Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.
0:00:10 Boy, this is a special one. I’ll keep my intro brief as my conversation with Alon Lee,
0:00:16 which you’re about to hear, covers the whole backstory. This is a very, very, very fun episode
0:00:21 for me. One I’ve been looking forward to publishing for months and actually about two years because my
0:00:25 brand new card game, Coyote, created in collaboration with Alon and Exploding Kins,
0:00:30 which started with this podcast, is now a national bestseller. It’s everywhere. Just
0:00:37 launched to 8,000 locations worldwide, including Walmart, Target, Amazon, and a gajillion others.
0:00:42 It’s a very fast-paced card game, takes minutes to learn, hard to master, hat tip, Nolan Bushnell,
0:00:50 and 300 million plus social views of gameplay now online. Everything’s gone bananas. And please
0:00:54 check it out. Please, please check it out. If I’ve done anything that you’ve benefited from,
0:00:59 coyotegame.com. And there’s a lot under the hood that I think you might find of interest. Even if
0:01:04 you’re not a gamer, you don’t think about yourself as playing games. Coyotegame.com. Super, super
0:01:10 satisfying. The entire team at Exploding Kittens is incredible. They’re rock stars. A pleasure to work
0:01:15 with. So enjoy my conversation with Alon Lee. We talk about the art of the pitch. We talk about figuring
0:01:19 out mass retail. We talk about prototyping. We talk about game development. We talk about the nuts and
0:01:24 bolts behind the scenes backstory of creating something like this from
0:01:29 nothing. One last thing, stick around to the end for a very fun surprise that involves a mystery
0:01:34 Hollywood party that you might be able to join. Would love you to join. So stick around. Please
0:01:38 enjoy right after just a few words from the partners who make this podcast possible.
0:01:44 If I were to update the four hour work week, which I get asked to do a lot, I would really
0:01:50 only add one thing. And that is a section on AI tools, because for everything I described with
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0:05:03 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:05:04 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:05:07 Now what is the internet, but you’re telling me.
0:05:12 What if I did the altitude? I’m a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
0:05:25 Hello, ladies and germs, boys and girls. This is another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I am
0:05:33 Tim Ferriss and I’m sitting with a friend of mine who I brought to my podcast with a secret agenda
0:05:41 that has ended up two years later with a very, very not so secret for long outcome that we’re
0:05:43 going to talk about. Alon Lee.
0:05:44 Thanks.
0:05:45 Nice to see you again.
0:05:50 It’s nice to see you too. That was a secret agenda. That was a two year in the making secret
0:05:55 two years in the making. So what we’re going to do in this conversation, and I just hijacked
0:06:00 his bio because I’ve had too much caffeine. So I’m going to let him do the self intro in a second,
0:06:06 but we’re going to give you a peek behind the curtain, under the hood, open the kimono,
0:06:11 choose your metaphor. We’re going to talk about the creative process, the development process,
0:06:17 thinking about distribution, retail, all these things, which I have not heard discussed anywhere
0:06:18 else in depth.
0:06:29 You buried the lead. All of that stuff of a game that we created that from the very beginning
0:06:36 was something I’ve wanted to do my whole life, which is create a game. I was raised, protected in
0:06:43 some ways by Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. It was my refuge from bullying and also just the straight
0:06:51 boredom of most of my schooling at the time. And that immersive experience, the ability to get lost
0:06:59 in a world of imagination and fun and laughter and emotion was so incredibly important. It was so
0:07:05 formative for me that the seed was planted really early. And I think you know this because I probably
0:07:13 sent you a photograph of this at one point, I still have all of my modules. I have the player’s handbook,
0:07:21 first edition, dungeon master’s guide, all of the dice, everything from when I was a kid. I’ve kept
0:07:21 it to this day.
0:07:28 I love this. But hold on. If you’re not going to say it, I’m going to say it. Tim Ferriss made a game.
0:07:30 I did.
0:07:31 That’s amazing.
0:07:32 It took me 47 years.
0:07:33 That’s huge.
0:07:34 Here we are.
0:07:40 So the game, I’ll just show it to camera for people who want a visual, who are not watching this. If you’re
0:07:48 listening, you can go to tim.blog slash coyote. So I’m giving a bit of what you might call foreshadowing
0:07:55 in the biz. But this is the game. It is a card game. It’s called Coyote. That name did not come
0:08:02 easily. We went through about 573 different names and lots of testing. And we’ll talk about some of
0:08:08 that. But this is the game. And it’s effectively, I’d like to hear your pitch because we have slightly
0:08:14 different approaches. But I would say it is rock, paper, scissors on steroids. So there are God knows
0:08:22 how many, maybe 20 different gestures, something like that. 66 total cards. And you can play
0:08:27 cooperatively where you’re all trying to beat the game together or competitively where you can
0:08:35 sabotage individual players, throw curve balls of all different types. And that relates to the name
0:08:39 Coyote. If you think about the trickster mythology associated with Coyote.
0:08:42 Yeah. We never got to your bio. Who the hell are you?
0:08:45 Oh, that’s the least interesting part of this whole thing.
0:08:50 No, I know. But it puts it in perspective and just explain the company a bit, the scope of it,
0:08:51 et cetera.
0:08:54 I love talking about games. I hate talking about myself. So I will try.
0:08:56 That’s why it takes someone like me to force you to do it.
0:09:02 Yeah. Okay. Here we go. My name’s Alon Lee. I am the co-creator and CEO of Exploding Kittens.
0:09:07 I believe we’re the number one independent game studio in the world. Something like that.
0:09:10 I don’t know. We’ve sold a whole bunch of games. We’ve sold 60 million games at this point.
0:09:17 And I’ve been running that company for 10 years now. And before that, I was the chief design officer
0:09:20 at the Xbox. And before that, I worked at a pet store.
0:09:28 And for people who want the full journey, including the sort of magical Tinder box that was Kickstarter
0:09:34 way back in the day, how this whole adventure started 10 plus years ago, listen to the first
0:09:43 conversation that I did with Alon. I had wanted to make a game and quickly realized that an RPG,
0:09:50 something like Dungeons and Dragons, right? Role-playing game was going to be too complicated
0:09:56 for me and my friends as adults to play. It would be too hard for me to recruit my friends
0:10:01 where you have, let’s just say a full day, then you have dinner, maybe you have a few drinks,
0:10:08 and then you have an hour before people split. There’s no way I’m going to get someone to build,
0:10:17 for instance, like a chaotic, good, gray elf, which was my orientation, and work from there.
