Think Like A Game Designer - Justin Ziran — Digital Magic: Fear and Success, Leading with Bold Decisions, and Redefining Innovation (#82)

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

About Justin ZiranJustin Ziran is a veteran of the collectible and strategy games industry. He has decades of experience shaping some of the most successful brands in tabletop gaming. He began his career at Wizards of the Coast, where he played key roles in product teams for Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game. In 2012, Justin became the President of WizKids, where he spearheaded the expansion of the company's product lines and reach. Under his leadership, HeroClix became a best-selling collectible miniatures game featuring Marvel, DC, and other licensed properties. He has overseen numerous board game releases and innovations across various product lines, blending business acumen with a deep passion for gaming.With a business school background, Justin brings a unique approach to game publishing, combining data-driven insights, market analysis, and creative intuition to make impactful decisions. He firmly believes in "why not both?" thinking—seeking innovative solutions that challenge traditional trade-offs. His ability to merge strategic foresight with product passion has led to consistent success across multiple gaming categories. Throughout a highly successful career, Justin has focused his innovation and talent on the one metric I've always said matters most: player experience. 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 Justin Zeran. Justin has spent decades in the collectible and strategy games industry starting his career at Wizards of the Coast, working on the product teams for Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, and the Pokemon trading card game. Zeran later became president of WizKids in 2012, where he played a plivital role and expanded

the company's reach and product lines. During his tenure, he oversaw the development and growth of Heroclix, best-selling collectibles miniatures game featuring Marvel DC and other licensed properties, as well as Dice Masters, a strategic dice building game. He is also involved in the release of many, many board games, many product lines, new aspects of that business. and we dive into all of that on this episode. Justin comes from a business background,

actually having gotten a graduate degree at business school, and being able to apply those skills to the gaming industry is a really fascinating aspect that I think a lot of designers underappreciate. Justin clearly has a passion for games, but being able to apply that with the data-driven and intuition-driven aspects on the business side and the analysis really makes a big difference, and it's contributed to success across multiple categories.

We talk about a lot of really great insightful nuggets that he drops, including the why not both philosophy when presented with a either or choice or why not all, as he talks about in the episode. We talk about the importance of doing what you love. We talk about how consensus management can lead to death that you need to be able to question everything and how to make bad information information you can't ignore. Lots of really great principles tied to lots of really great stories. His story weaves through a lot of the same great mentors that have helped me throughout the years. So he's absorbed a lot of lessons and he shares a lot of lessons. So I loved this conversation. I geek out about this kind of stuff.

So hopefully you enjoyed it as much as I did. Without any further ado, here is Justin Zeran. Hello and welcome. I am here with Justin Zeran. Justin, we have been trying to make this happen. I have been eager to make this conversation happen for some time. So thank you for coming on to the podcast. Great.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Yeah. So, you know, you've had such a massive, impact on the tabletop gaming industry. I'm very eager to dig into all different sides of it. And I know you kind of, I think the first part of your background I know of is managing the Pokemon brand, but I don't know kind of how you got started or what brought

you into the industry. So I'd love to just understand your origin story a little better. Yeah, yeah. So it started. I had graduated grad school. And I went to work in corporate America. I ended up working in Pittsburgh at general nutrition centers at their corporate headquarters. I was in charge of deploying what was kind of the precursor to the touchscreen systems,

and I was a project manager. Obviously, I played, well, not obviously, but I played the indie growing up. I played magic into college. When all my college buddies came back home, they're like, you love D&D, you got to play magic. So I started playing magic. And on a whim, I just went to wish. research.com and applied for a job there for project manager for D&D. Nobody called me back.

And so I was going to Origins. I figured I'd go to the booth and see what's going on. I tapped this lady on the shoulder and said, hey, no one ever responded to me. No one even told me that the job physician was filled. Damn it, you know, what are you going to do about it? She goes, who are you? And I gave her my name, I'm Justin. and she said, hold on.

She goes, my name's Heidi. I'm from HR. And she hands me her cell phone. And I literally have an interview on the show floor at Origins at the Wizard's Food. And I'm red-faced because I was mad because Joe Hauke hadn't called me back. And so this young woman, Julianne Parsons, interviewed me. And she goes, hey, can you come out? And I'm like, sure.

And she's like, how does Monday sound? And I was leaving Sunday from the show. So I parked my car at the hotel, flew out to Wizards on Monday, had a quick interview, and came back to Columbus, drove home, and by Thursday, I had a job off. Wow. I moved to cross country and ended up at Wizards of the Coast working on Dudges and Dragons. I then moved around. One year to my higher date, I moved up to the brand team where I worked on a game called D&D chain mail, which is the precursor to D&D miniatures.

This is the pewter game by Wizards of the Coast, and it was right before they decided to do pre-painted miniatures. But as part of that exercise, we kind of deconstructed WizKids' Mage Knight at the time. It kind of did kind of our SWAT analysis, and it was just great. So anyway, moved around on chain mail, then ended up working on Magic as brand manager. I then left the company. Wait, let me, let me, I'm going to interrupt, I'm going to interrupt a little bit because there's a lot of like really interesting little puzzle pieces here that I want to kind of get together and pick apart because, you know, you come from a, you went to grad school.

Was this for, this is business school or grad school for something else? Business school. Okay. So a lot of people that are listening to this, they, you know, we've got designers on here. we've got, you know, some marketing, we've got creatives, and they lose, they don't have a lot of insight into the business side of things. And you came into this from a very, very business focus. You just dropped SWAT analysis, which we can talk about,

and some people might not know. But what is it that got you? Why were you excited about going to business school? Like, what is it that drove you in that first place? You know, you know, you had a passion for magic or for, you know, D&D and Magic and Gaming. What is it that kind of brought you in there? and then you start moving up this pretty rapid acceleration through the ranks that you're describing. So there's clearly some skill sets here that are helping you to move forward.

So I'd love to just dig into what makes you such a good kind of business mind or what drew you to it? Let's unpack that a little bit. So it's a funny story. I studied out as a mechanical engineer. I went to a small school in Cleveland, Calcasters Reserve. It was an engineering school and a medical school. That's about it. They're very well known in the region.

but I got to my second ear of MacKee and I took a class called Dynamics. And Dynamics is the class that separates the men from the boys. I clearly was a boy. And I went home and I come from an immigrant family. My parents are moved here about 50 years ago and so I'm first generation here born here. Everything is about education. And if you're not a doctor, lawyer, and engineer, they don't know what you're doing. They're like, what do you mean you work for somebody?

And I don't think my parents know to this day what I do, but they just know I do okay. And so they're happy with that. But long story short, I confess to my dad that I'm not an engineer. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to be happy doing it. And what I came to realize about myself at that point is that I had to be happy doing what I was doing in order to be successful. Some people can power through my brothers, my father, my mother.

they can power through medical school. They can power through everything. I can't. So by default, I picked business. It was mildly interesting. I loved my econ classes. I love the math and the analysis side. And I ended up concentrating in something called operations management,

which is statistical process control of manufacturing systems. So it really has nothing to do with what I do right now, except that we learn a little bit of math, a little bit of statistics, and you have a general business background. And that has been instrumental for me. Business school, I always made fun of it because I always called them hyper-mb-as. They're all dressed up. They're all got their suits and ties on.

I was profoundly shocked at how much cheating went on. When I say cheating, what I mean is that people wouldn't care to learn the subject matter, but instead facts around or email around the answers to the homework so that they could get it done and check the box. I always found that absurd. I was the guy in jeans and a T-shirt and didn't fit in, but made the most of it. It kind of built my structured way of thinking, or at least structured way is probably a little overstatement. It taught you how to think and how to analyze things. And I learned a couple of pivotal things.

