BOARD GAMES 1: We're making a game

This is Planet Money from NPR. Check one, two. Check one, two. It's opening in one minute. Here we go. We are packed like sardines inside a convention center hallway waiting for the main doors to open. The crowd is surging. Is it open yet? Hopefully. That is. Some random guy squashed up next to us. I was hoping for some large announcement, but... The announcement is the screams of the week being trampled.

This convention is called Gen Con. It is the largest tabletop gaming convention in the country. We're talking board games and card games and role-playing games. And the sea of people we're with are all waiting to get into the exhibition floor. where all kinds of new games are on display, from big companies like Hasbro all the way down to little independent game designers showing their first games ever. It's happening. We're going. We're going. We spill into a room as big as what feels like...

three football fields full of so many kiosks with so many people selling so many games, and I instantly regress into a giddy little child. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, it's overwhelming. Okay, so...

Why have we come here? Well, board games rule, obviously, A. But B, let's just call it for now, market research. Do you want to tell me about the game you have? That's our transhuman sci-fi game. The game takes place 10 years after we lost the war with a group of AIs. So it takes place 10 years from now?

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, so Canvas Critters is a mosaic-making game where you play as these animal artists, and you're trying to impress the animal museum curator. She's a rather skeptical-looking rabbit. Yeah. Would you like to tell me about Biome? This is a nature-themed tableau builder where you are trying to build a biodiverse ecosystem of plants and animals. That last voice is Leonie Grundler. She's 29, founder and CEO of...

Lioness Games. Biome is her company's first game, and she has a copy spread out on the table in front of her, trying to draw people in. And it is working because... Biome is an unusually eye-catching game. It has dozens and dozens of cards with different beautifully illustrated animals and plants, plus hundreds of little very cute wooden animal pieces, and then the real showstopper, a biome.

bunch of fully functional but little baby-sized birds nests. And yes, we have little tiny straw nests with tiny wooden chicks and rabbits that you put in the nest. It's hard to overstate how adorable these little nests are. I'm pretty happy with how they came out.

Now, in Leonie's game, you earn points by playing plant and animal cards, and then the right combinations of those, at the right time, will cause extra special things to happen. In the spring, if you have played a bird next to a tree, or a rabbit next to any plant...

They will nest and have babies. As in little wooden babies that go into those adorable nests and earn even more points. Unless your opponents have predator cards and feast on your young. What do you want? Nature's brutal. Welcome to Biome.

As we talk to Leonie, we start to realize that she kind of is this board game company. It's basically her. And then anyone else she could drag into this for help. So my sister helped with a lot of the art and graphic design, which is really cool. And my parents are demoing. down the hall. Your parents are somewhere showing people this game? Yeah. Wait, I feel like I need to go find them. Yeah, you should. Oh my gosh.

As we wander over to find Leone's parents somewhere in this, like, airplane hangar full of plastic tables with people hawking games, it is so clear that what we've been hearing is true. We are in a golden age of games. Like when I was a kid in the 90s, maybe 700, 800 new games came out each year. Today, it is like 5,000. If you love to play games, it has never been better. But... The flip side to that goldenness?

5,000 games a year? If you make games, there has never been more competition. So someone like Leonie has to do anything she can think of to stand out. From manufacturing little bird's nests to enlisting her parents to travel across the country. country and rope strangers into trying her game. Hello, guys. I met your daughter, I think. Oh, yeah. Hello. Leonie's mom has earrings made out of two of the little wooden pieces from the game.

The sun is part of the resource, the sunlight. You're wearing sunlight resource earrings. I love them. Leone's parents.

Leone, the hundreds of other game sellers here are all hoping they've created the next blockbuster game. The term we have heard is Monopoly Killer. Frankly, this gets to why we've come to this convention in the first place. In this world, the Monopoly Killer is some mythical game that if you could invent it, would dethrone.

what is probably the most popular game of all time in the U.S., and make you rich beyond your wildest Mr. Monopoly monocled money bag dreams. There is a game people have pointed to as a contender. It's German. Many of you have probably played it. That possible monopoly killer, Settlers of Catan. Catan, Catan, however you say it.