0:10:23 It’s just not going to happen. And meanwhile, about maybe it was a year or two years before
0:10:31 I invited you on the podcast, I found this game, Poetry for Neanderthals. And holy shit,
0:10:37 I had so much fun with that. With my friends, I thought, okay, I think I want to tilt my
0:10:44 game dreams, which at that point had no real direction towards something more casual. But in
0:10:51 the meantime, I’d also been listening to all sorts of podcasts and so on that we’ll get to.
0:10:56 But you’ve explained your background. But hold on. So what you just described
0:11:01 is exactly why I started Exploding Kittens, because a little bit different. Unlike you,
0:11:08 I, when I encounter those crazy two and four and six-hour games, I am immediately turned off. Like,
0:11:14 I can’t focus for that long. I can’t understand the rules. If it takes longer than five minutes to
0:11:21 explain a game, I am gone. Like, I have no ability to play that game. And so the whole reason I started
0:11:27 this company, and I think the whole reason that you made the pivot from giant role-playing games to being
0:11:34 interested in the creation of casual fast party games is like this golden rule of like two minutes
0:11:39 to learn, 15 minutes to play. Because nothing’s at stake there, right? You’re going to learn it.
0:11:43 You’re either going to love the game or you’re going to hate it, but whatever, you committed five minutes
0:11:49 total to that thing. And I love the games where after the five-minute commitment, you’re still going
0:11:54 to play for two hours. But they’re going to be in these little five-minute sessions over and over and over
0:11:59 again. And it sounds like that’s the experience you had, which makes me so happy, because that means
0:12:02 like, you know, mission accomplished. Like, that’s exactly what I wanted to build.
0:12:08 And we’re going to talk about different rules or tenets that you have, because what I want to do in this
0:12:14 conversation, we’re definitely going to talk about the process of building this game, because I am really,
0:12:21 really happy with it and really proud of it. And we’ll have a lot to talk about. But the motivation
0:12:31 also of basically showing the cards, I’m going to use so many mixed metaphors here, is to teach people
0:12:40 game design and explain why this possessed such a toehold in my mind for so long.
0:12:46 Yeah. Well, you went through a journey. And I’m excited, like, looking at that journey through
0:12:53 your eyes of, I don’t even know what I want to build, but I know I want to build a fun experience
0:12:57 that I would enjoy, that my friends would enjoy, all the way through to this thing is at every Walmart
0:13:03 and Target in North America. That journey is incredible. And you got to see it for the first
0:13:09 time. Like, you absolutely drank from the fire hose here. This was fun for me, because I had to
0:13:13 walk you through this, right? You’ve never sold a game before. So walking through the process of
0:13:19 how you make a game and how you sell a game, it doesn’t work the way people think. So retailers
0:13:24 have a buyer per category. So if anybody wants to sell something to a retailer, you want something in
0:13:30 Target or Walmart or Amazon or Barnes and Noble, the way it works is you have to convince the buyer
0:13:36 for your category to take your thing, right? They have limited shelf space. It’s very precious real
0:13:40 estate. So you have to convince them that your thing is better than anybody else’s thing.
0:13:47 And twice a year, they have these things called line reviews. So the buyers have to buy games for
0:13:52 next year, right? They need to put stuff on the shelf. There’s only a certain number of meetings
0:13:57 they can physically have in a period of time because it’s usually one or two or maybe three people.
0:14:04 So they take as many meetings as they can. It’s usually a dozen, maybe two dozen. And in those meetings,
0:14:08 in your case, with different game manufacturers, different studios.
0:14:12 Exactly. So they’ll take a meeting with Hasbro and they’ll take a meeting with Mattel and they’ll
0:14:19 take a meeting, you know, all the big guys. And in those meetings, 20, 30, 50 games are pitched to
0:14:23 them in every single one of those meetings. And then they’ll make a decision on which ones they’re
0:14:28 going to purchase and stock for the next year. So that’s the line review. The tricky parts for line
0:14:32 review is one, you got to do a great job. But even before that, you got to get that meeting,
0:14:37 right? They only have time for a certain number of meetings. So you have to put yourself in a
0:14:41 position where you can get in that room. All right. So we’re going to talk strategy
0:14:47 and tactics for a line review in a minute because you are, and take this as a compliment, you’re one
0:14:51 of the best in-person salespeople I’ve ever seen.
0:14:53 That could also be an insult.
0:14:54 No, it’s not an insult.
0:14:55 I’ll take it. I’ll take it.
0:14:59 No, no, it’s not an insult. Everybody’s in sales, whether they like to admit it or not. Whether
0:15:05 you’re selling ideas, you’re selling a position, a perspective, if you want to call it deal-making.
0:15:10 This is what I used to say in my class, my guest lecture that I taught for 10 years,
0:15:15 once or twice a year in high-tech entrepreneurship. I would start off by saying like,
0:15:20 who here wants to be in sales? No hands would go up. And I would say, well, I’ve got some good
0:15:25 news and I got some bad news. Bad news is you’re all in sales. Let me explain why. If you want to
0:15:29 call it deal-making, fine. You’re going to have to negotiate. You don’t get what you deserve. You
0:15:30 get what you negotiate.
0:15:31 Well said.
0:15:35 And you get what you can present in a very persuasive way. I was like, good news is you
0:15:42 can learn it. This is a coachable, learnable skill, which I completely still believe. There’s
0:15:47 some people who may have a little bit of extroversion, charismatic, reality distortion
0:15:52 field advantage, but you can become excellent even if you start with zero raw materials.
0:15:58 Okay. So the journey, wanted to make a game my whole life. Okay. But it was this vague,
0:16:01 maybe someday, God, wouldn’t it be nice?
0:16:03 Let me just poke at that for a second.
0:16:03 Yeah, sure.
0:16:03 Why?
0:16:15 The why is I wanted to imbue someone else’s experience with the magic I felt playing D&D.
0:16:16 Well said.
0:16:22 That’s it. Or much easier games, right? I used to play, it’s such a simple game. I used to
0:16:28 play Sorry and Monopoly. And as a young kid, I just thought Sorry was the most hilarious
0:16:33 thing. When you could look someone in the eyes and go, sorry, and knock their stuff off
0:16:35 the board. Didn’t always respond well when it happened to me.
