, I mean, I actually, Justin, I agree with you. Like, I generally do not like working on asymmetric games. It's only expensive. Like if I'm pitching a game to the studio and I say, oh, there are 10 asymmetric factions, if that studio head is worth their salt, they know that basically I'm saying this movie's

budget has a floor of $100 million. I mean, it's just expensive. It's going to require tons of work. And it's also, it's an expense that is felt, and this is a really like in the weeds comment, but I want to say it. The asymmetry is expensive in every way a game can be expensive. It is unique layouts at the level of graphics. It's unique rules at an editorial level. It's unique sculpts if you're doing different miniatures.

I mean, it is hitting you every way a game can hit you if you make an asymmetric game. So like, why on earth would anyone do it? And to me, there is a reason to do it. which is when you're engaging with asymmetry, you are allowing players access to different kinds of immersion, which I think is important because I think there's a different, there's like a different argument for why asymmetry might be useful or not useful in a competitive framework.

If we're just talking about competitive games, and here I could rhapsodize about StarCraft for a long time and how the asymmetry works and doesn't work. But in the context of board games, if you're trying to tell stories and you tailor a, specific faction to be sensitive to this very complicated starting situation, that is going to put that player in the world that you're building in a much deeper way than a symmetrical start. Now, there's a downfall to this, which is as our positions of asymmetry drift apart, we stop

playing the same game. Correct. So, like, you know, if I'm the Tarrant and you're the Zerg, like we're both fighting over the planet, we still have a lot in common. But if I'm playing like a medic and you're playing like a bombardier pilot, why are we even in the same game? And so there's this kind of like, I think A cemetery offers immersion like with limits. And that's a very important, you know. Yeah, yeah.

And so there's like tons of different size to this, right? So there's like digital games like Starcraft and, you know, team fight tactics and a variety of other ones where you come in with a different, you know, character or even, you know, RPGs and World War. stuff like that. You come with a different faction and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. And I think those in some sense succeed because like balance is constantly adjusted. Like every one of the games is constantly tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, and so it's constantly upshifting and moving. And so the variety of that I think helps solve many of the problems in a sense because it's just like, okay, if there's a problem you fix it, it's problem you fix it.

Right. Tabletop games don't really have that luxury. So that's one side of like asymmetry that like I think only really works because of the constant introduction and updating. And then there's there's the versions of asymmetry, which I guess from the from a tabletop perspective, the closest thing would be like trading card games and games where it's like, okay, again, we have a we have a, those ones, we have a symmetrical like theoretical, like theoretical starting position and then we choose, we opt into the asymmetry in play. And then ideally there's there is balance because the, you know, the variety of strategies

can can counteract and change over time. Then there's a version of this that is the more like, you know, box. tabletop complete version and that one what you've done with root pushes it way further than for a strategy game I've encountered in a game that does it so successfully I would I would argue it really does feel like you're playing completely different games with these different factions of roots and so it's it's such a you know like I've done this in a variety of ways in a couple of my games we did it with essentially we did an expansion called dawn of champions where every player gets a new kind of starting character that they can play with and if I'm being honest it's my

least favorite Ascension set to play with because I feel, and this is the other challenge I wanted to kind of put on you, I feel somewhat railroaded, right? I get, I get, this character rewards me for doing thing X. That means if I do anything but X, I feel like I'm playing at a disadvantage. And so I feel like I have less strategic variety. And so I tried to address that. And just before, I'll finish monologuing shortly, but I want, I think it's really interesting. And I should wrestle with this a lot. So I want to give more context. With Shards of Infinity, we have, you all have your own character personas. And when I first launched the game,

it had no differentiation between them, again, because I wanted this to, you know, I didn't believe in asymmetry. And then I added asymmetry, but it was a, it was a asymmetry you built into. It was called Relics of the Future.

And after a certain period of time, you earned enough experience, you could unlock one of two unique to you cards that could dictate your strategy going forward. But because I gave you a modal path, because it didn't start the game that way, it felt like it didn't have that railroading problem. But the idea of starting from the beginning of a thing

with a completely different, set of like resources and goals feels like it's very hard to create interesting strategic variety. So, Randt overall, I'll pass it back. No, no, no. Well, that was very well put because it does to me, okay, so we're getting this level of immersion that we get with asymmetry. Let's assume that's just like a given.

