Think Like A Game Designer - John Zinser — From Pizzas to Publishing, Pioneering CCGs, Community Management, and Trusting the Strength of a Team (#25)

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

John Zinser is the CEO of Alderac Entertainment Group. His game design career started over 30 years ago, with Shadis Magazine and the CCG Legend of the Five Rings. In this episode, he tells one of the most entertaining and educational origin stories on the podcast. He’s a great storyteller and an even better teacher.  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. Welcome to Season 3 of Think Like a Game Designer. I'm very excited to continue to bring you more amazing guests, design lessons, and tips about the gaming industry. but I also want to share something new and exciting that I'm launching this year. In addition to the podcast and the book for Think Like a Game Designer, I'm also launching a master class for those that really want to go deep into game design

and work with an incredible group of people to take your projects to the next level. We've already had an incredible beta group go through the course last year. It includes video lessons for me, access to an exclusive Discord group, monthly masterminds where we can dive deep into the actual problems that you have with your own designs and really walk you through everything that it takes to go from initial idea, whether you have a project you really want to work on, or you have no idea where to start, all the way through to getting your game published,

whether that's launching it via Kickstarter, launching your own company, selling it to a publisher, or whatever you want to do to make your game design dreams come true. If you think you might be the right fit for this course, go to Think Like a Game Designer.com, to learn more. In today's episode, I speak with John Zinzer. John is the CEO of Alderac Entertainment Group, better known as AEG, and he has over 30 years of experience running businesses and being in the game industry. John has been a good friend of mine for a long time and was one of my

mentors as I was first starting up my own company. And I have been trying to get him on this podcast for quite some time. And it's amazing that we were able to do this. He recently had a brain tumor that he had gotten removed, and he is now back and up and running, and it was amazing to be able to share a lot of his wisdom with everyone, and I'm even more grateful for these opportunities to speak with him now. And so I hope you guys really appreciate all of the incredible insights that are here. Now, the first 20 minutes or so of this episode are a lot about John's origin story, and they have near nothing to do with the game industry at first. But you're going to see how these lessons that he learned from starting and running his own pizza business

to selling golf course maps to learning about the magazine industry, all led to key lessons that he has since applied to his games, design, and company within the gaming industry. So definitely pay attention to that section and it's just a really great story. John is an amazing storyteller and that really comes across throughout the course of this episode. We also learned the story of L5R, which is one of the coolest, trading card game story-based experiences that I've ever seen and how the organized play and tournaments has seen from that was a huge part of its success and turned it into a rabid fan base, unlike anything I've seen in probably any other game. We talk about Kickstarter and marketing in the

modern era, how you build communities and what it's like to have fans that feel like owners and the storytelling of that. We talk about how to pitch to a game company. John has been a great resource for people allowing designers to pitch to AEG, and we talk a little bit about what makes great pitches. There are so many valuable lessons throughout this and what is really in many ways a great history, not only of John's career, but of the gaming industry in general. He's had such a huge impact on the industry. He's had a huge impact on me personally. And I know that after listening to this, he'll have a huge impact on you as well.

So without further ado, here is John Zinser. Hello and welcome. I am here with John Zinser. Zinzer. John, it's great to finally get to have this podcast together. Yeah, it is very nice. I'm excited that we're able to do it finally. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's one of the things that has been my mission with this podcast is to really help connect people in the industry, to be able to inspire and empower people out there that want to either get in the industry or level up in the industry. And I have, you know, watched you for a very long time and we've been friends now for a very long time. And

And I've seen you sort of live this for so long. You have inspired so many people. You have enabled so many people to kind of come up in this space. And you're continuing to do so and innovate in it. And so I'm excited to kind of share and go through that whole story. And we're going to start with your origin story. But first, I got to say part of my origin story, which is before you and I met and I first started my company and we first started kind of coming up in the industry, the number one comment I got from people was, oh, I think you're going to be the next John Zenser. And I was like, I didn't know whether that was a compliment or not at the time, but afterwards

now, I know it had taken this quite a big compliment. So I don't know if I've lived up to those shoes, but it's been a pretty entertaining ride. Absolutely. Well, I think you sort of went down the, you know, I'm going to focus on creative path. And for my first 25 years, I was sort of focused on the business side of the business. So I think you took the better path. Well, you know, they both have their charms. And frankly, this is part of where I have my own selfish reasons here because I want to learn a lot of the lessons from you and share some of these stories because the business side is not easy. And there's this dream that the creative side of this business is, you know, you make a good game and you put it out there and everything's going to be just fine. And there's a lot more to it.

And you, I think, can illustrate that story probably better than most. So why don't we kind of just, you know, briefly start at the beginning. I know the people that are familiar with you will have heard the story some before, but some people maybe haven't. And it's great about kind of where you came from and how you got to, you know, found Aegee and become who you are. Okay, great. So I was a serial entrepreneur. When I was in college, I went to school in Southeast Missouri. While I was in school, I decided to open a pizza place, which did pretty well. And I ended up dropping out of school my junior year to sort of follow that dream. The pizza dream.

The dream of owning pizza places. I opened a little chain of pizza places and I was working unbelievable hours. The dream was a little bit more of a nightmare. And so I decided to sell the pizza places in Missouri to my partners and move to St. Louis, mainly because my girlfriend moved to St. Louis. May I ask just about the, I want to dig into the pizza place a little bit because I find this sort of fascinating. This was the first business that you had started? It is the first business that I started, yes.

What made you, A, decide to open a pizza place and be, you know, be successful enough to kind of grow it and sell it? What do you think was key? Because I see a lot of pizza places and it's not an easy business to succeed it. So I grew up working at a at a local, a very nice local pizza place called John's Pizza Pasta and ice cream. And it was sort of always a dream of mine to get into that business. I don't know why. It was much easier to work for a pizza place than it was to run pizza places. My buddy Dave and I got on a, you know, decided we were going to try and open a pizza place. place in Cape Girardo. And we started, you know, we started by going to a bank and asking them,

you know, hey, we want to open a pizza place. There's our business plan. Will you give us a home? And the first guy we met, his name was Lindy Duncan. He was super nice. And he sort of explained that that's not the way things work, that we needed to make, we had, we needed to have some assets or or some way to secure the loan and just having an idea was not good enough. So we spent a year, a year going around and meeting with investors. We bought the pizza recipe from the original place that we worked at. We threw pizza parties. And we worked for a year.

And then my buddy Dave got, he decided that he just didn't want to do it anymore. and I just kept doing it. I kept going for another four or five months. And Lindy, who was also a local entrepreneur-owned convenience stores, called me up. And he's like, you're still trying to get that pizza place open. He says, I think I might have a way for you to do it. We'd like to put one in our new convenience store that we're opening up in Scott City. There's no restaurants in that city, and we think that having a pizza place inside of our convenience store,

would be great. Yeah. And so we did it. It may have been the first hybrid convenience store pizza place ever. Yeah. That was like, let's say 40 years ago, but that's 35 years ago, maybe, something like that. So we had a very teeny tiny corner of a convenience store where we made and delivered pizzas to this farming town called Scott City. and it was a very successful business that could run with you know me and three other employees.

It was great. Yeah. It's funny because I think, you know, I say, you know, maybe people listening, they're like, hey, I want to get to the game industry stuff. But I think there's tons of great lessons that come, you know, right from this, right? That the origin story, which is also similar to mine, you know, that you work for somebody that was successful and was in the business before you tried to start yourself and were able to learn from doing it from somebody else, that the idea,

itself is not worth that much, that in fact, it's the legwork and having to actually validate the ideas and build the network and do the things is what really matters. And, you know, being able to kind of do, you know, do the hard work and the hustle to get something to happen. So, yeah, I can already see the seeds of where these skills come into value later. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the only, the main, the main reason why Lindy contacted me was not because he wanted to put a pizza place in this thing in his convenience store was because, he saw that a year and a half later, I was still out beating the pavement trying to figure out how to get that pizza place open.