0:16:44 It doesn’t have to be the incredibly immersive, complex game that D&D is. Although I still think
0:16:49 that is just like Gary Gygax and the team way back in the day. Holy cow. Also, by the way,
0:16:57 for people who don’t know, Gen Con, huge convention, started out around Lake Geneva and was, I believe,
0:17:00 created by the TSR guys way back in the day.
0:17:01 I believe that’s right. Yeah.
0:17:01 Yeah.
0:17:07 Gen Con from Lake Geneva and then was the Generals Convention and now is nothing. Now Gen Con doesn’t
0:17:11 stand for anything because it’s in Indianapolis. But anyway, sorry. There’s an aside.
0:17:16 So that was the kind of impetus behind wanting to make a game, but it didn’t have any form.
0:17:23 And then I suppose it was maybe like two and a half, three years ago, I was like, okay, I’d
0:17:30 like to actually take a deeper dive here because there are lots of things we have on our, say,
0:17:35 list of New Year’s resolutions. For instance, like for a long time, I had like develop the
0:17:39 side splits like Jean-Claude Van Damme. Never happened, but it was there every fucking year.
0:17:43 And it just got punted. I was like, well, it didn’t do it. Okay. This year is the year,
0:17:52 but there was no plan. There were no deadlines. There were no constraints, which is the power
0:17:58 of constraints, which we’ll probably talk about. It is so critical. It’s not just critical. It is
0:18:03 additive to have constraints, which seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. Well, I’m sure I get
0:18:10 to that. So I started looking at different options and the catalyst for this actually was something
0:18:16 way back in the day. Some of you will remember called the legend of cock punch. And that was an
0:18:24 NFT project. Remember those, which raised 2 million bucks for fundamental science and like mechanistic
0:18:29 studies, basically related to mental health. So all of the proceeds from that, if people want to look it
0:18:33 up, it’s easy to find legend of cock punch, but all the proceeds went to a nonprofit foundation.
0:18:38 which then fund mental health therapeutic research and things related to that. But in the
0:18:45 process of doing that, I got to with very low stakes, because I think it’s helpful when possible,
0:18:52 especially if you’re an intrepid beginner wading into unfamiliar creative waters, make the stakes
0:18:57 super, super low. And even before this podcast, it’s like, okay, this is a very unusual conversation.
0:19:02 It’s like, look, we’re not doing this live. If we really don’t like it, we can scrap the whole thing.
0:19:10 Like reduce, reduce, reduce the pressure and the stakes until you can get started. Right. Yeah.
0:19:14 With writing, I got the advice long ago, like two crappy pages per day. That’s it.
0:19:14 Love it.
0:19:17 And then you actually put pen to paper.
0:19:18 Yeah. Okay.
0:19:24 The overlaps are enormous with games, but yeah. Yeah. Super, super related. Also the iterative process
0:19:31 using the legend of cock punch as this pretext, basically I started writing fiction. And so I wrote
0:19:39 these very, very turned out to be very involved, very viable sort of fantasy histories and pieces,
0:19:43 tying all of these greater houses together. And then having these protagonists,
0:19:51 you know, the father and then the son who’s Tyrolean and yada, yada, yada, yada. And I still think there
0:19:55 might be something there, but in the process of creating that, I thought to myself, this would
0:20:02 actually make a fantastic game and it wouldn’t have to be as complicated as D and D, but you would have
0:20:08 allies. You would have age old enmities. You would have different strengths, certain strengths that
0:20:14 cancel out other strengths, weaknesses that can be taken advantage of. And that led me to start
0:20:19 listening to a podcast called think like a game designer with Justin Gary, which is outstanding.
0:20:25 Recommend people check it out. And a lot of the focus there, not entirely, but a lot of the focus
0:20:34 there was on trading card games, alternately called collectible card games, I guess, wizards of the
0:20:39 coast who created magic, the gathering patented and trademarked one of them. So they seem to be used
0:20:45 interchangeably, but Justin also former high level competitive magic, the gathering player
0:20:51 has a lot of knowledge around that world. He’s developed some incredibly successful games in that
0:20:57 genre where you’re building a deck, you’re buying certain cards or decks with the hopes of getting
0:21:06 certain cards and assembling your toolkit, basically. And that was initially where my mind went in terms of
0:21:13 game concept. But I realized a few things really quickly. Number one, I was a D and D guy, which predated
0:21:19 Magic the Gathering. My brother was a Magic the Gathering guy, but I’ve never really played magic. And when I
0:21:23 began to delve into it, I was like, you know what? I would like to think of this as D and D light, but this is
0:21:30 incredibly nuanced, right? To be good at this. Oh, for sure. It is incredibly nuanced. And also, if you’re
0:21:36 against someone who is really experienced or just has their mind wired for it, you are going to be
0:21:42 obliterated. Absolutely. And that’s what happened to me, playing a friend of mine. Kudos to Mike, just got
0:21:48 slayed. And God bless Mike. He’s like a number of my friends who just kind of want to watch you
0:21:56 die slowly in this agonizing, ill-fated gameplay where you’re kind of whimpering along until they
0:21:59 put you out of your mercy. Yeah. You play a card. Yeah. He’s like, oh, isn’t this cute? You think
0:22:05 you got that? Watch this. Yeah. Yeah. Which is just not really my thing. So I thought to myself, okay,
0:22:11 looking at some of the casual games I really like, there is an opportunity, and this will come back
0:22:19 later for the underdog or the person who is behind to win. It is skill-based, but there’s an element of
0:22:27 chance. And this is going to come back. So then poetry for Neanderthals, I don’t know how I found it
0:22:32 initially, frankly. I think I probably went into a game shop and I was like, hey, and this relates to
0:22:39 why as an adult, I want to spend less time in front of screens. And ultimately, if I look back,
0:22:43 I do this thing every year called a past year review. People can find it online. You can read
0:22:49 all about it and do it yourself. You don’t have to buy anything. Past year review, where I look at the
0:22:55 peak positive and negative emotional experiences of the past year. I go through my whole calendar.
0:22:59 Sometimes I’ll go through my photos. Sometimes I’ll go through my text messages or
0:23:05 my sent folder in the inbox. And lo and behold, and this is not a revelation for some people,
0:23:13 but the activities did not matter as much as the people. So then the question is, how do I create
0:23:19 different contexts for interacting with, let’s just say, my 10 or 15 closest friends?
