#53 - Critter Kitchen Design Diary

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

Hayward. And I'm Alex Cutler. I mean, AJ Brandon. This is our second episode ever without AJ. Yesterday, I recorded with AEG doing a part of our publisher series, and AJ had a snowstorm. Today, he said, I just don't like Alex. I could do it on this call, just don't want to. Today, we are doing a design diary for Critic Kitchen, which is a co-design between me and Alex. And we used to do design diaries on this podcast all the time.

We sort of stepped away from it. But I wanted to come back with Critic Kitchen because I think we learned so much from making that. And there are so many actionable lessons that we can talk about. So without further ado, let's jump into it. Alex, what is Critic Kitchen? Oh, Alex Cutler is a designer. He's been on the show before. He'd killed the podcast for two years, notoriously.

We will not elaborate any further.

Yeah so critter kitchen peter and i are co-designers of this game it was on kickstarter i guess about 18 months ago ish from cardboard alchemy it's the publisher and it is just now the creator of flamecraft and andromeda's edge same same artist as flamecraft same publishers then craft and drama's edge it is fulfilling right now this podcast is being recorded april 1st oh yeah oh we should have done something for april fools i should have been like hey it's me aj,

the joke is i like that i don't actually want to do this episode the end you thought you were wanted just like our whole friendship yeah so it's it's fulfilling now and it'll be in store sometime this month i think and it is a game that was kick-started and peter's probably talked about a lot on the podcast but since we're focusing some of my co-hosts would say since we're focusing the whole episode on it should we do like a brief overview of the game or do

you just yeah um you If you do thematic, I'll do mechanical, which is sort of out of here. So Critter Kitchen is a cozy adjacent game, at least in terms of aesthetic and art style. We are all critter chefs in the town of Bistro Bay. We are gathering ingredients, putting them together to fulfill little recipes, and also please a critic who's coming into town at the end of the game.

It is competitive, but because of the art and the low stakes of cooking versus saving the world or something, it does tend to sort of feel cozy.

The core mechanism of the game is that everyone has the same three workers we never quite found the right word for it but workers is the closest thing everyone has a mouse who's a teeny tiny little meeple who wherever they go they're going to get the first pick but they're so small they can only carry one thing everyone's got a lizard who will who will get the second pick but can only carry two things and everyone has a big

boar who can who goes last but carry three things yeah in our relationship i'm the big boar yeah. I'm a zoo chef. That central tension. I've talked on the show before about how, for me, I need a central mechanism from which everything grows. That was very much the core of Critic Kitchen. Every decision we made came from, how do we emphasize this? Because it was an interesting choice. Basically, you've got an array of options. What do I want the most?

What do I care about the least or what do I want the most of is essentially the way to play it.

Even when I'm teaching it, tell people look out the board whatever you want most send your ball there oh sorry send your send your mouse there whatever you want second most send your lizard there whatever you want your ball most whatever you want third most send your ball there and it obviously doesn't always work out that that's what you get but that's just a nice framing to which you can understand the whole game this is a bit of like a larger i don't

know that i want to get into this but like i like the idea of there being sort of levels to play right where the game is very very simple your first time out if you just do that what do i want the most send this thing and there's all kinds of depths of strategy that emerge as you go along but it's very accessible just on that first level pass of okay like even if i don't know anything else i can do this and get something good and as alex mentioned

at the end of the game you serve a critic and the critic only wants one of seven different food types in the game they only want to take one bite of each so you want to get the highest quality so the ingredients that you're gathering are ranked in quality from two to seven with seven being the best and well not ranked but like they have their different quality values of two being the lowest seven being the highest you can also get soup which is one but it is a

wild so it uses any ingredient but it's the lowest value and at the end of the game you want the best stuff for the critic but only one of each and over the course of the game you serve these challenges and you want to just put as much food into these challenges so you sum the total so if it was a challenge that required cheese bread and meat you put as much cheese bread meat in and you try to hit a total of 21 over the course of like a bunch of cheese a bunch of meat a bunch of bread.

And that quantity versus quality, we'll get into that later, but again, it's all leaning into that central mechanism. So, Alex, this is a game where you came up with the idea, but also I came up with the idea. I like the pure shareiness of the concept. Do you remember the conversation? So I remember the first time we discussed what would eventually become Critter Kitchen, because like many games, this started in a very different place than it ended up.

You were visiting, and we were going to a board game cafe here in Raleigh, North Carolina. And i was telling you about as as often co-designs start i was telling you about an old design idea of mine that i'd never really made sense of in my head and we're just talking through it to see we can come up with something together and the idea i had was you know the core dna of it was actually not crazy different from what critter kitchen became but the idea was we're running.

Taverns in a town that's been destroyed by like a tornado or something and we all are trying to build a new tavern and whoever finishes first will get to be the new one, right? Because you get all the business. And my idea was that you had three different workers, a small guy, a medium guy, and a big guy. And there was a secret selection of what place you wanted to go to. And then at those locations, after everyone reveals, basically.

I think in the way I initially conceptualized, it was just like, if a big guy's there, they get the thing and everyone else doesn't.

At one point it was mouse, cat, dog, and the dog scared away the cat and the cat scared away the mouse yeah that gosh it's had so many versions yeah i don't even remember that well it's funny you tell that story because my memory of it's quite different which is the i i think i think you're right i think your version is more accurate than my memory of it but i remember the the one of the things that you pitched was this idea of like some people the mice and

some people are the cats and some people are the dogs and so you were trying to like get to a certain place like you said that came later that's the one that eventually became cat and mouse which eventually became drop bear right right that was i remember exactly when that was that was a way later that was okay i'm going to like skip ahead a little bit here and we'll come back and circle to it but that idea that peter and i then worked on became

something called fairy city and fairy city if you'll recall peter started to get very convoluted and complicated well that's the next part of the story so right and then that then when we split that that's when the cat house thing came up so so alex pitched this idea of the tavern building one two three basically and i just So like this core idea is brilliant. And this is what I love about working with Alex is that his ideas are brilliant.

No joke. Just genuinely, I think you're a board game savant and idiot savant, even, I would say. Thank you. I would go so far to say, no joke. Just an insult in the middle of it. It's so hard to say sincere things because then a joke pops in your mind. You're like, well, I have to say the joke now. Of course. I understand. Yeah. You have the same pains. So Alex pitched this idea. And honestly, I think he was pitching it as something even lighter than CriticHitchin.

But I, at the time, was really into this idea of making heavy euros like heavy euros and alex and i've been working on for a while our greatest unpublished game which is called providence and providence is a huge three-hour euro it's big beautiful game we cannot find a publisher it is an unpublishable amazing game we were finalists in the carbon nursing award for that and we got these messages from the judges being like we just wanted to play this all weekend good luck and then sits in

nothing but rejection yeah uh no we had one publisher make an offer, but we didn't like the offer and we didn't like the publisher. So we passed, but I was in, I was in this heavy Euro space. I don't know if I was trying to prove myself or if I was just like, this is what games should be. So I took this quite simple, lovely idea and we spent a year and a half, maybe like crafting this monstrous game around it. And I think of various points in my career as having leveled up.

And this was definitely a point before I leveled up where if something was convoluted, I was just like, yeah, that's fine. It's just convoluted. Like, that's just a thing that games sometimes do. And this is something I see. We talk about this a lot on the podcast when we're doing the Daniel Dot Games episodes, especially like so many designers will settle for like, yeah, it's incredibly convoluted. That's just what it is. And the more I design, the more I'm like, no, you can you can fix that.

You can improve that. so fairy village okay i was just going to say i think in terms of like actionable actionable advice for designers right that is absolutely one of the best places to try and hone your craft is when you hit those those barriers where you sort of shrug your shoulders and say like that's that's good enough so let's focus on this we'll come back to that that good enough one because yeah there's there's a lot of juice to be

squeezed out of those i think we've had some of our best moments solving problems that didn't really need to be solved but then when you end up with something that's so elegant at the end it feels worth it this is day three of alex and i'm meeting every day this week, and so monday we had a three-hour call where we solved a bunch of those problems and yesterday we executed and found a lot of them were broken and re-solved

them in better ways and then today we're doing a podcast and tomorrow we're diving back in so it's an exciting week for me so the.

Yeah yeah the the when when you see a play tester not understanding a mechanism even after you've explain it to them twice the mechanism is always the problem not the play tester and this is a lesson i refuse to learn on village uh on fairy village which is what we're calling it so fairy village was basically a i won't go into too much details but it was a more pure worker placement game you had a little map of the city behind your behind your sheet and you'd put where all your workers

were and it wasn't just one of each you had like a bunch of goblins who were little and a bunch of humans which were the middle and a bunch of trolls and so you were sort of it's sort of like bidding. It was more like blind bidding worker placement.

But then it had to resolve in a certain order and it was just so clunky it was so clunky and unintuitive and a nightmare yeah the the map of the city looked like one of those little family circus cartoons with a line of like where the kids jumping around the house yeah and and to make up for the goblins being so weak they could move to a later location so every time location was resolved every time a worker placement space was resolved you had to

resolve the next like it was just it was a mess the one thing i really liked about the game i'll just flag is that we had the three strengths of workers trolls humans and goblins and trolls were undefeatable except for by elves and elves were like the equivalent of what became zoo chefs in critter kitchen they were like one-off hireable workers who were not that good except that they could chase away trolls and so i just liked that

scissor paper rock hireable fourth party i just thought that was that was nifty so okay i was just gonna expand on it a little bit more which was if the core of it was a bit cumbersome and we never solved that problem. But the. Race to have these short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, I think we never quite made them work in that game. But it was almost a direct one-to-one translation. I don't know if you remember some of the short-term, long-term missions that we came up with. I do not.

I know they remember the stuff, but I don't remember. Yeah, well there was that whole pyramid thing at the top where you could go for any of the ones that were revealed and then when they chip away it reveals new ones. But There were these medium-term goals that basically became the challenges in Cruter Kitchen. And then there was sort of long-term, I forget what we called it, but there was a different.

Something in the world each time like a ruler of the thing or that like gave you everyone a mission or constraint or something that eventually really shouldn't have any of this that's crazy we never got it working so it's we never even like oh it's played it was all theory crafting right right which is this is this is not good advice this is not good advice for designers but like peter and i are we have as peter likes to say we've leveled up to the point where we can we

can theory craft through bad ideas fast enough you don't actually need to put them on the table don't don't do that yeah don't put it all on the table so we we banged our head against this wall for i think probably a year six months it was a long amount of time and then we decided to take a break from it we doubled down on providence we got that into a really nice spot various stuff happened i think i think i moved countries in that time like it was it was a tumultuous

year basically uh this is all pre or during pandemic too and oh that's right because yeah i came and stayed with you during the pandemic, in early 2021 and just stayed with you for like six weeks so i bubbled for two weeks and then came and stayed with you six weeks then flew home and bubbled for two weeks to like avoid the the virus i don't know if you remember the coronavirus it was a big deal i've never heard of that what is it yeah no maybe it didn't come to raleigh except

when i brought it yeah and so we we had we had a big break from that game and basically you you run into enough banging your head-against-the-wall problems that you realize, I do anyway, that the core of the game isn't there. And again, this is something I think about all the time as a designer, especially when playing other people's prototypes. The question I'm always asking as a playtester, and you've seen me do this a

million times, is what are you trying to make? What's your goal here? And I don't mean as a. And you get the most interesting answers. I talked to her before about how Emily Vincent, this wonderful designer from Boston, I think she's from, before she started, I didn't even have to ask her. She's like, okay, guys, just so you know, what I'm trying to do here is make a board game that gets you excited about experimenting with cooking.

