#52 - Would AEG Publish This?

Music.

And welcome to fun problems the problems of fun i'm peter c haywood and this is the first episode the first real episode we ever had without aj brandon aj was caught in a snowstorm and i think eaten by a leopard there was a whole whole incident that's happening so i have stepped up but fortunately for you i've replaced aj with two people he's such a man he needs two people to replace him and i think i've actually picked two people who are so similar to aj you won't even know that he's not here.

Today, we are doing the second in our Would You Publish This series with AEG. So I'm very honored to have with me today, John Zinzer and Mark Wooten of AEG. How's it going, guys? It's going great. Thanks for having us. Let's jump straight into it. Can one or both of you tell us a little bit about AEG, the question I'm sure you've been asked a thousand times over your long and storied career? Yeah. AEG has been around for 32 years.

We started publishing games in 1995 with Legend of the Five Rings. We started off as a magazine company. I told you all this stuff at dinner, Peter, so I'm not going to give you the long tour of AEG's history. But we started in 1995, and our big game was Legend of the Five Rings. And that game connected us with a gigantic community of very passionate gamers.

And Mark was one of those players who turned his passion for Legend of the Five Rings into the head developing job at Alderac Entertainment Crew. It's a little bit like feeding a stray dog. You just can't get rid of him now. Absolutely. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Peter.

It's okay you're you're from the commonwealth you can take it so john and mark i've been working with you with a game that aj and i have actually signed and so we've gotten to know each other but i don't know that we've ever had this conversation so this this is the conversation that i have with publishers just basically the broad strokes of it is what are you looking for and then i play a little game of sorts right i pick existing published games

and i ask you would you have published this why or why not would you have published this just to try to get an idea of the shape of your catalog is the essential idea. Before we jump into that, when people are submitting, firstly, are you guys taking submissions? Is that a thing that we are doing right now? We are taking submissions. We've just recently opened back up again. We have, this is the first public notice that we are taking submissions. So yes, people can reach us.

You can reach us by submit emailing creative at alderac.com. And those pitches reach me and I go through the stage of letting those people know what they need to do to get deeper into the process. So the goal for this podcast is to get you guys better and more suitable pitches. So on the first note of that, is there anything in your submissions portal that you must or must not have? Like, do you have a player count requirement?

Do you have a length? Are you not looking for party games? Anything broadly like that? We're not looking for adult games. Like, anything blue is like, we're very family. We're making exceptions. We're a blue guy. But yeah, we're just looking for fun games that sort of, like, the games that we enjoy are the games that ultimately end up selling best for our company.

So we can't expect Ready, Set, Bet after Dark anytime soon. No, not after Dark.

So of of the games that you've done let's let's because you guys have been around actually have you guys ever published a game by someone who was born after the company started because i feel like there's not a lot of publishers who could say that probably yeah i think so i think i think that's probably true and we've worked with some young designers recently but i can't i can't i the one i'm thinking of and i don't know for sure if it's true but we did game by remember by hope hope wang

oh yeah hope wang yeah yeah we did he was quite young at the time yeah he had just gone into the military and was doing this he was just about to do a stint in the military so he was like 18 or 19 oh wow was this game yeah and we would have been about 18 or 19 years older i can't i can't like he might be right on the right on the board on the edge but i think that might have been a possibility so i'm going to say that aeg's scope has has shifted and changed and kind of

what you're looking for has altered over the years so i'm going to limit sort of to the last maybe five years or so let's say five to ten years what game that you've published, are you most proud of like what what's what sort of stuff do you make currently that like represents what you're what what you do i know what mark's answer is i'll let him go first.

Well so let's talk about war jess yeah that's fast does it rhyme with um with floor best well well i mean i i think it's very difficult to sort of gain most proud of because it comes from different perspectives i mean i recently did a game with elizabeth hargrave called undergrove and that was fantastic and i really enjoyed doing that because i i co-designed it with her so I'm very proud of that but I think from a pure. Development side of things, I think,

Yeah, Warchest. One of the reasons I'm quite proud of Warchest personally is because it's John smiling because it's a game I had to fight for. I immediately looked at it and thought, wow, this is great. And there were several other people in the company. But I think I wouldn't be doing a disservice, John, if I said you didn't immediately see how great it was.

War chest was not an immediate an immediate hit for me and i think that we ultimately, decided to do it because of your level of passion for that for that game how.

Strenuously you fought to get it on the schedule so people don't know what war chest is to play a abstract with a luck element i want to say like it's not pure abstract it's got some luck to it or random it has a small amount of luck it's it's it's not as much luck based as people think i always i always look on on uh on bga and see what the the skill rating is of the top players right in war chest there are i think several players over

the 700 rating which is usually a pretty good indicator that game is is fairly heavily skill based but abstract sort of classic abstract in your chess category it's a it's a chess style game and and yeah my strategy for uh my actually my strategy for for for winning john over we was we had a big we had a big company get together and his daughter works in the company but she's she's on the sort of finance side of things rather than the game thing so she's not a

big gamer and i i finally said to him i said right if i can convince your daughter that this is a good game will i will i be able to convince you if you can do that yeah so i spent i spent time with taylor and we played a bit and went through it i said so taylor what do you think she's like oh it's good i was like yeah you did it you won so aside from.

