Think Like A Game Designer - Rob Daviau — Innovating Legacy Gameplay, Revitalizing Classics, Unpacking the 'Elevator Pitch', and Balancing Game Aesthetics with Mechanics (#23)

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

Rob Daviau pioneered the legacy game genre, starting with Risk: Legacy. In addition, he’s worked with a variety of beloved titles: Star Wars, Axis & Allies, Pandemic, Betrayal at House on The Hill, just to name a few. In this episode, we go into detail about Legacy Game development and how to successfully work with beloved properties. 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 Rob Daviao. Rob has a long game design history and we deep dive into tons of it. Rob is maybe best known for pioneering the legacy genre with Risk Legacy. And he, we talk a lot in this episode about the upsides and downsides of designing legacy games and how you should think about making legacy games or if you should make a legacy game and some of the really cool origin story, the specific brainstorming tactic that he used to create the legacy game. And it's a tactic that I have now adopted in my own company and we've already used and gotten great results from. So I'm going to leave that as a teaser here, but it's like a single piece of absolute gold in this episode.

We talk about making games from other games. He's made things like Return to Dark Tower and Fireball Island rebooting franchises. During his time at Hasbro, he worked on tons of properties and making new expansions and new variations of games that people love and know well, whether it's trivial pursuit and betrayal at House on the Hill, a million heroescape expansions. So he has tons of experience with that. And we talk a lot about that and how you should think about making games like that. We talk about the way that his writing background and his advertising background helped him to craft great elevator pitches and what you should be thinking about when you're trying to distill your game idea down to the core, both for your own design purposes as well as for pitching to others. We talk about the process of play testing and the importance of figuring out where people are confused and different ways to know about how you can create your mechanics. And we reiterate a core message that you hear a lot in this podcast about being able to solve most of your problems by removing

things rather than trying to add things. We talk a lot about the production process and that as Rob has moved from just not just working for other companies, but also being a part of his own company and knowing about the production costs for games and how that can influence designs. And even if you're not thinking of making your own games, knowing about the answers to those questions can help you when you're pitching to publishers who do know the answers to those questions and are always thinking about what it's going to take to produce the game that you have.

And we talk about a ton more. Rob is this conversation was really great. Because Rob, even though we've been crossing paths at the industry forever, we never really got to meet before this conversation. So I was able to learn a ton from him. We really connected, got a ton of great information, and a lot of stuff that I think you're going to find a ton of value in. I know you're going to find a ton of value in. And I know that I am going to have many more conversations with Rob because he taught me a ton. And as I mentioned, things that I immediately started using in my company the very next day.

So I am excited for you guys to be able to get to hear this. It was exciting for me to get to have this conversation. So without further ado, I give you Rob Davio. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Rob Davio. Hey, Rob, how are you? Good. You made it through my name.

So already this is going well. You know, it's always one of those things I like to check before we get started. Because, yeah, it's an interesting one. I, you know, my name is Justin Gary, but my dad's, my dad was born. Stephen Gary Schnitzer, and he ended up dropping the last name because nobody could pronounce or spell Schnitzer. So I barely dodged the constant name challenge. So I'm very excited to get to talk to you. I have, I've been very impressed with a lot of your work, including some things that are nostalgic favorites as well as new favorites.

And so there's a lot of really fun things to dive into. I always start these podcasts the same. Just kind of, you know, you've been doing this for a long time now, but I think a lot of people may not know how you got your start in the industry. What kind of got you into game design? What got you interested? How did you get started on this path? I became a professional game designer in November of 1998.

I got a job at Hasbro games. They were going through like a, they had just moved. They like to do there every once in a while. Although everyone got moved to Hasbro headquarter, so I think they ran out of places to go there. I had been a hobby gamer before that, such as I could mostly role playing. It was really kind of right place at right time. I was a copywriter in advertising. I was looking for a change.

I thought I was going to do role playing as a hobby. I didn't think I could make a living at it, but like Hard Fridays out to do it. I just happened to see an ad in the paper that Asper was looking for copywriters. And through my hat in the ring and ended up, through interview process, it's kind of a weird, long story, getting a job as a game designer there, because they're looking for someone with a writing background, who knew Star Wars, and because episode one was coming out, and I happen to know that. So in retrospect, everything I had been doing my whole life had qualified me for that job.

Like, I was ready, like on paper, I was ready to go, but nothing had been done consciously, including even applying for a game design job. So it was like this one in a million shot. Yeah, so I'm interested to hear a little bit about the writing background, because that specialty of having copywriting and marketing background, you were originally working on very text-heavy games, things like Trivial Pursuit and projects like that. And one of the things I think a lot of designers lack is that understanding of writing skills

or some of those text-heavy projects can be a little intimidating. What do you think of the things that you learned in that in that previous life that prepared you to be a designer or that might be useful to other people that are sort of interested in being better at writing and approaching those style of games? Well, the advertising writing, I did television sketch comedy writing. Sketch comedy writing worked a little in television. That's what I wanted to do professionally. But in all cases, I was trying to tell a story or communicate an experience. if you know my games, that really hasn't changed much. One thing that really helped me is writing and advertising,

you have to get the point across quickly. If it's a billboard, you've got four seconds. If it's a radio commercial, you've got a lush 60 seconds back on the radio commercials, but banner ads. So how do you get the point of what you're trying to say across really quickly, whether it's words or words in picture or the name of something? So I think that has really helped me when I think of games and I think about selling games to a publisher, and as we're going to probably talk about later in this podcast, some of the games I've worked on,

is trying to encapsulate what is this game about and how does it feel to play? Not the rules to play. No one wants to learn the rules in a pitch unless you're learning how to play. But what's the promise of this game? Where is it going to take me emotionally? What story is it going to tell me? Now, I happen to use words for that because I can't draw. But even then, I'm often thinking of visually, how does it go together?

Like, what are the colors and the name and the graphics and the tagline and the pitch? And what's the 30-second promise of what you're about to experience? Yeah. I'm a huge believer in the importance of the elevator pitch as another sort of way to phrase that. You've got to be able to encapsulate what it is that you're making in this 30-second moment. Because if you can't get that image across, you're going to lose people. attention. They're not going to follow you the rest of the path. And we've all had that back, you know, when we were allowed to go outside.

And, uh, you get a pitch at a game at a convention. And, you know, they're volunteers and a lot of them are big game people, but they're not thinking pitch people. Right. And you get that jumbled pitch where they're sort of explaining the rules, but they haven't explained the theme and they haven't framed things correctly. And you just go, what is this about? I mean, there's a real art and skill to sort of explaining things and sometimes I'm better

than others, you know, at trying to do. that, but that's always my intent is, okay, I have a game I want you to play or buy for me or play tests and just framing things for people. Yeah, so maybe I'll give you two routes to go on this one because it may be a little bit putting you on the spot. One is maybe some examples of games and game pitches that are either successful or not or things that you've done or that you've heard. Or two, some general rules or principles that might be if somebody's at home right now thinking,

okay, well, how do I sell my game? What should I be thinking about to make my pitch? Either of those I think would be really helpful to help drive this point home because I can't, I cannot underscore how important this sort of thing is. If you can't get that synopsis done, you're never going to get to the next step of getting your game into anybody's hands. Yeah, I mean, Eric Lang and I worked on a game that came out about a year ago called Death May Die.

