Think Like A Game Designer - Elan Lee — Building Exploding Kittens, Marketing as Design, Retail Pitches, and Playing to Sell (#91)

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

About ElanElan Lee (@elanlee) is the co-creator and chief executive officer of Exploding Kittens, a leading gaming and entertainment company. Under his leadership, Exploding Kittens has expanded its portfolio to nearly 30 different games with more than 60 million games sold in more than 50 countries since its founding in 2015.Before founding Exploding Kittens, Lee was the chief design officer at Xbox Entertainment Studios, where he led the Interactive Entertainment Portfolio. Prior to that, he was the founder and chief creative officer of Fourth Wall Studios and co-founder of 42 Entertainment. He began his career at Microsoft Games Studios as a lead designer on the original Xbox.Lee has won a Primetime Emmy for the series Dirty Work; Game Innovator of the Year for Exploding Kittens; a Peabody Award for the world’s first alternate reality game, The Beast; and an IndieCade Trailblazer Award for a distinguished career in interactive entertainment, among others.In this episode, Elan and I discuss into how his company built their rigorous playtesting culture, why marketing is inseparable from product design, and how pitching to Target and Walmart is just another kind of game. Whether you’re trying to break into retail, sharpen your viral marketing instincts, or simply design games people can’t stop playing, this conversation will give you both insight and inspirationAh-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Execution is the Superpower: From manufacturing to social media strategy, Elan’s team treats execution as part of game design. Elan explains why 80% of his company are marketers, producers, and logistics experts, all aligned around making games irresistible to discover and play.* Marketing is Product Design: At Exploding Kittens, marketers have veto power. A game might be hilarious to play in the room, but if it can’t be captured in a five-second social video, the game never makes it out of the room. Elan shares how his team tests hundreds of games at design retreats, then filters them through a marketing lens to ensure the product is not only fun but also instantly communicable and shareable.* Play to Sell: When pitching to Target or Walmart, Elan doesn’t “sell” games—he plays them. He gets buyers into the experience, proving the fun directly. This approach yields extraordinary success rates, with most of Exploding Kittens’ pitched games picked up for retail. Elan reframes pitching as playing with new friends, making joy the ultimate sales tool.Show Notes"She said, ‘I just want you to take a moment and take a breath and realize you built this thing.’" 00:04:46It’s easy as creators to focus on what’s broken or what needs fixing (I know I fall into this mindset myself) but sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is step back, practice gratitude, and recognize how far you’ve come. Elan’s wife reminded him of this during a board meeting, and it’s a lesson all of us can use to cultivate more joy in our creative journey."It doesn’t matter if it’s the best game in the world. If they don’t know how to sell it, it is not worth wasting our time on." 00:15:15Sometimes as game designers, we feel like the job ends once the mechanics click. Marketing can seem like an afterthought, but the truth is that it’s part of product design. Elan bakes this into his process by giving his marketing team veto power at design retreats. It’s a powerful reminder: if you want your game to succeed, you must think not only about how it plays but also about how it will be discovered. For Elan, that means asking whether a game can be sold in five seconds on social media. He shares stories of projects he loved that never made it to market because his team couldn’t find a way to sell them. This strategy is tied directly to reaching the casual gameplay audience, which demands this very specific approach."All I do is I talk to my friends about how much fun they are about to have, and then I prove it." 00:32:25Elan’s approach to pitching games is radically simple: instead of talking, play the game and let the experience do the work. Whether you’re pitching to Target or teaching your prototype at a convention, the best way to win people over is to let them feel the joy for themselves. Hearing this made me rethink my own approach, as I’ve often been guilty of trying to “sell” too much instead of simply playing.“[Poetry for Neanderthals] is, in its purest form, a tool set to let you talk to other people in the room." 01:04:01Elan describes his games as tool sets that let players entertain each other, which is why games like Poetry for Neanderthals or Codenames can stay fun even after dozens of plays. My philosophy takes a different angle: I aim to design games that last a lifetime, so my team thinks deeply about what the 100th play will feel like, something Elan admits he never has to think about with his own games, designed for his casual gaming audience.Whether your players stick around for ten plays or a hundred, the real secret is the same: Whether they’re crushing their opponents with clever plays or laughing together as they stumble through ridiculous challenges—great games create space for players to shine. 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 Elon Lee. Elon is a legendary game designer that has worked on the Xbox, created the world's first alternate reality games, interactive media, created the hit game exploding kittens, and turned it into an incredible business

with countless hits, including poetry for Neanderthals and the recently released Coyote. You can learn more about Elon's background way back in episode 20 of this podcast when we talked and brought him up to speed to where he started his company, and this episode we get to go into a deep dive on what has made Exploding Kittens, the largest independent game publisher in the world, selling millions and millions of copies. You almost certainly have played their games and seen them in Walmart and Target and all kinds of other places.

And we have such a fun conversation. Elon is a great human being and we dig deep into the details of how Exploding Kittens designs games, their testing process, the development of a really rigorous play testing group. We talk about how games are marketed and how his marketing team actually has veto power over even great games that he might otherwise want to release. We really go deep into even some games that he would love to produce but can't, given the marketing and the positioning of exploding kittens. So this is so much fun.

It's just a great conversation in general. But if you love creating businesses, if you love making, games. There's tons of great stuff here for you. You can also check up my previous episode with Tim Ferriss, where we talk about his perspective on coyote. It's really fun to see the two different sides of how this thing got made. There's so much great content here. I love talking to Elon. I'm almost certainly going to be doing it again, hopefully in person next time. But without any further ado, here is Elon Lee. Hello and welcome. I am back with Elon Lee. Elon, welcome back to the podcast.

my friend. Yeah, second time. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great. And so, you know, you dropped a ton of gold in the last podcast. I re-listened to it kind of as part of my prep for this one. That was now five years ago, episode 20. Five years ago, I could not have possibly had anything interesting to say, but I don't think you're for it. Well, you have lived like so many crazy creative lives, right? I mean, you know, this, you've done, you've done so much from, you know, the movie business to video games and Xbox and, now at tabletop and across the board. So it's actually, you know, I mean, whatever, it's one of the coolest backstories. I think I've, I know of anybody. And I've talked to a lot of really cool people. I'll take it. Yeah, it's been a roller coaster and just mostly holding on for dear life these days.

Yeah. So that's what I want to, that's what I want to know about here, right? Because we're going to talk about some specific projects. But, you know, like Explodied Kittens has not, you know, when we talked before, you were, you were, you know, was a monster project. that had then spawned additional things. But now it's just this, it's this monster. I think you called it the largest independent game studio,

but it's sort of becoming its own behemoth in the space. So like, what is that like? What's the vibe? Yeah, isn't it weird? Like five years ago, it was a baby monster. I appreciate you calling it a monster. But it was, you know, we didn't know what the hell we were doing. Now it's 10 years old.

I think we've made, I think we've designed more than 60 games. We've got a TV show. We just launched our 10-year anniversary board game. We've done partnerships and licenses. And we're just exploring plush toys and on and on the list goes. But the answer to what's it like is kind of overwhelming. Like I was in a board meeting today. And we were just discussing the next few years of the company and all these things that we have to go through.

And I put it on mute for a second. I was actually in the car driving with my wife. And I put it on mute for a second. And she looked at me and she says, do you realize that you built all that? And I was like, what do you mean? It's like, there's 25 people on this call. And they're discussing financials and they're discussing fiscal responsibility. And they're discussing OKRs.

And they're discussing budgets and projections and reform, recalculating projections and all this stuff. And she's like, I just want you to take a moment and take a breath and realize, you built this thing. And it was this very surreal moment for me because it. It's worth doing every once in a while. It's just like take a step back and think like, holy crap. Like this, 10 years ago, this was literally nothing. And five years ago, it was big, but it was still a baby. And today it's just, it defies all logic, all expectation.

