Hey guys, welcome back to Meeple to Meeple.
I want to apologize to all of you.
I know many of you have been following along.
I had bronchitis, still kind of do, but my voice is back.
You will also notice that I am not in the Meeple to Meeple
studios. I am hanging out in Northern
Illinois and we're in the Tabletop Vibes studio.
So thank you to Adam for lending us his space.
And today it's lightning in a box.
Can Fury of the Elements catch fire?
That is today's title. And with me is Mark Szymanski.
Did I say that right? Szymanski did Mark Szymanski,
who is the designer of Fury of the Elements.
Mark, thanks for joining. Appreciate it for having me.
Absolutely no, this is great. I'm back in the saddle.
So this this feels good to be back sharing with my viewers.
Mark, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, how
you got into the board game hobby in the.
Vivid imagination and you want to really strike the hearts of
everybody, right, right. So I'm kind of a perfectionist.
So I, I pulled back a little bit and said, what can I do that I
can do mostly on my own and I know I can pull a few people in
to help when I need it, right? I was running in a games our
local game store at at the time and reel into TCGS and some
other card games and that's when lightning hit.
And lightning hit. I love that.
That's great. What was the what was the first
board game that you played that you were like, I'm hooked, I'm
going to be playing this. I'm going to be in this forever.
Man, we've played a lot of games.
A lot of older games I don't get to play as much now.
Sure, play quite a few, but my brother-in-law actually really
got me into playing tabletop games.
So I'd say one of my favorites that really is like, yeah, I
really want to do this is Firefly.
Man, that's a good one.
Yes, and I was a big Firefly fan, my whole fan, so that was
great. Yeah, I really liked it.
And yeah, you can't beat Cap now.
No, you're absolutely right. So question is about lightning
in the box. We have lightning in the box
right here, guys. This is Fury of the Elements.
I'm sorry that the microphone is splitting the box, but you could
see that here. I know most of you are sitting
in your cars, not even watching the video, but why don't you
tell us about Fury of the Elements?
What kind of game is it? What?
What's its key mechanics? So it's a two player strategy
card game. Now they're being more called
expandable card games, trying to kind of bring back that whole
LCG, you know, the living card game environment where they were
real hot for a while and they've kind of petered off a bit.
I think this is kind of there's, you're seeing a lot of games
that are in the same realm, but they're doing things a little
bit different. I don't want to say this is in
the same realm as an LCG, but it does have kind of that this
game's going to keep going for a while, you know, and it's it's a
two player strategy card game. You're playing on a grid.
You have positional based movement when you're playing the
cards down to attack another card.
It's very similar to it's inspired by triple try it, which
is a mini game off of Final Fantasy search.
OK, all right, so for those of you watching that no Final
Fantasy, you'll you'll know that game well.
I do not know Final Fantasy, so I hope you guys do and you enjoy
that. If you want another comparison,
just so you kind of know what it is.
While this game is not a trading card game, not a.
Good to know. It is still similar in the realm
of games like Paragon TCG and never FTCG kind of in the look
of hey, we both we all use positional based combat.
OK, OK, so we're going to play a card down.
It's got arrows or numbers like their games and that dictates
the direction that it attacks. OK when it goes down.
So are you attacking your opponent?
Are you attacking the cards or the Titans?
I believe they're called in the game.
So yeah, there's a bunch of different card types, and the
cards that are actually being played down are from two
different decks. The decks mirror each other, so
the game is completely 100% balanced right out-of-the-box.
OK. Balance is good.
Unlike a trading card game and some people would argue that
balance is boring. I beg to differ.
And this game has been said to have the perfect balance cycle.
So nice. That was a really big compliment
that I got on it. So, yeah.
But so you're not really attacking your opponent, OK?
What you're trying to do is there's two different modes of
the game, OK? You have Fury, which is a three
by three grid, similar to Triple Triad.
And then we extend it. And that's kind of like the
simple mode gets you the idea of how combat works, right?
Then we extend it to a 5 by 5 and we throw in some other
decks. So while the games, while the
decks mirror each other and they they have the same cards in
there, the same elements, all the same positions, the game is
different because you're actually unlike a lot of these
other games where you're playing grid based.
But when I'm playing across from my opponent, they're playing
their card the same direction I'm playing in those games.
And I, I, I don't understand that or why.
So I was real adamant about you're on your side of the
table. You're gonna play your cards
face up to you when you play my face up to me.
So it kind of turns it into like they're completely different
because they're positioned differently, right.
Yeah. So, so yeah, it's, it's a
position combat game. It is.
