#34 - Unhelpful Advice

Music.

Hello, and welcome to Fun Problems, the problems of fun. I'm Peter C. Hayward. And I'm AJ Brandon. Live! And for the first time, you can see our beautiful smiling faces and our beautiful smiling backgrounds. Some of us have put more of it in the background than others. I'm not going to name any names. The viewer can decide who. Viewer and listener, we have both now.

Well, I mean, our listeners are just confused right now because they're listening to a normal episode being like, what are they talking about? Do you want to explain what's happening, A to the J? Yes, we are now recording video as well as audio, so we can upload this. It's going to be experimental. We'll see how it goes. But we are now doing one take, goes up live, however it goes, and hopefully people enjoy it and find it on YouTube.

And if the video version sucks, this whole part will be cut and we'll just record a new intro. This episode is sponsored by Monster Rehab, because that's what I'm going to be drinking. How much money did they pay us, AJ? Well, how many bottles did they give you? I just don't have anything.

None. Nothing. I just drink them. I love them. AJ, what are we talking about today? Today we're talking about unhelpful advice. And you wanted to frame this in a particular way. Do you want to explain how you wanted to frame it and why you wanted to frame it the way you wanted to frame it? Yes. So basically, I've been doing this for a while and people ask me, like, how do do I X?

And I've, I've hit the point where I've accrued a big pile of advice that doesn't help people, which is sort of the opposite of the point of this podcast. But where my hope is that in this episode, I will share the unhelpful version of the advice and you will convert that into something actually actionable for the listener slash viewer for the audience, because I don't know how to do it. A lot of this is going to be like, just start 12 years ago and be me.

And very few people, Not no one, but very few people can do that. Yeah. So thanks for giving me the easy job this week with the Peter Lett episode. The first in many months. I mean, I imagine... Should we jump straight into it or do we have any follow-up? Yeah, let's jump into it. I imagine that the way this is going to play out is going to be, you know, we riff a bit back and forth on it. I don't think you actually have no useful advice or no element of this.

Well, I'm glad you set up so nicely because the first one I have, I think, is the most helpful and is probably something we've talked about before. So I signed nine games this year. I I just got a contract for my fifth or sixth game this year. I'm signing games at a pretty high rate, which is, I don't think it's arrogant to state that as a fact, it is a fact. Very few people are signing games at the rate that I am. And so how am I doing that is the question he said somewhat egotistically.

I'm asking myself this question, but people genuinely do ask me this. First piece of advice, which is something that we've talked about is I now focus so hard on product. I don't even let a game get past the first stage. You know how you kill your darlings or whatever? That's stage zero for me. I start with a title, and then once I have a title and a theme that even if the game didn't work, that title and that theme would sell.

Then I go into my folder. I'm like, okay, what mechanism that I'm excited about can I apply to this? So start with a title, product, product, product, product. I'll give an example, which is that about three months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and was like, I got it. I had a game title concept theme product that I just knew would sell. And like, as much as anyone can know, and this is why it's unhelpful. Like, how do you know I've been doing this for 13 years?

What I, what I used to do, and I don't do it. Okay. I'm gonna give you two stories. What I don't do anymore. And I used to do is come up with a game and design a full game and then sort of like 70% of the way through and be like, and what would a theme for this be? I'm going to use my game Cartouche, which is right here if you're watching the video. An example of this, this one had a generic nothing theme. It was like, what if water existed?

And I designed this full game and then Jeff Fraser came in and redesigned it and made it actually function, which my version didn't. And then once we were done, we were like, great, we've got this cool, interesting mechanism, cool, interesting game with no theme. And that is so much harder to theme. We had to work backwards and be like, well, what could this be? How would this work? What does make sense? And we came up with like Egypt, which is a fine theme. It's a non-theme theme

almost. Like it works for all the mechanisms. We tried to make it more theme-y by making it about Hatshepsut, who was the female pharaoh who got erased from history and you're trying to restore her. But it was really like starting with the game and then working backwards and trying to get a product to fit into it. And it was a huge flop that cost the company thousands and thousands of dollars. Because no one was excited by that product. This is our first big box.

Show and Tile was our previous one, but that was still like a $20, $30 game. This was our first like entry into the Euro space. And we started with game and then went to, sorry, we started with mechanism and then went product and it didn't work. The second, the example that I'll give is that I woke up in the middle of the night and was like, I got it. I got a full product. And the idea was witch's brew and you were witches brewing coffee in a coffee store.

And correct me if I'm wrong, AJ, Jay, but I'm like, I know who's going to buy that. I know what that's going to look like on Kickstarter. I know everything about that that's going to sell. Witch's Brew is an amazing title for that. It tells you everything about the game. And I am confident in myself, again, unhelpful advice, to know that I can design that game. So I went into my folder of mechanisms, was like this one, aha, pulled it out.

Within a week or however long it took, I had, I think I spent 11 hours in a single day just working on this and nothing else, sort of hyper fixating. I had a game that I was super proud of and a theme I was really proud of. I iterated over the course of the week. I printed it, got ready to show to a publisher, and then this happened. I'm going to show you the video, watch as AJ is going to describe it. This game got announced.

AJ, can you describe what you're seeing? I can't because while we are live, my internet connection isn't holding up super well for the recording, uploading, and doing this, but I know the story. You know from previous, yeah. It is a game called Tea Witches by the the artist and designer of Flamecraft. Flamecraft is another amazing instant buy from the title alone game. And so Witch's Brew is dead. And that's fine. These things happen.

I end up re-theming it to something that's like adjacent, but different enough that it separates itself. But the way that I always look at this is like, what a good sign. I came up with this very saleable game and discovered that in the week that I was working on it, someone announced that game in a very saleable way.

So my first piece of unhelpful advice, which I think is the most helpful they're going to get least helpful from here is product product product product start with a title that will sell aj how can that be utilized i have a few notes on this one first i want to talk about the title specifically and then i want to touch a little bit on product design i want to go too deep on this because we have actually talked a fair bit about product design including my talk why your good game won't sell check

it out on youtube i'll put a link in the description below which i have also referenced on here a few times but i'm going to bring that same video up a few times because.

But for titles i just have a couple examples of different titles that are good in different ways, scott alms i think is a genius at product design i think you should look at all of his games to see how to do it 100 i mean like genuinely if someone is a successful designer they're probably good at this yes i would say like one exclusively but probably go ahead yeah i'd say say one big success like one hit it doesn't necessarily mean if you've got two it's like almost definitely

almost definitely i think of john gilmore is almost being like the for the last decade or for for a period of time the king of this dead of winter was like what's the show the walking dead as a board game dinosaur island was jurassic park as a board game he had another like one at vault wars was another one and he had like a fourth one as well he just like kept on dinosaur island almost predicting the trend did i not say dinosaur island i meant to

say dinosaur this island he kept on and then path of light and shadow was game of thrones like the and he just had this real knack for like reading the zeitgeist and designing that right before anyone else did. And like the tiny epic series is just like such a good name like immediately tells you what it is gets you interested in it like tiny and epic how do you do that yeah so you've been eaten just like Like such an alluring emotional feeling thing, you know?

Oh, Kids on Bikes, John Gilmore. Same thing, like capitalizing on the Stranger Things kind of vibe. Yeah. Charcuterie. Kids on Brooms as a follow-up. Oh, Charcuterie. That was like, I saw that Kickstarter, didn't read a single mechanism, immediately bought it. Because I knew my girlfriend's a foodie and I knew she would go nuts for that game. And she did. She's played that more times than a lot of my games. Some recent examples. Let's hit each other with fake swords.

What's that game? Is that what it's called? Yeah, that's what it's called. That's the title. Oh, I haven't heard of this one. It's from Explained Kids, and I think Eric Lang. Eric Lang's involved with Explained Kids, right? And it's like a card game where you're trying to get sets of cards, but frequently you'll break into duels over the cards, and then you have different rules based off the cards, how to H-O-F-I-C-E sorts. I haven't played it, but what an amazing product design.

So how does this unhelpful advice solidify into helpful advice? Well, I think that there's a few ways that you can look at these successful titles and successful products and sort of absorb them. I think if you have the inkling of an idea, give that elevator pitch to someone you don't know, someone who is very comfortable hurting your feelings and see...

Not your mom. them right and be like would you buy this or does this interest you at all and if it does interest them ask them what about it interests them right because when i tell you to give someone an elevator pitch i mean like a one sentence suck but what you're gonna do is you're gonna give them a few paragraphs of like oh here's all the cool stuff going about it what's the thing that they were like oh that part sounds kind of neat take that part

build everything around it make that your You're guiding light and that's your North Star and everything is focused in making it that version of that thing. And if you want to look at examples of this done well, just walk around your local board game store. See what games other people pick up. See what games catch your eye. And try to think of like what elements of it are standing out to you. Try to be very critical about it.