We can say, okay, asymmetry and these, especially like a curated setup, it's giving you a sense of like the things you're worried. I've been playing these, I played a game called Here I Stand recently, which is about the Martin Lutheran the Reformation. It's a big historical game. It takes 10 hours. But if you're playing England,

you're Henry VIII. What are you trying to do? You're trying to have a male heir. And that's your whole game. And then, you know, if you're playing the Sultans, if you're playing the Ottomans, you're trying to take Vienna. And what's fascinating about the game is how it feels like I'm in a play.

Like I've got a role. There's like a thing that I'm trying to do. and my role feels very deep. I feel like very interested in the character I'm playing. But am I really playing a game? Like not really. I feel like I'm like acting. One of the,

I think one of the key points about root success is that the asymmetric roles in Root do not railroad players. They say to me, the, well, actually, one of my least favorite examples of asymmetry in modern games is something like Twilight Imperium,

where you get Delta race that has a very specific benefit and that really does just dictate what you're doing. And to a degree that sometimes when I'm playing TI, I'm not even really thinking about the decisions I'm making like, oh, I get plus one on cruisers, so I'm only going to be building cruisers. Because I know, like, my little game designer brain turns on

and I'm like, if this is my competitive advantage, I will get the most out of this if I push it as hard as I can possibly push it. So Root gets out of that problem because it says you have so little in common with the other players that you can't even lean into your differences because there are only differences. So it's not as if whoever plays their role the best, quote unquote, is going to necessarily win. But then there are two things that Root does. So the first thing that Root does is it says every faction actually has about three different strategic paths.

And oftentimes the best approach is a mixed. strategy. And I think that this is like, it's getting to kind of more traditional game theory about saddle points and things like that. But you often want games that offer a mixed strategy where it's like, look, the optimal strategy is not always throw rock or always throw scissors, but it's to throw rock like 20% of the time or whatever that might be. So, you know, Root kind of says every faction's got these different approaches that you were able to kind of tactically and strategically swing into as you play the game. And the second thing that I think Root does really well, is that the nature of the game changes dramatically, capital D dramatically, depending on which factions

are in play. And so the faction mix and root, which can be assembled using a little, like there's a competitive draft that people play with that is officially sanctioned and it's in the Marauder expansion, that draft sets the nature of the game that we're about to play. And then that kind of setup puts pressure on your strategic approaches. And the light bulb that usually turns on, and this to me is the reason why Root has done so well for so long. Because I can tell you, the first 100,000 copies of Root were sold because the box art is gorgeous and adorable.

But we've now gotten to a point where there are annual tournaments in many different countries. People are playing the game. And I know it's more than the art that's animating it. And I think the thing that's animating it is, when you select a, set of root factions, it dramatically alters the nature of the game. And usually the first time this happens with players or when they own enough factions that they can play a game without the cats.

And so suddenly the board is a lot emptier. And the game has just a very different character. And as people start playing it, they realize that all of their strategies, their calculus, their kind of strategic heuristics have to adjust to this new, like, moment they're in. And it's the equivalent of like playing with a new set of magic cards or something. where you're like, wow, this strategic paradigm was so important last season. It doesn't work in this mix. And now I'm kind of flying on the seat of my pants.

Yeah, yeah. I think so, you know, again, a lot to unpack there, right? This idea that there's an initial hook that brings people into the game and the cute art and kind of style is a thing. But the thing that's going to keep people over the long term, the thing's going to sell your, you know, 100,000 to million plus copies is going to be because the game has a level of like interest and strategic. depth and joy that is not exhaustible, right? And that this variety of starting positions can allow that. That's why, I mean, frankly, any game that does expansions to some extent is trying to pull off this same magic trick.

And I think the asymmetric starting positions does support that somewhat intrinsically, though I would guess. I've not played enough root with enough of the different factions to know this, but I would guess it is again, it's got to be just impossible to actually balance those scenarios correctly, but there's so many of them that you just won't know. You know, if a game's not balanced, but I've only played it twice,

it's like, who knows, it's fine, right? That configuration, I mean. There's a funny sidebar here about, like, how do we even assess balance? One of the most, like, one of the most important things that happened to me as a young designer when I was starting off in 2011, 2012, just thinking about it, is I was reading David Surlin's design blog, which was this fascinating window into how people were talking about design

in like circa 2011. But he had this amazing post about tiering of Street Fighter 2 characters, and he said, like, okay, look, we've got some of these characters that are clearly like S-tier, and some are A-tier, and some are B-tier, and he had numbers to back it up. said, like, look, in these matchups, these characters are winning by this amount, we can use this to drive a tiered list. And he had, I mean, kind of S through D tier characters. And he said,

look, and Street Fighter is a very well-balanced game. And I was like, how could it be well-balanced if this character pick has like a 20% win rate against this other character? Isn't that not balance? And his argument was that like, when we're talking about balance, we're always talking about a range of acceptable outputs. Right? Because you don't like, if the game is spitting completely even outputs, you should be suspicious of that number. Like it was probably a little cooked.

