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At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines to tease out the habits routines lessons learned and so on that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today was a blast. We cover a lot that can be applied to life,
business, thinking, game design, and a hundred other things. A lot of tactical advice, a lot of specifics. My guest is Justin Gary. Justin is an award-winning designer, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Stoneblade Entertainment and creator of the Innovative and award-winning Ascension deck-building game series. Prior to designing games, Justin was the youngest ever Magic, the gathering US national champion.
He has studied creativity and applied the principles of design to create dozens of products over his 20 years in the industry for brands that include Marvel World of Warcraft and the Wharton School of Business. Today, he designs consults and teaches creativity around the world as a digital nomad. And there is a lot in between. We get into the weeds and the best way possible in this interview cover a lot of ground, a lot of varied ground. So I hope
and think you will enjoy it. You can find Justin online in many places. Think like a game designer dot com is one such place. And I highly recommend the podcast by the same name on Twitter at Justin underscore Gary. And we will link to everything else linked in stone blade and much more in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast.
And without further ado, please enjoy this extremely, extremely tactical and I found very, very entertaining conversation with Justin Gary.
Justin, it is nice to see you. Very nice to see you again. Yeah, Tim, great to see you again as well. You are at maybe undisclosed, or you could disclose, but you are overseas at the moment. We are across the pond, or many ponds, as it were. I'm glad we were able to make the timing work.
I thought we could begin with magic. So magic, magic, the gathering is a game that I never really became familiar with because I was older guard at that point, Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of the very first editions, but my younger brother, on the other hand,
Really became immersed in magic and actually competed on some level and his friends were just obsessed with magic the gathering so could you please for people who don't have the context explain what magic is and suppose how you became involved and what that trajectory look like.
Magic's a trading card game invented by Richard Garfield what trading card game means is that you can buy it not just like a normal game like monopoly buying a store be a single box here you buy packs of cards like you would baseball cards and each one has different gameplay elements. And the way I like to describe it for people who don't know is it's sort of like a cross between chess and poker where you get to decide what deck of cards you're going to play what pieces you get to play with.
So there's the poker element of I'm drawing a hand of cards and maybe I can bluff what I have and you don't know. And there's the chess element of there's technically once I play those cards, there's tactically ways I use them and kind of battle back and forth. And then of course it has fantasy characters. And so it appeals to people who like Dungeons and Dragons. So you'll be playing wizards and dragons and warriors and stuff like that. And so I first got involved with magic in a pretty funny way actually. So I used to be on a competitive laser tag league.
So I'm a very competitive person by nature. I've been involved in pretty much whatever I do. I'll find some way to compete with it. And in between games of laser tag people were playing this card game that looked really cool. I'd never heard of before. And I watched some play and I was like, OK, what is that?
So okay, so I go to the store and I just buy a pack of cards. And as I mentioned, the cards are totally random. So I just took all the random cards I bought and just went to go play and I got my butt kicked. And of course, okay, you actually have to construct and build your deck and build your strategy. And that helps it come to life. So I came back the next week. And okay, now I play a little better and a little better. And eventually at one point, all the guys from my group, we're all going to go to a state championship tournament. And how old were you at this point? I was 16 years old.
Okay. Yeah. So I was the young kid. So I was like, oh, hey, come along, right? Come on the car ride. And, you know, those are some of my best memories in general, just like, you know, a bunch of guys hanging out, jumping in the car, just talking about games, riding up. And as it turns out, I won that tournament. And so I ended up becoming the state champion. And that got me an invitation to the national championships.
And again, I was not ever taking this sort of seriously. I wasn't even intending to go. In fact, I was supposed to go to debate camp that summer. Yet another thing I was arbitrarily competitive in. And it ended up being my parents couldn't afford to send me that year to debate camp. So last minute, again, my friends were all super supportive here. I ran a tournament at my local game store. They let me run the event.
I collected the entry fees from that tournament. I used that to pay for a plane ticket to fly to Columbus where the US National Championships was happening. I slept on a friend's floor and I was now 17 at this time and I end up winning the US National Championships and that ends up taking me on a career of traveling around the world playing magic for a living. So let's dive into a bunch of things that you mentioned and I was not aware of the debate camp component, the debating piece.
And I have watched debates. I've never been part of a debate team. Could you just explain for folks what a debate competition looks like or a debate as a game per se? What does that look like and why were you good or at least competent at it?
There's a few different categories. I'll just talk about my favorite one, which was called Lincoln Douglas debate at the time. And the basically means that you have a topic that you're debating, say the US should have closer relationships with China, or it's better to sacrifice the good of the, a few for the good of the many or something like that, some topic. And then you would have to pick one side of the argument.
And there's a judge in the room and you have a certain amount of time to make your case, then the other person a certain amount of time to make their case and then you have some time for rebuttal and they have some time for rebuttal and at the end the judge or judges would then decide who won. And there's a coin toss to decide who goes first because that seems like a major advantage.
It varies right so from round to round you'll go first or second and this is sort of how we did it in high school my favorite version of debate was what i did in college which was called parliamentary debate where you could literally make up any topic you wanted and just start talking about it and the other side have to defend the other side and you would just.
play and have fun and try to figure out and convince people that this was the way to go. And it was just, it was such a fun exercise and just persuasion and kind of tactically how you wanted to frame everything. And it became a, yeah, something I really spent quite a bit of time on and really enjoyed and then ended up being very useful for quite a few things later in life. Turns out being able to speak good has value.
So if we look at the Lincoln Douglas format or the parliamentary, I suppose the former is maybe a better example to use here, knowing nothing about it. But how much time do you have to prepare? Once you are assigned or have chosen one side of, let's just say, the US should have closer ties with China and you're either pro or con, how much time do you have to prepare that?
And are you just basically making it up, but you're using the strength of your logic that you construct, even if your assumptions are off to defeat your opponent? How does that work?
So for those formats, the same topic will hold for a while, for like months, like a season. And so you can prepare very much ahead of time. So those formats, then there's other ones like the parliamentary one where you have no idea what you're going to talk about till you start going up there a lot of the times. That was more fun because it was a little bit more extemporaneous. There's varying degrees.
When you have the same topic over and over again, you start to notice common threads about how people will present it. Then you try crazy things. Maybe the US should have closer ties with China and you take a position. Actually, the US should not exist anymore. It should dissolve. You start making arguments around that. You just have to take the argument seriously, in a sense, because the job of the judge is to leave outside their preconceived notions and just
Here what you have to say and so having to think on your feet and react and be able to kind of come up with unique answers and change the flow of things was really quite a bit of fun.
Okay, so Eden, I will move on to everybody listening. I will move on in a moment, but I really want to understand this because I suspect, as you mentioned, that these are threads that tie into other things later, at least some of them. Like these are not isolated skills. And if you're practicing, say the parliamentary style, and you are developing this approach to structured thinking and presenting,
And you don't know what you're going to be speaking about until you really sort of get on the stage. And somebody hands you the mic, it's like a freestyle rap battle. When you get up and then you give your spiel, how do the judges judge? What does that look like? Because presumably they might not know anything about the topic that you're discussing. So they can't really fact check a lot of what you're saying. I would assume. Yeah, that's right. There's no live fact checking in these formats. So you kind of just have to, it's about your persuasive ability.
If I were going to break this down into core skill sets and what the judges are doing, which is also what I'm doing as competitors, anytime my opponent is saying something, I'm writing down their points. I'm breaking them down into concrete notes. I want to make sure that for each point that's brought up, I am addressing it in some key way. A lot of times I can make some broader points that will maybe take out a few of their points. Because you only have a certain amount of time, how efficiently you're able to use that time to both refute
the points that they're saying as well as bring up your own points that are hopefully harder to refute so it becomes a kind of process of being very good at listening and taking notes. Then being able to structure how do you want to set up your replies so that you're gaining time advantage if you will with your persuasive ability to give you more time to make your own row of arguments so that hopefully they don't have time in their thing to properly address and attack everything.
Mm-hmm. Okay, great. So as promised, I'm going to move forward. This is great. I've never been asked about this before, so this is fun. Yeah. Trying to do my job. This is best I can. And returning to magic, so you mentioned that led to all these adventures traveling around the world competing.
What does that mean? Could you explain what that looks like in terms of incentives, stakes, how profitable is it for someone to be a full-time magic player? Imagine it depends on the person, but what does it mean to travel around the world and compete? We're taking this back now, date myself a little bit, but this is 97 when I won the U.S. National Championships, and the core of my career was about the six years from 97 to about 2003.
And that time, there was what was called the Magic Pro Tour, which was put on by the company that made the game as a way to promote it. And they would have millions of dollars of prices available. So at any given tournament, you could win. So my biggest tournament winnings would typically be in the $30,000 range. So a Pro Tour in Houston where I won that or, you know, these different tournaments. So to give you a sense, a first place in one of those tournaments was $30,000-ish.
all the way down till top 32, maybe you get $1,000. And then you'd have to get invited to these tournaments. There'd be maybe 300 people-ish that would get invited. And so I would do a tournament in Prague, then there'd be another one in Sydney, then there'd be another one in Seattle, there'd be another one in Tokyo. And so we've got to literally just meet up. And again, I'm in high school. I'm a teenager, right? So this is just like crazy. It's a lot of money. Oh my God, it's crazy money, right? So I was just like such a fun thing. But when you think about it as an adult, it wasn't
A crazy, crazy amount of money, but it was great at the time. You can't win every tournament. But when I was playing at my peak, it was maybe $80,000 a year I was making. So it's still not. That's no joke. No joke at that time. It was great. I mean, it's how I paid my way to college, better than flipping burgers. I'll put it that way. What was your major in college? I was a philosophy major. How did you choose a philosophy?
Well, as you might guess, I love debating. I mean, I've always been very interested in just sort of talking about the deep questions, right? Trying to get down to the fundamentals of what is interesting and what matters. And I tried a few different majors, you know, history and I was on my path to be a lawyer because my parents are lawyers and that's what I thought I was supposed to do. But I found most classes when I went to them, the job as a student in the class was to regurgitate whatever it was that the professor told you back to them.
and that bore the hell out of me. Whereas in philosophy, the job was to make a reasonable argument. It didn't matter just like in debate, right? It didn't matter what your position was, is can you defend it? Do you have good logic for it? I loved being proven wrong. I loved when I would have, this was a kind of strength and a weakness. I had, I loved debating with people and I loved it. When someone told me something I didn't know or told me, convinced me I was wrong, I was like, that's amazing. That's great.
