#54 - Would CMYK Publish This?

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

Hayward. I'm AJ Brandon. And this is part three of our Wood Publisher published this series. And today we are very honored to be joined by the magnificent Alex Haig and James Nathan from CMYK. How's it going, guys? Good. Fantastic. Now, one thing most people don't know about CMYK is that one of the people who works there is actually invisible. So very excitingly, we have an invisible Alex Haig today. But James makes up for it by being twice as visible as the average human. So it's all good.

Let's jump straight into it. Tell us a little bit about CMYK. Give us the elevator pitch of your company. This is not Shark Tank. You're not trying to sell to us. Let's do a thing. So I can't believe that we've been around for over 10 years at this point because it's gone by so fast.

But basically, basically cmyk started as a project between my friend justin vickers and i to basically just stay in touch after college he was living in chicago i was living in new york and you know we just wanted a little project to work on in order to have a regular time where we're like not every weekend chatting about things and so. That project ended up being our first release, which is a party game called Monikers.

That was the first thing that we made that's a sort of a box version of a folk game called Celebrity or Fishbowl or all sorts of different things. It has like a dozen different names, which means it's really hard to figure out what the exact history of it is. But it's my favorite party game of all time. And so we really wanted to like make a really refined version of that as the first thing we did.

And so, yeah, so Monikers came out and then basically it did well enough that we kind of got the opportunity to give this a go full time, essentially.

Billion so we've been making games ever since and i think really we've discovered that like what cnyk is is that it's a company that really exists in this middle lane of between games that are you know really complex require like a spreadsheet to understand or games that are so shallow that you play them and you're like uh that's like there's not really anything to that I've played this once. I've seen everything the game has to offer.

Yeah, and so we really try to course right in between those two things where we want to make games for people that you don't need to be familiar with modern games at all to be able to play, but also not a game that insults your intelligence or really speaks down to you or anything.

Like really like gets on your level and gives you really like deep interesting replayable moments that are memorable while not overwhelming you with doing that by overwhelming you with rules and so i think that's really the heart of cmyk in addition to like it's really that and then i think our a strong focus on our like development and product process where we sort of try to co-develop all those things along with the game's design in a way that kind of we try to

use those things to set us apart as a studio compared to.

Maybe other companies in the industry yeah i do think you guys have done a really amazing job of like positioning yourself sort of uniquely and starkly in the space like everything you said like i think as far as companies go is like you you've worked out what you want to do and you hit that as hard as a company can hit it i made some quick notes it's funny that you mentioned that like the company started as a way of maintaining a long-distance friendship because that's essentially

how the podcast started yeah it's a great way to do things yeah one is i think like Like the advice that I give to everyone starting out is like, you just need an accountability partner more than anything.

Like it's, you know, it's, it's a thing you do for fun and it's great to like hang out with your friends, but also like there's something really load bearing about just like having someone else there that if you don't produce something or if you're like meeting up and having a call and you haven't like done the thing that you're supposed to do, it's like absolutely humiliating.

You mentioned Monika's was this folk game. Before I was a game designer, before I started meddling in game design, I was working on on essentially monikers in like with all the wrong decisions because I really love that that point of frustration where like you hit a wall this is a weird thing to love but I genuinely love it we hit a wall and it takes like 20 minutes to get through it so like Barbara is you is one of my favorite video games of all time and so we

used to play a lot of that we called it marriage wrecker because I had a no pass rules so in the second round when you can only say one word if you picked a bad word cool it was 60 seconds of you staring at your partner and saying that word again and again until you end up getting divorced which i found very enjoyable but turns out is not actually the ideal way to do it i like okay yeah i like i like friction in celebrity or monikers or time's up or those those styles of games like

i i think that's not necessarily like the wrong instinct to have because i think those moments do lead to a lot of like memorability and fun but yeah i think the passing is so essential because at least for monikers what we discovered was that you really like the aperture widens so much if you get away from really common pop culture tropes right because like times updated is just movies or just celebrities whereas monikers as a game is everything it's uh i played it literally a week ago.

Exactly so it's just like everything from like yeah like a mere social distancing like yeah snapping someone's neck with your thighs or like naruto running in the area 51 like just things that are like we always try to treat the first round of the game almost as like a teaching round basically and so so yeah but but it is like some people do bounce off you know some of the more difficult parts in the first round until they do have that like those moments

of friction that you kind of have to be like it's okay if you skip yeah one more marriage wrecker story and i promise we will get onto the meat of the podcast i taught this game all across australia i got obsessed with with my horrible no pass version taught it to all my friends and i moved around australia a lot i came back to a city i hadn't been to for a few years and i i you know went to a party and they were playing marriage

wrecker calling it marriage wrecker and they'd added a fourth round that they swore that i had taught them so the way monikers works or this game generally works is as many words as you want then one word then charades and they had added a fourth fourth round which was just a single pose and i was like that's such a brilliant extension of the game like that's so clever and they thought i'd come up with it it just appeared out of the ethos out

of the mist okay so let's jump into it so that the idea of the series is to get an idea of what publishers are looking for and how they're thinking because as designers pitching to publishers is is difficult and one of the reasons i particularly wanted to get you guys on was because i essentially had this conversation with you off air about a year ago. And I think of every meeting I've ever had, I learned more about game design from that one meeting.

So no pressure, but like I, AJ will attest to this, I spoke about that conversation for like six months afterwards because it just really blew my mind. I think you guys really think about games and it's really switched on way. Talking to you guys made me a better game designer, so I'm going to try to share that with the one. I'm so worried now, though, because I'm worried that I like offered, I like had like way better reflection back then and I'm just going to totally.

