Hey guys, welcome to episode 140. Today's episode is all about the power of the design Sprint and how it's used to shape game design and assist in play testing for game designers, including my guest from Grodd Games and their trilogy of games they're working on right now.
Now, if you're not familiar as I was, not a design, Sprint is like a creative rocket booster originally developed by Google Ventures. It's a fast five day process to take a challenge, generate solutions, make decisions, and build a prototype you could actually test. It's all about speed, clarity, and bold experimentation. Our guest today took that same framework and applied it to
board game design. Instead of spending months stuck in development cycles, they used a Sprint to move their second game from concept to prototype and right into the hands of play testers. This conversation is all about how that process work or is working, what was discovered along the way, and how sprinting through design has changed the way that a game comes to light. Joining me today is Devin from Grodd Games. Devin, how are you man? Welcome. Thank you PJ excited to be here
and I am doing well. We're actually just chatting a little bit before we started the show. Currently on a road trip and exploring the country, so always got to start. Sort of like where in the world is Deb and Catherine from Grad Games? And we are, we are in Bend right now for the recording. Can't promise where we'll be next, but heading heading down the California coast over the next few weeks. So we're very excited. But design.
This is this is great. Yes, this is this is kind of cool because real quick, just to catch everybody up. So Catherine, your partner from broad games and partner in real life. She was on the show in episode 99, guys. That was the last audio only episode before we launched YouTube and started recording video. So here we are 40 episodes later and now you're on for the first time. I'm, I'm sorry it's taken this long to to get you on, but yeah. Thanks for. Thanks for it is busy.
You're you're definitely right about that. So before we dive into design sprints, do you want to catch us up on the status of a state Raise the Realm, the first game in your trilogy? Yes. So we have our first game in the trilogy coming to market. It is actually in production right now in China. So we we were chatting with our basically our project manager at at the factory and they are actively printing the game. So we're really excited about that.
It's good news. In a few weeks, we'll actually send someone out to China to to check on the production, basically QA it before, you know, all of the print is done. So that's exciting that we actually have someone that's able to go out there. We did not anticipate that, but I I have a family member who was like, oh, I'm going to China in two weeks for business and they happen to be going to the same city as the factory. Yes, please go check this out for us. That's convenient.
Yes. So that, that was huge slight delay in the timeline that we wanted for the Kickstarter. We had to do 2 more proofs than we wanted. So backers will probably be getting it end of the year, but most likely January and then we'll be releasing it to the broader public later in Q1 of next year. How how has the the tariff situation like? What is that going to look like for your backers? Like how much of A burden will be placed on your backers once
it ships over here? You know, it's, it's hard to to tell. I think there's been some situations where folks have used tariffs to in some cases, indiscriminately raise prices. In other cases, yeah, they said, hey, you know, do you want to volunteer and throw a couple bucks? And, you know, here's a rough estimate of our expectation. But with the way tariffs have swung from like, I think at one point it was 30%, another time it was 70%. I think at one point it was like
150%. So it's just, it's really hard to have any like consistent messaging around what we like, what we, we talked a lot about it, but Catherine mostly has been the, the deciding factor on that. And I'd say we've settled towards this idea of if it's under a certain percent, we're we're probably going to absorb it. OK. And if it goes up that threshold, we'll probably do some sliding scale and just communicate I pay, we are paying
this much per game in tariffs. If you would like to as a backer support us and and you want to pay that tariff, you can, but but keeping it optional. And we did do some other things on the back end like we explored different factors and things of that nature to sort of absorb cost in other ways. So that's been helpful as well where we decided to get a little bit creative and we also produced a little bit more volume to bring down our productive costs.
But then obviously upfront you've got more capital cost from the tariff. So just any lever we could move, we we explored moving and by we, I really mean that front which she she did a fantastic job. So what? Kind of support. What kind of support have you received from other designers, other publishers, and just manufacturers trying to help you navigate all this? Yeah, we, we chatted with quite a few different manufacturers, especially once tariffs got up to that 150% mark.
And that was sort of a big grimace, not really sure what we're going to do. And I really hope this changes and thankfully it did. So just that, that was tough. And then also our game is not that the game one, it has a lot of, but if you've seen it before, the player Matt said this nice indentation to them and it's got these pieces that are glued together and that from a labor cost perspective, it's just not really feasible in the US right now.