This is a game where you build roads and you trade resources like wool and wood, and you try to earn points by building settlements and cities. It is awesome. It has sold so many copies. It did not, however, kill Monopoly per se. No, we just now have two hugely popular games that each make a fortune. And we at Planet Money couldn't help but notice both.

are about economics, right? Yeah. Monopoly, obviously. Real estate, bankruptcy, antitrust, really. Settlers of Catan, road building, distribution of resources. I mean... Literally, the CliffsNotes definition of economics is the allocation of scarce resources. And it's not just these games. So many board games are tiny little economic simulators. They do what we try to do at Planet Money.

bring people into the world of economics in a fun, accessible way. And so is Planet Money not the perfect entity to create not just the Monopoly killer, but the killer of Catan?

And so we are making a board game. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Erika Barris. Planet Money. The game. A monopoly killer. A slayer of settlers of Catan. Or, you know, let's be real. We'd be happy if it was just really fun and people wanted to play it. Yes, we have been busy for the past year and are so excited to finally share everything. thing we've learned from throwing ourselves into one of the most crowded business spaces on the planet.

Over the next series of episodes, we are going to get an inside look at how you pitch a game for the shelves of big box retail. Are you going to get in the room for the pitch? They emailed me last night. We can be in the room for the pitch. Oh, no. I have a pitch, though. I have arm movements that are going to happen. We'll get closer than ever to this unusual moment in global manufacturing. So the tariffs would eat into their cut and not.

Ostensibly pick it up. The question is, do they charge us back for it? And if everything goes well, we should have a real game that you, listening at home, will be able to play on your table. You have to remember the first time you play it, you have a lot of questions. Does it help to know that it is...

is inspired by a Nobel Prize winning paper about the asymmetry of information in the used car market? I don't know anything you just said. But before all of that, we are going to need your help, listeners. Lots of your help. So stay tuned. This message comes from Mint Mobile. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no hidden fees. Plans start at $15 a month.

Make the switch at mintmobile.com slash switch. That's mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for a 3-month 5GB plan required. Equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first 3 months only.

then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. All right, we are making a board game. How does one make a board game, we should ask? Oh. Yeah, that little detail. Now, luckily, we had just met someone who could help with this. How many games do you own? I think around between 90 and 100. Oh, that's it? I know. It's because I've moved a few times. I was kidding. That's a lot of games.

This, again, is Leonie Grundler, who we met, along with her parents, at the giant game convention. We called her back a few weeks later. Yeah, because... Not long ago, Leonie was just like us, trying to figure out where to begin and how to navigate this incredibly complicated business. Plus, she had made the kind of game we were jealous of.

You know, Biome had all those beautiful pieces and nests, of course, but it's also a long, layered game. It teaches its players about ecology. I think we want that, but, you know, economy instead. Right. So we thought it would be... to simply hear how Leone did all of this, starting from the beginning. The first game I ever loved was probably Werewolf, which is like the German version of Mafia.

Leonie's mom is German. She spent summers in Germany playing all kinds of games with her cousins. Then it wasn't until high school, when I was introduced to Settlers of Catan, that I really fell in love with. Specifically, it's a gateway to the category of board games known as Eurogames.

popular in Europe, tend to be more complex games, built to reward strategy and not random luck. And I've always thought of this category as more thinky games, like Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride, if you've heard of those. But it's really Settlers of Catan that gets credit for breaking through first in the U.S. And young Leonie fell hard for it in high school. You know, friends would go after high school and get boba or play sports. So, yeah.

