Think Like A Game Designer - Jamey Stegmaier — Kickstarter Beginnings, Revolutionizing Rulebooks, Mastering Solo Gameplay, and Balancing Game Design with Time Management (#46)

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Jamey Stegmaier is the CEO of Stonemaier Games and the creator of games such as Scythe and Viticulture. He is a prolific content creator and thought leader in the Kickstarter and game design space, who’s spent years making videos and writing articles on nearly every aspect of running a game company. To be fair, Jamey probably interviews me just as much as I interview him, and we end up discussing everything from creating games to content generation to crowdfunding—so much knowledge is packed into this episode that it would be hard to list it all here! Enjoy! 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. I am very excited to announce that we are once again opening the doors to the Think Like a Game Designer Masterclass. What is the Think Like Game Designer Masterclass? What is the Think Like Game gender masterclass? Well, it has been over a year since I have opened up the doors. It is the most direct, effective, and focused way that I know of to take you as someone who has dreamed of making a game or who has designed some games but has not achieved the level of success that you want

into someone who is designing, creating pitching, and publishing games. It is a 12-week course where you will work directly with me and my team to get your game made. The course includes monthly masterminds with me where I will help you solve your direct problems, answer your questions about your designs, weekly meetups, weekly testing, an incredible community of people, including alumni from previous courses, and several of those alumni are people that I have hired directly, three people that were in the class now work for me, and they are all focused on helping you to learn, to grow, and to get your game made. And in addition, the course ends with a live pitch session where you will be pitching to top tier board game publishers

where you will pitch your project. And don't worry, we will help you get there all along the way, teach you how to pitch, teach you how to make the materials, teach how to get ready, so that you can really get the practice and get feedback from people in the industry and myself to make sure that your game is ready and that maybe you'll get picked up and published. So it's an incredible journey. We are starting on April 6th. So if you want to sign up for it, you can go to think like a game designer.com. And there's a link there to the master class and is a special bonus for my podcast listeners because this audience has been growing enormously. I'm going to give you a discount code for 20% off and then you need podcast to 20. That's podcast and

the numbers to zero to get 20% off the admission. Now we are keeping this class very small because it takes a lot of time and attention and we want to make sure everybody gets a focus on it. So there's not that many slots available. So if this is something that's interesting to you and you're hearing this right around the time that it's possible. This is April 6th, 2023 is when the course launches. Then I encourage you to sign up right away. We're also doing something a little bit different this year because, listen, the course is not cheap in terms of cost of money, but especially in cost of time. I don't want anybody to sign up for this course if you don't have at least five hours a week to commit to really focusing on your game because you're not going to get the most out

of it. We have over 40 plus video lessons. We're expecting you to iterate, playtest your games, make, use the core design loop, continue to improve. So if you're not willing to put in that time, then probably this is not the right course for you. But if you are, I know of no better way for you to get a return on your investment. Now, if that 20% off coupon code is not enough for you, if you have serious financial hardships, we are doing something we've never done before. We are holding a couple of slots for scholarship programs. So if you're the kind of person that really wants to do this, but you cannot afford it and you really are willing to commit the time interested. You can go to think like a game designer.com forward slash scholarship and we will be

picking a few winners and reserving a few slots for those so that that money is not a barrier for you to be able to enter this course. It's incredible. I've met such incredible people through this course. The community is one of the best I've ever seen. So if something that you are ready, you've been listening to this podcast, you love the idea of being a game designer and you want to make that leap, please go check out. Think like a Game Designer.com. And I hope to see you in the course. In today's episode, I speak with Jamie Stegmeyer. Jamie is the CEO of Stonemeyer Games and the creator of such games as Scythe, viticulture, and tapestry. Jamie is one of the most prolific writers and content creators when it comes to the topics of game design and running a company.

And so it was great to actually get to talk with him and break apart some of these principles and deep dive. And as you'll see in the episode, he actually does quite a good job of interviewing me and playing some principles. out from me in some of my games. It was the first time I ever got a chance to talk to Jamie directly, and it was actually one of the harder podcasts for me to prepare for because there was so much good content he'd already put out there. I'd talk about the sum in the podcast itself, that I really wanted to make sure we dove into some new ground

and deep-dived into a lot of interesting things. So we certainly accomplished that. We covered about how you use data to help make your games and your process better. He does a survey of his backers and his customers, and we talk into some of the value of that. We talk about the value of nostalgia in game design. We talk about the process for being able to generate content and how you balance game design, content generation,

running a company, and all of the other needs that constantly pull at your attention, including emails and communications with fans. We talk a lot about campaign design and go into the thought that went behind the design behind my own campaigns for Shards of Infinity and Ascension Tactics, as well as Ascension Tactics inferno,

as well as some of his games. We also talk a lot about crowdfunding and the process by which he wrote a book on crowdfunding and successfully crowdfunded games and why he's moved away from Kickstarter and crowdfunding. He has a ton of additional insights when it comes to things like how he approaches businesses. We talk about community building. We talk about ambassador programs. Really, we cover the full gamut. And I could have easily talked for another hour and a half, but we ran out of time. So we covered a lot of great stuff.

We also give links and content to get to all of Jamie's other materials. So there's plenty more. If you enjoy this as much as I do, I encourage you to go follow up and find many of Jamie's writings, videos, etc. throughout the interwebs. But for now, I hope you really enjoy my conversation with Jamie Stegmire. Hello and welcome. I am here with Jamie Stegmire. Jamie, it is great to have you here.

It is truly a pleasure. I've listened to your podcast for a long time. and hope someday that I might be a guest, and now I'm actually a guest. So this is really, really exciting for me. Yeah, and to just share back, I mean, you were really one of the first type of people I was thinking of having on the podcast.

I'm a little surprise. It's taking me this long just because we had never interacted before. Because you do such a great job of sharing information about the gaming industry, about what it's like to run a company, design games, market, Kickstarter, like the whole gamut, which has been really kind of my mission with this podcast. So in many ways,

It's going to be a challenge for me to surface new insights from you that you haven't already shared with the community. So I'm eager for the opportunity and hopefully we can dive deep on some fun topics. Yeah, I'm excited. And you've covered so many people that maybe don't have some of the platforms that I have. So I think it's wonderful that you've talked to people who don't have a podcast or don't have a YouTube channel. But I'm excited to be here too. Yeah, yeah. So I usually save this for the end.

And I tell people, give people the opportunity like where can they find you and things. but I actually kind of want to do this one at the beginning because you're you're so prolific with your content on multiple different channels. So maybe just give a brief overview for people that who are inevitably will love this conversation and think they need more of you and more insight. Where are the best places for them to go? Well, everything's at stonemiregames.com. That's the company that I run. For people who are looking for kind of the crowdfunding or entrepreneurial perspective, running a business, running a game company, that sort of thing, that's there on. Stomeyer Games. It's on the blog there. And around six years ago, I also started a YouTube

channel where, because I love playing games, I love talking about game design. And I didn't really have an outlet for that. And I didn't want to review games. I just wanted to talk about design, kind of like what you do here. And so on my YouTube channel for Stomeyer Games, I talk about games published by other people. And I do some top 10 lists and things like that. So people are interested from the design perspective. And they've listened to everything that you've recorded. They can go check out my YouTube channel and hear about games there too. Yeah. And I think the proximate cause for me finally reaching out to you as I saw you did a favorite mechanic review of Soul Forge Fusion and somebody linked it to me and I'm like, why have we not talked already?

We have so much of COVID. We really shouldn't be doing this. So I messaged you on on YouTube and we were able to follow up through there. So it's great. I mean, so, okay, so I, let's let's go back, let's go back to the origin story. Let's go back to the beginning. Again, you've, you've, you've chronicled a lot of this stuff. But for people that don't know you or don't know, you know, you know, kind of where you come from, you know, maybe give a little bit of a story of how you got into game design, how you got into this process of starting your own company. You know, it's, it's, this is a dream situation for a lot of people, even though they don't really understand what they're getting into a lot of the time. So, so maybe walk, walk, walk, walk,

walk us through a little bit, uh, where you, where you got started. Yeah, yeah. And a quick version of it is that as a kid, I loved games and game design. So when I was very young, I was already kind of experimenting with game design a little bit, dabbling just a little bit. I I don't think I fully understood what it was, but I would create a prototype and write the rules and play like the game once. And I thought I had designed a game. It felt good as a kid.

Then as an adult, I was enamored by the idea of publishing a game. And I started to see games pop up on Kickstarter. And I was equally enamored by Kickstarter. And so I designed a game specifically to put on Kickstarter. So I was interested in both the design side of it and the publishing side of it. And that was Viticulture, my first game that funded in 2012. I used Kickstarter for a few years. And then I moved on from Kickstarter and grew the company in different ways.

