It's almost like a snowball going down a hill. You start off small. You collect knowledge. You collect knowledge. You collect knowledge. You make connections. You make connections. You make connections. You make a good product. You make a good product. You make a good product. And then the people that you make connections with look back on you as the person who knows things and the person who made a good product. And now officially, you're in the industry.
Welcome to Nerdpreneur. This is where we have conversations with nerds making money with their nerdy passion. And joining me, as always, our fellow co host. Nerd co host. I don't know I want to refer to you yet.
I'm a dude. I'm not the dude because I can't take that from the great Labaski or the Big Lebowski.
The Big Lebowski. We just lost half of our fans right there.
Can't take that from The Big Lebowski.
And your name is Frank.
Yeah, my name is Frank.
And we have our first guest, inaugural guest, Ryan, on the podcast.
Hello.
Welcome, Ryan. How are you doing?
I am pretty okay.
We wanted to invite Ryan on to talk about some of the stuff that you're doing. That sounds kind of cool and exciting. I mean, what is your nerdy passion and how did you actually discover that?
Yeah, so I am a small independent board game designer. I work with a bunch of my friends at a small company called Zephyr Workshop, where we do design, development, and publishing stuff here in Seattle, Washington. We have mostly gotten our foot on our flagship game, Aegis Combining Robots, which is a combining robots tactic tabletop game.
When you say Aegis, sorry, it's Aegis Combining Robots.
Aegis. Aegis, like the shield.
Oh, okay. How did you get into actually designing board games and wanting to do that?
I started designing board games and getting into that probably in high school. I was going to a technical school to be a machinist. I made some friends at a local college while I was in high school and they were going to a local game design school. They kind of dragged me along, got me to get started in some things, started some game jams,
and helped out wherever I could. Eventually, I started to play more and more board games because the fun thing about game development or game design is, a lot of people start wanting to make digital games, but it's really hard to make digital games when you don't have a programmer. So, we were a squad of four or five people with no programmer. Well, let's just make a board game that makes sense. Aegis was the brainchild of Zephyr Workshop's director,
my best friend, Breeze. And from there, we just kind of spent five years developing, designing this game, going to conventions all over the country, showing it off to people and businesses. And eventually, we ended up kickstarting it, making around $50,000, I think, printing around 2000
copies and just about sold out. Now, I think we actually have single-digit numbers of copies left and are gearing up for a reprint and release of a second edition, a sequel, coming out, I think, sometime next year, sometime in 2022. 2022.
That's very awesome, man. What can you tell me more about your game? And like, what, how do you play that thing?
What is it about?
So, Aegis is a combining robots tactics game where two or more players each create a team of five robots to fight their opponent's team of five robots. The box comes with like 100 robots, so it emphasizes a lot on team building, synergies, and stuff like that.
But this is essentially robots fighting robots.
That's exactly what it is.
I'm in. All right.
It's great. It's fantastic. If you love, like, Voltron, Transformers, Power Rangers, Evangelion, lots of Evangelion references, even Pokemon to an extent, like art. Style-wise, it's pretty cool. It's a colorful game, it's very eye-catching and it's really fun.
So, okay, is it the kind of thing, you know how in Power Rangers, they each have their own robot robot that eventually combines at the end of every episode? Does that happen?
There is combining. There's a lot of combining where you can take two single letters, two single letter robots, or two robots in general that are kind of like different letters. So the robots are separated into five categories: Assault, Evasive, Guard, Intel, and Support. Aegis, that spells out the name of the game. Acronyms are fun and you can actually combine them.
Pay some energy, which is kind of like the generic resource in the game that you use to do pretty much everything, pay some energy, mash them together, and it actually forms into a new robot depending on the pieces that you combine with that has, you know, its own piece in the box, brand new car, new rules, all that jazz, and you literally just mash your guys together as the game goes on to get, like, bigger, cooler, Voltrony robots.
I am stoked, man. Like, I love this idea.
You're incentivized to combine further into the game as your robots get damaged, because once they combine, they lose all of the damage that's on them. It's kind of like, almost like a free plus, an upgrade later on in the game. So there's a lot of decisions, and when you combine, what's the right opportunity? A lot of robots can do various actions when they combine. It's like a once per game kind of thing. So it's like, what's the most tactical place to use that?
And then from a design aspect, it helps a lot with getting people to actually get to that endpoint of the game because the game is very front-loaded. You start with your most decisions that you have to make and the most complexity of your units at the start of the game, where you have five independent guys that can all do their own independent things as the game goes on. Now you have three, now you have two, now you have one. And you're only making so many decisions.
Now, I know you just mentioned dice, and I know a lot of our listeners love dice. What kind of dice are we talking about? Are we D6s, D20s, or do you have a combination of dice?
The entire game is based off of D6s that we had custom screen printed in Jolly Rancher colors. So the dice are very pretty, all D6s. So if for whatever reason, you're, uh, you're wrong and don't like the fancy dice, you can just use any D6s, but you should use the fancy dice.
I'm going to break out my Yahtzee.