Playing Catan every day was not like super mainstream for high schoolers at that time. Not every single day. Right, exactly. Leonie went off to college, studied hospitality administration, not... at all thinking about designing board games. And then... COVID hits. The pandemic was huge for board games. Sales went through the roof. People were locked into their bubbles playing board games. And Leonie, during COVID, got laid off from her job. So, of course, I spent that summer.

playing a ton of this game called Wingspan. The bird game. The bird game. Exactly. And so in Wingspan, you are playing these bird cards and the birds lay eggs. But the eggs just sit there. And I was like, what if there were snakes that could eat the eggs from other players? Aha! A new board game idea was born. Leonie was now one of... like a gazillion people who thought they had a good game idea. The question was, what next? Leone goes all in, testing out whether it is a good game idea.

So I started prototyping. I was printing out cards and cutting out cards. Even my grandma helped me cut out cards. After a year and a half, Leone had a final prototype of her game biome. She was now... one of maybe half a gazillion people with a prototype of a game. So now what? Well?

30 or 40 years ago, Leone would need to go to a company like Parker Brothers and say, hey, do you want to buy this biome game idea for me? And then the brothers Parker would be like, well, look, Leonie, we're still selling millions of copies of Monopoly and developing our own games internally. So I don't know, probably it's going to be a pass on these cute nests and your game, buddy.

For decades and decades, it was incredibly hard for some regular old game enthusiasts like Leone to get her board game idea to the market. And then came Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site. Tabletop games is actually the largest category. On Kickstarter, which is so... Get out of here. Yeah, it is. It's so cool. This is Orbeo. This is Masterpiece. Right. If you haven't been on Kickstarter in the last 10 years... Introducing Quark's particle puzzle. It really does feel like it's become...

all tabletop games on there. This is Cargo, a classic card game where you're stacking cargo. Don't just change every turn. They stack up on top of you and your friends, and until the whole table erupts in chaos. Here's how it works. At any given time, there are between 650 and 750 games, or like game paraphernalia projects. On Kickstarter, trying to get made, the total number since the beginning of Kickstarter, 57,067 and counting.

In Goblin Party, you lead your goblin clan to take revenge on those pesky heroes and adventurers. Which makes sense. Kickstarter was like a floodgate opening between a tsunami of game ideas and game demand. Yeah, decades of game fans with decades of ideas didn't need to go through Parker Brothers anymore. They could go directly to the rising flood of board game enthusiasts and ask directly, like, hey.

Do you like my idea? Because if enough of you pre-order my game for, say, $45, I can go make this thing. So, when Leone's prototype of biome was ready... she had a choice. She could still try and pitch it to a professional game-making company. They would help her polish up the design, deal with manufacturing, maybe some marketing. But, you know...

This assumes they would even accept her game. And if they did, Leone says she would earn a tiny fraction of the sales and maybe cede a lot of creative control of her game. I was like, Biome is my baby. Like, I want to have control over it as much as possible. And so it was going to be the Kickstarter route for Leonie. But she didn't do this.

Casually. Oh, no, no. She hired a company that specializes in launching Kickstarter campaigns. That is how big this Kickstarter world has gotten. And they helped her with... All kinds of stuff, including... Welcome to the breathtaking world of Biome. Giving her tips on making this Biome Explainer video, featuring an Australian accent that I have to say is working very effectively on me. Move through the seasons. Simultaneously...

collecting resources and playing wildlife cards. But beware, in summer, your opponent's predators roam. Will you guide your biome to peaceful victory or become the apex predator? The theory is games need a lot of buzz before the Kickstarter campaign even kicks off. That way... When you do launch, a big chunk of people will already want to buy your game, which might then cause it to shoot up Kickstarter's website and get even more people to buy your game. So...

By the time she launched, Leone already had Facebook ads, convention appearances, playtests. Leone's game cost $49 on Kickstarter. She wanted to pre-sell around 1,000 copies, which would kickstart Biome into manufacturing by hopefully getting $40,000 in pre-orders. So how did Biome do? Yeah. So Biome raised $400,000 on Kickstarter, which was insane. Super cool. Yeah, things went quite well in Leonie's case. She met her funding goal in nine minutes and then shot way past it. So then we...