I cannot believe I built this thing with, of course, some friends, Matt and men, of course. And now we get to run it and we get to keep building it. And it's just, it's the best party ever. I'm so glad I was invited. Yeah, amazing. And just, you know, the genuine joy and enthusiasm that's exuding from you is, it's awesome and wonderful to see. And the reminder to, like, you know, practice gratitude for wherever, you know, you are and the things you've been able to do. So, you know, I just got back from Jen Con where we celebrated the 15-year anniversary of Ascension, right, in my game and my company, which was wild.

You know, I get to. Thank you. Thank you. And it's one of those things where, again, I don't know, my default mode, right, coming as a game player is always like, I'm always. focused on like what's going wrong right like what needs to be fixed what's the problem as I'm designing a game you know and that's like what I do by default and it's and it's helped it's served me right I mean it's it's been a useful frame and powerful mindset that's allowed me to solve problems and achieve things but it's not a great recipe for like contentment and happiness and joy

yeah clearing for what's wrong every single minute yeah no constant scan you know in many ways it's part of why I was glad I kind of dropped out of law school because like I felt like as a lawyer, you're kind of like you're trained to be looking for the worst case scenario all the time. Right. Right. Like that's your job. Like what could go wrong and how do I fix it? Oh my God. How do I prevent that? Oh my goodness. Yeah. So so that that's an incredible part of it. But I, you know, and that seeing that that's seeing you in this role as happy as you are, maybe the happiest I've seen you or at least, you know, that's what I'm feeling. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So then I'm curious what your life is like now. compared to what it was five years ago.

I actually got to run into to Carly McGinnis at GenCon also. And she seems amazing and had talked a little bit about her role. I'm going to try to get her on the podcast as well. But like she seems really, really cool. But like maybe we could just speak a little bit of like how you've decided like what roles you take on for yourself now. How do you like distribute that, you know, key parts of running this now, you know, just, you know, pretty massive business that you got to have, you know, board meetings and reviews and finance. which will reject it and okay ours. Yeah. I'm so glad you brought up Carly because she is really

key to answering this question. Five years ago, let's go all the way back to like nine years ago. This was really small. This was like three or four people in my garage and we had one game, maybe two at that point. And we had these meetings. I remember we had these meetings where we called them all hands. There's three of us, four of us. Like what the hell is in all hands? Six hands. Yeah. That's all the hands. And we, you know, everyone would describe what they're doing that day and what problems

they were running into. And everyone else would chime in and say like, oh, I know this guy. I'm going to make a phone call for you. Or have you tried this? Or here's how you reboot your computer because that's never going to fix itself. And so we, like, that was it. That was how we went day to day and got through all the problems. And my job was largely creative.

It was, you know, there wasn't a lot of management because there's not a lot of hands. And it was mostly creating games. And then two things happened. One is we started to meet a tremendous amount of success. And so had to hire a bunch of people. And so management became a thing. And the second thing that happened is I realized I hate managing. And those two things happening at the same time are really unfortunate for me.

When you describe, yeah, it's really rough. You describe me being happier now than I've ever been. absolutely true because of one key difference. And here is where we're going to talk about Carly McGinnis. Carly started out. I'm only bringing this up because I'm the number one member of the Carly fan club, and I need to tell everybody why she's so spectacular. So Carly started out. I actually hired her when I was chief design officer at the Xbox. And I hired her as my executive assistant, literally answering phones and replying to emails for me, like booking hotels and travel and all this stuff. She was very, very overqualified for that job.

And I realized within like five seconds, like, holy crap, this person is way smarter than I am. She just happened to interview for the wrong job. So let me try to fix that this time around at Exploding Kittens. And I invited her over not to be my executive assistant, but to be president of the company. And she accepted. And very quickly my life started getting better. because Carly is so organized and she loves challenges and she's also creative. And so she took on the role of creative manager for the whole company.

She has been running that for the last nine years now as president. And it is only through her guidance that two very, very important things have happened. One, I'm freed up to go back to being creative and helping with the strategy of the company instead of the management of the company. And two is Exploding Kittens has grown into one of the largest independent game studios in the world. And those two things are 100% because of the incredible person that is named Carly McGittes. Okay. Yeah. Well, I got the, from meeting her, I instantly became a fan. And so I can see where you're able to realize that talent. And so just how big is the company now?

We mentioned when it was a six hands, all hands. What is it ballpark? What are we talking about? The ballpark 80. It's between 80 and 100. Based on how you define an employee, it's definitely at 80. It might be all the way up to 100. Okay. And so now that's a whole different world.

And whether this is the Carly that's been managing this process or how much you've been involved in the strategy of it, what, you know, whether it's structure or heuristics or culture or rules or how do you, how have you been able to keep a creative powerhouse and create a, you know, get everybody rowing in the same direction at that scale? First of all, it started out really hard. And the reason it was hard is because we kept hiring more and more help on the creative side. And eventually you get very quickly into this place of like just too many chefs in the kitchen. So we restructured the company.

And now when I say there's like 100 people, I would say 80% of the employees are not involved in game development. development because that's not our company's superpower. I mean, we're really good at it. I take a lot of pride in that. But what we're really good at is execution. And so when we take ideas and we have to make them real, we have to figure out like, okay, how are we going to afford this? All right, what do the pieces look like? Where are we going to print it? How are we going to ship it? Where are we going to store them in warehouses? How are we going to sell this thing? What is the social media going to look like? All of the surrounding stuff that isn't the creation of the game. This isn't the ideation of the game, but is very much the creation of the game and the sales of that game. That's what now,

that's our company's superpower. Now, the remaining 20% is cut up in creative. It's art and it's game development. And almost more important than all of that is it's testing. We have this incredible group of people called the Kitty Test Pilots. It's like 400 families who have volunteered to test our games. And we mail them games and they play them and they tape them and then they send us back the tapes, they get to keep the games, and we get to watch games evolve that way. And that is what this very small, this minority in the company, luckily that I get to lead. That's what we do day to day. And the way I keep my sanity is by saying, I'm only going to keep my hands all over this 20%.

I'm only going to manage this. I'm going to keep putting new ideas in there. And then I'm going to trust the wisdom and the judgment of all the other people to tell me we know how to make this game. We actually know how to make and sell this game or this game is not makeable or this game is not sellable, in which case that's exactly where games die. And it's that dynamic that lets us grow and grow and grow. Okay. I'm intrigued because I'm glad you clarified this, right? Because you said only 20% is involved in the game kind of ideation, but that the actual execution and the game development involves every.

everything all the way through marketing and sales and how do we make this product and how does it look on a shelf? All that stuff is a big part of the process. And so what I'd like to my understanding, and you can either just kind of answer this in the abstract or we could pick some specific examples is like, you know, a big part of when you're designing a game is you have to be thinking nowadays, especially with the kinds of games you guys make, it's like, okay, how is this going to market? How is this going to sell? Who's this going to appeal to? Is that a misunderstanding or is that part of that process from, you know, very early on. You literally just described the definition of a modern day game.

Like, we, I'll tell you a great example. So here is the process that we now go through for designing games. We have design retreats two to three times a year. We all end up in the same city. And when I say all of us, like four, maybe five people. And we just go through game after game after game. Some people show up with game ideas with a lot of games we create on the fly. Sometimes there are external submissions.

us and we just review games, but we go through hundreds and hundreds of games. And we usually can narrow that down to like a dozen games that are interesting, right? There's something about them is interesting. We're like, okay, so here's the dozen games we want to keep moving with. The next day, day two of the design retreat is marketing and sales comes to the retreat. And we all sit down around the table and we play those games. And they have ultimate authority because they can say, this game's really fun. It is not sellable on social media. There's no way to make a video about this game. And it is at exactly that moment that that game dies. Because it doesn't matter if it's the best game in the world. If they don't know how to sell it, it is not worth wasting

our time on. And what it's evolved into today is the only way to sell games is on social media. right like that's the single channel and so they better have a great idea they have to have an idea on how to sell it on what the video looks like on how to hook someone in the first five seconds on on on what the conflict and the resolution is going to be in that video and if they don't have all of that pop into their head for a game we might as well not make it fascinating okay so so now this i'm getting a picture of the process so you're talking about a basically quarterlyish retreats And you filter in however many dozens of ideas that get to you, either through submissions internal, whatever.

