Think Like A Game Designer - John D. Clair — Crafting Award-Winning Games, Navigating Legal Pitfalls, Lessons from Downfall, and Innovating with Kinetic Design (#40)

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

John D. Clair is the designer of Mystic Vale, which was awarded the ORIGINS Award and Gamer’s Choice award in 2017. His other titles include Downfall, Rumble Pie, Custom Heroes, Space Base, and Edge of Darkness. He is a fantastic designer with a lot of wisdom to share. In this episode, we discuss learning from mistakes made in previous designs, handling legal protections for new designs, and making the most of game components to make your games more fun and exciting. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with John D. Claire. John is a designer of countless amazing games like Mystic Vale, Kubitos, Spacebase, and Dead reckoning. John's background is really fascinating and really highlights a lot of the important principles that we talk about a lot here on the podcast. In this episode, we talk about the tips for overcoming rejection and the fear of rejection. We talk about how to successfully pitch

your game and how John got past sending over 50 different emails to publishers in his attempts to try to get his first game published. We talk about the origin of the card crafting system that is at the heart of a lot of John's games. We talk about the essence of kinetic design, which is the term that John coined, which is a really useful principle for how to approach designs. And we go through quite a bit of really interesting deep dives on how to make games fun when you are losing, how to make long, complicated games still more approachable for players, how to turn the nuisance and upkeep of your game into actual fun and exciting moments. And there's a lot of really specific examples from both John and my games throughout

the process. So it's a really great episode. I loved talking with John. We really got to deep dive on a lot of stuff. And so without further ado, here's my conversation with John D. Claire. Hello and welcome. I am here with John D. Claire. John, it's great to have you here, man. Yeah, it's an honor to be on the show. Yeah, like, I've been, you know, I've been a fan of your work for a while, and I was really excited when you came by my booth at GenCon this year. We started talking about some cool designs, including a project. We're not going to talk about here. But I realized that I wanted to take the opportunity to have you on and chat about all the fun things that are all the fun design things and really digging a little bit to your

history because you've got some pretty big epic games under your belt and some ones that are, you know, I both admire the designs for that sort of take things that existed before and evolve them, but also like really kind of do some new categories and some really interesting stuff like, you know, what you've done with Mystic Vale and a variety of other projects. And so I, I, I, I, I can't wait to dig into all these things. But I always like to start, you know, just kind of the origin stories here. Because, you know, for a lot of people listening, you know, they know you, they know your games, they see the kind of level of success that you're at.

And they wonder how do they get to this point. And so maybe we can like talk a little bit about how you got into game design and we'll try to tease out some lessons for people as we go. Sounds great. Thanks for that introduction. Yeah. My path to, you know, full-time game design is probably going to line up somewhat with other people's, but also be different. I'll take us all the way back to when I was nine years old. So I was homeschooled.

I went to first grade in kindergarten and growing up in Los Angeles. My parents couldn't afford private school, and they weren't in love. with the public school options. So my mom decided she was going to try homeschooling us. She tried it with my sister first, and then she found a good group, and then she tried it with me. So I grew up in a very different environment in that respect. It was very an unschooling system where we really didn't have much in the way of curriculum. So as a child, my days were very much kind of up to me with how I wanted to spend my time.

and I was particularly attracted to nerdy things. My friend group, we were all into games, and we all read Lord of the Rings when we were way too young, right? And we were into that. So at nine years old, I was when Pokemon became Pokemon, right? And just sort of like took over childhood, you know, in the United States. And all my friends had Pokemon cards and they were all like, you know, I was, I saw them and I was like, this is the coolest thing, right? And my mom at that point, this was very much her parenting philosophy, she had sort of drilled into me the, you know, if you want something, well, first let's see if we can make it instead of buy it, right?

You know, I'm the kid in the toy store who's like, oh, can we get that? My mom's like, no, no, let's see if we can make it instead. right so you know when all my kids all my friends were playing we're getting Pokemon cards my instinct as a nine-year-old was that's really cool I wonder if I can make a game like that that's great so that being being sort of instilled you know the sort of key maker instinct from a very young age that's that's like obviously really powerful seed to plant was that something that your mom does she is she a maker or creative person by default or she just sort of saw that as the way to to try to

raise you or like, where do you think that comes from? My mom is a super creative person. She is not as much, I mean, not to psychoanalyze my mom. If my mom had the same confidence and willing to take risks that I do, she could have had, I think, a tremendously successful creative career. But she's a very risk-averse type person. Sure. So she raised us with a very creative home and an eye to being creative, you know, whenever possible and making things.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just a great lesson that you're able to underscore there, right? You know, this idea that there are a lot of people out there. And I think, you know, that are very creative and very talented, but that willingness to put yourself out there and take those risks is absolutely. critical piece of the puzzle if you want to succeed in any creative field, let alone game design specifically. And so highlighting that, I think, is a really, really powerful note for people that are listening, that you've got to be willing to do that. If you're not, then you won't, you won't be able to, no matter how talented you are, you won't be able to get your stuff out there.

100%. Yeah. And that's, I mean, you know, if your goal is just to enjoy the creative process, then, you know, go ahead and do it, right? Have a great time. You know, write a novel or whatever that inspires you and you enjoy it. But if your goal is to, you know, get published and have more than your friends and family read it, you have to be willing to fail and struggle and get rejected and have people not like your creative output, right? Yeah. Well, I'll go, I'll push back even a little bit further here.

Like, even if your goal is not to be like a, you know, a professional and to have your product for sale, I still think that there's even that, you know, continuously showing. your creative work to even friends and family, right? There's a, there's a risk that comes from that. There's an emotional risk that comes from that. There's rejection that comes from that. And a lot of people won't even do that. And if you don't subject yourself to, you know, what I call the core design loop of this process of like getting feedback, testing ideas, iterating, and going through it, even just the, if your goal is just pure creative fulfillment, I still don't think you're going to get there if you're not willing to take at least some of those emotional risks to

show things to people, take in criticism, and be able to kind of learn and grow from that. Oh, yeah, I 100% agree. I mean, you might have the same raw creative ability and instincts, but yeah, without getting it out there, you're not going to hone those and improve upon them. Absolutely. Cool. Well, and then just one more tangent, then I'll let you get back to the story, because I know we were just talking before we started recording about your, you have three kids of your own now, including a newborn. And, uh, and, uh, and, and, um, Now, you know, when you, are you going to apply these lessons or how do you think about teaching your own kids now, now that that opportunity is going to be coming up for them very soon? Well, my eldest, who's three and a half now, he already is trying to design board games.

He doesn't really yet understand, like, what it means to be designing a board game, right? Yeah. but, you know, he'll be like, dad, you know, let's make a game, right? And I'm like, okay, what kind of game you want to make? Well, let's get the scissors in the paper, right? You know, he wants to cut out cards and stuff, right? Cool. Yeah, no, 100%.