Your brain is off now. exactly i'll tell you what it was we were talking about having a token at the end of the you know you get a token that lets you do a special action and how most games will say like oh if you don't use that token you know get get three victory points or whatever and i can't remember who but one of you said no it should be lose three victory points because using special abilities is fun so don't reward people for not having fun make them use it

like say yeah yeah you have to do this because that's the fun of the game and i just oh my goodness mind expanded yeah let me i'll come out of my like cloakingness of just sort of sitting here listening so you're the face she's the voice it's a great arrangement where i'm worried around the monitors i don't want to mess it up there's a game called mast buy it's a japanese game where you are buying new masts for your boat uh classic

i think that seems a little overdone but you know keep going well if you want the previous version of it was about buying new poles and you're all pole vaulters um.

Uh this is this game is more accessible and relatable yeah yeah it can remade it and it's just about collecting sticks, But one of the things it has in it is a little gym jam that an auction comes around to you and you can just say, no, I want to buy it. This is the price. We all start with one of those. And I feel like the common design trope would be, oh, if you don't use that, it's worth five points at the end. Right, exactly. But in this game, you lose five points if you don't use it.

And the pressure that adds to the auction is so great, right?

And i'm just such a huge like i used to do a lot of pottery right and in you know when you're firing things in the kiln you put this this very watery substance on the shelves called kiln wash that and i'm going to get this slightly wrong but it's a little bit of this ingredient a little bit of this ingredient and the point is that when you're firing a pot and it has glaze on it the glaze turns to liquid in the kiln and it starts to it sort of runs a little bit right

because it's like old glass or whatever. And if it runs off the bottom of your pot, it's going to stick to this expensive shelf that you're having the kiln that you fire your stuff on. So you take this loose wash and you put it on there and then you set your pot on there when you fire it. And if your glaze runs off, it doesn't matter because this kiln wash substance is so loose and flaky that it doesn't really stick to the shelf.

And so your pot will come off fine because you've put this like temporary barrier in the middle. So I'm sitting in the studio one day struggling to figure out how to decorate a pot and my professor goes you could you could put kiln wash on it and i go what are you talking about he wants me to put kiln wash on the glaze of my pot.

That's not what that's not like a that's not a decorating thing that's just a utensil for like making the process go bad oh man he was totally right it was amazing right but it just blew my In my heart, you know, like all aspects of my life way of like, I was limited. The way I, the way I summarize it now is I don't want to be limited by what I don't know that I can do. Right. Right. Nobody ever told me I couldn't do that, but goodness, it never occurred to me to try that. Right.

I have this limitation on myself that said I can't do that. Right. Yeah.

So that's sort of how I feel about the little auction thing in, in mass buy.

Right. right with you know i i i want to encourage people not to design things like by default right going back to ceramics again right we're making pots or you know whatever we're making one day and and in the critique afterwards we're talking about the lip of it right the top rim and it's like did we just make a we threw the pot on the wheel and worked on the foot and worked on the glaze and how much attention did we pay to the exact shape we were trying to give to that lip of it right,

Is it this way intentionally or is it this way by default because we forgot to thank God? And both of those ideas of, did you do this intentionally or is it by default? Right. Not being limited by what you don't know that you can do, I feel like have a lot of applicability to game design and product design. Yeah. As a species, we are very, very monkey see, monkey do.

And so obviously, the more you can escape that, the better. But the other way to approach it, I think, is just expose yourself to as much as possible. Because, you know, the classic advice given to game designers is play as many games as you can. And part of it is just you will see tools that you would never have thought of. The example I was using in life is that after meeting me, I know now over a dozen people who have dyed their hair because they were just like,

oh, you can do that. Like, that's the thing that you can do. And we all know that hair dye exists, but for whatever reason, it's not a real thing until you meet someone who does it.

And so representation matters, et cetera, et cetera, especially in the blue hair community okay one more thing that i promise we'll get on to the episode the other thing i remember now talking to you guys was alex my co-designer alex and i were pitching you a game and one of the notes you had was basically like hey look this game is mechanically very fun we're making interesting decisions and everyone laughs a lot but there's not a discussion point there's no point where the whole table sort of

like checks in and start talking and this was a party game and you were like that's for us as a company at least that's very important and you would have no way of knowing this because i haven't ever talked about it but i have taken that ethos out of party games into everything i make now so i'm working on a area control game with a friend and there was this little auction and i was like cool everyone should be in the auction because it's a moment like where the game stops anyway

so everyone should be in it and now there's yeah it just really made me think you know we are sitting around a table playing a game don't silo everyone off have a point where we all get involved and can discuss and yeah you guys leveled up my game design so i'm very grateful yeah we appreciate that. You know, and the one thing that I've been thinking about recently along those lines is.

You know, there's sort of a, a common critique of, of, you know, players who are distracted on their phone during a game and whatnot. And I've recently come around to that being a problem with the game and not a problem with the person, right? Yes. Your game should not bore me enough when it's not my turn that I will do that. Right.

And so, you know, it's not applicable to all games that, that, that it's a fixable thing. Same thing about the discussion, right? You can't, you can't always add the discussion in. Right. But chess is not lacking a discussion moment right right yeah it's not always out can you.

Make a game where i'm engaged enough in what's happening in your turn or i have enough to plan on my turn the game state's not going to change enough or my turn's going to come quickly enough like what changes can you make to keep me engaged when it's not my turn so that i'm not distracted, right? My phone's not the problem. Your game's boring when it's not my turn.

