#47 - Why Your (GOOD) Game Won't Sell – Part 2

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

Brandon. I'm AJ Hayward. And we are launching straight back into part two of my talk, Why Your Selling Game Won't Good. Why Your Good Game Won't Sell. I have popcorn, so... You scrambled it on the spot there. Oh, perfect. Your nice crunchy snack that you'll eat very loudly. Popcorn is the choice for movie theaters because it is not noisy. That's why they do popcorn at movie theaters. Well, what about the bag? Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.

We'll see. That's why I showed it. It's a nice... Look at that. All right. All right. We'll allow it. So when we last met, this is part two of AJ's 2018 presentation about, I want to say, game product design from a retailer perspective. Yeah. Now, you're no longer a retailer, but you still have a lot of interesting insights. And that talk is no longer online because it got copyright struck or something crazy. I think I know what it was. And it comes up later in my talk.

So we'll see if I have to skip a slide or something. Deep, deep racism. Just the incredible, how many slurs you put into 14 seconds was like Eminem level impressive. And like Eminem, I get a free pass, baby. Okay. So we were talking about boxes on shelves. Is that an accurate way to put it? Yes. So I was just complaining about the box design of catacombs. Since we cut, I probably should have put up the good box that I helped redesign for catacombs, but I didn't do that.

So you still have to look in the show notes for that. But now we're into good boxes. So this one I pulled separately from the presentation because in the physical presentation, I had props. i don't have those here this was at the time one of the best backup boxes that i could think of, Today, I think it's a little lacking in some areas. I probably would have complained about them back then as well.

But for the most part, it does a couple things really well, including something that I bet Peter won't even be able to notice. So things I think it does a little poorly. I think there's too much text. Three paragraphs of explanation as to what the deal is with the game. That's a bit much. The new rules being included make sense. Oh, sorry. Audio listeners. So the back of the box has three paragraphs of what you're doing in the game. You probably could have heard that.

Paragraphs of text is too much. Audio listeners, there are three paragraphs of text. Yeah, I didn't say what it was about, though. It's about the, it's like the sales pitch of the game. It does say that includes new rules. There is one sentence here that I think they would not put today, but was vitally important when this game first came out. Is it to do with pandemic stuff? No. Oh, yeah, that's funny. I didn't even think of that. Pandemic is a cooperative game all players win or lose together.

Right. That was absolutely like. Barely a thing when this game came out yeah i remember like that was that was the selling point of the game this is like whoa we work together that's crazy that's not a thing i mean obviously it was i know that people hate eating sounds so much i am not hearing you my comment before was more worried about if it shows up on the audio but i'm sure it'll be fairly quiet i just know that like the number one pet peeve of podcast listeners is eating sounds

so i don't want to ruin the second half of your presentation with popcorn munching maybe just mute your mic both between when you're talking. Not going to do that. Fair enough. All right, so moving on. The big thing that this does that I really like is on the back of the box, it has step one, step two, step three.

Step one, treat diseases before they spread. Step two, meet up to collect cards. Step three, discover the cure for diseases, cure all diseases to win. Now, Pandemic does have some pretty abstract concepts going on. So like understanding exactly what's going on is a little bit weird, but you get rid of some cubes, You get cards, you cure the disease. At least that's like an understandable process, step one, step two, step three, as to what you're doing over the course of the game.

I think that the exact explanation could be refined or possibly much improved by other games that have easier to understand turn cycle. But for the most part, I think that sort of structure really helps to break down the game into bite-sized parts and help people understand. Any thoughts on that? When we did the what is a sell sheet episode, I brought up Mighty Than the Sword, my co-design with local game designer Matt.

And that's the thing that I think we didn't have that I could never get on there.

Like that one two three as as a i like that kind of over oversight that's not the right word bird's eye view of the game where it's just like here's the things you have to care about done like that's almost all i want frankly and i feel like i never managed to capture that so i think that's a really interesting i'm thinking about this from the perspective of cell sheets i think it's a really interesting like feature yeah i don't disagree with anything you said a lot of my cell sheets what

I tried to do was have the speech bubbles and have three speech bubbles and the first and you know in reading comprehension or left to right top down you would say do this do this do this and ideally you would get a feel for the game from those three speech bubbles that was so the platonic ideal I was always reaching towards whether or not actually got there the there is one big thing on here that they have that is still rare

today but is surprisingly valuable to hardcore gamers Can you tell what that is? I bet you can't. Two new roles. The answer? Let me have a guess. I'm really curious about this. So something on here that is not common and you think is best for hardcore gamers? Yes. I don't know. What is it? Recommended card sleeves. Just saying these are the sleeves that you need to go with this game. So convenient. Recommended card sleeves, three gray game gen. Oh, I didn't even see that.

Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, so it's... Do you think it was like a sponsorship deal? I definitely think that there's got to be something going on there for that specific brand. But it doesn't matter because people who sleeve their games know the equivalent of all the different brands.

At least for the you know four most common ones the standard card standard euro mini euro so interesting i would i i'm not anti-sleeving but as a company jelly bean games has never, never made sleeving a consideration like all of our games we've never printed a poker card all of our games are bridge cards mini cards and tarot cards and you can obviously get sleeve for those but if we were sleever friendly we would never do bridge cards we'd always do poker cards and

so once we kind of made that choice earlier i was like cool we are not accommodating sleevers like our games don't necessarily fit all the cards sleeved or you know whatever else it's just it's not a priority for me so i would i would never put that on the box but i fully understand the appeal yeah it's something where you know you're never going to lose customers because it doesn't say it's on the box but people are going to immediately appreciate it have a

nice you know association there feel like they're seen because a lot of sleevers feel like honestly like i don't want to, overstate this but they feel like second-class citizens in a way and part of that i feel like sleevers are so entitled well coming at this from opposite perspectives i also hate putting anything in the rule book or the box that doesn't need to be there we don't list play testers. I, we barely list stuff. Like I, I just don't like stuff.

It's like I was talking about it last episode with the on writing. Well, like if I can cut something, I want to cut it unless that, like, I think the cost of every word that you add to your rule book, to your box, to your cards is so expensive that if I like having a list of play testers, cool. You, you know, that one person will find their name there and be like, look, I'm in this rule book. Why are you subjecting potentially millions of other people to that.

Yeah and i think part of this comes down to targeting if the game is targeting only the hardcore audience or primarily hardcore audience it's a super big heavy euro much more reasonable to have that on there if it's a more mass market game much less of a need of value to have it yeah.

But like people would literally look at and be like oh that's so convenient i love that because they're sleeving it also telegraphs to players that you probably thought about that in terms of the box and this is something that i think i get into later in the presentation but if you have a box that has cards and has some sort of insert that players are intended to use post opening the box having that tiny little bit of extra space for card sleeves is going to make people.

So so happy to sleeve their games and for people who don't sleeve their games it's not like it hurts the cards having a few extra millimeters all it does is make it easier for you to get your fingers in so it is if you're i would call sleevers an incredibly vocal minority which is not to say like you should ignore them but i think they are a minority but i think that they dominate so many conversations so it's worth considering them i'm on your side here yeah so

this goes into displaying the game this is something this is something i think about so much and something i'm very glad that we can bend aeg's ear on that we've already talked to them about is how to present your game man i'm getting fired up just looking at the slide so what you're seeing no no no i'm i'm getting fired up like like pumped like excited oh oh gotcha gotcha so this is a picture of pandemic legacy season one and two both with their two parts so pandemic

legacy season one is a blue box season two is a red box and if you put them side by side horizontally then they create a panoramic picture kind of and same with the season two they create the a panorama and all four of them put together create like one big panorama to an extent circle yeah yeah to an extent. And this is really interesting because it creates, and for those who aren't familiar, there's no difference between them. Is there?

Pandemic Legacy Season Red is red. Pandemic Legacy Season 1 Blue is blue. I thought there were differences in choices or parts or something like that. Nope, same game. I thought it was like some Pokemon games. Same game. I had literally no idea. But this does a few things. So first off, this is interesting because it's a legacy game.

You play it once and you're done right so by having the two that feel like they're connected like that it makes people much more likely to buy the second one because they're like well i can play through again make different choices and look how nice they look together it feels like they fit together in a way and as a retailer it creates an amazing display now they're huge so it's and And they don't fit in the display format on Calyx's, which is what we used.

But a lot of store shelves are wider and you can put them beside each other where they create the panorama. That is so unbelievably attention grabbing. It's very impressive. And it makes people say, hey, what's the deal with this game? I had so, so many people say, what's the deal with this game? And with the game that we have with AEG right now, we've been talking about product design a little bit. And something I'm very excited about is... A little bit. Yeah.

Well incessantly for months yes yeah and the big thing that i'm talking to him about is trying to get it get the product in a way that it can be displayed like this and communicating how to display your product to to retailers is also really a healing for instance with booster boxes for magic that's super common you have a cardboard box in shrink wrap but then if you sell individual boosters you take off the shrink wrap and you open the box but the way that you open the box is the lid becomes

this thing that stands up vertically it folds back in i love that yeah and creates this beautiful picture very appealing very easy to see and doing those sorts of things makes it really easy for the retailer to sell the game that is i think the number one way that you can sell extra copies easily is by coming up with a way to have better shelf presence and the thing is most games don't do this if you do something as good as pandemic legacy season

one or two then you're going to get retailers pushing your game really hard because it's so easy for them to it's going to sell itself it's incredible.

We never got the funding for it because Robotopia failed the first time and then like scraped by the second time. But when we were back in the AJ days at Jelly Bean Games, we wanted to do this thing that no one's done. I really wish someone could. I think it's so cool. Of like the box has like a, I don't even know how to describe it, like a hinged lid on top of the lid. So you've got the box, but you can open it up and now there's like a full art display to like show off the world.

Stuff like that I'm always thinking about. there's a little bit of that in some really old games from the 90s or whatever like HeroScape had that big door that you can open and see some stuff in, but yeah, modern games not doing it at all, part of that probably has to do with packaging, like shrink wrapping and stuff like that, because then you have to figure out a way to not get damaged on shelves without having that, but nowadays more and

more I was just going to say, nowadays more and more games are moving away from shrink wrapping for environmental concerns, so you can probably get away with it bit more easily i'm going to talk about all play again a because i work with them a bunch but b i think that they are top three companies in terms of product like stonemaia cardboard alchemy all play like they just get product to this incredible degree so i've got a game with them fiction which is a

wordle style guessing game based around books i've got a game with them things in rings which is a venn diagram guessing game themed around dr seuss and they picked up wordsy that we mentioned last episode by gil hover and they deliberately made a countertop display or i don't know if they did but they were planning on talking about making a countertop display with those like for those three games so the the store could order a set of help like whatever

it is four of each and it would come in a box because it needs to come in a box anyway but like the magic things it opens up and now it's a now it's a countertop display for your book themed games because they work a lot with barnes and noble really cool i just i love that kind of thing. Yeah they're awesome they're awesome not not a sponsor. Now, feel free to make fun of me as much as you want. Are we still in boxes? I got some box stuff.

