Welcome to episode 130, where neoprene dreams of card fueled adventures come to life. In today's episode we're going to reveal the story behind Game Head Games, a company that started by laying the foundation, literally, with stunning high quality play mats and is now leveling up into the realm of original board games. We're going to talk about vision, innovation, and what it's like to shift from supporting the game to creating the game.
We're going to trace their journey from accessories to game design. And we're going to chat with their new creative director, Paul Solomon, a well known name in the tabletop community. Paul joins me today to share his vision for game heads future, what it means to shift from supporting gameplay to actually creating, and how the company plans to nurture a unique community focused on gaming as a
shared social activity. This is an adventure you won't want to miss, so thanks for joining Paul. Morning. How are you? Good morning, PJ, I am doing great. This is great to finally get to do this with you. We met at Origins and kind of scheduled this for an early morning. That's right, we put it real smart. For those listening at home, it is 7:00 AM. That's right. That is right. Crazy. But so I did learn an interesting thing is that you're just in Saint Louis. I'm in Springfield.
We're like an hour away from each other so. Very near to each other. And I think I told you this the other day, but the I designed Honey Buzz and when I was in development with Elf Creek for that, there's they were HQ in Champaign, IL and I'm in Saint Louis. So Springfield was sort of like a let's meet in the middle. I think we met there like every two or three weeks, maybe a month for, I don't know, a there are more playing iterations and stuff. So yeah, I've been to been to
Springfield a lot of times. Also stopped at that old Steak and Shake that was there many, many times. It was kind of the perfect stop as I shot up 55. Which is just down the street from where I live. So I love that. And at Origins, when talking about our meeting, I love telling that story to all my friends. Oh, yeah, yeah. Honey Buzz was birthed in my town. That's right. And I'll tell you one more Steak
and Shake factoid. I used to be so into Steak and Shake. First off, I had a girlfriend who worked at Steak and Shake. And secondly, I dressed up as a Steak and Shake employee for Halloween one year and I had, she got me a name tag and I had the hat and the apron and everything. But they, they barely even, I don't think they don't even have servers at Steak and Shake anymore. So it's a, it's a very different place. Yeah, very, very different.
So that's amazing. So, So tell me Pulse, tell me a little bit about how you partnered with you came like where the iteration whose idea was it to go create gamehead games? So some background here, Gamehead Games. Gamehead is owned by a guy named Alan Hochman, who is the owner of Gamer Mats, creator of all these things and pushes these initiatives. But his story begins 33 years ago, I think, starting a retail shop called Pastimes, which still exists in the Chicagoland
area. And along along the way they started doing events, tournaments, Magic tournaments. And now they are sort of the premier hoster of like Magic tournaments. So at Gen. Con, I believe they're doing all of the Magic tournaments, all of the Lor Kana tournaments. So that's a big part of the business is running all the past time stuff. They do Magic cons, they just working all the time doing those
kind of things. And at some point he figured out like what would it take to make play mats here in the US and ended up buying some machinery and has it doesn't square foot warehouse and production facility in Chicago where they, they buy neoprene and rubber, you know, from China, but they print it all here in Chicago. And I checked out that facility. It's very cool. And they have a crew of folks that have been working there a long time, you know, making
playmats by hand every day. They have a custom minimum order of 1, so you can just you know, you want one playmat, you can do it. Their their main competitor for those that would probably know the name was Inked. Who made Playmats. Sure. Yeah. Inked I think just went out of business. So if you needed to get Playmat Gamer mats.com, it's the place to go.
We have a gamer mat. We have a gamer mat on our dining room table permanently set up that we ordered like some because it's like large enough in our dining room. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, whenever we're serving food, we just kind of throw a tablecloth over top. Totally, totally. Yeah. What? What's on there? Is it just black or there's like a design? So we were looking for a solid color and the closest they had on their website, it's like, it's like a grass. It's like a grass field.
Nice. We play everything on that. Sure. Of course, yeah, awesome. So I love so so then, you know, recently I think kind of inspired by what All Play did, shifting from boardgametables.com to become All Play and also just recognizing some of what's been success. He just, you know, wanted to push in and see if we could make
games. And his, his concept was let's make six games all at once and put them out in this retail kit so that we're not just saying like, here's a game game that we think is good and we want you to buy it, right? Which is what everyone on Kickstarter is saying, right?