I actually think my parents were excellent parenting role models, as well as good role models in general. I think. But their parenting approach, you know, I couldn't speak more highly about my parents' parenting approach, and I've learned, I feel like, a lot from them and want to take a lot of the experience that I remember having and not their knowledge and, you know, have a similar approach to parenting my kids. So just again, just because I'd love to sort of tease out and underscore principles that people can use here. What I heard is this, you know, letting your kids follow some of their creative interests and then whenever possible driving them to, if they want something to go through the creative exercise of trying to

make it and trying to make their own thing. Those were two things that I heard from you. Is there anything else that comes out or any refinements to that? If there are people out there with their own kids, they want to inspire like you were inspired? Yeah. I mean, so as a parent, you're, you want to always be looking, you know, this is me speaking as a parent of a three and a half year old as my eldest, right? So I'm not speaking with from a, from a year's worth of experience here. But both from what I learned from my parents, you know, parents of friends that I had growing up, and then, you know, what I've learned so far. Always look for ways to give your child a creative play space without telling them how to play. play. Right. And ideally, the play space isn't one in which they are given a lot of structure to their play. It's where they're able to create the fun, as opposed to the fun being given to them that they're supposed to have, right? I want my children So I have no I have no objection to for example Lego sets where it's like here's a cool Lego set

You get to build this like Star Wars ship right But when the kids are young I would rather them just have a giant tub of mixed up Legos And then build what they want and then figure out new things that they can build right And then as a parent you I think it helps to guide your children's slagery So you can start playing with them, right? And you start building something, but then you ask them, like, well, what do you think this should be as we build it further? Right.

I'm building a castle, right? Well, you know, what should the second story of the castle look like, right? As opposed to saying, like, well, we're doing this thing. Let's do that, right? Yeah, I think that's great. And I, my guess is, I actually don't know how old are you? I'm guessing you're a bit younger than me, given your, your, 33. 33.

Okay, yeah. So you're a little about nine years younger than me and says you're the first, the typical story that I hear, the most common from depending upon the age group of the designers on this podcast. And it's possible that you're the youngest now because we see the oldest generation, it's Dungeons and Dragons is the main launching point. Then there's the next generation, which I'm a part of where it was magic. And now I think you're Pokemon. And this, each one of these games provides, that kind of semi-structured but also unstructured play where you're making the fun, where you're building the experience, right? Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game. It's clearly that way all the trading card games kind of have that. And so I feel like those things create some of that magical space

for people to realize, wait a minute, I can create fun. I can build within this, either whether it's within a sandbox or your own separate thing. I think like those kinds of sparks, whether that's through Legals or cards or RPGs or something, really a really powerful force for kids at that right kind of age when you can really discover and start to create your own things.

100%. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the beauties of, you know, when I never actually got into Pokemon as a child, I was inspired by my friends having Pokemon cards. But I did get into magic as a, as an early teenager, and I actually had cards. And that was one of the things I loved about it was the creative side of crafting a deck in magic, right? This was a game with tons of card variety, right? And there was a creative element to say, like, is this card?

Could I ever make this card useful? Could I build a deck around this weird sort of cool system here that might work? Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, cool. Well, I've teased a lot out of your childhood already, so I'm excited to move forward. So, yeah, so we've gotten, you know, the sort of early being creative and building, the exposure a Pokemon, we've already now started talking about playing magic and the deck building experience from that. Where did we go? Where do we go from there? Yeah, so there was no real stop.

I mean, you know, as I grew up, as I grew older, right, and I got into the teenage years, I started doing more academic work, right? Our homeschool group in L.A., we would start taking community college classes when we got into high school years. So we'd be taking, you know, a half load to, then we get older, a full load of classes. So, but my game design side, all through that, never really stopped. I continued trying to design games, and they would get more sophisticated as I got older. And then finally, there was a hiatus. I, you know, stopped designing games.

And, you know, I guess when I was like a junior in high school through college, I was playing a lot of baseball at the time. I played baseball in high school and college. And then it was in my, you know, junior year in college, I had a summer, basically off, I had an internship, and I decided I was going to design a game, and I had this idea for this big, complicated 4X game that I worked on for a bunch, a bunch of time then and later. And then in my senior year, I designed the first draft of what would later be published as Rumble Pie, probably my most obscure published game at this

point. But I actually specifically thought to myself at the time, I really like this game design thing. And I don't want to just do it for fun on the side. I actually would like to get published, right? I actually would like to get a game published. So let's deconstruct some of that a little bit, because you took, you did it kind of just as a little hobby when you're young, you give it up because now you're a cool baseball player and you're not doing any of that nerdy, nerdy game design stuff anymore. Those definitely not the thought that's going to be. I'm just kidding.

But whatever. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, it went from, you know, hobby to not a priority at all. And then you kind of come back to it as a hobby. You, you choose a ludicrously complicated game category, which is, I think, one of the more common routes that people go that I always try to advise against. If you're, you know, if you're just starting off, like, don't design the 4X game. I don't try to, don't try to make like Halo plus World of Warcraft, which. just some pitches I've gotten from designers to try to come to the class. And I'm just like, let's start with something simple. How about a little card game? You know, how about a little

stuff? But anyway, and then you get to this to rumble pie and you're thinking, okay, I really want to do this. What gave you, you know, the confidence that you could do this? What made you decide that this was the path? Like, again, these are those moments. There's a lot of people out there, I think, that are in this place where they maybe played around, designed some games for fun. And then, okay, now I'm going to go get serious and get a real job. And you wanted to really pursue it. So what was going on in your head then? Well, so in no way did I actually decide to not go get a real job. 100% like I got an economics degree with a business emphasis in college, right?

I totally intended to have a real job. And I got a real job after college, right? Which I did for seven years, right? But nothing about getting a real job in my mind precluded me from also. designing games and and designing games with the intent of making money doing it. Right. And, you know, I've never been afraid of rejection, right? The creative fear of other people not liking your stuff is more of a frustration than a deterrent to me.

It's almost actually more of a motivator, right? So you just think something about your personal psyche that you, when somebody says they don't like your thing, you're like, okay, I'm going to make it better. I'm going to get it there. And you don't feel that, you don't feel that ego attachment to it that a lot of people do. Oh, I 100% have, I'm not an ego-free person. But I guess it strikes me more as a motivator than as a deterrent, right? You know, if I'm worried that people, won't like what I do, then I should just do it really well, right? You know, and then if, if I really like it and they don't, well, you know, that's just a taste difference, right? It's not, it doesn't mean it sucks and I'm bad at it, right? Sure. So with rumble pie, my, you know, in my brain, I was like, okay, I should actually, I actually

want to try to get a game published. I would like to make money doing this, you know, and I wasn't thinking like, hey, I'm going to make tons of money, right? I didn't, I didn't have delusions of grandeur or anything. But I decided I was going to start, I'm like, okay, you know, I've actually designed quite a few games at this point, you know, and they were all just like, you know, in a drawer, in drawers at home, right, hand-drawn games that I'd made. But I was going to, you know, I'm going to design something simple that can appeal to a wider audience, right, and won't be a huge design burden.