0:23:25 Some of that is doing things outside in the wilderness that are active and so on. But that’s
0:23:31 a heavy lift. That’s a heavier lift than playing a casual game, right? So it’s like,
0:23:36 if I’m here in Austin where we are right now and my friends or a bunch of my friends come in for
0:23:44 South by Southwest and I managed to get them together for one night, what can we play that will get us
0:23:52 off of our goddamn phones and deepen our relationship and create memories that we can hold on to that will
0:23:57 stick around. That’s it. That’s okay. Right. And then we had our conversation and that’s kind of
0:24:02 when everything, I guess, kicked off. Just a couple of things that we should mention also.
0:24:10 After our conversation, when I think very shyly, I must have reached out to you at some point shortly
0:24:18 thereafter and I was kind of like, hey guy, not sure if this would be interesting, but maybe kind of sort of,
0:24:20 do you want to talk about maybe making a game together or something?
0:24:23 I remember this exact conversation.
0:24:27 It’s like asking me out on a first date.
0:24:32 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like scratching my head, looking at the ground. And that’s how the whole thing got
0:24:39 kicked off. And I want to mention something related to that, which was for the last probably three years,
0:24:47 my New Year’s resolutions have been very broad, but they’re pretty specific. So I had two. One is
0:24:53 doing more delegation, which is figure it out delegation. So what that means is rather than
0:24:58 doing what I’m hardwired to do with my OCD and perfectionism, which is here, go do this thing. Let
0:25:06 me give you a 20-page installation manual explaining exactly what to do versus here is roughly what I
0:25:09 want done. Just figure it out and get it done. I don’t want to make any decisions.
0:25:15 So don’t come back to me with 12 options. Just make the best decisions you can.
0:25:20 And I’ll expect, you know, Reid Hoffman also of LinkedIn has mentioned this sort of a 10%
0:25:26 fault rate. Like 10% of the time, something’s going to go sideways. And that’s fine in the
0:25:32 interest of reducing decision fatigue and making things faster. So one was more figure it out
0:25:38 delegation. And number two was sprints with creatives. And for me, what that meant as someone
0:25:45 who has operated as a lone wolf, which by the way is a contradiction in terms, but who has been a solo
0:25:51 operator for most of my creative projects, I was like, you know what? It just isn’t that fun anymore
0:25:58 to do it solo. And it’s also antithetical to some of the creative projects I want to pursue,
0:26:04 like a game. I mean, there are some amazing solo game designers, not to say there aren’t,
0:26:12 but I was like, you know what? I want to try to be more social in my creativity and collaborate
0:26:18 with creatives and do sprints. Now, sometimes those sprints turn into longer things, but those
0:26:24 have been sort of my two guiding lights for the last few years, which is what then gave me
0:26:31 the ability to build up the courage. It sounds so ridiculous to say, but to actually reach out to
0:26:35 and be like, Hey, do you want to actually just bat around the possibility of something?
0:26:42 So from my perspective, that conversation, like I got very excited to work with you on something.
0:26:46 One, because it turns out you’re just a lovely human being and so much fun to hang out with.
0:26:51 But two, I asked you that very fundamental question. You said, Hey, do you want to build a
0:26:58 game? And I said, why do you want to build a game? And your answer was almost identical to what you
0:27:01 just relayed, right? You talked about your past experiences. You talked about childhood memories
0:27:06 of games. You talked about what you like, what you don’t like. And what became very clear to me
0:27:14 was there’s something special going on here. Tim wants to treat his friends and his audience
0:27:20 to something extraordinary. And we get approached all the time by people who want to make games, big
0:27:27 celebrities and singers and actors, all of them want to make a game. And whenever I asked them the
0:27:32 question, why the answer is invariably because my agent told me to, or because I think I can make
0:27:39 money or, you know, really very superficial. Often they’re not game players at all. They have no
0:27:43 connection to the experience of game design. And when I spoke to you, none of that was present.
0:27:51 Instead it was, this is a very personal thing to me. And ultimately I want to give a gift.
0:27:58 And that’s when my brain started lighting up. It’s like, Oh, this is going to be fun. Like he is in
0:28:03 this for all the reasons I’m in this. And that means we can make something very special together. And I
0:28:08 think we have. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely have. And another question that is sometimes a little
0:28:14 tricky to apply, but that has been in my mind for a while since Seth Godin, very well-known author,
0:28:23 thinker, just incredibly sage and awesome human being. He reframed for me, which is the reframing
0:28:29 of the question, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? Right? That’s a good question. Like,
0:28:33 what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? All right. That’s, that’s freeing. But the way he
0:28:39 tweaks that is he said, what would you do if you knew you would fail? In other words, what would
0:28:47 you do for which the process alone would make it worth it? And for me, because I mean, we became fast
0:28:53 friends very quickly. Right. And I was like, okay, that’s rare for me as an adult, number one.
0:29:06 And I’ve been banging this around in my own little head for so long. Even if this ends up not making
0:29:12 the cut for whatever reason, this seems worth it to me. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because coming back to the
0:29:18 kind of people over activities also, I was like, love hanging out with Elan and connecting. I’m going
0:29:25 to learn a lot. And at the very worst, I learned a lot and we’ve deepened our relationship. And that
0:29:29 stuff just snowballs over time. It transcends a single project. So even if this had not manifested,
0:29:35 it would have been worth it. And that’s how I try to pick my projects.
0:29:42 So when we first started down this path together, I remember I came out, we sort of visited each other
0:29:46 back and forth a few times. And I remember every time I would pack a suitcase full of games,
0:29:51 right. And we would sit with some of your friends and we’d play games like all night long.
0:29:56 And you’d say, I like this one. I don’t like this one. I like this part of it. But ultimately we
0:30:01 weren’t making any progress. We were just learning vocabulary essentially. And I would go home and
0:30:05 my wife would be like, how’d it go? What did you learn? You know, are you going to make a game
0:30:10 together? And I’d be like, I don’t know. No, we just, we just hung out and had fun. And she’d be like,
0:30:14 wasn’t that a huge disappointment? You just, you know, you traveled, you know, 2000 miles to go see him.
0:30:18 And I’m like, no, it’s just fun. I’m not disappointed at all. We’ll just do it again
0:30:23 next month and we’ll see how it goes. And we did that like five or six times. And I remember walking
0:30:28 away from each one, just thinking like, same thing. If this goes nowhere, I’m just, I’m having so much
0:30:38 fun. That’s so rare. It is rare. And if you can orient your life or professional life, and look, I’m not
0:30:43 saying this is possible for everyone, but it’s to some extent more possible than people realize. You might
0:30:49 not be able to like run out and invite Ilan on your podcast and then awkwardly approach him like a sheepish
0:30:58 12 year old boy to ask him on a date, but taking the lens of picking projects based on creating or
0:31:04 deepening relationships and learning slash developing skills. If you just do that over time, it is almost
0:31:08 inevitable that you will win whatever winning means to you. Yeah. Value the process.
