#46 - Why Your (GOOD) Game Won't Sell – Part 1

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

Hayward. I'm AJ Brandon. And today we are doing an episode of our podcast that we do. What a novel idea for us to get together and record a podcast episode. Are you excited, AJ? I am kind of excited because I'm glad that this episode's going to exist. I'm kind of sad because I'm just redoing something I already did. And you really hate it. Yeah.

So a bit of context for this one. Years ago, when I worked for a board game store, I noticed the same sort of patterns happening over and over again, where games, where the same kinds of games would sell and the same kinds of games wouldn't sell. And it wouldn't matter what the gameplay is in the box because that's not how people buy games. Like, of course, if they play a demo game, then they can do that. But in a board game retail environment, that's not how people are buying games.

Yeah, you pick up something off the shelf and you decide, do you want to take a further look at it, etc., etc.

And so I put on a little presentation that was titled, Why Your Good Game Won't Sell, or How to Design a Retailer-Friendly Game. Now, this predates the podcast by years, right? Yeah, this was, I think, 2018, if I recall correctly. And I put it on twice, and we actually had pretty solid turnouts for that. There's a lot of local Toronto designers that popped out. I hope they got some good info. And I was really pleased with it. I think it had a lot of good information.

But unfortunately it got taken down from youtube and so now we're going to go through my old slides and we're going to give 2025 perspectives on the 2018 lecture so maybe some things i don't agree with i haven't actually read through every single slide this also i think this could broadly be described as product versus game is that something you get into in the slides but like that seems to be the essence of it this is basically

product design and to a slightly more extended extent Like I would say this, this talk is most, is more relevant for publishers than it is for designers. It's the type of thing where, you know, you and I both talk so much about how designers need to think about games and product first. Absolutely. I was like, is it more useful? I guess it's more directly useful. But if you want to get published, you need to start thinking like a publisher and it all ripples down.

I would say if you're self-publishing, this will have maximum value. Let's put it that way. I also just want to mention there is construction happening next door. I think it's stopped for lunch, but it might pick up again. So if you hear weird sounds, sorry about that. We will give you a full refund on the cost of this episode. 100%. AJ, take it away.

Okay. So first things first, this is actually a sponsored episode. Not because we are getting more money, but because I was paid to put together the first time. That's not what a sponsored episode means. That's not how that sounds. This really should be presented by fun problems. The problems of fun. Jeez. So my slides are fairly text light. the way that I like to do presentations is I have very little text to prompt me to be able to say all the things I had bubbling up in my head.

So some of these slides, I'm sure I had more to say back then. This one was just me doing a caveat that I'm going to tear some games a new one, and I didn't want to hurt any feelings because this is all in the spirit of constructive criticism.

If you're a podcast listener and you somehow missed the fact that we now also host our episodes on youtube i'll do my best to describe the slides as they come up but i might miss stuff and the whole episode with visuals is available on youtube so that previous slide that aj was talking about was a piece of paper being torn which is what people mean when they say when they use the phrase tear them a new one they're always talking about paper 100 of the time.

So we have we have a a baseball flying towards the camera and it says the pitch who is selling your game, targeting your audience, types of pitches. How can you help me pitch your game? As in, how can you, the designer or publisher, help AJ pitch your game? Exactly. Because again, this is from the perspective of me as a store manager slash salesman. And so the crux of this talk was framing the way that your product is designed as a pitch to a potential customer.

The same way that you're pitching your games to publishers, effectively, they're going to be pitching the games to customers via the box so that's sort of the the bent that i want to take here and the presentation this is a high level overview we're going to be looking at who is the person selling your game how to target your audience with your product design what different types of pitches there are and of course how can you help me pitch your game because

if the easier you make it for the sales people the more likely your game is to get sold because you aren't there to do the selling doesn't matter how good of a salesman you are about your own game.

I i just got back from tantrum con where i had a great time my first convention back because i took the last year off and at one point i went on i was sitting here being like did i talk about this on the podcast i remember doing it verbally but i don't think i did it on the podcast forgetting that i'd actually been around real life designers in a real life environment so at some point aj has given me full permission to interrupt and interject so at some point i'll do my i'm

calling it the last stage pitch spiel oh exciting don't forget to do that maybe make a note i wrote it down perfect who is selling your game friendly local game store owner minimum wage employee a friend passionate employee pro that's it that's it.

You didn't have any thoughts on any of that all right you're gonna dive into them i see yeah i was like is this just me reading a slideshow, this is a high level overview these are the different types of people that are going to be selling a game to to potential customers now i'm going to add another one that that probably should have been on here which is a tastemaker so this could be you know a board game reviewer or something someone where someone watches the the review on

dice tower or something and says oh that looks cool check it out or watches a stream of someone playing those sorts of things but this again was from the perspective of me as the salesman in the store less so about people doing their own research and buying their own things this is someone coming and being like i already want to buy this game sell it to me like that's not a pitch anymore yeah so i do touch on the online sales a tiny bit but just a tiny bit in this

presentation so a friend is closest to what i was just talking about friendly local game store owner overworked passionate knowledgeable about older and red-hot titles only. Oh, that's a really good point. Thank you. So this is partially informed from the boss that I used to work for, but I do know other local game store owners, and they have all sort of met with this basic criteria. Not criteria, but these are observations I have, generally speaking about them.

Because there's not a lot of money in it, they are often overworked.

They're usually doing the job of two or three people, unless you have a very, very successful large FLGS, but then that sort of creeps into different territory and so they're very passionate about games in general but they know about games from back when they were playing games nowadays they often don't have as much time for games because they spend all their time working and the only games that they have time to learn about are the ones that are selling like

hot cakes or the ones that are coming from really established publishers and that sort of thing so they're not going to do yeah i was going to say this also sort of describes a lot of like professional game designers these days.

Like i know i know game designers who you know game designers who do this full-time who are not paid much you have to constantly hustle they obviously got into it because i love games but i can't i can't keep up with all the games like it's impossible and many of my full-time game designer friends like we try we know a lot about older games so like even listening to this podcast you're probably constantly hearing me draw examples from i know dominion

or whatever like stuff that is literally more than a decade old at this point and i will i will try i'll go to conventions and try to play some of the the newer games but given a choice between three hours learning a game and playing it or running three of my own prototypes i have to choose my prototypes like or even playing someone else's prototypes so that they will play mine like that's that's where my energy has to go so maybe i'll know some games because i played them in prototype form.

But like i haven't played seti yet from everything that everyone's told me seti sounds like it's exactly for me it is the exact peter game on every level i don't know if i'll get a chance to play it this year i went to tantrum con with the intent of playing slay the spider slay the spire the physical game i did not play a single published game at tantrum con i was just running prototypes from 9 a.m till 3 a.m every day mine and mostly other people's

actually at that convention but like i just don't have time to play published games if something really breaks through or if someone like literally sits down and goes peter you have to play this this is the new hotness i will but this this little description here is like such a incredible overlap with professional game designer i don't know if you have this too but i feel like an obligation sometimes more than like an excitement i'm like oh i

do need to check this out like professionally speaking so i understand like the landscape of the market or you know what's going on uh but yeah by the way this the advice is still correct play as many games as you can and i literally do play as many games as i can, I just can't play that many.

Yeah i i think like when i was playing or yeah when i was playing more games back when i worked at board game bliss i was playing like 300 games a year like yeah seriously maybe maybe more yeah and nowadays i'm i think i can actually tell you exactly how much if i pulled it up but i think it's like 50 board games in a year which is still pretty good but like i have to put an effort to get that many different games played yeah i'm friends with a lot of content creators

and just the sheer rate that they have to play games is terrifying yeah this is a good way to suck the fun out of it for a lot of people minimum wage employee mass market doesn't care not knowledgeable ugly bad breath wow aj this is really so this is definitely stereotypical but if you go to the average Walmart employees say, and you're like, hey, what's a good modern board game? They're probably not going to know. Many people who work at these types of jobs don't care because they're not just

selling board games. They're selling a lot of other types of products. Board games isn't the average Walmart employee's passion. So they're not going to be knowledgeable a lot so again they're not going to do a great job of selling your game unfortunately how friends pitch ownership how friend is pitch vague on mechanics specific on theme feel matters.

Moments oh yeah i remember this i've watched this uh probably five years ago ten years ago now seven years whenever it was so i'm like oh yeah i remember this whole this whole bit this is like commentary from someone who vaguely remembers it.

I'm like oh this this next bit i think is good go so this is uh talking about the way that your friends pitch games so typically speaking when i see people come into the store and they see a game on the shelf that they know and they're like oh come over here this is a great game they pick up and they're like so this one they will never say a single mechanic i don't think i have ever seen a friend be like oh look at this game and and tell them the mechanics without them

being like you know the super hardcore like us crowd right you know like an actual designer that i know or someone who's playing every like going on bgg daily or weekly type of thing yeah so they're not going to talk about the mechanics they don't even know the names of mechanics they might not even know the term mechanic they probably do in 2025 but maybe not, They'll be very specific on the theme, though. They'll be like, this is Blood Rage.

It's Vikings, and you summon monsters, and you use battles and beat each other up and stuff.

They didn't say it's a drafting game. It's a drafting area control game, yeah. So for the Friends pitch, the feel of the game is what's going to come through. And like we've said before on the podcast, this Eric Langsmall moment design, where you try and design the game such that cool moments are going to arise over the course of the game because that's what they're going to remember. That's what they'll tell them about.

Oh, this really cool thing happened in Nemesis where I was trying to work with this person and realized they're betraying me and then sealed them inside this room with the alien queen. It tore them apart. It was awesome. They're not going to tell you any of the mechanics as to how they did it. They're just going to be like, this was the cool moment that I remember from the game.