And now we have 15 games here at Stomeyer Games, some of which are mine and some of which are games that I've helped other designers develop that we've published, including probably the most notably wingspan is the game from Elizabeth Hargrave. You've had the pleasure of speaking with on your channel. Yes, he's amazing. Yeah, yeah. That's the short version. Yeah. Great. Okay.

Now I'm going to pick apart and dive in more because so you, again, it's, you're one of the, one of the more interesting guests to have on here because you've written in such detail about so much of this stuff. You even have a book that you wrote a crowd funder strategy guide back in 2015 and you continually update that information on your website. But when you go from, I like to make games and I made some games as a kid to I want to try out this Kickstarter thing now over 10 years ago. What was that process? Like how did you know even how to go about doing that? How did you know how did you build an audience that first time around? So for people out there that are just they're in that same boat of like, hey, I kind of like making games.

Maybe I can make this happen. What happened for you then? And if you want to interspers bits about how that's changed throughout the way, then that's cool, too. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you said that last part because it definitely has changed quite a bit. Back then, there were a handful of game projects on Kickstarter. Now there are a handful launched every day on Kickstarter.

And so one of the things I did was I started following and backing a lot of different campaigns. Not always for the full games. Sometimes I'd just back for a dollar and follow along. and I would just kind of observe. I was just watching a lot of campaigns and watching how creators interacted with the people that were supporting these game-related campaigns. And some were not game-related too.

I was back in a number of campaigns just to explore them and learn about them. And so that was really my research for it about how to run a campaign and kind of how to run a business too. I went to have a degree in international business, but very little of that actually applied to the practical elements of actually running a business

for running the Kickstarter campaign. And then the game design side of it, I had continued to play and design games for most of my life. And so I had a lot to learn, definitely. Like one of the things I didn't do for Viticulture, I did not blind playtested. I didn't know that that was a thing that I needed to do. And for those listening who don't know what that is,

that's when you, it's unguided playtesting. It's when you've created a prototype and you've created the rules for a game and you send it out to people who are, who don't have the benefit of having you there to teach it and play along with you. And so I didn't do that for viticulture and kind of learn the hard way that there's so much you can learn from that part of the process. Those are a few quick things. Yeah. Yeah. That's super useful. And yeah, that ability to sort of, so, you know, what I heard there was, you know, learning from other campaigns and what they were doing well and following those things along. You know, obviously iterating and testing and building a good game, learning the lesson of doing blind tests. Actually, it takes us a little bit on a tangent, but whatever, it's my podcast. I can do what I want. How you write good rules and how you get people to learn the game remotely,

without you there, is always one of the hardest challenges, right? It's just so difficult to do. And I've lately been leaning more towards doing as much as possible to drive people to other means of learning, right? Either, ideally, there's somebody that can demo to them or they learn in an event, but that's obviously not super scalable. So videos and kind of how to play walkthroughs, how do you think about that nowadays compared to the sort of more traditional?

Just here's a rulebook. Good luck. I think about it all the time. Yeah, I am constantly thinking about how to better onboard people into our games. As someone who has, right now I have like 20 games on my shelf of opportunity. And the ones that are probably going to sit there the longest are the ones with the biggest, most complicated rulebooks, even though those might end up being the games that I enjoy the most. And so I am constantly looking for games that have great tutorials or as you say,

have used other forms of media to help me learn the game or help me understand at least some of the core concepts of the game. I just opened a game called Box 1 the other day, kind of an escape room box. And it didn't have any rules. It just kind of walked me through the initial ideas of the game until I understood how to play. It's a simpler game. It doesn't always work that way. But yeah, have you? I'm trying to. So your Soul Forge Fusion doesn't, am I correct to say that it doesn't have a rulebook? I was taught it, but it has like an online. That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. We opted out of a rulebook in the box because it's a, you know, it's a complicated game to explain all the rules correctly. But not that hard to teach, you know, I can do it in a, you know, five to 10 minute video or direct, you know, interaction of 15 minutes. But to read through a rule book and have the contents of a rule book, it's largely, it's incredibly dense.

to try to be precise with that. And we felt that it was going to be better to just have people go. You know, the game itself has a scan component to it, right? Every deck can be scanned into an online collection and played online. And so we felt that our customers would, by default, be more comfortable with that, with that kind of game in particular. And so we went to a, listen, if you want to learn how to play, scan this QR code, takes you to a nice, you know, landing page with videos and extra materials that you can link to.

If you do want to read the rules, of course, we do have a PDF and all the things you could download. But we felt that like destroying a bunch of trees to include pages that no one would read didn't seem like the right call for us. And we got some heat for it. I don't want to pretend like this was just the right answer. Some people were like, no rule book. I'm not interested. I don't want to play your game. And so I think culturally that's going to shift over time.

I know I had Elon Lee on this podcast as well. And he talks about, you know, is very much trying to drive people to, you know, video and streaming and, you know, getting people to play with friends, not trying to learn from a rulebook, even though they spend a lot of time on their rulebooks, you know, it doesn't mean you get out of it. You know, and I think for most of my games that don't intrinsically have an online component, I'll still keep having rulebooks. But it's just such a hard way to learn. So we're continuing to experiment with it. We might, I think in our next edition, we're looking to do at the very least a quick start guide, like a couple pages, you know, short little pamphlet of here's how you, here's the gist of the game to learn more, go to this site.

I think might be the next approach for us. For the current version of the remote, the kind of the living online one, how often do you find yourself editing it? Is that, because it's a living, are you more compelled to like make little changes more often? Well,

that was part of the equation that went into it, especially again for something that's like Sulfur Fusion, which most people from the podcast should be familiar with, but it's a hybrid deck game. So it kind of has similar concepts to a trading card game, except that, you know, you're, you just shuffle build two decks together. And there's an algorithmically general.

set of cards, so there's 10,000 plus possible cards and infinite, you know, unique decks. So it's always new rules and new things that get added as new cards show up and new sets. But also we had a lot of little subtle tweaks about timing. In fact, we're, and we could deep dive into this whole subject too, but like now we're working on building the digital custom digital app. So, you know, at launch, we just use tabletop simulator. And as we're recording this, that's still the same tool to play online. We have a custom script for it.

But by the end of this year, we're going to have a fully, automated, you know, app that'll be available and people can play that enforces the rules and can do tutorials and things like that. And so that has forced us to revise our rules too, because you have to be much more precise when you need a computer to do everything correctly. So we knew we were going to have to make a lot of revisions once we had it out in the audience and players giving us feedback and catching things we didn't catch and things that we needed to update for the digital app. So there was a lot of changes that happened over the course of the first few months of release up till now.

We're actually, as we're recording this, we're pretty close to launching our second set in the North America. And then I think it'll stabilize over time. But certainly we felt more comfortable now because we wouldn't have a printed rulebook that would instantly be out of date as soon as we launched. I'm glad you mentioned the kind of learn as you play digital version as well, because that is exactly how I learned Shards of Infinity. I think, I can't remember if I bought it or if it was free.

I think there might be a free, like basic version of the game. But I had heard good things about the game. I tried the digital version, loved it, and went out and bought the analog version, the tip-top version right away, which I don't always do when I try a game digitally. But for that, it seemed like the best fit. And I like, actually, I'm curious what you think about this, too, if I may throw this back at you as well. For digital games, we have a few, like on-board game arena. We have a wing span has a great digital game.

Charterstone does. And side does. I like to think of them often as learning tools. and for that reason, I don't often put, or I'm not often compelled to put expansions on Borgame Arena in particular. But I noticed with some of your digital products, you do have a bunch of expansions. What is your thinking there for expansion content versus just having the base game available digitally?

Yeah. So my philosophy in general is I want as many people to be able to play my game in as many forms as possible. So as far as it is economically viable for me to do so, I'll put it up everywhere and and try to make it very expanded. I was very worried at first, especially with Ascension, the Ascension app,

because we've, you know, the Ascension app released in 2011, right? This is like early, early days of this. There weren't many board game apps. There weren't any deck building game apps at the time. And we was very concerned that I think we were selling it for $5.

Now it's free, but that somebody would just buy the game for $5 and then never spend $40 on a box game because why in God's name would you do that? And, you know, the reality was the exact opposite that we, that we saw our sales spike enormously. And I'm pretty convinced that essentially would not still be around today or what it is

today without the app as a kind of funnel to draw people in. So it lets people play the game in that format. And then people who want to have the experience of being around the table and shuffling up and sitting with friends, like there's a place for each. So I try to make them as accessible as possible. Sometimes that's not either economically viable or it's not practical. I mean, that's the hardest part. Do you have a digital team on your, like on staff?

or you license out or how does how do you handle it? Yeah, it's all licensed out. So we've done a variety of different things. We've built a digital team in house that worked on projects. We've done licensing partners. So the Shards of Infinity app we did with TempoGate games, the Ascension app we did with Playdeck and Soul Forge were building in house. I've been through the whole gamut.

