Think Like A Game Designer - James Ernest — Mastering Game Design, Navigating Bias Randomness, and Unconventional Pathways in the World of Gaming (#4)

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

James Ernest is a man of many talents. He’s a screenwriter, poker player, juggler and game designer. He’s worked with Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, and even developed the game _Tak_ with legendary fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss. In this podcast, James talks about how he and his company, Cheapass Games, work to designs new games, develop rulesets, and manage the expectations of players. This episode is a treasure trove of game design knowledge. Check it out! 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 podcast, I have a conversation with James Ernest. James is probably best known as the founder of Cheapass Games, creating amazing games like Kill Doctor Lucky, Unexplode, cow, the big idea, and more. Honestly, these are games that I grew up on in my college fraternity. We would play these games nonstop. And so it was a real pleasure to finally get to talk to James and dig more into the process for creating them all. He's also a juggler, a filmmaker, a writer, a gambler, and more. James has a wicked sense of humor and has wide-ranging interests.

And we touch on those all throughout the episode. In this episode, we talk about James' start in the game industry, the origins of cheap-ass games, the value of rejection and the joy of self-publishing. We talk about how to get access to James's games for free and why you should give your own games away for free. We talk about which Vegas gambling games are breakable and how to think about designing gambling games and more. James is a lot of fun to talk to.

He has a really interesting perspective and his varied background really shows in this podcast. So I think you're going to learn a lot and be very entertained by my conversation with James Ernest. Hello and welcome. I am here with James Ernest. James, it's great to have you here. Good to be here. Thank you.

I, you know, I'm very excited. You know, I was playing your games throughout most of my college years. It was actually the go-to. We just had a pile of cheap-ass games that we would bust out on a regular basis. That's great. And so it's, it's, I have tons of questions to ask

that are on my personal interest list and around the games. But for people that, that don't know you, you know, I've talked a little bit about your accomplishments, but really curious, how you got started in game design, what drew you to this? How did you kind of become James Ernest?

Well, I have a background in entertainment and a background in math, and those sort of meld together into a game design job, I guess. The first formal game design that I ever did was in high school when I wanted to write a chess-style game that was kind of the heart of a fantasy novel. And I did the game.

I never did the book. But that sort of taught me how to, like I said, formally design a game. We had playtest sessions and lots of revisions and notes and a pretty decent game came out of it for what it was. And I was kind of an amateur until I ran into the people at Wizards of the Coast and got involved with them right when magic was coming out and saw that I might have a job. So this, I want to dig into that a little bit more. So the high school, you just built a game just because you love, you love this idea of this book and this world and you wanted to bring it to life. And you just, you didn't have, you just figured that on your own and just started iterated and built that. Well, and I had friends who were playing D&D and we were kit bashing miniatures rules.

And, you know, we were, we were, I was in gaming at the time, sort of. And of course, I grew up playing family games and hobby games and all kinds of. stuff. So gaming is not unfamiliar to me. And how did you get connected with the Wizards of the Coast folks? My wife was working there. She was employee number seven or nine or something like that. And it was... Pure nepotism then. Yeah, I guess. You could look at it that way. I volunteered at the beginning because I was a technical

writer as well. And the alpha rulebook for magic was just unreadable. And basically, that was the first thing I offered to do for these guys was sit down and rewrite that rulebook. Okay. So actually, this does get into a key principle that I would love to highlight because that I've heard this again and again and the same thing was true for me and most people that, you know, this sort of volunteering and just, you know, doing work for free is one of the best ways to get into the industry. And so.

Yeah, it really is. I was just rereading something and I can't remember how I phrased it, which is too bad. But like you don't really break into this industry. you sort of, you sort of sneak into it. Like, you get volunteer work. I know a lot of people to, you know, write articles for magazines or for RPG supplements or whatever. They just sort of like get to know the people and get to know the industry from doing

volunteer work. The first volunteer work that I did for Wizards, aside from writing, was I managed the content on the mailing list, MTGL. I cut the noise that was on that very busy list down to about 10% for a digest. And, you know, I was doing that for free and for free product and not just not really being employed or anything and certainly not designing games for them, but that was how I got to know them. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, this ties into the, you know, question I ask a lot, which is, you know, what advice do you give to somebody that's, you know, just getting started, right? A lot of people that grew up on your games or that are, you know, are sort of really excited about it, you know, that volunteering is, I know, a huge piece. Are there other things you'd say to somebody in today's world? Yeah, I mean, it's all just sort of a part of getting to know the people in the industry that you want to be a part of.

This is not an insular industry. It doesn't have any money, but it has lots of friends. And so that's how you get into it, as you get to know the people. And I don't think there is any one way. And I don't think that my story is at all relevant because things keep changing. I broke into this business 25 years ago. So, like, I don't know how I would. do it today except to get to know people. I think people who only participate in entertainment

as a consumer don't really get how it's made. So you could learn a lot more by volunteering. I mean, it's not just about breaking in. It's about learning all the things you don't know that you don't know. Right. And you mentioned you had a background in entertainment in addition to technical writing. Can you dig in a little bit on that? Yeah, I was a stand-up comic and a professional juggler for a long time. I was juggling when I was in high school and sort of made it into a semi-career after college and just, you know, I was also a writer and just entertaining and telling jokes and telling stories and speaking in public and all these things are things I like to do. Yeah, so this is now quite quite the assortment of a very non-traditional career.

years. What do you think it is about you that kind of drew you to these things? Or is it something that's just kind of been always the way for you? I don't know. I'm always looking for the back door, I guess. I'm looking for a way that I can do something unusual that gets me paid. But that doesn't kind of subscribe to the normal 9 to 5 plan. And I've had those jobs and I really just deeply hated those jobs. Like when I was, in college, I was working at a shopping mall in St. Louis over the summer. And I was both working at a t-shirt shop where I was getting $5 an hour to fold and sell t-shirts and juggling on the street, you know, in the mall where if I made only $5 in an hour, I would feel like an idiot. And so all the time that I'm working in the shop, I'm like, I could be making so much more not in the shop. It was just really frustrating and weird.

Right. Yeah. I had a brief foray into the food service industry in high school that forever convinced me I'd never want a job like that. Right. And I took those food service jobs too. Like because I was a juggler, you want to be able to leave your schedule open. And so you're taking jobs where you can always take a day off if you need to and your schedule's really flexible. and one of the worst things about being an entertainer is that you're always applying for a job.

Like the process that people like hate of filling out a resume and going on a job interview and like getting a job, entertainers do that like three or four times a week. Like it's not a thing you do once. You're doing it constantly. You're always in a state of promoting yourself. And, you know, I was printing brochures with illustrations of myself juggling that I drew myself. And just like the whole package of promoting. that business was part of what kind of got me into self-publishing. I learned all about small press

printing and I learned all about, you know, production and going to Kinko's and making 25 brochures or 300 copies of a book. And that that knowledge was also pretty useful when I started publishing my own stuff. Yeah. So this is, this is another great thing to dig into because there's, there's very few of us that are, you know, kind of game designers and then decide that, you know, we're not just going to do the fun part and the work that comes with building that. We're also going to go into, you know, publishing and going through production hassles and fulfillment and all of the marketing and everything. So you feel like your your kind of background in juggling and having to go through that, that prepared you for it? And what made you kind of make that leap?

It did. I mean, I also published a juggling book. So I had specifically, I had publishing experience. I also worked in the comics industry a little bit. And it's just, I just sort of picked a little bit out of lots of different disciplines. And I think the reason that I started cheap-ass games to publish my own. own stuff was that I was inventing games at a far faster clip than I could possibly sell them. And having worked at Wizards for a while, I sort of saw how long it took even well-respected designers to pitch and sell and produce a game. I saw a game kicked around at Wizards for three or four years while I was there and finally never came out. It wound up going back to the designer.

And I was just like, wow, I don't want to be that guy. I do want to be that guy. But I don't want to be in the position of trying desperately to get one game through a four-year rejection process when I have like 12 games right now that I want to sell. So I started self-publishing out of necessity, really, because I figured nobody knew who I was. And I had a lot of product that I wanted to take to market. And it was kind of an experiment to see which ones were any good. But I would never know that if they didn't get published.

