Making a Board Game - Mondo's The Thing

do text stuff. I've got an interview that I'm gonna insert into this episode, and today I'm going to talk about the process of making a board game. Now, I know that's kind of a step away from what I normally do, but but stick with me. I promise you that, at least to me, it's really interesting and I hope it will be for you as well. Later on this episode, i'll have that interview. It's gonna be with a couple

of folks from Mondo. That's a company that has done a lot of pop culture merchandizing, posters, artwork, and all albums, whole bunch of different stuff. But they've also recently published a board game that's based off a true classic. In my mind, it is John Carpenter's remake of The Thing spoiler alert. I am a big fan of that film. Now. I know some of you are thinking board games are more than a little bit of a reach for tech stuff,

but I argue that it still counts. It may, in your mind, stretch the meaning of technology a little bit, as most board games require very little in the form of tech. If we're being really strict with the definition of technology, however, then I would say that board games totally count because what technology is is the practical application of knowledge in a particular area. Practical application of knowledge. Technology is the embodiment of the things we learned. So

when you look at technology, it is proof that science works. Right, that we understand that science and engineering these are are scientific disp lens that then can have this practical application and technology. If science didn't work, our technology wouldn't work.

And I guess this is where we insert lots of jokes about Blue Screen of Death, but you get what I'm saying, Like, if we didn't have science under a good understanding, then there's no way we would have all the stuff that we've got, the stuff what beeps, and I certainly wouldn't have a show. Now I argue that a board game represents that it is a practical application of our understanding of human psychology and also of game theory, and at least in some types of games, the relationship

between strategic decision making and random events. Now, first we have to acknowledge that not all board games are equal. Right. Some games rely way more heavily upon strategy than other types of games. Chess, for example, is a strategic game. There are no elements of random chance in chess. All moves are stemming from player decisions. All the pieces have very specific ways they hand and cannot move, and how

they can take other pieces. And while one player cannot predict the moves made by his or her opponent, none of the moves that are made in a game are truly random. They are the result of choices made by the players. Now, on the flip side of that is

a game like candy Land. Now there's no strategy, and candy Land all moves are dictated by a deck of cards which acts sort of like a random number generator, and drawing a card reveals a color which tells the respective player where to move his or her player piece. The outcome of the game is completely up to the whims of chance, which is why my niece can beat me every single time. It's not really true. My niece is three years old. She can also beat me in

trivial pursuit. I am not proud of this fact, but she is a very intelligent young lady. Candy Land is a game meant to entertain young kids and teach them about rules. It's kind of a gateway game, if you will. Now, many games combine elements of both strategy and random chance. If one wishes to get philosophical, you can say, well, that's a lot like life, right. Some people do really well in life despite facing adversity because they make incredibly

wise decisions. So while chance might be against them, they are capable of making very good decisions and coming out on top. Anyway, other people might do really well in life despite their foolish choices, just because they happen to be very lucky. Or you know, if you're a Jedi who, in your experience does not believe in luck, maybe you would just say coincidence just happens to favor that person by chance alone. For many games, you need a really

good balance of luck and skill to do well. Consistently, which can be both really exhilarating and also very frustrating. If you were an expert poker player, then you might get frustrated that occasionally you just get some bad beats, like you just get some bad hands, and the person that you're playing against get some really good hands, And it may be that you're a much better poker player than they are, and yet they're still winning. That's part

of the game. Now, there are some broad categories of board games out there, including some card games, and they have varying emphasis on luck versus skill, and I thought it might be helpful to kind of do a rundown on the different types of games that are out there and give some examples of each for the purposes of this entire conversation. Now, first we have the racing games or the classic board games genre, and these are the

games that rely heavily on chance. So, like Candy land I just mentioned, typically the goal in this game is to be the first player to reach a finish line of some kind. But nearly all the moves you make in these sort of games are dependent upon some sort of random event, So that might be rolling a die or a pair of dice, or maybe more depending on the game, or spinning a dial or drawing a card, or you know, that little popper that you might have

in some games. Other games that fall into this category include stuff like snakes and ladders or shoots and ladders if you prefer or sorry uh. Those games are largely social in nature. The value of the game mostly comes from the interactions you have with the people around you, and they tend to be kind of like family bonding experiences. But there's not a whole lot of satisfaction in the game itself, because again it's mostly due to random chance.

There's not really anything you can do to improve your chances of winning in those type type of games. On the flip side of that would be the abstract strategy games. Now, these are the games in which you are playing some form of strategic combat in an abstract way against your opponent. Checkers and chess both fall into that category. Your goal is to outthink and outmaneuver your opponent. Random elements are almost always absent or reduced to the most minor factor

in these types of games. These are also some of the games that have been solved by computers. Not all of them have, but Checkers, for example, has been solved. And when we say solved, we mean that the we have worked out algorithms that prove that you can either always win or always come to a draw based upon when you play if you assume that both players in

a game are playing perfectly. So, for example, and Connect four, if you are the first person to play a move, and you and your opponent both play absolutely perfectly, you're gonna win, right like, That's just the way it works. Tic tac toe. If you both play perfectly, you're gonna draw every time. This is, of course, again assuming perfect play. Not every game has a solution, or at least not

every game have we worked out the solution. Some games, like chess are very complicated, and we may find out that there is no solution, or that it's might may just take a really long time before we're ever able to come up with It gets pretty complicated with games where you've got pieces that can move and reverse their movements and not just move in one direction. Then we have the euros style games. Sometimes these are called German