And you want to talk about how hard it is to build physical games, man. There's a whole other set of problems and challenges that come with trying to build digital games. They're very expensive. iteration costs are higher. There's a lot of interesting. challenges that come with it. So once you've built the structure for it, ideally if you built it

right, adding expansions is cheaper and easier. And so you want to do that to keep people engaged and keep people excited. That's a good point. Once you've, once you've had someone invest that much time and you've invested that much money in the foundation of the game, adding the expansions is significantly easier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. And I mean, the world is, you know, it's continuing to evolve, right? The difference between having a game on something like board game arena or tabletopia versus. or tabletop simulator versus a customized app. Do you want to invest in all the different platforms,

some things that are playable on mobile? Do you want to be a game that can be played, the airplane games, as I like to call them, where the logic lives locally, or you want to build it server based where it's easier to update and secure? There's all kinds of questions that come with it that I've, at least I have put myself in this position

of I have to deal with the good and bad of both platforms, right? The building physical games and all the logistics and things that come with it. and then the digital games and all the challenges that come with that. So it's fascinating, but it definitely didn't pick the easy route. I do love the data that can emerge from it too. Like for tapestry when we released that, I put in the rulebook. I said, you know, if you want to report your winning civilization and your winning score,

here's a Google form where you can show us that information because I wanted to have that data in the long run in case there were some balancing issues that we missed originally. And we did. It turned out there were some SIVs that were a little more overpowered, some were more underpowered. And we wouldn't have known that if we didn't have a way of collecting that data. But with digital games, you don't have to ask for that data. As long as you have their permission to accumulate that data,

you can just get it and you can use it in the long term. Have you made any changes based on digital game data that you've gathered? Yeah. So it's interesting. I think that for the most part, we make the games physically first, and then we launched them digitally. That's been true with almost everything we've done. And in those cases,

I feel a pretty significant resistance to making a change based on, you know, digital input. Like we have, you know, we have done it with, we did, actually we did do it with ascension over time.

The correlation of turn one purchase of arbiter of the precipice, which is like a draw, a banish card to your victory was higher than we would have liked. We kind of knew that anyway, but we could just sort of reinforce our understanding of it. So in the 10th anniversary edition, it's probably the only card we changed in a way that made it worse. It's a five cost instead of a four-coster. We increased its honor value, which made it better to buy later.

So it wasn't a strict downgrade, but it was a change that we made. When it comes to purely digital games, like the original version of SoulForge we did as a pure digital TCG, then, yeah, we changed stuff all the time because of that. We want to see, you know, players love to complain about a given broken strategy. And as it turns out, they don't, they don't, they're not usually right. So, so like, actually, so we have this data now for Soul Force Fusion. It's a great example. People love to hate Krogius.

Krogius is our, starts off as a little one one, then goes into Kaku and then becomes a 30, 30, can't be stopped, you know, your opponent can't target it with spells or anything. And so it's very, players complain about it a lot. But we can correlate based on our tournament data, because everybody has to log in which deck they, they play. and we can see who wins and who loses. Corgius is not associated with winning. It's not correlated with winning at all.

Like, at all. Like, it's not even close. So there's a, and so those are great for me because I was pretty sure I was right. And this was a, this was not a problem. But, you know, the data helps to back it up. So I think mostly when I think about digital data, at least the way I've been successfully able to use it, it's more of a of a gut check against your instincts that you have already, not so much that it's like surfacing things you wouldn't know otherwise.

We do have, we do have some stuff. do behind the scenes. With Soulful intrusion, again, I talk about there's 10,000 different possible cards in set one alone, and that's exponentially increasing with new sets. We have ways to surface, like, okay, there are certain types of permutations. If there's a level one card that has eight or more power and more attack, surface it here for us.

So we can automatically see some things that might be problematic, because you just can't test a game the same way when there's that many permutation. So we have to use tools to get us there. But the data side of things is fast. to me because there's always a trap. I don't know how this works for you. In the data that you get, a lot of times it's very easy to interpret it in a lot of different ways.

In the tabletop side, I'd love to, if you have any stories or examples around this of when you've gotten feedback that's worked well or poorly for whether it be a Kickstarter or a product sales or something that's been going on where you're able to use that information well or where you're able to, in fact, there's too much noise and you end up drawing the wrong conclusion or being unable to draw a conclusion. Yeah, this is something I definitely have learned. learned thanks to Tapestry mostly and that I've applied to every game that we've made since Tapestry. With Tapestry, it came out, it released, and people started playing it a lot, which was awesome to see people playing it a lot, and discovering some of these SIVs that were a little bit more powerful or a little bit less powerful than others, especially in the hands of people who, as they became more and more experienced with the game.

And the complaint at the time was, oh, I bet some of our games just didn't play test this enough. And I was like, I know we playtests a ton, like not just internally blind playtests. We went over the top and playtesting this game. But what I realized the problem is, and I think this is what you're touching upon here, is that we weren't analyzing the data as well as we could. And for the most part, that means that I wasn't analyzing the data. I was the one looking at this data, and I wasn't diving deep into it because I probably should be better at it, but it is in my area of expertise.

And so we had someone surface, a guy named Jeremy, who's just a judge. job is to analyze data and in a completely different field. And Jeremy volunteered to start looking at our playtest data and our tapestry data and data from all sorts of games, any data that we get our hands on. And he just does an amazing job of diving way deeper than what I can see on my Google Doc of data when I get back a blind playtest report where he is really looking at specific player counts and how they, and outliers and all the stuff that's under the surface that I don't get to see. And it's made a big difference in in playtesting games as we look at that data from various games that are playtesting.

And it's made a big difference in tapestry and some of the changes that we're going to make with a revised SivPack for tapestry. So that data, I think that's where the analyzing the data can be just as important as the amount of data that you have. Well, yeah, the amount of data you have can actually work against you sometimes, right? Like if you have too much data, it can cloud what's actually going on. There's this idea in business around KPI's, right, these key performance indicators that you pick some key metrics, some key numbers you're driving towards and you say, look, these are the things we're going to optimize for. If you have too many of those, then you could delude yourself, right? Oh, well, this one went down, but this one went up or this is because of this thing, right? And really narrowing down, like, all right, what do we really care about here?

And so that can, in terms of, you know, in terms of your engagement with your game, it could be, you know, how many people are joining your email list or your discord with your company. it could be, you know, whatever your, you know, whatever your metrics are, obviously sales is a good one to track. But, and when it comes to your game, you know, you can be, you want to highlight some specific things, right? So we'll track, you know, whatever you're trying to solve for at that time, right? Okay, well, let's make sure we know which player, what the player order is and who wins in player order. Is there some aberration where going first or going last or something is an abnormal advantage? Or starting with this given sieve or this given forgeborn or this given character, does it have an aberrational win, win loss records? And so being able to find those things can help you point to problems.

But there's no substitute for the design instinct at the end of the day to find out, what the right solutions are, which things need to be acted on. Yeah, that's the gut side of things for the, that's the side that I enjoy the most. I think more than the data side of. Sure. Well, I think the data side is, yeah, the data, and it's my position that data, data can inform your gut and help you to ask, ask the, you know, kind of focus on the right. problems to solve, but I don't think it solves the problems for you. I've never experienced that

anyway, even with access to quite a bit of data. Speaking of data, actually, so you do an annual survey, right, of your backers or your customers and get, collect data that way. Can you talk a little bit about that and, you know, kind of how that started and how you use it? Yeah, I was actually just thinking about that as you were talking about how data can be a little skewed sometimes based on who you're asking. But yeah, we have an annual demographic survey that I send out to our e-newsletter their subscribers, just to learn how to better serve them, really, like how they're interacting with games, how many campaign games they played in the last year to see if we should make more or less campaign games, where they're playing games, who they're playing games with.

I just try to learn as much as possible about our customers. And it definitely ends up being biased towards the people that follow us and the people who choose to respond to this survey, which usually ends up being around 4,000 people. But at the same time, those are the people who are, those are the most active people. So I want to make sure I'm serving them and hopefully the way that I serve them can reflect on other people who join in the fund later. Yeah, this is, this is a great, not to interrupt, but this is a great point to highlight here, right? The loud minority or the most invested minority, the ones you're going to hear from the most

often. And yes, it's absolutely important to serve them. But a lot of times what they want is not going to be the same. what the mass of players want or new players are going to need to support your game. So, yeah, I don't know how you are able to parse that or how you think about or maybe some surprising insights you've had based on these surveys, either where you've learned something enacted on it or where you've learned something and said, you know what, this may not be the best thing for the customers who aren't speaking right now.