You've got game designers, quote unquote, the people who are core to the experience itself that say, okay, I'm going to filter this down to a dozen. Then day two, you open the doors and the marketers come in. I don't know why. I see it's gone, I'm all skippering. They're not that creepy. They're actually very nice people.

They're very nice people. There's nothing wrong with marketers, folks. No, but then they're playing those games that are now. I'm guessing is still a pretty early, like, you know, these, so these are marketers that need to be able to see through the, the ugliness of the game at that point to be able to kind of still, okay, there's a hook here. Yeah.

Is there a game that comes to mind that didn't, that was one of these games that you loved, that died on the vine right there? I'd love to hear about it if you could talk about it. And then also, is there a moment there where there was a game, in the reverse I'm interested in also, of a game where you're like, it barely passed that day one checkpoint, but the marketers jumped on it and like, oh, my God, this is going to be a hit. Oh, yeah.

Oh, I got stories for both of us. Okay. Okay. So we were working on this game that I fell in love with because I thought it was so funny and so interesting. It was essentially you're playing horseshoes, right? So you're playing in your living room. You've got these soft, squishy things and you throw them across the room and you're trying to

get in this target. And there's two, there's two extra elements here. One is the other team defines how you throw. it. So you got to throw it when lying on your back. You got to throw it with your eyes closed. You got to throw it after spinning around five times, whatever it is. They're setting the challenges for you. But then, like in horse, you then have to do the same thing. So it was this really funny, interesting game. It was the thing that you threw made a hilarious noise every time it hit the ground. And then whoever gets closest to the target wins. We played this game for two hours,

laughed nonstop. We made a complete mess of the living room. It was great. It was glorious. I loved everything about it. And then we invited the marketing team in. and the sales team and they looked at us and they even played and they had so much fun playing and they said we need to kill this game immediately and i was like no like oh come this is so much fun they're like a video of people lying on the floor trying to throw this thing how do we are we going to film the trajectory through the air how do we film the landing how do we how do we show the progression of this thing how do we show that it's one team and then the other team like everything about this is complicated everything about this requires five minutes not five seconds and therefore

this game is dead. And I looked at them and I thought, holy crap, they're right. They're just absolutely right. And it was so sad. And the game is still sitting in my little notebook of spectacular games that someday maybe I will crack. But today, in the world of social media, because we cannot sell you on that game in five seconds, that game will never see the light of day. Wow. Okay. Okay. That's awesome. I mean, it's sad, but awesome in the insight there. And it's It's such a weird thing to wet my head around. Okay, and then you got a story on the other side too. On the other side, yeah.

So I, let's see. Okay, all right. So we have this game that I never, I really didn't think it was that great. It was a hot potato game where you pass this thing around the table, and every time it stops at you, every time you're holding it, you have to roll a die and perform an activity before passing it along. There's all kinds of different activities. And I was like, I've played a lot of games like this before.

We actually released a version of this that was a kid's game. It's called Hurry Up Chicken Butt. And there it sells really well. This is the adult version. And I was like, this feels a little too silly. It feels like it's not quite going to work. It feels like it's hard to keep track of. It feels like it's a little bit too much like charades.

Like you got to get out of your comfort zone. And so I said, I think we should pass on this. And the guy who runs our development department, Thor Ritz, he said, I just want to show this to sales. Like, just let them come in. And they looked at it. And I did a terrible job pitching it because I was very negative on it. And they looked at it and they said, this is gold. We are making this game.

We know exactly how to sell this thing. We know what the videos look like. It's going to be glorious. It's the best thing ever. We know the box. We know what to call it on and on and on. And so I don't have the end of this story yet. because we just finished it.

It's about to be launched. It's called exploding pigeon. And you pass this ridiculous object around that clucks that it doesn't, do pigeons cluck? They'd make whatever noise a pigeon makes and then eventually explodes. And you don't want to be holding it when the pigeon explodes. Do they coo? They coo.

That's right. Yeah. Cooing noises. And I was never big on it. But I got to say the marketing, all the stuff they built around it is hilarious. And they were absolutely right. You will watch a five second video on this thing. and immediately jump out of your chair and say, well, how do I buy this thing?

Yeah. Okay. I'm intrigued. So now how do we, I'm going to put myself into the heads of what I think a lot of our listeners might be here. And I feel a little bit myself, which is like, you know, I'm a game designer. I love to create these great experiences. It feels like such a restricting thing that if I can't teach it to you in five seconds or I can't make a viral video out of it, this classes out, you know, so many great experiences. Do you feel that at all? Do you feel constrained by this space? I do, but I got to also say, I built this box for myself. Like, we have identified a very particular audience. And it's the largest audience, right? It's the casual game playing

audience. The people who are going into a store not sure what they want yet. They're looking for a birthday gift. They're looking for something for their next game night. It's undefined. And they are going to make their judgments based on what they saw on social media or box design or a funny name. And that audience, I chose them because that's the audience that adopted exploding kittens when we first launched it. Now, I can sell millions of copies of games a year because of that audience. If you identify a different audience, more hobby, longer game, not 15 minutes games like I'm making, maybe like hour-long games or two-hour-long games, and you're selling in more

hobby shops, right, instead of giant mass retail. Then you're allowed to sell games very differently. Then you're allowed to sell games at the conferences. Then you're allowed to go and play games in tournaments. Then you're allowed to go and sell it to your friends and even self-publish games. You're allowed to do all kinds of stuff because you're dealing with a very small, smaller audience. Some of these audiences are huge, but they tend to be smaller than the mass audience I'm attracting. And as a result, there's a lot. There's a lot. more than one sales channel to reach them. And you don't have to sell a million copies a year for a game to be successful. You can sell a thousand copies, five thousand copies and have a very big hit on

your hands. I unfortunately chose a different path. And so I have these restraints that I, these constraints that I have to deal with. Yeah, I'll, I'll agree with that in part, because certainly, you know, different audiences will have more, potentially more appetite for learning a game at a convention or following, you know, playing in a tournament. whatever, but I still think across the board, this social media like clip as a tool for sales and as the tool for discovery is dominating across every game category. I see. So I don't think you can get out of this. There are a few exceptions. Like what you just said is true and depressing, right? Like, I wish that was not the case. I wish that a great game would result in great sales.

I wish that was the case. But the answer is, a great game is half of it. The other half is the ability to sell the game. And there are exceptions, though. Like I said, I look at the case of Wingspan, right? Like, wingspan is an incredible game, and it's a beautiful game. And if it wasn't for, was it the New York Times article, the L.A. Times article, like whatever was its breakout, like, everyone pay attention to this thing,

it would have had a much smaller audience. And those exceptions are very hard to rely on. I don't know how to engineer that. So I need social media in order for a game to be successful. Okay. Well, so let's talk since you do know how to engineer social media. We've talked about, I can get the hook in five seconds. We've talked about it can be, you know, in your case, something funny, but at least something that gets your attention.

Are there other things for those out there that want to engineer for social media? maybe for the mass audience or maybe just for others. Is there any other principles that come to mind and how others could help get better at this? Because I do agree, to frame this a little bit, I don't view the fact that you have to market a game as intrinsically depressing. It is part of the design process.

When I make a game, I want it to be appealing. I need to understand how it's going to get exciting for my audience. So maybe you can dive into that. Yeah, the most important lesson that I've learned in making these and having a bunch of success stories and a whole bunch of failures. The most important thing I've learned is the thing you put in your social media videos for your game does not have to be accurate gameplay. It must be related.

You can't make a different game. But like, for example, okay, so we made this game called Coyote with Tim Ferriss, right? It's such a good game. It's such a good game. It's so well designed. Everything about it, I just adore. But it's hard to make a five second video about it. The way you actually play the game is everybody sits in a circle and there's a bunch of cards in the middle of the table and everyone one by one has to perform an action.