Nor is it likely to be fun in reality. Yeah, exactly. Well, because it'll just start, like, what ends up happening is that these rules of large numbers start taking over, where it's like, well, if you put enough randomness in the system, then I'll give you a game that like, you know, we're going to roll a D6, everyone gets a number, we're going to roll that die. It's a beautifully balanced game. Perfectly balanced.

Congratulations. Yeah, you've got it. But it is one of those things that like root is an impossible to balance game. So the way that we do root balancing on the back end is we have sort of like flags for the different factions. Like, oh, this faction like doesn't have a lot of pieces on the board. And then we have other factions that like benefit from games where there are few pieces on the board. And so we'll run these matchups that are like curated where it's like, okay, this should be degenerate matchup because we have one very aggressive faction and three peaceful factions. The

aggressive faction should just be winning. And then we will look at those weird scenarios and then balance for them and make sure that there are viable strategic paths are still operating. And then we take that adjusted faction and put it in the general pool to make sure we didn't break anything else. But we are basically, I mean, I have a, I have a script that I run that it looks at all the viable route matchups. and then we look at the ones that the script has put on the edge of viability, and we test just those matchups. Because if those work, then the other ones are going to work too. So what does it mean to say at the edge of viability then?

So every root faction has a number associated with it called its reach. And reach basically means how able is that faction to influence the board state? And this is a soft number. This is a number that I pull out of a hat and I just say like that faction that's a six or whatever and then every player count has a value where you need to have at least this many kind of reach points in the game in order for the game to be valid. And so if I'm playing with a bunch of low reach factions, it's not a good game because if someone starts winning the game like the actual table cannot change the outcome because everyone is too low reach. In a high player count game, though, you can have more low-reach factions because you're kind of splitting the power of the

herd across a wider range of people. And so what we do is I just run this little script. It's very simple. And it'll tell me what is on the edge of that viability. And then it will play those games, which might lead to the reach numbers getting boosted a little bit or diminished a little bit. That's fascinating. That's fascinating.

Okay. Yeah, I love that. I love that as a tool. And I think there's this really fascinating world that's like sort of coming where as AI is getting better at playing games will actually be able to run like, you know, these million, million monkeys, million type writers scenarios and find these breakpoints. I also think that, you know, one of the points you raised earlier was, is really important. It's like, what does it mean to be balanced? Right. This is a common phrase.

And we know we don't want even is not doesn't mean even. Doesn't mean equal. In fact, that's not. That's especially not the objective because it's actually not fun. And the way I typically will describe balance is that there's sort of no, no one strategy such that if I knew you were doing that strategy, there's no possible counter to it. Yes. Is kind of my benchmark for how to run this. And so that there's different, there's, there are counter strategies and the possibilities of adapting because of that adaptation process is fun.

And then there's like other interesting things in terms of Richard Garfield was on the, podcast and talked about his game Spectrum answer, which had, you know, because it was a digital card game that had asymmetric starting positions was they had a lot of data on what factions, you know, which factions were better, quote unquote, than others. And what they found was that in the casual player, like if you were not good at the game, certain factions were much more likely to win and certain factions were much more likely to lose. And as you got better, those shifted. And so because they were more complicated to play. And so the question was, should you just balance around the top tier players.

And the answer is almost certainly no, because most people are not like that. And that's going to ruin people's experiences. So understanding what the game is like for a beginner and when I'm just coming into this, of which I think something like Root excels a lot because it's so different every time you play a faction, you can't really have any clue, like until you played all the factions and had a sense of it. So it's like it survives the first several games in a way that I think is asymmetric games

get a bonus for. And then there's this sort of challenge of like, okay, now, now where does it? How do you figure out where it's solved? And I love this idea. I love this idea of reach, right, of the like different mechanics having different capabilities of influencing and impacting others. And I guess I interpret it sort of similarly as just sort of like interactivity, right? Like if, yeah.