Yep, They're saying here's this game that we think is good and we hope you'll buy it. And if you're if you're, you know, if I had done that with honey buzz and taking it to stores, and it would have been probably very hard sell to be
like, here's a game, it's good. But, but when you come with a, a brand that looks a certain way and we have these display kits that we've built, it presents to the retailer and to the customer that like there's something substantial here, there's something that makes sense, there's something you can depend on, There's some quality behind it. So that was the that was the original goal. He hired me in October of 2024, which is not that long ago. Not long. Ago at all.
In fact, that's when we launched our YouTube channel, so you and I were making big changes in our lives. Professional Lives 100. And 30 episodes and that time is crazy. So yeah, he basically put in front of me, I want to make six games and release some kind of, you know, he said kind of how long is it going to take? And I came from a place where it takes a long time.
And, and he said, really I want to work on like 12 games and release 6 and then maybe release another six and then we'll do like a larger size game and stuff. So that was really the start and it's been a ton of a ton of a ton of work since then. Oh, that's amazing. That's incredible. So he approached you, right? Well, no, actually. So I was head of development at Elf Creek for about two years. I was full time teacher for something like 16 years. Time has eluded me now but a
long time. And then through the success of Honey Buzz and all kinds of things I shifted to part time. So I was teaching three classes instead of five, then working 20 hours a week on Elf Creek products, Honey Buzz Expansions and Santa's Workshop and watches and clocks of Hickory Ducks and all these other products for about two years. But Elf Creek ran into significant financial trouble, to put it mildly. So, you know, I have a family.
I have to have a job and make money to pay bills and such. So I just, I started looking for other work and I saw their listing whatever upon whatever, you know, website we used to find jobs, jobs these days, but it said like, you know, you have to be local to Chicago. So I didn't even, I didn't even apply it. I never heard of that before because they're just rebranded. But then my buddy Derek Funkhouser got a job at Lucky Duck. He was at Wise Wizard Games doing development.
And then he left there and worked at this job right away from Lucky Duck. And I said, awesome dude, you know, congratulations, now find me a job. And he said, well, you should talk to this guy Alan. He's doing this thing at Game Head. So he basically, he set us up. And then Alan and I had a number of conversations about, you know, frankly, Alan didn't know all that much about the game industry.
OK. From a development standpoint, I don't think he would consider himself like a board gamer in the same way that you and I would. OK, so I really, we had to sort of get on the same page about what kind of games we're making and, and what our goals were. And I appreciate that he took a lot of a lot of, you know, thought and input for me because there's a lot of games I just don't want to make, you know what I mean?
And I'm, I'm really thankful that I'm creative director and basically I'm the first hire for the, for the game side. So I've been able to, I've had the leeway to really pick and choose exactly the projects I want to work on and pick what they look like. And that's been super, super, super cool. So it's interesting that Alan brings a perspective to the table that I would think would be helpful to you, especially as creative director now, right, there's that partnership. Percent.
Yeah. So that partnership's been really smooth, you found? Yeah. So, so Alan is incredibly busy with his, you know, 3 or 4 different businesses. So we, we only meet about once, maybe twice a week. But we have kind of, you know, we have some structures in place about how things would work. And in the first wave of six games, we so I built really in depth project sheets for each project that include, you know,
all all of the costs associated. And then you just tons of stuff that freight costs and how the box size is going to impact how many fit in a carton and how many fit, how many cartoons fit on a pallet and how many pallets fit in a in a 22, a 20 foot or 40 foot or whatever it is container to get all the way down to like the royalties and what the total landed cost is. And then if we sell it into district.
So ton of ton of numbers so that we could estimate break even point and the return on investment and stuff. And it was because of all that work that we could kind of like he could feel confident enough to be like, let's let's go forward. So that was great. And you know, we've had some conversations about making some tweaks in the future. We invested a lot in art in this first round, which which I felt was really important to grab the
gamer market. It's less important for some sorts of like mass market style games. So you know, each project you got to pick the right thing for that project. But yeah, he's been great to work with and the the main value I think he adds to what we're doing apart from all the money, is he has connections into a ton of retail because he owns a retail shop. He was on the board of Gamma. OK. He, you know, has friends, old friends and distribution and
stuff. So right away we're going to be set up to sell into ACD and PhD distribution, I think. That's great. Which is exciting and and his whole it was whole his whole idea also to build this retailer kit which is available to your FLGS right now. Our games are all 20 bucks and the retail kit comes with four of each game. We'll sell them to you at 50% and then there's a display kit which is, you know it's fold up display. It comes with 12 games in it.