Yeah, I mean, chess is a great example where, like, I don't think this is universally applicable as if you couldn't make a game that has those features to it, but, like, As a sort of value of CMYK as a studio, I think that's just something that we're naturally inclined to do and have really learned those lessons a lot. So, you know, starting with monikers, like the sort of full game celebrity is classic with this, that like half the game you're not playing,

but like it's fine because you're watching your friends. If you don't pay attention, you will lose that game because you need to know what's in the pile.

Right. And you need to like learn those things. So it's like this wonderful combination of reasons why you should be paying attention like it's almost like the best version wavelength we sort of invented this sort of like higher low like secondary like the off team is also paying attention and like has a betting structure at the end where like you're like oh did they get it is their dial position to the left or to the right of where it should be so you'll have this

like one little micro decision that shouldn't take too long but still gives you a reason yeah gives you a reason to care like you know but even in like i don't know like it it's partially maybe related to why we like push your luck game so much too is that it's just fun to watch people push their luck and either like have a huge success or more frequently like bust completely like like crash out and so having you know a game like spots like is just a game that like has a very traditional,

game structure i don't think there's anything particularly like you know avant-garde about the way it works it's rounds and turns and etc etc but it does have this amazing feature of just you get to watch your friends and family have these decision-making processes and then like you get to see the outcome of them you get to see sort of the drama of the of like the emotions on their face as they roll and if they work if they don't work and so i think it is just sort of a.

Returning feature of every cmyk game that has them maybe lacuna would maybe be the only exception but that game is also just like chess like and it's sort of like but like has a sort of chill enough feeling that like watching someone place their place upon as itself a little interesting and like yeah kind of cozy so one of the things that separates cmyk from other studios and makes you interesting is that many things make you guys interesting but one thing that's unique about cmyk is the

way that you develop slash sign games assuming you know what i talk about can you go into that a little bit because it is it is different from every other studio. Sure. So we, I think we've expanded this a little bit over the past few years, but our, our core is still this idea of starting the game design and development process much earlier, I think than any other studios specifically.

I'll use Spass as an example. We knew John Perry from, we just met at a number of festivals and have always liked each other. And we're working the game together. John's amazing. And, and, you know we had been working on this dice game that was like kind of a co-op.

Roguelike dice game that was interesting but it never really went anywhere and then, one day i was i think looking at instagram i saw this christoph nieman little illustration editorial illustration of just like a dog composed of a bunch of different dice and like a little like ink spot or something where like the dog poo was just like some silly like one-off like image like a clever a clever little like editorial like perfection and but at the same time i was like oh you could

just make a game where like you're creating little artistic pieces with dice like dogs that's what we have on the back of the box ultimately we're just like oh like dice have spots dogs have spots and like that's like oh that's like that's the game and so like chatting with john like we're like he kind of had the same reaction that image it's like oh yeah we should just like turn this sort of like weird complicated roguelike dice

game into something far simpler and it i remember back in the early days it was it was sort of another big reference point for us was the game dicey dungeon the terry kavanaugh video game and so really really like stripping down the idea of a pusher like dice game to its core and starting at a. Visual observation rather than a rather than a mechanic specifically and so famous uh it's a photo of jack nicholson like in a newspaper and someone just took a pen and sketched

in the joker colors onto his face and then eight years later he played the joker so it's this famous thing of like someone doodling turned into one of the most iconic film roles of all time it sounds like a similar development story yes yes exactly and so like that's a maybe that's maybe the most extreme version of this but the concept is that we really do like to you know we have people we've worked with in the past and and people we just meet along the way and

we really love to like get in there like that stage like the like hey i have an idea hey why aren't there why isn't there more x in card games or something like that and so starting from like that simple of an observation rather than like i think the more traditional structure of like a designer brings the finished wets yeah it brings the finished game that they worked on for months or years which like we have started to do this

for certain lines of ours but but like the core of cmik is always going to be this other. Mode where we're really working at it from the ground up like that and just spending like you know years and years for finding it to jump on the pottery metaphor train you guys want to be brought clay more than a full pot sorry go ahead james i want to happen a little bit on that so So start with the visual on that one.

But so much of our notes in the intervening time between initial idea and like final product are more just about how it feels, right? It's not about the theme. It's not about the mechanics. It's this part feels a little mathy or this, you know, I don't feel like I had enough choices here, right? And one of the things that feels singularly great about working with John is his ability to take our notes about how something felt.

And I do my best not to offer design solutions. That's not what I'm good at, right? But I can certainly tell you how I feel about it. His ability to turn that into actionable fixes is great. And his ability to change a bunch of things we didn't comment on is great, right? Seeing the process from this end has really convinced me that you generally can't think your way through is something better or worse than the current burden, right?

Oh, if, if the victory condition in spots was to finish five dogs or seven dogs instead of six, is it better?

And you can, you can, you can mentally try to, to puzzle that out. But until you try them, there's no substitute for just trying it. And there's no cost to try. Right. Yeah. And i really you know the there's this idea in like biology of the like kt fitness landscape right of like when animals reach a like evolutionary plateau of like here's a stable way where you know and and every way off of it is down right but there are there are some.

