#43 Co-designing

Music. Hello, and welcome to Fun Problems, the problems of fun. I'm Peter C.

Hayward. And I'm AJ Brandon. And today we have brought the harbinger of death. Alex Cutler is our special guest. Now, Alex, why are you the harbinger of death? Oh, that's a good question. Well, I started killing when I was just a young man. I don't know how to respond to that intro. So many years ago, we had Alex as our first ever guest with three of us on the show. And we ran into more editing issues with that episode than I think anything I've ever edited in my life put together.

We went through how many editors, AJ, including you and me? Oh, I think literally six plus. And eventually, so the podcast slowed down for a while, and that is entirely Alex's fault, just to be clear. No responsibility whatsoever. It was all Alex. Yeah. If I recall correctly, you were staying with me at the time, and we couldn't figure out how to record in the same room in any way that made sense.

So we were like through the wall from each other so like i could hear you like muffled murmuring while i was going and vice versa and then we actually probably could edit that episode but a we don't want to because it was such a like the episode itself was nice it was the editing process that was a nightmare and b it's been so long that like almost everything that is now out of date, they're like opened with you being like yeah i just had a baby and now he's what 17 18 yeah,

uh five but might as well be 17 yeah it's been a long time since i was it was a while show, so it's very lovely to have you back for those who don't know the fabulous alex cutler or have never listened to me rave about you in like half of episodes uh do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself uh please do not tell us that when you're a kid you played monopoly and risk because i hate that answer every board game podcast is like how'd you get into gaming and it's always like

i played monopoly and risk as a kid that i found other games right so anyway i I was playing Scrabble in chess. I mean, I did play Monopoly in Risk, but I will not talk about that now.

So good shit. And that's the end of the episode. Thanks very much so much for listening. This has been a delight to have you back. Hopefully this one has no tech issues. So I'm Alex Kessler. I know Peter very well, so I'm entirely able to deal with whatever he throws at me during this. Yeah, so I am a game designer and developer. I was the head of development at Pandasaurus Games for about three years.

And then about six months ago, I went full-time into being a freelance designer because I had a lot of luck getting things signed and decided that I wanted to focus more on the design side than development side. But I do still do both.

Alex, as my frequent collaborator, we have, I think we counted today, three signed games together, including one that is just, that first one is just about to actually land a people, Create a Kitchen, which again, if you've heard the show or if you're AJ, you've heard me talk about endlessly. So, we wanted to get Alex on because today's episode is about collaboration.

I think board game is probably one of the most, probably not the most, but one of the most collaborative mediums. A lot, a lot, a lot of designs are by more than one designer, including a lot of mine, a lot of, actually all of AJ's? No, AJ, you've got some solo designs, don't you? I've got loads of solo designs. And a lot of Alex's. Again, we've all designed solo, we've all designed collaboratively. And I have worked with both Alex and AJ, you two are my main two collaborators.

So we thought it would be great to get alex on and talk about the pitfalls the benefits the the everything to do with collaborating aj real sorry real quick just so we don't lose an entire another episode your guys's video is freezing a bit for me i don't know if i'm freezing a bit for you if it looks okay on your end we can keep going but i just wanted to flag that so we don't record for an hour and then you say actually there's a problem so mike my computer

is just sporadically freezing a little bit i think that's what's happening let me well aj talks i'm going to close some windows and see if that helps. Sounds good. That was no set on peer two. So the first thing I want to talk about is who we collaborate with and how is it different collaborating with different people?

Because I think a lot of the things that are going to come up in this conversation are sort of going to be framed differently based off of which of the co-designs we're talking about. So Alex, obviously you do a lot of co-designing with Peter. Do you co-design with anybody else? And with co-designing with each of those people, how does that differ and how does that differ from design solo? Yeah, so I have co-designed, I was thinking about it before the show.

I've got co-designs either signed or published with about four or five different people now. And Peter is probably the person I work with the most in terms of total hours. The second, the other person I work with a lot is a guy named Mike Mahalsik, who is a designer who did like Shadowblades Banner Festival and a few other, Flotilla was, I believe, him and J.B. Howell. And he's great. He's in my local group. So I live in North Carolina right now.

And so him and I are able to get together pretty frequently. Peter, I would get together with a lot more, except he's out in LA. So we've been kind of doing the thing right now where it's two trips a year, one of us going out to see the other one. For our North American listeners, North Carolina is the state directly. That's why it's called North Carolina. Carolina is the old Latin name for California. Well, the original name for California was South North Carolina. So as we all know.

I'm learning so much about American geography. Yeah, directly south of that is Canada, which is great for AJ. If we all stand in the right spot, we create a perfect vertical line. That's right. Yeah, it's like our own little Stonehenge. So the second part of your question, AJ, was how does it differ between co-design versus solo design? So working with different people, the experience for me has been very positive.

I would say at this point in my career, pretty much everything I do is a co-design. I still often will start at a solo place, but inevitably I take the idea and as I'm talking to Peter or talking to Mike or someone else, we'll sort of start spitballing and inevitably it sort of becomes this kind of collaborative process. I'm like, let's just make a co-design because we're both excited about this idea. I think probably like three or four times a year, I'll go to my local group with a solo design.

And then over the course of the evening of playing it and then talking with Mike or someone else there, I'll be like, do you want to just work on this together? Because I like what you said. And as someone who has two young children, I've got the aforementioned five-year-old and almost two-year-old.

And as someone who doesn't have quite as much free time as I would like to for working on designs, having a collaborator is often an incredible way to maximize the time and energy you're able to put into something and have someone to sort of keep you on task and keep you on. Mm-hmm. Same question for Peter. So I have an internal model of co-design, which is obviously it's different.

Sometimes it's 51, 49 for this model that I'm talking about, which is that generally one person does sort of the dirty work and one person does more of the ideas.

So with aj and i for example i would say you do a lot more of the dirty work you do the updating of the tts and the this and the that which i i hate doing whereas with alex conversely i tend to be the one updating the stuff and that's not to say that you know both people are involved in all the stuff people having having ideas etc etc but i do tend i do find it just becomes easier if one person is sort of more hands-on than the other just because you

know let's say i'm printing a physical prototype and i need to print another one i already have the files whereas if i print a physical physical prototype and then aj needs to print the next one he's not going to have it like it's going to be this whole like well i need to source this piece and that piece so generally speaking i would say the biggest difference between my collaborations is just who's who's doing the i want to say dirty work you

know what i'm trying to say like that the yeah bitsy work.

And i think that a lot of that just leans into determining who's doing what which was a future point that i had on here when i'm co-designing with you i do different work than when i co-design with other people like with you you do most of the component studio updating stuff because you're very very proficient with component studio with all my other co-designs i think i'm usually the one who's more proficient with component studio so i do all that and like

like you said with uh with us i end up doing a lot of the tabletop simulator updates you often do a little bit more of the rulebook stuff so it's a bit of a give and take but i think the important thing to making sure that it feels fair to both people is identifying what stuff each of you are happy doing, which stuff each of you is not happy doing, right? Yeah. I am always the Component Studio guy because in fact, it is mandatory that if you're working with me, we work in Component Studio.

I have people be like, hey, we should make something together. I'm like, if I'm interested, I'll say yes, but it does come with a condition, I guess two conditions, which is that I negotiate the contract and I get all the royalties and you get done.

No, i negotiate because i'm a very fierce negotiator i think you'll both agree with that, and i do the component studio and it has to be on component studio because i don't ever want to design off not not a sponsor i just i live in that program and in our christmas episode i showed in the youtube video just some of the truly ridiculous things i can now do in that program, unnecessary ridiculous things but like for everything i'm doing that's where

i want the master files to be that's where i want everything to be so component studio is how i prototype So if you want to collaborate with me, it's got to be through Component Studio. That's sort of my hard and fast rule.

And then AJ, you mentioned that when we work together, you tend to do the TTS mods. But I realized that I've actually always done the physical prototypes for our games. That's true. Which is interesting. That's not a common split, I don't think, necessarily. But that's something that I really hate. I really hate doing the physical prototypes. I don't really mind doing the TTS ones.

Fantastic. You know, we both find our lane. And I think there's this classic advice of every partnership works best when you both feel like you're doing less than half of the work. And the way that you make that happen is by doing the stuff that you're really good at or that you enjoy. and getting the other person to do the other stuff. And I would imagine that all the partnerships that fall apart fall apart because

both of you hate doing the physical pro-time. You're like, oh, I don't want to do this. That's just so funny because I thought you were going to go in the opposite direction. I heard a guide for like co-inhabiting or marriage, which is that both people should strive to do more than half the work and then it'll be equitable.

Which is sort of the exact opposite in an interesting way yeah that makes sense the way i find my co-design goes is so i've got co-designs with you peter obviously and i that that's like we riff really well because we've done so much working with each other and i find that you know it's it's almost like like breathing like we don't have to say half of the stuff you know we skip through yeah seriously or like you know you'll be you know

two turns into a playtest and you'll be like so the issue is the turn i'm like yep and And then we're like, cool, we just stop immediately.

We don't play, we just riff on different options for turn order and stuff like that. And that isn't how all of my co-designers like to do things. And I think it's really important to sort of pick up on how your other co-designers like to do things and figure it that way. And I think too, not just in terms of the strengths of which aspects of the work you want to do, but what types of games you want to work on can be really interesting.

For instance, I've got one co-designer, Stefan, and he really likes puzzles and does solo games and micro games. And all that stuff is like pretty far out of my wheelhouse. And so it's interesting having him sort of guiding those sorts of play tests and, you know, my different flavor being added to it. Whereas like with Blades that we have with AEG, it's kind of, I think, a really interesting mix because I come from a tactics game space. I really know that space really well.

And you come from a different angle where you don't have all the preconceived, you know, presuppositions of the genre.