So if you're trying to design a game such that friends pitching the game is going to be easy, you need to focus on moments, focus on feel matters, and focus on something that's highly thematic this this is like i said this is what i've got a whole spiel about that i'll get into after the presentation do you want to just do it i will say that might be a good time yeah maybe before that though i just want to say that like this is something

that i think i'm almost curious to re-watch our peter tears apart aj sell sheets episode because i feel like this is the thing that i i want to say this is what i was focusing on like, i i haven't watched the episodes since we did it but i vaguely remember being like oh look a list mechanics like i don't i don't care and i feel like this is the number one thing that as designers pitching our games we could really take from like saying as as a designer it's very exciting to say look

it's an i've got a game it's called fairy garden and it is a drafting bidding area control game with a really simple novel mechanic that no one's done before i'm already asleep from that description like as a designer that's what's really cool about it as a publisher as a player as a friend pitching it, no one cares, like….

The the only even vaguely relevant part of that is just how incredibly slick the game is but there's a better way to say it than this game has one simple mechanism and i think like we'll talk about this later too we're going to start doing more sell sheet episodes like this almost i want to be our guiding light like stop diving into the depths of mechanics get into theme get into feel get into moments like if you can hit those things you will outsell a designer who has

the cleverest mechanism in the world 100 times over one of the things that i do is i've talked about this on a very recent episode about having design doc before you start and the goal of that one is more to pitch it to co-designers to help you get on the same page as to what the deal is but one of the things i i write down every time is the vision like what is the core exciting thing about this game and the way that i think of it today

as aj in 2025 is what are you going to write down as the one sentence thing on your sell sheet that excites publishers.

So I think absolutely focusing on this and focusing on- The elevator pitch. Exactly. Do you want to talk a little bit about your sell sheet document that you recently reworked and uploaded? Not sell sheet, your design doc, the thing that you did. I'll tell you what, how about at the end of this presentation, I just literally pull it up, the template, and then we'll talk through it.

Oh yeah, here's my spiel. And I'm worried that I'm stealing some of your talking points because it was probably partially informed by watching this presentation when a game this is why i didn't want to admit it's a little bit long so bear with me okay a game starts in your brain you're like oh this tickles my brain in some way and then the very last step is people playing it on the table right like that's the that's the journey of a game idea from literally inception conception to being played

in a published version on the table. And I'm talking about pitching to publishers here, self-publishing is its own game, but I think it's relevant to both. There are a number of sale points or pitches or gates in between original idea and on the table. So the first one is I have to like it enough to write it into more than just an idea in my head.

And that can be, you know, the single sentence in my design folder that you and I have talked about going through our design docs and just being like, here's 20 ideas that we didn't never work on just because it's it's a fun little exercise that'll be a bonus episode someday.

And then the next step is an mvp or even just like starting to prototype it then the next step is an mvp and playtesting it and then playtesting it enough in mvp form that you're like okay this is worth showing to other people or building out a nicer version and then you want to show it to a public then you want to show it to your fellow playtesters and you want to like playtest it more widely then you want to show it to a publisher and then the publisher has to sell it to retailers or to

kickstarter backers and retailers or kickstarter backers have to buy it and then this is what i'm calling the last stage pitch when the person who has already bought the game they have physically bought it they have a copy how do they convince their friends to play it this is the last stage pitch and this is what i've been thinking about a whole lot lately which is why you can see how it's directly relevant to this slide that we're on right now the last stage pitch

is something i really started thinking about two years ago because i started attending some local game groups um one was mostly just regular gamers and a few content creators the other is mostly regular gamers and like one or two designers and i don't even know if they're published designers so we can treat that as just purely a gaming group and i'm so fascinated and i think it's super relevant as a designer who wants to publish their games which is what this podcast is geared towards.

To start thinking about how does that person get their friends excited to play the game? Because in the group that's all just gamers, they all back Kickstarters, and they only meet once a week. So once a week, everyone sort of comes along with the game and has to convince the group to play their game over others.

And it's such a universal and also specific moment that once I started thinking in this context i might have talked about this on the podcast before because i'm about to go into dracula's feast once i started thinking about this context i started selling a lot more games dracula's feast is my old it's the second game i ever designed, It's a social, it's a logical deduction game. It's sort of social deduction. It's sort of logical deduction.

And it's a game with a 10 to 15 minute teach that plays in about five minutes. It requires a large group to sit in silence for most of the time and think really hard. And if anyone makes a mistake, the game breaks. It is unsaleable. Like, I first really started thinking about this when a friend of mine was like, hey, Peter, I brought Dracula's Feast to my group who loves social deduction games and it didn't really land.

And I was like, well, of course it didn't land. It obviously wouldn't land in that group, but also that's the only group who it could possibly land. It's for no one. It is a game for absolutely no one. And so many prototypes, and AJ, I'm sure you'll confirm this, so many prototypes you play and you're like, Dracula's Feast is really clever.

It's really interesting and really clever i'm very proud of a lot of stuff in that it's for no one like these these can both be true facts there are so many games that i play i don't name anything because i think some of them are by listeners where i'm just like yeah look you've made a very good functioning system that i don't know who's going to be specifically excited to get their friends to play it does that make sense yeah this is something we were talking about recently which is games that

are more fun to design than they are to play yeah literally yesterday when we were just on a call.

I have i have got some games in my catalog where i think i've said before i know i've said to you aj i think i've said on the podcast after 18 months i generally don't like my new design my old designs and that's because i am just like learning and improving at such a rapid rate he said modestly that anything i made more than 18 months ago i'm like i wouldn't make it that way anymore like cool good job young peter good job little baby but like i've outgrown this game so it's very frustrating

to me because a game takes more than 18 months to come out so by the time it comes out i'm like ah yeah cool i have to go be excited about it but i'm just not anymore i'm excited for the next thing so yeah get games that games that are more exciting more fun to design than they are to make is one way of putting it but specifically the useful kind of path is genuinely being like who is going to take this game where are they going to

take it to and how are they going to sell to their friends and you've covered some of this in the friends pitch but the two groups I mentioned.

One of them is all heavy euros all the time. So heavy euro gets you in the door, but it doesn't get you to the table. The other one, Omnigamers, like they have the last few hours of every party, sorry, yeah, the last few hours of every party are party games. They will play anything from like 20 light games to three heavy, like they will play anything, literally anything that is designed that's not, you know, Uno or Exploding Kittens is for this group.

And so it's just so interesting because everyone, everyone turns up with bags of games. And as a designer, it's such good market research.

They're also my friends and i can't hang out with them but it's such good market research to be like who who am i making this game for and what gets it to the table instead of other games because ultimately you know games are a competitive sport game design is competitive in a sense in that like not every game can be published some are going to win over others i'm not saying go out and tear down your opponents or anything like that but like ultimately there are limited spaces for

games to come out and so you've got to start thinking like why will why will they play this game over another one things are rings is my biggest hit and that one sells itself people love venn diagrams people are just like oh venn diagram it's so easy to get people in it really plays up to any numbers it says i think two to six on the box but really you can play with any number of people in that game and by looking at the table you have learned most of the rules.

Like that that game is just so incredibly accessible and kind of thinky and quirky and kind of different and causes discussion and causes arguments which five years ago three years ago i would have been like that's a bad idea now i'm like no that propagates the game like if people are discussing it for 20 minutes later it sticks in their head and they want to have that discussion with other people in their life so things and rings is my biggest hit and it's also the one that can just get on the

table of any table at any time with anyone but a game like what critic kitchen just because i'm on my own games like that one is a feast in that like it's what stone meyer always talking about they're like we want the game that is the main game of the evening and that one is a big box with beautiful beautiful pieces and incredible art the game is also very fun but that's not what's getting it to the table that's what got it into the publisher but what's getting it to the table is the lavish

production and the fact that we designed a game that could be lavishly produced i was talking about this on discord i realize i've been talking for five minutes now in the middle of aj's presentation but you did ask me to aj you did tell me to. I was on a Discord and someone was like, yeah, how much time do you spend removing components from your games? And yeah, games should be as elegant and slick as possible. Having more components can sometimes, for certain publishers, be the thing to do.

It can also be the opposite, right? And this depends on your target audience. Having a lot of cool stuff is appealing to heavier gamers. Seeing 50 different kinds of components out on the table is incredibly intimidating to casual gamers. Yeah, but having beautiful components on the table is incredibly appealing to all gamers.

Yes absolutely so something like azul only has one type of component but it is beautiful it is clicky clacky and so that game has you know it's still a classic seven years after release or 10 years after release whatever at so yeah removing components not always good he said controversially.

Because i've started thinking about like well at this content creator thing the game that gets to the table is going to be the prettiest and i don't just mean like nice art i mean like you start unpacking it people like oh i want to touch that oh i want to play with that oh clicky clacky pieces oh this will photograph well for my instagram like that is a genuine like way in obviously not all parties have content creators but people like pretty games people

like taking photos yeah so that that's my the more you think about the last stage pitch as i'm calling it i think the more the and that's exactly what this model is it's it you're talking about this in the store but i think this exactly applies to that moment i'm talking about of like bringing it to the table sorry one more thing on that before we move on i was saying that a lot of a lot of prototypes are not for anyone dracula's feast is a great example published game but it's when

people try to marry these two unrelated things so i'm really trying not to call out specific people but let's say i made a let's use dracula's feast because i can safely rag on my own game it is a thinky.

Logic puzzle for a large number of players so i have made thinky logic puzzles that time you killed me is a thinky logic puzzle things and rings is borderline fiction is a better example fiction is a thinky logic puzzle but fiction marries thinky logic puzzle and word game and those are i want to say comorbidities because my girlfriend uses that term all the time those over you know in the venn diagram that's a huge overlapping space thinky puzzle word game that fits the same.

Type of brain, same type of party environment, same type of game night, same type of player. Large group thinky puzzle is a horrible mix. And it's not to say it can't be done, like Welcome 2 arguably fits that category, but... You say something. I'm not sure I'm following the point you're making here, to be honest. So a lot of people, I'm going to use Nate, who I love dearly. Nate Wall, listener of the podcast. His game is just the perfect example of this.

He got frustrated because he was going to a lot of game nights with his family, and they just wanted to play dexterity game, dexterity game, dexterity game. They wanted to play like silly light flipping games. I see where this is going. And so he got bored with those. So he made a dexterity set collection game where you do a dexterity thing and then you have a little puzzle. And that combination in my mind, sorry, Nate, you know, I love you dearly, is exactly the thing I'm talking about.