I actually say this. There's one or two things that I learned in business school. One is where to go for answers, because I don't have a good memory, so I now know where to go. And it's always just a fingertip away, especially now with Google being what it is. But then there was this professor that always told us that the answer to business problems often isn't black or white. It depends, is the answer that he always needs. And it depends on circumstances in your environment. Where is your business?

What is your operating cash flow? There's so many variables that it's very hard to answer a business question about what you would do in this scenario without all the environmental factors that are going on. So it depends was a big one that I learned. And another one that I learned, I know that I'm over. simplify in grad school, but it came down to, It Depends, and why not both? So when presented with two good options,

why not do both of them? And I've been maxed why not both to an extreme. Often I say, why not all? And, you know, as we get into kind of the whisked story, I can talk about that in terms of why not all and how that was one transformative, but also very difficult at the same time. And yeah, I think that's it.

Like, do what you love. It depends and why not both. That sums up my college and graduate school education. Yeah, that's great. And yeah, we'll dig more into all of those. But the, you know, sort of realizing to do what you love and breaking out of that, you know, I could definitely resonate with that story. You know, my parents similar kind of, you know, you got to be a doctor or a lawyer,

you know, or dentist or whatever. And that's your path. And for my parents who were all lawyers. was clearly that was the thing for me. And I actually had to, you know, I went to law school. And, you know, it was a very tough break to sort of drop out and become a game designer, which was, you know, a tough conversation. Was it your, did your parents kind of understand? Did they come around? Did they just, you know, would they break? What was that like? So it was one of the hardest conversations I've ever had. My father is, came from a very poor family,

I mean, very self-made, went to medical school, moved to London, went to medical school again for a second time. That did his residency in London, came to America, and did his residency again. So all of my problems paled in comparison to what my father had been. And so here I am kind of shaking, very upset. And, you know, I think I was crying, as I kind of told him the story. Like, Dad, I'm just not cut out to be an engineer or a doctor. I know that's your expectation. I just have to blaze my own path.

And to his credit, he said, just like the problems you have right now are nothing. They're blips in the road. You will look back on this moment and laugh and remember it fondly. He goes, do what you love. Don't let me stand in the way. and let us know how we need to support shit. And I was shocked, not that he let me do it, but shocked at how he answered the question.

And it was just, it was such a different side to my father. It actually changed our relationship from that day moving forward. They still, like I said, they still don't know what I do, but they're happy that I'm happy and they're happy that I'm doing pretty good. I can pay my bills. Yeah, no, that's wonderful. What a powerful connection moment there. And again, I can very much relate.

My parents were not, didn't come around quite so quickly, but they were, you know, they wanted me to be happy. And they also, there was definitely a change in the category of the relationship once I had broken from just following their expectations. And that ability to stand on your own feet is something that, you know, they were able to respect and makes a big difference. It allowed, for me, it allowed me to be brutally honest, my parents going forward. I no longer had to live in the shadow of their expectations. I could actually have adult conversations with them. And I'd have to say that's the moment I turned from a child to a peer of my parents.

Now, I'll always be their child, but I could have an adult conversation with my dad and my mom and know that their intentions were caring and loving. And, you know, they wanted the best for me. So it's been great. Wonderful. All right. So now we have, you've gone from boy to man. You've then gone and taken your great skill set as a business

officiado and then taking that back into your gaming passion. And now you, within a year, you jumped up to leading the brand for D&D and helping to launch this new category. And then from there, you moved into brand management for magic, right? And so these are massive moves moving very quickly.

Outside of, you know, why not both do what you love and, you know, depends. What was it that was getting you to move so fast in that organization? I mean, these are fast-growing situations. These are massive, you know, especially as magic is growing. This is a huge brand. What do you think is leading to your success there? What are some key moments for you? So for better or for worse, the gaming industry doesn't have a lot of people.

people in it that have married a business education with a gaming passion. It just doesn't exist. Usually you are a suit or you're a gamer. And there's very few people that mix to now, you know, had you asked me, you know, fast forward 20, 30 years, there's a lot more of us sitting around now. But at the time, just basic forecasting wasn't kind of part of the equation, if you know what I mean. Like you did comparable analysis, which is, hey, the last set sold this well. Maybe the next set will sell a little bit better. And you took your number up 5% and called it a day. We sought to kind of do something a little bit more sophisticated.

Given a little bit of statistics background and some other people at the company that were doing some work on forecasting, you're able to use the model that was developed at Wizards to make some very insightful kind of insightful kind of nuggets. We develop some insightful nuggets about the TCG business, you know, that 70% of the TCG sells in the first 90 days. Those are just little tiny nuggets that are really useful when you're running a business. Honestly, it's key metrics. I mean, I think I've heard you talk about it on some of your podcast, understanding what your key metrics that drive the business are and then min-maxing around them. It doesn't take a lot.

The businesses are rather simple. But on the key metrics, and once you develop those, all of a sudden, now you can operate with speed and agility. And I think that was part of it. So I was able to do a little bit of linear regression, simple linear regression on magic sales and help them. And I wasn't leading the brands. I was an assistant at this point. So assistant on chain mail, assistant on magic brand.

But as we started to be able to call the numbers a little bit more accurately, all of a sudden people took notice and said, hey, can you help here? Can you help there? And I was more than happy to help do all of that because it was. Pretty simple. And I enjoyed learning the business from that side, especially for games that I loved. Like, Magic and D&D were my jam. I wasn't good at Magic,

and you really don't get good at D&D. You just kind of play D&D. So it was just very, very inspiring and kept me going. Yeah, so that's, yeah, it's very interesting. And so I'm curious then from this phase where you're, you know, you've got a kind of superpower of being able to better forecast and kind of make projections for these, for these games that you love, which of course helps make everything be more efficient. You're helping to select and max and minmax for key metrics. What just, I think, I think

some people may still get lost and, you know, we throw around words like linear regression. Is there some maybe a story or narrative way we could talk about what is it, you know, how would you select a key metric, how would it decide, how would you make an interesting decision one way or another based on trying to min-max a key metric? It's situational. It depends. Yeah, yeah, it is. The situation, the heavy lifting was done by two peers of mine, actually a mentor of mine, Tina

and my supervisor at the time, Brian, they were just math junkies, right? Brian was an engineer. Tina was a nuclear engineer. So both engineers, both very high-level math skills. So when they presented the data, it became very easy for me to digest it. I don't know if I could have created the model. They did the heavy lifting. I understood the model.

And then what you could do is take data. So it's time series data. So you basically come up, if you remember Y equals an X plus B, which was the slope of a line, right? And you can take data in time and plug in some numbers and be able to call with reasonable accuracy at month three, what your month 12 total sales will be. That's transformative in a business where you want to int tightly, meaning not hold a lot of inventory, and yet fulfill everything that you want to do by month 12. Now, obviously, there's a lot of other math that goes into this. A lot of people print what they need and they hold it. Well, holding inventory costs money.

So you have warehousing, you just have obsolescence. What if it sucks? What if it rains? What if rats get to it? So you want to minimize how much inventory you hold, but at the same time, you don't want to lose sales from month 12 because you ran out. So being able to call that intelligently, or at least with some sort of logic, other than guessing is really transformative

and how you look at the business. And so once you have that map down, it becomes relatively easy. You have to tweak it. You're not always right. There's circumstantial and environmental issues that come into play, seasonality, things like that. But magic, for the most part, isn't that seasonal.