If you have five people sitting around a table and you have five cards, that round is over in five seconds. You do the first thing, second person does the second thing, third, fourth, fifth, round is over. That's a really boring video. What we found when we film the videos is do that exactly the same thing, that exact game, but go as fast. as you can and never stop. Go around and around and around. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Now you've done it 20 times and 30 times and 40 times and finally you're going so fast, someone messed it up and you have this hilarious moment. That's not actually how you play the game. But it's close enough that it does two very important things. One, it creates a very funny moment and two, you at home watch this and you think,

oh, I would rule at this. I am so good at this game. I'm going to go on by this thing immediately because I'm going to crush this game. And that is the answer to a successful social media post about a game. It's specifically this idea that I feel like I would be good at this game or I would be looking for that experience or that, you know, this would be hilarious for my family or I assume a variety of subsets there. That's right. This one in particular is going to like, oh, I could do this. Like, I got this now. Yeah.

And like you said, and my family's going to have a great time playing this. And so I'm going to be a hero bringing this game home because look how much fun they're having. We're going to have at least that much fun. And but, but, but, but that's not exactly the experience you're going to have. You're not going to remember. It's fine. You're going to bring it home. You're going to read the rules.

You're going to play this other version of the game that's even more fun because it's like, you know, 20 minutes long instead of five seconds long. You're going to love it. But I'm not going to sell you on that 20 minute version. I'm going to sell you on the five second version and then convert you to 20. Yeah. And I've had, you know, Tim was on the podcast recently. It'll either be the previous episodes of this one posting or two previous.

And we went into a lot of this detail. And he was really impressed by a couple of things about the way that your team operates. One, how much testing you guys do on these videos that it was like the subtle distinction of like, not exactly as you described it, that going from person to person, but that the camera would move to person and jerk to the next person, jerks to the next person, which helped to create that feeling of like frenetic energy. And like little things like that had a massive impact on. what, how viral that video was going to be.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, look, to get millions of views on a video, you look at the thing and you think, oh, someone just, you know, took out their iPhone and filmed, filmed us playing for five seconds. But no, that was, that was take 425, right? Did you get the box in frame? Oh, was that close enough on them? Oh, that felt too forced. Like, we need this to be national. Oh, my goodness, the light looks totally rot like on and on and on until we nail it in order to look effortless. Yeah. A lot of effort to look effortless. I love it. Well said. So then

the second kind of semi-related aspect to this, which will jump to us to another topic, is how much Tim has praised your pitching and presentation ability. If he described you as possibly the best that he's ever seen. Wow.

Coming from him. I know. I thought you were pretty good. I mean, I thought you were pretty good, but I don't take what I can get. Yeah. So, and this is now not just, because your job is not just to sell it to the public with these, with the social posts, but you have to sell it also to the buyers at these big retailers, right?

And you've got to be able to get them to take in your product. Now, you've already got a decent chunk of shelf space as the company you are. You've had hits of success, but not everything's a hit. So they don't just take every product that you guys make, unless I'm misunderstanding how well you guys do it. So what does that look like when you're trying to pitch the? those type of buyers or, you know, anybody where it's more of a, you know, business to business or somebody's trying to sell this to

distributors or retailers. Like, how do you, how do you make that pitch work? And how does maybe some of your, your previous life experience lead into that? Because I know you've built a lot of companies and done these things. You know, I was having, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who's also in the game space. And we were talking about the sell process.

You go to these things called line reviews with all the big retailers. You sit in a room. You pitch everything. you've got. And we started out pitching like one game, one game at a time. We go to a line review. Here's our new game. Please, please, please buy it. And we were saying like, you know, we're up to like we pitch 15 games now at a time. And he was saying, oh, yeah, you know, we have to do the same thing. We got this gigantic company. And we, we pitch 15 to 20 games. And I was like, cool. Yeah. So how many of those, what's your average? Like, how many of those do

sell? And he's like, oh, you know, one or two. Like, that's pretty good for us. And like, I realized that it was at that moment that I realized, wait a second, we sell, when we pitch 15 games, we sell 13 of them usually, sometimes all 15. Wow. And that's normal. Like, that's, it's very rare that we have more than like four games that are not purchased. And I realized like, oh, we're, we're doing something a little differently here. And I'm not sitting in on their meeting. So I have no idea.

All I know is is my own experience. And I recently trained someone to help me with the pitching process. And she was asking, like, you know, sit in on a sample pitch. I'm going to pretend you're the buyer and I'm going to pitch to you. And I was like, great, yeah, go for it. And she pitched to me. And I said, I was like, that was terrible. Because all you just did was you tried to sell me a bunch of games.

And I started putting two and two together and realizing, like, that's probably what everybody else is doing. They're probably walking into these rooms trying to sell games. That is not at all what I am doing. What I do is I try to talk to my friends and convince them that they're going to have as much fun playing this game as I have playing this game. And I'll walk into a room and I'll say, okay, so we got this game. We're going to play it. Who wants to play?

And they'll all say, no, no, no, we just have to go fast. We only have two minutes for this because you've got 15 games to pitch us. And I'll say, that's not the right answer. We're going to play this game right now. Come over here. Sit in the seat. I'm not asking you. I'm telling you.

Sit in the seat. I'm going to deal you the cards. and I will force them to play the games because there's no better way to sell a game than to play the game. And I suddenly realized, like, I don't think I've ever pitched a game. All I do is I talk to my friends about how much fun they are about to have and then I prove it. And I just do that 15 times and I sell most of those experiences. And that's it. That's really the only secret.

There's no other strategy. There's no training. Just love your games and play them with your newfound friends that are sitting in that room right there. God, I feel so stupid right now because I literally, I've done, no, because I did this. I did, I pitched to Target. I did this thing. I didn't have 20 games. I had like five.

And I pitched them. And only one of those games did I do exactly what you said. And I literally like, here's the game. Let's play. And guess which game they took? Which one? Which one? That was the one they took.

Of course. Yeah. Oh my gosh. All right. Yeah. No. Doesn't it weird that you need that explained to you? Like, I,

I literally, like, I had, I was training this, this woman at my company, and I had to explain this to her. And I was scratching my head the whole time. I was like, wait, why does this require and explain? This is the most obvious thing in the world. This is how you sell games to friends. And these are just friends that you don't know, they don't know your friends yet, but they're about to find out. Anyway, yeah. No, I feel really stupid. So thank you for that. I appreciate that. I should have known this because I've literally done it myself.

And I just didn't even make the one-to-one connection for my own experience. So I can, that's great. I love, my favorite thing is when people help me feel stupid because they can say an insight that's so obviously true once it's said. But just I didn't get there. Fantastic. Yeah. Games are fun when you play them. Yeah.

Crazy. That's going to be the headline for this episode. So does this, just to bring it back out to this, because you've also done, you know, you've pitched for, you've raised tens of millions of dollars in fundraising, you've launched companies, you've sold other products. So you've done other pitches that aren't quite in this space. Is there a similar version of that? Do I, when you're pitching there or is it a different structure? Because you've, clearly been successful across not just showing people a cool game you want to play. Yeah. I mean, look, everything you do with sales, right?

Like anytime you're trying to get a job, anytime you're trying to build something, get support, raise funds, whatever it is. It's just sales. You're just trying to sell them on a thing. And so I've just found that like I can only sell things that I have fun experiencing. And my whole secret to sales is just share that experience with others.

And if I'm not having fun, I can't sell it because I don't know how to approach it. But like you look at our Kickstarter campaign, right, where we raise like $9 million. And the thing about that is if you watch our videos, if you watch the interviews, if you read our posts are like weekly updates, we are having so much fun. And all we want to do is let you have that much fun as well. And that's the best way to sell absolutely anything. Even if it's a job interview and you're selling yourself, just have that much fun and invite the person interviewing you to have that much fun as well. That's all I got. Yeah, that's great.

There's another kind of, I forget who said it this way, but something that's always stuck with me is like this, the keys to life, which is know where you are, know where you want to go and have fun getting there. Oh, it's so good. Just like that ability, just like, I'm comfortable with where I am. I don't need anything, but I know what I'm looking at. And then this is going to be a, this is going to be a fun ride. Come on. Let's go. Like that, that,

that, that, it's, so, anyway, that came to mind as you were, that's the best.