And so, am I correct that killed Dr. Lockhe? first game that you guys? Yeah, it's a cheap-ass game 0-01. It's got a new stock code now, but that was the first game we did. When I invented the idea of cheap-ass games, I had about six months of prep work before we did our first launch, and we

had about a half dozen games in the hopper. Kill Doctor Lucky was clearly the best among those games, so it was the first one that we printed. And that one was a runaway success, and the very concept of cheap-ass games is really, was awesome to me.

Can you describe it briefly? Your brand was really, really amazing. Oh, yeah. I mean, so at the time, Magic the Gathering was only a few years old, and that and many other products were reacting to the sort of first wave of digital pre-press and looking better and better, but also costing more and more. So as a reaction to the cost of a deck of magic cards, I always use lunch money as an example.

But that game shipped as a two-deck card game for like, 20 bucks in 1994 and that's like way too much for a card game so there was this gulf under ten dollars that nobody was occupying and that was part of the puzzle the other part of the puzzle was I didn't have a lot of money so I was producing stuff on my laser printer and doing stuff in black and white and you know back when it was actually a meaningful savings to do stuff in one color instead of four colors doing short runs at local printers and so on so I was making really cheap games because I couldn't afford to print really expensive games And cheap-ass games, the brand of it is, you know, I'm going to sell you only the bits you need.

You're going to steal the dice and the play money and all the other generic components out of other games that you already have. And therefore, I can sell you the value for a lot less money by just giving you the good bits. Yeah. One of the things I love about this is, and it's something, you know, I hear when a lot of people come and talk to me about wanting to get in the game industry or wanting to publish their own games. And there, you know, there's all these sort of barriers. I don't have the money. Nobody knows who I am. I can't get the, you know, yada, yada, yada. And here you, you know, were unknown in the industry at the time. You didn't have a lot of money to do stuff. And you flip that and turn that weakness into a strength. And it becomes a

big part of that brand. And I remember when I first learned about it, you know, that's what got my attention. Oh, hey, great. You're, you know, you're saving me money. And all I care about is playing a good game in the first place. So I think that's just a really great takeaway for people. And it's something that. Yeah, I think, I think it's an appeal to the college student who doesn't have a lot to spend on stuff. And, and I wish that I could still do them. I wish I could still make black and white games, but I don't know that the market can support them right now, A, B, it's not much cheaper to make them in that format than to make them in full color anymore, because printing has changed and small printers have gone out of business. And C, like,

I've kind of split my business in two now. We do stuff on Kickstarter that looks really nice, but I also give away a bunch of the old stuff completely for free. So now you can print cheap-ass games at home for nothing, which is better than cheap. And that- Free is better than cheap. Free is better than cheap.

I mean, it is and it's not, right? Because you still have to do the make work of putting them together. But I try to post games that are fairly easy to print and play. But I can't, like, justify putting a $5 game through the distribution chance, channel like I used to could because the distribution of channel is so packed with, you know, $7 games that were full color and printed in China and just came off Kickstarter at a loss. I can't compete like that anymore, but I can certainly give stuff away because it's much

easier to print something at home now than it was 20 years ago. So, well, first of all, where for people listening that haven't had a chance to play these awesome games, where can they now download them for free or get them for free? Cheapass.com is where you go for that good stuff. Okay. So that's exciting and, you know, having played these games for cheap in the past and enjoyed it. I highly recommend picking some of them up for free. Yeah, there's some super good stuff up there. And there's a lot of, there's a whole category of games that are just rules that I would feel embarrassed to try to put them in a box anyway. But there's a, there's a PDF of it's called the poker suite, but it's actually a bunch of, mostly non-poker games that you play with a poker deck.

But it's like I said, just rules. So what, and what, now what goes through your head when you're, you're, you're, publishing quote unquote these things with you know all right well this is stuff that's free you're putting an effort you're putting it out there you're not making any money off of it why why do you do it well so a a lot of that stuff i had previously published so i i had made money and so it's not much more effort to convert it to a free version um in some cases uh they were like free games that where ads and magazines or things like that, really low impact to begin with.

But also, you know, we do accept donations on that site. Like if you download something that you like and you want to kick us a dollar, like we won't say no. It's not 100% zero profit, but it's not our main business. It's just kind of like a great way to demo the brand.

Like if you want to try some games by me, here's a whole bunch that you can get for free. I think this ties in similarly to the, idea of sort of working for companies in the industry for free and getting your, you know, learning and getting your name out there. I think the same thing applies even when you're, you know, on your own that, you know, providing value to, you know, fans and customers and people out there, I have at least found when we're able to do that, it comes back around, you know, one way or another. There's, there's. And I think for me, it is related in one other way,

in a similar way to like working for industry, volunteering for industry people, because you learn more, every game that I produced, I learn more about how to do game production. I learn more about layout and design and graphics and font choices and what specific styles I like.

So all of that, bringing all that to a printable state is much more educational than just sort of coming up with what a typical designer would hand over to a publisher and say, okay, here, make it look good. like I have to do the second part too. Right. Yeah. There's enormous value there.

So this ties into another sort of bigger topic to talk about. What does your game design process look like? You've been doing this now for a very long time. You go through quite a different variety of games. What is it? Is there a sort of process you go through typically? Does it change from game to game? How does walk me through what you're creation?

Well, it's certainly different from game to game. And at the moment, I think I'm sort of on a, a product treadmill. So like I always complain that I would rather be designing games, but right now I'm designing products. And what that means is that I'm informed by a product line and a release schedule and, okay, we need something to kickstart next fall and what's that going to be. And so the first part of the process is where does this fit in the schedule?

What are we doing for the spring of 2018? And if we can't manage that because it's a license thing, then what other thing are we going to do instead? that's the start of the process for designing a game product. But I mean, what I prefer to do, what I would love to do in designing games is just start with an idea. The majority of the cheap-ass catalog starts with a joke. It starts with an idea, a story about zombies who only had one brain to pass around, or kill Dr. Lucky, which explains what it is in the title.

Or, you know, that's the best place for me to start because I feel like that's also. where the players are going to start in understanding what he's doing. So the, you know, sort of germination idea slash, you know, joke one-liner or whatever, core concept, and then kind of build out from there. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. I feel like, I feel like stories are so much harder than game mechanics that if I don't have a good story, it's going to be hard to get one later. And I have this argument all the time with other kinds of designers and other people in the industry. And they, they all sort of fall on a spectrum.

between loving to start with story and loving to start with the game mechanic. I typically love to start with story, but like I said, only because I think that that part is really hard, and the game mechanic part is really easy. That's fascinating. Yeah, I'm very much a mechanics forward kind of thinker. Like when I have a license to work on or something that I know I want to build towards,

then it's starting with the story. But almost always I start with the mechanic that I want to see work and then fit a story kind of around that. And then they inform each other, of course. the process goes along. But I have lost, you know, many months and designs where I've got a great mechanic, but I don't know what to do with it from a theme and story perspective. So I've, I know, and that's really frustrating. Like my personal version of that is that I've been in meetings, you know, when I worked at Microsoft and I was in charge of a very big team, you know, and there's two

meetings that you can have. And one of them is, here's our story. What can this game be? How do the game, how does the game work? And the whiteboard fills with good ideas. And you get to pick your favorite ones. And the other one is, okay, we have a game mechanic. What is this about? And it's, there's nothing. Like, it's always a shitty compromise, right? So, so that's, that's my personal experience sort of informing how I like to go and other people have probably had very different experiences and maybe even the reverse of that. But I just, um, uh, it's borne out fairly, uh, similarly every time for me. Okay. So you've got two, tracks, one where you know you've got a kind of line and a deadline and thing to build, which I'm

also quite familiar with when you've, uh, and then you have another one where like, all right, I've got an inspiration and an idea and then I'm going to sort of build around that story. And then what, what is what does the process look like from there? Um, again, it's, it's just different every time, but typically I will try to sketch out a set of rules that's, that's well formed enough that I can build some components to make a, uh, a play test with, but it's expected that that first play test is going to, all the rules are going to get thrown away. So what I have, I tell people about the fish cook story because I think this is kind of an interesting example of process. So let's talk about how fish cook was invented.