You take them out and build this little step thing in there and then they kind of tear up like a point games display or something like that. So you can see all 12 and then also some branding like it says 5 minute, 5 minute setup, 5 minutes each, 20 to 40 minute play. That's true for all the games and you know, party games, casual games, thinking games. And on the back for if you keep it on your countertop, the seller, the clerk can see
information about all the games. And so they can kind of the idea was to make it as easy as possible for a retailer to know what the products are and convert the products to sales. So you know that that kind of like business insight is super, super useful. Yep, so in my intro to the episode I had said and I stole it straight from game heads website. I know I caught some of that. You caught it. You, your, your part of your vision is that gaming is a shared social activity.
So I'm wondering, how do you see not just the six games you have coming out, but the future of Game Head? How is it going to fit in nurturing this sense of community and promoting that shared experience? Yep. So here's what I'll say first about about it. So I'm also a host on the Decision Space podcast and we talk about all kinds of like
preferences and differences. I mean one of my good buddies, Pete Wissinger, who was Co developer on one of these games, he and I have very different tastes about games, but we play together. OK. We play together every Monday. So the game line, the game lines sort of reach out broadly to try to grab a lot of folks and hopefully bring new folks into the into the, you know, gaming
world. So our party line especially is focused on what most people, you know, non gamers would consider a social activity, which is let's get together, let's laugh. Let's you know, a lot of people need to be able to play and it's sort of structures socializing in a goofy, fun way, which is I think what first class letters is a little thinkier than that. But most people think of their social, social interactions as like fun and like probably and kind of maybe loud or something.
So that's kind of what's happening there. But for gamers, let's just say hobby gamers, you, me, probably everybody listening to this podcast. Right. We often are looking for more strategy. We're looking for, you know, when we say a shared experience, that shared experience might happen in the center of the table where there is some central board that we're all interacting with or some shared economy that we're interacting with.
So for those games, for the for the thinky line, the shared experience is, is much more interactive and strategic. So a game like Trinket Trove, pardon me, is Trinket Trove's a set collection card game. It's a bit like money from Reiner Kinitzia, which all players published. You have a hand of cards and some are revealed in the middle that you'd like to collect, but you need to bid for turn order
to draft those things. The things you bid with are cards already in your hand, and those cards also get claimed by people. So there is a closed economy where every card that's in people's hands will stay in people's hands, but exchange hands and additional cards come into the economy. And so, you know, that's a shared experience that's very different from something like Foolish Fool where anybody can play Foolish Fool and immediately understand what it is.
And if they can read, they can play and they will almost certainly laugh. But Trinket Trove ISM is a very different kind of strategic thing. It's not actually very heavy at all, but that's the sort of thing we look for when we think of a shared gaming experience. And our third line is the casual games, which are essentially for
just about anybody. They're a little they're going to be a little closer to the thinking and that they're, you know, they have it's like there might be some really light trick taking or some secret bidding, but they also are pretty rules light. They also can be fairly strategy light and a little random. They can accommodate chaos.
And that's really because the sort of what I would call the casual gamer who frankly might be in the 50% of people at Gen. Con that are not there to play hobby board games. They just see a game that's cute and they want to try it and they want to have fun. And so if we can make a game that's fun for those kind of people too, then the whole
community gets wider, right? And we can bring more kinds of people in. I mean, I, you know, I know you just saw that, that interview with Drew Denning, but I, I do not game head keep everyone is welcome to come in and be a game head. And we've we've got games for everybody. I love that. So I want to, I want to talk about, I want to talk about game design, but I'm thinking about Trinketrove because you taught it to me in like 5 minutes, just like you said.
So you were true to your word. It was easy to learn. While you were teaching it and we were playing, I was thinking about some of my family back home. I was thinking about some friends who aren't gamers. I was like they could get this, but to your point, there is there was deep and rich enough strategy as a hobby gamer that it really kept me interested and I wanted to share this game and look forward to getting a copy and sharing it with my family.
So how do you as a designer, how do you achieve that, right? Like how do you how do you bring that balance together? Is there an overarching theology? It's not the. Wrong word. It's the one that comes in theology in your game design that you managed to achieve that balance. Yeah, that's a good question. So I think to be broadly accessible in general for game design, this is true. Really in any game design, I should say.