So that's that's one of the reasons why we're in China. We did get some quotes from European manufacturers that have some tooling where they can sort of do that a little bit more affordably than the shipping rates. But from Europe at the time we were just like, that doesn't really make sense either. Other designers, we've gotten very creative in terms of how we approach design didn't really think about this component or this material cost so much with
game one. It's definitely something that we're looking at a lot more closely in Game 2 because there are some components that are I would say are very, there are a lot of manufacturers for in the US, example carts, there are lots of cart manufacturers. So you might see in the market like now and in the next 6 to 12 months a lot of small box card
games. And that's because that's something very easily, it's very easy to domestically produce or very easy to produce, especially if it's a small set card like small set card game. You can probably produce a lot more affordably and then you have much lower tariffs. That's interesting, I've noticed not so much small box card games, although I'm I'm sure that's true too.
What I've noticed recently is the small box card expansions to games that already exist and I had not even considered the current tariff situation as a motivating factor and why it's just a card expansion. Yeah, I know. That's interesting. Yeah, One thing we did do from a design perspective, and actually I think it added value to the game, which we had a in essence, in the center of our game board, there were a set of cards that are like action spaces that
change. So when you set up the game, there are some game board actions. There's a handful of them that change from game to game. And initially those were cards and it was a separate size card. So it wasn't our standard card size. And that that actually that component added quite a bit of cost and we were able to we had extra space on some of our punch
boards. So we ended up using that extra space on the punch board, redesigning it into this really nice like punch board tile and that didn't add any cost, which was fantastic where we were. Able to. OK, that's cool. Eliminate, you know, the components still exists but in a new form factor and we happen to have the material that it could sit on. So that was pretty cool. Because that's like if I recall and the version I saw, I play tested this, you know, a year
ago. And so I'm sure it's evolved. So that was like the, was it 4 events? There was 4. It's like in the very center, there was like a column of four and those are now cardboard tiles instead of card. I love that. That's, that's awesome. That's awesome. It's really interesting. You described some of your efforts with managing the components and the manufacturing as creative solutions. And that's why we're talking
today, right? Is you've gotten really creative recently and we're going to talk about design sprints, which was a totally new concept to me. And if I understand just doing some research with Google Ventures, the whole plan is it's just to tackle a particular challenge, right? Or a problem. It's a, it's a way to attack a problem, right? That results in a prototype. And you, you took the system and applied it to game design. Did I? I hope I explained that
accurately in my introduction. Yeah, at a high level, I think you captured it. It's as a framework. It's designed to build a solution to it, which as board game designers, I mean, I'm sure sometimes designers are coming at as design, design with a problem. You know, I played this game. I want to make a different game and solve this problem that this game has. I hear that from a lot of designers and I think that that's a valid approach. There are there.
I'm sure there's also lots of other different frameworks out there. And I just wanted to give a shout out to the the tabletop Game Designer Association. They had a ton of resources as the game design for game design. So I can take a look at that, but focusing on the design Sprint for game one, this wasn't something that we could use. We were just kind of let's let's build a game.
We want to build a game, but we didn't necessarily have a problem solving for game two since we're keeping this thematic, you know, narrative journey going. We have gotten feedback on Game 1. You know, there's a handful right now. I think we've got like maybe 35 ratings on working deep and I love them. I love when people actually like, leave comments and critical feedback. And there were a handful of comments that just stood out to me. And it's like, like, this is
really good feedback. And this could be perceived as a problem with our game. Some of them, we designed the game intentionally that way. So let's talk about day one. So there's five days to a design Sprint. Day one is all about understanding the problem. So I collated that feedback that we've gotten on on game one. As an example, one one piece was we have a massive deck, so we I think we've got 150. Yeah.
So some players don't like the card randomness, which actually got some great feedback from a gentleman MO over at Tabletop Bellhop. He's like, why don't you add a drafting mechanic at the start of the game? So this is early when we were play testing and sort of had our first like sample copy that we could send out. We sent one to him and got his feedback, and that was fantastic to get that. By adding that card drafting mechanic, we solved some of that randomness for game one.
It was also designed intentionally to have that large deck. I wanted people to have multiple times where they're going to explore the deck and find new cards from the end of the game. But I also wanted to have a unique strategy where players could mine the deck for cards, where now that you know the deck, there is one leader, like 1 faction, one player map that does really good at drawing
cards. So you could intentionally mine the deck for certain cards so that the massive deck was a intentional design of game one, but it is a problem going into game two. OK, more card design. We want to have new effects, which were odd more cards. If we you know, I did a mini expansion for for game one, like an interactive deck and it just it we're just adding more cards to an already very large deck. So that's that's one problem
that we're trying to solve for. So real quick, just to contextualize for those who for those who maybe don't know, so you're talking about not an expansion to a state, You are talking when you say game two, you're talking about a completely different game. And I believe your plan is to make a trilogy of games. Is that correct? OK. Just just wanted to
contextualize that a little bit. Yeah, I think when some people here were doing a trilogy, they think that these games will like cohesively mesh in the sense that you could sit down with all three boxes and play 11 giant game. But really, they are three distinct games that are going to tell a narrative story. So in your mind's eye, do you envision gamers once all three games are published? Maybe on a long Saturday, playing all three of them in succession rather than one big giant.