Ended up manufacturing 12,000 games, some in English, some in German, and some in French. Is 12,000 a lot or a little? So it's a pretty good... starting print run from what I've heard. Are you being modest? Is this like, are you like an insanely successful first time game designer? And you're like, it's pretty good. Yeah, it's hard to answer that question.

Yeah, no, it is not hard to answer that question. She had an absurdly successful game launch. Yeah, and okay, if we, Planet Money, are going to make a game... I could imagine Kickstarter being a great route for us. We get total control. We don't have to pitch it to anybody except you.

our audience. And we can generate buzz ahead of the launch by talking to you about it. Plus, you know, we don't have an Aussie accent, but our colleague at the Indicator, Darian Woods, has a killer New Zealand accent. Welcome to the breathtaking world of the Planet Money game. Also very much working for me. But yes, yes, we could totally pre-sell enough games and raise enough money to kickstart a Planet Money board game into existence through Kickstarter.

But of course, Leone's story does not stop with the fabulously successful presale of all her games. No, she had to, you know... figure out how to then actually manufacture thousands and thousands of games. She had to source a factory in China who could make little wooden chicks and bunnies and those little nests. This year, she had to figure out how to deal with the wild swings in tariffs. Last December, I imported about...

5,500 games to the US. I paid $255.20 in like customs and duties fees. Okay. Earlier this month, I imported 1,700 games. So, you know. about a third and I paid $6,354.81 in duties and customs fees. So yeah. from about five cents per game up to about $3.74 per game. And so Leone, by the way, did look into making the game in the U.S. She was going to have to turn all the cute little wooden creatures into cardboard and do something, maybe drop the adorable nest. If I had tried to sell a very...

This sad cardboard only game of Biome, I would have to charge $100 to $120 to the consumer. And so that's why, you know, even with the tariffs, I know that I'm going to have to keep manufacturing in China. So? That's where things stand for Leonie. Started as a huge board game fan, and Kickstarter allowed her to become the CEO of her own board game company, and I guess COO and CIO and whatever else, because she's the only full-time employee of that.

at Board Game Company. Yeah. We explained to Leone that this scrappy, independent Kickstarter route, it sounded noble, but also, like, beyond all-consuming. Okay.

This sounds like it's still a hustle. It's very tough. Is it cheating if we, if Planet Money, if we could link up with like a... bigger producer or a partner who's had more experience doing this kind of thing? Not at all. Oh, it's okay. It's okay. It's great. We're not selling out. No, you're not selling out.

You know, you'll with your audience and network, you'll get more people excited to play your game, hopefully. And then so you're just by bringing more people to the hobby, you're, you know, helping everyone out. Yeah, we were going to need to find a game publishing company to partner with. That's after the break.

You know, Planet Money did do a Kickstarter once. This was back in 2013. We wanted to make a t-shirt, follow it around the global economy. I'm Alex Bloomberg at Planet Money. And one thing we have a lot of in public radio, t-shirts. Not to brag, but that campaign did set the Guinness World Record at the time for the most money raised by a publishing project on Kickstarter ever. Nearly $600,000.

Fast forward two years and our record had been obliterated. And the Kickstarter campaign with by far the most supporters ever was a new card game. This audio is from that game's Kickstarter campaign video. We see the word kittens, then goats, explosions, all of this together in a single game. Exploding Kittens. Our Planet Money Kickstarter record was about 600K. The Exploding Kittens card game raised almost $8.8 million. So...

I don't know. If we are looking for a company to make our game with us, a partner who knows how to capture lightning in a bottle, it might make sense to talk to the people who made Exploding Kittens. Emails were sent, and a mildly awkward Zoom meeting was scheduled. Yeah. So...