You have to have the clearest, cleanest version of the idea so that the game communicates itself to the gamer very easily and can be taught easily and can be understood easily. It has language that's clear and doesn't interfere with itself. It has player aids, obviously, you know, so there's just in general you have to have the best possible user interface and iconography and a rule book that really works, all that kind of stuff to create a good user experience.
But you know, you can take Teramistica as far as you can take it with all of those things, and it's still not going to be for my dad, right? Right. So I think that when you look at and, and I should say, no board Game Geek is such a teeny tiny microcosm, not a microcosm, such a teeny, teeny micro set subset of the hobby world of the board gaming world. It's insane and laughable. I mean PGG is a huge deal. It is. But we know that it skews very heavy, the popular games that
are very heavy, right? And there are games that come out and sell a million copies that will have terrible BGG reviews because it's just not who the gamers are, you know what I mean? They're sure they're they're a certain kind of gamer there. But more games sell at Target then get rated on BGG, obviously, right? I mean it, you know what I mean? And if we looked at something like Explode kittens on BGG, what would your guess be for what the BGG Exploding Kittens average rating is 0?
Man, I don't know. I couldn't even begin begin to think. Throw one out there. Yeah, what a what? Like a 22.3 or something like that. That would be extremely low. This is a 5.8, but that's very low also. But here's what you need to know. The Exploding Kittens Kickstarter campaign had about 230 million backers. 200. And 30 million backers. And right now, the games that we have on people's top 10 lists have maybe they had 10,000 backers, right?
So it's a very different world when you think about who out there is playing games and what makes that game good for them. So I think there's a, there's a, and my, my podcast to some extent serves this. There's an echo Chamber of we like the things we like and we get around with the people that
like the things that we like. And we talk to each other about what we think is good or what we think is bad or why, you know, but that's just for us. And to make something more broadly accessible, you have to think outside yourself. You know, it's I'm, I'm as a game designer, when I made Honey Buzz or I made Stamp Swap or I made whatever, I made a game that I would like, that I wanted to play, that I wanted to see in the world that I thought deserved to exist.
But as a publisher, it's completely different. And you know, you're not making games for yourself. Like I said, I, I don't, there's lots of games I don't want to make because I just not interested in them. I'm probably the wrong person to make them, but I'm not just thinking about what I like. And I am thinking about not just sales because we have to make money. But sales, because that's more people are going to like your thing and it's going to have a greater impact on people's
lives. That is, that's just brilliant. That's well said. Yeah. So let me ask, how do you, how have you experienced recently? We can't get away with not talking about it. So you're about to put out this line of games. You just created this new this new entity partnership and we have a trade war going on. Yeah. How is navigating that What? What has that been like and where have you found success? Sure.
Our, like I talked about those spreadsheets, everything in those spreadsheets from day one was built on a $20 MSRP. And so we kind of reverse engineered that and talked to all Play who has a $20 MSRP and figured out what our landed costs need to be, production costs, art costs, etcetera to get profitable on like a $5000 print run or 5000 print run units, which is frankly it's a lot of a lot of games for a
starting company. And people in the industry sometimes talk about your multiplier from landed cost to MSRP, which is 5 or 6 is what we did at Off Creek. And the margins are a little tight. So we, excuse me, we pushed that a little higher to try to have room. So then once the when the tariffs were announced at wherever they started initially, maybe it was 50%, we were going to raise our prices to 25, which I think the games could be 25 anyway.
There were some sort of odd reasons why we didn't want to do it, you know, apart from more higher prices, less sales, right? So that 50% scared us. And then they were 100%. And we were like, you know, OK, wow, that's really bad. And then they were, you know, whatever it was, 145%. Something like that, yeah. And that was a huge problem. I mean, we had costs that were, you know, they were going to be a dollar and now they're 250.
And yeah, that was going to be really, really crazy devastating to the global economy and to board gaming. I did. I mean, one thing to say is that the night that that was announced, the 1:45, you know, there was a lot of panic and Alan, Alan really thought like, we're just we're just going to stop the games we're going to. We've paid some money, but let's just stop right there and not go forward and just cut the risk and and luckily cooler heads prevailed and we did push forward.
But yeah, we actually air freighted in about 300 copies or something of our games and those came across at 145%. So, you know, that really hurt as a bunch of money. And then luckily they came down. So we, we freighted in on ocean freight. We brought in I think about 44,000 units and those came in at 30%. Now that's still like $30,000 that we did not anticipate spending. So it's super sucks, right?