But the many of I want to mention about reach is that I think sometimes when we're doing like reviews on our own content as designers, we tend to prioritize like the hard data versus the soft. So I can arrange all the dominion cards by like cost. And that's useful. But like there might be a better number that I could invent that would factor in a bunch of elements to the card. And then I could sort them by that like judged value.

And so I like talking about reach because it is like a made up concept. And it comes from the idea that if like what makes a viable table of root, oh, there has to be like a certain like interactivity threshold that needs to be reached. And then we can measure all the factors. for their interactivity. That is a layer of nonsense on top of the actual hard code of the design, but it allows us to like see and sculpt what the design can do. Yeah, I think, well, it is a common novice designer approach that they're just going to find

some spreadsheet that's going to output the power level of a given card or factioner ability, and then we'll just use that spreadsheet and that will determine everything and I don't need to worry about balance for that, right? That's just an illusion in and of itself. And so this idea that there has to be some amount of, you know, kind of soft, you know, intuitive assessment that has to be part of this. And then, you know, another one of my kind of like my rules for balance is like sort of when in doubt push the fun, right?

Like you're never going to get it exactly right. But if like summoning a giant fire breathing dragon turns out to be a little bit overpowered, like so be it, right? But if like, you know, a stasis lockdown that lets nobody play any. resources or play any any abilities at all. It turns out to be the best strategy. Well, okay, your game is kind of ruined. So like when in doubt, make dragons better and make Staces worse, you know?

And this is something that we ran into like with base route where like base root was in some respects, like there are parts of that design that are very conservative, especially in the actual card powers. Because I hadn't designed a game with card powers until Root, really. And my first time getting a deck of cards where I'm like, oh yeah, I could put a power on this card. it can work with any faction, it gives them a social power. I, as a younger designer, especially at that time,

I didn't really know what the limits of those powers were. And so there are parts of root that are like very conservative. And then with every single product, you've gotten like a little looser. We've said like, you know what? Let's actually like when we actually built the second deck, which is just an alternate, you know, it basically is an expansion. You know, it's another way of playing the game replaces all the cards. It is dramatically more interesting and a little less bad.

balanced. And like, and so the, and I think, and a lot of this came, I mean, this is funny. You know, I, we watched, I think I, you know, designers always fall into two camps and I'm in the camp that like actually watches every single review of every day I work on because I want, when I see a reviewer talk about a game, I see them not as a reviewer, but as like another player. And if they're sensitive, especially if their sensibility is like mine and they don't like something I worked on, then I'm like, okay, well, I went astray somewhere because they should like the game as much as I do. And I remember watching the shut up and sit down a review of Root,

which I thought they were going to love. And instead they had these very mixed feelings. And a lot of their mixed feelings orbited around this idea that the design was like a little too cautious in very specific ways that stopped it from taking flight. And so when we started working the next expansion, I said, look, this like two-second clip or there's two-minute clip from this video, let's answer the call to make Root like a little wilder and woolier. Because it is a playful thing.

It will be doing better the more playful it is. Yeah. Yeah. So this this, this ties into a couple, a couple aspects. One, I think with expansions,

you by default, get that freedom more, right? Like you're, you know, you kind of, you need the experience to be a little tighter up front. And once you've got your audience in and you know the core of your game,

you can take people on journeys, right? I mean, we made some pirate sets of ascension, you know, as part of year like eight or something that was like crazy, characters moving around the board and everything that would just like it would have been insane if I tried to do that at the beginning right like yeah so there's there's some fun things that that open up

um i think just by default over time and and and then two i think the what expectations you set for your players is so critical when it comes to like the freedom you have as a designer right like the art style and world building of root makes people feel like they should be more in invested and you could have more unique characters and a bit more whimsy, wild and woolly, I think is the way you put it. But, um, and like, and so I've told the story before, but it's with Shards of Infinity, I mentioned, I started the game without unique player powers, but I gave you a character that had a backstory. It had a very different look. And I didn't until I had the actual production version of my hands. We had a giant character with, with a health dial in front of you. And the fact that that

character was so big and so like prominent in front of you as part of the game made it feel more like this should do something. This needs to be different. And so that's where we did that with the expansion. But it was like the promise of the visual components indicated that this game needed something that was more than it was there. To give us kind of full circle back to this idea of how the visuals and the design influence each other, which has become a great sub theme of this conversation.