This is still box related stuff. This is like the front cover. Graphic design 101. Clear, colorful, striking, clean, jaw dropping, unique, energy slash scene using the layered approach like a haircut. So me and Peter will be the first to tell you I'm very bad at graphic design. But i know bad graphic design when i see it do you have you seen your graphic design aj i mean you've also seen when i try really hard you know my i think i bumped the camera.

But yeah the it's still working right yep yeah anyway enough defending my graphic design because it doesn't need defending or rather not enough attacking your graphic design it's the sidereal confluence of graphic design go ahead yeah so basic things that you want this is talking about the front cover of the box someone looks at the box what do they see so this bleeds into art and that kind of thing which you know it's really all all of it combined right you want your front cover to be clear.

You don't want a lot of different things happening and to be very muddy. People just walk right past those boxes. By the way, again, my retail perspective, I have seen hundreds or thousands of boxes and I can tell you which ones people pick up and which ones do not. So trust me on this. You want something that is colorful. If it's just like a bunch of muted browns and grays, it just gets completely passed over.

People don't even think about it. you want to have something that is striking high contrast yep go ahead i want to keep going i'm talking about dracula's faith all right i'll finish off this slide and then and i'll let you jump in. You want something striking. You want something clean. Again, if it's really muddy, there's a lot of different things happening. It gets lost in the water.

Jaw-dropping, ideally. If someone sees a really gorgeous painting or something, that is the number one way that you sell your game is by the front cover looking amazing. And someone's saying, wow, I don't know what that is, but I'm going to check it out.

And again this is this is step one you you haven't made the sale yet you're catching someone's attention having something unique if you just have a generic fantasy person fighting you know you can have the best artist in the world but they're gonna be like cool another generic fantasy fighting thing like it's just gonna glaze over you want to have a lot of energy or like a scene like you you are imagine like you freeze frame a really exciting moment if you think

of the tv show arcane every one of those like slow-mo shots where like the characters are coming to punch each other and it just slows to a crawl those are really energetic and give you a good sense of obscene think of those and those will do well and then the last one is the layered approach which is just presenting the important information and the important pictures largely and the less important stuff small go ahead peter so the the game i was talking about last time dracula's feast.

There's an artist from back in the day called edward gory he did a bunch of like gothic cool stuff and he had this really distinctive inking style that we aped for dracula's feast so.

This is the cover of the original dracula's feast it's we're inspired by his specifically like he normally only worked in black and white but when he did book covers he would have a single block color so you can see this is all just black and white inking with just a highlight color a what's called feature color whatever it is accent an accent color and this was so divisive like i love it i think this is such a good looking

game i think the style is really good we've got a bunch we've got 10 characters in the game eight characters in the game i can't remember how i think 10 all done in this style all with one accent color and then we did the expansion which is very similar so it's all like and this is inked by our artist like she is an ipad but it was still like every line that you see here was drawn by a human in the style of edward gory so it's such a labor of love crazy divisive and people called it

cheap and i was just like i don't see how you can think of this as cheap like it's got this legacy it's got like this classic feeling it is more labor intensive than a lot of other art styles and then i saw the game nyctophobia on a shelf which is a pandasaurus title it's designed to be played with one person blindfolded so it's a really cool hook by katherine i can't remember her surname oh man anyway she's very lovely and this is her

first published design people really like the game but i saw that box on a shelf and And I was immediately like, oh, I see why people think Dracula's Feast is cheap. Not because, like, the box itself is fine. It's entirely black and white.

It's that same kind of ink style. But when it's surrounded by full-color boxes... It feels cheap. Like there's no other real word for it. It just, it's not, it's a gorgeous style, but on the shelf, it feels cheap. So we redid Dracula's Feast as Dracula's Feast New Blood, and we got a different artist and we just went with a more kind of board game-y style. And so we had two types of comments. We had people being like, ah man, I miss the old style. I wish you'd stuck with that.

And we got people being like, oh good, a game I can actually like put on my shelf.

So I just thought that like your note about color is really interesting in that like, there are games that can utilize like a rich black i think seven continent does does a really good job of it but usually the ones that are not colorful are very striking right those are ones where it's like black and white to really emphasize that yeah i think uh seventh continent is black and gold this is from emery so i could be completely wrong but like it's it's all black

with one color on it uh control which was the first key master game that's similar it's like all black with like beautifully graphic designed gold on it but yeah it's it's a thing that i had a relevant anecdote that i wanted to share why am i justifying this i'm talking on the podcast that i co-host aj it has to be okay or we don't have a show clear so can you even read that because that's what people see on the shelf drunken rumble gun i think

it's dragon rampage but i don't remember yeah dragon rampage yeah so for our listeners it's like one of those really elaborate text styles and then it's a. Gradient color so it's it's so hard to read just a really awful title it's like the rural juror yeah this one's even worse look how uncontrasted the the title is yeah i can see it as winds of fortune but you gotta you gotta work at it yeah and again people walking past this they see this right next to ones that

actually have really crystal clear things like those are going to pop out and explode and these are the things that people their eyes are just going to glaze right past easily now this one has yeah hope the problem with this one is less so the silver against a dark blue background it's got fine contrast but the whole front cover of it is foil so you can't quite see it in the picture as easily but it's it's really reflective

and it makes it really hard to read and it's it looking at or seeing a foil game on the shelf doesn't make you go oh wow cool a foil game it makes you go oh i that hurts my eyes to look at i'm gonna move on to the next one because it's it's blinding, how do you feel about lenticular covers. I have no, I think it would be, it would need to be the right one, but I think, I think it could be fine.

I think I've got a game I pitched to you as a co-design and you were like, no, I don't want to make this. And so it never got made, but it's called the mad woman of Bogsley Hollow, but the mad was going to be lenticular. Lenticular is that thing where it says different words from different angles. It was a big thing on like kids toys in the nineties.

I think. So if it's either the mad woman of Bogsley Hollow or from another angle, the wise woman of bogly hollow because the whole game is like is she just a mad raving thing or does she actually have psychic powers and can tell the future i think that could totally work as long as the title font and everything follow all the rest of the principles like if it's if it's still really striking still doing all this that's fine i do find with lenticular titles or lenticular i

shouldn't say tell specifically but take the pictures because of all like the the lines on it it actually does look a little bit muddy from most angles right so i think if you were like That's what Hope made me think of there. Yeah. Hope also has this like accent thing at the side that looks like it's a cutoff S. So I read that as Shopes. Yeah, for sure. And I honestly think Fortune and Glory, my other example here, isn't as bad as probably I made it to be.

I think it's just like the white and the red from the fire is doing a good job of showing the background, but the edges of it are dark and blurry. And mostly it's just like such a long title with a lot of small words.

I think that's the issue with that one. it's called fortune and glory rise of the crimson hand expansion yeah i was wondering if you if you pulled this one up because of the photos because i know that's a controversial topic in in board games what do you mean the photos oh oh i see pictures of people instead of art no i mean don't do it people just don't like it simple as that it's not controversial just don't do it oh my goodness.

French. This is the back of hope, and this is a better example of how impossible it is to read things with this. It doesn't help that they have a, like, what's that, seven paragraphs in tiny, tiny text? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so what stands out? Ooh, this is fun. This is fun. So this was, this is a little exercise for you. This is literally just a shelf of Board Game Plus.

I need to stock it, so the game's a little empty, but it's a good exercise to see which games stand out and which one's learned to the background so peter which which games are just popping out to you seven wonders definitely caught my eye first now that was that that one not the title specifically but that it's it's a big tall person it's it's a very clear image the side of the art i don't even know if it has a title but it's just i guess it does at the

very top but it's like a like it's just very evocative this statue on the side of the box yeah the all white one caught my eye because i would immediately need to pick that up and see what it is i'm not saying that makes it a good idea but, definitely that's the next one that that caught my eye and then not not much after that those are the two that grabbed me so a big pick for me pass those are fine call outs i think risk legacy is a really good one the red on the white is very striking to me,

And in particular, I would say the... Where is that? Right beside the white one. That's why you didn't see it because you were drawn to the one beside it. But like if you put Risk Legacy beside most of the other ones, it would still pop off really well. Yeah, agreed.

Yeah. But yeah, the big thing to look here is the contrast between the background. And the actual title or the actual image that you're trying to see. The one that Peter called out, Seven Wonders, has a bright yellow and gold person holding a torch on a black background.

Like really clear contrast one of the worst ones here i'd say is splendor like i happen to know what that game is but i could not have told you from this picture yeah the worst one is arcadia quest top left because there's it's so it's got so much busyness going on behind it but yeah think of the contrast that you have there and if you just go to any game shelf look at your own game shelf right think of the ones that are popping out to you and how many of them blur in the background so

many games use grays and browns and then don't have super super bright uh contrasting colors in them and because of that they just blur into background like consulting detective is even white on black but the text is so small and there's so much texture to it that completely gets lost don't don't be fancy don't be flashy don't let your graphic designers do all sorts of cool things just have simple crisp clear words or santorini and xcom are both really good here They're just super,

super clear, super easy to read. Great contrast. For any publishers or self-publishers listening, here's what you, here's what I strongly recommend. Go to a, ideally an independent bookstore and just look at the spines on the shelves because you will see people, the independent books, especially like published books. Yes. But independent books, especially will do anything they can to pop out. Whenever I go to, whenever I visit a city, I try to visit the local bookstores.

Like I just like books, but yeah. Just looking at those shelves, like I've got to start taking more photos because I'm always like, oh, that as a game would absolutely stand out. Oh, pardon me. Would absolutely stand out the shelf in the best possible way. It's research without ripping off your own industry. Yeah. Because, you know, if you did what Risk Legacy did, cool. But now you're just doing what someone else on that same shelf does.

Whereas independent bookstores, it's very rare that an independent book has a matching tie-in board game. Yeah. All right. Next one. The Bland Front Cover. So, this is Serbian Moose Sturbioth, the initial campaigns on the Balkan front in World War I, 1914, and just like completely nothing on the background. Now, this one, I really like this example here. I'm going to come back to this later, but this is my pick for, and it has an art that kind of all like blurs together a little bit,

very similar colors and stuff. It's all very browny, yeah. Yeah. So this is my example of a bland front cover. Colorful. Seasons. I think Seasons is very colorful. It's got like the bright orange highlights that don't distract, I don't think, from the rest of the thing. It just, the bright pop of orange sort of draws your attention to the rest of it. Now, it is a bit messy, but it's a very good example of being colorful and getting people's attention.

Striking. Saltlands. Look at that contrast, baby. bright white with dark, red browns for the characters and black title now the title is a little bit messy in terms of like it's got some like road marks or swirling sand or something that's making it a little unnecessary hard to read at the first letter I think it gets away with it I think it pulls, And it immediately gives you like a Mad Max vibe, like Saltlands, that sounds kind of like it would be Mad Max.

You can see like some junker stuff there, and these people look like they'd be from there. It immediately just pops. It's still using browns. It's all brown, and yet it absolutely pops. Clean. Cards Against Humanity. This is not just an arbitrary font that was chosen. They went really hard trying to find the perfect font for it. It doesn't have anything on the box except it says Cards Against Humanity, a party game for horrible people.

