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