And I would say you gave the advice of like start with the title or the theme. That's not always how games start. I think that's not necessarily useful for everyone. I think some people do better starting with the mechanics, but I do agree that it needs to quickly become tied into the rest of your game. And one way that you could do that is if you start with mechanics first and you're having trouble figuring out how to make it mesh with the theme, think of a wacky theme.

Because a wacky theme can help you incorporate weird mechanics that wouldn't otherwise make sense. Famously, I think I've said this in the pilot episode of this show, plants versus zombies was because he needed something where people knew that they couldn't move the towers. He didn't want to have like an archer because why wouldn't the archer just walk to where they needed to be? He needed something that was literally rooted to the ground.

So he put plants for the defense and he wanted something to fight against that's very slow moving in huge numbers, plants versus zombies. Yeah. We're live so i can't say let's stop until i think of it you guys know what idiots we really are.

This is what happens in real life oh yes i might have told this story on the podcast before i have an assistant who comes by once a week to help me out stuff and she's not a gamer at all she's played my games after working for me for eight months but she's like she's not the kind of person to go into a game and so i was trying to explain this idea to her between like a game that oh oh, that sounds fun. And a game of like, ooh, I want to play that.

And it played out like I'd scripted it. I was telling her about Cartouche. I was like, you're archaeologists, you're rebuilding the hatch sets, like things and Cartouche is this. And she's like, that sounds really cool. She's being very nice. And then I followed it up with, this is, that time you killed me is chess, but time travel. She's like, what? I was like, there it is. Like, if you're not getting are like, ooh, then for me, it's dead.

Also, that's such a good point. Once you find that phrase that catches people's attention, that gets people excited, write it down. That is what you're putting on your sell sheet. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to move on to my point two. And remember, I feel bad about this.

This is all unhelpful advice. So you're going to be like, cool. Thanks, Peter. Great. AJ is here to turn it into helpful advice. I've written as my note, make games with no speed bead bumps. Jeff Bezos, I think, calls them paper cuts. CJ the X, my favorite YouTuber, calls it friction or drag. He calls it wind drag or something like that. And basically, while you're playing the game, and we've done a whole episode on rules exceptions. This is that, but like to the 10th degree.

While you're playing the game, if you're like, what? I cut that. Like anything that makes you be like, how does that? It's gone. And how do you do that? You'd be be a designer for 13 years, but also just like be aggressive, be, be aggressive. Like if I'm watching people and they stumble, the common designer reaction is like, well, okay, but they don't get it or they're having, I'll give you an example.

The game that Witch's Brew became, I was playing in Toronto with my friends, Frankie and Jenna, who don't listen to this, who you know, you've, you've been to their house. We've recorded in their house before. We've recorded three episodes in their house and they were playing this cafe game. And Jenna just kept being like, what is the difference between draw a spell and cast a spell? Like she couldn't wrap her hand, couldn't wrap her head around it.

And Frankie was like, this is a really obvious difference. You're the idiot here, Jenna. And we all had a laugh. And like, I was like, cool, not a problem. Played it again yesterday. Different, like professional board game designers playing it and being like, every time he went to draw, he would cast. And every time he went to cast, he would draw. And, or, you know, the terms were just very misleading. So it's very easy to

be like, that's two people. That like, no, as soon as it's two people, it's a thousand people. If your game gets published, that's thousands, hundreds, millions of people, depending on what level of success you reach. And I'll tell you if it's millions of people, it's not going to reach millions. Anything like that now, I just aggressively prune. How do you recognize that? How do you do that? Ah, I'm not being helpful today. AJ, how can people action that?

So if you are as good as we are, I'm going to arrogantly compare myself to you in this one perspective, at least. Then you can pay attention to people while you play. Many designers, especially new designers, aren't good at multitasking like that. They can't think through the strategy of what they're doing and think through possible changes to the game and pay attention to body language and questions that come up and those sorts of things.

If that's you, don't play. If that's you, sit it outside the playtest, if at all possible, just watch other people play so that you can take notes and pay more attention to body language and do all those sorts of things. I think by removing yourself from the game, that gives you the best chance of being able to identify these things.

But if anyone ever asks you a question write it down if anyone ever says you know that they don't understand something or that or they get confused or mix something up write it down make a note of that that that's something you have to fix later that's a speed bump yes so that's how you identify the speed bumps how do you fix it you have to listen to like every other episode we've done but i would say i'd say like some good

rules of thumb don't be scared of changing other systems in order to fix that speed bump. A lot of the times when you see designs that have Band-Aid solutions, it's because they refuse to rework another part of the game to fix the speed bump. So they slap something else on top of it to try and solve the problem. And I think that you need to be willing to look at other options with changing things about the design.

Sometimes, though, it's as simple as graphic design. Sometimes it's as simple as changing zones of play.

This is something where I have to be extra cognizant because I do 99% of my playtesting on TTS and on TTS sometimes people forget things not because it's unintuitive not because they didn't forget the rule not because it's not a good graphic design not because of x y or z it's purely because it wasn't in their field of view because they were too zoomed in and you need to be able to identify that so I would say playtesting on TTS you have to be especially vigilant and you have to be

especially careful figuring out what the cause of those issues are and if you're not confident be able to figure out what the cause of the issue is then you have to make sure you get some physical playtesting in which you should do anyway i just don't you 100 should i might have talked about this before i'm a big believer in working as close to the final form as you can now we're actually talking about before we started recording that like i now i i aren't my games

way more than you're supposed to because i just want to see what everything looks like. I do all the UI. I'm not a graphic designer. My UI is not professional level by any means, but I want to make sure that everything is in the right place so that if it goes to a graphic designer who doesn't know the game, because a lot of graphic designers will be like, they don't have time to play all the games they're working on. They can imitate it and it'll function.

Okay. The next note I think we covered. So feel free to say, skip this one. Don't settle or compromise or make excuses.

This is the number one thing I see new designers doing like okay i'll give a really harsh example i'll play a game i'll be like this is never going to exist this is almost this is going to overlap with our daniel games blog yeah episode or two-part episode which is that like most prototypes i look at i'm like cool i hope that you're enjoying designing this i hope that you're learning from it if your goal with this prototype is to get it published that is realistically not going to happen

because this This is not a product game. This is not a good enough game. And a lot of designers will be like, yeah, but, and it's like, cool, you're now going to spend the next six months to two years of your time beating this dead horse until you finally give up and move on. I iterate very fast. I make a lot of games. I throw them out very quickly. We talked about this before, it drives AJ nuts sometimes because I'm like, I want the hits. I want the bangers. So yeah, don't settle a compromise.

Only make hit games. How helpful, AJ. This, it depends entirely on your goals. So this podcast is primarily aimed at people who want to be professional designers in the industry who want to make board games that will get published and that are going to sell copies and that gamers are going to like.

If you want to make a game for you and your three friends, I honestly think that, you know, I don't really know why you're listening to a podcast like this because so much of I'm going to defend this hypothetical person.

If this is your hobby i think this is an amazingly fun hobby it is fun to make a thing it is fun to show it to friends it is fun to watch people have those moments of joy even in a game that's not going to get published like i think those are all fun things and if that's your hobby like you you listen to you're a game designer but let's pretend you're not a game designer you play magic the gathering you're going to listen to mark rosewater's podcast because you like magic the gathering

like not because you want to professionally play or design magic gathering but because it's your hobby and you like hearing about it so i think there is a portion of our audience who are like this is the thing i do for fun if it makes money great bonus but that's not what they're in it for and i i see you and you are valid i i don't disagree with that i just think so much of our advice is aimed towards people who want to do it professionally that like i would I'd generally be curious to see what

percentage of our podcast is actually actionable and useful for them comparatively to a professional designer who I would say 100% of our advice is useful for. I'd say 70%. You don't think? You'd say 70%? Was it 30%? Or is that the fun question? Have you listened to previous episodes? There's a lot of stuff from like, I don't even agree with that anymore. Do we have an email address? Come join the Discord. We'll put a link to the Discord in the show notes.

Come tell us if you can answer that question, because we would love to hear. We do also have an email. It's in every single show notes. Every single one. What's the email? Tell us what our email is. Our podcast, it's funproblemspod at gmail.com. Nice. Okay. Anything else on that one? Don't think so. Cool.