Most of the trading card games aren't that seasonal. They just sell because they're very sticky. And so it's a pretty safe bet. plus or minus five or 10 percent. But getting within five or 10 percent is often enough. And it's better than guessing on a whim, on intuition. And my suspicion is that this sort of math is going to be a lot stronger for a product like magic that has, you know, a long history of sales and has a consistent, more consistent audience

that, you know, only kind of grows or shrinks at a relatively steady rate versus like a new product or new product line that would be a little harder to make this kind of guess. Is that right? A new product, very hard. Yeah, new products are much more challenging. But if you have the experience of working on a product line like magic with

decades of data, you can start tying things together and at least form a basis for your kind of guesswork on the new product. New product is tough. and it is you need to be gutsy, you need to put blinders on, ignore the naysayers, and take a shot.

And, um, yeah, it's exciting. It's exciting, but it's fraught with peril, obviously. Um,

and it either works really well, or it works pretty poorly. And if you're in the middle somewhere, it's hard to, uh, get the nose up and you end up sometimes taking a nose dive into the ground. Um, but,

uh, yeah, uh, yeah. Yeah. No, the definition of entrepreneurship, I think Jordan, I heard first heard from Jordan Weissman is the, you know, you're jumping off of a cliff and hoping to build an airplane on the way down, you know, so that you can, you know, it's a, it's a high risk type of situation, but you hope that, you know, your, your bet is right when you, when you, when you jump. So, okay, so speaking of jumping then, let's let's talk about the process that got you from, you're, I'm really good at this. succeeding with my favorite games, magic and D&D, two, I'm going to leave here and start up something new and start up with WizKids.

What's that transition look like or if there's any key points in between that I've missed? So there was a couple key points. One, I was working on products I love. And I think I was quoted as saying, one, that I will never work on a product that I don't love. and the Pokemon job came available. And again, going back to that one pivotal person, Tina, who basically hired me into Wizards. She calls me into her office and says,

hey, the Pokemon job's available. Do you want it? I'm like, yeah, you know, Tina, I just don't like Pokemon, and I don't really play it. I'm not sure that it's for me. that was great. Tina is very calm, steady person. I go back to my boss, Brian, and he's like, are you an idiot? Yeah.

It's Pokemon. And he goes, you're an idiot. Go back there and tell her that you're going to take the job. So I sat down, I thought about it, and I took the job. And I'm going to tell you, like, boy, did I learn a very powerful lesson at that point, which was, when you're highly involved with the game, Magic or D&D, I remember I lived and died based on what the leaders of the brands were doing. I mean, I got emotional about it.

If they were going to put this book out that I thought was terrible, I was crushed by it. If Magic was going to release Kamagawa and I don't remember any of the names in Kamagawa, I was crushed by it. Then I got to Pokemon. And what Pokemon taught me was this passionate decision making, doing what's right for the business. And that was really important.

Now, you have to realize I was working on Pokemon in its glide path to transitioning to Nintendo, to the Pokemon company. So I basically had the last four or five success, but it was still a monster, right? I mean, it was a big business. I don't think I could share numbers, but it was big. It was really big. and it was a small team. Mike Elliott was on it.

So this is where I got to meet a lot of people, too, that were very formative in my early years. So it was a small team of brothers and sisters. It was kind of the forgotten brand at Wizards at that point. So we got to do some things that we got to experiment a little bit. And so that experimenting was really good. The first set was legendary collection. I remember we did.

decided at that point to put a foil in every pack. And that hadn't been done before. And then we did a box topper. That hadn't been done before. I think we borrowed that from baseball cards because I used to collect baseball cards. And I was kind of looking around the industries adjacent industry, seeing what they were doing. In any case, that all worked very well and became kind of a blueprint for the rest of the sets at Wizards all the way through the cardee.

And so learning to be able to work on a business dispassionately, but still with passion for accomplishment and innovation, was really, really pivotal for me. Of course, I quit at that point and went to Upper Deck. I went to Upper Deck for a six-month tour of duty, but then came back pretty quickly. What was the timeline you were at Upper Deck? I think I got there just, I think you were there right after me, but I got there right before Jeff Donay got there. Actually, Jeff and I overlap a couple weeks.

But I had gotten there. We were working on what was called the versus system at the point. It wasn't the versus system at that point. It was a game that looked roughly like Yu-Gi-Up. And I said, why don't we do? I was just coming fresh off of a Wizards, where I had just done the analysis on Heracles. And so it was Marvel versus D&D.

And so I remember sitting in the office with David Hoppy and Jerry Bennington and we're like, what if we made a platform game that it was Marvel versus DC like Heroplex? And we're like, yeah, we'll just call it versus. And at that point, that was kind of the genesis of it. It was still kind of the following Yu-Gi-O mechanics. Then Jeff was hired. I pretty much was on my way out at that point. And Jeff took over, I believe, the game development and really rebooted the whole thing.

It just started from stretch. And then the whole team came in. I think you where the guys were there. I had left. I was also working on a product called Breaky. I'm sure you remember Breaky. Oh, I remember Breaky. You got to tell our audience about Breaky because this is a wacky project.

Yeah, I often say Breaky broke me. And it was very funny. So it was basically a game where you had these plastic keys. and the keys nested and fit together. And so you could fit the keys together and then each of you twisted and one of them broke. So it's effectively a wishbone mechanic, right? And it was crazy. It was really big and overseas.

We brought the license over here. It did this really sophisticated math in terms of collation and strategy. Believe it or not, there was strategy. Some of the keys were stronger than other keys. It all had to do with how they were injection molded and the thickness of the the the the the the the spruce but long story short a couple things went down with breakie. I just decided that upper deck was not the place for me and I left and came back to wizards to work on magic online and and so now I was back on something I love with perfect

data and that was that was an experience too I loved magic online it was broken at that point. I remember meeting you, I think, at the Invitational, if I met that mistake. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. E3 invitational, if I remember correct. I met you, Bob Marr, and the whole gang. But yeah, that was, that was a wild time. Well, that was, and then, I mean, that's a whole, that was a whole other revolution, right? Because that was like the first online, you know, trading card game experience that you could have

where you could actually trade, like, objects from one account to another, as I recall. I don't think there was anything before that that was like that, right? I remember this. It was microtransactions before there were micro transactions. I remember going to GDC. We were at Game Developers Conference, and I was sitting there with Scott Martens, who is,

God, I can't remember the company he worked for it. But anyway, he was doing Lord of the Rings straight into a game at the time. And we were the only two that were getting, like, there's a key metric in micro-transactions, RPU revenue per user. So all these casual games are getting like two bucks per user, three bucks

per user. And me and Scott are like, holy shit, like, two or three dollars. How did they stay in business? We're magic and Lord of the Rings. People are buying hundreds of dollars of magic cards on average. And so it was wild.

And anyway, it was a great experience there. You really learn the ins and out to magic at that point. Like what makes magic tick in terms of the consumer. Now, that platform was broken, so it was crashing every day. We made some improvements, and we

committed to making a new version of the game. But it was mine to manage while it was broken. And that was a interesting experience. It's got to be painful because you have at the same time, and I know, again, this is me as a pro player, as a super enthusiast and whatever. Like, it's the

coolest thing of all time that I can just do drafts online and I could play the game that I love, like so easy and so quickly. And then it was also the most painful thing ever because the interface was garbage and the thing kept crashing. And it was like, so you end up with a, the perfect recipe for lots of vitriol from your fans. You have the thing I love and it's not working and I'm going to come after you for it. Yeah. Yeah.