I just want to use these craps dice with holes drilled in them.
Exactly. Okay. How many people can play this game at once? And how long does a typical game last?
Usually taken out of the box? It can be played with pretty much any number of players, due to a specific advanced rule that we'll talk about in a second. The way that we intend the game to be played is two to four, two to six, and then the length of the game entirely depends on pretty much how many players and how new you are.
Experienced players playing a one v one game, a two-player game can probably finish in 30 to 45 minutes, but new people playing a four-player game, or pretty much anybody playing a six-player game, you're probably going to be there for an hour and a half. Two and a half hours.
Right. This could be a great game just for, like, you know, a Thursday game night or something like that, for people to get together and, you know, they'll get through. They'll get through it in an evening with their friends. Right. So it's not something like Risk where you have to, or Monopoly. They could go on for days and days.
Yeah. No.
And you hate everyone by the end. No.
One of the big intents we had behind designing the game is that we wanted to take a game and take these concepts and these items, put them in a box, give you the game, and allow you to play it however you want to play it. In the base game, just the first one, there are like three or four alternate ways to play, including a traditional war game style where you play. The game traditionally plays on a hex map, but it translates
almost directly over to inches. So, you can just play like a traditional war game, like Warhammer. And then, theoretically with that, you can play with as many people as you have pieces for. We offer 100 robots for you to make your teams however you want. If that's not something you want to do, we offer pre-built teams so that you can just grab one out of the box and play. We really wanted to emphasize, this is yours. Do with it what you will.
Very cool.
And you used to go to a bunch of, you know, before COVID you guys were hitting up a lot of conventions, right?
Oh, yeah. All the major ones.
What are the major ones?
So, there's a bunch of different board game conventions just in the United States, and you can kind of separate them based on more or less three categories. You have local selling and kind of like the more showcasey kind of convention, at least in my opinion. You have your small local conventions. You know, a few thousand people. Some of the big ones, I'm from central Massachusetts. Some of the ones around there were like Total Conventions. Temple Con, Armor Con, small ones that are just local.
You probably haven't heard of them. You have the slightly bigger ones that are kind of more showcasey, which would be like your PAX's, PAX East, PAX West, PAX Unplugged, PAX South. When that was the thing. Other big conventions like Origins, Dragon Con, Board Game, Geek Con, places where you go to sell things or to show things off. Then the third category, which I would give, are the conventions you go to specifically to sell things. And the biggest one of those by far is Gen Con.
And that is like the big money-making convention for a lot of these small, independent board games. It's like the thing you look forward to every year. It's like your performance review, effectively.
So, you pretty much, as I understand it, go there, set up your booth. You're kind of there. You have your numbered booth. You've paid to be an exhibitor. Thank you. So, you pay to have your booth. People walk by, they ask you questions, they check out the board game. They play it. Even, you know, maybe you'll show them a demo, you'll talk about it and give the pitch. But then there's also this. Aren't there opportunities for you to go and talk to people who might invest?
Working at a convention is like this weird little, I don't know if microcosm is the right word, but there's a lot of different things going on. And based on your team, you have to figure out what things you're able to do and what you prioritize over the others, which is why setting up a team for a convention experience is incredibly important,
and it should really be done beforehand. Like, get a schedule set up, get everyone figured out what they're doing, because you have a lot of responsibilities and you want to be able to do as many of them as possible. Because you go to a convention, you're here to sell games, you're here to spread awareness that your game exists. You're here to advertise, you're here to probably schmooze with other industry people.
You're here too, if you have other games that you're working on, because you never really have just one game. So theoretically, you want a lot of different products, which will have a long development time, so you've got to work on them kind of like stacked up.
Right?
What is it like, the development time on, like, an average game anyway? Just, I'm curious, like, is, you said you've been working about five years. Is that like a normal timeline for creating and getting a game out there and doing that? Or is that, like, what's the...
Not going to lie, five years is pretty long. It really depends on a lot of things. It depends on the scope of the game. It depends on the team. If you're a single person or you're working with, like, a big team, it depends on the style of game. These light $20 kind of filler games that are meant to be played in 30 or so minutes will probably have less development time than Twilight Imperium.
Right, right, totally.
It varies wildly. I know people who make one game in five years. I know people who make twelve games in a year.
Wow.
Like, it varies a lot based on who you are, how, like, kind of driven, your kind of personality. Like that. Do you have the drive to just do this?
Yeah.
The amount of time you've got.
Yeah. And that actually leads into something really well with the board game industry, is that it is an industry entirely built on passion because there's not a lot of money in it unless you work at, like, a large company.
One of the things you just mentioned, and I really thought was interesting, is like, okay, the whole board game industry is really driven by passion. I'm really curious, like, can we dig in a little bit on you? And, like, why, where does that passion for you come from?