Thank you, everybody, for joining. We should do a little bit of introductions. That is the voice of Planet Money's executive producer, Alex Goldmark. It's good to have him around on calls where we might sign any bad contracts. That way it's his fault, not mine and Erica's.

if that happens. Also in the meeting, Alon Lee, co-creator of the Exploding Kittens card game and apparently a Planet Money listener. I've been listening for years, all the episodes, just, yeah, very excited to be on this call. We were... Also very excited to be in the room with Exploding Kittens because they have evolved into a major game manufacturer now. Since that first Exploding Kittens game, they've published more than 70 games, many of which have made it onto the shelves at...

Walmart and Target. Games called things like Throw Throw Burrito, poetry for Neanderthals. Really loud librarians. Now, really, this introductory Zoom meeting with Ilan and Exploding Kittens boils down to a first date. Do they want to make a game with Planet Money? Does Planet Money want to make a game with them? Simple, in theory. Our basic question here is, can we make a board game and where do we start? Cool.

All right. Let me ask a few questions in order to answer that very exciting question. What does success look like and who is your audience? These are not rhetorical, I assume. No. I mean, we have a big audience that listens to the podcast. And some of them, we assume, like board games. That, again, our executive producer, Alex Goldmark, who, bless him.

could not help but immediately reveal how nerdily we were thinking about board games here. We want the game to like, I don't know, show you something about.

the world of economics or maybe make you feel something about the world of economics? Okay, so I think when you say you want people to learn something or have feelings about something, have a feeling about something that I get learn something learn seems like a learn seems like a bad word that seems like Alex Alex said a bad word when he said learn it's only bad if you want to like test it

If you just want to say like, yeah, you probably learned something, then that's fine. Okay, great. Yes, the guy who helped make games about cats that explode and cavemen writing monosyllabic poetry and burritos that you throw at each other. Not exactly eager to pivot to an educational game. Fair enough. Educational games, school games, do not fly off the shelves at Walmart or Target. But...

Maybe when we say things like learn and educational, we might be saying complex, like the game Leone made, Biome. Pretty hardcore strategy game that takes 60 to 90 minutes to play. Has such elaborate game pieces, your mother can make earrings out of them. Yeah, the games they call Euro games. Settlers of Catan was a Euro game, and it has sold gazillions of copies.

So in my head, I think I had imagined that a Planet Money game should be like that. A Euro game that takes hours to play, incredibly complex economic simulations, beloved by the hardcore board gamers, with a high ranking on... the famous website BoardGameGeek.com. And it seemed like Alain was trying to gauge just how set we were on making one of those high-ranking BoardGameGeek Eurogame-style board games.

When you say board game, I'm assuming you mean the requirement is not a board. It could be a card game or a throwables game or a run around the room game. I'm assuming that's correct.

Perhaps. I feel like we've already arrived at a critical decision point. And what are the trade-offs of these various... Well, the trade-offs are important and significant. Basically, we're trying to figure out... is the goal to make a board game, like on BoardGameGeek, which typically means high cost of goods, high sale price, small audience.

There are very few games on BoardGameGeek that satisfy the this made lots and lots of money criteria. On the other side of things is card game, like Exploding Kittens, very low cost of goods. very low price point between $10 and $20 and sells millions and millions of units, but of course makes a lot less money on each of those sales. So we just got to figure out what the strategy is there. Yeah.

Exploding Kittens doesn't really make Euro games. They make what are known as party games. Some famous examples that are not by Exploding Kittens would be Taboo, or Apples to Apples, or maybe even arguably Uno. Party games are much simpler to learn. They take way less time to play. And as a result, they tend to have more of a mass appeal. Exploding Kittens is one of the best companies in the world at making these.