I intend to host tournaments where you are doing the estate journey of, you know, there's the game one tournament, there's the Game 2 tournament and the game three tournament. And then you have, you know, a point ranking based on how you did individually for an overall winner across all three. So I love that. OK. And I think yes, very possible. OK, so you've tackled the first problem of the massive deck from game one. That's not going to be not going to be sufficient in Game 2.
Yeah. So that's one problem. We've identified another problem that we have coming out of our sort of our day, one of which may be just taking a step back five days, day one, all about understanding what are the problems you're trying to solve. And then day 2 is really about sketching concepts, sort of how many different solutions can you come up with for those problems. And then three is making a decision on what you want to move forward with and and prototype. And then day 4 is all about
doing that prototyping. And then finally day five, you're doing that play testing. And I would say we as much as I would like to take five days off and do a full week of just in design and do this design Sprint, you don't, I don't have the time to do that. So we have been breaking it up over a series of weekends. So we've done days 1-2 and three and we're currently in, in day four and we're going to be wrapping up day 4 this weekend. So 2 weekends ago we were in day
three as an example. So deciding so I can sort of, I had done the sketching of Game 2 and it's on basically index cards that I've cut to different shapes and sizes and laid them out and basically laid it out in front of Catherine. And we talked through, you know, this is the various decisions that we've made based on the problems we had. What do you think? Or, you know, decisions I made based on the problems we had. What do you think?
And literally she found a way, you know, I had a game board concept and it went from, you know, three times the size to 1/3. You know, it's not 1/3 the size. It's just, you know, great, great feedback. And that's why next week we got to start play testing it to, to get more of that going. But focusing back understanding that problem. And that's in the massive debt. We did have a couple other problems that we were trying to solve. So another problem we had is
time per player. So a lot of games we'll say forward 60 to 75 minutes, but you play at Max player count and all of a sudden it's, you know, 120 minute game. So we you're, you're familiar? Oh yeah, I have fallen prey to that. That unmistakable deceit on the side of the box. But we say our game's about 15 to 20 minutes per player. And that's one thing that I find as a problem where, OK, we're going to add another player. We know this game's going to get 20 minutes longer.
So I, I treated that as a problem. I, I don't want, I, I want our games to be, you know, somewhere that in that sweet spot of that like 45 to 60 minute where it's not too long, not going to take up your whole afternoon and then you can go and play another game. So right now, the first game was, but I was really concerned about Game 2 and we want to get a higher player count for Game 2. So game one goes up to 5.
Game 2 is a game that's going to be designed more for like 5 to 8. It can go down to two players. But I'm designing it so that, you know, I'm encouraging it for those nights where you want a strategy game but you've got too many people and you don't want to split up into groups. Yeah, So time for player was a concern. We're OK We're going to have an 8 player game and it's 20 minutes per player. That's too much. That's a. Long time.
Up and then the third thing we got, and this also came from from feedback off BGT that someone left a rating that's in game one. There's some random single round objectives which they're not quite random. In essence, every round of the game you introduce some effect and it could be positive, it could be negative and an objective that players will compete over. But as a result of that, players don't know the objectives until
the start of each round. So that that was sort of a third problem where, you know, there is a lot of randomness and I did that to create variance in game to game. But there are ways to make randomness where maybe you can create randomness through asymmetric information. So one player can make a change to the game board, you know, maybe you're changing out this event so this player knows the information. And I find that that creates an interesting variance. So that's something we're
exploring with Game 2 as well. So that's understanding the with those, those 3, OK. And then we started generating solutions. So I'm curious, I probably already talked to you a little bit about this, but yeah, time per player, how do you, how do you think we're solving that one? I have no idea. I know that when I play tested a state it was originally four players and you had special rule for 1/5 because I requested 1/5. Yeah. And it took forever.
Yep. I'm not sure how you're gonna and then you're gonna have eight players. How are you gonna solve the mystery of eight players and the length of time? I don't know, but I'm hoping you're about to tell me. Yeah, yeah, of course, simultaneous turns, so excited about that. So we've been playing a lot of simultaneous turn taking games. OK, Planet Moon 7 Wonders even that like Captain Sonar as an example, that's another bit of a team base, sure.