Fish cook is now a, it's an experimental black and white box game that we did through cheap ass a few years ago. I think I'm going to upgrade it to color. But the idea is you're just all chefs and you're all cooking and you're trying to make the best cooking. It's a simple economic game. But it started with an idea. I was sitting at my desk playing poker actually and I was playing poker online and killing time because I'm only playing one table and making notes about a game that I have always wanted to do that is for about the last six years, a game called run of the mill. It's a joke about German games. And so it's about running a mill and there's like six different kinds of wheat and it's as boring and unrelated to the story as possible. But I said, okay, what is, let's let's write

down rules for run of the mill. And I thought, well, what if it's a, a textile mill instead of a grain mill and what if instead of millers wear tailors and what if we're actually collecting patterns and material and putting them together into outfits that we're sewing and selling. And that conversation in my head sort of turned into, well, it feels more like cooking and it feels more like recipes and ingredients. And so let's do that. And there's a market for recipes and there's a market for ingredients. And that this is all, I call it a conversation, but it's a sketch. It's on a single sheet of paper that I'm just doodling on while I'm doing something else.

From that idea, I said, okay, let's make it fish cook. I called it fish cook because I didn't want to be cooking lots of things. things. I wanted to be very specific about what was in the two marketplaces. So there's six different kinds of fish and there's six different kinds of other ingredients. I made the bare bones of that game. I made a, I drew a marketplace on a big sheet of paper. I drew, I printed some cards that were ingredient, you know, recipe cards. I need these ingredients to make this recipe. And I knew a little bit about how I was going to do all these pieces of the game, but I had no idea what the overall structure was. And again, because usually the first structure is garbage and you wind up

rewriting it anyway, this time I just went to the table with nothing. I went to the table with the ingredient cards in the marketplaces. And I got three playtesters in the game with me and said, okay, what do you expect from what I just told you? How does this game start? How do we play? How does it end? And we kind of crafted that core structure together by playing with the components that I had made. I knew how the recipes were supposed to work, but I didn't know if we were going to play in days or in phases or anything like that.

The other thing about Fish Cook is that it has a underlying theme, which is, as an artist, it is often difficult to decide between creating something new and stealing something that you already know. This is a thing that happens in game design, but it happens in all art forms.

You know, there's highly derivative works, and sometimes they're very successful and there's highly original works, and sometimes they're highly unsuccessful. You know, you want the original thing that succeeds because that is the coolest thing there is, and it gets copied and all that. But usually when you experiment, you fail. So in fish cook, you can choose either to cook a recipe you know or to steal it from somebody else. And anything that anybody has cooked is now up for grabs and someone else can cook it

and maybe even steal it into their menu because they did it better. That's sort of telling that story of being an artist and making the decision between creating and stealing. And the fish cook backstory is another reflection of that. Like the story of the game is completely fabricated, but it was originally invented in France, in the 20s, and that gave rise to a whole genre of cooking games in the 30s and 40s, and then kind of faded out,

and there's a Japanese company that did a just straight rip-off of the original that we have now got the U.S. rights to the Japanese version. All of that is completely fabricated, but it still retells that story of, of creativity and stealing. That's fascinating. There's a, there's a,

there's a bunch of different things I want to unpack there. I think, yeah, the, the principle of, you know, creativity is in,

to some degree theft, you know, no matter what you're doing, uh, and there's the degrees, you know, that's just, you can't invent a new language

every time you make a new game. So there's, there's always going to be some layer upon which it's, it's similar, but, but everyone has a different threshold for comfort with, with exact similarity, right? Right, right.

And, and then, and there's, so there's two sides to that, right? There's the, if it's, you know, too similar or something else, then, you know, maybe you don't feel good about yourself or you don't fill a new niche and so you're not going to succeed in that sense. But if you're too different, you're almost certainly going to fail. Like, you, you have to people learn games and attach to the games because they build on the things that they already know. Well, and people play games in specific genres because they don't have to learn so much

every time they sit down. If someone says, I like deck building games, what they're saying is I like sitting down and already knowing 75% of the rules because the first swath of deck building games are all pretty much the same game. And that's actually convenient. You don't have to learn how to watch a new movie,

but you have to learn how to play a new game. And the more you can sort of put that behind you, the easier it is to get into a new one. So I get that from a consumer's perspective. But as a creator, I have been through the ringer on the creativity, argument and I'm kind of sick of it. So I like to do stuff that is new as far as I'm concerned.

Right, right. And then the other pieces I wanted to dig into were, you know, so you mentioned the, obviously the first set of rules is always terrible. And the, you know, initial designs are junk even for the best of us. And that's part of the process. and that's something I know a lot of people have trouble with when they're starting out. And the more comfortable I am with failing, the better my end product is going to be as a rule. And so sort of building that in, I think is great into the process.

I've never done the, I'm just going to come up with the rule. I'm going to let my playtesters come up with the first set of rules before. One of the things I like about that is, you know, one of the principles of good, design is that whatever the default thing that your players feel like they should do should be the thing that they're allowed to do, right? And this sort of builds that in in a way that's pretty awesome. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I always want to ask someone what their expectation is given the story.

Because I can't impose too much of that. And I'm never going to guess correctly. So there are times when having a brainstorm is really important, you know, at the very beginning and all through the process. But yeah, the fish cook story is fairly unusual. I still think I'm going to the table with a playable game in most cases. But I guess, like, attack is another example of a game that I thought about for a very long time before I got started on it.

And that's just the nature of licensing, because I needed Pat Rothfuss to be on board with the idea before I could get it. started but I had thought about the game ever since I read about it and what would that be and how would that be different from the games I know and so on but I sat down with my friend Beau who was just staying with me that weekend you know the on the day that I started working on that game and I said well here's some pieces you know what do they do and I that's an exaggeration I knew a little bit about what they did but but you know I didn't get too far into that before playing it with a lot of my friends and getting input from everyone I could pull in

to just get a sense of what their expectations were and how they reacted to the kinds of rules I was proposing. Can you give a little bit of more background on that for people who may not be familiar? Yeah, TAC is an abstract game that's described in a fantasy book. Patrick Rothfuss is the author of the King Killer Chronicle, which is the Wise Man's Fear and the Name of the Wind and the unpublished third book. And in the second book, the main character runs into a courtly abstract game that is kind of like chess and kind of like go.

And I think people who read the book kind of assume that it is go. It's not really described in terms of rules, but just in terms of like, this is a really cool game. And it's really hard to play correctly. And it's really simple and elegant and, you know, all the things that describe a good classic abstract game.

And I got Patrick Rathas to involve me in creating that game and actually writing it after the book came out. but writing a game that sort of satisfied the description in the book. So it's a two-player classic abstract with pieces that stack up. And the sort of core move in the game is to take a stack of pieces and string it out in a line and cover up other pieces as you go to change the way the board is laid out. Cool. So that's interesting for someone that starts with kind of a story building an abstract game,

but that's nested inside of a story. Right. So I'm a marketer and I have to publish my own games too. And so typically when I write an abstract, I assume I have no way to sell it. But in this case, I knew that because Patrick has fans who like his stuff that I would have an audience for this game. And it was a really unique chance to write an abstract that will actually get some attention. Even before we launched the Kickstarter for that project, we had put the game out into open beta about six months prior. And the fan base is so robust. bus that there was already a online game. You could play the game online against multiple AIs before I launched my Kickstarter. That's just never happened to me before. And pretty shortly after we closed that Kickstarter, you know, there's an independent USDA TAC Association that started up and was running tournaments and just like, it's a big thing.

And it was a great opportunity for me to pour. a lot of affection into an abstract, which I don't typically get to do. But it's still based in the story. It's like it has standing stones in it because there are standing stones in the world. You know, they're like Stonehenge. There are these standing and sometimes fallen over rocks in the countryside that are ancient and people don't really know what they were there for. And that's a great story element for the game. And that's a, that's a mechanic in the game. The idea of building a road, which was something Patrick asked for, is part of the story. as much as it is part of the mechanic and so on.

And we can't do everything. We can't cram everything in the book into the game, obviously, but it just needs to feel like it's part of the world. I want to dig into something else you mentioned earlier. So you said when you're kind of doodling the idea for the fish cook game, you had it written on a piece of paper and that you would, you know, while doing something else. And then for prototype, you actually like drew out,

I want to dig into the prototype, You drew out a map or a board of some kind and then printed cards through, like, talk me through a little bit about your prototyping process and what that looks like. I am trying to remember if the first fish cook cards had anything printed or if they were all drawn. I think they might have all been drawn. But typically if I'm doing a board game, I've got a big sheet of newsprint. And I'll just sketch that board out on that newsprint. that's just easier than trying to do it in Photoshop.

