Think Like A Game Designer - Dominic Crapuchettes — Designing for Constraints, Rebuilding After Failure, and Finding the Magic in Games (#85)

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Dominic Crapuchettes is the founder of North Star Games and the designer of massive hits like Wits & Wagers, Say Anything, and the Evolution series—games that have sold over 4.5 million copies. In this episode, Dominic opens up about the rise and fall of North Star, from building a 30-person team and landing six SKUs at Target, to watching the company go bankrupt and eventually buying it back. He shares what he’s learned from those hard-won lessons, including how to build frothing fan communities, how to design with audience constraints in mind, and why brand and hook matter as much as gameplay. We also dive into his most ambitious project yet: Nature, a new modular game system launching at Gen Con that aims to bring the magic of collectible games to families and casual players alike. Whether you're a founder, designer, or someone trying to follow your passion while staying afloat, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.Think Like A Game Designer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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 Dominic Crespatch. Dominic founded North Star Games in 2003, and they have sold over $60 million worth of games during their first 15 years. He grew the company to 30 employees with six skews at Target in 2018. And he also got a chance to watch that company sink over five years and go to bankruptcy. And then has since purchased the assets of that company and recovered and now is launching a

new game nature this year at GenCon. Dominic is a great game designer with games that have sold over 4.5 million copies, including wits and wagers, say anything, and the evolution series. And we get into a lot of the nitty gritty details not only of designing and how do you design for constraints and how do you does game mechanics connect to brand and the overall success of a game we talk about the rise and fall of his company and where those failures are i parallel that with a lot of stories from my own background so there's a ton of meat here for anyone whether you are an entrepreneur a founder a designer there's a great set of principles here and so i know you're going to love my conversation with dominic crepichshitz

Hello and welcome. I am here with Dominic Crapuchettes. Dominic, good to be with you, man. Yeah, nice to hear you, Justin. Yeah, we, you know, I was, before we started recording, I kind of, I shared this, like, bizarre deja vu I was having because I could have sworn that I had you on the podcast before. And I have a record of scheduling a podcast like five years ago, but apparently it never happened. And we just had the IRL conversation I loved. So I was so grateful you reached back out to me, uh,

to be able to share your story and have a deep dive on game design, business life and all the fun things we love to dive deep on. I am looking forward to it. Your podcast is actually the only, I would say non-mainstream one I listen to. I listen to like Ezra Klein Show and The Daily and maybe some NPR and then yours and that's it's as far as I go. Well, I appreciate that. I have to be in such good company and I've got a feeling that we're going to deliver for our audience here because I know you and I know you and I share. a kind of partial parts of our origin story from the early magic days. And that's kind of we first, first interacted.

But why don't we talk, why don't we start with your origin story for our audience here? Kind of what got you into gaming and talk a little bit about, you know, the studio you founded and kind of your non-gaming, fascinating background that gets you here. Yeah. So I knew this question obviously was going to come up because it always does. My origin story, I think, is tough. I think really the core is my family didn't watch television. We played board games.

We played board games. Well, we played games three times a week, and they were often board games. We played charades, hearts, spades, chess, monopoly, sorry, risk when I could convince them to play. So just all sorts of games, including as when we got older, a choir was a staple of ours. So I think the origin story really is my family. that didn't watch much television and played a lot of board games. Then I have another origin story. So I've got several.

So that's kind of the core I've been designing games most of my life. In eighth grade, I designed a game which got banned from school. And so there was a little bit of a bug there. That was really fun. And I took pride in the fact that they banned it. And the reason they banned it is because so many classmates were starting to play. It kind of started off with my small circle of friends. And then it started growing.

And you'd basically take a turn during class and then you'd pass the sheet of paper over. It was like graph paper to whoever you're playing against. And then they'd take their turn. Anyways, about 30 people started playing pretty consistently and it finally got banned. A friend of mine took out a copyright. I still have it in a file somewhere. And I remember being like the bug didn't catch me there in terms of starting company. I just thought that's really weird.

I'm like, we're, I'm just having fun. And I was kind of confused by what they thought. They're like, well, we could maybe make money. And I was like, maybe. I don't know. So that was eighth grade. Another bug is buying the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual and so the books and reading them thoroughly covered, you know, front to back and not having anyone to play with. And finally then going up to boarding school and high school,

couldn't convince any of my friends to play but I could play with kind of some of the awkward people and I think I got another bug there because the campaigns weren't what I was looking for they were going to room, fight a monster, get treasure, go in a room, fight a monster, and it was, and sometimes go to a bar and pick up on women, which I always thought was weird.

I'm like, okay, so you've got a high charisma because you're old die and so you're getting women And I'm like, I just didn't understand the fun. And so for me, I was always going, why is there a monster in a room? Why is this room here? Who built this dungeon? And why are they have treasure? And so for me, I always wanted, so I really got the bug of world building.

And another thing I really disliked was, let me go to the book and see what happens. Read through, oh, I think in Dragon episode, you know, 123, there's an article which says, this is how you do fall damage. And just all these things which took away from the story. And so I created in high school my own game system and then world-builded instead of homework and then played. It's just some crazy intense Dungeons and Dragons. So I'd say those two things. And then, wait, last one, magic.

Those three things are probably the most formative three experiences. Yeah, yeah. Well, the magic and Dungeons and Dragons are, you know, listeners of the podcast, will be, or no, the kind of cliched, most common to turn you into a game designer games. But I'm going to dig into this other piece because I find it interesting. So in eighth grade, you make this game and whether or not you know, remember more of the details of the games, we can choose to dive into it or not. But what I'm interested in is this bit that you did where it's, hey, I take a turn,

I write it on a little piece of paper, then I hand it to somebody else and then they can play it in class, right? Because I think this speaks to something that's an interesting principle of game design, which is kind of the form factor and the space that it fills for the audience, right? Like there's a genius there in this like, okay, well, we're in school. So we're stuck in a world where we can't really communicate or play a live game or have a table in front of us, you know, during this window. And so this like take a turn, pass, I think is really interesting. And I'm curious how you think about this in terms of some of your modern designs or if there is more space there. and the kinds of things that prompted in my mind, right?