Yeah, yeah. For the most part, I try to keep that in mind. Like when I make an annual blog post about it, I try to make it very clear that I am not saying that this is what all gamers are saying or what all people are saying. It's just what a small sector of our audience is saying. And even then, like, we have a good number of in-newsletter subscribers. I'm very grateful. I think it's around 45,000 people at this point. But we've sold 1.7 million copies of wingspan. So there are so many, many more people out there who have wingspan on their shelf that have chosen not to engage with us in that way. And, um,

I don't know what those people are thinking. I want to know. I would love to know what they're thinking and how they're interacting with their games, but I don't have that type of access to them. So it's just, yeah, it's just a small piece of the puzzle when I'm getting this data. I'm trying to think of a specific example,

because there was one question that I asked a while ago, and I can't remember the topic, where when I posed it to our audience, the answer was very different than when I posted it, even on the blog, for people who were following my blog. And unfortunately, I can't remember it off the top of my head. I think it may have been about campaign games because I think a lot about campaign games. But we'll talk about that in a second, I think, because I do have a question for you about Shards and Infinity.

But yeah, did anything come to mind as I was rambling there? Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think that's the thing that came to mind for me. And yeah, I'm eager and excited to talk about the varying challenges and upsides and ways we do campaign games. But the, you know, I know, so my, you know, my original background is kind of in magic. and I, the shift that has happened over the years where the game used to be very, you know, the community, the feedback, everything was very focused on the competitive scene, right? The pro players and people, which was great for me because they were catering to me. But then they realized that through organic fan uprising in a lot of ways, you know,

formats like Commander were the most popular by far. And it took them a long time to adjust and realize they shouldn't be fighting against this community trend. They should be catering to it. And something like 80 or 90% of all the magic players never even go to any event, let alone care about a competitive circuit. And so that changed the way that they market, changed the types of products that they made, it changed who they wanted to serve, even though many people complain very loudly. I mean, I feel like there's an annual magic dying.

They've killed it, a discussion that starts up on the internet. So it's a really, it's very hard, you know, just to get into the emotional part of this, right, as a designer, as a, as a founder, as someone who wants to, you know, you want to serve your community, when you hear people complaining and, you know, just, you know, lots of vitriol comes for people that care a lot about your games when you make changes that are designed to serve the wider audience, but not necessarily those most invested players. And so it takes a, it takes some fortitude to be able to make those decisions and not, a lot of times trying to give the people, the most loud people, everything they want will, will, will bankrupt you.

Yeah, yeah, it absolutely will. One thing there, do you still play magic from time to the devil in it? It's very rare now. So I'll play Magic Arena occasionally just to kind of see what the new set mechanics are and kind of I'll read about it. But it's one of the downsides of my life making games. And so I have a lot less time to play games that I'm not either designing or researching directly.

Well, if, I may ask this because I think it applies to you a little bit. You've been around for a while. You've made games for a long time. including with games that you're still actively kind of expanding. But one thing that's fascinating me about magic for the last couple of years in particular, because whenever a new set comes out, I often buy a draft set and I just draft it with my friends. That's how I play magic. And I am fascinated with many of the sets that have come out over the last few years about how well they've

tugged on nostalgic heartstrings for people who have, maybe I, you know, I did play magic when I was a teenager and then I returned to it as an adult. And they have like in the latest set, they have old, old artifact borders on some of the cards. Like they brought back some of the old artifacts. And I don't know if it's something that only magic can do because it's been around for so long and that they have changed things like the card frames over the years. But have you played around with that idea of nostalgia at all in your games? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

No, it's a powerful tool, right? I mean, so, so Ascension has been around for almost 13 years now. And so even in the Kickstarter. for Ascension Tactics Inferno, we had a, our day one backer reward was a original Eric Sabie art rat that was in, you know, sort of an alternate art version of one of the cards in the set with the old frame around it. Yeah. And so it's exactly, we did exactly the same thing. And it's great as a day one reward because it's like only, you know, if you know, you know, right? If you're not, if you're not into that, then fine, you know, you're not going to, it's not a big deal that you

missed it. But for the people who are our most loyal followers who are the ones who are most likely to back on day one, it was a great thing to be able to throw out there and be like, hey, look, this was our original style. Like, we've revamped everything over the years to, you know, keep the spirit, but change, you know, having to work with more artists and shift things. But the original art style, the original work, I think is something that people love. I mean, nostalgia is a very powerful force. Yeah. I don't, I don't think, do you, you don't do, licensed games, do you? I don't think I saw any in your catalog. The only one that's kind of in that area is red rising, which is based on a novel series.

Oh, yeah, that's great series. That's really cool. So, okay, so you got one at least. But I think that when I think about, which we don't have any license games. I worked on license games in a previous company in Marvel and DC and World Warcraft. And I love all that stuff. But I think if I were going to pick up a license, it would be trying to take something that's like a cool old nostalgia of value and maybe not as popular nowadays and bring it in.

because you just get that immediate, warm, fuzzy feeling and a whole class of people who would come over. So, yeah, it's a powerful tool. If you're going to use it within a game, I think, you know, obviously you need some history to be able to evoke it, but you can also borrow it, whether it be from other IP or honestly, I think the success of flesh and blood is very much a nostalgia play. Yeah. I mean, their marketing and their whole positioning was all like, remember what magic used to be like? Well, that's what we are. Right. I mean, I mean, it was explicit. And so, so I think there's, there's, it's, it's absolutely one of the tools in the toolbox for how you want to pull, pull audiences in. And especially now that, you know, all of us that grew up, you know, playing these games in the 90s and are now, you know, have a lot more disposable income and are great audience to target, especially for launching something new. If you can get a preset group of people that come in for nostalgia value, it's, it can be a high value, high value conversion. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm happy to, if you want to, you know, I know you mentioned you wanted to jump and talk about some campaign stuff. I have some other topics I want to cover as well, but I'm happy to bounce this back and forth.

You said you had something you want to talk about with Shards campaign or otherwise. Yeah. Campaigns are, so I only have a few campaign games. I have the Rise of Fenris, which is the last expansion for Scyth. And then I have Charterstone. Charterstone is a 12 game campaign. And I think about campaign games all the time because they get, they get a lot of attention on crowdfunding and some of the top rank games are campaign games.

They tell amazing stories. But I find myself as a gamer playing fewer. I'm drawn to fewer campaign games because I often feel like I have one in the works. Like right now I'm playing Betrayal Legacy. And I don't really want another one until I'm done with that. And I don't want that one to overstay. It's welcome. And I just wanted to partially thank you because I think the, it's charge of infinity, the Shadow

of Salvation campaign expansion, cooperative slash campaign expansion. I love, and I've lauded this many times, I love that it's like, is it a three or four game campaign? Three. I love that you made it a three game campaign. Like my girlfriend and I played through it in about a weekend, and then we played through it again, taking the other paths that we could take on another weekend, a few weeks later. And I just love that you made something short instead of something epic and by doing so you made it much more likely for us to actually finish it and complete that story so i wanted to thank you for doing that and i wanted to see if you had any thoughts about campaign length in general and the value of that in a world where some of the biggest name campaign

games seem to have made that name i think by having you know 50 game campaigns that hardly anyone actually finishes right yeah so so well thanks for the kind words i you know shards was the first campaign game that we built, I've really designed. And so I started from kind of first principles, and they were similar to what you described. Like, I, I don't have the time to play a 20 hour or 50 hour campaign thing. I don't, I don't want to.

You know, it's just not my, it's not my cup of tea. And, and each, and designing campaigns is hard. Like each, I think of each campaign game, each scenario is its own game. You're designing inside of your other game. It's so much work. Like so much work. And so if you're going to do it, both to create it and then to go through and play it,

you want to make something that's going to have like a high return on your investment and it's going to people are actually going to enjoy. So I wanted something that was replayable so that I wouldn't feel like if I did it once, I can't do it again because again, that's a lot of work for someone's only going to touch once. And I wanted something that didn't feel like I was committed to this insane length. So it's both the campaign itself doesn't take that long. and there's, you know, choose your own adventure, and we even have an audio recording of all the

scripts and everything, so you can, like, have fun with it. And then, but also that each campaign segment could be played in a normal game length for shards, you know, under an hour, 30, 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how many players and how fast you are. And then you could pause and then take the next one. And then each thing, you know, the whole experience shouldn't take you more than three or four hours, maybe five if you're, you know, take your time with it. So I think that, and then that informed how we built the campaign for ascension tactics.

Essentially tactics was a much more involved version. We had like a dozen starting scenarios, and then we had about a dozen campaign scenarios. Now, we still branched it. So we took the same lesson of branching campaign, so it's still only five scenarios you play through to get through the whole thing. But because of the more branches,

it was about a dozen different scenarios we had to design. And that was probably, it's definitely the most gameplay and work I've ever packed into a single box with that. And so I'm very conscious of those sorts of things. And obviously, there's a place for that, that market of, but I suspect, and I haven't played through them all, but I suspect that you've got to be phoning it in sometimes when you're designing 30 campaigns,

you know, to get there. Like, is there really that much interesting innovation going on there? Or are you just making, you know, small, small tweaks on a theme? Like, I, I know we've got the campaign for Ascension Tactics Inferno we designed and we created some new mechanics that allow you to play up to four players, which is obviously changes it a lot before it was only one or two. And then I just really went all out with the different campaigns. It's not that many. It's still, I think it's four campaigns to play through in this one, but they're all very different. They're very different experiences that you feel like you're playing a different game.