There's a lot of strategy involved and we can get more
into that as as we go. So you mentioned some other
games that it was like we've talked before the recording
about kind of the the evolution of the idea of Fury of the
Elements. So what was going on?
What was your inspiration that you like?
What did you see in the TCG and the LCG world that you didn't
like or you did like? And you were like, I think I can
make this better, or I can think I can, I can do this as well.
What was going on at that time when you came up with the idea
for this game? So at that time, I was running
our local game store as the manager there, Magic, you know,
PCG big game, right? Every store, right?
Pokémon, Yu-gi-oh, those were like the big three, right?
I was playing a different trading card game that was
actually really growing and blowing up in our store and
actually almost worldwide for a good solid four years called A
Force of Will TCG. So that game has some
inspiration. And this game came from Japan,
right? It was a Japan DCG, yeah.
And horse of Will, I love that. It was a really solid game at
the time, so it was some of the inspiration for this.
Obviously I'm really big into video games, so playing all the
Final Fantasies growing up, right?
The best thing, Some people are gonna hate me for this, but as
much as I still like the game, the best thing about Final
Fantasy 8 was Triple Triad. It was the mini game that was
actually in the in the game that hooked me that I spent so many
hours running around trying to beat everybody, get their cards
and build decks and you know, and keep going.
So it was that feeling of how quick that game was to play and
seeing how sometimes in TCG's when you're playing, you can't
even get through one round. I played right, tons of
tournaments and you sit down, you build this deck and like,
OK, by turn 7 I can, I can beat them with this, this right.
And it doesn't always work out that way.
Sometimes you don't even get through the first game in the
round, you know, and it affects your your whole tournament
standing. So I was like, what if, you
know, we could make a game that could play in five to 10 minutes
with the smaller version of the three by three.
And if people just wanted to play that, or it was a simple
version, they could play it over a cup of coffee, a beer,
whatever, because that's all they had time for.
Because face it, that is all people have time for.
Sometimes it's true. You know.
It's very true. So I would say Triple Triad and
a handful of TCGS, especially Force of Will, were inspirations
trying to fix some things that were wrong.
Well, I can't can't really say wrong.
I'd say for trading card games, there are persistent problems
where you're getting mana flooded, mana ramped.
I'm using Magic as an example for this one.
Force of Will was a little bit different and it didn't quite
work the same, but the idea of having to get resources, having
to get the cards you need and then trying to pull off playing
them just to have everything cancelled and you might as well
get up from the table and walk away.
Well, you and I talked about this, right?
We talked about the fact that you, you build a theme deck
because you're attached to the theme.
You have a love for the theme, right?
And I am going to use Magic the Gathering just for a moment.
My, you know, it's my wife built a cat deck.
She loves cats, right? That is a sole reason why she
built the deck. It wasn't what the cards could
do. Then we go and play at the local
game store with if they were friends of ours, but they were
more seasoned and she got wiped out pretty quickly.
And I know that's frustrating. That was frustrating for me to
watch. It's also frustrating as a card
game player when I design A game.
And so it sounds like you noticed that that was
problematic. Yeah, I have a kind of a unique
experience here with my resume. So I literally have been on both
sides of the counter. I've also worked for
distributor, OK, so I talked to store owners and managers on a
regular basis. So now that I'm full into design
mode, I've talked to a lot of designers too.
So it's taking a lot of information that I've gained
over the years and combine it with information from every
different spectrum of the community that we're trying to
serve and just trying. I'm not trying to reinvent the
wheel. I'm not trying to make the best
game in the world. I'm trying to make a game that
people will enjoy no matter what they play.
If you're a championship Magic player you'll probably still
going to enjoy this because it can be just as competitive, but
it's more skill based. OK.
So, OK, yeah, the skill is there while there's luck because it's
a card game. You got to draw cards.
Sure you have that look I have extensively gone through to try
and make everything balanced in those decks.
So your two power card decks in there are one for each player.
There's 60 cards and there's four elements in those decks.
It took a while to get this math right combinations, but when we
finally landed on the magic number per element, everything
clicked and it's 15 cards per element because that gives me
with numbers 123 and four for the power levels of these cards.
It gives me every combination that the arrows could be in
period, every combination one through 4.
So on the fours you have or sorry, on the fours, there's
only four number four cards in the deck, one of each element
because you can only have those fours and one those arrows in
one position, right? And then for the threes, there's
different combinations of where those where the three arrows
would be with one open spot. Say that with the twos twos have
there's six of those and then there's 4 ones.
It's the same thing, right? Twos are kind of unique because
you can do the up and down, left and right as well as right, you
know, so, so it took a while to figure out like, OK, the game
evolved from what we were originally doing and, and things
just kind of fell into place once we got that Magic.