So starting with alex do you guys feel like a start when you play test or start when you co-design with other people do you find that your sensibilities and your tastes end up butting heads or working well with each other i mean i think ideally it's the latter right if you're butting heads too much then that might not be someone who you're a good person to to collaborate with i mean there's there's two main reasons to co-design with someone right you like them as a person or

you you think that the games you make will benefit from that collaboration and ideally you have both but you know potentially you have someone who never both never both of those things it's always one or the other yeah well i mean you're just speaking from personal experience so yeah oh alex by the way i really like you as a person oh thanks i'm really glad that we established which one of us he likes but you know like i i've had situations where i have

had someone who i was friends with and we did not necessarily have the same design sensibilities and.

Those attempts at designing something together tended to be higher stress and and fall apart over time i guess especially if you're designing remotely i mean peter and i literally fly across the country to each other because we work so much better in person and then those in between months when we're trying to do things on tts and app calls it's not that we aren't working together well it's just you know maybe one tenth is sufficient is when we're actually in the same room.

I think i'm sorry i'm going to bounce off that briefly i find that when we're together we ideate really well and then using that time apart is really good for iterating so like come up with stuff together and then long distance iterate then come back and come up with stuff together long distance iterate and obviously you can do either in both situations i mean we have done both in both situations but with our with our big upcoming game with cardboard alchemy big game it's so big like i

just mean literally in terms of like table space and hours it takes to play we ran into a stumbling block with that for months like several months and i think we even tried once or twice to jump on a call and talk about it but we said you know what this is not urgent we don't need to have this straight away let's wait until we're back together and then fix it so even though that's that's sort of in the middle of ideating and iterating a i think that the space away

from it was really good for both of us to be like what do we like about this game but then when we got together i'm sure you remember 40 minutes like we sat down we said let's solve this problem that's been plaguing us for months 40 minutes later we had the best version of the game and in fact the version of the game that got signed a month later yeah that's happened on a couple different games that we've worked on yeah i think generally and just to jump back to original question, AJ.

Ideally, designers should be filling in each other's blind spots or their weaknesses. We've already talked about in terms of who's good at physical prototyping versus digital prototyping.

Oftentimes, I feel like I have a cheat code going when I'm designing with Mike Mahalsik because we'll get together, we'll play the game, and he'll go home and just like stay up till 6am like because he's like insane like that and then the next day he'll be like hey i have the next version and i'm like why the crap like that's great but then and. I tend to be the one who sets meetings with publishers and does the pitching or facilitates that because I have a existing network for that.

Mike and I are both on the introverted don't love pitching games side of the spectrum, which I think a lot of us are.

But it's i think anyone like pitching games i don't know but i think i assume you did i have a slightly higher tolerance for it than mike does so i tend to to do that and i think you know we both agree kind of that together we're more than the sum of our parts than because of how many more games we've been able to get signed in that relationship than if we were trying to do those things on our own because we're going away faster because he's versioning so

much faster and then we're actually getting the things signed and out there so ideally you're filling in each other's weaknesses i don't think that means that you can't design with someone when you have overlapping qualities i think it just means you might have still have the same blind spots that you have if you were solo deciding so yes it's not gonna it's not gonna be worse it's just gonna be as good or better one thing in my relationship with both of you but

i just want to throw it to alex is that i tend to like much heavier games than either of you and so when aj and i work together. I think we tend to work in the lighter space, but Alex, you and I have now made two games that are longer than you would ever play. Do you want to speak to that? What's that been like, kind of letting me drag you into the depths of heavy years? It's interesting because it is, I'm out of my comfort zone, right?

I would say that I have probably played in my life, I don't know, let's say a thousand hours of heavy games. And let's to find heavy games as like two hour plus games. And of those 1,000 hours, I would probably say a good, you know, 800 to 900 of those hours are the games that we designed together. My knowledge of games in that weight class is much, much, much lower than yours and probably the average gamer. I don't tend to like playing those games, but if it's.

Through the process of design and then with you playing some of those other games that were important touchstones for that process and learning about why people like those games and what systems and interactions are important if you're you know what what merits that kind of play time right because there has to be something compelling to get people to sit down at a table for two or more hours to play a game right and learning about that from the design side of things has actually really sort

of flip my opinion on those games because historically i didn't like to play them and now i don't like to play them but i am less precious about it so i will you appreciate them i i appreciate them yeah and i i will i will play them i just don't i don't tend to like games where three hours can go by and i you know feel like i haven't actually accomplished anything but, i should have mentioned at the start of the podcast we have two guests today

one is my neighbor's dog who apparently has a lot of thoughts on collaboration in board games so if you're hearing that coming through that is the most excitable that dog has ever been yeah when i work with that dog i do tend to do most of the prototyping, disposable thumbs very valuable is that why you fly out here for a month but i only see you for two weeks two weeks with me two weeks with the neighbor's dog you should see that dog's bgg page.

To aj's point earlier having you work on these big heavy games was also really interesting because you had none of the preconceptions and similarly if you like it then that means that something's working you know like if you don't play a heavy game and you enjoy this one then that means i'm not saying that you know the lightest gamers in the world are going to pick up our heavy games but it does mean that it's not strictly for those people who like three-hour games yeah i think that's

fair yeah yeah in the same way as like you know aj and i making a tactics games and i i have no objection to tactics games they just know what draws me so we had to make one that drew me for me to be interested enough to.

And similarly, like, you know, we've made a collaborative game or two, probably, yeah, we've made at least two and cooperative game. I don't know why I said collaborative, the industry term cooperative, as I call it, we've got, we've got a strict, like cooperative cozy game that we're working on. And that's not something I would normally play. So we have to make it for me, for me to be interested, which means that I think it really like can do something new in the space.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's not dissimilar from like any kind of relationship where if the other person is very into something and you get to experience it through their eyes a little bit it can help increase your yes your appreciation my girlfriend is so into horses i've read two horse books in the last week and i now know way more about horses than i ever expected to, i mean like you know people who like my partner's into horror movies or something and now i started to like

the genre or you know like you know asking your good friends with my wife nicole i just got her into football this past NFL season so she went from someone who's like I don't like sports at all to like you know like so I'll take it I really don't like sports I still don't like sports but I'm pretending really well yeah hey there was the original question I feel like I bounced away from it a little bit uh the question was I forget exactly how I phrased it but it's basically about

co-design with different people and how your differences can be resolved and how your different design tastes and sensibilities can work with each other versus not.

Covered everything i was going to say on that yeah to build on that let's talk about resolving disputes in these sorts of relationships do you guys have any tips starting with alex again for how to resolve issues if you are butting heads and disagree with a certain direction of the game i think this is this is something i disagree okay there you have it i just accept Peter disagree, Yeah, I just get final say all the time.

It's a great working, but it's very healthy. Well, I was going to say something very nice about Peter, but no, I'm not so sure. No, I think Peter and I are very good at this, which is we both strongly feel that at the end of the day, we want the game to A, get published and B, reach the largest audience possible. So when we make decisions, we are making them from that as a jumping off point of what is the decision that makes this the best game for the most people.

And oftentimes in pursuit of that, if he says this should be left and I say this should be right, we try it both ways and whichever one ends up more fun, we go with. And we're both pretty good at being dispassionate about removing ourselves from that equation. So it's very rare that both ideas we have are equally good and we're not precious about going with the other person's idea if it was the better idea. Right. I'd go one step further. It's very rare that either or it is any good ever.

I just, but no, I, I, yeah, the rule that Alex and I have always had, and I think AJ and I, we also do this is just put it on the table. Always, always, always put it on the table. And one of two things will happen. Either A, it'll be really obvious.

One is better than the other. And that is 98%, i agree yes unless someone is holding on to an ego and i wouldn't work with that person like i i have just no that's right that's your job in the relationship.

Yeah i have enough ego for both of us if someone is like but it needs to be my way, i've worked with developers who are like this they'll make a change that is a lateral move at best and then we'll come up with like a better direction or a shift or something like that and they will just cling on to their and it's just it's just the worst it's just the most infuriating thing when it's no longer about the best move for the game it's about making sure that their change has

impact or whatever i could not tell you with very rare exceptions who came up with what idea in most of our games like the critter kitchen story is sort of like i've told it so many times that that one i know and i guess the very start of the project i know but then past that there have been times where in a meeting i've been like man aj this change you made was really good he's been like no that was your change or you know someone or vice versa like we just we just we have that

exact same conversation in both directions all the time like there there are a lot of things that i think were your idea that you say are mine and vice versa and so yeah yeah put it put it on the table put it on the table put it on the table the other point of disagreement that you can have is outside of the game oh sorry no so i was saying that there's two outcomes 98 percent of the time it's just going to be clear that one's better than the other the other time and aj

i think I think you and I have run into this probably more than Alex and I have, is there's a disagreement about what game you are making. Do you want to speak on that, AJ? I think I'll let you give a specific example and I'll build off that. So AJ and I are working on a game called Cozy Hollow that I don't know how many times we've. It's been on and off for like two and a half years now, three years.

It's in a really good spot now, but it was not for a while. So we shelved it for a year and then came back to it. And AJ, I would say more than me, had a really clear vision of what he wanted this game to be. Like really crystal clear. Here is the design goal. Here's the intent. And again, not in a holding onto the ego kind of way, but just like the core of what the game was, he knew to the soul. Like he fundamentally was aware of what he wanted this game to be.

And so a few times we ran into scoring issues or this or that, and it was stuff that you couldn't necessarily bring to the table, or if you could, I was like, yeah, well, cool, that was clearly better. And AJ was like, but it's not, not because it didn't work, but because it didn't work for the game we're trying to make. The game, the kind of core idea of the game is it is pure positive player interaction in every aspect, in every way.

And i would say it probably took me several meetings before i really gropped that before like i internalized oh that is the thing we're trying to make and then amusingly we had the fight on the other direction where there was a mechanic do you remember this there's a mechanic that you wanted to add in and you were like but this game is about positive player interaction so people will never do this mean thing and i was like no no no no no no no you're coming

at that backwards because the game is about play positive player interaction we can't let them because i'm telling you If I play this game, that's what I'm doing every time. And rather than say, well, the game's not for you, we were like, oh, right, the goal is positive player interaction. And that is not only shaping all the decisions we make, but it's shaping what we let the players do.