And I was like, okay, this is not an answer I've ever received in my time playtesting. Strap in. And so the answer of what we're trying to do there just wasn't clear. And more than that, the core tension of the game wasn't clear.

The core structure of the game wasn't clear and the more unclear that is the more sort of fractured the the center of that is the more unstable the tendrils of the game become because you can't trace them back to a really clear core and so we had just gone to unpub 2022 which uh was in baltimore and we were driving home because the driving distance from your house do i just so people have context you want to give your full address in ssn sure yeah april fool's

and can you just put a long beep sound right so that was a six hour drive it was a lengthy drive it was a long drive yeah and as we've talked about on the podcast before we do our best designing either in long car rides or hot tubs or or walking or walking around the neighborhood so we had a long drive and that was a really exciting convention i just signed fiction it's been like a really good time and so one or both of us said hey let's revisit

fairy city and i mentioned before that i tend to level up. I can point to moments in my life where I've leveled up as a designer. And this is the point where I was like, oh, this is so obvious and so actionable. A, not everything needs to be a big, heavy euro. That's a really useful lesson to learn. And B, it's really important or it's really useful to to work out what the game is trying to be and lean into that. And this idea of the 1, 2, 3, 3 beats 2, 2 beats 1, etc., was not trying to

be Providence. It was not trying to be Arp Nova.

It was just trying to be something more light and fun, as well as that, I've talked about this on the podcast before, Fiction was the game where I sort of Alexified one of my designs, because working with you on various projects made me realize how important, and maybe you can even speak to this a little bit, it is to have those little fun non-mechanical elements so fiction you need a word of five you need a card of five letter words and it could have just been

a list instead i made it public domain novels with all the five letter words highlighted and the back of the card was the cover of the book it does zero things mechanically but a million things as a product so this is something that i think you are idiot savant about do you want to talk about you keep putting the Sorry, I know you don't like the word savant. This is a thing that you...

Do you want to speak to this? Because I think this is one of your real strengths as a designer, and I think we could learn from it. Specifically in the context of Critter Kitchen or just in general? In general, and then maybe zoom into Critter Kitchen. So I think... I think you have a passion for this, which is really interesting.

I do. And I think that it's also something that is... And I don't mean... I don't know how, I want to say the word easy, but I don't know if that's just because I've been thinking about it so long, but it's something that I feel like is one of the easiest things that you can do for a low relative amount of effort to improve the game significantly. Let's say low cost things, because I think that's slightly different from easiest. Yeah. I don't mean money cost, I mean like cognitive cost.

Right, because if you think about it, any of us who are designing a game.

Even if you get to the point where you're really happy with the game, you're spending hours and hours sort of if you're making it better it's it's it reaches diminishing returns right you you the first 80 of the game you can get to in maybe like five hours and then the next 10 is another five hours and the next two percent is great like you're always chasing that dragon of like how do i make this the best possible game but in

terms of making it something that people want to play and that publishers want to publish and that stores want to sell there are dramatic things you can do that are totally outside of the column of design just in terms of either the physical bits or thematic integration or just, you know, product hooks like with fiction that it's basically just brainstorming the ideas. And like, yes, it helps to have done it in the past and it's a skill you can

develop as anything else. But I would definitely encourage anyone listening who has a game they've designed that they're happy with the design and they're ready to start pitching it. Before you take that next step to pitch it, just take, you know, half an hour just to sit down and be like, when I picture this game on a shelf or someone opens up the box, before anyone has played a single rule that I've written, what is something

that makes them want to play the game? What is something that makes them want to play the rule book? And if the pitch is good enough, if the hook is good enough, it could be that. But there are plenty of games that are very basic games that sell like hotcakes in stores because they have an interesting piece of packaging. Or you can look on the back of the box and you see a component you've never seen before. I had a game called Don't Skip Leg Day that came out from Pandasaurus.

It's a pretty basic game. It's sort of like Sushi Go mechanics with a twist. But we packaged it in a shaker bottle, like a protein shake shaker bottle. And so it got into Target on the back. Weird packaging. It's unusual packaging. And that has nothing to do with the game. Do you want to talk about Expansity a little bit? Because I know that was a big driving force in that. I'm sure. So Expansity was my first game. I don't know if the camera captures it. There's pixel art of it on the wall

behind me. No, unfortunately not. The the game is a city building game which is a genre that i really like so you know both in video games like sim city and in board games and it could have just been tiles right it could have been cardboard tiles that stack up and i think it might have gotten signed based on, it's a solid mechanism the game the game's fine it's good you know there's like now 10 years later there's stuff i would do differently but it's no way you like

to say that you've got like what like an 18 month window where like you paid everything before that for me i'll i'll stretch it to like five years so it's older than five years and so there's things i went to and i was like get out of the house you're done so the game's fine and i think it might have gotten signed if it was just like you're you're you're putting cardboard tiles stacked up or something but what.

I had in my, the vision I had for it was, we're building a city, I want you to actually be able to see the city on the table when you finish the game. And when I say see the city, I mean a three-dimensional city. So my first prototype, like the very first time I'd ever touched a table was Legos, like building towers. And then as I iterated and evolved, I started doing 3D printing.

And then the final version does indeed have these very nice, it almost looks like those math cubes, the counting cubes you can stack up, they've got like a little dock.

And so when you finish playing the game you've built the sort of three-dimensional city that actually has character and charm to it and there are different colors and everything aren't they so you've got this like multi-colored am i missing no it's different player colors yeah and so then all together it sort of paints this picture and you know the tiles themselves instead of it just being like a square tile you're building on i i insisted when they were doing the art direction like

okay but i want you to make the edges of the tile have a city streak so that when you put them together it looks like the grid of the city it doesn't nothing gameplay wise but it just right you know has that vibe so i think choices like that can go a long way for for making games into products i feel like this is fairly intuitive for you so maybe this is not an easy question to answer but like is is there a way into that that you can recommend for designers a way into that

style of thinking yeah or like a starting point or i mean because you often will come in having worked with you from coming with a vision and it's like cool we just execute alex's vision and we're there but how do you what's the step before that ayahuasca yeah i don't think there's i don't think there's much of a way around just needing to to live in it for a while i think yeah it's something that you can learn right and part of that learning process is is looking at lots of other games

seeing what sells well seeing what people gravitate towards i know when you and aj had your podcasts about. The episode about product and him as a store owner, which boxes people gravitate towards, I think that same logic applies to when a game is on the table and what are people coming up to and playing and seeing. I did a screenwriting course about five years back, and the lecture was really interesting. I learned a lot from it. And one of the most interesting pieces of advice he gave was,

basically, are you a character person or a plot person? And let's just assume that's a true dichotomy for the sake of this. So are you a mechanics person or a product person in board games? I am a mechanic person. I don't think anyone would argue that. I am so obsessed intricately with mechanics. And his advice was, cool, focus entirely on product.

Because i'm a mechanics person the mechanics will happen the the product stuff won't unless i force myself to focus on it so with screenwriting i'm such a structure plot person that i took that advice and the next thing i worked on was just all character character character and sure enough by the end of it it had like this airtight plot because i can't help myself it's like forcing yourself to eat your greens because you're gonna eat the dessert and

the meat no matter what but you have to make yourself eat the greens so if you're not naturally product driven it might be worth thinking like cool starting from that start from products start from products start from products and then if you're a mechanics person like me the mechanics will come and i think it's also i'm not i'm not sure if i'm going to phrase this eloquently but it's not a first do one then do the other i think you can

get into a lot of trouble like if you design this whole perfect mechanically sound game and then the end you that's when you start thinking about how could this be a product yeah and i think if you start thinking about a product and then you get and then you get locked into what the product is and that doesn't allow you to go outside mechanically i think it has to be an iterative back and forth right so you know with with expansity i

had the idea for i guess you would say the product first because i had.

A vision of a city builder game where you were doing a 3d city yeah but then before i got too deep in the weeds on that i started testing mechanics and then those mechanics inform product and the product informs more mechanics and i i think of the finished product on the table as part of the design process not an afterthought to it and i think if you want it to feel really integrated it has to be that the lake day one is an example of one where it's not at all like that that was not part

of the design process right that was a nice happy accident but it's also a lighter gate i think with with printer kitchen you know we knew at the time of i'm going to jump ahead a little bit later but At the time of signing it, we knew the publisher, Cardboard Alchemy, was a company that was big into deluxe Kickstarters and extra bits and bling. And that freed us up, you know, design process-wise of like,

oh, pie in the sky, we can do anything we want with this. And then it's up to them to say no, right? And that was very liberating when you know that the final product can be whatever you want it to be. Now, that's a unicorn situation. You're not going to get that with every publisher. So it's not necessarily actionable advice, but it's something where... I would say there are almost no publishers that want to make a boring, bland-looking game and don't care about product. Right.

Outside of the driest of dry Euros, which are selling, you know, I don't know. I don't want to throw any names out there under the bus, but you know, the very, very, like, it's just cardboard in a box. War games tend to be in that kind of way too. Sure, war games, right? They're not looking for a gimmick to get people to pick up the box in the store because their audience is built in for gimmicks, right? Whereas for most of us, I think, listening to this and designing, our audience is.

Hopefully everybody you know like a lot of people it's probably as many people as will give us money yeah and so since publishers are wanting to sell a lot of copies of the game within reason a publisher should want to do little hooks that make a good product i know you just had joe on to talk about like how all play likes to have that one like prestige bit right yeah and and that you know it's it's not that they're going full deluxe like cardboard alchemy

but they're still like okay what is like this one thing we can do to draw someone in and they're still component oriented just at a different at a different scale at a different level yeah and so i think as a designer if you can go in with even just that one bit that one thing you know.

I really liked what joe said in that part yeah so i think that's great advice as a designer local to you who i think is the undisputed king of this julio julio like every time you play any of his prototypes there is a prestige bit that your mouth waters when you want to play it and and he gets he gets a lot of game signed because of that like i mean he's a solid designer very lovely fellow but he is i think the king of bits so i'm

gonna go back to that conversation in the car because i i think about that conversation a lot because over the course of the next three hours or however long we talked about it we designed close to 90 percent of what credit kitchen became before the expansion so like all the fundamentals are there and i'm curious if you remember your specifics because i i distinctly remember that we started from that like one two three you've got three workers one is one one is

the the best one one is the second best one is the third best and at the time do you want to talk about the the ogre and the goblin and the sure so at this point it was still fairy city adjacent and it was so generic magic market was the was the magic market so it's still generic fantasy so we the idea was like you have a goblin you have a human or an elf and a truck.

And uh we were still stuck on the troll is the big powerful one who muscles ever yeah so we knew we wanted to be like a go fetch ingredients kind of thing and we're like okay so the troll the troll can muscle everybody out of the way but it's got a small little troll brain so it can only remember one item so so it goes first the big guy goes first but it can only remember one thing and then like human can remember two

things and it goes second and the goblins get stuck at the end but they're very clever so they can remember things and i don't remember this i remember circling forever just trying to find a replacement for human because this didn't make sense that a human can only remember two things right you're like a dryad i think yeah yeah and this is actually an important thing i think in our creative partnership is that things need to make sense which sounds very obvious but we increasingly

don't compromise on it has to make sense that that's one of my big bugaboos because that's that's one of the things that bothers me when i'm playing a published game that has bits that feel hand wave um yeah the game we were working on yesterday the one that the big heavy euro that's signed but we're not talking about yet which i'm sure we'll do a podcast about in the future 2031 possibly not not even kidding.