I'm totally stealing that. That is so smart. I love it. I love it. Yeah, it's, it's,

when, when we, again, we were running the Kickstarter campaign, somebody asked me, like, like,

what's the philosophy behind this campaign? And immediately, Matt and I both said, like, it's a party and everyone's invited. Like, it was just that simple

and that intuitive and, like, we'll throw a party. It's free. Come on. Come along. Like you're going to have this much fun. Yeah.

Yeah. And we dug into that a lot of the details about that crowd fund in our first podcast. So for people that want to hear more about that specific one, I encourage them to listen to it. But one of the things I noticed is that, you know, you kind of, you ran a few campaigns after that, but then you kind of stopped as a channel, right? So what happened there? You went from, you know, the most successful game ever by number of backers.

And I think even it was dollars at one point. But I think they may still be by number of backers. I'm not sure. But massive success. Yeah, yeah. number of backers. So, so biggest,

biggest party ever. You did the thing. You've run other events. But now you've decided to step away from that as a channel. Why? I think the ecosystem at Kickstarter has changed significantly in the last 10 years. When we showed up to Kickstarter, most people that backed our campaign,

we actually, Kickstarter shared these results with us. Most people who backed us, it was the first thing they did was create a Kickstarter account and then back us. Right? like we were their entree into this platform. And that was glorious. Like what a cool thing, right?

And we're going to have so much fun and we're throwing this party and we've got hilarious updates and we're going to send you all this free stuff and on and on and on. And then those people stuck around Kickstarter because they should. And something started to happen on Kickstarter. One is it doesn't exactly have the right tools to build community. Like you can back a project, you can read about a project, but they're like their chat tools are quite antiquated. They don't have the ability to form subgroups.

They don't have the ability to have the kinds of conversation that you'd expect on most modern platforms. And the community suffers as a result. The other problem with Kickstarter is a lot of people over the intervening 10 years have had very bad experiences, not with Kickstarter itself, but with projects they've backed. Either a project never ships, takes their money anyway, or a project does ship and it's not what was promised,

or it ships and it is barely functional. And I have backed, you know, probably five or 600 projects at this point. And I've only got like a 50% success rate, meaning only 50% of those projects have ever mailed me something slightly resembling what they promised to mail me. And I think once that happens over enough years, it is very hard to get a casual audience. And again, our audience, very casual to return to that platform because they've been burned a number of times, like probably half the time that they've spent over those years since exploding kittens has been negative for them. And we found that as we started reaching out to our

audience over and over again and trying to attract a new audience, that the feedback we got from them over and over was, I'm just going to wait until this hits retail because I just don't want to go back to crowdfunding. And we eventually realized, okay, so our audience has moved to retail. That's where we're going to now focus all our efforts. Okay. That makes sense. And yeah, I had a similar, I mean, we, in our games, are a little bit more core focused, generally speaking. So I think crowdfunding is still a big part of what we do. But I found the same problems with Kickstarter that the tools were just so antiquated.

And it was shocking to me because we'd, you know, we'd had a lot of success there, not quite as much as you, but a lot of success there. And then we ended up transitioning. And, you know, we have a campaign, our essentially 15th anniversary campaign. Probably is, I think it'll probably be running around the time this episode air. So if anybody else check it out, you can. I'll shamelessly plug. But yeah, we went to GameFound

because it had a lot better tools for that, a lot better tools for community. And yeah, it's still something that there's a lot of room to evolve. So you now, you still sell through retail. You have,

you know, you market primarily through social media. You have a core audience of people that are your like super playtester family groups. The test pilots, yeah. Yeah, and that is a, so what was the vetting process for that group or how do you select? Because that's a really important role here. So I kind of want to dig into that piece of the puzzle.

Yeah, it's huge. We've grown it over the last few years. So basically, when we have openings, and we try to limit it to about 400 families at a time. And our criteria for becoming one of those families is one, we have any openings. Two, you live someplace that we can ship things back and forth easily. and fast. Three, you make a commitment that within 48 hours of receiving a game, you will send us back a video of you playing that game. And then there's a few other logistically nitpicky things, but that's basically what we're looking for. And if those criteria are met, we will accept anyone. And we're very much, you know, innocent until proven guilty. So we will love you and trust you and send you all the things until you violate any of those rules. So if you take more than 48 hours. Or if we mailed you something, but you never confirmed receipt, or, you know, all the, all the little things that say, like, this isn't important as important to you as it is to the

family right in line behind you. So now we're going to just get you out of this program and get the next family in. And we have a very, very low turnover rate. But when we find that you don't appreciate this as much as someone else who might, we try to get those new people in as fast as we can. Okay. All right. And so now let's let's, let's, let's, Let's try to close some of the gaps because we've, we jumped around a little bit. We got a, you know, submissions to filter one, designers, filter two marketers and sales. And we know that there's a outside testing group that's part of this vetting process. And we know that there's a, you know, come play with me and, you know, sell this to the stores and get it to the stores.

Where let's fill some of the gaps in between because I know when you send stuff to outside playtesters, it's got to be a lot more polished and ready. And it is on that day to day. Yeah. And I got to talk to Tim a little bit about the kind of sprint process that he went through. But I'd love to get from your side, you know, we could talk about Coyote specifically. We could talk about other games in general or how you try to structure that, that, you know, that design loop of kind of testing and iterating and getting it to that place where you're now comfortable, A, sending it to that group and B, sending it to stores.

Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about Coyote because it's the most recent. And it went through literally every step of this process. And we should talk about testing. and we should also talk about selling that game because there's a lot that we've learned on both of those fronts.

So for testing, that game starts with, we had this like little mini design retreat. Tim and one of our designers, Ken Gruel, came over to my house in Toronto, and we hung out for like two or three days, mostly taking walks and just kind of saying like, what do we like? What's bad?

And there was this one day we got rained out and we were trapped on the street. Anyway, all this stuff, all this fun, lovely memories. of like, what is joy? How do we put joy in a box? And it was around the third day that we finally started scribbling on cards

and coming up with this sort of, we called it competitive rock paper scissors when we first started. And I know rock paper scissors is competitive, but this had a different twist to it. This was like cutthroat insane rock paper scissors. And at first, it was literally just blank, playing cards that I buy literally by the tens of thousands on Amazon just constantly shipped

to me and I scribble on them with Sharpies and that's how I make games all day every day, blank cards and sharpies. And I walked away from that meeting thinking, there's something here. This isn't done, but there's something here. And I kept scribbling on the cards and kept tweaking the rules and I play with my family and I've got a few friends who live near my house who are always always willing to play a very broken prototype with me. And I tell them, and they know, it's broken. I know this is broken, but let's find the good parts in here. And we did that over and over and over again for a number of weeks until I had a deck that I was like, okay, this deck is at least solid. Like, I know the cards aren't broken. I know the core gameplay isn't broken.

My next big challenge is, can I record a video that's going to explain to somebody else how to play? Like, can people play this game without me as one of the players and still have fun? And so that's my next round of testing is either through video or I'll be in the room. But again, I'm just letting other people play. I'm taking lots of notes. I'm making new revisions. I'm sending copies to Tim. And we go through that.

And that takes a while. That takes a long time. I remember I once asked another designer like the final version, what version of the game is at? I was like, I don't know, like two or three. And I was like, holy crap. When I put out a version, that's like version, a thousand 60. I can't even describe how many versions we go through before we finally get to a version that I think should be on a shelf. So we go through version after version that way.

And it is only at the point where my friends and family who are playing this game a lot say, this is really fun. I think I get this now. That I will start to record or write down on paper a physical explanation of how to play. And this is like the scariest part because now I'm not in the room. Now I'm not correcting in real time. Someone plays the wrong card. I say, no, no, no, you can't play that at that time.

That goes on that pile over that, right? I can't do that. I'm not in the room. They just have the instructions. And the game has to survive on its own. And it never does. It completely did. I've got a few families that are, you know,

willing to try that version. And they always send back videos that are totally busted because I miss such obvious stuff in the instructions. So we go through that a few times. Then when I can pass the- And I just ask, how quickly is the turnaround time in one of these loops? You're saying you've got a thousand loops here. So it's got to be pretty fast.

