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[light music playing]
[Narrator] When I was a kid, I remember finding this magazine
that my dad had laying around.
And I was thumbing through it,
and I came across this picture, and I was...
I saw this guy in it,
he was wearing a business suit and a tie.
Kinda looked like my dad a little bit.
But there was like all this weird stuff in the... In the picture.
There was like this weird red bird in the background,
and there was this dude in a lab coat, looked like a scientist.
And this weird large object covered by a red sheet.
And I was trying to figure out what was going on,
and so, I looked at the caption, and underneath it said,
Marvin Glass: Game Inventor.
And I was like, "Game Inventor?"
I didn't even think that was a job.
[upbeat music playing]
[light music playing]
[sighs]
So here's like kinda what we're playing right now, section.
Scythe... Pretty... pretty awesome game, one of my favorites of all time.
Um, and Rising Sun.
One of my favorite games of all time, as well.
[Jason] Also, [INAUDIBLE] best game.
But the most exciting thing for me is to share a new game with someone else.
And when that game is mine, it's like icing on the cake.
And nothing gives me more pleasure in, on a board game night
than to see people playing my game and laughing, you know,
hooting and hollering... talking trash and throwing stuff.
If no one's standing on a chair, if friendships are on the line.
I don't know, there's probably some better games.
[light music playing]
[Charlie] I did all the art for my first game: Trekking.
I like to be a creator.
If I make a game, I'm gonna put my name on it
because I would sign my name to a work of art.
The first time you get to hold something you make,
in your hands, that's the best feeling.
It's fleeting, you don't get to enjoy it for very long, but it's amazing.
[Scott] Alright, so this is my, uh, bookshelf, maybe a very messy bookshelf,
where I have all my sketchbooks,
and these are where I keep track of my game ideas.
So, there's a whole bunch of them there.
These are, uh, "Scott's Book of Great Ideas."
Uh, and, I, uh, have them numbered. This one is number twenty-eight.
I think I'm up to about thirty now.
I carry a sketchbook with me wherever I go.
We'll go to the movies. I will have that sketchbook with me.
We go out to eat, I bring a sketchbook with me.
I am always thinking about games.
I always say that Walt Disney didn't start out his career
with the intention of creating the Disney store.
He started out making cartoons, and he made really good cartoons.
So, I'm gonna start out making board games, really good board games.
[light music playing]
[Nashra] Growing up, there was always the expectation that as a young Pakistani girl,
I would get married and have children by the time I'm twenty.
I knew it wasn't gonna be in my future.
As a kid, just in England, I would go to the rag market, pick up a bunch of games...
throw out the rules...
and then mix and match parts and try to create my own version of it.
So, I guess my experience of being a game designer started when I was young.
[Narrator] I think everyone on Earth has played and enjoyed some kind of tabletop game.
They're just so universal. Whether they played them when they were younger,
whether it's something they learned to play when they're older,
whether it was something that was within their family,
tabletop games are almost just a universal phenomenon.
[Elan] Some of my best memories growing up
were playing games with my brothers.
We used to sit around the table and make up house rules for Uno,
or try to figure out how to play Monopoly and cheat without being caught.
Those were the games that really taught us how to play together,
and kinda defined interaction.
Later on, we started playing more elaborate games,
like Eurogames, you know, Settlers of Catan...
Puerto Rico... Carcassonne...
Those really opened up my eyes to what a board game could actually be.
And the people who made those games
put their names right there on the box.
They... They were famous, you know, Klaus Teuber...
Reiner Knizia... Andreas Seyfarth...
I was in awe of those guys.
Today, we're in the middle of... a tabletop renaissance.
It's a three-billion-dollar industry, and every year it grows.
There is conventions, and awards,
and now, independent designers can get into the action without game publishers
because of the invention of things like crowdfunding.
And I looked at that whole ecosystem,
and I thought, "Oh, man, I wanna play, too."
I have, uh, a friend, Shane Small who, uh, said
"What if we tried to build Russian Roulette out of cards, and uh, how would that work?"
And what would it look like?
And we started tinkering with the idea over the course of a few weeks.
Um, and we created this game called "Bomb Squad,"
which was literally a deck of, uh, poker cards
that we took a Sharpie and scribbled all over.
This card, if you draw this one, you explode. It's the bomb.
We scribbled all over these cards,
and we played it with a bunch of friends, and it worked great.
Everyone became so addicted to this game.
[Elan] We got the game to a really good place...
A place where everyone we showed it to really enjoyed playing.
And one of the people that we showed it to, uh, was Matt Inman
who draws The Oatmeal, creator of The Oatmeal.
And he looked at it, and he said...
"Guys, this is... This is amazing.
This is the most fun I've ever had playing a card game... but it has no soul.
Um, what if, you, uh, let me partner with you guys, and we'll make just two changes?
One, uh, you let me illustrate all the cards.
Uh, and add a little bit of that soul to it.
Uh, and, two, is we rename it from "Bomb Squad"
to "Exploding Kittens" because... the Internet."
And, uh, those were two really, really good decisions. And Exploding Kittens was born.
-[explodes] -The way that we approached Kickstarter,
um, was very different from the way most people do.
Originally, our goal on Kickstarter was,
"Okay, we got this cool game idea,
we'll put it up on Kickstarter, let's try to raise $10,000...
that will allow us to print up 500 copies of the game.
That's all we need to do. That's the minimum print run our manufacturer needs,
and it's a little weekend project.
None of us are really taking this seriously, so...
uh, we'll just, that'll be our goal."
We hit that in seven minutes.
[light music playing]
The game eventually went on to surpass the $10,000 mark,
and, eventually made $9 million on Kickstarter...
uh, breaking every Kickstarter record.
Um, in fact, this game had more backers on Kickstarter,
um, it more than doubled the second place,
uh, number of backers on Kickstarter, and I don't just mean in games,
I mean, any project in Kickstarter history in any category.
[light music playing]
We've already hit our goal in just a few minutes,
so we don't care about funding anymore. Let's work on crowd.
So, we made our same stretch goals.
Look, we will also double the number of cards,
and give you the fancy carrying case, and upgrade the box,
and do all the normal stretch goal stuff,
but we're not going to associate that with money.
We don't care about money anymore.
We don't want you to give us any more money.
Instead, we're gonna throw a huge Internet party and everybody is invited.
So, to get these stretch goals, we want you to take twenty pictures of a real taco cat...
Taco cat is one of the characters in our game,
show us what a real taco cat looks like.
Or take pictures of you and fifty friends all wearing cat ears,
or do any kind of ridiculous, hilarious... party-based thing.
And every time they got a certain number of these things,
we made the game a little bit better...
because we don't care about money.
And, the result was we had more backers on this project than any project in history.
The question we get all the time is, "Hey, you made $9 million,
what are you gonna spend all that money on?"
Um, the reality is, we don't make $9 million, right? Kickstarter takes their share.
Uh, the credit card company takes their share.
We have to print 700,000 decks of cards.
We have to pay taxes. We have to hire a boatload of people.
Um, the end amount... almost all of what we have left
goes into the production of the cards
and the formation of the company.
Nobody got rich off of Kickstarter.
Um, what happens, is you get the enormous privilege of starting a company,
and it's incredible because you own hundred percent of it.
Um... it's unlike any start-up I've ever run before
in that you get to hit the ground running.
Kickstarter is actually the perfect phrase.
That company has been kickstarted.
[Narrator] I'm not saying that success like this will happen for everyone,
but there has never been a better time to go make a game.
[Jason] I have always created games.
Ever since I was a kid, I was always working on something.
And I... I think back, uh when people ask me, "Why do you create games?
Wh... When is the first game you created?"
I never really thought about it. It... It was like it was kinda like Dungeons and Dragons,
it was just... an effortless sort of, uh... Effortless sort of drive.
It's just what I... What I would do in my spare time.
My name is Jason Serrato and I'm the designer of Thug Life.
In the '70s, where I grew up in the city, Pico Rivera...
it was the Angel Dust capital of the world...
and uh, a lot of violence, a lot of street violence.
And especially growing up as a young nerd
at a time when being a nerd was not cool at all.
When- when walking home the right way was... Was critical [inaudible]
getting beat up or just being harassed, right?
My house is probably another half mile this way,
and uh, we would play D&D at the library.
