#51 - Audience Sell-Sheets

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

I'm AJ Brandon. And this is our podcast. Today, AJ, what do you want to talk about? Maybe the topic we prepared? Just a suggestion? Thoughts on my head? Thought you might be okay with that? I was going to talk about our favorite fast food places, but sure, we can do the topic. Is that not the topic we prepared? I'm going to give a disclaimer both to the audience and to AJ. At some point, I'm going to get a message saying I have to leave.

And so that will be the last one that we do and this is the perfect episode for that because what are we doing today aj today we're doing user submit sorry you're saying user i don't know where i know it comes from, we are doing community submitted sell sheets so we're reviewing your sell sheets we're going to be really mean and nasty we're going to tell you why you're really bad at what you and and that is not always positive we did an episode of this before where

we went through aj's sell sheets and i gave i think fair and critical feedback aj welcomes this and so he told people hey submit yours as long as you are welcoming up and you said aj that we got a consistent line in our emails yeah everyone was like tear me a new one in no way do we delight in being cruel or negative or anything like that it's just that we have strong opinions and we like to share them we also got a lot of

feedback i'm sure you got this as well that even though it was a visual episode people really like listening to it so.

This is going to come out as an audio podcast because apparently people like that so if you're not aware we do a youtube channel alongside the audio podcast and so you can watch our beautiful faces as we look at your beautiful sell sheets now i suggested very last minute to disrupt aj's plans because i don't like him that we start with one of aj's just to establish that we are not trying to be cruel or mean that this is just our like unfiltered thoughts

and we're not picking on our audience who we love very much etc etc any any other disclaimers before we start aj nope let's get to it okay whale the fall can you can you see this easily is it good i can see this and hopefully the audience can do so i'll describe for audio listeners it's called whale fall this is one of aj's it has his email at the bottom um have we removed contact details from people from the other ones we'd have to go and blur them later i did not remove any of them so i'll be.

I assumed it was free advertising, you know? Not the name necessarily, but if someone's put their phone number up, we don't want to put that on YouTube. So this says, Whalefall, highly asymmetric, easy to learn area control game. There are some pictures of some animals. It's 14 plus cape, two to three people, 45 minutes. When whales die and sink to the ocean floor, their bodies generate entire ecosystems due to the food they provide.

Each player takes controls of different factions vying for resources in a big starburst fast teach. Component list, 95 tokens, 1376, 35 cards, one rondelle, one rulebook, one board. Designed by AJ, in quotations, handsome face Brandon. It's a very nice little tagline you've got there. And then it's got some mechanical details that I'm not going to read.

Now, I am in a weird position because I was early on a co-designer of this game, then I dropped out, so I already know a decent amount about this game. So we are purely doing cell sheet assessment. So, my first thought is that... This is going to sound weird. It does say area control game. It's hard for me to tell what this is. Oh, you know what it is? There's no board picture.

And you don't always have to have a board picture or anything like that but i i'm looking at this and i'm i'm just at a glance this is this is first instinct i'm struggling to get a handle on what what this is so it says area control game says highly asymmetric sharks choose a card for their ability then choose another card to multiply its effectiveness lower multipliers come in power bonuses worms have a rondelle action selection they borrow into the wall becoming sorry

they borrow into the whale becoming powerful worker placement-esque locations octopi chain together the cards for maximum effect and hide your units true strength and camouflage this is all great and i understand that i'm doing a different thing with each of them but i understand what i'm doing i do because i've played the game but i i'm struggling from the cell sheet to see the shape of the game if that makes sense yeah i think that's a good note and i think that's something

that i don't do enough of on my cell sheets is show the actual like a photo of the game in progress show the board i think that can be very valuable and that's something that i often don't end up doing so i think i think that's my big note there's a lot of text there's not too much text i don't think but there's a lot of text i assume only three units uh three three factions correct.

So as as putting my publisher hat on i see area control game and i'm like two to three players who wants to play a two to three player area control game this is the most unsellable part of the game i've actually tried because i really like the 45 minute play time i've tried a bunch of different things to get a faction that plays really quickly and i couldn't get one that didn't bump up the play time to an hour plus so i'm leaving it two to three if the publisher is

interested but needs a fourth then i'll cross the bridge when i i will i'll tell you personal experience i signed a game last week an area control game oh the one that we we did on the on a previous social episode right yes yes publisher is a much better name for it which is shocking because i thought that was the best name possible that was always very much working time and i that's a co-designer with matt banshee whose name i learned how to pronounce.

And as you know aj from personal experience when i co-design a game i want it to be amazing a two player it is really important to me because that's how i'm going to play test the most critter kitchen is a game that you wouldn't think even plays a two-player it's amazing at two-player might even have thought is an area control game it's amazing at two-player, the publisher even knowing that it's a two-player game i'm sorry i have to reply to my side, of course i'm good i'm being

very curt because i'm trying to try to record talk i'm sorry i'm bad i'm all the tasking bad episode so the publisher was like look do we even need to put a two-player in because he's like no one plays area control at two-player which is he didn't say literally no one but the the thought was like look do we want it like do we just want to do a three to five game and we had to be like we had to advocate for like no the two player is really good,

like we promise it's a really interesting two player but two player was such a low priority for this area control game to this publisher that they were like why even put it on the box you know, um this game might be published as a three to five on the box even though it has a two player mode because they just they care so little about two players this is obviously anecdotal one publisher one experience but when i say two to three player area control game it feels like.

I'm not talking about this lately it was uh it was crap it's gonna drive me nuts i was talking to alex alex cover my co-designer and and we we've made a game that has a campaign and it's a cozy game and i was like yeah we should call it a cozy roguelike and he's like no cozy like roguelikes are like the association of roguelikes is this really horrible cutthroat nasty death death death they don't feel cozy at all we have made a cozy group like but by pairing those words together it sounds like

you don't know what you're doing yeah that's very so so try to pitch a two to three player area control game i'm like do you know how games work so that that's my biggest note i think is that fair sure yeah that makes sense i i think i would swap out the asymmetry which i understand as a designer you're like but it's so asymmetrical for what does the game do Like, what does it look like? What is the crux of the game? What are the specifics? Mm-hmm.