So using those as sort of the basis where every player is going to be taking their turn the same. So that's one of our solutions for that problem and I'm very excited with how that's turning out. And then I'll say the factions are no longer playing against one another. They are, it is a team, team based factions. So you'll have in A4V4, you'll have 4 factions on each team and then the teams are collectively taking that action together, which I'm very excited about.
So that's. Wow, OK, that's interesting. I don't know how I'm going to find eight people to get to my table. Wait, so you can, I am designing it for four players and two players. I haven't decided yet. And this is also because I I'm in a two person households and we're traveling and camping together. I don't know how to do that. So odd player. Yeah, that could be a problem. That's that's an open-ended issue with the current version of the prototype that I have not resolved yet.
I, I think, I think there's no problem with having one team with one extra player. I'm thinking, I'm thinking back to the first team game that I ever played in this hobby, and that was the Milton Bradley's Axis and Allies from the 80s. You had three Allies, you had two Axis countries, and it was a three versus 2 to play five players. So I think if you had seven players, it's just going to be 3 on four, or if you have 5 players, it's going to be a three on two. I think that's OK.
Maybe three on two seems a little worse than a four on three. I don't know. I guess it just depends, yeah. Yeah, it's something I've been thinking and I think there is a way to scale it so that you can have that odd player count. It's not. So Game 1 is a victory point based game. There's like 7 or 8 different ways to get victory points.
Game 2 is an objective based game, so once a team reaches the required minimum count of objectives, they win the game over the other team, sort of. They win the war. Game one, you're rebuilding after the war, right? Game 2, you are revisionists of history playing through that war, and you have to meet the objectives to manage your supply chain, you know, build out the right set of cards for your team to to win that. Yeah.
So where were we? I got I my brain started extrapolating and thinking, visualizing the team. I think we were on We were on problem 3. Step three. Step. 3. So deciding on what to move forward with. So I think we actually, we talked about one solution. So we talked about simultaneous terms for time per player. The massive deck was another problem. And so we're doing faction based decks, which that gives you a lot of flexibility to introduce more unique cards.
So create some really interesting theming. So in game one, there's a standard farm, every deck's going to have a farm, and I would have an opportunity to feed that farm to, you know, each of that, you know, the nuances of the different states of the state. OK, that was pretty cool. That is cool. Great opportunity to leverage artists to where I have this vision. Don't know if that's going to happen, but I'm having artists do each deck. So like a unique artist for each deck.
And that way then you kind of it'll just have like a really cool artifact and that that respect. But I digest. Let's let's get back to design sprints, faction based decks and then the the random single round objectives. That's sort of being resolved by absorbing into this overarching set of objectives that the teams are competing. Right, right. So that's that's what we decided on what to move forward with.
And now we're in that that prototyping phase of we have a game board, we have, you know, a set basically a period of time that the teams run through. We know what actions they can take. And now I'm in the process of designing those decks to start. I'm going to be doing a four player version for like 2000 and I have been played anyway and I'm going to be scaled up to four and oh is bypassing plug.
I will have 8 captions. I'm guessing I'll probably only have 4 at that point if it doesn't take a lot to come up with those who so my doing scenarios. There are two sets of four things for both sides and then I can do 2 to 4 persons and then group that up for an 8 person play tested. But that's the prototyping piece day four and then day 5 is all about play testing. So we're sort of in that hybrid. We prototyped A2 person version. We need to scale it up and play test it some more.
So how does day 5, like you're just one day of play testing and then you just call it because that seems that seems kind of short. You're testing the concept, and then that's gonna iterate into some sort of retrospective where you know, what did you like, what didn't you like, what are we gonna change? And then that's when you start to go through that rapid phase of step four and five. You're probably gonna loop through those multiple times. OK, But initially it's like a workshop.
I mean, you could condense this if you really wanted to into a day like the design game jams. They, I like some of the game jams actually, they'll give you, they'll give you a kit of some set of components. And then you've got to design A game with this set of components. And that in and of itself is kind of a design constraint. It's a problem that you need to work with. So you can use that same that same framework.
There. So ideally you do this over 5 consecutive days to get to that play test point that you just described. You're just spreading it out over several weeks due to everything that's going on. I honestly I would also recommend like maybe spreading it out too because it gives you time to to decompress and think about ideas that you've you've come up with. So, but isn't the point of the Sprint to do it quickly and not
right? So that's that seems counterintuitive to to the framework of the design Sprint. Yeah, I I'd say if you're looking for that rapid deployment, you're going to want to do the five day back to that. And if you can't, I mean, that's, that's fantastic.
And then you, I think some of the, if you go slower, I think you might sort of catch things where we have a sequence of actions that players are taking and we have been fooling around with the distribution of like how those actions will appear in the game. I feel like I'm being really like being illusory. I apologize. That's fine. And I think if I had gone in and just like done the five days, I would have had a version of it.