Maximums that are higher than other maximums right and and the his willingness to push it in all kinds of directions whether it was prompted by feedback from us or not really helps make sure his games get to like their global maximum and not just their like local packs, we have a game coming out called hot street it's a betting and racing game that's that we made with john that's going to be announced next month in may and it's a really i think it's our best example of that

because it really is a really nice confluence of our developing something from beginning the product design working hand in hand with the game design and so it just has all sorts of like the component wise it's really wacky because it's like basically you know in as we're developing this game thinking about like what is the format for what's like the best way you can create a race game and so one of the principles that we have along the

way was that you know our initial observation maybe that that started driving this is that.

Why aren't racing games fast why do they stop all the time and so there are some that that, don't capture that's like ready set ready set from aj yeah that's an example and our our thought on that was like oh it needs to be even it needs to have one more like tick towards spectatorship like you're still doing something in ready set bet when the race is happening and what if it was more like an auto battle or something like you just all of

the decisions you've made are made at the beginning at the end of the race and then you just watch the race yeah because then you can have it then the game's no longer real time right the race is real time but your decisions are done and you can just go back and follow about what's happening that's what stresses me about it every time i play it i get so overwhelmed that i just put all my chips on seven and step back like every time i i don't have the i don't have the

right constitution well you're playing the hot streak variant but yeah so that is right so that's basically like another example of you know basically like we have all these sort of frost pollination moments in our development process that i don't think would be possible with you know just someone shipping a finished design right basically like really my fans would be like pretty tied as a like game director or creative director if things arrive that late and it's not a card game or something.

While we're on John Perry, he has one of my favorite unpublished prototypes of all time. It's a court game. It's like code names, but there's a prosecutor and a defendant and a witness and a judge. Oh, it's so good. I love that game. I played it in shucks years and years ago. So good. Okay, so you guys are talking about this development process. Is this a closed... Can people email you and be like, hey, develop a game with me?

I assume you would be overwhelmed by people. or is this a people who you who you already know and have worked with what's the system for for getting designers in on that. Yeah, I mean, email us at hello at tmyk.games. Like, we definitely, yeah, we have, like, folks that we like to work with. Like, I sort of always have conceptualized this as, like, we're, like, a little film crew or something, and so we're making a movie, basically.

And so we, like, the crew comes together, we make our movie, we release our movie, and then, like, the next movie is maybe, like, oh, the lead actor is different in this movie or something.

But, like, the process is pretty similar. i saw this great video say saying that every heist movie is actually a filmmaking movie it's about getting the crew together doing something really intensely then going your separate ways again go ahead alex i mean that's that's actually perfect in that like yeah it's basically like every every book is about being a writer basically and every movie is a heist movie is about being a film director

but yeah i mean basically we are always on the lookout for new people to work with I think ultimately we'd love to work with designers that are not currently in the industry or underrepresented in the industry. I think we, like I said before, we really see ourselves doing things a little non-traditionally and so really would love to have that practice applied to just first-time designers and things like that too. Yeah.

To dive into the nitty-gritty just a little bit, what does that look like in terms of an agreement? Like, is this just a handshake deal? Is it a, we work on something for two years, and if it doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't go anywhere? Do you sign a contract on day one? What does that look like business-wise to get really boring about it? Maybe not day one, but we'll typically sign a contract pretty early.

We'll usually have an advance on the game. It's an agreement to essentially like work on the game together. And here's what the like, you know, basically like here's what the profit sharing model is and everything. And so. And the dissolution if it goes that way, et cetera. Yeah, if it goes that way, basically like if we're just like actually like we weren't able to get it there.

And this has happened a couple times with games. to like i just feel like so like i don't know i like i'm up at night sometimes being like oh so you don't even know what to do this or that or like there's a game that we're making with magnets at some point that was like the price of magnets like doubled over the course of like developing the game and all of a sudden we like couldn't make it anymore yeah i know it's just like so tragic but basically if that happens like all of the like game

design just goes back to the designer and like take any take our notes take our development work whatever you want like, I don't think we've ever really had this happen yet, but if they publish it somewhere else, I don't know, credit us in the rulebook as helping develop it or something, but zero money, keep the advanced, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, you said that that was for some lines of games that work better. What are the different lines of games that CMYK is currently working on?

So, right. So this sort of directs from the ground up model is sort of described with length and spots and things like that. But also there'll be games like Lacuna that we made with Mark Garrett that was a completely finished design.

I mean, you play the game and you're like, this cannot be improved. It's just sort of a perfect abstract game. And so this was like a thing that sat as a prototype on James Nathan's shelf, I think, for years, back before he even was at CMYK. And so there's this other track of, this is a game that already exists, but there's something about it that's difficult to publish or something is like standing in its way of being as great as it could be.

And so those are some of the other, like, that's kind of the other main track of CMYK releases. Lacuna, controversially, maybe Quacks, I would put in that category for other reasons. And then Magenta is sort of entirely like that around just sort of why don't people care about hard games? And so developing an entire line to kind of answer that question. Yeah, Magenta is your new, I want to say like Oink style line. Is that an accurate description?

Yeah it that was oink was a huge a huge inspiration for for magenta was in some ways like it was a always a provocation of just like would have seemed like hey like made oink games like what would it look like and so magenta is kind of our answer to that but it's also sort of an expression of like james nathan's amazing sourcing and taste and card games combined with i think like.

An effort over like two years to really think about like what is the best way to sort of present and and center um card games in a game night and and a slight note on that is that while the first four are depending on your definition of the word they are reprints right some of them there was a couple hundred copies of once and you know in general as a percent of people i will eventually sell the games to literally no one has heard of them so like effectively they're right yeah so funny to

hear people be like it's a re-release of the green from her it's been forever it's a really old game it's like guys there were like 200 copies of this game, no one knows what this way but it's disgust of my reviewers that are so inside the industry is fine. But anyway, so the next, I've lost count, four to six games in Magenta are signed and some of them are the other model where we're sort of building them up from the ground with the designer.