Cool. Should I move on to users? We want to start with one of mine to set the tone. Yes, yes.

To show that I love AJ very, very dearly. None of this is an indictment on him at all. This is just what the feedback process looks like. And that way, we're not just bullying our audience. Yeah. Hey, who we got? Sure. Okay.

Let me just find the best way to share here. I think I'll just share it like, this so i should be able to switch between these ones okay there so we've got a game oh do you want to read it now i'm happy to let you do it you do it i did it last time all right this is called four eyes and me i'm just gonna spit out things as this come yeah immediately i think this is a bit of a too clever title card here i don't care too much about pretty graphics and everything obviously this

is like a fairly basic looking thing but the four eyes is like very visually busy it's not gonna it's like it's like a handwritten thing like they're taking a piece of paper and they've written out four eyes and they've colored it in different colors and they've drawn glasses and leafs and and there's so many things overlapping text that it just makes it visually difficult you know what it makes you think of more than anything what is a capture Yeah, totally.

And so chapters are famously difficult to read. So when that's my first thought, seeing the game title, that's probably a red flag. Well, and it may very well like lean into what the game's trying to do. But the important thing here is usability is always priority number one. So this is a game ages 10 and plus, players 2 to 4, and 30 to 60 minutes. That's a pretty wide range.

That's a little bit of a red flag for me. it tells me that we're looking at like euro territory like like midway sort of um i was gonna say forest shuffle i just played a bunch of forest shuffles so that game is very much on my mind yeah it's not a huge issue it just it could literally be twice as long as you think, his little industry secret is that estimated player times are just never accurate there's no way of knowing when stonemaier did i think it was scythe he just wrote down every single

playtime someone said and then printed the average so the box said something like 112 minutes it was nonsense because the average of 100 play tests is not the average playtime it literally is but it's not so instead and this is so counterintuitive to us designer types you want your playtime to signal what kind of game it is aj worked really hard to keep his game at 45 minutes because that tells you what you are playing when i see 30 minutes

that gives me a really clear idea When I say 60 minutes, that gives me a completely different idea. When I say 30 to 60, my genuine thought is, I don't know what this game is.

So the tagline is design glasses for many eyed monsters in this positive player interaction tile laying game the monster optometrist who earns the most money wins the game okay i'm gonna judge you so harshly here it's not fair because i have the strongest opinion on positive player interaction i was gonna say did that make you light up or uh that it makes me ready to be disappointed is what it does i i hope i'm proven wrong it raises the stakes yes uh we'll

we'll do a whole episode on positive player interaction that's on our queue but i have strong opinions short answer okay so i have two thoughts here one is that design glasses for many eyed monsters that's interesting like that that is an interesting idea but i'm still stuck on 30 60 minutes if it's design glasses in a 30 minute game that that to me solves a very different experience design monsters design glasses for a 60 minute game if your selling point

is positive player interaction two to four is also a minor red flag for me if i'm playing a positive player interaction game i want it to be more than two players and obviously it is literally more than two players but two to four i don't know maybe i'm being too fussy here but i feel like two to four is sort of a defunct play account yeah oh having said that the common advice is is make the game work the play counts it works i just always aim for two to five i don't

think i've ever designed a two to four player game in my life. I think being an optometrist for Many-Eyed Monsters is a cute idea for a theme. So that's definitely not something I've seen a million times before, so that's nice. But as soon as I'm done reading that, there's no visual hierarchy here. So again, the points that we're going to hit on here isn't going to be like, oh, do you have the most beautiful graphics? I don't care about that.

That's not going to make or break your game necessarily. But the basics of important graphic design that you need to know is clarity and visual hierarchy. I think clarity being what we just talked about. How easy is it for me to read and parse your information? And information hierarchy, think of it this way. When you're reading a book, you start at the top left and you go across and you keep moving your way down.

That is naturally how human eyes want to move. And if you're going to break that flow, then you need to do it by having big bombastic things. You'll notice in a lot of mine from our previous whole episode on cell sheet design, I did a lot of speech bubble one, speech bubble two, speech bubble three. And when there was any amount of ambiguity whatsoever in which order you're supposed to read them, I labeled them. This is step one, step two, step three, just being as blunt as possible.

When I look at this, it's like actions and it looks like it's a vertical thing. And then positive play interaction is like this whole other section over here. Like a reading left to right. Yeah, it's a little confusing for me how I'm supposed to read this.

And even if you just have like a solid single color for the background behind all the things that you're showing at least that tells me that's part of the same section and that that's i read the colored borders is doing that so the column on the left all has green colored borders and and the title action is also green so i associate that with being one chunk but i completely agree i'm not sure if i meant to go down and read that boot shape or like start at the thing

that's technically higher but on the right like it is very visual missing i have one more thought on the tagline before i forget positive player interaction most money wins the game there's something weird about that to me like that those things don't quite click to me and maybe it's because i'm so deep in the weeds with our positive player interaction game but player interaction like positive play interaction for capitalism it's just it's a weird combination there's a slight

disconnect okay so let's go through the action section So draft monster cards. Do you want to zoom in? Because it's quite strong, mate. Yep. How's that? I'll just work my way through it. So actions. Draft monster cards and place them into an exam room. Collect acrylic glasses tiles from other players' displays or from the bag. Discard glasses to make monocle tiles. And check out a completed monster to earn money and upgrade an action for the rest of the game.

So this is. Go back to the top. I just need to read that first one.

Okay what are your thoughts i have strong thoughts here you go first i have strong thoughts too but i just read you take a turn uh i'm sure we've talked about this stuff in the past that one of my absolute obsessions in board game design is how does that make sense and i think aj i've played your your book your prototypes and given this feedback you've seen me play other people's prototypes give this feedback i i need what i'm doing to make sense so i'll use um tapestry as

example this is very common in exploration games in tapestry the way you explore is you draw a tile from the bag and choose where to put it that's not exploration that's like planet crafting or something and again countless games do this sometimes they can hand wave it enough that i'm okay with it like eclipse has a similar mechanism but it's like yeah that's the wormhole you're creating or whatever like space is not actually laid out in a 2d grid so there's already discrepancies being made

in tapestry you were exploring a continent by choosing.