And that's actually what Rumblepie was. It's a just a, it's a real-time card-battling, like, party kids game. And I designed that. It came together fairly quick. I worked on it for like a year off and on. And then I pitched it. And the pitch process was interesting. I learned a lot pitching that game.

I started off pitching it just email pitches. And I would just send emails. I googled publishers. I went to the New York Toy Fair website to see who all of the different companies that had booths there were. And then be like, okay, that's a game company. That's a game company. And I made this big list of game companies. I would go to their web pages and look at their submission guidelines.

And then I would send them an email. And a lot of times their submission guidelines would have like, tell us this about your game and this about your game and tell us that. and then fill out this form, and then, you know, that's your submission. And I would do that. And, you know, no one ever responded, basically, with almost, with almost no exceptions. And I think I sent out like 50 of these, right? Wow. And I think I got two responses.

Like, we're not talking like, hey, we looked at your thing and we're not interested, like, just silence, right? That's a tough spot, right? A lot of people would give up there with 50 emails and no responses, not even a thanks for submission. Yeah. So I changed my approach halfway through and actually started getting some responses. And it was to actually ignore the submission guidelines of the companies, which often would ask for a bunch of information. And instead, I just filmed, and the game had the advantage of being a real-time game. You could just film people playing and you'd be like, oh, that looks fun.

Right. But I just made a film of the game that kind of showed how it worked really quick. It was like a two-minute video. And then my email would literally be, hi, are you taking game submissions right now? If you're interested, here's a two-minute video of my game. And that would be the email, right? Great.

And I actually started getting responses. It wasn't, you know, it went from like, you know, a 1% response. response or 2% response rate or whatever to, you know, 15, 20% response rate, even if they were noes and not interested, right? And then eventually a company said, oh, this actually looks, I had two companies asked for a copy of it. They were like, hey, this looks like this could fit for us. One of them ended up playing it and saying no, and one of them ended up saying, hey, we want to license this. And that was, I got to tell you, that was an exciting email to get when they're like, we think we want to license this game. I'm like, I did it.

Yeah. That's it. Great success. And so then, I guess there's two ways to count this, right? You started designing games when you were a little kid. But from the point when you said, hey, you know, I really want to try to make a game and make a living doing this or get it published to when it actually, you got that game to market or you got the acceptance letter. What was that timeline? So I designed Rumble Pie originally called Capow in 2010, which is the year I graduated. So I designed it in college in my last semester and then worked on it for the next year, started pitching it in 2011, sold it in 2012. I think that's the timeline is when they picked it up. Okay. I wonder if it's – actually, I think it might be a little faster. I think I sold it towards the middle of 2011. And so it was about a year and a half from when I designed the game to when I sold it.

But again, the design process for that game was short. It was a very quick and simple game, right? And then like a year later, end of 2012, it came out. Yeah. Great. Well, and so, yeah, again, to underline a couple of lessons here, right, reinforcing once again the lesson of being okay with rejection, not being discouraged by rejection, but using it as a tool to kind of, all right, let me try to change my approach.

Let me try to do something better. And then I think that the work ethic and digging through and finding the different publishers and finding out how to contact them and doing that is great. And then I think you hit on it. When I do the teach people to do design and do pitches through the things like Game Designer course, it's a 60 second to 90 second video, a one page sell sheet that just has mostly like big highlights and top line stuff. And then, you know, that's it.

And that you don't want, you know, people don't have time. anything else. I need to be able to add a glance or in a minute understand what this is to be able to get a submission and then hopefully get through the door and actually be able to, you know, show them the game and play them the game. Even when it's not like rumble pie is a great case and it's one of the reasons why it's it's always good to work on quicker, easier to understand games when you're starting. But even if you have a super complicated 4x game or whatever, you've got to be able to get people hooked and interested and understand the core of like why why this game is different and exciting in that short of time span. I think is absolutely critical.

Yeah. Yep. I mean, those are all cheat codes to skipping a lot of the steps I've learned through trial and error. Yeah. Well, that's sort of the whole point of this podcast. We all had to learn a lot of lessons. Really, really the hard way. And I'm hoping that people listening can have a slightly easier path than we did. All right. So now you've got your first game published. So you quit your job. You're a full-time game designer now. You're rich. That's right. So after Brumble came, Pi came out. I was then a millionaire. And no, very much continued doing the real job while nights and weekends designing games. I was a lesson I learned early was to not sweat the legal protection of my games.

Say a bit more about that because this is also advice I give but is often pushed back on. Yeah, I mean, so my instinct, of course, when I'm, I was young, right, was I have this idea and this game, right? And, you know, what if I show it to a publisher? And they also think it's a great idea, but they don't want to pay me for it. So they just sort of take it and make their own game, right? And I would do what's called like the poor man's copyright where you write the rules and then you mail it to yourself and then you just never open the envelope, right? Right. Which is, which you totally do, right? Like, you know, that's, but that's kind of. of as far as it's almost worth going. And I don't even go that far nowadays, right?

And one of the keys there was, you know, what made it easy for me to get past that was, one, there was good advice just telling me not to worry about it too much. And two, I was one of those, I was in that camp of where a lot of designers are where there was no shortage of games that I wanted to work on and ideas that I was having for games. It wasn't like I had this one game idea and it better work, right? It was, you know,

I've got 50 game ideas and I only have time to work on five of them at a time, right? And, you know, if a publisher happens to take, you know, advantage of one of the ideas, that would be frustrating. And the cost of you trying to be so protective of your ideas is enormous, right? Let alone the, if you actually you're trying to pay to do any kind of crazy copywriting thing, which is nuts on its own, but even just the world where you're not willing to show your game to people or you want. you know, trying to force people to sign NDAs or whatnot. Like you're, you're going to shrink the sphere of people that you can show it to.

You're going to shrink the amount of feedback you can get. You're going to increase the cost to do any kind of iteration loop. Everything that you want to avoid making games. And I, yeah, I agree, you know, obviously we can't give legal advice here. But as far as the best to get the best designs as quickly as possible, like being able to share your ideas liberally and get feedback is critical. And because the ideas are not the important part. It's the execution.