Without going into specifics we had this exact conversation yesterday like oh well what if this part did this and it was sound to mechanically i think it was your proposal it was a mechanical thing and it was it was it was set it would have worked and it would have solved the problem, except for the fact that within the the context of what it is narratively and what it's trying to make players do it was completely backwards so it felt unintuitive from a not just a lore standpoint but i guess

like a narrative intention standpoint if i'm a player and i'm like what would i expect this to do it's not that so you know it was it was flat out wrong thematically and i'm I'm very okay with that. And that alone is enough for us to nix something. Yeah. Like, we, I think now... Our standards are very high. We are at the stage where we will give import to that equal to does it work mechanically. Whereas I think one trap you can fall into...

Earlier in your design journey is well this thing works mechanically let's find a way to like break and shove in the door to make it fit yeah and and i'll pick on former peter like you can see that in some of my games where i'd write a joke to make it make sense ah yes and like it works in that it sticks in people's head but you still have to like what we're trying to do is skip that step of like wait how does this work so in an ideal situation you go how does this work oh of course

it's this so this happens like you know what i'll use a very dumb example when you're putting a building together what do you start with the floor or the ceiling obviously you start with the floor now let's say mechanically for whatever reason you had to start with the ceiling cool now you've got to work out some way of like you said forcing this into people's brain so i would do that with a joke of like you know it's upside down land or something like that and they're like oh okay but you but

i want to skip that step of like going and learning how it works i want to just work the way it is intuitively and so if you have to stop and have a joke and get that into people's head and then come back to the game that that's what we're trying to avoid right and so that brings us full circle to this with the workers of the three different sizes which we took it to group while you were here and we'll give a shout out in the best design community in north america yes and so a fellow published

designer matt wolf who has given us lots of good advice on lots of games was playing with it and I don't know, a turn in or something. He's like, wait a second, why does the big guy only carry one thing? And we all just kind of stopped and it was like, I don't know, cuz it does. And like immediately we were like, oh yeah, that's stupid. The big guys should carry more things. And the second we got to like the small guys fast, we were like, okay, bam, nailed it.

And that was actually the moment where it switched from magic market to pretty kitchen. Because we needed a, again, like going back to this intuitive thought, we needed the small guy to go first. Why would the small guy go first? Because he's fast. How do we make people remember that? People are not going to be like, oh yeah, goblins, obviously they're fast. But, and I'm sure you remember it was a rabbit at the time.

Rabbits are fast. Rabbits are faster than, I think it was rabbit, pig, and raccoon. Rabbit, raccoon, pig. Yes, rabbit, raccoon. The pig was the big one. Yeah. It was, you know. And again, like the second you see those three, if I, if I handed a toddler these and said, put them in order of speed, you're going to get it. AJ and I have a list of upcoming episodes, like make it childishly simple. And I think that might use this example again. So listeners prepare for this one to come back.

Yeah. I mean, I think do not be afraid of taking from like stuff. Everybody knows. I don't know what, what's the word for that. Things that are just like in the ether of the zeitgeist, like just things that everybody knows that everybody knows that the small thing goes fast and the big thing is.

Right like that's just everyone knows that rabbits are faster than our stories are built around that right like it's um i have a game called i have a game called team three that's a dexterity building game right and it's based on the three monkeys so see no evil hear no evil speak no evil and the roles of the players in the limited communication are one player can't see one player can't talk you know like it's it's that kind of like well okay people already know this framework so

let's just lift that framework whole cloth and build a game around it i think i've heard you use the term before public domain ip is that yes that's something i say yeah that is something i say i usually use that to refer to theme so one of the games that came out that's done quite well and is very popular is parks from keymaster yeah and not not your game unlike the uh no you just mentioned like three games

two of them were yours and third one wasn't so unless you design parts and just No, no, no. I said one of the games that came out that did very well was Parks from Keymaster. And a lot of games since then have wanted to be about parks or park building. I mean, there were ones before that too, but national parks are a great example of public domain IP, where it is this thing that everybody has a mental image of, people have visited them on vacation. You have connotations and associations.

You can imagine what types of mechanics might flow from there and what types of situations you might be in, what the stakes are. There's all kinds of baked in.

Heuristics heuristical knowledge that you can use to access while you're playing that that you don't have to pay 20 to star wars or disney right like it's it is totally it's a it's a free thing so like christmas is a public ip yes right yes and and you know older older stuff that is now past the point of copyright is public ip literally public domain yeah literally public domain but like i'm talking about more things like going on a trip like a game about taking vacations or

like going to a city a real world let's go to japan that's let's go to japan great public public id yeah yeah it's something that everybody has a cultural touchstone attachment to and you don't need to onboard you don't need to say like here's all this context you need before you start yes you don't you don't need to have a page of law in the rule book to get people into the world everyone knows the world so we're in the car and we had this at the time ogre human goblin,

and we were just like i genuinely i wish i had a recording that conversation because we made so many choices in that call that just stuck so do you remember how we ended on like two three four five six seven as the ingredient numbers i don't but i do remember it was on that call we could try and talk through it right here i i know i i will i will say that i bet we started with.

One and then we switched to two at some point because i know you've referenced jeff fraser's yeah uh stuff on this podcast at that point he's like always start at two so i would have been like always start at two yeah because the jump from two to three is not as much as one two right so i'm going to say that going up to seven was your idea because you have a really good again intuition for this kind of thing of like no two

to five is too little let's go all the way up to seven yeah i tend to have a so for for context for listeners in critter kitchen you've got seven different types of ingredients and each one of them can have up to seven value and within In each ingredient, the distribution of numbers is there's three twos, three threes, two fours, two fives, one six, and one seven. There wasn't a time. There's not in the final published game. We added a second six of everything in.

Yeah, yeah. But like, so it had this like stair stuff cadence to it. And I imagine, yeah, like I imagine I just probably had a gut sense that going like two to five wasn't enough banding. Because you want those like power spikes of like a seven feels way better than a two.

Yeah so we also i i think at that point we we met yeah we made a lot of decisions on that call that just stuck with the game and not call on that drive so we got home and we we we did what i think is one of the most intensive 10 days of prototyping and playtesting we've ever done every day we played that game probably a dozen times not even kidding like just again and again and again so we would pull it out we would set it up we would play we would stop we would

break it down we would play we'd stop we'd break it down one of the things i really remember about that week i mean we solved a lot of micro problems. So 90% of design came out of that drive. We came home and... Yeah, I like to call it the first 90% and then we had to do the second 90%. One thing that I distinctly remember... And this sort of ties back to, like, let the game be what it was to be. I was, at the time, vehemently opposed to victory points. I did not want victory points in any game.

Or, more accurately, I didn't want to start with victory points. So a lot of my games eventually get to victory points. But I was always super interested in saying, like, okay, what if there are no victory points? What does that look like? So in early Magic Market, as was the time, you won the game by having the best critic meal at the end. So the end of, I don't even know if it was seven days at the time. I know at some point we latched onto seven and we were like,

everything should be seven. And so everything in the game is seven. Even in the card drive, I suspect we were like, well, if it goes up to seven, there should be seven ingredients. And then there's obviously going to be seven rounds. So I distinctly remember that the only victory condition was you add up your critic meal, most wins. Do you remember this? Yes. But we worked out very early on that you needed a valve of sorts for the ingredients.

Because you were just like with your one, two, three, you were just collecting more than you could possibly need for the critic.

And i suspect we talked about like what if the critic could take a bunch and we were like no too mathy now one of the one of the criticisms of critic kitchen is that it is already quite mathy so you can imagine how mathy it was when we were saying too mathy so we very quickly worked out that you needed a a way to get rid of ingredients and get something for it and the obvious choice was victory points and so i said cool let's try not that let's try

anything that's not victory points so the way that we structured it was the challenges at the end of each day became money and then money was the tiebreaker oh yes you'd forgotten this i had i forgot there was money in the game yeah yeah so for a while it was competitive so it was whoever did the best gets seven dollars whoever did the second best gets four dollars whatever and then one of one of my known weaknesses that any anyone who works with me will will tell you is that i love

a blind bid oh i love a blind bid and so it goes into all my games where it shouldn't and this is no exception yes so now it was for the ties right whenever there was a tie at a location for an ingredient you would take that money and you would do a little handout and you're. Yeah. And most money broke the tie. Two problems. One is that it disrupted the game to constantly be doing blind bids, which is always the case when I add blind bids to a game.

I love blind bids, so I'm like, cool, put more in, but it turns out they're not actually the solution to many problems in life, especially my marriage.

That's a whole other story. and secondly you would still end up with ties yeah you would do a blind bid and still have a tie and i think alex probably vetoed my suggestion of like well then do another blind bid and another blind blind bids weren't working so i think there's a good design lesson in there which is don't do blind bids well there's certain mechanics that work better as their own game versus part of a bigger game and i think blind bidding i think i i'm not going to say like a blanket

statement that it's never good in a heavier game but i think it's it is so much its own flavor that you can't sprinkle it into another game as easily as other if we want to use like a cooking metaphor right it's like cinnamon or some some like very specific spice where it's good in a couple of dishes but like if you tasted it in like let's not use cinnamon i don't know let's say like steak if If you put cinnamon in steak, it's going to be weird. Sure, yeah.

I put cinnamon in my chili, so maybe that's not the best idea. And this is why no one likes your chili. It's an award-winning chili. But yeah, there's certain mechanics that go great with everything, right? Like a market you can buy from. Lots of games have that. That's like salt or something, right? And then there's some mechanics where you just really want to use sparingly or use in the right situation. And I think blind bidding is one of those. So we got rid of that.

Sorry i got a call so my computer's freaking out a little bit so we mentioned earlier that you live in raleigh which has one of the best game design communities in the world you can still hear me right i can hear you can you hear me oh yeah yes good sorry my computer freaked out a little bit because my co-designer uh matt just gave me a call and i'm like not now man i'm recording a podcast with my other co-designer while my third this is how i find out yeah so we

mentioned earlier we live in raleigh which has this amazing design community and part of that is that they have really regular meetings what's the approximate schedule of like if you wanted to go to every meeting how often would that be we meet every thursday at one of the two game stores in the area and that's usually between like six and a dozen people and then we meet one to two saturdays a month so any given month you're talking like five or six meetings high quality

published designer feedback because i distinctly remember going to multiple meetings with matt wolf mentioned earlier and the first time he played it we were using this blind bidding mechanism and he said to was guys just use a priority track like this is such so clearly a priority track situation.

And and i said no blind bidding is the future matt you just can't see it yet and so we went home and tested tested and came back next week or next meeting and he said hey why don't you use a priority track because this sucks and he was completely right it sucked and so we went home we pulled out a priority track and we're really like oh he's we just we just wasted a week ignoring this advice i i have a general rule i think i think we have it in our partnership and i have it

elsewhere which is if i get a suggestion just try it just try the suggestion and i am so resistant to being told what to do again see my marriage and it's just this real issue where i just if i don't like a thought i don't even want to want to try it and sometimes sometimes that might be the right call but when it comes to game design especially just try the thought go ahead yeah i I think a lot of more like novice designers, people just starting out in their design journey,

it's very, very daunting when your feedback would require a radical redesign. Not that a priority track was a huge redesign, but I think, When I've seen people, newcomers to my groups that were sort of like reticent to follow advice, or I think about times earlier in my design career where I was reticent to like try a thing, it's because there's this.