It took me a very long time to realize most people are not like that. In high school, I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. So I learned to be a little bit more cautious and compassionate in my conversations with people. But I really enjoyed it. And so philosophy let me explore that space of really what matters in the world and what matters to me and really refine my thinking and get challenged on my thinking when I was unclear or fuzzy. I want to mention for people who may not notice this pattern,
that on this podcast, there is disproportionate representation of former philosophy majors. However, that could be severe survivorship bias. I'm sure there are many, many philosophy majors who do not end up on large podcasts. However, it is notable to me, right? You have people who are deeply interested in philosophy who also
end up in these conversations with me. Reid Hoffman would be another example who I'm not sure if he majored in philosophy, but he has taught philosophy and takes it very, very seriously. Why were you comfortable and maybe even invigorated by being proven wrong or converted in that way? Did that come from
being raised in a family of lawyers. Did it come from something else? What contributed to that? Yes, I think there's two factors here. I think one, you're absolutely right. My parents were wonderful in the sense that as a kid, I could argue my way to a later bedtime, or I could argue my way to, hey, if I finish my homework, I can get an extra setting of dessert or whatever. They encouraged if I could kind of debate my way to something, then I could get it. And so it trained me very young.
And similarly, my dad and I, we would be like cutthroat games of monopoly around the kitchen table quite a bit. And I found they did, they reinforced that after the game, what did you learn? If you lost, what did you learn from it? And that's the biggest thing that I credit for certainly my success in magic, and I've tried to apply that.
Everywhere else in my life is that when you lose, which you inevitably are going to lose in life, right? Doesn't matter what is that you look first like, okay, what could I have done differently? How could I have set this up differently so that I wouldn't even be in this position, right? It's easy when you're playing a game like magic, where somebody, your opponent draws a lucky card. You know, it's a one out of 60 that they draw that card and they beat you because of it. And you'd hear in the hallways, other people would be complaining about what's called bad beats, right? I got unlucky. Oh my God.
But the best players wouldn't do that. The best players would say, actually, you know what, if five turns earlier, I had made this different play, it wouldn't have mattered what card they drew at that turn. And that skill set was something that was drilled into me. And it's something I definitely credit quite a bit of success across a variety of fields.
This might seem like a strange question, but do magic competitors or did they study games in the way that chess players study historic games of chess where those moves and decisions are recorded in some way? I'm not sure if it lends itself to that.
Oh, it absolutely does. And people would break these things down. So again, we're going to take ourselves in the way back machine, right? 97, 98. This will era. The internet is still relatively new, right? So relatively light. And so people would go to what the time is called the magic dojo, which you can now find like the internet archives.
and it was where everybody would post tournament reports of okay here's what i played here's what happened and people would comment on them and break down on you know kind of more classic bulletin board style and that's where the core of magic strategy and discussion started to form now there's dozens of sites and tons of places where you can find this but it was a.
You know unlike with chess where people been doing this strategy and breaking down games for hundreds of years magics 30 years old or whatever in that the time it was very new and so you got to see the origins of these strategies come together and break down individual games and individual moves and.
They became obsessed. If you look at my old college notebooks, they are covered in magic deck ideas and scribbles and at least as much as there are notes about philosophy or whatever it was supposed to be studying. What were the main innovations if you had to try to.
Identify some game design elements that led to or contributed to magic becoming such a global phenomenon. What would you say were the innovations i mean there's definitely the slot machine like.
Dopamine potential of buying these packs just like buying baseball cards, right? But what else is there in the game that made it at least have the possibility of exploding the way that it did? There's a lot of factors. There's kind of a deep answer, but we have long-form podcasts. So if you don't like deep answers, yeah.
So take all the time you want. I teach game design and when there's sort of five major categories of like what people are looking for out of games and magic hits all of them in ways. So I'll talk about the categories first and I'll talk about why magic succeeds in such an incredible way. So the first is immersion. You're looking for certain experiences or you're looking to tell craft a story. The second is connection, right? You're looking to socialize. You want to help other people. You want to kind of connect with others.
The third is aspiration. This can be in competition. This can be like achievements. You want to win. You want to prove you're better than prove you can achieve something. Then the fourth is growth. You want to learn. You want to continue to kind of move up and improve your skills. And the last is expression, this idea that you want to customize or role playing works this way because we express different parts of ourselves through role playing. And so those are the kind of the major categories. And I think magic allowed people to both
Not only have these competitions like I was doing, but it allowed people to customize and grow in a world where it's infinitely deep at a certain point with chess. It's a deep game, but there's only so many pieces. I can learn them all. I can know kind of the frame I'm playing with magic. There's constantly new cards coming. There's constantly new things to do. And I get to own, I get to customize and own my experience.
So to relate it to something like you more familiar with like Dungeons and Dragons idea that you get to tell the story that you get to create the character is so powerful and so immersive and magic is very similar if you want to build a deck with all. Health cards you can do that if you want to build a deck that has every card that you can imagine is 300 cards you can do that.
If you want to be the hyper-competitive, hyper-focused guy, you could do that. There are so many experiences that you get to, in a sense, design your own game. And it's one of the things that I've learned, much like you talked about a lot of philosophy majors end up on your podcast, a lot of the game designers started from a game like Magic or Dungeons & Dragons. And because the, as you play, you're crafting your own experience. And I think that was such a unique and powerful thing. And Dungeons & Dragons could be a little intimidating for people because it's so open-ended.
So intimidated, so complex, or at least it can be. It can be. It can be. It can be. It can be. It's a real commitment. Exactly. Whereas magic, like you're playing inside of these box and these rules, but once you start exploring it, then this whole world opens up. And I think that was really the magic of it, quote unquote. And it really made it feel like something that was very new and spawned an entire genre of games. And I remember one point, I think it was certainly at the time, I think TSR, I was reading,
This book called, I believe it's Art in Arcana, or Arcana, I'm not sure how you pronounce that word properly, even though I've read it a thousand times, which is a
visual history of Dungeons and Dragons. And at some point, they realized one of the major stumbling blocks was people having to develop from scratch their own characters. And they provided out of the box templates, which was one of the ways they jump started wider adoption. It's giving people an easy place to start with some type of positive constraints, let's just say, in a sense. And that makes me think about
magic. Now, can you remind me and listeners of who developed magic? So Richard Garfield was the lead designer he created the game, along with, of course, a lot of other people that support it, but he was the lead the creator. I remember listening to, and you're going to have to fact check me on this, but I think I'm recalling this correctly, listening to at least one, maybe two interviews with Richard on your podcast, think like a game designer, and
He was talking about game development and I guess folks were auditing cards in the decks and the idea that some cards would get retired or removed from circulation or banned because they were too powerful but if there were no cards that were too powerful.
that they were also airing on the side of caution, something along those lines. Could you expand on what I'm very clumsily trying to recall from an interview I listened to a year ago? So there's this idea in games of balance, which is it's a term that people throw around a lot, but gets very confused. And the principle of it is that you don't want some part of your game to be so unfair.
that nobody can beat you. If it's in tic-tac-toe, if you get to make three moves at once, that would be pretty unfair, right? The game is already over. You've got your three in a row, and that doesn't make any sense. So the idea is you want to make sure that everything, you know, there's no one strategy that's too good.
But there's also some people think that that means everything needs to be exactly the same. And that's also not true, because the idea, if every card is just as equally good as every other card, then that you deny people that discovery, you deny people that ability to learn and say, oh, wait, hold on. As a new player, you don't know anything.
And then you can learn, oh, actually, you know what? This card's better than this card or the excitement of chasing and finding something that's very exciting that now you can combine with something else that you have. And suddenly that gets better. And so the way I define balance is not everything has to be equal. It's that there's no one strategy that should be unbeatable. You know, the best analogy is if you think rock, paper, scissors, perfectly balanced game.
Rock is great. But if I know you're going to throw rock, I've got a plan. I could throw paper and I'm going to be OK. So there's a lot of ways that you can approach balance, but that can give you a sense of what it should look like. And so for Richard, he wanted to make things that were exciting and chase and you're really hoping you open up in a pack. Of course, he didn't have any idea that the game was going to be as popular as it was when he talked about in the podcast episode that he thought you would just never even see all the cards that some people would have a couple of packs and other people would have a couple of packs and you just discovered as you went.
And that is actually an exciting prospect, but very quickly people would buy all the cards and now they're spoilers on the internet and everybody sees everything immediately. And so it's changed a lot since his initial concept.
As the next lilypad, I want to explore one of two things we're going to get to both. So you can choose which you think makes sense to talk about first. So the first option is your path to where you are now as a senior partner at a law firm, just kidding. So the law school, the other is what happened in your magic life.
after winning the nationals in that story. So which of those do you think makes sense to tackle first? Or you could talk about both in tandem, either or. We'll go in chronology order so that the magic career has its arc before my law career has its much shorter arc. I'm 17 years old. I win the US national championships. This is a huge, awesome, cool thing for me. But then I go to the world championships.
And at that point in magic's life cycle, the US was dominant. The US had never lost a world championships ever. And I was not just me, but a team of people that were representing the US. And unfortunately, we did not win. We did not do very well. And so that world championships, I was then.
Had this albatross around my neck of being the first loser us national champion list is the story i was telling myself so i was like okay this is not great night you know my career was good i was doing good but it was something that always stuck with me and so i kept wanting to try to get back on the national team to like redeem myself. So fast forward five years later.
Finally, the US loses again, loses to the Germans. So now I'm not the only loser, not that I was running against the US, but it was nice to not be the only loser. And then the very next year, I make it back on the US national team. And so this is my chance, like my chance at redemption after six years.
And I've with two other people on the team and the two people that are on the team with me, they were like pretty new to the game. They were, you know, kind of had come out of nowhere, just like I did when I first started. And I was so committed to making sure we did well. I paid to fly both of them to Boston where I was living at the time to like stay at my place and work. And we trained for like month, month and a half together with my team who is a year move games was the local store and group we would play test with.
We trained we slept on my couch we work together to be able to make it back to that year the world championships were in Berlin so we're going into enemy territory and it comes down to. Literally we make it to the final table to the final game it comes down to me playing this match and you know this is we've got stage lights were covering it this is like everything I have worked for and there's some online records of the experience but I am like.
I remember just sort of feeling in that moment that, you know, I'd been in tournaments. I'd won tournaments. I'd lost tournaments. There's a certain amount of excitement and pressure, but for this one, it was so much of a personal whole story, a personal kind of drama that I was playing out for me. And I drew my hand the first time for this final match where everything's on the line, people watching. And there's a rule in magic where if you don't like your hand, if you don't like the starting cards you have, you can take a mulligan. And what that means is you
You throw the cards away, but you get one less card and it's a big deal like less cards is a huge disadvantage in the game, but I draw my hand and I'm trying to make this like this decision. And I'm just like, all right, do I deal with what I have or do I just take a shot and I didn't like the hand. I wasn't going to let the world championships be decided on that hand. So I mulligan throw the cards away. My teammates are groaning in the background.
It's like, all right, here we go. Shuffle up, draw the hand. And it becomes one of those moments where you kind of like see it come together. Like the hand was good enough. We start playing it out. I get some board advantage. My opponent's kind of on his back foot. And he's got a couple tricks. There's some cards I have to play around. I'm not really sure. And then finally, I'm able to kind of get to the point and win this fight after however long people rush the stage, like able to finally like take that off of my back.