And it's a, it's a Kufu game. There's a lot of Kufu games out there. So why do you need this one? We can talk about the great miniatures. you can talk about on your turn you get these actions and then this card does that none of that's telling me why I need to play

it's telling me how to play it or why it might look good so for death may die very on like whenever we we would say what if you could shoot Cthulu in the face and you go and you go

okay well you can't because it's an elder god and you're like yes but what if there's a game where you've usually in Cithulu you see the elder gods and you go mad and then you break. And the question is, can you just get away before you break? But what if some people got away broke and now find the fortitude to go back and finish the job? Yeah, we're going to turn the tropes on their head. And we're going to basically say, if you can complete a ritual, while Cthew's being summoned, they're going to be mortal in this plane just long enough to get a

kill shot and drive them somewhere. It doesn't matter. They're out of your world. Maybe they're dead. Maybe they're gone. So you actually finally get that revenge power fantasy of not running away from Cthulu, but giving it what it deserves. And I said, we're going to frame the whole thing like a 90s TV show that was hired to compete with the X-Files, ran for two seasons, got canceled, but as a cult classic. Great. I love it. So I want to- I didn't tell you how to play. I didn't tell you it was cooperative. I didn't tell you you placed tiles down. I didn't tell you how the turn flow. I tried to promise you.

And then some people say, that's not Cthulhu, I don't like it. Right. Thank you. There's something else we can, you know, find for you. But I tried to, with that pitch, I tried to find emotionally how you're going to feel, tonally how it was going to feel, and why it was different. Right. And so there's a few great elements of that I want to underscore.

So one, you've, you know, taking a, creating this sort of visual image, creating a, like, I could see and picture what was going on as you're describing that. Two is finding other reference points that people already know is one of the easiest ways to get people across the finish line, right? To get people to understand what's going on. It's, you know, and being able, so a, you know, the X-Files competitor, right, gets me an immediate sense of the emotion and the mood and what you're going for. And three is taking something that exists already and either combining it with something new or breaking one of the preconceived notions that we have, right? So that is you sort of very explicit about like, all right, what if it's instead of running from Cthulu, you fought Cthulu, right?

Or what if we combine Cthulhu with a 90s television show, right? You know, feel, right? And that I find is actually one of the like biggest cheats to be able to create one of these moments and, you know, create one of these 30 second pitches because you can get people there by leveraging the things they already know to get them to where you want them to go. So that was a great example. Well, thank you. Yeah, no, I do find that some people when they're coming.

me up with ideas, want to reinvent everything. I have reinventing board games as, you know, every single part of this is different from what you do want to turn to your pieces. And I'm kind of like, this has a chance to be brilliant, but chances are it's going to be confusing because learning a board game, you're putting together what you already know of other games. And if everything is brand new, you have no frame to put it around. Right.

And you just end up like with a mess. Right. Some innovation is great. Too much innovation is terrible. You can get really fresh by just changing a couple assumptions and then going to count there. Now, that's the pitch. The game itself could be junk. Like, don't stop there and say, I've done the hard part. Now, you just make the game. The game is the hard part. But at the end of the game, you should know how to pitch the game, right, to get people interested in learning how to play or buy it or whatever it is. Yeah, well, and as you're going through the design process, what the game is may change, right?

I mean, as you're working and iterating through and playing with stuff, it's very often that like, oh, actually, I thought the game was about this, but turns out the fun part is here. And very often that will evolve as you're building a game. You know, it's great to start with kind of the pitch and core premise so you know where you're headed. But I found it's very helpful also to be open because you, as you're iterating, you don't know where the fun is until you actually, you know, test it and feel it. follow the fun. I mean, that's the thing is, have an idea of where you want to go at the start. Have an idea.

Have a very good idea. But at some point, move away from that idea. If all that, that idea is supposed to get you to a fun game. It may not be the fun game. And I'm Eric, Eric saying,

who we were evaluating a game at a convention that someone was playing. He said, I bet this part right here was the first thing you did. I guess like, how do you know he goes? Because it doesn't make sense in this game, but you're keeping it

because it was in your first prototype. And for some reason you think it's the heart of the game. It was like, it is the heart of the game. It was the heart of the first prototype. It is completely irrelevant here because everything else has moved around with it. It's like, you need to get rid of it. You could see the person going, no, no, you don't get it. My game is about this.

I know your game used to be about this. Start a new game with this and take it in a different direction and it may stay. And that's what games are supposed to do. Yeah, that's right. You have to, you know, once you figure out what the heart of the game is, what that core tension is, anything that takes away from that has to get cut, right? anything that, you know, if it does not support that heart, it's got to go. And now that, again, as you mentioned, it's don't feel so bad because everybody resists this.

I mean, even doing this for 20 years, I still resist it because you get attached to things. But just because you're cutting it doesn't mean it's gone. It means it's another game. You can save it for something else. Yeah. And my son's 17, and he's a budding singer, songwriter, musician. He loves engineering and he would play a song. And he's like, I have this intro and then I have the song.

I said, you have two songs. he's like no but this flows in because i said you you have like three minutes of one thing and three minutes of another i said pick one and then turn the other one into an insult song and he sort of resisted for a while and then he asked other people and everyone's like well you have two songs matched together and he's like okay okay like we all do it yeah interesting so so you know we know we know we all do it we know we know we have to cut it is there anything that that comes to mind when you think how do you know right how do you know when it's time to cut a project is it i mean In this case, it's other people are giving you that insight, but is there something that that's a cue that says, hey, this isn't, this isn't serving you anymore? This isn't serving the game anymore.

A lot of it's touch and feel. Yeah. Right? You have to figure out what's what is, was important, but isn't anymore. What is important now? You have to really watch playtesters and watch where people getting confused and what are they doing where they're getting the most fun. Right? If you have this whole game and you've got a very complex market, there's this auction system, hard to slide off. and you're like, this is the whole thing. You know, items only stay for a while and you get to time it right,

and no one's buying items, but they're having a good time. Well, you don't need all that complexity over there that you go make a different game about, but like the players are going to tell you, they want to do the fun stuff. And the things that they're doing that are fun should lead to winning. It should be like, the things I like to do that are enjoyable are also the best strategy. If the best strategy is to pass every turn, and then on the 25th turn, cash in all your cards and win, then you've got a mismatch between, you know,

what people want to do and what is the right, the smart thing to do. But it's really just watching people. But one thing I have gotten better, not good at, but better at asking in a project is, can we solve this by removing? Yes, 100%. Right? You know something's not working and you're trying to fix it.

And then you usually have the question. It's like, what if we just got rid of it? I cannot agree with the statement more. And it's so important for people because the instinct as a new designer especially is always to add. It's always like, well, it's like this game, but I also have this component. I also have this thing. And the correct answer is so often to remove. I tell the story a fair amount about when I was working on designing ascension originally.

It was there was a, the center row of cards that was available was like a conveyor belt. And every turn, it would like slide down and the last card would fall off. and a new one would come on because I thought it was really important to make sure that the row moved and new cards were available all the time. And it was, you know, I made all these mechanics around it and people would just keep forgetting. And it became this sort of obnoxious upkeep thing. And at one point it was just like, what if we just didn't do that? What if we just removed that whole thing? And the game was instantly better.