We actually... I remember they actually were crazy enough
h to buy Lord of the Rings books and D&D manuals, and...
they may or may not have found their way
into my poor friends' backpacks on the way home.
[door clanks]
Huzzah!
Um...
these are my pre-paid miniatures for gaming.
That... That idea of... Of being a gamer at that time,
as a refuge, right, uh, kinda is like a nerd sanctuary...
didn't really land with me 'til... 'Til much later.
You know, I'm like, wow, that kinda saved me, right.
You know, I'm like a fourteen, fifteen-year-old kid
playing D&D with like some fifty-year-old lady, you know...
or some sixty-year-old crippled dude in a wheelchair...
or some really colorful characters of all shapes and sizes.
All sexes, all backgrounds, all nationalities...
cause if it hadn't been Dungeons & Dragons
or having been board games and role-playing games, um...
I would've been running on the streets
with a lot of other knuckleheads... and that would've been...
I would've probably had a very different life.
Thug Life is a miniature, combat, uh, crime-simulation board game.
We take on the role of the boss, and you control a gang of thugs in the streets...
uh, you're committing crimes, doing drive-bys,
I like to say it's kinda fun for the whole family sorta thing
that always gives people a big chuckle.
And if I could just get a few kids off the real streets to play in these phony streets,
I think that's a win, in my book.
[Eric] When you look at the game on a table,
there's something about that game, just looking at it.
Either the way people are interacting with the pieces,
or the way the game just stands on its own
that compels you to want to take a second look at it, right?
Uh, take a new game like Photosynthesis
which is one of the most beautiful productions I've seen in a long time.
That game has amazing table presence.
You walk by a table, you, from looking across the room...
your eyes are drawn to it, and you are instantly curious,
and you kind of have an idea of what this game is like...
just by looking at it because... they're tabletop games.
Why on Earth would you not want to have table presence?
So games have three pieces which are flavor, mechanics, and data.
And so, flavor is the theme.
And mechanics is what you do in the game.
The data is what information is stored in the game.
Every time I am making a decision when I'm making a game,
I'm trying to make the game better,
I'm trying to make the game play better,
especially the functionality, what it is that you're doing.
Uh, my name is Charlie Bink, and I am the creator of Trekking the National Parks.
[light music playing]
I think the theme of Trekking is its initial pull for almost anyone
is they see, "Oh, it's a game about the national parks."
You almost never see that without it being like
"Quizzes for ages eight and up," you know?
I... I really wanted the box and just everything about it to say,
"Hey, this is a game, it's about the national parks...
but don't worry, you know, you're not opening a textbook."
You know it's... It's a game, it's about that.
The way that the game came about is, uh,
we've been playing family games for a number of years.
He introduced us to a game called Ticket to Ride.
And my wife and I were on a mission
to visit all 59 of the country's parks.
[light music playing]
Each time he'd visit one, he would take photos of the different parks.
Then about halfway through it, I think it was when I turned thirty...
he said, "Hey, I'm gonna take you to whatever park you want to go to,
which one you want to go to?"
Uh, as long as it's the one I haven't been to. So, so, I had to tick one off.
I said, "Let's go to Denali, up in Alaska, which is awesome."
And so, we went up there, and then sort of while we were there...
I think that was when he had said,
"Why don't you make a game kinda about the national parks?"
And I kinda was like... "God, it's a good idea, wish I would have thought of it."
Charlie said, "You know, Dad, I...
I love, I love the theme, I hate your idea."
[John] And he says, "It's because it's just a blatant knock-off of Ticket."
So, we spent the next, oh, gosh, twelve months just play
testing a whole bunch of different iterations of the game,
and came up with the game that we have now...
The game has two components, with the game itself
and then the guidebook that comes with it.
And that was... Terry and my contribution to it... because we'd been to the parks,
I took a bunch of photographs of the... The different parks.
[Terry] It's not just a standard,
here's the information that you can get in any guidebook,
it's a personal endeavor that we did.
So it's one thing to just have an idea for a game...
but even just getting it to a final prototype... that's a lot of work.
[light music playing]
So the prototype process has a... A bunch of different steps.
You... You start with the first earliest prototype
which is, you know, paper and dice and...
very, very simple things that you're using just so you can play-test it,
and get it to the point where it's good enough to play-test with someone else.
And your prototype keeps getting better and closer to the final version,
the more people you play with and the more feedback you get.
And then there's what I think of as the real prototype
which is what you are going to submit to the publisher.
[light music playing]
One of the, uh, best prototypes that, uh,
has been presented to us is Rayguns and Rocketships.
[Jerry] Presented to me in a box...
That was... Was beautiful. It was a well-done prototype.
Our initial reaction when we, uh,
saw the game was this was a great genre to make a game with.
Uh, it was not over-saturated in the sort-of pulpy sci-fi era...
uh, I can immediately tell that the designer of that game
really had a love for that genre.
[dreamy music playing]
[Scott] I just... I love games. I've always loved games.
I'm... I always like things that are very toy-like...
My name is Scott Rogers, and I have designed Rayguns and Rocketships.
[Scott] When I was a kid I really loved pirates,
and Flash Gordon is just kinda like a pirate movie
and it's set in a different genre,
so I really love the swashbuckley-ness of Flash Gordon, in particular,
but I also love how Flash Gordon kinda treats a big galaxy almost like a neighborhood
where here's the neighborhood where the lizard people live;
and here's the neighborhood where the lion people live;
and here's the neighborhood where the hawk people live.
A really good friend of mine who is a game designer, his name's Hardy,
we were sitting around one day playing What If?
You know, "What if you could do this? What if you could do that?"
And he said, "If you can make any game you want, what would it be?"
And I'm a really big Star Wars fan,
and I went, "I wanna make a Star Wars game."
And Hardy said, "Pfft, forget Star Wars, make your own damn Star Wars."
And I'm like, yeah, I... I could, I could make my own damn Star Wars.
And so that's ultimately what Rayguns and Rocketships is,
is me creating my own version of that universe
'cause when I first saw Star Wars,
it blew my mind like it did to everybody else my age and... And younger.
Um, but, what it also did to us,
it introduced me to all the things that inspired George Lucas,
uh, these are, you know, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers
and so when it came time for me to make my own damn Star Wars,
I thought about those things in context of what were the things that I liked?
What were the things that really got me excited?
And so, I tried to put all those into Rayguns and Rocketships.
In late 2010, uh,
I caught what I thought was a flu... A cold.
And I had, um, a fever, and a cough, and night sweats.
My wife said, "Let's get you to the hospital." So, thank goodness for my wife.
Ran some tests, and they said,
"Congratulations, you have stage 4 cancer Hodgkin's-Lymphoma."
Uh... took me out of action for a good eight months
while I was getting chemotherapy,
and another few months after that
to just kinda recover mentally from the situation.
Uh, my advice to everybody out there, don't get cancer.
When you're that sick, you really don't feel like doing anything.
I, then, was like, well, I need to do something with this time.
I need something to keep myself occupied.
The board game was something that I had been kinda noodling with as an idea,
but hadn't really committed towards moving forward.
And it was something that... What's great about board games is it's...
You can make it yourself, you don't need anyone else to make a board game.
I started with my sketchbook and I drew out all the components
that I thought I would need for the game,
what, what parts I would need, what cards, dice, miniatures, things like that.
Once I've got that created in my sketchbook, then I built the components.
So, this is the original prototype for Rayguns and Rocketships,
with my hand-drawn, half-painted cover art.
Uh, grab miniatures from other games that I already had,
like I used Adam Strange figures from HeroClix.
[light music playing]
Cardboard and make cards and write on 'em.
Then I play-tested it a lot, and got feedback, and refined the rules,
refined the rules, refined the rules, changed things, threw things out,
added things in,
and so now I have this professional-looking thing.
[light music playing]
Well, most of my designs really die in the first hour and that's a good thing.
The first thing you can do as a game designer
is fall in love with one of your designs
which do not work, and you put in more time and more time.
It's in the lost cost, the sunk cost fallacy,
so I've put in so much effort into it, it has to work.
There's tons of observation going on there,
a lot of notetaking and then you analyze your notes.
So, there's some analysis that happens after play-testing.
[Matt] It's a fundamentally like integral part of the process.
[Scott] So Protospiel is the...
For my money, is the best convention in tabletop gaming.