Okay. This is one that I've been thinking a lot about just in the last two weeks. I put it on this list, which is, again, I'm going to read my note and then go into it. Uh, integrate themes so much you don't even notice the work it's doing. And this could be a whole episode and maybe this will be a whole episode. Maybe this is not on place in this list, but it's just been so top of mind lately. I designed Witch's Brew. It was a coffee game.

And from day zero, it was a coffee game. Everything in that game was about making brewing coffee, collecting coffee ingredients, et cetera, et cetera. Tea Witches announced, I was like, cool, got to retheme it. But so much of it was also witches.

It was witches and coffee to the bones. like everything you could point to any part of that game and be like that's witches and coffee or that's witches or coffee there's nothing that was like and there's a mechanism because you need a mechanism so when i was like well can't be witches making coffee because tea witches exist which i hope does really well by the way this is not me being bitter it's just like this is this is the

nature of the game uh the game of making games not the nature of tea witches i was like cool well what else could witches be doing so i changed it to witch doctors so now you are witches who were like helping wounded unicorns and dragons. And I stripped out all the coffee and I brought it to the table and it was probably 60, 70% harder to play because in the coffee version, one milk and one coffee makes a coffee.

One milk, sorry, two milk and one coffee makes a latte. And you're like, yeah, of course, lattes require more milk. In the new version, it was like one healing crystal and one potion make this. And it was completely arbitrary. I had tried to theme as much as I could, but it was coffee to the bone. So it was really like pasted on theme. AJ and I have a bug game, which the publisher at one point was like, maybe not bugs.

And we had to be like, you understand if not bugs, everything needs to be reworked. Like the example I always give is, you know, there's a butterfly and a caterpillar. One of them can fly, one of them can't. Which one is which? With that theme, you don't even think about it. So that's what I mean, in like the work that the theme is doing, you don't even notice. And for me, this comes from starting from that title or as you said, very early on. Integrating a theme as hard as you can.

Is that sufficiently unhelpful for this episode, AJ? Or have I crossed the line into vaguely helpful advice? I think you've crossed the line to vaguely helpful, but let me add a little bit more. I'm so bad at this. So bad at not being helpful. It's okay, guys. The next one, incredibly unhelpful.

Is that an AJ-led episode? Just a shout at me. No, no, the next piece of advice I have. Oh, okay. I know this is because I don't agree with everything on Daniel's blog.

Oh, right, right. No, I mean, we've got... anyway yeah we'll cross the between make my make my vaguely helpful advice more helpful yes so i'm going to reiterate my advice for integrating theme with for integrating theme when you start mechanics first bottom up where if you need to do something and it's not quite working look at something wacky to be able to make it work and make sense i'd also say if you're having trouble finding the right mechanic to fit with your

theme and it's not feeling cohesive you should read isaac's isaac shalev's and jeff engelstein's book the building blocks of the building blocks of game design i can't live aj you know that i stutter now how brutal so that's a book that's all about mechanics just a huge list of them it's an encyclopedia and how they suggest using them examples of how they were used, things like that. Really interesting read, and it's really good for giving you some inspiration

as to what could possibly be a good fit. Amazing. This is perhaps the least helpful. No, it's probably the second least helpful. I have not gone to conventions this year. This is not the advice. This is incidental. I'm taking the year off conventions. And as a result, it's harder for me to pitch games. This is what happens when you don't go to conventions. It's not impossible. I think we'll do an episode on conventions if we haven't already.

But I am not going to conventions. So I was like, okay, I really want to like start. I've got some game designs I'm really proud of. I really want to start the ball rolling. I organized one-on-one meetings with about a dozen publishers, maybe more.

Just like emailed them was like hi i'm peter here's a list of my games that i've made can i jump on a call with you not to pitch you a specific game but to learn what you're interested in what your company's doing where you're going etc etc this is actually really common in hollywood where i live it's just called meetings uh so like when you get signed with an agent the first thing you'll do is do a round of meetings and you'll just meet with the execs from every network and be like they'll be

like look we really want a female-led crime show we really want a family thing that users, whatever. They'll have a list of things that they want. And that doesn't mean go away and write exactly that for exactly that network and spend six months of your life, because then if they say no, maybe it's a no. But by doing this, A, I now have detailed notes on what a dozen publishers are looking for. In an ideal world, this would be on their websites, but it updates so much that that's not their job.

Their job is to make and release games, not to provide game designers with information on how to best pitch to them. So this is an incredible, I'm fully aware of how helpful this is because this is an incredibly privileged position where I can be like, Hey, jump on a call with me. You'll have a good time. And B, not only do I have these individual lists, I'm now super aware of the trends of tomorrow. Like what these publishers in aggregate are looking for.

Have we talked about the game I play? I don't think we have. Yeah. I play a game with publishers and they're like, a game? Hooray, a game. I love games. And I list about a dozen published games, not by me, but games that they know and ask, if this came to you, if you didn't know this was going to be hit, would you sign it? Yes or no? And they've never thought in this framework. So they're like, this is so fun. They learn more about their company. I narrow down exactly what their tastes are.

It's fun for all. Most people can't do this. That's unfair.

Fair but like the games i use are something like azul because some publishers are like if if you brought them azul without the clicky clacky pieces without it being a worldwide hit does that fit their line sometimes it doesn't even though it's a hit you know there's a lot of games that i use as little litmus tests and so yeah the unhelpful advice i have is meet with every publisher and ask them exactly what they're looking for in a way that charms and delights them,

you know i think that's helpful as it is i don't think you need to say anything aj no no just be peter's level of charming with his level of connections and his ludology this this is why we had to call this episode unhelpful advice because i'm like that helps no one like that is the least helpful thing you can hear as an aspiring designer and i'm sorry but like i aj is gonna aj is gonna make it actionable aj so i think there are two things you can do that

sort of act on this. Emulate, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Thing number one is if you're privileged enough to be able to go to conventions. Then just go to every booth. Just take 10 seconds. Say, hi, I'm, you know, AJ. Or, you know, your name, whichever you prefer. No, if you don't say AJ, this will not work. AJ, it's okay. The episode is called Unhelpful Advice. We can say anything. There's no rules. By the way, for video viewers, it is 113 degrees or 45 degrees in LA right now.

So if I'm getting increasingly red, I had to turn off my air conditioner for the recording. I am going to be dripping by the end of this. And it's not just because of how attracted I am to AJ. It is mostly a temperature thing. Only mostly. Only mostly. So yeah, take a few seconds with the publisher at each booth and just say, hey, this is my name. Here's my social, whatever. But whether they're interested or not in your game. Just say, hey, what types of games would you be looking for?

And if they say no to your game, you can ask what types of changes would make it appeal to them, if any, or what types of games they're looking for in the future, so that if you have anything else that you might be able to pitch to them, you can show them that right away, and if not, you can keep it in mind for later. And like Peter said, if you do this with everyone at an entire large convention, like PAXU or something, it's going to give you a good idea of what games they're looking for.

You did this, right? Yeah, that's exactly what I did. And I don't recommend playing Peter's game with them at the convention. I don't think they'll have time or interest. Let's just make a blanket statement. We never recommend playing any of my games. That is the official fun problems policy. Don't play Peter C. Haywood's games. Good policy. But like, yeah, if you're, can you imagine if it became a trend though? And then all of a sudden a publisher's like, this is the seventh person in a

row who's ask me about publishers. Oh yeah, don't do this. I was going to say we should cut that part out. I don't want to subject the publishers to that. Okay, here's what we should do. I'm going to pitch this to you live on air. We should do a series where we get publishers on and play that game. Ooh, that sounds fun. Isn't that a fun idea? That's a fun idea. Let's put that in the back pocket. We're running out of advice anyway. We've resorted to... We're out of helpful

advice. Here's some unhelpful advice. Here's just some things we might do at some point. I mean, this episode specifically is unhelpful advice. Another thing you can do is when you cold email publishers, the typical thing that you do is you pitch them the game that you think is most likely to get signed by them, not necessarily every game you have in your back pocket. If they say no, then you can follow up and you can be like, well, what types of games are you looking for?

Again, if you have one that you've already designed, maybe you could pitch that one and segue.