That that tagline there is funny and might get you to look at further if you haven't heard a bit before but just the crisp clear confidence of just the title love that and especially in the party game market where they were looks nothing like anything else on the shelf yeah yeah everything else is saturday morning cartoony just trying to like hey hey hey hey it's like when you see those like business card content whatever it is like you put a

bunch of business cards out and your attention is immediately drawn to the clean one because everything else is so busy or if everything is clean you're immediately drawn to the busy one like product design is not in a vacuum it's in comparison to what what's in the market so i think i think this is one of the cleverest boxes.

For it specifically not for accounting books yeah clean so this one is a very good example of showing exactly what it needs to and nothing more there's this is blood rage by the way there's just like fiery explosion behind a viking dude charging towards the picture that is just such a simple clean understanding of like yes there's going to be a battle it's going to be awesome things are going to explode cool jaw dropping so this is just did you

buy the top tier artist did you hire a quanchai moria or one of those types of people my example is size. Scythe just, Scythe sold itself on the artwork. Like many, many people were- And Scythe came from the art. Jamie saw this art and was like, I want to make that game. Great, great point. This game got made because the art was that good.

Find an artist that good and your game will sell a lot of copies just because of that. Sandara Tang. Unique. So if you have a wacky box, people are going to take notice. Bananagrams comes in a banana pouch. Five Minute Dungeon looks like an hourglass.

Bears versus babies is furry laser riders looks like the cassette or the vhs box that kind of thing now i want to be very very careful here with what i say because as a retailer it is annoying dealing with weird boxes you have to be very careful with how you do it and if you have boxes that don't fit nicely in a carton then you can't ship them easily they might get damaged they can't go with other games easily and if you have something that's weird and wobbly then it might not fit

on the shelf like a five minute dungeon isn't a stable game pandemic is actually even worse than that because it's so skinny you can't have it upright on on a couch shelf without falling over pandemic was like the game that fell over the most for me and so if you have games that you want people to see the front cover you have to make sure it's wide enough to support its weight without falling over or we can't and then you lose

a lot of eyeballs on it because you have to have it horizontally or something weird like that and so earlier i went and got some games off my shelf specifically for this kind of moment so i want to jump to these now as as a retailer you know cast your mind back what do you think of these i'll do i'll do it in this order number one describe what you're seeing.

Abandon all artichokes it is a semi-circle or it's a circle with like a flat bottom, and it's a it's better than artichoke shape kind of oh yeah it's like an egg with the bottom cut off i think is probably the yeah so the way to think about whether or not it's good is sort of two things i think three three things thing number one how does it ship if it is a square or rectangle.

Then it will ship well if it is close to a square or rectangle it will still ship well you can have rectangular carton of that box and yeah you're wasting a little bit of space in it on the on the two edges but that's going to ship just fine it's not going to cause you any problems and if and what happens often is the retail store is going to purchase in bulk from distributors distributors are going to mix and match from different boxes so if most of the time you're not buying a

full carton of a game you'll buy a couple copies of it because there's so many games coming out you want to have a little bit of everything instead of you know a ton of everything or not or very little variety or whatever so if the distributor has to open up a box and then add in a couple copies of abandoned artichokes or whatever game into a bigger box full of the stuff that retail store wants to buy how does that fit with the rest of it abandoned artichokes would be fine there you could still

lay it horizontally and stack stuff on top of it it'd be totally fine. Step two is does it fit on my retail shelves and that one would it has a flat bottom so if it was a circular tin it would be awful because it would have to lie horizontally you would never see the front of the thing and that's the problem with the really skinny boxes like pandemic like i was saying because as that flat bottom it can sit upright and people can see it more easily that's great and the third

thing is just the shape for shelf presence which is what we were just talking about it being unique. So I'd say Abandon All Artichokes gets two thumbs up. This one's a little unfair because this is explicitly not made for retail, but... Oh, is that a wallet game? Yeah, wallet game. It is. Yeah, so that's interesting because they don't- It's cheating a little bit. I'm fully acknowledging that. Yeah. So they come in clamshells, not just like that, at least at my store.

And I think that they're not in retail, broadly speaking. My store had a really good selection, so we ordered from them directly, not from regular distribution. Maybe that's changed. Again, my information is at this point five years old, whatever.

But if it comes in a clamshell it doesn't work well yes if i have hooks so just to describe it a little bit you would hang on the wall these straight hooks that go long and then have like a loop at the end so they're not pointy you've probably seen them if you ever see booster packs of magic cards that's the most common thing that you'll see is them hung up like that in mass market stores or behind the counter at game stores that space is an all-time premium

and it's usually used for magic cards if you're don't have if you're not selling magic cards then oftentimes you will use those for small games or whatever but a lot of game stores don't even have those if they don't sell magic cards they won't have those at all they don't bother doing that which means it's in the clamshell it's sitting flat which means it's a bad product because it's hard for people to see if the wallet came you know what i how i would do it is i would have if you insist on

having the clamshell I would have a stand on the back of it or I would do something like that where it can sit like semi-vertically or just have the wallet as a product be able to unfold like shrink wrap it such a way that you can like unfold the half of it and then have it stand like that and I think that would do quite well or even the the trick is you want it to be small for the shipping and big for the store shelf in terms of what people can see but not That's the tension.

Yeah. But also not big in terms of taking too much shelf space because each retailer only has so much shelf space. And if they're like, well, this game is huge and isn't from a known publisher or something like that, then I don't want to waste the shelf space on it. Because if your game takes up the space of 10 other games, they could just put 10 other games on the shelf. So it's tricky, but I would say the wallet games were a poor product that were harder to sell.

They weren't meant to be for retail. Yes. Okay my last one oh don't skip leg day by friend of the show alex cutler who you will have known from the previous episode because of course you listen to all our episodes and it looks like a protein shake which is sick as heck so that one thoughts yeah so that one the annoying thing is the repacking there you can fit those into a carton you just stand them vertically and then And you have a rectangular box that can hold a bunch of them.

When they're being repacked, it's a pain. And that's going to annoy a lot of retailers. But because it's plastic, not cardboard, that's a huge difference. And cardboard boxes... It won't pierce. Yeah.

And it won't get dented or dinked. Dents and dings are so annoying for board game publishers.

Because if it gets a dent or ding, so many people are like, i would never buy that why would i want to buy a brand new board game with a tiny little i think it's quacks of queslingberg i bought a dinged copy because it was like 30 cheaper and every time i pull that game out i'm like i kind of just want to get a new copy like it's so stupid but every single time i play that game i'm like i wish i didn't have a damaged one so that's the huge problem because it comes in something that's not going

to get dented or dinged it's just plastic it it gets a pass from me for the shipping and on a retail shelf is going to get so much attention two big thumbs up from me cool okay carry on that that was uh that was this that was my show and tell excellent all right so this is energy slash moment design so remember eric lang talked about having a really cool moment happen in your game that captures people's attention this is the same sort of principle applied to

front covers and this is something that netflix does as well with their thumbnails and stuff you'll notice that there's very few thumbnails that are just like huge like here's everything you'll see in the entire show here's walter white and his lawyer and his you know and and his lawyer's bodyguard and there's guns and there's drugs and that's that's so much stuff it's it's hard to parse and you're just your brain's gonna ignore it but But when you have a concise.

Specific moment that you're trying to get across or a specific character or a specific one thing, that's when it gets people's attention. So this is a really interesting example because this is Star Wars, the card game, Eric Lang, designer of it. And it has just like a bunch of the heroes, a bunch of the villains and a bunch of people fighting on the Death Star and the TIE fighters and the Star Destroyers.

Like it has everything. Yeah. And granted, this is a CCG or LCG, so it's got a very different audience. It's fine to have all that stuff on there. But if you want to make organic sales, this is not the way to do it. A much better example is Star Wars Imperial Assault. And for this talk, I even did an experiment. I put them both side by side for a week and just saw who picked up both of those copies. And nobody picked up Star Wars the card game. Everyone. I shouldn't say everyone.

Multiple people picked up Imperial Assault. And Imperial Assault, the front cover, it still has a lot of stuff going on. It's actually not the best example in the world, but it's so much more visceral. It has so much more energy to it. Yeah, it's not just a cardboard cutout of Han holding a gun. You see who the scoundrel is shooting. You see Darth Vader in the picture imposing over these Jedi who are trying to hold back. It's using a lot of classic composition tricks of depth and lines of action

and rule of thought. But it's doing art instead of doing product. Yeah, absolutely. Doing art instead of doing product is the wrong term because we're talking about product design. But you know what I mean? It's following the rules of art rather than the rules of put everything in there.

And one trap I think a lot of board games fall into is because movies are about characters and games are necessarily about gameplay, I think oftentimes there's less emphasis put on the front cover of individual people but individual people are something that we can connect with and something that i think is a lot more appealing to someone than like you know a castle on a hill with no one there show me like the person who's the agricola artist he's

done so do you know who i'm talking about he did agricola and feast for odin and la havre i know he did you know the art okay so that that guy if you go through his covers he'll almost always have a person front center and then the landscape and i think he does a really like his art is divisive but i think he does a really good example of what you're talking about of being like character setting mm-hmm. There's a reason people have kept coming back to him for years and years and

years. Now on to layered. So this is where I talk about the bigger information is bigger, the less important information is smaller. And this one's a good example because it literally layers it line by line. So on Exploding Kittens, you have the nice big poppy title, Exploding is Exploding, but it's still legible. It's still clear to see, even though it's not as clear as the bright white kittens beside. Then you see a kitten chewing on a hand grenade. So it's just great in all ways.

But what we're talking... About to pull the pin out with its teeth without realizing what it's doing. Yeah, just playing with it. And it has the most backed Kickstarter ever award on there, right? That's something that people understand. It means more than the Dice Tower award because they're like, oh, I know Kickstarter, the most backed ever, wow.

And it gets away with the ages and player count and stuff being a bit big because it makes it symmetrical with the award that's on there, even though it's a little bit bigger than I would have liked otherwise. But it also has two minutes to learn, 15 minutes to play. Huge selling point right there. Like saying it's so easy, so fast. That's great. And it says how ages seven plus, easy to learn, two to five players.

The reason why it has this extra information that normally I think is downside that you wouldn't want to have all this stuff on the front cover and you'd want to be even cleaner than it is, is because each of these lines is selling points. Ages less so. I would have actually reversed it. I would have had two minutes to learn, 15 minutes to play as people would be like, whoa, tell me, tell me more and then get to the boring stuff.

But I think the other layering and on that section, you see it go top to bottom. So, again, put the most important thing first in the middle of it, it says a card game in big words. OK, cool. I get card card game for people who are into kins and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats. And each of these gets smaller and smaller and smaller because it's trying to lead you into the most important information and go smaller and smaller. This isn't something you should always do.

I just thought it was a great example of how you layer and... It's also... It's comedic timing in visual form. Yes. Yes. It's for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats. It's just a funny line and they've captured that delivery through use of text size. Yeah. Incredible, incredible cover. Oh, and look at that. So then I go into the layers. So layer one is the title and the kitten. That's the first thing you see that gets your attention.