Where the forest mountains and rivers are and i'm like that's that's not that's not exploring content that doesn't that doesn't it just fundamentally doesn't make sense i played a prototype that i'm not allowed to talk about for various reasons not mine someone else's i'm not allowed to talk about for nda reasons not for not for critical reasons but i just remember being like who are we like who are we in this game and what are we doing because you've

got us taking these actions here and then these actions on a second board and you're saying this is a week later but i'm like what i just if it doesn't make sense to me i can't enjoy the game and maybe i'm hyper aware of this maybe i'm heightened maybe this is why i get a lot of games signed because it's such an obsession of mine but like draft monster cards and place them into exam room okay like sure i guess you could pick out your customers that's not really how autonomous work but

this is monster world okay draft your monsters and put them into exam rooms sure you've got a shared pool of patients and you're going out and being like you come sit here, Collect acrylic glasses tiles from other players' displays or from the bag. You've sort of lost me here. Like, what is happening? But let's go past that. Discard glasses tiles to make monocle tiles. Cool. Okay, great. You snap a glass in half, you've got a monocle.

Adorable. I love that. I think that's so cute, so fun. That's so thematically integrated. Check out a completed monster to earn money. Yes, that is how commerce works. Love it. And to upgrade an action for the rest of the game.

Why like what's happening it's not the biggest deal but to me and again i am hyper aware of this i don't see cohesion in this yeah i think i don't have an issue with the drafting cards to me that's just like they come in and you're like figuring out who's working on which patient to me that that that checks out to me is this is more of like a it's getting a bit too into the weeds like yeah upgrade an action for the rest of the game that's like not a thing that's going to,

make a publisher be like whoa you can upgrade actions in this game even this number of steps so to turn this into actionable advice instead of just peter criticizing a thing, take the cool part and talk about that drafting monster cards to place a new exam room that's not cool it's a necessary thing for the game to work it's not a selling point and this is literally a sell sheet uh we could absolutely go back to aj's and make some similar points i suspect

you are trying to think of what is going to sell the game and we talk about this all the time the three main hooks are mechanical component and thematic and draft monster cards and place them into exam room is none of those i think it's fair to say yeah to me i think what i'm seeing for the hook we haven't finished the sell sheet but right off the bat it's partially thematic but i think the idea of having like these glasses tokens they're like covering their eyes and like seeing

the finished monster that sounds like it has a lot of great table presence that seems very visually appealing. It's component and somatic depth. I would be trying to lean to that as much as possible. And I understand, you know, garbage design is everyone's forte or whatever. But if we could see like a picture of what that looks like and it like really sells me on the final one. A big old monster.

And you've got this really cute, lovely monster with the two stalks and eyes on them. A big monster, some glasses, tiles, an arrow pointing to them, and then a smaller version of him wearing the glasses. That is going to do more to sell your game than everything we just read.

Yes. If you go back to the Soul Sheets review of my games, look at cosplay girls and cosplay girls i have a magic hat it's a it has this sort of similar thing where you card craft and you put the hat on the girl i have a picture of the girl wearing the hat now that sell sheet wasn't perfect necessarily but i do think that that's the type of thing that i'd be trying to lean into for this yeah so if you sorry i know we haven't finished yet if you frame your

sell sheet through hooks and not how to play the game because this is currently an instruction on how to play the game. How to play your game almost never sells your game. Okay, so positive play interaction. Game bonuses when other players take tiles from your display. Optical for oddities display, and then it's pretty hard for me to parse what all this iconography means. It's a bunch of symbols, and the circles and the squares look like they're glasses.

Yeah, from this example. They're everything else, I don't understand, except for dollars.

Yeah, this one maybe has got a wild one from somewhere, but you're showing me stuff that I don't understand, and that's and you're like partially explaining it which is making it worse than it would be if you were doing less it's also not clear to me if this is just purely random like do these just get dealt out and if people take them hooray you get a bonus like one of one of the columns is one dollar one of them is two dollars

whereas uh you played castle back in ludwig right aj yeah yeah like the the central mechanical hook no not the central mechanical hook but like a big mechanism in that game is you create the market to try to like make the most money like that that's one of the core the things you do in that game. Is that what's happening here? Because that's very different to if it's just dealt out randomly.

What my guess is is it looks like this is a player board singular because it's all one line and then each of these is if someone takes the thing that's on this space then you get the associated benefit but i'm asking do you do you put those out or do they get randomly dealt out or right i'm saying i don't think it does but either way it should be more more clear i think.

And this is also one of the thematic things that bugs me is like if they're mine why can't i use for my patience or maybe i can i don't know like i just don't have enough i've i have the exact wrong amount of information yeah comparing to something like castles of water deep it's like i build a building when you use that building i get a bonus it's my building of course i get the bonus with this one it's like i don't really know why it's happening yeah completing monsters upgrades

your actions try to chain them together for longer turns so i understand yeah so far we have actions as like maybe it's just discard monocles collect glasses the things that says over here that's my guess oh that was actions you're right yeah so i put that as a turn flow like you do those four things on your turn yeah that's what i thought initially but now that i'm reading this i think each of these is an individual action you have access to and then it's mirrored

to my earlier point of like the wrong amount of information one we shouldn't be wondering this and two it doesn't matter so you've given us enough to be confused but not enough to answer our questions yeah and.

If you want to just like if we didn't change anything else about the she except for the flow of information you would expand out this whole section here at the top your mouse doesn't appear for me oh okay the action upgrades like where you can see the actions for the turn if that's wider so it takes up the whole space and then each of the actions has the thing underneath it explaining what it does so like let's assume you choose one action per turn the rules

i mean do they even need to mention that like does it matter if it's one action per turn or a sequence i just think it's all irrelevant yeah yeah okay tiling gather the right glasses and each and monocle tiles to complete each monster's request yes they have specific things they're looking for get more points if you get the right match i assume or you have to get exactly right match to be able to it's all icon driven i don't really understand it but yeah and this

that seems like the most useful thing to know in terms of like what the theme of the game is yes and we'll talk about the positive player interaction episode but this in no way triggers positive player interaction but it is what a lot of people think of as positive player interaction so this isn't an insult towards you specifically this is aj having very specific takes yes all right so i want to make sure we have time for other ones so can we wrap this one up quick yes i

have two thoughts one is i would cut pretty much all of this do what i said big monster arrows pointing onto it give monsters the right glasses and then like maybe one other big hook. That's all you need like the point of a sell sheet is not to explain the full. Game i mean ideally you can play it on there and so like maybe you have the actions at the bottom or something like that but like.