But because I made the actions on the day 2, which was now I think that was almost 4 weeks, 3-4 weeks ago when we sat down for day three, I have already had several thoughts and like feelings about those actions and revise them thing into day three. This is like, it's sort of that concept of like, oh, you get a few nights to sleep on this.
Sure. Like I do think can be beneficial, but also if you're trying to get a game out there, that's the value of the design Sprint is that after a week, you can have a working prototype. And I do think it's for a lot of designers where, you know, they're very one pulled into their their baby or for designing it on the side and giving them giving yourself a framework to run through spread to the finish. So that way you can, you know, bring something to show people and get feedback.
That's right. So Step 5 is play testing. Is that what does that look like? So one of the things that I have observed from a lot of designers who, you know, they're they get caught up. This is their baby. They're doing it on the side when they're play testing, they end up play testing in an echo chamber. Like they're same, they're same 510 friends at their local gaming group. And it's like, this game is great.
Everyone loves it. And then you take it to a broader audience of play testers and it's like, and you know, sometimes there's resistance to critical feedback. Other times they're grateful for it. Like wow, you know, they're like, how did we not catch this? And I think it's because that echo chamber. So how do you suggest to a designer planning on trying to go through a design Sprint to tackle that that fifth day of
play testing? Yeah, I actually thought about that going into our own design Sprint and that is a problem where it's just the two of us doing this play testing initially for the two person version. And when we go up to the four, it's still going to be the two of us and it'll probably be the two of us for another month or two before we we bring it to a broader audience.
And one of the ideas that we had, which if we weren't so mobile, if it had been a little bit more safe scenery is planning an intentional day 5 where we invite a bunch of folks from the community, the broader community, like a play test jam or or find a play test jam to use as our day 5, which there are a lot of play testing groups out there. I think like out of Cleveland, they need a weekly. Is it? Wow. I would love to get in with a regular, regular meeting group
of play testers. That would be exciting. There is Pro Spiel in Saint Louis. There's something else similar in Indianapolis, but again, those aren't always accessible. Yeah. So is is PAX Unplugged going to be like you're? We're taking it to a broader audience. That's going to be our, our, sort of like our public playground of we're, we've got a group of folks that joined our, our Discord. So we're going to do a post there and say, hey, if you're at PAX Unplugged, we need 8 people.
And ideally it's, it's either eight people we don't know or there's a handful of play testers that I've noticed do a really good job of asking like very poignant questions. So if I could target this, just be like, hey, you know, hey Joe, you do a great job. Really. I want you to play test the new version of the game. And some of them are are super champions of the state 1. So I don't think it's a hard ask for them. I'm they'll probably be very excited to play it.
But similarly, they are super fans, so they're going to be biased. So 4 packs unplugged. We're still have some of that. I would say some of that audience bias and we are not, you know, in pass packs, unplugs, we've actually brought the game into oh, regarding the name of the organization, but they usually rent one of the rooms and basically like a designer like the space unpub. Unpub. That was my good.
Yeah. So we've, we've gone to Unpub the last three years and part of the reason why we don't want to commit to that is because we want to have more time to enjoy PAX and plug. It's one of our OK, one of the few cons where we have a very large amount of friends that that come to it. We are making more friends though, and now that's becoming more talented. And I want to play other games with other people. I don't want to just play test my game.
And if I start signing up for unpubbed time slots, I'm going to be like 8 hours a day. Let's go. Right. I can, I can see that. Yeah. Well, I mean, you and Catherine got to enjoy Gen. Con this year, right? So good. Good. So that's because we we got to squeeze in some time with you. So that was that was great. It was great to see you in a not professional setting. I don't know if is that how we is that how we refer to ourselves?
I don't know. Our identities are so intermingled with what we pursue from a business endeavour standpoint. It is so true, right? Yeah. A lot of ways I feel like my my person in the podcast are synonymous. And I'm like, hold on, wait a minute. That's not always the case. But yeah. So was that your first? Was that your you and Catherine's first convention that y'all got to just enjoy, not play testing? Quite a few years, yes.
So it was probably been since maybe 2018-2019 where all the conventions we've gone to since about 2020 have been, you know, exclusively to prioritize the game that we're building. Right. Yeah, so I'm thankful. Jetcon was fantastic. So many good games were played and it wasn't good. That's good, sure. Sure. I'm I'm more excited about your apparel than I am here. Oh my gosh, we were at we were at a restaurant the other day and they were selling Hawaiian
T-shirts. I was like, we should make an estate. Hawaiian T. What estate is not set on an? I mean, I guess you could, but I don't. Yeah, I don't know. I just love the estate T-shirts. Yeah, the third ones we have. Are yeah, that burgundy is or whatever color is just beautiful, beautiful color, beautiful font. And I love that. And I want one terribly. I'm a sucker for swag, man. I'm just, you know. Noted. I'm writing it down. Yeah, you just think of swag. Oh yeah, absolutely.