Step one to people picking up the box, and the first step towards people actually buying a game. Then we have the information directly below it. Your eyeline is guided down. And then the two things on the side. So are you, I'm going to drop, how familiar are you with this box? I mean, a little. He's holding up that time you killed me for the audience.

So what's what's your gut impression of looking at this i'm looking at the back of the box i'm having a hard time seeing the back of the box because you're really small my window and it's blurry do you want me to google it really quick uh just turn off your screen for a second like turn off screen sharing just for a second it's still just two pixelated blurry i gotcha yeah yeah just just google back of the box because yeah it this this

breaks some rules but i think in you know i'm gonna be biased towards my game obviously but also did very well it breaks some rules but in a very deliberate and successful way successful as in we did well with this like the back of the box i think is a is a real selling point i'm just trying to pull up a big image for everybody to see. Yeah, before I start jumping into it, I do want to get your gut thoughts. Your gut thoughts.

Okay, let me just... You know, I can't be asked to bring it up for everybody. Oh, you already held it up. They can see it. I just can't. I was going to say it. Right, perfect. Is it too blurry for you to see anything? I'm not looking at that. Okay, so first things first. Layering is great. That time you killed me is like, get this to the back of the box. You don't need to tell me the title again. But I can see all the components laid out really easily.

You're getting across the fact that there's like scenarios in the game right under there, and it's i think it's a good use of some of the space just like popping out and and looking very visually appealing and it says i am excited to announce that i have invented a time machine uh can you read me the text underneath that the well the gut i was gonna get is like this is lots of very small text which i think we would normally say is a no-no it also has a quote which you'd normally

expect to be a reviewer but like like you said it says i'm excited to announce i've invented a time machine and it's credited to credited to you several decades from now right yeah so that's i want to read the oh sorry go ahead no no go ahead finish i want to read the text because i i think it's funny but i think basically pandasaurus reached out we're like hey we need text for the back of the box and i wrote this and they were like

we were not expecting this but like we ran with it do you know the series um a series of unfortunate events by lemony snicket i do similar thing happened there he was asked to write a blurb for the back and he really struggled with it. So he eventually wrote Reasons Not to Read This Book and they ran with it and that obviously became a very successful series. But it's sort of the what not to do. At no point do we describe... I'll read it and you'll understand.

I have good news and bad news. The good news, you've invented time travel. The bad news, someone who's going to murder you and steal your invention. The worst news, that person is someone you know. In fact, it's the person you're going to play this game with. The worst news of all, you might not be the person who invented time travel. You might be the murderer. So how do you know if you're the smartest person of all time or the traitor who killed them?

Well, there's only one way to find out. Two, if you include just wait a few decades and see which end of the murder you end up on. Inside this box is a game that simulates time travel so accurately that only a true genius, the person who invented the time machine, can master it. You'll need to position yourself perfectly over three boards, past, present, future, and travel back and forth through time in an intricate game of abstract strategy.

Buy this game. Take it home. Play through the campaign. Defeat your enemy. Prove once and for all that you're not the treacherous monster who murdered their best friend for fame and glory. No, that's the person sitting opposite you. Hopefully that doesn't make things awkward. I think the last paragraph could have been trimmed down, but this is very unfair because you're a good professional writer. So yes, that is a very, very fun text blurb to read. And...

Think it gives you your to your point of it not saying like exactly what the deal is with the game i think it gives you enough context just by saying it's an abstract strategy like that's a gamery term but that's it's so commonly that that's like the most common genre known to other people because chess and checkers are abstract strategies and those are very popular and they can literally see it looks like a chess or checkers board it's a square

grid that makes them think of chess or checkers and you literally have white and black those are those are the same colors than they have in chess and it's a chess-like game so i think that does a good job of conveying it would i like to see a bit less text sure but is the text earning its keep i think so i think again the the last uh paragraph could have had a few sentences removed but it is it definitely gives you the vibe of this is a abstract strategy

that is going to be quirky and fun and funny right it it's it's a show don't tell not by showing you game mechanisms but by showing you tone which yes exploiting kittens you can see why that made me think of it okay so this is a fun one this is shady screen again yep so this is doing a little bit of homework here so is this cover successful is the question is it colorful is it striking is it clean is it jaw-dropping is it unique is it layered so let's let's.

Say is it targeting this this is the serbian moose stress been that oh yes 1914 serbian moose serbian the initial campaigns on the balkan front in world war one give it its due so in the elysian quadrant so peter is it colorful no is it striking no i mean it's striking but not in a good way uh is it clean not really which is weird because it's also like it's kind of busy for not having much going on is it jaw-dropping no is it unique like i i couldn't say i haven't seen i think all

gmt games kind of look like this but.

That can also be a branding decision like within a company is it layered i would say the i would i would argue like 50 on this one because the art does have like perspective and lines of action, and there is the image and then the not image like it's layered in that sense i'm gonna add one more question that i think i should have had which is related to the very last thing we just talked about how is the moment slash energy does it have energy is it a clear moment i assume

this is a war game based on everything about it except the images of like just people wandering like horses and people soldiers just walking through like a bunch of people like they're not in a battle there's no combat they're just they're just having a stroll i would not have consciously noticed that without you without your statement but then it's the most important pageantry but The game is, I assume, not pageantry, right? So the most important question, though, is who is this targeting?

Wargamers. 100,000% wargamers. Right. My uncle. This is, so if you just go off my principles, you would probably say this is not a good front card. But this is laser-specific targeting to a particular audience. The old grognard 80-year-old wargamers who are moving around their chits and counters, they don't want upright, colorful, striking thing.

This is exactly in line with their expectations of what this game is it is a dry historical simulation game and it looks like a dry historical simulation game so if you are targeting a hardcore audience a specific niche audience you need to target them in whatever form that looks like as opposed to blindly just following every principle that i have but the other there's a thousand million cards against humanity ripoffs and they also ripoff the product design so you can tell

it at a glance of the box oh this is a cards against humanity ripoff which tells me i don't want to buy it i'm not the target audience for that target audience they're like oh great crabs against humidity cool i know what this is what do you mean it follows the exact same thing as cards against humanity because it wants people to see that and think oh this is similar to that so again this is just saying don't blindly follow these things think

about who you're targeting But if you are trying to target random buyers, casual gamers who go into a hobby store, mass market people who pick it up off the shelf, a.k.a.

95 plus percent of the people who are going to be buying your games.

Need to follow these principles just there is a very we've talked about it before the obvious example of someone who made a war game but gave it a different box and so it had massive crossover appeal who am i thinking of a war game that has massive crossover appeal i assume you're talking about root yes because they made them cute little animals and it's not it's not it's not a chips it's not a chits game at all but like it's not not a chits game but it's not a chits game yeah Yeah, well,

it's basically just one of the coin games, which are the same thing, but not cute. So you can apply the principles and turn a game into a crossover hit. Obviously, there's a lot more going on with Root. It didn't become a crossover hit because of that one thing, but applying the principles could still help any game. Yeah. So going back to laser-specific targeting, Peter, can you describe what you're seeing on screen?

So it says food food truck champion in big letters very nicely highlighted with with white outline there's a truck racing past the words food truck and there's an illustration of a bunch of people at a food truck and some people at a second food truck queue of audience so there's five food trucks you're going to a lot of detail here so it's going a little more general if you saw this game on the shelf this is the front cover who do you think this game is

for uh my girlfriend who likes food games. The charcuterie audience, broadly speaking. Yeah, so it's... What would you say... What would you guess the weight of it is? Oh, let's say charcuterie weight. That's an awful... Light. Yeah, so this game is Glory to Rome. I'm not kidding. Really? It is Glory to Rome. Look at... For audiences, I've got literal Glory to Rome, beside Food Truck Champion. They are virtually identical.

There are a few changes made. I don't want to chagrin the... I don't want to dismiss the designer too much.

There are a few changes made i think for the worst but for the but like i don't want to bad mouth the designer but that game sucks well i mean i don't like any games so but you're you're literally splaying out the cards from the same player mat you've got like the four actions from the different card types your multi-use cards like it is glitch room it is a super hardcore strategy game very very thinky and it is marketing itself as though it was like a kid's game or a family weight

game you need to be very rich yeah i'm going to come back to root again because, root also to an extent does this it looks like a cutesy little card game and then like you said it's a coin war game which is pretty intense and hardcore and impossible to teach and it it obviously did very very well but it the biggest piece of backlash is definitely like i bought this and it was not for me at all root gets away with it by being one of the best games ever designed.

That's how you go ahead yeah you know classic us there are going to be exceptions to the rule but i would argue that it's more like root i want to say root succeed in spite of it but i think like the value of the cutesiness was someone who likes this type of heavy game can introduce it to people who don't normally like that kind of game because of the cute vibes and i think the if that's sort of the person you're going for the back of the

box needs to be crystal clear as to what type of game this actually is so after someone takes that first step looks at flips it over they understand what they're getting into, Alright, so this is one that's near and dear to my heart. Thumbnail. So, games aren't just sold in-store.

They also sell online. My friendly game store also sold games online. Now, I'm not going to say I am a genius marketer of the online space because I don't have nearly as much experience with that as I do with in-store. But I can tell you that the thumbnail of the game matters.

And the simple exercise you can do to determine whether or not your box is a good thumbnail is put it 20 feet away from you know get it to the point where yeah or down your screen zoom out in your screen make it two inches on your on your screen or something like that and then you'll see how good it looks so i've got some examples here do you have something to say before we go into examples no no go ahead uh so peter i'm having a sex joke and i was like not the time peter.

So peter can you describe the four games that you see here that we just talked yeah so we got kazian's humanity which is just the black box with white writing seasons which is the beautiful colorful fantasy scene saltlands which is the one that has a white background and then very brown but very stark contrasted characters and then blood rage which was the viking running towards the camera, And so I think looking at these through this lens shows you that even if they

excel at some of the principles, they can fail on the others. Seasons especially, I think, yeah. Yes, Seasons is punished the most. Seasons is something that if you're in the store walking by it, you're like, wow, this is gorgeous. And people will pick it up. But people are not likely to be scrolling past a million games and stop on Seasons and go, oh, wow, that one looks great. Because it's just so busy and there's so many different colors.

And it's not striking enough. It doesn't pop. Or a Salt Lens looks fantastic.

One is that the title is crystal clear in thumbnail form which is really impressive yes um and the second is that it does this kind of orange border thing which in the big version i was like i don't know what they're doing here but now i've seen it shrunk down i'm like oh that's actually carrying its weight not for the full size but to give the shrunken version some shape it's still too busy but at least like it's it's not just a blur of blue and green it's it's got an outline

it's got some character to it, which I really like. Now one thing to be aware of is these thumbnails are always square. So if you have, say, a really skinny or a really skinny from either dimension box, it's not going to look good as a thumbnail because you're effectively wasting half of the space of the thumbnail. If you have a square box or a mostly rectangular box, it's going to fit in nicely but something like, you know, Onitama or those types of ones that are fairly

skinny boxes, those don't do as well on thumbnails. Is it a deal breaker? No. Just something to be aware of that you need to be, you have to extra pop from that. Cartiers to humanity is interesting because they're literally just not using the bottom half of the rectangle. So if you needed to crop that to a square, you literally lose nothing.