Yep. Yep. And that's really the thing that distinguishes the people that I see succeed in all walks of life, compared to others. You're willing to kind of put in that work and hustle and keep going, even when most people would quit and most people would not, you know, would stop. It's like, oh, that was a good idea, but whatever. It's not going to happen.

So great. I'm glad we dug into that because I didn't quite know that much about that part of your story. Yeah. So I opened the pizza place. My girlfriend moved to St. Louis. I sold the pizza places to my partners so that I could move to St. Louis and open another pizza place with the guy who sold me my cheese. I learned two lessons. I learned, I learned, don't ever sell your business for a girl. Good tip. Pro tip. That didn't work out. And I also learned the location, location, location. We opened the pizza place up in St. Louis.

I'm one of the busiest roads. But there was no way to turn in and out of our pizza place. And so we watched hundreds of thousands of customers drive by every day. And that business struggled. So we did that for about a year. I got out of that business and got into the golf advertising business. again, because I had a guy that would come by the pizza place every week and try to sell me advertising. He was a real hustler, and it was local mail things to the local people, give them coupons and stuff.

And so we did some of it. And one day we sat down and started talking about those city guides that, remember when those were real popular, when a business could buy like their their shop on a map of the city. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we were talking about, we were talking about those city guides. And I said, you know what would be beneficial to me as a golfer is to do one of those city guides real nice, but as a golf guide that would tell me where all of the golf courses

that I could play. So that blossomed into, that blossomed into sort of an idea that we thought we would do, you know, on the weekends or on my days off. We got a golf map of St. Louis done. And it was this gigantic poster-sized thing that we had to carry around in a special container. We loaded it up into the car and went and saw seven golf courses and sold seven ads. And I remember calling my dad and saying, I'm out of the pizza business. I'm going in the golf business.

That's great. That's great. So this is one of those cases of kind of scratching your own itch, right, finding something that you really wanted to see and making it come to life yourself. You waited until you, you did it as a side hustle kind of until you, it sounds like, instantaneously validated it by getting, you know, seven for seven customers. And then you knew you had something and ran with it. Yeah. My business partner in that business, his name was Eric Tivoli. I think I learned everything I probably know today about selling from him. He had all of the best things that salespeople have going for them. And in some cases, all of the worst things that salespeople have going for them.

So we did this golf map in St. Louis, and we probably sold 50 golf courses in golf shops advertising on that map. And it was very profitable. and we had a plan to finish it up, get it to press, and then, you know, within 30 days, head to Atlanta and do the second map there. Right. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. That was the perfect scenario. Then the delays started. We had money, and I was like, when are we going to Atlanta? And Eric's like, I've got this thing to do, and I've got that thing to do.

Eric went through all of his money and then started borrowing money from me. And I didn't know any better. I was just like, oh, yeah, sure. You know, like, are we leaving for Atlanta next week, right? And he's like, yeah, next week, next week, two and a half months. All of his money was gone. All of my money was gone. Oh, my goodness.

I mean, literally broke except for a few dollars that we had in our pocket. And he's like, okay, it's time for us to go to Atlanta. We got into the car and started driving. And I thought, well, this is a catastrophe waiting to happen. And on the way to Atlanta, in the car, he secured free hotel for two months, a free rental car for while we were there. Wow. And free airline tickets so that we could come back to St. Louis. He traded for everything.

He contacted hotels. He started calling him and saying, hey, are you – Is the manager or owner a golfer called like six or seven finally got a holiday in where the guy's like, oh yeah, yeah, our manager's a golfer. Can I talk to him? Eric basically told him we were coming into town to sell advertising and a golf guide and that we would shower him with free stuff if he would hook us up with rooms. And he did. He just like we got there. We checked in.

One of the great things about working with Eric was we didn't pay for hotels. We didn't pay for food. we didn't pay for travel. Everything was a trade. And the value of that for advertising, especially in the golf world, was amazing because you could always find a golfer and bring them free stuff

that you could pick up from your golf courses. This is really funny. This just reminds me so much of my dad. He was always, you know, wheeling and dealing, he would call it. Everything was a trade. Everything was like a negotiated thing. And he was a lawyer.

So it was relatively easy. to trade, right? Everybody needs a lawyer from now and then. And he's like, you got a wheel and deal. And I realized that as a game designer, your assets are far less fungible. There's a lot of less people that really need game design or games than others. So, you know, sometimes people are really excited, but my hustle ability was somewhat restricted. Yes. I think that, yeah, I did, I did realize that that when I got into the gaming industry. You give away more free games than you can trade them for goods and services. Yeah. But I got to dig in more because you mentioned, you know, you've learned all your, you know, all the best and worst of sales from Eric and, you know, certainly the sort of trading

and negotiating thing is there. But are there other lessons that you could, you could distill in a way that our audience could parcel out? Because that seems like I would be, yeah, seems key. He was always very, he was always very prepared. And he had, we had a, we had a, we had a, budget for how much money we were going to spend a light budget for how much money we were going to spend on the golf guide and on getting it distributed. And for the first 10 or 15 sales calls that we would go on in a new city, somebody would say, well, are you going to put the golf guides in those little things where you can pick them up at hotels? Eric would say, well, yes, of course, we're going to have a very robust ability to get our golf guides if you stay at the nicer hotels in and around Atlanta.

And I would just have a little yellow pad and I would write distribute through hotels. And I just kept the bullet point list of the promises that he was making. And every four or five days, we'd go down that list of promises. And his pitch got better every time we went into a new. meeting. So now that we were distributing the product through, or our plans were to distribute the product through hotels, that would become part of the pitch that he was giving to the person that we were selling advertising to. So we started off promising small, and then over the course of time, as people told us what they would want to say yes to advertising in this thing, we were

able to say yes to a whole bunch of things. But since we started with such a small expense, which was just we're going to print these golf guides, give them away at different golf courses. That turned into a whole, that turned into a whole business of promises, which was where, you know, he was really good at getting the sales done. And I was pretty good at making sure that the golf maps got completed and that all the promises got kept. So we were a good partnership. Yeah. Well, and it's funny, too, because I can't help but view this through the lens of the way I think of game design.

where you create and you create the frame and parameters for something that's very small and achievable, right? Something that you know as a small budget and then you test it by trying to sell it in this case, right? You're selling the things. And then people will tell you what you want. It's almost like play testing your game. You're like, oh, no, what they really want is us to distribute through hotels or these things.

Okay, cool. Now the next time, now we're distributing through hotels and we're trying it at this tier. And then it's like you're sort of iterating your sales pitch and iterating your product through these individual little pitches, which is exactly the same way that, you know, when I think about building games or new products in general, that's like how you build them.

And so anyway, it's pretty interesting. So we did that for, we did that for a couple of years. We did Atlanta. We went down to Florida. And then we made a big push to go, our plan was to do South Carolina.

We're going to do Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head. And we got to Myrtle Beach. And we could have done seven to 10 appointments a day in Myrtle Beach because the golf courses are literally right next to each other. But we did not do that. We did two appointments a day. Eric wasn't a golfer, but I was. And so I golfed every day. Like it was, we'd go in to sell an ad and then the pro would inevitably say, oh, have you played our course yet? And we'd be like, oh, no, no, we definitely haven't played your course yet. And he'd be like, oh, our course is the best on the strand. And I'd say, well, I got my clubs in the

trunk. He's like, oh, we can get you out right now. It was great. We sold advertising. I was young, just out of college-ish, single in one of the greatest towns to be single in. We would go out every night and sell a couple of ads during the day. And at some point during that, What was the best part of being in that golf business was being in Myrtle Beach. We flew my dad out. I got to golf with him for a week. It was unbelievably good. We ran out of business cards and we went into a small print shop to get the business cards printed.