I don't care about any of this. I want to know what makes this game fun and different and interesting and unique. And right now, if it's in there, it's buried. I think as an exercise, what you might want to do, a designer out there, not the person who did this sell sheet specifically, but everyone, just write up a fake sell sheet for Twilight Imperium or whatever the heaviest game you can think of is. You are absolutely not going to be going to all the little intricacies of it.

And that exercise might help you think about what are the selling points of TI. Those are the things you need to focus. I can leave the nitty gritty off. And if you send the sell sheet to someone who's interested, they might say to you, I don't have enough to fully understand this game, but you whet my appetite. Let's see the rest. Let's play it on TTS. Send me the rulebook, whatever. All the sell sheet is, is step one, catch their interest.

I literally had a publisher reach back out to me and say, hey, I don't have a full grasp of how this game works, but I'm interested. Let's see more.

That's all I wanted the sell sheet to do. yeah my other note is a minor one which is that i don't think this font is comic sans ms but it looks very comic sans ms-y and that is sort of a running joke of like bad graphic design so while graphic design shouldn't be the focus and you don't need to be good at it you sort of pick the famously obnoxious font all right let's move on we got a lot more to do we're not going to get through nine today but yes let's move

on to another one maybe we can just commit to this being like a two-part i would like to go through all of them everyone took time to send them in i'd feel we We will do them eventually, just not necessarily this episode. Cool, cool, cool. Then I will stop stressing out and rushing. So this is Little Thief, players two to four, ages eight plus, time 15 minutes, components 125 cards. And there's a QR code I assume to a How It's Play video.

There should be something telling me what the QR code is sending me to. But having a QR code for a brief two to three minute pitch video sounds like a fine thing to do.

It has the tagline push your luck to steal from dragons which is not exactly unique or appetite wedding in any way well i mean that's literally clank isn't it i mean there's multiple multiple games with that exact theme there i could probably if i did a little googling find like half a dozen easily aj i have news which is going to be a mini episode because i only have 15 minutes fight all right very short then sorry about that i thought i thought i had more time but food got ordered

it's my job to pick it up okay go ahead just one more card stealing treasure from dragons is hard when you're just a tiny lizard but if you want to win the race for gems you'd better get sneaking and you'd better improve your skills, It doesn't really tell me much, but let's just keep pushing through here, and then we'll comment on it as a whole. Don't get burned. Playing is easy. Either pass for the round or delve one card deeper.

Get the furthest for extra treasure, but don't reveal six flames or you burn out. Small note, playing is easy is one of those show-don't-tell things. If it's easy, I can tell that by reading it. If it's not, you've wasted my time by saying playing is easy when it's untrue.

Yep, and you're getting to the weeds here. I don't need to know it's six flames, etc. Uh yeah right now i'm reading this and oh they blacked out their own information thank you very much ac right now i'm reading this and thinking oh it's it's time yeah that's exactly my thought yeah grab loot gear up your starting deck is weak and small fix it by customizing your deck with your favorite strategy so you get those gems before your rivals and without brain up little thief promises to steal

the hearts of gamers looking for portable fast fun so that is a difference it sounds like you're deck building your own deck which is yeah yeah at no point until that last sentence has mentioned deck building push your luck and that for me i think would be like a central thing i'd want to know as a 100 yeah that that that is what makes your game unique and that makes it much more interesting it does mention that the art is placeholder and sourced online i want to say that visually i.

Will love this i think this is really nicely laid out i love your choice of fonts i love your choice of like placeholder art i think this gives me a really and sorry go from components again yeah this this gives me a i i can see what this game is this is a 20 all play game or like a smaller game from amigo this is visually cohesive the names like everything about this is in complete complete cohesion i would just mention the deck building element

front and center because that seems to be although i do worry that mentioned deck building makes it seem like a different weight than it is so maybe like light deck building push your luck that's what i want to see up the top you know i don't think you need to necessarily say it because it says 15 minutes that yeah that's true that tells you like yeah so so deck building push your luck steal from dragons is not that interesting also in this image it looks like you are a dragon oh you're

a tiny lizard does say that uh yeah the thematically i'm not grabbed honestly like like you said it's still kind of clank it's like mini clank and maybe that's the intent so thematically i'm not super compelled here's a very cute idea to be a tiny little lizard thief stealing from a dragon but it's not it's not standing out component wise it's not standing out and mechanic wise it it seems like your best bet here is to go for like.

The tight little package of deck building pushy lock which i think is interesting and i think this is really well presented. So I don't think from this I would ask to play it, but I can see that this is only a few steps away from hitting that. Yeah. The nice thing is publishers know how to do their job mostly, so they could see this and be like, all right, I can come with a better theme. But I think giving yourself the best chance here, I would try and re-theme it.

The nice thing is it seems light and abstract enough that you could paste on basically anything, which gives you a lot of creativity and a lot of opportunities for different stuff. Just off the top of my head, I think if you were a tiny dragon stealing from a human, that's a twist on the formula, you know? Sure. Like I said, there's a million things you could do with this. Yeah. I think your best bet is to find a good one and pitch that.

And this one's fine, but I think it could be stronger. there you want to do one more i just want to look at no no i want to do one more i have one more thought on this maybe maybe this count is what we were saying earlier maybe maybe you'll disagree with this but like i wouldn't mind an example of what one of these cards does because right now all i know is that you are flipping cards until you get six flames then stopping but you can customize your deck with your favorite strategies that i

don't know what that means and you've got all these symbols and so like even just pulling out one card like the one with the three question marks in the black circles like i just want some information of what i can possibly do to get an idea of the game but this might be counter to what we were saying earlier about diving into too much detail yeah it's tough because i don't want to get too lost in the weeds but i want to know that there's something in this game other than something

that gets me points and has less flames you know like something that's super i think you could cut a lot of this down to flip a card or collect treasure like literally dot points flip a card to collect treasure six flames you burn out.