And you, I mean, you just said, spoke the truth there. The thing people are forgetting is the part that's not fun. Yep. Right. Every game has some upkeep. Right. And every game has like, you reshuffle. or do you do this or don't forget at the end of the round

you have to pay your people? Like everything has some sort of thing that you need to do that isn't just pure unadulterated fun. But if people are forgetting something that they should be doing but still having fun, then your rule is serving no particular purpose. Or if they're avoiding a mechanism because the upkeep doesn't match the fun,

we get a problem. Yeah, those are all great tips. So, okay, I want to go back a little bit to your narrative arc, because I uh so you've you know you had this uh you know you had the skill on sort of copywriting and in marketing and you were able and you had interest in games and star wars and you found this opportunity that presented itself to you where your skill sets kind of matched up perfectly and you started working at wizards hasbro and the whole process there what was that like you know either starting out and

you didn't have experience in game design before that so what what was what was a process of learning and ramping up like for you at that point? Well, I had experience in game design, but it was largely home-grewed role-playing systems in the 90s. I would take D&D and turn the Naut's head or I played Mars Magica and I would like me. I was a DM and I would come up with content and stories. And so I was doing game work and doing the math and doing the writing. And that's what I liked about role-playing is it allowed both of those things to sort of

come into focus because you can make a real crunchy spell system. Right. And people will dig that in a role-playing game. and then you can run a game and be very breezy and story forward. So I was doing game design, but I was not doing board game design per se. So I had some learning of how to take my ideas and boil them down for make them accessible. And I had some learning to do about exactly what a product designer, not even a game designer, a product designer does at Hasbro. Because at Hasbro, the game designer is responsible for the bill of materials and the profitability.

and there's a lot, you know, like the first thing they'll do is say, what's the pitch, which we've covered, and have you run a cost to make sure we're going to make money. Now, that cost doesn't have to be final, and, you know, they know it's going to change the things of all, but you have to be in the ballpark. They tell you, you've got $8 and $61 to make a game, and your first pitch has a $14 bill of materials. They're like, we're not approving this. If it comes in at nine, they're like, okay, you're going to have to shave 40 cents, but you're close. interesting so yeah so then you know and this actually ties into some things that i've learned because when i started as a game designer i didn't i didn't have that set up but we were just making trading card games so it was like you know we were just doing cards so whatever but when i became

you know i started my own company and i had to build my own products then it became very very important price point and how what the cost of goods were and how all that stuff was there and i feel like it really changed me as a designer to be able to think in those terms um So for you to be able to get that up at the beginning seems pretty valuable because I know a lot of people that will make these pitches that are just like these monstrosity component style game. It's, you know, like I say, it makes me incredibly middle-aged boring guy that I am in a sense of like right at the beginning, I start a game like who's the audience? What games do they like? Why would they play this game over those other games? How much does it cost?

what box size is it? Because I don't want to start making these game boards. Then they can't fit in the box. And then you shrink it down. And then the spaces are too small. And then you've got to remove spaces. And you've been working on it for a year. And you're like,

ah, why did I think of this? I lay out like, okay, this is going to take a year. It's going to need extra play testing. So maybe I give myself 14 months. Like I block out the schedule and try to figure out, and it's going to be $60 and it needs visual appeal. And then I start going. And I think some people say like,

man, you put all these restrictions on yourself. and I go, they're going to be there eventually. Right. Why not just, you're always going to have restrictions. Why not deal with the ones that are, they're absolutely going to happen before this goes onto a shelf? Yeah, 100%. And that's where like when, even in my very first, you know, core design loops, I'm going to,

you know, I have an inspiration and an idea, kind of what I want to do. And then immediately, I'm going to frame that with exactly the questions you're talking about, right? Who is this for? Why do they, why do they, what are their interests? Why do they care about this? what kind of form factor and price points am I needing to work with? And again, like you said, it can be ballpark. It can have some room to shift.

But I want to go further because not only is it that, yes, eventually you're going to have these restrictions, so why not start up front? But actually, like, you know, there's this myth that the creative process is best when there's no restrictions and you can do whatever you want. The exact opposite is true. Yeah, it's the opposite. Like restrictions breed creativity. That's where that's what forces your mind to work and be able to come up with these interesting solutions. and new things. Like just the,

hey, make a game right now is a very tough thing to just do. But hey, make a game about Cthulhu that costs $40 that I can,

you know, have ready in a year. Okay, well, now I'm instantly going to start thinking about certain things about what I'm going to want

or that little build of this demographic. So it's a great, you know, it may sound, you know, middle age basic or whatever, but I'm telling you,

it is 100% the way to do the job. So it's always good to reinforce those lessons. I agree. Like, you're going to have restrictions. It's going to have,

have form and space and cost and a length and number of players. And you can shift them, as you said, maybe I start on a game and say, it's going to kind of be this breezy, 40, maybe $50 game. And then everyone's loving it. I look at it, go, a little heavier, it's a little longer. It's not overstaying as welcome. I think this is a $60 or $70 game. Well, now the components don't really feel like that.

Let me reframe something. So it moves into the place where it feels like it wants to go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and that, and that, that's where I think that touch and feel comes in, right? It's like, you know, set those parameters, set your, you know, your core selling point and your parameters up front as you're iterating, follow the fun and then, you know, shift accordingly to make sure that everything kind of lines up in the product and the game and the audience and the cost, all those things kind of are moving in parallel as you're really zeroing in and what the,

what the core of your game actually is. Yeah. So I want to, so you, all right, so you've learned. You've got the lucky part of being able to, you know, understand price points, audiences and the very beginning of your process. This is a lesson that most people don't get to learn until much later. And so that was that was a great shift from just the home brew. There was other stuff that I was like, I don't know why I have to do this. Like one of my, there's a couple things that just worked out really well for me.

You know, one, I was getting a steady paycheck. And, you know, 401K matching and vacations and health insurance. So I could learn on the job. I was surrounded by other people who had experience into what they're doing. I had the support of a large corporation, also the political nonsense of a large corporation. And I also was working on games I knew. Can you do a clue card game? Can you do a battleship card game?

A lot of it was what would be development work or repurposing work or doing expansions or line extension. So I didn't have the blank page much my first five years. And it was just a wonderful way, like I was being a craftsman to be an apprentice and just make all these mistakes along with people to fix them for games that were going to come out for Christmas and be gone in five weeks. And I look back now and I go, that wasn't very good. Sorry about that young kids in 2001. Yes. Our apologies. Yeah, my apologies.

But, like, you know, one of the things that the job also being designed. is responsible for because it comes from a toy company is responsible for anything three-dimensional that goes in the box like a vac tray or a piece of plastic so my one of my first projects was monopoly loony tunes and i like it's monopoly it's a theme game which to be fair a different version of monopoly was still kind of novel in 1998 that's hard to imagine right now i know they they got a little caught up in it um and so i said oh you're you're buying cells like the the space on the board are different cells and when you get them together, you can put TVs on them. And then, you know, you can upgrade to movie theaters and you're doing their, like, little

film reels and little, like, snippets of film. And people are great. I'm like, and the TVs, they look like cartoon TV, so there's no right angles. And they're like, what do they look like? I'm like, cartoon TV, no right angles. They're like, can you give us a cat drawing and make sure to account for draft? And I'm like, I don't have no idea what you're talking about. Are those words in English?