In fact, I just did an expansion for Kill Doctor Lucky. Dr. Lucky's mansion that is haunted, and it's a side view of a haunted house. And so unlike the top-down maps that we usually use for Kill Doctor Lucky, this one's a side view, and it's kind of like, I'm not sure if I can make this work, but the players are all ghosts. And so I said, well, we don't really need doorways anymore.

We can just move through those ceilings and the floors and the walls. So I sketched it on a 8.5 by 11 sheet of cardstock. It's sitting right here in front of me. And that is actually what I handed to the artist, Cheyenne, to get the final art done. But I played all the playtest games of this map on this hand-drawn piece. It's just easier. It's like I probably drew this in a couple of drafts over the course of about an hour. And if I had tried to do this in Photoshop, it would have been a colossal,

waste of an entire day. Yeah, yeah, cheap, quick, whatever the fastest way to get your prototype done and the bare minimum needed to be usable has always been my rule of thumb. Yeah, and it's really hard, even for someone who's done it for a long time, not to become attached to a thing that you've worked on,

even if it's terrible. So if you can fail faster, if you can draw your map quickly, and in pencil and fix it as you go and not worry that it took you several days in Photoshop to make these pretty cards or whatever. Like that investment is bypassed and you are much more willing to just chuck it and make it better. Right. Yeah. Both the factor of time investment in makes you less willing to discard it and, you know, the prettier and nicer something looks, the less willing you are to sort of mark it up and change it and mess with it. Right. And you're just like, well, I sat and thought

about this for days, guys, and you're just seeing it for the first time. So obviously, your opinion is wrong. You know, that's just a total wrong mindset to be in. Yep. Yep. So I know, of course, this is different from game to game, but do you have a sort of typical timeline where you'll be, you know, moving something from kind of idea to first prototype or iterating through a second prototype or, you know, what your timeline is to completion? Like, do you have kind of benchmarks for that? No. Because it's always so, different. So like, my, my record for producing a game is four hours, so I can't really beat that. And the record on the other end is like eight years. And everything sort of happens in flashes.

Like, you know, you, you, it's like I feel like sort of all my projects have narcolepsy, because, like, I'll work on them really intensely, but then I'll get distracted by something else, and they'll have to sit for two months, and then I'll come back to them and forget half of what I was doing. So I don't really know like if I was just doing one game from start to finish how long it would take me probably a month or two But there's times when like in the winter when I go to very few cons and I get very little outside play testing that I just have to like let stuff sit and wait till the summer and take it to shows and play it then So so everything overlaps In a way that makes it really hard to guess how long every project really took Yeah, I have a I have a similar experience as far as a lot of my designs you know the ones that are

you know on a schedule and and you know part of a line are are pretty are pretty standardized now but the you know with everything else and all new projects it's you know they'll get they'll shell for months at a time and one of the things I always tell people is like write your stuff down write your rules down write the things that you're thinking about down because yeah when you come back two three six months later it's like oh yeah what was I doing here what what were these cards for yeah I'm I'm pretty good about that when like when I'm building a Photoshop file I will like name every layer and tell me myself what its purpose is because I know that two years from now I'm going to have to open that up and make some change to it but I'm less good

about that with games I'm getting better about it but like yeah write down not just like what you're doing but but why as much as you can't this is the first year that I've actually tried really did diligently to keep all of my playtest notes in the same book and that's been really useful because my house is just littered with notebooks all of different ages and and all of with lots of game ideas and playtest notes and whatever in them but just impossible to sort through it's nice to have it all in one book yeah i've i've had i had a similar problem and actually a couple years ago i shifted to just doing things um digitally i use a an app called workflowy which is basically just a lot of nested lists and i anytime i do notes on a

play test by hand, I will transfer them over into this, you know, kind of list, nested lists. I've been doing digital note taking since the era of the Palm Pilot, and it's never clicked for me because I still, I have too many gadgets. Like I can't, and you're, you're probably talking about a thing that keeps everything together, but I've even tried those. And they get old eventually. And then all the stuff that I had in Evernote is like, okay, where is that now? And so, yeah, I, I'm still a failure at keeping all my notes. And in fact, I wish that I had six months of free time where I could just bulldoze my basement

and put all of those things in the same place and at least know where they are. Yep. No, I still have a closet full of old notebooks that I've been, you know, it's always on my list. I'm going to go through all of these old lists, but never quite make it. And sometimes when you go through one of those, you're like, I don't remember writing this down.

Like there's whole game ideas in those things that are just like, wow, I want to make this, but I forgot all about it. Yeah, like I think I did make this, but then didn't. And I have no idea what's going. on right now. Right. Yeah, I had that too. I have a box of like old playtest decks and a couple of them, I look at the decks and I'm like, I don't even know what this is for. Yeah, that's my favorite

is I find the, I find the prototypes and none of the notes. And I'm like, okay, I kind of remember these were in different zones and these had certain attention. This happened to me on Deadwood, actually. Deadwood Studios used to be just called Deadwood. And in fact, I made a game that used the same components. We didn't like it very much. I lost the rules. And then about six months later, we got the game out and said,

well, I forgot how this works, but here are the pieces. Let's try again. And that was kind of like an early example of, you know, the first game is terrible. So just make the components and try again. Because the second one,

we like quite a bit. Yeah, I actually have had a, I've done a fun process with my team. At Stoneblade, we take, I have like a, just I collect random cool little bits. and pieces if I see something in a, whether it's in a game or in a,

and I don't like the game that much, but the pieces are cool or I find it in some, you know, random, random notebook or origami things or whatever. And just kind of have them all collected. And so we, we've done this twice now where we have a day of like, all right, we break into teams and everybody takes a component of random stuff and, you know, makes games.

And then we kind of play each other's games and, you know, do cool of fun iterations. And it's a fun, it's a fun process can inspire a lot of different stuff, just playing with toys. Yeah, that's fun. I did an impromptu exercise once. Nobody said the rules, but we just did it, and it worked, and I've never managed to make this work again. But, like, someone said a sentence, and then someone reset that sentence with one word changed,

and we kept doing that until we got a thing that we liked, and then we said, let's make a game out of that. And it wound up being like, you're all dinosaurs and you're eating clowns. We decided it was called clownivore, and the tagline was, does this taste funny to you? It was a video game where you're the T-Rex and you're like stampeding through a circus grounds or a carnival or whatever and you're just like eating everybody but you really want the clowns. That is awesome. They make a little honking noise when you eat them. Of course they do. If you can find one of the cars, it's got like 11 of them inside, you get a really bonus.

Oh, exactly, right? You just keep hitting the car and then the clown comes out. Yep, yep, perfect. But that started as a sentence about the weather or something. And we just passed it around the room like a football, like changing a word until we got a thing we liked. Oh, that's awesome. So this ties in.

Another thing that you've done is you've worked in both the physical and the digital gaming worlds. And they, you know, are very different. And I want to kind of get your sense of like, how do you feel about, you know, what lessons sort of cross over, what things did you find were different? How did you like working in that space and the digital sign? I was really frustrated by the digital space. I came out of a tabletop world where I can instantly prototype something, and I'm not a coder.

So I was doing game design work, but in terms of being able to build testable prototypes, I kind of had my hands tied, and that was frustrating. I think the best work that I did when I was over there was stuff that I could prototype by hand. I did card games, and I did pub games, and I did stuff that the game mechanics could be checked before a lot of money was poured into the code. But the really frustrating thing about that business is just, it's just how slow things move and how often things get canceled. You can work on a project for two years and just decide that it's done,

throw it away and start on a new thing. And that's, I just couldn't, I couldn't handle that. So the, you know, both the kind of huge iteration costs and testing costs and then it sounds like you're a little bit like me also in being something of a control freak and not having the ability to put your own stuff out and ensure that it gets out as a big driver. I mean, I guess that's true, but it's not just a control freak. It's that I know that because the first rules are terrible, like if you spend two months building a prototype of the first rules, you just wasted two months because they're terrible.