No adult games you guys would would be open to a solo you'd be open to a party game you'd be open to a three-hour epic you'd be open to a 10-minute fun time absolutely you guys i think it's safe to say i have one of the broader scopes of all companies out there because you're you're more concerned about the quality of the game than the specifics of the game which we we. Absolutely. I think that that is, I think that is true.

We, we kind of like, we, we've zeroed in on the idea that we, we, we want to do what Ryan calls party mode games, which are games that could play from one to 1000 people with, you know, with, with no issues. And so not specifically party games, and not specifically multiplayer solo games, but somewhere in between. Like Tiny Towns is a game that we play at Big Game Night with a thousand people, and it's just like playing bingo. It's awesome.

Ryan is the co-founder of AEG. Ryan was my original partner back when we did Legend of the Five Rings. But he split off, and when AEG went one direction and Five Rings Publishing went another direction, and I was partnered in both of those businesses, and then we sold Five Rings Publishing to Wizards of the Coast, and he went on a different journey with them, saved Dungeons and Dragons, and did a whole bunch of other things.

So he wasn't the co-founder of AEG, but he certainly was the sort of core partner that took us from being a magazine publisher into a board game publisher or game publisher.

And then big game night is the gen con event that you guys do every year where you get a whole bunch of people in a room to have a lot of fun and tiny towns so i i'm wondering if if you would i was thinking about these questions before we came on and if you had to pick one game that represents you know 2025 2015 to 2025 ag my guess would be tiny towns i realize that you sort of answered war chest but i feel like tiny towns is sort of representative of what you guys do in.

That was, from the outside anyway, you guys kind of had a mandate a couple of years back of like, hey, we're not going to go down the path of 20 games a year. We see a lot of companies doing that. We really want to focus on a few select games and just do those. And so Tiny Towns, I feel like, was almost the inaugural game that started that. It was the inaugural game of the fewer better games catalog, yeah.

And you guys pushed that one really hard for like months and months and months before it came out in a way that if you're doing 20 games a year, you just couldn't afford to. So would you say, Mark seems to have frozen up. I don't know if that's just on my end. Nope, he hasn't frozen. Oh, okay. Just on my end. That's very weird. Hopefully the recording is going yet. So would you say that Tiny Towns is like, not in terms of representative, emblematic,

is that the ideal AEG product? Or is there another one that springs to mind? I think it's probably hard to pick one, hey? I'm not going to pick an ideal game. I think we're really proud. So Tiny Towns and Space Base are a couple of our better selling games. Space Base is my favorite game to play of all the games that we've done. Oh, that's great. I think that Mystic Veil is probably the, you asked the question, which game are you most proud of? I think I'm most proud of Mystic Veil.

Like figuring out how to publish a card crafting game and print on those plastic cards was a journey. It was a journey. I had to go to multiple factories in China and really figure it out. I would say that if we were looking at a weight class that we thought could sell a million copies, I think the Tiny Towns and Space Base are partners at Flat Out Games. They made Calico and Cascadia and were lucky enough to be a publishing partner for their games.

And so they live in that family-level weight class. And we just sort of lose weight and dally in it.

And then we go back up and do complicated games like Thunderstone Quest and Dead Reckoning. Yeah. So, over the years, I've heard a few different things from AEG, and maybe you can coagulate these different thoughts or correct me if these are just outdated sort of submissions ethos. I don't know why I'm being so formal about this. So, I've heard you say in the past that you're looking for games that invent

a new genre of games. Because you guys obviously did Love Letter, and that exploded the micro-game scene. You guys did Mystic Veil. That was, I want to say, the first card crafting game. War Chess was the first abstract game. A lot of people think it's chess. Actually, War Chess came first. It came first, Mark. You are on the correct track. Is that still something that you are prioritizing or even exclusively looking for these days? No, go ahead, Mark.

I don't think we're exclusively looking for games that do that, but we are always on the lookout for games that do that. And Mark has a pretty strong theory that there are certain kinds of games which have, in the current zeitgeist, a better chance to succeed than others. So I'll let Mark talk to you about that. Yeah, I mean, I did a look on BGG to see if I could see any commonality, you know, the look for the perfect game.

But I found that the two categories of game, which seem to have really high numbers of ratings, which is a property for numbers of sales, obviously. Yeah, of course. And also got sort of actual high ratings as well. I defined those into two categories for me anyway, one of which was defining a new genre. So something like Dominion, John and I will always to this day talk about the essence we were at where Dominion was released and how overwhelming it was there.