Yeah, I'll usually go through like five or six versions a day. Wow. Something like that. Yeah. And how are you? So you're getting, you have people around that are testing with you five, while you're moving through those five or six versions?

Oh, yeah, constantly. Yeah. Amazing. So we do that for a few weeks. And it is finally when the instructions and the game are both able to stand on their own, right? Like the instructions don't have graphics in them yet, but they're at least comprehensible,

And the gameplay is solid. Then we hit Kitty test pilots. And we send out a questionnaire with the game. And that questionnaire used to be very long. And now it is only one question long. And that question is, do you want to play again? The most important question by far. That's all I care about.

I used to send out all these questions and I realize I'm not even reading the answers. What was your favorite part? What was the worst part? What do you think could be improved? I don't care. I never read any of that. do you want to play again when we get like 90 95 99% yes that's when we stop testing and we go into final production wow i love that one you know you talked about having kpIs for the company you've got one

kPI that matters do you want to play again seriously i mean what else matters right like it's just yeah took me forever to get there but yeah and that's where we are oh that's great again that's a lot work to make something actually simple and make it look easy. Effort to look effortless, I think you said. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, okay, so then this is a great, great level of insight into the process. I'm interested now in, because the Tim project and Coyote, it didn't sound like it went

through this kind of initial filter. It sounded like this was something you just were excited to work with him and kind of push it into this process and be willing to go through the loops. with somebody who's not in, you know, not traditionally in game, games space. So Tim obviously has a great background in games and, you know, again, we've talked about it. He's got a great mind for this sort of thing.

You've also worked with other folks like Jeff Propps to make the Survivor game. Yeah. Which, as you know, I'm a huge Survivor fan. This is a cool moment to have. So I'd love to know what when you're going through a pipeline like that

and working with someone who's not traditionally a gamer, but in both these cases, has some game experience clearly. What makes you decide to work with a partner like that? How does that differ from a, you know, more traditional, it's a game designer pitching a game or you coming up with the idea? Yeah. Okay. So there's three very different things we're talking about here. One is traditional game design, which is, you know, we either develop something internally or someone submits something and we evaluate them where we go. The Tim Ferriss model, which is, I was on Tim's podcast and then we, I don't know, overnight became best friends somehow and started working on a game

together. And then the Jeff Prost model, which is totally different. I'm going to challenge you to say I might even be a bigger survivor fan than you are. Like, I just adore that show so much. I've watched all the episodes. I've watched the episodes in different countries, like just all of it. And I got very lucky, I got very lucky to be invited to be on the challenge design team for one season. So this is a few guys sitting in a room run by Kerhofer, who's just this, he's been on since season one, just this incredible guy.

He runs all the challenges for every season ever. And we sit in this room and we design challenges. And I got invited and I was so excited because this is like, you know, just absolutely on my bucket list. And this was right after the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter campaign closed. So I had one copy of the game. There were actually like a few in existence, but not many. And after this session, I left the game there at the office,

having a little bit, you know, a bit of an idea in my head, like maybe I can plant a seed here. Maybe someone will play this. And a few weeks later, I get a call from a voice that sounded very familiar. And he identified himself as Jeff Probst. And he said, hey, I found a copy of exploding kittens in our office. And I was like, yes. And he said, it's so much fun. I have this birthday party tonight. I want to give this as a gift. Where do I get it? Now, the correct answer, the true answer is, oh, it's in Target. Just drive down the street and go there. But the answer that I said was, you can't. It's nowhere. The only copies in existence are at my house. So you have to come over to my house right now. And to his credit, being the incredible guy he is, he said, oh, sure, I'll be right there. And he came over to my house and there's

knock on the door and I open the door and holy crap, it's Jeff broke. What is happening in my world? And he comes in and I show him the game and we just immediately hit it off. It was just like fire. It was total man crush. Fireworks. I was like, this is like talking to a more evolved smarter version of myself. He turns out to be maybe the best game designer in history. He just doesn't know it or identify that way. And so I gave him the game. He gave it as a gift. After a while, he started calling me saying,

hey, you know, put on your game design hat for a second. I'm having this weird issue with the show, and I would love your advice. And it got to the point where he would say like, hey, I'm thinking of introducing an economy into the game, like tokens, right? These fire tokens. You can use them to buy things and trade things. And how do I test whether or not that'll work? And I said, well, you're going to need a full economic simulation of your. your show. And so I'm just going to write that for you. And I spent like months writing this massive

simulation with all the contestants and all the variables and these little miniature AIs like running through the show. And I was like, and here is the answer. And he loved it. And of course, it never quite made it onto the show. But it, but it was it was just showing like my level of enthusiasm for this is going to exceed anybody else you know. And I promise you like this is, this is very, very important to me. Oh yeah. Well, yeah. It's, I mean, the idea of being able to design for that game. First of all, that, you know, has so much history and that there's so many interesting, like, it just creates such fun, interesting social dynamics. And as I recall, your, you know, your friend is like, you know, your goal is not to make entertaining games,

but to make entertain, make the players the entertainment, right? That's right. And that, you know, that's the whole point of this show is to be able to do that and create this experience specifically for the audience, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's exactly right. And so one day, he actually came to me and said, hey, What about a card game for Survivor? Here's a rough draft. And I've been playing this. And it's fun, but it's not great, but it's fun.

And what do you think? And we played it. And it wasn't great. I mean, it was, it certainly had, it felt like a Survivor rapper around exploding kittens. And I was like, there's so much about this, about your game, about your show, about like, the low blood sugar and about the personal conflicts and about the insect bites and about getting grumpties. and about getting grumpy and now you're you're just you're starving and you're frustrated and like how do you do all of that in 30 seconds because I think that's possible and he said cool what you know show me and so I sat down with my team and we built a version of it and we all went over to his house

and we played the game and it was glorious I mean it was so cool it was certainly had a lot of rough edges and we eventually went back like three, four, maybe like a dozen times and eventually got to a place where we're like, holy crap, this is survivor in 20 minutes. It's the whole show in a deck of cards. And it's all of the conflict and it's the, it's tribal council and it's conflict and its alliances and its betrayals and it's backstabbing and it's building a spy shack and finding out of the thing that nobody wants you to know about it. It's all of that in a deck of cards. And that process was very different from any other

because in that case, we knew exactly what success looks like. We just weren't sure how to get there with a deck of cards until eventually, finally, all of a sudden, it was very possible. And when we solved that very complicated design issue, everything started going really fast. We actually got that thing pretty much wrapped up within about eight months after solving the design challenge. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I love where a game is trying to take the emotional experience and impact of another game and port it to a new media. Like, I find that to be such an interesting challenge when you're like, you know, making a card game version of a video game or like, you know, I worked on the Marvel and DC trading card game for a little while, the versus a trading card game. I have to take the comic book experience and like, okay, what's it? what happens with Superman and Wolverine have a fight, which is like, I would imagine all the time

as a kid. And how do I represent that in this card game? It's a really fun, really fun design challenge, especially takes something that you love so much and to be able to shepherd that to a new moment. I have to share one really fun moment. So we have this designer, a senior designer on our team named Ian Clayman. And I tasked him with, he was like, okay, first step of the game, you draw a card. And I was like, okay, yeah, but hold on.

What about conflict? What about, like, how do you make it so that people are constantly having, like, there's limited resources? How do you make it so that when you draw a card, somebody else doesn't get to draw a card? How do you instantly create conflict? And he came up with this super simple thing, which is the first step of the game is not draw a card. The first step of the game is steal a card. You must steal a card to start your turn. Pick a player, steal a card. You must do this. You must, you must, you must. And he shortcutted, you know, 20 days of sleep deprivation and low blood sugar in one second. You must steal a card.