I am. I am crazy for it. So yeah. So PAX Unplugged, you're you're are you. So you're going to, you're going to expose the game to a broader audience, but it's going to be kind of in an unofficial capacity. So the people who will get to play Test Game 2, they already know they're going to get to play Test Game 2. I have not reached out to anyone yet actually.
OK, but is that your play? If someone's listening to this and they're like, hey, I like state and I want to play Test Game 2. Yeah. Feel free to reach out. So I think because you're currently in Oregon, you're going down to California next. Pax is in Philadelphia. This is a big country. Springfield is on the way. You're you're in spring, there's a lot of springs. Springfield, IL. Illinois, yeah. So we we do have plans to come up through Chicago. You've gone too far north.
You've gone too far north. But we've we've got to travel N to make that trip because we're starting from Southern California. So the road from Saint Louis to Chicago. I'm in the middle where I have 4 play testers for you. Interesting. Because all four of them played, tested the state and where we discovered that there was not enough wheat in the game. Oh my gosh, that was also a tough nightmare in terms of because we again, going back to that component issue.
So we had added the tiles into the punch board and then we were like, oh, there's space on the punch board. If we're short resources, we could add a few more. And it got to the point where we're like finagling because there's the big castle tower and we were able to like cut down the the amount of bleed we had on the castle tower and that made just enough space for like 10 more resources. So. Oh yeah, wheat was wheat was in high demand in that game. And it was just like, Oh my
gosh, we don't have enough. Wheat. You've got to make some bread somehow, you know? You do you've got to feed everyone so that that's exciting. So it's it's interesting that you are so are you going you're going backwards. Game 2 is going to be the war that predates a state. It's not going to it's not the factions during a state who they built their States and they're warring against each other. This is the the war that they are rebuilding from, yeah.
So there will be a little bit more, I would say a little bit more take than Game 1. So game one was a little bit more multiplayer solitaire, a little bit of interactivity like oh, you did something. I did a slight benefit, not much, a little tiny bit of take that you know, you had a thief in there. You did, you did.
But there's going to be a lot, I think a lot more card turnover in Game 2. And I'm very curious to see how it plays in higher player count games where you're probably going to be cycling your deck a little bit more. And that's also a big question of our distribution in the factions that we're doing and how big the deck is, because I don't want to run into the same problem and end up with like a 60 card deck perfection and. Right now.
I feel like I'm headed that way, but you know, you start big and then you kind of scale back, right? You've got plenty of time, you're early in the designs. How do you OK, that's interesting because problem number one, too many cards. So you've gone through this design Sprint process, you know, obviously you're not finished. How do you keep from as a designer? Generally speaking, how do you keep from not repeating the same
mistakes? Yeah, I think there's a lot that goes into like there's so many mistakes that get made sure like wait, that's like our biggest thing is like we want to spend more time retro in just like reviewing what we did. Like even from like a Kickstarter perspective. I would love to sit down with our partners and do like a deep dive. We still haven't done that because it's just like there's there's no time in the world, the schedule across all of us when you're across four time
zones, right. But yeah, that's that idea of doing like deep and staying accountable to what changes you want to make. And we do that, but we do retrospective weekly where it just on our Kickstarter front. So that's a good example where we had a number of partners that we work with. So we have a small market agency that was running, you know, I think we're doing like $500
worth a month that we had. We had an artist who was kind enough to do a bunch of social media posts for us where they were sharing their the art that they did for the game and sort of linking that up to, you know, just basic collaborative posts on Instagram for us. But you know what, what was effective, what went well with that?
We haven't had the time to sit down on that and retro on the Kickstarter side, but on the game design side, we do have AI think a fair amount of time where we're sitting down, you know, almost weekly to review like these are the this is the steps that we took and we ended up from point A to point B by the end of this week. And sometimes you're taking 2 steps back because you're like, maybe we actually need to go
back to this. And yeah, so going back to the massive deck issue, that's a perfect example of that where I've designed these sort of two initial factions and had a set of cards, but I'm finding it's just it's heavily weighted on like standard cards right now. Make sure I haven't designed a lot of unique cards yet and the so if I start adding in more unique cards, the card count for that deck is going to start to
balloon, right? And there's, there's going to be a happy medium where I need to cut down on right now. I think maybe there's like the Agrarian Lord, for example, he's one of the two factions that we've designed. He starts with like maybe 6 farms in his deck. I don't know if the Agrarian Lord actually needs 6 farms. In there, so you could make you could make the farms like produce the output of each farm, increase the output and reduce the number of cards right? So you could do that.