And sitting on the counter was this teeny tiny little copy of Shadis Magazine. And I was like, what is this? What is this thing? And they're like, oh, it's a gaming magazine that the guy that runs the presses and the back prints. And he's like, you want a copy? You can have it. Jolly's not here right now. Take that magazine.

Go, you know, I'm like, oh, great. So I took the magazine, went back to the hotel and read it cover to cover. I was sucked back into gaming in the span of one evening. And so when I went back to pick up the business cards, Jolly was there. And, you know, I think you know Jolly, Jolly Blackburn of nights at the dinner table. and my original partner, he was self-publishing this little magazine in the back of the print shop and printing 100 copies just because, I mean, no reason for it. Just passionate, a passionate hobby or whatever, something he was just excited about.

Absolutely. And so he had done four or five copies at that point. So I introduced myself to him and said, oh, I loved your magazine. he's like, oh, I've got, you know, the first four issues here. You can take those two. And so I went back to the hotel and gobbled them up. So I went back and said, you know, can you tell me what's going on with your magazine? How come there's not?

I mean, I was in the advertising business at that point. How come there's not any advertising in your magazine? He's like, well, you know, I've called all the game companies or contacted them and I send them copies. And I haven't gotten anybody to advertise in it yet. In some of my free time, I got on the phone and started calling up game companies. And I'm like, hey, do you know about Shadis magazine? They're like, oh, yeah, Jolly sends us a copy every couple of months. I'm like, how come you're not advertising in it?

They're like, the ads are too small. We have to make a special ad for Jolly's print size. And there's no district. He doesn't have enough distribution. He's printing 100 copies. I'm like, oh, I'm like, how many copies would we need to print to get your business? And, you know, it was only a few thousand copies. And so I went back to Jolly after I had sales in hand and said, I'm in the advertising

sales business. And I can sell advertising in your magazine if we can change the size to make it a more standard magazine size. And so we worked through doing that with his little print shop, which was nearly impossible. And my buddy Dave, my buddy Dave, my buddy Dave. Steve C, who I played Dungeons and Dragons with in high school, I came back and told all my old D&D buddies, I was thinking about doing, you know, helping do a D&D magazine that any of them want to help. And Dave did. So we did a couple of magazines with only a few ads and Dave and I used our money to help make sure they got printed. And then I think it was 93. We had talked to enough people and we had heard that the White Wolf gave away 10,000 copies of their magazine every year at GenCon. And we had never been, we'd never been to Gencom. We'd heard about it, obviously. And so we decided we were going to give away 10,000 copies of Shadest number nine at GenCon. We got a little 10 by 10

by 10 booth. I got on the phone and started calling people and saying, we're going to bring 10,000 copies of our magazine to GenCon. And we're going to give them all away, you know, here by advertising. We sold enough advertising to have an outside printer, print the magazine. We loaded them up in my pickup truck and a U-Haul trailer that was dangerously loaded with magazines. I mean, dangerously loaded. And we, me, Jolly, and Dave drove across the country. And one of us had to get in, my truck had a camper shell on it. And we had filled it with magazines.

And we'd made it like a trough in the middle so that somebody could lay down. in between the magazines on top of them because we couldn't get three people in the cab of the truck. I love this. I love this story. It was amazing. Dave was a police officer at the time. And we got pulled over in like Denver. And the cop came up and Dave's like, just let me handle this. And the cops like, hey, what do you guys think you're doing?

This looks a little dangerous. And Dave's like, oh, I'm an off-duty police officer. I got my weapon in the car. And him and the cop just had a conversation for like three minutes. He's like, all right, guys, be safe. See ya. That's helpful to have a cop with you on the ride. It is helpful to have a cop with you.

So we got to Jen Con and we unloaded the 10,000 magazines into this little 10 by 10 booth, which almost filled it up. And we had people walking by on the first day saying, What are you guys doing? We're like, we're going to give away 10,000 magazines. They're like, there's no way you're going to give away those magazines. And so we sat in the booth and gave away as many copies as we could that first day. And we probably gave away 750 copies.

Yeah. It was bad. And did you ever, did you ever do a Jen Con in Milwaukee? No, no, I didn't. I was indie before I started going. Okay. So Gen Con and Milwaukee was spread out. It was in the convention center, but there was another building across the street and there were a bunch of events in the hotels, as you know, as you know Jen Con is. And there was a whole bunch of people that never made it to the booth. Like they were all queuing in line across the street for Dungeons and Dragons events. And that's, that was their whole Jen Con. And so on day two, We had found out where all these people were queuing. And so we had jolly in the booth.

And Dave and I just kept grabbing like racks of 25 and 50 magazines and hustling to where the lines were and giving the magazines to people. It was an exhausting three days. But we ended up giving away every one of those magazines. And that was the same year the Magic for Gathering happened. Yeah. So that was nuts. right so the whole industry was buzzing about you know about magic and and this game that people couldn't get you know couldn't get their hands on and so we not for any reason we got the checklist

for the first expansion or the first magic to gathering base game checklist and we published it in issue number 10 of the magazine and we sold 10,000 copies yeah there you go that's brilliant just dumb luck right like there is absolutely no skill I don't, you know, like. I don't, I don't, I don't buy that at all. I mean, you, you seem like throughout this entire thing, right, you seize on opportunities and then you, you work your ass off to get things done. And so the, you know, getting it to the point where you're, you know, you're hustling across the way getting his magazine sold to then, yeah, yes, magic just showed up and that maybe it was lucky. But then the idea and, you know, wherewithal to be like, okay, well, then I'm going to put the checklist in here and we're going to sell it is taking advantage.

of that opportunity. But we didn't know it was going to sell any magazine. We put the checklist in and we told the distributors, this is the contents of the magazine. And we have this, oh, by the way, checklist in it. And like the next day, the fax machine, facts, that tells you how old the company is. The fact machine started worrying with orders coming through. Yeah. That was pretty awesome.

Yeah. That's great. That was the day that I sort of broke my dad's heart. I called him and said, I'm getting out of the pizza business, I'm getting into the golf business. And he was, you know, he was happy. He's a golfer and love that stuff. And then I called him and I said, oh, I'm getting out of the golf business. And I'm getting into the game magazine publishing business. And like, I will never forget the sound in his voice. He was like, can't you do both? Can I still get free golf outings? Yeah, we get free golf out of it. And I said, you know, Dad, if what I'm seeing happening right now continues to happen,

we'll be able to pay for our golf. It won't be. We won't need to get the free golf. Right. Which it took a lot of years before that was actually the case. But yeah, so we, I'm making a short story long, which is great. So we did Shadis Magazine for, we published it for 50 issues. And a year later, we went to Jen Con and, you know Ryan Dancy.

Ryan Dancy was advertising his little company in Shadis Magazine and showed up at Jen Con and we just became instant, like separated at birth, instant friends. And we walked around, we walked around Jen Con. talked about all the CCGs and everything that was happening there. And by the time the second Gencom we went to was over, it was pretty obvious that we were going to try and make a collectible trading card game together. Yeah. So yeah, I definitely want to dig into this because this is, this is the wave, right? This is the every, you know, magic is hot. Everybody, their brother, sister, cousin, mother, all are making TCGs. Everybody wants in on this. And you are able to break through

in a way that maybe three or four people are able to total. And I want to talk about what built L5R and how you were able to achieve that. Okay. Well, I think that at that time, that year, everybody that printed a collectible trading card game didn't matter how good it was. They just made money.