But I mean, there have been other games that have done something similar going back in time, right? They've defined a particular genre. I think Pandemic did that to an extent as well, right? So.

I think any publisher would tell you that if they could find a game that was really great and was defining a new genre, they would take it. I don't think that, yeah. Well, that's actually one of the interesting things about this series is that publishers don't have like a global rule that they all follow. So we had Joe on with our preview episode, Joe Wiggins from All Play. And there are some hit games that any publisher would be happy to publish.

And he was like, I wouldn't have done that. Like, I would have passed on that. And we might find some today where you're like, oh, actually, you know. Yeah.

Sorry carry on having said that dominion was one that he was like yeah we'd absolutely i think most publishers if they looked at a new game and thought they really liked it and also looked and said nothing like this has ever been done before i think most publishers would tell you that that would be the perfect game i just can't speak to the other category of game that i think i think every few years there is a tableau engine building game so you

built both a tableau and an engine and i i feel like every year every not every year but every couple of years one of those comes out and and is truly great over wingspan terraforming mars like.

In the most recent wonders before that right oh that's true yeah in the most recent episode aj and i sort of went through and tried to work out what the most recent genre defining game was and i made a case for terraforming mars as inventing the genre of big decker cards engine building tableau building uh aj aj was unconvinced but he's not here now so i can just okay i listen as a stand-in for half of the aj i will give you a half a vote towards that being a genre defining

game i still don't understand it i'm not good at terraforming once i mean i have tried to figure out how to play that game and how to make the the engine work and i just have never been able to do it one more question along these lines so the most recent times i've talked to you guys about you know what what is ag looking for you've given me the answer that you actually just said mark which is simultaneously one of the least helpful answers you can get and one of the

most helpful answers you can get which is you are looking for a game that will sell a million copies that that's what you guys want is that is that still a true thing of ag that is a big hairy audacious goal yes we would love to be a company that can that publishes games that sell a million copies. Now, very few games sell a million copies, so it's like, it's, our goal is to build a company that.

If we can do that, that means that games that don't naturally get to a million copies, because you need certain things to happen, in order for that to happen, you'll sell more copies of those games. And so it just means we'll be a better game company for whatever games we decide to publish. It's unhelpful because, like, obviously you want a game that will sell a million copies. It's helpful in that genuinely I look at my list of games I'm pitching and I'm like, oh, this half won't.

And that's that's not a deal breaker for a lot of publishers because they just want to make something cool and weird whereas you guys are like you're aiming for that big big hairy audacious goal okay last question before we get into the game is during the submissions process when you guys have gotten something uh you know you've got your people submitting games oh do you guys require sell sheets that's something i should

have asked earlier so we ask people to send us a a sell sheet and like a two-minute explainer video, right? Like we don't want a long video. And in the video, if you're not pitching us directly, but if you're pitching us directly, we'll ask you, what is the most fun thing that happens in this game? And how often does that thing happen?

If you don't win the game, what are you going to talk about as being the fun experience that you have that's going to bring you back to the table to play again these are great questions it's a great question for john particularly yeah yeah because because he never won i never went you know i surround myself with the most talented people on the planet and so and and mark it's it's a real range of uh and mark i'm off yes uh actually so let me turn those questions back onto

you. Let's use tiny towns as an example. What is the most fun moment in tiny towns and how often do you hit it? Is that the question? Yeah. So that's a great question.

So what is the most fun moment in tiny towns for me? It is, It is that moment when you've got an idea of what buildings you want to build, and then the cubes being called sort of falls into place, and you've got cubes all over your board, and then buildings start to appear because the puzzle starts to come together, and space opens back up again. And from that point forward, Tiny Towns is a game that's supposed to squeeze

your options, right? It starts off with a whole bunch of things you can do. And as you're taking up the space, it gets harder and harder. Cause your own problems in that game. You cause your own problems in that game. But I think about halfway through that game, if you have any building that you get to place after you're about halfway through, gives you that sort of serotonin hit of, okay, I worked it out and I figured out how to make this happen.

And then the big payoff at the end is not, did I win this game, but did I do better than I normally do? So it's one of those games that is great for people who are not the best player in their group, but they can see that they are getting better at solving the puzzle and figuring out how to play the game.

Yeah i think i think and to go to to the other point john made as well is i think i think there's a i think there's a fun payoff because obviously it has two modes time towns there's one where the resources come up essentially randomly and the other one where you can call them for yourselves and there are two different modes but i i think there's actually quite a fun payoff when that all goes wrong for you either by.