So there's there's. Yeah, there you go. There are three games that come to mind that suffer from this exact problem. And I want to preface this by saying that these are three games that I love, that I think are fantastic, but I'm frustrated every time I play them because of this particular issue of too many cards. And you might be able to guess them. And those of you listening may also know the first one is Terraforming Mars. I love Terraforming Mars, but
that deck is just just. Outrageous. You know, it's like, and you add the expansions and you get more cards and it's just like you. Yeah, it's terrible. Especially if you have a corporation in Terraforming Mars that's dependent upon a certain tag and those tags never come about, right. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Arc Nova is another one. Love Arc Nova it too, although the marine worlds came up with a interesting mechanic to kind of you know, like when whenever that wave icon came out in the market, you would sweep a cards in the market so that you would see more cards. It accelerated the cards coming out of the deck a little bit. That was great, not amazing, but it addressed it. It was a concerted effort and Everdel is just that thing is just massive cards, right.
In fact, I think if you have the entire collection set, the whole thing now with all the expansions, I don't even think the tree, the ever tree holds all the cards anymore, I don't think, which is kind of excessive. Could you imagine your castle not being able to hold all the cards? Well, a very early iteration of the game, but may have been true. Yeah, so those are just three games that just kind of popped in my mind right away. Is like they suffer from that
same issue, right? That same problem. And terrifying Mars does not attempt to overcome it at all or Nova does with an expansion. But then I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about Kavango by Mazaza Games. Yeah, so it has a lot of cards, but the cards are, I can't remember what they're called and we just played it the other day. They're kind of like, I guess if you were to take, if you were to mirror how they manage their cards in your game, they would be ages, right? Similar to 7 Wonders.
So you would have age 1 cards and then age 2 and age 3. So they would fall away, right? And you could have the same size deck with all the variability that you envision, but the the entire deck is not accessible for the whole game because they do that the further you get each, each round round. Yeah, round consisting of 10 turns in, in Comango, there's like AB and C decks of cards and they get increasingly more expensive. That's not the right word.
We're talking about animals and trying to feed them. But yeah, that's a that's a possible way of managing a large inventory of cards in your game. I don't know, we almost, you could, you could reach out to Matt and Zara if you wanted to at Mazaza Games. They're very open and they would be happy to talk to you. They're working on their first expansion for Commando, which will be hitting Kickstarter soon. That's a little plug for them.
I know I haven't mentioned them in a long time, so I'm sure they're excited for me to even be talking about them right now. Like, Oh yeah, this is great. They're really good people, great designers. And yeah, they would they would be able to talk you through that, too. Those are the games that I can think about with a massive card, Yeah. I need to pick up a copy of Cabello. You do. Noted. I will say we almost did that for game one where we almost broke up a deck and had some of
your really more cards. I have a separate deck maybe you can only start drawing from in round 3, but there are a number of reasons why we didn't do that. Don't need to go into full detail. I don't know that it would work in a state though, to be fair. It didn't. It did not work. I don't, I don't think that would work. But yeah, I mean, there's definitely, there's definitely ways to address that though, I think. That's an example of a solution that did not make it past PESCO
on day three. See. Bring it back, bring it back. Bringing it back, bringing it back. I love that, that that's really cool. I'm still stuck on the. How do you avoid making the same mistakes right? Yeah. So what what advice would you have to a game designer, whether they're a first time designer or a new designer that maybe has one game under their belts? And we're thinking about implementing this design Sprint as a way to get to that play test prototype quickly.
What advice would you have for them? I would say start with blank paper. That's for the first entirety of day one, thinking about the problem was just like a blank sheet. Like I was like, what were the problems I had? I was like, I remember this was you and life and it really irked me. And then I always like we did this retrospective about doing 1 here two months ago.
Let me pull it up. So we have like a database of content that we found just in front of like, so we'll record our records in there, but let me pull up that where we mention this and they'll add that to the paper like to start with a blank slate. But then to your point, that creates the issue of like, well, you might recreate some of the existing things that you've, I'm like trying to think like an
elegant piece of advice. And the only thing that I can think of right now, it's just like you got to play test it with as many people, as many of a variety of people as you can. And then there's one I don't know if I would call it a problem so much as like a feature of the game. So we we worked with one artist for game one and definitely like that artist injected a very particular style.