And so I'd rather invest in like those great experiences than, you know, a lot of small variations on a theme. And maybe I'm wrong. And other people are just spending hundreds or thousands of hours on their campaign design. But it's a very tough, it's very tough for me to make that exchange where I could design entire other games, multiple to hire other games in the time would take me to do something like a, you know, 20 or 30 campaign game. One way that I thought about it with the rise of Fenris is I wanted to create like a major memorable moment in every scenario. And that can be easily diluted.

Like without that goal, I definitely could have ended up with a 20 game campaign where maybe you remembered three moments out of that campaign. I would much rather have an eight game campaign where you remember almost every individual game because it's whether it's different or there's like a big impactful surprise in every one of those in every one of those games. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, this is where the idea of, you know, look, what you're trying to deliver on a core experience and a core emotion for your audience, right? The how long is the thing, how many scenarios you play through?

Like, that's not really what matters. What you want is you want to give people those powerful emotional impacts that they're looking for. And I feel like people who play a campaign game, they are looking for something different than a regular game, right? They're looking for some sense of progression. They're looking for something where they can feel that their decisions make an impact on future events that are going on.

There's a little bit more socialization in the multiplayer version, of course. I think solo campaign clearly has its own audience. Curious, do you have a sense? I don't know if this is including your surveys, you have a sense of what percentage of your players, you know, actually play solo play? I've always been curious about this. Yeah, let's see if I have it in my survey from last year.

I don't have it, no, I don't have it handy in the survey from last year. I think for us it's around 10%. Yeah, okay. That seems like a reasonable position. To me, it's like the vast majority, like I love games. I love board games. But the vast majority of why I choose to play a board game over, say, a video game is I want to socialize, right?

I want to be connected with other people. Um, the solo board game for me personally, I would generally rather just play a video game. Um, and so it's a, it's a it's harder for me to reach that. You know, I mean, I've, you know, I build it, but um, and I built the solo modes and there are several people who are very excited about them. And so we did it again with Ascension tactics inferno. But it's just, um, it's a lot of work for what is not, you know, I'm not part of that target audience group. So it's, it's, it's harder to design for, uh, successfully for me. I have to make sure we have other people on my team who are more into it. So I, I lean on. So I, I lean on. So I, I lean on. So I, I'm, I them more. But it's an interesting space. It's grown in popularity over the years. And I do the same. I focus on the multiplayer side of our games. And then we have the automa factory, my friend Morton, who handles the solo side. And one thing that he has pointed out to me that was enlightening to me, because I did come to it wondering about the social side of it. Same for me. Like I play games for the social aspect. But Morton has pointed out that there is a robust solo community of people who play the game solo,

but they play a solo partially because they like to talk about their solo experiences with the solo community. So I think there is an interesting interactive element there where they're talking about the games with this greater community, even though they're playing by themselves. I thought that was interesting to learn when you pointed that out. No, that makes a lot of sense, actually. I hadn't really thought that through. But it also explains partially why the solo players are, I think,

louder percentage-wise than others because this is there, that's how they socialize with it, that becomes a thing. So that's fascinating. While we're on the topic of campaigns, there's two other things that I find interesting and sort of challenging around it that come to mind. One is how you balance like the difficulty level of a campaign. What makes you think about what do you target? How do you play? Because in a in a PVP game, right, you just, okay, you're playing against each other. So, you know, as long as the strategies are not degenerate, I've done my job, you know, and you're having fun, but in a PVE game, it's in a campaign where you're just fighting against the game itself,

setting a difficulty level is not an easy task. So how do you think about that topic? Yeah, it's on my mind a lot. I'm working on a game that either could end up being a campaign game or it could end up being a mini campaign game or could end up not being a campaign game. So I'm thinking about this a lot lately. And that's one of the challenges. Like if I decide to make this game a campaign game,

then I need to make sure that when you're playing, whatever, game five, game 10, whatever game, however deep into the campaign it goes, that that your character isn't completely imbalanced against what the game is, with the challenges that the game is presenting them with. And at the same time, also the amount of kind of mental overload I'm asking players to keep in mind, because by game, by game 10, do they have the three dozen cards they didn't have in the first game or, you know, all this, all these different things they've gathered over the course of the game? Or am I going to artificially constrain that and say at the end of each game, you need to get rid of all this stuff and you can only keep one? Just I don't have to face those types of design decisions when I'm designing one-off games.

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. So it's a lot harder. And, yeah, then, I mean, that begs the question too, right? How do you decide? What factors you use to decide if you're going to make a game a campaign game or not? Yeah. Well, you mentioned the experience. What kind of experience am I trying to offer someone?

The game that I'm talking about is a game where I built a big world. And I'm trying to decide if it's more exciting for players to end up on this world and spend a single session on it and then blink out of existence and then come back later fresh and new. Or is it more interesting for them to spend a lot of time with the same character walking around this world and exploring this world? and going deeper into their character and having that that character-specific progression. I don't know the answer to that for this particular game, but that's kind of the decision point that I'm making. What do I want to offer players for that experience? Yeah, yeah, well, that's the heart of it, right?

Every, every, we're going to talk a lot about different design decisions, but they always come down to that at the core, right? What's the experience I'm going to create for my audience? You know, who am I trying to serve? What experience don't want to create for them? Like, that's, that's always, it's just a great, like, thing I always, always come back to. If I'm ever confused or lost in a game or design, you're really coming back to that, okay, what's at the heart of this? And then once you know that, the other decisions,

I won't say they're easy, but they're definitely easier. As you know what you're trying to target. And I did go through that with Charterstone. Charterstone is a competitive legacy village building game that I made. And from fairly early on, I knew that I wanted players to have that sense of pride of building their own part of a village and that that part of the village would carry over to the next game. That was really important to the game itself. So that was kind baked in from the beginning. Well, yeah, so let's let's tease that apart then a little bit too. So legacy games and I'm trying to remember to define our games where, you know, the game is permanently altered based on previous game plays compared to a campaign game where your situation is

altered based on previous games or previous scenarios, but you can still sort of reset everything back to the beginning if you want to. It's sort of the main fundamental difference as I define it. How do you think about, you know, those two different genres and how you decide between them or because we had, we had that same debate with Shards. Do we want to make this a legacy game? In fact, that's where we started. And then we kind of, the more we thought about it, the more like, I think it'd be more fun to be able to just replay it. So we out it out. But how do you think about those terms. I think permanence is powerful. I've learned a lot from watching what Rob Davio was created and the way that he talks about the power of permanence. I think I view it as a tool,

a tool to use in the right circumstance. Like sometimes that permanence can be really powerful for players to experience when they tear up that card or when they put a sticker on the board and that that sticker is there from then on. That is, you know, that is a feeling that is an emotion in itself. But I, as from the design perspective, it's a big choice to ask a player to make a permanent decision because it can't be undone.

They have set themselves on a path then and I need to anticipate that path as a designer. That made Charterstone by far the hardest game that I've ever designed because I had to anticipate all these different, this web of paths that players could take that they couldn't undo because of the permanence, because of that feature. And so I'm glad that I did that. I'm glad I went through that experience with Charterstone, but it also made me never want to design a legacy game again. And I'm amazed that Rob has just made a whole career out of it.

Yeah. No, yeah, well, it's awesome. I mean, he's also been on the podcast and, you know, talking about the origins of that and when where, you know, where it's evolved. And yeah, so if anyway, that's interested in legacy games,

that deep dive, please check out that episode. And I think that, yeah, I've played around with this. It's probably shouldn't. be spoiling this right now, but we don't have it figured out. Yeah, but I've been played around with how do you make like a legacy game,

like using some of the algorithmic generation tools like we built in SoulForge, where you could theoretically have a, you know, because there's a variety of possible things can have in the legacy game, but once you've sort of, you know, opened up the box or ripped the sticker out or done the thing, right, the magic's kind of gone. It's still like gets to that probably, you know, you could play it again, but there's some diminishing returns on it. And having ones where literally every box you get could be different and you don't know

what's coming. and then, you know, the sort of permanent changes come from that. Like, that's a pretty sexy concept to me. Like, there's something that's really, really splashy about that. I haven't cracked it yet. But yeah, I don't know if you've put in any thought into that kind of space, but I'm really eager to figure it out. I toyed around with that.