0:31:15 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:32:32 description. Let’s talk a little bit about the origin story. Now I’ll throw out a couple of things here,
0:32:35 and we’re going to talk about the game development. Then we’re also going to talk about
0:32:37 how to sell this thing. How does that work?
0:32:43 Yeah. And it’s worth saying, designing a game, I remember you asked me this early on.
0:32:49 You started out from the, hey, let’s design a game, and then we’re basically done.
0:32:54 And I remember really forcing myself to think through this process because I wanted to explain
0:33:00 it to you. No, that’s half of it. The other half is selling the game. And just as much work goes into
0:33:03 that. And if you’re not willing to do it, or if you have no mechanism by which you can do it,
0:33:07 you might as well not design the game. Because one without the other, useless.
0:33:12 Yeah. Yeah. So it depends on the scale you’re going after, right? If you want to make something
0:33:14 for your friends, you can do that.
0:33:15 Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.
0:33:18 But in this particular case, I mean…
0:33:20 You wanted to make something cool and share it, right?
0:33:24 Yeah. I wanted to share it. I wanted to share it. So that kind of dictated parts of the process that
0:33:29 we need to weigh really heavily. So the game development process, I mean, we started off
0:33:36 looking at the possibilities of modifying existing games, right?
0:33:41 So looking at, say, Poetry for a Neanderthal with an alternate set of rules or a different deck
0:33:50 plus A, B, or C. We looked at prototype games that you alluded to earlier, bring in the suitcase,
0:33:54 right? So we did that all over the country.
0:34:00 Yeah. I showed up. I remember I have this notebook of game ideas, three, 400 in there. And I add more
0:34:05 every month. And I remember I picked my favorites, like five or six of them. And I would show up with
0:34:10 just the jankiest prototypes. I was like, here’s something I scribbled on a few cards. Here’s,
0:34:16 I took some dice and I like rubbed out the little nubs on the dice and hand wrote something on all the
0:34:21 die faces instead. Let’s try playing this weird game. And you were very patient. And you had a lot
0:34:28 of vision, thankfully, to look at these just horrible, very hastily created prototypes and say,
0:34:34 not, this is no fun, let’s move on. But you would always say like, oh, I like this. I like that moment
0:34:38 where we had a conversation about what you were going to do next. I like that part. I didn’t like the rest
0:34:47 of it, but I like that part. And that astute sense of notes, like really thoughtful and forward moving
0:34:53 notes was ultimately what guided our conversation. Cause then the next time I don’t have to pick from
0:34:58 400 games to bring. Now I know like, okay, this cooperative thing, he liked that conversation
0:35:02 aspect. There’s only six games I’ve got like that. Let me bring those six and we’ll refine it even
0:35:10 farther. Yeah, totally. We can talk about the Toronto trip, the Toronto project. So that is
0:35:15 where things started to gel because we’d had a number of these meetings around the country where
0:35:23 we would do a one to kind of three day sprint of testing, take all these notes. And we’d done a few
0:35:30 of these and we’ve both got a lot going on and your wife would ask you how it went and you’re like,
0:35:37 well, not really sure. I think we had fun, but no game as of yet. So we scheduled time. I was going
0:35:44 to fly to Toronto to do a sprint. You were going to bring in a expert game designer, sort of game
0:35:50 mechanic specialist. Ken Gruhl. Ken. And it was like, okay, this is the trip. If we make it happen,
0:35:55 great. If not, we’re just going to call a spade a spade. We seem to not, we’re like circling around
0:35:58 this thing, but not really getting it done. It was like meeting number eight or nine at that point.
0:36:09 Yeah. We tried a lot. And it was during that trip that the very primitive sort of germ of an idea
0:36:18 started to resonate, which ended up being Coyote. And I remember a few things and thank God also for
0:36:25 Ken’s apparent photographic memory with things transpired. But we’re walking around all over
0:36:31 the place in Toronto, the three of us just spitballing. Then it starts to rain and we seek
0:36:36 shelter. We failed twice, I think, with various coffee shops, no room, no seats, whatever it might
0:36:45 be. End up sitting in this weird kind of multi-purpose building. And I remember where we were sitting and
0:36:51 we played, I guess in English it’s Hanabi. Hanabi. Hanabi, which is Hanabi in Japanese,
0:36:58 which is fireworks. Yeah. And Hana is flower, B in this case is fire. So it’s like flower, fire. That’s
0:37:03 Hanabi. For everybody out there, if you haven’t played Hanabi, go try this game. Yeah. It is very
0:37:08 special. So we played that game, kind of killing time. Yeah. Giving it a shot because you guys had
0:37:16 mentioned it. And I was like, okay, this is a very elegant game. And from that, liked the cooperative
0:37:23 aspect. So when people think game, I think most folks are more familiar, maybe exclusively familiar
0:37:30 with the sort of winner takes all or team versus team competitive type of game. But I really enjoyed,
0:37:35 and I’d seen this in other ways in different capacities, but the cooperative option and the
0:37:41 cooperative aspect of this. So that then gets kind of stuck in the mind and the rain clears up. We go for
0:37:49 a walk by the water. And I remember, well, I’ll own it. I was kind of stalled. I’ll be the kind of
0:38:00 hair plugging the drain in the bathtub. Because I was trying to search my mind for game examples,
0:38:06 but I was thinking tabletop games because that was the canvas we were sort of painting upon.
0:38:07 Yeah.
0:38:13 And we’re walking, we’re walking, fed quite a bit of caffeine by this point. And it was either you or
0:38:20 Ken, I think it was you, who asked, broadly speaking, any kind of game, what games have
0:38:29 you really enjoyed? And that’s where rock, paper, scissors came up. Right? Rochambeau. And I just,
0:38:35 as dumb as it might sound, and I said this at the time, I was like, I love rock, paper, scissors.
0:38:35 Yeah.
0:38:39 It’s just, it is, especially when you play over an extended period of time with friends,
0:38:42 maybe there’s some alcohol involved or not. You don’t need to have involved,
0:38:48 but you start to pick up tells, you start to pick up patterns, and it’s actually very, very fun.