So the good thing is we're able to improve it a little bit. And we also able to systemize the customer service side of it. And that helped a lot. We were able to do some really cool things. We went backward in time and released older sets, which was nice. It was just, it was a lot of fun, a lot of learnings. I used to call it magic in your underpants, right? And it was the only way that it was for people that had more money than time, right?

Because in general, we weren't targeting current magic players. We were targeting people that were older, that were married, that had kids. but still loved magic. And it was really good. It was really good at doing that. And, you know, so it was counterintuitive because everybody thought like, oh, this is going to kill magic. Well, magic went on to have, you know, a decade of its biggest, you know, biggest years ever. Yeah.

While Magic Online was in play. And to be played out of all the digital executions of magic, you know, arena, just beautiful now. And magic is booming and like it never boomed before. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'd be curious to get your take on this because I have my own take because I had the same experience when we launched Ascension. This is our 15 year anniversary for Ascension, right? We launched in 2010. And then in 2011, we launched the app. And the app was like, you know, kind of first of its kind as well for a digital duck building game. And I was terrified that instead of people spending $40 for the board game to have to get together and sit and play, they could spend $5 for the app. And then eventually we made the app free. And then why would they ever play the board game? And in fact, I think it was, it was just always, always our sales go up and our audience increase. And it, you know, it had this massive overlap. Magic, and especially when you have a game like Magic where your collection is, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars,

to have it live and duplicated in a digital space versus a physical space. You know, it's not obvious that that would grow both sides of the business. What's your take on that, why that worked the way it did? magic was unique in that the pricing structure of the online game and the physical game were identical. So that did a lot of the pre-screening for us because what that did is it took current magic players that were playing the paper game. And they said, why would I spend $3.29 at that time on a booster pack that I don't quote unquote own? they weren't understanding the value of it because they have more time than money, right? For those of us that had no time because of family, kids, and a job, this was a way to play magic.

I would have paid double the amount for boosterback to play the game that I loved online. And so I think that in and of itself really kept the audiences segmented. Obviously, there was some overlap, the people that played both. And of course, the pro players that were using Magic Online to practice infinitely and go infinite on the platform itself. But I do think the exposure, at the end of the day, our games are still pretty nichey. And you're not teaching a 10-year-old how to play our game. Not teaching, you know, 12-year-olds even. But once you get onto the digital platforms, the teaching tools are so much better.

your awareness and your reach is so much greater. So it doesn't surprise me that Ascension, you know, probably you probably have people, a vector of people that started with the digital game and ended up buying the tabletop game. Absolutely. And that is why I think it works.

That's why I think Ticket Ride exploded, Catan, even to some extent. Katan was big before their digital app, but there are some games that I prefer to play on iPad and only iPad because I don't like Fittali pieces all over the board. Ticket to Rides is a great example. I hate managing all the

trainings. But now the app does it for me and I don't care and I love it and I play it, you know, obsessively or whatever. You do 100,000 games like this now. So yeah. Yeah. I'm a big believer. I'm a big believer in, you know, the medium impacts the design and the economics and the business model impacts design, right? These things have to like marry in a way that I think a lot of people don't appreciate it, which is why I love having guests like you, which, you know, kind of bring more of that business mindset over. And Magic Online is such a pivotal moment in the history of gaming because it is the area where digital object ownership first really kind of became a thing.

But you didn't technically own your stuff. You weren't technically allowed to sell it, but people did and they still do as far as I know. And then there was this transition over time where people now, you know, in Magic Online, people won't know, not all of people won't know this, but they had a policy where you, if you collected an entire set, you could order the physical cards of that set in exchange for your digital cards. And you could shed more light on this, but the philosophy, as I understood it, was like, well, people didn't really necessarily know how to value digital objects. And so having them tied to a physical thing that you knew you could value helped to kind of underscore the economy and the people's willingness

to spend money. Is that an accurate assessment or is there more to that story? Yeah. So essentially it was a gold standard for digital magic cards, right? So every magic card was backed by a physical magic card somewhere in a Wizards of the Coast warehouse, right? And if you, for the privilege of redemption, is what we used to call it, you had to complete a real full set. Now, trading was very, very active on magic online. So, and there was so much limited play going on that so many cards were getting spun off into the trading forums that you could build a complete set, right? relatively quickly. Now, I wasn't there at the genesis of the business model, but I have to believe that everyone prophesies that people are going to have a tough time paying full price for digital objects that they don't quote unquote own. Therefore, having a gold standard was necessary. In the end, redemptions were pretty, you know, like smallish. It was concentrated to a very narrow segment of the community. the vast majority of people didn't redeem.

And that's what was really interesting, because now you don't have to have the gold standard. Honestly, it was, like, kudos to wizards for thinking about it and blazing that path. But in retrospect, I don't think they needed it. And they certainly don't need it now. I mean, all modern games don't have it. Although I think it would be interesting to go back to it

and test that model again, saying, how would you do it differently? No, in essence, that's what Richard Garland. Fartfield and I are doing with SoulFord Fusion, right? So we have a different world. Right. So every other other part of the industry has moved to less player ownership, less physical things, less ability to get your content and your objects out of the system, right? Magic Arena does not let you trade, doesn't let you redeem, doesn't you put your money in, you keep it. That's stuck there forever. That's all it is. You lose that side of the thing. Same with Harstone, same with Marvel Snap, every all the major games. And so what we did with with Soulford Fusion is we have both a

physical version of the cards that can be scanned into an online account. The online account, you can turn the stuff into NFTs and trade the cards digitally if you want to. And you can also, we're soon building a version where you can go the other direction where if you want, you can order a print on demand and just pay the printing fees

basically to get that deck back into the physical world. I love it. I love, love, love that you took that angle. I didn't know and I apologize for not knowing. I just don't keep up with everything on a cutting edge basis. But holy shit, that's innovative and disruptive, which I love.

I can't wait to see how it does because I do think there's something there. And one thing that you'll get maybe in this phone call or over time, I love, I'm not a counterculture guy, but I do, like, I don't like following the crowd, right? And as a product person, and that's my training, I'm a product person at the end of the day. It's identifying white space, like where, go to where everyone isn't. So that's what I like to do. There are products that I'm a Me Too product. Like I just follow kind of the trends. But the truly innovative, truly big things come from those people that say,

wait a minute, this is where I think people will go. No one is sitting there right now. Let's go give it a shot. And going back to a physical tie-in is really, really clever. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, those big product success moments, right? you have to be, you know, both non-consensus, which means you're doing something other people aren't, and you have to be right, right? That's the hard part. That's the hard part. You know,

if you're going to go out, you're going to try something other people are doing. Well, a lot of times other people are doing it for a good reason. And you know, so you've got to decide where's the place where you know what, I think, and this is this is a big thing about, you know, product creation inside of a company as a product manager or owner, as an entrepreneur, you know, starting a business. This is the classic and perennial challenge of what, you know, I need to basically have confidence that I have a hypothesis. I have something that's, I know that the rest of the world doesn't or I can do better than the rest of the world in this space. And it's fun to take the swings, but you definitely, you definitely miss, you miss a lot of them because you're taking that risk. Yeah, I haven't had the chance to work on an innovative TCG business model.