There is almost no overlap in that Venn diagram. As a designer, I see how he got there. As a designer, I understand the appeal of like, it's two things that have never been put together, but they're not targeting the same group.

They're targeting almost diametrically opposite groups, much like Dracula's Feast. And so there's no party or game night where someone pitches that and it gets through the ring of fire. To try and say it a different way, if I'm understanding you correctly. It's Nate identified the genre that he wasn't into, wanted to make something that's in the genre that he would still be able to enjoy while being able to play it with people who primarily like that genre.

But what you're saying is in trying to sort of appeal to these two completely different audiences, you end up creating something that Nate would never buy off a shelf because it's not doing what Nate wants. And Nate's family would never buy off the shelf because it's not quite doing what they want. Is that accurate? Yes. And it's not always that people get there from that starting point of like, I want to combine these two genres.

Sometimes you're working on a project, working on a game, and it starts drifting in a direction and you follow that direction. And by the end of it, you have, you know, a math quiz for a hundred people, which is not for anyone. It's like when roll and writes got popular and I don't like roll and writes because their player interaction empty, almost all of them, at least at the time when they were really like taking off.

And so my mind immediately went to let's make some highly attractive roll and writes. But like the people who like roll and writes don't miss the player interaction. People who really love the player interaction aren't going to get super excited because now there's some player interaction in a puzzle that they don't care about. it. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a, of another example where like maybe you're working on a really fun, cool party game.

You've got this great party game that plays 30 people and you're like, wow, this is amazing. But to solve design problems, you start adding rules. And by the end, you've got a 30 player party game that has a 20 page rule book. And that's, it's just not going to work.

And it's not that you started by being like, what if I had a big party game with lots of rules you just naturally got there as a result of the design path that's the kind that's that's the other way you get there that's what i'm talking about like not just starting from like what if i made this thing that combined two genres but sometimes you'll start from one place and end up just like in unpublishable territory it has happened to me so many times this

is not anything to be embarrassed about it's just something to just start thinking who like can i literally think of a person who would without knowing i made it take this game to a game night and successfully get it to the table against other games.

And if you don't have that, you might not have anything. You might not have anything. Player psychographics are super important. It's the same in a business concept. I've talked about this before. Gabe's talked about it on Board Game Design Lab with me. Making sure that you have... Richard Garfield. No, not Richard Garfield. Mark Rosewater talks about it a lot. Yep. And the psychographics look different for each game type.

You know, Magic psychographics don't exactly one-to-one line up with board game players, for instance. But Mark Rosewater looked at Magic, said, who does this appeal to? Well, these types of cards appeal to this person. This type of card appeals to this person. Look at your game, like Peter says. And I think that you gave really good advice there.

Literally think of a human in your life. Who in your life is going to be excited for this game? You know, if you have a friend who's really into dungeon crawls and you're making a dungeon crawl-esque game, be like, hey, does this elevator pitch excite you? Would you be interested in looking more into it? Like that kind of thing. Start thinking in those sorts of terms. I literally did that actually with our friend Sean. I was like, this game is meant to be for you.

What are your thoughts on it? i'm i'm treating every word you say i'm also making a game for sean right now sean is just very very very designable too i mean i i think every one of my games i just make for sean i just really want sean to approve of me that's that's my end game in this get a high five from sean, all right great let's let's get back on track here yes i feel like i have a thought bouncing over head but i can't find it it'll probably come up again

later because a lot of these things do do come up in the presentation all right you want to keep reading oh sorry i remember it.

This is almost free fun market research go to a game night find a local event near you where it's just a public game night and not like a creep but like watch which games get tabled and why i go to these game nights to play games to have fun to meet my hang out with my friends it's useful for many reasons but also just like watching when two you know people like what do we play next that conversation is invaluable yeah and it's fun market research okay passionate employee.

Passionate. Employee. Knowledgeable. Often not good at sales. So this is a bit of a contentious point here, but I remember I was talking to a magic store, FLGS, like they have some board games, but it was mostly magic related. And FLGS is a friendly local game store. That's some industry terminology. Thank you, Peter. So this person was talking to me about who they hire and why.

And they said, I will always hire the person who knows magic cards because I can't teach you how to know magic, but I can teach you sales. And let me tell you, I have met a lot of his employees and they're okay at best at sales. And yes, sales is absolutely infinitely more teachable than the knowledge of a 30,000 card game. 10,000 hours of magic gathering. It is impossible.

But I have found that oftentimes, again, strictly speaking, as a salesman slash woman, you are often not going to get a great one of those at Apple GSs. This is absolutely not a blanket statement like this is always going to happen. But I'm saying, oftentimes, they're not going to be the best salesperson, but they are going to be very knowledgeable, and they are going to be very passionate about games. And that passion alone can 100% drive sales.

So again, we're just talking broad strokes, who's going to be selling your game. And then we get to... The professional with a man with a gun. It's James Bond. Not just a man.

Passionate knowledgeable great salesperson so these ones absolutely i like to think so, you can ask uh previous patrons of board game bliss for their opinion i'm a little biased but it's sales half when you left now these people don't need much help from you as as the designer or slash product designer they're gonna yeah they're gonna be able to sell sand to the, box looks like a butt they're going to be able to say it's actually full of gold and here's why and they're going

to they're going to do a great job so obviously the professional like i said doesn't need help you can help them still but the professional is very rare most people who are selling your games aren't going to be this they are going to be friends they are going to be, salesperson who doesn't know as much or who isn't as good sales those sorts of things again this this isn't exactly actionable advice that i'm giving you i'm just talking right now to try and get you to realize how much help or

rather how much value helping them is you know what i mean yeah okay so oh and then the next slide be just saying that. Most retail people aren't knowledgeable aren't passionate almost aren't almost all aren't good sales people need your help. Targeting your audience. Non-gamers slash mass market. Casual, most common. Hardcore. So this poorly spaced lines of text here is... And inconsistently capitalized while we're picking it apart.

This is just very broad strokes. We were talking about psychographics before. This is my psychographics. So this is super broad strokes.

Basically as broad as you can get, really. but for non-gamers or mass market these people are the type that walk into a store pick up a game off the shelf and they're like what's the back of the box look like or just what's the front of the box look like yeah seriously yeah they walk up and they're like this says game of thrones i like game of thrones i will buy this thing actually i was i was thinking that that's absolutely right i was also thinking

about the huge trend maybe since this presentation of meme game titles yeah, I can't think of a single one. No cap. Exploding kittens. Is presumably a game. I don't even know, but like, what's that? I would say exploding kittens. Like it's, or. Exploding kittens. But, but I mean like titles that are just literally an existing meme. Now it's a game title.

So like, I don't know that there's a game called no cap, but I promise you there's a game called no cap or skibbity, whatever, or, you know, if it's, if it's a thing that you've heard of, someone has put a, put that onto a game. Alex Cutler, who's on the podcast, he has a game called don't skip leg day.

Like it's it's selling it's like remember i said don't even look at the back of the box that's that's that kind of game and i i've seen those have been like oh i know exactly who i would buy that for there was a game i think either right before she passed or right after she passed uh which was basically like ruth gator bins ruth beta ginsburg the game and i was like oh i have 12 people in my life who would be delighted to receive that as a gift it almost doesn't matter what the game

is those ones like at that level and this is like the very extreme literally the back of the box doesn't matter literally the front of the box doesn't matter except for the title that you're selling it purely based on the title yeah i mean whitney's game charcuterie sells itself no one's looking at the back of the box or no one cares if like charcuterie the board game i love charcuterie or my friend loves charcuterie i'll pick it up

you know yeah like my girlfriend if i see a food game i buy it for her there's just like no processing between seeing a title or seeing a front cover and buying the game it's just a straight line another one is including charcuterie i bought charcuterie for her. And this is where like product design is peak effective. Like I bought Laser Writers. I'm an intelligent consumer here. I didn't even bother looking up a review for Laser Writers.

I was like, it looks like it comes in like VHS cases and stuff like that. Like the vibes of it were 10 out of 10. Yeah. So let's not speak of the game itself, but the vibes sold me. I think I did some dev on that. Did you really? I think you should have done some more. I don't know if I ever used any of my changes, but I think I, at some point I got paid some money to do something on that game. Well, like I say, amazing product that literally some of the best I've seen.

I will reference that game later. And we're going to go into a little bit more detail in the audience in a minute. But casual, this is the most common, I would say. This is the type of person in terms of people who are going to buy your game.

There's more mass market consumers out there but in order to break into mass market or those types of people you have to really make a hit or or have a product that's selling to a publisher that is going to be able to sell it into mass market much less common for us as designers casual gamers these are the type of people who have you know say 50 game collection and they're like when when When they find out you're a gamer, they're like, oh, I have a lot of games.

I was about to say, casual is 50 games. Well, again, this is maybe not the strongest term here. Maybe hobby is a better word than casual. Sure. But this is someone who they have like 50 games, but they play them and they play them a lot, right? They're like hanging out with their friends every week and they're busting out coup every single week, you know?

I would call this the hobby audience for sure. gaming is their hobby like yep i think that's i think that's very fair and then for hardcore that's us that's people who are on bgg constantly these are people who you know maybe they're gamers who are so hardcore that they dabble in design maybe they're actual designers maybe these are people who are buying you know multiple 300 kickstarters a year right these are the the bgg crowd the people

who like i recognize at the friendly local game store because they come in so often. Yeah. So for, I guess this is, again, I didn't go through all the slides beforehand. So for non-gamers and mass market, types of things that help sell it, if it's got great visuals, funny titles, those sorts of things, if it seems simple and easy to pick up, the box is really big for selling this, and demoing is very important for selling this.

So these are the ways that they're going to be, these are things that are going to appeal to them. Casual they're going to most often get new games based off of recommendations.