You get really caught up in the idea of like thinking through why it won't work because you just don't want to take the time to actually build it out. And I think one important thing that we do quite well is we figure out a way to test it. Even if the game is already very far along, we can test the change with an MVP.

A minimum viable you know prototype chunk um and i think that's what you need to do yesterday we had text on the tts mod to represent a whole deck of components right and we need two for now you know that'll do if you've got a game that you know uses blind bidding and someone at your group says test out a priority track well you don't need to like go make a fully finished new version of the game that has every you know possible thing baked into it it's like literally take

out a piece of paper and scribble one two three four yeah you know so it's yeah it's always good to test an idea even if you don't think it'll work um and finding a way to do that is cheaply like cost of not money cost but time reduces the barrier to actually trying it yeah because you never know i mean even if that works for you one time out of five that's still one out of five successes that you wouldn't have had if you weren't doing it so so there's

two i think really interesting elements in Critter Kitchen that I have zero memory of how they came about, and that might be the case with you two, and I'm curious. One is Spice, and one is Rumors. Do you want to give a quick overview of how those work within the game? Yeah, so there's two bits in the game that Peter's referring to. The first one is Spice. Spice is a type of token that doubles the value of a matching token.

So if you have a carrot that is a value of 5, and you have carrot Spice, you can make that carrot value of 10. And so this is a token that has no value of its own, but you can pair it with a high number to make an even higher number. And then the other thing that Peter mentioned is rumors. And these are a deck of cards that tell you secret information about what the critic likes.

So, for example, maybe the critic doesn't like even numbers, or maybe the critic wants lots of spice, lots of spice, or maybe the critic loves carrots. Yeah. Or maybe the critic thinks that, you know, threes are so good that they're actually worth six points, but there's something weird like that, right? Like it's, it's basically just things that if you didn't know that rumor, you would play the game differently and potentially miss out on some points at the end of the game.

Or it changes what you prioritize as a player. If I know the critic loves carrots, I'm going to be like, cool, I'm going to go hard on carrots today. So for example, let's say you go to a location with, that has like a seven meat and a six carrot, you know, carrots are worth double. The other player doesn't know that. They're like, ha ha, I sent my mouse. And so I get the seven meat. You say, well, I sent my lizard. Oh no, I got the six carrot.

Or, you know, you go first and you take the six carat instead of the seven meat and then the other player's like, he did see that rumor. Does he know something? I don't know. And so in the game, the way they work is there's a deck of them, three of them come out that are paired with the critic and then there are items in the bag you draw from to see the ingredients that have little rumor symbols on them. And if you get one, you get to peek at the matching rumor.

So it's just this sort of, you always have the option to go back and look at it and then it goes back and lives on the table so other people can look at it. Do you remember how either of those came about? Because I did not. I don't think either of them were initial drive. No, they were definitely not. I suspect rumors were my idea because that's a repeated mechanism. Spice might have been mine, yeah. That feels like a very Alex thing.

If you don't, that's fine. I was just curious if you have a memory of where they came from. I can tell you what probably drove us to add Spice, which is we wanted more granularity without increasing the number of numbers.

So if you have a six meat and I have a six meat, like it's a little bit unsatisfying i guess to oh i would say as well as that if i see you take the seven meat because there's only one of each then that's game over for the for the best meat although best wasn't a thing at the time actually now i think about it no but it's still it's less defeatist yeah because especially if they're being only one seven there was definitely the sense of like because we at that point we

did have some of the rumors and things where people cared about like you know some of the critics i guess cared about like an extra point 10 points for the best carrot course or something and if you get the seven carrot i don't know if we did honestly anyway i'm just curious i bet it had something to do with the granularity where we just wanted there to be more peaks and valleys yeah we also might have wanted more stuff in the bag um like more variety of what

came out the the whole premise of like there's a two meat and a seven meat is so on me especially at the time like i want everything always to be fair all the time so if you if you look at something like village pillage the cards don't have costs because they're all equally good and so i know for sure that having like a meat worth two and a meat worth seven where one is just better than the other was that that came from your brain for sure because i

would never come up with that especially in in 2022 at the time yeah and so yeah. The game we were working on yesterday, we just recently added a new system where, what game is it from, Peter? The Dropout Track? It's also done in Terra Mystica. So, yeah. And Resortana or a few other games, yeah.

It's a game where players take turns clockwise around the table and at a certain point, our game is a game where players will drop out at a certain point and just start getting a little bit of like passive reward while other players are still doing actions.

And one idea that came from Peter that is working quite well is it's got this deck of cards where you drop out and you take a thing and then you reap that reward and I think Peter's initial inclination was like okay well you know balance these things to all be equally good and I proposed something that was like very too good and Peter was like well that one's too good and I'm like yeah but if someone really wants it they'll drop out first then everyone else will get to do other stuff right

like it's and then this is actually I think of this as a Jeffism which is you can craft these things there's nothing to the critication now it's just general game advice you can craft these things to sway the players to do what you need them to do and i i don't think this way i'm like no what's most fun you should do that so in in this game for example we want this certain one to be taken when the last person drops out it's most fun when the last person drop out takes this and

then it activates the thing for everyone but the round's over so you can't take them so we're just making that one the worst one so now staying in the longest is naturally good and so taking the last one you know taking the worst one is going to happen from the last person and it smooths out some game issues while not being fair in a way that everything's even, it's it's really interesting okay so let's skip forward a little bit we decided

to add victory points into the game so once we had that priority track we were like well look we still have these challenges and we said let's just make them worth victory points and one thing that you are very cognizant of as a designer is when the numbers are wrong for the game do you know what i mean by I thought you'd want me to go into it.

Yeah, and I think you've talked about this with AJ in other episodes, but basically, tell me if this is not what you're referring to, but the idea of like, if I'm playing a lighter family game, and...

You have to add up a bunch of stuff and at the end of the game the final score is 137 to 116, it that those numbers feel wrong for the experience you're trying to give you want your final score for a lighter game to be you know i i got 12 and you got 10 and i feel good about that right and it's it's subtle but it matters so so at the time i remember we had 5 10 15 and that was just so it was easier to move we had a score track at this point and so you just move

down the score track either one two or three basically for every challenge that you served.

And then at the end you'd just add up all the numbers your critic score and that would be your final score so we're having games ending in the 130 and this was true right up until when we pitched it actually so we'll get into development in a moment but we we hit a point where we're like look this a very early one i should say we don't normally like pick one game idea and work for 10 days very early on in this process this game was remarkably fun

and i realize we're the designers so this is zero percent modest but we've made a lot of games we've made hundreds of games between this like unpublished and unpublished mostly unpublished and there is a huge difference between a game that is immediately fun and a game that you're like oh i can.

See the potential of this but maybe in six months time i have a personal rule and this drives aj bonkers i have a rule that if a game is not fun by the second play test i don't bother with it yeah i'm increasingly adopting that rule for myself as well yeah now again this is sort of unactionable advice this is unhelpful advice which was a whole episode we did and i think i might have talked about this there but like with critter kitchen we played it and even in the rough stage even

with the triory track not there even with like money in the game and blind bidding it was still one of the most fun things that either of us had worked on i think it's safe to say and so that's why we're like cool this is all we're doing this week because origins was coming up so we spent that 10 days at your house working working working working i i pulled several like if not all-nighters but close to just getting the new prototype together in our dynamic i think

we talked about this in collaboration episode i tend to build the prototypes and you tend to have the children and yeah because it's mostly because i'm a control freak and i know exactly how i want everything to come out and so we we worked hard on this with the intent of pitching it to origins so in one sense this game took a year and a half to start being Critter Kitchen and then got signed two weeks later.

In another sense, we came up with it in a car drive and then signed it two weeks later. It was one of the fastest turnarounds. Yeah, depending on how you want to define the start of it, it was either one of the longer games we've worked on or the absolute fastest. I have a game coming out from AllPlay called Triangulation. Someday I'll do a design diary on BGG about that, and I want to call it the game that took me four years and three hours to design.

Because I came up with the idea four years ago and just ran it in my head for four years until one day it clicked and two hours later it was done. Game design is funny like that I've had that experience on a couple different projects It's really interesting how Much you can bang your head against a wall Knowing that there's something good there And then finally solve the puzzle.

But to your point about giving up on things if they aren't fun, I think it has to be the rare case where you really know the idea is worth it to bang your head on it over and over. There's one game that we got signed that hasn't been announced yet, but it's a sequel to one of your games. And we had tried all these different... It's a lighter party game, and we had gone back and forth and tried all these different things.

And we got to the point of being like, maybe this just doesn't work, maybe it's not clever enough.

And we decided to put a pin in it until the next time we were together in person and i came out to visit you in la like eight nine months ago or whatever it was a year ago and within like two hours of talking about it just like being in the same room and moving bits around we'd cracked that nut we figured out what the thing was that specific conversation because i remember that so distinctly yeah we hit a point even in person in la where we're like we got to give up on this yeah we're

like if this doesn't work in the next hour we'll give ourselves one more hour of talking about it and then if that this doesn't work we can't waste more time on it yeah and then 15 minutes later it was it was just working yeah and and that was what so i actually i want to dive into that a little bit because that that's subtly different i i'm talking like if you can see the core fun in those first two prototypes.

So with that game that we eventually got signed the sequel we could always see the core fun we just couldn't get the shape of it working like we knew that the activity to use that that dichotomy that i don't like too much we knew that the activity was really interesting and fun it's just that the game structure wasn't there and we genuinely did hit a point where we're like maybe this this activity just doesn't have a fun game structure yeah the the four

hours the four years and two hours game i was talking about four hours four years three hours that one was another one where like i knew the central puzzle was fun it was just about the simplest way to get people to that puzzle and so critter kitchen even though it mechanically wasn't there like you could play a game from start to finish even though the structure wasn't working the core fun was almost was always always there we've got

another half hour before i have to run so i think we're gonna actually no i've got another hour anyway do you have a hard time out one hour from now yeah okay cool so we we we worked on this game working this game we added the rumors and the spice tokens we had the priority track we added victory points in and we took it to origins and again just like i'd run Now, the other thing about having a game that's inherently fun early on is that I

hate, hate, hate to my bones making people sit down and not have a good time.

It is the opposite of why I'm in board game design. And so when I have those games where I'm like, guys, I want this to work, but it's not fun yet. I cringe. I actively cringe at the idea of being like, hey, people who could be doing other things right now, can you sit down and not enjoy yourself for the next hour? Like that's hell to me. So this is another genuine motivator.

There's like a social contract that you enter into with the people playing your games where you're like, some of your like self-worth is tied up in it where like you almost don't want to show them games if you know they're not working yet.

Because you're like are they going to judge me as a bad designer because like this even if you preface it with i know this isn't working so when you do finally get it's not a judgment for me it's the like i don't want to be the cause of people having a bad time yeah so when you have one that you know works yeah yeah with your personality you obviously have no problem with that but for me who's charming and delightful i want to

make sure the roast of alex car so one of the reasons why if a game is popping right from the start i will table it i will bring it to the table.

Every chance i get because and and i'm sure part of it is what you're saying about like my ego is tied to it but also i'm like hey come sit down you will have a good time like this is not going to be like many of my other prototypes where it's like hey can you come suffer so that i can benefit from it this is hey you will have a good time and get to give feedback now i will disclaim that designers if especially if you warn them that hey this isn't fun

yet but i want to fix it that is fun for a lot of people that's fun for me i'm sure that's fun for you of like there is something here and we need to coax it out that is a fun little puzzle yeah i mean a fun problem i'd imagine this is true for you it's definitely true for me as a you know designer who is you know been to a few rodeos if you will at this stage of my career it's actually way more fun for me to play a game that's pretty busted because i feel like yeah or like has like that yeah

that one big thing that's not working because if you get to solve that you you feel like this like you know.