Yeah. And I'm like, I'm like, one person I remember was like, do you know what job you got hired for? it was like my second week. I'm like, I apparently right now, no, I don't. I thought, like I really thought I just specced out the concept, wrote the rules, and then I'm like, okay, play testing team, do it. Okay, graphics, and that was not at all the job. And so I got a crash course quickly and then learned how to delegate soon thereafter in a lot of stuff that I was never all that good at. Yeah. Including, I can speak very coherently now about plastics and miniatures and tooling and draft and stuff like that.

I still can't do it. Well, yeah, so I also had this crash course in, so when I was working at, I was working at Upper Deck, and we were doing the World of Warcraft Miniatures game, and I was the lead design on that. And back then there was a distinction, like the designers just made the game, and then you had brand managers and product managers to make the product and sell it. And we went through like two product managers who couldn't make it because they'd never made miniatures before.

And so they were just going to kill the project. And I was like, wait, I've been working on this for, so long. I want to see it exist. And so I was like, can I try? And it was the Wild West. So they made me a product manager. I had no idea what I was doing. But I just had to figure it out. And like flew to China and inspected the factory and figured out how to make miniatures and like got the thing done. So we could actually release that became the brand manager. Did the marketing, did the sales. Had to go through all of that to get the game to exist. And then it was like at the end of it, I was like, oh, well, I guess I can start my own company now. I know how to do all these things. And it was like incredibly

useful lessons if painful at the time. They're painful at the time, but I honestly think all these things make me a better game design. Yeah, 100%. Right? Because you know everything that has to go forward. And I remember I was talking to a publisher and I said, okay, you know, we're wrapping up. We're getting ready to turn it over. I'm going to give you, you know, I'm going to give you indesign files, not just text. And you can tweak them, but I'm going to think through like the bleed and the, you know,

the punchboard and make sure there's tolerance and stuff. I said, you're doing this in a different language. They said, yeah, maybe I said which ones. And they talked and they said, German. And I'm like, okay, well, I'll make sure that your text is going to expand by 50%. So I'll make sure the English copy is small enough. And I said, do you want it designed in such a way for a black plate change? And they were like, are you a designer?

Because you don't know, usually designers just give us headaches that we have to solve. And you're like ahead of it. I'm like, I don't do that. So just let's, I just so we can clarify for the people that don't understand what you're talking about. So, you know, when, like, changing a black plate is when you're doing a print run. And normally, if you're going to change the language on the cards, you have to change, you know, change the cards. But it's a different color. So maybe you want to explain a little bit more detail.

Yeah. So when something is printed, it's they don't have like an orange and a green. Everything's broken down into cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, which covers like 95% of the colors really well. Some neon's don't work well and orange doesn't work that well. But you can get almost everything you see that's printed is four-color printing. And they make film, and then they turn the film into big plates that kind of come down and stamp. And they all have to be perfectly lined up. You've seen that in some comic books or newspapers where one plate's a little off,

and you get that sort of ghosting sort of effect. But one of the plates is black, and it's much easier and cheaper to just make, if you're going to do 14 languages, if you just have to change the black plate to the different language. But that means that all of your text has to only appear. in black. You can't do knockout white. You can't do red to show it. Like, if, you know, it's just so that way, it's easier and cheaper to do different languages because you're not making four sets a place for every language. And you know, if to line them all up, you just have to change one. It doesn't work in all cases. And actually just flat black doesn't look as good as

four color black, but that's a whole separate thing. And in some cases, it doesn't work. Like the cards are so good or it needs colors, it doesn't work. But if you've got text that isn't that important and you can just make it out of a solid black color and you're doing it in different languages. You've made your game a lot easier to make down the line. And just again, just the kind of things that a new designer would never usually be thinking about, but the fact that you've had to address these issues or you think about, okay, well, in that case, I'm only going to put text on this set of cards and everything else we're going to use icons so that only this set of cards would have to get changed out and so that makes it easier to translate. There's all these different

little tricks that you learn, again, from having to do the things in many ways. The hard and learn these lessons early in other industries. And I just want to say, if you're a new designer, you don't have to be thinking about these things. And often what will happen is you won't think of something. We're not going to certainly cover every trick in this conversation. And the publisher, someone down the line is going to say, we have to change this because of X. And usually you change it. And often like we were talking before, with restrictions, you might come up with something better. It might be a slight loss of quality. You might be a little disappointed. But now you know that this is a thing that needs

to change and what you do is you start getting better at thinking of them ahead of time so that your design isn't surprised after what you think. It's like, it's done. It's bought. And then it sounds like, we've got to take six cards out. Yeah. You're like, uh-oh. Yeah.

So I wanted to also touch on a thing because having to, you've had the opportunity to play in other people's sandboxes, right? And that's taking these classic games, whether it's, you know, the battleship or risk or any of these great games and create something new out of them. And I find that that process has its own interesting challenges, although it follows the same form factor, right? You know, what's the heart of this game? And then what's the heart of the new thing that you're doing and bringing in? Is there a way that you think about when it comes to sort of building expansions

or building twists on, you know, older or beloved properties? Are there other things that you think about that kind of drive you when you're working in that style of place? and you've also been responsible for bringing back, you know, super beloved games out of, you know, with the restoration game stuff and these things. So it's a really interesting space to be working in. And it's pretty much where I, I, does it make my bones? Is that the expression? Yeah.

I make a lot of my living off of repurposing, reinterpreting, or expanding or rebooting things that existed before, whether it's doing a legacy game, which is an extension, working at Hasbrooky. or with restoration game and doing the game. I do original games, and I enjoy original games, but I don't, they're always like the one out of the eight things that I'm doing at any one time. I had been in advertising for being at Hasbro, like I mentioned,

and getting down to the core essence of what this game about is about was something I really wanted in advertising. So, you know, and Hasbro is very good at over-complicating this with brand managers and brand managers, and brand pyramids and unique selling propositions and emotional indicators and all these other things, which always felt like a bit much, but it was good training to get me to think this way. So, for example, with Fireball Island, which company brought back a couple years ago, it was like, flick a marble, hit your friend, they fall over, it's funny.

And we would get into stuff that it's like, well, what if we had like this dynamic scoring? a mark, I'm like, does any of that involve flicking a marble at someone or being funny? And they're like, no, but it gives it a depth. I'm like, this is for six year olds or drunk people or people with six year olds who may or may not be drunk, the people, not the six year olds, right? So like, that game, like, you can basically say, that's a great idea, not for this game. That's great. If you can just figure out, like, what the fun, what the, what's the one fun part about the game? Yep. Yep. And so in many ways, it's exactly the same thing when you're building a new game. That's the, except that in the previous, when you're building upon something else, there was a fun thing that you are, you now have to sort of stay true to.

And once you know what that is, you can re-envision things in completely, you know, pretty dramatic ways, but still keep the heart of that game. Once you know what the heart is, you can move forward and try a lot of different stuff. Oh, yeah, you can give it all new clothes and make it feel different. But what we always look for restoration is, wow, this is a totally different game, but it feels like the game might remember. Right. And that's the thing I was looking for. we're wrapping up, we're kind of crunch time on those physical components

for a return to dark tower, which has been the most complicated being the work on. And we have to keep going back to, nope, that was in the original game. The sound is important, or you should feel this way about the power. And like, what are the touchstones of the original game? And how do you make it feel the same?

So I'm constantly asking that question. And even on my original game, like when you were just mentioned, I have a friend who does more in video games, but who regularly challenge the signers and say, what's the one thing your game's about? Well, the three things that I like to talk about first, and he's like, one.