Like, how quickly can you get a thing that you can test and change it to the point that it's good? There's there's also there's there's internal politics in all these places there's people who don't know what they're doing telling people who do how to do the thing they're doing and and that's that that's more of a control freak issue I suppose but like here's a great example of my time at Microsoft when I got there they handed me a dossier full of half done game ideas and let's develop some of these and I said great and I focused on one of them that was a Pachinko game you know a level by level shooting a ball into pegs and watching it bounce around and getting points. kind of a game, and I developed it in its particular direction and pitched it. And if you read the pitch document over and over, it says, don't worry, this will be fun. Because that was the pushback I was getting from everyone. Like they didn't feel like they would have enough control over the ball to make it a game. It was just an activity and it wouldn't be fun and blah, blah, blah. So the the pitch doc is like, no, no, trust me, watching the ball bounce around. That's super fun. But I only had my own, you know, imagination to tell me that. I didn't have any. Oh, and then suddenly Peggle came out.

And then everyone knew what they were looking at. And they were like, oh, of course it's fun. Great. But we're not going to do it now because there's Peggle. Okay. Whatever. So this transitions pretty well into talking about gambling games. You've worked in this space. And actually, this is one of the things I got excited about when I first started talking to you on. on your podcast at Origins is sort of designing in the gambling space. Can you talk to me a little bit of how you got involved in that and what the work you've done there? Well, I grew up playing poker and license plate poker and all kinds of other gambling games with my family.

And so I get them. I enjoy gambling games, which I think a lot of game designers don't. But it's a really difficult challenge to construct an original gambling game, where the player really has to understand what he's supposed to do, how he's supposed to win, immediately, and still after 20 minutes or whatever, can still be having fun playing it. I've done, I did the fable two pub games for Microsoft,

and that was a small foray into designing original gambling games. And I have a game now that I'm sort of backdooring into the gaming industry. Like, it's fairly expensive to exhibit and get certified. and whatever, get the math done. And I've got a partner company who's helping develop it for a specific client who's actually paying for a lot of that stuff. And that is a, it's a poker variant that's really different from what's being spread on the floor, but it's still scored like poker.

So people can sit down and look at it and immediately know what they're doing. But I don't know. I'm probably not answering a question, but I'm just telling you what I've done in that space. Yeah, that's fine. So I can, one of the things that I find the space interesting as well. And I, you know, I don't play a lot of the gambling games because I can't escape the math on them when I'm at a casino. But I do enjoy, you know, playing poker.

And I enjoy playing these sort of gambling style games with friends, you know, LCR and silly things like that where it's like, you know, it's just a fun experience there. But you mentioned that you think those are sort of derided by by game designers in general. Is that just because They are exactly. And in fact, you can tell that there are real silos within gaming, especially between even computer gaming and casino gaming.

I went to GDC in San Francisco when I was still working at Microsoft and I was in a really big auditorium where the person behind the microphone said, wouldn't it be great if there was a theme park dedicated to games? I laughed and no one else did. And I didn't realize they weren't kidding. And I was like, okay, whatever. That's called Las Vegas.

There really is one. But you don't believe that because you don't think gambling is gaming. And like you say, it's hard to escape the math. It's hard to be a game designer and know that you're destined to lose and still enjoy the game. Unless you just think of it like, well, I can't escape the math of going to the movies either. I know I'm going to spend the money, but I'm being entertained by it. Right. I'm entertained by all of these games because I'm fascinated about why I'm being entertained.

bite these games. I'll play slot machines, especially the new slot machines. They're really intricate, really crazy. They're actually kind of hard to understand and break into. But they're very entertaining. They tell a really good story. And that's like, if you're going to design for that space, you kind of have to enjoy that and understand

why it's working. So maybe you can help me understand this stuff then, because I literally, I feel like I'm a relatively intelligent gamer and I sit down with those slot machines and I have no clue what's happening. Right. What's going on there? The modern slot machine is kind of like the gaming version of the penguin.

Millions of years ago, the penguins were kind of a tropical bird, and as their habitat slowly drifted south, they sort of drifted with it and became this really weird fish bird that lives all by itself in these really weird ways. And modern slot machines have gone through this evolutionary process

of making sense to the most recent generation, but that's it. Now, if you sit down cold, yeah, it's really hard to understand what's going on. basically the original slot machine was one wheel and if you hit a win spot then you won and if you hit a loose spot then you lost right and and you can see examples of these machines they're really cool they're of course they're they're 100 years old and they're intricate and they have all this great metal work on them and whatever but they're just big wheel of fortune machines where sometimes you win and sometimes you don't and that evolved into what you sort of understand as a slot machine which is three reels and now you're looking at the edges of the reels and now you have to line symbols up in order to win something and this affects the way the machines work because now high jackpots can be much more unlikely than they could be with just one wheel so as you're looking at these three wheels and you're looking at the symbols lineup first of all this is the great story of slot machines that you're

watching something happen and so when you see seven and then another seven and then you're waiting for the third when your mind is doing that auto complete that makes matching game so fun you're imagining a seven in that spot you're telling yourself the story about how close you were and if it's one off or if it doesn't happen or whatever, oh, I almost had three sevens. That's part of the story of the game and why you're still interested in it. But as you're looking at these three sevens, when you see the last one come in and it's just above the line,

you're like, well, what if there was another line that went through that spot? And that's where multi-line slots come from. First, there's just a diamond pattern that's got three lines in it. And then there's a different one with just three different lines across the middle. And then there's five lines with an X across the middle. And pretty soon, you've got all. the possible lines. Right.

150, 150 different patterns or whatever it is. And those multi-line, multi-way machines are even more popular today because the penny slots have resurged in popularity. It used to be a penny slot. You put a penny into it. And those things went away a long time ago. But now you have electronic money handling. Change doesn't come out of these machines anymore.

Tickets come out of these machines. and you'll put a $100 bill into a penny slot and be betting it like 500 pennies at a time. It's really a $5 slot, but it's a penny slot because the denominations of the payouts go down as far as single pennies. You can win a penny on a penny slot. You just can't bet a penny on a penny slot,

which is so crazy. But that means you're playing a game now where sometimes there's so many lines you can't tell where the lines are. A ways machine has every conceivable line, not exactly, but basically. So all you really want to do is just count symbols. You're counting symbols from the left to the right. So it reads like a book.

And so if you see a pretty pattern, but it's over on the right side of the machine, it probably doesn't pay you anything. And that can be very confusing if you're new to this, but you want to be usually reading from left to right. And sometimes symbols are wild for certain other symbols. And sometimes there's bonus games that are irrelevant. It doesn't matter where the symbols stop. And it's a whole bunch.

It's like pinball, right? At a certain point, you don't understand what a pinball machine is doing anyway. You just play it. And slots have definitely got to that point. Yeah, I feel like the, I mean, you raised a great point in sort of that, that story arc as being the core of what's exciting there, right? That build up of like what's happening first, second, third, you know, can I get these, you know, rare events to occur and modern slot machines have even more sort of rare bonus spin

and mini games and whatnot that can create these sort of low probability, high drama events that you can kind of dream about, tell stories about, and hope for. The fact that there's so many different symbols and the comprehension of those is so challenging is something I found as a barrier to entry that it surprises me why that is draw. That's compelling enough or valuable enough. You're right. And in fact, like the seven, seven story is disappearing. And now it's the bonus symbol story.

Like all you really care about is bonus symbols because you're going to bet 40 coins. something unintelligible is going to happen. You're going to get 13 coins back out of it. And you're like, whatever, great. All you're really waiting for now is that bonus event. So that's why it gives you the special noises. That's why it gives you a windup when something special is about to happen. Like now you're really just focused on those big events and you're letting a small one just kind of churn.

That's like, yeah, it's impossible to know, to follow it, to do all the, like, anticipation on every line like you used to. So now you just wait for the big events. So, you know, in designing these things, one of the things that always occurred to me, like obviously these casinos have gotten pretty good with their rewards point systems and using this to sort of encourage behavior and get you coming back and, you know, keep people hooked over periods of time. But to me, it always felt like slot machines were missing that sense of progress, that sense of being a persistent character.