And it's this weekend where all these game designers
converge to share their game prototypes,
and for me, it's one of the more important events of the year
because it's a place I can not only debut my games
but I also get play-testing from some really smart game designers.
And... And it's great to get feedback from regular people,
but getting it from game designers, they can very quickly focus in
on why the game is good or bad and give very telling advice.
So, normally, these would be the guys that you would be using in your game,
but I need to play-test these new guys.
So, I have four new characters that I want you to try out.
[upbeat music playing]
All these game designers have come from all over California
and some from even out of the state,
to show off their newest creations.
But these are all games that are still in,
uh, they're still being worked on.
They're not quite ready for prime-time yet.
So, we're trying to knock out all the bugs and the problems
and having lots of cool people come play our games for free,
and then we get to learn from them and, oh, what...
What things can we do to make our games better.
So this game is called Who Farted?
And it's basically Go Fish meets Clue with fart noises added in.
[woman 1] I finished the art like a week ago, I think.
This is fairly early prototyping.
I have been working on this off and on for a couple of months.
This is kinda first time with a lot of strangers and... And non-sympathetic,
uh, players.
[Scott] Things are gonna break.
Somebody's gonna come along and find a way to play it that you haven't thought of before
but that's awesome because now you can look and go, "Oh, crud,"
is this a critical thing that I need to fix or is this an edge case that I can kinda go,
"Okay, well, maybe a slight tweak at the rules will solve that problem."
[dreamy music playing]
So, in front of me is the very first prototype of Thug Life
but it was meant to just be a very quick sort of experience.
It's still pretty fast right now,
but, you know, obviously, chips give you certain luxuries of like,
"Alright, three guys are gonna do the thing,
um, I'm gonna get a money, I'm gonna get a gun, what have you."
And, um, this was the base game.
And um, there's no hoods, there's no street board,
it was meant to be playable in a small space by casual gamers,
but this is what we landed on before we committed to the first Kickstarter,
like the miniatures production line.
[key clicks]
[dreamy music playing]
[Jason] I love miniatures.
I think, personally, I love miniatures
because of the representational aspect, and how much fun that is.
The idea of like that's my character, it looks like my character, it's...
It's what I imagine my character might look like.
My first experience with miniatures and...
And maybe the first several dozen experiences with miniatures
was all the same experiences. I did and that experience was that I couldn't have any.
I couldn't afford miniatures when I was a kid. They were expensive.
Some of my friends used bottle caps, rocks, pebbles, pennies, paperclips,
whatever we had within, you know, arm's reach.
Sometimes we'd fold a piece of paper into a triangle
and tape a penny to the bottom, draw a character on it, that was a thing.
We launched on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. And we didn't get funding.
And uh, you know, we... We plan to relaunch this year,
but it was a, um, it was a difficult process, um,
but it was also a tremendous learning experience.
We learned a ton, um, watching our game not fund, right?
Watching our game not be embraced, not be beloved,
not be a Cash Cab, none of being...
It being none of those things.
It seemed like a doomed space shuttle launch.
Like you just, you knew that you were doomed from the beginning,
but you just, you... You couldn't,
you're not gonna just let go of the steering wheel at that point, right?
You're gonna, you have to keep trying.
For me, I think, if I don't have some option
to include miniatures with Thug Life, uh,
as part, as an option, as least as an option to play that experience,
I think it's, um, falling short of the original vision of the game.
And as someone who loves miniatures so much,
I would never want to play Thug Life
without the miniatures, personally.
So when you're shopping for a game,
the artwork and the name are more important than anything else, right?
You're competing for... For shelf space.
The artwork in games is unreasonably important to me.
Uh, there are really good games that I won't play because the artwork's not good.
You're gonna make a knee-jerk decision,
as to whether you want to purchase a game.
Many times, it's gonna be based on the art.
You actually have to restrain yourself otherwise.
A... At least that's how I feel about it.
You see a beautiful game and you want to buy it just because it looks beautiful.
[ship horn honks]
[light music playing]
[Nashra] So it started off, actually, as a class project
where initially, my professor was like,
"Make something that's important to you."
And the one thing that has bothered me forever has been arranged marriages.
I have been, or tried, like my parents have tried to make me a victim of it.
A lot of my friends have been in similar situations and they haven't had a way out.
So, that was the topic. I knew immediately that the topic was arranged marriage.
My name is Nashra Balagamwala. I am the designer of Arranged!
which is a board game about running away from arranged marriages.
It's a game that forces participants
to confront the struggles that South Asian girls face
when being forced into an arranged marriage.
[light music playing]
The game play, essentially, involves three teenage girls and one Rishta Aunty
who, essentially, translated means the "proposal lady" or the "matchmaker."
And this matchmaker is chasing down the girls on the board
trying to get them married off to any and every one she can find.
The aunty draws cards which will have an example
of something that happens in South Asian culture
that would be considered bizarre elsewhere.
Um, such as, "You see a girl who uses Fair and Lovely," which is a whitening cream,
and, therefore, she seems more attractive
because she's fairer and so you move closer to her.
However, the girls are trying to do things
such as coming up with creative ways to avoid this aunty,
so that they don't get married off,
like they don't end up in a loveless marriage.
So, they are doing things such as, when they draw the cards, it will say something like,
"You photoshopped yourself with alcohol to, you know,
get the aunty to move away from you."
I have run away from so many of these aunties.
I have done the most ridiculous things to avoid them,
and so, I'm gonna create a game about avoiding them.
[light music playing]
I was around twelve, in seventh grade,
where I learned about RISD, and I researched it
and I was like, "Oh, what is the Rhode Island School of Design?"
And I was like, "This is where I want to go."
I want to get out of Pakistan because I don't believe in these societal norms,
and so I started spending pretty much every day
working on an art portfolio so that I'd be able to leave.
It was extremely overwhelming.
There were several points where I was ready to quit and leave.
It was... Like I spent days crying freshman year,
and I was like, "This is... This is too much for me to handle,"
but slowly, I had a really good support system of friends
who helped me get through it, get adjusted,
and now, I'm so thankful that I didn't go back.
I'm on a work visa. I've been in New York working for the past year.
However, it expires in a couple of days,
at which point, I'm returning back to Pakistan.
The money that I make off of it will initially be used for just to fly back to America
and to be able to apply for another visa
so I can come back and continue my life of being a designer.
The day I land, I'm going to my cousin's wedding.
After that, I'm gonna be dealing with proposals, as always,
or maybe due to all this press that I've recently gotten
and really speaking out about avoiding an arranged marriage,
maybe I'm not gonna get any proposals, and I'm hoping that's the case.
Maybe this time, this was my way of avoiding it.
[light music playing]
Rob Daviau, the designer of, um, Pandemic Legacy and a bunch of other games.
He says that the best moment that a gamer has is opening a box.
You open the box, you're like "Wow, this is so great, look at all this great stuff."
[Scott] And the worst moment is reading the rules.
There's an incredible discipline and there's an incredible talent and skill and craft
that goes into writing rule books.
And I am passable at it, at best.
Always a struggle to be very, very, very clear in the language
without being legalistically confusing.
You're not an epic science writer or an epic fiction writer even
and it'd rather be boring and use the same expression three times,
rather than trying to be varied and then confuse the people.
When you're a game designer, what you really need to focus on
and what you really need to be confident in
is that you can hand those instructions to anybody who speaks the language,
and they should be able to play your game without any difficulty.
There are some really good rulebooks out there, too.
Um, I... I would get things like, um,
the little pamphlet that comes with Exploding Kittens.
It's a really great set of rules.
Our initial version of the instructions for Exploding Kittens,
uh, fit on one card.
[Elan] It was so elegant. It was so beautiful.
It was, literally, like six sentences that explained the whole game,
and there was sort of a recursive logic to it
that would point you from one place to another.
I was so proud of these instructions.
And we sent it out into the world, we put it through play-testing,
and what we found is nobody can figure out how to play the game.
Instructions require a massive level of redundancy.
And they require so much hand holding.
I would say we went through, literally, no joke,
hundreds of versions of Exploding Kittens.
And um, every time we'd test it out
and find another three things that we messed up.
When I was doing Trekking, my thinking was like,
"I'm gonna make this game to the point where if grandma understands it quickly,
then I've... I've hit it."