Totally. I come from an employment background of retail. I was a professional poker dealer for a while. Customer service. I like helping other people. I like letting other people have a good time. I like to consider myself a fun person. I hope Frank would agree. I think one of the best ways for other people to have a good time is for you to present them with something that they can enjoy. That being a board game makes it really easy. It's everything in a box. It's like,
here are the rules. You get this. It gives you three separate experiences. Just by playing one board game, you get the experience of learning the board game with your friends, which you know can be good. You get the experience of actually playing the game, which is the main goal: to play the game and have it be as fun as possible. You want to have a great experience, and then typically you always do.
It's a little overlooked, but I think that one of the, another really important part of any board game experience is talking about the game afterwards. It's what kind of really drives people to want to play again or to have conversations about it. It's like, oh, you did this thing on the final turn. But I think next game, I won't make that mistake.
So, Zephyr Games, you guys are a gaming company. This is your kind of flagship product, I'm guessing, right? Aegis, can you tell us a little bit more about Zephyr Games? And, like, do you guys have core values that you ascribe to as a business and why?
Yeah. So, at Zephyr, we try and follow more or less three principles that you may have already been able to guess. We try and provide customizable experiences. We want you to be able to play your game the best way you want it. We want your experiences to be affordable. The company was started by a bunch of poor college kids and a high school kid. I mean, we didn't have a lot of money. You could get that entire box of Aegis back when we first released it for, I think, $50.
It was like 100 robots, infinite hours of gameplay, whatever, right? And then the other. The third thing is that we want you to feel like you have a community. We have a really big Discord community that we actively participate in, but we also want to develop games that you can build your own community around. Aegis is a great example of that.
It's a competitive game at heart, where you can bring it to places, set up tournaments, play against your friends, fight for whoever the best pilot is, all of that. But then other games that we work on, we're working on another one that is a space opera style of game that takes a very unique twist on a lot of different mechanics, that plays a lot of players. It plays up to seven at the moment in our base box.
That's the kind of thing that you're going to be able to bring somewhere, and it's very eye-catching. You're going to be able to attract people to a table and be like, hey, check out this thing. That was fun. Do you want to play again next week?
Do we have an idea of when that game's going to be coming out?
I'm going to cross my fingers and say there'll be more information next year, in 2022.
I'm curious because one of the things you mentioned as well is that this is kind of a labor of love, and everyone there is very passionate about creating games, but I also know this isn't necessarily the main driver, not all you do. So, you balance this around having a career and doing other things and friends and family and playing D and D and all those things. Right? How do you find keeping yourself motivated to do this?
It can be hard at times. I'm the kind of guy who jumps around a lot. Like, I'm super into this right now. And then three weeks from now, who knows if I'll even own it again. Like, I'm going to hyper-fixate on this civilization-building video game and stay up and play it for 30 hours over the next three days, and then not play it in two weeks and not touch it for a year.
Yeah, right.
I'm that kind of person. I do that a lot. I try to work on it, but.
Only, I don't know if our nerds can relate to that.
I think I definitely relate to it.
I think every single nerd in this room has those experiences and names or, sorry, has those games and those experiences where they're like, "Man, what happened last week? I just woke up from 40 hours of this video game or 40 hours of this one thing." But I think that really helps people to hear that you can be that way and still be able to launch a product in a business that actually, uh, goes somewhere.
Yeah, definitely. Two of the things I would say were the most helpful for me and my team, at the very least, are being able to split your focus while still being productive. For example, my little book of game design ideas has probably 20 games in it. Whenever I lose focus on one thing, I just flip through the book. I'm like, "Oh, I should have an idea for this." And then I start working on that, and then a week and a half later, "Oh, but this looks cool."
Totally.
You. You always have the same end goal, and you're taking different kinds of branching paths together. It's like, no matter what, I'm developing a game and designing a game, but, like, which game am I working on today?
So, you've got multiple irons in the fire, so to speak.
Exactly. The second thing that I would say is incredibly helpful is having a very good. And this is probably hard for people who try to do this by themselves, but having a very good kind of supportive rock of a team, something to kind of anchor you onto a project when you kind of have to put your nose to the grindstone and just get at it. Having that one person that's like, "Hey, this needs to get done. Can you do that?" Yeah, of course.
It's just that I was busy doing something else, busy being in "air quotes." But I'm more than happy to work on this if it needs to be done, kind of thing.
And I can relate to that so much because I've started a number of projects that have initially been just me, and then I've brought people in before, and they just maybe haven't had the same passion or the same. They aren't that rock, you know, and they haven't been moving things forward. And I always. The way I refer to that person, that rock, is,
I call them my spirit warrior. Like, I need someone who's spiritually war-ready, like, ready to go to war for these kind of ideas and these kind of things. And that's actually one of the reasons why I talked to Frank about this whole nerdpreneur experience, is that I felt that he was like the spirit warrior who would start down this same path and care enough about doing it that things would actually move forward. And he's been doing. I mean, he has.
I don't know. I feel like we hold each other accountable really well in terms of being able to move a project like this forward, and where I drop the ball, he kind of picks it up, and when he drops the ball, I pick it up. And I think that's such an important point that if you're in this alone, it could be way harder. But if you have that one person you can count on, man, can you start moving things forward like that? Steady progress when you have someone else outside of you.