Way and if not then you know again for next time what types of things they're looking for so even if you can't make it to a convention there is a way to be able to get some of that information start building a head canon yeah implied but not stated is i then only pitch that publisher the stuff that they're looking for i hope i hope that was obvious without me saying it i sort of to tack on to that whole general thing too is when they reject a game and

most of my pitches get rejected the vast majority of pitches i make i'm signing 10 games a year i'm probably pitching reaching 30 40 50 100 like i don't know the numbers some designers have you seen this some designers track their pitches and and sign stuff that's really interesting to me but i do not i think i would find that demoralizing yeah i i will often reply and be like why and because they know me from the conversation or from

my reputation or from this podcast or whatever they're not like oh i don't want to get into an argument with this guy they will be like here's why and that's super helpful um i'll use kurt covert i don't think he'll mind me using him as an example smirk and Dagger, he was like, look, this game is a lot of fun. I really like it. I think like he didn't like the theme, so I fully rethemed it like. But like in the email, I was like, here's a theme that would work.

And he's like, that's a great theme that would work. I'm not going to sign it because we want our games to be, after we play test it, it sticks in people's brains, which in its own way is unhelpful advice, but I'm like, oh, okay. Like some people really want a slick polish thing. Kurt wants something that is going to stand out from the market in a particular way.

And that's really useful for me to know. So I'm not going to pitch him X, Y, Z, because I know that even though it's a solid game that another publisher genuinely will and has signed, it's not going to work for Kurt because what he's looking for, Cardboard Alchemy, another great example, they want a game they can bloat. That's not a very kind word, but they want a Kickstarter that has, I think Critter Kitchen had 72 stretch goals.

My 18 card button shy game is not going to do that. Like it's not physically possible. You know, our game Battle Bugs with AEG, that's not going to have 72 it just can't like it doesn't make sense unless they wanted to do 7 years worth of content in which case cool we've got to go design for another 2 years and playtest for another 3 years before we can even get there so, Saying why not in my position can be really helpful. Anything on that or I'll jump on to my next point? Next point. Okay.

I had to frame this episode. Yeah. Agreed. I had to frame this episode as unhelpful advice because in a sense, don't do this. I can get away with it. And I think maybe AJ is like, this is not helpful to tell people, but that's why the episode is called Unhelpful Advice. I think there's something in here for someone, but don't do this. I will design a game that is mechanically rock solid and then pitch it saying, here's what I have and here's where I want it to go.

As a new designer, you can't do this. AJ, can you reply now?

I feel so uncomfortable. And then I'll come back with some examples. But this one makes me cringe. This is me visibly cringing.

If i were you i would not have publicly said that i did this i i think it's useful for people to hear what the life is like once you hit a certain point i don't know maybe i'm wrong maybe maybe you're just like peter you're just exposing yourself as a charlatan i don't think you're a shot i don't know like the it's not like the games you pitch like like you said it's it's not that they're like bad they're really good they just aren't done they need a lot of polish right right?

Like that's what the 70% line is, right? No, no, not, not polish. Okay. I will go into my example. So Critic Kitchen, probably my biggest hit at this stage. We pitched, me and Alex designed that. The core, the, like the three workers that you put out or the three chefs that you put out, so fun, just instant, like hits all the brain chemicals, go listen to our brain chemical episode. We're on YouTube. So we can have a little thing being like brain chemical episode, pop up in the corner.

Super, super, just fun to play. Like just one of those things where you're like, oh, this is going to be a fun experience. Then we were like, look, we want this to have player powers. We want to add this new thing called zoo chefs where you can like recruit these guys who have individual powers. We haven't done it. We haven't written those yet because we know that we can, and we can point to our ludography and say like, we've done this before. So the game is done, but the content is not.

Battle Bugs, our game with AG, we pitched six factions, four of which were really thoroughly play tested. We We were like, these four could go to publication today, and we'd be happy with them. The other two are not. But from the four, you get the idea of how it works. And we promised to do the work. And again, reputation helps being able to point, like, call Peter Vaughn, and he will tell you, we do the work. But it's not a completely finished, ready-to-print product.

Yeah, so it's interesting, because those are very, very different examples. balls with battle bugs that needed some development time but development's the whole point of it like those factions standard yeah yeah those factions i think were fun as is i think they're much more fun now that we're a year into development and all that but i don't think either of us were happy with those at the time of pitch but i was like look i want to pitch this now because

if no one buys it i don't want to spend another six months developing yeah that one also as a product is very different though because like we could have just launched it with four and the game would have been done you know that that could be a most publishers could launch critic kitchen without any of the content we added and it would be a game but so i would i would alchemy want those 72 stretch goals and we

were like we will bring those to you but we haven't done them so i would argue that the game, wasn't 50 to 70 done it's like you did have a complete game just not with the, content that gives it more replayability. The exact words I used were 50-70% of content. I must have missed that. Shame with these live recordings, hasn't it? And to your point though, a lot of these games, I've played it 5-10 times and been like, cool, this is ready to pitch.

Whereas a published game, ideally we'll play it 100 times. I have not balanced to it being played 100 times.

Make sense yes and that's more i think what you were responding to originally before i told you you were wrong and silly and i had a better beard than you yeah i i think this is something i can work off of cool so my off-the-cuff helpful version of this advice is if you have a game that uses say a map right you don't necessarily need to make the map modular you can build a game with one good map if you're doing like a hidden movement game right make it with one map and

you I think it's fine to go to a publisher and say, hey, it's totally done. It'd be cool if we could make the board double-sided and I could do another map, but I haven't done it yet. I think that is totally reasonable. And I don't think that's a turnoff to the publisher saying, hey, there could be more content in here. But as it is, it's already good and could be published. Okay. I feel like in today's market especially, you want that. Maybe it's a me thing.

I want that extra content, extra content, extra content. content but as a designer i can't afford to make all the stuff before it's signed it just doesn't make sense because let's say i do it takes six months of my design time and then no one signs it cool i could have i could have made four other 50 to 70 content games in that time you know what i mean i understand why your reaction was so like why are you telling people this that makes a lot more sense now i think it

totally depends on where you're as a designer too if this is your first game you've been working on it for five years and like you really want this game to succeed put in the extra time if you're trying to do this full time and you've got like six games on the go at once and you're pitching all these different games to different publishers at the same time don't go to 100 with each of these games.

Feel like for a first design you should but then it's the problem that we see all the time of people who just make a first design obsessively and never get anywhere with it yeah i think it would be fair if if you make extra content but like us right you you don't necessarily have it totally balanced it's like this content is here it functions but it needs some development i think that might be like a level to go to what do you think yeah it's hard to say i i'm

i'm i'm the unhelpful one aj i mean i'm i'm kind of in that like unknown state you know like there are people who know me in the industry but not many and i have a lot of designs but i've barely pitched to many and even though i have a signed game with aeg you know that doesn't it helps me start emails like hey i'm aij i have a game with aeg here's my pitch yeah but once it comes out and hopefully does well that helps you even

more like i have a wonderful working relationship with all play was that that's why i'm so lazy i'm like i don't need to pitch my games once this comes out everyone's gonna see that i'm a genius and then they're gonna look at all my pitches i've got like 10.

Completed pitchable games i'm just not really bothering oh crap was it oh yeah i work a lot with all play i think i'm signing my sixth or seventh game with him or something um and that relationship exists a hundred percent because he reached out to me being like that time you killed me loved it let's meet and i was like okay random person and then we met and now he is my most frequent publisher collaborator. Yeah, by far, like not even close.

And it's like, again, it's not helpful, but like once you have a hit, it is easier to pitch future games. That wasn't one of my pieces of unhelpful advice, but it absolutely, oh, there it is actually. I'm going to skip one then. So unhelpful advice, get a reputation for being someone who's good to work with.

People generally speaking, like working with me, I want to say like Joe and I, Joe from small play of a great relationship peter vaughn and i hang out as friends all the time and love working together like i don't think i'm a difficult designer i noticed that you didn't mention me.

So, no, I think you and I, like, I think AEG are really enjoying working with us and they've said, like, they've kind of closed the doors to pictures, but we are allowed to because they like us and they know that we are going to do the work. I meant as a co-designer, not with your publishers. Oh, no, I'm talking about publishers. That's why I was like, I guess you were fun to work with as a publisher. No, I'm talking about like with publishers.

Publishers like me. Oh, God, this is the most arrogant episode. I feel so uncomfortable with this, but we're going to power on through. Publishers see my Facebook posts. They read my book reviews. They know that I, you know, they might watch an interview with me or play one of my games. And they're like, this guy seems fun to work with, which hopefully I am. And then I meet with them and I'm like, also, I'm a really hard worker. Here's my references.

And so I have started to develop, I'm saying started, I'm nowhere near the level of like John D. Clare or, you know, any of the big designers, but I have started to build a reputation as someone who is fun to work with, will do the work is passionate and will make a game that hopefully will sell for them.