Okay, I love Root. That's definitely the game of yours I have the most experience with. But we've probably beat it to death for anybody that's not a familiar root. hopefully you still got plenty out of it because I think asymmetric starting positions, the relationship of art and design all really play in here. I want to speak a little bit about your Oath game and this idea of legacy gameplay because it's another very meaty topic. What made you decide a legacy game?

Maybe you talked a little bit about it and how you chose to build legacy into that game and we can bounce back and forth on that a little bit. So Oath has kind of two origin points. the first origin point is watching people play root and how they talked about root as if they were telling a generational story. Like people would say, oh, yeah, my dad, he won like three games in a row and then suddenly a player dethroned him. And I was thinking like, well, this meta-conversation about the game is not really what the

game was doing at all. Like, there was a discussion about the story that the game was telling that was fully outside of what the game was doing. And I started wondering, like, is it possible to design a game where my starting point is a conversation that players are having about the game when they're not playing it? And just like designing a game for the meta, almost. And then the other origin point of oath was playing a lot of legacy games and kind of being a little dissatisfied by them. I mean, legacy games are funny in the board game space. You know, these games that players kind of open up, they play them over the game.

the course of maybe five to 15 games. They tell a pre-written story. It might be nonlinear. And then at the end, the game either has like a special mode that you play or it's fully bricked because you've told this story. And even the really good legacy games always, to me,

struck me like bad television. Like the best legacy game is like an okay series of a show. And it's because they have these pre-sculpted, like every trick that the game can do, the designers already know it before you start playing. And I thought, like, for my own sake, I love when players surprised me with really inventive play. And so I just kept wondering, like, is there another way to approach the legacy framework than offering a big pre-written narrative? And so I had this idea of like, okay, well, what if we built a game and the core premise of oath?

I mean, I wrote this on a little post-it and like stuck it to my monitor. It's like, Oath remembers how you played it. So the very core foundation of oath is the in-state that you create collectively in that game is the start state for the next game. And what this does is it means that depending on how you win, it forms and shapes the next game that is going to be played. So if you win by destroying everything in the world, the next game is like barren. If you win by building a big city, the next game is in the city. This is a very weird design challenge Because it ends up you end up feeling like you're designing a video game engine

Or like a framework or a role playing system rather than a board game Because board games are like little entropy systems Like when you when you play a game of chess All of your potential energy is housed in those chess pieces And at the end of a game of chess there's like four pieces on the board Like there's no juice left you can't you can't just play another game of chess in that setup So we had to do certain things that would allow the game to like heal itself and to prepare for for that next game.

But it was an interesting process, which I'm sure we'll get into, but basically going into that game, that was basically all I had. I did not know if the game that we were working on was going to be possible. I didn't have a sense of what genre it was going to be. I didn't even have any, like, central mechanical hook. I just said, this is the high order thing, what I want the game to do. And then the longer I worked on it, we started slowly establishing some of the mechanical foundations for the game. that were tied into that premise.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. And I love the idea of playing with legacy and different ways to do that, right? So, you know, it telling some story that lingers. And I personally, yeah, I personally also took, like, I took issue with the idea of like, this game is bricked because I've done everything, right? It bothered me.

So, you know, we did a legacy game, we did a legacy gameplay with Shards of Infinity. also the first version was in Shadows of Salvation where it was like you know kind of a choose your own adventure book basically that you could go battle through you'd move through the the different aspects of it your deck would be permanently quote unquote permanently modified till you got to the end of the journey there was some time travel that could move you back and forth if you lost somewhere in this path but then you could also just still reset it and play it again right so there's enough variety that you would play it more than once there was enough different experiences there

because I just didn't like the idea of destroying destroying my game and then with the latest version of it, we did a new thing called the saga mode, which is, again, we've called it Legacy Light, where in essence, it's like all of the expansions in one box and we're using the legacy experience as a way to unlock the expansions as you go, right? So that for a player, because I don't want to give you all the content up front, but it's still falling into the trap, as you put it, or, you know, kind of this idea that like it's, it's, you know, there's nothing that I haven't thought of that's not, that's happening that's in there. But there's enough variety in a game like that to keep, you know, every game is going to be different regardless.