Yes so i have a game called which which is which where again the fun puzzle was was fun and the game sucked and so i was at gamma a few weeks ago and multiple times i was like hey everyone, this game isn't fun and people like this peter peter c haywood is bringing us a game that he acknowledges isn't fun what's going on here and they solved it like that game got signed two hours later that was one of the fastest turnarounds from like this isn't fun to play test to signing like like

crazy and but having said that if the game is fun then i want to show it off in the same way as you know you get your published game and you want to play with your friends that's what critic kitchen or games that are fun from that first or second playthrough they so not only are they starting at a higher level because they're starting fun and it's all up from there and But I love getting it to the table. So it's going to be iterated faster and faster.

And I can see the potential. And for me, seeing the potential of the thing is really important for me to work on it. So Critic Kitchen at Origins 2022 got played a lot. It was a lot, a lot, a lot that that game got played because I just wanted to show it off. It was so early in the design process. Like you mentioned earlier, it was two weeks after we sort of restarted the design process.

We went into origins thinking it was good enough to get signed but also wanting to use the time as play testing right so yeah so and and i i genuinely i don't know how much this year round for because you were you i lived in that unpop room that year and you you were in and out.

We kept running into these little issues i want to say issues people kept giving feedback which is great that's why you play test and maybe because we hadn't done our due diligence because we'd kind of speed run how do you say speed run as a past tense speed ran it's like sped run. Because we speed ran that game yeah i felt like oh man this feedback is not something it was considered so i started applying changes and i applied changes apply.

Changes so can you talk about how consolation soup works in. The final game and also how it worked it was the same in our first two weeks yeah so what it.

Was at the time and yes that's right which is a little bit less palatable than constellation soup but the idea was the you know leftover food gets gets thrown down into the compost pile and there's also this thing called compost which is just this extra one value ingredient and the way it was both initially and in the final game was if you are at a location if one of your excuse me if one of your workers is at a location and either everything has been taken or everything you want is taken

you are allowed to instead get a singular piece of compost one singular piece of compost so if i send a look if there's a location that has three food items someone sends a mouse someone else sends a lizard and i send a boar the mouse takes one thing the lizard takes two and then my boar would take one compost so not three even though it could carry three but just one and that's how it works and people don't like that people don't like sending out their big guy and and part of it's the

framing if you say hey this guy gets three and then they get one it's like well hey and you said he gets three so over the course of the five days of origins or whatever it is i was like okay cool well you can get up to your carrying capacity in copper so if you went to get three and you only got one you got two compost if you went to get three and you got none you got three compost and so it just mitigated mitigated the the bad luck or the the chaos or the randomness or however

you want to put it yeah another thing is that the rumors were at the time i think we only really had seven rumors that we're really happy with. Which was carrots are worth double, meat is worth double, mushroom is worth double. So that was all we had. And...

Someone was like hey instead of making these that everyone get you should be like for me character's worth double for you mushroom's worth double so i'd shuffle them up dealt everyone a random one at the start probably some other minor changes that i can't remember i don't know if you recall any of them and then sat down to the worst game of critic kitchen that i think has ever been played in the entire cycle of that game yeah they just happened to

be with with three publishers yep one publisher got up and left after one round.

One of the publishers who stayed for the whole time and gave some very nice feedback is someone who you've worked with and i'm about to work with so just the opposite of the like this game is always fun it just and i don't know if there's anything actionable out here about this but it was truly remarkable to me how this game was like it peaked fun at the start of the weekend and then all my little changes all the feedback i was taking all the little iterations resulted in the most beige

bland experience with 98 of the mechanisms exactly the same yeah i mean i guess if you wanted to try and turn it into a lesson it would be needing to know when to be selective about feedback or or trusting your instincts as a designer which is sort of the opposite of what i was saying earlier about always take the feedback and always always take well we did we took it and we tried it and it didn't work.

But I mean, I think it's a really good example of like why design by committee doesn't work, right? Because if we give everybody what they want, it's, there's a developer who I won't name, but who I know has worked on a lot of different projects and they're sort of famous for rounding the edges off of things, like not wanting players to feel bad. So they sort of like, this was a little bit too mean, so let's soften it. And this one's a little bit too, you know, whatever. So let's soften it.

And oftentimes the final product that comes out has been so sanded down from the original design that was signed that it it's functional but the charm is gone the things that make it the peaks and valleys that made it an interesting experience are gone and so we 100 went through that with twitter kitchen we were making all these little tweaks to make the game a little bit friendlier here a little bit softer here you know give people some extra

power here and then it all came out in this unsatisfying wash that we had to go undo of those the the two lessons that i learned and i don't know how applicable this is to other people uh you often hear like you know there's there's no sunshine without rain or whatever the phrase is like you know that you can't have the highs unless you have the lows that play test was when i truly learned that yeah it feels kind of bad

when you send your pig out as it was at the time and just get one soup whereas you could have gone to the soup truck and gotten three soup but.

Like making the consolation of okay well you always get it truly cutting those lows also neutered those highs it reduced the band of everything and and i i'd heard that a lot but i never truly understood to that playtest the other thing which i thought was really interesting is and again this is maybe too specific to be actionable but it's a design diary so we're going to talk about it when you say hey alex for you cheese is great for me carrot is great

cool a seven cheese and a seven carrot comes out there's no game there anymore like i'm gonna send my mouse to the one with the cheese and you're or whatever you're going to sit with a carrot and the tension of that game comes from getting each other's heads okay if you know if there's a seven here and a seven there which one do i think you're going to go for and can i cleverly snipe one and get the other like you know there's a full game there that is lost as soon as you make it asymmetrical.

100 so i've talked a lot about the past about how i i have a publisher in mind when i design a game and this one from the moment it became critic kitchen and stopped being magic market, i said you know who this would do really well with kids table board games um helena capel runs a company in canada i've worked with her before she did my game buds and runs love working with her helena's great yeah this would have been either just just around

the time or right before creature comforts came out yeah so it was right after because i was like this would be such a good follow-up for that whole like world and brand and get that same artist and it fits and in fact they did cafe barris which has nothing mechanically to do with critic kitchen and i'm not like oh they ripped us off but like clearly she also saw the potential of a food themed one as a follow-up so we i i'd scheduled a meeting with her right hand man sean and

this was right after that disastrous publisher thing so i was like alex i need i need 20 minutes of your time because i'm showing this to elena and i don't know if you decided or i decided if we decided we were like let's revert all the changes yeah because even if it's not like as honed as it would be after a weekend of playtesting everything like when we entered this convention we had a solid eight and a half out of ten game and we've managed to.

Death by Commitiate to 4 out of 10. Yeah. I think it was both of us. I think we both came out of that meeting and were just like, let's just tear this thing back down to the studs. And I don't want to sound like it was a waste of playtesting. I distinctly remember there were some things from that weekend. I can't remember what, but I just remember being like, okay, I'm going to revert everything except for this and this and this. Like little tiny tweaks that had just made the game better.

I don't remember any of the things I did. I could be wrong, but that might have been where we made the choice to say that the tie break track only moves if it's the first ingredient taken at a location yes i think you're right so in a previous version of this that we took to origins there were a lot more ties that were often inconsequential and felt kind of bad so as an example of that let's say you know someone sends a mouse to location and peter and i both send a bore and the mouse takes

a seven a two and a two right and the and the seven goes away and then peter and i you you waste your priority on the tiebreaker track splitting something that you don't care about yeah so what the rule then became was the only time that the priority track changes is when it's the first ingredient taken at a place would be involved in the tie so basically you're only ever losing tiebreak priority when it's a good thing that you would have wanted to do and i think that might

have come out of that yeah i think you're right and just some more like tiny stuff like that.

Yeah maybe even something as simple as like if you already have a rumor token you can't take a second one of that type yeah because like you want to do it to screw over the other person which is fine but not that interesting so we always let towards the more interesting you already know the rumor you can't learn it again so i showed it to sean he loved it uh this game this game was so solid at this point uh he set up a meeting with helena i've probably told the story before and

helena came to me and said hey peter i don't want to play your game because sean raved about it and we are booked out for the next two and a half years and and at the time i was really like this has to go fast because i i think i was worried that someone else would come up with the same game or something like that but like i wanted this game to well you were right in a way at the next year's origins and so and so she said look peter i know you want this out in the next two years we are

booked up for three years if i play this game from what sean's telling me i'm going to bump another game for it and i can't do that so i'm going to decline to look at the game yeah and i was like while unsatisfying that is the highest compliment one can receive so it is the loveliest rejection we've like they didn't reject the game they rejected the pitch.

And so i i took it back to la where i live and alex had worked with peter vaughn on expansity and so you messaged him or yeah so so peter vaughn was the head of development at breaking games when expansity got signed back in 2015 or 16 or something and i loved working with him he's a wonderful person and he had you know we got together at gamma once a year and had brunch together and talked about our lives. He had always wanted to work with me again, but he- Wow.

And he had left breaking games and started his own company cardboard alchemy and flamecraft had been a huge success yeah this was probably about like what like a year year and a half after flamecraft's campaign and so it was one of those things where the stars had never aligned in the past and you know i i hadn't had anything that might have been a fit for him before then but i think i i messaged him and it was like hey peter's local and i think you are going

to the same groups or something yeah so i don't know if he reached out to you or you reached out to him well we saw each other every month so i think i think i saw him at the playtest event that he ran at the time first play la and he said hey alex says you have a game or i said hey i've got a game you know that alex has told you about whatever sat down played it he loved it um we also showed it to joe from all play who was obviously in the in a earlier episode of this show

and he also was like yep i'll take it done and that was before we pitched helena so i was like hey i want to hold off because i want to show it to helena she's the one who's added for and his response i think he said this on his episode. He was like, oh yeah, she'd do great with that. You should absolutely sign up with her. Go for it. He's so lovely and supportive. I really like working in jokes. So I showed it to Peter. Peter was like, okay, cool. Can we take this and consider

it? And I was like, yep, that's fine. And then they came back and I think, was it Peter came back and said, look, we want to do this. We want to do it with Sandara's art. And we had not been expecting that. Obviously Sandara is a slam dunk of board game art. She is the standard that everyone should aspire to. And so we signed up with them and we started the development process.

Yeah, and I don't know if you remember, but I believe the signing was contingent on her being on board for it, like if she had the bandwidth for it, because I think they said they wanted to do it, but only if she could do it. That's what it was, yes.

So they signed it, and we got to sign a developer. And I just want to dive into the development process, because this game came about at such a breakneck speed. Like, literally, from the day we started pitching it, from the day we had that car ride to the day we started pitching it, it was 11 days or something crazy. Peter Vaughn was a week or two later because I had to come back to LA, and then he signed it a week or two later. So we say sign in two weeks. Really, it was closer to a month.

But from the moment we got home from Origins, I don't think we touched it again until it was signed. And we got assigned a developer, Chris Strain, who also designed Asking for Troubles. He's a staffed project manager and developer for Carbon Alchemy. And we... I think we thought the game was kind of dark. Yeah, I think we knew that there was going to be some content to make, especially now that we were signing with Cardboard Alchemy.

Yes. We knew that they wanted bits, right? Like extra content in the box.