And that's you know their job the way they keep their lights on is by selling games so that one's sort of more important than the rest but as you know people want to work with people they want to work with more than they want to risk like you know two two people being equal you want the one who's fun to work with and two people not being equal you really really really want the person you know is going to put in 110 or even just reliability if you have someone who you

know is good and you're like this other person might be better but i know this person is reliable they're going to.

Do the job they're not going to you know mess anything up and i know how to work with them i know like the way that they work that's why it's like it's it's not even like just straight nepotism or something it's just like if you have a good experience with someone one you're way more likely to just go back to them than to go searching and maybe finding someone that's good yeah all right so without having uh i'm at as of today i'm at 21 signed games without

publishers without having 21 signed games other publishers and a bunch of release things etc etc how do people action get a good reputation i think this is almost unhelpful advice from me but if you are privileged enough to have free time and money to do this volunteer or yeah or find find some and that doesn't have to be at conventions people will hear volunteer and be like oh at conventions i don't live in america great thanks

guys no tell the story of how we got in with aeg because i would never have pitched that game to aeg you were the one who set up that. Pitch and then like with the CEO of AEG. And like that, that was all you baby. Yeah. With zero published designs. Like. Yeah. And he, I didn't even mention your name initially. Like as soon as I had the pitch, I said that you, I said your name, I said I had to co-design it, but I didn't like name drop you to get the meeting.

I volunteered on their Facebook design forum. They had a design forum that used to be quite active, now has sort of lapsed. Hopefully it will get back up and running at some point, but we'll see. And they were looking for moderators. And I reached out and I said that I would moderate because I had just gotten laid off, so it was great timing. I had a bit of free time for it. You were privileged enough to have just gotten laid off. Yes. Woo!

But even if I didn't, it doesn't take that much time to moderate a forum, especially now with a team of people.

And one of the things was they said if you have a game that you want to pitch because all of the people who were volunteering were designers this is a designer form they said you can just let us know you don't have to go through the standard process that was like the one perk up the job i mean it was also like nice to work with ag but you know that was the the one thing so that was the that was the payment almost yeah so i didn't have anything for them that i thought would be a good fit at the

time and then even after the forum sort of lapsed i came to them like months later and i literally just facebook messaged the ceo because i had a working connection with him and just said hey i've got a game that i think would fit for you and immediately he was like yeah let's schedule time and easy as that and if you can find some way like that some sort of in where you can you know i read it as a cost sacrificing your time and it's a bigger cost for some

people than others but it is a very convincing and effective way to get an in with a publisher that you want to have have a good relationship with.

Yeah. I completely meant to open this episode by talking about the concept of unfair advantage. So AJ, just take this bit and put it at the start because we're able to edit this episode with no problem, right? Have we talked about unfair advantage specifically like the business concept? We have not, not on the show. Do you know what it is like personally?

Yes, because you told me. Okay, cool. So basically if you want to start a business, everyone who wants to start a business has also started a business and most people are not going to get to the top. So you need to sit down and be like, what is my unfair advantage? Because running and starting business is so hard that you need an unfair advantage to get ahead, which sucks. That's not great, but that is the real world. And if you can isolate your unfair advantage, then you can get ahead.

So I'll use Hollywood as an example. You want to be an actor? Cool. Everyone wants to be an actor. What's your unfair advantage? Now, the best unfair advantage is just to be the world's greatest actor. Cool. If you're the world's greatest actor, the book's so good, they can't ignore you.

It comes up a lot but for me, because I really love that book, like if you are so good at what you do that you don't need to play these games, great, just like bring it to anyone and someone will be like, this game is the best game ever. It'll go to the top. Like I genuinely believe that. The rest of us, we need to be like, what is our unfair advantage? And that's what this list kind of is. I'm like, look, at this point, these are my unfair advantages.

When I started, my unfair advantage was that I had the capacity to start a publishing company. Yours might be, you live in Indianapolis and you might think, Peter, that's not really an unfair advantage. It absolutely is. Why is that an unfair advantage, AJ?

Because Indianapolis is where Gen Con is or something i don't know yeah so you can volunteer at gen con for zero cost you don't have to get a hotel you don't have to fly like and obviously most people listening to this don't live in indianapolis so you need to work out what your unfair advantage is like it's going to be different for every person aj's i think we've discussed this at least personally is that you worked at a board

game store for however many years like that's an unfair advantage because now you know no product better than any aspiring designer that I know. I have a lot. I'm not calling you an aspiring designer. You know what I mean? Yeah. No offense taken. I was just objecting to that being the only unfair advantage I have. Right. Right. Like I'm a straight white male from an upper middle class family whose wife's job can support me doing this as long as I need to. That last part is the relevant part.

I think like every designer is a straight white male. You know what I mean? Like statistically, that's who's designing games. That's not an advantage in this field. Whereas wife supports you full-time so you can spend all your time designing, absolutely is. When I started with that, my career requires me to live nowhere in particular. So I was able to move to Toronto, the board game center of North America in some senses, and specifically I lived in Toronto because of that.

Anyway, so the framing of this episode was known to be unfair advantage. And now I realize how long we're going, so I'm going to zip onto my next point. If that's cool, AJ? Yep, please.

The next one, unhelpful advice, be a publisher for five years. Because as a publisher, you will take pitches and you'll understand what makes a good pitch. You will publish games and understand to your bones, to your bank account, what the difference is between a hit and a flop. And you will understand production stuff. You'll understand what the workflow looks like. When I pitch a game to a publisher, I ask for an unusually high royalty.

And I'm like, because I will be like, not, not a, not in a bossy braggy, like interfering way, but I'm like, I get it to a degree that most designers can't. And I will bring that knowledge and expertise. And like, that is actually valuable. It sounds like I'm talking about being a know-it-all who's going to try to backseat drive. Not at all. Like I understand this process from top to bottom because I have now published as a publisher, 17 games.

I don't even know what the number is. 15 games, 12 games that got lower every time. Cause I don't know. And I don't want to overestimate, but like, I get it. And that is so valuable to other publishers to be like, oh, he's not going to suggest 700 unique dice. He's not going to say, why don't we just get Quan Chi to do 700 pieces of unique art? He's not going to, my girlfriend works in film and the director was a first time director.

And she was like, can we just get Taylor Swift to do the music it's like no no you can't just get taylor swift to the music i'm never gonna ask that question because i've been through the trenches and i get it aj turn that into helpful advice an easy task i feel i think you should go watch my talk why your good game won't sell because that's where i go into a lot of product design talk now granted that was like seven years ago So,

you know, might be a touch dated, but there's a lot of good stuff in there, I think.

And I think a lot of the advice I give there is for people who are self-publishing. Even if you're not self-publishing, you want to understand what your game as a product is going to look like. And if you think of your game as a product and look at that video and listen to the things that I'm saying, it's going to help you understand whether or not your game can succeed as a product. But that video aside, I think look at similar games to yours in the marketplace.

Place and if your game is very different in one particular way then ask yourself is there a reason why no party game costs two hundred dollars right is that blood on the cocktail yeah and there's a reason that's a very niche game it's not on shelves at books at board game stores for sure yeah well that's the thing too right is it it's not even like a hundred dollars it's a hundred on kickstarter you can't buy it into retail and if you did it would be a lot more than a hundred dollars yeah

but yeah those kinds of questions and think about if there's multiple things if it's not just like oh this has a lot more custom dice or this has a lot more minis or this has a lot more whatever than than a normal type of game in that field if there's multiple weird things what are you doing they're like really seriously ask yourself that because maybe it's because you You approach this from a different angle and you've come up with something really clever,

but much more likely you're doing something very wrong, I would say. A lot of my points can be kind of coagulated into I design to market these days. Yes. This is the one I had as like a kind of final note, which is when I'm pitching a game, I'm thinking about on three levels. I hope we didn't do this in another episode. I can never remember. Which is, I'm thinking, which publisher does this make sense for?

And I, and AJ and I've talked about this before. I design to a specific publisher every time because even a successful specific publisher, because even if that publisher says no, they're clearly doing something right. And other publishers have a chance of being interested. Battle Bugs, the AEG game, was designed with AllPlay in mind specifically.

He passed on it for a variety of reasons, but because AllPlay are a big publisher and AEG are a big publisher, there was enough overlap that AEG were also interested. I then sat down and played that game with John Zinza, the CEO, and I discovered that by chance we had brought him a game that ticked off every box of what they were specifically looking for. That was very fortuitous, But it wasn't a coincidence. It was because we were targeting the market.