So I'd say that's very rare. But any time we've had a disagreement about what mechanic to go with, it's come down to what are we trying to do?

And I think it's very useful to have this conversation early in detail. I would say the more time goes on, the more effort I put into that initial meeting and those initial brainstorms and those initial design docs and those sorts of things.

And I just make them more and more detailed because I really, if it's me that's sort of like spearheading it or me that's like proposing the game for someone to co-design with me, I want to get through all those issues as quickly as possible and make it as clear as possible what i'm trying to do and vice versa i've i ran into this issue uh where i didn't ask enough questions on a co-design recently and i was like oh you know what i i didn't understand what they were really looking at and i need

to take a step back and i did one yeah and one other way to help that is if earlier you're like i'm not quite getting it get the other person who does have the clear vision to build out the first prototype so you can see it we actually did that back and forth on the game we have with aeg twice where i i was like i i see this and you're like i don't make it so i made it and you're like oh i get it and then you're like but i think we should do this differently

it's like i don't see it you do it and then you do it i was like oh i see it and then i did the first build of the next one you're like aha it was really ridiculous we sort of came to a nice confluence there um it's interesting peter what you were saying about.

How you described that the problem of like okay well if you give people this this tool they're going to do this thing, this negative interaction thing that you don't want them to do because that made me think of this thing where oftentimes when, whether I'm designing or co-designing, right? Like you have all this institutional knowledge because you've done this before and you've got these facts floating around in your brain, like how people will interact with the.

One of the great benefits of co-designing is you've got you know two fonts institutional knowledge coming in so a lot of times even though i would say that you and i are both you know, perfectly successful game designers in our own right we don't necessarily know a lesson that the other one has already learned from a past experience or you know thing that didn't work or didn't you know could work better a hundred percent um and that's very valuable and then that made me think

i have only ever co-designed with people who i would consider of an equivalent design level to me. So like when I was first starting out, I had a co-design with someone who I think we were both like kind of just starting out. More recently, I've worked with you and Mike and we're further along in our careers.

I'm wondering, have you either of you ever had an experience where either you were sort of working with someone who you sort of felt outclassed by or who you felt you had sort of like been around the block a few more times and then how you sort of resolve and deal with conflicts in those situations of who.

You know, like do you worry about getting steamrolled or like is there like a deference to experience that that you have to like i'm gonna give a slightly tangential answer and then i want to hear what aj's thoughts i i work with jeff fraser sometimes nowadays he's he's sort of stepped out of the design development space which i think is real lost because i think he's amazing and he and i i would say i mean he's he's a fairly tempestuous personality and

so am i we're both very opinionated that's a better way to put it and so we would disagree on stuff we would just really disagree and stuff and it was sort of what you're talking about with that institutional knowledge so i'll use the example that i always think of i don't like arbitrary hand sizes it's a very specific bugbear i don't like it when a game's like you can have a maximum of seven cards i'm like but why why don't just give me a number and expect me to accept that i need to i

need to see the paperwork i need to see the reasoning and so in our game cartouche you can hold a maximum of four kind of goals that you're working towards and jeff wanted to be like cool it's four and we'll just trust people to remember that and that was deeply offensive to my soul i'm so ridiculous about this kind of stuff you've probably both encountered this as well i just don't like it and so we eventually the way we solved it was we had four slots

where they can go and so you know it's four because there's four slots and it is still arbitrary and jeff's point was like cool you've taken this arbitrary number and written it down i'm like yeah but we're not expecting people to to store it in their head it's not a floating point that variable if. That's what I don't like. I don't like numbers just floating around that you have to remember. My ideal situation is you have three because you have three huts.

And if you build another hut, you'll have four hand size and so on and so forth. Or no limit. That's what I think all of our games have always been. In Critic Kitchen, you discard down at the end of the round, but it's printed on the board and it's very clear why it's that number.

Or some sort of counter incentive. I think I actually, one of you might've pointed this out on this podcast in an episode I listened to, or you told me in person at some point but like something like in like even though it's a much older game now i think it's like a really great design choice in katan right where it's not a hand limit of seven but anything you have over that is at risk right so it's like take as many as you want but if you've got 20 cards and the thief hits you you

know bam right i love that yeah it's also something where you don't have to remember the exact number at all times which is huge yeah it's only irrelevant when it when you're about to get screwed by it yeah and so i i also had a pair of designers the stevenson's who i've talked about before who they they had a they have a published design i think and they've been doing this for about as long as i have and we ran into this issue a lot where i would be like no no

no like you can't have the numbers be two three eight and nine it has to be five and seven and they're like but why and i was like because those are the numbers that just exist in people's brains like we are okay with five and seven we're not okay with eight. It's dumb. And so to a certain extent, I had to sort of appeal to authority. But generally speaking, bring it to the table and that resolves it. AJ, I'd love to hear your answer to this, because I think we're in an interesting situation.

Yes, I absolutely have worked with someone who is a better designer than me. That is Peter. I've desired more. I mean, I would say today we're probably in the conversation. And I mean, it's such an amorphous thing. I would never be tangibly, Peter's 15% better than me today or something. I would say I am indisputably a more published designer than you, and that's a safe statement. But what I mean is, when I first started designing with you, absolutely, you were better than me. Absolutely.

And at least I think so. Do you not? I don't like anything. Fair enough fair enough but i think that we started on a development project for a game and i think because there was already like a strong baseline to it that was like a really comfortable way for us to start the relationship working together and it meant it just like it's the same thing where if you're a designer and your first design is creating an expansion for a game that already exists or if you're writing and the first

writing that you do is fan fiction where there's already established characters and stuff. It just means that all the hardest stuff is already taken care of. And that was a really fun time too because it was a lot of us just picking apart the game and saying, what tiny little edges could we improve? What tiny little things could we tweak there? And there was a fair bit of game design involved in that process as well.

But that is absolutely the most polarized of relationships I've been in for co-design. I would say at this point, I designed with Thomas de Janela Spross who did Decrypto. I designed with Stefan Barco. Those are both excellent, excellent designers. And I would say like we're in the same ballpark of each other for sure. I would say, you know, I feel nowadays that I'm in the same ballpark as Peter for sure.

So I don't feel that big disparity and I've actually I would actually refuse to co-design with somebody who I felt was at a much lower level than me. I would definitely take someone who's higher than me if they wanted to.

This might sound like I'm being a dick, but I would playtest any, designers game and give them feedback gladly that's no problem but it's the if i feel like i'm significantly above them especially if they i mean regardless of if they feel it or not it's actually problematic either way but it's like i wouldn't want to feel like i'm being pulled down or that i'm like having to like do all the work for like the stuff the phrase um always try to be the dumbest person in the room always surround

yourself with people smarter than you is that the logic.

Kind of but it's also like this is like a little bit selfish honestly but it's like if i feel like someone isn't going to be able to contribute much to the design like i'm talking like an extreme disparity here you know like if someone's like hey this is like my first game do you want to come on as a co-designer i would just be like no no definitely under almost no circumstances it's interesting because i think there's like a tangential point here which is kind of relevant which is,

I think, I don't know what other industries are like. And Peter, you might be able to speak to film or writing, but in board games, I think the default is almost all, and this is just anecdotal, I guess, because I haven't surveyed all the designers, but the default almost always seems to be that if it's a co-design, it's an even split co-design. And the idea of dividing it some other way almost feels like dirty, right?

Like, hey, do you want to be my, Like, AJ, in your situation with someone who's a first-time designer, you would feel uncomfortable if you said, yes, I'll co-design with you, but it needs to be like a 60-40 split or a 80-20 split, right? We're such an equitable kind of industry that the default is to want to do 50-50, and then because of that, you want to design with someone who you feel is doing 50 to your 50. Yeah. I've got a few thoughts on that. To directly respond to that,

I'll tell two related stories. There's a podcast. About when I was doing a terrible job co-designing with you. No, no, no, no. Genuinely. I'm just kidding. My favorite podcast for a long time was a show called Cortex, which is CGP Grey and a guy called Mike who runs a podcast network. And Mike approached CGP Grey, who is notoriously reclusive and would not work with people and was like, hey, I want to do a podcast together. And to sweeten the deal, we'll make it you get 70%, I get 30%.

And Grey said, no, I want to do 50-50. But in exchange for doing 50-50, here's the tasks that I don't want to think about. And in a sense, that's not equitable, but I just love that so much. He was a much bigger name and he was bringing the audience. And so actually, Adrian, I think we did that to a certain extent where I was like, I'll do a podcast with you. I'm not doing the editing.

And so for a long time, you did all the editing because I was like, I just, I can't just, not that we make any money off this show, but it was a similar kind of thing. And then the other thing, and this is something I've used now with Alex once, and we're about to use it again, once the game gets signed. John Brieger, as a developer who's been on the show before, he gave me the advice of if you want to do a split, like if you want to do an uneven split, don't do it on the royalties.

Instead just have one designer get the full advance and then go 50 50 from there yeah i was gonna bring up that example are we allowed to talk about the game that we signed yeah let's let's keep it let's keep it vague it's a sequel it's a sequel to a game that peter designed, and we had an idea for what would be a very you know exciting follow-up to that product and so. In the course of you know hey what feels fair about this because it's you know it's a good this.

New game is a true co-design but it's coming from the dna of something that was just yours and that's exactly what we did so peter got the full advance and going forward it's a 50 50 split on royalties after that yeah and then alex actually i want to bounce back to this later but alex basically came to him he's like hey here's a game i have fully designed and i don't know what to do with it take it we'll split everything 50 50 but i'll get the advance on that one

and so like i'm fairly confident that one's going to be signed because it's amazing and exact same thing in reverse yeah the most important thing in terms of splitting royalties which is apparently what we're talking about now is what alex said earlier which is that you design with someone because you like them alex is family to me like alex's wife nicole is my best friend in the world alex is one of my closest friends in the world his kids biologically my.