And it was a very exciting moment for me. It was a very fun journey. And it was a result of a lot of hard work, right? It was like a lot of dedication that got there, but it kind of felt for me. It was like the end of my magic career. It was like the thing that I had like I had been striving to do that I kind of like checked those boxes and that was kind of like what let me move to this next stage. So before we get to your short arc in the world of law, was there something coming back to your previous comment that you learned after
losing on the world championship stage first? Was there something you learned or decided to change about your approach after that? I think that, now we're talking about years of gap in between, right? And so what I did learn and the major thing that I realized in that, like magic is generally a single person game. I'm playing a magic against somebody else in competition. But in this case, it's a team game.
And I think the biggest shift in focus was I didn't just think about myself. Like I had to think about how do I lift everybody else up and all thrive together to be able to make it through. And it really, it changed the way I focused there, changed the way I focused with other teams I've worked with and made a huge impact. And then, you know, just being willing to again, come back from a loss and not let it discourage you that you can't overcome it. But I think that being able to work
Typically most of the games I played have been single player you know whether it was debate or wrestling or most of magic it was all about like i'm here to win and i think my shift in mindset was no i'm here for us to win and that was a really huge turn around for me. Yeah it's a big shift in terms of looking through the prison.
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So law school, yes. Tell us about law school.
Just to frame this, right? So I've already mentioned both my parents are lawyers, my mom's lawyer, my dad's lawyer, my stepdad's lawyer. I was debate captain. I was doing that. I was supposed to be a lawyer. That was just like my path from as early as I can remember. That's what I was supposed to do. And even though I had been making a living and traveling around the world playing magic, at no point did it ever occur to me that that I would make a living in games. None. It was just, oh, this is a fun thing to do while I'm in college. I had this mental block.
And so, graduate, go get into NYU Law, I teach the LSAT for a while, I go to law school. And I'm lucky, I'm a pretty happy guy by default, but this was the first time I was really depressed, like I was very unhappy for an extended period of time. And I will remember very specifically, it was one day I'm getting up, I'm living in Brooklyn,
snowing outside, just like covered in ice in the floor. And I have to get trudged up and put on all these ridiculous clothes and go get on the A train and pretend like I'm not staring at anybody else. And everybody has to studiously avoid looking at anybody else in New York. That's just the rule.
and make it all the way in, have my Boston cream donut for breakfast, because that's just how I lived back then. And I go into this NYU Law Library, which is like, you know, you could picture this, you know, just cavernous giant library with old oak and towers of books. It was back when you had to use books to learn things. It was a wild time.
And I checked out, you know, the blog books I had to read before class and I'm, you know, stack them up. It's just towers around me and I'm just there. And I'm there for hours, just like reading case law and just not very happy. But a couple hours later, I realized I got to get to class. And so I sit up and I have this jolt of pain through my spine, jolt of pain. I can barely move. I'm hobbling to get out of there. And I realized I threw my back out from reading.
From reading that is how unhealthy i was how i was over about forty pounds heavier than i am now how just like miserable i wasn't like this is my first clue that i'm on the wrong path and i think this is something i just it's a really important lesson i think for i imagine there's a lot of overachievers in your audience and that this path of trying to win whatever games in front of you.
It can be way worse to win the wrong game than even to lose one that you actually enjoy playing. And that was a big shift for me. And fortunately, that summer I had an opportunity to go instead of interning in a law firm, I got to go work on a Marvel Comics card game, a Marvel versus DC Comics card game for a company called Upper Deck in San Diego. So summer internship working on comic book games, that sounded great.
And so I flew across country to go and work there for the summer. And again, even though I knew I was miserable, even though I'd had this terrible experience, even though I now had an opportunity in front of me, it's still my assumption at this point was I'm going to go back to law school. I'm going to go back and that's just, I got to finish that path.
But I come out to start working on games and I am in love with it. I'm super passionate about it. I'm enjoying it. Again, we're debating these really interesting ideas about design and definitely happy to dig into what that looks like. But then when they offer me a full-time job,
I'm still stressing about this. And it's still finally when I make the decision, I tell my mom she literally cries when I tell her I'm leaving law school to go become a gave center. It was so hard and I look back and it's so silly to me. This is one of the things you've taught me. I didn't have these words at the time, but I learned it through you. This idea of fear setting, where in fact, I wasn't really giving up anything. I could always go back to law school, but it just didn't feel like that at the time. And so being able to break out of that spell,
and then go follow a path that was really passionate for me that I was really excited about, one of the best decisions I ever made. How did you find the internship? This was fortunate because of my magic career. They had reached out to me to kind of just vet their game and, you know, kind of check it out and stuff. So some of the other people in the magic pro tour who people who I'd known had already kind of been hired there. So they were like, Hey, and they knew I was miserable. I, you know, would chat with them. They're like, Hey, come out for the summer, come work on this thing.
You got nothing to lose kind of deal as your mom come around or she still my mom has come around that day when you return to law school my mom has come around. I'm sure she'll listen to this episode hi mom. She did she just and this is the thing the people in our lives there's a lot of pressure that we all feel right whether from parents from friends from like.
They want the best for us. You just want us to be happy and safe and comfortable. And you've got to realize that you, in order to find the path that you actually want for yourself, the path that you will be fulfilled by, you've got to be uncomfortable. You've got to be unsafe. Parents, I think, try to protect their kids so much. In reality, you can't. You've got to be able to push past that. And she knows that now. And she was very happy. It all worked out.
Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to film the gaps for those people who aren't your mom listening. Since we have a lot to fill in it, now I feel like I should defend your mom also. Certain paths are more predictable than others. There is the perception and maybe even the reality of safety, consistency, stability with certain choices.
But as you said, choosing the right game is more important than winning the game that just happens to be in front of you. And at least certainly in my experience in the experience of a lot of people on this podcast. And just because something is unpredictable does not automatically make it unsafe. It just makes it less certain. And as you put it, many of these things, for instance, I'll give you another example. And this is very analogous.
When people invoke the names of say Zuckerberg or someone else who dropped out as this throwing caution to the wind burning the boats behind them to take the risk of entrepreneurship. Whenever possible try to point out that's actually not the case for most people who say take a leave of absence from a Harvard or Stanford. They can go back anytime they want to go back.
Yes, 100%. And again, you've said this better than honestly, anybody like this idea that most of the fears that we have, this resistance to uncertainty is just made up in our head. There are so many ways that you can recover and go back. And if you can just remember that, I could have gone back to law school later on when I quit my game design job to start a company. I could always get another job. Those illusions of uncertainty and fear, if you can push past that, it changes everything. I mean, most of the times we take risks. We're not jumping off cliffs or into burning buildings. It's just.
Okay. Yeah. Your career takes a different path or you're behind in school or whatever. It's a very low cost. Most often recoverable. So I'll link to fear setting and people can just search fear setting like goal setting with a hyphen in it and all sorts of things will pop up if you just search that or go to tim.blog slash Ted because that was the topic of my TED talk. I suppose quite a few years ago now, but
Moving on from fear setting for a moment, it might come back into the conversation. Who knows? But what did that first year or six months, month could be the first week, however you want to frame it, of designing games look like? What was that experience like?
It's a really fun question because people just make this assumption that because i was good at playing games then that means i would be good at making games and they are one hundred percent different skills i did not think of myself as a creative person i thought there was just some kind of like magic special secret sauce that other people had i was just gonna fake it and go out there and see what happened.
So when I go there, I'm having serious imposter syndrome. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to make this come to life. And I researched a ton. I read some great books on creativity. A whack on the side of the head is one I'd recommend. And I started to talk to other people who I did respect as designers and kind of break it down. And over time, I realized that there is no.
There's no thing that's differentiates like a creative person from a not creative person other than process. And so as an analytically minded person, I was able to break it down into what I call the core design loop, which is a six step process of how do you create not just games, but I think every creative field that applies to.
And so learning that and i was very lucky i'll talk about the details of it i won't leave you hanging on that piece but i will let you leave me hanging. I was lucky in a sense in that you know i went to go work at a company where i had a lot of friends that were already there.
and i had immediate deadlines this game is going to release you have to turn over the file with the cards and the things like within two months and so there was no choice but to act what i say is that deadlines are magic it doesn't matter if you have no idea what you're doing you have a deadline.
Yeah, I was literally going to just say the exact same thing verbatim. It's like, what a beautiful constraint. It's just remarkable what you get done. So that was, I think, a real powerful tool about why. Like, so one really short deadlines and my job was on the line. So I had stakes, right?
And I didn't want to go back to law school and to that I had other people that I could ask and talk to who were smarter than I was who had done it before and I could get some insight into it. So being able to find either books or mentors or other people that you can talk to was also helped accelerate it. That eventually turned into this kind of step-by-step process. So if you like, I can go into that now or can jump into other stuff.
Let's actually, before we get into the process, could you explain why a whack on the side of the head was impactful for you or what you took from that that was valuable? Because in the course of doing homework for this conversation, I noticed that you had mentioned this book before, and I actually have a deck of cards designed by the same author.
But could you speak to have not read the book however could you speak to why that had an impact or why you recommend it. So it's nice in that it helps to in a sense demystify creativity and just bring it down to like a very simple granular level of example so.
You know, one of the principles in it is that I've used all the time is basically, and I forget how they were in the book, but basically like turn the object around in your mind, right? If you take something that you normally think of one way, how many different ways can you look at that same thing? So if you have a pen, you can say, all right, well, what do you do with a pen? Well, you can write with it. Okay. Well, no, all right. I could use it to help force me to smile by biting it. I could use it to prop up my microphone. I could use it, right? You could try exercises that give you different frames were very powerful and ways to like break you out of your thinking.
the idea of using random constraints. One of the exercises that I encourage anybody to do, if they want to, if you're having a problem, some creative challenge, some block, go to a random book on yourself, open it to a random page, and point to a random word, some substantive word.
Now figure out how that word relates to whatever your problem is and journal on that for like five minutes, 10 minutes. And you'll be amazed at how all of a sudden it can crack open something because we get so linearly focused on the problem in front of us and even a completely random constraint can open up the door for you. And we'll give one more to just move past.
the quote unquote right answer. You may have an answer and say, OK, that's fine. And you stop. Most people stop. Instead, say OK, I'm going to look for the third right answer, the fourth right answer, the fifth right. I'm going to look beyond that to go deeper and find more things. So this is little exercises. And you could just do those exercises.
would suddenly say, oh, wow, OK, I'm already seeing myself be more creative. I'm already seeing myself do more than I was. The book was impactful because it could just like by the time I was done reading it, I had already seen myself do creative things I didn't think I could do in ways that sound pretty stupid. I'm sure to me saying it, like pick a random page of the book, be more creative. Trust me, try it. You know, it works.
Without having read that book, I've used this approach in actually writing teachers that I had long ago back when I had hair and was in school, also would offer these types of random constraints. It's almost like the eaching approach to creativity. It's like, okay, you just throw a bunch of scrabble tiles on the floor and you pick the three that are closest to you, and that's your constraint, or that's the filter, in a sense, or what directs the exercise.
Very, very powerful and I wanted to mention since you were talking about going past the right answer and finding the third right answer actually reminded me of something a former guest's Derek Sippers who's one of my favorite people he's been on a few times and.