No, right. We're like, oh, let's keep these
single colors. Let's put all four colors in the
deck and we have 60 cars. Wow.
People who play Magic are going to feel right at home with that.
Yeah, right. That's that's in the wheel.
So let me ask you a question because so for for my viewers, I
have not played this game. Only tangent tangentially was
looking through the contents before recording.
I noticed that there's dice. Can you tell me what role the
dice play in the game? Yeah, sure.
Right now they play a very small role.
OK, you'll notice that if you saw them, there are six colors.
Yeah. So we have 6 elements in the
game. OK, so we've got fire, water,
earth, air, and then we've got what's called void and balance.
Oh, OK, So you have your four normal elements, and then you've
got these two. Like, what the heck are these?
Well, they're kind of the storytellers of the game.
Everything revolves around these two elements and the other ones
are kind of along for the ride. OK.
So yeah, so basically with with those, with those elements,
there's so many different combinations you can do.
And we consider make cards and keep going, right, combining
them. And we probably won't get to
that at some point, but yeah. So do you foresee because you
talked about it is you see it as an LCG living card game?
Do you see it as like big box expansions or like just booster
blister pack types of expansions?
How do you how do? How are you envisioning that
going forward? Well, the the.
If I'm allowed to ask that question, OK.
It's actually it's one of our key, key selling points for the
game really. We've developed what's called a
modular deck system. Modular deck system?
Yeah. How?
How does that work? So how this works is you've got
the two power decks that have the elements in it.
Those are the cards that the players are generally playing on
on the field to battle. OK, we've thrown in some spells,
we've thrown in some void cards, we've thrown in some Titans
we'll get into those later, but those are all different decks as
well. OK, they all have server purpose
and how you get those out on the field and what you do is all
it's all trigger based. It's it's different every time
you play, right? So to get these decks using the
modular deck system, if this box in here is the Kickstarter
exclusive box, this has the same stuff inside that the retail
version we'll have If we wanted to take one of those void decks,
which consists of 25 cards and say we make an expansion down
the line and we want to do something small or like, hey,
this is a really cool idea just for the void cards, which we
actually did backwards. It's kind of interesting.
Thank you Gencon. So basically all you have to do
is just when you set up the game, you take that void deck
out and you put the other one in and your play experience is
completely different. And it's like that for the spell
decks. It's like that for the Titans as
well. So talk about the reverse
engineering of that, right. So I don't let that fall tell us
about that. Reverse is actually a term of
ours. OK, reverse.
Yeah, so the game goes beyond just using the elements in a
normal hierarchy, right? OK, what happened at Gen. con?
So just stay on the topic of the void cards.
The game was a little more complex for the full version of
the 5 by 5 the Titan's fury mode.
OK, OK, so when we're explaining it, people, everybody caught on
everything quick. But the void mechanic was a
little extensive. It was a little too much.
Just a little too much to swallow when you're trying to
learn again without reading the rulebook.
Okay. And ask explain to you really
quickly because we're trying to Gen.
Con and people are coming up and you're trying to get them seated
and get the plane right. Okay, so they can test it out.
So we had arrows like we have on the power cards positions,
right? Well, we have a grid on our our
playmat, it's 5 by 5. And there's designations on the
void cards of where those go. How they come out doesn't really
matter right now, but they have a spot.
OK. So originally the original
design had arrows on those as well and they were different for
each spot that they were on, they pointed different
directions. So when a void card came out, it
interacted with not just a card in its space, but wherever it
was pointing as well. It's a really cool mechanic and
it gets a little more extensive from that.
So we felt like, you know what, it's really good and people
really like it, right? But it's a little too much to
bite on right now. So we want to keep this game
streamlined. You can't make a game for
everybody, but we are trying to make it where as many people can
play it as possible, where they don't feel overwhelmed.
Sure, that's different age ranges.
We had so many different age ranges playing this.
It was great. But So what we did was we rolled
back the void mechanic panic a little bit and we simply took
the arrows off and put that mechanic on hold.
So now the only interaction is when the boy card comes out, it
interacts with the card in its space.
Okay. That's it.
So all this came out in a four day play.
Play testing Play testing at Jen Con.
Yeah, three day for us. Yeah, three day.
We took off to actually try and enjoy the.
Good for you. Flew back home to California.
Good for you. People tend to forget, like if
you're a designer and or you're working the con, you need to
take a day for yourself. It was a lot of work.
So I want to ask you, this has been a, you know, if everyone
has been listening, this theme about emotions, vulnerability
and community, right? This has been the theme of my
episode for so long. And I want to talk about, I want
to ask you about the play testing, right?