Intent of the other player when they're when they're calling them for themselves or when the just the random card flip doesn't quite work out and i think it i think it can create a fun and humorous moment and it's it's one of those things that the game can actually go quite disastrously for you even if you're quite a good player i mean the very best tiny towns players tend not to have it happen but but you can be quite a good tiny towns player and still have things go disastrously wrong that you

know the deck of cards happens to throw three wheat off the top and and the thing is that the the tension and then the release of the tension that you know john talks about serotonin it can kind of work both ways you can get that perfect thing that you needed you're like come on deck i just need glass i just need glass glass or you can have the oh no wheat again and they both kind of feel i'm drowning in wheat yeah i'm drowning wheat and so i i think that's the beauty of tiny towns is it sort

of it feels often feels to me like. You know those things where you can kind of do those underground mazes where you're crawling through little pipes? And it sometimes feels to me like that thing where I've gone through a particularly tight squeeze and I come out into an open space and I'm like, oh, yeah, that was cool. I apologize to people who get claustrophobia because that's what we're talking about.

Peter, do you know what he's talking about? I mean, we don't crawl around in – like, I'm an adult. I don't go crawling around in pipes. So the context you're missing, John, I lived in Canada for a while.

And in the same way as, like, down here they play football. up there they just go go underground and crawling pipes it's just a standard weekend activity that makes that makes sense they're half grab it so it's it's a historical thing for them last time i did it was in france with my then 10 year old son yes but no i i do think it i think that is the thing with tiny towns is it's that that moment whichever way it goes whether you feel like oh no i

mean you know i'm just gonna have to give up or whether you like no i hit the perfect thing yeah right mark you're especially touched on what i would have given as the answer for tiny towns Because I primarily play that game at small play accounts, most likely two, as I do with most games. And we always play the call the number, call the resource one. And so I spend a lot of my game looking at the person's board and being like, what do I want that you really don't want?

You guys have worked me long enough to know I'm just a horrible person. Yeah, I was going to say that's because you're inherently mean. Mark is also a horror. You guys are like, no wonder you like each other because Mark's a horrible person too.

And then the second question i really like because in in the vast majority of games ever made there are more losers than winners like one person will win and if it's only fun for them they're gonna have a bad time so in tiny town and you sort of touched on this in your answer john like what about tiny town is fun even if you lose it makes you want to play again yeah i actually think that it is that that the

the feeling of potential improvement right like people like to get better at, at, at tasks. And I think that the tiny towns gives you a very measurable moment where you're getting better based on what you have done. I'm like, I'm a big golfer. And as soon as I divorced my, my feelings of wanting to be better than the people that I played with and trying to just be better than myself, I think like I love golf even more now, just because of just the challenge of just self-improvement.

So I think that Tiny Towns is amazing for that.

I think that's a feature of most games. We talked earlier about what does a game have to have, but I think almost all games that people play at any level need to have that sense that I'm in some way getting better, unless they're just pure random look games, which people obviously still enjoy.

But by and large, if you're talking about the gamer community or the family gamer community, most people enjoy the fact that they saw a different way of doing something or they sold a different part of the puzzle or they just performed better.

So the question I've spent a very long time getting to is during the submissions process, what's a game that absolutely caught your eye and you were like, yes, this is an AEG game.

So space-based tiny towns what what war chest well for mark it was for mark it was war chest although that wasn't a that wasn't like a traditional like aeg aeg game i would say that the most memorable so for me there's there's two games that stand out i'm going to do i'll talk about point salad first i played point salad and and i just had such a great experience with that product i i basically came back to the team and i'm like this is like one of the best small hard games

that i that that that i have ever that i have ever played my my secret shame is that a i don't like point salad that much i'm close friends with with the flat out crew we get along great i love them to bits i was one of the judges in the year that that was up for carbon edison and i looked at the scores later and i'm fairly sure that i am the reason it didn't win because everyone else loved that game and it just didn't connect with me so i think i accidentally

torpedoed that game it's just not not for me so the fact that it didn't win cardboard as an open the door for us to be able to get that partnership which opened up like so they don't feel so bad i think that helped that helped us you know connect with them as friends and publishers but mark and i made a trip to japan together to go to game.

Market and we had a. Guy his name was tack who was sort of taking us around and to meet designers and and translate for us while we we looked at games and we had a meeting scheduled with hope actually we were going to go see guild hall which we ended up buying from hope and publishing and uh on our way there in a hallway we got introduced to to Seiji Kanai. Right? And like Seiji is like this, like sweet, nice, like useful,

you know, just vibrant person. Then he's like, hey, do you want to play a game? Go into a meeting, we'll come back. And we were like, we couldn't be bothered. We're like, oh, we're on. He says, it'll only take two minutes. And Marco's, oh, okay, great. And he's like, I got your hand. So he made us make a table out of our hand. And then he shuffled up a deck and he started dealing cards to us. And we played like a perfect game of Love Letter.

Everything that makes that game amazing happened during that game where we were playing. We did the stuff, and we were done. And we were like, hey, don't go anywhere. We'll come back and talk to you. And we walked away, and Mark looked at me, and I looked at him, and almost immediately we both said, we're going to buy that game, right? And like, yeah, definitely. We knew that that game was magic halfway through the first minute that we played it. Yeah.