You know, a lot of people go, "Well, will kids be able to understand it?"
Don't worry about them.
A five-year-old will understand a game faster and easier
than an eighty-year-old will understand it.
[upbeat music playing]
[Charlie] There's definitely benefits as a small publisher.
If you're publishing your own game, you can make more that way.
It's possible. There's way more risk, but there can be more reward.
On one hand, it's amazing the world we live in,
'cause, you know, you want something,
you order it on Amazon, it's at your house.
But then you just expect that that's just how the world works,
and you don't realize that when you're Walmart
and someone in Beijing wants to order something from you, that's no problem.
They have steep discounts and... But then when you're just like one dude trying to make a game
and you go, "Yeah, I can ship my game to you, it's gonna cost sixty dollars,"
then people want to bite your head off 'cause they think you're robbing them.
You're like, "I'm not! I promise. I just... It's that expensive to do this."
[Charlie] We store all our inventory in a U-Haul
that's not too far down the street from us.
Uh, boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling.
Each case holds about five games, um,
and, yeah, we just keep the bulk of them there.
Maybe keep about twenty at the house that we can ship out whenever we need to.
I've worked for other publishers before.
I've seen what they do, and you know, I...
I guess there is a little part of me that goes "Ah, I can do that, you know?"
Now that I've done it, I'm like "Oh, my God." That's so much work, you know.
It's so much harder. There's so much more to it than I thought.
Any business requires a team and we have developed a team of, with different talents.
Again, like I said, Charlie's the creative.
Uh, Terry's pretty much the operations,
and then you have to have somebody that helps sell it. So that's been my role.
[Terry] I know when I order something online
or order something from a website,
I wanna know exactly when it's coming.
So, when we get an order on a daily basis,
I've got it packaged and ready to go,
and it's shipped out the same day.
It's very involving.
She's the best at shipping.
[mellow music playing]
[Charlie] My parents are older. They're retired.
They... They've worked, they're ready to, you know,
be retired and enjoy their legacy.
And then sort of just, wow, at the same time,
their legacy is sort of manifested into a physical product.
This is great.
I mean if I'm gonna be really honest, uh,
running the business with my parents,
running it with them has been hugely turbulent.
Hugely turbulent.
I can't say it's brought us closer together.
It's changed how we interact with each other.
It's not the same relationship as it was before the game.
I think if you ask them, they would say a lot has changed because of it.
[mellow music playing]
[Susan] I think there's a difference between an artist and a designer.
I think an artist is somebody who's creating something that they personally love
and they don't give a darn what anybody else thinks about it,
and they don't have to 'cause they're creating it for their own...
Their own enjoyment. And that can be, it can be a composer,
a game designer, a writer, whatever it is.
When you're an artist, you're doing it,
and you might, you might like other people to like it,
but all that matters is that you like it.
[mellow music playing]
[Jason] A vast majority, if not all, of our negative reactions have been on social media.
[mellow music playing]
I think a lot of people see the game,
they judge the game based on, uh, its cultural, its cultural look.
And it's kind of subversive, you know, name and tone.
In Thug Life, there's characters called homies.
They're unique signature individuals.
Many of which are based on actual people.
Uncles, and friends, and neighbors, right?
[Jason] The one comment we would always have was like,
"Hey, why can't it be Vikings, or, you know, ninjas, or that sort of thing?'
And sure, but my attitude was always if I'm going to go ahead
and do that game, games I've already done before, why even bother?
Rather than just re-skin it, I would just do a completely different game.
Why is it not okay for this game to exist, when other games just like it,
actually games much more irresponsible,
that actually feature graphic sex, graphic violence, graphic depictions of drug use,
and you know, crime, why this pushback to this theme right now?
In any kind of business venture, if you're going to compromise your effort
based on a really small amount of public opinion,
you're not going to really do anything that's honest or worthwhile.
The number one reason we didn't get our funding was our price point was too high
for the community that would have wanted to buy our game.
Most of the game friends that are in my immediate circle are,
you know, white gamers, I love these guys, I love playing games with them.
And I don't mean to have like this extensive conversation about color in gaming,
but with Thug Life, it's got black kids in it,
it's got, you know, brown kids in it, it's got yellow kids in it.
You know, Black, Asian, you know, Hispanic kids,
they're too poor to buy Thug Life.
When I was a kid, I loved games of all sorts,
I mean, I think I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was eight.
I'd have to drive five, six cities away
before I could even find a game store.
And the bummer of those drives were often the fact
that when we'd arrive, we couldn't afford anything at the store.
So, here I am as an adult, who's really into the miniatures hobby, and I love that,
creating games that I would've priced myself out as... As a kid.
Even if Thug Life cost thirty dollars.
Even if it cost twenty dollars when I was a kid,
there's no way I would have been able to afford this game.
[dreamy music playing]
Something I wasn't really aware of as a child
was that how actually white the board game industry was.
It wasn't actually 'til many years later
when I put Thug Life out into space that I realized it wasn't just,
you know, white people playing board games.
It was American and European white culture that were defining the games.
As amazing as the gaming renaissance has been,
I have never been more aware of not being a white person
than this journey that kind of Thug Life took me on.
[Luke] Yeah, yeah, we have a diversity problem in tabletop games.
A puzzling diversity problem because there's no real like deep-seeded cultural bias
or like weird made-up cultural tradition
around masculinity and game design.
People might be more interested in them
if they felt that they were reflected in them.
I don't think the characters are that diverse
in a lot of strategy board games.
Like my daughters, I have many daughters and I got a kids' game one time,
and there was four boy characters and one girl.
And my girls said, "Why is there only one girl character?"
And I said, "I don't know, a lot of my games are like that."
Say, take Clue, for example, all the characters are white.
In fact, there's a Mrs. White in there.
When you open up a box of miniatures
and all you have is white characters,
you're basically telling a lot of people
that you're not part of this experience.
[Jason] Seeing Star Trek as a kid, I thought it was neat that there was like, you know,
a black chick on the spaceship, there was an Asian guy on the spaceship.
You know, but always in my brain,
and the running joke with me and my friends
was like I guess Mexicans never made it to space.
'cause as inclusive as that is and as cool as it was,
Star Trek's one of my favorite shows of all time, you can't ever do it all, right?
There's someone saying, "Hey, how come there's no Portuguese guy on that ship?" Right?
We're better at it than we even were one year ago
and I think, next year, we'll be better to a greater degree than we are this year.
And that's coming from people being...
People in publishing, like myself and my peers,
and people who care about growing the market beyond our segment right now.
Another thing that we are doing, and what I hope to do,
is that we're just hiring, naturally,
hiring more people of greater demographics
so that it is becoming a little bit more natural
and not part of our implicit bias.
If people aren't actively looking for new designers
who maybe represent different points of view,
different classes, different ethnicities,
different languages, different regions of the world
that are not known for making games,
we have to be curious about finding new voices.
[Eric] So, I get asked a lot about Kickstarter.
It closed the divide between creator and fan,
in a way that no other medium has before, right?
As, in my opinion, as profound as the democratization of like music tools, right?
For people to be able to make like homemade,
home studio recordings and put it on YouTube.
It's almost that much of a seismic shift.
[Elan] Crowdfunding enables the actual market to decide.
It allows anybody to try their hand at a game,
and the good ones succeed and the bad ones fail,
but we get so many more out the door.
It's not, "Here's a thousand, pick two."
It's, "Here's a thousand, pick a thousand."
Kickstarter operates really well in terms of outsiders or independents
or people who are taking a risk.
You know people who are outside of the kinda normal chain of distribution
or manufacturing or publishing that can come here, to Kickstarter, and say,
"You know what, I think I have a good idea
and, you know, I think I know who would like it."
You now have this outlet of Kickstarter that you can go out and you can enter your game,
which is fine, you will sell, you know,
a good game that's well marketed will probably sell, you know, 800 to 1200 copies,
and almost to a person that's gonna be the end of that game.
You have a calling card that you can use and say, "Hey, I did this game,"
but all you've done is put another game
that will now be an orphan into the marketplace
and there's no plan for you to continue to market that game
for a couple of more years.
No plan for you to reprint that game on your own
with the profits that you've made off the first round of the game.
There's a ton more games that exist, of course,
because the vetting process of publishers,
the gatekeeping of the traditional publisher model can be circumvented now,
and has been proven financially viable for many creators.