When I asked him who he thought of when he heard the word successfully said, well, my first answer might be, say, Richard Branson, but that really ultimately depends on his goals in life. And if his goal was to have a quiet life undisturbed by entrepreneurship, then that wouldn't be successful. So let me skip the first answer, get to the second answer, get to the third answer. And he said, what you should ask people is who is the third person who comes to mind when you hear the word successful.
And it's really a powerful heuristic that you can use in all sorts of ways. All right, so that's a snapshot on a wack on the side of the head. Let's talk about the core loop. Before we jump into the core design loop, I'm going to give one more thing. It's not from a wack on the side of the head, but it's something I've actually
Developed more recently as a process that I've been super valuable. And one of the things that we try to do in our company is always surface our assumptions. There's a lot of things where you're assuming a game is going to be fun because of this. We assume people are looking for that. We assume we're making this category of game, et cetera. And a really great exercise to do that's in this spirit is once a quarter, we'll do an assumptions challenging exercise.
And what that means is you surface every assumption you can. You can do this by yourself or if you're on a team, everybody writes down on their own all their assumptions. You put them all up on a shared board or a shared Google Doc if you're doing remote like we are. And then you one by one, okay, what if that weren't true or to use your terminology? What if I did the opposite? And it's so powerful because sometimes it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes it's like, okay, that doesn't make any sense. You move on. But without fail, by the time we finish that exercise, we find some core assumption that all of a sudden changes everything.
And that ability to just take what you assume to be true, one, making it explicit in the first place is super powerful, just so you know really what you're doing. And then two is this inversion process is incredibly powerful. Could you give any examples just to make it a little concrete in the minds of folks listening? Yeah, of what those assumptions might be.
I made this game called Soul Forge with Richard Garfield, the guy that created Magic, and we did this over a decade ago. And we made it as a digital trading card game. And so purely you play it on your phone, no physical objects at all. The game was successful. We ran it for a few years and eventually we took it down and we were talking about we wanted to bring it back because we loved the game. We wanted to bring it back. And one of the exercises we did is okay, Soul Forge is a digital game.
And then we're like, wait, what if it's not? What would that look like? And we had built it to be a digital game. But then all of a sudden, we're like, well, now it's seven years later, digital printing technology is way better than it was. You can actually algorithmically create one of a kind cards and free things. And that started us down this road of investigating this new technology. And so the new version of Soulford called Soulford Fusion is now a physical card game that has this new technology built into it, which never would have happened if we had just gone with our assumptions of, OK, we're going to remake the same game again.
So that's like one example of this is recently impactful for me in this. Yeah, I love that. I can't tip my hand too hard here publicly, but I've been very much focused on possibly working on my first book in five or six years. It's been a long time. I wasn't sure I would do another one, but I've been very strongly considering it. And I've been not in written form, which would be more helpful, I think, but in a sort of meandering
Mental form, which is sort of a mix of like reverie skepticism and daydreaming, looking at some of the basic assumptions.
Is it a book? Right? I think of it as a book, but does it even need to be a book period or I should say question mark? And if it is a book, for instance, generally, if you're going through the publishing process or you have been through the publishing process, your thinking has been shaped in a certain way over and over again, you're like, okay, I have to do print audio ebook and you sell all of those to one person.
Well, what if we split those up? What if there was no print whatsoever? What would that look like? And just testing these very basic assumptions, right? And I'll give you one example also, which people might not realize, or if you're outside publishing, why would you realize this? But none of my books in the US have ever gone to paperback.
And if you were to ask most authors, like, why have you gone to paperback? The answer would generally be something along the lines of, well, the publishers always do that. A year and a half after the hardcover, they lower the price to make the market larger for the book and you come out in paperback. And I was like, but if you look at the math, does that make any sense for you? And then they think about it and they're like, well,
Let me think about that. Okay. I was making 15% on each hardcover book, which is already discounted on Amazon to something very affordable. And now when I go to paperback, wait a second, my royalties just got cut to seven and a half or six and a half. Now I have to sell twice as many books to make the same amount in royalties. Oh shit. That makes no sense whatsoever. It's also not really relevant in a world where ebook is an option.
if that makes any sense. If somebody is looking for a lower price, they can buy it on e-books. Hence, from the beginning, none of my books have ever gone to paperback. Let's, if you're open to it, we can certainly, I love, as you know, you know this very well. I love digging into testing assumptions because, yeah,
Yeah, your assumptions of the operating system that governs your life in a way. And you want to make sure those rules can be justified on some level. But maybe it makes sense to hop into the core design loop and talk about that a bit.
I think it's a perfect segue because exactly what we're talking about with assumptions is going to come into play in the core design. So the core design loop is how games are made, how creative projects are done, but we're going to focus on games. So it's the kind of main topic I teach it in. So the core design loop is six steps. It's inspiring, framing, brainstorming, prototyping,
testing and iterating. So step one is inspiring. What is it that's driving you? What's the core of what you're excited about? So it could be you want to make a game for this IP, this world that you love, could be you want to make a cockpunch game, could be want to make a game about fantasy warriors, right? Hypothetically speaking, or miniatures, right? If you love miniatures.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you love miniatures. You know, you want to make a miniatures game, right? Could be a component, could be a theme, could be a mechanic, could be, you want to make a game about dog walking, whatever it is, right? You're excited. What is it the heart of what you're doing? And in general, the heart is going to be an experience you want to create for your audience. But you start at something, whatever high level thing, it gets you excited. Then framing is a lot what we talked about, right? We want to put a box around it. We want to put constraints around it.
And so that constraint should always include a deadline, ideally a short deadline to whatever your next step is. So I'm going to have a prototype to test in two weeks. It could be one of the most common mistakes I see game designers make in the economy. OK, I want to make a game that's like Halo and World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto, but like all rolled into one with like a bunch of cool stuff happening, right? And these are massive games that take millions and millions of dollars in teams of people. And it's like, well, you've never made a game before. Maybe let's start with like a simple card game, right?
So constraints with your components, constraints with time, what's the space I'm playing in? Step three is brainstorming. And brainstorming is where you ideate and come up with your ideas. And I'm very particular about how I recommend people brainstorming. This comes from research from the Wharton School of Business and work I've done with them.
but the basics are three phases and to get really granular, because I know that your audience likes that. I break it into three steps, 20 minutes each. First is where you're open exploring. You write as many things as you can, as many ideas as you can, and don't stop. There's always this critic part of our brain that's like, no, that's stupid, no, that won't work. Turn that off. Just write down as many things as you can. If your pen stops moving for more than 10 seconds, you're doing it wrong. As many ideas as you can on the paper.
Then the second stage also recommend 20 minutes is organizing, where you take this massive ridiculous, some cool ideas, some ridiculous ideas, and you start to try to find patterns between them. And if you're trying to make something specific, you start to kind of think through, okay, if I'm trying to make a game, what's the victory condition, how do people.
figure out what are their moves, how do they interact, you know, you start trying to kind of put some structure around it. Or if it's a book, okay, what's the opening of the book? How's it going to help people? Who's my audience? Whatever it is, right? As you start making these connections, you're naturally going to see gaps and you're going to fill those gaps in.
And then the last step, which is also 20 minutes, is elimination. And that's where you, you went from starting with as many ideas as you can. And now you want to get to as few ideas as possible so that you can start moving to testing them. And so that's where you go and you'll try to like, okay, what's the minimum amount that I can prototype, which is the next step, to test my idea, right? To test my assumption, to test the core of what I'm doing.
And so prototyping is exactly what it sounds like. What's talk about an MVP or this minimum viable product? What's the smallest thing I can do to test my idea? What's the easiest way I can do this? And then step five is testing where you actually show it to somebody, you get some feedback, you actually figure out what's going on there. And then step six is iterating where you take what you've learned, and then you cycle back through the process. And what I've learned is that the skill of creativity
specifically with game design, but really with anything is how well you can kind of flow through that process and get the most out of each loop and go through as many loops as possible. All right, we're going to come back to brainstorming in a second, but what I want to do for people listening is highlight. And you said this already, but I want to just make a few notes and give a few examples. This process can apply to almost anything. And for instance,
You want to start a podcast. I'll use that as an example. Inspiration, thematically, where are you going? What is the format that you're excited about? What is driving you to be considering starting a podcast, right? Setting parameters, thinking about the constraints. What are the constraints? How do you keep it?
Interesting enough that you continue to do it but simple enough that you don't quit after three episodes and the example you gave of like i want to be like halo plus world of warcraft plus war hammer and you're like whoa whoa whoa easy. The reason there is an elephant graveyard of a million.
dead podcasts that stopped after episode three is they're like, I love this American life and I think it's going to be like this American life meets cereal meets Joe Rogan and I'm like, whoa, slow down text. There's a reason the credits are five minutes long at the end of this American life. Yeah, I'm not sure you realize how much goes into making that. And then brainstorming, right, coming up with whether it's
guests, ideas for questions, et cetera, prototyping, giving it a go. Maybe you record as I did five or six episodes before publishing your first so that you have a chance to kick the tires and try to figure out what's working. The testing, you're going to get, in this case, right, testing with your guests, but also with test listeners, let's just say, and then iterating. This also applies to books. This also applies to
really any creative project that I can think about. And to come back to the brainstorming from a moment, when you are brainstorming, what is your personal preferred method of doing this? Whiteboard versus pen and paper versus typing on a keyboard versus a tablet of some type. How do you like to do it?
I am a huge fan of, in particular, an app called Workflowy, and it's a totally free app, and it's basically a series of nested lists. And the nice thing about it is it's infinite, so I can continue to make lists in, you know, sublist and sublist and sublist, and I can link pieces to pieces.
And so I find over the years now I've been using that for seven or eight years. That is like my personal favorite tool. The important advice for people is not to copy the tool, but the whatever works for you, whatever is easiest flow, like the least resistance. Right. So there are a lot of people like Notion is a similar type of tool, but it's like.
bulkier and a little bit slower in my experience. And that speed is everything. I don't want anything that's going to slow me down. So that's where pen and paper is great, but I don't like unless I have a giant sheet of paper, which I do enjoy. If it's a big, big like poster board and give markers and bigger things, especially if I'm working with a team, so either a giant whiteboard or a large poster board on the table, because you can all share the same space and see ideas form that I think is great, but a small sheet of paper for me, like my brain
When it sees a page start to get full, my brain just subconsciously thinks, okay, well, you don't need any more ideas. Your page is like the goldfish and the fishbowl, right? And it's like, all right. I'm not going to grow anymore. This space is getting a little constrained. Yeah. So I like workflow because it's got that infinite kind of growth and I can like shrink or grow nodes or like, okay, I want to dive deeper into this idea and link ideas together. It's been my favorite. And what are some of the ways that you like to prototype?
I'd love to know where you think people most often get stuck, like in between or after which step do people get stuck. And as someone who's been, as you know, because we've had conversations about this and you've been incredibly helpful, thinking about prototyping and games and design. I've been very excited about this for a while now.
I tended to get stuck at the prototyping phase because it's also my first sort of rodeo with this. But the inclination is to try to make something that's really good and kind of polished. I know I'm not trying to make a finished product.
