Think Like A Game Designer - Eric Lang — Crafting Immersive Game Experiences, From Sugar Packet Prototypes to Epic Viking Sagas, Navigating Kickstarter Successes, and Fostering Empathetic Design Teams (#17)

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

Eric Lang is a legendary game designer who has created more games that I’ve personally enjoyed than almost anyone. Just to name a few, Eric designed: The Game of Thrones Card Game, Quarriors, and Blood Rage. He’s launched several highly successful Kickstarters and has a lifetime's worth of wisdom in game design. There are a lot of lessons here. Grab your notebooks. 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 Eric Lang. Eric is a legendary game designer and somebody who's made a ton of games that I love to play on a regular basis. His games include the Game of Thrones card game, the Cthulhu card game, couriers, blood rage, and countless more.

He's been a part of many highly successful kickstarters and has a lifetime worth of wisdom to share when it comes to game design. I always love talking with Eric about design. We do it whenever we get to see each other at conventions, and it's been awesome to actually finally get to share those lessons here in the podcast. And he taught me some new things for sure, which I think you're going to love on this podcast. I think you will see a lot of interesting things about the way that he tests games and the way that he processes feedbacks, the way that he's learned to teach other players and other designers how to make games better, and the way that he has this very interesting self-retrospective and very analytical approach to things, which I always really appreciate.

We also spend a fair amount of time talking about Kickstarter. As some of you may know or may not know, by the time this episode goes live, we are very close to launching our own Ascension Tactics Kickstarter, which is going to highlight not only 10 years of Ascension's history, but launch in a brand new miniatures deck building hybrid game that takes the best principles that I've learned over the years from both my time working on the World of Warcraft Ministers game, as well as the decade of Ascension,

to make something that's truly new and awesome, and it's been very exciting for me to be able to finally go back to Kickstarter after many years. So hopefully you guys will go check that out. But Eric, as one of the most successful designers ever, as far as total revenue earned on Kickstarter for games that he's worked on, gives a lot of really great lessons. So for anybody out there that's deciding whether or not you want to make your games and launch them on Kickstarter or publish them,

he has a ton of great insight in that. And, you know, it's just one of those things where these kinds of conversations are why I started the podcast. I learned a ton from this episode. I always do whenever I have a conversation with Eric, and I know that you will as well. So without further ado, here is Eric Lang. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Eric Lang. Eric, it is awesome to get to talk with you.

Yeah, you too, Justin. I've been looking forward to this all week. Yeah, you know, you and I have been friends for many years and we've had a ton of great game design conversations over those years. But you've been kind of my white whale for this podcast. I've been trying to chase you down to get you on here for some time. So I'm glad I finally got you here. Oh, that's great. I love being a white whale. So, you know, I always start these conversations the same way. You know, most of our audience is probably going to know who you are. But, you know, how did you become Eric Lang? What got you into the gaming industry and kind of brought you your career to where it is today? It's kind of a brief overview. Sure, sure.

So I have a Reader's Digest version, right? So that it starts with Magic the Gathering, as a lot of things do. I've already been a gamer at that point for five years. But when I started playing Magic in 1993 with, Beta Edition, that that was the thing that woke me up. I was like, I knew I was a gamer, but this made me go, I wanted design games for a living. It was like without even seeing interviews, without reading any of the behind the scenes, I could tell instantly that this was a game, this was a wonderful piece of art that was also

created with a massive amount of discipline and passion and discipline. And I was like, you can really make a career out of this. So I did. Of course, now I'm 47 years old projecting into my 19 year old self, right? A lot more wisdom than it exists. But that's my story I'm sticking to it. Anyway, it starts there. Yeah, no, life's a lot easier to tell a coherent story in retrospect than going

of course. Of course. Of course. So between 93 and 97, I think I, sorry, 93, 96, I designed like, I don't know, 17 collectible card games. I just every every role playing game campaign I'd ever had, every IP, every property I was interested in,

everything that I designed, every story that I'd ever told, license off my own books, my own poetry, my own music, all this stuff I'd done in the past, I just went for it. Most of them were absolutely terrible. They're creative, but terrible. And then I started getting, I did

the thing that most people say you shouldn't do, and I just went right ahead and contact to TSR, who was the original publisher, of course, of Dungeons and Dragons. And I just said, you know what? You guys have this IP called Chronomancer that I think is really cool. I want to make a time-traveling card game. And I just submitted it. Here you go.

Now, I got the rejection letter that every young, every young, infinitely wise game design, I know what doesn't want to hear. It's like, this sounds like a neat idea, but your game is horrible. That's it. So in defiance of that rejection letter, I went and contacted almost every publisher I could back when IRC was the main chat channel for the internet. I accidentally found somebody from FASA at the time. FASA, of course, being the original publishers of Shadow Run of Mech Warrior. Yeah, yeah, I had Jordan Weissman on the podcast.

podcast earlier. Jordan's incredibly brilliant. Of course, the person I met was not Jordan. It was actually the art director of Fasa at the time, who was the lead designer of the collectible card game for Shadow Run. And he was talking about the card game. And of course, I didn't know who it was. So he was talking about the card game.

I was like, oh, this looks really bad. This looks terrible. This is how you should do it. And of course, in my brash overconfidence, I guess I actually sounded knowledgeable. and you said, well, why don't you do some playtesting for us? Which I did for several months, parlayed that into a development gig, where I redesigned a bunch of the cards and gave them some direction for expansions. And voila, I was in credit in a FASA book.

That was the point where I realized I can do this for a living. So what is now the timeline between? So you discover magic, you decide I'm going to be a game designer, you start working on games on your own, to how long from there until you submitted your game to TSR? My memory is a little fuzzy here, but it's about two years. About two years from there. And then from the rejection letter where now you're sure that you're a genius

and they just don't see it to the point where I know, we've all been there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And then from there to the point where you start doing free kind of dev work for FASA is how long? I believe that was 90. I believe that was 96. Okay. And then from there till when they actually hired you on to do paid work? So they never did.

So nope. Great. Okay. So what, but I mean, the credit was I did it all for credit, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. We know everybody says, don't work for exposure. And you shouldn't.

But I did. So. No. Yeah. I don't, I have a different. I have a different take on this. I mean, I really do think that, like, people make a mistake when they worry about making money too early in this industry. And it's echoed of almost every successful designer that I talked to that they do a bunch of work for free because they love it, because they want to get involved, because they just can't stop themselves.

And then once they sort of get their feet, you know, under them and understand what they're doing, then it's much easier to start making money and, you know, really doing things. So I go against that frame. I think doing things for free is the best way to actually make a living. And I agree with you, but, but, but you and I are sort of, uh, entrepreneurs at heart, which we can talk about little later. And I think that that's part of the, the entrepreneur DNA. Um, sure. But, yeah, so they didn't, um, so they, uh, the card game, uh, collapsed relatively quickly. I think they did two expansions and they were out. Um, while that was going on, of course, I had to work, right? So I was, um, I took a job at a,

uh, at a, at a, at a hobby game retail store. Um, and I was managing it and was running their tournaments and of course I was a big magic fan so I was I mean obviously played magic most of the time but I but I really um even though I was doing it just to to earn money I was actually getting the best possible education I could I got to see how um I got to get a real deep dive into how gamers view discuss and critique games in their natural environment or as close to their natural environment as we'll ever get to. Sure. You're like, you're like, you know, studying the apes in the wilderness.

You know, you get to see this is the true natural form. This is how they interact. Well, and the thing, I was doing it kinesthetically too, right? Like, I was, I didn't have a plan, right? I wasn't sitting there with a lab code going and making meticulous notes. I was just observing it and, um, and just taking it in. And the thing that the biggest, it was a, it was a very grounding experience, right? because I would bring some of my designs in,

and they get brutalized, unbelievably brutalized, of course. Because people who come into a retail store, they have absolutely, they have no motivation to be encouraging to you. In fact, counter motivation, people show how smart they are by criticizing other things. That's true. That's true. Luckily, I learned to avoid some of those relatively early, but I just got a real taste of just honest feedback.

from people with purest motivation. The only thing I want is to have fun at this game. Why are you not letting me have fun? May I ask? Because this is often a point where a lot of people have trouble, right? You start getting, you know, you got rejected by TSR. You get round after round of negative feedback. People telling you your game's garbage.

You're doing this, you know, while you're there all summer. You've been working on this stuff for years and not making a living doing it. What kept you going? Like what do you think kept you driving to keep improving and standing up in face of criticism and rejection and things like that? So there's two answers. There's the answer I have that I would have had in the moment. And there's actually the more contemplative answer

that I have now looking back into it after doing some self-reflection. So in the moment, right, I would have told you, well, no, this is my career. I need to do this. It's my compulsion. I'm a creator. Every hobby, everything I've ever been passionate about

has always culminated in the act of creation for me. Like when I was a kid, I listened to a lot of music, so of course I became a musician. I read a lot of books, so I instantly became a writer. I watched a lot of TV. I wanted to be a TV writer. So that's just how I am. That's how I'm wired. In the, my presence self looks at it in the same way. I actually heard, I heard Jerry Seinfeld put this very articulately, and it resonated really home with me. I think it was during his special, one of the HBO specials,

he was just discussing his crap. He basically put, he said that he is the comedian's weakness. And when he is uncomfortable, when there's no laughter in any situation, I realized right then, that's actually what, that's my issue.

I have the game designer's weakness. In any social situation, I'm deeply uncomfortable when people are not having fun. Anybody, if anybody's not having fun in a situation that I feel the, I feel compelled to rectify that through any tools available to me at the time. That's where a lot of my games come from to create fun where there is none in the moment. That's where that's where the artistic part of it comes. Yeah, that's fascinating.

So I just, I just felt driven. I had to do it. Like it didn't matter what, it didn't matter how many times people told me I was wrong. It just means I have to do it better. that is a very romanticized look backward of course there's a there was an element of defiance to it as well right like i'll show you guys well sure anytime everyone's uh as greatest strength is also their greatest weakness you know that that sort of relentless drive that can serve you super well in some cases can you know really have negative effects in others and it's it's one of those things that you know again yeah i've been doing this as long get a little older start getting into your 40s you start to

you know, get a little bit more of a perspective and appreciation that, yeah, okay, you know, it all comes in this sort of mixed bag. When you can leverage it in the right way, it's fantastic and could lead to great careers. And if you get lost along the way, it can be a real problem. So it's fascinating to be able to have both those perspectives of what was it like then. And, you know, again, for a lot of our listeners where they're sort of in the thick of it and also being able to know that, you know, down the road, what is it that's going to matter to you?

What is it that you're going to learn along the way is, I just find really fascinating. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there was a, I would say it, of course, in the moment at the time, the emotional component was much heavier, right? It was a need. It was an absolute need. I was not happy unless I was in the act of designing some kind of game. And, of course, I was also fatally overambitious in everything I did.