I guess it's a twofold question. I guess my first, the first part
of the question is how easy was it for you to be vulnerable, to
open yourself up to all the possible opinions during this
three day play testing? And then second of all, how did
that go? How successful were you and how
successful did you get? Talk to me about that.
All right. So we've got a lot of management
experience and you've always got higher ups trying to tell you
how to do this. I did that right?
I'm pretty resistant. I'm kind of the kind of guy that
pushes back a little. Bit right?
OK, especially if I'm proven myself time and time again, then
I'm kind of the the resistant one.
But it took a little bit for me to figure out how exactly to do
this. And one of the master classes I
was in of Justin Garry's, he talked about, you know, you've
got to be vulnerable. You've got to be able to take
criticism, positive, negative and and and run with it.
So because of going and this Gen.
Con 2023 was the first public outing for the game.
We actually introduced it to the world over three days.
We had well over 8586 people OK play test it just at Gen.
Con. So preparing for that just I had
to steel myself and say no matter what they say, take the
feedback, listen to it and even if I don't agree with it, try
and find the value in it. That's not an easy task.
No, that's very difficult. So whether whether it's all
feedback is valuable and and you might get something that's just
like, well, that was, you know, OK, whatever, didn't see that
coming order. And nine times that 10.
I'll be completely transparent here.
When you're a designer and you've gone through one of the
secret sauces of game design, which is iteration, most likely,
I've already come up with what anything anybody else is going
to come up with, right? But you never know.
And there might just be some little thing pops up.
And there was, oh, there was this.
Oh, it was perfect. So this young gentleman came up
and played on the Thursday. OK.
And he said, man, I asked him. It's like I asked.
Everybody said, hey, did you win or lose?
I lost. OK, let me ask you this.
Did you have fun? Yes.
Good question. I did my job then.
If you have fun losing that should be a decent game.
I agree, right. So he gave us one piece of
feedback. He's like, there's just one
thing that nags at me with this and he's like your spell cards.
I love what they do when I can use them.
I was like, OK, he's like, I just I can't use them because
basically you get us the spell cards on are on what's called a
clash deck. OK Clash spell deck and the top.
That's one of the two decks. One of those decks, OK, it's one
of those other decks that I was talking about, the 25 card deck
and the top card is is is is face up.
OK, so and this is kind of odd because most people would expect
to be face down and they're just gonna draw it.
I agree. But there's a method to this
madness, and we've play tested multiple times, every way you
can think of. This is what we settled on
because it was the highest stakes because now you know what
you're playing for, you know what you're fighting for.
So what you're trying to do is that spell deck is a community
deck. So when OK, you're when you do a
certain mechanic, it unlocks the ability for you to get one of
those spells and then the next one flips over.
Some of them have field effects that affect everything instantly
until somebody gets it right. And then some of them are cards
that you use when you want to, not instant speed.
It's not like a trading card game where you can react and
dump your hand or anything like that.
You can't. It's very specific.
Everybody gets to play and that's again another reason why
it's so balanced. It's very quick.
I'm playing a card, you're playing a card.
OK, cool. I'm going to do another
interaction now. I'm going to lean to before I
play card out of my hand, I'm going to play this spell card
that I won earlier, which goes in one of two spell slots for
you to save spell slots. And there's reason.
There's two. There's a reason.
We'll talk about that reason another time.
All right, two slots. And you can save those spells
for later for when you need them.
So a piece of feedback we got was, is there a way I can use
this later or is there some other thing we could do with the
spell to make it useful all the time?
The game is very situational based, meaning that because you
still have RNG from all these decks, including your own decks,
and they're, they're still balanced, meaning you can always
play something. It doesn't always mean that the
effect that a Titan has or the the effect that a spell has is
going to be what's needed right at the moment.
And that's OK, because that's part of the charm of the game.
If you had every tool in your arsenal at every given moment
and could do everything, then it wouldn't really be fun, right?
There's got to be some restriction.
So the he asked us that and we went back that night to the
hotel room. My Co designer Omar and I and
our friend Zach who was helping at the con, we talked about it
and we're like you know what? Let's for the rest of the con
put a static ability. We'll just tell everybody, hey,
there's a hidden ability on the card that isn't there.
It's because it's a piece of feedback we got.
We want to try it out. It's play testing, so go for it.
So what we did was we said that all these spells have their own
effects. We gave a static effect across
the deck that says draw 2 cards and put back any two you don't
want at the bottom. Everybody that plays card games,
especially trading card games, loves deck filtering.
So it was that I was so happy with that piece of feedback and
then being able to come up with a resolution so quickly.