And Charterstone is a little bit of that, given that it's a competitive legacy game. But it can rapidly spin out of control, I think. depending on how much you let players change things over the course of the game. And I think Rob actually does some interesting things in betrayal legacy, where he kind of gives different components a timer, where something might be really powerful, might get more powerful,

and then it goes away if you've used it a lot. And I think by giving something a half-life, a timer, that can help with those power levels. Yeah, fascinating. Okay, I want to make sure to cover some other things because there's so many deep dive topics we could cover here. But I want to talk about a little bit more on the business side too. You know, I think one of the things that you seem to do a great job is, you know, consistent content generation, you know, creating stuff, whether it be posts on blog posts or YouTube videos and, you know, multiple different channels. And I know from doing things like this podcast, how much time this stuff can take.

And so how do you think about your kind of time allocation for those things? How much do you credit that as kind of a business strategy versus just something you're doing because you're passionate about it? I mean, to some extent, it's all tied together. But for people out there, I'm, you know, I'll tip my hand. I think that, you know, creating great content for people for free is one of the best ways that you can build an audience nowadays. And just by adding value to the world.

So how do you think about that and what's your. strategy like for deciding what's worth your time to create and how you'd balance that with the other interests of your company and design. I love the question and I love that spirit of generosity. The idea, and you're right, it is tied to marketing in the end. But I love the idea of creating something that adds value to people and hopefully starts a discussion that everyone can benefit from, including me. When I write a blog post, it's often about an idea that I'm kind of processing. Maybe I've experimented with something and I want to talk about it, but I genuinely want to see what people think about it. And I learn from the comments on my videos.

I learned from the comments on my blog posts. And so part of it is just like a collective learning experience. Part of it is marketing. And in terms of time management, that's something I had to learn over time about how to be consistent with this content, while also knowing that I have a lot of other things to do with running my business and developing games and designing games. And so I kind of have a schedule where on Mondays and Thursdays, I write blog posts on Tuesdays. Tuesday is my recording day. I typically record a couple game videos and usually a top 10 video on Tuesday. And then I schedule them ahead, which is something that I didn't do for a while.

I used to record on the same day that I'd post. And so I have like my Sunday video. I'd record it on Sunday morning. And then it occurred to me. It should have been obvious at the time. But I can record those in advance. Like no one knows when I recorded them. So I record that stuff on Tuesday.

And so yeah, breaking that down and having those habits where I know this is something I do every Thursday morning. And every Tuesday morning, I need to be ready to look at the camera for a few hours. But that I don't have to do it after that by that I'm done with it. I can focus on other things after that has been really helpful to have that consistency and that structure that I found work for me. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I find I find things like that where you can carve out time and have consistent. consistent structure is really valuable. And I also think putting yourself into public deadlines is super valuable, right? If everybody knows, you know, we, we, you know, we post at least one

podcast a month, which is not too onerous, but it's a, you know, I make sure I get it done. If I know I'm going to do a blog post every week and I start posting and I tell people that the pressure of people are expecting it is also really helpful. One of my phrases I like to repeat is deadlines are magic to really help make stuff happen. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And for you to, I may have this wrong, but do you live in a different country right now? Are you traveling actively all the time? Yeah, I'm a nomad. I'm a digital nomad.

So for the last two years, I have been without an actual normal home. And I'll spend a couple months in different countries around the world and shifts. I'm heading to Europe. Right now, I just got back to the U.S. because we had a team in-person retreat in Vegas. And I have a couple conventions I'm speaking at. And then I'm going to go off to Europe, June, from beginning. of June until uh gen con in august okay i think it's really cool that you found that that that worked for

you um and does it get in the way of or does it create a new challenge for scheduling time to talk with other people since they could be on very different time zones than you of course of course yeah no there's a lot of challenges so one is you talk about your routines and your habits yeah yeah when you're home and you have your setup everything's great and all dialed in that's much easier to do you've got your right okay i know i've got my mic and camera set up over here so when i walk in this room, I'm going to record. I know I've got my, you know, my nice little coffee maker and my desk where I write stuff. You know, everything is like set up. And so I've had to learn how to create those triggers and create, you know, sort of portable versions of that that get me into my

habit routines. And then I've also been, because we've already prior to starting this process, what kind of got me on the road in the first place was I, you know, COVID made us become 100% remote as with most people. And then we started hiring people from all over the country. And then all over the world because they're just good people and they don't have to commute to an office anymore. So why wouldn't I hire great people? And so we already had to figure out how to work with people in different time zones. And so a lot of that became as much as possible making meetings asynchronous. And when they are synchronous meetings, making sure they're documented well, creating those spaces where it turns out a lot of the times people spend in face-to-face meetings

is wasted. And so they still are valuable. Again, we had a team retreat where everybody got in the same room for four days just a couple weeks ago, and that's immensely valuable. But we use that time very consciously. So it's forced me to become a lot more efficient in ways that I'm very happy about that I will carry forward even, you know, whenever I decide to stop being a nomad. But it's, it's no question, it's harder. And I had to learn, you know, when I started on the journey, I would do like a week here, two weeks there. And I found that to be way too disruptive. It just takes too long to get yourself situated. So my productivity took a hit. But now with a couple months at a time. I find it to be a pretty good rhythm. With the new employees paired with the

traveling, has it changed how you delegate? Do you delegate more or less or do you find specific things that just weren't working for you as you became that digital nomad? You know, it's actually, the answer is delegate more. And the reasoning for it, and this is maybe a good insight for a lot of people out there because I just, I think it's a common fallacy for a lot of entrepreneurs and that you know, I just felt like I had to do everything. I'm, I know I have all the context. I'm good at what I do and you're not going to do as well as I can. So I need to make sure that I'm the one doing this or I need to make sure that I'm closely checking up on you and, you know, micromanaging you as you do this, which ends up being worse for everybody. Right. And forcing

myself to do this. I actually learned this more before I became an official digital amendment. I just did a, I took a three week trip to Thailand back in 2017. And I told my team six months ahead, hey, I'm going be unreachable. Now, in reality, I was not. I was still checking my email. I still in. But I told everybody I was unreachable and I just to run it as an experiment. Like, you have six months to get ready. You have plenty of time. What do you need for me? How do we set this up? And everybody stepped up in a way that I was so impressed by. And then it made me feel so dumb because I realized that I was the reason that they were holding themselves. I was the one holding them all back. And so removing yourself, this idea that you're some superstar and you have to do

everything is so critical if you want to scale a company. I have a great team. They're incredibly talented. And I'm not saying I got this perfect by any stretch. I'm continuing to learn and try to get better because as we grow, I don't know if you have the same problem. How many people do you have on your team? Now we have, I have three other full-time coworkers and two part-time.

Okay. Great. So you're still, you're still, that's an awesomely small team. We were that size maybe a year and a half ago. and now we're like 12 plus full time and then another six or so part time. We scaled a lot recently with different divisions and a bunch of different things going on. And that just you have to manage differently. You have to change everything because you can't, you know, with three people, five people,

even up to maybe eight people, you can pretty much know what everybody's doing. You can be very closely connected to what everyone's doing all the time. Once you get past 10, that becomes actually, you know, impossible. And you have to start thinking about this is where like the idea, We talked earlier about KPIs and managing some things by metrics. So you have to ask yourself the question is like, what is it that would need to be true for me not to worry about this at all? What would need to be true for me not to worry about this at all?

And then you write that down, ideally, right? And then you can share that. Say, hey, here's what I would need. And here's some milestones I'd like or here's what I would like to see written up from your meeting notes or here's whatever it is that you would need and then give your team the ability to run and being conscious for yourself. Because I always tend to worry about everything that's going on. I mean, you're running the business.

It all falls on you eventually. You have to take responsibility for everything, even as you realize you don't really have control over as much as you would like. Well, I love the idea, too, of almost intentionally going on a vacation to realize that maybe you are a little less important than you think you are. I have definitely gone through that myself. And it also made me realize how amazing my team is.

It sounds like you realize that, too, that they can handle things really, really well when I'm not available. I jury duty a couple weeks ago and I was really worried about it. And then in the middle of it, like, because in the trial, I cannot do anything. I can't check my email or anything like that. And everything was fine. Because my team is awesome. And they don't need me to do that, do everything from moment to moment.

Yeah. No, that's exactly right. It's a great, it's a great insight. You know, if it's a forcing function like that that requires it, then, you know, so be it. And so then what then do you decide now, you know, you've got a great team. team, you know that they can handle stuff without you. How do you then decide what's, what are the things that you decide you want to do versus you let other people do? How do you, how do you make those decisions? And what specifically are,

are they nowadays? Yeah, I was thinking about this, a little bit of that with the, the content creation. I found that I enjoy that more than I thought. And so that that is definitely part of my weekly workflow of that content creation. But I did realize along the way that, like, I like turning on the camera and talking for a few minutes about a game. I don't like, and I realized I don't like editing the videos. I don't like adding images to the screen. I don't like adding the, you know, I have not learned Adobe Premiere. I could, but I don't really want to spend time doing that. And that takes the joy out of it for me. And there are certain things that I had to do in my job that are not, not everything is full of joy in every single moment.