If one of the friends is like oh hey here's a cool game or they sit down to play like bang with their friends like oh bang's a cool game and they pick it up i find that for this audience that's the most often way that they will end up buying the game i would also put content creators as as like a big source of recommendations like people who they don't watch every rato video every dice tower video but if shut up and sit down if shut up and sit down do a video they're probably going

to watch that and buy that game yeah i would say i think for a lot of hobby gamers they don't actually watch that many reviews and aren't actually that tuned into tastemakers but again the lines are a little blurry here and we don't need to you know split hairs i brought up shut up and sit down because they sort of back when this was made more so than today but like they would only do one video a month and it would get tens if not hundreds of thousands of views so they're breaking out of the

hardcore audience and into the hobby because their videos were entertaining to watch like right i'm not talking like so very wrong about games i'm talking about like the the the hit the hit the hit videos to to me i would think i i hear what you're saying and i i don't like strongly disagree or anything like that but i think more of something like tabletop as like the thing that a casual would watch that'd be like, oh, totally. So yes, absolutely.

Peak, shut up and sit down. They were definitely breaching into a really wide audience there. Not, not board game co who I love and watch. I watch his videos cause I'm in the hardcore audience, but like the, the stuff that breaks out of the hardcore audience into that. Yeah. Tabletop's the perfect example.

And I find that also very importantly for this demographic, I'm going to refer to them as Peter's term, hobby gamers from now on in the presentation, not casual, because I agree that's a much better term. I think that the value that the game provides is very important. They're often going to be like, why is this box so light? Which, again, we'll get to later. And demos are a great way of selling these games. They will buy games if they

are fun and they play them. and the reason why they don't buy tons of games isn't that they're not willing to buy tons of games, it's that they just play the same games with their friends because they don't know about other games. And as soon as they start reaching that sort of tipping point of like, oh, here's this amazing game store with hundreds and hundreds of games, that's often what pushes them into being hardcore gamers. Yeah.

Two things on this. One is that this is the audience that we sold Village Village to. We would just get a booth at a convention and just nonstop run demos.

I got i got i've demoed village pillage probably a thousand times if not more i got really good at just like teach i had all my jokes ready and you know after two rounds people are like cool i've seen enough gonna buy this like they get the core loop and how fun it is so they would just buy it and then like you said just play it over and over and over i things in rings will overtake it but i would say village pillage is by far my most played game not

necessarily most sold but like that is a game that's been out for almost 10 years now and people have been playing it you know it's one of those games that you just pull out weekly because it's so quick and so fun and etc um and then just just for people who don't know because we are old hardcore gamers tabletop was a t was a tv show it was an internet tv show hosted by will wheaton of star trek fame and every week or every month i can't remember how often it

released but he would just play a game with internet funny people, so like Rhett and Link were on, or Paul and Storm, or people like that. Epic mealtime guy. Yeah. Yeah yeah just like internet youtube celebrities internet celebrities they'd come on play a tabletop game and it was such a huge hit that uh they called it the tabletop effect i think where after.

A game was on tabletop you couldn't buy it for six months like the printers had to the publishers had to go and print a hundred thousand new units to keep up with demand shut up and sit down used to have a similar effect they don't really have that anymore they've lost their that place in the in the zeitgeist but sharp and sit down and tabletop are the two that i think of of like they they were so inherently entertaining if you didn't know the game and that's so hard to do yeah i know

most reviews are for people who have played the game go ahead i know people who watch up and sit down for games that they're like i 100 know i have zero interest in buying this game i just want to watch the review because they're funny yes yeah and tabletop the same way it's like oh i like red and link i'll go watch that oh this game seems fun i'll buy it they stopped making it after three seasons there was a bunch of drama you can read about but just we

didn't throw out the word tabletop which has many meanings with no context i wanted to dive into that a little bit i appreciate it and last one for hardcore audiences so this is where reviewers and tastemakers and cons are super valuable they also like demos of course everyone likes the demo but i think that this is the audience where if you get a really good review from you know dice tower shepherd sit down that's going to make waves in this crown and the hardcore audience is well it's

it's interesting to think about which one is the most valuable to target because there are more mass market than everybody else but again that's the hardest one to reach i think the casual sorry the hobby gamers are actually the ones that will end. Up converting the most people to pick up your game because again they play the. Same games over and over again whereas the hardcore ones often it's they'll. Get a new game they'll play it once right like come on That's what almost all of us do.

The targeting, we're going to start a publisher series that we'll talk about in a bit. And the targeting the hobby game is, I think, the common thread you'll find watching those episodes or listening to those episodes that come out. Like, everyone wants that hobby audience. That's what everyone is aiming for. That $40, $50, you know, beautiful box, accessible. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to read stuff in again? The pictures.

Recommendations. Seeing it on the shelf. Playing it. Playing it. This is obviously from the context of the friendly local game store. Yes, yes. This is all from my perspective, seeing games get sold in my store. Recommendations. Theme. Player count. A strategy game or a party game. Something like... Something excruciatingly specific. So, sorry. A good game, price range, usually for gifts, $20 to $40. Sorry, this is a little bit stiff. When I was giving the presentation,

you know, I knew what was coming up. So I knew how far it was. And now I just kind of have to keep tapping until secret actually ends. I'll try and be a bit more on the ball with that. So the way that I sort of framed this was how do people ask me for recommendations? I don't know if this is actually useful to anyone. So I'll just quickly go over it. This is something I probably would cut if I was doing this from scratch today. But this is basically what people ask me for.

So this isn't if someone picks up off the shelf this is they come i think this is super valuable i think this is like this is this is a unique angle that you have that i am not aware of outside of this cool all right so thanks for validating me and give me a little pat on the back now just tell me i'm a good boy i'll keep going nice work aj no i said to say i'm a good boy.

So for this one if someone comes up and asks me for things sometimes they'll say do you have a pirate game i love pirates i just want a game with pirates that sort of thing i've never had someone ask me for something like a quilting game or a game about cats because those are things that a lot of people don't think of as being an option but usually when they're back back in 2018 yes i still don't know if the casual sorry if the hobby gamers would think to

do that but maybe nowadays they would because the board game themes have expanded a lot i don't have a whole quilting line there's patchwork cats are the theme my my friendly local game store geeky tees which i i genuinely think is the best game store in the world i think if you're ever in la make sure you go to geeky tees it's insanely above every other game store i've been to they are also a cat sanctuary and they have an entire wall or a little display

i guess like like the size of an average board game shelf just cat games all cat games nothing else. So the next thing that the last word is a player count. We always play with five players, but every board game only plays four. What's a game that can play five? That type of thing comes up all the time. So the moral of this story is flexible player counts get you recommended if they're good at those player counts.

Because if someone comes up asking for a recommendation, if the employee knows about the game or if the friend knows about the game or whoever, they're not going to recommend one that's okay at nine they're going to recommend the one game that's actually great at nine so games that do specific player counts really well i think have a lot of value i think this is kind of untapped market potential by the way we were talking in our discord but join our discord about holes in

the market this is a great way to identify holes that you can design towards if there's a great strategy game that plays you know six seven eight nine people in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of overhead, that has a lot of value. If someone comes in looking for that specific thing, because they always have their group of friends come over for game night and they have nine people and they don't want to play a party game.

They want to play a heavy strategy game, but they also don't want it to take nine hours. I think that there's a lot of value into looking at that kind of thing. You've not touched on the two, I think, most relevant specific player counts. Do you think one is the most specific relevant player count? I think that is the second most relevant.

Three player i would guess i don't know though two players you don't have this people are constantly being like hey what do you have for two players sorry i thought you meant from the perspective of holes in the market like things that you can no no no no i'm talking about like trying to trying to nail a specific play account i think right i think more people ask for two player games than any other play account absolutely true absolutely true i was just

misunderstanding what you were saying there and then and then you're right solo game is the other one where i'm in the middle of pitching a couple of solo games so they're very much on my mind and actually you and i had this conversation off air if you don't mind me bringing it up where i was like aj you want to work on a solo game you're like why couldn't we just make it a co-op and i'm like but that they're no they're different things like for me there's a real i don't say beauty but like

there's a specificity sort of sort of like your broad point here about making a game that plays one only and it nails it and I think there is a huge market for that who won't necessarily buy. It's a co-op and you can play it solo. I think they're just two distinct audiences, not different audiences, but two distinct audiences. I think it also has to do with the targeting and the telegraphing to players. If you say it's one player only on the box, that tells all solo gamers, this is for me.

If you see one to six players on the box, you're probably going to think, okay, there's a solo mode, how good is it going to be very big difference exactly like you're saying earlier of like if it plays okay at seven they're not going to recommend it over the other ones games that we've seen a huge wave of this at the moment the adam is in wale do you watch adam in wales the board game design sporadically yep uh he just released one about trends it's a chapter from his new book that he's

got out and he opens with here's a bunch of two-player versions of existing games and, so apparently we're sort of in a two-player trend at the moment where people are taking like.

Flamecraft is the one on top of mind like there's about to be a two-player flamecraft coming to kickstarter flamecraft plays at two but this is a two-player only game so two players are trending but two players have always been again i think the most common play account yeah absolutely it's most game if you think of games the majority of them not all but the majority are two-player games chess checkers go i guess those are abstracts but like it is guess

who two players is the default play account i think yeah i mean it's the easiest number of people to find you just find one person and if you have a roommate or a partner living with you or whatever but it's not hard to find one person to play games with yeah yep i say play account i think is such a like i mean that's why you bring it up such a useful framing to come into game design through we mentioned our friend sean earlier and you mentioned big player strategy games that that's

what i'm working right now it's I think it's a four to 10 player strategy game that plays best at like eight.

Awesome. Next up is someone asking for something, asking for a strategy game or a party game. Those two specifically, like you might think I'm talking genres here. No, it's those two.

Pardon me. Those two genres specifically got brought up the most, at least again, back then and i think that has more to do with limited vocabulary than it does with anything else because usually i would ask some follow-up questions to zero in on the right game for them but if someone comes and asks for a strategy game basically what they mean is not a party game they're like people bring apples to apples and i don't want that what i

want is something that has thinking to it but you know if you recommended a 20 minute tactical game that would fit under their thought process of a strategy game even though in our minds it's that's common usage i think, whereas party game for them that's like i like apples to apples and cards against humanity do you have something that will make me laugh is basically what they were asking where would you. So my hot take is that Codenames does a poor job of serving the party game audience.

They're asking for party games because it doesn't feel like a party game and does a poor job of serving the strategy game market because it doesn't feel like a strategy game. Clearly, Codenames is outrageously successful. I was going to say, I would very happily have a game that doesn't serve people to that level. Yes.