But the more I have studied what you've done, listen to the podcast, talk to people like Elanli or others, the more I appreciate how quick and dirty it is. And also just as a reference, I think,
I have a blog post about Stephen Key, who's an inventor, product developer, who's based in California, at least he was at the time, who has done extremely well developing toys for major companies. The toys are ultimately some finished product that look great, but he will use construction paper and newspaper.
to prototype. And based on that in a description and maybe a video of how it functions, he successfully licensed products all the time to huge companies. So could you speak to maybe the prototyping phase? Yes. And you've already hit on the core of this, but I'll just leave it. Keep it simple, stupid, the kiss principle.
It is the tendency to over develop and make your prototype super nice or not feel like you can show it to somebody or test it without being so nice is the graveyard of the most games probably have anything on the planet. And the most ideas frankly in general so let's make this very concrete probably one of the games of most well known for is a deck building called ascension. I.
First prototype that game, there was another deck building game and a deck building game for those that don't know, it's unlike magic, which is a trading card game where you're buying packs of cards and trying to build a deck. In a deck building game, you, you have a fixed box of cards. You buy it like a box like you would monopoly, but like during the game, you're acquiring cards for your deck. So it's like, you get to play the game of building a deck, deck building.
So there was another deck building game called Dominion, which was released. It was the first of its category. And I fell in love with that game. I started playing it a bunch, but then as I played it like a hundred times, I was like, ah, you know, there's some really some things I would like to see differently. I want to see the cards are too static. There's too many rules and resources. I wish I could change it. And so my first prototype of Ascension was literally just instead of having Dominion cards, which are all kind of laid out at the beginning of the game, takes like 20 minutes to set up, I just shuffle them all together.
and dealt them out and said what would a game look like if it was randomized and i played that way and the game was not good but it gave me enough of a proof of concept that like oh you know what there's something fun here and if i spend the time to do this i can now move forward and just for clarity you were using the dominion cards but changing the rules to see how it impacted gameplay exactly right.
So if you can prototype using something like a deck of cards around the house or take a monopoly set, I don't know, I keep using monopolies and whatever most people know it. So you know, hey, what would this look like if instead of going around go, you actually had like dinosaurs that would like try to eat each other as you're moving around the board? What would that be like?
Okay, that sounds kind of fun. Let's see what happens. So it's literally that simple. So for my prototyping tools, my first round of prototyping is just I have a bunch of stuff. I have a bunch of dice and my D&D dice with all the random signs. I've got a decks of cards. I've got random pen and paper. I will draw things. In fact, yeah, like when you and I work together a little bit, I showed you some things. I showed you what like my early sketch prototypes look like and they are ugly.
I talk about the phases of design, and so every time you go through the core design loop, your questions go from bigger to smaller and smaller. And as you go through it, you're going to care about polish more. So if you're just trying to figure out, like, where is the fun? What is the idea? What's the theme? What am I doing here? You don't want to think about, imagine you're building a house, right? And before you even laid the foundation, you're worrying about the paint color on the walls and where the furniture goes.
You're not going to get very far. You're wasting a lot of time. Make sure you got a solid foundation first. Worry about the paint color later. And so I think a lot of designers start by worrying about the paint color being wrong and they're never going to finish a house that way.
I'm going to stand in, this is a lazy satirical trick here, but so I'm going to defend the newbies, including myself for a second, and ask a question which I think is actually really important at the very least helpful in all sorts of disciplines, not just game design.
One of the reasons a lot of writers get stuck or aspiring writers is that they kick out a first draft. It's rough. It's ugly. It's really, really rough on all the edges. And they compare their rough draft to the final draft of incredible writers.
and the rough draft of those writers is invisible. They never see that rough draft. So what has been helpful to me, for instance, when thinking about potentially writing comics is seeing the original scripts and how they were tweaked and how the concept art was modified over time to ultimately land on what we see in the finished product, because then I can see
the ugly babies in the beginning. I'm like, oh yeah, okay, that's very reassuring and it gives me more confidence to work with my ugly baby to try to shape it into something that ultimately is good. Because if I'm comparing everyone's finished product to my rough product, it can be really demoralizing. So the question is, is there a way for folks to see
The rough drafts of games the prototyping and so on if they wanted to explore this as an example. It's one of the reasons why i started my podcast is to sort of unlock a lot of stuff for other designers right talk about their origin stories talk about where they're you know the things that inevitably fail.
You can also go there are a variety of places where people will have prototype testing. So let's say you have a favorite game company or game designers. We do this at Stoneblade at my company. You can join our discord and then we will periodically put playtest requests out because we want to get feedback, right? We want to get feedback from you also and they could see how terrible those games are. Now we've already gone through a few iteration loops before we put it out into the public. So to see the most raw forms, I think there's not enough of it out there. I think it's something I really want to encourage more of because
It's really helpful. I've been doing this for 20 years and my first prototypes are hideous. So if you want, I can share some. I'll put some up on the think like game show or the show notes. Yeah, whatever. Because I want to demystify that process. It is okay. In fact, it's better. In fact, I'll go even further, right? Because not only is it faster.
You know, you don't get hung up on making it really pretty. It's faster per day. It's actually better to change. It's easy because you need to iterate, right? So if you've put a lot of time into making a beautiful board and beautiful cards and then you realize you've got to change a card, you're going to feel weird about it. Yeah, your sunk cost fallacy is going to come to latch onto your back.
I have a card that I messed up. I'm just going to cross out something on it with a marker and write something else. And then, okay, now it's this. Go. And I'm making the resistance to change is so much lower. So it's actually net negative for you to invest in making something pretty early on in the process. Makes perfect sense. So you've mentioned your company a couple of times, but last time we left Young Justin in our chronology, he was working at a game design company. So yes.
Could you fill in the gap for us and tell us how you went from working for somebody else to working for yourself? This is a fun story and this is you actually come into this story too. So I'll share it. So I moved from working on pure card games to I had an opportunity to lead a project that was the World of Warcraft miniatures game.
And this is a very exciting project for me. I get to build something that's super cool with an IP everybody knows, and I had worked on it for about 18 months. And we had the company that I worked for was called Upper Deck. They had made trading cards forever, most known for baseball cards, and they made Yu-Gi-Oh! in this Marvel game I'd been working on. But they didn't know how to make miniatures games.
And so they eventually were going to kill the project. The executives come and they tell us after 18 months of work on it. And I, this is pretty common in games, but I had never had a project I had worked on get killed like that. And I was like devastated, right? When my dream project, I'm going to change the world with this game. It's going to be incredible. Now of a sudden ashes.
And so I didn't want to let it happen. And so I said, listen, I don't know what I'm doing here either, but if you're going to kill the project, give me six months. Let me see if I could figure it out. You got nothing to lose. And I was able to convince them to let me become a project manager and try to figure out how to make a miniatures game specifically.
And so same kind of process like I did when I first started to design, I was like, okay, let me talk to people who know what they're doing. I've already got a very clear deadline. You know, I talked to Jeremy Cranford, who's an incredible art director and I talked to the guy that made the Dungeons and Dragons miniatures lines. I just work months and months and months, try to figure out how to make this work, fly to China, fly to the factory, figure out how the plastics and paints and all this crazy stuff. And making it work just for my clarity is making it financially work for the company.
That's exactly right. Financially, how do you make it work, right? Because Blizzard, who makes World of Warcraft, had very exacting standards about their miniatures. They have to have spiky pauldrons this high, and these amounts of colors, and nobody had ever done anything quite like that before. And it needs to be financially viable to make this product for the company I was working for. So that's a partnership. And so I have to go figure out all these logistics, set all this stuff up.
Finally, and this is where I first read the four hour work week. So this is actually super impactful for me and being very efficient using 80, 20 principles. And I've learned to set up auto email replies. So people didn't bother me. So I've already getting my efficiencies in it, but I'm in this zone of just I'm going to finish this mission. And then I have the opportunity to speak to the executive team. I'm going to make my presentation or make my case. Is this project going to live?
Or is this project gonna die and i'm just some kid who wants to make a game and i've got to convince so i'm there and i will never forget i mean they had this like ugly green carpet i'm sitting waiting for my turn to get called it just i don't know the details are super stuck in my mind and like
You know, go down this long corridor and my palms are sweating. You know, you open these huge like oak doors. And this is, you know, it's a huge sports memorabilia company. So there's like a baby sign bat on the wall and Michael Jordan, Jersey and like a Tiger Woods golf club and the rich mahogany conference table. I mean, this is boardroom cliche, right? But it's like very intimidating for me at this time.
So I get up there, the owners like sitting in his leather chair and like staring me down and I'm like, okay, I give my presentation and I'm stammering through it, but I've I've done my research. I've done my homework. And I go through the presentation and, you know, hard to beat. And finally, I stop. And this is like pause at the end. I'm looking around like, what do they think? Right? It's like the CEO, CFO, the big wigs, right? And.
They start talking about the idea and they start to talk around and I start to think, oh my God, I think, I think they like it. I think this is really going to happen. And then they start like pontificating and they start talking, oh, well, there may be this problem with this thing or this thing. And it took me a minute to realize this, but as they were talking, I realized that they had no idea what they were talking about.
I had finally done enough research that I knew they didn't know what they were doing. And like I just said, up to that point in my life, I feel like I had just assumed that the adults in the room knew what they were doing. These is a company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Of course, they know what's happening. And now all of a sudden that illusion is shattered. And I started out terrified of terrified. I mean, we're literally this project, you know, it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to hopefully make millions or could lose millions. Who knows?
And nobody knows what they're doing. And so I'm like, oh my god, like what do we do? And then I walk out of that room, my heart's beating and I'm just like, what's gonna happen? How do we do this? And then all of a sudden like a cold splash of water in my face.
Nobody knows what they're doing. I cannot know what I'm doing, at least as well as anybody else. This idea that the difference between a leader and somebody else is not like that they know something or that they have some special access. You're just willing to make some assertions and own the consequences. That's it. That's the difference.
And so then I finally clicked for me the other parts of your book, not just this, you know, efficiency and automation, right? But the, this idea of defining what you want and then creating the freedom for yourself to do it. And so that's where I suddenly started doing the fear-setting exercise and going, okay, what's the worst case scenario for me? If I quit and I do my own thing and the dreamlining exercise, which is basically, you know, what is it that you really want? How do you define what you want? How do you make that very concrete?
And so then that transform is like, okay, I'm going to get this game out the door. I'm going to save up enough money. So I have a year of savings and I quit. And that's exactly what I did. And it was a life changing moment for me because it was exactly that taking ownership of my future. I'm so grateful for you as a key part of it. And I'm so grateful for.
That was exactly because they really opened the door for me. And I don't pretend to know what I'm doing all the time either. It's most of the time we're making stuff up, but it's being conscious about that, surfacing our assumptions, and learning as you go. It's been a powerful journey. Thank you for sharing that and for saying all that you said. And I would love to know when you did.
the fear setting and you're trying to identify the worst case, how you can mitigate against the worst case, what you would do as sort of a backup plan in case the entrepreneurship does not work out or maybe doesn't work out, at least with the first inning. How are you thinking about that at the time? What gave you, in addition to what you already described, which is the realization that, oh my God, almost all the emperors have no clothing. So I think I can do that at the very worst. I can also do that.