That cares about the same thing?
Yeah. At least one. I mean, it has. I mean, there's also that accountability that goes along with it. You say that you're going to do something to some. There are times where I tell Chris, "Oh, I'm going to get this thing set up just before we talk next week." And if I didn't have that, I would have pushed it to the next week and maybe even the next.
You know, if you're consistently meeting with a good team, you don't want to show up with nothing done. You want to keep showing up and moving it forward. Let me ask you this, then. I mean, because, like, was there a shift for you that you had to make from being able to say, like, "Oh, I like board games, and this is kind of a hobby" to this being like, "I think I could make some
money and run this as a business." Like, was there a shift mentally that you had to make at some point to make that happen?
It kind of came naturally, as strange as that might sound, where I went from doing this for fun, you know, traveling every so often. And then I didn't go to a convention 10 miles away. I went to one in another state. I went from Massachusetts to Philadelphia. I spent three days at a house in Maine or whatever, just working on a game with other designers, kind of like a retreat. I moved across the country to go work with other coworkers who had also moved.
I do this, I do that. And eventually, it just kind of fell into place. It's you. You end up. It's almost like a snowball going down a hill. You start off small. You collect knowledge. You collect knowledge. You collect knowledge. You make connections, you make connections, you make connections. You make a good product, you make a good product, you make a good product.
And then the people that you made connections with look back on you as the person who knows things and the person who made a good product.
Right?
And now, officially, you're in the industry.
That's so cool.
And it's just, it entirely depends on when you stop the snowball, how far you'll get.
So, you're just sticking with it.
Well, and also, like, it sounds to me like you're stepping into bigger steps, right? Like you're taking bigger steps progressively. I really like the idea, the way you put it where you're like, "I made a choice to go out of state for this bigger thing." Like, you were all of a sudden in a bigger playing field, right, just because you made that choice. And then, you know, you committed to going to a retreat for a few days. Like, okay, that's a bigger step than maybe you would
have taken in the past. And these are, like, interesting milestones along the way. When you take those bigger steps, all of a sudden you get into a smaller group of people that have taken those bigger steps. And I like also that you mentioned, it's about good product connection, right? You've been working hard and doing these things, like those three things together. I mean, that's almost anything you want to be successful in. You have to be, you know, good product. You have to be working hard.
You have to be making connections. Like, that's just always going to be important. But taking those bigger steps into the arena where you're going to be able to do that at a higher level, I think that's really good for people to hear and for them to understand that when you start making those steps, you can start really making progress.
So, I like how what you said earlier around people focusing on multiple things and having many irons in the fire and how that keeps people engaged. Damn it, I forgot my second point.
I think you're embracing the nerd brain there, right? Because so many nerd brains are, like, distracted by one thing or the other. And like, I bounce around to different projects. All I know, Frank, you know this about me. I'm just bouncing around to different projects all the time, but allowing, not fighting yourself. Like, you're not fighting your own natural tendencies with work, which is, I think, one of those barriers a lot of
nerds have when they start off. It's like, "Ah, I can't get anything done because I'm always bouncing around at different things." Like, well, can you use that as a skill and bounce around the things that you care about and make steady progress? Right?
Yeah. The small steps. Many small steps over a long period of time, as opposed to lots of steps within the next day or two.
Being able to look at something that you might consider a flaw as a potential advantage in most industries is one of the best traits you can have. For example, if you do have that kind of mentality, that brain that skips around to a bunch of different things, a lot of people would beat themselves up over that. Like, "Oh, I can't focus.
How am I going to get anything done?" I try to look at it as, "Oh, I'm focusing on multiple things, I'm putting in work into a bunch of things, and if I desperately, maybe not even desperately, but if I feel that I need to focus on a single thing, I can." But, I really excel at working conceptually, or whatever, on just a lot of different things and putting a lot of things in a pile and picking out the ones that I think are the best.
Did you have anybody that, when you said to them, I'm going to start a board game company, said, you were a bit crazy, or, there's no way that's going to work out? Or like, did you have any haters or people on the other side saying, like, how's that going to happen a little bit?
It's weird. When I, when my, when Zephyr workshop was started, I came in very early. I was like one of the founding six or so members, but I wasn't responsible for that big initial push to start it. That was the director, Breeze, who was going to school for game design. He's like, "I want to make this game. Aegis was his brainchild, it's his baby." And the rest of us helped him foster it, and it became our weird collective eight parent child.
But when you say to a lot of people, and I think it was different for me because I was the youngest of the group, I was still in high school when it started. Hey, I'm 17. I'm not going to go to college. I'm going to make a board game with my 22-year-old friend.
I can imagine.
How do parents feel about that one?
Eh, more supportive than you'd expect. One thing that I've noticed a lot, at least from my parents and my friends' parents and television, is that as long as you have a backup, I feel like you can do most things and have support from your general audience.
Right.
For example, my dad's like, "That's gonna be really rough for you. I'm fine with this, and I want you to do what you want, but go learn how to deal cards, because that's what he did." So I went and I dealt cards for a year and a half as a day job while I was making board games and then moved across the country, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here I am.