And I get jealous of you guys sometimes because in the plastics world, you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars before you get to market, right? And then you get to market and you're kind of pop committed to your business model at that point. You can change, right? But I often believe that the key to success, especially for innovative and disruptive products, is kind of agility. and that is gathering information quickly, letting things fail fast and making adjustments. And in the paper side of the business, much, much, much faster, much easier because you can always print

domestically, you can even print on demand if you need to. And you can make changes. And digital is even better because it's hours of programming and boom, something new is there and you're ready to go. So pretty endless. Yeah, well, it's just on all different sides, right? the ability. So like we did it. We built the first when we we launched SoulForge Fusion as a physical product first because we could we knew we could print it digitally. We knew we could get it and test

the market that way. Once we had a sufficient version of sales and people were excited about it, then we invested in building the digital back end infrastructure, which was a much higher investment cost for us. And then, yeah, now we have the ability to kind of shift. And in a sense, you know, get both the best of both worlds, but also, you know, have to have the overhead of both worlds. So it's very interesting. Every decision you make has so many different ramifications. This is why I was excited to have this conversation with you because I think you may be better than anybody else in the industry can understand that having dealt with so many different sides of the business. And, again, yeah, working with plastics and, you know, major brands for the

card games and now I think accessories that you've moved to. So it's pretty fascinating to see how this applies and what you've learned throughout this pretty varied career through the industry. Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure, I've been fortunate and very lucky to be able to work on a lot of different things. But it's only been in the last 10 or 15 years that I was a decision maker and got to use some of my intuition and just knowledge of games. Now, to be clear, if you're going to make some of those decisions, you've got to be in it, right? And it's got to be your passion. The game has got to be your passion.

I'm not a game designer. That's probably very fortunate for the whole world. But often finding a game. designer that shares that vision, right? And it's hard because game designers aren't necessarily business-minded, right? They may look at it as your suit, right? And so you have to break through the suit factor. But I usually just let my passion for the idea kind of show, and that made a big difference to the designer. If I was excited about it, they could get excited about it. And quite honestly. I think a lot of designers probably love to have a passionate person on the business

side as passionate as they are. Oh, of course. Listen, man, I only got into the business side of things because I couldn't find that person in the same way. If I could have just made just designed games only, I probably would have done that. But I just wanted to make sure that every design I had made it through and got to the finish line the way I wanted it to go. So I was like, okay, fine. I'll do business too. And it's fun. Now I enjoy the game. of it, right? But it was definitely an interesting path to see what it takes to get a vision from initial concept all the way through to, you know, successful market launch.

So you're saying you were just pissed off and so you did it yourself. Oh my God, it's so true. Honestly, I'm pretty sure. I mean, whatever, you worked at Upper Deck for a little while. You know what it was like. That was my only job, right? Like I went and I was working and working for that org. I mean, whatever.

A lot of this is now like court-based public knowledge, but it was not. the best organization led by the most ethical people. So I kind of was like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to work for them. So the only thing I knew was, well, okay,

I'll just do it on my own and figure it out. And so that's kind of how it got started. So it's in many ways I'm grateful for the, the incompetence and slash, I've often described it as being, being run by a bond villain, both evil and incompetent. You know,

it's like, if I were working for, you know, an unethical, but very sophisticated organization. At least I could respect it. I was running for a, you know, a good, but, but, but, you know, not, not the smartest. I could like them.

But, you know, I was like, all right, I'm glad to go. A lot of great. And again, just to be clear, incredible people in that organization, lots of great folk, just was not, not something I wanted to be tailored to that, to that particular owner at that particular time. Yeah, 100%. I'm there with you. So, okay.

So then let's, so we've gotten through, we got through the Pocke Humon years. We got through the upper deck year and we've gotten to this is when you leave for WizKids? Yes. So my boss at the time had left Wizards of the coast. His

name's Joe. He had went to With Kids and joined a small team over there. And this is in the transition year. Pops had bought Wiz Kids. I believe Jordan was still there doing design work. And Joe had gone there.

And he said, hey, do you want to come over and interview for a job? And I said, sure. So I did. I got the job. I got to meet another pivotal person in my life, Lacks, a good friend of mine that worked at Pops. And he was running with kids at the time. So I did my interview, started my job there. And Jordan, there's a couple people on the industry, Jordan, Richard Garvey.

field, I'd probably put Johnson's or in this boat too. And there's many, many, many more, right? But I think you're on that short list too that can create from nothing. And I cannot create from nothing. I am a optimizer. I am an insightful, intuitive-based optimizers. So I like things that are set up and then come in and manage them over long periods of time or manage them and innovate. the ability to watch someone create something from nothing,

and especially everyone that I've mentioned on that list has done it multiple times, multiple times. It's really hard. They've jumped off that clip and built that airplane on the way down several times. And so getting even to work in the shadow of them was pretty humbling. And while I don't know them very well, I know John pretty well, but I know Jordan. I've talked to Richard probably a couple of times in my life.

Just to work in their shadow was incredible. And it also kind of instills in this in you, like, honoring their legacy. Like, the least I could do is be innovative, right? If I'm working at Jordan's company, right? That's the least I could do. I mean, he did it with Mage Knight. He did it with Heracles. Just on and on with FASA, with Mac Warrior.

You name it. He's done it two, three, four, five times. And just being able to learn to that. I mean, I didn't have them teaching me how to do it, but just observationally learn. It's pretty great. Got to meet a lot of great people at WizKid Seattle learned a lot of things, too. You get to challenge. WizKids, in many ways, was in the shadow of wizards, often confused for Wizards of the Ghost.

And so that was an interesting dynamic. You know, they were fiercely independent. And here I am from Wizards, like public enemy number one. So it took me a while to kind of warm up to everybody and I got to meet everybody. I love them. They're a transformational job for me. Once I experienced Wiz Kids, I knew what I wanted in my life, which was small, intimate team, burning the candle at both ends, doing incredible things, right?

And that's what I want. I didn't want bureaucracy. I didn't want a lot of consensus. Consensus, I think, is a tool of bigger organizations to take decision-making risk out of the equation, right? So when you're consensus-driven, you're managing bad decisions, right? You're trying to manage against someone saying, let's make magic booster packs $29, right? Because we can. Everyone will buy it.

Well, you've got to consensus manage that out of the matrix. The side effect of that is you take the great ideas that are incredible, but probably a little ahead of their time, and you water them down as well. Because anything different probably looks like a bad idea to most people. But those people that kind of get it know that, hey, that's an excellent idea. This is a bad idea. Let's get rid of the bad idea, but somehow preserve the ability to do the good idea. That's really rare to find it a big corporation. And so in smaller corporations, it's just easier to get through that.

And then in very small corporations, I'll probably use you as an example. It's, you have a track record of success. You're intuitive, your database, like, people will follow your good ideas and go out on a limb for you. But yeah, that's what I wanted to do. Small, agile, preferably with something established. That helps me a lot because I'm not a great starter. I'm a good, like I said, optimizer. Yeah, that's amazing.

So there's so much I agree with and support here. You know, John Zinser, Jordan Weissman, Richard Garfield, all also mentors of mine, people who I'm very proud to call friends, all have been guests on this podcast. So anybody listening that wants to, that's the whole point of this podcast is to help other people get this same, like, osmosis wisdom that you and I got to benefit from by being around these great people.

and to be able to share that. So it's, it's just, I kind of get fired up just thinking about it. And I think that the, the other piece here that I'm, I pulled from now having, having talked to you through this is your ability to know yourself is impressive, right? This is a, it's a discovery that we all have to go through in life, but understanding, hey, I'm not good at this. I am good at this. This is what I need in my life.