And there were a bunch of, there were some good games that came out, but there were also just a bunch of, you know, either esoteric or just not great games that were just rushed out to sort of bandwagon on. And I remember some of those companies saying, you know, we're not a collectible trading card game company. We're just doing this so that we can keep making role playing games. And, you know, Ryan, Ryan was like, why isn't your business the thing that's actually making you money? So we left that Gen Con.

And then we formulated a plan to create Legend of Five Rings. The original meeting where we got a few people that were, you know, part of AEG and Ryan's partners up in Seattle, where we brainstorm what we would do, we ended up with make a cowboy game, make a pirate game, and make a samurai game up on the board. when we said let's make a game about samurai, we had a couple of people working for me at the time who were just samurai nuts. And so that was the game that we were going to do. And most of the people working at AEG Shadis were at a role-playing game background.

So telling a story with the card game was something we were always going to do. the plan was we would tell this cool story and then we would and you would get the chapters as expansions that we released was it was the idea of having uh you know tournaments and players evolving the story in there from the beginning or was it something that came later that was not so that was the fact that we knew that we were going to to tell the story was always there but then we sat down and said, you know, how are we going to get people to, you know, engage with this game? We can't compete with the games that are given away money.

We, you know, we just don't have the budget to do that. And, you know, as sort of a marketing thing, we decided that it was going to be an interactive storyline. And we thought that it would be a few small interactive storyline points that we would let players make decisions with at events. and when we put that into our advertising and announced it, it just sort of took off. We were literally a business on a shoestring budget. We had Dave Williams, DJ Trendle, Matt Wilson, you know Matt.

Yep. John Wick, you know John. Yeah, I know John. And a guy named Matt Sorosick, Dave, Dave, C, myself, and John. Jolly all working out of the LA office. And Ryan and a few of his gaming group working out of an office in Seattle. And we had no money. We started doing this CCG.

And then, as you know, CCGs are expensive. Yeah, they're very excited. That was going to be my follow-up question. How do you start doing a TCG with no money? Because I get people all the time to tell me that they want, you know, they're just starting in game design. They're like, I got this TCG. I want to make it. Okay, well, that's a big budget project to start with.

How were you handling? Yeah, so we had cash flow from AEG. And then Ryan and I both got our parents to invest in Five Rings Publishing Group to, you know, to help get the game printed. And Ryan got his, Ryan's company in Seattle were going to be the financiers. of the game. So we had just enough backing to do the basics, like to get all of the art ordered and to get the game ready for press. Yeah, no, I want to just sort of highlight a few of the things because, you know, the idea of sort of picking a theme that you guys were passionate about, right, samurai, focusing on a way to differentiate yourself, which is sort of we're going to tell

a great story, right? I mean, magic is great and it's got a flavorful world, but especially at the beginning, it was more of an open-ended world with a lot of characters and you tell your own story. And here, you guys were focusing on this communal storytelling in a very public way. And that engagement as the hook was the thing that everybody knew about. You know, this is what, this is, what, 95, 96 this is happening? Yep. Right? So, yeah, I'm, I just start coming into this community around then.

So I started playing Magic in 96 and won the U.S. National Championships in 97. So then I start going to, you know, conventions and things. And all I hear is the L5R people just like cheering and doing their little chance at the other table. I'm playing for like $20,000. And they are way more excited than anybody at any of my tables. And it was amazing. I was like what you guys had been able to build an enthusiasm was something that has stuck. And it is, it remains the thing that we reference all of the time, both in my company and elsewhere, as the icon of,

that community building, immersive storytelling, like that incredible hook and magic that you guys were able to create is something that has just made an indelible mark on the industry. And so the fact that you were able to do it with, you know, borrowing money from your parents and, you know, just kind of hoping for the best as you were building this thing out is amazing. Well, the funny thing is that when we finally, so we did a, um, Peter, we, I was friends with Peter Ackison, but friendly with Peter. And we asked Peter for, like, his one piece of advice if we were going to do a collectible trading card game. And his piece of advice was, print a practice sheet. Like, print a practice sheet. Learn that process. You'll save yourself a whole bunch of headaches

and a whole bunch of money. So we built, we basically built one practice sheet that had a demo deck on it and some promo cards. And we printed that. And so prior to the game releasing, we had these demo decks and we were we were handing out demo decks to people and we were running demos of the game and teaching people how to play the game, which was. And this is before you, you don't actually have the main game printed at all. You're just demoing just to build butt.

Yes. It was all, it was really all we could do at that point because we were, we got. one of the copies of Scri and 95 to the offices. And I opened that thing up and the shadow fist four panel ad fell off of that cover, right? Like they had that that girl that was flying through the air. And, you know, you opened up this magazine and I was like, that's a $10,000 ad. Like that's nuts. We can't compete with that.

Yeah. And we can't compete with that. There's absolutely no way. And, you know, we were very dejected at that point. We thought, wow, we are likely in over our head. But we were so far in, we had to stay in. So our only play was to demo the game. And so we demoed like crazy.

And then when we finally released it, we had people come by the booth and learn how to play. And they would say, can I play some more? and we would be like, well, if you put on this AEG shirt and teach people how to play, you can stay at the booth and play. And so that is the magic. That is the magic moment. That's exactly the thing, right? Like when you get that point where you show the game to somebody and they just want to keep

playing and we'll start sharing that with somebody else, that's when you know you've got something. A collectible trading card game, it is everything. Everything. Yeah. Yep. We, even without that, I had the exact same story as what happened to me. my first year on Ascension. We had the same little dinky booth and we had just a couple staff and we were just hoping for the best and we started showing it off and people just start like sitting on

the floor around the booth demoing to people around them and it's like, okay, this is it. It's an amazing feeling. And it's the main thing that like I try to advise people, a lot of people will go first and they'll print an entire game or printed entire TCG before they have that moment, before they know that people will share it, will independently play it. And that, until you get that magic, together, you have something that people want to share and play without you pushing them to do so, you don't have anything. And so it's, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, our five R into the first, the first CCG crash. Like, the CCG crash was happening while our product was at the printers. And prior to the crash, we had all two thousand cases that we were

printing sold. And every week, two or three hundred of those cases would disappear. The fax machine was working, but it was working against us. People were like, you know, we're going to take a little smaller, you know, thing. Instead of buying 40 cases, we're going to buy 35, and then we're going to buy 30. And then we're going to, so we watched 60 percent of our pre-sales disappear when the CCG crashed happened. Wow. And we had no money. All we had was the product.

And so our only move was to give away free decks and demo. We couldn't run ads. And so we just hustled. Like you said, we went to every game store we could possibly go to. They set up a war room in Seattle. The people who had become fans of the games, game during its first four months had you know we're we're all wanting to go out and and and get new get new players and build a build a player base for it um we had the we we got sort of the

anti-magic crowd early on like yeah it's like yeah we were we were Pepsi to coke right so there were people who were probably we had some really good players play l5 r and after five or six years I think we saw some players who I would think were probably, you know, probably would have been professional CCG players at any level. But early on, I think we had a bunch of players who were good, but we were the small pond where they could be the big fish. Right, right. They can't be at the top of the magic pile, so they could, they'll jump to this and they could be at the top of this pile. And then that makes them more excited and then grow the commuter.