That is such a great lesson. I heard that somewhere else about how a mom was giving her daughter advice, a similar kind of thing. The daughter really wanted to do. Didn't know what she wanted to do, actually, so it's slightly different, but didn't know what she wanted to do. But the mom said, "Hey, whatever you like, you could figure out what
you want to do later. Like, that's fine. Like, this doesn't have to be your passion, but you got to do something that you can do anywhere around the world so that wherever you are, you can be making money." And this was, you know, this person's a bit older now, so this was back in, like, the seventies or so. But that advice was so true. She ended up becoming a beautician, and then she could do that anywhere. Anywhere in the world. Valuable skill. I mean,
I wish I had been given that advice. I mean, I've done okay, but I wish that I had been given that kind of advice, because that is so clear. That makes so much sense.
I think that's true because, well, I mean, I went to theater school and acting, which was not necessarily my parents' favorite idea. They were like, "What are you gonna do with that?" I don't know. I guess I'll go act. But, you know, the idea of getting into being a professional actor and making a living as an actor was just not really realistic because theater is not high pay at all.
So one of the things that was really valuable to me was picking up the skill of sales, because you need to be able to sell anywhere. And you know what's funny? Both my parents are salespeople. So, what did they tell me I should probably learn how to do? "You should learn how to sell. You should go to business school. You should do these things because that's what they know, and it's worked well for them." And so,
same thing with your parents, right? Like, your dad's like, "You should learn to do cards because that's what he knew, that it would be effective. Right?" And so, I think there's sometimes that disconnect when parents give advice, and we rarely want to listen to what our parents give us advice around when we're young. But then, it's funny. It's like, yeah, they're only seeing their perspective and
what they know. Generally, they'll say, like, you should do the same thing as what I did because I made these choices. And if your parents are in a great position and they're successful and they've had a great life and built up your life and encouraged you to, like, then you, it probably is good to take some of that advice and listen. If your parents are not where you want to be, maybe it's not right. Like, it depends on who your parents are and what kind of person they are.
But, I think that's a really interesting tidbit because all three of us have had similar kinds of experiences like that.
Yeah. So, as far as haters, though, did you have anyone that kind of came up? And some people get inspired by people trying to shoot them down or give them doubt, or some people, it really, they take it to heart and it creates quite this obstacle that they have to overcome. Did you have any haters that really left an imprint on you? You don't need to name them, but just the experience.
"Haters" is a strong word. I think the closest thing I can think of isn't even a person. It's just a kind of general stigma because we've had a very big resurgence of, you know, nerd culture, geeky stuff, things being very popular that weren't popular in, like, the eighties or whatever before I was born. But that's, that resurgence has been relatively recent, like, in the past ten years or so with, you know,
all of the games and board games leaving. Like, there's more than just the game of life and stuff like that. And I think that there's that general stigma around "you're going to go make board games." Oh, like Scrabble, and it's like, well, no, it's a lot of uncertainty in the time that I think a lot of which has passed at this point, especially in my kind of inner circles now. Everyone knows what I do and they're kind of like, oh, yeah, I know these things. My dad wants to play board games now.
He wants to try playing board games.
That's awesome.
Not like Scrabble and Connect Four, but like, he wants to play Cartographers and Bullet and stuff like that. Like hobby board games, which I think says a lot.
And I think the resonance of that is that people see you moving through and getting success. And again, I think that if you're doing that and making progress and actually doing your passion, like taking action on it, then everyone around you who was questioning it first will start to get on board because they see the progress and they see the results. But it's like, if you're not doing that, then it's probably, they're probably just giving you advice that you should listen to.
Because if you're not taking action on moving your passion forward, then maybe it's not really your passion, you know? Or maybe it's not really what you want.
I will say that you really, I mean, I know. Before we move on to the next section here, Ryan, you were the first person I met who was a board game designer and maker, and, and that, to me, you were that person. That was, I was like, oh, this is a thing. Like, this is like, independent game designers can do this.
And I had this, there was this period of disbelief that probably lasted about a week while we were working together in the beginning, and then eventually you told me more about it, and I hung out with you more. And then I met your other friends that were in this, that are in Zephyr. And I just remember thinking, like, wow, these are people like me that are doing this. This is not that
far from the realm of possibility. And you, you have really, I mean, not to inflate your ego here, but you've really kind of inspired me for my own projects, my own mechanics that I've wanted to build and turn into something. And that is, I mean, that's exactly the kind of thing that we've been talking about, is that you do more, you go farther, and you meet with other people that have done the same thing. And then, whatever happens, you know, you inspire, you collaborate, or whatever.