I was never able to just do the thing that they say in game design school, start small, start take, take tick-tac-toe, change a rule, write the rulebook for hopscotch or anything like that. Do these incremental steps in order to learn. I said, no, screw that. I'm making a collectible card game. Nope. TCG, starting on a TCG.

Exactly right. Starting on that. And one of the pivotal moments during this period after fast, I decided I'm just going to start going to game conventions. I designed a collectible card game based on the Chronicle of Amber, a series by Rogers Lasni that I grew up on was my favorite fantasy series of all time.

Oh my God, I love that series. I didn't know you made a game for this. Well, it's not published. So there's a story. There's a story here too, right? So now, of course, I mean, I was a, I was not an entrepreneur at the time, which is a game designer. I didn't know anything about licensing. I just said, I'm going to make this. And if I, and I'll figure it out. So I made, I made this game. I took it. I worked on it for a year and a half, recruited a lot of my best friends as playtester. And I said, you know what? I'm going to do all these conventions that we keep hearing about. So I went to Origins and GenCon. My very first Origins was 97. And that was, I've never been to a major game convention except as a quote-unquote exhibitor.

I didn't get a booth or anything, but I got a demo table. And I just sat there. We went there on Wednesday night, slept on Wednesday night, demoed all through the convention, slept again on Saturday night. That's funny. Origins 97 was also. my first origins. Oh, there you go.

Yeah, that was, that was the way that's where I won the U.S. National Championships for Magic, which was the thing that put me into this whole industry. Oh, that's cool. They were ships in the night. There you go. So, okay, so you had,

I really, now I really want to find, I want to play this game, by the way, because I love, I actually tried to make a game for the, uh, the Chronicles of Amber also. Oh, yeah. And, and, uh, never quite got to the point where I was happy enough with it. but I absolutely love that IP and super cool as a TCG concept.

Yeah, me too. You will not play this game. I will not publish it nor will I reveal it. But I mean, it was a classically, highly creative because I made a bunch of, I made a bunch of game design mistakes that, like huge mistakes that only somebody creatively motivated and purely action-driven would make. And I never wanted to fix them. So by the time I got to actually sitting down and meticulously analyzing the game, I got bored of it and I moved on.

Well, I think there's actually a few different threads I want to pick up here. I figured. You know, when I first started becoming aware of you as a designer, it actually, you know, I've been, so, you know, trading card games obviously is sort of my, you know, where I come from also. and it's something I spent a ton of time in. And you, without fail, had the most solid, innovative, like, well put together,

well thought out trading card games that I had experienced since Magic the Gathering. I absolutely loved. I mean, the Game of Thrones game, as well as the Call of Cthulahua ones you did, were both very, like, appropriate for the IP,

brought something new to the table in the different ways that they presented, they presented, you know, play. And they generally worked. Like there weren't stupid mistakes all over the place, which is that I constantly see. Like even when somebody has a good idea, they're constantly just, they just throw it away with some, you know, very obvious errors and things that were in the experience. And I am now sort of hearing more of your story and background, like seeing where this came from that you had gotten so many reps and iterations in and building these engines. Because building a trading card game engine is very hard.

Like it requires, you know, I've done it dozens of times now, but it's every time you do it, it's just requires you to. think through, you know, years and thousands of cards of ramifications and all these different components. That's right. So, you know, I'm curious how you approach projects like that, you know, think either for those projects or, or nowadays, like when you're thinking about building a new, a new engine and a new system of that type, because you've done it on a whole variety of ways. I think you did the, the Munchkin trading card game too, which is a hilarious project and IP

to work with. That's right. And a whole variety of different ones. So I'd love to just dig in a little more in, like, how do you, approach, you know, a project like that and what goes into your engine design process? Sure. So each one is a very unique and different story. And I guess the biggest common thread you'll find here is that what the thing that motivates me is newness. So the I never approach any project the same way twice. And I never approach any, I never approach any project going,

oh, okay, this is how I'm going to solve the following problems. Usually the common thread, is I look for new problems that I haven't solved before or that or that excite me or that or that frightened me more more likely that and just sort of play in that crazy space right so um I that's I mean that's the mechanical that's the mechanics driven up yeah no I love I love and you know heading face first towards the things that frighten you is a wonderful philosophy for an artist as a general rule. So I love that in general. Now, I'd love to see how that played out in a few of the specific examples. Sure. So I guess Game of Thrones was, well, I mean, it was my first published CCG, but of course it was my, I don't know, 18th design or something like that. So that one,

that game was a super interesting process. It's, so what happened was everything about that game came up from necessity and it literally is the most punk rock project I think I've ever put together. Because Fantasy Flight at the time was a board game company, and they had 10 employees of which I was one of them. I was a consultant who was sort of a de facto employee. Nobody at the company had any experience with trading card games, even though they had done discourse at the time. The charm of that game was their inexperienced with the format.

So I was the only person at the company that had experience with collectible card games. They actually hired me to develop a card game. game designed by Reiner Kinitzia, which has now become Scareblords. So my first day on the job was to look at this game and analyze it and then have to go back and report to them. This game is a very nice mathematically well-balanced game. It's a terrible CCG for the following reasons. So my second day on the job was to write a letter to Reiner Kinizia saying, so I'm a new guy

in the job you've never heard about me, but I'm rejecting your game. sorry. Amazing. That was fun. So the way that schedules, of course, for medium-sized publishers at that time, right? They were so cash flow-driven that you have to meet your release. You have to, period. So they were like, well, we need a collectible card game for GenCon.

So he, the CEO, Chris Peterson actually asked. me if I was interested in doing a Game of Thrones, a collectible card game. Of course, at the time, I was reading Storm of Swords, would it just come out, the third book in the series, would it just come out a couple weeks ago? So my answer to that was to run back to his office and grab a copy of the book, slam it on the desk,

and go, hell yes. He said, great, so why don't you show me a basic engine for the game tomorrow? Tomorrow? So there's a comment. thread here. This happens to me a lot. Design a TCG engine by tomorrow. Well, right. Now, when we say design a TCG engine, right,

we mean in, like, well, more completely than just a theory craft, right? But, but, like, design something that works with some example cards that show that this works. Sure. So, so I did. Now, of course, again, I was

a fan of the series. and now Chris Peterson was my co-designer on this game and he actually, he was the one who came up with the idea of doing a plot deck. He was like, what if we just, what if you had a deck of resources that you don't draw? You could pick out whenever you want,

turn by turn. I was like, that's crazy good. Yeah. So I took that and then, turn that into a game. So the, of course,

you can tell my, My love for magic is in that game, right? The core of the core of Game of Thrones is the challenge phase, how the challenges work. And what I was thinking of was, I guess my motivation there was, the Game of Thrones is a really interesting, is an interesting series because it has elements of military, of politics, and of intrigue, right? So it's like, well, all right. So what if I basically did a sort of attacking and style blocking combat system?

which had three vectors that covered the military side of it, the intrigue in the politics. Now that ended up after I started testing it on paper with sugar packets. Splendos sugar packets are my CCG design tool of choice. I just grab a bunch of splendor packets and literally started envisioning the play in my head while playing with them,

coming up with stats in my head, playing it out and waiting and playing it and playing it and playing it, changing it, playing it, playing it, playing it until I could get an emotional reaction out of myself. Like, oh, this is really exciting. Oh, this is frightening. I haven't seen this before. So I came back the next day with that basic challenge system and the dominance phase. We're like, oh, by the way, anything that you keep standing outside of challenges will also get you the victory points at the end of the game. Now, of course, at the time, I was also a disciple of Eurogames. At the time, Settlers Katan and Carcassona had just come out, and a whole bunch of Euro games from Rio Grande games. So I've become, I love those mechanics-driven, really elegant, simple, victory point-driven games. I was sort of inspired by that to go,

instead of making a game about decimating your opponent, to make a game about collecting points for yourself or your house. It made thematic sense. and it felt a little different. Yeah, and just to go dig a little bit into it, because this game's been around a long time, but some people may not be aware, so that each of the phases of combat,

if you won that type, that style, then you would get a different type of bonus that would all interact in some way, right? That's right. And that, I just found that to be such a fascinating, where you could theoretically ignore, you know, one or even two of those channels if you wanted to, but you were going to be at this huge disadvantage,

And so you would have to sort of decide what your strategy was going to be. It was just such a fascinating execution to make, you know, story-wise makes sense, right? You don't want the, you know, the sort of little finger or the spy master to be like swinging a sword and fighting against John Snow. But on the other hand, they have their own way of winning victories. And so that I just thought was really both story-wise a huge hit. And then, yeah, created all these obvious and interesting mechanical plays. So it was really really stuck with me for all these years. Oh, that's awesome to hear.

Yeah, that's that game is, it's, I mean, I'm still proud of it, of course, but I was the sole designer, developer, art director, producer, web content developer, and organized play assistant manager for that game for three years. So I burned out really hard. Yeah. And I still can't play it anymore. I can't play. It's hard for me.

I actually curious that in general is, because I have this problem too with a lot of my older games, it's very hard for me to play them. Very hard. Of course. Because I'm sure you just see mistakes, right? Yes, exactly. All I can see are the mistakes in a lot of my older games.

And it's a very challenging place to be. Because I know, I mean, there are things that are great about it. Some people love them, of course, and I'm proud of them in many ways. so but every time I personally play them, the mistakes should jump out. I'm like, oh, my God, I can't believe I did that. Like, oh, I would never in a million years think I'm taking this now. That's right.

But no, but flip that on its head, though, right? So in the last couple of years, in the last few years, I should say, I've actually become, I sort of changed my thinking on this a little bit because one of the questions I get asked in interviews all the time is like, pick a game of yours, a famous game. What would you like to, what would you go back and what would you change? And I'd always have a quipy answer for it. or thoughtful answer, because of course I do this exercise,

go back and say, what would I change? But I've actually come to appreciate games as a, of course, games as art. That's obvious. But one of the most important things about arts, of course, is its historical context. So I'm not sure I would go back and change anything. Because if, so let's say, like, for example,

say I went back to Game of Thrones, right? And I said, all right, clearly, I mean, there were several crazy mistakes in the card pool. But a lot of those mistakes were just like the early mistakes in magic, right? They were so, they produced so much adrenaline at the table. They produced such amazing stories that I don't think you could, I don't think doing a more correct version of that would have hit the same chord, I think. Because one of the things that I was a big fan of in collectible card games at the time when I was doing Game of Thrones was sort of riding that Razor's Edge, right? Making a game that I played a lot of games. I'm sure you have at the time.