Yes. And that one's a good example too, because it pops so hard that it doesn't matter if you're using all the space because whatever the background is of the store, it doesn't matter.

It's giving itself a pitch black background with a bright white front cover it's funny how much we're complimenting what is arguably the most bland box of all time but it's it's not it's not unthinkingly bland it's very specific and deliberately crafted absolutely and then blood it's like complimenting a game for its sheer elegance it doesn't mean like they didn't bother design it i mean they did such an extraordinary job of designing it that there's almost

nothing there yeah absolutely so for blood rage i think that's a really good example of how. How clear it was when you looked at the larger version of it. It's just dude running towards you with a fire in the background. But because the whole thing is such similar colors, it becomes very like muddied and blurry when you shrink it down and it works way less effectively than it did physically.

Will say that they've used some again like there's a line of action literally just like some lines that give it give it some separation like it's not just an orange blur yes it's a very distinctive circle in the middle with some lightning striking that circle and they could have gone a little bit further with lines of action seasons meanwhile has no lines of action like it sort of has everything meeting in that like right below the title where

the staff is being held but with with like a little bit more contrast they could have made that to a really distinctive cool thumbnail shape yeah i think if you make the person i'm an art director so i obsess about this kind of thing yeah so if the person was a bit darker relative to the other ones and then lava flows were like a brighter red.

Or a brighter red slash white and the lava bursts were going sort of diagonals leading you to right that's what i was thinking yeah if the lava basically you want all the all the lines to be pointing at the one thing which in this case would be the shield in the middle and they've they've partially done that but then they sort of haven't it's a very successful game it's a very beautiful piece of art i'm not trying to tear down something as being a failure but i think i agree i think a

lot of these types of comments i just in general in this podcast is we can talk about a very successful game and critique an element of it because even though it was successful sometimes it's successful in spite of a minor defect or a minor area that could have been improved whether it's the box size or whether it's the the front cover whether it's the title something it could have been even more of a success, potentially, if it followed some of these principles, I think.

Agreed. Back of the box. Do you want to read this one out now that you're done eating? Game in progress.

Components. Playtime slash play account slash age. Steps of play. So turns out... Pandemic again. Turns out I did go into this more. I think pandemic was my bad box example because I always fell over. And then I go into the good stuff on it here. So yes, like we said, it has the steps.

It has the important information that you need to have. but it doesn't the components and everything don't get in the way of the rest of the box and it shows the game in progress which is something i don't think we explicitly mentioned but you know we basically went over so we'll just skip ahead here can is my screen too blurry for this to be even visible yeah for me it is yeah i'm sure everyone can see it fine so it's it's the box front of critter kitchen which is also behind me

on a shelf somewhere and sandara has done this really clever thing where it's a busy cityscape like there's a lot of stuff happening actually just pop back to blood rage for a second like the thumbnails page yeah so much much like the blood rage thing there is a person in the center and then a lot of stuff happening behind them but what she's done is she's put the person in the center so like there's buildings on either side but then they sort of i want

to say like end so it's just like a white background not literally a white background but essentially a very very light background behind.

The central characters which means in thumbnail form you can clearly see their their outline like even even on my phone this is teeny tiny but i can immediately see the boar in the middle i can't necessarily see all three of the chefs but i can see the ball really clearly because it's a character against a white background despite being in the middle of a busy city scene you know if they're done something here so so imagine if

like there was a lightning bolt behind this character i think this is sort of what you're saying like if if that jet of um red like that very light red if that had been directly behind the character coming up then they would have been perfectly silhouetted and.

I think that's all i see exactly why you brought this up this is almost exactly what we were talking about with blood rage the white buildings and background are a literal v pointing towards a main character to emphasize oh you pulled it up yeah yeah and yeah all the lines like the lines of action is the thing i think about all the time is direct like all the characters are looking at them even and like there's there's no doubt what the center literal center but

also the focus of the images go ahead yeah and the parts that aren't the v are all darkened slightly it's it's subtle but it's all right there it's very effective yeah yeah my only note might have been to only have one character there in the middle instead of the two the the boar and the snake person just to like there's a boar lizard and a mouse which is hard to tell in the thumbnail version yeah but that is the core of the game so like it's oh right because it's

like a work place where you have three people or something like that you have yeah exactly three workers and it's those three characters so yeah i think i think i think it made sense to do what they did but i'm also curse acknowledging it so i think what i would have done is take the right dark diagonal push it back a little bit elongate the bridge and have it the bridge more clearly emphasizing it is all three of those yeah and that's what i was thinking too

but it's very good Like that's... Oh, yeah, yeah. Again, we're talking... It's going to sell some copies. Yeah.

All right. So back to the box. We already talked about...

Is just me emphasizing it perceived value this is something that i think about a lot and i think this might be the thing that designers and maybe even publishers think about the least probably probably not publishers but i was gonna say publishers in in the modern day anyway i'm very conscious of this yeah so perceived value there's a lot of ways that you can i'm sure i have the.

Size weight component quality length of play flexibility i think even even when you made this but probably twice as much component quality has become the most relevant factor and this is what i was saying about in the last episode about like cutting components is not necessarily a good idea because people want those like fancy nice components i in in the age of in the kickstarter world anyway i only partially so i i agree make

your points and then and then we'll we'll see if we disagree we probably don't but my point basically comes down to all games bar of quality has been raised so it's less of a selling point and more of a way to get your foot in the door like if you have bad component quality people be like oh really like this box is like so then these cards aren't as nice yeah go ahead we're coming out from different angles you're thinking of publishers i'm thinking of designers pitching to publishers right okay

component quality has become so key like you said that as a designer we need to be thinking about this cool all right let me agree in a way that maybe we didn't 10 years ago so how do customers perceive value it's a very difficult question for someone to ask is this game worth 60 dollars. Human brains do is not actually try and calculate how much is this game going to be worth $60 of fun to me. What we do is we substitute other questions in their place.

Common psychological phenomenon. It happens in every way for when you have a difficult decision to make or an amorphous ethereal sort of question to have. So instead, what do we substitute for board games?

Immediately, you see the size of the game the bigger the get box the more perceived value it has the heavier the game is the more perceived value it has as in physically heavier yes the weight of the game the physical weight weight of the game has two different meanings i just wanted to really make sure we were talking about literal honor scales weight yes uh component quality like peter mentioned this can be everything from cardstock to minis to those cute

squishy berries in every at all we like i call that bake bakelite tiles what are they called now the azul tiles i don't know the name for them but yeah the clicky clacky tiles that's what i always call clicky clacky tiles.

I have cracks quiddlingberg with a busted box but with all the bgg clicky clacky upgrades, and when i show it to someone they're like i'm gonna go online buy it right now i'm like okay whatever price you see to get the clicky clackies you need to pay twice that much again, and the game is so good that they do but it it goes from being a 40 purchase to 120 purchase because you need you need those clicky crack ones they're gorgeous this is a physical medium the physical components matter

length of play so this one is much less important than the other ones much less important but it does matter if you have a 15 minute game and you try charging someone 50 for it they're gonna they're gonna have a mismatch in terms of their expectation and they're going to be much less interested in the game it's this one's a bit more tenuous but again if you think about just like the experience of like pulling out a big expensive game people expect to have a bigger play experience.

An interesting i'm going to talk about an all play thing again their game river valley glassworks i don't know if you saw that one it did pretty well it did very well kickstarter that's a good game that is a 40 15 minute game which is such a weird like they get away with it but it's it's that that that's such a mismatch from what we're used to that i'm kind of impressed that it's sort of a testament to how good the product that they made that work i'm just you're fact checking

me yeah Yeah, I want to see what my Canadian price is for the standard edition.

Yep, yep. Peter, dead on. Wild. Yeah, so then flexibility. So this is... You know why I know the price. Yeah. We have two price points. True, true. So flexibility. How easy is it to get to the table? If someone looks at a game like, wow, that game looks awesome. But it's really hard to get to the table, they might buy it. Now, this isn't maybe perceived value, but it does factor into whether or not they're going to make the purchase.

Right this is actually pulling directly against what you were saying earlier of like if you can make a game that is amazing but only plays three that increases the chance that'll be recommended for three players but also really cuts down the the flexibility part of the perceived value, cge made a game deal with the devil which is four players only you have to have four players i love cge they're probably my favorite company favorite board game company outside of maybe,

leader games but i'm not going to buy that like it's so rare for me to have you know i have enough games that play flexibly that i'm not going to buy a four player only game yeah if it's four players only witness was another four player only one it's not you have to think of it it's compounding factors it's not just for people it's for people who want to play this specific type of game and then you have to talk them into it when they can play anything else.

Is another four player on the game that i'm much more likely to buy because that game is for anyone in a way that deal with the devil is not yeah flexibility there's other factors as well but basically flexibility just means how likely am i to get to the table if i buy this yeah so like seafall has the worst flexibility of almost any game ever it's a legacy game so you have to so you're committing to playing it a bunch of times yeah

it's your economic game that also has like story elements and choosing an adventure and i i'm sure i had more cogent points back then but.

I was so excited for this game yeah so for perceived value uh component quality minis they used to add a ton of perceived value now less so because so many games have them but it's still a big driver for sure it's still up there yeah having uh cool meaning or not who do blood rage like they sort of made the that they entered the market by saying like hey we're gonna do minis well and people were like you can do minis well and sort of open the door to like

you said there's a glut of minis these days but if you've got cool distinct unique minis i think it is still definitely a selling point so this is uh interesting these tokens are from battle for rokugon which is a troops on a map game that was relatively inexpensive but had the cardboard tokens but by relatively expensive at the time i think it was battle for rokugon was like 45 CAD and I think Canadian dollars and I think Blood Rage. I thought it was 45 CAD.

I think Blood Rage was like 75 or something like that. So one was about double the price of the other but people would look at Blood Rage and think wow what value I've got all these minis and they look at Battle for Roku and be like wow that's expensive it just comes with cardboard. There's nothing they could see that would justify half the price of Blood Rage. Interesting example. I don't know why this one's in here. I'm sorry, guys. This is...

Oh, there we go. It'll explain it on the next slide. Perfect. Good or bad pitch. Do you want to read this out? Cave Paintings is a drawing game in which you don't have to draw well to win. The game includes team rules for playing with more than seven players, as well as an advanced variant. Should you be more Cro-Magnon than Neanderthal? So this is what it says... It's a deep cut.

Yeah, so this is what it says on BGG4. This is like the publisher trying to sell it to you. And I think this says it on the back of the box as well. So I want to break this down and talk about whether or not this was a good or bad pitch from just the text. Perceived value? No, no. We're on from perceived value. We're on to the next form of pitching. Oh, right, right, right. The description. Remember the last episode when you were like, let's just finish off boxes.

That was a whole week ago. I can't remember that. All right. So Cave Drawings is a drawing game.