When we did the Ascension app, it was actually one of the best decisions we made was the like kind of take a turn. It messages your opponent when it's your turn to play. So you could, you know, there was enough meat on the bones for a single turn that you could then wait and then have a long-term game or things like words with friends or word or it intentionally restricts you to only being able to play it once per day. I feel like there's something there that maybe has been lost and there's not a lot of modern games that are doing it that I can think of.

what are your thoughts on sort of play constraints and how do you build around that kind of thing and you could take that anywhere you want but I just found it an interesting topic yeah I think it's a great topic and one that I think about more than most game designers so I think about who's the audience and how does it fit into their lives and what are the needs that we're meeting to those people games are an art form which can fit into so many different people's lives in so many different ways. So for instance, our company, when we got big, we were catering to what I used to call. So forgive me for being not politically correct, but I'm just going to, I'm just who I am. We called them moms. And the reason we called

moms is because mostly the toy stores catered to 80% moms. Same with the Target aisle. 80% were moms. We kind of knew the demographic. And the need that a mom has, which is also a dad, and I was a dad, so I understand this need deeply. You're putting, putting diapers on a kid. Someone's crying. You're getting a bottle together. You're managing a very difficult, complicated relationships where everyone needs you. And what you want is a game that you can stick, I'm going to say, in your purse. So like Happy Salmon was came out of figuring out where this fits into someone's lives. You can't have a complicated game. You need to be able to teach the people, the kids, they need to be able to play while you go off and manage the baby and

do what other things that you need to do. It needs to be portable. you know, fits in your purse. So happy salmon, like when we first went into the toy market, I just thought, oh, we're doing games. And we did games in the mass market, and now we're going to do a family version. And the needs that were being met were not family game needs. People go to these toy stores to get expertise from the people that work there to buy a gift for one of their kids who has, and I've been through this, I have two kids. You'll have one to three birthday parties every weekend and you want to go and say, well, they're six years old and they like Star Wars, you know, or they like drawing. And so you have to really understand how is it fitting into

someone's life. And that mom does not understand boys in a basement. And again, they can be girls, but I call them boys in a basement because that was me. We've got a lot of time. We want something super intricate. And we're going to like, we could hang out in our basement for six hours and just have the time of our lives. And mom would look at that. go, that's really dumb. And our boys in a basement would look at happy salmon and go, that's so stupid, who plays a game? Like, they think, each side thinks the other person is not very smart. And they're just completely different needs being met in different ways. Just like the need when we were in the party game market, it used to be mom would want to get everyone together,

breaking away from the television, you know, the sports games, and interacting. And so understanding, like how are these games fitting into people's lives are really, really important. Yeah, and I think that there's an important power that comes from understanding, you know, both obviously understanding your audience and what their needs are. It's like absolutely critical to not just game design, but, you know, any kind of business or product or service you want to offer. But then, you know, embracing those constraints and understanding like that the, you know, the medium and the constraints of the audience are actually an opportunity for creating

new play experiences and new forms of fun, whether that be designing a game for a mobile device where you know you've got somebody's attention for like a minute or two instead of maybe the hours you might have, designing for a platform like virtual reality where we've built games that have the full spatial world around you, but after 20 or 30 minutes, you kind of, at least the VR we were designing for,

you were pretty much over it. And so you had to constrain within that space, building a game for you know I've spent a lot of time though I don't think I've really cracked it the way I want to is like trying to design a game that you can play while you're like standing in line like at a show or at a whatever you know like something that allows you to kind of have that space and I think that there's just like it's a great exercise to be able

to go through and can come up with a lot of really cool items and in fact this even like ties in well to kind of one of your most successful or it might be your most successful game the wits and wagers right you kind of took the traditional kind of trivia model and help to adapt it for people who aren't necessarily that good at trivia. Maybe we can speak a little bit to that game's innovation. Yeah, so that bug started in high school when we would play for class, a trivial pursuit.

And I really, I didn't like it for a lot of reasons. One, I wasn't really into memorizing facts and regurgitating them back to the teachers. So I come from a family of kind of like philosophy academics, kind of. And so for me, talking about interesting ideas was wonderful, and memorizing facts and telling them the facts that they asked us to memorize just was not a process that I enjoyed. And so trivial pursuit felt like a pop quiz. Lots of people would get mad. There's lots of complaining because it's like, oh, you got the easy one, you know. And I felt the same way.

Some men were like, oh, God, you know, I had three questions that I knew and now I got one that I don't know. So one of the things I wanted to solve there was having everyone answer the same question. the issue that I was trying to solve on the regurgitating memorized facts is how do we design a game that sees how well you understand the concept instead of how well you've memorized a fact and so that's what led to the numbers is like and all the questions did used to be more academic so so people who understood you know the geography better would understand would be able to give an estimate on the height of Mount Everest than someone who has no knowledge. So they were all questions about making good estimates. And then the betting part came because trivia was just,

I mean, not trivia. And Texas Holden is just starting to get hot. And so I was interested at the time of doing what people do in a lot of art forms is take, you know, a drumbeat from Africa and a guitar rift from, you know, some other place and then fuse these two things together. and both of the each individual elements have been refined for over generations into being something really compelling, but mixing them together feels really fresh. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And, you know, I think this is great because we've already highlighted two really, really,

like, fundamental and powerful principles, maybe even three fundamental and powerful principles of our, of design. You know, one is understanding your audience's needs and the constraints that come from that. Two, is sort of embracing those constraints and seeing how they could. create new design opportunities. And now this one that you just brought up, which is sort of, you know, kind of combining different genres, ideas,

you know, this kind of creativity is really just sort of being able to take two things that already exist and mash them together in a way that is elegant and makes sense. And so your, you know, wits and wagers where you can have a trivial pursuit-like experience, but you're picking a number,

you know, number-based answer, laying those out on a grid, and then having a poker-like betting system where you can then bet on the answers. And it plays into what I what I view is the essential like party game like hook, which is the being able to understand and learn about the other people in the room, right? The, the sort of, oh, okay, I don't know that height of Mount Everest, but I bet that Jimmy does because he knows everything. So I'm going to bet on Jimmy's answer, right? And that lets me now

play this game, which I think most of the most successful party games all have some aspect of that to it. And I think it's a it was a very clever, clever process. Yeah. Cool. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I was going to bring out like several of the elements that are fun.

So memorizing and, you know, answers and then stating them is a, is something that's useful in real life. But as I'm in the marketplace, I kind of feel like a more useful skill is to know your team well. We're building a team. And I know who to go to for marketing, who to go to. for each different aspect, because everyone has skills. And knowing the limits of what you know, knowing when to defer to someone, because sometimes when you're in a soft science,

you have no idea who knows better. And a lot of team building early on is growing to understand your team and their strengths. And wits and wagers really plays off of that skill of like there are certain people who always bet on themselves. And they say, well, that's the answer I thought it was. Why wouldn't I bet on it? And it's like, okay, you're missing a huge power of like learning about the people around you and leaning on their expertise.