There was a whole generation of collectible card games that were, air quote, fixing the mistakes of magic. By making it more procedural, by making it more boring, by flattening the power curve. All the things that makes magic exciting. right that they fixed all quote unquote fixed all that and i was so bored of that i was like no i'm i'm going to i'm going to make magic more broken yeah i'm going to i'm going to make a card that i'm i'm going to make a card that a conditional kill card that is free right that that kind of stuff and um made the fulcrum of the game's balance based entirely on dynamic interaction rather than a,

rather than something that was as easily computable as a man occurred. Right. Right, which is why the resource system in, in games in terms of so malleable, right? And so that, I knew I hit on it because I was watching people play and they were, and it was so swinging. I mean, that game is so crazy swinging, especially when you played with 40-card decks in the old days.

It was so swinging. And so the stories that came. came out of it were incredible, even though I know I would never design the cards like that again today. I don't think I would have, I don't think the game would have been as successful in that time, in that place. Sure. Yeah. And there are both in the, in the realities of, you know, the game in the marketplace at the time it was. And then as sort of this other side of your point about it being artistic is it's a reality of who you were at that time. You know, that each, each thing you create can't help it be a reflection of who you are and what things you were concerned

about and what things you were blind to and where you're you are reacting to the type of stuff that was out there and i think that yeah there's still value and and and joy out of that uh looking back and and then you know again building on top of it you know even the the games that you made then have now become the not only the platform and foundation for games that you've made since but games that tons of people in the industry have made sense you know these these elements become building blocks that now are quote unquote, you know, sort of solve problems that allow people to approach new unsolved problems that weren't even, you know, visible before or weren't approachable at all before that. Right. Or problems that you created. Right. Yes. Yes, indeed.

So I'm, uh, uh, so many different ways we can go here. I noticed that, uh, one of the things that you mentioned, uh, you know, you described it as your most, uh, punk rock of games and, and you talked about, uh, you know, you're sort of having to take everything you love and create with it, whether that being, you know, making music or writing screenplays or scripts. Do you see a lot of crossover in the types of the ways that those arts have done? Is your writing or music background informed your game design or vice versa? Oh, sweet God, yes. Absolutely. So I was a musician before I was a game designer for well over a decade.

I picked up my first guitar when I was 11. I've been playing guitar bass and drums since then. I'm not great. I'm not giving guitar lessons to anybody. But I think in music. And I've spent my life developing my ear. And the most, I guess the most cogent analysis I can come up with in gaming when I'm when I'm describing, when I'm situationally

describing game design, I always fall back on music. And so the, I throw a lot of crazy analogies in there, right? So I've been telling, I was just talking to a friend of mine, one of my oldest friends, Kevin Wilson recently, who you know, I talk about game design all the time. There was a point when I remember I told them, like, you know, I always thought, I always thought I was, like, I always thought I was Prague rock. But I'm really like, I'm really a punk rocker who got into, to Prague for like 10 years and then decided you want to be punk again.

But you can't take the Prague out of you. So the analogy they're holding that, I mean, I was, in my early years, I designed entirely by instinct and training my ear. In game design term, right, that's just the ability to recognize when something is fun or unfun, right? As, I know that's not the most fungible definition, but you still get it, right? So, I mean, player experience is the only metric that matters at the end of the day. Exactly.

It's fun and we're having a good time or we're not. And so that's key. There's no replacement for having that instinct or training that instinct. You don't have to have it to begin with, but you do have to, you do have to learn it. Exactly right. And so there's a level of empathy that goes along with, that goes along with an essential level of empathy that goes along with both game design and music, which are related as well. Right. So when you're a musician, you're outperforming, what you're performing for.

I mean, yes, you may think you're going out there to perform flawlessly. You may think you're going out to jam with your friends. And those are essential components. But you're there to share energy with your fans. Right. And you need a degree of empathy to read the room to adjust your playing, to adjust your performance in order to make the fans happy. That needs to be an essential part of your motivation. your character.

I feel the same way about game design, right? You, when you're designing and when you're play testing, which are the same as far as I'm concerned, you are spending your time reading the room and adjusting. I don't put a lot of taxonomy behind it, but I use mostly the same skills while in playtesting that I did when I was performing. And so that is just sort of that awareness of the,

you know, the energy, the feeling in the room, the reactions. and then that and then also just relying instinctually on what it is that caused those and how you might adjust it to modify and get to where you want to go. Absolutely. So I was the, God, I'm going to sound like a hipster here. Before it was the cool thing to say. I was the high priest of noetic experience, right? So I was the guy back in, I don't know, 2005, 2006, those out there preaching about the perils of data-driven early playtests, right?

But your feedback comes from the table, your feedback comes non-verbally and through observation, not through post-mortem. And especially in gamers, more so in gaming than doesn't use it, gamers who are generally more, have a higher knowledge and higher IQ, I guess, but not necessarily, maybe a slightly lower EQ, you tend to, especially the really smart ones,

tend to reconstruct their own memories of what was happening at the table through a lens that through a much more rational lens than actually what's happening at the table. So that, I mean, I'm not so like I'm telling you anything you don't know, but like you sit there at the table, the classic example, you're sitting there playtesting at the table and somebody is obviously struggling with one

if you're with a part of your core game loop. They're just completely struggling. They don't know what to do. They don't know what the next step is. They always have to be reminded. They always have to ask. By the time the fifth cycle of that loop has happened, they're like, oh, okay, I finally get it.

All right. And at the end of the game, that's what they remember. And if you ask for feedback, if that's what you're taking, they'll say, oh, yeah, I got. It was easy. Yeah. Right. And without especially, you know, with social norms being what they are and especially if they're playing with friends, it's even worse.

So I got to the point where I took it to the almost extreme and said, like, nope, you watch the table, you read the table. Ideally, you're not even there. Yes. Yes. If you can have, you know, that's sort of, for a couple of games I've worked on, I've been fortunate to be able to have that one-way mirror playtest where I can literally watch them react and not have them see me.

It's amazing, but very rare that you actually get to pull that off. It's true. I've actually spent a lot of time training my play testers, though, to treat me as I wasn't there. So I actually have some testers that I do trust to just play. And that's part of, by making myself as quote unquote inaccessible. That's great. That's a super valuable resource. So how do you, just because that might be a useful skill for people. So what is it, what do you do to train them? Do you slowly stop talking as you're hearing them? Do you make a face, you know, put up a little, a little, a little, cardboard sign or what how do you have you during this actually it's going to sound so condescending and patronizing but it's true um so when playing i i use i have some old tricks i use right so like

people play a game then they'll come ask me a question they'll like uh and then i just turn to a touring machine i'm like well what do you think right what do you assume is going to happen and or even like if i'm feeling glib right i'll be like i don't know i just got the game let me check let me check the rulebook up it's not in here uh let's let's see if we can find it on i'll see if i can find online you guys continue right stuff like that or or like even through negative reinforcement i'm like well if you have to ask me then something's wrong with the game we've got to stop yeah um that that's a that's a a little bit of a devilish trick because um i sometimes do that even if uh even unprompted because um that that's one of my tests to find out if people

really want to continue playing the game, the game that is rather than the game they want it to be. Because if I pull something like that and it's like, no, no, no, we'll just fine, we'll play. We'll figure it out. Oh, that's amazing. I love that. I love that trick. I'm definitely going to steal that. That's because I, I, you know, for me, but don't make this too public, Justin, because it stops becoming effective. Don't worry. Don't worry. Nobody's listening to us right now. It'll be fine. No, because I mean, there's there's a couple pieces there from, you know, you know, so I always tell people like the key to knowing whether you're, you know, you're actually on the right track or not is do people play independently of you

telling them to play, right? Do they just start up another game when they finish? Do they continue to want to play outside of you prompting? But this is even better because this is you try to take it away from them and they stop you from taking it away from them to continue to play. That's a, that's a very powerful. positive Q for sure. And I will do the, I will do the, I've done, hey, I want, this is a,

somebody gave me this game to evaluate. Do you guys mind helping me to check it out? Right, whereas like they don't know it's me. So they're way more likely to give me real feedback and I can, you know, kind of see what's going on. I used to preach that at the panels. Unfortunately, I did that one too many times and now my, now testers are immune to it. Yeah, yeah.

This is, this is what, the problem of us giving away our tricks. Right. Yeah, but I did exactly the same thing. I go into GameSwer and say, hey, a buddy of mine made a game. It looks, I guess it looks fine. Let's see what happens. Yeah.

And often what I would, I would even come into it as a negative guy. Right. So, and people do that with me too. Like, even with my own games, if somebody says like, like, oh, it's this, uh, was this intentional? I'll be like, I don't know.

Right. Like, like, or somebody gets glib and says like, oh, is this fun? I'm like, no. And if they, like, sometimes they'll be inclined to defend it, right? And that's cool. But I'm not, but, or sometimes I'll just like, I'll even troll playtesters in the middle of the game and just start a random argument about something. Just to get them arguing amongst themselves.

Oh, wow. You're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, I'm, I'm kind of, kind of glad now. I haven't been a playtester for me. Well, but they love, like, again, this is, this is from reading the room, right? like if reading the room or knowing the playtesters, but if sometimes I'll just start a debate about, especially among people who love to argue, because then I just select,

I listen carefully to what they choose to argue about and what they choose to get passionate about. And that's, I mean, that ultimately that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something that's going to excite, the type of games that I make, I'm looking for something that's going to excite passion. Yes, yes.

That's really the key, right? the getting the people that are excited and passionate because and it comes to the territory on both signs right people getting passionate about your games meaning they're going to get passionately upset too right and and you you know you do this as long as as you have and you know you got people that they really get fired up and you know you've ruined my game or you've done this horrible thing and like you know how have you how have you dealt with that over the years are you just immune to it now or is it something you actually even look forward to or yeah god i'm a nerd i made myself little VP track, victory point track of milestones, of, you know you've made it when.

And it was a bingo card at first, but I lost it. So I made the simple, might sell a little VP track of the types of negative reinforcement I was looking for from the internet. I've got my own Reddit thread voted to why I'm the biggest hack in gaming. I've got, I have my stocker, my internet stalker who will not allow any internet thread to be, any positive comment to be made about me without interjecting about why it's wrong. I've got the, I've got the impassioned armchair designer, reviewer who deconstructs my stuff artistically in a very Roger Ebert fashion to explain why everything is exactly wrong with it. Oh, I'd say, yeah, I've, I have won several of my own board games by this VP tracks several times over.

That's wonderful. It still stinks, right? Even today, it still stinks, right? Especially, like, somebody just saying, oh, this guy sucks, I don't care, right? But somebody who is obviously the target audience of one of my games making a, I thought I was supposed to love this, but I really hated this for this and this and this reason. But that still stinks. Yeah. But I get over it pretty fast.

Yeah, I mean, you have to get a thicker skin because it's going to come with the territory. and especially where, you know, your sort of stated goal and, and certainly the longer you're in the industry, you know, you want to be pushing boundaries. You want to be answering questions that people haven't answered or that are scary to answer. That's right.