That's the important part. That's what separates great designs from, you know, mediocre ones. And there's a billion great ideas. Any good designer that I know has a list of at least 50 that they have not been able to work on yet or haven't been able to finish yet. They're just laying foul. So, yeah, there's a million games I'd love to make that I've just never going to because it just takes so much effort. That's right. My folder of game concept ideas grows much faster than the folder.

of like being progress and finished games. And I've also, I don't think I've even heard of a story of any major publisher stealing a game like this. I mean, I'm sure it's happened, but it's like such a rarity. Like it's just not worth it to them. Like the cost to pay you as the designers is a very small part of their budget in the scheme of things. And they'd rather have you building it than try to steal it and do it themselves most of the time anyway. So it's just not a fear that I tend to worry about her.

Yeah. And the reputational hazard. for a company in our industry of if they did that if they did that to a designer who's known it would be bad if they did it to multiple smaller designers that would be really bad also right and you know it's a small enough industry that people would know if the company does that and it's just not okay so you're uh you're continuing to design nights and weekends working your job uh you've got your uh where where what's their kind of next next big big break moment here.

So, yeah, I mean, I had a, the big 4X game I was actually still working on. And I pitched that, I started pitching that a year later after, I guess it was the end of 20, yeah, 2013, I started pitching that. And I remember I played it with Michael Mendez of Tasty Minstrel Games at board game geek con. And actually, I should rewind one step. Why was I at board game geek con? So I actually pitched downfall earlier that year at New York Toy Fair. And I was at New York Toy Fair because that's where Rumble Pie was, they had a booth there and I was helping them demo it. And I also showed off Downfall there while I was there. And I showed it to Queen Games. And Nikki, who used to work there,

she was vaguely interested in it and she's like, well, you know what? Maybe this would be for us. And she mentioned that I should go to board game geek con because that's where someone from their company might be. And I was like, should I go to that con? It's a lot of money. Right. Is it worth it?

And I decided I would go, right? I was like, okay, you know, it's worth it. It'll be fun regardless. You know, I'm going to go. And then when I was there, I pitched. around it turns out Queen Games wasn't interested in the end but I played it with Michael Mendez of Tasty Minstrel games and I remember the next day after we played we played the game and we had to end the game like two-thirds the way through and the next day he sort of like and I didn't

really get a feel for how he felt because he had to like run midgame and I'm like okay I guess who knows right and the next day he like flags me down in the conventional hall he's like hey can we play that again tonight and I was like yes that's a good sign right yeah that's always there's no there's literally no better thing that I know of that as far as like do people actually like your game is I want to play it again like that's right I don't trust I almost don't trust any other feedback other than can I play that again that's how you know you got a good game so I played it again with him that night and then he made an offer for it and that that there's a there's a longer story on the back end of why that game took so many years to come out and you know my opinions of

that design now years later when I think I'm a better designer than I was back then. Oh, yeah. That's actually a really interesting thing to dig into, right? So like your, your designs, as we all had this experience in it's not something you know, you get better over time and you look back on your designs, even ones that are like successful. I know, I'll just speak for myself. I know I look back on designs that I've done and I'm just like, I cringe a little bit, you know, I'm just like, oh, I would never do that now. I can't believe it. But, you know, it's cool. I'm glad we did it. I learned from it. But it. It's a tough thing to, I don't often play a lot of my older games.

I don't know if you feel differently, but it's kind of tough to look back on those things for me sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, my feeling on downfall is not exactly that, but it's, you know, it's some portion of that. I really like the core game of downfall, and I actually really like playing it now, even like, you know, if my friends were like, hey, let's play six-keler game of downfall. would be a lot of fun and I like that game. But the problem with downfall, and it's a problem that I was just too much of a novice designer to really identify as a big of a problem as it is, is it is a really, really beginner unfriendly game. And when you play that game with four or five, six players who all know the game, it's fun.

It's great, right? It's a tight, tough, challenging game. When you play it with six, four, five, six new players, it's just brutal, right? It turns out at least half of them have no fun, right? And the problem, of course, as a novice designer, was I was playtesting with the same people over and over again, right? Right. And they were all experts at the game, right? So we were all loving it.

Yeah, and that's just a good lesson. and learned, right? That, you know, and obviously there's other things I would change about the design. I designed that game in 2000, the first draft was like 2009. I essentially finished this design in 2012,

right? Several years before I even came up with the card crafting idea. So like, and then amazingly, the game actually didn't come out until 2018, which was weird, where I was like,

okay, I hope this game does well, but this is an old design. Yeah. Yeah, well, okay. So, yeah, you highlighted the lesson of make sure you test with new players. And I'm, you know, not just the same group to make sure that the new player experience is front and center, which I agree completely with. And I am, I'm hyper focused on the new player experience in my designs. And I, when you're, but when you're designing a game like these kinds of 4x games that are giant monster games, like I have a worker placement game that I've been working on that, you know, probably be coming out next year or the year after.

and it's very challenging to make games that have these kinds of very deep decision trees with scaling resources and things that all hinge on each other and not have it be such that the experienced player is just way out front. And so what kind of tools or things do you like to lean on to be able to build a game like this that maybe mitigates that harm? well so the problem is exacerbated if you're making a game

that is unfun to lose right so my most complicated recent design that's come out is dead reckoning right and dead reckoning I think falls into a camp where you can lose that game

and lose it fairly badly and have a good time right like you can have So you can play against someone who's really good at the game, and they will usually win, right? But that doesn't mean you'll have a bad time, right? Yes. In downfall, if you lose badly, it wasn't fun losing badly, right? So in a game like Dead Reckoning,

the engine itself is just fun, whether you're doing good at it or not, whether you're doing well at it or not, right? And keeping your eye on whether what you're doing in a game is fun, as opposed to whether you're succeeding at a game is fun, right? Very much alleviates the problem of, you know, experienced players being better, right? Right. Yeah, that's a really important lesson, right?

Most in a multiplayer game, most people are losing. And even in a, you know, most people are losing most of the time. And if they're not having fun doing that, then the game is, you know, generally speaking, not fun. So it is an important thing to understand what that experience is. And so I've familiar with Dead Reckoning, and you just had another Kickstarter that did really well, and their original one was phenomenal. Maybe you can give a quick little elevator pitch

for people that aren't just familiar with it because it's still pretty new. Sure. What's the core mechanic that's so fun for people? Yeah, so Dead Reckoning is my latest iteration of my card crafting system. It does it in two ways in this game, and that's sort of the biggest hook, right? Dead Reckney's gotten really good reviews,

and I'm super happy about the reviews. Some people have not like this. Some people have not like that. Some people have preferred this. The one thing that everyone has said, that I have yet to see someone not like is the card crafting in the game. And there's two elements to it.

So in the game, you're a pirate, you're sailing around, you're trying to influence islands, you're trying to capture treasure, you sometimes getting in fights with other players. All of that is driven by a deck of You have 12 cards. Each card represents one of your sailors on your ship. So your captain, your first mate, your deck hands, etc. And each of those cards is actually a composite of a image card and an ability card both within the same sleeve. And then depending on basically the image card is always at the front. And then the ability card at the back can be rotated around to reveal different powers. You know, I won't go into the specifics. mechanically how it works, but essentially the card itself can go through four different level stages.