So with oath, the idea that your, so the end states are, it's just, it's just changing kind of starting board position. There's no permanent adjustments other than that. Right. So it's changing starting board position and it establishes basically, here's, here's what oath remembers. It remembers what the starting board position is. It remembers what the victory condition was set at at the end of the last game. It remembers what was in the deck, which is very important. And that's, and that's really it. We're just to say, it doesn't, you know, we're talking real 8-bit memory. It does not remember that much. However, the deck is very important because in oath, the deck is essentially, it establishes like a set of rules that modify how the game is played. And so if, for instance, the starting

board position has, I'll use the example of like the gambling house, the gambling house is a very powerful card that completely changes how the core money economy of the game works. If it is in the game, if it persists from one game to another, those games are going to be marked by the fact that you're playing basically a different economic game than in a world that has a bunch of farms in it. So a lot of the memory is like housed at the level of like a single card that is that holding global rules or things that kind of change it. Now, this actually created, so this is very, very built into the core design of oath. So I had the thought of like, okay, well, I want to tell a game that can store its history.

So I have a way of saving a board position. I know how I can do that because of how the board is laid out. But I also knew that I wanted there to be richness and a lot of character in the individual worlds. And so I did this through the deck. So Oath's central mechanism is essentially the world of oath is a deck of cards. The game is almost entirely card driven. The deck has about 54 cards in it. And critically, only 10% of the deck changes from one game to the next.

So at the end of one game, six cards are coming out, six cards are going in. It is up to what happened in that game is determining how that shift happens. But this is very important because I wanted players to. establish relationships with the cards. So you have to see it in more than one game. If I see a card, even if it's a really cool card, but I see it for one game and then it's out the next game, I don't have time to build any relationship with that card as a player.

Right. Yeah, I know that emotional resonance is going to build up over time. And as you said, sort of tell the story, emphasize storytelling, which I think is what I'm hearing is kind of the key of this execution, right? That I'm going to be able to have the story between games. Like, oh, man, you use the gambling house. in the last game and the last two games to win,

and now I'm going to get it out of here so that you can't do that next. You create these kind of meta-narratives for people who play a game over multiple sessions. And it's worth drilling into the detail of card flow because it established all of these weird rules. So I said, okay, well, the deck is 54 cards. So if there's a card in the game, there has to be a chance that you don't know precisely which cards were kicked out of the game, which means not all the cards have to be played with from one game to the next. And I use the example of like a lost sword and a fantasy novel.

The thing about a lost sword or a lost artifact story is that people thought it was gone forever, but actually it's still here. Like the ring was just at the bottom of the river. And so in order to create that in a game, you have to not use all of the cards each game. And so I was like, well, arbitrarily, let's say I use half the cards in each game. So I have a deck of 54 cards. We shuffle it up. We play with the top half of that deck.

at the end of the game, we're going to shuffle the deck again, we're going to play with the top half. Well, over several games, the ring could seem quite lost, and then it pops up in game four. But then, when I got around to the problem of actually designing the game, I ran into this issue where I needed to make a game that worked for the deck of 24 cards or 22 cards. But like all of these things have these very funny follow-on effects, where when it came time to actually build the mechanisms of the game, I didn't go to a blank page. I went to a, I know that the design needs this many cards.

The full game, the full storytelling power of the game has to be able to be executed with pretty few components because the game has to change. Oath is a funny design because there's a lot of content in that box and players are playing with 20% of it or 10% of it in any particular game. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's one, I'm just sort of noticing a trend that you like. like to take very hard game design projects on where you're taking on a lot more design than most players will actually encounter, which is fun. But this idea, which I do think is important to kind of emphasize that, like, look, you're, you know, you're creating your initial design hook, and then you start to create some design constraints to come out of the kind of emotional impact or story impact

that you want to have. And then those ripple down because games are very sensitive systems, right? They're going to really, you know, one little tweak over here is going to have ripple effects. down to the other side of it. And so knowing what the core is of like, no, no, no, this is the experience that I want. This is the experience that matters. And thus, as you play with it,

you'll start to realize, okay, that means this has to happen, this has to happen. And this has to happen. Now, okay, within that constraint, what can I build? And how do I move to where I want people to go, right? So it's a,

I hear that logic with you, which I think is exactly the way. I think about games and it's worth like, just kind of making a little explicit because I think a lot of people will benefit from understanding that better. Well, I want to underline to the degree to wish,

which these difficult projects are made possible because of how our company is structured. So I am the career director here at Leader Games. We run crowdfunding projects. And our audience loves really ambitious, strange, kind of almost avant-garde designs. It's sort of what, where our core audience is. And our whole model is built not on making a game that's going to sell a million copies, but kind of keeping that 60,000 people core audience as happy as they can be. And so I usually tell people, like when I'm looking at a potential title for leader games,

I kind of ask myself two questions. Like, first of all, is this project like much too difficult for a small studio to take on because it's too big? And then also, on the other hand, is it much too risky for a large studio? And if it's in that sweet zone where it's like too hard for a small studio, but too dumb and risky for a large studio, it's probably a good fit for what we do. Fascinating.