But I think Codenames is like, it's my go-to example of the perfect game i think it's unsurpassed see i i think that this is one of the rare well maybe i'm giving myself too much credit here but i think this is one of the rare cases where i just can't be helpful because i because of my personal bias i like i think code names i can play it but i really don't like it and i really don't like again for it's for smart people i get it well part of

what we're talking about earlier right is like the when do you pull it out group and codenames is one that you could presumably basically always pull it out and people be like okay with it but i never have a moment where i'm like oh this group would love codenames whereas i absolutely have that for things like so clover those kinds of games where it lean where they're a bit more i want to say like sure but they're a little bit more they're doing the thing i want to

a greater degree in fairness codenames open the door to those this is like our would aliens make go discussion like so clover does not exist without code names and and to be clear like me not personally loving code names is not an indictment on code names let alone why would anyone care if i had an indictment against the most popular party game of the century.

Your favorite podcast is so very wrong about game i can see why you why you have these opinions of course so next someone will be like they'll come in they'll say do you have something like blank And this is most often from hobby gamers who have grown tired of playing the exact same game hundreds of times. This is this is a is the classic example of this.

So here's my hot take. Munchkin. I think at least at the time, there was a very strong prevalence of if a game already exists that does something like this, you do not want to do something like that at all because they'll just buy the popular one. And I think that there's like definitely the logic to that. But I cannot tell you how many people came in and were like, I have played a thousand games of The Resistance.

Do you have something like The Resistance? now clearly like the resistance was basically the first popular boxed social deduction game so it there was a lot of incredible yes incredible design absolutely but i'm so hard to work in social deduction because you end up just making worse resistance yeah you really have to like break the mold to get away from it i think i've talked about this before i think it was like a black hole of game

design code names so clover the resistance like there are some of these games that if you're working in that area, every improvement you make sucks you further towards just being that game.

So you really have to like hit escape velocity and make something so different that you're not just making worse code names or worse so Clover.

Yeah. For our listeners that skipped it, this is our foundational games episode. Oh, is it? Yeah. We did a whole episode on this. We're in the forties now. I can't even remember what we've talked about.

Sometimes they would ask for something excruciatingly specific so this again isn't super helpful i don't think to people but you know there's one person who basically came in and described fief to a t and i was like oh so you want something like fief but if someone wants something like i really love deck building and i really love pirates but i also hate you know playing with other people is there a solo pirate deck building game it's like actually yes friday But if you don't want

that one, I have nothing else to suggest. So this isn't something you can design towards. It's just personal taste. Sometimes people... I've got a meme that I want to send you. It's got a swear in it. So I'm just going to... Do you have a Facebook Messenger open? I can pop it open quick, yeah. This meme, we'll put it in the show notes. I don't know if you can pull it onto your screen or anything like that. Yep. This is the podcast where you listen to AJ Chocolate memes.

We'll toss it in the show notes or Discord. But yeah, basically the...

I don't want to go with the punchline. You have to join our Discord, actually. That's where it is.

Yeah this is a teaser yeah so next one is people asking for just a good game where they're just like i i just want to try something i don't have a specific thing in mind i'm i'm just looking for new game for game night that kind of far away you should get far away uh you should go far away with that joke this is where they just like you're not recommending the hotness right you're like hey look everyone's really into a moment grab a zoo that's exactly it either

i'm just going to recommend whatever is popular if i'm one of the employees who doesn't care as much or or just knows that it's been popular and it's on the top of your mind or it's whatever i've been playing recently that's on the top of my mind because i like it exactly so again this i know i know your game tastes so well these days although.

Sakura arms is a pretty safe bet man i love that game and the next is a price range this is usually a gift this is something where someone is like i want something for this person they like games do you have something that's like 20 to 40 bucks 20 to 40 bucks oh this was uh this is canadian dollars although with inflation so like one to three dollars with inflation it's probably yeah yeah it's actually probably about so yeah basically this is someone who's looking for a

gift for someone and either the person buying the gift likes board games and just like wants to get them a board game gift because they want to get them into board games and like board games or it's because they're like i know this person generically likes board games a lot what's something that maybe they don't have and then i would ask you know what types of games they like that kind of thing but the fact that this is a

whole category of thing that people ask for should tell you a lot about pricing your game if your game is going to be.

Even 45 50 that gets to the point where it's very difficult to recommend as a gift not too many people are like yeah i'm just gonna blow you know 50 60 bucks on someone for present that they may not like or already have or yeah yeah they want to show up some flamecraft i think was 40 at release and that's just like the perfect price point critic kitchen is coming out at 40 as well that time you killed me was meant to be 40 and in fact there's a joke in the

in the box about the 40 price tag and then at the last minute they had to raise it 50 and the game still did well i'm not complaining and I got more in royalties, but I really wonder what, what a different world we would be in if they'd managed to get that out at 40. Hmm. Okay. Sorry, jump back. I just want to ask about, in your experience as a retailer, $10 games, was that a thing or did it not make sense? Yeah. You're asking, like, did they sell? Yeah. Or did you have many?

Like, what's the world of $10 games look like? Yeah, so mostly that's card games, micro games, those sorts of things. Even Oink games, those were 20 Canadian back in 2016. So Love Letter would be less than that, I assume. Yeah, Love Letter was $10. There's very few games that go for $10 Canadian, especially now. For $10 USD, that's basically like $15 Canadian. Then you get into a little bit more. I think that's probably where we're at

these days. That would be probably what Love Letter is. That would be the $10, yeah. And I think they absolutely have a place. In fact, I think that they have a really valuable place.

So if you look at most game stores, in terms of the physical layout, usually they have shelving for all the big games and the small games actually go at the front this is prime real estate uh even if they like barring selling better than the other games because i don't think they did but they those were the most often ones picked up for gifts or things for like kids especially if you can get like a kid's card game for like 15 bucks or 10 bucks, that could go really well.

But while one more small caveat is CCGs or LCGs, like, Game of Thrones living card game, you would see those on like brackets because there's just so many of them. That's just the way that you would merchandise them. But usually at the front counter, you have space for small items in glass cases at the counter or on shelving at the counter. Because if you're a friendly local game store, you need to make use of every square inch of your space and you're not going to fit giant boxes there.

You want to fit a lot of small things. So every customer who comes in is going to be right in front of that counter. And if they have to wait there for a minute while I go grab something else, what are they going to do? They're going to pick up and look at those games. So actually, if you have a small box game that's 20 bucks, absolute max, hopefully more like 10 to 15, people might impulse purchase it or at least ask me about it. So small box games that you can fit on.

That doesn't mark it. I feel like publishers are very reluctant to sign anything because it's just like the margins aren't there. So I was just curious what that looks like from the retail end.

Yep, I had full shelves there. Wish I had a picture of it that I could show you what it looks like, but yeah absolutely a thing that that sells and that those are the most likely ones to get impulse purchased because they're cheap and they're right there in their face it in fact what i would do is i would take a lot of the top sellers or games that i know are really good in small box like love letter and i would line the shelf right where people are standing while

they're waiting in line with those games and that's not just because people are looking at them and then they if they ask about i can tell them how great it is and then they buy it but it's also because if someone's looking for a small box game i can just pick it up right away and show it to them so yeah very good for says it's fun i feel like this episode is exemplifying what i was talking about where i'm like yeah you know games like love letter like i

i don't know any of the new i only know the very hot games and the very old games that's the extent of my knowledge yeah same more and more each year. You want to read the next bit the hook the hook one to two sentences unique sexy understandable Hooks aren't just the hook, the singular hook, not three types of hook.

I mean, I go into different types of hooks. Give me a little credit here, but the idea of this is give in the same way that you would just write your hook when you're telling a publisher, you want people to be able to deliver a hook. And so you have to communicate what that hook is to the person selling the game. This is kind of tricky because you're removed from the situation. But, you know, if Peter had to give a hook for a popular game, well, it's just Peter, what's a hook for Blood Rage?

Big old minis. Perfect. Perfect. You're like, look at these giant monsters. Look how cool that is. That's a hook. You know, it's a sexy, understandable. This is the type of thing where the person selling the game or the game itself needs to deliver this to the customer clearly and easily.

So shelf the title the front cover slash self shelf presence back of the box perceived value, bgg slash product description quality so is there can i can i guess the game that you're going to mention here uh i'm not thinking of a specific game at this moment but hold that for a bit i feel like we can't have this conversation about mentioning one particular game but go ahead Go ahead. You can just say the game you think you have. Canopy.

Canvas. Canvas. Sorry, Canvas. Canvas is amazing product design. I actually don't know if it was out for this one. I'll have to say it. Yeah, I was going to say it probably came after this, but it is just the game for front cover shelf presents. Yeah. Beyond everything else. So this is talking about the type of pitch where the shelf itself, or the game on the shelf, is going to sell it to the person looking at it. So for this, you need to think about what is the title of your game?

Is the title something where when you say it, the people who are reading it go, oh, that sounds like a cool thing. Like, blood rage isn't a real word. It's technically, well, it's a single word as a title.

I'm pretty sure, isn't it? Can you double check for me? i'm checking right now please do but either way i'm putting i'm putting money on it being two words okay yep two words perfect two words aj's wrong yet again but uh it's not like a as coherent of a sentence like why is the blood raging right right yeah but it's not a phrase it's not a common term but it gives such strong vibes there's going to be blood and there's going to be rage yeah, and yeah flamecraft flamecraft though the title alone

doesn't do it you need the context of the box which is fine because people are looking at the box so in that one you see flamecraft you're crafting things that's a nice vibe with flame because it's dragons and you can see it's a cute dragon it's not a big scary dragon it's getting that across one so the front cover slash shelf presence of the box itself can be selling point to people i think i go into this more i I think I'll go into each of these a little bit more,

so I'm skimming over them quickly here. The back of the box is so invaluable.

Perceived value is very important to the customers, how much they feel the thing should be worth. Occasionally, people will look up the BGG or product description listing of it, and the quality of the components, that sort of thing. So, what's in a name? Unlocatable. Incomprehensible. Meaningless.