And we were excited about that. But I think at the point in time we signed it, we probably felt like the actual core gameplay was 95, 98% done. Yeah. So one of the big early changes they made is we had this optional module called Zoo Chefs. And do you want to quickly explain how Zoo Chefs work? Yeah, so Zoo Chefs, which is a pun on Zoo Chefs, are extra little critter workers that could either be size one, size two, or size three, like the other ones.

But you have to pick them up like an item. So they're at a location called the Chef Academy, which is one of the places you can send one of your workers to. And if you choose to, you can select them. And then for the next round of the game, you'll get them for one single round as a fourth worker. And they stem from the elves from Fairy City. Like this is one of the few things where I can directly be like, that's where that came from.

Yeah and so they all have like a special little twist power and i think at point of time of signing it we probably have like what like a dozen or something i i don't even know if we had any i think we just had them as a concept it's a concept yeah that doesn't surprise like this is not oh i can i can tell you exactly why i know we have them as a concept go ahead i was just gonna say this is probably one of those things that's not good advice but

we definitely signed it with a lot of things being a little bit hand wave just like you know we're good for this just yeah we'll figure it out as we go so and and so i i think it's not that we were arrogantly like this game is done it was more like what what are the changes that we made because we'd sort of hit the point of like okay we don't know we don't know how to make this game any better and there's always scope to make the game better we

just couldn't see that vision so the zoo chefs so we put together a rule book and and you laid it out like a menu it was a really lovely little look at the end it said hey here's the the modules that we haven't designed but you know we're good for and again Again, unhelpful advice. Alex and I have been doing this for a long time. We've got between us almost 20 years in the industry.

And people have worked with us. We've got good reputation. People know that we can deliver. If you're a first-time designer, make this content. Maybe not all of it. Maybe don't make a deck of 30 like we ended up doing. But make your seven that you need and pitch that.

And uh we so we sat down one day to make the zoo chefs i don't know if you remember this and discovered a minute in that we had completely different ideas how zoo chefs would work oh yes okay so the way they actually work in the game is they come out for a single round and then go away and the way that was it you who thought it was the other way or no you it was me definitely you because i've won that one okay yeah really actionable advice keep track of your wins as a games as a

collaborator always well see now i don't remember this well i know it had something to do with them being there for the whole game then but i don't remember how that so so the way that zoo chefs worked in your mind and this wasn't wrong they didn't exist yet was that it was a power that was affixed to one of your three base.

Workers oh i don't remember that at all okay yeah and the way that i worked in mind was that they're a temporary worker that you got and i think the moment i said that alex was like that's cute oh we're doing that like i don't think it was a debate i just remember that we came into the meeting with different ideas what it was going to be like yes uh you know that that's a good thing to circle back to in terms of talking about product right because at that point we were signed

with a company that was willing to make extra bits yes if if we were signed with a company that did not have the budget for extra bits but still wanted that content having all the queerness of no extra having it be a deck of cards that just have a little different power each time that attaches to one of the existing chefs is a way to do that but for cardboard alchemy we knew like if we have you know 20 30 40 of these little zoo chefs each one gets a different meeple each

one gets their own unique art you know the associated you can be very thematic with the powers have we talked about this do you remember my thoughts on the title you did not love critter kitchen at first because i think in australia critter has a more negative connotation it's just not really a word we say so for me it was the u.s equivalent i think if we called it like varmint kitchen or something i think so yeah it's like oh a moment has an american ring to me

yeah in a way that yeah i think you're right i think varmint kitchen is a bit not vomit kitchen if you can't hear Peter's accent but varmint I've actually got a game coming out called Vomints and Garments so. Anyway, so one of the big changes, so we came back with these Zoo Chefs, and there's two things I want to talk about here. One is that originally this was going to be a completely optional module,

in the same way as player powers are for a lot of games. You can play with them, you can play without them. Peter Vaughan strongly wanted the Zoo Chefs in every version of the game. Do you remember this? I was opposed to this. Not hugely opposed, and I'm a big, like, I trust the publisher, trust the publisher to do what they do best.

But i i was aware that the complexity creep of this game was already like hitting what i was comfortable with for what was meant to be quite a light game and so having a variable player power come out each round and you have to learn how to grab them and you have to remember to use it it's only one round etc etc that worried me did you remember having thoughts on this i think we were of the same mind on this we were both happy to

defer to peter vaughn because he knows games and knows his audience but yeah i think it would be fair to say that that is actually something even in the final published games that ratchets up the complexity of it having some shifts in it right so but yeah we trusted him and we trusted him to know what to know what he wanted and and ultimately like this is going to sound sick and phantic your job is to keep the publisher happy as

much as anything don't let go of your core vision and it's not like the zoo chefs were against that core vision they also solved a big problem there are very few hills you should die on as a designer when you're with a publisher like always you know who you trust and you You should only go with publishers that you trust. Always speak your mind when asked, but, you know, barring them saying like, what if one of the critters was Stalin or something?

And you're just like, I don't, I don't like that. You know, like, like I don't want my name on that game. Yeah. For the most part, the publisher knows their audience. They know what they want the game to be. I would say it's very, very rare that they have changes they want to make that actively make the game worse. Usually it's just different. We've talked about that before.

I will say, if you and I had both been opposed to this idea for whatever reason, like let's say we both, like we tried this and it sucked or whatever, and we'd come to beat Yvonne and said, hey, we really don't like this. I don't think he would have been like, ah, publishers, you're idiot, designers, you're idiot. It's like, I think he would have listened.

As it was, I think it was a good idea and I'm glad we did it, especially because it solved a problem, which is that all the food in the round that isn't taken goes this one location.

So you can send someone there to try to grab the leftovers. But if everything's taken and you send someone there, there's literally nothing for you to grab. By putting the zoo chef there, there's always something to be going for. And I really like what that does for the game. Yeah, I think Critter Kitchen is a good example. And we've talked about some of these, and I'm sure we'll talk on a few more as we go through the development process.

More so than any other game I've worked on, I think it is a game where I'm very proud of the two bird, one-stone solutions we can work with. There are a lot of mechanical systems in the game that subtly address one or two problems at the same time, that when you're learning the game for the first time, you're not even aware that there was a problem there.

But what you just described is exactly true. It's like, okay, well, we have this mechanic, it sends the leftover food to a location, and that's great. But if nothing goes there, it feels terrible to go there. Well, I realize also it feels terrible to go there, and we have a strict rule of breaking ties.

So now we're breaking ties to get nothing and that's that's garbage alex and i will often say this in our meetings it feels like bad design yeah uh and it's maybe it's an intuitive thing maybe it's obvious i don't know but like it when something feels like a hack or a patch or it it just it feels wrong we will again go to the end of the world to stop that from being a thing yeah so like an example of like a bad fix to what you

just described would be say if there's nothing at the chef academy you don't break the tie and then you you've tacked on this extra rule right and that is like kind of intuitive but you have you have sure but what i'm saying is like like that that's what we would call like a patch rule right and that's something where like if you.

That might be good enough you know for a lot of designers and i think that's where we're really good at what we do is it wasn't good enough but we need to solve it and we found a way to solve it that not only eliminated the edge case that we need a different rule but also added like something unique and yeah it eliminated the edge case but also eliminated the need for an edge case i guess that's the same thing yeah i'm thinking of

the game that we were working yesterday with the when you drop out you get a thing one of those things we had to trigger each round like it has to for the game to function. And a bad solve would be put out five. And if no one takes that one, it still triggers. That's a terrible solution. Instead, we put out the number equal to the player count, and that one's always one of them. And so it's always going to trigger. And so you just, you never run into the problem. So you don't need to solve it.

It's a pre-solve. In terms of actionable advice for designers listening, the more you can take something that would have to be like rulebook upkeep and maintenance and force it into the normal flow of the game so that it's happening automatically i think the better you'll your final product will be that that's sort of my recent level up because we're trying to solve all these problems with our big heavy game and that's what we're that's what

we're going to every time we're like cool how can we make this not a new step or a phase of the game but just part of the game flow and that's just not something i've thought about much before so it's really interesting to incorporate that into our thinking so zoo chefs were new we sat down and i want to talk about zoo chefs a little bit i know we're running short of time oh thumbs up the you're not you're not on mac it only works on mac for some reason the people

listening my my mac camera gives me a big thumbs up sometimes it loves me what can i say we designed these and i don't know if you remember like the crocodile or the the original turtle or anything like that but basically we had some zoo chefs who remember you take them for one round and we had some zoo chefs that when they came out if they didn't collect a certain item they stayed out for the next round yes yeah. And they were genuinely super fun and interesting.

They created all these tactical, interesting decisions, and they are not in the final game. Why are they not in the final game, Alex? If I'm remembering correctly, it's because there just weren't enough locations if too many of them come out. Yeah, it was the same thing. We ran into the edge case where either A, you can send another chef to that location. So now I have two of my chefs there.

And you're competing against yourself, yeah. What if I tiebreak against myself? Do I spend my tie to win against myself?

It or if i'm not let's say i have two twos and you have a two does it go me me you does it go like it was a mess it was a whole shambles secondly as he pointed out if you get two of those in certain play accounts you just run out of locations you just don't have anywhere to go and so while they were genuinely fun and interesting and i think we wrestled this a little bit we were like cutter we will come up with better ones that don't have these rules exceptions and

that is so like this is something i see designers doing all the time it drives well Peter, did you know that when they were writing Arrested Development, yes, for anyone who has not heard that story a million times, Peter likes to talk about how they always cut most of the jokes. They wrote so many jokes that they were cutting good jokes, not just bad ones, they were cutting good jokes.

So we wanted to make so many zoo chefs that we could cut the good zoo chefs and only have ones that work without weird rules exceptions. Yes, and we got there, and there was a brief concern of like, what if we can't? And then I probably told, I genuinely in that conversation told the Arrested Development story.

And so i see designers doing this all the time driving me nuts like if one of your cards has any kinds of rules exceptions that card should not exist i've said the quote before it's a screenwriting quote no no scene for a line no script for a scene don't put like don't put a scene in because you want like one because you like one line in that scene don't write a script because you like this one scene the whole thing needs to be holistically amazing

and and those cards were just two rules exceptiony okay uh restaurateurs peter vaughn loves player powers.

He loves player powers so very long he was like hey i want player powers in this game and i think that's when we did put our foot down and we were like look we'll put them in as an optional module we don't want them in every game and i think he was like yeah cool as long as they're in there yeah i think in practice they're they're so fun and simple that i think when i teach the game even without any expansion content i do tend to give people

restaurateurs but yeah i don't but i'm a purist i think i think people online because the game started to come out the backers and we're getting a lot of lovely reviews and stuff like that and people are saying like yeah put them in, i'm glad that they're not mandatory for the first game because i play a lot i play with so many non-gamers like that's almost my primary gaming demographic these days and i don't want you know my assistant who is lovely

and she's going to come on a future episode and go through my game collection my game bits like all the prototype bits i want to do that episode uh she would like she'd be fine with it she's an intelligent young woman she's not a gamer, And so it just adds that extra strain that you don't need. So I'm absolutely fine with people putting it in, but I didn't want it to be a mandatory inclusion.

Yeah i think the the last thing that got added later was the carts there's one more thing that i think is because we touched on this earlier but never came back to the conclusion which is the the scoring being high numbers oh yes yes yeah i've got that in my you're working their way towards that okay yeah yeah i just want to get through all the stuff that we added because double teaser then go ahead and say your thing because we went with carbon alchemy and they tend to explode

games in the best way they wanted a bunch of content they wanted more that they could unlock put as unlockables for the kickstarter and turn into bits and this kind of stuff.