So of your catalog of games, I'm going to make you choose your favorite child. What's a game from your catalog that you're really proud of and that you think really represents like CMYK? This is what, when people think a CMYK game, this is what it is.

I'll go first. I mean, it's going to be boring, but I think I just have to say wavelength. It's really, I think it really is the title that was the turning point. And it really proved the model of our approach to starting at the beginning with the designer.

Having the development of the problem go hand in hand with the development of the rules and yeah yeah it just hits all of the main points that we want to hit with a game which is like it's social it's surprisingly deep you can explain it in 30 seconds and then really sweating we haven't talked about this but the other really big part of what we try to do at cmyk is reduce the the setup and tear down time of game and so i think like you know while we were developing wavelength one.

Of my goals was just it needs to be played in the box it needs to be ready in five seconds there can't be like handheld cards do this do that like set up the board it needed to be like passable and it needed to be ready in three seconds so you could be at a party and be like you're already playing if someone has it open aj and i are extremists on this front of just like any step in setup you can cut you must cut that step and and we actually get a decent amount of pushback from our listeners and

from the comments but we just so passionately believe that like you know cutting one step of setup is going to double the accessibility of your game yeah there's a game called number nine i come from a retailer background so i worked at friendly local game store i demoed a lot of games and number nine you literally lift the lid shuffle the deck and i mean you don't even have to shuffle the deck it's already random right you just pull it out and you're good to go i was doing a presentation on

how to make demo friendly retail friendly games and i said can someone time me and before they had a chance to pull out their phone and start the timer i was done setting up the game negative time yeah um so submitting to cvk is there anything that people must or must not do do you have like hard lines anywhere that you're like please this or please please always this or please never this for example like play account

or or component or weight or i mean you've spoken about the weight element well i'm gonna grab a pro Mm-hmm. All right, I'll still tell you while James Nathan grabs his props. I would say that, as you could probably tell from everything we've talked about with TMIK, it would have to be a hell of a solo game. I'm not saying that we wouldn't do it. And a game like Figment, which is our redesign with Wolfgang Warsh of his game Illusion, is playable.

It is solid, terrible. And I do love those types of games personally, but it would really have to be, it would be a hard turn forcing WK to do, which maybe that's the fun part of it, but that would be a tough ask. Anything that's pretty... Anything that requires a huge amount of setup or a massive amount of time learning the game would have to have something pretty. Unbelievable under the hood or do something really unique.

At the same time, we published Daybreak, which has both of those things but it also is very special and unique in other ways and was accomplishing a totally different goal of ours so it's less never and more really balanced you lean towards yeah yeah we lean towards like speed of setup ease of play interactability interact interactive social having these moments of conversation having it be there be a reason that you're playing this with people around the table and you know ability to have

some interesting like product design hooks, i'll throw one more one more super niche one is a game that like sort of like changes how you experience your life outside of playing it right i don't have any examples i'm willing to talk about right but but as a general showing. Things I'm working on licensing, et cetera. No, no, no. It just sounded so immediately different. It's like the Monastery as an example, right? In that first round, maybe you get cards you don't know.

Right. But then as you go about your life, in the weeks and months after you played it, you're like, oh, yeah, that was a thing for that game we played, right? Yeah. That's great. And games can sort of like give you those little moments. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Just things that you get right. You're okay.

Yeah. if you're like at the most sort of kind of elevated level or pretentious level even like a game that really is sort of you know mind expanding or curiosity creating and a person would be i think is like the highest goal that we might have and sometimes we hit it and sometimes people and sometimes the games fit that and sometimes they're they're in little like gem box world but you know games like monocles is a great example of just something where you do just learn things and so i

think we're like as a studio i think everyone who's here and working with us is just a naturally curious person who likes to learn and so building that into the structure of our games too is really valuable i have a model of thinking about creative work called hook craft and spirit and hook is basically what gets you into the game craft is how well it's made and while you're playing it and then spirit is the hardest one to nail and that's what stays with you after the game

and it sounds like you're saying that is actually again somewhat uniquely for game publishers, a core element of what you're looking for and what you want to create and put out in the world. James Nathan, I know you have a prop. I'm sorry. I can't reveal. You know, I look at all the submissions that come in. I generally don't have time to respond, right? But I don't know that I have strong answers on what they must or must not have.

I just want to talk about what makes them the easiest and most enjoyable to think about, if they're a good fit, if that makes sense. Here's the back of the box. That's a helpful thing to bring for our game, Walmart's Warehouse, which I adore. Also a game that leaves you with all kinds of memories. Yes.

And you know going back to the retailer side i get that like uh it's helpful for people at a retail store or even at a game cafe if you can like demo my game from the back of the box right heck yeah right so one thing we're working on doing is sort of like we did on this one where it sort of just like runs you through a whole turn of what you're doing and what you're thinking about in like a one two three like yeah floral steps every once in a while i get a pdf

on a submission that is like boop boop boop here's what you're doing on your turn and i was like oh thank you like what's not you know let me let me talk about it from a different way when i'm reviewing games when i'm researching triaging you know eric martin's spiel list of here's all the games coming out of essen and seeing what do i want to personally buy and play what do i want to professionally consider licensing for the U.S.