Upgrade your deck to you know with special abilities you know i think that all of this text could just be that and then you've got a little bit more like that gives that gives me everything i've already got and then you could have one card like pick your most fun and cool and interesting card and oh i actually have plenty of time sorry uh this is so chaotic.

I have half an hour okay we're back to a full episode sorry aj i'm giving you i would just, yeah just just recording whiplash yeah i i would i'd cut this whole first paragraph i i think this basically goes without saying for push your luck game rather than saying this you know it's the it's the show don't tell just show me the deck and and walk me through a turn be like step one slip over cards oh am i gonna bust i'm gonna use this one power card like peter said and

it's like oh okay so that's the type of cool effect i have you know and then you can go into the deck and then i think the selling of this is that it's a tight little 125 cards that's a great card count that's a great 15 minute game like it's a great theme like it's sort of the opposite of the last one it's very cohesive it's just over explained and i just want like the key elements and then one cool thing and then i think you've got some and maybe

a the theme's fine i just yeah i feel like this theme is a solid six or seven out of ten which is great but you you want to hit it eight or nine or ten out of ten okay that's all for me, Well, this one pops quite a bit more. So this is called Faken, F-A-E-K-I-N, which is a very cute title. The shape-shifting social deduction game. Faken is such a cute title. I really like that. It's done with this really nice, ornate sort of elfin font.

Basics, two to eight players, ages eight plus, 45-minute games, 10-minute rounds.

Cut the word basics. We don't need to know that these are the basics. we understand how a soul sheet works anytime i can cut a word i want to cut a word i do like the split between 45 minute game and 10 minute rounds i think that's interesting it gives me a shape of the game remember with yours aj i was saying i don't quite have a shape of this game that immediately tells me ah okay you're going to play like four or five rounds it looks like each one's going to be 10 minutes

so i already have an idea of what the shape of the game looks like tiny thief also did that really nicely with the like you run you upgrade your deck you run I'm like, cool, I can now see what game this is in 15 minutes. That's really interesting. Highlights. Again, we don't need the word highlights. Lightning-fast rounds. Simple rules in a genre known for its spiraling complexity. Beautiful fey art on each card. AJ, what are your thoughts on these highlights? I don't like these highlights.

So first off, I know how long the rounds are going to take. They're going to take 10 minutes. It says we're in gear. Second of all, I wouldn't consider 10 minutes lightning-fast. If you're comparing it to resistance, maybe. I usually take less time than 45 minutes to play a game of resistance and that's maybe a group is exceptional but yeah I don't know there's a lot of. There's so many games that are so much faster than 45 minutes.

10 minutes per round does not feel like any fast to me. So there's a disconnect there. I think simple rules in a genre known for its spiraling complexity. I mean, Resistance is a pretty... I mean, it's got a few rules, but it's definitely not complex by any stretch of the imagination. And yes, a lot of social deduction games are getting more complex. That's because they're selling to people who have played a lot of the Resistance and want something else.

So a lot of them that are out there, i don't even think that they're that complex so to me this is like it's commentary that i just don't agree with so to me it makes me feel like you're not super familiar with the industry yeah i have two thoughts on this one is same as last time show don't tell if it's simple rules like i i feel like saying simple rules adds nothing it's it's like applying for a screenwriting job and being

like i'm really funny and it's like well cool you haven't made me laugh yet you've only told me that you're funny in a genre known to inspire complexity and this is similar to what you said is just like flame like what you're doing if i'm a person who makes social deduction games.

Stop it like don't do that beautiful fate art on each card i can see that if i look at it and also now you're telling me that there's a complication with the art is this your art are you gonna are you not going to sign it with me if i want to change the art yeah what does it say down the bottom is it my immediate thought is to scroll down to the bottom and be like did they so they're not listed themselves as an artist or

anything like that oh thank you for blacking this out by the way you've saved me so much editing time okay so yeah beautiful beautiful fail on each card that's not your call or it is beautiful but oh yeah it's very nice but it's not your call and if it is your call then you've added an obstacle to the game if it's and secondly show don't tell if it's beautiful give me a big old car.

Zoom back out i'll keep reading it's hard to say because this is so so small right but does this look ai generated to you i don't know it does to me no i can see it yeah if i'm it's too small to say yeah it's very hard to tell but as on the trademarks and the fact that they don't list themselves as an artist makes me think that it might be now having said that i do i do like making my prototypes pretty and i often use ai art to do that but i don't say this is a pretty game because if it is

you can see it and if it is you're gonna have to like in the current climate you're gonna have to make your own art so i'm saying like hey i want to art direct this game which is not a good pitch yeah all right carry on welcome to fakin which is capital case which is interesting choice that's like camel case i'm very against that by the way an elegant social deduction game which thrusts you into the role of children born from the forbidden love between the heirs of the fey

courts of summer and winter. Embracing their whimsical nature the fave designed to devise the game to unravel the fate of you misbegotten shape-shifting offspring all while determining which season shall reign supreme.

There is some interesting stuff buried in here i think first red flag for me is the fave designed a game i don't i was told this very early in my career so it really stuck as early advice does people prefer to play games that are about things not games that are you playing a game, if within the world of the story you're playing a game that is just a level of separation that and obviously this game is going for immersion so does that make sense what i'm saying yep yep,

the children born of forbidden love between the heirs of fake courts feels very rose of court and thorns to me which is a fine fine selling point that's you know you could wingspan it bring in a whole audience people who don't normally play these games i actually think that's all really cool it's just a little wordy for me and and you've said elegant social reduction game which is another show don't tell yeah I think this is a little cerebral for me too it's like,

devise the game to unravel the fate of misbegotten shape-shifting offspring while trying to determine which season reigns supreme that's just like where is that buddy, So just to rewrite it on the fly, I would say, rather than welcome to fake and elegant social reduction game, I'd be like, you know, the summer fey and the winter fey have been at war for years, and you, even that's too long. But just give me, again, I want bullet points. I just want, like,

what do I need to know? What makes it interesting? I think forbidden love between heirs of the fey courts of summer and winter is a very interesting idea in a very clunky sentence.