Boring. So. Really? the game so let's go through them one by one the game that's the title of it is unlocatable have you ever tried to search their database of 3 000 games for a game titled the game the game it is i did development work on a game called empires which had the same problem you just can't. So that's frustrating to me as an employee, and it means that I'm less likely to recommend the game. And if you have a game that has very bad SEO like this, people might not be

able to find it even if they are looking for it. There's a game called Top 10. Try to search Top 10 The Game and find the actual game you're talking about. It's madness. People, please, this is the lowest hanging fruit for things to avoid.

I think we did a whole episode on naming Robotopia where we talked about some of these things too Yeah, I think we ran circles a little bit with them, but we probably mentioned a lot of the principles, so incomprehensible, Peter, can you read this title to everyone? Five Minute Dungeon Now listeners, what do you think you just heard? Like literally, write it out or type it out, and think did I write it out correctly?

The title is The Number Five, not the word five and then a space and then a dash and then a space and then minute and then dungeon. Like... I don't think there's a space between five and minute. It's an adjectival phrase, which means that it should be hyphenated. Maybe. Either way. Like the blood rage debate again. Yeah, it doesn't hugely matter.

Yeah, Peter's right again. No spaces. Still, the number five versus the word five, I actually would avoid numbers and titles entirely, if at all possible, because of this type of thing. Three, three hundred and four, like... I've played the game. I could not tell you how that is. Is it 304? Is it 304? Is it numbers? Is it letters? Is it? Yeah. And yeah, including dashes and special punctuation. You're just asking for trouble, people.

Having said that, five minute dungeon is an incredible description, like tells you exactly what you're getting. That is very true. That is very true. Wits and Wagers. So this one, I think it was just another example of Unlocatable where it's the ampersand. Ampersand is something that, again, you might want to avoid in general because people, if I told you Wits and Wagers is the title, by default, you will think of the word and, not the ampersand.

And again, these are minor things. But trust me, I have seen people not able to find the game they're looking for. Don't get in the way. Do you want to see the worst example of this in history? Do I ever.

Oh show and tile but it's a plus not an end just just the word we i could not win that argument with our artist she was she was insisted that this was the only way to do it and i just yeah show and tile is already not a great title if i'm being honest it's kind of a pun on show and tell but it's not interesting enough to be a pun on show and tell but using that plus instead of even an ampersand oh gosh i think oh gosh i think it's

really close to a good title like it does describe what you're doing in a way like you're doing your own little yeah but not in a way that tells like once you know what you're doing it tells you what you're doing but until with some wages i think it's the same thing like i hear this and i assume it's about bards at a tavern right yeah and once you know the game you're like oh yeah i can see how this describes that but i just don't think it gets you there without having the the curse of knowledge

it's it's such a good point yeah the Curse of knowledge being you already know the thing and it's hard to put yourself into the place of someone who doesn't know the thing. And you see where someone who knows the game would come up with that title thinking it's a great descriptor, but you have to think of it from the opposite perspective of if someone knows nothing about this game, is it a good descriptor?

Soterial Confluence, Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant, our favorite game title of all time. Come on, people. I feel like we've discussed this a disproportionate amount. I think we have discussed it the exact right amount it deserves for being, I would say, the second worst title after the game. After the game. Yeah. Prolix. Yeah. Gilhova has said that he hates the title and it became Wordsy later. He changed it to Wordsy, didn't he?

Yeah. Which Wordsy is cute. and at least gets across that it's a word game. And distinctive. And yeah, when AllPlay recently republished it, they kept it as Wordsy because that's a great title. Yeah, Prolix may be descriptive, but if someone has to reach for a dictionary, then you're doing it wrong. Oh, and they're real Wordsy. Good job, Past AJ. Sakura Arms. So listen, Sakura Arms is an amazing game.

That's a pretty stupid title. like yeah what what do flower blossoms and arms oh it's arms like weapons but there's not even weapons in the picture of the game because they're using different things like it's just so so ridiculous maybe it makes more sense the japanese that was originally a japanese game but i think they did themselves no favors with that name i can never find this quote when i want to but there's a there's a great tweet which is naming something

falls into one of two categories you immediately have the perfect title or you never like you spend the rest of your life struggling to find anything that even fits remotely the next is valeria card kingdoms yeah i think you should avoid fake proper nouns in every title really i do i think katan i said fake proper names isn't katan a real place am i wrong oh you're thinking of carcassonne oh i am thinking of carcassonne,

I mean, it's hard for me to be like, yeah, okay, the super successful game should have had a different title, but maybe it would have been more successful with a different name. I don't know. But I think that at least Catan sounds, I mean, I thought it was a real place. It sounds like a real name where a lot of those like Euro-y games, that's like a stylistic sort of thing. Like it brings you, and originally it was the Settlers of Catan and that gives you a lot more than just the word Catan.

All these like fictional fantasy names, they all to me are just like white noise that blur together and i think i think to be fair to your point it's more the the fantasy ones where it's like the rune terra or something it's like it just doesn't mean anything to anyone and it tells me the game is going to be about fantasy but that doesn't really get any strong vibes going if if you do it really well you can kind of get a vibe from it but yeah i i agree with you i don't

think i'm looking at my list now i don't think i have a single published or pitched game that has a non-dictionary word in it like that time you killed me is very distinctive but they're all dictionary words by the way that rant well we're on the topic as one of the best titles i've ever heard it took it took a six month six months of four people trying to come up with a name before jeff jeff fraser came in and was like i got it it was worth it yeah

the closest i have is ransom which is a real word but we've taken the vowels out r n sm robotopia no robotopia is a made-up name never mind i have one very obvious example the one that we tried to rename and couldn't yeah because and and this is this is a part of it like.

But i have an unsigned game called city fall all one word which is not a dictionary word but it's two dictionary words right shoved together like flamecraft and and that's why i think robotopia like i don't think it's the best name in the world by any stretch but i think that that one gets a bit of a pass because robots are very clear yeah utopia or dystopia that's like you've clearly merged the two words and it makes sense to anyone reading it what the tumor what

the two words are if you have a fictional fantasy title like that go for it by all means but if you're like the mages of blizzmorz it's like a great example of how to create a fantasy world is it fantasy maybe it's real old but anyway the the the the vibe i got stuck between vibe and zone the vibe of fantasy world while using dictionary worlds paladins of the east kingdom west kingdom raiders of the north sea like so evocative completely searchable yes yeah and then mound builders.

Is this not the most boring title like who's like oh boy it's weird mound builders i sure do want to build some mounds, You know what should be a boring title, but I think it really works, is Stone Age. I think Stone Age does have some weight to it. It does give you some evocative things of like, ooh, back when it was prehistoric or that kind of thing. It sounds quite generic, I think, but I think it works.

Great titles. Scythe.

Twilight Imperium. Twilight Imperium. twiligd imperium an infamous traffic exploding kittens cards against humanity mysterium dead men tell no tales so i and i'm always going to go one further and go back to make sure i didn't you're good so i think these are we're talking about these wouldn't be all on my top list today i didn't do notes for this episode so i can tell you what my top list would be today but that time you killed me would be on it that time you killed me yeah i think

critter kitchen is pretty damn good that was alex i think i fought against it because i was like critter is a dumb word but i'm not american so i didn't realize how much cultural cachet it has here scythe i think is an interesting example because it does so much heavy lifting in so many subtle ways like a scythe is used to harvest things scythe is a game about resource management and euro sensibilities much more than it is about the

stomping mechs so actually when people are like oh the theme doesn't really match what i thought it was going to be it's like well the front cover isn't the mech's fighting it's them harvesting stuff the name of the game is scythe the title gives you more than the the premise does yeah plus but scythe does have like it can be used as a weapon.

There is like some like it's a sharp bladed instrument it does give you a hint of edginess to it i think it's just a very strong striking word scythe and twilight imperium that's kind of just made up stuff but i do think it gets across the well it's not made up stuff but do you know i was gonna say do you know what i mean no but i just mean like it gives you a good sense of of the vibes of the game twilight like the end of something right and yeah go ahead

so twilight is the end of an imperium is empire yeah it's it's a game about the old em oh my goodness the old empire has collapsed so it's the twilight imperium the end of an empire i think it's an amazing title i'm agreeing with you an infamous traffic so this one i think does a really good job of. Scratching the mystery box itch that's why i like this one as an example for so in an infamous traffic. It's about the cocaine trade, I think.

I've never actually played the game. But as soon as you hear an infamous traffic, that immediately makes me think, what is being trafficked, right? What's the deal here? And I think that sort of leading you to question it further is really interesting.

Exploding Kittens, I think, like we were talking about before, it's just like such a wacky, memeable thing that you hear and you're like, what do you mean Exploding Kittens? What is this nonsense? It tells you everything you need to know immediately. Cards Against Humanity. This one, I think, does a very good job of setting the tone for it. Like, you are going to be doing some things that are, like, this is a safe place to- Do you know what phrase it's riffing on? No, actually.

Crimes Against Humanity. It's even better than I thought. Yeah, it's really solid. Mysterium. so mysterium is a made-up word unless you're going to correct me on that one too and.

My name is mysterium but it's a mysterious game it is about a mystery a murder mystery kind of thing and also mystics does a very good job getting that and dead men tell no tales like common pirate saying and it tells you it's a pirate game it tells you that there's going it's going to be high stakes there's going to be some death involved those things it's great that was the subtitle of scuttle scuttle was scuttle dead men tell no tales i think something like that now i don't

know why there's a giant eyeball here i guess i was just leading to my my shelf presence and what it looks like shelf presence fits on the shelf sorry fit on the shelf get notice create conversations around your game show us how to display your game so now we're going to some examples here so fitting on the shelf the sensei's path i mean i i really wish i had one it's for this part so sensei's path is an expansion for onitama and.

Onitama is in the exact same shaped box uh for those listening it's a unique uh vertical, rectangular prism that's with a square base yeah and so it's a very unique shape is very recognizable and the base it's closer in shape to a pringles can than a board game just to get yeah square pringles can is a good description so the expansion is just like 15 cards or something like that and every person who buys it is like why is it in the same like big fancy

box they could just shrink wrap the cards and i'm paying more for the box i'm like yes and no one would ever see a shrink wrapped pack of cards how am i supposed to display that whereas this one immediately you walk through the game store you see this one you recognize it has to go with the other game and I guarantee you it sold an order of magnitude more than if it was just a shrink type of stuff cards. Maybe more than that, honestly.