Yep. So, yeah. And it's, these are, these are, these are all just examples, though, that just again, highlight the universal principles here, like turning weaknesses into strengths, right? You're broke and you can't advertise. Okay, we're going to demo the hell out of this and we're going to get our, you know, our army of enthusiastic people to come and go. I don't have the budget or the prize pool or the, you know, the size of the audience that Magic has. Okay, well, I'm going to attract the people that don't want to be in that pool and they want to be in a different pool. Like using those things and

flipping them around, I think is just a key part of succeeding in business and really being able to position yourself. You know, it's better to be Coke, but being peeing. Pepsi is not a bad thing. Without a doubt. We were probably more like RC Cola, if we're being, if we're being honest here. So, yeah, so the rest of AEG's history has been, has been told, right? So we were always behind the eight ball after the CCG crash. We, we immediately had, we immediately had, we immediately.

had printer debt, which is the worst, right? It's just, you get into debt just enough so that it's, it doesn't kill your business, but it is sort of debilitating to all of the actions that you're going to take next. Yep. And because of the CCG crash, Ryan's business partner basically said, we're not we're not giving you money to print the first expansion for the for the for the for the set the plan was print shadowlands five months four months after the base set released and then have this cycle and we couldn't put a we we we didn't have the money to print shadowlands and we had the base set game so we actually spent a year building customers with the base set game and we actually spent a year building customers with the base set game. before the Shadowlands expansion, before we finally got, you know, outside money to help us print the Shadowlands expansion. And that's when, you know,

that's when L5R really took off. We made it through the lean times where we were just demo in that Imperial Edition. And then when we finally got some investment money with Shadowlands, we... This is the pizza story all over again, man. It's really interesting. It's that same thing, right?

You just hustle and grind for a, year plus in a world where most people would be, would be dead in the water. Most people would give up. I mean, just what you're saying, you've released a TCG, you have an entire year before you're able to put new content out. And you're, and you've got what, you know, printer debt hanging over you. You have to just sort of hustle and sell set one and grow the base as much you can that entire time. Most people crumble in that situation. And, and it's, what do you think is it about you? Where did you get that kind of tenacity? Because that's, it's a really, it's a really rare precious thing. And then how would how would somebody else, you know, when do you know when,

when is it time to quit and when is it time to keep going? That's a good question. I actually, I know that a lot, that some of my success stories are all about how I have, I have fought through a very tough time and I've been tenacious. But I see myself as a person that gets to a wall and looks at it and says, is there any way I don't have to go through this wall? I don't want to do that work. I want to go around the wall or through the door or over the wall if that's easier. So I'm actually somebody that usually looks for the easy path. And I think that with the pizza business, I was, I was young and it was.

a grind and I didn't have anything else. And so I was, you know, I was kind of desperate with, at least with the gaming business, you know, the thing I had to do to, to, to keep the dream alive, let's go play games, right? Like we would, you know, get in our car and drive into L.A. and go to shops and, and do demos, you know, every weekend. It was, it was amazing. So I don't think I answered your question. No, well, I think you did actually, because this is something that I tell people too, which is, look, no matter what business you're in to succeed is going to be hard. And forget business. I don't care if it's business or creative work or anything, right? There's grind that comes with the process. If you love what you do, if you love your day to day,

then the grind is much more tolerable, right? It's not that the grind disappears, but that you could do it. You're like, yeah, okay, I got to play games every day. I got to, you know, show this off and sell this game to people that I love and I believe it. It's a very different story than I got to go sell insurance or I got to go do something that you're just not as fired up about. And so I think that insofar as you can hold on to the, no, I really do love this and I really do believe in this. That can help in the lean times.

I can help give you that extra motivation, that extra drive. I think that definitely is a part of the story. Yeah. Well, you just said that better than I did. So I'll... I yeah well so I then you know now nowadays I just sort of to kind of fast forward a little bit you know I see that you've you know Aegee has gotten to be you know not only just sort of an icon in the industry but now you seem like you've got a real stride when it comes to being able to uh launch games with a

huge following on Kickstarter to be able to you know have enthusiastic communities and you know of of the, plenty of the haters, too, that come with any large community, but managing communities at scale and being able to launch things like that at scale, what do you think is leading to that success and how might, you know, those of us who want to emulate it, you know, go about it? So 10 years, 10 years ago when we were sort of at the end of the cycle of the collectible trading card game business, we had done Elphibar and Warlord and sold Elphi Varr and sold Elphi Var and got it back. And we decided that we wanted to be, you know,

that our next transition was going to be into board games. I think our first two board games was a game called Monkey Lab and Abandon Ship by Reiner Kinizia. And I learned a valuable lesson buying that game from Reiner, right? Like, Reiner is a legend. Yes, he was my first game design idol, game designer idol when I was growing up. Absolutely.

And I convinced myself that if we just bought a design from Reiner, that his name was going to sell that game. And Abandon Ship was a great game. We did amazing production value on it. We actually made a ship sync while that game was being played. And it tanked. Like the first two games, we learned so many lessons. So, like, our first print run in China of Monkey Lab had mold in it.

Oh. Like, we had to destroy every copy. Like, it was, and, you know, I mean, you open up the box and there's, like, a little dot on the thing. And you're like, what is that oil spot? You know, and then, you know, then it turns black and you're like, ugh, that's not good. And abandon ship, we sold, I don't know how many copies we sold, but it wasn't, it wasn't nearly what we sell now of games and not nearly enough to make transitional money. And so we, you know, we kept doing the CCG business to sort of to keep the business stable,

but we knew that that wasn't going to be, that wasn't going to be, that wasn't going. to be the be-all and end-all for us because our team didn't love the grind that came with doing CCGs the way we had done them. So it wasn't just work on the CCG and then put the CCG out. When you build the kind of communities that we built with our storyline, collectible trading card games, you also build a situation where those fans always expect a little bit more, and they take unbelievable ownership. They all felt like

owners of each of those storyline games. And so at first, every decision that we made was a good decision. But then we started making some decisions that caused people to not be happy. We'd kill off a character. In L5R, the worst thing you could do was give a character a bad death in fiction. And the work that we had to do outside of creating the game was much harder than the work that we had to do to develop the game itself. And it became obvious to

me that the only way that we could stay a CCG company would be to completely clear the decks of every person working at AEG at that time. Because our staff, they didn't want to do the really, really hard work. And I didn't want to do that work anymore either. It was difficult. They didn't want to do the hard work to give the players the experience that they had gotten used to. Can you say more the experience that they had gotten used to in what way? What does that mean? It means regular storyline events. It means quality fiction. It means demos and special deals at stores. the amount of energy it took to manage those communities was awesomely hard. Yeah.

Right. It was it was awesomely hard. And we slowly stopped doing our best work. I mean, you know, I haven't said it very often in very many places, but there were definitely periods of time. We weren't keeping our promise as a publisher. Like we had shown you this, you know, this, this, this, this amazing place, this amazing experience with our storyline games. And then we just, I don't know if we were working hard enough or if we, we weren't inspired, you know, to have unique new ideas. But it was really, it was really difficult.

I appreciate you sharing that because it, you know, I often wonder the same thing, right, why the flip side of like, why L5R, you know, sort of stays in everybody's mind as this icon of this storytelling, community building, and interactive fiction, is that nobody seems to, at least in my experience, nobody's done that since then. And I think it's part because it's really, really hard. It's a really huge burden. Even though everybody wants to be able to do this sort of interaction well, it's incredibly difficult. And I can imagine it was wearing after years of trying to pull this off. It was wearing after years of trying to pull it off. We were older than, like, We were all young and single when we were doing all of that stuff.

And the L5R playbook was work all week, do some demos in the evening, then go do demos all weekend, go to as many conventions as we could go to. It was a young man's game, without a doubt. Like, there's no way I could keep up that pace that I would have been able to keep up that pace now, right? Or even 10 years ago or whatever. So magic to gathering and CCG has changed the industry in a pretty amazing way. Then Dominion came along, right? Dominion came along. And I don't think Dominion gets enough credit for being as influential in changing the gaming industry as well.

So your first game. I haven't heard of that one. Tell me more. No. Yes, obviously, I had a huge impact on my own. My entire, I saw that game was like, oh, yeah, okay, I'm going to build a business around that model. Thank you. Absolutely.