Yes. And then on top of that, you can, as you're sailing around the board, you can purchase what are called advancements, which are transparent, mostly transparent cards with one section that isn't transparent, that's a new ability. And each card, you can sleeve into up to three of those. So a single card can go from just sort of your basic crew who like gives you a little bit of cargo to this like super badass crew who's fixing. your ship, getting you tons of cargo.

He's also now good at fighting, right? Yeah. And the progression of your crew cards through the course of the game is just really satisfying, right? Right. Well, that's, and that's the thing, that's the thing I wanted to hone in on, right? Because I think that, that idea of progression, that idea

of being able to, and I want to really dive deep into the card crafting system, because obviously that's one of your signature mechanics. And it's, but that idea of feeling like I can start in certain place and over time I get more powerful. I'm able to have some agency over the direction that my strategy goes and I'm able to see that strategy through, you know, maybe it doesn't work out quite as I'd planned, but I'm able to kind of feel that arc through a game is so critical.

I mean, it's one of things I, you know, like deck building games like Ascension have always done and others like you can lose very, very badly, but you still feel like you made your deck is way better than it was when you started. So you feel that, that growth. And I think these card, card crafting systems are similar. And I think that that is one of, I mean, the core of the play being fun is the point you highlighted earlier. I think that matters. But I think that that feeling of progression is just really critical, especially for any

game you're going to be playing for like an hour or more. Like you need to feel like you've accomplished something regardless of where you land in the final standings. I think it's a common. It's not just that you've accomplished something, but the reason you've accomplished something is because of choices you made. Yes, absolutely. Agency that you want to have.

You want to have ownership over the progress, right? And that's that sort of satisfying feeling, even if ultimately someone else made better progress because their choices were more honed and well executed, right? Or they just got lucky or whatever, right? That you went from point A to point X, right, making choices along the way. And you can see, oh, those choices got me to hear. Right, right. And if I had made a different choice, maybe.

this would have gone differently. And so I feel like I could have made things happen otherwise, but that my choice is. It's that if question that gets people to keep coming back. Right. Okay. Let me play again. Let me try this different approach and see what happens here.

You know, while we're still in this kind of subject, which I do find to be very interesting, like how do you make these games more fun for longer, for more people, especially the deeper complicated games? I think tools for either extending how long players are still like viably in the game, right? So you're not like if you, you know, you play like Puerto Rico as a great example. Fantastic game. But if you don't know what you're doing playing each other people, you will lose.

On turn one, there's no hope that you are ever going to win. And you have to play another hour and a half and you're never, you know, you're already out of it. And it's very clear you're out of it. And so having things that give you either comeback mechanic, variants, higher scaling of endgame things, or honestly, like, just the obfuscation matters a lot. So with Ascension, you know, I, in Ascension, when you kill monsters, you get honor beads that are right in front of you. So it's clear, like, how many points you get from monsters.

But when you buy cards, the honor is on the card and hidden in your deck. Now, we could have just as easily put all, just give you the same tokens you do with monsters, but then at a glance, you could look at somebody and be like, all right, well, they have way more points to me. But the fact that the cards just go into the deck makes people not 100% sure. And keeping that uncertainty just makes the game more fun. And then at the end, you count it up and you see what happened. So there's a lot of elements to like how long people feel like they maybe could win or that there's some crazy risky play that could make that could make it possible.

I think that extending the length of that time is also a really useful tool. 100% agree. Yeah, I think it depends on the type of game, right? So engine builders are particularly tough in that regard, or the more engine-y focus the game is, right? Because early decisions have those ramifications all game long. Yes. And it becomes, a lot of times in engine builders, your point about hiding people's score is actually more important. So in a lot of Euro games, your score is just going around the track and you can see it, right?

Right. Whereas, I think a lot of deck builders, you actually kind of, often you want to hide the points to a certain extent. But depending on the game, yeah, the right choice sometimes is player interaction, right? Players become a self-balancing force at the table. That's how a lot of area control games work, right? It's clear that that person is winning, therefore we shouldn't fight each other. We should fight them. Yes, then it becomes the game of whining.

No, no, I'm not winning. He's winning. You should attack him. Yeah. Then, you know, in other games, like a gambling type of game, right? You want players to diverge on the risk-reward path. If someone's in the lead, they have an incentive to make less risky, just generally, like, you know, moves that'll guarantee points. but someone in behind can always still have a chance at hitting that big lucky payout type of thing, right?

Right. Yeah. Yeah, the, I mean, at its core, a lot of like the most interesting gameplay decisions are where you're trying to give people those choices between like higher risk, higher reward, you know, kind of safer play and get let them, you know, that's like it's just one of the fundamental axes of any kind of gameplay decision or frankly life decision that you're going to. to make. And so it's a, it's a, depending upon how, you know, random you want the game to feel will be how much variance you allow people to opt into throughout the course of the game. Yeah. I think also backloading a lot of the scoring is important, right? Yes. And that's another way that a lot of engine builders can get away with, um, or, or get around the issue of some players being in the big lead, right? If you say, you're not going to like, you know, 70% of the points are going to be scored in the last 20% of the game, right?

Now, that doesn't mean that the last 20% of the game is the only part that actually matters, right? It was the prior 80% that determined how many points you would have the potential to score in those last 20%, right? Right, right. Yeah, there's just the conversion in all these games where you're like, try to collect resources and gain position and then convert those into points and where that conversion happens. But it still does help with the obfuscation problem, you know, even if it doesn't really change who's going to win. Yeah, so in a game like Cubitos, right, one of my games, that has both. That has heavily weighted end game scoring, or I should say late game scoring, where once

you've built your engine, you can start turning it into points or essentially movements along the racetrack at a fast pace if you've built for it. But if you've built for it, then you haven't actually moved much yet, right? where someone could have been moving steadily. And then combine that with it being a push-your-luck game, you know, if you're behind, you can always push more. And if you get away with it, all of a sudden, the gap starts closing, right? Right.

Yeah. Yep, that makes sense. I did this with, so there's the game I did many years ago called, You Gotta Be Kitting Me, where it's like a kind of a bluffing style game, where you're trying to guess how many cards are in everybody's hands combined. mind and we added in, you know, the game got way better. We added in both a high variance like cards off the top of the deck get added in. And then a, you know, kind of like push your luck level like, okay, if you can call the number

perfectly, then you can get, go from a behind position and get a huge advantage. So just like giving people the option to be like, this is very, very difficult to do. But when you do it, it's amazing. And so you create these opportunities for incredible moments for players. You let them, you know, feel like, all right, whatever. I'm going to take a shot. And if I'm out, again, I feel that. agency for it. All those things really, really make an impact. And so anytime you can give people

that chance to feel like they have ownership of their outcome. I think that's really just a lot of it. My decision to dictate where the game goes to some degree and that I have the option to be, you know, risky or not, even if it doesn't necessarily work out in my favor, it's going to feel better than the world where I feel like my options were closed off or there's nothing I could do. Right. I would much rather lose by a lot, but within the last three turns of the game or so, still have felt like I could have won. Yeah. Right.