Now you have enemies. Everyone has enemies. Now let's play Survivor. Yeah, that's great. I think that there's a lot of really fun, subtle things about how you make games like this matters, right? Like there's what I call kind of hot conflicts versus cold conflicts, right? And so where there's a world where if I have a face-up set of cards that we're taking and drafting from, and I pull something from you that you, that you want. It's way more viscerally meaningful than if that was a hidden set of cards and I

was pulling those. The mechanics could be very, very similar, but then I know that I took that from you or even if the cards are literally in front of you and I'm pulling them, right? It makes a big, big difference in the emotional impact. I think it's like a really fascinating little, little twist that. What you've just described is exactly the mantra that I was saying earlier, which you recounted, which is, I don't think the game should be entertaining. I think the game should be a tool set to make the players entertaining. And the interaction you just described is exactly that. All right.

So let's let's have some fun here. Let's take an exercise and apply your model to a game that you wouldn't make as exploding kittens. Let's see if that, because this world, right, where you, you know, you said you put yourself in a box and it's a very lucrative box with a lot of players. but if you were going to step outside that box, and I'll let you pick the genre, because I just think this will be fun to blame. What other genre would you be interested in that we could apply this model to

and ideate on something fun? Yeah. So I really like light strategy games. And even light strategy games are too intense for my audience, right? Like I love Caton. When my favorite games of all time is Ticket to Ride. And so we could, never make ticket to ride at Exploding Kittens.

But the reason I love this game so very much is because all the tools that you need to win the game are right there. They're right in front of you. Everybody can see them. Everyone can see all the tracks. Everyone can see all the little possible routes. Everyone can even see the resources to build those routes. The only thing missing is which one you want to build and which one I want to build, right?

That's the secret information. And now because that information is limited, every time I make progress, it's going to be potentially at somebody else's expense. And you kind of gauge interactions between the reactions that players make when you put down a track to figure, oh, well, now that really pissed you off. All right, I know what you were going for. Right. Like that beautiful, beautiful, we're all making progress, except only one of us can make this one little bit here. And now you've got to go all the long way around. Like, I love that. The reason we could ever make it is because it's very long. It requires a lot of patience. The beginning of the game is very slow. You don't

jump into the action. But once you invest in this game, once you're 25 minutes into this game, this switch flipped and it just becomes the greatest thing of all time. And I would love, I would love to be able to build games like that, that players would trust me through a slow beginning that the ending is going to be spectacular, but I just, I have not figured out how to bring an audience along with me yet. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. So I think that let's, let's, let's linger on this game category for a while. Because I think things like, you know, ticket to ride and Caton and Carcassonne, maybe to a little bit of a lesser degree, like they've, they've, they've been able to kind of be in many ways to sort of gateway games into, you know,

more serious strategy games, but they're light enough that anybody can play them. They're, they're approachable. But they are, there's like a secret, to these games that I find fascinating. You know, like, like, like, a ticket to ride definitely is like this where it's, you know, if you know what you're doing,

you should be taking out and blocking these main like road paths. Yeah. From very early on. And like, yeah. And so it creates this really interesting dynamic of, if the players are at different skill levels, the game is a blowout a lot of the times, right?

It's a very trickle of space. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's like a fun, If you're all at the same skill level, I think that game is amazing. And I think similarly, like Carcassone, if you've played that,

where it's a tile laying game, and there's a beautiful simplicity to it, right? You're just trying to match up sides to the tiles. The more pretty things you complete, the better. But as a competitive player, what you really need to be doing

is blocking off your opponent's options by like brutally cutting the number of pieces that can now complete their things and trapping their thing. And so, that's right. Or manipulating the economy, right? The whole thing is supply and demand. And so if you can control that, suddenly you dominate that case. Yeah.

So so yeah. So then is it is it are these are these features or are these bugs in the games? I see. Okay. So we're actually talking about the difference in audiences, right? I think. Because I think these starts start out as features until you get masterful at the game and then they become bugs. Now, here's the thing. My audience is really never going to transition to that. Yeah. Right. Like, they just, they will move on to the next game before they play their 10th game of Katan. And as a result, they're never going to get that level of strategy. So, yes, it's a bug for certain audience groups.

I currently don't have access to that audience. So maybe that's a good thing. Like, maybe that's a glass half full version of the audience I'm dealing with. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So this is, we've actually had to think about this a lot in our game, right? So, you know, our company motto is work with awesome people, make awesome things, help each other grow, right? Which is a great, it's a great statement.

It's a great feeling. But also, it's a little vague. And when I say that, so we have a deeper kind of level, like, what does it mean to be awesome people? What does it mean to be awesome things? What does it mean to be helping each other grow? And we kind of break it down. And I'll just, I'll speak to one of those things because when I talk about awesome things, it's now it's like, how do I differentiate my awesome things from other people?

And part of what I look for is these games are going to last a lifetime. These are games that I'm going to continue to find that depth and continue to find that, like, that they hold up to the 100th game strategy. And that's a big part of what I try to make in what I do. And it's really interesting to see that. Actually, you know what? It's maybe as a benefit. Like, no, you could make, I could get away with so much more if I wasn't worried about that.

Like the ability to make a kind of light strategy game that only needs to hold up for 10 plays. You can get away with a lot more. It's so interesting. Okay, so I'll give you, I got two answers to that. One is, I have never thought about that, right? I've never thought about the 100th game because I don't need to. Because nobody's playing 100 games. No, I was playing these games 100 times.

And so, yes, you get a lot more leniency when you don't have that thought. But there are games that I've designed that people do play hundreds or thousands of times. and I'm thinking of games like poetry for Neanderthals. And the quick version there, just so everyone's on the same page, is this is a game where you have to get people to say a word on a card that only you can see, but you can only give clues using single syllable words. Immediately you start sounding like a Neanderthal. That's it.

That's the whole game. Very simple. But the reason that people play that game hundreds or thousands of times, the reason that they bring it to tournaments, the reason that it shows up in family reunions over and over again, is because that game is barely a game. That game is in its purest form, a tool set to let you talk to other people in the room. And other people in the room are infinitely entertaining, right?

They're going to bring a thousand versions of that game to the table, a thousand play-throughs of that game to the table, because it relies on people's brains in order to play. And their brains are going to be a little different every single time based on the cards, based on the input, the environment, the other people in the room, et cetera. So I think there's two things in play there. One is you can't abandon that.

You absolutely can't abandon the 100th play-through constraint and free yourself up tremendously. The other and equally valuable avenue that you have as a game designer is to design a game that relies almost entirely on the brains of the people playing to provide the actual gameplay, not the strategy, not how to get through

the dynamics that you created, but how to actually supply the content of the game based on what they bring to the table. Yeah, so that's interesting, and just in terms of like what we mean by kind of like depth in a play experience, right? So this idea that there's a variety of different ways

I can choose to approach this and come in, whether it be poetry for Neanderthals or charades or any of these games where I'm performing in some sense, or even, you know, Dungeon Dragons or those kind of things. It's a lot of it is like, I'm with an opportunity to perform. and create.

And so this is a showcase for me. And then there's other games where the gameplay itself is like quite simple. But the players' dynamics with each other is what makes things interesting. So poker is a great example of this, right? It's like not that complicated of a game, but it is infinitely deep and interesting because everything that you do is now signaling information and we're playing back and forth in this space. You're playing the players.

Yeah. I guess a more modern game. I think code names is a wonderful case study in this as well, right? It's like really, really brilliant design. I've recently got, I'm going to get, getting Vlad on the podcast soon, which has been, I've been looking forward to we get to, to chat. Oh, good for you. Oh, that's so exciting.

Wait, can I tell you my favorite way to play code names? Yeah, please. Here's a little hack. If you've played code names and you're ready for the next level of code names, here's what you do. Secret tip. Okay, you take code names. I know. This is so much fun.

You take code names and you also go out and you buy a copy of code names pictures, right? Same exact game. It's just images instead of words on the cards. And then here's the key, you shuffle the two decks together. So now your grid is made up of both words and pictures and now play with all the same rules. It's just now you're looking for clues that satisfy potentially, you know, pictures and words all in one set. It's glorious. It's so much fun.

Oh, that's really good. Okay. I'm going to try that out. I like this. Do you have any other? Okay. So then we're, I can do gone forever, but we're going to run out of time. Are there other games?