That's just money that goes to the US government from our company and makes it a little harder for us. And so our choices were we had to raise prices or make less money. And so we decided to make less money and you know, stay at $2020.00. And then if we release a mid game, mid sized game, it'll be $30 and big box be 40. That's kind of our plan.
We thought we could do 25, but let's try to stay at 20 and hopefully, you know, hopefully the market comes our way towards, you know, if we can stay at $20, maybe it makes us more competitive and maybe people will shift towards smaller box games. So, you know, there's been so, so, so much volatility that it's been impossible to actually estimate anything. What I will say is that I did, I had conversations with US printing facilities and manufacturers and gots got some quotes and stuff.
And I know that they had a million quotes to do, you know, when tariffs were so high. Of course, all of that demand has been undercut by dramatically sweeping changes to the, to the tariffs. But you know, a game that's $1.50 to make in China is $5 in the US, You know, that's three 100% or more. So if we wanted the same profit margin, we'd have to sell them at $60.00. We're not. Obviously we're not going to do
that. And I just want to say, like, I work with Game Land in China. I've worked with Rawstone and Panda, and I've talked about E Star and all kinds of people. I love the people that I work with China and I have just no reason to think that I shouldn't be doing with business with them. I love Rainbow Yang and Judy and Alfred at Game Land. All these people are awesome. And so I'm glad that we can continue to keep working with them. Well, thank you for sharing
that. I think that's, I think that's an element of this story that a lot of just gamers, hobbyist gamers we miss. That is why do these publishers keep working with China, and it's because of the relationships. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. These guys rock. They're so good at their job. They're incredibly nice and responsible, you know, I mean, they just want to do good business with us the same way we want to do good business with
them. And I would have the same interactions with them if they were in Springfield, IL, as I do in Ningbo, China. You know, it's just that we could all meet on Central time. Right. Which is so much easier I gotta say. That I would take it. This is great that like we're in the same time zone because gosh, time zones, man. We're still up at 7:00 AM, which is what I would be doing if I wanted to meet with, you know, whoever in China or Britain or wherever. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So you had mentioned early on in your early conversations with Alan, 12 games released 6. I know that you're releasing 6, so did you make 12 and you're going to release 6 and you've got another six in the pocket or? Yeah, so, so when I was signed, we had we had one signed game. When I came on we had one signed game which was called Queen of Horde and became Trinket Trove.
OK. There were two games that they were in discussions about but actually didn't have a contract on. One I kind of said I didn't want to work on right then or maybe on a later line. The other one was re implementation of the Goude Tama card game, which I did that design. The new design became Corgi Pile Up, which I designed with Steve Ellis. And then outside of that there are two games that are sub licenses from where we have Foolish Fools from Keef Edition in France.
That's their game Foo Foo Foo and its expansion Foo Foo means crazy, crazy, crazy. And then Venture Angels is a sub license from Mandu games in Korea who Mandu does many, many amazing games. This one is flying under the radar, but it's so good. And then signed to more games original title. So we've signed first class letters from Peter C Hayward, a word game rolling right word
game. And then we signed no loose ends from Taiki Shinzawa, an incredible trick taking game from 2024 that released only in Japan. So that was the first wave. Get those six together and of course along the way, I mean I had huge, huge lists of potential games and I see I have to see at least I'm like it's got to be a hundred 250 games a year that I get pitched in my e-mail mostly. So you know, there's things in there. I got pitched something at Origins that I'm really excited about.
So right now, assuming I can sign that game, we have our next wave of six set and we have another two games past that set that are both signed. 1 is Bonk from Leo Colvini and and Bruno Phi Duty. This is like this is one of Tom Vasil's favorite games. It's kind of bluffing gambling sort of game. You you add these poker chips to increase the value of these tables and then you move to them. But somebody might cheat at that table and take the things from you.