And, you know, I would say, like if my design goes out the door and I'm not scared of something in that design, then I fail. Right. Like I, there needs to be that. Otherwise,

you're putting out a boring experience. You're not giving your best, right? I can safely make a B plus game, but that's a fail. You know, if I'm not really trying to go for, you know, going for the A or,

or the F. You know, either I'm knocking it out of the park or, or it's a big miss. Those are, those are fun, you know, that's what really keeps me and gets me up, you know, really trying to do something that's exciting and different. And anytime you do something that's exciting and different, you know, you're going to trigger people. Absolutely. And it's cyclical too, right, to a degree. So like, I mean, like yourself, we're about the same age, I think, right?

So I, and I'm easily been a gamer as long as I have. So I've been going back to my roots from time to time. And I went back and played some old, like, Tom Wham games and some old Peter Alacka games, not Cosmic Encounter, but like Outpost. And just playing these really charming, flawed games to remember what I loved about them. And looking at them today, looking at them in today's context and seeing how innovative they would be treated if they were released today. right so like for example i'm doing i'm working on a big box board game right now big box one and a half to two hour board game that features player elimination um that nothing new under nothing new there but today it's it's like it's it's greeted with like oh my stars right like

right yeah something that was sort of a you know viewed as a negative which of course player elimination has huge downsides and then you know it becomes common accepted that, okay, well, we're not going to do this ever. And you realize, well, hold on. Actually, we lost some tension. We lost some interesting tradeoffs here. And then to bring that back in light of new contacts, maybe with some new solutions to some of the downsides, is an exciting thing. Yeah, that's right. Exactly right. And so, I mean, right, right now the one of the current dogmas, right, is that, especially in, it's a reaction to the marketplace, right? That every game has to have an amazing first play experience. And the dogma around

that has become every game must, every player must feel like they are in the game and feel like they can win at every single stage of the game. Every game must be a very evenly pace experience. Don't have your ups too high, don't have your downs too low. I mean, they don't explain it that way, but that with a push

pull of basic tension in games, that's how it works out. There's a lot of that, right? And especially in the more modern family or family plus games. So I started making, when I ask people like, what are your favorite games? they'll be, oh, I love Battlestar Galactica, right?

And I mean, I was one of the developers on that, I was the developer on that game. That game is all high highs and low lows, right? You can have amazing games of that because you can also have terrible games of that. The stakes are real, right? The dramatic question is, the dramatic question is actually a real question. Like, is this game going to go off the rails?

Oh, it did this time. Yep. And in a game with two-hour investment, those stakes are really high. But of course, right, because of the way memory works, right, you tend to, you'll remember your low lows, but you'll, but in retrospect, it's a story. And now it's a part of your, it's a part of your narrative. You're giving the narrative. It's actually enriched your life for being that low of a low. I truly, yeah. And in fact, in fact, this is true in games and in life, but, you know, often the sort of worst experiences create the best stories.

I mean, I think about, I have played, I played diplomacy only one time and it went horribly. I'll bet. It went horribly. Like, friendships were ruined. But I'll never forget that game. And I learned a lot. So I'm glad I did it, but I'm never doing it again. Yep.

Absolutely. I love it. Well, I think that I want to make sure I touch on some of these because you've now, you know, you've done a lot of work. with Simon, you've had a lot of these big box board games with tons of miniatures in them. It's a really fun experience. I am in process of working on one of those myself right now. So I want to begin. Yeah, I read about it.

Yeah, I'm very excited about it. It's really nice, like a combination of, you know, the deck building genre with the technical miniature genre, you know, which I've worked on back in the day for the World of Warcraft miniatures game and have played for my whole life. But I always, you know, every time I approach this type of genre, I try to, similar to you, like, you know, ask some new questions and try to solve some of the core problems that like underlie the industry. So, so like with the World Warcraft Ministers game, I really wanted to address this problem that like, you know, most miniatures games at the time were just like, all right, I move all my guys, you move all your guys in this sort of static march to the center. And so I created the timing tick system to vary how things go and make that a key resource to what happened. And I think with your designs have really done a great job of upending a lot of the common conceptions around what belongs in a miniatures game.

Blood rage in particular stands out to me is one I've played probably more than any other, where in fact having your miniatures die more often can be a path to victory as well as a variety. of other paths. Can you talk a little bit about that game's kind of origin and what your motivations were there? Sure. So this, it's hard to come up with a Reader's Digest version of this because this game particularly, its lineage just goes way back. So back in 2005, I actually, I designed a game called Midgard,

which is a Euro, a pure Euro style Viking game. And it started off as, because I wanted to do a Viking game, Viking mythology has always been one of my, I grew up on it. I grew up on a very twisted version of it from children's books in Germany. And I wanted to make a game that was just based on sort of the pop culture idea of what Vikings did and what Viking life must be like. And at first I tried to do a Euro game based on that.

I designed it for Zeman games. And the principal mistake of that game was that he gave me 100% control, the designer. So I was the designer developer, editor. I was even the art director. I directed the graphic design. And of course, none of these games are one-man shows, right? Even my mostuteur projects, I always have very strong voices in the room that disagree with me and can push me when I need to be pushed.

that game I had none. I did everything I wanted to and I had no there was nobody opposing me in any part of the process. So the game, I commissioned this amazing cover by John Gravado who did a work for Games Workshop and Magic. This awesome Viking

with a badass helmet sitting in Ridley Scott pose holding his arms in the air going, oh my God, at the end of the world, and like comets coming down. It was amazing cover. Inside was a, Euro B-key point-solid game based on card drafting. So the disconnect between product and experience was so high, the game just tanked.

People who were really in, who tracked about that cover and got this sort of Euro game were like, what is this, right? Eurogame fans who sort of knew my background, who didn't like to take that elements. It just, it was too middle. That's fascinating. So yeah, there's a lot, a lot of great, a lot of great lessons there. The irony of you getting everything that you want being a curse is a key, a key team there. You need people to put it back.

No matter how long you've been doing this job, you are wrong a lot of the time. In fact, most of the time, you have to find, you need ways to validate how wrong you are. And then building a thing that making sure that it all is cohesive. You know, I, a brief, intro to the idea, so I made a game called Bad Beats a several years ago. Yeah, which I really am proud of. It's this very fun, you know, bluffing, you know, trying to lie to your friends kind of thing. But it's given this cutesy cover of these kids, you know, at the dinner table trying to get rid of their beats. And it's a neat-ass game.

Yeah, and it's a mean game. I mean, it is just a cutthroat game. And I think we just completely failed to mash those two. So even though if you were a kid's game player and you would like this, this is going to be too cut-throat for you. and if you were the kind of person that would love this gameplay, you're going to get turned off by the cover. So I also had to learn that lesson the hard way. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So the thing is, I mean, generally speaking, I mean, the further along ago in my career, the more control I have over my projects.

But I still get the final call on most of the stuff I worked on. But I absolutely make sure to surround myself with people that disagree with me and listen to them. Even if I disagree, I still want to have that argument in the room. right so the um the the i don't know at some point 10 years later i was working on some other games i've done chaos ball and arcadia quest for uh for simon that was really i got to i felt like a kid in a candy store right i got to indulge all my favorite toy game fantasies um and i was just i looked at the cover of midgard sitting on my shelf going you know what i want to actually make the game that that cover promised and that's where that's that's the root of like

That's the origin story of blood rage. So it actually started with the idea that I love the drafting. I love the card drafting, but I wanted to make sure that everything in the game was rooted, was rooted thematically. I hate the term Ameritrash, not because I don't like the term trash. I think it's cool. But I just think of it as one type of discipline, right? All it is is immersive thematic. discipline. And what I wanted was a game that where every design decision comes from a very,

very clear, unapologetic vision. And the vision was you are, you are Vikings that are like pillaging in the like in the worst Michael Bay Viking movie ever. Everything is exaggerated. Everything is the greatest in the world. And then after that, I was just going to use my gut and indulge all my CCG drafting expertise and translate into board game form. That was the start. But yeah, the, the, so thematically, I didn't start, I didn't start, I didn't start going, I didn't start thinking with the, with the mechanical question of like, how can I address units dying?

I came with, well, these are the gods that you are following, because when you're drafting, your being bestowed gifts of the gods. And it's too much for you to handle, so you pass it on. What are the, so of course I thought of the gods as lightly sort of as colors in the color wheel like magic, right? All great games come from magic. But the, what is the feeling that each God, what is the strategic domain that each God covers? And of course, Loki, the trickster, the emotional heart of Loki is,

is you play against Loki and yes, he loses, but that was his plan all along and he screws you for it. Right. So that was the easiest one to come across. The rest of them came up a little bit more subtly. Loki just sticks out because it's the one that plays against the norms and that kind of game. So thematically, it totally makes sense that, yeah, you die.

If you die, he can punish you for being the one who wins. And of course, the Viking, the pop culture idea of what Vikings, in Valhalla. Like you fight, you fight for glory. If you die, you go to Valhalla, and that's even better

because you get more glory. Well, since it's a VP game, that's clear. And it's clearly an obvious, clear and obvious. So theoretically, just like any good thematic game, where the theme can inform

every aspect of the game, including where you're going against the brain, that's better, right? It doesn't work. Of course, I'm immensely proud of blood rage. I think that game was a, that's one of the few games

that wouldn't change, much of at all, even though I see mistakes in it, I wouldn't change much at all. I'm very, very proud of it. But part of that was because so much of it was I never strayed from the core principles of that. Even though I changed mechanics around it, I changed hard effects. I iterated like crazy. I never strayed from that core vision from day one. I was just, I was so connected to it. So there's this thing there that I think is interesting where, you know, Look, you have this core loadstone, this core, you know, seed that becomes the game and that is sort of your guiding principle of like, this is what I want. This is where what's going to drive all the other decisions and filter my decision making.

And this, you know, having that and being able to stick to it is incredibly powerful. In this case, it was clearly the sort of the theme and, you know, bringing to light the promise of the cover from, you know, years earlier. do you tend to find that that is a thematic core for you? Is there a mechanical core? Is there an emotional core of a different type? Is it all over the place? What tends to provide that inspiration and drive your designs? Yeah.

I mean, today, it's something that scares the crap out of me, right? I love just scaring myself with a design. Like yourself, I've seen, I've been around the block, I've seen a lot, right? I'm really not interested in doing anything that's kind of safe that's already out there or something that's going to replicate something that's already on my shelf. But the, and that doesn't necessarily mean like I have to make, oh my God, something's so innovative, nobody's ever seen this before, even if it's, even if it's fresh, if it's a new take on something we've seen a hundred million times, sure, no problem.

I've actually found that most of the entertainment I enjoy is that. It's just a fresh perspective on something that's very well known. But generally speaking, nowadays, I've never ever come into design going, oh, let's go through board game geek and, oh, worker placement. What would I do with worker placement? Like, no, I never think like that anymore. Mechanics are tools, their notes, their scales. You need to know them.