board games. These games are slightly less abstract than the previous category, but not as detailed or grand as strategy games. Which I'll describe in a little bit. These games have really strong themes that find their way into game mechanics. So whereas you might say candy Land, the theme is very much it's it's very surface level. There's not really anything about the candy Land game that translates into game

mechanics for the most part. Same thing with Sorry. But there are other games in the in the eurostyle where the theme is very much tied in with the game mechanics and the way the game unfolds. There's typically some kind of resource management factored into those types of games, and typically players are in the game for the duration of play. You don't typically see German board games or eurostyle games that knock players out before the end of

the game comes about. Everyone's in it to win it all the way to the end, and often there are some sort of score ring elements that will allow someone to win even if they appeared to be lagging behind the others. You might have some secret elements to it where you have a goal and if you reach that goal you get bonus points, which means you could end up winning the game. When it looked like from just

a casual glance you were in the last place. There's a really strong emphasis on eurostyle games on strategy, so random elements are typically limited to where resources might be found or other minor elements in the game, but most game events are dependent upon the choices of the players in the game, and those games also frequently allow players to make temporary alliances as the game progresses. The games in this category include things like Settlers of Catan or Carcassone.

Those are two very popular German board game or eurostyle game out there, so if you're familiar with either of those, you know what I'm talking about. Strategy games take elements both from abstract strategy games like Chess and eurostyle games like Settlers of Catan, and then combine them into really deep, rich, and often really complicated games. Sometimes their war games are

military based. These tend to be gamers games, meaning they frequently have more complicated game mechanics that appeal to experienced gamers and require a lot more explanation or maybe multiple play throughs to really gain a good sense of how the rules work. The board game rules and narrative often drive the action, and they might include both competitive and cooperative play, often within the same play session, and there

can be metal level playing in this game. In other words, the game isn't just happening on the board, it's also happening within the interactions between players outside of the confines of the game itself. You might find yourself actively trying to deceive other players as to the relative strength of your position. So you might be bluffing, trying to make them think that you're in a better position than you

really are, or you could be doing the opposite. You could be downplaying or position in order to lull them into a false sense of security, and then you spring the trap and they go all Admiral Akbar on you. These games also can take a really long time, sometimes several hours for a play session, depending on how complicated game is. Risk Is a style of this Civilization board game, is the style of this a Boal Star Galactica, and

also the thing which we'll be talking about later. All of these kind of fall into this very large category, though obviously each of those games has very different elements from the others, So while they all kind of belong to the same category, that doesn't mean they're game mechanics are necessarily similar. They're not. They're also card based games.

There are several different categories of these. Strategy based card games still involve an element of luck, since you can't predict which cards are going to end up in your hand. You typically in these games will draw a certain number of cards from a deck. Players usually play from the same pool of cards, so it's not like you have your own deck and they have their's. You're both playing from the same one. These games also tend to have a theme, though the extent to which that theme plays

a part in gameplay will vary. Some examples in this include Munchkin or Seven Wonders. Then you've got deck building games, in which players build out a deck from a common pool of cards. Players may have to do something in order to earn cards while building their respective decks, such as purchasing individual cards within the game itself, using some sort of end game currency not real money, or by completing certain in game tasks. Games like Dominion and Corriers

fall into this category. Then you've got trading card games. These are the games in which players build their individual decks based on purchasing packs of cards. Typically, in these style of games, you would buy a starter deck that would have a good distribution of basic cards and then you would supplement that with booster packs. So you go out and buy booster packs to add more variety to

your cards and add more capabilities. Some of those booster packs could contain particularly rare or powerful cards, and then players would go up against each other using these cards, kind of dueling one another in an attempt to win a match, and typically that involves each player having an assigned number of points kind of like health points or hit points, and the other players trying to whittle that down to zero. So the first player to hit zero is out. So if you knock your opponent down to

zero and they're out, then you win. Games like Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone, which is a video game version of that style of card game, fall into that category. And there are more social games out there. These games are where your Apples to Apples or Cards against Humanity will fall a million dollars. But is another social game that's out there. And there are games that rely upon

expressions of creativity, such as pictionary or cranium. And then there are games that rely heavily upon knowledge, whether it's general or specific, like Trivial Pursuit or one of the many themed trivia games that are out there, and that's just a quick rundown the basic types of board game and card games out there, excluding the more traditional card games like poker or whist or bridge and things like that.

Each game requires designers to make very careful decisions to ensure that the gameplay is fun and challenging without being too frustrating or obtuse. And this is actually a pretty tricky path to follow. Sometimes you just don't know if a game mechanic is going to work until you actually put players into the situation and see how it unfolds.

If the players seem confused about the mechanic or they failed to use it properly, it could be an indication that you need to tweak that element so that it's more easily understood. Now, most games require a lot of workshopping or play testing to get right. In fact, the game of chess was created over the course of centuries. It seems apparent that the early form of the game arose along the Silk Road. And I'm talking about the real silk Road, not the black market on the deep web.

I'm talking about the pathways that merchants traveled more than a thousand years ago when they were trading between cities, so chess likely evolved from similar games that were played in China, India, and Persia among other players places. So players would bring up boards and pieces and incorporate rules from their different cultures and their different travels into a single game, and so the game of chess evolved over time this way. It wasn't until the Renaissance that the

modern rules of chess really began to emerge. My point here is that even games like chess went through a lot of play testing, so this is not new now. To get a better handle on what it's like designing a game, I spoke with Jay Shaw and Joe Van wetter Ing of Mando about making a game adaptation of the nineteen two John Carpenter film The Thing. We'll listen

to that interview right after the short break. To thank our sponsor, I'm really fortunate today to be joined by a couple of guys over at Mondo really worked on this game to make it what it was. And so, gentlemen, if you would please introduce yourselves to the throngs of listeners of tech stuff and uh and let us know what it was that you did in regards to developing this game. All right, Joe, you go first. Yeah. Sure. My name's Joe Van Lettering and I'm the game designer.