It's very interactive fun game. And then another, another Bruno Fi Duty game. I'm a big fan of Bruno Fi Duty. So they are Wave Wave 2 though is set and it's going to be another two party games, 2 casual games, 2 thinky games. We have an amazing trick taking game from Taiki Shinzawa coming, which I will just tease a little bit here. It's a RE implement because we just started art on it, which is
really cool. So it's a re implementation of his game Twinkle Starship, originally called Segment Segment Tricks, I think. Yeah. And ours is going to be called Trick to the Future is a time traveling trick taking game reminiscent of Back to the Future as you might imagine. Come on. The the hook of the game gameplay wise what makes it a
time traveling game. You have cards in four suits, past, present, future and beyond, and you have the numbers go from zero to 9 and the center of the cards is A7 segment display like you would have in a a DeLorean let's say. Sure, yeah. Or a digital clock and but you have these fuel rods for your time travelling machine, which are basically wooden sticks. And when you play a card, you can spend fuel rods to put them on the card and change the
number. So if you have a zero there, you can spend a fuel rod and turn it to an 8. And this can help you win tricks. But every successful trick you win is like a time travel that you took. And at the end of the round, you need to be gay, able to get back to your own timeline. And so to do that, you need to have enough fuel rods leftover to cover the number of tricks you've had. So if I win 3 tricks, I need to have three fuel rods at least to
get back. You get certain points if you have, you know, leftover fuel rods. You get double points if you have a perfect journey. And you get no points if you have no fuel rods left to make it back. So it's a very, very unique gameplay experience. And the art is going to be really, really cool. I'm so very excited about that. So we're going to be on the lookout that what is it going to be called? It'll be called Trick to the Future. Trick to the future, guys,
That's yeah, it's amazing. That's going to be really, really, really cool. That's cool. So it sounds like yeah, you've got you've got a lot in the pipeline. Do you have a robust process for and the reason I asked this is because I've got a lot of first time designers who've been featured on here. I talk to them all the time. Had some great conversations at Origins with friends and they're looking to pitch.
Maybe they're number. Do you have a real best process that they can come to you and be like? Hey, sure. Yeah. So the the thing that I always ask, first of all, anybody can e-mail me at paul@gamehead.com. I respond to emails. If you want to pitch me a game, really the only thing I need to see is a short, you know, 2 to 5 minute overview video. It can be any quality. It can be completely unedited.
It can be shot on the iPhone. You know, I've looked at pitch videos that are shot on an iPhone looking at a screen, an iPhone recording of a computer screen, and it's still better than any amount of writing that you can put in a, in a thing. You know, obviously in that video you should tell me the player count, you should tell me the time length, etcetera. But I'm, you know, I just don't have time to read your rule sheet cell sheets just don't get enough information down.
Typically for me to understand what you did is I want to know who you are. I want to know the very basics of your game in writing. But then show me the and you don't have to teach me a whole game. Don't you don't teach me the game. Just explain to me what The thing is, what makes it fun, and I'll say a couple more things about, because I talked to a lot of new designers. The questions that I asked them about their game is like #1 who's the game for, right?
Who's gonna like your game? And what are they gonna, after they play it? What are they gonna tell their friends about so that their friends want to play it now they're going to go and they're going to say, oh man, you, you have got to play Arapamine because it has this thing. It's like battleship, but it's better because there's these gems in there and you shoot the light in and it bounces off like it's it's almost hard to explain.
You just have to play it, you know, like, you know, or I can say things like your game seems a little bit like it's a mix of of For sale and Splendor. So like what makes it more than just a mix of For Sale and Splendor? Or why should I play this instead of playing For Sale? I think those are important questions. And then the question that I'm always answering as a developer of a game is like, what is the game? What is this game actually about?
How many rules can I get rid of so that it's just the core of that game, right? For Sale is a game where you auction with money to get cards and then blind bid those cards to get VP. That's the game, right? And it's easy to understand it's a two stage auction process and I I think that's really important, right?
And Honey Buzz, for example, is a worker placement tile laying game where you don't buy, you don't take actions with your workers, you take action tiles and how you place them might create the actions you take. You know, that might be a hook you would describe for that game. So I think that's really important. Anybody that sends me a video, I'm basically looking at it within 48 hours. I often send very thorough feedback, but sometimes the answer is just like, this seems
kind of cool. I like that it's this part and this part, but it's not a good fit for game head right now. Or I could just say that we can't put this in our $20 box. Right. Or, you know, whatever it is, sometimes it's a theme, etcetera. But I just had AI just had a conversation with someone this week where they sent me a cool design and they showed me the design on TTS like recorded. And I just said I think this is
pretty cool. But all of our games are designed to be played on a bar top table, 30 inch diameter. And I don't think this fits, you know, so may, and I think the components are a little, you know, it's just kind of maybe it could be better. And I, I wrote, you know, a couple paragraphs explaining what I thought he could maybe do with the development. And then right away he started doing some work. So, you know, I'm, I'm looking at that game again, thinking about if it might be a good one.