Good. We know it's about drawing. that that's important to know that a lot of people are going to immediately be like that's for me a lot of people are gonna be like that's not for me not for me yeah yeah good communication in which you don't have to draw well to win whoa that's really good to know because now it's this increases my flexibility right i can play this with people who can't draw well if i and it tells you that it's going to be like a lighter party sort of a game so cool good

to know cold start it's all it's also a point of difference from like it's a usp yeah and then what's all this garbage the game the game includes team rules we're playing with more than seven people like what are you talking about this was my experience with some of your cell sheets where i was like why are you clarifying a thing you haven't told me like yeah totally hi my name is peter it's okay my aunt's moving back to bismal you're like what yeah.

Yeah so this don't worry i didn't need to read this in my presentation before this is just showing you how much information is either so this is good or bad pitch for gloomhaven and then i just skip ahead so if you're looking at the screen you can see which parts of that i think are actually relevant i think the i think i switched colors here so the green parts is the stuff that's like actually useful do you want to just read the green parts to people gloomhaven is

a game of euro inspired tactical combat in a persistent world of shifting motives and then next bullet point the green part is this is a game with a persistent and changing world in in the actual thing it's not back-to-back persistent like that but just the way i'm reading it happens to be that is ideally played over many game sessions after a scenario players will make decisions on what to do which will determine how the story continues kind of

like a choose your own adventure book so the green here is i think the real selling points from this it's a euro tactical combat like that tells you a lot and this is targeting hardcore gamers so can use that type of advanced terminology this wasn't trying to get into mass even though it is a mass market nowadays and i think that the exciting part in this blurb at least maybe not the most exciting thing you could have said about it but the most exciting thing in the blurb is talking about

the campaign structure and and how it can evolve in those two things i think at the time that was a bit more unique and and a bit more interesting.

But then the yellow stuff you really don't need all that and then the red part at the end there is players really don't need yeah players must be careful though because over time they'll permanently lose cards from their hand if they take too long to clear a dungeon they may end up being exhausted and forced to a tree you're getting into the weeds way too much way too much detail yeah okay this is another topic that i love ah this is so fun i love talking about my experience or my area

of expertise so this someday i'll find mine and i'll be able to talk about it Yeah, I mean, all areas are my expertise. This one's just a specialty. You know what mine is? What? Ted Lasso season one.

Out on YouTube soon. Day so for demoing design these are the things you want do you want to read them faster setup faster teach easy to understand table presence fun first time so this is what you need to do if you want me at a board game store that has demo copies to put your game up for a demo or if i'm at board game cafe and someone asks to play a game what i'm going the qualities i'm going to be looking at to decide whether or not that's the game i'm going to pop the shelf to show someone,

So benefits of demoing. I'm going to go through this quickly because I feel like it should be obvious to most people. Someone who plays a demo first, way more likely to purchase a game. Most games are, I mean, if your game is good, then you want people to play it because people are going to- It'll sell itself. Yeah. And after a good play, people are way more likely to play it. You get way more exposure. I mentioned last episode that we would run Village Pillage at conventions.

On one hand, I'm a very, very good salesman. on the other hand i'm a bad salesman because i just don't care enough about sales and so we'd get like a round or two and people would be like cool i want to buy it i'm like oh you don't want to finish the game like the the point of the demo is to sell the game but i like games so much that i'm like the point of the game is to finish the game and the sell sure buy a copy but don't you want to see who wins and

it gives players a feeling of being part of something they have like some bit of like invested interest especially i think when they play with the designer at a convention like peter was just saying that kind of thing and absolutely if you can and i think this was also from the context of like getting you to demo your game at a friendly local game store so it builds a rapport with the friendly local game store if you're like hey i'll come in and i'll just do like a

free demo session or something and people can go to the event and play the games just as dropping or whatever all right so the the that time you killed me box on the back we mentioned it has like the three boards the chest looking boards and something like this where you can play the game by pointing to it because in this game you travel back in time so i can point to a space and be like look you can move back to this and it's like you can demo the game

from the back of the box we talked about this in the sell sheet episode as well it's so useful it's so.

Crazy useful yeah all right so demoing practically do i read the thing yes clear concise give strategy sparingly get them into the game quickly be personable don't goad them into saying nice things that's an interesting one so this is as relevant for playtesting i think as is for demoing but it's especially true of demoing games so if you have a finished game in your hand and you're demoing at a con or something like that you want the rules to be clear to people but you also

want to be concise don't go over edge cases they're not important you can tell them that if it comes up, don't play the freaking game for them don't be like oh you might want to do this because then this happens, When I was demoing Village Pillage, I had a very specific way of doing it, which was I'd be like, okay, everyone, shuffle your hand and put one to the left, one to the right.

That's not how you play. You choose. But for the sake of just getting into the game quickly, I just wanted stuff on the table so I could talk through how it worked.

And then my mother, my mom is very lovely and supportive and 0% a gamer. So every time she has played Village Pillage, she has been overwhelmed by choice. And Village Pillage is not a heavy game at all.

So she just shuffles her head every turn she'll shuffle her hand and put them out and be like oh what does this do what does this do and then about seven rounds into a game once she was like man i wish i'd played something else there i was like mom you can you have that power you don't have to shuffle each turn so yeah the the putting out the cards at random and having resolve and then picking up being like cool you actually pick people like oh man that

thing that happened i can choose whether it happened like it was a i really that's my favorite game i've designed to demo i think yeah i think that's a great example it's very sweet as well but you can you can say like we're just gonna like do a practice and we're just play this type of play one of these cards and then just work off of that i want to have done that first round just be like all right we'll just keep going it's a demo you know yeah yeah exactly it's not a tournament game let's get

them into the game quickly uh be personable don't don't that should be obvious don't be rude to people don't don't like be a little anything just try to be friendly and you're canadian though it's different everywhere else and don't go to them don't be nice don't go to them into saying nice things if you're like too pushy a salesman is that the idea yeah like it it turns people off really easily personally this this i think might go too far but i wouldn't even say what did you.

Think because you're right there you're the designer they're going to feel pressured to be like oh yeah it was amazing so do you want to buy the game no no like what one one thing i very oh crap it's gone oh yeah this is not on your list but get them touching things as quickly as possible great tip don't move for them like i said i used to work in sales and the number one trick in sales is have them hold the thing so i would make excuses like i'd be holding a product they're like

sorry can you hold this and i'd rearrange something arbitrarily once something's in their hand they feel ownership over it this is this is way too specific what we're talking about but if you're demoing or playtesting your game don't move the pieces for them be like hey move this piece to here a because it makes them invested involved and b because it makes them be like oh yes the horse is that horse shaped piece it's not they're not watching a play they're playing a watch Yeah.

And just one more quick thing for getting them into the game quickly. You want to teach them only what they need to know to start playing the game. You can teach them like the political phase once the political phase comes up. You know, you don't need to teach them every single thing before the game starts. I've talked about this before, but I increasingly design to the pitch, to the teach.

If you go back through my catalog you'll see a bunch of games where it's like okay step one is going to be this thing now this doesn't make sense yet but it'll make sense in a bit okay step two now this actually relates to step four which we haven't done nowadays my games as much as you can the thing that you do first is all you need to know the thing you do second only requires you to know the thing you did first the thing you did third say like don't require

future knowledge which means sometimes makes the game a little bit less integrated but it just makes the teach a. Thousand times smoother so this is just a small anecdote of someone demoing their game and why it worked basically they left a free copy at the store so people could play if they wanted to cost me as a store or nothing i can do whatever with it if i want and if they come in and run an event for me where they're demoing the

game that's great not all friendly local game stores will be down to that because their play space is valuable especially at peak times like saturdays and that kind of thing but it's very cheap advertising like what what did the copy of the game cost you right so yeah like three dollars exactly uh critter kitchen is launching to retail in april and in about a month the gamma convention is happening which is the game manufacturing association i i

believe and i don't know this for sure i believe lucky duck are giving every retailer a free copy wow nice or like hundreds anyway like hundreds of free copies are going out like if you go to the show don't quote me on this but like something like everyone who goes to the show gets a free copy of this game that they can sell or they hopefully they will demo but like it just immediately does what you're talking about yeah that's awesome okay so

this is uh some very nitty-gritty i'm going to move through it quickly this is mostly just like pet peeves as a retail person and things that you should do as as a publisher specifically so again i'll go through quickly pack your boxes protect your corners the number one cause of dents and dings is a corner of the box.

Being bumped so put corner protectors in there or our cardboard common cause of damage is an exacto knife through the top we expect that if we cut the tape on the top of the box we're not cutting through the games just put a piece of cardboard there or something.

Yeah again dents and digs suck paper is great you don't need to use plastic or anything like that you can just use crumpled up paper that's what board game bliss uses 100% of the time when they ship out games when they repack it's always recyclable paper and this part i'm sorry this part doesn't save the earth but shrinking your games at least at the time shrink wrap yeah shrink wrapping your games not made smaller is necessary i i know it sucks that you're using plastic you

can do paper if you want but paper isn't transparent some people are moving into paper these days yeah but paper isn't transparent so you have to take it off when it goes on the shelf which is an extra step and and the other problem is that it doesn't protect it when it's on the shelf because it can get shelfware if it's picked up and put back a lot ideally it'll sell if it gets picked up but it doesn't happen all the time and it and it's

more likely to annoy the publisher than anything some of some publishers now are just doing uh like little tabs little plastic sticky tabs they've been doing that for years but again it it can cause damage and then and we have to sell it as a damaged copy, it sucks. If I was a publisher, I would shrink up all the games, no question.

Designing for demoing so that's what i was just talking about yeah sakura arms i think this was another demo section or where i had physical yeah prop section so sakura arms is an atrocious game for demoing it has a fair bit of setup it's not clear what the strategy is right away it takes more than one play to understand the fun part of it and no one likes it yeah the recommended ones that i know the number one is number nine have.

You ever played number nine the the letter stacking the number stacking game right yes yeah so it's a polyomino-esque stacking game of game points i can teach that game in like two minutes and this is after your time but i would put boop up there yeah yeah it's such a joy to teach but the biggest thing is not just thinking how good is it for the players but think of how good is it for me as the person demoing the game in that in number nine

the way that you play is you take off the lid you shuffle the deck and now you're ready that's it that's the entire setup and it has an insert so it's it's literally as easy as lid off i said to someone time me how long this takes to set up and before they had pressed start on the timer i was ready to begin like that's incredible and also because it has have you played boop i have not played boop oh okay i was gonna say like boop's not literally that fast but

it's not far off like you know you know checkers and chess you have to set up the board yeah boop the board starts empty so once you have the board out you're finished set up love it love it yeah if you have a game that doesn't require setup or you set like the you play to like get things onto the board that's awesome a friend of the show michael murray was designing a game once where uh it was it was a two-phase game and phase one was basically like it

was a full like strategy game but you were basically seating the board and then the second half of the game as you play you're taking the board down? Such a clever idea. That would have demoed like crazy. Okay. Limited window of opportunity. You have a few weeks max before your game is old news. And nowadays, less. Terrifying. Yeah. So you have to make the most of it. You want to be on the BGG hotness. You want to make cons. You want to have tastemakers and social media buzzing about your game.