Maybe that's the most emblematic AEG game, although that was a while back. Okay, so let's play a game, boys. Okay.

So the the question is simply would you have published and the answer is not yes it was huge hit we love huge hits but if it came to in prototype form if you didn't know that it was going to be a huge hit is this kind of thing that you would have you would have taken a gamble on, and and and if so if not why not especially so let's start with um the one we always start with which is azul is azul an aeg game yeah i think that so like i'm trying to imagine what the prototype for Azul looked like?

When you look at a game like Azul, part of the thing that makes Azul amazing is the components, right? Yeah. Let's say they brought that and it's just cut out cardboard pieces. Let's say it's a really nice prototype where you're solving that puzzle. If it was themed as Azul in that prototype, maybe. I think I really like Azul. I think that those components take Azul from being a really, really good game to Azul.

It's the tactile movement there. So I would love to say that I could have seen that, but I think there's a chance that if it had just been a cardboard, maybe semi-unthemed game, that we might not have said yes to Azul. I'm slightly further down that path than John is. I would love to say that we would have been smart enough to say yes, but I have a suspicion we would have said no, because. I think Azul's a great game, and we would have loved to sign it.

But I have a suspicion we might have said no. Yeah, what makes Azul sexy is the components. And if they're not there, having worked with AG for a while now, over the course of the last year or two, you guys, I think, maybe of every company I've worked with, the most development-focused, which as a designer is such a wonderful experience. You guys obviously still care about products, still care about components and all that kind of stuff.

But i would say that your strength as a company and feel free to disagree with me because i know that mark's here and we like being mean to him uh is just the the sheer amount of love and care you put into development and so azul is obviously like it's developed like let's let's let's see became like there's nothing to do there so then the question is yeah so i think sophie is is the woman who's running the company that's brilliant she's a genius she

does like no she picks games she yeah she's one of the best pickers in the game industry so yeah next one i have on my list is camel up the racing game for a million players not not a million is camel up an ag game i think we might have said yes to camel up because i can't imagine that you would show up with a prototype that doesn't like that doesn't have like cut out stacking you know little camels i mean i guess if it had just been pieces of paper that stacked

on each other like so again you had chevrons or something surely yeah yeah i i would have to like we were partnered with. Pegasus for a while we've done a number of things with them and so i think there's. Yeah, I think there's a chance that we would have said yes to Camelot. It's definitely not out of scope for you guys. You would have been like, oh, gambling, party game. Well, not party, but, you know, big old racing game.

Camelot is one of those games too, though. I mean, because when you're getting a game pitch, you usually only play a game one time, right? If not.

Our pitch process is like we look at thousands of games when we're looking at games and we only say yes to playing or or to the next level for maybe 150 games and then we end up playing like 40 of them and so i i think that that it camel up if you have a good first play of that game it's a definitive yes but i've played a couple of camel up games if you only played it with two people and you didn't get the camel up experience right so maybe you say no to that game yeah i i've had a game

of camel up that went for two legs because one camel jumped another and it went forward and it went forward and it went forward it was over and so as a designer when i'm pitching i i stack the deck i cheat yeah if i know that there is a chance of having that rough first game i will cheat the hell out of making sure it doesn't happen because you want to show off the game at its best not at its at its worst okay let's let's move away from fancy components

uh flip Flip 7, recent hit, is that an AEG game? I am ashamed to say I have not played Flip 7. But we do... We like those small card games. So... I can teach you all the rules of flip seven in a minute, which is part of the huge appeal. It's a deck of one to 12. There's one, one, 12, 12, et cetera. On your turn, you get a card flipped in front of you and it comes to you, it's blackjack. Hit or pass. If you get two of the same number, you're out.

If you pass, you bank all the points that you have. So if I have 12, 11, 10, then that's 33 points. If I have 12, 12, I get nothing.

If you get all seven sorry if you get seven different numbers then you get an extra 15 points the round ends for everyone that's essentially there's there's a few more like special cards in the deck but that is literally 90 of the rules and this is why it's such a huge hit because i can teach it to you in the middle of an unrelated meeting it's it's really sharp it's just one of those when i was really good yeah uh okay no no go ahead uh skull is the next

on my list so kind of similar area just that kind of light thinky game skull is an extreme have i have ever talked to you guys about above the table and on the table is my like dichotomy of game design so above above the table is skull where the game is not on the table it's me looking at you and trying to work out what you're saying yeah war chest is on the table i would say or the game that we're working on is like 95 on the table five percent above the table so skull Skull

is a pure above-the-table game. Like, there is no mechanics. Not no mechanics in a bad way. The mechanics perfectly facilitate what the game is, which is looking in your eyes and saying, John, you SOB, you are lying to me. I know you are. I think with that description, there's a chance that we would not have said yes to that game. I think that we recently played... Oh my god, it's like I would have said yes to this one with no doubt. The The multiplayer...