There you go, keep it sweet. Uh. My name is Jay Shaw. I'm a creative director at Mondo, and I helped Joe. I like it. I like it. You know, it's great because it's it's an accurate description of what you've done, and yet gives us very little information to go on at the very beginning, very much like being in the thing, right, we were going to dig down

and discover in this process. And actually my first question before we get into the mechanics of the game and the development of the game is it's just the question of why why John Carpenter's the thing? What was it? They? Where? When did that idea kind of come into being about developing a game based upon this classic film, which, by the way, I actually I love that movie, so I'm not being at all facetious here. Oh yeah, everybody loves it.

Um Yeah, it was interesting. I I started thinking about doing board games of Mondo a few years ago and just really kind of a as a fan of board games type of thing where I said, man, it would be really cool if we did a board game. That'd be nice. We have no idea how to make a board game, but it would be cool to do. And that conversation just kept coming up at the office. It kept coming up in phone calls and creative meetings and just saying, yeah, I wish we did a board game.

I wish we did a board game. And finally it went from which we did a board game too, we should do a board game. Let's find somebody who knows how to do it. Um. So, you know, the thing was honestly the first game that I thought of, because the movie is perfect for it. It's a it's a it's a confined area much like a board. You've got to you know, you've got a set group of people, You've got conditions that feel very much like a game

of sorts. You know, it already kind of felt like it was it didn't seem like it took a lot to get that story from movie to board. So yeah, I've reached out to Joe and started talking to him, and you know, I'm lucky that he design board games for a living. So that was really the genesis of it was just this should be something we should do. Let's do it. It's really cool because, as you say, the story of the movie does lend itself to certain

game mechanics. There are certain games that that exist that have some similarity to the mechanics in the thing. Uh, you know, nothing that is a one to one certainly, but there's there's certain ones that I kind of recognize, Like there are elements to the game were Wolf. For some people play it as afia the idea that you're

playing in a group. Some people in the group are working at counter purposes for what the rest of the group is trying to do, and meanwhile, the rest of the group has no idea who they can trust and who they cannot trust. Uh. The thing actually goes a little bit further because even if you are on the side of the thing, if you are one of the the the compromised characters, you don't necessarily know if anyone

else is also compromised. So it makes it makes it a little more tricky when you're trying to figure out who you're trying to sabotage. But generally speaking, this is one of those asymmetric games where you have two groups. Originally it'll be I assume in individual versus the rest of the group working at cross purposes, and as the

game unfolds, that dynamic continues to change. And obviously, in order for you to have any sort of competitiveness in this game, that means you have to make really careful decisions about what the capabilities are of one group versus the other. So, with all of that in mind, the idea that you've got this hidden character who's working to try and sabotage the rest of the group, I assumed that meant that there was a lot of experimentation during

the entire design process to get that balance right. I mean, you don't want you don't want the thing to be so easy to defeat that the game is over in ten minutes. But you don't want to make it so difficult that there's maybe only a two percent chance that everyone's going to get out, or even that a significant number of people are going to get out. So take

me through. Now, you've made the decision to turn the story of the Thing into a board game, and as you've laid out the elements of the story lend itself to that, where was the next step? What we're How did you start to lay out the process of building the game itself? Yes, so we first of all, I watched the movie about one hundred times and just tried to get a feel for every single aspect of the movie and what feels right, what what's the storyline going

to be within the game, how does that translate? And then I just started with a very very simple hidden hitt and identity game, you know, just kind of like a pass fail that's it, almost like a Mafia or Werewolf. And then kind of took that base and brought in parts from the movie, you know, brought in the outpost, probably the flamethrower, that kind of stuff, and just kind

of built it out. And I'm going to tell you right now, designing a hidden identity game is extremely tough because I already have all the information here, right So when I'm designing it, trying to go through a game plan just by myself in my head, it's tough because I already know all the information, that's what this game is about. So I got a lot of help from some co workers, some friends, lots of play testers just to you know, see how do you play this game?

You know, what do you do at this point? So it was a hard process, but I feel pretty good with the results. Yeah, there were a lot of There was a lot of testing, and I remember when as Joe was coming up with kind of these different iterations of the game, we would he he'd give us a chance to play it and say, here's here's sort of a white box version of this. Why don't you guys

try it out and see what happens. We actually went out to San Diego a couple of times to play with play with that team, and it was really it was interesting because we play it, we'd all kind of go, yeah, this is good, we like it. This is a lot of fun. But you could almost tell the Joe Joe go yeah, this isn't there yet, this isn't working. I don't I don't like the flow, I don't like the pace, I don't like the length of the game. I don't like how this plays with six people. I don't like

how this plays with eight people. So it was just over and over and over again, tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until you know it's it's funny because little element to get removed and it changes the entire game, Like how do you decide who the captain is? Well, if you do it this way, the game is really long. And it takes it's just, you know, too much downtime for people. Well what if you do this, Oh cool, this makes it a lot easier. This is a better flow.