Is that something you've looked into at all? Right. And there are a few slot machines that actually deliver that. and they work for gamers, but they're not actually worth keeping in for everybody else. I don't know if you play the Star Trek game or the Lord of the Rings game, but they have a server-based identity that you can log in, and it'll say, oh, you're actually level 17,

and that means you have all these other bonus games or whatever that you can play with. And the Star Trek game was the first one that I played, which unlocked whole different real sets, and those real sets really had different math models, and they were meaningfully different games. They weren't better, but they were different, and you kind of felt like you were really making progress if you leveled up to these games.

I sat down with a friend of mine who's also a game inventor and gamer and played these games with him and he was like, okay, this is the thing that's going to make me like slots because it gave you a sense of permanent progress. No matter how you're doing on the money side, you're always getting experience points and that's progress. And that, okay, that's awesome. I'm definitely going to check those out next time I'm in Vegas.

But what- can't, they're gone already. That's the thing. They weren't successful enough to be kept around. And once you sort of start retiring these big server-based identity games, you kind of retire all of them, because now nobody can log in anymore. They've been, the newest thing, the newest thing in Vegas right now, oh, my God, is another generation of small repeat jackpot games that actually display on the screen how close they are to hitting their jackpot. And like the two generations prior to this one, these games are susceptible to advantage play, which means they're also susceptible to griefing. Okay, well, so now this then ties into a tweet I saw from you that you apparently have been hassled by Caesar Security for being an advantage slot player. Yep. Isn't that great?

What's going on there? I was a card counter for several years and I never got hassled except one time when I wasn't really. even doing anything. But yeah, I actually had security bust me out of a Caesar's property. It wasn't Caesar's proper, but it's a big chain. For, well, they claimed it was for other stuff that everyone does, but it was actually for going in, sitting down at one of these advantage machines, playing off the jackpot and leaving again. And I think they had seen me do it a couple days in a row because I was just learning about these things. And here's what I was learning about them. A, you can beat them,

although not for a very large profit. B, there are teams of guys who have, like, cut up the strip and they're, like, mob guys. They're, like, handling these machines and diving in whenever anyone walks away from them to, like, check to see if the jackpot is big enough. And, like, and the casinos are now having to take countermeasures to get these guys to quit, you know, doing this

and running off their good customers. It's fascinating. I don't know why the casinos would ever spread a machine like this, why they would even offer this machine, but it's really popular and everyone's got it. And I didn't just read about this online. Like I actually went to these machines over the course of a week and witnessed the people who were literally doing this, who were literally like sweeping in and then playing off the jackpots and sweeping out again. Okay. So wait, let me, I just want to make sure I understand this. I know this is a podcast about game design, but maybe I got a new career ahead of me.

So I If you want to make 20 bucks an hour Being hassled by the security, then sure, go ahead So the this is a slot machine that's displaying like one of those progressive jackpots or is there something else? So I'll I'll the games we're talking about are Our two games from IGT one of them is the plants versus zombies Ancient Egypt machine and one of them is the Aladdin's fortune machine and And they both work slightly differently.

I want to go all the way back to a machine called Boom, I think, back in the 90s, because that was the simplest one to understand. Boom, every time you got a specific symbol on one of the wheels, would add a firecracker to a line of firecrackers that was collecting along the top of the machine. And when that firecracker line finally filled up, it would burn down and pay some amount, right? So you could sit over someone's shoulder. watch the firecrackers build up. And if they happened to leave right before it was full,

you could sit down, play a little bit, fill it up, take the extra pay, and then leave again, right? And griefing happens when you make them leave, when you light up a cigar or do something else annoying or do whatever it takes to get them off that machine at the point where you can sit down and win on it. Plans v. Zombies is a similar thing, except it's really annoying.

because that firecracker line is now a collection of brains. Every time you get a brain, the brain line fills up. But every time you take a spin, the brain line goes down a little bit. So your health bar is always filling, but it's also always falling. And it's a random walk with an upward drift, but it can also go all the way back down to zero. Frustrating as hell, but that's the way this particular one works. And when the brain line fills up, you get a bonus game. And the bonus games are all positive expectations, so you want to get that.

obviously. Aladdin is a little bit different. The Aladdin game has a feature on each of five reels. There's a feature where if Aladdin's lamp stops on that wheel, it fills up a four-stop jackpot, W-I-L-D, for that reel so that when the D is complete, that reel is wild for the next four spins. So you can look at a machine like this,

and count the number of letters, how filled up each one of those reels is, how likely it is to become wild in the next few spins, and ascertain from that, whether it's a player-positive setup. Fascinating. I think the, you know, I've always wanted to kind of design a gambling game

and build something that would go into one of these casinos. I think it's just an interesting puzzle. and, you know, both in the terms of building something simple enough people understand, but in these cases it seems like actually these odd forms of complexity that I presume are driving things the way they want them to, but have a lot of unintended consequences. Well, I mean, I'll say two more things about the subject. One of them is nothing I've said so far is necessarily true. That is to say, the machine might actually be designed in such a way that your odds of hitting those jackpots,

diminish with the screen display. I think that's not true, but I think if I were writing those games, you know I would do it that way. But the evidence that is guys sitting around haunting these machines trying to play them off when they're advantage suggests to me that they are exactly as advertised. But the other thing I'm going to say is these are not the kind of games I want to write. Like I enjoy them, but I want to write table games. I want to write pub games.

I want to write games that literally are simple, but they're just new. Yeah, yeah, I mean, if I were going to go and design something in this, you know, in the slot space, I think it would, that's why I wanted, I was, I was intrigued by this idea of something that's progressive of something where you feel like you can, you know, make some choices that, you know, maybe don't matter in your, your, your, your, your odds, but feel like more gamelike than a slot machine feels to me. It's a little discouraging that, uh, it sounds like things that have been attempted haven't worked so far. Well, here's what's really going on in the industry. There, and this is why I, I just wish I could break into it. Um, and I, I, I am, you know, I'm making inroads, but very slowly. There is a generation of players that they don't know how to appeal to, and they're calling them millennials, whatever that means. I don't think that's what they are, but there are players who certainly grew up on a different set of games. They didn't play craps when they were in the Army in World War II.

They play Candy Crush. And when they sit down at slot machines, they're similarly unenthused by them, and they certainly don't understand any of the table games or have fun playing them. They know poker a little bit, but they know Candy Crush a lot better. And so what the term the industry has cooked up for these guys is they want more skill games. It doesn't really mean that they want a game that's hard to play. They want a game where they feel like they're making relevant decisions. As a gambling game designer, that's really hard to develop, though, because you don't want a game that slows down every time someone has to make a decision.

And there's been waves of skill-based slot machines that have done terribly. Video poker is a colossal exception to that. video poker is like one of the major categories of slots and it is skill-based but like there have been slot versions of checkers, Othello chess like and they weren't chess obviously but they had like every now and then you get to make a move like you're playing chess and make the right decision and these things tank they do they do terribly so how do you make a decision relevant game that's also a slot machine that isn't video poker and appeals to to a candy crush player. That's the million dollar question in the casino industry right now.

The problem is that they don't really understand where those designs are coming from because they don't have a discipline that is identified as game designer. They have artist, mathematician, and producer. So one of the articles I saw that you posted, I talked about the principles of wet versus dry mechanics. And I think it's similar to something that I've talked about but using different words. And I'd love for you to kind of highlight what that means. And I remember we can talk a little bit about how we think about that in design. Oh, man, you're going to have to remind me because that's not a term I use a lot,

but I did, I wrote it up for that particular blog post. Yeah. So the, the way I interpreted is that wet, uh, wet mechanics were things where there's a very fluid jump from one point to another. So, you know, um, you can, uh, bidding, uh, like I think it was in a, uh, uh, uh, mechanic bidding mechanic that if it's if it's wet then you can go like point by point and have very little little smooth transitions from thing to thing and if it was dry then it was a larger chunked component and that you had the you had like the first it would strongly emphasize

initial bids and and that the the amount of the the chunkiness of moving from one unit to another was bigger. Right. Boy, it was very specific to that game, and I haven't, of course, I've seen a look at that blog post since I wrote it, but I don't,

I guess I can talk about a similar principle, which is asymmetry on purpose. And they might be related. But I feel like I've played some games that seem very mathematically consistent, but are really boring. And I guess that's a way to describe, you know,

I could describe that. But I like things to be kind of wrinkly and imperfect because that's just more interesting. So talk a little bit about, or do you have an example of sort of wrinkly imperfect in this context? Well, I hate to use as a bad example, a game that's just fine. But I think of Sero. And the one thing that I would do to improve Sero is probably change the mix of cards in the neck. Now I know the cards in the Sero deck are all of the possible combinations of paths that you can have on a tile. Like that is why there are exactly that many cards, and I totally get that.

