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