Kids sorry to tell you about this on the podcast you you are you are family more than anyone in this world that is not my actual blood family and so any any disagreement we have like let's say you got more money than me oh no your kids who i really do think of is like my kids not biologically but like in terms of how much like i care for them oh no they're gonna have a better future oh better fight this contract and then aj and i we've been friends for what eight years now

oh more than that for sure yeah more than more than eight years and so you know when we when we split a co-design like I care about our friendship so much more than I care about niggling over 4% whatever's like, it just doesn't matter to me as much as working. And so, AJ, you mentioned... Guys, you didn't tell me we're allowed to swear on this podcast. I've been holding back. Yeah. Did you swear? I didn't catch it. I did. Oh, we're not allowed to. Oh, we have to edit that now.

I'm so Australian. I don't even notice that I swear. I shouldn't have said anything. AJ is so used to it. He doesn't notice either. AJ, you asked about disputes between co-designers and all the examples so far have been in the game. But I do want to talk about what happens when you disagree outside the game.

And obviously my headline is work with people who you like so much that you're not going to disagree with it i'm going to give a non-board game example which is i was working with a screen writer an aspiring screenwriter like me and we were working the script together it was all going great and then he did something i'll go into it i think this is okay to talk about basically he is, so staunchly ai it's like become a part of his personality he's one of those

people who's always like rallying against it rallying against it rallying against it and so one point you said What's that? You said staunchly AI. You mean anti-AI? Anti-AI. Knowing your politics. Yes, he's very, very anti-AI, which is fine. Like we weren't using it in our writing, whatever. There was a rumor. I don't think it was even vaguely confirmed. There was a rumor that Google were going to start pulling data from Google Docs to put into their AI LLM system, whatever.

And so he insisted that we stopped using Google for any of our collaboration. And you both know that that's where I live. Like I live in Google Docs, I live in Google Sheets, I can't work not in that system. That's where all my files are. And so that by itself wouldn't have been enough. But once you've hit that point of ideological difference or ideological inflexibility, negotiating a contract is annoying. It is difficult and annoying. And finding a home is hard enough by itself.

If you've got one person with suddenly this really strong ideology, I was looking 200 meters down the road, sorry, 800 feet.

And just thinking like i don't want to do that i just have no interest in you know disney makes an offer and he's like but we can't work with disney droop droop droop like i just i don't want to do that so we stopped working together on the flip side of it alex and i we're talking about this today actually we have a big beautiful game that no one will sign it's so good it's so big it's unsignable for whatever reason we got an offer on it and we got an offer from a publisher that

we ended up turning down and the game's still not signed and probably won't be and so i was saying to alex today in our chat like on one hand that feels stupid like we ideologically didn't sign a game but neither and correct me if i'm wrong alex but neither of us regret that at all no and i mean it's a very privileged position right because like we we didn't need the money from signing a game we didn't need the you know satisfaction of

getting our first game signed right we were we were definitely in the catbird seat of we can choose to say no to this because it was a bad offer and the publisher was very rude about it so it was yeah yeah so i guess yeah opening up to you too what what have have you run into any situations where the disagreement is not about what's best for the game but what's best for the game i i have been i you know it's interesting because I don't think they're

disagreements in the sense of they hurt my feelings or caused any kind of actual animosity. But you and I, I think, have different sensibilities when it comes to getting things signed. I think you are a contract hawk. You go hard in the paint when it comes time to negotiate the contract. And I have benefited greatly from that. And the game you just mentioned, I probably would have just said yes to that if I was on my own.

And the fact that you didn't just take a bad offer and roll over means the game isn't signed, but it also means for every one of those, there have been three games where we're getting two to three to five points higher on royalties than we would have if I was the one just saying yes to whatever the first offer was from the publisher. I think I almost gave AJ a heart attack. We got an offer from a very large company and it was a very standard offer.

And I said, nope, we want a higher number. And he was like, or we could take the number or we could sign the game. And I was like, no, I want this high number. And in fairness, we got the higher number. Yeah. And we, you know, it's, that's a, you know, but to the earlier thing about like you being a much more signed designer, right? Like if that hadn't gone that way, I imagine AJ would have been, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, AJ, but that would have felt pretty terrible.

If it's like, oh man, this like great opportunity, we missed out on it because we asked for two more percent and they wouldn't bunch. I mean, it worked out fantastically. Like we actually got more than we bargained for. Peter bargained for a lot. Yeah, they counter offered with a better deal because I made a very compelling case. I was like, look, this is actually really good. Like if it goes well, we both succeed. And they were like, yeah,

okay. You can have a better number than you asked for. We're like, done. Yep. And to be fair, I'm sure that they would be the first to tell you they couldn't be happier with the relationship post signing the game. Like we've put in a lot of effort. They've said we're the most engaged designers they've ever worked with post-signing. So everyone's happy. And I think this is not a comment, it's not exclusively about co-designing.

But I think to that point, one thing that Peter and I have had a lot of success with is repeat business with the same publishers because they do see us put in that effort.

And getting your second game signed with a publisher, if you're good at what you do and you put in the work on that first game it's so much easier than getting the first game signed because publishers are people just like us and they want to work with people who they trust and like and I am sure that both our next game with Cardboard Alchemy and some of the stuff we've got with Allplay and all kinds of things.

Getting that second or third contract was a direct result of being good to work with on the first thing so that's been nice and that's a thing to look for in a co-designer right like do they play nice with other people right like if if you and i got a game signed and you know you were in there trying to make things work and i i came in and just like you know crapped all over everything and said i don't like this i don't like this i don't have any solutions but i hate that and if you don't change

it i'm not going to put my name on it you know that would be you know even if i'm not directing that at you peter that would be a perfectly reasonable reason to not want to work with me again. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what my Google Docs example was. Like it was, he's so lovely. I really like, he's going to move to LA soon. I'm hoping we hang out and become friends. We maintain that friendship when he moves to LA, but I could just see that sort of putting a flag in the sand or whatever it is.

It's a harbinger of death to describe Alex. Hey, that's me. AJ, go ahead. Yeah, I don't have an example of the meta one, but I do have one that's kind of on the line that I think is a good example of just resolving disputes in general for co-designing.

So this is one of the very, very rare cases where you and I couldn't resolve something directly from obvious playtesting but it wasn't be it wasn't like a binary one person is wrong one person isn't wrong it was just a taste thing this is the the content stuff so peter as if you've listened to many episodes of the podcast know that peter really loves having lots of lots of content in his games yeah yeah i was like who are you talking about yes i'm caught up.

I'll interrupt you to say when we're talking about splitting duties i always want to be the content guy i'm even a little selfish about it because it's fun to make the content and so if they want any i'll do 10 times as much then my co-designer will be like well i i would have i want to make some too i just love it i just love it which is great it's awesome having you know someone who wants to put a bunch of work and make a bunch more

content for it but we were at the point where we were in development and had been in development for like eight months or something.

And i was at the point of being like i want to trim back a little bit of this content and at the point where we were getting where i was thinking that peter was like hey i just made a whole bunch more content for it and this is again it's not like to say that peter's wrong or i'm wrong i want to have like yeah i just want to have the 10 most like polished my favorite 10 things that like every little interaction has been thought of and peter wants to be

able to come back to it a hundred times and see new stuff like totally totally reasonable point yeah and the way that we resolve that is just i acquiesced to peter i was like listen we can just have like more content in the game basically and then at some point development we can cut it at least i said that initially once we got into the like development peer was trying to add more i was pushing back more on that but then the development team eventually said yeah

we want a little bit less content in this can you trim it back to just the favorite stuff and peter very uh magnanimously said that yeah that's fine you didn't want to be involved in the kind of the content but you were like i i see it you know i get it yeah and that's i mean it like you said it was a purely a taste thing and the publisher's taste trumps our taste or trumps my taste in that in that situation like i'm not saying you know kill kill your game to make the publisher happy but in this

case we had two designers who were equally passionate about it the publisher said we want to do this so, obviously like don't don't don't piss off the publisher and my co-designers so that i can have my, And same, like if they had said the other thing, like, man, I wish there was a bit more content, I'd have been like, yep, all right, let's add some more content. So what do you do if a co-designer wants to step away from a project? How do you handle that? Has that ever happened to you, Alex?

So would you say step away in terms of like, I'm done with this and I don't want to come back? Or step away like, hey, let's take a break on this because I'm just not feeling it right now? Or both? Let's go with both.

I know peter and i at various points in time have felt more or less enthused about particular projects and we actually i think use that to good effect as part of our design process which is, we'll pause something and say hey we're butting our heads against a wall here let's work on our other games and then oftentimes just the time if only we had 11 other games on the whole time oftentimes just like taking a pause on it means

that when we come back something has been shaken loose and it's there for the picking. So that to me has never been a problem. I have had situations where either I or my co-designer sort of was just not feeling that there was a reasonable way to continue working on a game. I had a co-design that I started about five years ago, five and a half years ago, right when I moved to North Carolina with one of the guys in my local group. Lovely guy had a few published games.

This is not like a negative story, but I will not, I guess, say who it is because it's not relevant to it. But we started working on a game together. COVID happened, right? So it was then needed to immediately be like a remote kind of design process, which I'm not a huge fan of. I'm not great at when it's all remote, especially because the game in question was a very like three-dimensional physical kind of game and just trying to do that on TTS and just I was not feeling it.

And then I had my first child had just been born and I was just burnt out. And I was not in a headspace to keep doing it. And so I was like, hey, look, I cannot match your excitement level and your time commitment to this. I am happy to just... Here's a formal email saying this is full yours if you want to continue with it. Because he was very excited about it. He wanted to keep going with the idea. I was just like, totally fine. Here's the thing saying that it's now full years, right?

Pay you $1 or whatever for something, or you pay me $1 to buy me out of it or something, just legalese or whatever. That was it. I felt a little bit bad, but I felt better than I did when we were working on it together, and I didn't feel like I was holding up my end of the bargain. Because like you said, you want that 50-50, or like we were talking about earlier, you, feeling. And I knew that I wasn't giving 50%. I wasn't even giving like 25%. And it just didn't make sense at that time for me.