This is a non-negotiable. And then being willing to, when you need, need to shift shift. And I'm curious then now kind of looking back, you know, from being that optimizer and being able to kind of take these things and run of the other, other insights or things that you would maybe tell yourself 10 years ago, right, that you've only really, only realized recently that now about what you've learned in retrospect over the last 10, 10 or 15 years. So I wish I knew myself better back then. Like, I think your life is divided in a decade. They're 20s.

You're trying to make a name for yourself and climb the ladder. Make an impression. 30s, you're kind of in the thick of it. 40s, you start not caring about what other people think. In 50s, you really know yourself really well. And you don't give a shit about what people think. At that point, you are in your career. So I often said this.

If I'm still in gaming by the time I'm 50, I'm not switching careers at that point. I'm in gaming to the end of my life. And so, it's tough to switch out of that. I wish I had my late 40s, early 50s perspective in my early 40s. And I think self-awareness is the most important thing and not believing your own bullshit, right? Just like at the end of the day, I am a, I'm skeptical, right?

I question everything. I question what others do, but I also question what I do. And like I try to rip it apart. And I mentioned Lax. Lax and I have a good friendship. And one of the reasons that's so stimulating is that we can play devil's advocate to each other. But at the same time, put on the hat and say, okay, we're going to get in line and push through. Because often we don't agree, but just getting to understand who you are and what you're good at, surround yourself with.

I personally, while I'd like to be the smartest guy in the room, I'm definitely not the smartest guy in the room. I like to have very smart people around me. And it's okay that they're smarter than me. And I'm cool with that because in the end, that's how you do great things. You have great people around you. And again, you min-max your particular skill. And everyone has them. And everyone has their idiosyncrasies.

And everyone has the things that are bad at. Just knowing what you're bad at and just pushing that to the side and hiring that away, either in a partner or an employee, is really critical. And I wish I knew that earlier in my career. I really do. Yeah. Yeah. This is such a powerful idea to emphasize, right?

Because you talked about the challenges of consensus, meaning we're trying to avoid the really stupid decisions. But at the same time, we water down the rare, innovative decisions, their ideas. and this idea of your, as you get older, you get more comfortable in your own skin and less concerned about what other people think, which to some extent lets you tie into your own intuition and run forward. But you do still need mechanisms to check when you're off. So you want to be able to have that,

and this is where your question everything mentality, I think really comes in. What I talk about with my team is we need to build a culture of psychological safety where we can all question everything and that that's okay, that we are in a world where if I say something, just because I'm the CEO, I want somebody else to tell me I'm stupid and I'm wrong. Well, not I'm stupid, but then I'm wrong.

And it's show me why, because that's fantastic. Like, better to save me that trouble of making that terrible decision than just going along. And if I don't agree, then okay, cool, we can figure that out and then support the decision whatever it is. And I will often, you know, there's Jeff Bezos phrase, that they use at Amazon, the disagree and commit that I really love.

Right. Like, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're not, you know, it's not me versus you. It's us versus the problem. We're going to work it all out. And at some point, whoever's in charge is going to make that decision. And we're all going to do our best to make it succeed regardless of whether or not that's the thing we thought we should do. And I think that like mentality is so powerful. So I love that. Disagree and commit. Like I like these little like, you know, get to catch phrases because they're so insightful and They're so simple and yet so hard to do.

Yes. But disagree and commit. So that's one of the things I struggled with. So I hope that people that worked for me in the past know this. But I have a problem with titles at a corporation. And I think you probably, you hinted at this, which is when you're in a leadership position, president, CEO, whatever it may be, people want to make you happy. And they yes, you. and that is the worst thing.

And it forced me to go outside of my employees at times. Whenever I detected that I was being yesed, and again, this is no fault of the employee. It's just, it's a side effect of hierarchy in titles. Yeah, it's human nature. Yeah, you have to go outside of that. And fortunately or unfortunately,

I'd go to retailers, I'd go to consumers. I do something really strange in the industry, which is I give out my phone number and presentations. Like I literally the cell phone that I carry, my personal cell phone, I give it out. And this comes from a nugget in a book that I read, the good to great book, which is make information, make bad information, information that you can't ignore. And I think it was the president of Gillette, don't quote on this,

that literally gave his telephone number to consumers. And his logic and his reasoning behind it was if, like, once you're in a company, I mean, you are insulated from the front line and the pulse of the business. And you don't know what's happening and you don't know what's being represented out in the public. So why wouldn't I, as the leader of an organization as the president, want to know where we're failing? And, you know, in a corporation, when something comes in a customer service and says, you guys suck. That message gets filtered so much. And by the time it gets to you, people are probably telling you like, yeah, people are pretty,

okay with our product and you suck to pretty okay at our product is very different. And so I want to know what we're failing. And it's not to single someone else. It's not to single out an employee because honestly, like if you've hired well, you have good employees, but you make mistakes and you make bad judgments. And as long as you're doing, you know, 51% right and 49% it's okay. Make the mistakes, fail fast and fix it and move on. But not hearing the information. is suicide. And so now I try to make every piece of bad information, information that I can't ignore by giving my phone number to people

that are outspoken and vocal. And it served me well. Like I might in 10 years, I might have gotten 50 calls, maybe 50 in 10 years, which is nothing. Yep. No, it's great.

And it's a real, you know, both the value of being able to learn and hear directly from your customers. And in the game industry, we have some of the most vocal and passionate customers in the entire world. And they are happy to tell you what they think. And also then, you know, to just, again, this part partially just like, how do you cultivate that within your own company, that the people will bring you bad news, that they will present ideas and they won't, you know, kind of. And again, a lot of this is unconscious. People just naturally conform to the boss's ideas.

So something I have had to work very, very hard at. and I'm not very good at, but I'm still trying, is speaking last. In a room and you're in a meeting, I have my ideas, and I want to say them, but I have noticed that if I say the idea, then the room warps around the idea. I want to get everybody else's ideas on the table.

In fact, so we worked with the Wharton School of Business to design an ideation tool called the Breakthrough Game that actually is purposefully designed to help solve this problem amongst others, where everybody ideates, and there's plenty of other design. design ideation tools, but where everybody writes on cards, their ideas first before sharing them.

And then only then do you actually reveal the cards and then start recombining. And it starts with the least senior person in the room, does the first share and recombine, and then it works its way up so that you encourage the innovation and those ideas, and you don't just squash them because there's a lot of data that shows that if you put a lot of smart people in a room in a hierarchy, they all get dumber. And we really try to fight against that. Yeah, yeah. I think what you're identifying is critical.

And honestly, it's corporate self-awareness, right? It's not a personal self-aware. The company needs to know who they are and be able to speak about it candidly and bluntly without offending themselves, right? And I got over it with myself because I said, just don't believe your own bullshit, right? Like, you're only as good as your last release is what I always say in this industry. You're as good as your last release. You're a genius if you have a home run and you're just.

suck if you have a flop. And I've had a lot of flops. Don't get me wrong. But I've had a lot of good, good luck too. And so I think that's key to this. And if you can get a group of people that also things like that, I think the world is your oyster, especially in our industry. Yeah. No, that's wonderful. So there's a lot. We've dug into a lot of the, some of the principles, but there were so many other little nuggets that you've dropped and I know others that you have. So when you're, you're, let's,

let's tie this in back to the story of kind of growing with kids into what it, what it became. And, you know, over the time there. And the principles, you also dropped the why not both, uh,

principle that we haven't really dug into. So maybe we can talk about the, your, your, your, your, your, your,

your, your, your, your, your, your, your, product to a multi-product company and, and how this why not both philosophy pays in or any other nuggets you want to

drop along the way. Yeah. So when I when I got to Wiz Kids Seattle, we were pretty much down to HeroClix and Pirates in the Spanish Maine. We then canceled Pirates of the Spanish Maine. We closed up shop and went to New York. It got sold. I followed the sale about six months later. I was working underneath. A familiar name

Lex went with the with the sale. He recruited me. I had the liberty of working underneath him for two years in building some knowledge of the business and also some rapport with the owner. And one thing that we realized was, you know, we were beholden to the Heroclix platform, which is as Heracles went, so did the game company. So there was an all-your-egs-in-one basket thought. Now, Heroclix was booming at the time, right?