Love Letter is a great example of one that has shelf presence and how to do shelf presence properly because there's multiple versions of Love Letter. I don't have it on the slide, but they sold like clamshell one where it's like a plastic case and then it has the bag with the cards inside of it. And they sold a boxed version of it. And I might be mistaken. I know that the premium box was a bigger box.

I think at some point they sold a small box and the clamshell one and they were the exact same contents. Like that big. Yeah, it's just one had the bag and one had the box. And the box one outsold the other one significantly, even when I put the two of them side by side on the shelf.

The box has a presence that people recognize. and and if it's the form of a game they understand what they're getting yeah and importantly it displays a lot better if i have uh think of a thin clamshell box that's just as the same width as as few cards that's going to sit flat on the shelf it's not dynamic it's it's harder to see because you have to be looking directly down at it and if i do have a hook for putting straight on great but oftentimes that type of

space is reserved for things like magic cards or lcg expansions those or something so you're not often going to display those whereas a small box that fits nicely on the shelf that's gonna be way easier for me to just sit straight up and people will see i i feel like this is the all-play model with their small boxes like things in rings fiction come in this like it it's almost designed to be like at the front of the store yeah it's 20 but it's like.

10 10 inches by 10 inches i don't know inches that well but it's it's not like it's like it's like a decent sized iphone height in both dimensions and then you know half as thick as that it's just a really nice satisfying form factor if i still worked at the flgs i would have every single one of those small box i'll play games on my front shelf every single one of them they're they're perfect they're the right price point they're the right size 60 games or something like that yeah well

i could fit 60 games on there i had a very big well it's so what you're probably picture is like the front desk where like i was but it has a lot of width there's a lot of front counter space at least at that store there is no there is if you're ever at a convention and all plays there and if you're at a convention all play probably will be there go and look at the way that they set up their booth they have the best booth in the business every time zero competition yeah that because

because they've they only have two box sizes they have the little one that i was describing and then one that's like two and a half times as big as that all of their games are in one of those two sizes they're all at the same price point per size and they just line up so nicely and they make shelves so the shelves behind me are actually all play shelves and so they've made these custom like booth display things and the way joe who's the owner put it is like yep five years of consistency pays

off because you go there and it's just beautiful like it's just this incredible display of like simile size games it's very very satisfying mm-hmm.

So this is my catacomb fit on the shelf comment let's see if i have my slide oh i don't have the slide maybe i do it later the i hope i go into it later let me let me just skip ahead really quick i'll just see no it doesn't look like spoilers spoilers i'm really mad that i didn't put this on here oh because i had the physical props that's why all right well man i really missed that presentation that i did on video where i had it actually if i run really fast downstairs i can grab

the box but i don't i probably don't i'm going to i'm going to be right back okay i i will i will riff i was going to do this at the end of the episode but i'll do it now because i need to fill time we have got uh two series coming up two series coming up one is going to be us talking to publishers so we're going to do little like 30 minute episodes where we talk to a publisher we ask them what kind of stuff they're looking for what their brand is we're going

to play the game that we talked about in the unhelpful advice episode where we say like would you have published this why not why this why not what's their you know what's their favorite game they've designed etc etc please let us know either below in the youtube comments or by emailing or by joining a discord which publishers you want us to hit because we have access to a lot of publishers and so we want to you know i think.

I think this will be a really cool series so just let us know which publishers we definitely definitely should talk to throw in the discord we see everything in there we had a huge influx of people in the discord recently by the way so thank you to everyone who's joined it's a really lovely community and then the second thing aj i'm still going is we are going to start doing a series where we look at sell sheets like we did with aj's so what's our email

address aj funproblemspod at gmail.com it'll be in the show notes.

So email us at funproblemspod at gmail.com please remove anything that you don't want to appear on screen so like your phone number or your email address or anything like that you can leave your name on if you want that's not going to bother us but if you do submit a sell sheet and we welcome you to realize we are going to be honest you saw the episode with aj we're not going to be like hey nice job you made a soul sheet we're going to be like look here's our honest first impressions,

and as you saw in that episode you, I can be harsh. AJ can be harsh. We're doing it to help you. We're not, you know, getting off on being mean. But if you do want to go through the trial of fire, then please send us your cell sheet. And who knows? Maybe someone will see it and be like, that looks really cool. But please submit your cell sheets again to funproblemspod at gmail.com.

Nice. I vamped very nicely. Go ahead. That's perfect. That is extra perfect because of a little breath from sprinting down two flights of stairs and sprinting back up while holding this. It's it's very very dense because i have almost everything for it love catacombs cool game so why was this my example for terrible box design first things first you can't tell from from just looking at like this but doesn't fit on a calyx is just too big.

I was about to say calyx is the industry standard like what was foundations of rome, huge huge game that came out from arcane wonders fits in a calyx you gotta you gotta fit in a calyx that's that's the board game of shelf of choice all play shelves not modeled after the calyx but they are designed to fit what a calyx can fit because that is the industry standard you can stick out a little bit if you have to but that's the only dimension that you can cheat on,

so oh yeah as in forward yes yeah it's like stick out back into the wall just punch a hole Yeah, I was thinking like the top of the side. I'm going to get something over you, Torb. Go ahead. Okay, so I'm going to hold this up to the camera as best as I can for a second here. I know that the audience can't see from the, the audio listeners can't see, but there's some awards down here, text blurb here, and a bunch of wasted space over here, basically.

And then a huge health and safety. So that's what I'm going to be referencing. I'm going to set this down now. It is very heavy. This is a game full of wooden tokens. It's a dungeon-crawling dexterity game. Think Descent meets Crokinole, if you're familiar with those two. And I have all the expansions, so my out-of-breathness has nothing to do with me being very out of shape, which I am. So, problems with this box. On the back of the box, you'll see that,

like I said, there are... You can go back to the video and pause it there if you want to reference that. I'm going to explain it all. There were a few awards on it. But the awards are on the back of the box. And they actually have more awards than these, but they only, I think, put out the biggest awards. They were like the Golden Geek Dice Tower Award. And those are pretty influential awards. It's not Spielscher. Speaking of awards, AJ, what were we just named?

We were named the second best Canadian board game podcast. Yeah, that's wild. Anyway, I just thought that was cool. Yeah. Carry on. Yep. So the problems with this is people who are buying games aren't going to be swayed by awards on the back of the box if they're looking there.

They're going to care about the content of it. The people who impulse buy are predominantly the mass market gamers or casual gamers looking for a gift or some casual gamers will be swayed by awards or get interested in them from awards. But awards don't close the sale. They start the sale. So you don't put the awards on the back of the box. You put them on the front of the box. And awards usually mean nothing in terms of their clout.

Because yes, the hardcore gamers are familiar with Dice Tower and a Dice Tower award might get them interested. But the vast majority of your audience doesn't know who these different reviewers are.

Ask any ask almost anyone who isn't a hardcore gamer what the spiel des jara says you know like this i was about to ask if the spiel like in europe i know the spiel des moods units it's nothing the like the dice tower word or the golden geek means more because at least they're in english really yeah i've never once so here's the big lesson awards mean something in volume it's not oh this award in particular matters it's this game

won a lot of awards if you're going to put awards on the box earlier you showed wits and wages literally the tagline of that game is the most awarded party game in history yeah and again what that does is you put on the front of the box people go whoa if it won all these awards it has to be good right that they will literally say that, and then be like it makes sense like there is a logic to that it's not a dumb

thing to say absolutely it's if it's winning if a game has won five awards it is worth checking out.

That doesn't mean you'll love it it doesn't mean it's for you but i just i really think there is a distinct logic to oh multiple panels of people chose this as their game cool yeah so next problem with the back of the box is the use of space is atrocious i'm going to show briefly one more time here so there's so much space of just like oh here's some cards and here's some stuff lying there there's a huge text blurb which no one's ever going to read and and the text blurb duplicated in

french and then this whole chunk here is just components like it's just like such a huge waste of of space, I ended up, Joe, a Slack friend of the show, after I gave the presentation, I was like, hey, I'm friends with them. Do you want me to get you in touch? So he got me in touch and I consulted on the revised box of them, which I... Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. That's so cool. So I'll put the revised one

in the show notes. I don't have a copy of the revised one. I should have asked for one, but... Yeah, you absolutely should have. But yeah, the main things that we did was, first off, it doesn't even say it's a dexterity game anywhere on here.

So it's like and and you again you don't want to say it's a dexterity game you want to show it so we put a hand in that was like flicking one of the tokens uh showing like how it works there, a much shorter tagline again you if you're going to have this text here you want to be a hook a short it's the same thing as you're doing with with a publisher you want to be one or two sentences really sexy sell the game go off vibes that sort of thing and yeah you want to show

what's on the back of the box what's going on there shrink all the stupid boring stuff people don't care about no one's going to be like, oh, it comes with 15 item cards, but it also comes with 13 special item cards. Are you kidding? Yeah. I think in some places it's a legal requirement to list the components or maybe not a legal requirement, but it's definitely the industry standard.

But that doesn't mean listing each type of card separately because the extreme version of that is one sword card, one dagger card.

And if you can say, Create a Kitchen, the deluxe version comes with 256 poker size cards that is in 12 different decks because there's all these different modules maybe more i don't even know the numbers but when people are asking how do i sleeve it we're saying you need 256 poker size sleeves the end yep and the thing is is if you're and yes put your components on there but don't put them in the middle of the box and in big font right like

tuck it away in the corner so someone can go there if they want oh yeah yeah put put it at the bottom, we're going to finish this section and then we're going to split this into a two-parter so let's keep going but i'm just giving you a heads up sounds good see you next time everyone no no no wait no we're still going oh oh got it i said we're going to finish this section and then, okay well this is a this is going to be a fairly long section i think i could

be mistaken the the boxes that we're on now yeah i think so but we can figure it out all right well we're gonna we're gonna stop here we'll do a fun question and publish a tip and then we will come back for part two, the rest of the box sizes things sounds good okay aj you want to stop sharing your screen and we will do a can you do that you have the technology yes hello it's us we were here the whole time.