And one thing that they'd been pushing for from almost day one was location powers and i was kind of like i i don't know what that looks like like when you go here do reverse order like it's just stupid it doesn't it didn't make sense to me, and then one day we were playtesting in first play la and one of the locations is called the desert vendor and someone was like ha ha it should be the dessert vendor and peter vaughn said yeah

we'd love that peter won't do it i was like me peter and i was like oh you want you want more stuff that you can get i can do that and i literally sat down with a pen and paper i've got a photo of it somewhere and wrote out the first seven carts so carts add to various locations and they add more stuff that you can take there and they all have like unique little mini games essentially and it became its whole expansion called a la carte and we submitted what

like 30 of them and 18 got in yeah it was a lot because when they were writing best development they wrote too many jokes and they were able to cut out the best jokes and still have great jokes here is this going to show up on the camera oh you found it i'll put it in the i have i have your uh it's too blurry but i have your design diary on bgg pulled up oh yes yes we did these extensive design diaries i say i did these extensive design diaries

on board game geek if you want to go check those out we'll put a link to those in the comments i asked on the carbon alchemy discord if anyone had any questions for us and one person had an interesting question that i didn't know the answer to, who named the locations do you remember because i assume it's a good question i i definitely.

Had involvement but i think it was actually peter and chris big peter vaughn and chris chris strain i think most of it came from them like one of the one of my funny stories is that there's a location in the game called lantern lane and i actually live on lantern lane i live on lantern walk lane is the name of the street i live on i did not name that location that was just a complete coincidence there's also another one that's named after

your ssn can you just quickly say what that is yeah yeah no so like i i didn't name the the desert bender i didn't name the you know like when we were doing the world building of the game we talked through like i know you named bistro bay i know i named i named bistro bay coming up with the name for the city was something that we you know had gone back and I think Critter Kitchen was probably my intro. Oh, 100%. I'm opposed to it. Yeah, and then.

I had built that like, okay, so like there's, you know, a market by the docks and a market over, you know, like I had lore ideas, but I didn't actually, I think it was, I think it was someone at Cardboard Alchemy that actually put that touch on it. We quickly found out that with more players, you need more spots and it needs to scale more than just three more per player.

So we end up with i haven't gone into the midnight match like that but the the other thing i want to mention too is that when we switched from magic market to critter kitchen we quickly realized that this game had no magical element to it and and that was what part of the reason we were very happy to switch from magic market because it wasn't like magical things happening it was just you go to a market you pick up some fruit and you come home and you cook that fruit and there's

no magic in that there's a game called harvest by trey chambers and the second edition came out from key master the first edition was from tmg about 10 years ago and it is completely magically themed but there is no magic in that game it's the most jarring disconnect where it's like yes you're collecting magical pumpkins and you can plant them in your garden and grow more pumpkins and then sell them at market and it's like well hang on what why

aren't they just pumpkins then and sure enough for the remake they just made them pumpkins or whatever uh they changed it to and so we came in being like hey look we don't want magic in this game and peter peter vaughn bolted that because they're just on flamecraft and so they were like look we think we want to do this fantasy and i remember being like but it's it's not it's not fantasy and so i don't know how much was just misunderstanding

how much was a compromise but the final game is not fantasy but it is.

It's this weird mix of like like when you have a, what's the example of a mount like the mouse in the game has wings mice don't have wings but it's not a fantasy creature it's just a normal mouse but with wings so it's this it's this weird blend in between yeah it's not hybrids it's it's more like 80 what it is with like a little bit of a twist right so like the giraffe has scales or the you know yeah tiger has purple stripes or

stuff like that it's just a little bit out of the ordinary we worked really hard so every zoo chef is an animal every critic every critic is an animal we worked really hard to theme all of those i've had so many hours researching like what what animals will eat spice and it turns out that parrots eat because spice is a poison to the animals like that's why plants are spicy to deter animals parrots don't care about spice and this other animal don't care about spice so anytime

we had something that wanted spice we made it one of those animals and so we worked really hard to like yeah theme all that it's interesting because so much of the the gameplay mechanics that are associated with various critics and zoo chefs and things like that are starting from a what is this animal and what do they do position yeah and that is incredibly fertile ground for design but i don't actually know if it's good advice or bad advice for designers to to.

Think about that in their game because i feel like it's so done now i mean i think it's i think the broad advice of start from theme and make it work it's like we were saying earlier you know rabbits are fast and pigs are slow yeah but in terms of like this game makes sense because of you know these creatures are anthropomorphic cute animals in a world there's a lot of games that do that you know we were certainly not the first you will not be the last but uh yeah we

were pitching it based on creature comforts which is literally that yes yeah all right so let's let's talk about this the starts so at the time of signing you would add up your challenge scores we're trying to central score track and then you would add up all your critic stuff and you would double it and so you end up with these scores i think the average was like 180 like we were talking like especially once you add in that extra content.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It started to really creep up. We had games in the 200s, I think, once you had it in cards and stuff. And so the developer, Chris Strain, had done this. It's so interesting because this is a true collaboration between you and him, in a sense. He had come up with this thing where instead of getting five and ten points, they didn't want to score track. The score track is wrong for this game. It's similar to what I was saying earlier about you and numbers.

Some games are score track games, some games aren't. It's an aesthetic thing. You just have to learn to identify it.

And so we had a score track and he wanted to kill the score track so instead challenges were worth one two or three stars later we changed to four maybe it was four at that point i can't remember and so when you when you finish the challenge you'd get these stars and at the end every star was worth five points and you've reversed that because because of your number thing talk about that yeah so what we we switched it to was you get

the stars for doing challenges and then at the end of the game your player board flips over to a score track so it's it's not this like maintenance thing during the game it's just at this discrete step of okay we're scoring the critic meal and you just move your meeple along and you get a score and then each row of it's one through seven and then you know eight through fourteen nine through twenty one at the end of each row is

a star and just however far you get you just go down the side and that's how many stars you get for a critic meal.

It divided the final scores by seven so instead of being you know 140 it's 20 20 yeah yeah and now scores in between 20 and 40 stars on average like even with everything in there yeah by the way if you're interested in this game you can see four different designer versus designer matches that cardboard alchemy put together alex and i sit there and play and talk through our decisions i did quite well at the beginning alex on the first two and i overwhelmingly won the next two.

And so yeah and and that was just i mean coming up that score track i don't know if you remember that was lots of effort that was oh my gosh because it was it was there were so many early versions of it that just the ui was just so unintuitive and just that that is an example of something where like i don't think i had input but i'm not a graphic designer right and so chris just iterated and iterated and like the final version is fantastic i love it

it's super clear but it was a lot of false starts and trying to figure it out and it's critter kitchen is a great example of a game that could be so much worse if it was with a publisher that cared less like cardboard alchemy cares so much about the final product yeah and well they only do on average one game a year so they spend a year plus 18 months on every game the team like a full team working on it's incredible to watch it's

incredible to be part of um i should get them on for our publisher series so the the last two things i'm going to talk about and obviously anything that you have as well i am an amateur screenwriter i'm aspiring screenwriter and so i had for a while a screenwriter partner who lives in florida lovely lovely gentleman and he came over to la and i had a prototype of critic kitchen and i wanted to show off my game and this is what i mean when i say like i didn't want restaurant tours to be part

of it because he's not a gamer he's a very clever man but if if i can trim one thing away i want to do that. So we sat down, my housemate at the time, my screenwriting partner at the time. I'm not really in contact with him anymore. I burned bridges very quickly. I'm divorced. I don't like Alex. There's a whole list of stuff. And we played Critter Kitchen. And this guy is incredibly giving screenwriting notes and does not game.

Like maybe he's played one game of Cards Against Humanity. Like he's just not a gamer. And so at the end, I was like, what do you think? And he's like, I liked it, but I think these locations are in the wrong order.

And i was like intriguing tell me more what the heck are you talking about non-gamer person and at the time the location this this will not mean anything if you haven't played the game locations went soup truck chef academy normal location normal location normal location midnight market and so the art which was done at this stage sort of showed the day getting darker as it went along because at one point each round was going to be a day we moved away

from that so now makes no sense on multiple levels but the art was such and the chef academy the second location was where all the food went that no one took and also where the zoo chef was and so actually when i say that the zoo chef solved the problem they would have solved a different problem which is that that location had nothing in the first round and so it immediately just solved that problem because all the food that

went to it would be to pick up the next round so you always knew what was in each location when you were going there mm-hmm. And he said that the Chef Academy should be at the end. We haven't talked about the Midnight Merchant. Midnight Merchant is just like five random items when you get to it. So you know that there's going to be five things there, but you don't know what they are. That was 100% Alex's idea. I guarantee that.

I like random. I think I also added the cart that added gambling on random stuff in the bag. I just like, I like random stuff in my games. It's great. Like all these little things, they make the game 10% better or 1% better. But that last, like you said, the second 90% is the second. Yeah. Anyway. we earned the second 90 on this game we did a lot of we got so many hours and so he said put this at the end and i was like okay interesting note and it felt weirdly right immediately.

So i went home and i called alex and i was like alex my screenwriting partner just gave me this note and i think he's right at this point we were months from the kickstarter we were like, art was done games were literally about to go to reviewers like this was not early in the process this is very very late in the process and as mentioned Alex and I have a rule of we just try it so we set up a game on TTS we move that location and I did not think that this game had the capacity for

like a even a one percent improvement and this was like a three to five percent improvement like this was far better than it should have been and we were both like, oh no oh no so we called Peter Vaughn and and to what you're saying about like every publisher's different we called peter vaughn and we were like we think we want to change the other locations and he's like haha good joke i know it's april 1st when you're recording this podcast several years

in the future but right now it's not so we're obviously not doing that right and we said can we just play it with you and we played it with him and he was like oh no yeah everyone does the same it was just so clearly better and again i don't know if there's any actionable here other than like it's never too late to to play test and make radical changes late in the game.

Being willing to be open. I think the advice applies on an earlier scale as well, which is a little bit like what I was saying earlier, where people get really in love with their version of a game they have and they aren't willing to actually make the effort. I think it's the same advice as that. It's just be willing to try it because you might be pleasantly surprised.

Which we were. And so Claudio, my career-rounding partner at the time, I think in the rule book is a special thanks because that was such a distinct improvement.

What was the other thing I want to talk about? but did you want to say anything about either going to six and seven or solo mode oh yes good call we're gonna have to speed run it now because we're butting up against the next meeting the thing i want to say was actually that good on cardboard for like taking that because the thing is like they care about the game they deeply deeply deeply care about the game and so when he saw that it could be

let's say three percent better he was happy to shift timelines and move stuff around it and do a really rapid rate of playtesting yeah i mean i think a huge takeaway here is it's great to work with someone you respect and trust because what this game ended up being as a final product is you know way more a result of cardboard alchemy's choices and scope than just what we did as designers like the final product is way better than the similar parts.

So the game was originally pitched and designed as a two to five player and we always thought it'd be nice to go like up to six just because six is like such a nice big play count and i couldn't get there i just beat my head against the wall again and again and again couldn't work out how to get to six and then one day alex said you know it'd be nice if this game went to seven because everything in this game is sevens i was like oh i can do that like i just thought there's an old story

there's an old fairy tale about a wizard and a king the king is turned into a dragon and he's like wizard turn me back into a king he's like i don't know how to do that i can't turn you into a king what i can do is turn you into a king with three heads and then remove two of the heads and so it's it's still him turning him into a king yeah but he couldn't get there through the linear path he had to take this weird thing and so the six seven play mode in critic kitchen uh as soon as we as soon

as you say seven it's such an audacious number i just did an interview with ag where they kept talking about like the big hairy audacious goal which is a business talk a business expression when you get to seven you can't just add more locations it doesn't work you have to fundamentally rewrite a part of the game and so we just went down to two chefs each and originally you'd roll a die and it would be random which which are the ones you got cut

out and you know what happened alex you do because you were there.