So we had just come off of the closure and we had just brought back here. So we could do no wrong. In fact, we printed, we were printing as much as we possibly could tolerate in terms of risk and still calling it wrong. And so that was our biggest problem, keeping up with the demand. But even during that time, when you're kind of giddy with success, we're saying, hey, we got to line something else. And so you start looking at what are you good at? And one thing that you got really good at being the Heroclix company was sculpting. And so you learned that it was basically a core competency of the business.

So we had a pipeline. We were managing. We knew how to manage sculptors. We knew how to get them through. We knew how to get them approved. And so we started out with ideas around there. So I think the first introduction, we did some HeroClicks. offshoots. So we did

Iron Maiden Clicks, we did Gremlins, we did Star Trek on Heroclick style. All very good and all supported the business. But then we said, okay, let's branch up into new platforms. I think I called Lisa Stevens

and I'm like, and Lisa ran Paiso at the time and we're talking about doing miniatures for RPG. And I had showed her that we moved to an all digital workflow. So this was 15 years ago when nobody was sculpting digitally. In fact, it was friend of it.

But one thing you realized was, and we wanted to run lean and mean, so you realized that managing 40 sculptors with a creative team was a lot of work. And those sculptors had opinions. They were passionate about their work. You had to have a team of five people managing them. And it was hard to manage. those sculptors have strong opinions. So we started going to a digital workflow.

And that was the pipeline that controlled the company. As the digital sculpting pipeline went, so did the company. And we realized early on that if we can only sculpt 300 things a year, we can only release four or five sets a year. And we said, what would it take to release 10 sets a year, 12 sets a year, 20 sets a year? And so this is where why not all came in. I skipped why not both. And I just went, why not all?

And like, let's figure it out so that we never have to have this discussion again. So at the time, CLO, Brian, took on the task of widening the pipeline. So we went all digital. We ended up, you know, finding some studios that were kind of dispassionate about kind of arguing about sculpts and arguing with the licensure. So that was good. And we were able to create this sculpting pipeline that allowed us to do. two to three thousand sculpts per year and flex it as needed.

I think at the time, and honestly, I think even to this day, we might have been the single biggest sculpting studio in the world. I don't think video games even generate that much sculpting. And we were doing two to three thousand a year, and it was crazy. So that problem was solved. Then we were able to go, okay, Pathfinder, let's do Pathfinder. Okay, the hard part was going to get D&D. and while you have Pathfinder.

And fortunately, I had good friends at Wizards, and this is where Why Not Both comes like. So I did Why Not All, but then I had to go back to Why Not Both? Why Not Pathfinder and D&D? We're already speaking to our RPG base. Fourth Edition was doing its thing or not doing its thing at the time. We knew Fifth Edition was coming out, and we reached out to Wizards and said, hey, can we do it?

And my connection back into Wizards with Elaine Chase, she was my boss while I worked on Magic Online. And so she's like, stop asking me, and we'll call you when it's ready, right? We'll call you when we're ready. I remember the day she walked up to me at New York twice fair, and I hadn't seen her for a couple years. And she goes, hey, we're ready. And that was like, she didn't say hi. She goes, hey, we're ready. She goes, start calling.

So I did, and a couple months later, we were in the D&D figure business. And I think it was January. D&D was releasing, Fifth Edition Player's Handbook was releasing in August. And I mean, you know this, but development timelines for plastic are usually 12 to 15 months. And we had to do it in seven. So we really got working on it in February. And thankfully, because of that digital pipeline, we were able to clear the deck. and ram it through and do a really good set.

It was tyranny of dragons. If I remember correctly, yeah, it was tyranny. And it was dragons in flying poses that had never been really done before. And it was just a real, it's one of my prouder moments being able to get it out and maintain the rest of the business at the same time. But it proved that you could, if you put your mind to it, you could do it. So now we have D&D. Then we start talking, okay, now we have RPG accessories. Let's look at board games.

Board games was explosive back then. I was a Gen Con for the fifth edition launch, or maybe a couple of years before. Mike Elliott walked up to me and said, hey, I got this game idea. 15 other people have told me now, and I'm exaggerating the number. It probably was 10 other people told me they can't do it. they can't make it profitably. So I thought I'd come bring it to you. I'm like, thanks, Mike.

So I was your 16th choice. And he's like, well, you'll understand why. I'm coming to you. And he shows me quariers. Or what was a dice building game at the time? Nothing like it existed at that point in time. So Dominion was doing its thing. I think Mike had just published Thunderstone.

So deck building was kind of a thing, right? It was established. It was thriving. He's like, it's kind of like deck building with dice in a weird kind of way. If I had to use a loose analogy. And so he's like, here's the deal. It needs like 144 dice for the base set. I was like, boom.

So I said, let me give it. Let me, let me take this home and take a shot at it. A couple weeks later, I went back and said, we want to do this. And I didn't think we could do it, honestly, from a cost perspective. what I was magnetically attracted to that no one had done it before. And 15 people said, I can't do it. So I was like, that was my counterculture moment, right?

Which is, let's go to where these people aren't going. And so we started doing dice. And boy, was that a ride. Now, at that exact same moment, like, I said, Mike, wouldn't it be cool if we could make this collectible? in booster packs. And so we theorized about what that would look like, but we put it on the back burner.

Quarriers had to be launched, and it was all hands on deck. I met Eric Lang at that point, and those two are a great team. And Quiriers did its thing, and it was really successful game. Easy, light, pretty casual, fun. To me, it has a lot of evocative mechanics of magic,

I often tell magic, magic players, I'd be like, oh, yeah, Quarters is like playing with Trick Rats all the time. And so you do universal damage around the table, just like trip, triprots does. And people kind of got it then. So we launched Quariers. I remember Corriors being on the Hottness for some ungodly amount of time on BG. But to great fanfare, Quarriers came out, did its thing, and we had a new platform.

And then we started working on the origins of Dice Masters. And Dice Masters is where I got to really know Eric well because I got excited about Dice Masters because I was like, Eric, wouldn't it be cool if we could do 99-cent booster packs? Now, I hadn't thought through 99-cent booster packs very well, but I was like, two dice, two cards, 99 cents, let's go. And I got really passionate. And Eric was like, holy shit. Like, that's incredible. This is great.

Eric was so supportive. Mike was so supportive. And we started the business of collectible dice game. And it did its thing. And it had a pretty good run. But you got to sell a lot of 99 cent booster packs to make money. And I was really frugal. Like, the margin was tough.