Of course, the absence of that vetting process
means that it's a little bit more risky for the player, for the consumer, right?
I don't know if this game's been play-tested.
I don't know if it's been put through its development paces. I'm taking a chance.
[dreamy music playing]
[Charlie] Bink Inc. is... I don't know, I mean, I'm selling the games.
I'd like to continue it. I have no idea where I'm at right now.
There was definitely a moment where I just realized I needed to get a job.
The selling games thing wasn't paying all the bills,
so I needed to get back in the working world,
make some money, so I can continue to sell the games.
There was a time when a very prestigious game company
was flat out going to buy Trekking. It wasn't a question.
All I had to do was say yes.
And there was a big family disagreement about it.
I was the only one that wanted to do it.
My parents were very much against it.
He did have an offer, but the game is still pretty young.
And we felt that it still had a lot more potential, and why sell it now?
[John] Let's see what happens with it.
[Charlie] I need this to be a source of income.
I need it to grow like faster is always better.
Um, I think their perspective is, you know,
we need to maintain the legacy and we need to not sell the farm.
[John] Well, it would be like selling off your child.
I mean, we gave birth to this thing as a family,
and then just to hand the game to somebody else who really is more...
Would be more into it from a monetary standpoint than...
I mean, we're emotionally attached to it.
[Charlie] I definitely tell people now...
Really think about it before you start a family business 'cause it's not something...
It's not like a normal business.
[Jerry] I like the discovery of new games.
I like when we find an opportunity, whether it is a person
who has given us a game that is very rough
and we can try to work with that vision to see it to the end,
and then, to add in the graphic design
and the artwork and how it all fits in a box.
That whole process, I absolutely am just fanatic about.
I love that part of the business.
Working with publishers might seem frustrating
because especially when you're starting,
you're young, you're impulsive, you're excitable,
you feel like you know everything.
You've learned all the lessons you need to know.
Um... and you've got this brilliant thing that you gotta put out
and publisher is kinda standing in the way of your unbridled genius.
[Jerry] We really ask that, uh, that when we see new games that come in that are pitched to us,
are we dealing with people who are being flexible or not?
I think every new designer should get their ass kicked by a publisher.
I'm put in the unenviable position
of basically people coming to me and saying, "This is my grandchild."
And I say, "Well, let me tell you about your grandchild."
That their brilliant design is crap...
Eyebrows are a little funny...
That their ideas are not nearly as brilliant as they think they are...
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with the way the nose is bent...
In two seconds, somebody with experience
can show you the problem you've been working on for years
is actually a problem rather than the solution you've sort of glommed onto.
And I'm not sure that arms gonna give, you know, it's kinda frustrating,
but ultimately, my job is to be as critical as I can,
to make sure that out of the probably four to five hundred designs
that we see over the course of a year,
the four that we intend to move forward on and publish,
which, of course, includes all of our professional designers
and all of the people that we've worked with before,
you know, we find absolutely the best fit for game
and for audience and for marketing purposes that we can.
Publishers don't have the weaknesses of an individual
trying to bring their game to the marketplace.
[Jerry] They're not gonna be an expert in finance, legal, graphic design,
editing, artwork, sales management, warehousing, logistics.
I would never take the publishing experience away from a new designer
because it feels like a crucible you have to go to... Go through.
I think that not every designer needs a publisher,
but they won't find that out until you've gone through the test.
[light music playing]
[man 1] Catan is a board game with global appeal.
Introduced in 1995, it sold nearly 30 million copies worldwide
and has been translated in over 40 languages.
What is the game you're nuts about?
Settlers of Catan!
-Settlers of Catan! -That's a good one.
[Matt] I think my first experience
with Settlers of Catan was in 1995 at Gen Con.
My first time playing Catan, um, was glorious.
It kind of opened my eyes to like,
"Oh, this is what I've been looking for."
I played a lot of games prior that, really,
I just kind of found disappointing.
It didn't really scratch the itch in the same way that Catan did.
It was a phenomenon. It was a sensation when it came over.
[Steve] So, Catan is this iconic brand, right?
It's a foundational game, and by that,
I mean, it's something that has really.
It's at the core root of the tabletop game experience.
It's always been a very successful game,
but over especially like maybe the last five to eight years,
you've seen this kind of new momentum.
[light music playing]
[Guido] My dad was always inspired by stories.
That was always the foundation for game design,
and so at a very early age, like he always read stories to us.
And like he would, you know, sit on a train ride
and he would sort of look out of the window
and he's probably thinking about, you know, some story.
And with Catan particularly, it was Vikings.
He just immersed himself in that kind of fantasy
and that kind of story, and that gave birth to the game.
That was the foundation of the Catan game.
[Benjamin] Klaus always put a magazine,
like a comic, next to my place, when we tested games.
And he realized that I didn't like the game, when I was grabbing
for the magazine and started reading during play.
And that never happened with Catan.
My dad, before he started doing game development, he ran his father's business.
He was a dental technician.
They had a dental lab, and it was a tough job running that business.
[Guido] It wasn't his passion.
He liked that work, but like it wasn't his passion,
and so like as a way to take refuge and to do something,
like have a creative outlet, he started game design.
And so, that hobby grew more seriously,
and then at some point, like, he started to win some awards,
and that encouraged him to keep on going
and, eventually, turn into a full-time profession.
He didn't expect it to catch on to that extent because it was...
We figured it would be successful, but not like to that scale.
It's been really amazing like my dad like is in Germany,
and he's doing a lot of the development.
And like I... early on, I worked with our publisher here,
and then my brother Benjamin is... He can do both,
he does the development and also the business part.
So, the three of us really complement each other,
and like we have a really great working relationship.
And it's family and business. It's all really one, and so we're very...
I feel very blessed to have that setup.
The more exciting part of the job is now developing games together with Klaus.
For two or three years,
we're like developing the new products together.
I would never have approached both of them
if I didn't think that we would get along, so that was the basis.
And now working together with them
even made our relationship stronger.
To have something, like, every morning when you get up
and then you know you're working on something
that you're passionate about with your family...
It's really, um, we feel extremely grateful
and lucky to be in that situation.
[light music playing]
[Scott] So, Haunted Mansion is a very special place in our household.
It's my favorite and my wife's favorite attraction at Disneyland Park.
It was the place that I proposed to my wife.
I wanted to do it in a place that I knew wouldn't get torn down
after a whole bunch of years, so I said, oh, Haunted Mansion is a place we both like.
We both like going to Disneyland.
We've both been many, many, many times,
and so, I decided I was going to propose to her in the Haunted Mansion.
[Scott] I'm sure my wife feels I have too many games.
She likes that I like to play them.
She's always very good about letting me go off and play games with friends.
Now my son is a little more game to play board games.
Now he's more of a video gamer than a board gamer,
but he will go with me sometimes to some of the local conventions,
Strategicon, and, um, we'll play games like Munchkin or X-Wing or things like that.
I have tried for many years to get my daughter to play board games with me.
A few years ago, she told me she doesn't play board games. She doesn't like them.
Although she recently had a birthday, and what did they do? They played card games.
They played Uno; they played Cards Against Humanity;
they played one of my prototypes,
so maybe she's coming around, I don't know.
We play a lot of games, I guess. A lot of pretty good variety, I guess.
I shouldn't complain. But they won't play Star Wars games with me.
[Evelyn] No... they're boring!
[sighs]
[Evelyn] They take six hours.
There's nothing wrong with a good six-hour game.
So, when Evelyn was like four years old,
she came up to me with a drawing, and I said,
"Oh, it's a lovely drawing, Evelyn."
And she said, "It's not a drawing, Dad, it's a game."
And I said, "Alright, well, what kind of game is this."
And she said, "Well, it was a picture of a castle
and there was a princess in like one of the windows,
and she says, "Well you're a prince
and you climb up the castle and then you go save the princess and you give her a kiss."
And I'm like, "It's not a bad idea for a game."
So, this is the art of the game that she's working on.
So, she's doing these different illustrations, and, you know, based on my design,
but she's got a really great style, I think.
And it's also, I just think it's fun that she's...
My daughter's contributing the art.
Mm-Hm.
$750.
Well, actually, he has the family discount
because I'm charging him $10 for each colored picture, but my actual rate is $30, so...