And it stuck. The second we did that, he came
back on Saturday and I told him he was just like, perfect.
That that was what he was. Looking for perfect.
Nice. So, yeah, so it kind of got me
right here, you know? Yeah.
And I imagine that that motivated you beyond Gen.
Con when you got home, right? Oh yeah, so he's not the only
one to give us feedback. We took feedback sheets.
Yep, We we did a little just real quick for them.
Didn't take any personal information, which might have
been a mistake, but I was trying to respect people's privacy, you
know? But we took all this feedback
that they gave us and I went through most of it and I was
like, OK, most of this, it's good feedback, but it's stuff
we've already tried or stuff that's not going to work.
Some of this stuff will work later and we've already got
plans for that. So hopefully they'll stick
around and they'll see that, hey, we did listen and we were
thinking on the same page as them, just not for the base
game. So yeah, I was, I was really
happy with that outcome. I was real happy with.
It was there any during those, during that three days, was
there a moment where the feedback was either the feedback
was difficult or the person giving it was difficult?
I mean, we're all human, right? Yeah.
So. So you told me a good story.
Was there an opposite story? And if so, how did you deal with
that? This is going to blow your mind.
You're. Going to tell me there wasn't.
And this is. Anything negative to say?
It's not that they didn't have anything negative to say because
I wrote down everything, went through everybody's survey and
there was a little bit of negativity, but it wasn't what I
expected. I expected people straight up
say this game's trash, I don't like it, get off the table,
don't even think about it, you know, whatever.
None of that, Absolutely none. The most negative thing we got
was the spell card right issue, and the void was too complicated
and there was just too much to swallow.
And then there were a few situations that just came up
with cards being played a certain way that we hadn't fully
realized like that could be done.
Didn't see that one coming. We thought we saw all the
situations. There's a few we didn't see.
That was it out of like 86 people, right?
That was it. So that right there told me that
okay. You've got a good product.
We're on the right track right now.
Let's go back and give them all the visual stuff that they want
to see. They want to see more stuff on
the cards to differentiate them between each other.
So one power deck is purple, it's got it's it's accented with
purple on the back and the front, and then the other one is
yellow. There's a reason for this.
I saw the, saw the yellow cards. I'll get to the reason in a
second, but they wanted just a little bit more visibility to
just make them a little more distinct.
OK, It's one thing, you're playing them upside down from
each other. That should be a pretty good
indicator. But sometimes all those colors
can blend, especially if you're color blind.
Yes, which brings me to my next point.
We designed theory of the elements to be accessible to
color blind, OK? That is why we used purple and
yellow. Wow.
OK, talk. So I don't know a lot about
visual impairments or color blindness in particular.
Talk to me about that. So I'm not, I'm not saying that
it's perfect. We we did our best to do some
research and we have a very close friend that's really
colorblind. OK, so we figured we would use
purple. Well, we researched that purple
and yellow were two really good contrasting colors that allow
them, if they can't still see the color, that they are starkly
different, that they stand out. OK, see I didn't.
Know that not only does it fit our theme because balance is
yellow and void is purple, OK, there was a underlying reason
for using them and, and that was it.
So in addition to that, outside of colour, we made sure that we
put the elements or any important information that
that's visual where it can always be seen whether the cards
in your hand. I moved an emblem from the Gen.
Con version of the element under the number.
So when you're holding them in your hand, you've got the
element and the number right. So it doesn't matter if you can
see the colour or not That's cool.
Everything OK, Everything is set up that way.
Writing cards, the spell cards, everything.
So there's also an interesting component, one of the things
when I was getting ready for this episode, I was reading the
rules a little bit. I noticed like so there's
there's six elements and you can I don't know if manipulate the
right word and I don't know that this game inspired it, but this
is what I thought. And Please remember, I have not
played the game yet, so I'm going to learn this this
weekend. I got the feeling of like Uno
right, Whatever your opinion on Uno is, But I was thinking of
hey, because there's there's a way where like red beats green,
but you could somehow reverse that.
OK, now you bring. I always said reverse was one of
our. Here we go, reverse.
OK, so Uno was also a, an inspiration for it too.
But when you're talking about the game, you're trying to do a
tagline something real quick, you know, 2 sentences.
You can't say it was inspired by 15 games.
No, you can't. You got to cut it down.
You got to do something. So I, I, I went with triple
Triad originally was triple Triad Magic the Gathering, but
that's mainly because of the spell art and the spell types
and stuff like that. It it's familiar, but reverse.
So I was looking at Uno deck and when we first designed Fury, we
started with 52 cards, an actual playing card deck.
OK, OK, because there's four suits, right?