I wholeheartedly agree. Yeah. a deal three fated cards that will assign a player a hidden court and rank duel secretly to gradually reveal players identities deceive the rival court while determining who is in your court deduce the heirs of each court using information gathered through duels this already feels twice as complex as the resistance to me.

I don't understand what's happening yeah i don't know what so hidden court and rank one of those has to be like spy versus resistance like which team i'm on right which i think is the summer winter split is the but then i i don't know what the second one is right and then maybe rank is what determines an air i assume that it feels like love letter meet the resistance yes that is what it seems like to me and the thing is love letter

already has an element of social direction like figuring out what uh they have back there so in duel grad secretly to gradually reveal players identities it looks like you're playing some sort of yeah light card game where you just play two cards compare whoever has the better card doesn't reveal their identity to the other person so then you have information and then you tell other people oh yeah they're the bad guy go get them or that sort of thing right

so there's sort of a double social deduction which is determining who's on your side like who is you know because if i'm like hey everyone he's winter and everyone's like oh cool we're all winter so we're going to kick you out for being summer that it seems. Cerebral is a good word it seems complex i don't understand how to play and it currently seems complex yeah i do like visually the cloudiness of this i i can give this a lot of compliments on its composition and art direction and everything.

And I think I'm getting most of what's happening here. It's the same note as two ago, which is that I understand enough to be confused and not enough to be compelled. It's the wrong information.

Let's let's zoom out here aj i just want to i want to spend five minutes looking at this and saying okay aj you are a publisher who's like you know what we don't have in our catalog a social deduction game what do i show so let's let's pretend that this is our this is my game what can i show you that makes you request a prototype because if it's if it's elegant and simple and all that that'll come through in the prototype straight away like what what

piques your interest and i realize this is a bit role play but yeah what what should be on the sell sheet to make you request the prototype because right now i think this is a really cool sounding game that doesn't make me want to request the prototype at all the i'll give you a vague answer and i'll give you some specific answers as examples the vague answer is the thing that we always need which is a hook i don't know what the hook is of this game it seems like what you're saying is

this it's elegance is a hook and then you're not showing us why it's so elegant and actually seems more complex than the most popular one in the genre i think the thematic hook of this is really strong well i don't know if you know how much of a hit a court of thorna roses is.

Yeah it's very popular like it is a mega hit if you can capture that into a game you've got an audience built in and that's clearly the vibe they're going for right like i'm not imagining that it is i just think that what i'm trying to say is they're not showcasing that as being their hook they're showcasing elegance as being the hook and that's what not what i'm seeing yeah they do they do have that whole paragraph about it so they're not they're not ignoring it like it's in there

enough that we've identified it but that what you're right showcase is a good one that should be the prime focus i think of what you're selling yeah so i think that it does have a thematic hook there which which is interesting i don't fully understand the mechanic of what's going on there which i really need to but to to answer your question as to like i want to give some specific examples because i bought a lot of social deduction games and

i will tell you the last like four that i bought and why i bought them yep so i bought you must be an idiot which is a social deduction can you stop insulting me and start telling me about social deduction game please have you heard of that one no i haven't heard that so you're playing a trivia game but you get dealt out a loyalty card as to whether or not you're actually trying to answer correctly or if you must answer incorrectly so if you answer incorrectly you have to come up with an

answer that seems like a believable mistake. Immediate mechanical hook. Yeah. As soon as I heard that, I was like, I bought it on the spot. Yeah. It's bluffing at social production. It's from a different angle. Yeah. It's doing a lot of stuff really smart. I purchased Inhuman Conditions, which we did a whole episode on and is one of my absolute all-time favorite games. The thing that hooked me from that one is they said it is two-player social deduction five minutes.

Five-minute social deduction is already a hook. Two-player social deduction, a hook. Saying both of those, I'm like, how is that even possible? I'm intrigued. So I wondered if you'd bring this up because we kind of skipped over it at the start, but the first thing we read was two to eight players. Yep. Now, that, as a cynic, that makes me suspicious more than intrigued. Yes.

Yes. So the thing is, if you say it's a two-player social deduction, you're telling me I built this game around it being two players. If it says two to eight players, that tells me the social deduction element is really much less social and much more deduction. And that's a very different type of experience.

My guess is- There's a swear word on our screen and has been the whole time oh no oh so there is i have to play that out, i'm not gonna people just know that we swear yeah it's not on the podcast it's just on youtube we can start youtube that's kind of you have to go to youtube if you're listening to this to see what.

It's the most vulgar it's it's not it's not on the cell sheet i do want to make that oh yeah yeah we don't want to throw this person under the bus yeah, But yeah, so saying it's two to eight actually makes me less interested in the game because most social deduction games have a pretty tight player range because it delivers a specific kind of experience. And I think it's a very different kind of experience, generally speaking, that you get with the lower player count social deduction ones.

And having said that, we made this association with Love Letter. I could see a version of Love Letter that's kind of social deduction that goes from two to eight. So if it was clear to us from the sell sheet, oh, we see how this plays at two.

Then it would be fine but as it is it does it does raise a red flag more than intrigue me right and as i say like part of this is if if you're coming to me you're saying i have a social deduction game you're looking for a social deduction game then i'm looking for a social deduction game right and if you're telling me this is more of a deduction game where you know you're trying to infer from actions players are taking on the board not from conversations you're having with

them a love letter then i think that this it makes more sense what i'm looking at here you know what i mean so what what could we do with let's say you were now designing this game and bringing it to me who's looking for social deduction okay how would you how would you arrange it i just want to make sure we're doing actionable advice because i think i think it's an interesting thought experiment i would want to give more information as to the deceiving and deduction elements

of it again we're this is right into the problem of it's giving us not enough detail to actually parse it out and the fact that i i don't know what a rank versus a court card is, is a problem. I would want to be able to show you what the conversations are going to look like in my social deduction, if indeed this is a social deduction. So I would present, you want beautiful art to be the pitch? Cool. One quarter of the page is a winter card. One quarter of the page is a summer card.