But that was one of the things that when I, when I hired my coworker Joe, I was like, Joe, would you, Would you maybe be open to doing this? Would you be open to enhancing some of these videos that I make to make them look a little nicer, serve people a little bit better with captions at the bottom, showing them what game I'm talking about right now, that sort of thing? And Joe does that. So I'm able to do part of my job that I think I'm pretty good at and that I enjoy, and Joe does the part of it that makes it even better for people.

He enhances it. But I also carve a few hours every day for game design. I carve a few hours every day for game development. And then a lot of my job is serving people, like the many different emails that come through my inbox. And I enjoy that. And yeah, yeah. Yeah, that there's a, so there's a couple things.

Yeah, I heard there, right? There's the things that you enjoy doing, right? That's key, right? This, like, you know, things that give you energy rather than sap energy away from you. There's the things that you're best at doing, right? Things that you can add the most value with, right? Where are you uniquely positioned to do it? And then there's things that really are the most critical things, right?

What's the most important that has to get done? And ideally, you're spending most of your time in the center of that Venn diagram. Obviously, sometimes it's not. Sometimes you've got to do critical things that you hate or that you're not good at. Sometimes you've got to be able to do, you know, do the things that, you know, the things you like are okay to do when they're not that important. It's an interesting balance. And then I think that when you're trying to,

decide as things shift, how do you prioritize? You mentioned another thing that is interesting, which is sort of inbound versus outbound, right? There's a, when I find that as I've, my career has progressed, I have a lot more inbound than I used to. A lot more people sending me emails, a lot more people making requests, a lot more other things that are trying to vie for my attention, and that I have to fight to preserve the, the protected time where I'm doing my deep work, where I'm, I'm dictating my own work in time. And that's, It's a constant battle for me. I don't know if you've experienced that or how you deal with it.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, but time is by far my most precious resource. Two things that I've kind of found that that helped me a little bit is one, if I'm going to have a conversation with someone, whether it's answering a question about one of our games, a rules question or if it's going to be a conversation like we're having now, I want it to be a public conversation. I wanted to add value to other people. Like I love, you know, you and I could have had this conversation on the phone.

I would have gotten a lot of value out of it. But only you and I would have gotten that value. Whereas you're going to put this out there for hopefully other people to listen to and get value out of it as well. So I figure if I'm going to spend my time on something like that, my hope is that other people get value on it. And the same thing happens with a rules question. Someone can email me a rules question and I can answer that question. And I do. But if they ask that rules question in the wingspan Facebook group or in the tapestry page on board game geek or on the side page or on our website,

then other people who might have that same question can benefit from it as well. I'm often funneling people into public forums if they're comfortable with that socially where we can treat them well and answer them publicly for other people to hear those answers. That's part of it. The other part of it is also

I really try to carve out two hours at the end of every day, usually between 8 and 10 at night, just for design time. And I try, for a while, I found myself, like, getting all my computer at 8 o'clock and still going to my email and try to empty my inbox and do those sorts of things.

And eventually, it was about around a year ago, really, that I gave myself permission to let those things wait until the morning. And everything is fine when I do that. It's fine for 99% of those emails to wait 12 hours until the morning. And protecting that creative time that gives me so much energy at the end of the day to do that has been really fulfilling for me to do that. That's great and also a message I needed to hear again at this time. So it's definitely been, I felt myself on the other side of the equation for the last several weeks.

Yeah. And the are you an inbox zero kind of guy? How do you process just for any of education's email and treat that sort of stuff? I am inbox zero. That's why it can be so hard to not reply to that email at the end of the day to not have inbox zero. Yeah. No, that's where I am too. I don't feel comfortable if I have more than more than like a day or two.

My things sit in my inbox. I start to get jittery. But it requires some good processing tools and rules for how you move through stuff. So I don't want to spend too much time on this because I imagine it's not as exciting to our audience. But I will tell you if any of you reach a level of success that many of you are aspiring to, this will become really important. And it's important regardless of your business industry these days. It's a, you know, how do you process incoming information sort it in a way that's useful and actionable?

And balance that against the deep work that you care about and want to generate is a, is always a critical skill. I'm constantly working to refine. Yeah. Same here. Okay. Let's get back to one more topic. I want to make sure to cover. And then we'll, if, you know, see, whatever we can cover in the last little bit of time. I knew we were going to, I knew we were going to run up the time here. So, you know, you're very thoughtful about the way that you, run your business. And as you mentioned, you create content and you'll put your thought, you're thinking out there in the open, which I very much appreciate. One of the things that I thought was interesting was your, your champion, your Stone Meyer champion program. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it anywhere else, but I'd love to hear some details about that

and how that's been going for you. Yeah, this is a program that we started, it's either four or five years ago. And it's evolved over time. But the basic idea of it is I wanted to create a loyalty program. I wanted to give people a reason to, if they were going to buy a Stelmeyer product, that the first place that they might look for that product is our web store. And over time, even that philosophy has changed a little bit. Really, I want people to buy the product in the way that's right for them. Hopefully, many of those are their local game store, but I also want some of them to be directly from our web store. And so what we've landed on at this point in time is that champions, people who sign up

for a champion membership, they pay $15 a year. And their main concrete benefit is that they get 20% off every order from our web store. They also get like a special monthly newsletter. And it's a way for them to support the content that I create because none of the content that I create, the videos, the blog post, none of it is, has ads on it. none of it is gated in any way. It's just it's out there for people to consume. And I did at the time when I was thinking about this,

there were an increasing number of people, and I really appreciate them asking, saying, can you start a Patreon or something? Can you start some way for me to express appreciation for the content you create? Which I really appreciate that. And so I thought, okay, I'll create this champion program as a way for some of those people to do that. And the champion program has grown.

I think currently we have, we're actually getting close to 14,000 people who are in the champion. program. Wow. And many of them, many of them are just like I announced my new game expeditions a couple weeks ago. Many of them may have just signed up to get 20% off on that one game because that might be more than the $15 at their pain. But then their foot is in the door and maybe they'll check out something else later in the year. Maybe they'll stay in touch with Stomire games more than they would have. So I think even that one purchase can be worth it. But yeah, it's a little like a mini Amazon Prime just for just for Stomire games.

Yeah. So there's an interesting, yeah, so this is why I wanted to open the door to kind of this idea of loyalty programs, ambassador programs. Like I find I continue to, it's just so hard to get through the noise nowadays, right? It's so much content out there. There's so many games being created. There's so much happening. Like ways that you can empower your most invested players to both have a direct relationship with you and, you know, ideally buy directly from you, at least some of the time. but that's the secondary goal. And to be able to empower them also to spread the word, spread the gospel, you know? It's something I think about a lot and especially with games like Soulforge Fusion where there's, you know, this sort of repeat purchase model, there's tons of content coming, there's events, there's that you need to get people to serve as your ambassadors in a powerful way or else, you know, it's just not sustainable, right?

The value gamers love talking about the games that they love. You want to make it as easy for them as possible, ideally with some rewards. along the way. Do you have any other programs like that or experience or thoughts in it comes to sort of not just the subscriber level, but the kind of alpha enthusiast level? Or how do you think about those kinds of things? Yeah, we have a separate ambassador program, which just doesn't cost anything because they're offering just as much value to us as hopefully we are to them. But there are people who are really, really excited about what we're making it still my games. I think there's around 500 of them right now. For a while, there are actually

a lot more. And I decided, I kind of, there's a little bit of a weird turning point in it, but I realized that a certain number of our ambassadors really hadn't bought into what we were actually trying to make. We were trying to make accessible, eco-friendly games that were inclusive. And I kind of realized that some of the ambassadors were buying into that concept. And so there's now kind of an application to become an ambassador. But it's pretty easy to get in.

And so there are often are evangelists. They're evangelist. What's the word? I'm stumbling evangelical. Evangelical? Evangelical. Evangelists? Evangelists, yes.

Evangelists for our games. And we also have a Discord that we set up, which is probably the most recent thing, set that up a few months ago for people who want to just have that one specific platform to talk about our games. And we have the Facebook groups, too. If someone's really passionate about just one of our games, they can go into the Facebook groups,

which I love the community. that have built there as well. Have you used Facebook groups for specific games or Discord? Yes, both. So we have a Discord first, which anybody can access by just going to Stoneblade.com, which has all of our games in it and anybody there. It's actually my favorite of the social channels right now because it's very just very chat focused. It's very easy to reply directly to people. So it's the one that my team and I are most engaged in. We've been using, so we've been using that for at least a couple year since, I think since COVID, actually, since we started the, we had to run our ascension tactics campaign with no physical presence. So we figured out Discord became our kind

of water cooler. And now we run our whole company out of Discord as well. So we have our kind of back, we have our back of the office chat room, which is locked. And then the main chat at the front of the store where everybody can show up and hang out. So it's actually, it's really, it's really cool. And then yeah, Facebook groups we've used since, you know, since they existed pretty much. So we have them for each of the brands. So, yeah, they're all very valuable. It's that balance of like, you know, you want to go where your, where your audience is. But you also want to balance how many channels you're trying to support and how much time,

you know, we have to have a dedicated person to do that. In addition to the sort of the thing I like about Discord, at least for our usage is it's, it's default. Like, I'm looking there anyway every day. So it's easy for me to jump in and reply and say stuff. So it's nice. This also we use it for my Think Like a Game Designer course. which we're going to be launching again pretty soon.