So I was fine with that interaction. And then that guy, I remember feeling like a little bit guilty about it at the time because he was like, kind of didn't feel great about it. But then later, like a year later, he had a kid himself and he came back to me like a few months later. He was like, oh, I totally get it. You haven't slept in three years. I They tell you about the lack of sleep, but God, you don't understand until you've done it, just how little sleep you get.

Yeah. So like trying to like, you know, have a design call, you know, once a week at like 10 PM or something, right? After you get your kid down, that's not what I wanted to be doing with my life. So yeah, so it hasn't happened to me a ton, but the times it has, it's been pretty easily resolved as long as both parties are reasonable, I would say. What about you, Peter? So when they were making Arrested Development, they had a rule in the right.

Do you want to explain why that's funny, Alex? Welcome to the podcast. Peter has told me a story that starts with that sentence 40 times. And the first, I would say, 25 of them, he didn't remember that he had told me before. So I heard it for the first time 25 times. And now it's just a really joke.

When they were making Arrested Development, they wanted to have so many great jokes in the script that they had to cut great jokes.

I love that philosophy. when we're making critter kitchen that was we made there's 18 carts in the game we made what 40, at least there's 37 zoo chefs we made 100 like we just we way over delivered so that when they were cutting it wasn't like well obviously these ones it was like god we love all of these and have to cut them and this is why as aj said earlier i don't like being part of the cutting process but that's not the fun part to me that making

the stuff i love oh it says trying to reconnect can you guys hear me yep no looks like we may have lost peter again oh no hello hello was that like 10 seconds of robot noises for you too aj or was that just on my end yeah that was me too hopefully it's all good on his end uh hopefully uh what was the last thing you guys said you're still a robot yeah hello hello hello still a robot still frozen man now i'm gonna have to edit you're gonna have to do something alex you are a curse can i swear a

bunch right now just really loudly so you can see where it is in the wave five. It's all working on my end so i don't know can you guys hear me or am i a robot i can hear you robot style but your video is frozen for me yeah same okay trying to reconnect make sure we have a. Well, you know what? Maybe we'll just let Peter go and he'll come back when he can. And in the meantime, we'll just keep going. Just truck on through.

So I'm going to give everyone a quick little tip here because maybe this will get cut. Who knows? But this quick random stupid tip is sometimes, I don't know if this happens to you, Alex, but you'll get into sort of a riff and you'll be like, all right, we found a problem. And you'd be like, well, you could increase hand size or you could decrease the cost of this or you could do this.

And you sort of end up in this situation where you keep bouncing ideas off over and over, but they don't quite fit. And what I found works a lot, what Peter and I do all the time is when we get into those loops, we'll just stop and we'll be like, okay, let's just say out loud what the problem is. And just doing that, just like very clearly articulating the problem, making sure we're on the same page and then thinking through, okay, are any of these solutions actually addressing that problem?

And are any of the solutions addressing the problem in a way that undermines the core of the game or are they actually something that's going to reinforce the core identity of the game?

Like we said with Cozy Hollow, everything has to be positive player interaction. So our solutions have to solve whatever specific problem we have right now and they have to be able to actually address them in a way that still supports the positive player interaction. Do you have any experience with that? I think that's great advice because I think like any relationship, you want to make sure that you're both talking about the same issue at the same time, right?

Like with your partner or something, if we're having an argument, are we arguing about the same thing? Are we on the same page about what we're even discussing, right? And having those check-ins is great because I think with Peter and with other people I've co-designed with, just verbalizing the problem like you just said, sometimes I realize that you're both trying to solve different problems and that's why you aren't seeing eye to eye.

Hey peter yes you're back you're back and there's also i don't know if any it's just a black screen, oh good i don't know if any of what you guys just did was recorded the little flashing record light has been going but oh yeah we'll keep going then you are give me a quick summary of what i'm missing sorry go ahead you're a fair bit louder just fyi. Yeah, go ahead, Alex. AJ was asking or saying that oftentimes you'll win.

Man, are you frozen again? No, you're just eating. Okay. It wasn't robot noises. It was crunching noises. Verbalizing the problem and making sure you're on the same page about what you're trying to solve with your proposed solutions is an important part of finding those solutions. Because if the two of you aren't in sync about what it is that you're trying to fix, then you might be sort of ships passing in the night in terms of what you're proposing.

Finish that thought. I'll circle back and finish my earlier thought. We finished. We're good. Go ahead. Oh, okay. Hey, guys, I'm back. My internet is letting me join the call again. So what I was saying is basically it's a concept called scarcity mode that I think about all the time, and I'm sure I've mentioned in the podcast. If you have a lot of a thing, you're not going to be precious about it. And so that's exactly how I am with co-designs.

My my favorite method is the person who wants to leave the co-design just wholeheartedly gives it to the other person and that's what alex did in his example and aj you and i've had that on at least one game where i was like look i i'm not excited about this and i need to be excited on a game like very very very early on to work on it so i was like it's yours like everything we've done every part of the idea and i think that was an idea that

i brought like the thematically and i was like nope it's yours like take it do what do what you will with it so that that is very much my attitude towards the thing from 45 minutes ago when i left the call yep i i think that's the the best way to do it it's clean it feels fair to the other person you know it respects that the game isn't done that it shouldn't be like a royalty split because it's still in a rough enough spot that obviously

you walked away from it before it was done if it was really that close to done you probably wouldn't have walked away right yeah i i have i have seen other people be in situations where they tried to math their exit out in a way that led to hard feelings later, right? We're like, I don't want to work on this anymore, so let's make it, you know, like a 30-70 split.

And, you know, that's not worth it. If you're going to walk away, walk away. Don't try and, like, bake it into some kind of contract. And like Peter said earlier, like, presumably you're co-designing with your friends. What do you care about more? Maybe gain a few dollars down the line if the thing even gets published, or do you care more about maintaining a healthy relationship with your friend? You know that's why you should always co-design with your enemies because then you can be.

This is just a simple thing can we just talk benefits and disadvantages of co-designing, alex just right off the top of your head what are the benefits of co-designing versus doing it solo i think efficiency is a huge one ideally in a co-design relationship you are more than twice as productive, right? It's not just twice as productive, it's significantly more because.

You're kind of getting, this isn't exactly the right language, I guess, but you're getting free playtesting as you go, kind of, because there's two of you, right? No, 100%. That was going to be my best. It's just the nature, unless it's a game that has a minimum player count of three and you, for whatever reason, can't fudge that in the testing process because it's like a social deduction game or something.

The act of just designing the game with someone else means you are pushing pieces around on a board and trying things out and you can get to those answers so much faster i think all of us who've done solo design know that experience of like working through in your head how you think something's going to go and building out all the pieces and taking it to your design group very excitedly only to find out within like one term that it did not work at all like you expected

and now you have to wait another week to get more information with the next version so you completely skip that when you're co-designing the bandwidth is is so much larger So that's a huge advantage. I would say what you were talking about earlier, about if one of you has a type of task you're not a fan of, if the other person is able to fill that gap, then that can be great.

So what I designed with Mike Mihalsik, him being able to go iterate the next physical version of the prototype is such a load off.

Like i appreciate that so greatly because if i was trying to just build out versions by myself i would be significantly slower and i would probably half the games you've made together i probably would have just like shelled and been like i don't want to make a whole new version of this you know so that's huge disadvantages oh don't do you have no advantages to add to that i i i was i was so perfect in my analysis there's nothing i i thought we were doing one by one uh so.

Aside from the stuff that Alex mentioned which is very very true one thing that I've found just so I will if I'm solo designing and I get stuck on a problem, that can either be the end of the design or that can be the end of the design for. In a co-design, almost every time I'm stuck in a problem, sort of what you were saying earlier, I can just vocalize the problem and the other person will be like, oh, well, now that you've vocalized it, here's a solution.

I'm like, that is the solution. Of course that's the solution. Yes. And so it just gets rid of those speed bumps, which for me can completely derail, to mix metaphors, a project forever.

I mentioned earlier that I co-designed with Jeff. We actually, I'm realizing now, co-designed differently than I've ever done before, which is because we both were so opinionated and often in opposite directions we would just be like okay cool you build the next draft and play test it and then come back and we'll play it together and all the stuff i disagree with i will just take out and i will play test a draft and it was funny because a lot of the times i

would take something out that was like that's stupid i don't like it play tested it i'd be like oh you know what would fix this problem that that thing that exact thing i just took out so just having two different brains on it like i think both of you would agree i think very differently to either of you and you two probably think very differently from each other and so many times when i'm like ah well this is obviously an unsolvable problem one of you

will be like oh we could just do this thing that solves it we just immediately fix it it's so funny how often one of the two of us will have a problem be like oh yeah how do we solve it and the person's like it's just so obvious you do that it's like oh i guess it's not a problem laughing. So, yeah, the two different brains, again, to Alex's point, like it's more than twice as good as working by yourself, not only for speed, but just for the angles that you can. Yeah.

And I just, this made me think of it while you were talking. We haven't talked about this and I don't know that we need to go into crazy depth on it, but we're talking, we've been talking during the course of this podcast and video pretty much exclusively about two player co-designs or sorry, two person co-designs. We haven't really broached the topic of like, if you have. I've never done one. I was just going to say, I have done it once before.

It's not super common, but I'd imagine that you get into the cons camp a little bit of it's not, you're not able to just have two people kind of pick the best of the two choices. You end up in that sort of like that triangle power dynamic thing of two people think that the right way is one thing and steamroll the third person, even if you're not trying to, it's just kind of human nature.

Two people is a relationship, three people is politics. yeah so i i have i don't have a lot of experience with with that but yeah so that this advice may not be applicable if you're trying to co-design with your polycule or whatever so it would be interesting to get like flat out games or the sprawlopolis guys on because like those are two people or two groups of people who design a lot in in a trio another huge advantage and this this is a very specific one so i'll use

critic kitchen as an example critic kitchen i think is best at three i think three is like the best play account for that i think it's great at all play accounts but it's best at three and a best at three game is often not that good at two but because the vast vast vast majority of playtesting for critic kitchen was me and alex playing against each other the two-player mode is amazing like it's it's like for for a game i've had a lot of people be like oh well

you know this this game people will play it four or five and be like yeah i guess it has like a dummy hand to whatever it just doesn't we just like because we needed to solve those problems before we could play test like every time we sat on a play test if we ran into a two-player problem we couldn't play test without solving it so that game had so many built-in.