You have to hit the ground running so when it gets to my store, there's already demand. I want people to be asking for the game before the game comes out. That's the goal. How do i recommend so some of my slides are blank that one's blank and it has been many years so i don't. Remember what i said on this slide or what it's relevant so i'm gonna. Skip it games i wish i could again you.

Can get a full refund for this episode if you if you so desire games i wish i could recommend this one is also blank but i can tell you clank is on that list clank is one where it just takes too long to set up you have to see too many things but it's a fun game and again i wish i had more examples of this sort of thing but just think of how long does it take to set up how long does it take to teach and then when it's set up how long

does it take to reset between plays because if i want to demo it multiple times over a day then that's a huge pain and also very importantly how fun is just playing a couple turns if i have to play the whole game to get it bad demo game if i can play a few turns of it and be like oh i already like this game great that's awesome because then the person can buy it and move on and interrupt you like peter was uh just pointing out too something like santorini like santorini doesn't take

long to play a few turns and get a feel for and it has great table presence great one i'm gonna skip over the swear word and why was my your your prototype yeah yeah well i was i was showing why some of my other designs were bad for demoing and what makes them probably the asymmetry so colossus was one where it was a good example what i don't have a picture of it but basically that one was the board itself is a is a player you were playing as the board

it was this giant shove the colossus style monster and you're moving it around as you played so i had incredible table presence so in that way it was fantastic for.

Demo game and in the teach it was terrible because it was highly asymmetric and way too complex that sort of thing again sorry i don't have all my slides here just make a great game just make a great game make a great game so these are games that i listed that do well in spite of them not following all the great principles oh i see what you're saying yeah it's not like the uh the gmt cover but yeah yeah so high society is just such an interesting

player dynamic people like immediately on the first turn they're like wait i can bid however much i want but i don't want to bid everything because if i have nothing then i lose so so interesting lost cities where you have that immediate tension it doesn't have a great selling point like i don't have like a hook to give someone about that game but it's just so interesting that if i sit down people i'm like just trust me they will have a good time.

Championship russian roulette is one where i don't know this game ah this is i think the most underrated game i've ever played we'll definitely play it next time you come it's it's a high excitement push your luck bluffing game and it's a it's awesome i tell everyone about it, that was a game that sold zero copies online or close to it and i sold like dozens and dozens in store jaipur jaipur is another one where it's like how do you explain jaipur in a way that sounds like really

sexy to someone like i i can't do it the best i have is it's a two-player game yeah but again you sit down it's a great game and because it's so good it's self-procreates so, it's annoying to set up that's the biggest problem with that game that is true the the insert helps a little bit but it's it's still d setting up is also annoying and then sacrams is just my example because it's so good that i push it on everyone even though it wasn't that popular there we go okay props to

bring it at the end oh it's so funny can i can i get you to duck back there's a bullet point list right before we we split between the episodes so at the start of uh basically what i want i just want to spend a few minutes i know we're running long but i want to spend a few minutes take like distilling what you've done and turning it into actionable advice for designers because you were coming up from the self-publishing retailer not self-publishing retail, you know what I'm trying to say.

And I think that one, one of the things that this show really tries to focus on is what are some actionable steps that you can, you know.

As a designer to meet this can you take us back to the slide i don't have any notes uh can you take us back to the slide that had the the play time play account and weight and components i think i had some stuff around that yeah just give me a sec yep while you hunt that i wrote down a note oh yeah so i'm going to talk about all play again but i'm also going to talk about button shy, you you when we had exploding kittens on possibly last

episode who knows it's all blurred together the for me they said you know what was two minutes to teach 15 minutes to play all play do a line that they call i can't remember it's called easy to play or something like that and they all have the same font on the front and they mountain goats is in that line so if you know mountain goats they are all exactly that they are games that will teach in less than a minute and then we'll play in about 15 20 minutes that is so valuable

to publishers so like if you're looking for.

Ways to increase your chances of getting signed designing and it's hard it's really hard to design something that is fun and takes a minute to teach but if you can do that it's killer and then button shy have the simply solo line now this one you can't pitch to because it's all games by scott arms but it's the same thing it's solo games in 18 cards that take no time to learn or like very little time to learn simply solo so just just something to think about as a as a designer,

i don't think this was what you're talking about was it no it wasn't that maybe maybe go go to the present maybe like the gift yeah yes yes okay so recommendation what was i thinking here i just want to i just want to take some of this stuff and and so yeah okay let's use this one and then we'll probably have to wrap up uh i'll do a we'll have some fun so this ties back to what i was entire list you should be thinking about.

And specifically, product cohesion. So we talk a lot about product design. Product cohesion is so important. And I think this is why it translated to also related to the slide that had playtime and component quality and all that. Like, if you look at all those as disparate items, you can end up with this ridiculous. Frankensteined game that doesn't do what anyone's looking for.

Value so yeah that's the one thank you so size weight component quality length of play flexibility this is not five disparate separate items these should be in as close to perfect alignment as you can have where the weight and the length of play should be connected the component quality is like we were saying earlier like we had a little debate about hyper relevant if you are making a game for that $40 hobby gamer easy to get into you know it's tactical strategy you

can play it 100 times component quality is really important for that audience in a way that maybe it's not as important for for a different type of game does that make sense so basically like this this slide this slide particularly i think is as a designer one of the most valuable things in this whole presentation because you.

Want to think about your game from that top down level look at a game on the like find a popular game in what you're trying to make so i'll use um veil of eternity do you know that one the uh card drafting engine builder that got really hot about a year ago i didn't like it everyone else loved it but as a product like if you're making something for that market pull out that game or pull it up on bgg and directly compare are you

a similar weight are you a similar length of play do you have a similarly flexible play account if you're making a light veil of eternity game that only plays three players you're going to.

Struggle if you're making a heavy tactical game that only plays three players that's actually got a better chance of succeeding because it's already niched down in a way that veil of eternity wants to be as open as possible like does this make sense yep yeah absolutely okay pop pop back to the gifts i want to and Actually, I want to pause for one second and do not comment on perceived value. Was that slide with... Whatever. I'm not going to bother trying to find the exact slide.

So, in my example, I talked about Pitch Car, but near that one, I also had Burgle Bros. Are you familiar with Burgle Bros? Yes, the 10 Fours game. So, this is a very interesting target point. Burgle Bros is very, very, very dense. It is in the smallest possible box it can. Be and is heavy as heck so you might think.

Oh the two kind of balance each other out it's really heavy but it's small so people are going to understand that it's it's got value to it but people still feel weird about spending at the time 40 canadian nowadays i don't know 60 on a tiny little box even if it has the same components as a bigger box and worse than that if you're selling this game online people don't feel the physical weight so the weight of the game doesn't factor into those decisions people

only have the thumbnail to work off of so if they see it's you know 40 60 game and then they google what it is like or google a picture of the components or something and see it with a reference item then they might be like wow that's tiny that's so expensive that's overpriced and not realize that it's because there is zero space at all besides the components and and this also sort of like the button shy example he's not making it for retail he's not even making it for post kickstarter

i mean he's he wants those sales but he's making it for kickstarter yeah and if you're fulfilling a kickstarter having a big box destroys your budget like it is it is so expensive to ship a big box even if it's light it's the size that matters so he was not making that game for retail i think similarly paperback like all of his games are made for kickstarter and so they don't exactly align with what the retailers want because that wasn't the initial audience it's a fascinating little subset of

business very good call it. So something like, I suppose I want to dive into that. But yeah, I think, again, just like, oh, you never talked about your design document. Yeah, I have that in an alternate tab. I was going to use that as the publisher, get tipped, whatever. Perfect. Okay, great.

So this and the previous one we showed about perceived value, if you're at the point of seriously pitching your game, or ideally at the point of starting to design your game, then, or if you're pitching a game and you're struggling, a list like this or the perceived value is really helpful just to see where there's a mismatch i was you know you've probably heard this story i was shown a game that had 200 dice 150 dice like 150 dice and it played in eight minutes and there is

just a huge disconnect there between what that is going to have to cost, and the play experience if you are making you know if you don't know your theme play account and whether it's a strategy game or a party game, what are you doing? Like, so similar to what we talked about last time, you need this alignment of product. And some people are going to be like, well, that's the publisher's job. Cool. But if you want to get in with a publisher, the more of this work you can do, the better.

Price range is such an important thing to start thinking about. What do you want your game to cost? Veil of Eternity, I think, is $30 US. it exactly it knows exactly what it is and it hits that audience and it doesn't it did really well if that game had been 50 wouldn't have done well if it had been 20 it might have done well but it would have actually felt too cheap for what that.

Audience is looking for it's it's such a specific thing so if you start by thinking about what else is on the market like yours cool what price should your game be and then not work backwards i'm not saying start with a dollar sign and then start designing from there but very early on in my process i will have a mental list of these things and make sure that they are at least broadly in alignment and then you know game design is being is asking yourself a thousand questions

and a lot of them it doesn't matter which way you go there's so many things in in the game that working with ag where you know we could do a or b and it's not going to tangibly improve or detriment the product it's just we need you need a north star you need a guiding light and so having that vision that alignment right from the start just makes it easier i we've talked about this a lot before i do this by having a publisher in mind i will think about

which publisher and then every time i have a choice like that i'm like well what would this publisher do oh okay i'll do that and if it's best for the game to go in the other direction i'll go in the other direction but by the end of it i have a very cohesive aligned product in game and it's a big reason that i sign as much as i do absolutely all right do you want to go on to the get your game published tip no we're gonna have some fun it's time for fun aj what we do the fun first but.

Oh, we literally just did it. Who knew? All right, let's do it. Let's have some fun. What is your favorite word? I'm going for a nice quick one. So over time. English or non-English? I feel like we've done this one before. Have we? Give me both. What's the answer? My favorite non-English one is ikigai, which is a Japanese concept that means reason for being. And if you Google ikigai, actually, I can just show my screen.

We have the technology. i mean the audio listeners will have to have it described but that's fine okay so okay aj's pulled up a screen it's a guy who looks really icky it's not what i expected at all all right so oh yes yes you've shown me this diagram before i don't know if it's on the podcast all right so basically it's a venn diagram know how much peter loves venn diagrams, and it's talking about like your purpose for being so on the one axis it's what you love what the world needs what you

can be paid for what you're good at and the goal is to find something that can fulfill all of them and that is your ikigai so for instance if you have something you love and you have something you're good at you found a passion but if you can't get paid for it and the world doesn't need it then it's a passion that you know may not amount to anything if you have something great hobbies are great but it's not ikigai yeah and if you have something that you

love and something the world needs you have a mission but if you're not any good at it and you can't make any money from it you know and so yeah i think about this concept a lot and i kind of thought i had this at my last job but i think it's just because my last job was so much better than my previous jobs and it was good for me a lot of ways like i'm not upset with that job that i had at the board game store i really loved

working there but designing games that is my e guy i am good at it now i think what's it called if you have like four eiki guys you are the eiki master.