So it was it was it was really kind of cool to watch from the outside of it for the development process to see how how tricky these things are and how how tough it is to get the perfect balance so that you've got that like really good game experience, Right, Yeah,

I imagine that. It's it's similar in ways to I used to play D n D quite a bit in my youth, and I would game master and you design really cool scenarios and you're thinking, oh, man, when they go down this hallway, it's gonna be so great because you know everything and you just assume you know how it's going to work. And then they're like, yeah, we're gonna take a right. But there's and such same sort of thing, like you you have to it's I understand

exactly what you were saying, Joe. It's it's very difficult to simulate ignorance so that you can understand what how the gameplay elements will actually unfold in real situation. So tell me a little bit about how the game actually works. So for those who are not familiar with the thing, it is set in an outpost. Uh. It is completely secluded from all civilization. There's no way of getting from the outpost to someplace safe without taking an extensive helicopter ride. Uh.

And so you're you're pretty much stuck there. But how does the game actually unfold? Yeah? Sure, So to start, everyone gets a player board and it's one of the characters from the movie. And then the next thing you get is a hidden identity card, so you keep that face down in front of you. Only you can look at it, and it either says if you're a human

or if you've been compromised in your invitation. And to start the game, there's only gonna ever be one imitation, So you get that, and then you have a hand of supply cards, which are items you would find at the outpost. It's you know, got the Petrie dish, you got copper wire, knife, gun, that kind of stuff. So you have that in your hand. You have your identity and then someone gets chosen as a captain. They draw

a mission card. They read it aloud. It tells you how many people need to go on the mission with them, and if there's any restrictions. So each player board has a different team and you have science, maintenance, and operations. And each mission card will say okay, I need six people. I need to operations and one science, so you have to take whoever those people are okay. So then the captain will read the mission. It'll say, you know, everyone turning cards and you need to copper wire to pass.

So he goes around and says, okay, do you have copper wire? Do you have copper wire? You kind of get a feel for who he wants to bring on the mission, and you choose a room on the map, and each room has a tile face down in it, and once you go in a room, you do the mission and if it everyone's gonna turn in cards, the captain is gonna secretly look at them. So the captain is the one with all the information here, so he'll know, oh, you told me you have copper wire, but you were

actually lying. So he but again he has all the information. He could say, oh, you said you had copper wire, but I didn't get any from you. But you know, again, the captain could be the one who's you know, the imitation and trying to throw suspicion on other people, so save the mission passes. The captain reveals all the cards.

Everything's great, all humans. You flip the tile over in the room and under the room tiles um you have certain things you're looking for, and each and the outpost is broken out into sectors, so you start with sector one. You need a rope and you need to defeat a

thing that's on the board. So at some point you're gonna flip over a room tile and the thing's gonna pop up, and you have to do this big battle where the captain takes everyone on the that's already on the team and collects more cards and rolls dice tried to see it m So once you defeat it, you go back and you kind of have a discussion like, hey, what what happened there? Like I thought I trusted you this and that um. All the while, the captain will move to the next person and you just keep going

on missions and the actual gameplay itself. You kind of can pick up after a couple of times, but the game is gonna be different every time depending on who you play it with, because certain people are gonna, you know, maybe play it pretty cool until the end, or some people are just gonna go hard because there's uh these red sabotage cards in there that it's in the Supply I deck that you could secretly turn in and purposely

sabotage a mission. So once you go through the entire outposts and you clear a certain nine tiles you find rope, imitation, dynamite, and the flamethrower, you get to go towards the escape phase. So the goal there is there's a helicopter on the board and you want to try to get to the helicopter and escape, so that there's a final captain. Everyone's gonna vote on this final captain, like, oh, do you do you trust this person to make the team that's

going to try to escape? And everyone votes and it's yes or no. And Finn captain. Once he's chosen, he's just gonna go through and he's gonna pick in uh, let's say six player game, he's gonna pick three other people to come with him. He chooses his people, they go, they placed their movers on the helicopter tile, and one by one everyone reveals their identities and if you have all humans, you win game over. Great if a single imitation makes it onto helicopter. They've made into the rest

of the world. Game over imitations when right, you've just infected the entire world by unleashing this horrendous beast outside of the secluded area. Yeah, and what's what's kind of fun. Um, what's interesting is that as you clear out these sectors, so in between each sector, uh, there's an infection phase that happens. So you know, there can be more imitations. So you know, somebody who started the game as a human playing perfectly fine, Um, they may at the end

of the game being imitation. So there's there is kind of an interesting dynamic there where you start off with this one limitation, you end up with three, you know, at the end of the game, and you really don't know who's who at what point. I mean, you maybe have built complete trust in the person next to you, but every time a sector gets cleared, that trust just has to vanish because you really have no idea what's

going on. And then the imitations. While the humans have to get out with the perfect number of humans on the helicopter, the invitations have a few ways to actually win the game. They can't they don't just get on the helicopter they can move this tracker up. For every failed mission, for everything that goes terribly wrong, this tracker moves up. And what as the tracker moves up, there are more and more consequences to the humans. And once that tracker moves all the way to the end, the

game's over. The invitations of one. They can destroy the base, they can catch rooms on fire, they can absolutely you know, make it so that there aren't enough resources to win. So it really is kind of a it's a multi kind of multifaceted thing where you know, as the invitations play, some might play it, like Joe said, totally clean and just pretend to be human and hope to get on

the helicopter by the end. But that's not always gonna work because they haven't they haven't messed the game up enough to really kind of make that make that work. So you know, some imitations may play very destructive, and you know, by the time you get through sector to

the base is most completely destroyed. So there's a there are there are a hundred different ways to kind of plot and out of the you know, million times I've played the game of you know which, most of that time of limitation, I found all these different ways to play it, and some are really effective against some players, some are not effective at all. It's it's it's really interesting. There's a lot of there's a lot of dynamic there.