Scaffolding for an amazing two-player experience so yeah the benefit of of in a duo specifically designing is that you end up a lot of the time with a really great two-player i think just building on the like sounding board comments is i one thing i get a lot of co-designs is more confidence in those early play tests and stuff just having someone to like bounce ideas off of and maybe like oh i think this is a cool idea for something and then immediately having feedback

backup that is a cool idea or no that doesn't work because of this it gives you a lot more confidence and it saves you a lot of like early iteration cycles and that kind of thing but i think i think the thing that i bring to proto to co-designing less so with alex but with most the other people i co-design with is i'm very good at not letting us go down the wrong track and i say not without because he's even better than i am but you know one of my co-designers aj or matt or

tom lang or jeff or someone like will suggest an idea that i i just again from like a decade of doing this i'm like that's a trap like oh i'll use a really obvious example putting in any kind of exception and aj you're pretty good at cutting these exceptions but i think one thing i do is i really cut it off at the stem like yeah as as the co-designer is reaching out to plant a seed i'll pull out my gun and shoot it out that's quite a mixed amount of like it.

But i think you guys have missed the most important benefit of co-designing, you only get half the money royalty.

That's in the distance can you see why that's in the disadvantages column i was gonna say it's so fun but i guess you guys have more fun arguing over percentages you know getting half the royalty is a fun problem so, well that leaves no it is just fun to like creatively work with the people you love I mean, you know, Peter and I were friends before we started co-designing together, but it's absolutely made our relationship stronger. I mean, it gives us an excuse to spend time together.

Yeah. You would not be flying out to LA twice a year for a week if we weren't co-designing. You just wouldn't make any sense. And I think for me personally, my co-designs have mostly come from people that I playtest with a lot. And then we're like, we just click so well and get on the same page, have such similar sensibilities, have this cool idea. It just sort of emerges out of those people that I already like spending time with a lot. So yeah.

Disadvantage yeah let's start with alice what do you what's the biggest disadvantage besides peter being peter well yeah the disadvantage is having to spend time with peter so much more hate than otherwise so we i mean we just mentioned right you're splitting the royalty i don't really consider that a disadvantage because if the co-design is doing what it should be doing you're signing a game twice as fast or faster than you would be otherwise maybe if

you only have one game and it happens to become an evergreen and that's all you ever do it feels like a disadvantage but i think when you're doing this over and over again it's like a career.

That's it's not a problem because i i yeah that they come out you make them faster and in in our cases me with both of you they saw higher than the solid absolutely they're more than twice good um i will say i can speak to something that is probably like more unique to me than i think either of you in terms of a potential disadvantage without going like too deep into the details i had co-designer who I worked with in the past, who I had a personal falling out with.

And so we just, we're no longer friends. And we had some games together that, you know, maybe they are signed with a publisher who wants SQL or the rights have now reverted and we could be in a position to pitch them again somewhere else or something like that.

Any of that follow-up kind of stuff is now infinitely more complicated because we don't want to have a business relationship anymore because we don't have a personal relationship anymore so you know if it if the publisher isn't paying us royalties property properly or something we can't present a united front to to handle that so oh that that reminds me one of the just while we're while we're talking about co-designing one lovely thing about working with alex and and aj both

actually is that when you're when you're negotiating with a publisher and i don't mean the contract i mean like post post signing when you're in the development process it's really good to have someone to bounce thoughts off like you know they did this and i don't know how to feel about that and and you just get a thought back and then you can alternate who drafts messages and like it a it's really important to prevent provide that united front i think that's so vital

peter vaughn from cardboard alchemy has said that he thought he would never work with a co-designer because it's twice as much work and then between working with us and working with luke and max laurie who made andromeda's edge he's like oh it's great because we provide such a united front it's not like dealing with two personalities it's like dealing with no personality well i've been on the other side of that as a publisher so when i was

working at pandasaurus some of our designs that we signed were co-designs right and right it is so so much nicer when both designers are on the same page like it's a complete 180 from like there was one pair of designers that was difficult to work with and it was more one of them than the other. And that really actually caused problems for wanting to work with one or both of them again. Whereas the partnerships where we worked with them, they were both great.

It made us more likely to want to work with them as a pair or them as individuals. Alex is better at diplomacy than I am. So in the same way as I deal with the contract negotiations, I'm like, Alex, it's a diplomacy problem. Fix it. He does. That's great. The two big disadvantages, I don't like the word disadvantage. I'm going to say the cost. In the same way as when you get married, the cost is that you now have to factor this person into all your plans.

For me, I work very, very, very, very fast. I iterate really quickly.

And so sometimes with collaborations it can be like i'm ready for the next draft but i don't want to do i don't want to get three drafts ahead i've had that happen before i worked with a designer, quite a quite a big name designer and i would play test and then email him the notes and he replied with like a thumbs up so i played this again and email him the notes and by the end i just felt like i was designing this game and he just couldn't

keep up with me and that's not a diss he was a very very very busy man but i just want to go go go like i will when i'm solo designing or you know when i'm in the same space as someone else it's more likely to happen but especially when i'm solo designing i will design for 10 hours straight on the same game i will just build it play it against myself rebuild it play it against myself rebuild it play it against myself and you know co-designers

are busy and and they burn out faster than everyone burns out faster than i do that's not an insult i can just go and go and go so i do sometimes feel a little bit slowed down by co-designing it's not a disadvantage it's a cost like the cost of the game being twice as good.

And coming together faster than it would if I was solo designing is that you are working to someone yeah and I think that's a cost uh regardless of which person you are in the relationship because I'm on the other side of this to Peter right and there have absolutely been weeks where just between like kid stuff and home stuff and other work stuff I just was like I I'm not available I'm not putting in work I'm not working

on this thing that Peter's very excited to work on right and I feel guilty or I feel like I'm not carrying my weight or you know he says hey don't worry about it I got it and he goes off and does a version i'm like well but i wanted to like be involved in the version right.

I wanted to design i wanted to make content but but you know yeah we're we're very good at you know smoothing that over and not having it be a problem but that comes from a place of having to the experience of dealing with it and and knowing how to navigate it and being very good friends outside of game design so and that that is what you know that example i gave earlier i gave earlier of the uh the game that i had to you know back out on that i was working on with one of my local designers,

it was that exact same thing, except we didn't have that history, we didn't have that working relationship to where it made sense to try and navigate it and keep it alive. So the correct answer was to just give it back. But oftentimes, Peter has so many projects that he's working on that if I'm not available to work on one of our things, it's not like he's just sitting there twiddling his thumbs. Yeah, I'll go design eight other games while I wait. And then the other one

is sort of related, which is when you have... So I'll use Critter Kitchen as an example. We made Critter Kitchen together. That is a pure co-design. Like, it could not exist without either of us. And I would like to, on some level, take that core mechanism and try some other stuff. And that doesn't feel right. Because Alex and I, like we have, like I said, literally 11 games that we just don't have time to get to. And so I don't want to be like, hey, remember that game that we made together?

I've made my own version. Bye. like i can't do that i don't want to do that and so there is there is a slight limiting factor of like if it if it's a collaborative idea it doesn't belong to you it belongs to you as yeah that's a great point because i have a solo design that i don't know i don't think i've played with you aj but peter you know i have that i have a mechanic that i have that i i don't know if it's 100% they called it

like pick or push it's like a type of drafting that i had not seen in other games and it leads to a lot of really fun moments and i designed the game with that i got it signed It came back during the COVID years, but then it got signed again. And then I used that same mechanic to design another game that got signed. And then I used that same mechanic to design another game that got signed. And because it's my own idea, I'm not ripping anybody off by doing that.

So I don't have to stop and check in with someone or be like, hey, is this too close to that thing we made together? Which, you know, if you did the Critter Kitchen system in a later game, I'd be like, well, I feel a little bit bad about that. I wouldn't do it because I would feel bad doing it. It's funny, too, because you would have, we, you know.

It's not the politest way to phrase it but like game designers rip off games all the time like you can't make a mechanic that is truly novel you know if you have you know sushi go drafting in your game you're presumably like you saw it and played it and now you're using it but because you don't you know you're not friends with phil walker harding you don't feel like you're you're doing anything untoward you know whereas if it's a yeah my game fiction is based on the web app

fibble and i was like well cool it's it's out there now i can do that whereas if you had made fibble right it would be a wildly different situation so you're actually you're less able to reuse your good ideas for you for other designs when they're coming from a co-design or at least you feel ickier if you do aj what you got i think that's a good spot to stop it but would you like to introduce our new segment yes i see no sorry i i wrote down some stuff that i wanted to quickly,

because we are aiming to be the most practical uh podcast i just want to ask some really practical questions how do you find a co-designer we didn't cover that eyes well we sort of incidentally did but i wanted to really give concrete advice alex you marry their best friend.

That's that's how i it's right nicole's been my best friend for eight years that mike do so, for me when nicole met alex she was like he's a game designer you two can design together and i was like uh-huh sure sure thing nicole that's gonna happen because it's so rare to find someone you collaborate with and then she was right she has good taste but in best friends agreed, for me most of my co-design relationships have come about from people in my

local design groups peter was the exception peter i did not meet locally right he was someone i met on the convention circuit through my wife. But pretty much everyone else I've ever designed with, it's a local designer who I'm playing their games, they're playing my games. We get a good sense of if we are working well together. And then we organically or by design say, hey, let's think of an idea to work on together.

Or, hey, that thing you brought to group today made me come up with this good idea. But like what we were just saying, because it's similar to yours, I wouldn't want to do it if you weren't involved. So would you like to work on it together?

And I've seen so many you know co-design partnerships come out of the group that i'm a part of right like other people who are like just pairing off and pairing off and i i really think raleigh has the best design group in america like and i'm not saying that because no i it really does i think it is.