And they're like, it's hard to say, because there's really like six interconnected things. He goes, you have no idea what your game's about. Right? And no, it's not about one thing. There is one thing and there's interdependencies and even nuance, but a lot of people say, like, there's nine things going on here,

and they're all equally important. and they're all interdependent you can't touch any of them. Often that's not true. Yeah. Well, and the fact that there absolutely can be many interdependent systems, but they have to be based around some fundamental fond, some fundamental tension that is what connects them. It's the connective tissue of like, here's why this stuff matters.

So I think it does apply, even though it may not seem like it, even for very complicated, very involved games to get that right, being able to dial that down and boil it down into one fundamental principle of like how what's your what's your north star is so critical to the task. Yeah. All right. So you mentioned legacy designs and I absolutely would kill myself if I didn't devote a fair amount of time to discussing this because it, you are, you know, you are credited as the founder of the legacy game genre, which has taken the world by storm. It is such a cool concept. I remember the moment I saw Risk Legacy and saw what was possible and it was one of those smack on the head.

Like, why didn't I think of this before moments? I'm so lucky I got one of those. Usually I see someone else do something. I'm like, oh, that was right there the whole time. And I didn't think of it. And then I had this one. I'm like, oh, I think, wait, I think I had one. I did it.

Yay. Yeah. I was so afraid it would get killed or I'd get hit by a bus or someone would be like, oh, yeah, that existed in the 70s. Yeah, yeah. Well, getting that out through the Hasbro machine in and of itself, I can only imagine what the challenge has come with that. That's an hour-long story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to know, but I don't have that time for this chat. The short version is, it was at the end of my career. I had been there like 12 years at that point. And I had eventually learned the levers to pull to work within the system to get stuff done.

I mean, every group dynamic has, well, you ask this person, but you don't. You ask mom, but not bad. if you can stay up later. Like you just know this. You ask this friend to help pick you up and bring you to the airport because that person always sleeps in. And it's the same thing with a large corporation. You eventually need to learn not only the people, but the departments that you can lean on or do things with.

But yeah, no, that thing was almost dead like six times. And I just, I brought it through start to finish. It's like you being the project manager. Yeah. And I managed to get the graphics and this and the sales and all of this stuff. Yeah, this one's your baby and you're going to see it. It was the exact same thing. I'm not letting this die.

I believe in this one. Yep. So talk me through then your initial creation process for this. Like where did the spark come from? What point did you know you had something? So the backstory to it was that it was on a Clue brainstorm. And then there were, I told the story a lot, so I'll do the quick shorthand for people. But I said two things in an off-site brainstorm about clue.

One, I said, as a joke, I don't know why they keep. inviting these people over to dinner. Someone always gets killed, right? Like that it was an ongoing story of this town. It was like, ha, ha, ha. But I think it got me in the mood to say the more insightful thing later in the day where we were doing a brainstorming activity, which I highly recommend, which is to make assumptions about whatever you're working on, either before you start or if you're

stuck to see if any of these assumptions aren't necessary. but just things that you put in because you think you're supposed to, but if you change it, it works just fine or it gives you inspiration. For example, do you have a question? No, no,

go ahead. You're answering it. It sounds like that. You know, if, you know, yeah, I'm just going to take a Sharpie.

All right, we're going to make a new Sharpie. What do we know about a Sharpie? Well, you can hold it in your hand. It writes. It's permanent. It only has one color.

You can put the cap on. It eventually runs up. out of ink, right? And you try to get more and more bizarre. Like, it costs under $10. It doesn't have lights in it, right? Like, it, you know, like it doesn't have batteries. It is affected by gravity. It is affected by gravity. And sometimes you say things like it's affected by gravity later on. And then what you do is you go through after you have your list and you're supposed to just be almost joking. And then you start running through and you go, okay, what if this wasn't affected by gravity.

And like, what does that mean? It's like, well, what if it was really light? What if it had a magnet that would keep it up in the stand? And most time you go, anything, anything? No, okay. And you just go on to the next one. And then every once in a while, someone's like, hey, you said it only has one color. What if there was two different colored tips, like tints on each other?

So now you could do it. Or contrasting colors, can we do that? And you might like open up a new idea for a direction for a concept or a line or a brand. So I said this about clue. now it just happened to be about cool but it was true for all games. I said the actions you take in one game don't affect the next one. And my boss,

I'm going to call my trusty pop again, who was writing on a whiteboard when like he had that, you know, don't forget that. And I don't remember any of those the rest of the meeting because I was immediately like, what does that mean? Yeah. And then I started thinking like, well, this is a campaign game. I didn't get 10 chapters and just play the next chapter in the

campaign. But kids aren't going to remember a campaign, right? It might be four months and then like, when mom's not teaching you or something, like, how do you mark what happened? Because they're not grown up gamers. And I'm like, what if you put a sticker on? Like you just make a note. What if you check a box? And I'm like, I can't do that. Right? That's permanent change. And then immediately I started saying around the office, like, what if you like physically like change things? Like, you know, like, oh no, you only have time to grab one piece of equipment. And then the other card is just gone.

it's ripped up. People are like, whoa, whoa, you can't do that. I made a pitch for a clue and they didn't want any part of it. And then I rebooted it about a year later as risk, which seemed a little better to be aggressively ripping up cards and defacing cards and a little more macho. If you were ever going to take a risk. Yeah.

I had the pitch of a – going back to our pitch, I had the pitch of a lifetime for that. I was just cleaning up my hard drive before I get a new computer, and I found my pitch for 2009. when I did it. And I don't remember the exact line, but Hasbro always talked about how we need game-changing opportunities. We're the game changers.

And I said, look, we talk all the time about being game changers, but you can't be a game changer unless you're allowed to change the game. That is a good. That was my closing line. That's a good line. You've done marketing. That's awesome. So, all right, I appreciate you.

sharing that story. I know you get asked about that a lot. But now I, you know, I want to, I want to dig into some more of the design principles that make a successful legacy game. Because now, you know, they're all over the place. And I won't lie. I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how would I take my own games and turn them into a legacy contents of what are the things that can work well and what are the things that haven't been done. And then maybe you can even talk about it also in the context of now you've been doing pandemic legacy for several years. and there's a season zero as we're recording this season zero is coming out soon. And so even not only making a game that has a legacy built into it,

but even one that has seasons of legacies is also really interesting. So what makes a good legacy game? What do you think are sort of some principles of people who are thinking about entering into this space where the games are changing from play session to play session should be thinking about? All right. Let's see if I can summarize. this. If you're a new designer,

don't start with a legacy. Yes, okay, good tip. Good tip number one. Because a legacy game is making a game, and I think that the game should be no more than intermediately. You want to make a big, rich, complicated two or three hour game. Probably you're not going to get a big audience

and people want to play that again and add no those to it. And I think it's a game that should have a world characters or something else that would let you tell a story. since a legacy game this can be something when I look to say a dozen times as a shorthand,

although there's nothing magic about these numbers. You're asking people to return again and again like you do with television. You need some reason what happens next. And some people would really be excited to what happens next is now we have a new resource to build with. But a lot of people are going to be like,

I want to find out to that person who is, you know, hanging off the cliff. Right. Yeah. You know, I want to know at the end what it meant when it said and you open the door and that's where you're, you know, destiny was awaiting you. You're like, what does that mean, right? So there's a lot of television thinking or comic book thinking and story pacing that I put into my personal legacy games that are then manifested in boarding uniform. At the core of it, I think of a legacy game as a game with about a half dozen expansions planned out and you are going to see some. are all of them, but maybe not in the same order as someone else.