Unlike other games where you know it's just a quick like pass fail and you're just trying to fail fail things, this one's got that. There's a lot of nuance and how this one's played. I imagine there's also a great challenge on the part of players. Let's say that you start off as human and you end up being imitation after clearing out a sector. Uh, then the the the onus is on you as the player to try and make sure you're not playing so differently than you were

before that. Immediately everyone is keyed into what has happened the strategy there. Yeah, if you react to anything, or you kind of all of a sudden you're just yeah, you're acting a little squirrelly, people are gonna instantly I think there's something wrong with you. I mean, there's even a there's even a deeper kind of level of play for imitations where I played one game where I got ahold of the Flamethrower and I was an imitation and I actually knew who another imitation was, So I killed

the other imitation. We all voted on it. They said I could do it. I torched another imitation. At the table, They're gone forever. They revealed their cards. Sure enough, they're in imitation. I had the trust of the entire table. There was no way they believed that I was an imitation. Sure enough, I was got out on the help helicopter. I was voted the captain, got out of helicopter as the captain. Uh. And that was great. It was like the most It was super cathartic because you know, I

murdered another imitation. But that's what That's what a imitation would do. It's all part of one organism. So why not why not cut off an arm to be able to get out and infect the world. Well, so, how long did this development process take from the point where you know, Joe, you came on board to win. It was a game that had gone through playtesting and you guys were feeling good about ready to go into production.

Yeah one did we start on that? Yeah? Exactly. Um, I'd say it was probably a year and a half total. And for design a game that's pretty quick, especially one that has so many little complicated factors. I mean, every individual game mechanic when you just look at it, you know, sequestered from everything else, is fairly simple. But then you start adding them all together, and it adds this level of complexity where you are going to get very different

play experiences every time you go through it. So, uh, I imagine that, you know, again playing through and making sure, oh, did the new thing that we just added to the game, not literally thing necessarily, but the new element we just added to the game, did that just break the game?

I imagine there was a lot of that. For example, you like in I know that in the game, as in the movie, you have that that ability to test someone like you can choose another player to test if you have the right equipment to test their blood, and then they have to reveal to you whether or not they are human or imitation. But at that point of course, then it's up to you, the person who just did the testing, to convince everybody else that what you saw was real or maybe not real if you are in

fact in imitation and trying to trick everybody. Uh. I imagine that was one of those things where you you saw that scene in the film it's iconic that moment where they're all together and they're being forced to test their blood to prove whether or not they are human. I imagine that was one of those things that you knew you had to have in the game, but at the same time, you can't. You can't have it be something that can happen all the time or else the

imitations are revealed immediately. So how did those considerations come about? Was that just sort of trial and error or was there some other approach? Oh? Yeah, lots lots and lots of play testing, ton of help from a lot of people. Um so that I think that started off where there was a flamethrower in the actual supply deck cards, and there might have been like one or two in there.

So it's originally, if you've got the flamethrower, a copper wire, and a Petri dish, you can choose to test someone. But that was so random. It would not happen in a single game, and then the next game would happen three times, and it I just like to be able to control when something like that happens, right, Um So that's why when we finally figured it out. Okay, the flamethrower will just be its own thing. It'll be a tile. And at one point all the titles were random, you know,

you could just go anywhere on the board. So again, like it made the games vastly different and that you couldn't really control the gameplay experience. How you know, you wanted it to feel similar to the movie. So when we finally figured out, okay, you have sector one, sector two, sector three, and there will be different items and the tiles. So that's why we put the flamethrower in sector three. So once you get to sector three, that's pretty much the end of the game and you have to find

a flamethrower. So we're gonna make it so people will you know, want to use this before the game ends, and it's the end of the game. So if someone kind of gets revealed, that's okay because you're not kind of just sitting around for the rest of the game, you know, being accused or whatever. So, um, it was

all about controlling when certain things happened. Yeah, and that was like, oh and that was actually I was gonna say that was that was one of the most eye opening parts of watching the development of this game, because you know, on the on the Mondo side on this, um, you know, I mean ro Amando now. But you know, at the when we were doing the development, I mean we were really responsible for the art in the design, and Joe was you know, completely took over just doing

the game design. So our contribution would be things like, hey, what if we did this, would this be cool? This is from the movie. I watched the movie again last night, Can we please do this? And you know you could see poor Joe's head explode because it would be something that was so mechanically difficult to put into a board game. But there was this this moment where Joe got it all into this, into the sectors and with the tiles that are in the sectors and the supplies that you're afforded.