You need to study them. You need to have a good sense of cause and effect and how they work together, how they don't work together, et cetera, et cetera. But now that the tools in the box, it's always good. And so it's just something that's got to, something about it has to really excite me. And nowadays it's got to frighten me. So the natural follow-up question is, what frightens you these days?

What frightens me these days? I recall a conversation with Jordan Weissman, our mutual friend. I asked him the same question. This was way back in the 90s. No, sorry, it was in the mid-2000s when he was running WizKids. And he and I were working together on a project that never came to light. I asked him, like, because he's one of the people I respect the most, and I look up to the most and sort of emulate to a degree.

I was like, what's the thing that scares you the most about your, career and what he struck without skipping at the he said becoming irrelevant um that resonated with me um the the the thing that scares me the most is that i don't have anything interesting left to say right and i want to be clear about that not that i don't mean i don't i don't want i don't mean that to say oh i'm not i don't have any new mechanics to throw into the bgg toolbox or I have a new exciting themes. Like, what I don't want, I, um, the thing that scares me the most is falling comfortably into the quote

unquote Eric Lang toolbox. Right. Um, if I make an Eric Lang game, I want you to, I want you to feel like, oh, this is a cool Eric Lang game, but something about it's got to surprise you. Hmm. Interesting. If it's too, if it's to you, it's not good enough. Well, right. Well, because I mean, so I've watched enough Kickstarter videos where people were talking with creators who make these miniature area control games. And too many times have I seen these Kickstarter games, people saying like, oh, I want to sort of make an Eric Lang style miniature game. Like, okay, well. Yeah. But that's off. That's to the new generation now. I got to do a new thing.

Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, constantly innovating and finding ways to push the envelope, I think is, is. certainly what keeps things exciting. And you've, uh, you, you mentioned Kickstarter. So, you know, obviously you've had a ton of success on Kickstarter. You know, you and your projects have got to be near the top total of all the things earned by anybody, uh, period. Uh, how does that feel? It's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a crazy, you know, shift in our entire industry that you in many ways are at the forefront of. What, what do you think about that and it's, it's influence now and how should, How should other people be thinking about it? I mean, how do I feel about it?

It scares the heck out of me. But the scares the heck out of me as an artist, right? Because for precisely the reason you said, right, but I participated in a string of games which have accumulated this much Kickstarter notoriety and money that you get to that point like, oh, is that it? If I peak now, is that like everything I do is going to be measured against that, right? That's rough, right? But I mean, I love Kickstarter. I always have. I always will. I try very hard not to become cynical about it. To degrees, some of us are already sort of treating it

like a solved platform, but by sort of copying the zombie side formula or, or nowadays, the Awakened Realms formula, or the monolith formula, it's, I think there's so much, it's a new platform, which is all it is is a new engagement platform that is still basically in its infancy. I still feel like there's so much room for innovation and new expression and new engagement that I would be, I'd be sad if I was part of the movement that sort of dogmatized that part of the industry. Well, I'd be curious because I think, you know, for a lot of people, I'm sure, you know, that are listening to this where they, you know, when you say these formulas, they're not,

they're not transparent to a lot of people that are out there. And of course, you know, there's always ways to innovate. What do you think of, you know, not to sort of dogmatize, but of best practices that are out there or maybe even, you know, tailor that with new, new opportunities that are on the horizon? What kind of advice would you give to someone that wanted to, you know, run a Kickstarter or sort of get involved in this space? Well, um, so, Says the guy about to run a Kickstarter. Right, right. Well, no, it's, it's really hard for me to give contextless advice, right?

So, and it's weird. It's almost a nervous tick with me, right? If somebody asks me a general question like that, I'll usually, I will want to know more about the person asking the question, right? Like, where are you from? Yeah, so I can, we'll give it two cases. So you can give me direct advice because why not? It's my podcast.

Sure. Because I got a Kickstarter coming up. as we're recording this in a couple months. And so some or someone generically that has, you know, has some experience, has some, you know,

some time in the industry and has something that they've developed and want to bring it to Kickstarter and really try to knock it out of the park. And then we can, we can take, do another take again with somebody who's more just starting out and doesn't have as much of an audience, doesn't have as much experience. So I'd be,

you know, both contexts would be interesting. Sure. Sure. Well, I mean, so somebody like yourself, right? Well, I mean, you're a bit of a unique case because you have so much more experience, I think, than the vast majority of your listeners, right? So to somebody who is a, we'll come with Justin Gary Apostle, right?

Somebody who listens to a lot who's absorbed a lot of your work, like the Mark Rosewater Apostles on the Internet, right, who can recite everything he's ever said and could design a Mark Rosewater style magic set, right? to somebody like that, I would probably say the, I mean, the success metrics are pretty transparent. I actually do think Kickstarter is one of the most transparent success models out there because everything, every interaction we have is out there. You can see it. You can reverse engineer any C-MON or or Awaken Realms or even the Exploiting Kittens just diligently compare their numbers with Kicktrack. And it's like the data's there, right? The thing that you can't do is synthesize it contextually, right? A lot of smart people can come up with a lot of different reasons why this

the day spike, why this particular update spiked or this one failed or flop. Timing obviously matters, all that stuff. The thing I would, the, what I would suggest nowadays as the as the platform is maturing. I believe that Kickstarter is probably a more pure expression of the reputation economy, I think, than any other platform. You as a publisher, it doesn't matter how awesome you are as an individual. You enter that platform without credit, without street credit. That defines your ceiling, right? realistically defines a ceiling of how successful we were going to get from a

dollar's perspective. Nowadays, it's much more important that it's as important to delivering a good game and delivering a great experience that you have a track record of getting on the platform, delivering something cool, fulfilling and ideally going beyond the expectations set by the Kickstarter campaign. and really managing the post-Kickstarter excitement. Now, we do that fairly well.

As in S-Mond, we do that fairly well. We still have a lot to learn. I don't think people understand just how much of S-Mond is dedicated to the Kickstarter engine. It looks like it's a couple really excited people making comments on our board. It's not. We are a giant worldwide fulfillment engine. We have a huge multinational data collection and processing team. I mean, I can't say too much more about that in detail, of course.

But the core, just this, I'm only talking about the back end, not the front end, right? Once the Kickstarter, your troubles when you're starting a. Kickstarter. If you have a successful Kickstarter, the day that your thing is backed on the final day your Kickstarter, that's when your troubles began. Right. That's why the people like Adam Putes who did Kingdom Death Monster, one of the most successful dollar-wise kickstarts of all time, almost went broke.

He did not have the infrastructure to run that thing. So my advice to you, Justin Gary, would be, are you prepared to run a publisher? that is essentially a live team in video game speak to manage both not only the Kickstarter during but afterward and parlay that into your next one. Are you going for a one and done? If you are, I would actually suggest don't do Kickstarter. That's great. So talk more about that. So the, because the overhead and management and logistical challenge of running something through Kickstarter is so great if you're not planning to build for the long term and to be able to run multiple campaigns and build a sustainable infrastructure, you're saying it's not worth it?

I don't think so. And again, and this is about expectations, right? If, like, and this is, and this, I'm giving this advice to you specifically. So somebody in the industry who has, who has the experience, who has, to a sense, has priced themselves out of certain brackets, right? Like, you, Justin Gary, are never going to make a game for, for blank and giggles. Yeah. unless it puts a play with your friends,

you're not going to spend the same amount of effort on a game that's going to pull in royalties at a small publisher on a 2000 copy print run. Right. If that's your expected ceiling. So if your expectation, based on your salary, your needs, and your expectations,

if it's in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, if you're going to build that engine, you might as well build that engine with an eye on sustainability. Yep. Nope. That makes perfect sense. And I, you know, I have for me, you know, actual me, personally I have this experience having run,

you know, several, you know, multiple six figure kickstaters and then losing money at the end of the day for exactly that reason that we were not prepared for the execution costs and challenges. Now, those were digital games and that had its own giant challenges too. But, you know, and that's what sort of stung us for, you know, five plus years of not going

going back to for exactly the thing that you brought up, which is like, no, no, if we're going to do this, we're going to make sure we've got it right. We're going to make sure we've got everything, you know, set up ahead of time. And yes, that it's a sustainable thing that we can for sure deliver what we're saying and make it, make it meaningful. So it's something I constantly echo that, you know, it's not Kickstarter. It's kick finisher. You need to be ready to go and really have all your ducks in a row before you even be before you even start planning a campaign. And then I think your emphasis is also really great here, which is forget just the campaign and even the post campaign, but then the next campaign, right? The whole thing has to be a plan if you're looking

to be playing at this scale that you need to be thinking at that scale, which is, which is wonderful advice. Right. Absolutely. And of course, it is a, it's a semi-matured platform, right? So the barrier to entry is, it's up there, right? Like, if you are, if your, if your dreams are to compete with the monoliths, with the SEMONs, with the Awaken realms of the world, well, that bar is up there. And we've set that bar intentionally very high. So that you, I would, I mean, just like any discipline, even in game design in general, I would say if you're looking to follow somebody through a door to success, you'd almost be better off just, well, almost you would be better off,

just looking for a slightly adjacent door. Yeah, that's one of those things where it's common practice and to some extent common sense, well, hey, if success leaves clues, right, just follow the path that somebody else has already succeeded with. And while of course it's valuable to learn, you know, especially if you're trying to follow in the path and the footsteps of, you know, giant corporations that have done this a ton and have a ton of resources to throw at it, well, you can't follow that same path, right? Right. David doesn't beat Goliath by arm wrestling him.

Right. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. Exactly. And Goliath's twin brother is not going to be beaten by David's twin brother. Right. He knows better. He's going to be wearing a helmet.

So then let's then shift the advice. Let's downstream the advice a little bit. So now, you know, it's not somebody that's really, you know, kind of priced into the market and has a ton of experience and a ton of you know, and an audience, it's somebody that's, you know, pretty new. Maybe they have a published game. Maybe not, you know, they're small scale, but they really have this dream of being able to put their game on Kickstarter and get something, you know, that they can actually get made and get funded, which they wouldn't be able to make otherwise. Right. So what I would suggest for that person, generally, I find that the, the, the, the operational on of those type of creators, they're generally, they're very creative, very smart, and they're usually fairly innovative.

I love those people. And I give them the roughest advice because it's not a love, I promise. But every decision about whether to go Kickstarter or not should be weighed against, as a pros and con list between go Kickstarter and make a print and play and just distribute it for free.