So it sounds so I'm, it sounds like you're, you're committed to that, that $20 price point keeping it within that same. I don't know if they're small boxes. I mean, yeah. I think we call them small. Boxes. We call them small boxes. I think we call them small. They're about an inch bigger than an in all play box. Yes, yeah. And when I think of small box, I think of all play so and they're a little bit bigger, but OK. Yeah, yeah. So you're committed. That's the size.
So anyone comes to you with a pitch. Or if you're thinking about designing a game yourself, you're thinking about that space. That's right. Thinking about that box size, we can fit 2 decks of cards side by side. Realistically, we could fit probably 200 cards in that box, yeah. Yep, we, we can fit quad fold. We're going to do a hex fold board.
It'll fold out pretty darn big. You know, I know the numbers of like, you know, 135mm is kind of the biggest width you can put of a product component inside the box. Now, sometimes people will come with a game that doesn't necessarily seem like it would fit in that box. And I can find a way to do it because you can change the user interface to change the way that the people interact with the product so that it's smaller, right And designed.
Don't necessarily always have a clear sense for like component fixes. Maybe they're thinking about gameplay fixes. And I think that's part of what development is. The harder thing for designers to know is how much it's going to cost to make their game. Typically they'll, they'll think like, I mean, you know, this is this is like a game I could buy for $30 or this is about the amount of components that are in a whatever cost game.
Right. The more time that you spend in the industry, you know like OK, I can make this deck of cards for $37 or $0.37 or whatever and I can do the box for this many cents and the woods going to cost $0.05 or whatever. So that kind of stuff really helps. Something that I never did it as a designer on my own, but I recommend to people is actually like reach out to someone and
get a quote. Reach out to a manufacturer and get a quote for your project to, you know, know what it's going to cost at 2003 thousand 5000 units, because that will be really, really valuable to, to a publisher to know like, oh, OK, because it's, it's a it's a long, it's a lot of work. First of all, for us to prepare the spec sheet to even hand over to say these are the materials we want, like give us quotes. Let's go through the thing and it'll take a lot of time to
figure that out. But if if you can hand me the quote from, you know, Panda or Game Land or E Star or whoever, that that's a huge help. Wow, that's good advice. So I hope our listeners are paying attention. If you're thinking about designing a game or working on it, that's really good advice. So something else that stood out my mind. Your first six games, and you said this earlier in the episode, you've got 2 thinky games, 2 casual and two party games.
Is that kind of your? Is that your vision for future lines of games that two by two by two? Well, you know, I'm not sure. I think. Partly we'll we'll see what is catching, you know what I mean? And we'll, we'll sort of, we wanted to go wide to sort of see like, you know, I think all play goes pretty wide and catches a lot of folks. We wanted to be doing that. Oink Games catches a ton of folks, but they really only have one line, which is this is our box size and these are good
games. So I'm not 100% sure right now the things that are selling the most are the thinky games, but that's because we're really ahead of release. I mean, we're, we're selling now on gamermats.com dot com, but the people that know about the games again are the inside hobby gamers. And even at Gen. Con, we'll we'll have a big booth there. We'll catch a whole different crowd of people and things will start to shift. I would expect so.
And we're not, we're not sure if we're going to do 6 again or maybe we'll do 3 and then three, but it looks kind of like we'll have 4 ready to go. So partly it depends on when things finish, when when they're done and ready to print. And then partly it depends on when we are ready to print enough to fill a container. You know, if we have restocks of old titles that we need to do, then that might help.
Or if we're going to like do localization, maybe someone wants to print in the Netherlands, then we will include them in the print run and that kind of stuff. But those 3 lines I think are good and kind of communicate, but we might also add a two player line. We, you know, I'm, I'm open to other kinds of things. Yeah and, and I'm not sure if we would do a solo game right now or not. It's a very hobby market type of
thing. Well, here's an interesting fact is we're gonna there's a game called orapamine, which I, I just talked about for a second, I think from play T games and this has been getting a lot of press as a really amazing deduction game. It's basically you and I are playing battleship and and we have these gems in there. I was talking about and I'm trying to buy kind of ultrasonic radar, identify exactly the position and color of your gems and you're trying to do the same for me.