So I think about which publisher. I increasingly think about what platform they're going to sell it. A game that I'm designing for straight to retail, straight to board game stores, is very different to a game I'm designing that I think will go to Kickstarter, is very different to a game that I think will go to Barnes & Noble or Walmart or Target or any of the big box. Like those are three distinctly different markets.

And from the moment I start designing a game, I am now thinking about which market is going to Kickstarter. You want to have stretch goals. You want to have bling. You want to have this Barnes and Noble. You want your mom to be able to pick up the rules and understand it fast enough. And you want to have some kind of like mainstream hook board game stores.

You want to be in a genre. And we've done an episode about genre, I believe. Um, where people who like worker placement games will be like, ooh, a worker placement game, et cetera, et cetera. And that also applies to a certain extent to Kickstarter and Barnes & Noble, but I think that's almost like a primary thing. You want the AJ of Board Game Bliss 10 years ago, when someone walks in to be like, well, I like this game. And he's like, got it.

I know exactly what I can sell you. And you want that to be your game. And then thirdly, I think about, interrupt me if you want to respond to anything before I finish my, I think about what game night people are going to be excited to take this to. Because this is a kind of showy off hobby. And I mean that in a good way.

Like books, you're not, I guess there's book clubs, but like you are targeting someone who's going to sit by themselves and read a book and you want to know what they're reading. Board games are a social experience and they're also a bit of a show-offy experience. So you want to think like, why is someone going to be excited to bring this to their game night and battle other games to bring it?

Like just getting your game played these days in such a saturated market, market you need to have an edge in that mini game of getting your game to the table you want to provide the player in this case the person bringing the game with the tools to win the game of get your game played and that is a that is a multi-step process so i am in the again fortunate position of i have a non-gaming group i have a heavy gamers group i have a party

game group i have a girlfriend who loves games and so i'm always thinking about who is going to bring this to which kind of event and fight for it to be brought to the table. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that's a really useful lens to look at games through. That's one that I don't hear talked about and I think it's super valuable because if you think about like a giant Kickstarter game, Kingdom Death Monster, right? Yeah. That's one that I cannot bring to a friend's house.

Like physically, logistically, I can't bring all the stuff that I need to. It's like 40 pounds or something ridiculous. Yeah, you need a second car. Yeah. But that is one that you build a game night around. Yes. And that's a very specific. I'll interrupt briefly. Stonemaier says on his website, we want to be pitched the main event of the night. We want to be pitched people are coming over to play this game. Your wingspans, your sides, not the filler beforehand, not the like,

okay, we're finished. Let's throw out a party game to wind down. They want the main course. And that is something to think about. Go ahead, AJ. Yep.

So I think just breaking it down, saying to yourself because every game is going to fit in one of those contexts right it's hard to imagine a game where it's like there's no possibility of anyone ever playing this game if so why are you making it yeah i was gonna say i can name a lot of prototypes that fit into that yeah i mean if if you're looking at your game and you're like there's no way that anyone actually maybe you should give some examples of do you can you think that any

published games that you're like there's just not really a place for this so.

See my camera yet to every game he's ever designed he is saying that all of them are useless and no one has ever played them meow and dracula's feast are two of my published games so i feel very comfortable being negative about them meow and dracula's feast are really cool quirky interesting ideas that have no audience dracula's feast is a 10 minute deduction game that requires a large play account where you sit in silence and if anyone makes a mistake the game breaks and

has a 15 minute teach who is that for aj who wants to like and i've had people get excited because it's such a cool weird idea and bring it to the table and then it just crashes and burns because it's a laborious teach and if anyone makes a mistake it's wrong and you're sitting there inside they're expecting werewolf they're expecting you know one night ultimate werewolf even, but instead they got like, it's a logic puzzle. It's a Sudoku disguised as an eight player experience.

Who is that for? Meow is similar. I was like, it's a party game. You do wacky things. No, you sit there in silence and try to remember the rules and occasionally do a wacky thing sort of obligatorily because that's one of the rules and no one has fun. Outside of my games, I don't feel comfortable, but I think you're right.

I don't think those games get get published because who are they for i can give you a film example oh please tomorrowland did you ever see that no yeah no one did oh light year light is probably a better example light year is a toy story sequel that's a serious sci-fi who who asked for that like what is what are they doing it was pixar's biggest flop i think tomorrowland was one of disney's biggest flops because I liked it. I really liked the way it's put.

It's a Dracula's Feast of Films in that it's really interestingly assembled, but who's it for? There's just no audience for that movie except people who watched it because they like other Brad Bird films and were like, this is weird. Cool. So let's pause for a second here and think about it. We can't, AJ. This is live. So with Dracula's Feast, for instance, you're saying there's no context in which someone's looking to pull that out.

Like is there if that was your prototype you know are you looking then you're saying it was, i'm talking to the audience i met you with that prototype do you remember that was the first ever encounter we ever had what do you think of that when you played it i didn't like it i think i said that but i said it in a very nice way i'm not i'm not asking for feedback for my feelings i'm just like did you have that thought of like who is this for i didn't have that thought of as as to who is this for,

I was still very green in the board game space at that point. I played probably like one or two dozen modern hobby games at that point. Something like that. Oh, really? Probably two dozen. But yeah, like definitely that was right when I got into hobby games. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah. I have been part of your board game experience from the start. Yeah. You're my origin story. Oh, I didn't know that. That's lovely. Yeah. That was at the first ProTO. And I brought some prototypes to that.

And most of my experience had been like Twilight Imperium, Descent, Magic the Gathering.

And then yeah basically i saw some games on dice tower top 10s that i picked up on a whim and like that was that was basically me going to it go ahead i haven't i haven't answered the question but keep going go ahead galaxy trucker today i feel is right on the edge of like what environment do you pull that out it's a real or pendulum or sorcerer city like in no way am i trying to deny like vlada shvatil is my favorite designer of all time and galaxy trucker was what got me into the hobby so in

2013 or whenever i played that like i think that absolutely had a place today i don't know that it does in the same way all three of those games sorcerer city pendulum and galaxy trucker are real-time strategy games and i don't know that there's a big audience for those but big audience today's market the same framework as what group pulls it out right like Right. Well, that's what I'm saying. Like, I don't know what group pulls those out.

I could see myself teaching it to my girlfriend, but she'd be like, cool, can we play Rez Arcana or Shot and Totten or something that is like got more of an identity. I could see convincing a group to play it. Maybe, but like, it's a lot. Here's what it is. It's not that it doesn't have a place. It's that it doesn't give you the tools to win the game of get this game to the table.

But so like looking at pendulum for example which i haven't played and i'm not super familiar but i do know it's a real-time strategy game obviously so why does that not fit with stonemaier's framework of a main course game.

Think because it well again i'm not saying it doesn't have an audience this is probably a whole sub episode that we should do and if we weren't live i'd say like let's let's cut all this but let's finish the thought i like this framing that i came up with live of games giving you tools to win the game of get the game to the table i think that's a really useful framework to think things through this is a new idea so i'm not married to it

so if you're like peter that's actually useless shut me down but let's use a hit game i'm gonna use things in rings which i realize is my game but it's just, I happen to be super familiar with that. I didn't prep anything else.

Things in Rings is a Venn diagram game. People are like Venn diagram game. That's a cool idea. Once it's on, it has cool table presence. As soon as you see the table, you understand that game. And the publisher loves this about it. He's like people at conventions walk up and they see the table and they see the rules in my hand because they're not playing and they understand everything about the game. That game gives you a lot of, and it's fast and it's a fast teach.

And it's, there's no rules to it that game gives you a lot of tools to get at the table low low entry.

Visually interesting people like venn diagrams pendulum which i also haven't played so i don't want to i don't want to be too harsh about i'm sure it's a really good design i don't think they would have signed it otherwise there's not a lot of people who are excited by real-time games in a strategy environment so it's sort of like who is it for right there it's gonna have all the rules overhead of your wingspan or your scythe or whatever probably a little bit less but it's going

to let you embarrass yourself by getting it wrong in a situation where you can't stop and explain what was wrong so it's set up to fail in that sense it doesn't give you like what are the tools that it gives you to bring to the table i can't think of any other than it's a stone mire game i don't think the theme is that compelling i don't think the mechanism is popular.

And it has stuff working against it has drag in that like it could embarrass you in front of your your friends in real time in a way that wingspan you can always pick up the rule book and sift through it or ask a question you can't do that in pendulum and wingspan also has the bird theme which is a really cool novel theme it also has designed by women so a lot of female game designers are going to be like i'm sorry female

gameplay is going to be like oh this is for me in a way that i don't feel you know space tech game 64 is and it has the beautiful art which i'm sure pendulum has as well. But do you know what I mean? Is this framing making sense? Yeah, I think so. I think that makes sense. I don't want to dwell on this too long because we're running past an hour at this stage, but carry on. Finish your thought and move on.