Then a game where, you know, I lost by a little, but it was pretty much known that I was going to lose, you know, halfway through. Yep. Yeah. All right. I do, I want to dive deep into the card crafting system. I also want to talk about space-based a little bit, too, because I really like that game.

And it's an interesting evolution of that genre. We've been talking plenty about card crafting, so let's start there. Let's talk about the origins of your card crafting designs and kind of how you got to there, because I think it's pretty fascinating as a, you know, basically a new category of game. How do you think about it? Well, okay, so let me define card crafting in my definition, because I know a lot of people call, for example, gloom. If you ever played the game, Gloom, people have said,

hey, that was a card crafting game. You know, Mysticville wasn't the first. I don't, I think glooms, I think people, I don't consider card crafting just the use of transparent cards, right? So card crafting to me is if during the game and or potentially prior to the game, you can make choices that modify and change the cards in the game, such that,

those cards retain those modifications and retain all the properties of being a card. Right. So you've changed the card in a way that it's now permanently changed. And that card can still be shuffled, dealt, drafted, you know, put face down, put face up, etc. Right. And it keeps that change. Right. So that's why a game like Gloom doesn't really fit that because it's really just you put a card on the table and then you put a modifier on that card. and then you put another modifier.

It's kind of just like putting plus one plus one tokens on creatures and magic, right? Sure. But a much more visually cool way. Like it's nothing against gloom, right? Like gloom, you know, that's a visually, it's awesome and it works, right? Sure. Well, and I made a game of a similar sense called Redekai back in. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that one we had clards that, you know, you started off as you had your kids in play that were your team and then you could play cards on them to transform them into monsters that were like clear. So it would change some of their stats. I'm not, or you could play, you'd literally play your attacks on your opponent, and it would deal damage to them and impact their health bar. So it was really fun, but yeah, we gave up, you couldn't, you know, then shuffle those cards into the deck.

So that's a key, a key differentiator here, which in this case, I guess, required you to have sleeves to be able to pull this off. So, yeah, I mean, I haven't done card crafting without sleeves, because another thing I find important is that the game can be reset. You could do it with stickers, right? or with pen, right? You can write on your cards. But a key component for me for a lot of these games, at least yet.

I haven't made a legacy game. I want the game to reset back to where it was, right? So the way I've done that is with card sleeves. And the modifications to the cards is by putting transparent cards into the sleeve that overlay on top of the original card adding some sort of modification. to it, right? And then since they're both in the same sleeve, if all your cards are sleeve, then it's just one of your cards and now it's different, right? And then like in Dead Reckoning, I did it a little bit, I did it two ways where the card actually starts with two things

in the sleeve. And the card can change based on how those two cards within the sleeve are oriented relative to each other already, right? Right. Yeah, I like, I like, so this is, this is one of those areas where like materials design is important. I don't know where you, how you started this, right? But the typical dichotomy is, uh,

for designers is that they start with either a mechanic that they're really interested in, like a gameplay system and then they build from that or a theme or a story that they want to tell and they build from that. And I think there's another way to build from, which I've done. Um, in fact, that's where Reda Kai came from.

I was, I was kind of given a, you know, an assignment to basically build a game with clear cards or, uh, I have these rolling toys. I got to design a game for. And so you start with the component and then figure out how to go from there.

Does that the way that this worked for you? Was it this idea that you wanted the clear, you know, kind of sleeved game to happen? Or you just started with a, hey, I really want to upgrade my cards and you ended up with sleeves? So, yeah, I've actually come to call it kinetic design, which is a sort of a term, I think I kind of made up in the context of games. but it's used in other areas with a different meaning. But I sort of define it as like using the physicality of a component to inspire a game or a game system, right, as opposed to starting with a system and then trying to find components that fit for it, right? You start with a component and you say, how could this be done, how could this either normal or abnormal component?

be used in a way that would then create a unique game system experience, right? Yeah. So that is where I start, started with Mystic Vale. I, the brainstorming, like, you know, at this point, I had sold Rumble Pie and downfall, and I was working on a number of games, and, you know, in my brain was like, look, if I want to make a splash, I want to come up with something really different, really original, right? And the brainstorming process for me was actually, one of the processes that I used was, okay, let's just think about components. And like, how could a component that we just,

we know about, it doesn't have to be a weird different component, just a normal component, be used in a way that we've never, that's never been used before, to create a game that's never been done before, right? You know, I thought about dice and I thought about cards and I thought about game boxes, right, and cubes, right? And, you know, somewhere along the line, I landed on card sleeves, right? And, you know, and then the light bulb went on

and I was like, oh, wait a second, okay, card sleeves. Those always are just used to protect your cards, right? But maybe there's a game there, right? And actually where my brain went to next was that the card sleeves themselves would have icons printed on them. and you know you'd put one card into a sleeve and that would and then you know depending on what color sleeve it was in right that would affect the card but then the card could switch colors of sleeves or something like that right right and then I actually made a game that used that was like that where we all were actually playing out of one's shared deck we were all sort of we were all sort of deck building the same deck but we would use card sleeves that had a little like icon on the front that when you sleeve the card in there,

you would own that card in the shared deck, right? And that would have some gameplay implication. And that actually game system ended up in Edge of Darkness. But the real idea that hit me later on was, you know, a card sleeve can hold multiple cards, right? And like, okay, well, what game design space does that open up? Right. You know, what if you use transparent cards and then the overlay them?

And that's where I was like, oh, that's the end. idea, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. I think it's really funny to me as I think about the different ideas and how they all kind of overlap and how we approach things differently. Right. So when I was first working on the original version of SoulForge with Richard Garfield down back in 2011, and we knew we wanted the cards to to upgrade and level up. And we wanted it, it was going to be a digital game, but the way we were playtesting it was literally exactly that we put three different cards into a sleeve and then whenever you play the card you pull one out and then that would be the leveled up version that you could then shuffle up into the into the deck. And so it was a it was

funny that we were just like yeah, we ended up playing in the same space but ended up, you know, going in a very, very different direction. Yeah, that's hilarious. Okay, cool. So then, so when you, you set this up and you now have a system and and the other thing I wanted to highlight here that you're, that you're, you were doing that I think is really important is, um, when you take a, in this, you know, sorry of a kinetic component here or, or even anything, right, a mechanical component, you want to be able to see it from different angles, right, like kind of turn it around in your mind and say, okay, what do sleeves do? Okay, well, they have a different color. They have a different back. They could have things in the front. Okay, they could hold multiple cards. Okay, the cards could

multiple cards could be stacked on top of each other, which I think is what you described. You were doing in dead reckoning where the orientation could matter. It could hold cards. And, okay, multiple cards could be front and back and layered. And then that got you to where you were going. And so like going through that exercise of saying, okay, if I'm going to use this component, what are all the traits that that component has and how might I use those things in a way that makes the design better?