And you are going to shape the game enough that you feel like it was your story. But as a designer, you can't shape it so much that you have 128 different endings. Right. You can't do seven games. And every game, it goes in two different directions. You just can't design that. Right. So how do you let people explore and do different things, but sort of keep them on the central spine

where it doesn't feel railroaded? Sometimes I get a bite for them others. Yeah. Yeah. So just so digging in, right? It's, it's all, all of these points now revolve around, around storytelling. And I think that's, it's so powerful. And again, we can do a whole hour plus on just that.

But so the idea of creating these cliffhanger moments and the, that the, you've played this game, but now this whole new thing is opening up in what's next moments at each game conclusion. And then being able to create that feeling of freedom. but keeping the branches from spreading out too far. And those sound, so, and then you also sort of talked about it being, you know, a sort of half dozen expansions, which, which begs the question of what, you know, what is the, what's the life cycle of a legacy game, right? Because unlike traditional games where I can just play it, you know, however many times I want,

and it's always going to be, you know, the same or within the various, various elements, there's a point where legacy games, you've kind of explored all of the new, or you've unlocked all the things and then it probably doesn't get played anymore or you need to buy a new copy to play it or something. So how do you think about that arc? Well, there's two ways the game can end. With risk, I knew there would be the very legitimate complaint

of, well, now I can't play them. And so I said, no, the game stops changing it now just stabilizes. And your final copy, which can be on your shelf and you can play as much you want, is a perfectly normal game now. It doesn't change. And yet it's going to be completely different from everyone else's copy.

like you worn it in like a leather jacket. So the game doesn't have to not be playable. However, I think a vast majority of the people never play that game because they played 12 games. And the fun part was it was changing and there was new stuff and there were little presents you could open. So even though technically it exists there, I think it's not touched that often.

Right. Maybe once a year. With pandemic legacy, the publisher said, eh, I don't want that. We played it. You got hours and hours of entertainment. and don't worry about it. It has not affected sales in either way.

It affects some of the PR. I got a lot of people who are, they said, I don't want a game that I can't play after it's done. I'm like, it was at a convention. It was at S and I go, oh,

there's 5,000 other games for you right here. Right? Like, you know, not every food or meal or movies for everyone. But you should know when you start out which one you think you want to do. I just want to highlight that there's another super valuable lesson. You mentioned it earlier and you mentioned it again here that like, you know, part of the key of marketing and design is also being very clear about who you're not for, right?

Like trying to appeal to everybody is a death knell to a game. It's a way to make it the most bland, lame thing of all time. Like you, by making a stand and saying, no, you're right, this is not a game you're going to play forever. But after whatever, 12 hours, 20 hours, 100 hours, that's the entertainment you're buying for the price of a game. It's still a really good deal. And if you want this experience, I'm giving it to you, is, I think, very powerful. Yeah, and the analogy I make is some people want to get, I mean, it's out of date because music is not bought physically anymore, but you want to buy the CD, which is exactly the same and you can play it forever, or you want to go to a concert. And if you're halfway through the concert, you can't be like, I don't like this concert.

I want to leave and get my money back. And then when you're done and you want to see it again, you get to buy a new ticket, but the concert's going to be a little different. It's never the exact same thing twice. And some people want one and some people want the other. But cooking is my main hobby. That is the most transitional form of entertainment there is, from the cooking to the eating. It's all gone within a few minutes. And then it is literally gone from your life within 48 hours.

It doesn't matter how good it was. If you want it again, you've got to buy it or make it again. And it's not the same. So I think that was a big part of it. But when you're actually coming down to design, I would say make sure your first game is good. And that's one of the mistakes I made with Seafall, the game that part. get the worst reviews sold all right, actually, and some people really like it. But overall, worst reviews of any legacy game I did is I was so focused on the legacy part

that I didn't just make that game one and play it and play it and play it. It's basically what you're doing is I'm going to design a whole game. Then I'm going to design 12 more. And you should think a little bit about what's going to change. But I was designing like the first six games at once. And I don't think I did a good job of getting that first game to be crisp and clean. blocked out. So do you do you do how strong of a claim is that like do you recommend not thinking at all about the legacy component when you're first building the game and really just this has to be super

fun and then I'll figure out how to make it change from game to game or is that you know is there maybe a premise there that you you would already have as a seed and then okay but before I build out the the branches I'm going to I'm going to work and make sure the seed yeah you should know where it's going but I would caution against going there got it right like with Seafall, which to be fair is about the only big start from scratch, make a legacy game. I don't have a lot of examples. Since then, I've been in a fortunate position where a lot of publishers have said, hey, can you build a legacy game of X? And I can skip the step. Because I go, yes, your first game is done. I just need to change these 15% of it to make it

have hooks to continue. You should be considering it. But like with CFA, I'm like, oh, and then you're going to explore islands. And then you're going to get to shoot cannons at each other. So, like, I knew I needed these things in there. But I would be, like, designing the combat system and then from game four and then putting it back in the starting game and a watered down version. And I would have island exploration. So I needed to have. And it was just, I mean, I just should have said, okay, you know, explore is a factor that chips have. It's going to let you explore later. I don't know how it.

But it needs to do something game. So what does it do right now and then get better at in future games? and so you need to know where your hooks are where you're going to build off of the branches you're going to put on your tree but that first game has to be people need to know how to play it needs to be fun

it needs to set the stage of it's a pilot episode of a TV series right and if you want people to say you know Netflix is about to start the second one that first one better been good right and you just make a good game and then you'll know

you'll know where you want to go. You can't help but think of it, but just try to be like, okay, just make a few notes. Don't design it. Put off to the side. Got it. So you go through, you kind of have a sense at the beginning. Okay, this is going to be a legacy game. So I know this type of thing might evolve,

but I'm not going to worry about that. I'm going to focus on making this game as great as I can be. Occasionally taking down extra notes. I'm like, okay, this would be a cool thing to have evolve over time. And then once you've got that being like, hey, people would be happy to play this game, just like it is. it's awesome. Now I'm going to build the 12 extra games on top of that. I got to build.

And I would say you don't have to take it to like it is publishable, right? It is tuned and awesome because you know when you're doing the game eight, you go, I have an idea. And you have to go back and change something in that first game to set the stage either narratively or mechanically to get it to make sense. But you want that first game to be past the rough prototype where You're like, it's not really working and you can't finish and it's not super fun, but let's just play it. Like, that's not good enough. It needs to be people going, it's pretty good. This is, this is coming together.