And we wanted four elements on the power cards.
Those are the only ones we were worried about at the time,
right? Void and balance word for
something else. So we're like, OK, well, what
are we doing? So originally we actually had
one through 13 because, well, there's 13 cards for six.
Right. Right, but we, you had the void
cards in your hand. We had some cards that were
called charge cards that did kind of like a wild card out in
the field and it was cool. But as we refine it, like I said
earlier, and we got down to that Magic number and the way
everything worked, we we scrapped that.
But that was the original inspiration.
Now Uno, it's funny you bring that up because yes, I used kind
of the color scheme. OK, Why did I use the color
scheme? Well, I mean, they're elements.
They're going to have that red, blue-green, you know, but Uno's
very familiar with a lot of people.
It is a lot of people. So it's very simple.
You see a color and a number. Some of them have symbols,
that's it. If you look at my power cards,
you have a number, a symbol, and some arrows.
The picture on there is just for flavor.
The only text on that card is the name of the creature that's
on it. That's.
The point? OK.
It was to keep it simple. So using Uno as an inspiration
for that was actually really, I think, good idea because keeping
the base part, the combat simple in terms of not having to read a
card and just play it speeds up the game.
Keeping the other spells to one sentence or so also lends to
that. But reverse.
We have a special card and it's in everyone of our games that
we've designed and we're trying to make sure that mechanic is in
every game. We design for the theory of the
Elements universe, and we have other games too, but for that,
this is our our front runners. We have a card that's called an
elemental reverse card. So it's cool when you play
Pokémon and you've got this big hierarchy, this piece, this
piece, this piece isn't just going around a big circle.
Well, we're like, well, we're not going to get into that many
elements because that's just too complex for a card game.
So we'll simplify it. We'll use the four.
What can we do to spice this up? I want to do something where we
can reverse something here like I want to change the game state
right Yep, reverse the elements. Nice.
So you have this card and on one side it has a normal hierarchy
that you would expect water beats fire, fire beats land,
land beats air, air beats water right.
You gotta have something. And in some other games, you
know that hierarchy changes a little bit based on however they
design it. So it's it's somewhat different
in in a few other games, but for the gist of it, that's a normal
hierarchy and that's cool. Well, it'd be really cool if you
could literally reverse it and then make every everything in
your hand play completely different.
Wow. So your 60 card deck just became
120. Yeah.
Because now you can, because cards that you were going to
play that were like maybe a filler move, they're like, I'm
going to play this one because it's it's the best play here.
I don't want to. I've got these trump cards in my
hand. I don't want to expose these too
early. It's not worth playing these to
capture these cards because I'm only going to get one or two.
I want to try and save it to get a big pull, right?
Well, what if you like a problem in TCG?
You got a handful of stuff you can't use, whether it's land,
whether it's spells, because you don't have the land.
That's a problem, or that is definitely a problem.
So this was another way to kind of fix that.
I like it. So no resources, that's no
resource. That's incredible.
No resources and you'll thank me later because the game flows so
smooth it's just so quick. It's like chess.
You want to plan a few moves ahead, right And sometimes
there'll be a little bit of analysis paralysis because you
there are some hidden stuff that unless you've played the game a
few times or you just really catch on to it real quick and
you can see it there are some amazing combos you can pull The
whole point is to capture your opponent's cards and collect
them and that becomes your point total at the end of the game.
So when you're when you're doing that, you're trying to play
these one through 4 cards to capture as many at one time as
you can. So the fours are extremely
powerful in that regard because they can tack four ways.
They can potentially take 4 cards, but what if you could
take 12 with one one play? I mean, that's, that's kind of a
bold move, yeah. So when you combo off with a
spell, a tighten ability, and the power card, you play, and
then you get to follow up with another power card because that
spell told you to play a power card.
And you still have to play your card, your power card per turn,
and draw back up to your maximum hand size.
So it stays even, right? Yeah, you can pull off some
crazy combos. So like I said, at the end of
the day, it's a strategy card game.
It's an expandable card game through the modular deck system,
and I love trading card games. There's always a place for them.
There's a lot of them coming out.
A lot of really good ones have come out.
It's true. I didn't want to compete with
that. It started off being designed as
one, but at the end of the day, you should never design your
first game as a trading card game.
Sound advice. Because the resources you need
to actually pull that off are insane.
So, well, I know some of you at home are probably doing just
that. Good luck.
I wish you the best success in that.
But I would tell you if you could put that aside or refine
it down to a base game like we did with this, then lead into
that or make it a separate game in the same universe because you
like the theme. You want to link them?