I love that way of looking at your business model. I think these things are, how big is your studio? We have 17 full-time people. Awesome. Okay. And how many of those work on the kind of game design portion specifically? Half.

About half. And so when we work on projects, it is usually like an all-hands-on deck, or at least full-team on deck. and I want to have Kyle, our artist, and our graphic designer in the very first meeting about a game. In fact, some of my favorite Oathart was done before Oath had a name, any components, where Kyle was just kind of viving with the general project and what it might be. We didn't really know what we were going to be building together yet at that point.

And how often are you releasing games? Once a year on average. Maybe once every 16 months. something like arcs took like two and a half years to build so it's a pretty slow schedule yeah yeah it's fascinating uh you know just to give people a sense of how much work these things take um that's that's that's a lot of resources devoted to these projects so it is it is a pretty pretty risky gamble uh in the scheme of things for how many resources have to get added into one of these projects succeeding like if a project doesn't succeed in that you know you're talking about maybe three years of

of cost per one outputs. I mean, we measure the success of our studio in how many projects we feel comfortable canceling. And, and I mean, it's funny, sometimes I will be hanging out with other publishers

and they'll be like, oh, like, what are your benchmarks this year? How many games are you trying to make? And I usually tell them like, look, man, I'm trying to make fewer games more slowly.

Yeah. Because I do think something special happens when you work on a game for six months and then throw it away and then start again, that you just can't, There's no way to replicate that. And it's a thing that amateurs and non-professional designers are able to do, but professional designers are very rarely able to do it.

Because the opportunity costs for, you know, you're like, I'm a software engineer. I don't necessarily need this game. So I'm going to take my game and I'm going to throw it away. I'm going to restart it. And it's on that second or third restart that something really starts to take off. And so we really try to preserve that flexibility at the studio. Yeah. I know I will have games that will like be shelved and then come back years later and then get shelved again and then come back years later and then finally there's a home for it.

And you know, some of those are still in my my back catalog. So it's a it's a it's a never ending process. But I think that let's let's let's let's use we're running low on time. So let's just like let's kind of future future predict here a little bit. Right. You've you've found a great niche here. that lets you work on some really compelling long-tail games that, you know, take lots of effort and have an audience that you've delivered to. Crowdfunding as a business model, you wouldn't be able to exist and do this kind of thing without that. And so, you know, as the future of games and the industry is shifting, what do you see changing now, you know, two years, five years down the road? How does that, how do you think about what the future of design might look like or publishing might look like?

In the space of hobby games, I think there was a, really a pretty magical period of about 15 years where it felt like everybody who was playing hobby games was kind of in one place. And you could see this when you would look at something like the BG Top 100 games where there was a real coherence to that list. It was as if one group had got together and decided these are the top 100 games that we care about. And we are now no longer in that mode. There are so many sub-communities who have found really, I mean, there are so many amazing audiences who have really built communities around specific titles. And the reason I mentioned BGG is you can now see this in the top 100 list,

where when you look at that top 100 list, as a single list, it is not coherent. It doesn't make any sense why Gloomhaven is next to Terraforming Mars, except it's telling you, boy, there are a lot of people who care about Gloomhaven. There are a lot of people who care about terraforming Mars. They're not the same person, usually. And so I think one thing that we have seen at leading, is the movement to game-based discussion forums. I mean, it's almost like the 90s or something,

where our company discords, where people are talking about Root, are tremendously exciting spaces, where you get a lot of audience activation. It gives us a lot of stability in our business models, but it also starts to stop games from really hitting a wider audience. And so to me, there's this funny,

I think that we're at a really interesting point of fragmentation, where the types of games that I work on, we are on the one hand drilling incredibly deep. It's never been easier to have an evergreen that works for a specific audience. But on the other hand, it's never been harder to figure out which games you want to try to make the general, like, mass market appeal to. And this is reflected in our own production schedule. So right now we're working on two projects. I'm finishing a big expansion to oath, which sort of changes its 8-bit memory to a 16-bit memory and allows the game to remember a lot more and change a lot more. And then we're working on a root expansion.