-Getting a heck of a deal. -Mm-Hm.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
I assume your rate will go up with the next project.
It could.
[upbeat music playing]
[Nashra] So my parents have played the game and they really like it.
They've had a good time, and they think it's a funny game about things
that have actually happened.
They can relate to some of those cards themselves.
I knew what arranged marriages were when I was four or five years old
because every single person around me had an arranged marriage.
However, watching any movies, which were Western movies, I was like,
"Wait, but those guys met each other, they went on a date.
Mom, Dad, you didn't do that.
You didn't even meet each other 'til the day of your engagement."
I was a very stubborn child.
I am still very stubborn, and also a hopeless romantic.
And I was like, "Nope, not happening.
I'm going to do whatever it takes to fight my way out of it."
[light music playing]
So, initially, I just wanted it to be a way to get my frustration out
and to write it all down.
You know, write out all the points that anger me.
And then as I started to make it, when I was play-testing it,
some of my Western friends started to play it, and found the examples so funny.
Someone was on the floor in fits of laughter,
like, "Oh, my God, this is unreal.
And I'm like, "No, that's actually based off of something that, you know, happens."
And he couldn't believe that, which is what got him
to start thinking and talking to me more about what the society is like.
And then I realized how powerful it could be
that it could really serve as a platform
for people to be able to discuss this issue.
I am making it for all the women in Pakistan
that have been forced into an arranged marriage.
For the women that believe that they don't have a choice
because this was very difficult for me to publish it and get it out to the world.
It's been very controversial. I have received messages from people like,
"Oh, enjoy your fame while it lasts
because when you come home, you're gonna be dealing with the consequences of it,"
and it's gonna be difficult.
I've spoken out about a lot of things
that people don't want to discuss,
but I am hoping that with this game,
someone else will be inspired to be like, "No, I can break free, too."
[light music playing]
And even if it affects one person,
that's good, that's still one life.
That's why I'm always trying to create work
that can change the way people think about things
or talk about issues that are present.
Because as corny as it sounds, I do want to make the world a better place.
And I think that art is very powerful
and, even though, everyone says, you know,
"I want to use my work to make a difference,"
does everyone really do that?
And if you're presented with the opportunity to do it, you should jump on it.
[light music playing]
Costs of the materials for your game will affect or should affect
choices you make in designing a game.
There's not a lot of money to be made in tabletop gaming.
Um, you know, it's that old saying,
how do you take a big fortune and make it a small one?
You know, go into tabletop gaming.
Between the sizes that you choose for your components
or the weight of your overall game
you're going to make a lot of choices, um,
about the game and even the game design to keep your costs down,
so that you can make something that actually can generate some money.
[calm music playing]
The biggest challenges that you have with board game production
is if you source from twenty different suppliers' components for one game.
It starts with printed sheets, goes over the instruction sheet,
wooden pieces, plastic components, whatever's in the game.
You need to have everything in place at the right time and the right quantity.
For this game, we definitely have more than ten suppliers
for the different components.
Start with the box, you have a printed sheet and you have the board itself.
So, it's already two suppliers.
You have the board of the playing cards,
you have the printable playing cards,
cello-wrapping of the playing cards, which is three suppliers.
The plastic components in this game are coming from one supplier.
The wooden pieces are coming from a different supplier.
The vacuum tray, the instruction sheet,
the game board that we produce in-house.
The board itself, different supplier
than the other board that we use for the boxes.
We have the tape that we put on the board, and we have the printed sheets.
For a game like that, if we go through every component in detail,
we, for sure, have at least fifteen different suppliers.
[light music playing]
[Nashra] I'm back in Pakistan and I'm dealing with the production of the game.
I wanted to get the game made in Pakistan
because I want to support the local economy,
however, it's made it a lot more difficult.
Customs clearance has also become a lot more difficult
because, now, they're looking for drugs
inside my game for some reason.
So, the rule book which is made out of double layers of paper
was ripped apart.
And, you know, they were poking holes in it just to find the drugs.
It's so sad to see all my efforts ripped apart.
When I got back to Pakistan, I went to my cousin's wedding,
and these aunties that normally loved me, hugged me, wanted me to marry their sons
were now rolling their eyes at me, kind of sitting in a corner
and whispering every time I walked by.
And it was a very hostile environment,
and they would come up and be like,
"Oh, Beta, we heard about your game."
And it was just the most disapproving look,
but I just smiled politely and walked away
because I did not have the energy to deal with them.
And, quite frankly, I'm relieved that they no longer want me to marry their sons.
I have been working on my O-1 Visa full time, and I really hope I get it.
I'm just... My fingers are crossed.
Everyone's hoping and praying for me, and if, hopefully, I do get it,
I do want to move back to New York.
[mellow music playing]
[Jason] In the second Kickstarter launch, we made the game cheaper.
We've learned a lot more about what gamers do and don't want.
We created a different sort of approach to the components.
We're using these really well-produced standees.
The fact that the people's hands that we really wanted to put the game in
couldn't afford it and...
And that was a very sobering sort of conversation
because it stood contrary to a lot of the things
that we initially sought out to do in the game.
Yes, I would love to have created a miniatures experience for a lot of these kids.
At the end of the day,
I think the gateway that the game is creating now is way better.
There's almost no version of this where we don't fund.
I'm not a marketing person or a business person,
so I just thought, you know, this game is about national parks,
it needs to be made in America.
[Charlie] Making anything in America is very expensive,
and so it made that first print run, which did sell out,
it made it hard to make any money off of.
I had to make a decision, once I was sort of running out of the first print run,
am I going to continue making this game?
And if I do, do I actually want to, you know, buy some groceries with it?
I have to go to a Chinese manufacturer.
Since I did my second print run with China,
I am making about a little more than three times as much per copy.
So, it's significant.
Being able to get the unit price per game low,
obviously, it helps me selling the game
or it helps, you know, the publisher selling the game,
but it actually helps the consumer also.
You know a game that would maybe cost $60 suddenly costs $40,
and those tiers make a huge difference for people's buying habits,
which, of course, then also, get them to play the game which lets them enjoy the game.
It gets it out there more.
I was very worried the first time around
that if the game wasn't made in America
that customers would not like that.
So, um... But I've been selling it a lot ever since,
and actually, only one time ever, this one lady came up to me.
Now, this was before the second printing.
This was when I was still selling the American edition,
and she came up, she looked at the game,
and she sort of eyed me suspiciously and said, "Where was this made?"
I said, "It was made in America."
She goes, "Oh, okay." Then she just walked away.
She didn't buy the game.
[clatters]
There's a convention season and then there's a con circuit,
but conventions, especially pop culture conventions
where you see a hundred thousand people
and it looks, "Oh, look how exciting that looks,"
that is a real expensive way to make money.
[upbeat music playing]
[Elan] We take the game to conferences all the time,
and the problem with conferences is it's really hard to stand out.
In previous years what we've done is
we've printed out giant decks of cards,
like six-foot tall versions of cards that take four people to lift,
uh, so that we can play with people
and stand out in the noise of a conference.
[man 2] [INAUDIBLE] This is it.
This could be the end of the game.
[all scream]
This year for conference season,
uh, we are building a giant Exploding Kittens vending machine
that we call the Exploding Kittens dispenser.
[Elan] It's huge and the trick to this
is it's absolutely human powered.
[upbeat music playing]
We had to register as a grocery store,
in order to get all this wholesale produce.
[upbeat music playing]
Watermelons and potatoes and onions and pineapples
and all kinds of insane things to spit out the machine,
when you push that random button.
[upbeat music playing]
[chuckles] Yeah, we actually tried.
-[man 3] Really? -The problem is, we're not allowed
to bring live animals on to the conference floor.
So, we thought it would be hilarious to give out real kittens,
and take them back 'cause we don't want to stick people
with essentially, adopting a cat,
uh, but they won't even let them into the conference.
[overlapping chatter]
[Scott] Uh, when I was eight years old, I read Dragon Magazine,
and in the back of Dragon Magazine
there was an ad for a conference called Gen Con.
And for years, I dreamt about going to Gen Con.
I never went. It took me a long time to get there.
[upbeat music playing]
[Charlie] What I love most about Gen Con is, honestly, the spectacle.
It's a great convention floor.
You go to enough Comic Cons and you go, "This is just a flea market."