But as a player, I feel like I can draw cards that are very useful and I can draw cards that are terrible. And that's just the deck screwing me. And I'd rather that didn't happen. And also, there's a really complicated endgame where you have to pass a tile around to be permitted to draw cards as soon as someone's out because the deck isn't empty because there's only so many cards. and there's not enough to cover the board. I feel like that is a hindrance to that game. The publisher think that it's that it's the best part of the game. I think that maybe just because he's the publisher.

It's a feature, not a bug. But like, I appreciate the game is fun, and I appreciate the work that went into it, and I appreciate the mathematical stability of that card set. But as a player, I could give a crap about the mathematical stability of the card set. I want to draw cards that are interesting. And so that's that I'm I I can't say that I could improve on Searle. Sero's great, right?

Surro does great. But as a designer slash player, I kind of look at this and go, well, if I did it, I would mess it up because I would make a set of cards that was A, deep enough to cover the board and still have some deck left. And B, like didn't deliver such a mix of unplayable cards. There's cards that can only have one orientation. They're symmetrical in all four ways, and that's plainly less useful than a card that has four different ways to play it. Right. So then you have both more potentially decision space

and more utility in the things that are going on. Yeah. Maybe this ties into another, you know, when sort of working on especially collectible games, which is something I've spent a good chunk of my time in, you know, you do want, you know, a pretty big variety. in the sort of power level and availability of things that are there that drives both player behavior and, you know, collecting and building, but also forces you into, you know, situations where you, okay, well, I have crappy cards now. I got to deal with that. And, and having those big gaps can be frustrating, but also ends up creating some of the best stories when you have to sort of make do with what's, what's in front of you. Well, I think that's true, but like, let's talk about that phrase, I have crappy cards. Now I have. have to deal with that.

Like, I just don't think that any game should have that to any game that has a play length greater than five minutes or any money writing on it should have that. I know poker does, but you can actually play a bad hand properly. You can throw it away. Like, if you have a bad draw in magic, you lose. And that's nothing you decided. Like, you can try to rebuild your deck so that you don't ever get that bad draw again. But there are cards that need to work together.

And if you don't get those two cards, then you lose. And that's just frustrating. Like, I think after you retuned your deck a thousand times, you finally realize there's no way to make it perfect. You're still going to be fighting against this biased randomness that's built into this game. That's kind of, like, biased randomness is the thing I'm saying about Sero is that if the dice can decide who they love,

there's something wrong with your game. If you can get two resources that are useful to two different strategies, then that's fine. But if you have a resource that's just useless, then when you get that, the dice have decided that you lose. That's interesting. I guess I want to push back on that a little bit more

because I think the value, I mean, in that sense, every game should be chess, right? I mean, if randomness at all creates these divergent scenarios. Well, no, but I'm saying biased randomness. You can have plenty of randomness, but you don't have to use it to arbitrarily advance the position of a player. Right?

You can do lots of other stuff with it. And what you're doing with that random information or that random resource generation is to give players a different mix of choices rather than giving some of them lots of choices and some of them none. Right. So the distinction then between randomness and biased randomness, maybe I'm not clear on that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the other category, I call it fair randomness, but fair is kind of in quotes. So let's talk about a trading card game, specifically opening up a trading card game booster pack. So we're not talking about the rules of the game.

We're just talking about the rules of opening a booster pack. And canonically, that booster pack has some common cards and some rare cards in it. And the common cards are generally multi-use, low-power cards. Most strategies can use them for something, but they're never going to be amazing. And the rare cards are usually limited utility. high-power cards, which means that usually they're worthless, but every now and then they're really super cool. And so whatever deck you're building, there are a very small number of rare cards that are perfect for that deck, and the rest of them you don't want. And the common cards, you probably could use them.

You know, I'm talking about something like as common as land cards or as common as, you know, one-one creatures or whatever, but morph that into whatever game you're talking about. That resource bundle, that booster pack always has the same number of cards. And in fact, it even, usually always has the same number of common and rare cards in it. If you play a game with biased randomness, you're opening booster packs with nothing. That's the biased randomness. That's the problem.

The promise of the booster pack is at least there's some cards in here. But if you play a game where sometimes you generate no resources on a term when everyone else does, you're not being given anything to work with. You're just being set back. I see. So a world maybe where I get, and just trying to make this a derivative,

example if I get between, you know, one and six of two different resources and I can get more or less than you, but I have to work with what I have is different than the I have zero resources or I have no opportunities. Is that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let's talk about a game like settlers, right? You build on the best place you can, but for a couple of turns, you generate no resources. So what do you do? Certainly, I would, I would kind of classify this. It seems like the problem here is more about the, you know, dead turns or the areas where I can. can't do anything that impacts a game, which certainly is a negative in any game. I mean, right, the longer I'm in a game, even one without randomness, if I'm, you know, playing chess and it's just a matter of a few moves before I lose. I can't do anything to fix it. That's a terrible position to be in. Exactly. Yeah, that's right.

And I think that a lot of, and I, a lot of the games that I talk about, a lot of the games I work with are half done. So my analysis has a lot to do with how this game should be built, should be improved from where it's at. But a lot of games boil down to a dice race. Like, we all have a horse in this race, and every round we each roll a die, and we go forward that number of spaces. And that game just simply is not fair. That's biased randomness in the most naked degree.

And I think a lot of game design is exactly that. And it can try to mitigate that by adding more dice rolls, which doesn't really work. What it really should do is give you something else besides nothing when your horse doesn't move. your horse is charging up energy or the fast running horses are getting tired or something like that. If there's some balance to that or better yet, if you can just decide how fast to run, then

you're playing a game, right? Otherwise, the game is playing you. Do you think that is often served, is that just sort of obfuscating it to some degree? I mean, you know, if you knew enough in any given game position, you know, especially given the way randomness,

you know the way randomness is going to play out, then you know you're, you know, you're dead in the water. from the beginning. Well, sure. That's, chess is theoretically solvable, too. Like, do you ever want to be black in a game that's solved? So, and, of course,

all of this is independent of my love and recognition of gambling games. But again, the kind of gambling games I like to write are the ones that have irrelevant decisions in them, even though they have randomness. A, they're very short. So you're never trapped in a game you're losing. And B, the better ones are the ones with some choices in them. I play video poker mostly because I enjoy the choice. the choices of it.

But I also know the odds in video poker are better than any of the other slot machines. And I'm hooked into the system that gives me reward points and cheap hotel rooms and whatever for all the play that I give them. So I come out either even or a little bit ahead. But yeah, I don't, I don't, I, slots are like a thing you watch. They're not really a, they're not really a game in that sort of, I want to play a game with my friends kind of sense. I don't want to sit down and play slots with a bunch of people that I know. I want to play a game. Right, but you'll play, but you'll play, you'll play craps.

You'll play a craps table with a bunch of people. Craps is also, it's fun, but it's also, you know, strictly dice driven. And I don't find it very interesting. And it's very social and everyone screams together and that's all good. And those are things that make a good gambling game. But that's a, that's a, I guess I just don't like craps. I don't know why. Another thing that's fascinated me about you is actually you're, you know,

we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the, of, of, talk, but you're very much a polymath here. You've written multiple books, both on juggling, gambling, game design articles and things. I think I read a line that you produced a film. Is that correct?

I did, yeah. We just watched that again this week. It's called The Man Between. It's a spy comedy, sort of. But it was like a student film project. My friend Anthony Galea and I traveled a lot

in the year, I guess it was 2002, 2003, something like that. We were all over the place. And I had this idea for a spy movie that is like Rosen-Kranton-Gildenstern meets James Bond. It's like all of the boring stuff that he does in between all the action stuff. I like it. So we happen to be traveling and we're like, fine. We don't have a script for this thing. Let's just go do it.