What that ended up doing is it actually became this really really really tight narrative in a game where you can go anywhere you want to do what you want to do, choose who you want to choose to trust, who you want to trust. It's it's so controlled in the pacing. I mean, in the beginning of the game, it's kind of it's easy and everybody's getting along and

doing just fine. By the middle of the game, all of a sudden, you've got a rope, and you know, you can tie somebody up to the couch for that turn so that they don't, you know, come with you and mess something up. So all of a sudden, there's like that that the bigness trust starts to happen, and then by the end it's complete chaos and everybody's yelling at each other and somebody got a flamethrough and oh my god, what if the thing got a flamethrower? What

are we gonna do? So there's this really kind of neat uh, like you said, this control of the moments that were really important, to beats that were super important to the to the narrative there that I was. I was really blown away once it once it all started to come together, and every time we played it it was different, but just as thrilling every time. Well and and again that goes back to being evocative of the film itself, which is all about paranoia. I mean, that's

ultimately what the thing is. It's the bit about this this alien creature that is infecting people. That's you know, that's the the the instigating factor. But the drama, of course comes from all these different characters not knowing who they can trust, and that playing out throughout the rest of the movie to the point where even at the very end there's some questions that remain. So it's, um, it's fantastic to see that being incorporated into gameplay so

that you you can have that experience. If there weren't uh, these elements that would cause players to start screaming at each other, that you wouldn't really have the thing. Maybe a different John Carpenter movie, maybe I don't know, Big Trouble and Little China or something. But so you mentioned the Mondo working on the art. I mean, obviously Mondo is known for art design and for incredible posters and other types of of tie ins with various types of

pop culture. What were some of the was the John Carverter film? Was that the like the one and only influence or were there other influences when it came to the art design for this game. Well, it's interesting because we we hired Justin Ericsson to to do the art and you know, Justin is one of those artists who he'll do he does the best stuff with large product jicks like he he really loves to dive in and

get into the details, get into the tiny stuff. He did this really phenomenal Batman, the animated series box set for us, the vinyl box set that we put out, um and it's just head to toe gorgeous. Every piece of that is is its own piece of art. So when we were doing our first game, I mean, it was almost a default kind of artist selection. Who said, Justin Rickson, that's the person that we trust right now. We can have him do this for our first game. We need him to do it. He'll take this thing

and go nuts with it. And so he and I really dove in and we we looked at the not only the aesthetic of the movie, but a lot of it is the aesthetic of you know, what would Outpost thirty one? What would things from Outpost thirty one look like? Things you don't really see necessarily, like, you know, I uh, like an operations manual, So what would it? What would an arctic you know, kind of research station in two? What would their ops manual look like? That's what our

manual should look like. That's what a rule book should look like for the game. And you know what would what would an employee file look like? There is there anything we can add to that that would be kind of cool. How can we do personnel files and how do we So we were really trying to extract from a bit of the utilitarian design that would exist in a US Antarctic research station. You know, there's it's it's

fortunate and unfortunate. But unfortunately the film, you know, it takes place in snow, there isn't there isn't really this kind of lush like, you know, there's not a lot of color other than blue and white. Um, you know, the location itself is very unsexy. It's not it's not some cool sci fi thing with a bunch of chrome and all this neat stuff. It's just this really kind of bland base. So that was one of the biggest challenges was you know, kind of making this still look

really really cool. So diving into a lot of the you know, let's have fun with taking real artifacts out of this base and seeing how we would design those. That's that's where it started to really come together, and it you know, it feels like something from the film, but also just feels like something very real cool. Well, were there any elements that you were hoping to include

in the game that just didn't make it in. Maybe there was something that just it just could not work within the components that you had designed, or uh, something that that you just could not really figure out how to make that a gameplay mechanic. Joe, did you have anything? Um, I'm trying to think. I mean, we had a ton

that was the thing. We really we threw everything at it in the very beginning, and you know, you've got to you have to scale back, and you've got to you definitely need to kind of pull things away more than add things. Um, but I don't know if there was anything huge that we completely missed that we didn't get to do. There is one element and that element will be uh will be revealed as a as an

expansion to this game. So yeah, there is that. We did have one big one um that we all just sort of went, God, it would be so cool if this happened, and then it was turned into no, wait, let's just make that happen. That's cool, it's we'll do an ad on. That's fine, we can actually do this. But yes, aside from you know, I think everything was in there. I mean, I honestly I can't think of anything that we left out or just regrettably weren't able

to put in. I mean, we've been got the you know, McCready's chess computer is a you know, is a three D piece that you move along the tracker. I mean it's little stuff like that where you go. Wouldn't it be good if we could do this? And then somebody says, well, why don't we nice? Good, Yeah, let's actually do it. I love that all the pieces are are you know, those are the actual characters. It's not like a little

generic marker. You've got the actual characters that you get to play with, uh, which I mean I would have expected that from Mondo, so totally makes sense. But uh. Yeah, the designs that I've looked at, and full disclosure, I haven't seen this in person. I've only I've watched a lot of videos and looked at a lot of art.

Uh and uh, I love the design. Also, I feel very very strongly as a John Carpenter fan, that if you are to play this game, especially for the first time, you need to have just that that synth soundtrack playing in the background. Absolutely, yeah, you really do. Um And to give it to give a shout out to uh one of our partners out there, Waxwork Records actually put out The Thing on vinyl and it's a stellar release.

So when you go out and buy your Thing board game, please make it a point to get the John Carpenter's The Thing on vinyl to listen to it alongside. Absolutely. Yeah, Justin Ericson actually did Dark as well. Yeah, this was a great kind of crossover. We had no idea, you know, because we don't it's not like we share what we're

working on behind the scenes with everybody. But yeah, when, um, when Waxwork announced that they had that they were doing the Thing and they showed the fantastic artwork and it's really cool package design. I called Ericson and I was like, how in the world were you working on the same property at the same time for two different companies And you said nothing, And that guy is just's he's a he's a total h he's a total pro. And he said, no,

it was cool. It was really good. I got to just do two completely different ideas for the same movie. But yeah, Ericson was in Thingville for a long time there. That's fantastic. Guys, Jay and Joe, thank you so much for joining me on the show and talking about this this project. I look forward to playing it. I've got a lot of friends who are big into board games.