But what I love about game cons is people are there to actually do things.
[Charlie] They're there to actually play games.
And I've met friends that I stay in touch with
just because I met them at a table at a game con,
and that's never happened to me at a Comic Con.
What am I looking forward to most at Gen Con?
Well, seeing the fans.
Meeting a lot of friends that I know from past years,
meeting a lot of people for the first time
who are really excited to play our games.
-This is our first year. -Yeah.
-So, I'm kinda excited. -Yeah.
Games just always bring the family together.
[woman 2] They make us laugh and that's just one thing
that we've instilled in our family's lives is game night.
It's actually better. Like it's more than I thought.
-It's a lot of fun. -Yeah, it's amazing.
The thing about Gen Con is really that makes it so interesting
is the level of excitement.
It's the biggest game convention in the world for tabletop gaming.
There's more people who come here than anywhere else.
This year, they sold out,
and it's just every game publisher of any note comes here.
[Tom] There's designers, there's people,
all over the place just so much going on.
So that's at hype level. The biggest games of the year are often released here.
It is the event of the summer. It's Christmas in August.
Once I started getting into tabletop gaming and I did some research
about where was the best place to meet publishers, I always heard Gen Con.
If you have a game you want to sell, go to Gen Con.
[quirky music playing]
[Scott] And I sent you the rules...
[Zev] Uh, yep, I read the rules and everything, too, yeah.
[Scott] So it's a very simple card game, but horror-themed.
I'm a big fan of like The Haunted Mansion and Disney,
so I wanted to create something that was scary
but not blood and gore and anything like that.
I like the puzzle aspect.
I like the fact that you play cooperatively, competitively, and solo.
Yeah, this would be something I'd love to take back and test with my group.
Well then, thank you very much.
-I appreciate you taking the time. -My pleasure.
[quirky music playing]
So this was, this game was kind of derived
from my love for The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
The ghosts are going to float in, so as we play around,
we're going to get a hand of three cards.
[quirky music playing]
Actually, I have one other really simple card game.
All the art is done by me and my daughter.
I think it went really well. The fact that they were willing to spend that much time with me
is a really good sign.
The fact that they wanted to see everything that I had
was amazing experience
because I brought a lot of diverse games with me to the show,
and I went in there expecting to only pitch maybe one or two games.
And the fact that they wanted to see everything, was a really nice surprise.
So a lot of his stuff is relatively original, which is good.
Um, I like the fact that he has a little story
behind the games that he's pitching.
You know, I don't have any signed contract.
I'm not going away with any sort of handshake or guarantee,
but right now, I'm feeling really positive about this show.
[upbeat music playing]
[Jerry] Gen Con is the largest convention in North America,
but Essen Spiel is the largest convention for Europe.
[Jerry] We've seen a lot of games come over from Europe because I think, you know,
the gaming community in Europe was much stronger than the U.S.
Um, and I think Europe really showed people in North America how innovative a game could be,
and not just the standard fare that's been out, you know, year over year.
[traffic noises]
[Reiner] The Spiel in Essen, this convention is very special
because it brings a lot of people, around 150,000, together.
It's amazing to see people from all across Europe,
all across the world coming together to play tabletop games.
[upbeat music playing]
[Reiner] And these are not just the gamers who play games every day,
these are families, these are school classes, and it brings joy together,
in a big, big forum of seeing so many people playing
that there are so many other people who are interested.
[upbeat music playing]
Uh, it's huge and it's full of board games, and just go with a random stranger, play a game,
and have big fun with it.
[Rindert] The great thing about Essen is that
it's a convention for everyone, I would say.
Families... Grandparents, gamers, geeks, casual gamers,
uh, beginners, everyone gathers here.
And there is a game for everyone.
We are really looking forward, each year, to come here to Essen
because as you can see around, it's full, it's packed.
Board games is a big thing, since ages here in Germany,
and the whole fair reflects this.
If you're arriving at Spiel and you haven't been here before then, for me,
it's some of the biggest conference halls I've been in ever.
And you walk in and you almost can't see the end of the hall.
[Kerstin] It's really key for us to be here
and to get the latest trends, reactions on our games here.
[Reiner] It also brings a focus for the press.
It brings a focus for the journalists,
and that means the message of "we are playing games"
gets really carried out into the world, into the country,
and that's good for the culture of gaming.
And that's also a very special part of this convention.
If the world doesn't play games, then we don't need any game designers anymore,
and the world would be certainly a much sadder place.
[car passes by]
[Jason] There's a local store, Game Empire,
uh, run by this great dude named Chuck.
He's been running... has been in the game for a hundred years.
And he was talking to me about there's only two awards that matter, on your box.
There's Spiel des Jahres and there's also, um, the Mensa award. Right?
Um, and if it's not one of those two awards it doesn't matter. Keep it off your box.
I think the award is great because it gets people really focused on quality,
and, uh, I don't know...
When you see that seal on the box, it's something special.
I saw it on Settlers of Catan, you know,
and that was a big moment for me when I started playing that.
[foreign language]
Welcome everybody.
[Reiner] The Spiel des Jahres in Germany is one of the most,
if not the most important awards you can get in the gaming industry.
There are three selected every year.
One is for the children and one is now more for the gamers.
One is for the families and there is a list of nominees.
Three and then, like for the Oscars, you go there,
and if you're lucky, you are one of the better three,
one of the luckier three,
and you win the Game of the Year.
The criteria is mostly the experience that the game can create,
of course, also, hardware, the design, the rules are important,
but, mostly, it's just the, uh, experiences.
The Game of the Year is actually decided by a jury of journalists
who are very knowledgeable about games, who write a lot about games,
and who then sit together until the white smoke comes up
and they have decided which one is the Game of the Year.
There's people who say we're like the Oscars of the board games.
It's very important in Europe, in Germany.
It's just something that's been put in front of me.
And it's been so close that it's just sort of this fun thing to kind of aspire to
So, I think it gets a certain amount of recognition, and you get sales,
and then you get this wooden popple,
which looks like it'd be fun to hold.
I haven't touched it because I don't want to ruin it.
[laughs]
So, when I won the Spiel des Jahres with Hanabi,
I was a little confused because it was the first time
they gave it to a very small game,
so I was like, "Oh, did they really give it to us? Okay, oh, that's nice."
It was one of the stressful moments of my life
and I have three kids, I know stress.
And, uh, yeah, it was... It's indescribable.
I... just remember grinning a lot
and being really happy and amazed.
Scary. Then it was, like, really surprised, and then you're really glad,
and then it was amazing.
[Antoine] The success was huge, and I quit my day job.
I was a schoolteacher by then, so I liked it, but I wanted to design games full time.
The feeling was spectacular because we had a lot of financial problems at this time.
And um, this was a big help.
The feeling was, of course, very nice.
I wasn't present at the awards ceremony
because I, at that time, was in America and stuck in a little snowstorm.
And I was thinking whether I should next time not go there
because maybe that's a better luck than going there all the time
and not getting the Game of the Year.
I would like to segue to Reiner Knizia to say that everybody knows
he's unbelievably prolific.
He invented many of the mechanics that a lot of designers use.
He was one of the first guys that made a career out of business.
He's the consummate businessman.
Of course, he's a great game designer,
but he built a business out of being nothing but a creative designer,
in a time when nobody's even heard of that.
Nobody made a living doing this.
He just made game after game after game after game.
The quality was amazing and excellent.
The industry changes. The games we are designing today are different from the games
we decided to design in the '90s.
What is relevant to people is different,
therefore, what excites them is different.
And I think one of the bigger challenges in a long career is to remain relevant
and not just stay with your old tools.
And I think one of the indicators
if you're still relevant is being nominated or winning awards.
It's crazy to be nominated. It's very big.
It's what I dreamt of all the time, so yeah...
[light music playing]
[camera shutter clicks]
[foreign language]
King Domino!
[applause]
[dramatic music playing]
He's done so much for this industry. He's always on every fair.
He's always working, explaining his games to other people,
so I think it's really important for the industry,
so I was very happy that at last he gets this award. Yeah.
[laughs]
[dramatic music playing]
People say, uh, you sell a lot of games after you win.
I mean, uh, we are not allowed to talk about numbers,
but we can say it's at least 200,00 that you will make in the next Christmas selling.