If we want to make a Monopoly killer, a game that finds its way into as many homes as humanly possible, is it possible that we would have a better shot with a mass appeal party game? It's possible, but I will admit. I didn't really think of party games as smart games. My own personal bias, perhaps. And Planet Money should have a smart game. We knew that much. However, the more Elon talked...

the more I realized like there clearly can be more science and complexity to a party game than I had thought. So the, the mantra. that we have at this company like every game we've ever launched has satisfied only one criteria and every game we've killed has failed this one criteria which is uh the game itself should not be entertaining the game should make the people you're playing with

entertaining. And I assume you're not going to badmouth an existing game that doesn't do that. But if you would, hypothetically, I'd be open to hearing it. Well, the worst game ever invented is Candyland. Take that, children. The reason that I pick on that game a lot... is Candyland is get to the end of this path, right? And the way you get to the end of this path is you draw cards and the cards tell you how to move.

There is no faculty there, right? There's no decision making. There's no mastery. There's no interaction. You might as well not be in the room. And so why are you bothering to have that experience? Yeah, Candyland is basically a kind of solitaire that happens to be played by a bunch of people sitting next to each other. And this gets to what seems to really get Ilan excited about designing games. Candyland's problem, he explains, is something known as its core mechanic. So...

Every game you have ever played has a core mechanic in it somewhere. It's sometimes called a board game loop or a game loop, things like that. It's the repetitive thing that you do over and over again. that drives you from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. Hopefully, it escalates and you get better at it the more you do it. So, Candyland, the mechanic is... Draw a card. The card tells you what space to move to. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Not so fun. A slightly more complex example.

If you look at something like Monopoly, the core mechanic is accumulate properties and make money off those properties. And so you just keep doing that, right? Over and over and over again. You get better at it. There's escalation because you've now got more property. Some people are losing property. Some people have more money, less money, etc. Right? Are there any new game mechanics?

that we could like, like, would a goal be potentially also to be to introduce a new kind of game mechanic to whatever we're building? Yeah, I think, look, if the game is recognizable as just a skin on another game or a different way to present an existing gameplay loop... I get bored fast. I'd rather just play the original or not play that gameplay at all. So yeah, unless we come up with a brand new gameplay mechanic, I don't think we should bother.

At the end of about an hour with Elan and his team at Exploding Kittens, I don't know how to say it. We were starting to see ourselves in... party game hats like it seemed like maybe there was a way to have both the mass appeal of a very fun party game but also sneak in the complexity and nerdiness that we thought you could only get from an elaborate

highly rated board game geek Euro game like Catan. If we want to make a Monopoly killer, maybe the best chance is a super fun party game that is subtly smarter than you think. Let's agree. We're aiming for fun, something that will sell well, and we don't care how it does on board game. Correct. I don't care. Yes. Awkward first date.

A success. We had, in principle, agreed to make the planet money game with exploding kittens, and we had big goals. We wanted to make a mass appeal party game, and we wanted to get it onto actual shelves at... actual big box retailers. We wanted our game to have a brand new core game mechanic, and it must still be smart and complex and include, you know, some backdoor economics learning. So?

Time to schedule the next date. I think what the next step here is we do some homework and you do some homework. And our homework is go play around with some interesting core gameplay mechanics. Your homework is... Give us three themes that are interesting to you. As in economics themes, big ideas that we want in our party game. I'm curious to see what you come back with. The next phase will be really intriguing. And we were off.

Nice to meet you guys. Nice to meet all of you. Thank you so much. Off to try and make one of the 5000 board games coming out each year and see if we could get anyone interested at all. On the next planet money, we try to take our economic ideas and spin them into tabletop gaming gold. Hopefully. Think about this. There are elves. They live forever, but they have to plan for retirement. What are you going to do? What does that even mean? Think about it. Yeah, got some work to do.

This episode was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peasley. It was edited by Marianne Pune, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Special thanks to Asher McClanahan and Leonie's parents. Thanks so much. Shout out Leonie's parents. Hawk that game. I'm Erica Paris. And I'm Kenny Malone. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from BetterHelp.

To mark World Mental Health Day, BetterHelp is thanking the therapists who change people's lives all around the world by providing accessible mental health support. With over 12 years of experience matching clients with therapists and one of the world's largest online therapist networks, BetterHelp can help you find the right therapist. Visit betterhelp.com slash NPR for 10% off your first month.