0:38:54 So it’s important to note, the moment you bring up rock, paper, scissors in any game design discussion,
0:38:58 that’s usually the end of the conversation, right? There’s nothing to that game. There’s three tools,
0:39:05 deploy a tool, determine a winner, you’re done. It is only when you say, let’s acknowledge rock,
0:39:11 paper, scissors is no fun unless you play multiple times. Because now we’ve made a very important
0:39:16 transition. We’re not playing the game anymore. We’re playing each other. Right? Because I know
0:39:20 what you did last time. You think I’m going to throw scissors again, right? And now we’re playing each
0:39:25 other. Yes, rock, paper, scissors are the tools by which we’re playing each other. But suddenly we’re
0:39:31 playing a very different game and it starts, it cannot start in round one. It starts in round two and
0:39:35 moves forward from there. And once we started having that discussion, things started to get
0:39:36 really interesting.
0:39:44 Yeah. Things got interesting. And do you want to show the prototype deck? And part of the reason I
0:39:50 want to show this prototype deck, and we’ll describe it for people who aren’t watching, is quick and dirty
0:39:59 is the fucking way to go. And I will just make another recommendation for Stephen Key. So Stephen Key
0:40:05 has a book called The One Simple Idea, which is about licensing and creating inventions. He’s got a
0:40:14 number of books now. But Stephen has made a gajillion dollars creating games for all the biggies that you
0:40:21 can possibly think of. And he uses construction paper and glue you would find in a second grade class
0:40:24 and a handful of markers.
0:40:24 I love it.
0:40:33 And by and large, that is how he creates these amazing, they can be games, they can be toys.
0:40:34 Yeah.
0:40:40 He’s pretty broad spectrum, but it might be a new way to play basketball, shooting dirty laundry into
0:40:45 a hamper, right? Something like that. And he prototypes these things incredibly quickly.
0:40:52 And for him, for what he does, that is enough. He is able to put together a pitch, he’s able to sell
0:40:58 it, and he’s able to develop these amazing passive income streams with these annuities that just come
0:41:01 in from all these different places. But that relates to what we’re looking at.
0:41:09 I love that we have not even described what Coyote is yet, but that’s okay. I think the value of this
0:41:14 conversation is to actually talk through the creative process and talk through, I think a lot of people
0:41:19 want to make games. This is how you do it. And we went through this two-year journey, and we arrived at
0:41:26 a very happy outcome. So I’m excited to talk about, well, let me show you the very ugly, very first deck
0:41:31 we ever built. So we had this conversation about rock, paper, scissors, and I knew there was something
0:41:36 there because we were talking about my fundamental premise behind all game design is games should not
0:41:41 be entertaining. Games should make the players entertaining. And suddenly, when you said rock,
0:41:49 paper, scissors over time, I was like, oh, that’s perfect. But three tools, rock, paper, and scissors,
0:41:55 not a very robust tool set, right? We can’t really play a game that way. So ran home and started
0:42:00 scribbling on cards. These are just blank cards. I took Sharpies. I buy these by the thousands on
0:42:04 thousands on Amazon. So I had a ton of these, and we just started scribbling. And so we made a card
0:42:08 that says rock, and we made a card that says paper, and we made a card that says scissors. And we thought,
0:42:15 what if we’re all on the same team? But what if these cards here are not tools to fight with each
0:42:21 other? What if these are a challenge that we have to all solve together? And so we started just putting
0:42:25 down a bunch of things, rock, paper, scissors, rock, rock, paper. And we’re like, all right,
0:42:30 we’ll sit around the table, and we’ll all just do this pattern. Everyone do scissors. Now everyone
0:42:31 do paper. Now everyone do rock.
0:42:37 And we’ve been talking about these different variations and ideas on the walk. And then we ended up
0:42:39 back at your dining room table.
0:42:40 Yeah, that’s right.
0:42:41 With tons.
0:42:42 Curiously scribbling.
0:42:45 Yeah, scribbling and modifying cards as we went.
0:42:51 Exactly. So now the modifiers are really the most interesting thing because the game that I’m
0:42:55 describing right now is useless. We can all do scissors and then all do paper. Who cares,
0:43:01 right? There’s nothing here. But now we have a baseline. We’re all going to do this thing. Cool,
0:43:06 easy. And then we started doing these modifiers. All players do all blue cards,
0:43:09 right? So we start scribbling rock, paper, scissors in different colors. And now we’ve
0:43:13 got this modifier. So now I’m going to do scissors, but then we’re all going to do paper. And then
0:43:17 back to you just doing rock and things like that. And so then it was like, okay, well,
0:43:24 skip a player after every red card. Okay, shout every blue card, right? And we started writing all
0:43:30 these crazy modifiers. I’m just putting all these cards all over the table because the challenge got
0:43:35 more and more interesting. And then it was like, okay, so something interesting is possible here.
0:43:39 Now, what if instead of just splashing cards all over the paper, what if we were responsible for
0:43:45 this? What if one at a time, everyone had to add a new card to the table to make this challenge harder
0:43:50 and harder and harder? And that’s when we started talking about the vocabulary of this game.
0:43:55 What are these cards? What makes this thing harder? Rock and paper and scissors very quickly got
0:44:00 eliminated from the game because they’re so boring. So we started talking about, well, okay,
0:44:04 what if you’re making a peace sign? And then you came up with, well, what if you pose like a ballerina
0:44:09 on a card? And what if you slap the shoulder of the person next to you on a card? And what if you have
0:44:15 to, I remember one of our earliest notes was eliminate all shouting cards because that was no fun at all.
0:44:18 Yeah, we tested that and then that got old real quick.
0:44:18 Right, exactly.
0:44:26 And also, as we’re playtesting, right? As we’re inventing mechanics and testing different things,
0:44:30 we play for a few rounds and be like, okay, that was okay. But what do you guys think of this? Okay,
0:44:34 we like this aspect. Great. Let’s like make four more of those cards of different colors.
0:44:35 Yeah.
0:44:38 And then we play it again. And then we iterate and then we play it again.
0:44:38 That’s right.
0:44:49 And we ended up with, I mean, spreadsheets full of different cards. And this is all still now in
0:44:50 cooperative mode.
0:44:51 All in cooperative mode.
0:44:51 At that point.