If a game wins the Spiel des Jahres, that Christmas in Germany,
it sells two-or-three hundred thousand copies.
And then, you expect it has some kind of a life after that.
A lot of people, they buy games as gifts at Christmas time
and they don't know about which games are the good ones.
And so over the years, they trusted this association as much
that they just go into the stores and buy the game.
[light music playing]
So you asked me, what can a game designer expect
when they publish one, two, or three games,
and how financially sound is that going to be?
My answer is, if that's the question you want to ask,
don't be a game designer.
The average royalty rate in our industry
is between three and ten percent.
So, what happens is if you license a game to a publisher,
let's say you get a 5% royalty 'cause that's just easy to figure out.
And your game's gonna sell for $20, again, 'cause it's easy math.
So, I go to the store and I buy your game for $20.
How much money do you get?
Well, the store gets $10 'cause that's their profit on it,
and the publisher gets $10.
And they are going to give you 5% of that $10,
so they're going to give you 50 cents for a $20 game.
You just can't expect that there's going to be a lot of money initially.
It's gonna grow as the game grows, but it's gonna start very small.
I think if you do it for the money,
you will not become a successful game designer
and you will not become a successful author.
You need to be prepared to put a lot of energy in,
and you need to be intrinsically motivated because you want to do it.
You want to hold the box. You want to say, "I made this, I made this..."
I hate to even say the word "product," I think that lessens it,
but like I made this kind of piece of art that everyone can enjoy.
One has to be a realistic. Not every game is a highflier.
Everybody knows it's like in the movie industry.
They say you make ten movies and eight of them lose money
and one just earns what it costs,
and the tenth has to earn it all.
The problem is you never know which one is the tenth,
and it's the same with the games.
[Scott] Uh, I've been looking forward to this moment, um, for a long time.
Um, all I really wanted is this game to be real, and here it is.
It's real, it's on the shelf, it exists as a thing for people to buy,
and, uh, it's really cool.
I, um, I really, um, I'm really proud that it's here
amongst all these other games that I really like playing.
And now other people can come and play it and buy it.
So, the story goes that George Lucas went to King Features,
the guys who own Flash Gordon, and said,
"Hey, I'd love to make a movie of Flash Gordon,"
and they said, "Nope, you can't do that."
And so, George says, "Alright, I'm going to make my own damn Flash Gordon,"
and he went off and made Star Wars.
And... I wouldn't be lying if that didn't inspire me in the long run
to make my own damn Star Wars,
and that's Rayguns and Rocketships.
So, you know, who knows, if anybody wants to make a movie of Rayguns and Rocketships,
give me a call.
[laughs]
'Cause then they'll make their own damn thing. No, I want... I want...
I can see Rayguns and Rocketships existing as a movie, right?
I have big plans for Rayguns and Rocketships.
The question is...
[sighs] ...will people buy it and will they be enthusiastic about it?
And if they are, then great, then we're off and running,
and it means, hopefully, expansions and all types of good stuff.
And then, hopefully, it will grow.
Hopefully, it will grow into bigger and better
and more interesting versions of the game
and of the story and of the universe
because that's what got me really excited
about making Rayguns and Rocketships is I got to...
I'm making a universe, a galaxy from scratch, and it's a lot of fun.
[Charlie] Once we were almost out of the first edition,
I was personally feeling like I didn't want to reprint the game, unless I did a nice update,
clean up some of the stuff I wasn't happy with,
cut out all the extra fat and make it exactly the game
that will make my customer the happiest.
Basically, I wanted to make a second edition.
My parents, they were happy with the pace it was selling.
It was running out, but this isn't sustainable, ordering another run of the game
the way we're doing it now isn't going to fix anything.
Something needs to change big, if it's worth continuing to do this
is to try to make a business out of it.
Months and months later, an opportunity kind of presented itself
where I could do a second edition with another company.
I was working another job for a while,
and then I, just sort of by happenstance, met the partner that I have now.
He's an Amazon seller.
He's been in the game industry for a while,
and he wanted to start publishing.
And so, we decided, we kind of met up and decided, let's start Underdog Games.
And our first product is the second edition of Trekking.
It just seemed like the perfect time
to just rekindle it right then and there.
The new model for Trekking: Second Edition,
we finally got serious about Amazon.com.
Sort of investing more in web sales and advertising online,
and the reactions have been night and day different.
We've been selling a ton of them.
We did an initial print run of 9000 copies of Trekking: Second Edition
and within three months it was all out.
We had to reprint again, so there's already a second printing of the Second Edition,
and we've just been trying to get it out to more and more people.
And, hopefully, next year, we'll actually get into retail stores.
I think my parents' reaction had I sold the game, they might've been disappointed,
but I, honestly, think they are looking for my best interests
and they have a longer view than I have.
Um, and, uh, I have to thank them for that.
There are some things that I think I see way more clearly than they do,
and, um, I have to say that the decision not to sell
was something they saw a lot more clearly than I did.
I'm happy that I did it as a family
because I did not have the tools or the resources to do it alone.
[light music playing]
The main thing that I want is to be in this industry.
I want this to be...
I want it to be my resumÃÂ© that I am in the game industry.
"Oh, Charlie Bink?" "Yeah, he's in the game industry."
And so, wherever I end up or whatever I end up doing,
I wanted to be in this industry, so...
I think I'm on my way.
I think I'm crawling in that direction.
[light music playing]
We funded!
So, we just finished the Kickstarter,
and, uh, it was kind of a crazy ride.
Had a really interesting time.
I mean, there was a lot of results that we were expecting
and there was definitely a lot of surprises.
A bittersweet journey throughout, but at the end of the day,
it was extremely positive and we actually were able to connect
with a pretty excited crew of backers.
So, by making our game more affordable and by using standees,
our goal was to make it accessible to the audience
that the game was, not necessarily originally intended for,
but that we wanted to bring into the gaming space.
You know, it's kind of like a kind of love letter to the streets,
now they can have it, too.
We'd always asked ourselves many, many times,
"Is this too much? Is this too far?"
And in every case, after listening to critics
and after really thinking about what we are doing,
our answer was always, "No, really this isn't far enough."
We're going right to the edge, looking down,
and it's awesome like we really like the view here.
We didn't want to do something that had already been done in the space before.
We didn't want to do anything that was untrue to our artistic vision,
to our design vision, and to the kind of thematic core of the game.
The name itself says it all.
If you're not trying to create this sort of street life experience,
the game is called Thug Life. Why even bother?
[light music playing]
[train rumbling]
I'm back in New York.
[Nashra] For the past year, I have been traveling,
speaking at places such as human rights conventions, game design conferences,
women's empowerment events,
and I've gotten the opportunity to do all of this because of my game.
I've also come back to America
because the visa that I got was based off of this game.
And now I am pursuing my career.
I'm living the lovely freelance life
doing whatever it is I want to do,
and it's all 'cause of Arranged!
So now that I finally don't have this pressure, I don't have this timeline
that has been provided to me by society,
I am pursuing my career and I'm at my own pace.
I'm doing it if and when it feels right for me,
and I'm not rushed by this deadline of turning 26 and having to get married.
After I released this game, all the proposals stopped.
And my dad even said, "You wanted to make sure you wouldn't get married
and now you've done that."
A lot of girls from India have reached out to me
to thank me for releasing the game
because it has given them a platform
to discuss this topic with their parents.
They have either played it with their parents
or even just shown them articles and been like,
"Look, here is this girl who's out there pursuing her career
and doing all these great things,
why won't you let us do the same?"
So, it's definitely been an amazing feeling
to know that I have helped change people's lives.
[light music playing]
What's most important in any creative endeavor is creation.
You actually have to build the things.
You actually have to try the experiments.
You actually have to talk to the people
and get as much creative output as you can out there into the world.
99% of them are going to suck.
Probably in your first try, a 100% of them are going to suck,
but there's always little nuggets that you learn from, that you can grab from,
that you can pull from various things that you've tried,
bolt them together in a new way, and try a hundred more things.
And those are all going to fail, too,
but you'll continue to run through that process
over and over and over again, um,
until something good comes out
and that something good is the result
of the entirety of your creative output.
And that's exactly what you should be presenting to the world,
and that's what you should be striving to present to the world every single day.
[dreamy music playing]
[mellow music playing]
[dreamy music playing]
[mellow music playing]