Oh, the poker game. Oh, the gang. The gang. The gang. Yeah. And I love poker, and I played the gang, and I had so much fun. I definitely would have said yes to the gang. And the gang is very much like the mind, right? It's such a good experience playing the mind and playing the gang. I don't know if we'd have said yes to the skull, Mark.

Yeah i i'm not sure i i think we might i think we we might not have done it would probably depend how long ago we were shown it because because i think i think things like the gang and oh, what ito sorry ito is another one that's ito and then and then there's the the trick-taking one oh come on it's got out of my head crew the crew thank you the crew yeah i kept wanting to say coup, but yeah the crew i think i think i think games like that have have definitely

got into the consciousness of people and i think if you can come up with a clever one of those yeah i i think yeah we we would say yes in a way that we might not have done three or four years ago yeah oh yeah this is this is about today if someone was pitching that to you today is that a game you would have done yeah interesting so let's move into the co-op uh genre i'm going to assume pandemic is a yes if not that's a fascinating answer pandemic feels

very agy i think it does feel very agy my first pandemic experience was again with mark and you're like i didn't even know this game had a traitor and yet somehow no it was not so like so we we publish a game called. A game like Pandemic, where people have to solve a... I forgot the genre is... Cooperative. Cooperative. Yeah, our cooperative game. And we have a house rule for that game that basically says, if the communication system is off, you cannot give advice to other players.

Which I think just should have been in the rules for the game, because my experience with Pandemic was Mark figuring out how to not have the pandemic happen and telling all the people at the table what to do and being so right that we just had to watch Mark play solo. So I'm like, yay, we won! We stopped the pandemic! Mark won! Hooray! Mark won! So, I mean, I think we would have said yes to Pandemic because it's a first of its kind.

So we haven't really talked much about theme today. How much of a consideration is that for you guys? Are you theme agnostic? Are you theme dependent? Are you theme in the middle? For me, I feel like, and this is interesting, having said how much I like this abstract game of war chest, but for me, I do think there is a very strong tie-in between theme and gameplay. So I think the game needs to be authentic for what it is.

Um my big my biggest takeaway from this was i my wife got more into games she would always describe herself as a non-gamer and so she she generally like you know like family end games and at the back end of the pandemic we've got some local friends and over game night i said i said uh, how do you fancy playing a game of brass? And I wanted Liz to make up the numbers, and so my argument was, oh, this is set in Birmingham, which is where she grew up, or near Birmingham.

And this non-gamer sat down, played brass, and now loves brass, I mean, loves brass, and he's good at it as well, and has become much more of a gamer, and has dipped her toe into things like Great Western Trail, and let's go to Japan.

You know we play wingspan or all these that's great and games that she probably would never have played were it not for the fact that she's she started playing brass and she started playing brass only because she could essentially look at the board and go oh you know that's that's dudley and that's wolverhampton and that's you know yes and all these kind of things and it was a real light bulb moment for me when somebody who professes to be a non-gamer can

sit down and play i mean this wasn't a light game this was brass yeah oh yeah and brass is a fabulous game i love brass but it's not the kind of game you would traditionally expect your you know your non-gamer wife to sit down it's not a game game it's not a game game not the game and so that that said to me if if the game's mechanic is authentic with the theme and the theme is something that interests people then that's a trifecta right you've got the scene the mechanic

and the authenticity of the two and i think it i think that is important and war chest even as an abstract game does that tiny towns does that i think i think that that's the thing is if you look at all the games we've talked about you would always say oh they do that yeah so okay aeg exists because we made simulation games right like we knew we wanted to make collectible trading card games and we whiteboarded out all of these ideas and we ended up making legend of the five rings first because

as I said, let's make a game about samurai. But Legend of the Five Rings was... It is a samurai warfare game that was inspired by the idea of making a game about samurai. Doomtown was a cowboy Wild West game about building a town and having gunfights, inspired by the idea that we wanted to simulate that moment. 7th Sea was a game about being pirates and sailing the seven. Those games were designed theme first. Let's make a game about pirates and make this feel as piratey as possible.

So... I'm going to... I'm going to undiplomatically suggest a game, which is Charcuterie. Have you guys played this? I know of it. Charcuterie, and I hope that this doesn't offend anyone, I don't think is the strongest game mechanic. I think it functions. But I think I saw that Kickstarter, and the moment I finished reading the word, I got to charcute and hit back.

Because my girlfriend loves food games. She will play any food game, and it's such a perfect, like, you are arranging all the meats and cheeses and fruit on a charcuterie board. So in terms of, like, it has that audience, and it hits that theme really hard. And I'm, again, I love it. I bought a copy. It's not a diss. I don't think that mechanics are the strength of that. Is that an AEG game? Or are the mechanics so cool to you guys that you have to love the gameplay,

regardless of what it's doing thematically? I...