Right. How are you thinking about risk assessment and what you would do if things didn't pan out perfectly as you went into entrepreneurship? I got very concrete. What is my actual minimum living expenses? What do I need to be okay and have what I need? I figured out what that number was.
And then I said, okay, how much time am I willing to give myself to run this experiment to see if I can figure it out and make entrepreneurship work? And I decided a year of savings was what I wanted. And so I focused on saving up. So I have that cushion, right? Because if you're in the red, if you're like, I don't know how to make my next paycheck, I don't know how to make rent next month, you can't be creative and be free. You know, do the things, you're making decisions for the short term and I wanted to be able to make decisions for the longer.
So step one was have have enough of a cushion that i could feel comfortable now other people can do this as a side project or you know after hours whatever but for me i wanted space to just focus on this and then the other piece was like okay well what let's assume it doesn't happen and after a year i've got nothing it's not working.
I had done enough in my career that point. I could just get another job. I could either be hired back at the same place or hired in another company. Like, it's not like I was going to go hungry on the streets or I have to live on a friend's couch for a little while. That's not that big a deal either. Right. So I really, I went through all of those things. Like a go bankrupt. My house catches on fire. Like.
hilariously like you did in the book. So that's where it highlights the same kind of lesson as before, which was when I quit law school. It sounds scary. Everybody thinks, oh my god, you're such a risk taker. I'm not. I mitigate risk at every turn. When you're playing magic and you're trying to set up so you can't get out drawn on a game, I'm just mitigating the number of ways my opponent could beat me over time.
And in this one, I could always go back to law school when I quit law school. I could always go back to a job when I started as entrepreneurship. And same thing later on, when I became a digital nomad, sold all my stuff. I could always buy more stuff. I could always get a house again. And so I strongly encourage people to just go through that. If you really, really think about the worst case scenarios, 99 times out of 100, they're totally recoverable within a year. It's often way less. And what was yours knowing how methodical you are? You were not just
Hopping out of this job with savings with no plan. So what was your plan? I'm sad to say that wasn't that much of a plan. Well, I guess with the core design loop, I guess you are going to be following some version of that probably. But did you have an inkling of what type of game or what types of games you want to make?
You know, obviously card games were kind of my specialty and so I knew that that was a space I wanted to be in, but I really wanted to create that open space to figure things out. And so as you mentioned, of course, the core design loop was part of it. I didn't have it as clearly defined as I do now, but this idea that I'm going to try things and prototype them and test them. So I would during the day, I would work on some designs, make up some prototypes, and then I would go.
find my friends who were still working at the company or elsewhere to try it out, give me some feedback and come back. And I didn't have any ideas. I hadn't designed a game ahead of time. I didn't know what I was going to do ahead of time, but I had enough space that I could figure that out. And then it worked out that another person from another company contacted me to see if I could do some contract work for them. And so I started working on some kids' toy-based games, which was great. And so here's another fun story. So they knew me because they used to work at Upper Deck, where I used to work. And then they started working at this other company.
And he's like, hey, we need someone to help us design a game. Can you do that? And I'm just like, again, no job, no plan. Like I'm just figuring it out as I go at this point. And so I'm like, yeah, definitely, I can do that.
Okay, well, give us a quote. I'm like, okay, quote, how do I quote? I don't have never quoted anything before. So I'm like, okay, I will let me just think about it. How many hours do I think this is going to be? And then like, what's my minimum, like hourly rate that I think I should be paid? And I'm like, okay, that's what I'll charge, you know, make it easy. And I send them the quote and he literally laughs at my face. She's like, yeah, okay, sure, sure, man, no problem. And you're like, wait a second. I'm undercharging.
Yeah, yeah. I'm undercharging. So the next time, you know, I still try to over deliver, do a great job. Next time I get another opportunities. Okay, what do you quote? I doubled my number. They still laughed at me. Okay, great. All right. Doubled it again. That my strategy was I kept doubling what I asked for until I met resistance until someone was like, I'm not sure. I'm like, okay, that's what I need to be charging. That's the number.
There's one other story I'll just, as a side note mentioned, which also just underscores the fact that part of the frustration, but also joy of entrepreneurship is you have to figure out a lot on the fly. You cannot prepare for all the eventualities. You don't know what you don't know.
And I recall, I might be misattributing, so my apologies to the founders of Nantucket Nectors if this is misattribution. But when I took my first entrepreneurship class, first and only, actually, high-tech entrepreneurship with Professor Ed Shau, who changed my life in so many ways, he used what a lot of people refer to as the Harvard case study method, where you have sort of a business situation, then a problem, and then there's a break. And you have to try to figure it out. And then only after you've had the chance to try to figure it out,
on your own as a class, then you read the outcome and the decision they made and so on. They're a part of this Nintucket nectar story where these guys are selling juices and Nintucket and they end up with a tiger by the tail because their drinks become really successful and they decide to make the shift to retail and they meet with a distributor and they're talking and talking and distributors like so.
Do you have good plans for POS and they're like, look at each other. They have no fucking idea what he's talking about. They're like, oh, we have great plans for POS. We have, we have really, we've thought it through and we think we have, we have an excellent strategy and he's like, okay, great. And then they leave the meeting. They're like, what the hell is POS point of sale, right? Displays.
It makes for a lot of good stories. You start to figure out your pricing by doubling and doubling and doubling. Maybe you could flush that out a little bit in terms of you're doing this contract work for people who are giving you specs of some type or another. That's right. But you have some money coming in the door.
Correct. With fewer and fewer laughs at your proposals along the way, what else is happening in that first year? So I'm using my kind of spare cycles, and there's this really interesting thing, right? The difference between an entrepreneur who has no employees or anything, and some dude just sitting on his couch can be very subtle.
Yeah, yeah. You know, until you start like really kind of getting income coming in and start making things happen, right? So there was definitely a window of uncertainty. I mean, even now in my life, the distinction is pretty blurry. But yeah, right. It is, you know, it's, you know, now I got a team and the people, it's like, okay, I feel like I got a business, but it's not an easy distinction. And when you're trying to create something where you don't necessarily know what it is, it's even harder. So what I would do is I would in between doing this work for hire, I would work on just projects that I thought would be fun. And so I would just make
prototypes, try them out, try them out on friends, and I remember it was actually with Ascension, where I didn't make Ascension specifically to think, oh, I'm going to start a company with this game. I made it because I really wanted that game to exist. I played enough of Dominion, and I was missing something I really, really wanted.
And then I showed it to a friend of mine, Rob Doherty, and he has his own, he actually was a guy that owned your move games, the store, and where I used to play when I was younger. And I show him the game, and he's like, dude, you have the ball, run with it. This is great, make this a thing. And he had been an entrepreneur for a while, and so he helped me kind of like, okay, no, let's do this.
And that started down the road. And so this is going to be my project now. And I started my early prototypes were ugly and I will, I'll find a way to share them with you. I mean, some of them are like horribly inappropriate. Like we had just really just rude pictures and I won't share those, but you know, just ridiculous because it's just for fun. Root pictures. How dare you? I'm imagining that's code for lots of dicks everywhere. I mean, yeah, I was like, yeah, I'm not part of the imagination of the listeners on this one.
Not appropriate for public consumption. Leave it at that. Just to defend my Dick's comment, I will say there's a place called Hotel Barone in San Francisco. Great wine spot. Excellent place. And I don't know if this is true, but at one point, this is one of the first places with a console for digital signing way back in the day. And the rumor was that
of all the guys who went there and bought drinks. It's like 75% just drew dicks. I thought it was actually pretty hilarious. Well, there's an important game design principle I didn't talk about here, which is the TTP, which is time to penis. Any opportunity that you give people to create their own thing, at some point, someone's going to make a dick. That's going to happen.
TTP. All right. I'm going to add that to my metrics. Yeah. Key show notes. But I mean, so what it is, I mean, the more broader point is like anytime you allow people to customize, you have to think, what are they going to do with it? And how does that share? And how does that build your community? But TTP is the shorthand for that. So it is, it is an unfortunate reality of our society that that is just going to happen. Okay.
So you'll share. I did not get this interview going this way. I'll tell you that I didn't know. Thanks, coffee. So let me try to write the ship here for a second. So you're talking about roughs and the prototypes. You'll filter out some of the rude pictures and we'll share some of that. When you were chatting with, if I'm remembering correctly, Rob, and he's saying, you got this run with this.
Were you at that point at all thinking of how it fit into the potentially competitive landscape and how it was differentiated, or was it just enough for it to be something that you used to scratch your own itch and you assumed, hey, if this is exciting for me as one person, as someone who plays a lot of games, I assume it's going to be attractive to more people.
So three things, right? One, absolutely. It has to scratch my own itch and I have to love it. I loved it. I wanted to see it exist. All of my most successful projects by far are the things that I make for me and that I really want. And then I know they're going to agree. So that's, I think, really important.
2. I do not chase trends. I hate chasing trends. In fact, every time I've tried to chase a trend, it's been unsuccessful. The idea of like, I'm trying to build something for some hypothetical. I think this is hot right now has never worked. However, there's a third point here, which is important, which is it can't be just about you. And so the rule I like to use is I will show the game to people and I'll prototype it and test it.
And when people start asking me to play again without me prompting them, that's when I know I've got something. So it's not just me, that's why like Rob, who I respect a lot, he was like, no, no, no, this is great, like play again. And I would show it to some other game designer friends and show it to some other people and they're like, no, no, this is great. So as you're going through, you're getting like a wider, wider sphere of feedback that's helping you move forward. And if your game is targeted at a different target audience, right? So I make a game called Bakugan, which is a toy based game for kids.
Obviously, how much fun I have playing it is not nearly as important as a five-year-old or an eight-year-old. You have to test with your target market in that sense. I don't say that target market testing is not important. It is, but don't try to chase a trend, make something that you know is fun and that you enjoy, and then get the feedback and iterate as you go. As you get that positive feedback,
Now I'm willing to invest more and more into the product. So now I'm, I actually am going to go and start putting some real art on it. And the story behind the art is, I guess it's at this stage I can tell. So back when I was living in Boston, I met the guy that lived down the hall and he comes in the knocks on the door and says, Oh, and I have like, at this time I just moved out of college. So I'm like blacklight posters on the wall, like, you know, kind of like it's still basically a college door room. I just had to transport it to a department.
And then the guy comes back over 20 minutes later, was like, bag of weed. I'm pretty sure you want to smoke this, right? It's like, OK, cool. So we hang out. We've become great friends. And he actually turns out as an incredible artist. His name's Eric Saby. And, you know, whatever, we became friends. I have one of his art pieces on my, well, not on my wall anymore, but in storage now. But it's actually, it's not my wall in my dad's place. I didn't put that one in storage. Anyway, so 10 years later, when I'm making a game, I'm like, oh, man, his art was really cool.