I get the rulebook because that's like more helpful generally than the BoardGameGeek description of how I play it. And there's so much setup that is irrelevant to my vision of do I want to play this game. What I'm missing is give me something between the BoardGameGeek description and the rulebook. I need a like rough overview of what it's like to play the game.

And this is something that if you look in CMYK rulebooks more recently, it's something we've been really formally adapting into the introductions of every one of our rulebooks. And so before setup, we essentially have a little comic, I guess. I don't know what question.

Involved but it's essentially valid where it's like who's what the game is like a really graphical view of how it's played and so that's great i think the first game did that with was actually daybreak because i was just so overwhelmed with like how do i explain this game to people like it's so it's not complicated but it is complicated and so how do i get people like on board with the core ideas of this game before they open that dreaded page where like all of the

components so laid out and it just looks like such an overwhelming mess. And so like you've got to like ease people into that. And so we do it as a company firm. Game manuals now and also I think like to James Nathan's point I hadn't really thought about that until you brought it up but yeah I think like game designers who are pitching their games I think would really benefit from that because like you really do just want to know what it is like to play at the game.

Like you don't really need to know the backstory and and i don't need to know what components yeah you're suggesting are in it just let me know what it's like to take my turn you you are doing us a huge favor right now we have a recurring series on this channel on this podcast about improving your cell sheets and this is specifically one of the things that we have been pushing really hard so it's very lovely to get real people on to confirm it okay let's jump into the game so it's very simple

uh would you have published, and then the assumption is that it's not already an existing product, you don't know for sure it's going to be a bigger hit. It's just, would it have fit your taste? Would it have fit your company? It's just the kind of thing that you would make. I always like to start with Azul, because I think Azul's a really interesting one. Would CMYK have, if someone had came and pitched Azul, would you have made it?

1,000% we would have made Azul. It's really interesting that it would be like a dream to do it in a quark style design of Azul and make everyone. I love Azul. I love the friction of it. I love how sharp Albert is.

It's like it's a game that i think like cmdik would actually be really well positioned to publish because we could like there there were parts of the teach of that game that could be really simplified um and yeah i just i love everything about that and just be clear would you have taken azul and published it as is or would you have done like a full pass and like you said maybe cracks the quiddling bird a bit or oh like when when you're imagining

you publishing azul is it you know different graphic design or whatever but essentially the game that exists now or are you like we would have started at that point made something different.

I mean that's always my secret agenda like frankly like the only reason we started publishing quacks years ago one is like a favorite Wolfgang he wanted to be like closer to like the like major markets for his game but also to like I wanted to read as an exact so it was like here, it could be much more accessible to people and so like I think it would be really, we did it with taverns and we currently sell the like Ganshan Clever series

of games sort of again it's the same setup with Wolfgang but I mean my secret plan is always to do a like a reclimatization of them I don't think we would ever like blanket like statement like we would never just take a game to like be a pass through, for another publisher in general it's funny because. My first thought of Azul is that it doesn't fit you guys, but the more you speak, the more I'm like, I could see how that would be a CMYK game. It's so social.

I mean, it's mean, but it's so social. Definitely CMYK is not known for games that are particularly mean. Right. But that's not a turn-off for you guys.

No. I mean, I think there are at least one Magenta game that's coming out that is, I can't announce it yet, but it is like a very classic card game that is like mean as hell and so we're doing a visual redesign of that and so that is like in our toolkit game flavors that we'd like depending on who you're playing with monikers is also very mean that's true that's true next on my list actually aj do you want to go yeah just off of that comment you just made there's something in there that made me

wonder about the estates are you familiar with that one yeah would you have publish the estates no i don't i haven't played it so i'll let do it even uh have you played noia heimat alan no i'm familiar with this game i've just never played it i like those chili spiel games are great and if anyone has a copy of master plan they're willing to sell i'm i'm in.

I say you get a game signed with cmyk a gift well the advance is you give me a copy yeah yeah i don't know that it's it's i think it's a little i think i could be wrong that it's just a little too gamery for us you know i was playing i was playing northern pacific with with a group of one of my regular game groups that i refer to as the urban foresters it's not important but that's what most of them do for a living and the urban foresters aren't really, gamer per se, right?

You know, if I go over, they may be playing Betrayal at House on the Hill or Wingspan, right? But I don't know that they have Board Game Geek accounts, right?

To give you a sense of who they are. And so I took Northern Pacific over the other day because I thought it would be a huge hit. I love that game. I totally adore that game. But I think it also requires a certain amount of understanding weird board game negotiating. Right. And the way the incentives are is a little... It's not as accessible as you guys have. It's a little bit of a gamery for a lay person, right?

To back up like i would say like in general that's probably why we would an auction game would really have to like blow our minds in order right or it would have to have some sort of like.

Huge hook that like got us interested because i do think that like those games are inherently a little inaccessible because you just don't know what the like implied value of everything is at the beginning of a way that's like actually can create a lot of like anxiety and problematic interactions in the first couple plays of the game and like if you're designing a game for like, serious gamers like that's a benefit but for our audience it's it would it's a little it's a

ton off yeah like obviously we would publish raw like but not yeah i would say like games that really require a like serious consideration of like do i bid 17 or 18 like we probably would never publish them for that reason right yeah i think i think that's right you know and so like we played the three rounds in Northern Pacific from the Rio Grande rules in, And round one was kind of odd because they were, I don't know what they were.

They were not playing in a. And I think the game anticipated them to play. They were playing more spiteful. They weren't doing things to get their own points. If they could screw somebody else out of a point. And it's like, you're not. This is what if you just invest down here later? Like, clearly this is going to. There's there are there are emergent alliances to be had here. And they weren't seeing that.