Actually, pretty damn soon after this air is probably where everybody, you know, all the students are in there and can share their games and connect and play. And it just creates a much more, I don't know, just kind of like a cool, casual hangout spot than the other social platforms do for me anyway. That's great. So I want to keep the thread on, so building community, this is a key part of it. it's all, it's all connected here because I think great games is, is, is a critical piece of the puzzle, right? If you don't have great games, then you're, you're dead in the water to begin with, but it's not the only piece and may not even be the most important piece.

It's that building a great community is, is at least as important over the long term. Yeah. And so, you know, these social, digital communities, supporting stores for their communities, and then, you know, having these ambassadors, these, these, these, you know, alphas, whatever you want to call them, to help build communities in places you can't, reach necessarily. So you said you have a, and selecting those ambassadors is not necessarily an easy process because you want to open the, you know, be inclusive, but you also want people that are going to represent you and your game and your philosophy as well. So you said you had a short survey. What is that what if you don't mind sharing? Like what's on that survey? Like what, what are filters are you using there? Like how do you how do you decide, you know, who gets in the door, who doesn't in this program? Yeah. So it's one of these, uh, you know, I'll,

I'll share some of the questions with you. Some of them might be contentious at this point, but let's see. So the first question is, do you believe that Stelmeyer should offer exclusive, tangible content for our games that is only available for a limited time to specific groups? And this is kind of our way. So we have kind of fully embraced the idea that we want to be inclusive with our content. And if we are going to have promo content,

and we do a promo content, that it isn't exclusive to a single moment in time or single group. And this was actually one of the biggest things that I found that there are more and more ambassadors who seem to really want exclusive stuff. And it just is not the philosophy of Stomeyer games. That isn't the type of content we create. How do you feel about those exclusives? Oh, yeah, you open up a can of one. I'll give you my short answer, which is like I hate it when games do gameplay exclusive content.

Yeah. That's like that, right? Like, I don't get to play with this cool toy because I didn't. happen to be at the right place at the right time. Exactly. That really bothers me. But I don't, it does not, alternate art or variants or just purely cosmetics, I do not feel that way.

I think that's actually a great way to reward people for whom are particularly loyal or to show that they, hey, I went to this event or, you know, I think, I think cosmetics are fair game, but, but gameplay exclusives are distasteful to me personally. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we're definitely on the same page there. Then I have a few questions about, questions about, let's see. Yeah, so a lot of our ambassadors are kind of moderators.

And so I say this is kind of an easy one for them to answer. But on social media, you see someone post the following. Side sucks. Don't believe the hype. How do you respond? And I give a few options for how they could respond to that. Some are nicer than others. There's one red herring answer, things like that.

Because I want to make sure that the idea of the ambassadors is that they are welcoming people in, even if someone comes in with a little heat like that. I want them to feel welcome too. So there are questions like that. Basically testing how welcoming they're going to be to people who come from different walks of life. Yeah, that's great. I think, yeah, making sure that people are going to be, you know, be kind, be good at what they're, you know, have some semblance of understanding of what they're trying to do and that their hearts in the right place is some of the most important parts. Building that welcoming positive community is so critical.

Again, it's why I know from just consuming enough of your content, it's a big part of why you do what you do. It's why I do what I do. And if you bring someone on board that doesn't have that philosophy, it can be very corrosive very quickly, whether that be ambassadors or staff or anything like that. Oh, yeah. It's every level. And I think if you, if like we've done, I think we've done a pretty good job, but fostering this welcoming community, especially these, this welcoming group of ambassadors that welcome other people. And it takes a lot of pressure off off me to do that. and pressure off my coworker Joe who works in customer service because the ambassadors are out there

answering questions often faster than we can. And if they're doing so in a way that is kind and welcoming, they're doing, I guess they're doing part of my job for me in a really great way. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think, I think that's a, it's a great and powerful tool. It's one of the things that I feel grateful for to be able to have enough of an audience that there are people that want to do this, right? It's a great threshold to be at. Do you find that these transition much between different games, right? Like how many of these people are, you know, Stonemeyer fans and playing everything that you play or a bunch of different games? How many are like, no, no, I'm here for Seid. Like, that's my jam. And, you know, because we have, we have that too, right? We have Ascension

players. We have Soul Forge players. We have some crossovers. But typically there's, there's somewhere they're leaning and that's the universe they want to play in. Yeah. There's, there's, It's a little all over the place. One of the questions on the survey actually is, and let's see if I might have actual data for you right now. Ooh. Yes. Okay, so I ask,

how many Stomyer Games products do you know fairly well? And let's see. The people who answer most, most is 8 plus, and that's 16%. And then some, which is 3 to 8, is around 25%. percent. Actually, no. This data, it's a little skewed because it looks like I've changed the answers over time to the pie chart is a little skewed. So it looks like about half and half.

Some people know a lot of our games when they sign up to be an ambassador. And it looks like around half, only know like one or two. So maybe their foot is in the door through a wingspan or a side. And they're excited enough about that game that they want to learn more. And that I'm fine. I kind of like having a mix of the two, that they're only the diehards that know everything. but there are also people that just know a few things and want to know more. Yeah. No, it's great. It's great balance to have, actually.

I think that's a pretty perfect ratio, to be honest. All right. So we're running short on time. So I, you know, again, normally at this point, I point people to your other sources of where to find you. We did that at the beginning. And I do just want to reiterate. I mean, the wealth of incredibly great knowledge that you share is, it rivals anything I've seen in the marketplace.

And so I want to thank you for it. I've used it in the past. when I've run different campaigns, and I'm always looking at you as a thought leader in the space. And so other people should look to that as well. And there's guides from the beginner all the way to the experimental. So I know you've got a lot of data out there. Is there anything that you would want to share in a majority of our audience are designers or aspiring designers?

Actually, I've learned quite a few people that are in the industry already that are checking in. Is there any sort of other insight you'd want to share for somebody starting out or some counter. intuitive thing that you're still working through or anything that you want to share with the audience before we wrap up. Yeah, no pressure to end strong here. Like I said, I started strong because I started by saying, you were one of the hardest interviews I've had to prepare for because so much of your content's already there. And I didn't want to just rehash stuff you've already said.

So you've done a great job sharing a ton of value. If something comes to mind, great. If not, no worries. You know, something, I don't have anything amazing that comes to mind off the top of my head. But I really enjoyed this conversation and anyone listening to this, I hope they feel welcome to join the conversation on my YouTube channel or on the blog. Because really that's what it is. Like I'm posting some ideas out there and sometimes it's data.

Sometimes it's a strong opinion, but I really genuinely want to hear what other people think so that I can better serve the people who are playing our games or are curious about our games. So yeah, I think that's the best way I can say. I'm going to learn more, I think, from other people joining that conversation than they can learn from some moment of insight that I can share right now. No, that's, that's, that's, that's great. And I think that actually does serve as a pretty deep point here. You know, like there is a way to, you know, people feel like it's one of the reasons why like having these kinds of conversations.

People feel like they're their, their ideal designers, the CEOs, the game designers are these unapproachable, you know, all knowing things. And I'm just like, we don't know what we're doing as well. We're just figuring it out as we go. And we love conversation. And teaching and writing and talking through it is how we get better. And so the feedback is critical. In fact, it's one of the keys to long-term success is you got to be able to take those feedback. So for those out there that want to, I mean, I reached out to you by a comment on your YouTube channel.

Yeah, yeah. You know, even I did this. So you're responsive to it and people should feel that way. And I hope that other people feel that way with me and my content too. So it's worth reiterating, right? I mean, put that stuff out there. I actually had a thing in my book in one of the last chapters that gave people the way to contact me directly. And out of, out of, you know, many, many thousands of books sold, I think maybe 20 people total ever.

So it's a, it's a, you know, the ability to just reach out. If you have questions, comments to engage, to share your thoughts, everybody in the audience, please do so. And then he knows, maybe one of you out there will be the next guest on this podcast. and you'll be sharing your thoughts with the whole world. So this has been fantastic. So thanks so much, Jamie. I appreciate the time and the extra bonus time. I would love to have another conversation with you.

Maybe even be fun to get together and brainstorm a project or something. I think we have a lot aligned in how we think about these things. So it would be a lot of fun. If you're a nomadic travels ever take you to St. Louis, let me know. Yeah, love to chat more. Sounds good. All right. Thank you.

Take care. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares 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 wherever find books or something.