And you just put a clean up version of that sentence. You know, the summer fae and the winter fae have been at war for all time. Just give me that beautiful art. Give me the two thirds. I want to look at this and be like, ah, they're doing ACOTAR. If that's the pitch, if it's a thematic hook that you're going for, that's what your sell sheet needs to be.

And right now i feel like that's buried in here and we can draw it out i would even say the social deduction game for people who love a quarter first like i i think that maybe that's too on the nose but you really got to like lead them down down that path because if a publisher knows a guitar.

I just love that as an acronym if a publisher knows a quarter thern and roses then you could you need to you need to grab them if they don't they're probably not the publisher for you like i don't think you're going to sell someone and like no it's it's a really big deal you just haven't heard of it you know so i think i would make that front and center and then again i'm a big fan of the bullet points just like three bullet points being like you

are randomly dealt one of those two court here's the thing that would sell me on it you don't know how many are in each court because that's that's what i think is happening but it's not clear like resistance you know there's knowing minority and a non-knowing majority right like that that's the core hook of mafia werewolf resistance this one i feel like the kind of twist is that you don't know how many maybe there's an

equal number either way i just i want to know that like half of you are on the winter team half on the summer team there's a random number on each team whatever it is but like you've got these two you've got you've shown me these two courts you've told me you're one of these courts at random and then you know the two courts have been at war for hundreds of years.

You are what are you you're like a shape-shifting offspring i don't know what that means mechanically you've sort of got you know the term hat on a hat yeah yeah the fey have designed a game to unravel the fate of the misforgotten shape-shifting offspring cool so they're trying to ferret out the divergent while all determining which season will be supreme cool so there's also a war for control like oh you know what the smacks of this seems to me like this person has spent a lot of

time on this external story and lore and have this whole world building thing and you know what i noticed at the bottom it says like nevergreen with like a logo and then nevergreen games llc this is like a world where they want to have like 50 games in that probably right right and yeah which which is great but like you need to sell the first game to sell the rest. So if you're going full theme, cool, give me theme.

If you're going innovative social deduction mechanic, give me the innovative social deduction mechanic. Right now, we've just kind of got a slurry thereof. And again, we warned you that we're going to get harsh feedback. I just don't know what this is. And I feel like it's sort of like the last one. I feel like it's close. It's close to something. You just want to work out your hooks and hit them as hard as you can. All right, let's do one more and then I got to run. Cool.

Spymaster two players 10 plus ages 10 plus 30 minute playtime all right down with this so far yep they're very clear like spymaster and those things cohesive cohesive cohesive cohesive.

Cold war duel between rival spymasters the shadows of the cold war are cast long over europe as heads of the opposing intelligence agencies can you outthink and outmaneuver your great rival to claim victory as an allied player reveal the soviet spy before they gather intel as the soviet player gather the required intel book for your caught and run out of time cool so for people listening this is a very very text heavy sell sheet

yeah and this is supposed to be it's well sorted i will say that it's very clear what i'm looking at everywhere, but there is a lot on here. This has excellent visual hierarchy, it seems. Or maybe not excellent, but definitely solid. Clear visual hierarchy, for sure. Yeah. But my issue here, sorry to be extra rude. That was a little unnecessary.

To me the space underneath your title is like for a tagline and when it's your prime real estate yeah and if you go back and watch peter talking about all my sell sheets there were multiple times that i had a tagline that was like eight or ten words long he was like way too long trump back and i think he was right i i think like the tagline needs to be really pithy and having i get like this this space what you're using it for isn't the tagline what you're using it for is like a general vibe

of what's going on but it's it's too much and it's not necessary like this is too much especially because we know all this right this is the theme of a hundred games like a thousand games like we know we know that the shadow the cold war happened yeah and you literally like duplicate information as a soviet player gather the required intel before your car run out of time and it says that like right over here what the soviet player is doing and what

the allied player is doing at the top yeah go ahead here okay everything that you read out then can be summarized as. Allied versus soviet cold war yeah spies that's everything right like literally those five words whatever it was i didn't actually count them tells you this paragraph of text in fact. A cold war duel between rival spy masters has already told us the entirety of that text there is.

No new information in this entire paragraph yeah that that is the tagline and and you basically yeah you don't need anything else there the only thing that you might want to add in is that it's asymmetric it sounds like it's quite a different thing that you're both doing i didn't get that vibe at all oh let's find out as we read more yeah and then the next the next thing is a competitive game of deduction espionage we got that yeah you've told us we're spies and it's two-player dueling we know

it's competitive we know it's a game we know it's deduction we know it's espionage you've given us no information at all and actually on here on the side game type light strategy it's a 30 minute game for ages 10 plus yeah i figured that out and then again deduction spy strategy i see these words over and over again yeah come here's a here's a minor note uh components you can move this down and out of the way this is poor visual hierarchy this is not something

that should be prominent it should be tucked away this is this is you need it there so they can evaluate a thing when they go looking for it not draw attention to this yeah and this is actually something i meant to say on earlier yeah faken did this really well by the way faken is an amazing name yeah also i like how they have a fun font for the title that's still legible yeah and faken of everything we've seen so far faken's the one that i'm honestly most

intrigued by maybe tiny maybe little thief as well but faken just because it's such a solid product if if it is what i'm imagining, but the question is, am I imagining it or not? One tiny note for Faken is it specifies like 13 summer cards, 13 autumn cards. Publishers don't care about that. This is something that you shouldn't just be copy pasting from your rulebook. You should just say how many cards, how many tokens, you know, that sort of thing. So the publisher can get an idea of cost.

That's what they look at or why they look at components to see how much it will cost them. And if you have four different types of cards, that means they have to do math to figure out how many. Don't make them do work. Let's jump back to this. So big picture of the game. This is what you were missing in yours, AJ. I don't think this does an amazing job of telling me what I'm looking at, but it gets me further than whale-folded.

The players determine the action of the game through an initiative card order system. I don't know what that means. Yeah, I have no idea what's happening there. There we go. The value of each player's initiative card, you're missing an apostrophe for players, it should be going to ship. The value of each player's...