Engaging, yeah. So I started table talking a little more in the second round about like, oh, I'm going to go here so that this person will do this. And like by the third round, it was a different game, right? Yeah. But I sort of had to hold their hand to get there a little bit. And we had sort of two rounds. And luckily in that game, it sort of resets between the rounds. Whereas in Noya High Map slash the Estates, oh man, there's no chance to really reset in that, right?

So I think it required advanced analysis than... Is really my core audience. Right. Just to build on that for a second, what about something like Skull, which is still an auction game, but much, much lighter, much more accessible, and the stakes and the consequences of the cost of the bid is, I think, a little more intuitive. Would that fall in line with you? Yeah, I think Skull would probably be a yes. It feels very in line with other Magenta games.

Frankly, the sort of hesitation in my voice, though, is that I love Skull, But for whatever reason, the teach of Skull is very painful. And so people really easily misunderstand the rules of the game. And so it would be an interesting challenge, but I think I would really need to dive into whether that's something that we could really fix with how to play video in a good clip. I talk a lot about what part of the game is on the table, what part of the game is above the table.

Actually, often on this series of episodes, where on the table is you're moving the bits around, above the table is i'm looking at alex and being like are you going to do this because if you do it screws me up and i feel like you guys are saying like your games need that above the table the way that a lot of publishers don't and even something like azul which presents as an on the table game is actually incredibly above the table and i think i think and

correct me if i'm wrong but i feel like that's what's drawing you guys to these games i was actually going to mention skull also as a gimme because i think that skull is such a cmyk game but you're right the teachers is the trick to teaching skull is just start playing recent if you need to but like i've given up on trying to explain the rules i'm just like you do this you do this you do this cool that's how the game works let's go yeah one needing

that like one i've never actually sat down and tried to do this because we don't publish skull but like if we were i'd really sit down and think about like what is the way to describe it. Not only that you have to start flipping from your own stack first, but what's the context you give people as to why that's important without having to talk too much strategy? Oh, wait, really? Oh, I tried playing with that. Yeah, I like it so much more without it. It's completely a house rules.

It's how I played it accidentally for years, and going back to the other version is horrible. It's worse in some ways, I guess, but I love it so much more. Okay, here's a weird one for you guys. Seven Wonders Duel. If someone had brought you that, again, Seven Wonders doesn't exist. Is that a thing that would even be on your radar or would it not make sense for you i'd like to think we would derive seven wonders if someone brought you seven wonders is that a cmyk game.

I think so i think it is james jathan what do you think i think it has the roots of something we would start from i was gonna say it feels it feels much more i want to say gamey but not in an insulting way like it feels much more on the table than what i think you you guys are aiming for yeah i wonder if we like it's interesting to think of what the cmyk version of seven wonders is but maybe maybe it has to do with with the like the civilizations that

you are the wonders that each player has like maybe they could be made a little more interactive i mean it's just such a good game like there are just some games where i'm like well it doesn't really matter if it's like not a very cmyk game it is just so good it would be like it'd be hard to pass some it'd be hard to pass and there's some yeah i just think like visually redesigning seven wonders and like thinking about like the way you could maybe just squeeze out a little

bit more accessibility for it and like general appeal for it is such a juicy question that like that in itself would be would probably like drive us into doing it what about welcome to the the roll and right that sort of rode the initial wave? I played it once or twice. I don't remember it enough. So it's, well, but that probably tells you what my answer. I, I, I really, I really enjoy it, but I think no, like rolling rights in general, I think would have to be like.

Have some really highly highs and i think welcome to is a really good like it was a chill pub game experience that like i personally really enjoy as a player but like it just like doesn't tick those seem like a boxes i don't think that one's so heads down that i thought it'd be a no but i'm sure that my my radar was right okay very strange one sidereal confluence trading trading in the in the quote what's it called uh hold on hold on let's

give it to sidereal confluence trading negotiating the Elysian Quadrant. It rolls off the tongue, Peter. I simply adore Chinatown, and I feel like we would, if they'd come out, we would have said, take this out, take this out, take this out, and ended up with something closer to China. Interesting. That sounds right to me. It's like, it is. I, again, I really have enjoyed the couple plays of Euroconflicts I have, but it's like.

You just like look down, like, sort of to my one of my first points about just like we don't want a game that like looks like a spreadsheet like you are just right literally putting a spreadsheet in front of yourself basically and yeah it's just not accessible enough and like i mean trading games are like.

Probably like cracking that would be like the dream cm like a project is to like create to make a trading game that like stands up to a like bonanza or katan or tiny town or something but like side of your confidence would be like way over in the other direction of where we would be all right last one for me and then aj and then we'll wrap up unmatched i haven't played or um, yurashima hex or any of those like two-player dueling games which

is aj and i have one which is why it's very on my mind again like not as much as solo games but like two-player games i think would really need a like it would just really they'd really need to like wow us with something i think like so for example sky team you'd be more likely to do because that is two-player but in a super interactive way or is sky team also a no for you i know i said last one but i'm cheating i actually

haven't played it i really should probably i've played it i mean i don't think we would really that's so interesting yeah i would have seen that was no judgment on the game to say bad or anything i don't think it's the right fit for us is that not communicating part? You interact, but it's not like the direct conversations. You only have those moments.