So back and forth like that. It is a two player game. I'm sure that's how it was built to be. But similar to a lot of types of games, you can have somebody just have the gems and facilitate the game and then like 5 people can solve the puzzle against each other, right? So it's it's kind of a two to five player, but it's pretty different at 345. What what plates you put on the box is like a big two and then a dash and a small 5, which I thought was interesting.
So for that I would put it in our think you if we had a two player game line, like 2 player line, I would still put it in. Our thinky line, but it's an interesting sort of blending spot where we might do a two player game. I think the short answer is any game that I think is awesome that fits for what we're gonna do, we're gonna try to do it. And right now it's gotta stay in that 20, but a $20 box. But we do have like a $30 coming.
And so we're starting to look. OK, so there's been a lot of chatter on Reddit, on Discord, all the different online communities about these are Gen. Con attendees who are sharing concerns with, you know what, is there going to be a Gen. Con this year? So many, so many vendors have pulled out. What are we, what's what, what is Gen. Con going to look like this year? So tell, tell us what can we expect from you at Gen. Con? You did mention you're going to have a booth.
You've got events, you've got demos, you've got learner plays. What do you what do you have going on? So we actually these sort of whole pastimes, gamer mats, Gamehead family. I think we have three different booths. So we have pastimes has a big HQ and event space in whatever the hall is where they play magic and stuff. There is some other booth, maybe it's like on Lucas Oil Field because I think some of this stuff is going to happen down there and then in the proper
vendor. Hall, which closes, you know when it closes and stuff, right? That's. Where we'll have our game head gamer mats booth, and that's going to be on an end cap. It's booth 1629, a 20 by 20, so pretty big. One of those pretty big. Booths, yeah. It's good size and what we'll have there is 6 demo stations, one for each game, around the size of a bar top table, kind of, you know, 30 inches by 30 inches. Tons of games underneath those. So anybody can walk up, down any of the games.
That's kind of on the left corner. On the right side corner we've got this big tower like light up thing that shows the gamer mat side. And right behind that there's a long row of our play mats on tables. Some of them we have these really cool like fuzzy play mats people should come check out. They're really neat. And then right on the end of that, I think is it is a like a desk with a computer where you can, you know, look at what's online and stuff.
There's another one of those in the back. And then there's 36 foot tables full of play mats with our register area. So we're going to have a ton of stuff to come and check and feel. And then we also have like we sell some pins and and stickers and stuff. We have a lot. Of cool characters on the play mat side that end up in there. So it's going to be an awesome place to stop by.
Obviously you can buy a bunch of great products or great hang out with good people and you can play these games come by and demo. Gen. Con is not always a great demo spot, but I think the game head booth will be. Excellent, excellent. So the games, the game OS games that you can demo, will they be available for purchase or not yet? All of them 100%, yeah. So we'll be demoing Trinketrove.
Basically what we're going to use to demo is, so this is a little known fact, If you buy a three by three calyx and A2 by two calyx, you can kind of Frankenstein them together to make 2/2 by threes. Yes, OK, take 2 two by threes, jam them together and now you have basically a 30 inch square, you know, pillar, and then you've got 12 cubes to store games. So we're going to have tons of copies of each game underneath the demo area. You can grab those. They're 20 bucks.
And I think our deal is going to be if you buy 5 from the set five games, you can get a six game free. That's awesome. So if you're looking to get gifts or just by the full Wave 1, yeah, everything's going to be for sale there and all our all our sweet products will be there. I'm sure there's specials on the gamer mat side too that I just don't know yet. And what was that booth again for everyone listening? That's booth 1629. 1629 guys, so make sure if you're at Gen.
Con, check them out. Paul, thanks so much. This has been a great conversation. Thanks for your honesty and fielding all my questions. I appreciate it. This is this has been fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate it. Will I see you at Gen. Con? You will, you will, and now I know where to go. That's right. Anybody listening out there, you know, come by, say, hey, you know, shake a hand, let's play a game. Let's chat a little bit. Yeah, guys, check out these games.
They're they're Paul shared them with me at Origins. They're really cool. I've got my eye on Trinket Trove. I've not stopped thinking about it since you showed it to me. Guys, thanks so much for listening or watching. Remember to like and subscribe, please. We're trying to get to 100 subscribers on YouTube by October. We're at 76. We're almost there. Don't forget Spotify, Apple, all your podcast streaming devices and once again, be kind to each other and play more games.