Another way that it gets played is just people playing the odds. And then another way is just people, you know, interested in the trivia. Yeah. Well, and it's a really nice thing to have these different aspects that different players can hook into in a game depending upon what they want. Right. Like I think about this a lot in the context of trading card games, but it applies to a variety of different aspects. where like what I am interested in, maybe different what somebody else is interested in.

And so you have this sort of psychographic profiles, right? So when I build games, I build some cards that have, and again, I'll speak just TCGs and we'll broaden it. But like, I'll build some cards that appeal to the kind of, you know,

the power gamer that wants to have the coolest, biggest things that they could do, the kind of Timmy in Mark Rosewater's terminologies. And then you have the ones that are sort of more for the competitive. And you can find the cool combos and you have ones that are like really cool story. And, you know, this applies to the story. story side too where we'll have like kind of you know the classic male power fantasy characters and

you know we'll have the you know more crazy monsters and have the the trickster characters and like a lot of these like classic tropes that like I put a bunch of stuff out there and different people are going to be excited about different aspects of that but then you know we've created a big tent so that all these people can play the game together and enjoy the experience and then I think with other games like you know things like wits and wagers as you mentioned there's this version where you can have the you know okay I'm interested in you know playing the odds and betting the thing. I'm interested in seeing what I actually know. I'm interested in just the socialization and understanding the people around me. And the more of those hooks that you can put in,

the better people get in, and the better the more likelihood that the games go to succeed. It's very hard for games to succeed in rich critical mass. You want to have a bunch of those hooks. I'll give one more example. Then I'll put it back to you was my game, you've got to be kidding me, which also made it into Target had a original version of that game was just like shapes and symbols. And it was the same gameplay, but it just didn't quite hook. and then when I added in adorable animals and everything, now all of a sudden you have people that can just enjoy the game for that part. And the people who enjoyed the game for the core of the game still enjoyed that.

And now all of a sudden, I had a bigger tent in a game that can succeed at a different scale. Yep, exactly. So let's, you know, we've talked about a couple things. And I think we'll bounce around a lot of game design principles. But you are, you're kind of one of those rarities like me, where you're both a game designer and a founder and a CEO. And there's a lot of interesting opportunities, challenges, and lessons that come from that. So I want to make sure we devote a sufficient amount of time to that.

So let's set the table. Let's talk about the founding of North Star Games and what that was like. And you've got a really impressive arc. I want to be able to touch on several parts of it that I think will be both instructive and interesting for our audience. I am primarily a game designer. I came to business reluctantly. So that kind of religious background kind of had a vibe that money is bad. And I always looked at business people as bad and superficial.

So that wasn't what drew me to games. What drew me was wanting to design games and get them out to people. And so I reluctantly went to business school to find a business partner and to learn about what I would need to do to start this company. So when I think of myself, I think of myself as a game designer. But then I went to a business school. I worked at an entrepreneurship for like a, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship. I was an intern there for a couple years. I was a consultant to entrepreneurs.

So I really went deep into the vibe so that I could try to build my company. So let's linger on this for a moment because this is a part of your background. I did not know that the kind of sort of missionary, you know, business and money is bad, sinful thing. What was, yeah, what, I mean, that, they must have been really hard to grow up with. I mean, that ability to, you know, to make that, you know, feel like you want to create things and to be pressured against it. Like what?

And then to then jump so deep in and go to business school and, you know, entrepreneurship, internships and processes like, what was that like? How did you make that break? What was, put me in that, pay me a picture here. Okay. So they're not discurs. encouraging me from creating. We're a mission-driven family.

So following your passion is what I was told to do from day one. So I was encouraged to follow my passion, and I was encouraged to see my calling in life, even though my parents are not religious anymore. That vibe is still there. You seek out your calling and you figure out, what are you called to do? And so that framework is still influencing me.

And yeah. So this pursuit of passion, you know, I similarly, you know, strongly support and speak to, I think, but pursuit of passion in an intelligent way, I think is really important, right? The just pursue your passion, you know, go become a football player or a movie star or a game designer, right? Like, these are all like kind of dream careers and most people who do it don't succeed. So while I do believe in following your passion not being trapped, you know, as I was in law school and, you know, on somebody else's path, right? I do think that there's an intelligent way to do it. And there's challenges that come with that. So you must have started as a game designer and then felt like there was no other choice but to create your own company.

Or did you just hit a wall or did you try to pitch your games to other companies? Did you try to like, were there other paths you tried before you're like, I have a game. I want to make it. I got to figure out, I got to go to business school and figure all that stuff out. Was there a path in between? Well, I pitched a game to two different companies. Actually, both companies wanted it. And then it ended up getting dropped because Alan Moon's ticket to ride exploded.

And then they chose an Alan Moon game and said from Alea. So I pitched twice. And it was successful. This is back in the late 90s, maybe. No, I guess it would have been early 2000s. But no, I just always knew I was going to start up a company. At first, I thought I was going to compose classical. music and then I realized nobody cares about classical music.

And so then I went to, so then I started, you know, I was always designing games anyways and people started asking to borrow my game for like, family, you know, like New Year's Eve and stuff. And so that kind of planted the seed of,

well, maybe I could turn this into a career and do something that I love and, and live off of it. Hmm. And then, I went, and I was never taught to be practical. So your parents were saying,

you know, become a lawyer. That's the smart way. You've got a career. My parents never talk about career. I was completely lost. So I've got a bunch of years where I'm just kind of wandering around trying to figure out what my calling is, you know, because that's more of how they speak. And they do a couple's relationship communication skills. They do workshops.

And that's like their mission in life. And they feel like they're helping the world by doing this. So yeah, I think I struggled on the opposite end is like you say, how do you do this practically? And even though I really disliked business, I kind of was introduced to business through the eyes of economics. So economics is not a selfish endeavor. It's really about how to help the most number of people in your country. And business is used, people selfishly pursuing their own interests, is used to help meet the needs of people around them, you know, with an economic viewpoint. So then I kind of started realizing, oh, businesses are really meeting the needs of people, and they're actually providing a really good function.