Certainly the best per capita like in terms of density of published game designers it's absolutely the highest but we have a group that meets five times a month game designers of north carolina a shout out five times a month and routinely has between like six and a dozen people coming out to each meeting and has like 80 to 100 active members and as a group yeah we have i think we're pushing like 200 published games so very very strong representing

north carolina which is you know as you know directly north of california so aj your answer is going to be almost the complete opposite of alex is it do you i mean i'm thinking about the people you design with are they local, people you met through local playtesting but through actually yeah my answer is really weird my initial thought was yeah it's just people that i playtested with but it's actually a lot more complicated than

that if i trace it back at one step further you i met through local playtesting at a pro to the first year which everybody knows of course and then but we didn't stop. Designing together until this podcast so just start a podcast yeah so yeah start podcast with So that's a great way of doing it. Thomas, I met at a different proto to very briefly.

I playtested his game, didn't know who he was, criticized him on how he taught his game, then taught his game to other people to try and make it a smoother process. If you've played Decrypto, that's what I'm saying, Brian. That game is the hardest game to teach in the world. It's worth it, but it's so hard to teach. Apparently, that made a good impression on him. So we became friends, and then we playtested every week for like a year or two, and then started co-designing just last year.

And then Stefan was someone that I met through this podcast as well, who was a listener.

Oh, really? I didn't know. Yeah, I don't remember how we initially met, but it was something, it was it was either in the discord i was asking for playtesters or something like that i'm pretty sure uh stefan might remember but yeah it was something to do with the podcast is how i met him i'm pretty sure and then we similar thing we playtested a whole bunch and eventually, with him it was he told me about an idea he had or it was it was a fully built

game not an idea but he was like it's not quite working but i was like that sounds so cool let me see it and then immediately i was like well if you redid this part and redid this part and redid this part but then it would be great. And then you forced your way into it. Basically. And now we're working on two different games where it was like, one of them was his initial idea, one was my initial idea, and we're both like alternating what we're doing. So it's working great.

I think the general advice answer is the same as mine, which is playtest with people, playtest with people, playtest with people. My local co-designer, Matt, is interesting because we were playtesting just the two of us for about a year before we started co-designing.

And part of the appeal was sort of what we were talking about earlier. is i was just like you think about games so differently to me so in in a sense like i'm a more published designer than him he's got a few games out now but like i've got far more out than him just because i have a stupid number of games out but i was i never thought of it as looking like down on him or anything like that because i was just like i i want to learn how you think about games because

i like your designs and they're nothing like i would make and then sort of the the what not to do would be i can't swear because we don't swear on this podcast but in In LA, there's a term called star effing, which is when if someone's a little bit famous, you want them. And I would advise against doing that. Like never, ever, ever get stars in your eyes.

There is a pretty well-known designer who I think everyone in this podcast has had him offer, be like, we should co-design. And the first response is like, yeah, you're a huge deal. And then you realize a few months in, oh, he's not actually co-designing. He's just taking my design and putting his name on it.

So do not do not do not co-design with someone because they're a big deal strongly recommending and certainly don't approach someone and be like hey you're famous let's co-design because it it's it's star effing it's not good. Again, the next really practical one I have is, question I have is, how do you start a co-design? AJ, you already talked about, hey, that game you made, I want to do this with it. Alex, I think you mentioned that as well.

But what are some other, like, Alex, you and I got together and we're like, let's co-design. What was the next step? Yeah. So, you and I think this, I don't know if this has been mentioned on the podcast before. You and I have our hot tub time, right? Where we get in a hot tub and we just, like, talk about games and it leads to some, like, really cool designs. But I don't know, I'm thinking back to like Providence, the big heavy game that no one wants to sign that you mentioned earlier.

And that came about because, I don't know, six years ago, seven years ago, just before I lived in North Carolina, you came to me and you were like, hey, I like time travel and you have a city building game and we should make a game about time travel and city building. And it was just like, here's this thing I like, here's chocolate, you have peanut butter, like let's just, you know.

And I think that's a perfectly fine way to do it, right? If you're designing with someone, hopefully you respect them and the things that they've done. So the idea is, what is something that I think you're really good at or you're really good at seeing, either thematically or mechanically, and then how can I bring something to the table that meshes well with that? And where's that sort of magic spark when those two meet in the middle?

And for our origin story and for a lot of the games we've made together, I think they've definitely just come out of a place of us talking about something maybe completely unrelated to game design even, and then being like, oh, there's a game there. There's something. Or we came up with a game two trips ago in LA, a drawing party game, where literally Peter was talking about a game that he had played. Or you'd talk to a publisher who was like, I really wish there was a game that did this.

And then within five minutes in the car of talking about it, we were like we just came up with a game that does this like it's actually this is a really good example of another huge advantage of co-designing which is when you misinterpret what the other person said and come up with a better idea so like countless times one of you will say something i'm like oh like this and like no no but that is better than what i was saying let's do that adjacent to that is is my my

famous line if you've co-designed with me you've heard me say this a thousand times.

Okay i've got a bad idea and just like throwing out a bad idea opens the door to a million good ideas in a way that sitting in silence does and a shocking number of times the other person will be like that's not a bad idea and here's why and i'm like oh that's not a bad that's a that's a super invaluable skill right it's like a conversation starter almost where it's like you are you are very very good at like here's this sort of like idea seedling that i'm just going to throw out there you know

like how can we react to it and you're very good at like thought-provoking questions right so and even if you don't have i plant the seed and you don't shoot it out of my hand see and even if you don't have a fully formed idea sometimes you know i'll just be like listen i i i don't have a full thing but what if in this direction this kind of effect worked with this kind it's just like very amorphous but it it gets you thinking in the right direction right 100 yeah

aj how do you start co-designs so this is if i'm interpreting your question correctly we have decided we want to make a game together yeah okay cool yes so the way that i start is i have a big long list of game ideas that i haven't started working on and i read out all of them and then i say what ideas do you have and we.

Find the one that we are both excited on step one step two yeah you'd say that was gonna be my answer so i want to jump in like it's about tickling the other person's brain so aj literally we've done this he will read out five ideas i'm like i don't care about four of those but that last one that has got me thinking what if we did this and then you're off you're racing like you're going go ahead aj so then once you have agreed on one of the game ideas oftentimes you'll you'll

like riff a little bit on the spot and then what i usually do is if it was one of my ideas i will write out like a really really simple design doc i've got one right here i'm just gonna read out one of the games i'm working on with stephan i think he I think you'd be fine with it so this is AI on a long distance ship similar to was it gen 7 or whatever that one was called like that the.

It's it's the one that does the crossroads thing where it's like a generation ship that's like, so anyway it's it's along those lines where it's like the last remnants of humanity is like leaving earth and it's about that journey so the ship starts off perfect and it falls apart as you go and you're like triaging all these broken systems and stuff so immediately i was like we were like okay so what's the player account what publishers would be interested in it what

are the different types of hooks, trying to get, you know, hit all the notes. What type of gameplay should it feel like? What mechanics are we considering to start with? What does a round look like? What are your objectives? Stuff like that. So then I write all this out and then I present it to my co-designer and I say, Hey, and I basically just pitch it to them. I'm like, what if we did this? And like, anytime they want to, we just stop and we flesh out a thing where

they're like, I don't think that really makes sense here. What if we did this instead?

And we just work through it once we're done going through the whole note now we've got a good idea of what the game looks like and then again if it's my idea i will usually build out the first draft and we'll you know throw it i'll throw it together very very roughly we'll play it and it'll fall apart in five minutes and we'll discuss and then we're on off to the races the designing to a publisher thing as you know that's something i think about all the time and so

alex and i have had many either we'll start with like what game would we design for this publisher or after we've got an idea that we like the first thing we do is like okay which publisher is this for and i think we've done that all the way yeah we have a whole spread you know in the same way aj that you were describing you know track like building out that information of like what hooks what player counts what what things you want in your game peter

and i have a similar kind of like google doc google sheets structure of like here's all of our in progress designs here's who they'd be a fit for here's like you know a tier publisher targets b tier publisher targets you know who's who's rejected it who's looking at it you know things like that the other way to start a co-design which is we've touched on earlier in the podcast is literally uh alex i'll use i'll use the most recent one between us which is alex yeah sat

down said hey i have this game i don't know what to do with it we played it i took it away i rebuilt it i came back we played it we rebuilt it like just one person having a complete design or a game the design they're stuck on just being like here yep that's actually i was going to bring that up when it got back around to me, which is that is exactly how Mike and I do pretty much all of our designing. Very few of our designs started from the ground up being a new thing in between both of us.

We've basically taken turns bringing one of our old games that we consider sort of shelved or dead that we're like, this was a really cool concept. I like 50% of what it was doing or 80% of what it was doing. I never got it to work.

Let's make this our next game. And from that sort of scrap heap revival, we've gotten three contracts already of like we just alternate like hey you know next one up is from your list so we have a game coming out from smirk and dagger that's when you kickstarter i think this month well january 2025 i don't know. A place for all my books. And it's like a cozy kind of book stacking game where you're moving books around your apartment. And it's based off of a design of mine called Sandoku.

It was like a book stacking game. It was like a Japanese word that means like buying a bunch of books and stacking them up around your apartment and never reading them, which I came up with like seven or eight years ago. And I thought it was such a cute, clever idea. But the direction I was going with, it was much more of like, if you ever played like Rush Hour from Robinsburg.

It was like a push puzzle kind of thing where like you put a book into one thing and it moves and it was much more of like, how can you solve this puzzle? I'd have like a little book of puzzles and Robinsburger evaluated it and didn't want it. And there weren't a lot of other publishers out there who want that type of game. And so I just, it was just on a, you know, it was on a shelf and that was something that, yeah, exactly.