It's proofread your cell sheets. i feel like that's that that's a fairly basic note the value of each player's initiative card compared to their opponents determines what actions they can take i still don't know what it means i want to know what it means i'm intrigued but i just have no like you've given similarly to at the top you gave us two paragraphs with no information this is three sentences to answer a question that i literally asked out loud and i still don't know the

answer to either yep i'm just trying to parse it as well it's looking like you we don't we don't have time to jump into to what if sorry yeah i just noticed the time.

Rrp is an intriguing choice i don't think i would recommend doing that say again having the recommended retail price yeah it's like especially so specific 20 to 23 dollars like you don't know that publishers can glance at your components and they know how much it'll be and also like That price can vary so much depending on how exactly they do your tokens, how exactly they do- How many they print.

If Amigo or the op is doing this, it's going to be a wildly different price point if Jellybean or Weird Giraffe are doing it. And even things like you know linen finish cards versus cheap card stock like a lot of things add up so yeah that's not necessary simple rules engaging interactive matched play small footprint first of all one of those is not like the others.

So sorry to rush through this tom uh tom merrigan submitted this one by the way, but right now i don't know what the hook is i don't know how to play the game i know the theme five times yeah aj at a glance component hook mechanical hook somatic hook i'm not seeing them yeah simple rules show don't tell engaging show don't tell interactive i feel like it's implied in a dueling game like i don't think you can make a dueling game

it's not interactive or if you do it's no longer a dueling game small footprint we already saw that match play i don't know what that means you've got your reference cards here which i'm just going to say generally speaking is a no know like either take the information from the reference card and blow it up into cell sheet format if it's like so simple that that is the whole game and like you can teach it from the cell sheet or omit it definitely don't

put put your reference cards on it's a lot of information that we don't have full context for yeah i think that this scroll is up for me i think the strongest part of this is spy master a cold war duel between rival spy masters and then the basic fact i think the to me that is like a cool theme you know i i said that i didn't really see any strong hooks but I think there is something about the espionage of trying to figure out who the spies are. There's something to that theme.

And even though we've seen that theme in certain forms before, this has a bit of a different granularity than, say, something like Twilight Struggle or whatever. I still don't know if this game is asymmetric or not. Variable player powers. So let's wrap up. I think that the common theme we had is too much of the wrong information, pretty consistently. And to really just try to boil it down, ask yourself, what is your thematic hook? What is your component hook? What is your mechanical hook?

How can I make the sell sheets those and almost nothing else? You want to be a hammer looking for a nail. You want to have one really strong purpose, which is make the publisher request a prototype. That's the goal of the sell sheet. It's an ad.

Imagine you're making a Facebook ad. obviously that's too simplistic but if this was a facebook ad what i'm looking at right now i don't think anyone would click it if you go back to tiny thief i think there's elements there little thief i think there's elements of that that you would click as a facebook ad it's not quite there.

But it's yeah i i think workout and maybe maybe i'm maybe i'm getting this all wrong because i don't make sell sheets maybe we shouldn't be giving this advice but i really think that the sell sheets that i would request as a publisher are the ones that just give me the core, why I want to play this game of the game. Is that fair to say? Yep. And the most important thing about a sell sheet is your hook.

Whatever your hook is, front and center, in blazing lights, as big as you can make it, the hook is what gets publishers to take a look at. And if you are looking at your game, having completed it and saying, hmm, I wonder what the hook should be. You have done it wrong, I am sorry to say. No. Yeah, I completely agree. I think that... I'm sorry I'm so dark, by the way. I don't know. I'm in an Airbnb and I don't know where the lights are.

So I'm just going to switch over to a white screen so I can't see you, AJ. But hopefully you can see me a bit better. I think that almost all of those had a hook that we were able to kind of tease out. If you can take that hook and plaster it on your cell sheet, I think you'll get more success. But obviously, life is a gamble and who knows? AJ, quick publisher tip or getting published tip. Be prepared. So going along with the whale fall example here, I pitched that to Joe.

That's the one game I pitched to him so far. And he passed on it. And during the conversation, I think the main sticking point for him was he was worried that the teach would be too long. And for all play, he was saying that even his most complex game into the desert is only about a five minute teach. Yeah.

Thank you. and at the time i knew it was a fast teach because i only ever make games with fast teaches but i did not know how long it was i didn't want to seem argumentative not knowing how long it actually was so i just didn't comment on it after that meeting i recorded a video of me teaching the entire game start to finish it was less than five minutes and that's for all three unique factions and all core rules a hundred percent of the game for three players

with very symmetric factions less than five minutes yeah and if i had known that going into that conversation maybe he would have signed it so make sure you come prepared and you're ready to answer the questions and again not an argumentative way but just like yeah i we only sign games with five minute teachers cool i actually timed this to be a four minute teach but if it's still too complex that can be simplified like.

Don't don't argue but yeah having that data is definitely helpful aj you want to have the world's quickest fun yes what is a skill you have but never use uh puppetry i am an amazingly good puppeteer and i have not done it in over 10 years hey didn't you have like a show or something i have done multiple tv pilots where i've been the puppeteer and i can do voices and i can do the puppets and i've invented new puppetry techniques and i use zero on it what about you i've i've had a

few jobs in like fast food and stuff like that so i can make food very quickly because that's the pace of making fast food. It's in the name. Yeah. But I hate it. And I'm actually the slowest cook you'll ever see because I like taking my time. Because I've done so much of that and it's not fun to... Work for eight hours straight going really quickly. I never, ever use the ability that I have to go quickly. What if I needed help felling a tree? I actually am not very good at that.

Even though I was a lumberjack, I was mostly doing the extra tedious stuff. What's that? Chipping wood? So for instance, if we have a log on a saw, it's like a bandsaw on a machine that pushes forward and cuts.

I would be like after the cut, moving the wood as it goes and then like stickering the wood so there's gaps so it could dry out that sort of thing so i was doing a lot of like the really tedious boring stuff it was absolutely horrible do not recommend thanks so much everyone sorry about my poor lighting and confuzzlement i'm fully dark now so i can see aj's beautiful face that is our first in our series of soul sheet episodes please submit your soul

sheets where can they send them aj funproblemspod at gmail.com and uh we'll talk to you next time aj oh i keep beginning to ask how do we end this podcast by saying goodbye everyone bye. Music.

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