Oh i'm the icky gang and i don't know what my answer was initially for my favorite english word but my favorite english word currently is palindrome spelled backwards which means a word that is a different word if it's spelled the same backwards and forwards like palindrome which is great mine if we did this before this will be familiar uh is actually i just like the mouth fell i just think your mouth goes on such a such a journey when you say actually

ah it's just it's a delight so good uh aj do you have a publisher tip ready i do in that we referenced by publisher tip this is a new section where we give you a tip on how to get published is the, So this is a bit of a stretch, but we teased it last episode slash the first half of this one and we wanted to go over it. So this is a design outline. This is what I do when I start my games. I fill this out and then I have an idea of what I'm making. Do you want to read through it or shall I?

Yeah, I thought this was much more detailed. Didn't you redo it for the discussion? This is the redone one. It's not complicated. So the four headings are Vision, Hooks, Publishers, Brainstorm. Vision is what is the elevator pitch? why is this exciting hooks are thematic mechanic component other publishers is blank but i assume you would list. Like three or four and then brainstorm mechanics slash. Systems what does the term look like objective yeah so.

This isn't like obviously it's not filled out and and all that but this is the skeleton that i used to start more so it's more relevant for co-designing but if i ain't helpful in general nowadays and i never used to really do this i would write like the vision but nowadays i think it's helpful to think about all the things and how it ties together so for the vision to me that's the north star that's what you do first and anytime you have a question you refer

back to that and that way you don't lose sight of what it is that you're actually making which could absolutely happen so what's the elevator pitch for the game you start with that what is it going to say at the top of the sell sheet or what do you you know say to someone when they're like oh what type of game is this this is the place for that and that can change but having something to start is really valuable i think and then why is this exciting this is to me

like the the hook should sort of or the vision should be sort of self-explanatory let's use our ag game just because we don't talk about it enough sure so my my my gut like whenever i'm talking about this game the elevator pitch i use is it's a asymmetric dueling game where the factions are completely asymmetrical one person's playing a bag building game the other person's playing mankala one person's playing a hidden movement the other person's

playing pick up and deliver but on a shared central board and they all integrate perfectly and it takes 30 minutes to play and less than 10 minutes to teach i think those are huge huge selling points that i always include on that but on that completely. Is this exciting i i often describe it this is in informal contexts as gamer crack.

The the ace the fact that the asymmetrical factions work seamlessly together is really exciting to gamers because they get to play these like sort of root style vastly different things vastly no pun intended in in the same in the same board and it is endlessly replayable which is exciting to me that's why i mentioned it because we've got six factions so far and there'll be many more to come and every two factions is a wildly different experience yeah i

think a few things for me that add to the excitement excitement is it's so easy to teach but i think very replayable but just the the whole nature of the game is like different combinations every time and the each faction basically works as an expansion for the other one and i had one other thing that i thought was really exciting about it but it slipped my mind now yeah i i think there's a lot that's exciting about this game the then we go down to hooks so i think this one actually has a lot of

hooks what do you think is the thematic hook so i. Think thematic is the weakest of our hooks i agree in that the thing that appeals to me is that every every faction is themed after a bug and we have done the meticulous like theming to make it match that bug's pattern so like the bees are picking up pollen and delivering it back to the hive and if you attack with the drone the drone dies like we have gone deep into making to the point of like not arguing the publisher but really insisting

no we want it to be this way because it makes sense for this insect so for me it's it's like and you're gonna have a very different answer which is why i'm not stepping on that but for me it's the it's the integration between bugs and the mechanics i think is really strong yeah so and not only specific mechanics but like when you're playing the locusts you are building up a bunch of stuff and swarming them so you feel like a locust perfectly good answer i think of this again as though as the

weakest one and i think of this as a unique spin on traditional fantasy so a lot of traditional fantasy like oh mages and soldiers fighting it out and this one is the spin of their right their fantasy warriors that are really small riding on insects as though they're mounts like instead of horses you're riding a dragonfly kind of thing and so i think that's very evocative and a unique spin on traditional fantasy stuff that's got the the

sort of thing we talked about where it's half similar half new right mechanic now this is interesting what.

Mean this is the big one it's it's the asymmetry the asymmetry asymmetry asymmetry it's a dueling game so in the style of niroshima hex which has some asymmetry absolutely that was that was a point of inspiration for us but it just it makes it more asymmetrical than i think any dueling game has ever been while still being super accessible and super super smooth and super interactive to me it's the it's the combination of i think this is the exciting thing

i didn't mention it's a combination of very asymmetric and very interactive and easy to learn because like if you name any asymmetric game we thread the needle if you name any asymmetric game you can have two of the three like vast super interactive you know super asymmetrical impossible exactly and so you need to know what everyone else can do before you can take your turn yeah and in this one the way that you take turns is you just choose an action tile and do what it says literally just read

the thing and do the thing and those four action tiles are unique to each faction you shuffle and mix them up and snap them together and when you take a turn you take your action tile and then the one that's across from it your opponent gets to do for free so it has built-in counterplay where you can sort of see what the opponent's doing so yeah i think there's multiple mechanical hooks part of why this got signed by aeg right but also a

good answer yeah each faction has its own like little mechanical hooks but the the kind of geeky game designer mechanical hook is the coupling mechanism where you have four powers i have four powers we shuffle my four and lay them randomly under your four for that entire game those are linked whenever you use your power i use. My matching power whenever i use my power you use your matching power it makes.

Any two games like again this is this is not what you'd put on the box or go on like social media to talk about but as a designer.

That's the mechanical hook yeah like talking to designers which hopefully if you're a listener you are if not get out of here you're not welcome we don't want you i mean publishers might listen so what are you doing this this is two hours this is two hours long why are you still here non-designer, i might like this to publishers this is i think very useful to publishers especially new publishers yeah that's true component hook what would you say the component

hook is because i have a very specific thing in mind. It's the map, so maybe that's what yours is as well. Okay, you want to explain it? Yeah, so the way that you play the game is you don't just pull out a board. Each faction is completely component independent from every other faction. You take the two boards, mine and yours, and you snap them together, and that creates the unique board that you're playing on.

So not only are the factions unique in terms of their gameplay mechanics, you're playing against everything, but the way that your faction interacts even on the board changes. So for instance, the bees, they harvest pollen from flowers.

They're playing pick-up-and-deliver game. so if your opponent has flowers in a particularly weird spot that completely changes how the bees are going to play against them what i like about this is again from a nerdy design perspective is that it is in alignment with the central hook and i think i gave my seed metaphor at one point where like we started with the premise and everything grew out of that premise everything

grew out of that seed and the fact that like my board and your board work differently than any other two combinations of board and we've learned to this as hard as we can with each faction.

Makes makes every faction even more asymmetrical like it it every faction pairing i should say it just further emphasizes that core hook yeah every single thing about this game is as asymmetric as it can be but the games tie into each other really nicely do you think there's any other hooks that we have for this one i think that the expandability is a hook yeah i think that is for me anyway like knowing that these six factions what's what's the combination there six factorial,

as soon as we release another six factions now it's 12 factorial which if you know math is, way more than twice as many like not even close yeah i think that this will really appeal to people who like ccgs and those sorts of the games because they're already two-player dueling games and stuff like that but rather than like choosing your deck you're choosing which faction you want to play in that sort of thing i think there's a lot of i think there's a lot of interesting

stuff there and every time a faction comes out again it's like an expansion for each of your existing ones because they play so differently paired with each other and one thing we're finding with this really interesting play testing is just how much you know. On this map against this faction, this ability I have is 10 times as good. And, you know, we need to get those in line, but it's very cool. So then publishers, we did talk about this initially. Yeah, we designed this

with AllPlay in mind. I love working with AllPlay. You've heard me mention them 2,000 times this episode. I pitched it to Joe. He doesn't like dueling games. It was just a non-starter. As well as that, the expandability for Joe was actually a huge turnoff. Do you know the game Dice Throne by Roxley Games?

They made dice throne huge huge hit gavin the owner of roxley spun off dice throne into its own company which he is a minority owner because dice throne was became its own beast that needed constant like maintenance not maintenance being new content and so on so forth it would have been roxley would have been the dice throne company and that's not what he was interested in doing so he spun that off he still has ownership but it's now run by people who just do

dice throne that's all i do full-time all play don't want to be the battle bugs company they want to be the wide wide wide they have a million different games company they don't want to have to put a team to one company and just make battle bugs content yeah that's just so unappealing to them that that was actually the fact that it was a dueling game and the fact that it was expandability was was the big turn but when we were making decisions the 20 dollar box size

i was talking about every decision we made was to fit two factions into that $20 box. Mm-hmm. Our other publishers that we had as backups were Leader and AEG. Leader ended up passing just because they had too many games in their pipeline. And obviously, AEG signed it. So that worked out great. So this is the brainstorm part. So, okay, we understand the selling points and everything. What does the nitty-gritty look like? What do the mechanics and systems look

like? What does the turn look like? What's the objective? I don't know that we need to go into that first. I think we've talked about this before. That first one took us a while to get into because we just had different visions.

And that's why this is part of the vision document because i wanted little mini games off the main board aj wanted the game to be a hundred percent on the main board we ended up i think pretty evenly compromising between the two but our mechanical visions were incompatible and we had to go back and forth what four times before we finally found that like found the ability to see what the other person was seeing and i think maybe this is an interesting anecdote where.

Because so many asymmetric games are so non-interactive or there's so many elements where it's like i look over at your board and you're playing root and i'm like you have the moles i'm like what do you even have over there like what am i supposed to do with that that was a huge turnoff for me so i think i pushed really far in the other direction where if you were playing against the quacks of quillenburg expand or style game then you could do things

to mess with their bag and the other one you know similarly you could interact with all the elements of each other and it turned out that was just too much and that was too like frustrating to deal with and because we already had so much interact so many interaction points in the rest of the game that last step wasn't necessary and just was frustrating to get there so you might not remember but you also literally didn't want anything that wasn't on

the board i don't remember that but it does sound like me yeah i do remember like the the tombstones all the sorts of things, yeah yeah the the version i made was ants the spider or something like that. I was like, look, the only way that we can make it all on the board is to essentially make an asymmetrical abstract game where like I am playing an abstract game and you're playing a slightly different abstract game.

And if, if literally everything is on the board, it has to be an abstract game because there's no other way that I can see to do it. And so I built that out and it absolutely played. And you were like, oh, this is not what I want to make. Like not, not in a rude way, but I was, I wanted the stuff off the board. You're like, no, it all has to be on the board. So I was like, I will make that and I will make that to the best of my ability. And we played it and you were like, you made it.

You made it about as well as it can be made. Not what I want. Yep. There's a quote from screenwriting. The executive, it's an executive. He says, I asked you for a brown suit and you went away and you made a brown suit and you brought me a brown suit. And the second I saw it, I realized I wanted a blue suit. Yep. It's, it's, it's a, it's a inevitable part of the process. Like no one's wrong in that situation. You just don't know that you don't want it until you see it.

AJ, I have a deep personal question for you. What's up? How do we end this podcast? By saying goodbye, everyone. Bye, everyone. 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 funproblemspodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.