And I thought it was just such a cool concept. So when Mike and I started working together, I pulled it out and like, you know, pretty much immediately it became a completely different game like that's not at all like like the core like genesis of the idea is still the same but like in terms of the actual mechanics of the game it's completely different now it's much more of like a true co-design but that came from this you know old idea that i

had that mike thought was interesting enough to want to iterate on and then we've done that with some of his ideas as well and it's it's kind of like a great i think it's actually a really good thing to highlight that as much as i love co-design and as much as i think co-design is great i don't think you should only do co-design oh yeah yeah i think there's it is a red flag for me when i see someone who only only own right it's in it for all like the

strengths of it for all of the ways it accelerates the process if you haven't cut your teeth on on like designing your own game by yourself and going through those steps i think you don't have a lot of that institutional knowledge and and sort of background that would make you a good co-design.

It's like when you meet someone who has never not been dating it's like do you not like yourself and and i guess i guess there would be an exception for like people who only design in the same pair all the time for me the red flag is when i see someone who has 20 listed co-designers and no designs of their own i'm just like what's happening there i don't know maybe maybe that's a crazy opinion when alex comes to stay i realize that we're way

past the time when alex comes to stay for a week we work so intensely because he's away from the kids and i cancel my meetings and we just like work, work, work. So many of our designs come from one of us just being like, hey, is there anything in this? What if, you know, every third time you flip a coin, you get another coin, whatever. Like that's a terrible example, but something like that. So often the other one of us will just be like, yes, and it could look like this.

And again, after the race, it's sort of like AJ's list of games reading out and tickling the brain, but just like literally as we're walking to a cafe, we will do that.

We've had multiple games come from a walk you and i have designed games on long walks on long car rides oh oh in the hot tub for sure over just facebook messenger chatting about unrelated things like having having uninterrupted time to just be in the same space with the other person without even the intention of designing a game has led to some really great ideas yeah okay aj do you want to do you want to lead back into me i'm leading into you leading back into me peter

do you want to introduce the new segment sorry i wasn't expecting this oh my goodness for a second i forgot what you're asking me to do so we have a very lovely discord please come join our discord it's such a lovely little community i really love it and someone was people started asking for topic ideas which we fully welcome by the way please jump in the discord suggest topics that you'd like to talk about we love that one person requested sort of how

to how to be product first how to how to think more about publishability, which I feel I could talk about too much already. I feel like that's more of a focus of the podcast than I want to, but I completely see how that's valuable information. So rather than try to do an episode about that, we'll miss a bunch of stuff.

I want to start doing one tip at the end of every episode. So the kind of, we need a catchy name for this, but it's basically how to, how to make more producty publishable games. And because we have a special guest today. Alex, can you start off our new section with a tip about how to get games published? Because you are incredibly prolific.

Dozens at this point yeah and i think i think i mean there's a lot of like stuff on bgg that doesn't count as a game but between what i have published and what is coming out it's up somewhere in the like 15 to 25 range depending on how you count it that's great i think that one so this is specifically as a product or how to get it published sorry what was the uh but that whole arena basically we we try to keep the podcast focused on actionable game design improvement and anything outside of

that i'm less comfortable with so i want to have a dedicated section well if this is the first segment of it i'll start with some of the low hanging which is get out there physically right go to shows start meeting people in real life it's not the easiest thing to do especially if you don't live near like a major population center or you know it wouldn't be easy to get to a show but i would say of the games that i've gotten signed somewhere between 95 to maybe even

100% of them came from the fact that I'm pitching to people that I met in person at least at some point previously who I have an established relationship, who know who I am, who know I'm a real person who's serious about game design. It's not to say that you can never get a game published if you just do sort of like a cold submission to a website, but it is a much harder road. So much of our industry is who you know and networking and FaceTime with people and just.

Putting a face to a name, getting out to a show is the best first step kind of to that world if it's something you're serious about. I think that's a great tip. AJ, how do you feel about having fun? I love having fun. Very briefly at the end of each one of our episodes for a very short amount of time, and that's it. That is the idea. I'm actually a doctor. This never comes up, but I'm a fully trained medical doctor. And I can tell you as a doctor, that is the correct amount of fun.

If you're having any more of that, you will die.

You know, it almost wouldn't surprise me if you were i was at a family function recently and they and i was just talking to them about like you know my story of like work i've gone through and how i've gone to the place where i am with game design stuff and like wow they should make a movie about you when you get big and famous i was like no if that happens they're gonna do it for my co-designer not for me, i think stephan would be a fascinating subject what's

what's our fun question oh actually no let's talk about this in a previous episode i described it's going to be the scariest section i don't know if it's still that way for you aj but peter is just like four pixels right now yeah most people have to put a still picture somewhere in the discord in a previous fun question at the end of an episode i described a toy i had as a child and alex being the sweetest man in the world went and

bought me that toy so i have a dragon as a direct result of this fun section and also the harping game. AJ, take us away. What is the most fun team you've ever worked with? Alex. Game design team, I'm assuming? No, no, no. This is a fun question. We're allowed to have fun. It doesn't have to be at work. Well, definitely not game design, though.

Most fun team. I've ever done a part of it. Maybe a group of people you took. In fact, let's say it must not be about game design because that way we're not going to accidentally step on any time. So before I lived in North Carolina, I lived in a few other places, but one of them was Burlington, Vermont, which is a very small city. It's the biggest city in Vermont, but that means nothing. It's like 40,000 people.

So it's a small town. And when I moved there, I didn't know anybody, but I wanted to get involved in something socially.

Right so i went on meetup.com and and made some friends in the area and it it led to me joining a like a beer league softball team which i i played a little bit of softball when i was a kid but not a ton and so this was very much just like a bunch of guys and girls go out you know like once a week 20 weeks in a row during the season or whatever and just like literally drink beer and and hit softballs and catch them and then go out to dinner afterwards

and i think there's like a you know a league to it where you're actually trying to win the games. It's not just total heartless fun. I mean, everyone's terrible at it, right? And me especially. We're not athletes, right? And we're at varying levels of drunk probably by the end of it. It was a ton of fun. We were called the skeleton crew or something. So we had the MLB logo, but as a skeleton on our shirts. It was just a ton of fun. And it led to some friendships that I still have to

this day. So that would be my fun team that I've been a part of. That's lovely.

Back in 2015, I had never left Australia. never once had i left the country of my birth and in february i went to new york for the first time and discovered that america is home which is the most ridiculous thing to discover as a australian in my mid-20s i've never felt as home as i did here so i stayed for a month left and just immediately wanted to come back it took me nine years to get my permanent residency i'm now a permanent resident very exciting uh thanks to board games

but when i came back that first time so not not the first trip but the first time i came back i went to chicago and i did it's called the improv olympic or io they did a six-week summer intensive where over six weeks you would do the first six levels of their improv program and normally each of those weeks was a semester because you do it you know once a night for 12 nights or whatever so for 12 weeks one night a week for 12 weeks instead they did in four days that's right so traditionally it

would be eight weeks one night a week they crammed all of that into four days so the first half of the first day was the first week second half of the first day was the second week and you got split up into sections so there were i think 16 sections section one section two section three and that was the people who you were with for the entire six-week program the person who read out somehow messed it up instead of saying section six they said session six and

so my answer to this question is session six which was this group of maybe 15 20 of us i can't remember now we because i. Was new to american enthusiastic and outgoing and all that i insisted that we you know go get to know each other we started having breakfast together every morning before we went in then we'd go in do the full day then most nights we'd go out for a drink and we had every week with a different teacher so over the six weeks it was six different teachers i think

every single teacher said in the entire time the program has been running they had never found a group as close as we were that's great i just i love those people like i still am facebook friends with them i see all their updates i just yeah absolute ball absolutely wonderful group what a lovely question i didn't have the answer that i have all these photos up around my house if i had more than four pixels you could see that and i have multiple photos of session six.

I feel like I trauma bond a little bit because the two that came to mind was one when we went running this podcast. When I was a teenager, I was on a missions trip teaching English to, oh my gosh, I'm going to mess it up. Russian speaking Czechs in, no, it was Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Czech Republic is where we were at when we were teaching English. And that was really intense. Like I was like 16 and didn't know how to be an English teacher.

And it was a pretty intense experience for a lot of reasons. But that was a really incredible experience with everybody. And classic AJ, I will give my second answer, which is we were in drama class and I was in every single play. I took drama two to three times a semester out of four of my classes. I took more than I was supposed to, I think, but I just maxed out every possible chance. There was almost no drama classes I wasn't in.

And so in grade 11, I think it was, I knew everyone from all the drama things and really well. And we were doing a play that was called The Laramie Project. Have either of you heard of that one? So for the listeners, it's basically about a small town where a guy is brutally murdered because he's gay. And it's just the people who made the play just went in and interviewed different people around the town for their opinion on what happened.

That is all the play. There's absolutely zero commentary from the actual playwrights. It is just monologues from people who were at the town, what they thought on it. It was really intense, really powerful. And as we sort of publicized that we were- It's a verbatim theater. And as we were like preparing for it, we started advertising a bit around town that we were putting it on. And Westboro Baptist got wind of us doing it. Oh, no.

And we're going to come over. Please don't tell me your answer to this question. No, fortunately, they were stopped at the border. But it was a very harrowing experience for a lot of us who like some of them, I think, were getting like death threats and stuff like that. And it was a pretty intense experience. And we definitely bonded a lot over that. This is so fun. What a happy, happy note. But yeah, like I said, there's some trauma bonding for sure.

But I feel like I've never felt closer to a group of people that I worked with. And it was a long period of time that we prepared for that play as well, right? So we all became very, very close. It was very hard saying goodbye to that class. Love those people. I always forget that I bring the fun in. All those Russian Ukrainian Czechs were actually the orphans of murder.

Cool alex thank you so much for joining us in in two years time when we realize we can't this episode we'll get you back and we're just gonna have like a series of like still shots of me getting grayer and grayer and the episode never comes out, but no this this is really great we appreciate you coming on how do we know we end these aj you you do always forget it usually ends with you asking me how we end these things and oh that's a good that's a good and i say that we

don't do the stinger anymore so you can just say goodbye oh lovely bye bye everyone. Music. Thanks for joining us you can follow us on facebook or twitter at fun problems pod 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.