Would hope that we have evolved to a place where we wouldn't over try to over develop a game like that we have we do have a very development centric company and our development team and and the other spinoff people who who are associated with development they just they they really want to grind down on on making a game as as as perfect play-wise as possible And so a game that you described that way, I think we could bring in to develop and then just hammer ourselves trying to

figure out how to make the game itself better. When sometimes a game is a more amazing product if it hasn't been, I'm going to use the term, overdeveloped, right? Like if you haven't tried to take shape off all the edges of the game and make the gameplay absolutely perfect, you have to take a step back and look at the game for what it is and say, this game is a lot of fun because I get to do these things and build the charcuterie board.

And every time we try to make the game mechanics better i haven't played it so i don't know if that that came like whether your analysis is correct or not but when sometimes when you try to make a game better you take away some of the charm that makes that game a great product right.

So i i guess the question is if if someone brought you and by the way any designers watching this don't make make your game great but if someone brought you a clearly amazing product like a game where you look at it and you're like oh i know that this is going to sell 100 000 copies but the gameplay isn't there is that is that you're like oh cool we're going to do it we'll take definitely like like so our definition of that would be this is this will be a great product,

i i've had so many conversations with mark about this i think that that that because of, because of how we are evolving as a game company and we're starting to work with out-of-house developers, my guess is that we would say, this game is great right now and we don't need to do too much to it. Let's try and see if we can improve the gameplay. But as it stands right now, we think this game is a winner. And so let's not develop the win out of this, the joy out of this game.

Okay, next one on this. have you guys played decrypto yeah i've played decrypto is that an ag game it's very hard.

Is that is that an ag game if someone brought you decrypto today is that a yes or is that a no, i think it i think it would be i mean today i think it would be i mean it i think you know of the sort of big word-based games that we've seen i mean you you saw code names in japan was just just before korea after korea yeah and korea korea rather yeah and and i mean you without knowing that it had been released i think went over and said how do i buy this.

Yeah so the the story is i was i was meeting a bunch of game designers in korea they had a game store and there were like 20 people that showed up to show me their games and they were rotating designers around these tables and there was one table that wasn't moving that people were just laughing and having a good time at. And after I'd seen all the games, I said to the guy like.

When do I get to see that game? Right? And they're like, oh, no, no, that's you know, that game's already been published. You should go over and play it. And so I played one round of that, and I didn't sign any games from that meeting because I was like, wow, that game is genius. And it was just like a total palate cleanser.

Like, I was like, I played a bunch of really nice games today that I was thinking about signing, and then I played this game, which in my opinion was obviously going to be great.

And that was before it was, right? It was like at the beginning especially when i was taking submissions which which my company doesn't do anymore i i made a rule of every unpub every metatopia every prototype con to play a published game for exactly that like you you play seven unpublished games and the eighth one might be a six out of ten but by comparison it's an 11 because you're just so used to seeing like half ideas

which is part of the process and very normal okay so the crypto would be a yes i was i wasn't sure about that one i think that's an interesting one that one's a 50 50 i think for market would be a yes I think there might be a little debate in-house about that, because we still are trying to publish a low number of releases each year. And that one is a hard sell, in many ways. It's obviously brilliant. I think everyone here will acknowledge how brilliant it is, but it is the hardest

game in my collection to teach. I've talked about it before. Okay, here's one that is a little bit biased by the fact that we're in the year 2025.

But if someone brought to you today Scrabble, is that a yes or a no? Assuming it doesn't exist in the market already oof wow.

I mean I think it might be a no for AEG because I don't know if we would I don't know if it would be our kind of game but I, so Scrabble doesn't Scrabble's a wow that's a really interesting one would be one of those stories where we said we said no to Scrabble, I think it might be I think it might be so Scrabble is interesting because to me I still very occasionally play Scrabble, but a lot of the times when we've talked about the fun, we've talked about that

kind of endorphin hit and that sort of moment. Pulling the blank out of the back. Yeah, Scrabble doesn't have that many of those. It's much more cerebral, right? Right. And I wonder if that would put us off. Yeah, I think we would say no. I don't think we have a lot of crosswords puzzle people here at our company. And so, like, there hasn't been any word games that have really, like, They have just drawn us in and said, we need to publish that.

Let me throw you a similar, but kind of more modern example, which is if Tim Fowlers didn't publish himself, but he brought you paperback. Is that an AEG game? It's so themed, maybe. Yeah, I was really drawn to the whole idea of paperback. And I thought that is, at the time, I thought that would be a game that we might know how to sell. Because it is well-themed and just a fantastic product. So I think maybe I would have said yes to paperback.

I've not told this story before, but the year after paperback came out, I hadn't heard of it because I was living in Canada. and someone brought me, as a publisher, someone submitted to me a deck-building word game and it was just the letters, so no special abilities. And I was like, this is brilliant. This is the future of gaming. And I went to sign it when someone was like, Peter, you should play paperback. And I was like, no, it's already been done and frankly better.