And it's a whole bunch of sort of little vignettes. Sometimes he's having a conversation with the bad guy. Sometimes he's just waiting for someone to show up or he's not sure. is in the right place. But it's pretty funny. Is there some way for me to watch this film? I think you can still buy the DVD from our web shop. But my goal is eventually to recut the movie into some shorter vignettes for YouTube.

I just have not found the time to do it. So, you know, writing books, designing games, putting together a film, which you know, put all the components of it. and even, you know, starting a company, there's, you know, a creative process behind each of these. And I'm curious to hear you speak a little on how do you compare those processes? How do you feel? Do you feel there's, you know, overlaps in what the creative work is like? Do you think they're totally different? Is it what, you know, I really like, I believe that there's this sort of distillation of what it means to be creative in the process that one goes through, but don't have that,

that breadth of experience. I'm curious to get your thoughts. I don't know. I mean, I, I, I, I'm pretty much focused on the user experience. Like, what's the final, what's the user of this thing going to experience? So I'm not really doing a thing for the sake of the thing, but for the end result. That's the only thing that I can think of that's similar between all of these things. But like, I do a lot of graphic design for, you know, ads and board game production here. I do video production. So all the Kickstarter videos that we do, and I've done some video production for other campaigns as well.

they're all kind of like there's a goal here. I'm trying to communicate information or emotion or an experience or whatever. That's the related thing about the process. But other than that, it's like I spend a lot of my time using the tools, learning how to use the tools. I call the man between a student video because I was learning to use the tools. That's one of the reasons I did it was just to figure out how to make a movie, how to shoot it, how to cut it. and that taught me a lot. I got a lot better at video production

through the course of doing that. But yeah, they're all about the end product, I think. And how do you process that, what was your process like getting, learning those skills? Was it, you know, watching YouTube videos online? Was it, did you talk to mentors about it? Did you just like, what, you know,

to jump into making films, seems very intimidating to me? Well, you know, I made super eight movies when I was in high school. So I had a little experience already. I've done photography forever. But when I jumped in, I jumped in. Like I got a Super 8 movie and started shooting. These tools sort of work by themselves.

I got a Super 8 camera for Christmas, and I shot like three reels of footage of my family chopping down trees. And I did a lot of stop motion stuff when I was in high school. And so it always, it always, just starts with a passion for the thing. I learned, I scored the movie, so, you know, I learned how to do that and, and do the editing for the purpose of getting the movie done. And I think I learned most of the layout stuff and most of the editing and music stuff that I learned from books. I have a few friends who do it. I did learn a lot about layout from a friend of mine who's a

big comic book and font geek. But mostly by doing. I mean, the way that I tell people to learn how to design games is to design games. Not to play games, not to talk about games. Those are all very interesting and educational, but nothing is going to teach you how to do it except from just doing it. Right. So this, I've given the same advice.

But do you have, other than designing games, Do you have other resources you draw, you would recommend for people that are interested in the space and then just sort of, you know, getting into the nitty-gritty and doing it, any books or resources online or any other things that you think are valuable out there? There are some good books about game design.

They're not great. There are some collections that I've contributed to that are not too bad. There's some textbooks on game design. A lot of them focus mostly on digital games, not tabletop. Of course, I would be plugging my own book here if I had finished it, but I haven't, and I won't for a long time. Well, I know you wrote for the, the Cobold Guide to Board Game Design, which I thought was a really

good book. That's a, that's a great book. But I, I'm reluctant to recommend it because I don't think that I personally used it. I certainly didn't use it when I was getting started. Like, like, I don't think you need those things. I think they're fun to read. But it's just one more sort of set of activities that takes time away from doing it.

Like make games. You can't learn more than you can when you're just making one. And maybe I'm giving you bad advice and maybe it's bad practice. If you're going to make a game the wrong way or something, but I just don't think that's right. I think, number one, think about what your player's going to want and what your player experience is going to be and forget about the mechanics of what you're doing.

Like, I guess it's important to learn about F-stops and exposure times and all that and ISO, but eventually you want to frame the picture. right and take a good picture. And I think game design is like that too. You can learn a lot of really technical stuff about how it's done and still not really know how to do it. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right. And it's one of the things I hope, you know, there's people listening to these podcasts are aspiring game designers. The difference between aspiring game designer and game designer is someone who actually just makes games. You go through the process of creating that experience, testing it, and iterating on it and just doing that over and over again. You do that. That's it.

game designer. Well, I mean, and you know, from my personal experience, also producing it. Like, you learn how to produce games only through producing games, too. You can't just hand it off to a publisher and understand that part. You can't just watch it. Um, so all of the things that I know how to do, I know because I do them. Yeah. And that, you know, the one of the nice things about working in the tabletop gaming industry is, you know, just look, the costs of producing this stuff is just, it's so much lower now than it ever was. And it's got a lot of, you know, especially for small runs and things that you, you might want to do as a new designer. It's, you know, it's an achievable goal of publishing your own game and getting it out there. I think, I mean, I said before that there are people who

only experienced this from, from the outside in. And so I don't think that they really have a grasp of what it can be to just make a game and let that be the end product. Like they don't, they see things that are highly successful retail products that have been advertised and pushed out into the channel and, you know, they're products. But a game isn't a product. game is a thing that gets played and you can make one copy of it and have a good time and that can be a success and you don't have to worry about the demands of the marketplace or the timing of it or anything like that. When you're making one copy, you don't even have to worry about getting a license for the art or the theme or whatever. If you want to make a Firefly game to play with your friends,

you just make it. And there's such great freedom in that that people don't understand when they only perceive the big commercial products. Right. Yeah. The key of defining what is success mean here is really important in any endeavor. And I think nobody does that. I think they take that definition by default. I don't mean nobody. But I mean, a lot of people that I talk to who are aspiring game designers haven't really defined those boundaries between making it, okay, you want to design a game.

That's easy. And what they really secretly want, which is to be a successful game publisher in some respect or other, not as a publishing company, but as a designer who makes money designing games, that's a whole different challenge than just learning how to make a game. But draw the line there. If you want to make a game, then great. Let's talk about how to do that. If you want to make a product, that's a whole different challenge.

I'm not even sure that's what you want to do. Yeah, having gone through all the different parts of production pipeline, it's a lot less fun than the game design testing part for sure. So we're getting close to the end of this talk. There's a few questions I kind of always want to ask for my guests. What are your favorite games that you are either playing today or that have kind of had the most influence on you as a designer? Well, so I learned a lot about game design from Magic the Gathering. Like I got into the business end of this business when Magic was coming out,

And so magic has taught me a little bit of things not to do and a whole lot of things that it did right. Every game that I make that has a deck of cards, the contents and balance of the contents of that deck are balanced because I learned how to build magic decks. That's, you know, a magic deck is a game design kit in a box. It's, okay, here are the tools now, make this work. And, you know, the game that I play all the time now is poker.

Poker is so hard and so simple. Poker is the gold standard of gambling games that require decisions but aren't overcomplicated. And I grew up playing poker. I grew up playing five-card draw and seven-card stud. And I'm not a huge fan of Hold'em, but it's the only game in town. So that's the game I know the best. And you only have a couple of choices in that game, but the choices are really tough. Yeah, I considered as many of my friends did jumping into the professional poker lifestyle back when I was, you know, finishing up my pro magic playing days.

And yeah, it was a compelling and interesting challenge. But I ended up deciding not to go down that road. And because I liked, I felt like if I make a living, making a living as a poker player is just taking money from people stupider than you. it was a it was like oh I like this for a while but I don't know if that's the way I want my entire career to go well I you know I have a retirement fantasy that involves playing a lot of poker but but I

keep trying to make money at it and failing and and for people that want to learn more about you or reach out to you or find out about your products where where should they go well cheapass.com is the nexus of information about cheap ass games

and you can learn a little bit more about me there. I have a fairly rarely updated blog on Tumblr. That's probably about it. I can't think of anything else. Okay. Well, I think that's all for today. It's been awesome having you here. Thank you so much for taking the time and chatting with me.

It's been great to, you know, as I said, I've sort of been a fan for many, many years. so actually getting to talk and dig into a bunch of this stuff has been fantastic. So thank you, Dave. Cool. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast

platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life.

If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or soul.