0:44:58 But over the next week, I would say we designed 80% of the game. We were at this like stalled at 1%
0:45:05 mode for months. And then in a matter of days, 80% done. Because we found this like,
0:45:11 every time we played some version of this, the immediate answer when we were done playing was,
0:45:12 let’s go again.
0:45:12 Yeah.
0:45:19 Is that the litmus test for you? I mean, in terms of the indicators that something is worth
0:45:25 further development, right? Because you have 400 in your notebook, right? So you’re not going to
0:45:30 develop all of those. What are some of the, could be a water field that you have, but like,
0:45:33 what are some of the indicators where you’re like, okay.
0:45:37 So there’s two things to talk about here. Certainly let’s play again is a great one,
0:45:44 but to set your mind in a place where you’re willing to say, imagine this, but tweaked,
0:45:49 but something a little different. There’s this principle I love called the zero effect.
0:45:50 Zero effect.
0:45:54 Yeah. Zero effect. It’s from a movie, I think in the late eighties, early nineties,
0:45:58 somewhere around there called the zero effect. And there’s this one scene where they explain what
0:46:04 the zero effect is. It is as follows. If you’ve lost your car keys and you’re looking for your car
0:46:08 keys, here you are in your living room, you’re looking for a car keys. The chances of you finding
0:46:14 your car keys are very low because there’s so many things in this room that are not your car keys.
0:46:20 So your chances of finding that one thing, very, very low. If instead you are trying to find
0:46:27 anything, your chances of success are suddenly at a hundred percent. You will find something as long
0:46:33 as you don’t care what it is that you found. That’s my favorite premise for brainstorming
0:46:39 and for early testing. Don’t lock in your head. I’m looking for this particular thing.
0:46:44 I must find X. I must find X because the chances that you’re going to find that thing
0:46:50 are almost non-existent. But if you can keep your brain open and say, I’m just looking for something,
0:46:56 I don’t care what it is, something, anything. And I’ll tweak it later. I’ll play with it later.
0:47:02 I’ll find some way to consider this thing. I found my car keys. As long as you’re willing to make that
0:47:08 leap, brainstorming becomes a pleasure. And does that take the form of what if blah,
0:47:15 what if we blah, what if the, this car did blah, is it precisely? Yeah. And you’re not scared for
0:47:19 all of those to fail. Yeah. Right. Because you can come up with those all day long. And that’s what
0:47:26 we did right over the next few days, that process, what if blah, let’s try it. What if blah, let’s try
0:47:33 it. What if whatever, let’s try it. And as long as the answer is always, let’s try it. You will a hundred
0:47:39 percent find what you’re looking for. All right. So let’s make some recommendations for people
0:47:48 listening or watching. What books or resources would you recommend for people who are interested in
0:47:55 game development? And I want to reiterate also, whether you think you’re playing games or not,
0:48:02 you’re already playing games in life. So for me, this is a way of putting on a table what we’ve
0:48:08 already implicitly agreed to in our own lives in ways that we generally don’t realize, which is we’re all
0:48:15 playing games. Now, what does that mean? That means that beyond Maslow’s basic rungs on the ladder,
0:48:24 shelter, warmth, food, etc. At some point, particularly as adults, maybe it’s before you
0:48:32 go to school, maybe it’s when you’re in college, but you have decided to play or you have just ended up
0:48:40 drafting into a game with certain rules, certain conditions for winning or losing, certain ranking
0:48:50 mechanisms. And step number one is figuring out what games you’re playing. So I would suggest that
0:48:58 learning about building games helps you to put on x-ray vision glasses where you start to see the world
0:49:06 is comprised of tons of games. Yeah, it’s so true. And you start to dive deeper into game theory,
0:49:14 what is the prisoner’s dilemma? What is a zero-sum game? If you can start to identify those very
0:49:21 fundamental game design concepts in the real world, you can jump to the end of a conversation so much
0:49:26 faster. You can avoid so many missteps because everything follows, within reason, everything
0:49:34 follows game design principles because this practice, this art form has been so well studied and so well
0:49:40 researched and so well documented that you get to take advantage of all of that. And I love that.
0:49:45 I use that for my relationships. I use that playing with my kids. I use that at work all the time. It’s
0:49:50 just there’s these fundamental principles of game design. And I’ll talk about a book I love that
0:49:54 illustrates them. But yeah, they can be applied to anything. You’re right. You’re playing a game all
0:50:00 the time. And the first step is to be aware that you are playing a game. All right. So I got two books.
0:50:10 Let’s hear it. One is A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. Raph Koster. R-A-P-H. Raph. It’ll outline
0:50:15 all these fundamentals. It is the first game design book I ever read. It is the one I go back to and
0:50:20 refer to the most often. It’s just got everything. And the author is brilliant. And go read that book.
0:50:23 The second one is going to be a little controversial.
0:50:24 Memoirs of a Geisha?
0:50:25 Yeah.
0:50:29 It’s called Don’t Shoot the Dog.
0:50:29 Oh.
0:50:33 This is an exceptional book.
0:50:34 Exceptional book.
0:50:34 So it’s by Karen Pryor.
0:50:37 It is not explicitly about game design.
0:50:43 It is not at all about game design. But here’s the thing. This book, the fundamental premise
0:50:53 of this book is you are trying to teach a companion, a dog, to behave in a certain way. And the answer
0:51:02 to how best to do that is, when things go wrong at least, not to blame the dog. It’s to fundamentally
0:51:07 change the way you operate and the way you convey information and the way you look at the world in
0:51:13 order to better relate to your dog and to the way that the dog understands and sees the world.
0:51:22 It is the best game design principle I have ever encountered in my life. And true, it has nothing
0:51:29 to do with game design. But when you’re designing a game, you’re designing it for a target, for someone
0:51:34 who isn’t you. And you’re not even going to be in the room when they encounter it. And to have in
0:51:41 your brain from the very first step, every problem that comes up is my problem, not theirs. Every
0:51:47 responsibility is my responsibility, not theirs. And if you can get that in your head and design games that
0:51:52 way, those are the games I have found that are the most successful.
0:52:02 This is Don’t Shoot the Dog, terrible title, but it is the fundamental starting point that I recommend
0:52:09 to anyone who’s interested in dog training. And Karen Pryor is one of the popularizers of clicker
0:52:15 training as a way of shaping behavior. I believe she had experience with marine mammals, which by
0:52:20 the way, you can’t whack on the butt with the newspaper to punish them. In other words, negative
0:52:25 reinforcement. So how do you do it? You use positive reinforcement and use clickers or whistles or
0:52:31 different tools. And I believe the back of the book, people will be able to fact check this, but it
0:52:37 basically says, you know, whether you want to get your dog to heal your cat to stop laying on the
0:52:42 kitchen table or your mother-in-law to stop nagging you like the principles are all the same. Yeah.