It was amazing. I think that the difference between the rush to do deck builders and the rush to do collectible trading card games was whether purposefully or not, the industry had definitely learned from its mistake of just rushing out bad deck builders. Ascension and Thunderstone and a list of deck builders that came out that were second to market. There were a bunch of really quality, really unique games that gave people a different deck building experience, right? That were mostly fun. Like there weren't a lot of bad deck builders that came out right after. or Dominion, right? Like, people were like, oh, this just makes sense.

So our first successful boxed game was Thunderstone. Yep. Right? We, Mike Elliott contacted us. We talked to Mike about Thunderstone, and he's what I call a Reese's Peanut Buttercup designer. He's like, what if we smash Dominion with Dungeons and Dragons, right? He thinks that way a lot.

So we had this really nice game. And then we spent eight months or whatever it was getting it to be more like Dungeons and Dragons. That was our goal. When we got it, it was a lot more like Dominion. And we worked with Mike to make that game feel more like Dungeons and Dragons, which was a smart move for us. obviously. Yeah, yeah.

For me, I think my favorite part of Thunderstone, obviously, you know, since we kind of both came to market at around the same time as the follow-up to Dominion, the thing I really admired about Thunderstone was the leveling up mechanic that you guys had. With, you know, the characters can get, you know, gaining XP and being able to, like, upgrade the cards themselves in your deck, I thought was a really great innovation. And, yeah, whereas you kind of took Dominion and D&D, and pushed in that direction, I took Dominion and draft it,

you know, magic drafting and sealed blood is kind of the direction. I went with mine. So clearly a lot of space there. I think it's interesting too, because I would push back a little bit on your theory about deck building games.

I think, obviously there were several good ones that came out. I think there were several bad ones that came out, quite a few. But the two things, I think, that worked in the favor of deck building games, is one,

the industry, well, the industry had matured. So I think game, design overall was better that it was back when magic first came out. I think a lot of people learned a lot over the interim years. And I think that the since the both the barrier to entry and the cost of being involved in a deck building game is so much lower than a TCG, right? If you're playing a TCG, you play one TCG, maybe two because it's like hundreds of dollars of commitment to really like

be invested in a TCG. But you could buy an entire deck building game for 40 bucks. And you've got everything that you need. So owning and playing a variety of deck building games is no big deal. You can like Dominion and Ascension and Thunderstone and play them all. And that's fine. You could still, you know, afford to pay rent. But you couldn't do that if you were a heavy player of, you know, magic and Pokemon and L5R or whatever. Unless you were winning world championships. Yes, yes. Anyway, so yeah, so you were able to kind of make that transition, have a big success with Thunderstone, and the lessons that you had learned from building a community, from, you know, teaching people and growing via demos, all that stuff then seemed to be key in playing to your

ability to differentiate yourself as a board game company. That is very true. So we, up until, you know, eight years ago, we did a lot of internal design. Like we, we had not figured out how to take pitches from outside designers very well. And even when we did take those pitches, we had a lot of people, like the development process at AEG was more development design because that's just how we had started as a company. When we said, let's make a game about samurai or cowboys or pirates, we filled endless whiteboards with just the ideas of what needed to be in a samurai game. You can see in L5R that whiteboard, right? Like the fact that duels had to be in there and that honor is a force more powerful than steel. That came from one of

those whiteboard sessions, right? Where seven of us sat in the room and talked about being honorable in the samurai culture was way more important than being a good swordsman or being a good politician. That your honor meant everything in Japan and that that we needed to make sure that that was an important part of the characters and the culture of this fantasy world that we were building. And we did that for all of the games. And then we reversed engineered the play experience from it. So that happened with Thunderstone as well. We knew that it was Dominion meets Dungeons and Dragons. And so we thought, what are things that have to be in this game if it's going to be that? And leveling up the characters was an obvious one. A game wouldn't

have been nearly as good if the characters didn't level up. Yep, 100%. Yeah, so now there's a couple of pieces to this I kind of want to expand out on because you talked about the ability to, you've transitioned from a company that builds things and designs internally to a company that's able to take in pitches from the outside and, you know, cultivate and develop those. And so I'd love to learn more about that because I have definitely fallen into the other

camp. You know, we build everything internally pretty much. don't really have much of a pitching process at all. And so I'd be curious kind of how that got built up and from both sides, both if you're someone that wants to be able to take in pitches or if you're someone that wants to pitch your game company, what goes into that? Okay.

Well, 10 years ago, the two books that you were instructed to read if you came to work at Alderac Entertainment Group, and I think we've had this conversation privately before, I know that you are a bookhound and are always looking for, for the next best thing. But the two books that you were instructed to read were good to great, which was the model that we were trying to use to figure out who we were going to be as a company. And our focus statement that we ended up with, you know, from that was be the best small game company in the world, right? You have to put a true, a possible statement out into the world.

and then everybody at your company has to buy that statement if you're going to do the good to great path, right? Like, we don't want to be the greatest game company in the world. We want to be the greatest small game company. And then we did a whole series of things where we defined what it meant to be the greatest company in the world and what it meant to be small. And so we had that framework 10 years ago when we were looking at doing this transition. And then the other book was the four-hour work week, which the messages in those two books are almost diametrically opposed. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

The four-hour work week was my, I think when we talked about this before I mentioned it, but that was the thing that got me first motivated me to quit my job at Upper Deck and try to start my own company. It was just that the basics of the fear setting exercise, like, yeah, what's the worst thing that's going to happen to me? and kind of kicked me off that path. I have not read Good to Great, which I'm now making a note of that I need to do that. Oh, that book is, yeah.

So it took me a while to explain to the people who were working for me. I would say, you're going to read the four-hour work week, and you need to read it through the lens of not a selfish lens, right? Like we've got this structure that we got from Good to Great, which we're trying to create. And the lessons that you can learn from the four-hour work week is just full of interesting information and it's also full of crap, right? Like there's something.

No, yeah. You've got to filter through that at all. It's got, it's got gems, but you got a sift. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's easy to read that book and say, oh, this is a book about how I cheat the system. Right? But if you pair that with life goals and company goals, it's not about cheating the system.

It's about what I said earlier, about finding the shortest path to success. Why would you work on something for eight hours when you can get the same result doing it for four? Right. Right. And that book changed the way I managed people at AEG and the way we managed people. if you work for our company, you have a lot of freedom. There's a schedule and there are things that we talk about as being things that we need to do, but you don't have a boss that is micromanaging you and making you tell him what he got done this week.

If you come to work at AEG in any of the jobs, it used to just be like it started with the creative team, but I sort of let it blossom out to everybody. there is no Uber boss at AEG telling you that you need to show up at work on time, you need to be here doing X, Y, and Z. There's just a set of best practices, which you quickly learn when you come to work for our company. If you don't follow those practices, the company, you know, sort of ejects you. Like there are a bunch of people who are all on a path to try and make us the best small games company in the world. you know, if you're not one of those people, you don't last here.

Right. You need to be aligned with the vision and the company culture, and then from there, you know, run with the ball. Yep. Am I correct that I think I remember the story that you were the, you invented the term dictatocracy? Is that, is it? Dictocracy. Yes.