Constant ties every round was tiebreaker after tiebreaker after tiebreaker because it turns out when you have seven people with two two sizes each you are get on the same number of spaces you're just constantly intersecting and so adam mahoud who's a very very lovely game designer who i know from convention circuit he said what if you just let people choose and again it was one of those things like oh yes that's obviously correct and

we tried it and it immediately fixed all the problems and so six seven player mode exists because of that because of that suggestion solo mode i talk a lot about above the table and on the table i literally last episode i recorded i talked about this where above the table is a game like skull or resistance where it's about like looking in the eyes of your opponents and trying to work out what they're up to on the table is like you know your chess or your expansity for example like

it's a game where this is the game the mechanisms and what you're doing is the game and the people are like fun competitors but they're not where your attention is. Critic Kitchen is this split between above the table and on the table. Above the table, also called Yomi, is the Japanese term for it, which I really like. And the more above the table a game is, the less you can solo mode it. You just can't do it. You can't have a solo mode for resistance. It literally just doesn't make sense.

You'd have to design a whole unrelated game that is technically using the bits, but it's not resistance. Because of Critic Kitchen's split, I didn't know how to do a solo mode. And do you remember how we cracked that even?

You i will i mean i'll just i've said it publicly before i'll say publicly now i did very little on the solo mode i i was happy to talk to you and entertain your ideas and play it with you or watch you play it but the solo mode was you know whatever percent you want to split between you and chris working on it so i don't i don't like solo modes and i don't know how to design it's just not something in my i like puzzles and it's a puzzle anyway so i had this

very elaborate solo mode i always start elaborate this is true of critication as a whole and it's true of the solo mode where like you had this little card that you checked all the bits and you slid this other card onto it all this kind of stuff i remember i remember that i remember you had like the sliding card system yeah and i was immediately surprised by how well it worked like obviously you're not getting ahead of the ai opponent but it

felt like you were like you were immediately like ah he went where i. Why why'd you do that like it felt personified and so chris took that mess of a system and took the most fun part out of it and made that the whole system so i considered like i insisted that chris get solo mode co-design and that you didn't i insisted no but similarly you get a world building credit that i in no way deserve because you did all that world building and so yeah the solo mode

is this really cute little we had a big conversation with the publisher i mean there's like four stories i want to tell i got 12 minutes before my next meeting where we had two options we're gonna make a big crunchy like solo mode for the solo players or we can make a very light solo mode for the for the cozy audience and we end up going that direction which i think is 100 the right choice especially because we can now just release the level on bg afterwards yes and i'll also

say that i've been very surprised by how like we're in the critter kitchen facebook group right like there's a facebook group for fans of critter kitchen i'm surprised by how many of the people that are like you know non-hardcore like just cozy gamers have shared pictures of them playing and complimented the solo mode like it's definitely it is making people try it because it is so accessible. I'm going to speed around my last three stories. Are you ready? Yes. We wanted a bunch of cards.

And so Alex had this really clever idea of starting from component because Cardboard Alchemy said, look, blue sky, whatever you want. So we started from a die and we built the cart around that die. We started from a pie dial thing and we built the cart around that dial thing. We also did all the mechanical stuff of like, let's, rumors. How do we make a card about rumors? We end up with, I think, everyone's favorite card, the newspaper card, which is just like all rumors all the time.

Super fun. so that was just a really interesting like for me way to do it where gold coins was a big one because we knew flamecraft had like the metal coins and we're like well our game doesn't need coins but we're gonna put them in there yeah and then once once we had the the component and or the theme it's very easy to come up with mechanisms same ways as we chefs okay speed round one done the two bags do you want to talk about the two bags yeah so in in

critter kitchen you have you do a blind draw from a bag to seed out the ingredients at the different locations and we had the you know appropriate amount of tokens for the game and the way it would work is as tokens got spent and used they would go into the second bag and then when the first bag ran out you would take the second bag and sort of start over beginning am i am i getting this right peter yeah and then it was it was very this was my weird obsession

with fairness you had to see every token in the game yeah i don't know why i insisted this but i really did yeah and and so you'd have weird situations where it was so disparate that player count how like i think at a five player game you might go through the bag twice even or like very rarely but we used to take tokens out based on player count which nowadays i'm.

Like right yeah gross right like disgusting but it was one of those things where like there were these edge cases where like we weren't a hundred percent sure of the math but like it seemed like there was this chance that you'd actually run out twice at a high player game but you might not even get to see everything in a two-player game and it was just really messy and then the solve it was an ergonomical nightmare because it was like

okay put them into this but not this bag put them into this bag okay and then half week of the game the bags would switch and it's like oh that bag you've been putting something dude no no no no no yeah that's no longer the bag it was just so ugly it was just so ugly it. The solution we eventually came up with was refrigeration which is the idea that your kitchen can only store so many ingredients at the end of the third round and the sixth round.

And anything that you can't serve or store gets thrown back into the bag. So you can't just hoard everything and keep it out of the economy. So in practice, what you have is there's enough tokens for at any player count to get you to the end of the third round. And then everyone serves their challenges. Those get dumped back into the bag. Everyone saves up to five ingredients. The remainder gets dumped into the bag.

And then it's the same bag every time. And it just keeps going. It's so much better. We had refrigeration. The change we made was, it used to be you can always store 10. And we were just looking at it being like, you never saw 10 after the third round. That's so high. So we changed it to 5 and 10. And this is the kind of arbitrary number keeping in your head that I don't like in games. But it was printed on the board. So I was very okay with it.

Yeah, I think that's an example of a patch. But it's a patch that solved so many problems that it was worth the lack of cleanliness. It's not a thing you have to keep in your head. The question of how many things can I store is answered regardless of whether it's 5 or 10. Yeah, you talk about in some previous episodes, right, of like you don't want to have a hand limit unless it's visually enforced in some way by having like

slots in front of you on the table. So having a refrigeration limit at all is arbitrary. So you have to look it up by looking at the main board that you should be looking at anyway. So having those numbers be different from round to round, I don't think adds more than an iota of cognitive overload.

Okay, my last one that I'm going to speedrun is Chris Strain was a developer and he had correctly identified that there was this weird disparity between the challenges where it's as many as you like and the critic where it's one of each and this had been really important from a design perspective because the one two three that you know the mouse the lizard the ball thing.

Meant that you needed that duality between quality and quantity so that like it all it all stemmed from the same central thing and and chris suggested an alternative to the critics that we just hated i i think i think all of us would agree it just didn't quite make sense but what we ended up doing to to fix that was by we did a few things one is that at the end of the meal at the end at the end mill when you serve the critic the best of gets a star which is

now the victory points of the game so having the best meat the best cheese the best fish just flat out gets you a star and that addition a it weighted things a little bit more towards the critic in a game that really needed it and b it just made it clear that you were going for quality like it was just one of those little mechanical things it is a new rule you can't deny that it's a fun rule it absolutely earns its keep and it does this

subtle thing of like reminding you of how the game works and And the other thing we did was, and we did this actually quite early, so this was before this became an issue, but it really helped, was we made a starting critic. So we haven't talked about this at all, but every critic in the game, each game you play with one critic, and each critic just adds a global rule. So for example, if you're playing with the kangaroo, all the sixes go upside down and become nine.

So now six is actually the most valuable number, which is crazy. It's a lot of fun. And you start this game by playing the mouse for your first one. And the mouse has two rules. One is that you conserve them as much cheese as you like at the end of the game. It's not just limited one, it's as much as you like. And secondly, the mouse gives three stars for the best cheese instead of one.

And being able to give them as much cheese as you can, this is what the phrase, the exception that proves the rule literally means. If a sign says no parking Thursdays, they are giving you the exception which proves or suggests the rule of you can park there the rest of the time. So by the first time you play the rule being you can serve as much as you like,

it tells you that that is not normally the case. You can serve as much cheese as you like, which means there is a limit on the other ingredients. So that was an example of content, like especially curated first game content, telling you how the game works. And a combination of those things really helps make the challenge critic dichotomy clearer. Okay, Alex, any final thoughts before we go into our segments and I get to my call on time?

No, I think that's really good. I think having on-ramping for like your first gameplay is great, especially with a lighter game.

And i also think that one thing that the best of stars did that's really nice is it gives more players the opportunity to have victories at the end of the game it's not just there's one winner and everyone else loses you get this moment of going around the table sharing this experience of like well i got the best cheese i have the most soup you know yeah one of you and i've been learning in our partnership is how important those presentational moments are because in the past you could

just sit down and just add up your score and be like cool i got 15 stars for my critic meal whereas this way it was like hey everyone what was your cheese it's like oh wow you gotta you You got 14 cheese? Damn it. I thought I had it at 12 or whatever. Yeah. Cool. Alex, so we like to end our episodes with a little tip on how to get your game published or how to guide your game design in a more publishable way. This is something that people requested.

You know this. You've been on the show before. I don't know why I'm belaboring the point so much. Yeah. So what did I say last time? Bribery? Yeah. She said, sleep your way to the middle. No, I think last time I said, you know, go to shows, put yourself out there. I think I'll lean, I'll double up on the product note, which is if you are pitched, publishers are seeing, a lot of games. Hundreds and hundreds. You've been with it because of Scout before.

I've scouted and I've been ahead of development and it's a lot. You see a lot of games and a lot of them just blur together. You need to have something either in the physical components or the visual theming of your game that I have not seen before to really make me take a second look. It's not fun advice, I guess, because you might have a really mechanically sound game, but if it looks like 20 other games I've seen, you just don't get the kind of...

Especially if you're doing cold calls. If we're at a show and you've booked a half-hour meeting and I'm playing the game, maybe then it's my job to see that next level, like what Joe was saying, how he likes to be the one who does the next level visual stuff. The scout at Pandasaurus before you was John Gilmore, and I sat down with him at Unpub and played That Time You Killed Me before it had a campaign element. It was like, cool, you've shown me a really excellent abstract game.

I've seen this six times today. Not literally, but I don't care. And I was like, well, it's going to be a campaign. He's like, show me that. An abstract game with a campaign no one had done before.

And so when i built that and came back and he was like yes and then it eventually got published by pandasaurus so the game was always mechanically sound but the sexiness was missing for sure okay we're gonna have a little bit of fun and we're gonna have the fastest amount of fun possible yeah one minute of fun yeah one minute of your shirt.

It is a lovely critic kitchen shirt mine is a charlie brown shirt which i think is very cute uh that means the the listeners to the podcast got to have no fun yep as as they should, describe something that someone who's watching this could not possibly fathom so that it's like do you know like the thing that's like i secretly loathe the color block yeah yeah, thank you all so much for listening to alice thanks for coming on and talking

to me for two hours anytime this was fun uh well we've already done this episode so we're not gonna do it again that would make any sense what a what a stupid note to end the podcast on well i i am a idiot savant so uh this was great thank. Music.

You so much and i will talk to you later bye, thanks for joining us you can find us and our incredible discord community in the show notes or reach out to us privately at funpromispodcast at gmail.com we'd love to hear from you if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.