And that's really what this podcast is about, getting to have people share stories that, like, you know, Ryan's not that much different, probably, than a lot of the people who are just listening to this podcast and saying, "Ah, should I at 17, go to college or should I try and pursue this thing that I think maybe I could do or like?" And I guess the thing I want to say about this podcast is, I think it's about bringing these stories to light, so that we can
bring people in and hear that. You know what? Ryan's not that different from me or you or any other listener here, but there are things that you've done to be able to create success in that area. And that's what we're trying to get out, is that you can create your own nerdy passion into a business, start moving it into a reality. And there are ways in which to do it and strategies. I did want to ask you about advice because it sounds like you've got some good advice over the years
and we've heard some of that already. What's the worst advice you've ever heard, I guess, in your industry or in your niche, that you would tell people to avoid?
I think I probably have two things. The more broad one is: games are for everybody. Don't be like a gatekeeper at all because you're already coming from a history of a disenfranchised, air quotes, people, you know, the satanic panic of, whenever that happened.
Yeah, D and D, in case you don't know, D and D used to be the satanic panic for our younger viewers. It is basically when in the eighties, D and D came around and everyone thought it was like a satanic game. And so there were newspaper articles about kids sacrificing people due to this D and D game. And it was all BS and not real, but there was a little panic around it.
It scared a lot of more religious or tight Republicans.
It scared a lot of Republicans.
I was going to say conservatives, but it definitely scared a lot of parents that had pretty tight control over their children.
Yeah, but, yeah, you have things like that. You have the portrayal of nerds in movies and popular media and stuff like that. LARPing, being just a bunch of sticky nerds and fat guys beating each other up with foam swords and wearing tissue boxes, stuff like that. And then you come from that kind of a background. Think about the roots of the things you enjoy, and then think about someone new who's trying to come into the hobby that you've been enjoying for a long time.
Why would you not want that new person to enjoy it with you, especially, especially if they're already coming from a disenfranchised group? It should be gaming in general, should be for everybody. So, don't be a gatekeeper.
I love that.
What's some of the worst advice maybe you've heard in your industry or niche?
The worst advice would probably be in regards to playtesting and board games. You'll hear a lot of people write off certain things playtesters say, such as they don't know what they're doing, they're inexperienced. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That has some merit depending on specific factors of what you're trying to get feedback on. Like for example, if you're playtesting a game that you've been working on for three weeks and someone says, "I wish the cards had art." Well,
there's probably not art yet. That's fine. But you have to always keep in mind that when you're showing people a game and they have an intrinsic dislike of a certain thing at their first playthrough, and you're like, "Well, that thing makes sense later on when you've played the game more." So, I'm just gonna not count that.
That's horrible, because the most people that'll see your game will play it once, and then if that one experience that they had was bad because they haven't played it five times, and they don't have this, like, intrinsic knowledge that you're going to assume people have, and this is a lot of pitfalls newer designers fall into. They're never going to play it again, and you're going to get bad reviews online. You're not going to sell copies.
So, if people are assuming that their audience knows things that they know, that is a pitfall, that is a thing to avoid. Instead, make sure that your audience, when they're trying out the game, when they're playing, testing, that they have everything that they will need when they are first starting off to enjoy it that first time, instead of assuming, oh, well, yeah, sure, the first time is not that fun, but the second time is so much more fun. Don't assume that.
Just make sure that the first time they play is fun.
That's very important. And a lot of it also breaks down to just don't write off player feedback because of pretty much any reason that, at least in my opinion, involves gameplay. There's pretty much no reason that that shouldn't at least have some sort of bearing on future decisions.
Yeah, I mean, even the stuff that you get back when you were saying, like, around art, it's like, well, yeah, we can forgive that because it's three weeks old, right? But it's still real feedback where it's like, we better get some art on these things. Like, you don't want to discount any of that feedback that you're getting because it's direct feedback from a first playthrough.
I know in our business where we launch products online, literally the feedback we get from our clients is the most important thing that we do for designing our products. Because if you don't, you're likely to spend so much time designing a product that not only they don't want, but also they don't need. That doesn't create the transformation that they're hoping for. Whereas, when you do take that feedback, even if it doesn't seem right at first, it is right.
There's probably some real reasons why you want to take that to heart.
It kind of follows over the generic old food service kind of thing or retail thing you'd hear from long ago. It's like the customer's always right, and that's not true in most situations, but the customer isn't necessarily always right. But they always have a feeling, and it's yours. Your job as the playtest runner is to figure out if they have this issue. What is causing that issue, and why do they feel this? You're not looking for fixes. You're looking for causes.
Nice. I like that. So, what are you especially nerdy about outside of your core business?
Coming with. Coming with the territory. I do play a lot of tabletop games. Other than that, what do I like? I like miniature painting, which I guess is kind of adjacent.
Like Warhammer 40K miniatures.
Like Warhammer 40K miniatures, which makes it very adjacent. I do like cooking. Cooking is really fun. And I'm big into food history. Food history is really interesting to me. I do have a little bit of an issue where I don't like to read very much and a lot of food histories are in books. So, someone make me the food history podcast. Shonen long form, shonen anime, and I'll watch all 800 episodes.
If you had a million followers, what would you do? What advice would you give them?