They're also colossal geeks like myself. I say that with love that we we love games, we love pop culture, and uh, there's more than a few like die hard John Carpenter fans. Also, more than a few of them here at How Stuff Works. Two of them are in this very room that I'm sitting in. So uh so this is this is definitely the game that's made for folks like myself. If people want to pick up a copy of the thing, where would they go? So it's

arriving right now actually on local game store shelves. Um, so we've got it's everything has come in and it's just making its way out to shelves now. Um we will have our Mondo Edition of this game. And that's uh, that's the special edition of it. It's limited to one two copies. Um, it's got different box are a slip case, some additional pieces and some some goodies inside that will be available for the first time at Mondo Con next weekend, and then whatever we have left over from that we'll

put online shortly after. But right now, you can you know, call your local game store and go pick it up. Sweet. Well, guys, thank you so much for joining the show. Yeah, thank you very much, and then we'll take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Thanks again to Jay and Joe for joining our show to talk about their work on the game. Now, as you heard, figuring out exactly how to create a game be challenging. One thing that really

helps is having a specific theme in mind. In this case, Mondo wanted to capture that feeling of paranoia and isolation that defines the thing. Now, that can help a great deal when you're working on the game mechanics. Anything that contributes to that feeling and allows players to progress or perhaps encounter setbacks is a potential keeper. Anything that detracts from that experience needs to be tweaked or tossed. So let's say you decide you want you want to make

a game. You've you've got the itch. You're like thinking, I've got a great idea for a game. How would you go about doing this? Well, one thing I recommend is looking up an article written by David Silverman, and that article is titled how to learn Board Game Design and Development. If you google David Silverman and how to learn board game design and development. It will pop right up.

That article has got some great tips in it. I'm going to share a few here, but it really do suggest you check out the full article to learn more, because I'm just going to kind of highlight some stuff that Mr Silverman points out in his article how One tip is to do something similar to what the guys at Mondo did, which is to pick a theme for your game and use that theme to help determine which

game mechanics should be included. In the case of the Thing, the designers knew they need to have an element of distrust and suspicion built right into the game mechanics, and having one player secretly working at cross purposes against all the others does the trick nicely. Silverman also suggests that you look at some games that you really enjoy playing and then at that point either add in new mechanics or try removing certain existing mechanics from that game and

see how that affects the gameplay of the game. This helps you understand which gameplay mechanic elements are critical to making it work and how they fit together. So it's kind of playing through experience and learning how these game mechanics actually affect gameplay. Again, taking the Thing as an example, we can look at an identity game like Werewolf and see how that applies. So let's say we take the game Werewolf and we say, how could we adapt this

to make it the Thing. Well, for those of you who do not know what Werewolf is, the game is pretty simple. It's played with a group of people. You typically have a moderator who is kind of judging what's happening and watching what's happening at the entire time, and then everyone else is a player. Uh. You usually want to have around seven players or more. Odd number is

better than an even number. Typically, within that group of players, one or more of the people are designated as werewolves and the other players are villagers, and they don't know who is a werewolf versus who is a villager. The game has two major segments to each turn. There's a nighttime segment and a daytime segment. Let's take daytime first. During the daytime, the players, all the players, the villagers, and the werewolves included, and remember the villagers don't know

who is a werewolf. They all try to suss out who amongst them is a werewolf. The people who are werewolves are obviously trying to push suspect away from them and toward innocent players. At the end of the day turn, they can vote to put someone to death, upon which that person who has put to death would reveal his or her identity and reveal whether or not they were a werewolf. Or you could also just try and gather information and wait to see what happens at the night turn.

So at night, including the very first turn of the game, the werewolves are allowed to make their move. So at the first turn, everyone is supposed to close their eyes and the moderator says, werewolves, open your eyes, and the werewolves can all look at it around and see who else as their eyes open, and thus identify one another

on that first turn. Then they decide which innocent villager they want to eliminate that evening, and assuming that villager is not saved by someone else's actions during the night turn, that person is dead come morning, and then the villagers have to try and figure out who is the werewolf.

There are some special villager types that can actually save someone, but they have to do it without really knowing who they're who they should, you know, protect so there's a character type called the doctor, and the doctor can heal one person per night, and after the werewolf after their turn is over and they close their eyes, the moderator would say, all right, doctor, open your eyes, and whoever is playing the doctor would open his or her eyes

pick someone in the group to save, and if they're lucky, they're saving the person that the werewolves have attacked. And then the doctor closes his or her eyes. And then there's one last character called the Seer, and the Seer is able to point at any other character and look at the moderator, and the moderator essentially gives a thumbs up saying yes, that person is a werewolf, or a thumbs down saying no, that person is not a werewolf.