And so I kind of made peace with, I'm going to try to figure out how to do this craft in a way that people really like what I'm doing. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the essence of business, right, in its purest form, right? Like, I'm going to add more value to you than you will exchange to me, which is why you give me money in exchange for the thing that I'm doing that you consider to be more valuable than the money you've just handed. me right like that's the whole point is a is a is an asymmetric value exchange and so um yeah okay that makes sense to me and so so you made this this jump and then and and when it came to starting a company were there you know this was back in what 2003 i think you found at the company um and so what uh is there any kind of key uh insights from that process that you either did particularly well or that you maybe did not so well or advice you'd have for somebody else

is thinking about going down the same route. So I was very good. I used to captain a fishing boat in Alaska in the summers and I was very good at a small team of experts. So I just, I dive, I dive into just entrepreneurial endeavors, give me something that I know nothing about and I'm comfortable. I'm on a boat and something breaks and I go, we got to fix it. And I, and you figure it out. So entrepreneurship is something that was very, um, made sense to me. Like I was very good at. What I did horribly was grow from, I would say five people up to 25 plus another five that were contractors, full-time contractors. So that transition where there's a layer between you and employees.

And especially, I am especially bad working with people who aren't experts. I get frustrated. I can't communicate vision. Especially back then, I was like, I'm busy. I've got stuff to do. I'm working. I can't waste my time teaching you stuff. Figure it out. And then those people, you know, most people are not entrepreneurs at heart. So they're not, they don't know how to just figure something out. They're like mad because you didn't tell them what they're supposed to do. So that's where I failed horribly. I mean, there was a lot of things that led to the failures of our company. another one being we had three co-presidents which works really well when you're growing but what happened is we siloed and then during a dramatic big shift in the market we weren't able to pivot

because we have three visions three competing visions so a lot of those things okay well see yeah there's a lot to unpack in there right so and and look no I appreciate I appreciate your honesty and transparency here like these are hard things and I've shared this story also where I had exactly the same problem as you did where, you know, running a team, you know, when you're at that one to 10 people, maybe even up to 12 to 15, like you know what everybody's doing. You can manage everyone directly. You have like all the context and all the information.

And also especially if you're in person, you know, there's an absorption of knowledge from everybody that like makes things run very efficient. Once you start crossing that 10 to 15 threshold, and especially as to, and for me, it was similar. I was at about 25 employees and almost exactly the same, five or ten contractors. And all of a sudden, I lost thread of the organization and I couldn't manage in the correct way. And I actually ended up taking, even when I had really smart people, I took a lot of smart people and put them in a room and made them dumber.

I can admit that to myself now. And it's tough, right? You start to have siloing. You start to have factioning. You start to have different people with different interests. and you don't and so I almost lost my whole company I almost went you know

literally that phase of talking to bankruptcy attorneys on and it very very painful and it sounds so so same thing you're not yeah same thing so you're not alone here and I'm sure that there are people listening that that have are experiencing this and and so part of why I like to share these stories

is so that people that are out there maybe feel like they're alone or they're failing you know that they know that they're not and then hopefully there's some other people that are listening that haven't yet hit this barrier that maybe we'll learn from us about how to fix it or what to do about it.

And I also want to, because we glossed over like, I mean, you guys had massive, massive success, right? I think it was $60 million worth of sales in the first 15 years.

You had like, just give people a sense of the scale before we, we tear it down. Yeah. I mean, my games that I've designed, I've sold four and a half million copies.

And then we've sold another probably million copies of other games. Yeah. Yeah. These are, these are unbelievable levels of success. So again, another just important point to drive home is like there is no like, it's level of success where you're like immune to these kinds of problems and failures.

No, I mean, look at Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs had amazing success and couldn't manage certain things and had to got booted out and then had to rethink through, you know, how he's going to become better and then came back and really was able to transform the company again. Yeah. My, my, my, my, there are a few sort of definitions of success. that I find amusing and repeat often, right? One is moving from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

And the other is that you're able to make more and more expensive mistakes. And that's what I've sort of learned. I've been given the opportunity to make more expensive mistakes as I've gotten better at what I do. And you know, and you keep stretching, right? That's what keeps things interesting. So, okay, so, well, let's speak to a little bit of the we'll move forward into the kind of more of the challenges. But before we do, what is it that you would say now that you've learned about how to do this,

either do this job better if you feel like you've got solutions on how to do a job better as you kind of scale? Or if you've decided, hey, listen, this isn't my wheelhouse. This is I would like to stay in a smaller. Like, how do you adapt? So I've come to terms with the fact that I have an entrepreneurial spirit that a lot of people don't have. And so my thinking way back when was we'll hire a team of like go getters and we'll figure it out. And now I think that was a poor methodology. Now my methodology is what drives sales and how do you find people that have expertise in those areas that are needed to drive.

sales and get someone with that expertise. You'll never find someone who's perfect. But, but, you know, in our industry, we design games. We create brands that hopefully make people froth. Like, they're like, oh, I want that so badly. And then we have to let them know that, hey, we have this thing that you really, really want. And that's, that's where we're experts at.

And so I need to, I can't, I can't train someone to do the things. that are that critical. I need to find someone who's really good and then bring them on. And then my job as the leader is to have a vision that can navigate the risks in our industry

and communicate it. And then we work together as a team because as soon as you're, let's pretend like we're crewing in a rowboat, as soon as one person's rowing a little bit to the left and you're rowing a little bit to the right, you're just going slower.

no matter what, you're just going slower. You're moving a little bit this way, a little bit this way, a little bit this way, and the more you can get everyone aligned, even if you're not necessarily going in the right direction, moving as a unit quickly is just more powerful than being pulled in a lot of different directions. Yeah, I think that that, you know, the trick is really getting alignment to function, right? Like that ability to keep people moving together is not easy. Right. So to me, they answer there, a lot of that is culture.

I've taken a lot more responsibility and put a lot more time and attention into company culture than I have before, which is both how do you hire the right people and what's your filters for doing that? How do you onboard those people to make sure that they feel connected and they understand like how we do things? here, right? And then how do you maintain that over time and make it so that your, you know, the core team of, you know, that six to ten, whatever, become the sort of evangelists and then they spread it and then they spread it so that it's not you that has to be the one that's the voice in the center of it. And so I've spent a lot, a lot of time thinking about that sort of stuff and, and, you know, team effort and time to keep maintaining it because otherwise, as you said, you start rowing in different directions and it can lead to some real problems, very, very,

pretty quickly. Yeah. Well, and as soon as someone doesn't feel heard and holds resentment, that festers. And they're going to share that at some point with someone. And then you're kind of fracturing the community and you're not all working hard with one common goal moving in a direction. Yeah. Yeah. Making sure people feel heard, making sure you create a space of psychological safety for people to be able to speak their mind, encouraging dissent. There's a lot of different. And then encouraging dissent, but then making a decision and everyone getting on board and going with that decision. Yes. I'm a big, so I'm a big believer in, I think I first heard this expression from Jeff Bezos and one of his Amazon letters is disagree and commit. That we can all, you know, I want everybody

to disagree. I want everybody to have their voice heard. And then whoever it is, that's the decision maker in that space, makes the decision and everybody else tries to make that as successful as possible, even though I didn't think it was the right choice. I'm going to go ahead and do my best to make it happen. And another thing that's been very challenging for me, and I also prompt you because I'm going to want you to dive in a little bit more into some of the specifics of the key features that you talked about in terms of how do you create frothing brands and how do you create some.