I think it should be a top pro and con list to make, and it should be obviously has to be tailored against your individual goals. If you're just looking to make some money out of it, I would, if you're looking to make some money out of it, I would say then try to find a publisher. You're going to become a game company instantly,

that the day your Kickstarter becomes successful, especially if it's funded with a small number of backers and a high degree of money, which means that you probably offer too much. You're giving every, you're promising too much you're going to end up spending the rest of your life as this logistics clerk. But if you're doing this for reputation, if you're doing this to get your, like a marketing

effort to get yourself known, I would honestly, to circle back to where we started this podcast, do it for exposure, put your thing out there for free, put out a print and play, get people to love your game, get it to spread virally organically if that's your goal, right? You can always, always, I mean, print and play games that have been out there for free have sold later. That's, I've actually, as a publisher, as the guy who's in charge of looking for new games for Seamon, I look at the print and play in the print and play community for games that have already attracted an audience and already have proven successful. There's a third type of person starting Kickstarter, which is the, which is the designer who's

been rejected too many times by publishers. who wants to bypass the vetting process of publisher. To them, I unequivably say don't. Just don't. The Kickstarter Graveyard is littered with the bodies of unfinished, unfinished, unpolished designs that clearly have just evaded that process. If no publisher wanted to publish your game,

there's probably a reason for it. And maybe it's just time to work on your next game. Yep. Yep. So I think that there's a lot of great, a lot of great advice in there. I think one of, you know, that focus of your arc should be when you're first starting out, it should be learning. You're not nearly as good at the craft as you think you are. Every one of us starts off way to, our arrogance to ability ratio is off. That's just the nature of youth and then getting started. Step one is to learn. And then step two is, you know, to sort of add value and, get your stuff out there in whatever way form you can. That's, you know, build relationships, get, you know, make people happy, see what works, get that awareness. Do not focus on money first. And that doesn't mean you have to work for free, but it often does, whether that's putting print and plays, whether that's doing play testing for other people, whether that's submitting your

games, you know, and getting them overworking with a publisher to get to the point where they can help bring things to life is critical. And then going the route of trying to self-publish or kickstart i i always you know for some people it's the right path but it is should be like the last resort should be i can't do anything else therefore i have to go down this road because i've i've i've i've i've already established myself and i love this particular thing right like i would not have gone back to kickstarter except for building you know a miniature style game at the scale i want to i have to you know i need i kickstarts made for that sort of thing oh yeah because i you know uh and and the the upfront costs are so great and we can make something way more awesome that way.

So awesome. That's the way we're going to do it. And yeah, it's, it's, you know, it's just in addition to the other note that you gave, you know, don't make your Kickstarter too complicated. If you do go to Kickstarter, don't promise all the things. Right. Just pick a thing. Give one one thing.

Do that well. And it's so easy to get swept up, right? Especially when you're mid-campaign, right? You're riding the high of the excitement of the, you've caught the enthusiasm of your backers. The, I actually treat, I mean, I'm saying this as if I'm the one who makes all the decisions here at Simon. I'm not, but I'm definitely a voice in the room.

I treat the feedback of backers the same way I treat play testing. Yes, if you ask anybody in the abstract, would you like X extra? They will always invariably say, say yes. If you give them the option, they will say yes, regardless of whether it's actually good for the game, good for the product, good for the Kickstarter all the time. I mean, we have a running joke in Come On when I wrap up a game in development for the Kickstarter team. I will even put a note on it saying, nope, there's no solo mode for the following reasons. Nope, there's

or if it's a cooperative game, nope, there's no head-to-head mode for the following reasons. This is the player count. For exactly these reasons, no, we will not go to X number of players. No, we will not go down to Y number of players for these reasons.

Because, of course, people ask, it's the first thing people ask for. And there's this, there is this absolute, of course, this great positive feedback for yourself to be able to grant that wish to the backers. but if it doesn't serve your product, people are going to remember the high of being listened to that once, but they're going to remember the mediocre product

that you gave them forever afterward. Yeah. So that's a, that's a, so nobody's going to listen to this, right? I'm going to give this a bite. This is the thing I know I'm saying that no one's going to listen to. Having that discipline in those situations is incredibly hard. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

incredibly hard. Actually, I can relate to this back to the crafted design, too, right? In every very highly successful game I've ever done, there's always been a feature, sometimes a core feature that I've pulled out of the game. Not because it doesn't work. That's the obvious. But I pulled it out for a variety of reasons, but I pulled it out against the protests of my play testers. Like Blood Rage had a super innovative mechanic that mirrored the way the area majority worked in it.

I mean, I've never seen anything like that in the game. I might turn it into another game, which is why I can't tell you exactly what it is. But it was so innovative. People played them, wow, that's really innovative. It was so innovative. It was distracting. Nobody remembered they were playing a game about Vikings

going to Valhalla. They just remembered this really cool mechanic. So it's like, I was like, you know what? after watching five or six games of people just loving that mechanic so much, I took it out. And the game was so much more smooth and enjoyable. And of course, the people who had played it

before were like, you killed the best part of the game. This is the, like, when did you take the end of this out? The people, I said, I took it under advisement, thank you. But the next group of players who played the game, everybody who started playing the game, it was not smooth, it was not, it didn't deliver on any of the promises. New players who came in after I,

took out, took that new feature out, they were, they loved the game, like almost from start to finish. They wanted to play it over and over and over again. Feedback I'd never gotten before. Yep. I had the same thing with Rising Sun, the same thing with my current new game. And people hear this all the time. This is the, the, the, the, the, the chair designer syndrome, right, which you'll get, especially if you listen to much of the internet. It's relatable to the film side, when people release special features DVDs, right? And the director's cuts and all the stuff that they show you all the stuff that's on the cutting room floor.

It always looks cool. It always looks amazing. And of course, as the armchair creative, you're like, why did you take that to the film? It would have been so much better. When you look at, you read an article on magicgathering.com and you see all the cards that they cut from a set. They were really innovative, really creative and special.

And like, why did you take that out? Because it went against the cohesiveness of the product. It made the product more mediocre by its inclusion. You can't prove that unless you play it. Right. So, and that's tough, right? If you listen to, if you listen to those too much to those voices in the room, you will always invariably make inferior games, in my opinion.

And then you have to listen after all, you have to listen to the internet. When people say like, oh, your games are so delivered. derivative, you're not bring anything new to the table. Well, I think it is what it is. Yeah, well, I mean, this is one of those things. I use somewhat different language for it, but I echo the sentiments in that, you know, you have to figure out what the core of your game is, right? What's the core tension?

What's the core story? What's the core elements of what's here? And anything that distracts you from that, I don't care how cool it is. I don't care how great the thing is, it's got to go. Like, if it takes it away, from the core, it does not belong there. And again, you already hit the key point, which is, don't think of it as this is gone forever. That mechanic is going to come back. It's a great mechanic. Whatever it is, this mystery mechanic. I'm sure it's great. But it's going to come back.

And you can use it in the future design. But it is not serving you. It's not serving your players. And again, and so that that's like just a fundamental part of it. And then there's the other part that is an interesting thing to highlight, which is, you know, your playtesters are always going to compare what you showed them today with what you showed them yesterday, but your players will never do that. They don't have that option. And so you need to be able to parse those differences. Well, if you never saw this other mechanic, this will be a common thing that will happen with us, where it'll be, you know, we will have, you know, somebody that'll be like, oh, no, no, this was, this was great when we did it the other way. And I really, now I keep wanting to play

that way instead of this. I was like, well, yeah, That's because you were used to it. Other people will never see that. Right. You don't know what you were missing, so you're going to enjoy what you have. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right.

Ironically, I work with a team of exceptionally talented developers at KMahn. And one of my jobs there is to mentor and to train them. And, I mean, they're all very talented and skilled in their own way. One of the toughest piece of experience I've had to transfer to them is exactly that, right? To like try not to get too down when people, or when people, when your playtesters, not even them, when their playtesters get really attached to a certain part of the game

and give you this negative feedback of, well, you've ruined it now. We get it. We get it. Those playtesters are gone. I just hold them to fire those playtesters. It's time for a new batch. Yeah. And it's unfortunate, but,

but it's just part of the craft. So I think that, you know, mentioning this mentorship, how big is your team right now? We have 11 designers. Well, yeah, we have 11 designers. Distributed or same location? Distributed. So I'd love to talk a little bit then about what it is, what are your best practices for working with a distributed team, which, you know, as we're recording this, everyone is a distributed team by default. So I'd love to get your best practices on that.

And then as well as, you know, when you talk about mentoring and training designers, what are the kind of best tips and things that you do when you're trying to help your teammates to learn and grow and work better together? Well, so I've only been, I mean, I've only been doing this full time as a career for about three years. Right. So I'm still building those best practices. I've always worked with teams in the past. I've always sort of had a senior sort of mentor position, but not formally. So I can tell you, I'm not sure if I can tell you really best practices, but I can certainly

tell you some mistakes. That's how most of us learn. Exactly right, right. So like the, so, and they all stem from such obvious things, right? But point number one, your designers are not you. I mean, saying it on your podcast, it sounds so obvious. Like, why are you even saying this? It goes against, there's a certain degree, again, of empathy and chemistry that goes among a design team where if you come up with, if you come up with the kernel of a game and ask your partner to finish it remotely, there's a part of it where you're hoping they're going to read your mind.

and finish it in a way that you sort of saw. But the whole point of working collaboratively is to add a unique perspective, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, that helps evolve your game. This goes a little contrary to what you were saying before and what I also believe in. You have a game, you have the core of the game,

the thing that you're going for, and everything else needs to be cut. When you're working collaboratively, you have to be able to adapt and you have to be able to allow the game that you're working on together to take form as you both find that fun together. And ideally, in that situation, you're looking for something that is greater than, or different from something you would have, either one of you would have done yourselves.

So I spent my first year, of course, trying to teach people how to design like me. And that's impossible. It's so, it's so obviously impossible. I'm embarrassed to be saying in public that I spent a year trying to do that. Hey, you're talking to a guy who wrote a book on how to design games. okay, so be careful. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, it's, I know.

I mean, there's a certain degree of necessary hubris that goes with our profession, right? Sorry, I didn't mean interrupt. I just couldn't resist. No problem. So, yeah, they're not you. They have their own perspective. They have their, they come to the table. They bring their own unique sets of both merits and flaws to the table that you have to embrace.

So I've actually started going back to my music background here a lot. I mean, I've played in bands all the time. That's what I've been doing all the time. And the best practice is there follow. Every band is a dictocracy. This is a term I stole from John Zinzer, a good friend of mine. We're on Zerg. Dictocracy, of course, is a democracy.

Everybody gets an opinion, and then we do what I say. I like that. It's a great thing. So everybody does get an opinion, everybody deserves to be heard, and everybody should be heard, and everybody needs to have influence over the final product, but there needs to be a leader. And that leader has to make the final call. Of course, being that leader requires you to have the intellectual honesty and the emotional honesty to be able to go, you know what, even if I think this is the best idea, it's probably best for the game that we try this other thing.

right and if when you try that when you try somebody else's idea you have to have the um you have to have to have the honesty to actually admit when it works it's really easy to say don't come into this with too much ego um and it's almost impossible to execute on you do you need a very very healthy ego to be working in this industry right because um game design is a navigation of this impossible see of open possibility and cause and effect, right, that almost, most nobody can see, you need a clear vision and a determination and confidence in your, in your vision to filter all feedback. That comes from ego.