For some reason, I have an exception for Lacuna, but I just feel like there's, Two-player games just lack some sort of social energy, for the most part, in my experience. Interesting. It's just like, it's not as enjoyable of an experience. It just feels like, by default, a more heads-down, confrontational thing than... Sky Team is co-op. Yeah, no, I... Yeah, yeah. Which is why I thought maybe that one. I think also Sky Team and Daybreak came out at a similar time,

so they're very, like, they're sisters in my mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, AJ, do you have any others? And then we'll let these fine gentlemen go. I do. The Resistance. Ooh, that's a good one. James Aiden would definitely say no, because he doesn't like social deduction games. I would probably say yes. Like, I just like some, one of the sort of canonical social deduction games, like we definitely would like Resistance or Superdome or Jarius Werewolf Orients.

Very, again, like That's something we've really tried to crack a lot at CMYK. Years and years ago, I feel like it's maybe as a genre not as compelling anymore, but similar to trading games, that's one that's always in the background. It's a white whale. It's a white whale for sure. It's a white whale for sure. AJ, the might. Oh, absolutely. If I were to like list top 10 games, it would be like number one probably.

Wow. i mean that was like why we made wavelength i like my mind and immediately went home and dm board games amazing wow that's cool how about lanterns lanterns is one that's like heads down in some ways but has that interactive in other ways yeah yeah it again falls under the i played it but don't remember enough to comment so probably not it's got a really novel mechanism way it's a tile laying game and everyone gets the thing pointing at

them so you you play a different quadrant so it's interactive but it is interactive in a very on the table kind of way okay we know you guys have to run so quick quick last questions um you said earlier that you're taking submissions you said hello at cmyk.games is the best way to contact you um is there anything you're is there anything you're specifically like hungry for or looking for right now do you have a wish list.

Card games we have an unending appetite for at this point with magenta like related to all of those sort of priorities that we that we sort of have described over over the past hour.

Also i mean like i said like honestly games that can really creatively like craft new ways to play like trading like directly with their trading social relaxing games again ones that are like could somehow like achieve what they do without a level of like meanness i think would be other ones yeah james what do you think yeah i mean i think that's that's a fine list i don't i don't know how to describe what we're looking for you know again hopefully i have

the back of this box and not the front of this box but like in what world do i explain to you that i want a cooperative storytelling memory game when like yeah we had jerry wiggins as the first person on the series and he said that he wants a game like, what was the example he used? Macro Micro? Where he's like, that's not a game that existed before this company. It's a new game. And I feel like that's in line with what you guys are looking for.

Yeah, yeah. Just two quick caveats on social deduction and on trading. I think trading and negotiating get lumped in a lot. And I think in the Elysium quadrant especially. I think what we're looking for is, On the wavelength spectrum of a Cole Whirly game to Chinatown, I want way more on the Chinatown end than on the like PAX premiere end of negotiating, right? Yeah. Where like the whole game experience forces me to do this trading and not...

I would say... Yeah, this didn't really come out, but I feel like your games are very, very, very focused. Like they are, again, not in a diminishing way, but they are the one thing and that's what they do. and they do it amazingly. And I feel like that's almost the trait of a CMYK game. And so similar note on social deduction is I don't know what the other end of the spectrum is to give you the exam.

I mean, I think I know what I want to say. Was that New Angeles kind of like where it's a big heavy euro with a traitor or whatever? Like you've got someone who you're trying to betray. I don't like to lie. Even in the magic circle of the game. Yeah. I don't like the like improv-ness of having to act like in Spyfall or whatever. Like I know what we're doing. Yeah. So is there a game where I can do social deduction without?

Right. I'll send it to you. like lying last 10 seconds rather than 10 minutes or something like that i think those are like directions that we've always like wanted to go in basically for for that i think like yeah i i played so much werewolf like in college and afterwards to make you think overcome like come around because i think too where it's like i like i'm like good with the like negative emotions and accusations like yeah it feels like

that as a genre seems like it's just like you're always having the same version of the same experience similar to like and like I guess I would throw in like one last one like which is just like in-ish like games but like somehow. Resolvable without king making similar to these other things if someone has ever cracked that like please email us. I want to break all the rules and just throw one more into the game which is Dominion.

I feel like Dominion is a really interesting one for CMYK I mean it's yeah I mean it's like on that list of like, it's so good you'd have to say yes but otherwise no so no i just think it would like look a lot different because it has like a huge amount of setup the like the modularity of it i find to be like a serious problem of getting people to play it i haven't played in a while but like basically it's like all of those things

i would like really want to think hard about are you are you yeah create the game to to be ready and like under a man rather than like five minutes or like build the modularity into the like form of setting it up or something like that. Like it feels like a missed opportunity that you're always having to like have this like throat clearing at the beginning. Thank you guys so much for coming. This has been so interesting.

I could talk to you guys for another two hours. Do you guys have any final thoughts that you want to share with our viewers or anyone submitting to you or the world in general? Our world in general right now is tariffs. So I feel like no one wants to hear about that. So it was really a pleasure to think about that for a while. It's always so fun to catch up. We should just do this more often. You guys are the first publisher on the interview series that I haven't worked

with, and you're very much my target is to get a game. This is really selfish, honestly. Cool. James, Nathan, any final thoughts? Nope, nothing from me. Cool. Thank you both so much for coming on. And again, hello at cnyk.games. If you want to submit to these wonderful people, I have not worked with them, and yet still thoroughly recommend it, because I'm close with several people who have and they say it's a wonderful experience.

Thanks for your time. And we'll be back next time with more fun problems, which is the line that we use to end every episode, apparently. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can find us and our incredible Discord community in the show notes, or reach out to us privately at funproblemspodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.