I'm going to call him up and I called him up and said, Hey, would you want to make art for my game? And I built the IP and the story around his style because I knew I could get this batch of art without having to pay for like a whole new artist and new things as he'd already made it so I could pay him less and he was a good friend and he booked it up. And so now I start bringing art into the game and figuring out how you can use what's around and build a lore and build a style around what's available. Okay, now we've made some art. Now we've got some cool looking cards.
I'm investing a little bit more, and then I take it to a convention called gamma, which is a game manufacturer's association event. It's like an industry insider tabletop game thing, so publishers and retailers and distributors are all there, so I'm not a public show. I get a little booth.
And I bring my little fake prototype there. And I realized, actually, as I was going to the show that I didn't have in the game, you get what's called honor, which is like victory points, basically. And I forgot to make anything that you track. How do you track? How many points you get? How many honor you get? And I was like, oh, man, what do we do? And I went to a Michael store, like a little craft store.
Crafts or yes, thank you. And they had these little beads, these little plastic fishbowl beads, you know, and they're all the oddly shaped. It's like, all right, whatever, let's try these. I'll just use these for the prototype. So grab the bunch of those, put them in and we start demoing the game and people get drawn to these beads and like, oh my God, this is awesome. Like crows, finding a shiny button.
Yes, exactly. They're super shiny and they come over and like, are these, you know, they play the game, they like the games like, oh, this is awesome. These are going to be in the game, right? I was like, yes, yes, they are. It was like the POS example you gave earlier, right? I have no idea how to get these things. I have no idea how to make them. I don't know what to go, but they're definitely in the game.
So that show, the response was so overwhelming. Like the people loved it, stores wanted to order it, streamers wanted to order. So now all of a sudden, it's like, okay, now I'm going to literally, I'm all in, right? I literally put my entire life savings now, all the extra that I'd saved up to print at the time was 10,000 units of the game, which is pretty crazy, probably a little. Sounds like a lot of units. Yeah, it sounds like a lot.
Yeah, most times people are going to start a new game. It's like you print a thousand units. You better hope to God you don't have a manufacturing anomaly. Oh, dude, I was a nightmare stories around that for sure. That's a whole different piece. But again, and this is not like I had worked with manufacturers before. I had made games working for another company. So this part wasn't totally new to me.
And I wouldn't have put all of that money into the thing. I used to joke, if this doesn't work, I'm going to have to build a house out of ascension boxes. That's pretty much all I got. But I wasn't, again, just to demystify the risk. I had gotten so much positive feedback. I had stores and distributors already waiting to order the thing. So now it's like, OK, it's willing to put the money in and take a risk.
Yeah. And also just for folks who are unaware, I mean, there are all sorts of ways to potentially finance things if you have that demonstrated demand. I'm not suggesting this. You got to do your own diligence on these things, but like invoice factoring, right? Like if you have people who are pledging and signing whatever it is, letters of intent or something more binding to purchase a certain quantity, you can use that with manufacturers to then get finance terms.
And there are companies that independently do this as well. So waste work around it. My question that I want to ask next is related to gamma. How many exhibitors or people with games like yourself, game developers, were there at the show? Actually, it's not. We don't even need to be specific to game developers. Like how many booths or exhibits were at the show?
At the time, I think it was like about 30. Okay. Now it's probably, it's not, it's not huge, you know, and now it's, it's bigger, maybe two or three times that, but it's not like, you know, it's less than a hundred. Okay. No, no, no. So that's one of the nice things the game, the tail, you know, this kind of game industry is still a little smaller than like a New York toy fair is the more big one. That's like, it's a, it happens and that's got thousands and thousands of booths and you're spending millions of dollars to have a presence there. It's like a much bigger piece. This is, this one's a little smaller.
So the reason I'm asking is that, in fact, if somebody wants just a separate collection of stories around these types of trade shows, and I think it was the New York Toy Fair, Todd McFarland, the legendary comic book artist has some stories around this from our conversations, which are hilarious.
What I was wondering, and maybe it doesn't apply because there were 30 tables or 30 booths, but did you do anything to draw attention to yourself or the game at this event? Or was it simply enough to pay for a booth and then assume that there would be enough foot traffic to bring the right people to you?
So the principle you're driving at is critical, right? You need to get people's attention. You need to find a way at these booths, even at, you know, GenCon, which is the tabletop, more public facing tabletop convention, where I actually did launch Ascension. And there's a lot more people and a lot more vying for traffic at shows like gamma anywhere.
Or even on a store shelf, why is someone going to stop and pay attention to what you're doing? The great thing about where we are in our modern world is it's easier than ever to make stuff. You can print your own books. You can print your own games on demand. You can make anything you want. The downside is we're flooded with stuff, not surprising. And so how do you separate from the crowd? How do you draw people's attention? So at Gamma, I mean, I already told you by accident, almost as shiny beads helped. Nobody had those shiny beads. That was a really attractive thing.
But I also invested in a video drop like a TV screen and I made like a little cool rotating loop showing the things and people most people there didn't do that. And so finding something that draws people's eye and brings them in so it can be a cool unique component. It can be a cool giant visual. It can be I had a game I launched years later called bad beats.
B E T S is like kind of play on the poker term of bad beats but with actual beats I had someone dress in a giant beat costume of one of my two members into a giant beat cost. Yeah it's gimmicky but it worked right so if you have a great product, it doesn't matter if nobody ever looks at it and also all the gimmicks of the world won't help you if you don't have a great product so step one have something great step to have a reason for people to pay attention to you.
The workshopping attention grabbing in real life, I think, is really undervalued in today's increasingly digital world. And this applies to, for instance, workshopping book material by giving speaking engagements, even to a very small group. You'll figure out very quickly what works and what doesn't, what's confusing and what isn't, what people will remember versus what they immediately forget or didn't even pay attention to in the first place. And the trade show stories are bringing back
memories because I recall when I back in my former life had my sports nutrition company and I would go to these trade shows and as you know, I have to imagine this is true for these other trade shows. Once you get there, you are a captive audience and if you want to share, it's like, oh yeah, you can rent a chair for 300 bucks for a day and I was just going in somewhat naive because I paid the exhibitor fee and I was like, oh great, I'll figure out the rest shouldn't be too bad.
But it was pretty bad. So I remember trying to figure out how to draw attention. And at one particular trade show, I next to no budget because there were a couple of things that were mandatory that you had to rent, which struck me as a little bizarre, but it exhausted my.
my budget. So what I ended up doing was also getting, I bought a TV at Best Buy, a big screen that I could return. And I put on highlight reels of Muay Thai kickboxing, right? Because it's definitely going to grab some attention, but to provide a little context, this was at a
It was a strong man slash sports event. It was kind of like the Arnold classic in Columbus for people who might know that it's a huge event. This was much smaller, but there were a lot of athletes and competitors and so on, milling about. And I also brought, I think it was four or five of these hand grippers called the captains of crush, which are incredibly
and increasingly difficult to close depending on the poundage to the extent that some of them are so difficult that there may be five or six people or twelve people in the world who at that time could close whatever the highest rated captains of crush was so I laid those out for people to test with all these athletes milling about and then put this video up ended up getting the couch in chairs at a good will and I had to like bribe a guy to help me with this truck to get it over
Oh, yeah. And ended up being a really hilarious experience, but it taught me a lot about what worked and what didn't. And I was able to iterate because it was a multi-day event. And taking a step back for a second, and then I want to come back to Ascension and all the adventures there, what have you learned about good playtesting versus not terribly effective playtesting? And what I mean by that is,
When you're providing your game to people, certainly one pass fail is do they want to play it past the point that you need them to play it? That's sort of like the Viagra test, right? Like they send it out to test patients for whatever it was, hypotension, hypertension, something like that. And then lo and behold,
All these guys over the age of x didn't want to send back their medication and it's like, huh, interesting. Let's look at that. And that's how Viagra came to be in its current iteration. But there's that. And the reason I'm asking this and this is going to be a very long paragraph question is that when I am doing the equivalent with my books and chapters,
there are definitely better and worse ways to elicit feedback. If you're like, what do you think of this chapter? It's a crapshoot. And if people are trying to be nice, which comes down to who you select also to be your play testers, in my case, proofreaders, you're going to get a bit of a scatter shot of responses and it might not be actionable. But if I ask,
read this chapter, tell me the 20% that I should absolutely keep no matter what, then tell me the 20% if you had to cut 20% that you would cut, you're going to get very, very different type of kind of surgical feedback. Similarly, with someone who's maybe less experienced as a reader, you could just say, note any place that is confusing or where you find your mind wandering. And then that gets you to also stuff that you might cut. What have you learned about
Listening feedback or evaluating feedback when you're letting people test again. It's going to depend upon the phase that you're in. Every time I go to the core design loop, I like to think of myself like a scientist. I have some hypothesis that I'm trying to test, and that's what I'm focused on in that testing session.
So when you're early on, you're like, okay, is this even fun? Is this idea of rolling dice to try to punch somebody and making combos fun, right? Or whatever it is, right? You want to just see, is it fun? I'm not asking, is it balanced? I'm not asking, is it pretty? I'm not asking, does the game last too long? I'm asking, is this part fun? And that's what I'm focused on. And so I know when I'm testing that if I start getting feedback on these other parts, I'm not worried about that. I can set that aside because that's not what I'm looking for here.
And the whole, I want to keep playing. I want to play again, test the Viagra test as you put it. That's not going to come true until later on in the cycle, right? Your early prototypes are most likely not going to meet that. So you're looking for other things. So I do like you. So I have a questionnaire that I'll use. I have it. It's up for free. I'm thinking like a game. I designer.com slash media, or we can link it in the show notes, which has a bunch of specific questions. You can just print it out and use it. So I will ask, all right, what are the three things you like the most about the game? What are the three things you like the least about the game? Where did you get confused?
And much like your book question, right? You really want to pay attention to where people get lost and confused. And nonverbal communication is at least as important as anything they're going to write down and tell you. If you say, give me the three things you like the most, three things you like the least, what would you change, whatever, people will say something to you just because they feel like they have to say something to you. It doesn't always mean that that's really what they feel, right? You're prompting them to it. So you have to use your intuition to say, okay, where A, is this relevant to the hypothesis I'm trying to test in the states that I'm in?
B, does this align with what I see visually of what they're doing? My mom tells me she loves all my games even when she really has no idea what's going on in some of them, right? She's very nice. But if I see that somebody's getting lost or leaning back or checking their phone, like watching for those nonverbal cues is so important and you sort of train yourself over time to get better at that.
But yeah, so asking questions to prompt for the specifics being focused on what's important to me right now, looking for nonverbal cues, and then in best case scenario, just like you mentioned, right? You have some more sophisticated readers and you have less sophisticated readers. You have more sophisticated game players and less sophisticated game players. So if you can test with
Other game designers, they're going to be better at zeroing in, okay, yeah, I don't care that the car doesn't have pictures on it or that the numbers aren't balanced. I know what you're looking for, and I can give you feedback assigned to it. If you just take it to somebody, you know, just a regular person, they're going to get hung up on a lot of little things. And so you have their feedbacks a little bit harder. You have to parse out a little bit more of what's important. Of course, as you get more and more focused on the final product, somebody that's in your target audience, their feedback matters a lot.