And I think you can do the same thing with any given mechanic in your game. If you know you're going to be shuffling your deck, every X turns, okay, what are the things I can do with that? Maybe something triggers off of shuffling. Maybe there's some kind of, you know, bomb that shows up in the deck, or maybe there's some mechanism for, you know,

like all these different ideas of what you can do based on if a given thing is here, what else can I do? with it. What else does it empower for my design? I think is key to both having breakthroughs like you did, as well as having a kind of elegant design system where you can use a minimal number of components and rules to get a lot of play value. Yeah, sometimes you can find some weird solution to three problems with one of the idea that is just sort of out of the box, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. This actually, so to just a tangent to another one of the story, so with when we were going from Soul Forge to Soul Forge Fusion, this was moving from a digital game where, the fact that your deck would shuffle every couple of turns was automatic and kind of, you know, it was all handled for you. You have to remember when your deck is supposed to shuffle and track the kind of turn structure.

And so we were like, oh, crap, we need this card to do. We need something to do that. And we also wanted players to have more identity. So eventually we ended up, instead of having just a tracker card, which was net negative, as just this annoying thing to do, we've created these forge-borne cards that every time you shuffle of your deck, they level up and get more powerful. And so all of a sudden, it went from like this kind of annoying side piece to like one of the coolest things going on to solve this gameplay problem.

And I think those opportunities, when you're a designer, like, when you find those moments, it's just like, it's just this pure joy. Like, you know, most of the time is tough tradeoffs. That's such a good subtle tip, right? That like if your game has sort of a element of bureaucracy that you need to do in order to track something or to update things, right? if you can add just a even if it's subtle

a subtle way that that thing actually matters right people will remember to do it and it won't feel like work anymore right so like in Cubitos we have almost everything works simultaneously

but like if the number if a certain color of dice is about to run out it matters who gets to buy the last one right so we had we had a start player die that after every round it would pass to the player We had a start player token that after every round it would pass the player on the left. And then it would just be them going first and then clockwise if we ever needed to determine timing issues. And people would forget to pass that thing all the time.

Right. You know, and we'd get like few turns in and then there would be a timing issue and we'd be like, wait a second. How many rounds ago was, do we last remember to pass the thing? Right. And someone just had the idea that was just like, well, why don't we just make that token? matter, right? Like, if you make it good to have the start player token, then the person who's going to get it next wants it, and they'll just remember to take it. Yeah. Yep. That's great. Okay, we've been, there's so many fun topics to talk about here. I do, I do, I do want to get,

but I want to get to space, base, because I really love that game. I think it's the first game of yours that I played. And it felt like just kind of an immediate, uh, improve on a genre. Maybe we could just talk a little bit about the origin story for that game and kind of how that development process went. Sure. So I think the first game that I'm aware of that uses that sort of roll two dice, depending on what you roll, everyone gets resources, is Catan, right?

And I played Catan back as a teenager. Many of us played it early on in our game design journey. And then I think Machikoro was the first one, almost surprisingly, right, to actually iterate on that. Yep. And to turn it into just like a pure engine builder, right? And then I think Valeria Card Kingdoms came out sometime after that. I don't remember actually if that was, I think that was before Space Space. But it was Machikoro and playing it with John Zinzer, who was somewhat,

John Zinser, the CEO of Aege, who I think you've had on your, He has been on the podcast. It's a great episode for anyone that wants to listen to it. You should check back how luck. He has some of the best stories of anybody. He's a good stories over. And I talk about a lot of industry experience. So he was really into Machikoro.

I think he had a slight chip on his shoulder for not getting to publish it because he wanted to. But we were at board game geek con and like again, we were like, what game do we play? And John's like, let's play Machikoro. So we played it again. And just like I was just lying in bed in the hotel room that night after having played Machikoro and thinking about the ways in which I, again, it's no knock on Machikoro, but the ways in which I would want the game to be different in order for me to enjoy it more, right? And then that just started a few ideas clicked and I was like, oh, yeah, I would prefer Machikoro if like every time I rolled, I always rolled two dice. Like, I don't like the phase of the game where I roll just one. I always want to roll two.

But I would like if I could choose to take either the sum, like I want a subtle choice there, right, of whether I take the sum or the individual dice. That feels like, and then, and then, of course, once I thought about that, I'm like, actually, that creates a really interesting probability curve, right? Where one through six numbers are actually significantly different probability-wise than seven through 12 in a potentially really interesting way.

right right um and then even that like literally the whole almost the whole game i came up with that night it's it's one of those weird game design moments where like you know maybe that'll never happen again um like i even came up with the like you know well it should matter it should be different on your own turn right so in machia right it's some cards that only ever trigger on your own turn and some like i want i want every card that i buy to matter on other people's turns but like maybe it should be different on my own turn sometimes and that was the whole idea of like first a card goes on your board and then you can replace it and it upgrades

and then things stack right so all of that actually came together in my brain in one night and then after BGGCon I went home I drafted up a really simple black and white prototype on my computer printed it out and again like this is one of those things that you know just doesn't happen normally in game design but not a single rule of space base changed

from first draft to final game. Get out of here. Just card balance changed. I changed the balancing of the cards. Like even the colonies were in the game from the beginning. I just changed the costs balancing and some of added new different abilities, changed abilities and stuff.

Wow. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard of that before. Yeah, yeah. Especially for a game, it's like, I mean, a really good game. Like, that's impressive. Okay, so now teach our audience how you do that. Right, yeah, I want to learn how you want to do. I want to just design a game. Let's just design a game tonight and let's be done with it and then just balance it and you're good.

That's right. I need to learn from myself how to do that again. Wow, that's cool. So I'm really glad I wanted to take the time. I know we were running a little over on time, but I wanted to like just, yeah, hear that story. That's awesome. And, you know, it's just another one of those things where there's some key differentiators, whatever, outside of this ludicrous savon.

like design in one day. I think that there's a, there's a, an interesting difference between when you're designing a game where, like, say, Mystic Fail, where you're really trying to push the boundaries and, like build a kind of new category versus a game like this,

where you're trying to refine something that exists and say, you know what, I would like this more if this, right? Doesn't say, and I mean, this is, you know,

my story with Ascension, right? Like, obviously I played Dominion. I loved Dominion. I thought this was really cool. But I'm like, man,

I don't want the same static. bored and they don't want to have all this setup. I would want it to just be faster and just deal out new cards every time. And so I just did that. And, you know, I didn't do it in a day, but I thought I did it fast, but not clearly. And then, you know, we were able to kind of just build something like, hey, this is what I would want. This is a category of game I would want. This is I'm going to make something a little bit more streamlined or a little bit more interesting or a little bit more decision space. And then build from there. And honestly, I think it's one of the best things for new designers to just kind of start with. Like, typically speaking, I take, you know, take a game

that you like and or that you think, you know, maybe has an issue. And then ideally remove something from it, shift something that's a little bit, you know, make it a little less complicated. But even if you just want to change it and add something, I think it's a great way for people to just get started. You know, I mean, my first prototype for Ascension was literally a shuffled up dominion deck just to see what happened. And, you know, it was like, okay, this kind of works.