Feels like this could be a different episode. Tools for gaining game to the table, which is something I love talking about. Unramping new players. That's like my favorite topic. Yes. Yes.

I'm going to do a quick fire round because this is stuff I wrote as we were going in, so you don't have any notes about. Unhelpful advice, co-design with brilliant people. It's so helpful to have a co-designer like AJ, who when I bring up a problem between us, we know we can solve it. Alex and I work together a lot because we can be in the same space and just develop at a rate 10 times faster than if I was working alone.

My co-designer Matt with the game I'm currently pitching around, like he pushes me to make better games than I would if I was making it by myself. There's been so many times where I'm like, this works. He's like, but it could be better. It could be better. It could be better. It could be better. And so we spend a week on it. And I'm like, this is twice as good as it was last week. Like it makes an impactful difference. So unhelpful advice is just find the best game designers and work with them.

AJ, can you make that helpful off the cuff yeah go to whatever local design meetups there are slash cons there's proto spiels happening all over the place so and even if you can't make it to one of those there's a lot of like online design forums and if you play in those and show your games and play to start people's games you'll probably quickly make friends or at least quickly know who shares the same sort of sensibilities as you do and you can work with and then

you know you can do a try one and go co-design with them i will say having done a lot of co-designing your results may vary and so part of this advice is hold on to the thing you're working with them very loosely don't be afraid to let it die or let the project die and if you can kind of like a prenup at the beginning of the project sort of discuss what happens if one person loses interest in it or something like that we've never had to do that even though one of us has lost interest

no one of us has lost interest because i'm not worried that's because my my philosophy is just give them the idea i am like don't be precious about your ideas if you couldn't get it to work as a team you're probably not going to get it to work by yourself and if they think that they can let them have it if they're the one who loses interest then be like cool can i have that and if they're like no then be like well then And you haven't lost interest.

If I lose interest in an idea, I want you to have it because we thought it was cool enough to work on and I can't get it to the table. Maybe you can. And I have enough ideas that I'm not married to any one of them. I would say if you run into creative differences, that's something that I kind of struggle to give advice on because like, if you and I have a disagreement about, you know, a mechanic or something, right?

The answer isn't, well, I disagree with you. I like my version better than yours. So we're just not going to do it. The answer is always, if we can't talk it out, let's play both. Bring it to the table. Exactly. And we had that happen. I've told this story three times since it happened. You don't know this, which is that I came up with a mechanism and AJ was like, and I'm not, I've done the same thing in reverse. This is not pick on AJ day.

He was like, I think that's going to overwhelm the player. And so we said, okay, bring it to the table. You play it and we will set up the most possibly overwhelming version of it to just stress test it right there and then. And a turn in, you're like, this is not overwhelming me. And we're like, cool. At least we know we can start with that. I'm not saying therefore it has to be in the game, but we had enough knowledge to know that it's going to overwhelm the players is probably not an issue.

And like we always say, you know, MVP it. Like it didn't take that long to test that idea, you know? And we didn't have all the sub clauses worked out of like edge cases. We were just like, bring it to the table and see if it works. And so, yeah, that's, I don't know how we're on co-design. Oh, because I've said design with brilliant people. Yep. Oh yeah. Anything else? Elevate, elevate, elevate. This is related to some stuff I said earlier and what I just said about Matt.

Now that I've seen Matt do that, every time I'm playing one of my prototypes, I look at it and I'm like, I'm going to make this a little bit better. And then I make it a little bit better. You see how unhelpful this advice is? But like, as a result, the game is better. AJ, can you turn that sentence of unhelpful advice into actionable advice? That is the most vague thing you've ever said. Make the thing better. Yeah, but I will play it and I'll be like, okay, cool.

I'm liking this. This is working. looking instead of settling be like could this be could this work from its core stronger could this be magnified like there's a rule in game design of double the numbers apparently in video games was it you who's telling me they're like multiply it by a thousand yeah it wasn't like design advice necessarily it was just like a Twitter thread it was like as an experiment just multiply a number by 1000 in your code and see

what happens and I think that's fantastic game design advice to take in spirit, where it's like, what if we just do this crazy thing? What if we do just give the players this really overpowered thing? What if we do just make this effect really well? Just Carl, shut it up.

Yeah. When Tom and I were working on Village Pillage, the artist and graphic designer, Tanya Walker, she was like, wrote us a message once to be like, working with you guys is like watching a pair of velociraptors circle a locked down building and just relentlessly find the weak spots and get inside. Because we just kept on like doing another pass. And again, this can turn into the bad obsessive thing of like you work on a game for 10 years and it never comes out.

But we like, I do this obsessively. This is my life. Board game design is my life. I told you I sat down for 11 hours flat and made the first version, Witch's Brew, and the second version, and the third version, and the fourth version, and the fifth version, I will often just open up a spreadsheet of a game I'm working on and just read through it and just be like, that could be a little bit better. That could be a little bit better. That could be a little bit better.

That does get harder as you get more projects, but I've never found it not to be worth it. And then, like I said, looking at the core mechanisms and being like okay but what if this was just like better. So i'll try and spin this by giving you the easy task today i'm the unhelpful one this is a great role we should do every episode like this i always think you use the unhelpful one in my car.

That's how we work as co-designers i think that my super negative take on this is the market is very saturated and only amazing games are going to be able to come out amazing products i should say because yeah amazing product means a lot more than just an amazing game yeah and so if you have a game that is good it is not good it enough you cannot be satisfied that you have to look at your design and think i saw a talk about this once oh yes but this isn't a product design issue i'm

trying to narrow down it's it's it could be anything could just be the gameplay if the gameplay is good then that's not enough if it if it's amazing it's not enough i think what you need to do is think about sort of every element of your game and wonder is there a way to make it better whether it's you know the the theming or how intuitive it is or how simple the rules are all those sorts of things and if you can't find a way to make it that top tier

then maybe you just have to design more games and get better or maybe that's a good way of framing it yeah have a standard and make sure every every part.

Of your game meets that standard don't let there be any holes for the velociraptors to get into yeah i've had to shelve a lot of good games i think i'm up to like half a dozen good games that i think like if if i had made these you know 15 20 years ago they'd get published easily and nowadays it's like you know what they're not even close not even a chance yeah.

Probably talk about that more in our daniel.games blog episode uh he talks about that a lot okay last one i promise very unhelpful have a brand as a designer because that makes it easier for publishers to know what they're going to get it makes it easier for consumers to be like if i like this i'll probably like this and it makes it easier for you because you can really specialize so when i started i thought my brand was going to be no victory points i've now made a dozen in

victory point games or something like that. I don't like victory points. I try to avoid them, but sometimes it's the best thing for the game. That's some helpful advice is let go of stuff. God, I used to hold onto stuff tight. Let go of it. If you're like, but I want to make no luck and the game sucks, add luck in. And if it's fun, cool, follow the game. And so my two brands, I would say, are that my games have just infinite content. I love generating content.

AJ gets frustrated with me sometimes because I'm like, can we add five more cards to this deck? And he's He's like, why? It has 25 cards and you play three per game. Why do we need five more? And I'm like, okay, what about seven more? And can you help me come up with them? He's like, no, what are you doing? That Time You Killed Me famously has four chapters and the fourth chapter is about as much content as all of the first three chapters.

And the last envelope in the fourth chapter alone is as much as the whole rest of the game put together. Like it just, it's Barber Is You is my favorite game because it just never stops giving you stuff.

Stuff like literally it does obviously but like way more than you expect uh critic kitchen has 72 stretch goals or whatever it had like just crazy amounts of content and then my other my other brand is i had a publisher tell me this and i hadn't realized it is that my games always have like a oblique take on whatever it is so like that time you killed me is sort of the abstract game but it's also a campaign game and you don't have to like abstract to play

it that time you killed me is a party game which stretches your brain like my games always have this kind of like off kilter angle. I don't know why, said the man in a blue beard and a zebras print top.

Those two things have established a brand for me from a publisher's point of view anyway and someday hopefully from a consumer's point of view and make it easier for me to design new games because now i have like a starting framework unhelpful advice can you make that helpful on the spot i think this is another one where it's very designer dependent i think there is basically no through line through my designs. I mean, there's aesthetics.