So you the medieval fantasy game and right, some oxen and I feared this story and people, you're no one's going to know it. But now that I've shared it, it's going to. Be everyone's going to see it. There are no horses. You will notice there's one horse. None of his legs are shown. So that was actually an interesting point.
Like our because of the timeline that we have for art, there were certain animals that like our artists had a tough time brought great beautiful environments, beautiful man spirits, really
cool like night. But there were certain like specific things like it's like I'm really struggling with this, like I still get the leg right or like the main right, we don't need it. Let's you know that was one of those moments of speed to value where just because of the timeline that we needed to get the art in by like we so we did 10% of our art up front for the so we did 90% afterwards.
OK to get. Our timeline commitment to the masters, we had to really Sprint on that 90%, which makes it maybe 98 or so art assets in the game. So that, you know, they had to do essentially 90 pieces of art, you know, illustrations for us over the course of a six month period, which is a lot to ask for and stay creative on. I'm sitting here trying to think back. There are no horses. Yeah, which that'll probably change for game two. There will be horses.
You can't go to war in the equivalent of medieval times and not be on horseback. I mean, you know. Who has the stirrups? That's the big question. Yeah, that's that's huge. So Devin, yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Biggest piece of advice, play test as much as you can. Play test as much as you can. And don't be afraid. Like I said, there's also just this fear, like it's my baby, someone's going to steal my idea. I feel like we're a pretty friendly community of publishers.
We, we want to give you feedback. We don't want to like if another publisher stole a designer's idea because you'd manage to fall out from that. It would be a bloodbath. The content creators, once they get wind, would just annihilate them. Yeah, Yeah, you definitely. Yeah. I would not worry about someone stealing your idea. Not in that sense, of course. But it hurt and I'm like don't, it's not going. To happen?
Nope. And I've often thought like, if that did happen, like the abisceration factor, but also too like, that's an amazing form of flattery. If that happened to you, like someone might sign you for another game like that's. Right. I mean there it is there it is there. So Devin, thank you so much. This is this has been a great conversation. I love this. So tell everyone where they could find you if you weren't so
damned mobile, right? So I'm thinking about I'm thinking about there might be designers who want to talk to you about this design Sprint. I'm thinking we may have listeners who just want to know about the next game play testers. I'm also thinking about this is important. I'm thinking about artists. You talked about the possibility of being able to feature multiple artists in the second game.
What if there's an artist, a game designer, a play tester out there and they want to be able to find you or Catherine and try to connect with you either in whatever form? Where can they find you? In all of the socials. So we do have an Instagram estate reads the Realm. I think we are going to be transitioning that over to grad games though. So I just want to call out both terms, which it's grad GRD games.
Personally, if you want to drop me an e-mail, it's my first name Devon, which is Devon, so spelled Devon at gradgames.com. Always happy to chat. And then if you're looking to find a copy of the game gradgames.com. We are in pre sales but won't be delivering until Q1. And then otherwise, if you're looking to meet up in person, we we meet offered to conventions, but there's one of three three that I love origins that's unplugged and now I'm adding it Gen. Con.
He's adding it. That's it done. It's it's. You it's in the roster. Those are the three. Those are the big three. Pax, you, Gen. Con and Origins, I think hands down are the big three. In the US, anyway. In the US, yeah. So, guys, reach out. Also, on a personal note, don't be surprised if you're actually talking to Catherine. We do. Swap and you may see a change in the tone of voice and be like am I talking to the same person? Yeah, yeah.
I'm like, so it's like when scheduling for this podcast, it's like I'm dealing with Catherine and it's like, but you're coming on and I'm like, OK, So what date and what time and what's the top? What are we talking about? Well, Devin will be on at this time and he wants to talk about this. Like why won't he e-mail me and
tell me himself? I just want to talk about game design, but also I get a full, Full disclosure, Catherine is this full time on the board game and he's creating so much leverage for us, which is fantastic. Yes, and I get I get about if I'm lucky, 10 hours a week. OK, so my my time is very sacred right now and especially trying to put it towards towards game design. Sure, she's lifting all the the heavyweight in a lot of other areas for us to to help maintain that.
Yeah, well, thank God for Catherine, right? Yes. So once again, thanks. Thanks for joining. I want to be respectful of your time guys. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel. We are still doing our very first giveaway. We've got a six edition copy of Katan from Catan Studios that's celebrating your 30th anniversary this year. So that's big news for them. The drawing ends at the end of September and the first week of October sometimes is when I'll pull that lucky name.
So if you subscribe, you get 5 entries if you like on Instagram and post and do all the cool things. So I check us out. I just started a Tick Tock accounts for the podcast. Late to the game there, but check us out, yes. So thanks again and be kind to each other and let's play more games.