So we're going to go back to that. But I think the other key as an executive and kind of CEO I found is like the default is people are looking to you for answers. the default is you know what you're you know what's going on and you're the one that's going to give the answer in my experience people will actually warp themselves even smart normally like you know argumentative people will warp their opinions around yours um and so what i have tried to also focus on is speaking last uh i'm not going to say i'm very good at this but i'm trying to and whenever a decision is reversible try to make somebody else make it or at least force them to put an

opinion out first. And when they raise a question, I try to have them say what they think the answer is, even if their confidence level is low. Because most of the time they're right and you're training them to come up with an answer instead of training them to wait for you. And because again, I know it's shocking to hear this, but I am wrong sometimes also. And better that I train other people to say there to put forward answers than not. And so, you know, again, these are just like, I think this is a really just interesting topic

because I think a lot of people hit this barrier, and I'm glad that you kind of brought it up. But then so there's other things that you have found as practices on this side of things, whereas like other ways you're able to maintain alignment culture, keep people rowing in the same direction as you put it. And or I want to make sure we transition back into this idea of like, let's get specific into some of these skills that you need in a successful company. Well, so specifically, you know, they do these team trust building exercises. And the way I understand that now is I need to trust that Ross understands aspects of marketing that I don't. And I need to defer to him when we're in that realm. And I need to defer to Sam when it comes to supply chain.

And Sam needs to defer to us. when we say, no, the product has to come a month early, because we have to get it to reviewers. And like, he has to trust us because he's looking at his job and he's saying, that's going to, that looks badly on me because the product's going to be $10,000 more expensive. And he has to trust us when we say, no, that's worth $10,000. So as it turns out, the world is a very, very big place and you can't know everything. And that's why you get experts in their feelings.

and you need to trust that they understand their field better than you do. Does that mean that they're always right? No, there's going to be 20% of the time where you had an insight and they didn't, you know. And so good communication skills are obviously really important and there's a give and take. But that's why I'm really big on, well, make sure you hire someone that has the actual skill you need. In fact, I just made a huge mistake here. And we had to let someone go because the tariffs are obviously elephant in the room, causing a lot of issues.

But I hired someone who had worked for five years at a retail game store, had great experience there. But I hired them to be a salesperson. And they weren't. And I never was a salesperson in our company either. So I couldn't onboard him. And so it just created issues

because he thought he was doing what he needed to be doing. And really at one time he should have said, Dominic, this isn't working. this isn't working. This whole position isn't working. But he didn't have the experience to even know that. And I didn't have the experience to really know that. So that's why I'm really big on.

Okay, another time we hired someone who's a really good, he runs events. He ran poker things. He ran like, he's like a comedian. And he's really good in front of people at a big stage. And we ran him and we hired him to do our social media. And he wasn't an expert at social media. And in fact, he's not data-driven.

He doesn't like data. He hates spreadsheets. So there's a whole element of social media and advertising online that really you need to be data-driven to do this well. And what he cares about and what he's good at is being in front of a group of people and getting a crowd bryled. And so you think that the skills are transferable, but really I've learned if the skill is really important to the success of our company, I need someone who's done that exact thing for things. three to five years. Hmm. And so this role as kind of a core sales in,

in particular, it's just like sort of diving to that, right? How do you find that right person? And this applies to a lot of different areas, right? Where it's like, I don't know how to do this thing.

I've never done this thing. I need this thing. How do you find the right person? Is it just that, okay, well, they did this thing somewhere else so I trust that they can? Is there like,

how do you invent their performance? I found this one of hiring, you know, engineers has been my kind of challenge, right? I have to hire people to program. And we have a whole digital division of our company. I don't know how to program.

I don't know if they're doing a good job or not. Like I've gathered some knowledge now after doing this for 15 years, but it's not like, you know, I just have to kind of trust and hope for the best a lot of the times, which is rough, right? So how do you manage that when you're trying to hire a critical skill for your company,

right? And we've talked about a few of them here, as sales and marketing and production, you know, logistics, right, in addition to design. And how do you,

How do you manage that and do that successfully? That's a really good question. I can't say that I'm really good at it. What I'm increasingly doing is networking with people, and you quickly learn who's knowledgeable. I can tell you're knowledgeable. I mean, I've listened to your podcast, so I know that you think about the same sort of things

that I think about, and you think about them deeply, and you're good at it. And so as you network, people say, oh, have you spoken to so-and-so, he's good.

And so, you know, it turns into a little bit of that good old-boy network, work, you know, but there's a lot of valuable information from someone that's saying he's really good. You should look at what a person you know and trust deeply is saying that. It's, you should. You should look at that person. Dude, I think this is like, it's kind of a cliche, but it's, I think it's a really important and profound insight. Like they, this, like the, the friend referral by far, I think literally every good hire that I have.

ever hired has been like a friend referral. Like it might be, they might be too extreme. Obviously, there's, there's versions where I just like had enough personal experience with them directly that I knew because I just had interact. Right. So like, if I, if I'm hiring somebody cold, like, you know, where it's just an interview is and not like a fur thing. I always just do a three month trial. I'm like, you're hired for three months. There's no guarantee after that. We're going to see how it goes because I

cannot know until I actually work with somebody. But I think that that friend referral thing is like, it's really important. And, And it leads to like strategic next steps, right? So if you're a person hiring, one of the things that I have learned to do is like, I try to ask friends around more often, right? I talk about, you know,

I try to build a network of people that might be useful and might be valuable down the road. Even if I'm not hiring that right now, I kind of just try to keep those things going. And in fact, that, you know, we just joked about this because we're actually hiring a role right now. And I just like,

okay, I'll just put up the bat signal. And I like message like a large, a group of trust. and friends and I always get a response of something. Maybe it doesn't work, maybe it does, but that's like far better than like LinkedIn or any other freaking mechanism or headhunters. I've never had success with that.

So like I think it's like looking at resumes and they want to sell people and it's, it's not necessarily the right way. And then and then on the flip side, for those of you listening that are the not the employers, but the employees or potential employees, you want to be doing that same sort of networking too, right? And that means putting good work out there to connecting with people that are, you know, that are professional and have a respected network of friends.