I, generally speaking, favor very light rules and very elegant gameplay. That's what I strive for. I would say that's the only thing I could really settle on for my framework, but that's so vague. I do party games. I do strategy games. I would argue that yours are heavily player interactive in a way that a lot of games are not, including some of my games. I have some games, I think most of mine are player interactive, But I think yours, that is a strong through line throughout your work of what

I've played. I haven't played all of your games. No, that's definitely true. Player interaction is like the number one most important thing, I think, to me. I couldn't see you designing a roll and write or caring about a roll and write. I made a roll and write with player interaction. But you know what I mean? Like a classic separated solo Euro roll and write. That's just not an AJ game to me. At some point, I'm curious to stretch my wings

and do a solo game, maybe with some handsome Bluebeard fellow. but we'll see. You know Handsome Blue-Bated Fellow? He sounds great. But I think for trying to pull this into advice is if there is a genre that you're really into or if there's a specific style or if there's something, if you just love a mechanic, it's fine to super deep dive into that mechanic and be that mechanic person. Matt Gertz is like the Rondell guy.

And all he does is Rondells. And he makes really, really good Rondell games. And he's the best in the world at it because he is specialized. Uwe Rosenberg, Worker Placement, Polyomino's. Like, yeah, you can name a lot of, uh, Steffenfeld, Point Salads, like. Matt Leacock, Co-Ops. Yeah. If, if you are good at something and like it, then specialize, like absolutely double, triple down on that and make it better and better each time.

That, that's a completely reasonable and valid path to success in my mind. But if you don't, and you're like me and you are just, you know, very ADD and like, Like, oh man, that looks cool. Oh, that looks cool. Like I design in genres I don't have any interest in playing just because I get an idea and I want to get it out of my head.

And I think that's fine. I'm going to push back on this because all the things you're describing about you is 100% me and yet I'm still able to find these through lines. My biggest hits are a two-player abstract, a 10-minute party game. Like a 45-minute light Euro, and we're coming out soon with like a three-hour heavy Euro. It's a pretty diverse range of what I do. And yet I think you can still find through lines in your work. Sure. It depends on how broad of a through line we're talking here.

Like for me being like, it's elegant. But my examples were like, my games have a lot of content and they have an oblique approach to that genre. And those are not genre specific. Those are not... Any other thoughts on anything that we've talked about or else we'll move into the end of the episode and let our viewers go because we have gone long.

We always go this long, but we normally edit it down, but we couldn't for a live episode. Yeah. I would like to give one piece of unhelpful advice and have you fix it. Oh, yes. Love it. I'm in. My unhelpful advice is a lot of designers love the idea of having a finished game. A lot of designers like getting positive feedback about how fun their game is.

But I think the most important thing is you have to find the process fun so my unhelpful advice is find the fun problems element of game design where you run up into a problem and you have to solve it find the like the iteration process you have to find all of that fun so there's a thing in writing we might have talked about which is some screenwriters whose podcast and who would ask every guest, do you like writing or do you like having written? And this is professional writers.

We're not going to explain what happened for podcast listeners. You just have to go check out the video. It's because I'm on Apple, if you're wondering. And so the split between professional designers, it only works for me, was surprisingly even.

It wasn't like everyone one answer the same way it was a 50 50 split so i i don't know that that is valid advice which is different to unhelpful advice and i would recommend learning to love the process because it's going to be a lot more process than it is i mean you know in one sense once you have written you have written forever but it's such an unreliable genre unlike writing i don't know i don't know what i'm trying to say here but i i don't think that it's as simple as

like if you don't enjoy it don't do it But I think identifying that you don't like doing parts of it is completely valid. I hate updating TTS. In our co-designs, AJ's in charge of updating TTS because I just can't stand it. And now for my other designs, I pay him to update those as well because I can't stand doing it. Identifying part of the process you don't like is different to loving every part of the process, you know?

Sure. Yeah. And not loving part of it is natural. I don't think there's anyone who start to finish adores every single element of it. I mean, I guess there probably is someone, but. I do see whenever I see burnout, whenever I see people who are like really down on games, I like to get depressed from it or those kinds of things. It's always the people who want the end result and don't like the process.

If it's genuinely work for you, I just feel like maybe there's a different hobby that's better for you. But I mean, if you're comfortable pushing through miserable work of making the game to have it, you know, go for it. That's why it's unhelpful to us. Just being self-aware of that is helpful, I think. Knowing that you don't like writing, but you love having written gives you something where at the end of it, you're like, okay.

There's a quote from John Cleese that I quote all the time. He says, the difference between an amateur and a professional writer is when it gets hard, an amateur writer is like, this is hard. It's not working. I should stop. A professional writer is like, ah, I'm at the stage where it's hard and I feel like I should stop. I recognize this and they keep going. Recognizing that you don't like the process, totally valid. If you don't like the end result either, what are you doing?

That's bizarre. And I mean, I don't like physical prototyping, right? But I've cut that out of me. I have an assistant who comes by once a week to do that for me. Uh, do you have a fun question? If not, I have one. Go for it. Okay. I have been decorating my house lately for the, I've lived here for eight months and I'm finally putting stuff up on the wall. If you're a, if you're a viewer, you can see some of what I've got right there.

AJ, if you had an infinite budget, but your current house, and don't be silly and be like, I put dollar bills so I could be a millionaire. What would you decorate your house with? What would you, what would you put on all the walls and stuff like that? Give me a succinct answer. Don't go wall by wall through the whole house. You've asked the worst person because I look around. It's beige. This is my office. I've had it for a year and a half. You would keep it like

this? This is your answer? No. Okay. Well, for my office, I probably would. I have sound foam here. All the things you can see around here are where the sound foam was supposed to go, and it isn't sticky enough, which is why you're hearing a bit of echo. But hopefully we can edit that out. I really like paintings, so I would get some nice paintings.

So i was just showing you one let me all right dancing at dusk yeah dancing at dusk is a beautiful painting that i saw in person and i was just talking about how i might buy it for thousands of dollars so maybe i will pretend like i'm rich that's your when next time you get an advance you'll uh yeah but i think current house there's not much i can do because a lot of the things i would want to do are things that i would need to just have the bones for you know i like big open rooms,

nice tall ceilings, all the cheap stuff, you know. The one thing I would put a lot of money into is a kitchen. I do a lot of cooking and I would really love to have nice marble countertops and, you know, all the bells and whistles and a nice beautiful, you know, horseshoe kitchen, just make the perfect layout, that sort of thing. I think that'd be like my number one thing is not really decoration, but just having a really good kitchen.

Yeah. You already know mine because we were just talking about it, but my favorite artist is a man called Rob Gonsalves. I'll put some of his, I'll try to put some of his art up by literally just holding an iPad to my camera. He sort of follows on the tradition of M.C. Escher. We'll put a link in the show notes. And it's almost like a, tessellation is not quite the right word, but it's like two worlds combining in a kind of child book style.

I love his work. I love it. I would cover every wall in my house with either art from my game or originals of his work. Like owning an original of all of these would just like, he's got so many too. He's prolific. He unfortunately died of suicide a few years back, but before he did, he, he created so much stuff that just like is exactly for my brain. Yeah. I just, I love them. This is one of my favorites. It's children bouncing on a bed. Oh yeah, we should describe it for the podcast listener.

It's children bouncing on a bed with like a yellow, not yellow, green and dark green checkered thing. But the bed sort of morphs into a field and we see that like past a certain point, they're not bouncing on a bed, they're flying over fields. I just, I love it. I love his stuff. And as you can see, if you're watching the video, he's got so many. If you go to robgonzalves.live, I believe we'll put a link in, you can see all the stuff I'm showing off now.

This one's cool. Can you describe this one for us, AJ? My picture quality is too bad. It's an observatory with someone looking at all the stars, but then it's revealed that while some of them are actual stars, some of them are just a curtain with stars painted on them, and someone's opening the curtain to let the sun in. It's just like this weird blending of worlds. Anyway, did you have fun? Is that the fun part of the episode? The only part where we had fun? I did have fun.

I hope you didn't have fun at any other point, because that's not allowed. Never. Not with you. Do we still do teasers? I can't remember. No. Thing of the past. Okay. No teaser for you, but please do let us know in the comments or on the Discord what you think of a video episode, because it is more work for us, so we don't want to do it if no one cares.

But if you enjoy looking at our beautiful faces and my very busy background and AJ's very not busy background, let us know, because I think if people like it, we'll do more of these. Am I right, AJ? Yeah, for sure. Cool. Anything else? Nope, we're good. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time. Bye, everyone. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter at FunProblemsPod,

or reach us via email at FunProblemsPodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you, and if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.