So you need that in order to be a successful designer. being able to let go of that just enough to let other ideas in and to let other ideas influence you is tough. It absolutely is tough. And if it's not tough, if it's not tough for you, I would arguably say that you don't have enough ego. You should actually be working on building it up a little bit. Yeah, that's really, it's really a fascinating way to present the problem because, you know, everybody understands intellectually, you know, that ego is a challenge and ego gets in the way. but it's much harder emotionally to be able to know when it is the thing that's in the way or when it's the drive that's going to get you across the finish line, right? When it's the thing that's pushing you forward.

And what I found is if you have enough emotional awareness, at least self-awareness to sort of know, are you a, you know, sort of typically dominant person in the room, right? Where you're talking more than you're listening, where you're generally your ideas are spoken loudly and moving forward, then you need to go about. above and beyond on the flip side, which is to say constantly, you know, actively pause in the room. Let other people talk before you say anything. Restate other people's positions before you state your own. Couch your own language with things that are like, well, it seems to me, I might be wrong, but like actively put those words into your parlance, even if it doesn't sound right to you at first, training yourself to speak that way, training yourself to pause more, training yourself to reflect more will help to surface those other ideas in really powerful ways.

Absolutely. Actually, the second, sorry, Justin didn't direct you, but the second point that you made there, the core of Socratic dialogue is to state your, to state your colleague's position in your own words, so they understand it, is not only good, it's essential, in my opinion. It's actually the core of all of our conversations. So I do it all the time. Yes. Right. Like, hey, let me restate your point so I understand. Yes. Because even by doing that, you're, even if it also, what's important here is it protects their ego as well. Yes. Right? Because even if you disagree and you're adding something to it and you're morphing industry, giving it back to them, it's still their position. Yeah. And they get credit and they're getting the social credit for it, which is very important. Yes, 100%. And and I think, you know, to sort of emphasize it further, we do what we call steel manning. Right.

which is not only should I be stating, stating your position back to you, I should be stating it back in a way that is even stronger and making it better, right? As opposed to straw banning where, which is very common where people will just state the other person's position in some, you know, like a loose way that is easy to refute.

Here you want to make the other person's position as strong as possible to then be able to have a discussion around it. That's right. In the band or collaborative dynamics, sorry again, but in the band or collaborative dynamic, a great stop to that, right? Like there's a, there's a silver bullet. It says when you're when you're on the receiving end of that, right? Well, there's two.

One is really, one is really aggressive. I've used it sometimes, not too often, right? Which is like, hey, if I just say you're right, will you shut up? But it's super aggressive. I don't necessarily, if you need to, that's your like fight. Wow. Yeah, that's that one might. The only response there is, you know, punch somebody in the face after that. So that's a tough spot. But the other one is also aggressive, but I found it's very effective if you're on the receiving end of that.

I've usually said, like, just a quick, are you, are we creating or are you just trying to win an argument? And that usually, that usually at least, obviously you can only do it with people that you're familiar or comfortable with and have a lot of respect for. I had it used on me. And it stops me in my tracks. right and it does it it does help you recalibrate the conversation and keep your momentum so i i think those are useful tools although they are certainly uh blunt force objects uh to some degree oh yeah

oh that's nice i might uh the maybe a slightly a subtler more uh more judo uh way to approach the uh that i like is is focus on principles not positions um if you zoom out a bit from the hey i think this mechanic should be this way. I think this mechanic should be this way and arguing over the specific. It's like, okay, wait, let's back up. What are the things we care about here? What are we trying to get at? Right. Okay, I really want player choice to be more meaningful here. I really want there to be more variance in the outcome. I want more. Whatever, right? You go into the like the principles behind what's going on. And very often that can unlock. It moves from I'm on this side of the table and you're on that side of the table and we're arguing to, hey, we're both on this same side of the table,

trying to analyze this problem, which can help really reframe and get the egos out of the way a little bit. Oh, absolutely. And usually the greatest point about working collaboratively, especially with like a great team like the one we have, is we get to the point you're talking about right now. We get to that point. Right. Even when we're arguing, we get to that point. Sometimes where it gets a little aggressive what I was talking about is when you're at that point. And then you actually start to misaline on vision.

Yeah, yeah. Right. And that happens a lot during late stage development, right? When you're looking for when you're troubleshooting, you're looking for specific problems to solve. And then diagnosing and also attempting a cure, right, which is, geez, God, we could talk for hours on that. Yes, yes. Well, and that's really great because, like, we spent, you know, a lot of time talking about the sort of early phases of design and where sort of the concept comes from and how you start bringing that together. But these sort of later phases are in, you know, that's where the rubber meets the road in so many ways.

You know, these little, you know, these kinds of tradeoffs and decisions that, you know, ground level, you know, everything from, you know, what's the wound mechanic here to does this guy get at cost two or three, you know, can have these like rapid, you know, like cascading effects on everything that you've done before and how you resolve those decisions. I think it does all tie back because you've got to be able to know what your loadstone. You've got to be able to sort of have those principles up front to help guide you. But in many ways, it's trench warfare, man. There's no, there's no, there's no rubric answer. It's, it's all on the ground level. Well, so sometimes, sometimes, and this is, I'm sure this happened to you too. Sometimes later stage development does expose fundamental cracks in your game.

That, right, which is one of my young developers, Leol-Meda, he calls a burden of knowledge for players, which is a great encapsulation of that issue, right, where once a player has broken through the matrix in your game and realized a particular play pattern that is actually dominant, it is very difficult for those players to go back and enjoy the game the way it was before. So what are internal phrases, does this game survive burden of knowledge, right?

And sometimes the cracks that it exposes actually do, and have required a realigning a vision, right? Because at the end of the day, right, game development, I mean, the game development isn't only about solving problems. It's about deciding what problems you are going to solve and what bugs are acceptable. Because there's no such thing as perfect. It's not a bug. It's a feature.

Absolutely, absolutely, right? Because so I have an exercise I do with designers very often. when they're pitching me a game either from outside or not, as I asked them to, especially if I like the game, we're past that phase. We're now going to work together and figure out how to develop this. I'd like you to write me, you, the designer, to write me a board game geek review of this game,

a short review, like a couple paragraphs, of somebody who rated the game in eight, and then write me a review of somebody who rated the game of four. Oh, that's wonderful. And they both have to be, they both must be plausible written by people. It's a good, because it's, it's too shorthand, I find to say, like, who is this game for and who is it not for? By forcing them to go through the exercise of writing the review from the point of view of a real human being, it gets them, it forced them to dive a little deeper into that. That is a wonderful tactic because, yes, that, that, you know, that's just a great way of encompassing because that principle, you know, who is your,

game for who's your core target audience and who do you not want it before is absolutely critical but it's very hard for people to sort of a go through that exercise at all right everybody wants their game to be loved by everyone or b to bring oh that's yeah right right which is just like it means you're not really trying you're not you're not actually doing your job and and and then but even further is to really personify and make that come to life like when I talk about in I talk about this I say like you know really picture the actual person that you want to this game to appeal to. Like, like, give them like a name and like, what else do they do with their day? What other games are they playing right now? What do they hate? Right? And so I like try to make

that part really like make a real person. But this is a really wonderful way of like writing the review out at these tiers gives you, you know, it's not the 10 and the two. You know, it's not the like, this is garbage. You don't know what you're doing. You should die. Or or this is the best game I've ever played. It's these, you know, good high ratings, but thoughtful. Or, you know, no, this is not for me and here's why. And forcing those reasons is a wonderful. I'm absolutely going to incorporate this for some of my games. I love it. Absolutely, yeah.

Eight and four are very important numbers. I've actually, I've played tested this. They do, they, they, those two pairings, and of course using DGG as a reference, right? But those two pairings do remove hyperbole from the table without you having to say that. Which is, which is good. But also, and again, we're saying, we're revealing too many tricks on podcasts, but it's also sort of a low-key interview question. Because when working with the designer also gives me a sense of their intellectual honesty, right, and their emotional honesty. Some people are just not capable, are not capable of writing before.

And that's, it's a pretty good key indicator for me to figure out how difficult we're going to be to work with. Yeah. And that's, you know, just tying into our previous discussion about how the, you know, having those, having debates, right, the process of working on a design team is a constant clash, right? You're just constantly smashing ideas into each other. You're constantly debating things. And if you are in the room of people that are all intellectually honest, genuinely trying to make the best project and willing to sort of self-analyze and able to self-analyze, then that conversation and that process can be a joy. If you don't have that, it's hell. I mean, and I've made this mistake too. I mean, there have been various times where I've had a very talented team of people who collectively were.

are way worse than they would have been individually because the egos and their things. And, you know, a lot of lessons had to get learned the hard way. And again, I take, I take as much blame for that as anybody. And I had to get a lot more intellectually honest. And it takes sometimes some big failures and some big mistakes to get that lesson drilled in. So hopefully the people that have stayed with us this long are able to learn from our mistakes and take that hard look. Unfortunately, most won't.

But some will. Of course. Well, it's music again, right? You're in a band. Right? And it's not every, like, chemistry matters. Right. And I do, I really do believe it's all chemical.

Right. There is, it's, you have to, you've got to get in there and you got to figure out if you have chemistry. I've worked with many different designers, many incredibly talented designers. I thought I would, we would, we would work great together and we did not, we did not at all. We've remained friends and we're, we, tons of respect for each other. We just did not click at all. And we had to, we had to get in there and work together to figure that. out. And I've also had collaborations that I thought were going to be, like, we're not going to work

at all that were amazing. And it's just, it's pure chemistry. And it's, it's, it's all based on do the two of you, do the two of you generate more excitement between you as a result of your interactions, excitement, um, and a positive feedback loop than you would working apart. Okay. Well, if you really were going to make an offer to do a collab together. That would be a great time, Eric. Wait, maybe we have chemistry. I mean, you know I'd love to work. Yeah, I think that would be a dream.

I think we've got to make it happen. And even if we don't, we'll learn a lot along the way. We can have a follow-up. We can have a follow-up podcast of a post-mortem of the great game slash disaster, whatever comes out of it. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So I, sorry, go ahead.

If you don't mind, I just want to tell you, real quick, because to keep this a little less abstract, and I apologize to my, everybody works with me knows I'm going to say this stuff public anyway. So I'll name two collaborations, right? I worked with Mike Elliott on several games and worked Rob W on a recent game. Rob is the guy that I thought, we worked, by the way, we worked on a big Kickstarter game, Death May Die, worked great, and we worked well together, just in a completely, different way than I thought.