And a lot of times that putting that good work out there is means like doing work for free and posting things that people can discover and then starting to, you know, connect and just add value to people in the industry in various different ways. And then that is the more likely way to sort of get quote unquote discovered or get those opportunities. So I think it really is, I have not found a better way. I keep looking for a better way. For instance, our nature playtest team, they're all volunteers. They're going to get their name in the credits and they're going to get a free game.

But they're basically just donating time. It's fun. We have a great time. But that process allows me to work with people and see on the game design side who's really good. And then if I were to want to pay for development because my bandwidth is too narrow, that's the first place I'm going to look is like, oh, you know, what would be great is this person for this thing? thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I had my, this was a totally unintentional thing, but I ended up creating the best, like, recruiting tool I've ever, I've ever imagined with my thing like a game designer masterclass, because I just like, I literally do a three month intensive with people and I teach them how to make games and I watch them and by the end they have a game and they pitch it. And I like, literally can just find the best of them and be like, yep, I'm going to hire you. I did not intend it, but it is, it is the best recruitment tool I've ever come up with. You know, and here's another really interesting thing.

Specialties are just so, like, people are really good at specific things. So, for instance, Nick Bentley, he was internal with North Star for a while, he designs two-player abstract games, and they're fantastic. And I hired him to first work on Oceans, which is a Magic, the Gathering card synergy type game. And his brain does not work that way. So in my mind is like, well, he's a phenomenal game designer. But he was the wrong person for the task of synergistic card games. So, you know, just like, you know, think of movies. There's some people that do comedies really well or romantic comedies.

But if you tried to take them to do a war movie or a zombie movie, they would flop. You know, that's not their skill. And so even within an expertise like game design, people are good at specific types of games. Yeah, yeah, knowing someone's specific skill sets. And then I find another factor that ends up happening with me in my business is I kind of warp the business around the skills that we happen to have. Right. So I know I've got designers that can do a certain type of thing. I've got programmers that can do a certain type of thing.

I've got like, oh, we actually have a network of connections in this space. And so maybe we could like so, you know, I had connections at the Wharton School of Business. So I started doing educational games and teaching through, you know, through to other companies and Fortune 500 companies and doing, you know, innovation and entrepreneurship. entrepreneurship things. And it was like, okay, it just like it matched my interests and some connections we had. And then I had a team that could do it. And so like I think a lot of times like business opportunity also comes out of that like mishmash of just like knowing your strengths, knowing your weaknesses. And either that allows you to hire to, you know, to fill the gaps if there's a key weakness or it allows you to strategically push in a direction that says,

okay, well, these are our strengths and these are kind of untapped resources that we have. Let's go ahead and leverage those. I want to transition this kind of type. a few items together because I think there's this idea, one of the key skills you talked about was creating kind of the frothing fan, right? That's like, I'm I've created a brand and I've created this thing where people just want to hear the next

thing we have and they're going to come, you know, sort of raving fan, Matt, and this idea of like how do we market successfully with, and I'm going to pair this with the idea of word of mouth is the way we recruit. Because I still think that as the marketing world gets harder and harder and everybody can

attest to this. It's again, it's sort of a cliche. There's more people making games and more channels are crowded. I still think what word of mouth is the thing that does this. And I love to get your thoughts on this because I still how do you create frothing fans? What are the things that have been successful in your, you know,

in your experience from kind of marketing tools and does, you know, is this my intuition right here that it really is about kind of this word of mouth and if so, how do you do, how do you make that happen? Yeah, I mean, the word I might uses community. So,

yes, community is super important. The bigger part of the value that we're providing is a community. And ideally, if you're... So think of it this way. When someone spends money to buy a game,

if the experience is I pay $60 or $80, and then I go to a game convention and I say, hey, I've got this game, it's called blah, blah, blah, do you want to play it? And everyone goes, huh, blah, blah, blah. I don't know.

What's it like? I've never heard of it. And now they're grilling you. And now you're worried about whether it's going to be fun. And then, you know, maybe you convince them to play. And now you're teaching. And the whole thing could be not fun. You don't know.

Like that experience, you just paid $60 for an experience, which is not great. On the other hand, you say, hey, I've got a game. It's called Wingspan. And someone goes, oh, my God. How did you get a copy that? I wanted a copy. but they sold out, yeah, I really want to play. All of a sudden, you're a hero,

and you're providing, you're providing them something they want. So that community, even though the game could have been exactly the same, the game mechanic could have been exactly the same, the experience that someone's purchasing is completely different. And people want to purchase that experience of, I'm a part of something that's bigger than me, it's fun, which is exactly why our industry is a blockbuster industry. We're a blockbuster industry because people want to be playing the games

that other people are playing, and being a part of something, a community. So yeah, I agree. You know, I don't know if you're talking, you know, if that's addressing what you're saying about word of mouth, it's looking at it slightly differently. But it's that that leads the word of mouth, which is way more powerful than any advertisement,

than anything you can do, even any award. The fact that everyone's playing it and talking about it and it's a thing makes you want to watch Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or a Game of Thrones, you want to be part of the conversation. And it's important for you to remember that as the owner of a company because even though we haven't yet talked about really game design, which is my real expertise and what I really am passionate about,

I know that my product won't sell based upon the mechanics I put in. It needs to have a hook and a brand that people go, oh my God, this sounds so cool I want to play it. and then building that brand with fans. There's a relationship and a give and a take and a little bit of a dance to get them excited about your products. And then like you say, that becomes infectious and word of mouth helps grow it. Yeah, well, so we, I mean, we, you know, we kind of started this whole conversation,

you know, talking about game design and some key principles of game design. And I, again, I like, I like weaving this in with the business side because you're one of the few guests I have that, you know, shares, you know, both. both sides of that, you know, equation. And I think they, I'm going to push back a little bit because you said, you know, well, the game design and the game engine doesn't really make the, you know, the happen, you know, the frothing and the brand brand identity happen. And I think that it does.

It doesn't make it happen on its own, right? But I think that the idea that you have a mechanic or a hook or a system that plays in and tying it back to the sort of early principles we talked about, where it's like, hey, this audience needs this thing and it creates a gameplay experience that now fits to that audience. Or this audience, the game mechanics we have, let me participate. So wits and wagers, for example, right? Let's say game, like, I'm not, I don't have this sort of fear, shame, or embarrassment around

not having a trivia answer. So I'm okay to put this to the table or be a part of it and share it. Then I would otherwise, that is a big part of what makes that a success. And so I think that there is aspects or, or I, I, I, I think a lot now about table presence in the game designs. Like, how do you make it such that it looks good on a table and or streams well, right, to allow people to share it and give them the gift of letting them share it in a way that is cool and gives them presents and lets them pay attention?