Hmm. A million followers? It would probably be, "take a break." You see this thing a lot, at least in my experience with, like, kind of older millennials, people in, like, their low to mid-thirties. That's very, like, "get to the grind." I need to be doing this. Why am I not being productive at this exact second? And I noticed that a lot with my coworkers at Zephyr and my friends. Uh, things like that.
If you're going to live your entire life just pushing forward, you're never going to have a chance to look behind you. To see all that you've actually accomplished, you really need to take a break and not beat yourself up over it. There's zero reason for you to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, or just any obscene amount of effort. Take a break, go for a walk, go on a vacation, just chill and watch TV for a day.
You do not have to just kill yourself day after day trying to be productive, and then beat yourself up when you're not.
Amen, dude. That is so, like, that is something I've been really trying to channel in the last few years and really accept, and I mean, a decent amount of therapy has gone into the demon that I have called productivity. The voice always trying to make me productive despite it being the weekend or a Sunday. And I've had to have friends kind of watch my friends relax on a Sunday. And my initial reaction being, how can you nap on a Sunday? How are you okay with napping for most of the Sunday?
And they would say, oh, I'm resting, I'm recharging. And I'm like, "Yeah, but you could be busy. You could be productive."
This is so funny because I had a conversation with someone literally right before this, when I was having brunch, about this exact thing where so many people, the only way they become productive is by beating themselves up.
Whoa.
And it's legitimately a weird thing. And I relate to it because I was like that for years and years and years. It's like, I need to beat myself up in order to be productive. And, like, if I'm not, I don't have permission to feel good. And that's like a really bad recipe to cook your life in. All right. It's like, what you want to do is find ways to be productive, for sure, but also allow yourself those times, because why are we being productive?
But to be able to have those times where we enjoy ourselves and earn those breaks so that you feel good and breaks are part of your success plan. I think that people forget that when you are putting breaks in, and intentional rest, and times that you're working hard and then times that you're not, you're actually setting yourself up for success by doing that and making sure you have the things that make you feel happy and are the best person you can be to create the best results.
Finding different ways to be kind to yourself, which is, I think, the message you're hearing here, like, to be kind while you're going through the process, allow yourself to. To continue to move forward without beating yourself up. I think that's great advice, and I appreciate, Ryan, you brought that up, because I think it really hits home for a lot of people.
Let's go ahead and transition over to the D100 and the rapid fire, Chris. So, Ryan, if you wouldn't mind, go ahead and roll a D100, please. Do you have the 2D10s or do you have an actual D100?
I have a Google thing that I found online.
Perfect.
I got a 94.
I'd like to know what was the.
First, it could be for any tabletop role-playing game, but what was the first character you ever played? The one you ever made and played.
Ooh, first character. I don't remember his name, which is a shame. I would play very frequently. This was my go-to character for pretty much anything in any role-playing game that allowed it. So any fantasy-themed role-playing would be a halfling barbarian wielding two axes, riding a dog.
That sounds awesome.
And it was bad, but it was fun.
Why would it be bad? I'd imagine that because of halflings. Are we talking about the fifth edition?
Yeah. So here's why it's bad. Level one, barbarian on a mount with two. With two axes, one in each hand. And I'm pretty sure you cannot move the mount unless it's a bonus action, if I remember correctly.
Unless you command it.
Unless you command it.
Yeah.
Right. So, you can't actually attack with your second axe. And you also are wielding two of them, so you can't versatile your first one, but I still did it for fun.
Well, the concept is badass, so I think that's it.
The concept is very badass. And the other thing is that if you use gold to buy your original character, you have just enough gold for the equipment that I mentioned, which is two axes, a dog, and barding.
Nice.
And you have nothing else.
What would piss them off? What would get them raging?
Anybody taller?
See, that's why it's fun.
That's good.
That is so many things.
Oh, wow. That's awesome. All right, well, let's go. We're going to go ahead and switch over to the rapid fire. So in this section, we've got another. We've got a long list, but you don't have to roll anything. So I'm just going to ask a couple of questions to you, and we're going to go. We're going to do five of them. We'll start with five. So, Yoda or Obi Wan?
Yoda.
DC or Marvel?
Marvel.
Game of Thrones books or the tv show?
TV show. I can't read.
What? Super.
That's right.
What superpower would you want?
Earthbending.
Ooh, interesting.
If you could fly or turn invisible, which one would you fly?
So smart with?
Out.
Thank you. Flying. So much better.
And probably one of the most controversial questions. Coffee or tea? Coffee, without a doubt.
What's the best? Munchy God.
Goldfish.
Wow. All right, cool. That's like, wouldn't have been on my top list at all, but that's cool.
I was very torn there.
What was? What was the other one?
There are two others. One of the other ones would have been the soy sauce. Wasabi almonds from, I think, Blue Diamond that I refer to as flavor blasted almonds. And then there's actually a snack called Munchies.
Oh.
I know.
That I haven't had in a long time because I don't know if it still exists. Munchies was the best munchies.
It does.
That's the one that has the Cheetos, the pretzels, and the Sun Chips in it, right? Like, it's all.
It's like the better Chex Mix. Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Oh, man, those are so dangerous. Destroyer. Whole family size bag.