We had some real issues at the beginning of our working relationship because we were too similar. Interesting. Our excitement came from the same places. Our backgrounds were similar. We were both sort of, well, I'm a wannabe writer. Rob's an actual writer. And we just spent most of the early parts of our design process just telling each other's

stories and getting just out pretensioning each other with all these cool themes and subtext or little stories. And at some point, we fell into a dynamic where I actually became the cold mechanical guy. And Rob became the guy who was going to inject the soul into it. And we had to carve those rules for ourselves. And that's a role I almost never take in a collaboration. But once we found that yin yang, what we had was amazing. But we found it over time from some frustration.

Mike Elliott is the type of designer, incredibly brilliant guy. I'm sure everybody who listens to us knows who he is. He's the smartest guy in the room, every room he goes into. He's so smart, it's intimidating. He's blunt, even more blunt than me. He does not suffer fools. He kills ideas all the time and doesn't get attached to anything. that's tough to work with.

I heard about his reputation when I first started working with him. I was like, oh, I don't know if I'm going to be able to work with this guy because in those type of situations I tend to beta, even though I'm actually creatively in alpha. So we worked together and when we started working on Quariers, which are first game, again, overnight in one phone call, the core system came together. It was just, it was electric and amazing.

I couldn't believe it. And we've worked on like three games since. Yeah. So you never know. Yeah. No, you never know. I love collaboration, especially. I really do like collaborating with people who are very, very different for me and who bring a very different energy and experience and attitude.

I have a, this game has not come out yet, but I collaborated with Mike Selinker on what is sort of our spiritual successor to betrayal at House on the Hill, Hyde Society. Oh, cool. And it's, I don't know when we're going to actually release it, but it was really cool because Mike is such a, you know, story driven, puzzle driven, like very creative, very abstract kind of thinker on a lot of these things. And I'm very kind of more granular, more mechanical, more, you know, direct. And that clash of the two, it made me a better designer. I mean, it created a lot of challenges for sure, you know, in learning how to communicate and stylized. but I absolutely learned a lot and was able to, we created something that neither of us would have ever created originally.

So it's a, I really enjoy that process. And again, so much of this is about, you know, I sort of said earlier in the podcast, you know, at the beginning,

your job should be learning and also at the end, your job should be learning. You know, now it's exactly the thing that like what motivates, you know, when you talked about sort of, you know, avoiding irrelevancy,

you know, or kind of, how being able, that is involving, learning, constantly trying to find new things and explore and push your own boundaries. And that's, you know, it's a big part of why I started the podcast, right? Because I can kind of have these types of conversations where, yeah, you and I would talk design, but to be able to dedicate now nearly two hours, and I apologize, we've been running

over because we're so excited about this discussion and can dig in and learn more things. It's just, it's great. It keeps me excited and keeps me like, okay, now I'm going to make this thing. And now I'm going to try this trick. And now I'm going to have my team do that, you know, board game geek review exercise. So it's awesome. And I really appreciate, you know, you've taken the time here. And I know, I know we share that same passion.

So it's great to get to share that with you. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So I tell you, like one of the few pieces of advice I give to people, because I try not to give too much blanket advice anymore. But listen to podcasts like this. Like I personally, I'm going to plug your podcast for you. It's amazing.

So like there were bits in there. I mean, of course, you have some of the, greatest designers in the world. But there are bits in there that really stuck with me, like a good bit from stand-up, right? They keep coming back over and over and over again. I remember that there's when you got Richard Garfield up was like, oh, man, he's going to say all the clever things that I could ever think of anyway. You don't need me anymore, right?

But Richard and I share something that I didn't even realize how much we shared it until we brought up in your podcast, which was his belief that a lot of modern games are overdeveloped. I share that intrinsically. I probably feel even more strongly about it than he does. What I mean is that when I say that overdeveloped, like developed to a too far toward a median experience and away from the highs and lows,

like the extreme highs and extreme lows that make games memorable. Yep. And I absolutely believe that to be true. And it gets me in trouble sometimes. But I'd rather that than, play it. Well, yeah, and we didn't get a chance to dig into it back when you were talking about it. But when you know, you talked about, this is another thing Richard brought up when you talk about the burden of

knowledge and sort of what happens in the to your play experience as you, you know, discover more and and maybe find degenerate strategies or whatever. You know, Richard talked about something that I thought was really proud. It's like, who are you developing for, right? Is it, is it that new player? Is it the super sophisticated player? Is it somewhere in between? If you have to make tradeoffs, where do those tradeoffs go? what should the should the get you know where should that sort of balance an optimal experience be and you know i didn't have a good answer for that you know of course you want to make it good for everybody but again just like you're trying to make the game great for you know great for all people that's also not it's also a non-answer uh and and and the tradeoffs of focusing on

the high end player and making there you know the person who knows everything still be very interested is going to come with a trade off that the first experiences are not going to be as you know they'll be more opaque a lot of the time there'll be more challenges there so it's Well, absolutely. So I can make a bold statement about this, which I'm sure some of your listeners will disagree with, but I stick to it. There is absolute tension between those two player experience, like absolute push and pull. And the choices that you make for the sophisticated player who's motivated in the most pure game theory sense to win rationally using more skill than luck, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to develop a game to create the most

fair, median, challenging experience for that player, the magic spike, as it were, but the advanced magic spike, the player who's going to play the 50th time, the decisions you make to deepen that experience and to continue to continue the hockey stick of that curve going up

are absolutely in contrast unless your game is pure abstract, like go or chess, are in direct contrast with the game's decision that you will make to make the game accessible, fun, and, well, fun, accessible, dramatic, and memorable for those first few players. I think it is absolutely imperative that somewhere in your mind that you have a sort of an idea of the statute of limitations of your game.

How many games is your game going to last before you near the end of that hockey stick? I know we talk in legacy games, it's kind of obvious, right? It's obviously not replayable. but I think you have to be okay. You just have to be okay with going, you know what? You've mastered this game after X number of plays. How conscious is that process for you when you're making games?

Do you think, you know, this is like probably a 20, 30 replay game? This is a... Never in early design, in late development. Because I'm always, I'm very seldom the final developer, but I'm always present. I'm there to be the counterweight, right? Because developers, no matter how good they are, will make decisions often that go against, again, because of burden of knowledge, that will compromise some of the drama from that first player game in subtle ways. Sometimes they'll add too much text.

Yeah. Right? They'll add too much clarifying text. They'll add too much. I mean, they won't all add hacks, but they will to a degree, right? Little hacks, little death by a thousand cuts, right? And I've got to be the counterweight to say, nope, it's too much. Yep.

This is, this is exactly the trap I fell into when I first started designing and developing games. I was, you know, I came as a magic pro player. I started working on the versus system trading card games. So of course, you know, when you're a pro player, your job is to just break everything, right? Your job is to find the thing that's broken and then just exploit, exploit, exploit. And so when I became a developer, I was like, well, okay, I'm just going to remove all the exploits. I can do that. And it just, it just sucks the soul.

whole out of the game. It was not until after, you know, a couple of years that really, that lesson really got drilled home to me. And it's a common, it's a common problem out there because you want to show how clever you are and you want to, you know, make that the better player is going to win more often. And that is just not the most important goal. And so it's a key, a key lesson I had to have battered, battered into my skull. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a weird thing. I mean, even top-end developers, right, they could, I would give them the advice to just go listen to streamers, right?

Like, there's a whole ecosystem of streamers for every kind of game, right? But you and I come from, I mean, I'm sure you're very familiar with Heartstone. They have one of the most mature and sophisticated streamer ecosystems, but just spend some time and really listen to them, listen to the way that those streamers, analyze cards. The ones that are the most compelling, the ones that have the biggest audiences are very seldom the top players, right? They're the ones who, they've just, as I would say, early in Puckus, they've developed the ear. They know intrinsically what, they have enough skill to be able to be good at the game, but they know what's fun and they know what's, and they know

what's compelling. And the way that they, when they do their sneak preview reveal season, when they talk about what cards are good and what cards are not, they talk about the cards that are, sorry, one of the most common criticisms they give to cards. Well, this card is fair. I'm not going to play it.

Right. And so much of exceptions-based games, which are the type of games you and I make most of it's about, even I try, I strive still today to make cards that even if they are fair to feel on. Yes. Well, that's actually the best. That's the secret.

Right. The more you can make it feel like, oh, when somebody sees a card, their eyes bug out and it feels like such a big deal when they play and feels so impactful. But in fact, there's a balance underneath it all. That's the, that's the dream in my mind. Or you can kind of get that emotional high without upending the system. Right. And unfortunately, most of that balance comes from counterweight, right? It comes from meta-game counterweight. And there's there are players who don't accept that. And those are the players who will write the fore. your review. Yes, they will. I'm so confident we could spend many, many more hours doing this. I've already overrun. I've already overrun the time I promised I would cut us off. So I'm going to, I want to bring this one to a close with a for sure promise of let's do another one post our upcoming yet to be created collaboration. I dig it. Sounds like a deal. In the meantime, for those that want to find more of your awesome stuff, whether that be on the webs or the games,

where should they go? Oh, man, I am so bad at this. So I technically have a website that I haven't updated for three years. Eric Mlang.com. You can find some stuff in there. I'm most active on Twitter. I'm, what is my Twitter?

Eric underscore Lang, if I'm not mistaken? That's me. I'm very active on Twitter. Just a warning, it is a personal, it is a personal, not a corporate account. I'm 100% unfiltered on that account. So I also talk about politics and social issues and stuff like that. But I do try to center it on games. I do web content sometimes for, for Come On.

If you go to our website, a lot of developer articles from my games were written by me. Other than that, I'm mostly most of the grindstone. Yeah, well, it's great to see you always creating awesome new things and facing those scary challenges. I, you really have been, you know, one of the designers I've admired most over the years and love all of your work. It's super rare for me that I will play games that I'm not working on just for fun and yours come to the table probably more often than any other designer, not counting, you know, magic and Richard. and so that's it's very high praise and I think you're you're awesome. Wow. I really appreciate the time.

That's humbling, dude. Thank you. All right, man. That's it. We're going to call it a wrap. Thank you so much for being here, buddy. Thanks, Justin. Talk to you next time.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that episode. But before you go, I just want to make one little plug here for Ascension Tactics. If you're listening to this, the Ascension Tactics Kickstarter is launching on July 7th. You can right now go to stoneblade.com forward slash tactics to get a direct update. You can sign up for our email list, get behind the scenes information, and follow the Kickstarter to be able to get notified the moment we launch. Or if you're listening to this a little late and we've already launched, you can go straight to Kickstarter. Find the game, support it, back it, check out all the cool stuff.

I've tried to apply all the lessons I've learned from this podcast and all that I've done over a decade of making ascension and the decade before that of working on games to make the coolest most awesome. that I can. I really put all my heart and soul into it, just like I do with this podcast and everything I try to do for you guys. So if you can go check it out, follow us on Kickstarter, back the project, or share it. It would mean a lot. You will really enjoy that project as much as I enjoyed making it. So thank you guys again. 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. Listen to reviews and shares with 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 ever find books or something.