That would be my advice is do something like that because
there's a lot to learn. I knew a lot about game design
like when I joined Justin Gary's master class, everyone was
looking at the game like is this game done like already?
Cuz the art like one of the biggest compliments we get
especially at Gen. Con.
The art, the art, the art, the art.
The art work is amazing. And art from a visual standpoint
sells games, so we wanted to have good artwork.
Absolutely. Selling a game and keeping a
customer for life because the game's good, right?
Yeah, that that's a big one. So we've talked about all this
play testing back in Gen. Con 2023.
Here we two years later, what is the current status of Fury of
the Elements? The game was supposed to
originally launch last March. It was done.
Yeah. I took all that feedback from
Gen. Con.
I had it done in the airport on the way home from Gen.
Con. I've been a graphic designer for
25 years, so that landed me the ability to actually create the
game from the design point. I didn't have to wait on a
graphic designer. I didn't have to shell out the
money for that. I've spent thousands of hours,
yeah, thousands, right, doing this.
Thousands of hours, folks. So that's a challenge, but.
You've got it, you've got it, you've got a Kickstarter launch
page right now. Yes, there is a pre launch page
up pre launch. The game itself is, it's done,
it's ready to go. Everything you saw on the box
earlier, there'll be other videos where you'll see
components and whatnot, but everything is done.
Nothing's changing now. Mechanic wise, it's good to go.
We could have launched last March.
There was a series of unfortunate events that happened
and hey, life happens, you know? But it's ready to go.
I'm trying to get the advertising funds to do the next
round of ad testing and hope that people gravitate to it.
Don't confuse it like they did last March during the ad testing
as a trading card game. Because Paragon and never if TCG
both came out at the same time and Battlegrid wasn't far behind
them or just ahead of them. So there were games out there
that looked like mine. They were all trading card
games. Fury is not a trading card game.
It's a strategy card game, yes, right.
That's very important. You made that clear multiple
times. Right.
We tried to fix what people complain about, about trading
card games, right? We still made it competitive.
We held a tournament last year at a con.
Yeah, crowned our first champion.
There you go. So yeah, there's that.
But yeah, we tried to fix all the problems that we recognize
with trading card games. Complaints that I used to hear
in the store working or when I work for the distributor or
other managers and owners were talking to me like, hey, you can
people complain about this? Is there another game that maybe
doesn't have this type of mechanic that I could introduce
to them? And that, again, all that stuff,
my entire experience is what prompted that, Yeah.
So pre launch page on Kickstarter, anyone can go now
and follow it. So make sure to do that check it
out. Fury of the elements.
So here here's my I think my last question for you, right?
It's pretty much the same question I've asked of every
designer in the last few weeks, right?
We have a trade war going on. The tariff situation with China
is problematic and constantly in a state of flux, right?
So what what do you see is your biggest obstacle?
What I'm I'm, you know, what do you, what do you think about
trying to launch this game, whether it be in the next month,
this summer, in the midst of all that, how difficult is that
going to be and how do you brave through that?
It has already put challenges on us and we haven't even launched
yet because we know that some backers, people that would
normally back stuff, have backed off because they don't want to
spend the extra money. And they're not wrong, you know,
they shouldn't have to. And I'm doing everything I can
to absorb what I can. The game is mostly, I do have a
Co designer and I do have a friend that helps with the
marketing and stuff at cons, but the game's mostly done by me,
one person. So it's outside of our
commissioned artwork and licensed assets, stuff like
that. But it's already a challenge
enough and now I've got to deal with this.
I'm trying to raise funds so that I can do this for the rest
of my life, because Fury's not just a game, it's an entire
universe. I've got two other games that
are going to be on that Kickstarter with it in the same
universe. So you're planning on launching
them together? There was a silver lining to not
launching last March, so the game Affinity War and Elemental
Fury will also be there as add-ons and they'll be included.
I think the highest, the highest tier we have, they'll be
included in there. Some of the stretch goals you're
going to want to follow this campaign.
I will say one of the things I've really enjoyed about what
I've seen from the game has to do with, and I noticed this a
lot with designers is the design of the box itself.
One of our friends in England, Becky, a Missus, get into games
and she complaints constantly about all the negative space,
the empty space in a box, right? You have a little card game and
it's in this big box and there's all this cardboard that you get
rid of. That's very frustrating.
But here's the thing. So if you want to, if you
haven't gone to Kickstarter, look at this.
I'm telling you, this is really cool.
It has a neoprene mat and it rolls up and there's a slot
where it fits. And I'm thinking of a couple of
games recently. Well, that's done.
And I just want to say kudos that that right there is a huge
design element that is just the chef's kiss, as someone would
say. Thank you, that was definitely
one of the things I was adamant about.