Can you explain what that means? Everybody gets an opinion and then we do what I say. That has that I'm less of a dick talk Than I was Yeah It can be frustrating for me at times when we have to work through people's opinions When I had my Oh it's we're coming up on the

The four month anniversary of when I had a tumor this year Which we haven't talked about yet but I had a tumor and I learned that what we have built is strong, right? Like the team just kept doing their jobs. The company just kept moving forward. It was the, the tumor was probably the final thing that I needed to fully let go of any micromanaging that I was doing. I've got great, great team members and, you know, I trust them.

and more often than not when we get into an argument over whether we're going to do thing one way or another, both ways are usually pretty good. Like, by the time we get to a point where we're arguing over which decision we're going to make, it is almost seldom, you know, a good decision or a bad decision. Right. Well, and it's actually one of those, I mean, it's obviously you had to learn this lesson a very hard way. But it's, it is, it's a powerful one, right? that, you know, the ability to let go, the ability to trust your people to run, you know,

and do their, do their thing. And also just that if, you know, when you're arguing over something, not getting so entrenched in your own position, and that actually as a leader, whenever possible, you should be going with what your, you know, your teammates and what your team wants to do. And allow them, even if you think it's a mistake, allowing them to make the mistakes and learn is going to be far more powerful. You know, if it's not, like you said, not an extremely wrong decision, then saying, no, it's got to be exactly this way

because, you know, as brilliant as you might be, sometimes you're wrong too. And that takes a while to internalize, but it's a powerful lesson. When I have been wrong in the past, there have been some doozies. Okay, so what was the question that you just asked?

Well, I really wanted to get into pitching process and saying you've now you now set up a system around other people being able to pitch games in and build a sort of not just an internal team to build stuff and and you are reimagining and resetting up your company to be more streamlined in this way and so you mentioned good to great and getting a focus statement on the book and for our work week and making it more efficient and being able to not micromanage and let your team run and so then maybe some either if you want to take in either direction of then what is it like the process for being able to take in pitches and how you run that through your company or the other way around if you'd like and what makes a good pitch and what makes those things successful. Okay. So I think that you will agree with me that one of the hardest things to do once you are a game company is to play your games.

It still feels after 28 years of doing this Like I am screwing around when I am playing games I can't get well I have gotten over that feeling But it took me 25 years before I realized that that was That we would buy a game and play it four or five times And then we would publish it and then we'd be surprised when that game wasn't successful. Yeah.

Right. Like it was literally just a, just a product that we put out. So we have learned that for a game company, we believe the most important thing we do is picking the products that we're going to publish. So there was a day when playing games was not, like, I am my father's son. and I have tons of great stories about my dad, but he helped with the company all the way up until he died in 2001. And he would come to our offices in Ontario and a truck would show up and it would have, you know, it would have a bunch of boxes that we need to take out.

And I remember specifically this day when a truck arrived and it was me and him and Dave C. And there was a big L5R meeting happening. and we had to walk past the L5R meeting with boxes. After like the fourth trip, my dad was like, what are those guys doing? How come they, don't they see us lifting these boxes? Shouldn't they be helping us unload this truck?

And I was like, they're filling the truck, dad. Like, their job is more important than what we're doing right now. If having them help us unload the truck would feel good for us. But we're paying them to think and to put ideas on that whiteboard and to end up putting them in a box. We're not paying them to move boxes into the office. That's what we get to do. And so I think that three years ago, I guess it was three years ago, we decided that I wasn't going to be running in the company anymore.

My job was going to be the head of development, finding new games. And we put Ryan Dancy in charge of running the company and Nicholas Bonshu in charge of running our international business. And my job became working with the developers to make the very best games that we could make and finding games that we could publish. And we rented a house in Orange County on a street called Larkstone. and we call it the Larkstone House. And it is basically just,

the rule is no business in this house, just gameplay. So we would just show up every day and play games. We would invite designers to, when we would sign a game or we wanted to sign a game, we would invite designers to come down and stay at the Larkstone House, and we would wine and dine them, and we would play games for, you know, two, three, four, five days that they were in town. And what we found was not having the gameplay

happen, an environment where work was the most important, having it happened in a place where play was the most important. And then most importantly, having almost everyone that was interacting, staying under that same roof, we have had so many inspirational conversations over a bowl of shirios in that house in the two years that it was operating, it was unbelievable. Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. What a great, what a great process. I mean, being able to, you know, learn that lesson of separating, you know, creating that separate space for creative work, valuing the creative part of the process, being able to, you know, actively, you know, work with designers and cultivate that, you know, both fun and effective for actually building things

that are going to be great and they're going to be worth doing all the business side stuff for. Yep. And it makes the business side that much easier. We have a great salesperson. We have a great marketing team. They have figured out how to sell a good number of copies of a decent game, of a good game. But selling a great game is just easier, right? Like instead of selling, you're allocating. Instead of desperately needing to convince people that they need to buy a game, you're informing people about the availability and how good the game is. The whole company's workload shifts to being easier when you're selling great games. And so, yeah, I feel like, I feel like in the last few years, we have really leveled up our game. And the number of

of winners that we're publishing is much higher. The biggest decision that we made, Justin, was that we said that we were just going to make fewer games. We still develop about the same number of games, but we don't publish them. Our goal is to be making one game a year, which is nuts, right? But we want to be so good at picking that one game a year that we are, that we're making ticket to rides, not, you know, not monkey labs. Right.

Yeah, it's such a hard decision to be able to make it. You're like, well, okay, so here's how we're going to make our business better. We're going to release less product. Like, you know, there has to be some pushback as you were internally to be like, wait a minute, what? But, you know, releasing and spending the time to make something good is worth it. And it's also just a more fulfilling way to run the business. this too. Even if sometimes you're like, oh, I wish I could do more, but being able to do something

great is more than a 10x over doing something good. Absolutely. I agree with that. So as far as pitching games to game companies and pitching them to AEG, I have a tendency to get long-winded about my stories, right? So I believe that most game companies are not super focused on looking at all of the, at looking at all of the games that get submitted to them. Like almost every company has a send game submissions to this, you know, game submissions at all direct.com or whatever our email address is, which for the record, it's creative at all direct.com if you want to send games to us. If a lot of those, at game companies and at AEG for a long time, nobody was spending the time to sift through

all of those games to figure out which games we should actually take a look at. Well, and to be fair, it's a lot of work, and most games submissions are terrible. So it is not, it takes, it takes a real effort to sort through them and find the good ones that can be cultivated into something great. Yeah, I, you know, I believe in the you got to kiss a lot of frogs to find a princess, right? Like, that's, that's how we do business. I send, I would say I send probably 40 or 50 rejection letters a month out to people. people. And we only bring in two to four new games a year for development. But I can tell you that we

look at all the cell sheets that come in and we contact designers who have interesting ideas. I can tell you the things that we look at that sort of that stand out for us with sell sheets. So sell sheets and those little three-minute videos are the first way to, you know, to reach most game companies now, right? Yep. For us, we get a lot of pitches from designers of, you know, this is a game about fantasy fighting and going into dungeons and, you know, doing X, Y, and Z. Nowhere in the pitch or on the sell sheet is the elevator pitch.

What makes your game unique and different or better than something that's on the market, now. Like, the chances of a game designer discovering the next deck building, very slim. We don't get, I mean, I don't think we get any pitches from designers. They're like, this is a totally new mechanic. Right? Like, that, that just doesn't happen. So what we're looking for is, what is the hook that is going to make somebody want to buy your game? Play your game, right? Like, what's the hook that's going to make us want to play your game? Because even though we're playing more games than we ever have before,

our time is still limited, right? Like, we have to get people through that first gate and play games that we think that we can then turn into products. We have a couple of buckets that we're trying to fill with games at AEG. So we're always looking for our next big Kickstarter. You mentioned that we've had some success on Kickstarter, which we have. Again, thank you, Thunderstone. Our first Kickstarter was a relaunch of Thunderstone.

But we're looking for the next game that we can level up into an expensive Kickstarter. And those games are actually really hard to pitch. We don't get very many pitches from game designers for epic level games that could be kickstaters. What makes a game an epic level pitch that could be a Kickstarter? What are you looking for when you're saying this could be the next big thing? So a game that we're going to put on Kickstarter needs that, like any game we look at has to have sort of a nugget that makes that game fun, right? That we've combined this engine building mechanic with this worker placement

that creates this really unique play experience. And it could be any mechanics, whether it's new or a combination of mechanics that already exist. But an epic-level Kickstarter product can be leveled up. We haven't done a game with a bunch of miniatures in it, but games that like miniatures or have a – that could have a lot of components or that use storage containers that you put into the box. I watched a video for a shut up and sit down video the other day that Ryan shared with me.