I have a fun question for you the one part of the podcast we're allowed to have fun i came with one prepared today let's hear it what is the non-board game thing that you are working on or involved in that you are most excited by that's interesting okay, Is it fun? Because it is legally required to be fun. And if not, I can be arrested and deported. You go first because I know you have a million projects going on.

Do you know what mine is? I'm working on this thing I've been talking about for literally years at this point. It's so close. Is it your YouTube channel? I am making, yes, I'm making a three-part video essay series about Ted Lasso. And I wrote them, I wrote the first two in 2021, and I filmed the first one last year, and I had an editor edit it last year, and now I'm doing my final pass, and it is so close to done.

And because AJ doesn't like reading scripts, he's not read anything at this point, so I'm waiting to have this version to send to him to get thoughts and feedback. So AJ, who is as into Ted Lasso as I am, and likes hearing my thoughts on stuff, I'm very excited to share it specifically with you, but also with eventually the world.

Awesome my video essay it's it's called uh ted lasso season one is perfect and it'll be out.

Someday look look forward to that i'm sure we'll we'll add it to uh one of the show notes or follow-ups or something for you're gonna say just the end of the episode just the whole youtube video yeah just the whole thing no i just meant to let people know i could put a trailer you know what screw it at the end of this youtube there's going to be a little sneak peek of my video essay nice because why not we can do that not on the

podcast but you have to come to youtube for it we can do literally anything we want this is our podcast we can do anything, think for me i've i'm not i wouldn't say i'm actively working on at this moment but it's in the back of my head i had when i i told uh the viewers on here slash listeners that i used to want to be a writer and that i stopped that so i could focus entirely on game design but there's one short story that has always stuck in my head as a thing that i really wanted to

do and something that's very unique to writing as a medium and i've been on a bit of a kick of just like researching writing structure and stuff like that so i can get good enough to just get this out of my head and and actually write it because i i've done some short stories that i'm pretty happy with but i'm absolutely not like a great writer by any stretch of the imagination and this one requires.

Longer stretches of stuff and a bit more structure to it so i've just been i've just been into the preliminary steps of like trying to get into a space where i can get that out of my head didn't actually do it so i'm pretty excited about that have i talked about the writing book on writing well by i think it's like william rad radkin or something have i talked about you've have i talked to you about this book probably at some point but doesn't ring a bell it's from

the 70s i i started reading it and my library copy had to go back and i'm still waiting for it to come back through my libby app really impressed me just really really impressed me and the whole.

It actually is very applicable to board game design the whole thing that he focuses on is condensing don't use two words when one word will do don't use a ten dollar word when a simple word does the same thing like and within that framework he shows how you can still have voice and personality but this is something i have needed to read i've been a professional author for over a decade now but i get paid by the word so in no way am i incentivized to cut

my words but i'm starting to write fiction that i'm going to start public pitching to publishers and so this i've known that this is a weak spot of mine and this book just exactly is for what i need and i really recommend it it's called on writing well and the relevance to board game design which is not why i brought it up but is is also is that the core kind of principle of this is two sentences one of which is half the length of the other but that says the exact same thing

that is a superior sentence and obviously subjectivity blah blah blah but like the the the good good writing you know on writing well is literally the name of the thing on designing well two games that do the same thing but one has half the rules that is a superior game by the you know the standards of taste and and obviously nothing's nothing's objective we go about we talk about this all the.

Book example really illustrated to me how why that matters in games also to get like one tiny step further which is well two tiny steps further one still applies to games in terms of literal writing as you've been very big on with just reducing the amount of text on cards that sort of thing oh yeah this is something that we don't i was about to say fight about we don't fight about it at all my job is to do a pass and just cut words cut words cut words do you want to talk about the assassin

bug example i think it was really interesting yeah so that's one if i know what you're referring to specifically where.

I wanted to cut rules and you want and you went through and just did a pass of trimming words and making it more clear what was going on and the goal of this from both of our perspectives was to make the assassin bug easier for people to understand and play so i was coming up from the reducing rules complexities side of things and you're coming up from the cutting literal text from the card to make it more parsable and after you were

finished you were like i don't think we need to cut any rules from this i think we probably still will because we're both driven by that but i was staggered this was normally like i said i go through and cut all the words this one i just hadn't for some reason for like 11 drafts so it just grown and grown and grown i was genuinely stunned by how easy that faction is to play compared to how hard it was with the like right we didn't change a single rule and yet i i think that that faction

halved its complexity just by tweaking the cards yeah like and and this is something that is super valuable for designers to be thinking about where when you run into a problem don't just think like think about why it's a problem right there's often multiple solutions to the same problem and sometimes aj we stopped having fun oh quick thing. Sometimes it's your rules explanation. Sometimes it's the reference card. Sometimes it's iconography based.

Pay attention to precisely what the thing is that are tripping people up and try and solve that.

And then we finish each episode with a tip on how to get your games more publishable, which is sort of what this whole episode is about. So we could skip it, but we won't. We're going to do it anyway. Do you have one, AJ? Do you want one for me? You go ahead. I've done everything else this episode. Come on. That's true. I've just sat here and never monologued at all. Certainly not got on a 20 minute rant in the middle that had very little to do with what we were talking about.

I'm going to talk about contests briefly, because I think contests are a really interesting way of getting your stuff in front of publishers or getting some attention to publishers. Now, winning a contest does not mean your game gets published, but I think there is value in looking at what contests are out there. Cardboard Edison is the big one. Buttonshy do contests all the time. Oh, no, they do one once a year.

BGG has contests. And similar to the awards that we were talking about earlier, it's not that winning a contest means that your game is amazing and will get signed. But if a game has won three contests, I promise you a publisher is more likely to look at it than a game that hasn't.

I i genuinely think like oh this one three different contests from three different things that is more worth my time than a game that didn't again it's as self-explanatory as five awards versus no awards so you look like you disagree yeah kind of so i mean this is kind of funny because you're one of the most published uh designers i know and i don't have a published game so it's still just like it doesn't mean i'm right about stuff yeah we'll

talk about this in the solstice episodes but like i have strong opinions that does not mean i am correct yeah.

So my perspective on this comes out from a different angle, which is there's an opportunity cost to entering contests. Now, if it's just a blanket contest of like best game wins, whatever. If it is, which is way more common, here is a contest that puts you under a restriction. Most commonly, it would be 18 card games from Bunchai or whoever. The Lady in the Tiger contest and the Jabwocky contest. So the thing is, is you only have so much time in the day to design.

And if you spend your time designing games with an arbitrary restriction, of course, restriction can breed creativity and you might come up with something really great. But oftentimes what you'll end up with is something that was designed around a restriction that would have been better if you hadn't designed around the restriction. And now you have this game that is less sellable to other publishers because they don't care that you followed that restriction.

And I had that literally with the Lady and the Tiger contest. 18 card raw. Yeah, exactly. Which I think is a rock solid game. But then as Pichy around there, I was like, it's a micro game. And like, well, I don't care about it being exactly 18 cards. Like, can you do it better with other things? I'm like, oh yeah, I guess I can and should now. I'm going to disagree pretty heavily here. I'm going to bring receipts.

So the two things that make contests worthwhile, we did a contest for Lady and the Tiger and Javwocky. So I'm coming at this from a published perspective, but also I enter contests as a designer. Yeah.

Two things that i think matter that are relevant here one is that we we we published a bunch of the lady in the tiger games button shy published a bunch of the contest winners in fact uh skulls of sedlik which is probably button shy's second best-selling game after tussie mussy was for a contest like that explicitly came out of that contest and once once you have that relationship with the publisher it is we've talked about this before it is easier to publish future games to

a publisher you've worked with fact yeah just just a fact like any lady in the tiger designer could email me and be like hey can you look at a game we're not taking pictures we have not taken pictures for years now i would absolutely look at that game like we have we have a relationship we have an ongoing financial relationship on literal level but then to your specifically to your point, i can name a lot of games that have gone into specific restriction contests,

won or placed or not placed and then been reworked into published games there's a 25th century game called a gueda the city of umbrellas i don't know if you've seen that one that was actually for the same contest of skulls of sedlik the the skulls of sedlik contest was make a make an 18 card game based around a location 18 cards is insanely restrictive did you did i tell you what the latest button shy contest was it really tickled me no i assume less than 18 make an 18 card game.

Where you only use nine of the cards each game i'm sure incredible some of the stuff that came out like i'm like i would buy that immediately so if you're not inspired by the contest don't enter i'm not saying like spend 20 hours on like don't treat it like a job but if i saw that and i was like how would that work it tickled my brain would you say restriction breeds creativity absolutely did that if it hadn't i would have stopped but i end up having a

really cool game that I've entered, I don't think it'll win. But I had to get it to the point of polish where it is pitchable, and now I know how to tweak that into a non-18 card, only-use-9 card game. And I think you'd be surprised by how many published games... I'm not saying it's like 10%, but like how many games go from, they were in a specific contest, they won or didn't win the contest, the designer opened them up and then they found a home.

I think that is a really common viable pathway. I don't know if I'm overselling it. I don't know. I mean, I don't have any statistics, so I don't think I comment further of like how my people go on to sign things versus people who spent their time doing it. 18 card wrath. People looked at that. Like you had that with publishers for quite a while. Like you got paid, I think, advances or am I misremembering?

I didn't get any advances. I did have a publisher seriously interested, but didn't end up taking it. Right. But that was a game that was from a contest to a publisher. It didn't make it, but, you know, it could have. Maybe you still can. Who knows? Maybe you still can. And if you're getting these notes of like, it's too little, cool. Tweak it, make it bigger. Don't just make raw. That won't work. Okay. AJ, how do we end this podcast? By saying goodbye, everyone.

Bye, everyone. piano plays softly. Music. Thanks for joining us you can find us and our incredible discord community in the show notes or reach out to us privately at funpromispodcast at gmail.com we'd love to hear from you if you enjoyed the podcast please tell a friend.