But we ended up, I think, launching at $1.49. don't quote me, but it was still a tough margin because dice are tooled and they're plastic and so you have all the hassles of a plastic product line, but then you're marrying it to cards and then you've got to marry dice to cards in a coalition which is challenging too. Yeah, it's really interesting because you ended up in this world

where you first, just to kind of like one of the through lines of this narrative that you found you had a core business which was, you know, the Heroclix business, and you were constrained by your sculpting pipeline. And as a business, you know, kind of running a business very often, you know, you, all right, what is the, what's the kind of choke point in my, in my business? And that's the main thing you want to focus on. And you, instead of just like widening that choke point a little bit, you like 10x the choke point. And then all of a sudden, that opened up these possibilities for you to then bring in other

businesses that were adjacent of, okay, now we're going to do licensed miniatures and figures. and then that same plastic pipeline allowed you to do a dice game and have an opportunity that no other company could make or at least 15 other companies couldn't make. And so then this has allowed you to grow. And then from that experience, you then grew into the next thing. It's like that kind of like, you know, creating an opportunity by doubling down on what is your core competency, your core strength. And then seeing what adjacent opportunities now open up leveraging that core strength.

I think that's just such a profound, like an important business inside. I just wanted to kind of like emphasize that for people that were just kind of of following along and like how cool it is to go from thing to thing. I think there's a really some conscious decisions and then some opportunities that you were able to jump on because of that. That's really interesting. 100%. There was a lot of luck involved,

but I always say this like luck favors the prepared, right? And like if you allow your, if you put yourself in a position to take advantage of good opportunities, that's to me what luck is, right? Which is being prepared well enough to jump on an opportunity. And when we opened up that sculpting pipeline, it actually made life easier. Less employees managing more sculpts,

it took less time to manage more sculpts than it had previously because we're not dealing with necessarily the personality. This probably won't be very popular among artists. But at the end of the day, we could either be a company that puts three releases out a year or we could be a company that tried to do something bigger and better. and to do that, we had to widen that pipeline and make it more. But the time that was saved mentally from thinking about sculpt management to free time and free thinking,

now you can start considering a quarieres and you can considering a mage night, the board game, Mage night. And on and on and on. We kept on parlaying this into more and more. Now, we had to grow the company. So all of a sudden now you start, I mean, you know this, As you hire more people, the quality of the decision-making averages probably down. It's very hard to average up as you hire more people.

But you start averaging the quality of the decision-making, not the quality of the people, not the quality of the work. But the ideas now have to be filtered a little bit more rigorously. So now you get back into this consensus management. Now, we never really got there to consensus management. You had a litmus test, which is you had to get it through a gauntlet. of two or three people ripping the idea apart. One was me, Brian, and a couple other people. And we'd rip it apart, and we'd disagree and commit.

Now, I didn't know those words at the time, but it was disagree and commit. Certainly came into it. And that's the only way we could remain fast. And that allowed us to then eventually bring on one of the most prolific game managers that I've ever seen, which is Zev. And when we hired Zev, this was the golden era of board games. And I was like, okay, we had done two or three board games. We had a really good batting average, right, in terms of success.

I knew that batting average was going to come down. It just has to, right? You can't, unless you're, unless your days of wonder, like, at least at that time, Days of Wonders would hit a home run every time they went out of game. And we weren't days of wonder, but we thought we were pretty close. But I didn't believe our own bullshit again. and I'm like, okay, let's bring in Zev. So he brought in Zev.

And I remember the conversation. I'm like, Zev, I really want to do about 10 board games a year. Like, oh, I can't do 10. I'll probably get you seven or eight. He comes in, and next thing you know, we're doing 20 board games. Now, a lot of people probably will say, oh, you were part of the problem. And by all means, I think that's a fair assessment because at that time, I think there was four or five thousand board games coming out a year.

what I use that 20 board games for is to learn the business and how we didn't lose money in any board games but we learned how to print small so we were I'll say this a relatively big market footprint Wiscuits was never a big company but we we punched above our weight class in terms of what we had in the marketplace and so when learning how to print small and print big at the same time was really challenging. I mean, I don't know if you ever do this at your company, but switching hats from big company hat to little company hat is really hard. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, we have, we have processes in like kind of small portions of our sort of budget and

time that are designed to just make new small things that we have to separate out. And it's very hard to focus on that when you have like your kind of main business line monsters that you're trying to feed and grow. And yeah, it takes, it takes, it takes, effort and a will to do it that is not easy to maintain. Yeah. So at the end of the day, once we brought board games on, at that point, we were just loaded in terms of so we could do Heroclix, which is a miniatures game, I get RPG accessories, and then we started doing board games.

So at that point, the only thing we were really missing is a TCG, but we kind of had that in dice masters in a tangential way. So now we were diversified. We started adding to the RPG stuff and leaning into Pathfinder and D&D. I mean, we went crazy. We started to do that life-size foam stuff, the trophy plaques, you know, life-size, you know, six-foot-tall drits, or drits is actually like five-foot-six, but five-foot-six drits. And they're really good. And it was a really interesting way, if you guys remember Sharper Image, remember the Stormtrooper that was in Sharper Image for $12,000.

I just remember like a life-sized statue there. And I was like, oh, my God, I must have that. And lo and behold, you know, forward 40 years. And here I am making life-sized statues out of foam. Yeah. It's a low-volume business, but boy, is it fun. Yeah. Yeah.

So we leaned in everywhere that we could. That didn't come without problems. At some point, you have to hire for that. I'm a firm believer and stay small as long as you can. I just, I think it's wise I always hire about six months late. We made an exception to that during the pandemic where we started hiring proactively because the talent was getting scooped up so fast during the pandemic that you had nothing left if you didn't hire like quickly.

That was problematic because, you know, the company wasn't used to that. So we had to manage our way through that. And then when the business slowed after the pandemic, like everyone's business slowed, it was a lot to do. It's hard to slam the brakes on 20 different categories. It's hard to slam the brakes on two categories. Yeah, it was one of those problems that everybody in the game industry sort of felt this where we said this incredible boom that came from the pandemic because everybody was home buying games. And then the reaction and the backlash afterwards was a lot of companies didn't handle that well. And it was definitely problematic.

Yeah, yeah. So I call it Black January. I think it was January 21, 22 maybe. The end of the pandemic and all of a sudden the government subsidies and the money was running out. You could see it. Movies were open again. Restaurants were open again. Hotels and travel destinations were open again. And you literally watch the money disappear from the industry. Yeah. So I spent the better part of a year with the team saying, how do we slow? this business down and min-max this. So slow down the small company projects, but yet keep the foot on the gas on the big company project. I will tell you, it was one of the hardest years of my life. It was tough. That was tough. Yeah. Well, I knew this was going to happen because there's so many things that I want to talk to you about. You've had such a cool career that we weren't going to get through all of it. We were running up against time here. So I've got to have to have to make the request that we get to do this again.

Because this has been so much fun. You have a new company that you are with now, and for people that want to come find you and find your cool new things, where can they find you, your stuff, where can they go with the projects and find the projects you're working on today? So in January, I joined a company in the RPG accessory space called Sirius Dice. So I think SeriousDice.com,

they currently make dice, but we are branching out into more categories, as you would assume. Why not all? Why not all? And so I think, you know, not to overplay that, or set expectations high, but you'll see a nice diversified offering over the next couple years. It's a great team. Honestly, a lot of familiar names that I've mentioned on this.

I'm joining, going back to my mentors and working with them has been great and small, fast, agile team. I love it. I love it. All right. Well, then we'll do is we'll wait a, I'll give you another year or two to get some of these fun things out in the market.

And we'll chat all about that and all of this new phase. So I wish you the best with it. I'm so glad we finally got you on the podcast. And I will, I'm sure, see you at some shows nearby. We can share some more conversations and maybe a drink. Great.

Great. It was great talking. I can't believe you were in 90 minutes. I know, man. I just looked at the clock and I was like, oh man, we really, we really ran out of time, but we will come back to it. So thanks. Thank you.

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