And it was like a 4X engine building game. And the guy was like, well, you know, there are 123 things that you need to pass out to the individuals to play this game. And, you know, he listed off all this weird stuff that you had to do. And then he's like, okay, we're going to do that now. And then he just reached into the box and he took out these five little, plastic containers and put them in front of people. It was like, okay, I'm done. Right.

And then he opened one up and he just showed how elegant the system to put away your components was, but also the fact that you would just open up that box and move a couple of things around and then you'd be ready to play. That's the kind of thing that we can only do if we're kickstarting again. like the cost to make that player carrying case is too onerous to put into a game that we're trying to sell at retail. Makes sense. So, yeah, so those big components, those large kits, high price point things tend to do better for a Kickstarter project because you have the margin as opposed to putting it into a retail store. That makes sense.

We had a similar thought, obviously, when we moved from Ascension to Ascension Tactics, it was like, well, okay, we've got a lot of It's a big thing. It would be to sell this at retail would have this cost like $200, but I could sell it for 100 on Kickstarter. So it's something you can actually make. All right. Anything else in that bucket that makes you kind of stop and take a look? Obviously, this core of fun, decent number of components, cool storage container, something

that kind of visually is appealing. Yeah, we're doing a couple of, we'll see. We're doing a couple of our next two kickstarters are not going to be. are not going to be $100 to $100 games. They're going to be $60 and $70 games with really nice components. So maybe what we're looking for will change. I think that what Ryan has told me, Ryan and Luke runs our Kickstarter,

we're actively looking for something big right now. So the other bucket is games that we can sell at retail for $40. That is where most designers are actually doing. doing, you know, where they're doing their work now. We see a lot of pitches that are low complexity games that are like Splendor or any of the games right now that people have in their collection. And we think that those $40 games, there is no end to the number of those games that you can own other than the amount of shelf space that you're willing to displace. I think that that's a new problem that you and, you know, us that all publishers are going to have to deal with.

game rooms are full now, right? At some point, somebody's going to say, enough, don't keep buying new games. Yes, I've seen, I think that people just need bigger game rooms and more shelves. That's really the answer. Absolutely. I think that that's what you're living rooms for. So we're always looking, most of our games that we publish in a year fit into that sort of somewhere between a $20 retail and a $60 retail. the $60 games are tougher, right?

When you do a $60 game, you can get a lot of buy-in on that early. We've done a few. We recently did Ecos, which was a $60 game. But keeping momentum on a $60 game is harder than keeping momentum on a $40 game because there is an actual purchase decision that you're making on that $60 game. Right. It gets into that area that you were talking about, about how much money do I have to spend on my hobby. Right.

Right. Yeah, $40, $20 game, $40 game, those are just impulse decisions, you know, $60 game and up now. It's like, okay, I got to think about this a little bit more. Absolutely, absolutely. And so there are a number of $60 games that, you know, are very successful. We still have at least one of those in our lineup each year. But for us, sort of the magic spot is a game that we can sell for $40. We determine that based on what the cost of goods are in the box. So a game you sell on Kickstarter, you get 92% of the money that shows up on that Kickstarter, which is why companies can do bigger, more interesting things. With a game that you sell at retail, you only get 40% of that price. So when we sell a $40 game, we only... get $16.

It's a way different business than selling a $40 game on Kickstarter and getting $34 or $35. Oh, yeah. I know all too well. It's, that's why, yeah, people don't recognize how much, you know, you need to kind of upmark your product because of how little you actually get of that percentage and why. So one of the reasons why Kickstarter has been such a great platform for board games in particular, I think, is that it does. It lets you have a direct connection.

to your audience. It lets you sell at a much higher margin so that you can make, give more good stuff and higher quality products to players. And, and again, tying back into what you talked about, all of those skills learned from building communities and engaging and having fans that feel like they are owners, right? This is the main thing for L5R. It's exactly the same thing with Kickstarter. I advise everybody that's going to Kickstarter. It's like you're a big part of your job when you're doing that is making sure that those people that back you feel like, owners, they feel like a part of the process. And that's, that's a lot of what they're paying for is to be, you know, a part of the team and, and that, you know, it's not an easy thing to fulfill that

promise that you're making. A good chunk of your customers on Kickstarter want to come along for the ride, right? Like, like, I think that that people are buying so many Kickstarter now that I think there is room to innovate in how you interact with your customers after a Kickstarter has funded. So, you know, hopefully that will end up on one of our whiteboards and we'll be doing this again in a year. And you'll be like, well, you know, you guys innovated again. You did it again, John. You did it again. Yeah, I would love to do that.

And I know we've run over time here a little bit. So I want to be respectful. You've given a ton of awesome insights here. But I know you're doing a lot more of this on a regular basis. Not only you're taking in pitches, but you guys have built a Facebook community for game designers. you've been doing other things. So for those designers out there that want to be a part of this and want to hear more from you

or you already gave us the creative at alderac.com pitch address, but what are the other places they can go to connect with your community and hear more about the games you're doing and maybe pitch some games to you themselves? So on Facebook, we've got a thing called the Alderac Design Center. We've got 828 members in it currently. So I just checked.

And that is mostly current game designers, or aspiring game designers. We're using that to, I mean, we just started that this year, and then I was sort of running it. And then, you know, I've been out with health issues. So it is the sort of main place where we're communicating with designers about what games we're looking for. We are looking at pitches there.

We also have the Creative at Alderac website where you can send us your pitch sheets and your three to four minute videos. We take a look at all of those. I take a look at all of those. That is something that I try to do every week. Blind submissions, I would say that the number of games that we have gotten into publication because of blind submissions is still pretty low. But we have built really good relationships with designers who then we've ended up publishing their games.

Maybe the game that they pitch us isn't the one that we do, but I connect with them and, you know, we get to talking. And the next pitch that they give us is more in tune with the way we play games or the way we want to publish games. Yeah, well, and I would just give everybody out there that's thinking about, you know, pitching games and being a part of this process, the same advice that you learned or at least exhibited in the pizza place and with L5R and going forward, right? It's the failure and the low times are going to be there, but that persevering and keep going, your first pitch is not likely to succeed,

but if you build relationships, if you show you're good to work with, you show you're improving and learn lessons and, you know, get better and iterate, then, then, you know,

you will succeed in the long run. And so I think you, you creating that environment for people is, it's fantastic. So, um, thank you for doing that. And thank you for doing this.

And it's, it's, I know, you know, obviously it's been a rough year. You've been through a lot, and it's wonderful to see you, you know, back up and running and to be able to have these conversations still, you've been such a great friend. And I've learned so much from you over the years. And to be able to share that wisdom here has been an honor.

So thanks very much, John. You too, Jess. All right. We, uh, Jess and I have been cultivating, uh, you know, a weekend out for quite some time. And after I'm fully healed, we're going to make that happen after all the lockdown stuff is over. We're probably just going to go berserk. You just say when and where, my friend, I am 100% in. That's one of the reasons why people were telling you that you are the new Johnson.

I was, like, there was a day when, you know, if you told me something was happening, I would just parachute in and be there for that party. That, you know, that, that, that has slowed down now that I'm, now that I'm in my 50s, but. Well, I just turned 40. And obviously, I've had to slow down, you know, I mean, since the whole world had slow down here a bit, but we get at least one more outing in us, I believe in us. Absolutely. All right. All right. Thanks so much, John.

Thanks, Justin. Really appreciate it. 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 make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer.

In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever, find, books are sold.