So I had to let the poor designer know, not only was I not signing his game, but no one was signing his game because it's already been done. He had no idea it was a parallel development.

Let's go back in time once more. Uno. If someone in 2025 brought you Uno, Has that even got the potential of being an AEG game? So, if somebody brought me Skipbo, yeah, which is obviously an UNO derivative. I mean, I have played hundreds and hundreds of games of Skipbo with family and friends, and I... Skipbo for sure. I'm not sure about Uno, but I would have been yes for Skipbo for sure. Yeah. I mean, we said we published 10 from FlatOut.

And so I think that there is a universe where our best-selling small card games came first. Right? We did Love Letter, set that off to the side. It's sort of the legendary product. But we did Point Salad and we played Point Salad and we knew that that game was going to be a hit. And then it was a big, a big hit. And the follow-up games that we did did really well, but they didn't do as well as Point Salad. So we sort of lost our taste for the small card games.

But I think that it may be on us, right? That we were not. Hungry for them. Well, we weren't aggressive about looking for that feeling that we had when we played Point Salad, and we were just looking to continue publishing with Flat Out and putting out games that fit that mold. And I think that another part of our process is now to talk about how we feel after we play a game.

And if we think that that game, that quality that has a game wants to bring you back to play it over and over again, we look for that. Gotcha. I could keep going for an hour, but I just noticed the time and I did promise not to take up too much of your day. any final thoughts on the kind of games you're looking for, submissions process, anything we've talked about today. Well, I think that it's important for everybody to know that we're not going to a lot of conventions right now.

So we don't do convention pitch sessions with designers. And we need a lot of designers through our creative inbox. We had a designer Facebook page set up a few years ago. So before I left L.A., we rented a house in L.A., which became AEG's central gaming hub. And we would fly designers in, and they would stay at the house, and we'd fly staff in, and we'd play games there all the time. It was like a gaming mecca. It was the best setup I think AEG's ever had for being a game publisher.

And because it was in LA and there's such a big community of game designers, it was like a clubhouse. People were always coming over and playing games. And we we COVID caused us to have to sort of shift our mindset and we got out a lot less and we started taking pitches on TTS and other places and we've gotten really good at.

Playing games on TTS or any of the other apps that signers use to play their games, and And having conversations about what this game actually looks like in person, and then getting the game from designers and actually playing it in person. But that's kind of our process right now still, is that we look at games and we see the video and we decide whether... Because we're all over the country. Like we are like super virtual business.

And a whole other country as well. And we're all over two countries. We're all over multiple countries. We've got people in France and Greece and all over the place. Greece, UK, Canada. Yeah. So go ahead. Their email address was creative at. Alderac.com. Alderac.com. And we'll put that in the show notes. When people email you, you want a soul sheet attached and a link to a video, Is that their request? Self-sheet and a two-minute video.

I don't want to watch a seven-minute video. We don't want you to teach us the game in the rules. We are looking to be wowed by the elevator pitch for this product. If you have answers to those questions and you give us a reason why your game stands out, we'll reach out to the designers and say, hey, You know, now we'll do a quick call and just have a conversation with you.

One of the other questions that we like designers that we've not worked with before is we want them to introduce themselves to us. Like, Peter, you're a perfect example of, you know, designers are... I'm a perfect example of a designer. You're right. You are a perfect example of a designer. Every designer has like, okay, you bought that game. I've got seven other games to show you. Yes, you guys passed on a game, and I'll let you know there's now a bidding war between three publishers on it.

I don't doubt that to be true. That's going to be your Scrabble story. He's going to make us come back and do this in three years' time. Listen, our Scrabble story is King of Tokyo. Oh, yeah. We were pitched King of Tokyo, and we said, yeah, no, we did that. We pitched the year before we did Smash Up, and we're like, yeah, I don't know if we.

That's like we're making these sort of crunchy gamery games that's not really for us and then we cut out smash up and I was like yeah, yeah so I think that that if you send us in a thing like it's it's it's like a video to try to get on the TV show survival right like like just wow us a little bit but well with your personality with your with just the key ideas in your game I think that a number of designers don't realize.

That the world has turned into this place with a bunch of really, really good game designers. And so game companies are sort of looking for the whole package now, right? It's not just like finding that fantastic, perfect game. It's finding people that you will have long-lasting friendships and relationships with and that you can work together to try to figure out how to make the games that you publish as big as they possibly can be.

I will say of the various publishers I've worked with, AEG is right at the top of the stack for being designer-focused and designer-inclusive. And you are not a company who takes the game and is like, okay, cool, go away now. We'll come back in two years with a finished product. You guys are really involved with the designers, and it's been a great experience. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. Anyone who wants to submit to AEG, I strongly recommend it.

They are one of my favorite companies in the world to work with. And thank you again. All right. Thank you, Peter. That's all from us. Bye. 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.