I play this again. Like, that's about all you need. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. That's a good break point. And so, you know, when you're building these kinds of branching, you know, paths and different options, I'm sort of envision this, you know, giant whiteboard with all the different little, like, trees coming out of it of what the different things are going to do. Like how much are you trying to, what is, you know, is there a target range of, you know,

number of playthroughs or number of hours that you have in mind? Is that you just sort of go where the design takes you? How do you know when to stop? Because again, this could go on, you know, this is a, this is a challenge for just any normal design. You know, and so, but now you've got this where you could just keep making game after game after game within the same network. So what, what, do you have any guidelines for how you think about that and, and the scale of work? You know, is it

five times as hard as making a normal game? Are you spending, you know, 10,000, many hours? It is about like making three to five things. Yeah. And going back to the thing we have before is knowing production tricks helps. Scratch off versus stickers versus writing

versus hiding things. Like, how do you obscure things? There's a little bit of like production magic that goes in there because it's interesting. You know, people look at a game on the shelf and they'll pick it up this game is heavy. Heavy is good. I really think we would have sold more

Fireball Islands if we had put a brick in there. Right? Because it's vac trays. It's all thin. And you're like, this is not worth the money. Like they're really expensive to make. They're just not heavy. And then people will open the game and then will immediately try to see like,

look at all the stuff I get to use. Well, in legacy games, you go, ooh, here's half a third, 20% of the stuff I'm going to use. And since they can't see the rest of it. it might work a little anemic when they open it. They can get their money's worth, especially since the act of hiding things and putting things in boxes involves people.

It means every time you involve an extra person or an extra touch or an extra step in the manufacturing process, you're adding costs. So what you don't want to do is end up having half your cost be on hiding things so that people feel like they didn't get their monies worth. You want to make sure you minimize that, which is a tricky thing to do. if you don't know your way around production.

Yeah, it's interesting on a couple levels. Like, one, I think it's an experience people don't think enough about a lot, which is that box opening experience, the what is it that I feel like I've gotten? And especially nowadays, especially nowadays, where a lot of times people's exposure to a game is going to be seeing an unboxing online or, you know, getting those kinds of early reviews,

like that experience is a big deal. But I also think there's something different, there's something very different about the magic of, okay, when this happens, open this pack. and see what's inside versus don't look over here until I tell you to. One of them is more magical and more mysterious than the other one, I feel. Absolutely, yeah. There's a difference between a wrapped present under a Christmas tree or on a table at a birthday party

versus I bought something nice for you. It's in the closet. Don't go in there. Or it's in the living room. So if you go in, just look to the side, right? Like there's... Right, right. Yeah, the other one you can pick up and move and shake and one.

wonder what it is. Right. Yeah, the wrapping and the presentation matter. So there's, yeah, what are the, what are the, some of the best maybe tricks that you found or what, to get that wow moment, you know, understanding that there's a, there, there are cost implications. Well, minimize. I find other, you look at legacy games, like, but they do it this way.

So these are the tools I use, you know, minimize the big boxes. Like, don't, don't have 14 boxes, like, and then one of the box has a card. Yeah. Right. One of the things I've done I did with betrayal legacies, you can have a deck of cards that's numbered with numbers in the corner. And you say, go get card 161. I mean, you could cheat, right?

But you'll just fan, fan, fan, maybe you're like, ooh, that had a picture. I wonder what that one is, right? And then so we talk about what are surprises that are essential that you don't see and what are things that are okay if you see versus stuff that's a complete surprise, versus stuff that's telegraphed. Like there's a lot of planning a birthday party around these sorts of things. Like, do you want to know who's coming to the party?

Or do you want to know what the dinner plan is? Or do you want the whole thing to be a surprise? Like, everyone wants something different. But not everything can be a surprise because it also affects how you learn the game. Right. If you're constantly opening and doing things. And so sometimes you go, okay, this is really great. I love that we reveal it at the end of game one.

But now it adds 17 stickers to the book. and just all this blow can we just make this a rule in game one? Right. Or can we put it on one page and say, this is not involved with a prolog, skip it? Is that a surprise that's so spoiled that if you happen to read it,

you go, oh, there's going to be people who live in the city. Like, yes, of course there's going to be people who live in it. You know, like if you have an office and there's no people because I'm making up the legacy game in the spot. The first game is 7 a.m. and no one's in. And then 8 a.m.

is the next one, and then one of my workers are going to be in the building. It's obvious. It's not like, I don't believe it. Workers showed up at 8 o'clock. Like, that's amazing. I didn't see it coming. That's not a magical surprise. That's just, we just don't want you to play with this rule yet.

So there's different qualities to the surprises. Yeah, you could even create some public variance in it. You're like, hey, these are the people that work in your office. You don't know exactly when they're going to show up. They definitely won't be there at 7 a.m. But then, like, at 8 a.m., there's chances that X, Y, or Z person shows up at 9 a.m. There's chances at X.

I actually like this game we're talking about quite a bit. Okay. I know. I'm getting excited. Yeah, like this is the fun part of game design where it doesn't actually have to be played or worked or anything like that. Right, great. Yeah, but I love the idea is you put out four people and you put them face down from this large deck.

And you don't know what's going to show up. So everyone's game shows up different, you know, like at a different pace. But then you know immediately like, no, you need this person to show up by then. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, okay. Now it's, it's, it's noon. You better have your TPS reports in before lunchtime.

Right, before lunchtime. And so some stuff you can tease it's coming because learning it is both obvious narratively and the rules are complicated enough that you don't want to have to patch it together. But like if at noon the circus shows up and a clown parade goes through your office, well, you probably didn't see that coming and that's better as a complete surprise. Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. So understanding, you know, the nature of the surprise that you're looking for and thus how you'd represent. in it, how that trades off with, you know, cost and complexity.

And then so it's funny because one of the things I actually thought was an exciting advantage of the legacy model is that you, you know, you, in many ways, you get that tutorial experience that video games have, right? Because I can give you the simplest version of the game to try, hey, here's the basic rules, play this. And then, okay, now here's another rule. Next time you play, add this rule. Then next time you play, add this rule.

And so that you get that process. It almost seems like an upside compared to having to teach every. everybody everything all at once. Yeah, that, that, I backed into a couple of things by accident, because the original game was going to be, you were going to play and make permanent changes. And so in risk, you get these stickers that you can put down at the beginning of each game. I forget what they're called now. It's been 11 years.

You get these little, everyone gets a card that has like a bunker or a tower or like this one-time trick you can use in a game. And, but it's permanent. So I just gave them to everyone at the beginning and they would start playing. Even though you only got one a game, within three games, they were all gone. on. People didn't say, no, this can be better in Game 5. And their world was a mess. It's not like, now that I know how to play, I wouldn't have made any of these decisions, but they're permanent. I gave matches to toddlers here. You need to play a little bit before you get these stickers.

Right. So I was like, I need to lock them up. I'm going to put them in an envelope. And I was just like, you don't get them until game three. And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And I'm like, oh, that kind of lets me do a tutorial. Like here's the simple stickers and the median stickers. I'm like, well, game three is arbitrary. there's got to be something better. I'm like, oh, you get this when someone wins their second game, which will either be game two or game five. Well, that's cool. Now it's kind of in their hands and there's a little bit of drama. Wow.

And then I was like, well, wait, I'm telling a story here. Right. Like open this when two missiles are used on the same role. Like, well, that's not going to happen to at least game three, but it could happen as late as game six. But the players are deciding when this moment is, I was like, it was all to keep people from using their stickers in the first game. And that kind of created the second branch of legacy, which is you make permanent changes

and you get stuff doled out to you in a way that is sort of sometimes random, sometimes not, and tells a story. And it was all just to fix a design problem of the permanent changes were all being done too quickly and without knowledge and people needed to play more games before they got more quick. Yeah, that's fantastic. And just that other sort of little tip about like when, you know, I think a lot of times we say you've got to tell a story and leave people with cliffhangers. I think a lot of people take that literally as like you're literally writing out a story, which can be the case. But that these things like conditional trigger moments like somebody wins a game twice or somebody loses by X points or more or these things now.