That's awesome. Okay, which Hogwarts house would you be in?
Hufflepuff.
I really want to know. How come?
Very inclusive. Not evil.
Yeah.
Can't read a theme.
Apparently, immediately out of Ravenclaw. Yeah.
In the best, which is Hufflepuff.
Nice. What are your three favorite pizza toppings?
Pineapple, bacon, banana peppers.
Team Pineapple. All right. I like it.
Now, I'm really tempted just because I know, Ryan. I'm really tempted to ask this one question that we don't have on the list.
Sure.
It is a calzone.
I knew that's what this was going to be about.
Go ahead, sandwich.
A calzone is not a sandwich.
What is a calzone, then?
I. A calzone is pretty much a folded pizza, but it's not because typically, calzones, at least to my knowledge, don't have sauce in them.
So then when people take a pizza slice and they fold it in half, is that then a sandwich?
No, because a sandwich is between two separate pieces of leavened bread.
Okay, I don't know where this is going, but how could a calzone ever be a sandwich?
Right?
Like, I don't understand how that.
Okay, how about hot dog is not a sandwich?
No, not at all.
Then what about a hamburger? Is that a sandwich?
A hamburger is a sandwich.
It's a hamburger style of sandwich. Yes.
Okay, but you said it's between two pieces of bread, so a hot dog is between two pieces of bread.
No, it's not.
No, it is. It is in a V of bread, right? There's, like, a connection. It's more of, like, a fold, someone.
Like, slices a concave shape into pieces.
Into a piece of. It's closer to a taco than it is to a sandwich, in my opinion.
Oh, Ryan, would you care to comment?
I probably shouldn't. A hot dog is not a sandwich because the bread is connected on the bottom. So, it's one piece of bread with a cut in it. Now, I've had this question asked before, what happens when the bread breaks? It has not become a sandwich. It is now a broken hot dog.
So, it still remains within the universe of hot dogs. But it is a different state of the hot dog.
Yes, it's one of the hot dog's three forms of matter.
There's no way that a calzone could ever be a sandwich, none at all, in any light, might be, I don't know.
But it is between two pieces of doughy substance.
No, no. It is one whole piece of doughy substance that does not have separations at all. It's much its own thing. Right? Like, in the world of calzones, it is just its own thing. You can't say, like, oh, is it a sandwich? It has no subcategory pastry. No, it's not. It's just its own thing. It's so.
It's not even a pastry.
It's more like a stuffed bread.
I mean, I just don't think it is. If we're trying to come up with food genuses, I don't think it's under any other genus. It is its own thing. Like, like the duck-billed platypus. It's just there.
I think I would. It depends on how you do your classification because if we classify purely on structure, I'd probably agree. But if we classify based on origin, structure, contents, and general flavor profile, I'd probably put it as an offshoot of a pizza.
I mean, I definitely believe calzones are just pizzas that someone messed up.
Calzones are delicious, though.
I mean, I haven't had a good calzone. I'm not gonna lie.
And I've had some great ones.
I've almost gotten into fistfights over a hot dog sandwich.
This.
This was. I had never met anyone who was so passionate about this topic until I met Ryan, and then it just made me smile every time.
Thanks so much, Ryan. I appreciate you doing this. Oh, last thing, is there anything else you want to plug or anything else you want people or our audience to know about you or about your game or anything?
Coming up, look out for the following Zephyr workshop on social media and look out for Kickstarters coming next year.
Yeah. Oh, and you know what? Because this one's always near and dear to me. Star Trek or Star Wars?
If I had to pick, it'd be Star Wars. I hate Star Trek.
What? You didn't have to say that last part. How could you?
It's so boring, in my opinion.
Okay, all right. Fair enough. Star Wars is much better for the masses.
I don't really like Star Wars that much either. Okay, that's a lie. I like Bad Batch.
How about Babylon five?
I've never seen it.
That's, like, basically the go-to answer. Every time I bring up Babylon Five, everyone's like, "I've never seen it."
Oh, you're going to hate when you ask me if I've seen Firefly.
Oh, my God. Really? You haven't seen it?
That was going to be our next question. Is Firefly overrated or underrated?
I'm going to say it's overrated. You don't need to watch it.
We just lost all of our fan base.
Everyone's gone. Good thing this is the end of the episode. Thanks, everybody. Thank you for listening to Nerdpreneur. Be sure to subscribe wherever you found us and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Every review helps our show grow. You can follow and chat with us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Nerdpreneurpodcast. Nerdpreneur is a labor of passion, and Chris and I would love to keep this going.
So if you want us to continue making content, you can support us by going to patreon.com/nerdpreneur and become a member of the board. Members of the board get shoutouts. They can submit rapid fire questions. They get behind-the-scenes peeks, and we record super fun and valuable content exclusive to our board members. We love all of you nerds. Keep it nerdy, nerdpreneur.
You know I love my work. Life's a game, so I'm going to take my turn. Nerds deserve to put the passion first. I'll let them rap first so they can all be heard.