Everybody was like, you could like Adam's got the prototype
version and the box is this big. I've already saw it at Gencon.
Yep, 200 cards fit and that just fine.
But I was going above and beyond because I believe in value, yes.
So when you get this game, yeah, you get that neoprene mat.
So I wanted a box that would fit the mat and expansions all in
the box. I noticed that.
I noticed that too. So back to the trade war.
Stuff, right? What else have I done?
So I've opted to not do expansions in big boxes like
this until later on. There will be one specific one
because there was a sister box to this that people were
expecting because they saw the artwork for it.
We are saving it though, and it's actually a good thing we're
saving it because it's going to be so much more special when
they get that. But overall, all of our Bach,
all of our decks come in tuck boxes.
I noticed that. All of the expansions that
they'll come in tuck boxes, unless there's too many cards,
then we'll make a box, but we won't go all out on it like we
did with this. This is a very thick, heavy duty
box. It is high gloss right off the
bat. You're not getting that
printing, you're getting high gloss.
Because I wanted the box to last longer.
I wanted to reflect UV light some Yep, so it wouldn't be sun
bleached. So yeah, neoprene mat.
That was by design. I was adamant about it.
Could I have done a smaller box, made this game cheaper?
Sure. But I found other ways to
increase the value of it and what people are getting and
fight the trade war in my own way by reducing waste and
reducing what people would probably throw out anyway if I'm
making a box like this to hold most of the stuff.
So I have to ask, and I'm sure you've already gotten this
question from feedback from folks.
Will the box be able to accommodate all the cards
sleeved? And then the follow up question
is, are you doing an add on or a stretch goal where you will have
sleeves of the artwork itself? So this is where I've had a
hard, hard time. Sure, I'm nobody in in this
world right now. I'm.
Nobody right now, OK. So it's been very difficult
partnering with people. I've been flat out ghosted, no
responses for three months, multiple emails sent phone
calls. It's been a tough Rd.
But we did partner with Titan Shield.
To provide. Sleeves on our second tier and
above game comes with sleeves. Game comes with sleeves.
And each tier you get more and more because in those tiers
there's more stuff that's included that needs sleeves,
including the other games. Well, there you go.
So we'll hold sleeves and we'll come with sleeves at the 2nd,
2nd. 2nd tier at the first tier I made super accessible to
people. People are going to look at and
go like, why is this, this price?
Right, right. Sure.
I am kind of taking it in the shorts on that one.
But the my thing isn't so much the amount that the Kickstarter
raises is to a degree of transparency there we are trying
to raise money, right? But I'd rather have the volume
and more customers so that all the games for the entire
universe that we've got 10,000 years of war laid out.
We're doing games from card games to TTRPG.
We want them to be on board. Nice, nice.
It sounds like you're covering all the bases.
I love it. I think it's great.
So it's Fury of the Elements, a strategy card game, not
collectible or because customize.
Well, I guess no customizable card game sounds excite.
Where can people find you and where can they follow you and
find Fury of the Elements? Biggest places to follow us are
on Instagram OK Fury, CG, Facebook.
Just look up fury of the elements.
Our website isfurycg.com super simple.
Fury, CG dot. We are on Board Game Geek as
well. And then our Kickstarter pre
launch page. You can go to the website, you
can go to our Instagram, we've got that thing plastered
everywhere. You can become a VIP if you
want. And I understand the problem
with that for some people putting the dollar down, but
I've made an out for everybody because I'm trying to make sure
that bases are covered like. Right.
If you don't like the dollar
down, skip it. Go right to the There You Go,
the Kickstarter page and just follow.
Yeah, check it out. If it looks good, if it looks
like something you might want to back in the future, then, you
know, go ahead and follow it. I know that that a lot of
designers talk about it's really important to get the followers
ahead of time and how that translates in the backers.
So Mark, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show.
Help me out a little bit to get my mojo back after being out for
several weeks. And again, thank you to Adam
from Tabletop Vibes for lending us his studio.
And so when we're done, I think we're going to play Fear of the
Elements and I'm going to learn about Titans and Void and
Balance and see how great these games really are.
So thanks again. Appreciate me and thank you,
Adam for letting us use your studio as I flew into California
almost unannounced. Almost, but he made it, so we're
happy. So thanks again, guys.
And TuneIn next week, we've got a lot more coming up.
I've got some series as planned. Gareth and I are talking about
what's going to happen with the future of the podcast.
So stay tuned and don't forget to hit that like and subscribe
button. We are trying to get 100
subscribers by October, where it'll be one year anniversary on
YouTube. So thanks again guys.