Because this is a fun thing to do as a designer, right? You kind of like, you know, create your own little twist and redesign a game. You know, like I had Richard Garfield, you know, I got a bunch of people to record some videos promoting, you know, talking about their feelings about Ascension or whatever for the 15th anniversary. And he was kind of to record one. And he's like, by the way, I have my own variant of Ascension, which I encourage everybody to play, which is you try to make the worst deck possible. And how do you deck, you know, some basic, a couple little rules on like you're required to spend

all your resources if you're able or whatever. That's so good. And it was like, oh, that's so cool. He just completely inverted my game. And it's such an interesting model. That's so good. Okay, wait, I got a few. Okay, hold on.

I got two. I got two for you to try it. All right. One is really easy. Monopoly deal. Monopoly deal, I believe, gets infinitely better if you remove the deal breaker cards from the game. Just go through.

I think there's only one of them. Maybe there's two. Remove those. Play the game again. I think that game gets 10 times more. at that point. But okay, so that's an easy one. That's more of a critique than a hack. Here's the actual hit. Here's one that's a hack. Bonanza. Have you played Bonanza? Yes, I have. Okay. Bonanza, for those who don't know, is a trading game. You have a set number of cards and you cannot change the order

of your cards. So you've got a secret hand, but you can't change the order. And on your turn, you have to play the first card in your hand. You can play the first two if you want. The way that you make room for the cards that you must play is by trading with other players. And the rules of the game dictate that all trades have to be with you. So you trade with another player, right? And you just do that and then you end your, hopefully you open up a few doorways for yourself and then it's on to the next player's turn. Here's the rule. The rule hack. You allow trades to happen on your turn between any players as long as the cards move through you. So you say like, okay, you need green beans and you need vanilla beans. I don't need either one of those.

I'm going to allow you to trade with each other as long as I get a blue bean somewhere in this process. I don't care who gives it to me. And as soon as you open up this global trading economy instead of this like one-to-one trading economy, that game becomes the most fun thing ever. Oh, okay. I'm intrigued. So basically I'm the broker in this deal.

Like if it's my turn, I'm brokering a deal. And so I'm only going to allow it if I get something out of it, but I am allowing a sort of direct exchange. Exactly. And you can even open up future commodities. You can say, look, all right, you need that card. You need that card. I don't have either one.

I'm going to let you guys trade. But next time you get a blue bean, I don't care when it is, you give it to me. I'm going to trust you. And that's the future trade that I want. You can open up anything as soon as you say, this is a global economy instead of a one-to-one economy. It's just, I love it. It's so much fun.

Yeah, this is great. And this has been fun to linger on in a couple of these. definitely going to try. But it's another nice, like, I think game designer hack in general, right? Like taking games that you already love or that are out there and finding a way to twist them up and finding a way to like take away a rule or switch out a card or change something or add something. It's a really great way to kind of hone your design instincts and get to see like kind of what works and what does it in a system that already basically functions, you know? Absolutely agree. And sometimes you end up breaking perfectly functional games that way.

Yes. Oh, 100%. And you realize, oh, wait a minute. Maybe. Maybe. just adding this other whole thing wasn't a great idea at all. And here we go. As a designer, the other thing I would recommend is everyone should try that. Because even if you don't create a better version of the game, even if you monumentally screw up a game, you will start to really appreciate how much work went into the design that ended up in the box.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It's a lot. I mean, it's very, especially with my audience, maybe, I don't know if this is true with your audience, but they are very passionate about the games. and they're very passionate about their critiques about the games that that we make. Absolutely.

And so, and again, I'm grateful for that because that means they care. But when you see like, hey, if I just, you know, the most classic example, like people want to get rid of the, you know, bad land draws in games like magic, right? Like they want to remove that variance. You're like, no, that is so critical to the fun of that experience. You just don't realize it. So, you know what? Go, try it.

See what happens. Yeah, you'll arrive at the right place. Just try it. Yeah. It's the key, I think, and, you know, as I've matured as a designer, I still, like, make as many, I make plenty of stupid mistakes all the time. I'm just able to, like, find, find that, you know, discover them faster. Like, I'm able to like, okay, I've made this kind of error before.

So probably we're going to move in this direction. Or I'll very quickly see in a mental playtest to be like, oh, yeah, that's not going to work at all. And I could skip a step really quickly. Yeah. Your ability to do the rapid level of playtesting that you have and you know five or six versions a day is pretty remarkable i mean the fact that your games are are so short is a big part of it but are there and i mean that's for sure i did a game you know i did a game

called the bad beats way back in the day that was like this was a quick little bluffing game kind of like a minimalist version of like coup and so you you have two cards you pick one you keep it and then you just say what it is and people can believe you or not and if they don't if they believe you then you do whatever the action is that if they don't then you reveal and if they're wrong It was fun, great, great little game. And I made it in like three months or something. It was like so fast because I could just play and iterate, play and iterate, play and iterate.

So that one piece obviously is a bit of a hack, but maybe it doesn't apply to everybody that's making some people that are making longer games. The quick and dirty is another piece that I know is really important. And you said you have hundreds or thousands of blank cards and Sharpies. I think the fact that A, you can create it quickly and B, that it looks ugly and you're not attached to anything, are both really important pieces. Is there anything else that you lean in on

that helps you rapidly prototype, iterate in line? Yeah. Well, first, let me just say, when I say blank cards, I don't always use them as cards, right? Like, I travel around with cards because they're easy. But when I need a dye for a game, six-sided die, I'll just take six cards.

One, two, three, four, five, six, shuffle them up. Now I've got to die. When I need it to be a 25-sided die, just as easy, right? When I need a spinner, that's cards as well. When I need a board, that's just a grid of cards, right? Like, cards are everything. So I'm not just talking about cards.

I'm talking about the fundamental building blocks of all games when I say cards and sharpies. Let's see. I think the other thing is I take a lot of feedback when I'm testing games. Like, players talk a lot. And it took me the longest time. to figure out that I'm allowed to ignore them. And you're inviting people into this very vulnerable space and they trust you and they love your game

and they want you to succeed and they start talking about change this and change that. And I used to spend so much time either saying, I'm going to write all this down or I'm going to tell you why I've tried all those things or I'm going to tell you why I think those are a bad idea. And then I just realized like it's okay to just let them talk, nod and smile, and then go to the other room

and write out a whole new version that has nothing to do with what they said. And they're going to play that next version anyway, and then we're going to go through this whole thing again. And that's okay. And I saved so much time by just giving myself permission to, in a very polite, very courteous way,

just ignore what they're saying and move on with what I think I need to do next. How do you know when the time that you should listen to your playtesters versus when it's time to follow your instincts and ignore them? It's very simple. You absolutely do not. Best answer possible.

Oh, my God. All right, fair enough. Yeah, I was asking this, this is true. Maybe this is tied to it or not, but I've had this come up in an interview I did. And another one, I interviewed somebody else. And the difference is between when you're going through a hard time and you're kind of in the dark forest of creativity or the trough of despair of a project

and that it's just about taking the time and pushing through and going through the iterations versus when the universe is telling you, hey, this is not working. Stop. And I often ask that question of people like, how do you know the difference? And I think that your answer applies to that too. It's very hard. It's very hard. It's very hard. Yeah. Yeah. And it will always be. There's no one that's going to drop any wisdom that's going to make this any easier. Damn it. Are you sure? I really was hoping. I've been doing 80-some-odd episodes. I'm looking for somebody to tell me. I don't know. Yeah, well, maybe 81. All right. All right. We'll keep it going. Awesome. It's so much fun to talk to you, man. I really appreciate you coming back on. I want to sneak into one of these design retreats one of these days. Can I bring some fun games that we can play?

You are so welcome to. That would be such a delight. Yeah. Okay. So next time you're in Toronto or Los Angeles, let me know. Okay. And like I said, we do these like three, sometimes four times a year. It would be so much fun. All right. I'm down. I cannot wait. Thanks so much for coming on. And I'm going to see you in person next time. I love it. Thanks for having me. All right. 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, 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.