I don't expect either one of those expansions to actually grow the audience at all. These are games that are built to make our existing audience happy to show our commitment to keeping these games alive. But we are not currently working on a big hit. And it's because something that I've found as just a company head is it is a lot of work to maintain a living game. I'm sure you had this with Ascension. It's like the biggest thing I did not understand about Root. I thought I was going to finish Root and be done forever. And instead, I was at a root meeting earlier this morning.

And we're, you know, we're seven years from Roots release. And the degree to which it actually takes time to service. those communities and keep those games alive. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if you see more game companies basically become, you know, these are almost single title shops that are just there to support those communities and keep them alive. Yeah. So this is the 15 year anniversary of Ascension at Jen Con will be the exact moment of our first

sale. And yeah, we're in, you know, 17 fully standalone expansions and a bunch more promo packs and side quests and who knows what's. and that's I often wonder because I definitely spent a lot of energy on a bunch of other games if I had actually just doubled down

and really focused on that way the business would be and it's an interesting model because it's such a hit-driven business and you're right the costs of maintaining and expanding and keeping and it's it's hit-driven and it's recency-driven right if a game could be a

it used to be like look this is just a great game and you buy it and you could continue to buy it and that's great, but that just doesn't work like that anymore. If a game is great, it has to have expansions or it's, quote, dead, right? Which is a really weird phenomenon in game psyche. And there's very few games that have been released in the last 20 years that succeed but don't have new content coming out. Well, it's a funny, I mean, it's a little bit like in the digital game space,

like the paradox model, which is some of these games, if you want to build them to their fullest extent, they are like 10 or 15 year projects. And so in order to do that, you have to like build these product lines that can actually support it. On the other hand, like, that's ridiculous for the vast majority of games. And it is, it is, especially, I mean, the, I feel, I'm in a space where I feel like very hopeful about the industry with an important qualification. I think light games, I think very competitive.

competitive games, I think heavy-weighted games, historical games, are all doing great right now. They have found their audiences. People are doing fantastic design work. But the middle is getting totally hollowed out. Like that, you know, in the context of board games, like that 90-minute, like really interesting Euro design that was going to win the spiel in like 1998, there is no place for it in the contemporary market. And that's a bummer because those are amazing. There's amazing design work that happens there. Yeah, yeah, there's definitely, you know, there's definitely interesting space there. And I think there's something to be said for like kind of almost how you started in your industry when you, you know, making these kinds of games and being able to make games that have an audience of 500 or 1,000 and be able to test and build in that space.

I think there will be a time that comes around for, you know, if that 90 minute your game is, is at a lull now serving a small version of that audience until something can kind of hit and growing it again. I would be surprised if it didn't rise up in some form or another. So we'll wrap up. I want to say, one, is there any advice that you'd have given this kind of context of design and publishing now for someone that wants to kind of break in or is thinking about designing or pitching to a publisher or moving things? What advice would you have kind of beyond the stuff we've already talked about here to that audience member? You know, no one is going to be as critical, as skeptical, as hard on yourself as you will be. So when you're working on your game, like preserve your own skepticism about your work. Like really ask, I mean, I always tell people that, I mean, making games is all, I mean, I think about it is almost like something sacred.

It's so rare. It's so precious. If you're going to build something, really do care about it and try to make something that you hold to a really high standard. sometimes when we work on games, it becomes more tempting to finish a game than to make it good. Don't ever fall in that trap because it's never going to lead you to where you want to be. Great advice. And where, if people want to find your stuff, find your games, follow you. Where would you direct them?

For the leader game stuff, the best place is the website, leadergames.com. For the historical games, you can find me at Worleygig.com. that's W-E-H-R-L-E-G-G-com. These days, my social media has kind of fully moved over to Blue Sky. So if you just search Cole Worley on Blue Sky, you'll find me there. Awesome. Cole, thanks so much, man. This was great.

I love this kind of deep dive. This was so much fun. Thank you so much for taking the time. There is so much more to talk about, Justin. This is a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll have to do a part too because I could have gone a lot further, but I'll have to wait for the next time.

Yeah. All right. Thanks, man. 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 platform, 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, things like a game design. 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.