But, you know, I need to go do real work on it. I think a lot of designers before they became designers, their first endeavor, into game design was just house rolling games at home that they liked but wanted to like more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay.

So I think I do want to talk about, you know, Cini, you have an upcoming project, right? You have another project that's going to be coming out pretty soon that I know we talked about a little bit at Gencom. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about ready set bet. Yeah. So ready set bet is maybe my weirdest design yet. And the inspiration for Ready Set Bet is also a really weird one. So briefly, Ready Set Bet is a betting game where you are the betters at the horse races betting on the outcomes of the races.

You have zero control over the outcome of the race. The race is just happening. And in real time, you're betting on the outcome in competition with the other players. And Dice are driving. a dice rolling drives how the horses move and how the race goes. And then there's sort of a craps-like-looking betting board. And everyone has five bet tokens. And when you place a bet token, it's locked in.

You can't move it. But you've also claimed that bet and no one else can make that bet. Right. So that's where the real-time tension comes in. So as the race is going, you can choose to bet early to get the bets that, like, you know, if the eight gets rolled right out the gate, you're like, oh, eight now has the best chance of winning. You can bet on the eight, right?

or you could wait later in the race to see more what's like what the outcome of the race is more likely to look like, but other people might claim the good bet spots. Cool. So where the idea for that came from was this idea of thinking about

a zero player game and how to make a zero player game interesting to watch. Right. So it's basically a game where there is an outcome. There's a, variable potential outcomes.

The outcome is unknown, and, you know, something ends up winning, right? So I used to do this thing with dice when I was just bored. I had a couple of dice and I would just roll a pair of dice and then write down what number got rolled and then roll it again and write down what number got rolled and then see what number got rolled 10 times first, right? and it was weirdly way more enjoyable and interesting. And I would have this like, I enjoy watching sports, right? So I would have this like running commentary in my brain while I'm rolling dice of being like,

oh, their four is taking the lead, right? And it was way more fun than it should have been to just like roll dice and see which number got rolled the most, right? Because it's like, you know, when you have a small enough sample size, seven doesn't win all the time, right? Right. it's the favorite it's always expected to win right but like sometimes 10 wins and that's crazy right right um and that's like exciting when you're like oh my gosh 10 has a three spot lead it only needs two more rolls to beat seven can it do it right like that shouldn't be fun that's just stupid and random and rolling dice right but it actually is kind of fun so that was the

i was like maybe i can just turn that into a game where that's the zero player game that's happening and people are betting on it, right? And it didn't have to go in the real-time direction, but the question was, how do you make that zero-player game into a tense and interesting game where people are emotionally invested in the outcome? Right, you could roll three times

and then everyone takes a turn making a bet and then roll three times, right? You could do something like that. I chose to go the real-time route where the race is just happening, right, at its own fast pace. And players can just choose when at any point during that race, they can place bets. But if they don't choose fast enough, the good bets will go away.

And it's wildly different than anything else I've designed. And the response to it, honestly, it's the, it's similar to the response I was getting with Spacebase, where, you know, pretty much everyone that played it, whether they're a gamer, a heavy gamer, a medium gamer, or a light gamer, or my dad, right, liked it, right? Yeah. Where, like, a game like Dead Reckoning, you know, my dad would just walk away the second I'd pull out the box, right?

Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, finding those games that you could play with the non-g gamers and that are still fun for them, but it are still interesting and fun enough for gamers, that's a great space when you can pull it off. and not an easy task.

So it's nothing like anything else I've designed. The inspiration was coming from an interesting spot. And I actually like the idea of that zero player game idea. I would like to try to dig a little deeper with some other designs also of this idea of a game a game in which you have no control over the outcome of the game, but you care about the outcome of the game because of this other game that's going on that you are playing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is really interesting.

And I mean, there's another thing that makes a big deal for like just making games fun to watch is a big part of, I think you sort of mention that really. Like it's so much more critical than ever before where like a lot of game discovery comes from, you know, Twitch and YouTube and people like making these videos that like being able to watch other people play is one of the more important things now, even than I think it ever was before. It's also just a good sign for your game that if it's fun to watch other people play your game, then it's probably quite fun to play the game. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, doing things like, you know, things like real time or at the very least shortening the time between, you know, people play, taking different actions, having, you know, sort of high variance outcomes and excitement moments, whether it be from die rolls or card flips or whatever, giving people more information that's public that they can, like, play along with you. We're all really, all tools I've leaned on. And I have a game that I've been working on for a while that's like a kind of a pressure luck deck building game that kind of works this way. so you don't know you don't know you don't know every card just comes off the top so everybody

can kind of play with you and decide okay do I want to flip into the card or do I want to stop don't flip into the car don't want to stop and those things are really fun create some really fun moments so yeah I'm excited so if people are interested in ready set bet where do they how do they how do they find it how can they support it when is it coming out it's uh it's official release date is September 30th okay all right so that should be right around when this podcast airs Yeah, friendly local game stores, Amazon, direct from A.E.G., whatever your preferred game acquisition method is. Great. And if people want to follow you, find your other games, reach out, see more of your stuff. What's the best way for them to see you on the interwebs? I have been purging social media from my life, actually, but I do do the Twitter now and then. So John Declare is just John Declare is my tag on Twitter.

Awesome. That is where I'm active occasionally. Okay. Well, fantastic. John, this has been really great. I've loved a lot of the deep dives here. I love the stories of all your different game designs that really very, very different paths and mechanisms and inspiration.

So this is lived up to the hype. I've been looking forward to this for a while. So thanks for coming on. And actually, I'm excited about the possibility of doing another one in the future when we have some other potential projects to talk about. Yeah, this was great. It's a good conversation. I love talking about games, right? It's just, it's a bottomless well of interesting conversation for me. Yep. Yep. Yeah, this is a podcast number 30 or something. And I'm still, yeah, I love all this stuff. Basically, I was just having these conversations with friends and designers all the time.

And I was like, yeah, we should record these and let other people share in. And I, yeah, I love this stuff. So, so thanks for joining. And until next time. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share. on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at Think

click at game designer.com or wherever find books or something.