And then the last thing I'll say is a quote that I think is also one of your favorites. It's definitely one of mine from Neil Gaiman. When your reader says that something is wrong, they're almost always right. And when they say how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. I don't know if I'm butchering it, but that is 100% true in games too, right? If you get your testing with multiple people in your target audience that are consistently saying that something's not good,
You, as a designer, have to fix it. They definitely do not have the right answer for how to fix it. That's your job. But that's another key part when I'm testing is that, okay, I'm looking for themes, looking for patterns. One person telling me they don't like something. Maybe I can dismiss it. But if 20 people that are all in my target audience say that, that's something I got to focus on. Yeah, no matter how pretty the paragraph, no matter how shiny the fishbowl pebble you might have. If a bunch of people are saying, I don't get it. It's confusing. You got to cut it.
Not always the easiest thing. So what happened with ascension? So you have enough ascension kits to build a house, or at least you put in the order, and what unfolds. So then I go and I get a booth at GenCon, as mentioned, and this was where I'm going to have the unveiling. And now, again, I'm very poor at this point. Now, GenCon for folks who don't know, can you just maybe paint a picture or an analogy for what GenCon is and the significance of GenCon?
So Gencon is the tabletop and role playing a mecca of the United States, possibly, you could say the world, right? Gen from Lake Geneva is where it started. It's why it's called Gencon. It's not there anymore, but that's what it came from, where the original Dungeons and Dragons people got together and played. It was like the first place where people started gathered and it kind of built this core of what gaming became today. And so now it happens in Indianapolis. It's like 60,000 people.
Every year, somewhere in that neighborhood, and every type of game you can imagine, people are playing all hours of the night. They call it the best four days in gaming, but it's got anything you can dream of is there and many things you can't dream of. So it's like kind of the place to be, if you will, for tabletop and role-playing game nerds like myself. All right, so you show up at GenCon.
You've gone from 30 booths to God knows how many, right? You can't count how many. And I'm just, I'm just a little guy, right? I don't have any. You're at a Taylor Swift concert now, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so what I had was I bought a 10 by 10 booth, which is the smallest booth you can 10 foot by 10 foot booth.
and then they had like a newbie competition like a little submit your marketing plan and we can give you a 10 by 20 booth for the price of a 10 by 10 and i won that contest so fortunately got a 10 by 20 booth which is still like very small in the scheme of what's there and i set up my stuff and this was people had started to hear about my game because i showed it off a gamma before and i start you know i'm just kind of putting it out there in whatever way i can but this is just posting online and sharing with friends i don't have any marketing budget or anything like that.
And then I get there and not only do we have like some of the early adopters who had heard about it, run to the booth, but then they play the game and they loved it so much. They would then take it, open up by it, open it up and then start showing it to their friends. They would like set up. And so we ended up, this is not allowed at Gen Con anymore, by the way, but they would just take over like nearby tables like at the seated area.
and just start demoing the game for me. Like totally for, you know, didn't ask them to, didn't pay them. The Ascension splinter cells activate. It did. And I would start seeing people play it in the halls and then I would see people carrying boxes around. And so it became this kind of like viral before, you know, this sort of viral sensation in a way that was very, it was very exciting. It was like a very
incredible moment. And so we sold out of everything we brought. So this is just a very rewarding, very cool experience. My team, every, you know, it's not just me now. We've got other people there like working really hard to make this come to life. You know, teams like four of us. And then I got an offer that was very difficult offer to refuse. So I, at this point, I had early product that was shipped for GenCon, but the rest of the stuff was still in the way. So I still haven't sold these 10,000 units with all my life savings tied up into it. And I get a call from another very big gaming company.
And I don't think I'll say the name just because I don't know anyway. And they say, hey, we like your game. We want to buy it out.
all of it. We'll take it over. It'll be our game. We'll pay you a royalty. You don't have to worry about anything. It'll be all done. Now, this is a very tough moment for me. In a sense, it's a dream come true. They buy all the stocks on my monies off the table. They are a big company. They can push it. They can sell it. And then I can just go back to making games and I'll have some amount of royalty and that'll be good to go. And I sat with it. And at the end of the day, I was like, you know what? This is my baby.
I've worked so hard to get it here. And I just want to see it through. I want to see it through. I wanted to stay in mind. I didn't want to sell it off. And I said no. And it was like one of those. I might regret this one later, right? And then 30 days later, product shows up finally after delays. Funnily enough, the product launch delay was launched such that it actually launched while I was at Burning Man, which was not supposed to be, but there was.
When I come back from Burning Man, I have a little release party like out in the middle of the desert on the fly. And when I come back, we'd sold out. Everything was sold out the entire run. And we had to make a reorder and it was like, okay, now I can actually, the company is, it's working. I can reorder, start making expansion and start and like the rest of the company's history kind of.
evolved from that in a way that, well, I'm glad I made the decision I did. All right, many questions. So at GenCon, how many games did you sell, roughly?
Oh man, I don't remember exactly, but it's hundreds. Hundreds, some number of hundreds, yeah. I want to bookmark this. This is not gonna be my first question, but just how you sell 10,000 after selling a few hundred. Was it word of mouth online? Was it something else? Just what factors do you think contributed to that? Because it's not an immediate, obvious outcome, at least not for me listening to the story. But before we get to that, because this all sort of undergirds a lot of what you're talking about,
How do the economics of, say, tabletop games or card games work? What's the kind of traditional model? How do people get paid? Who's getting paid? Like, what? What are the percentages? Is it terms of royalties? What is that a percentage of? Could you just give us an overview of what the economics of that world kind of look like as a template?
When you're producing games, you typically, most of the time, you're going to produce them overseas. So now with cardboard stuff, it's starting to become a little bit more economical to do it. Stateside, we do some of our game stateside, but mostly doing overseas. Whatever the retail price of the game is, the cost of the game has to be about a fifth of that. And the reason is that as a manufacturer, you are going to sell the game to a distributor at about 60% off the price of retail.
They're going to sell it to a retailer at 50% off the price of retail. So they've got like a 10% margin for distribution. And then the retailer has that 50% margin for the rest of it. So if you are a game designer and manufacturer, then it sounds like 20% margins generally on games, something like that. Yeah.
Now, if you're a game designer, typically, if you're an external game designer, you pay a royalty to that designer off whatever you're selling, right? So if you're selling it to distribution, you sell a percentage off the distribution price. If you sell it direct to consumer, you sell it to consumer price. And that can vary depending upon the designer. So in tabletop games, typically, it's going to be anywhere between six and 12% at the high end for more mass market games, big scale games. It can go as low as 2% or 3%. Okay, got it.
This is important because it highlights how challenging.
your decision to say no was, right? Because we're not talking about like, I'm keeping 90%. Well, I mean, maybe with direct consumer you are, but it's not like 90% margins versus six. It's like there's actually a narrow gap, right? Which is also true, for instance, in books for self-publishing and traditional deals. People think they're miles and miles apart. In some cases, maybe they are. But when you start to factor in all of the costs,
The delta between the percentage that you take, say, self-publishing versus traditional is not as wide as people might think. So thank you for giving that. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that?
Yeah, well, it comes down to it was a little bit more than just the money and the dollars and the sense of it. It was a matter of like, this was my baby, this is my IP. You've worked with publishers where they now take over the rights of stuff and you can't just do what you want with the book anymore. Yeah, right. I would imagine if you want to do ascension expansion packs or ascension ABCD and E, you want to do a whole derivative line. If the publisher owns those rights or effectively owns those rights, you're in a tight spot.
Think about where we are now thirteen years later there's over sixteen stand-alone expansions for attention we made ascension tactics which is an ascension miniatures game which we did another expansion to that ascension's been featured in a major motion picture we're you know working on trying to take the IP and make cartoons and make other things comic books out of it right all there's all of these things that.
are fun. We've had conversations about this for stuff. It's fun to create and grow and expand your storylines. When I first made Ascension, I had sketched out a three-year story arc of what the world of Ascension would be if I got the whole thing done. And now, of course, it's 13 years later, so I've had to make some more stories since then. But that's the part I love. Just like growing up playing Dungeons and Dragons, the process of coming up with the stories and making it and bringing that world to life,
is just i love it and so i didn't want to to lose that and i don't you know for people that are listening they're trying to make these decisions like it's not obvious even though i've been fortunately successful it's not obvious it's the right decision for every like i spend way less of my time.
just designing games because I'm running a company. I have to manage logistics. I have to manage people. I have to plan out the marketing strategies. There's all these things that come with running a company. And so I think a lot of people would actually be better off. And then what all you want to do is make games, then selling to a publisher is a great strategy. I wanted to kind of build worlds and build something bigger. And so here I am.
I'll just repeat a name I mentioned earlier, Stephen Key. I don't think he does what some people would refer to as venturing, which is basically building the business to do it mostly yourself or a lot of it yourself. He loves developing new toys and new products, and he's really good at the licensing game. And that, as far as I know, maybe things have changed, but that's the game he plays. And I would say just on the do something bigger side,
There are different ways of doing something bigger. So if you want to have the freedom to do the extensions and so on, like you have, on some level, you almost certainly have to retain rights. But for a product developer, doesn't have the business know-how or doesn't want to develop it, doesn't want to spend time that way.
A licensing to a gigantic company that has a global footprint and distribution could be the perfect path or the best available path for making a large impact in terms of distribution and putting a spin on the ball of culture. Speaking of putting a spin on the ball, the game Bakugan I mentioned earlier is a game that I work on that's spin master as a company owns it. They have toy plastic balls and there's a game that I designed the game, but they own the rights. They own the game. They own the distribution. They do everything. And that is by far the biggest
quote unquote game I've ever worked on I mean it's all over the world is in toy stores anywhere you go there's a cartoon multiple cartoons like it's enormous and so that is also fun and also really cool exciting thing and so that path is totally viable so you can do work for hire you can create projects and sell them and make a royalty you can launch and publish your own things there's an enormous number of ways.
To go forward and a lot of it comes down to just getting clear, defining what it is that you want, what's important to you, how do i make a living as a game designer, that's like the surface level question, how questions are a trap right you need to get below that what does it mean for me, what is it i actually want, what does success look like for me and then even deeper than that why am i doing this.
because I want to make super cool worlds and I want to grow into a universe or because I want to collaborate with people or because I want to reach millions of people or because I just want to have something to play with my friends and do something on the side, right? There's no wrong answer to any of those questions. But if you don't dive deep enough for yourself, you're going to end up chasing down a path like I did many times where I'm just going to compete or move on a path for the sake of it because I want the most dollars. The most dollars is the wrong game to play. I'll tell you that.
Yeah, he can lead you astray really quickly. Important to keep your eyes on the cash flow, but also can be a trap. Don't run out of dollars, but don't just optimize for dollars. All right. So maybe this ties in.