Well, here, let me share my framework. So, and it'll be worth exactly what you pay for it. The brand is the most important thing. So when you look at the sales of a game in its first year, if it's an Eric Lang game, if it's a fantasy flight game, if it's a Stonemire game, if it's a Star Wars game.

So all these things are brands outside of the game itself. And that's going to determine, and I'm willing to even say sometimes a brand is just like a hook, not a pre-existing brand, but you hear it and you're like, oh, that sounds so cool.

So maybe a hook is a better way to call it. The hook, which is often a brand, in our industry, will determine the sales in the first year more than anything else. So Rob Davio comes out with a legacy game. It's called Seafall. The brand is huge. That first year sells a bunch of games. The game was too ambitious.

Clunky didn't quite work. I never played it, so I don't know exactly. So the sales crashed. Alternatively, you get a game like, oh, Manhattan Project. It's called an Ever Brown. it sold 5,000 copies the first year. Phenomenal game. Sold 5,000 copies the next year,

and the next year, and the next year, maybe even grew up to six, then down to four, and it's got this long tail. And so what I'm shooting for in my company is, how do we get a brand that's exciting to people in year one with mechanics? So the mechanics, to me, create the long tail. The brand creates the launch.

And so what I want to do is nail those two things together. So like wingspan is a great game. You can play it a lot. It's got a lot of replay value. And the brand was Stonemire. Came right after Sithe. And everyone was like, viticultures and then this and then this and then sithe. And it was like, oh my God, what's next?

And what's next happened to be a game about birds. Pandemic happened. And a lot of people went to birding. It was done by a women designer. People were really excited to have a woman designer. She's an amazing woman and a great spokesperson for the industry. So then there's a convergence of, all these things, but that brand, if

someone else had released wingspan, it would have been an ever brand, an ever brown. It would have sold a few thousand copies a year, not hundreds. Interesting. Yeah. Okay, I like that framework a lot. I think that there is

this idea of the sort of long tail of a great game. And I think, you know, this is going to be true for any commercial media to some extent, right? You know, Marvel movie, there's going to be a certain number of people that are just going to watch it because it's a Marvel movie. If it's a great Marvel movie, then maybe you keep you're watching it a decade later or whatever. Yeah, so that's exactly, that first Marvel movie, people are going to just watch because

the brand is so big. And if it's not that good, it'll die out really quickly. But if it's, if it's great, you watch it again, you talk about it again. And then, you know, that obviously leads to sequels. But yeah, it has a long tale. All right. So I think that's a great, great, yeah, great set of insights there. I think let's dig in because I want to get, I want to make sure that people understand the

arc of the story. And even I understand the full arc of the story because you have, you know, incredible, you know, success. Game sells more, you know, games that sell more than any, most designers ever dream of. And then, you know, at some point, this business and game thing sort of takes a turn for the worst and ends up, I think it is, it does, in fact, go bankrupt at some point or just kind of, yeah. I bought the assets for like, I bought the assets for more than they were worth because it felt guilty to just get them for free. So talk me through that. So do you have investors, you have employees?

Like, again, just not to dwell on the negative, but to be able to kind of rise from the ashes as you have here is pretty impressive. So what happened? How did this go down? So, you know, from the start we bootstrapped. I put about $30,000 on credit cards, you know, and just was like a bootstrapping thing. And then raised, I think, $95,000, $30,000 from. one of our entrepreneurship professors at the University of Maryland,

and then classmates and friends and family. And so we had $95,000, which took us to Wits and Wagers. And then when Wits and Ragers, when the target buyer said, we'd like to put Wits and Wagers nationwide, can you do that? I was like, sure, yeah, no problem. And did some quick math and went, Satish, we need about $400,000 in the next three months. And so then we put together a presentation, did a road trip, show, but the fact that Target already wanted us, obviously made that big. Kevin Plank, the founder

of Under Armour, put on a competition, the Cupid Cup's competition, because he used to go to University of Maryland. We won that competition, his first one. Two investors from the audience put in $100,000. We ended up raising like maybe 400, whatever we needed. But basically, we were just always producing results, which led to the next level of funding. Ended up raising a total of $1.2 million when we decided to do a digital division. And then I'd say that the digital division was a complete failure for us, along with a whole bunch of things that just all kind of crumbled. And then I bought the assets from the investors, and now I'm trying again.

God, man, our stories are so similar. It's eerie. Like, you know, literally it was like exactly this same process. And, you know, the numbers and specifics maybe shift a little bit. but like we ended up, yeah, we raised millions to be able to build

our first digital division managed. Oh, SoulForge. I loved it. I donated so much money to SoulForge. I'm spending money going.

I'm helping Justin because I love this game even though, you know. Well, I appreciate that. You had maybe $500 of mine in that game.

Oh, well, your, your money is, uh, is appreciated and, uh, was lost along with a lot of other people's money at the time.

I knew I was risking it, but I was like, I was so, I love, well, that game, was my favorite of all the digital implementations that have yet been released from from magic to hearthstone to anything i was like why can't you it be as good as soul forge yeah well thank you

i appreciate that very much and then you know we were able to sort of avoid bankruptcy but barely um and kind of clawed our way back up and then you know reinvested in the game and now launch soul forge fusion and now have a new version of it and all of the original people who put money into SoulForge, we gave them our new Web3 token far in excess of their money in. So we were able to make people whole that participated, we were able to launch a new version of the game, we're able to have a new life to it.

It sounds like you've done a sort of similar thing in this, you know, a slightly different path. So talk to me about the new life. Let's talk about the new thing. Let's end this on a positive note and where people can support you because I mean, again, these are these are titanic moments as you're going through them, right? I mean, it is not easy.

when you feel like you failed your employees, you failed to your team, you failed your fans, you failed everyone, yourself. Yeah, exactly. It's, it is crushing. I mean,

my, my personal, you know, psychological journey aside, I can, I can totally understand, you know, where you're coming from.

And I, again, I share these stories in hopes that it helps other people who might be going through dark times and that say that there is like a light and learning that comes from this. So,

so you're, you've got a new game that you're launching this year and, you know, let's talk a little about that and how we're doing. Yeah. The last three years of my life have been working on this game, nature, and rebuilding a team. That's all I've done.