Play continues, So the werewolves their goal. They want to try and eliminate the Seer and the doctor as early as possible so that the villagers don't have any protection. The villagers obviously want to identify the werewolves, and it's during the daytime when everyone gets to accuse everybody else in try the werewolves trying to capitalize on that paranoia

and suspicion. Very similar gameplay element that would play out in the Thing, although obviously in the board game of the Thing they tweaked this gameplay element quite a bit and they add a lot more to it. But it's kind of taking that approach that Silverman said. You take this game element that you find really compelling, and then you say, all right, well, how can I use this same sort of idea but in a new transformative way, so I'm not just treading the same ground someone else

has already done. And of course even in where Wolf there are more advanced rules, there's some other special types of villagers have been added into variations of Werewolf, and just like that, you could see the same sort of complexity creeping into the Thing, although again the Thing adds even more elements with rooms and missions and things like

that that are not in Werewolf at all. Um with the way things unfolding the Thing game, it's probably a good idea to avoid having all of the impostors know for certain which other players are bad guys. So in were Wolf, all the werewolves know who is a werewolf and who isn't. And the Thing, the the impostors, the the actual aliens that are posing as human, they don't know who any you know, they don't know if there are any other impostors there. They don't know the identity

of them. They're working without that knowledge. But that's probably a good idea because they already have a lot of advantages over the human players. There are so many different steps the humans have to take in order to score a win, so adding even more challenge with a united enemy might make the game all but impossible for the humans. So Silverman suggests a game designers should also write down all their ideas for the game, including notes that this

described the intent for those ideas. So, for example, if you were to say that you know, you can't allow people to just leave the confines of the board, the intent of that rule might be that you want to keep that sense of confinement in the game, And it may turn out later on in development that you want to change the game design, but you still want to

stay true to the intent. You don't want people to feel confined, But you perhaps have found a different way to be true to that intent that works better for the game as a game mechanic, and that's a good thing. So that's something you actually want to strive for. Some of the other things you'll need to think about will be pretty basics, such as how many people should be

involved in a play session. It's often best to aim for a range of players, because if you create a game that has to be played with a specific number, that limits your audience, and it can also lead to very frustrating experiences, like if you're at a party and you realize, oh, this game is for four players and we have five people, someone has to sit out. Figuring out how players act, how they are meant to interact with one another, and how long the game should be

are also basic questions that are worth asking, you know. Um, keep in mind that players can and will choose to do things that you didn't anticipate. So it's your job as game designer to create the framework within which players can enjoy the game. That might include creating some strict rules, perhaps even some rules that some players might think are

arbitrarily restrictive. But if you leave a game's rules super open and flexible, that puts so much more pressure on everyone who's playing the game to keep things working properly, and it can lead to a lot of ambiguous game events, which is not terribly satisfying. You might feel the temptation to make your game incredibly complicated and rich with detail.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. You may want it so that the feeling is more closely aligned to what you had in mind when you came up with the concept. Let's say it's a weird fiction game that's set in a Cathulu like universe. There might be a lot of complex rules to dictate how characters interact with that world. But complexity also adds in a tougher learning curve for players, and it can end up being too restrictive and frustrating

if it's not dealt with properly. Silverman actually suggests simplifying your game as you develop it, streamlining elements so that you end up with the most important and fun game mechanics and you toss aside anything that's laborious or detracts from the feel of the game. Silverman also suggests that you go easy on the prototypes, so when you're making your first prototype game, don't go all out. Make sure you create items that will represent the actual game mechanics.

You do want to have those things there, but don't spend too much time on designs when there's the very real possibility that you'll need to do revisions and perhaps even extensive revisions when you're ready to make the next iteration.

If you spend hours and hours meticulously designing game tiles like you're illustrating them and they look beautiful, and you've done all the sketches and the color and all of that, and then you find out the tile system you created isn't much fun, well, that was a lot of time you could have spent on other elements of the game, and it's time you're not going to get back. Playtesting is also obviously a very big part of this process.

Sometimes you just can't tell how well a mechanic will hold up until you see it put in use by real players, and it really is easy for one additional element to mess up something that had been part of the game's design from the very beginning. Q A testers are familiar with the idea that with every new feature you have the potential to break a lot of the

old ones. This is also true with board games, just as it is with websites and other things, So something that seemed like a great idea after a playtest session might turn out to be a game breaking device when you put it into practice. Playtesting also helps you identify the features that are working and the ones that are not. Silverman also recommends recording playtest sessions so that you can reference specific times when something important happens during a game.

It might be something that's good and you'll want to figure out how to make that more important and prominent in the game. You might think, well, this was a really special moment. I want to make sure that this special moment happens more frequently, not so frequently as to lose its special ness, but to happen enough so that it's not you know, a once in a million kind of chance. Or maybe that a playtesting session leads to questions that don't have answers yet and you realize, oh,

I need to address this. Recording the sessions really makes it a lot easier to focus on the important aspects. Silverman also walks you through how to get a game published, whether it's self publication or otherwise. Now, I feel that goes beyond the scope of what I'm trying to do here, so again I recommend you go find David Silverman's article again. It's titled how to learn Board Game Design and Development. It's quite well written and has a lot more information

on the subject there. I do not know David Silverman, I have no connection with him at all, but I really did like the article quite a bit. Games, I feel are experiencing a real surge in popularity these days. It's been happening over the last several years. Particularly games that bring people together in the same place at the

same time, so board games and card games. And even if you have no intention of ever making a game yourself, I think it's pretty fascinating to look at all the things that go into making a game come together and to make it work. And I hope you enjoyed this episode, whether you're an avid gamer, a casual game player, maybe you're a game developer, or maybe you really never gave the subject much thought before. I want to thank Joe and j from Mondo again for taking the time to

chat with me. Mondo may some really cool stuff, including some killer posters that I love to collect, so you should go and check them out. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a technology, a person. Maybe there's someone you want me to have on as either a guest to interview or a guest co host, let me know send me a message. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on

Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is text stuff hs W. Remember I record episodes live on Wednesdays and Friday's on twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. Just go to that link and you can find the schedule there. I hope to see you in the chat room. I always like to chat with you people whenever I have ad brakes and and before and after shows. So hope to see you there and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of

other topics because it hou stoff works dot com. Wond