And then a reveal of, oh, wow, okay, there's just a giant crater where their home used to be. there's this new, you know, new, you know, like that now is like, oh, wow, what does that look like later? Like, you've told that story and you've now, in people's minds, creating the experience of, what will it be like when there's a crater in the middle of the board? How do I play around that? And so that's the sort of the storytelling that evolves is pretty amazing. So there's an interesting thing since we're doing like wonderful deep dive designer stuff is between games and a legacy game is where stuff happens. So technically the end of game two is the beginning of game three.

But not really, because the end of game two might be days or weeks. from the beginning of game three. So if there's a narrative moment, like a crater where your house was supposed to be, we will do that at the end of the game because it's a cliffhanger. Like it happens, it's an emotional payoff to the game you just played.

You don't say open this at the start of the next game because you might forget. You want to have that moment like, you lost by 40 points. Let's see what happens. Oh my goodness, the crater, that makes you want to play the next game. But if there are rules for the crater,

we will, if possible, do those at the start of the next game so you don't sit there and go, oh, right, no, we were supposed to do this. There were rules from that game we played back in February that we forgot to do. So if it's like new rules, new things to integrate, we tend to do at the beginning of the game when people are fresh, they're ready to learn, they're excited to play. Yeah, let's learn some rules. Then we're going to get into it. Where if you're learning rules at the end of the game, often you're like, I'm tired.

I didn't get any of that. We're going to have to go over at the beginning of the next game. And you can't always do that. Yeah, that seems like it's hard to get that all presented in the right sort of way so that people will do it correctly. Like, okay, put this crater sticker down and then next time open this envelope or turn to this. So if the rules are tied into the thing you just open like the crater, you've got to bundle them together. But if you just decide that in game five, there's going to be a new rule, which is the office was just bought out by a new corporation.

and now you've got some analysts here deciding if your job needs to stay. And you know that always happens at game five. At the end of game four, you could be like, you've been bought out. Right. Ooh, what does that mean? Game five, you do the rules for getting bought out. Right. Because it's not conditional.

It's going to happen at the beginning of game five. Like those sorts of things. Yeah, yeah, I like it. So has there, you know, we're going to run short of time, which I knew what's going to happen. I know. I'll come back on sometime. I appreciate it. I, well, so, but it may be even deeper than that.

Has there been a comedy legacy game yet? Because it feels like everything we're talking about is like the heart of like good comedy too, right? You're creating these like surprise moments. You're like building on these like interesting stories and narratives. And you know, the traditional thing is like, yeah, we're at war or we're fighting these demons or we're fighting a disease. Yeah, I don't. I love the toughest idea we're working on. I feel like there's like a real, you know, it could be.

like restoration games is working on a game right now which is definitely silly and fun in almost a comedy game and normally I would say oh don't make a comedy board game because every time you play it the jokes get stale

but the whole point of a legacy game is you only get the jokes once. Machikoro Legacy had a real tongue-in-cheek tone and actually the draft I turned over was definitely much more of a comedy than the version that come out

which is not a criticism. The Machikoro brand is owned by a Japanese company. And I think my American humor did not translate. It was very much a cultural thing. I worked on the Ugiot brand for a while. It's a very, very different rules. It's very, I mean, something's not funny.

It's just my sense of humor and, you know, and their brand, and it goes back to being in advertising and their brand. And also they say, hey, this is going into like 12 countries. And this might fly in England and U.S., but everyone else is going to be confused. So we've got to be a little more straight lace here. It's still very tongue and cheap. It's still very.

happened and then this happened but it was um yeah it was different like now you have fountains before you used have coffee fountains so that people could work all night like the idea that people would just build fountains of an endless coffee on tap right um and then people were just having stomach troubles and stuff like that from all the coffee they drank like it wasn't highbrow humor yeah it wasn't complete potty humor but it was certainly it was a type of thing that kids wouldn't get it and parents were like oh i get that joke yeah and uh a lot of that had to be taken out for just international stuff. No, yeah, it just seems like perfect space.

Because like the games that are, you know, sort of designed to be like funny games, right? Whether it's like, you know, your cards against humanity or your, you know, various picturesque party games, they have a shelf life. It's like once you burn your way through the content, it's not, it's not funny anymore. But yeah, this, the legacy thing, it's just like, it feels so perfect for that, for that expression, which is a, is really intriguing. There you go. Free idea for people.

just bang out a game in a couple months. There you go. No problem. Easy. Yeah. You know, it's easy. Game design, legacy games and comedy, three easy things should be no problems. I absolutely love it.

So I have really enjoyed this talk. I know we have to have to wrap up soon. So I've already mentioned the pandemic legacy season zero coming out soon. if people are more interested in other things that they would love to learn about you, depending on if they listen to this months or years from now, where's the best place for them to find your games or learn about your stuff or connect with what you're up to? Right now, talking from 2020, as I know you said that people listen to.

You can find me on something called Twitter. At Rob Davio, and I'll spell that. R-O-B, D-I-N-D-A-B-A-B-A-B-A-V-A-V-A-V-A-V-V-A-U. I also am part of Restoration Games. You go to Restoration Games.com. I have a website, Robdabio.com, which is horribly out of date, but I promise we'll fix real soon. That's where you can find me.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Rob. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm very hopeful that we get to do another one or make a sweet, hilarious game together at some point. Yeah, comedy. We're going to do it. It's an office legacy game.

It's going to be what we need a name, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's see, before we close out. Office park. Like, what sets that stage of, in my mind, mind-numbing, you know, a lot of cubicles, a lot of... Yeah, I mean, we could, like, you know, we could license, or you could, you could Dobert Legacy or something, but... You could, or the office. I mean, I think the office nailed it where they had paper sales.

Yeah, yeah. Which is, you understand what it is, but no one aspires to be in it. And no offense to anyone who does aspire to be in it. I don't think it's like when I grew up, I want to sell paper to companies at both. Right. Yeah. But that to me is a vibe. Like getting back to the original pitch, I'm like, I want an office vibe.

Right. Yeah. I want the petty politics. I want to lean on. Yeah, like corporate ladder. Oh, you know what? I'm working on a game that's kind of on pause right now, which is a comedy legacy game. It's a type of thing.

And this happens, another thing, designed it. You may have games that are fun and you love them and they don't go to market for any number of reasons. So the publisher is having a little bit of second thoughts of whether they want a legacy game of their brand. So always put a kill fee in your contracts if you do work for hire. Good pro tip. Like I will get a royalty if it goes and I will get a smaller kill fee if it doesn't go. I say it's 50-50 against the market. But that one actually is quite a bit of comedy.

It's just on pause. Yeah. Yeah. Similarly, either kill fee, if you're hired on contract to do a project or, you know, a return clause if they license your game and then don't publish it or stop publishing it that you can actually get back. Oh, yeah, you're 100% new return clause if it's your own original design. Where I am in a position where people say, would you do a legacy game of our product? There's not much I can repurpose for a different brand. There's some.

I could take the story or stuff that, you know, got added to it. But I'm in a position where I have to say, okay. But if you don't make this, I've just spent a year of. my life working on it. We need something that I can recruit from my time. Yep. Okay, great, great final pro tip. Thank you so much for the time and we will, I'm sure, be chatting again soon. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and share.

is 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 fine books are safe.