I haven't released any products. Basically, we've licensed other people's games from Hong Kong and released them, but nothing internally. It's a huge project. So in a nutshell, I am trying to create a lifestyle game with a gateway center that can bring families in. that's just at a core and when I got pressed by Corey Heath who was one of the designers of the gang who was kind of getting mad

at one of our design teams or groups he's like Dominic why are you doing this stupid game you've already done evolution like is this going to win the spiel and I was like no it really doesn't have it won't win the spiel it's like why are you wasting your time with this and it prompted me to think about it why am I wasting

my time with this. And it turns out my experience playing pro magic was so impactful to me and so magical that I wanted to share it. And I couldn't share it with my girlfriend. I tried. She played with me, but she didn't catch the bug. I couldn't share with any of my friends from college. I couldn't share with my parents who are gamers. Nobody. So my life turned into my life and my friends and then what I called my magic friends. Some of the magic friends, I didn't even like. I didn't respect. There was cheating involved. There were things that I thought were unethical.

I was like, I don't even really enjoy some of the people that I'm spending a lot of time with. So the nature is trying to give that experience, bring it to more people. And what it needs is a core gateway that's just as simple as it can be and really, really fun that you can teach. And I've taught this to a lot of families like casual gaming families, and it works. So it's kind of like a three-stage process. And then it's a modular game system. So you can mix and match as many modules as you want. And the modules then change the environment.

Create an ecosystem that you can explore and discover. The step for each module has to be super small. And so with family testing, you know, like relatives, I would say, hey, do you want to play one of the modules? No, let's just play nature. Hey, how about now? No, we'll just play nature. And so it wasn't until maybe the third vacation,

more like in an Airbnb vacation home, where for some reason she said, yeah, let's try a new module. Let's try a module. So we tried one module. And then after that, she was hooked. She was like, wow. And I was like, yeah, hey, you know, next time we can play flight again.

And she's like, well, what else is there? And so, and the reason that it was so exciting for her is, the rules were very small. Once you know the core game, with just changing a few core rules, you can really change the whole emotion. So you add a few traits and change a few core rules.

And you have to reevaluate every card. And so she was hooked. And so that's the second level, but you haven't yet reached what I consider the magic experience, which is a world of limitless possibilities that you're exploring with your friends and discovering things that the game designer doesn't even know out.

And so where the nature system does that is it's a modular system. So right now at launch, I think there's about 100 different combinations between the five modules and the two mini modules. And while I've playtested each module hundreds of times, I have not playtested all of the combinations. And so those are like building blocks like Legos, and you can now explore things that I know nothing about. And then we can talk, I'm a part of the community now.

I can speak with people, argue with people, say, I don't know, I don't think that's too good. You know, I like this. I don't think that's a good combo. And so that's kind of hopefully a three-step process that can get people to have that spark of discovering a world of synergies and limitless combinations. Fascinating.

Okay. I'm I'm I'm really intrigued and want to try this because it's an ambitious project it is so ambitious you know there's a lot of people who've kind of tried to take bites at this apple and yeah it's not an easy one to land and get right so where so where you're launching it later this year which means you've got most of this dialed in what's your what's your plans to launch or how can people find out more about it if they're excited about it so we had a Kickstarter fairly successful about $850,000 we're launching it at GenCon, we're going to launch

the core game and two modules and then we will launch two more modules in November and then another one in April of 26. The Kickstarter people were able to buy a big box with all five modules. We have a digital version. So nature is a re-implementation

of evolution. So it's really part of, I've been working in this system for the last 10 years and it wasn't until Corey asked me these pointed questions that I really kind of figured out why I was so obsessed with trying to make this thing work. And the key is how do you get the core game easy enough to teach, but compelling enough to have replay value, you know, kind of like a Carcassone or a ticket to ride or a pandemic,

like something that's really core. And then how do you create a modular system around that? So what happened is Target initially said, hey, Dominic, you are a hobby gamer. why don't you create hobby games? Like we're starting to, hobby games are blowing up here. You have wits and wages and say anything and you understand games

and we're getting pitched these really complicated things. I'm sure you can do a better job. And I told them, we don't have a hobby division, so like I can't bring fans. So like, yeah, the game will come out, but it won't sell.

So let me first create a hobby division, which I did with the evolution brand. It was quite a big hit. I think we've sold 350,000 copies about. But when I came to Target, I still didn't think, I thought it was too complicated. So I created evolution in the beginning for Target. And that sold like 110,000 copies at Target.

And in there was leading people to go play evolution, because in my mind, evolution was the actual game. And instead, people wanted expansions to evolution in the beginning. And I realized, like, I just screwed up. Like, that game, that gateway should be the game itself. And you should already know all the rules with that game. and then the world is built around it with modules. So I'm going back and just redesigning everything

the way I wished I had done it from the start. Well, maybe a small theme of this phase of her journey, which is one I relate to, which is the fix the things I didn't do right and learn from those mistakes and try them again now. And whatever, it's very grateful to, you know, moving from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. This is like a key place where,

because we learn from each iteration, right? And the same things. Like, I've been lucky enough to be able to go back and revisit my old designs. We released the Shards of Infinity Saga collection, which took all four expansions, revised them, and then actually have them, you unlock them through play. So it has a similar mob, you know. Like a campaign.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It's sort of like a little mini, you know, legacy light is kind of what we call it. Right. Where you do you unlock the different elements of it. There's, you know, you have little stickers and things. to indicate that you've done, but it creates a cardboard. Yeah, cardboard.

Oh, okay. I was thinking to do it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is for charge, it's, charge of infinity. So it has a, um, the ability to, that's a digital game to me. Yeah. Unfortunately, only the first expansion.

Only the first set is available digitally. So I can't, I want to get, uh, get more of those out. But, um, but, um, but yeah. So it's a, it's a, uh, allowing people to have that experience of discovery and then kind of opt into the sort of infinite, you know, infinite depth that can come from it as a deck building game or a trading card game or a kind of board game that's trying to mimic those things. I think it's just so critical and so valuable. So thank you for sharing the story with us, man.

There were parts I knew already, parts I didn't. And again, the amount of parallel and overlap we have is fascinating to me. I definitely want to come see you at Gen Con and check out the game myself. And then hopefully other people will be doing the same. So I'd love to do another one of these maybe on the other side of the Jen Con. and hear how it all went. Yeah, that'd be great. I can also give you a copy of the digital game, which has like tutorials and a campaign, and there's three modules that are already in there. Great. That's way easier for me. In general, as a nomad, big box games are not useful to me,

generally speaking. So I'll take the digital game. That sounds great. Yeah, that'd be great. Awesome, man. Thanks so much, buddy. We'll chat and I'll see you at JenCon. Thank you, Justin. 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 sold.