0:52:51 And at the end of it, like you said, is this radical ownership of it may not be your fault,
0:52:52 but it is your responsibility. Exactly.
0:52:57 And in a lot of cases, certainly with game design and instructions and so on, it is actually your fault.
0:53:02 Yeah. If people are confused, it is your fault. Yeah. Before I started Exploding Kittens, I designed
0:53:07 games for friends and I just had the hardest time. When I wasn’t in the room, people were not enjoying
0:53:14 those games. And it was only once I read that book that I realized the fault is absolutely mine because
0:53:19 I’m trying to get them to have as much fun as I want them to have. And the fact that they’re not,
0:53:22 I keep blaming them and that’s so wrong.
0:53:25 So what did you do? How did you fix that?
0:53:34 So one, there’s basically two parts. One starts with design. One says, the game has to be so simple
0:53:41 that it is almost self-correcting. And I have to strip out all complication. I have to remove all
0:53:47 nuance. I need, anytime I’m like thinking of the rules and I say, if this happens, then this happens.
0:53:53 Except if the moment I say, except I’ve gone down a wrong path, right? Like I need to get rid of all
0:53:58 of that stuff. That was the first part. And then the second part is in writing the actual instructions
0:54:04 and figuring out like, if I’m sitting in the room, you’re going to get this game because I’m going to
0:54:08 explain it and I’m going to be enthusiastic. And when you ask a question, I’m going to answer the
0:54:12 question. And when you get confused, I’m going to clarify it. Like I can a hundred percent do that,
0:54:18 but a piece of paper trying to do that same thing. I have to write it as if I’m in the room and I have
0:54:21 to anticipate those questions and I have to cut them off before they come up and I have to correct
0:54:26 behavior because I know exactly where you’re going to go off course and fix it in the instructions.
0:54:34 And that kind of one, two punch changed my game design from, yeah, like 10% of the people get this
0:54:36 to like 95% of the people get this.
0:54:40 Yeah. One aspect, I mean, there’s so many aspects, but one aspect of this that I enjoyed
0:54:43 was related to the instructions.
0:54:44 Yeah.
0:54:49 And so number one, you make it really clear in the instructions, which we both poured over
0:54:54 ad nauseum, but reading is the worst way to learn a game. Go watch this video, QR code, right? So
0:54:58 that’s number one. But if you’re going to put it into text, and I think I’m pretty good at this,
0:55:04 but I was very impressed with your ability to identify anything that could be misunderstood
0:55:12 or that wasn’t yet defined or that could be taken with another more broader connotation that would
0:55:17 steer people off course. And the number of edits in that Google doc.
0:55:19 I mean, it’s got to be in the hundreds, right?
0:55:21 From all of us, hundreds and hundreds of edits.
0:55:28 Yeah. So the most important skill is you will write better instructions. You will convey information
0:55:35 to people better. If you can clear your mind, if you can approach any set of instructions from the
0:55:41 perspective of the things I know, I do not yet know. And the words that come out of my mouth
0:55:45 have to not only fill my brain with the required knowledge.
0:55:50 Basically beginner’s mind, right? Putting yourself in the place of someone who has never seen this.
0:55:54 Exactly. And it’s so hard to do because you have this information in your head. It must be there.
0:55:59 Otherwise you’re not going to be able to explain the thing, but to back all the way up and say,
0:56:04 I’m just going to split my brain in two. There’s this one reading script and I know the information
0:56:10 I have to get out, but the other half is the recipient of that script. And it knows nothing.
0:56:16 If you can do that, it’s so hard. It takes so much practice. If you can do that, you’re going to not
0:56:20 only be able to design good games and write good instructions, but you’re also going to be able
0:56:24 to just converse more effectively just out in the world in general.
0:56:29 You mentioned, I think it was two minutes to learn, 15 minutes to play.
0:56:30 Yeah.
0:56:36 What other golden rules or guiding tenets do you have?
0:56:36 Yeah.
0:56:40 For yourself when you’re doing game design within Exploding Kittens?
0:56:45 If a component does not need to be in the game, remove it from the game.
0:56:50 Right. So an example of that would be, we had these chits or like little chips, like poker chips.
0:56:51 Like bingo chips, right?
0:56:53 Like bingo chips that we were using for lives.
0:56:53 Yeah.
0:56:54 Or strikes.
0:56:54 Yeah.
0:56:57 And it turns out you don’t need that.
0:56:59 Yeah, because you’ve got a whole thing of cards right here. Just use those.
0:57:02 You can use cards by flipping them over and using the back of the card.
0:57:06 Exactly. That’s a perfect example, right? Like we have this thing where we’re like,
0:57:11 hey, you know what would be fun is if everybody had a big hand of cards and we’re going to play
0:57:15 a card and you make decisions and like, I get that. Most games you play, you have a hand of
0:57:19 cards and you’re going to play a card and you’re making a decision. That’s awesome. But you know
0:57:24 what? That’s a private moment and you reveal a card. Every game you’ve ever played. When you play
0:57:28 Uno, you’ve got a hand of cards, you’re making a decision, you play a card, you’ve revealed what
0:57:34 card you just played. And I remember thinking, is there a simpler version of that? And it turns out
0:57:40 there is. And the simpler version in Coyote is take some cards, put them all face up on the table
0:57:45 and then decide which one you’re going to pick. That’s very similar to having a deck of cards,
0:57:47 but now it’s public.
0:57:47 Yeah, it’s public.
0:57:48 Right?
0:57:54 And also when the competitive version is brought in, which is the way that I like to play,
0:57:59 the way I would suggest people play, but you can warm up with cooperative. If you have somebody in
0:58:04 your life or in your family, you just cannot lose without creating a huge pain in the ass,
0:58:13 then the cooperative mode is really fun. But the competitive mode then allows the group decision
0:58:18 on which card to play potentially, although ultimately it’s individual, right? That has
0:58:25 implications for cooperative when it’s public, but also for competitive. There are a number of tweaks
0:58:30 made to this, but I mentioned earlier, sabotaging. So we had competitive, but different minds are wired
0:58:37 for different games. And so God forbid what happens to you is what happened to one of my employees who
0:58:43 was playtesting this, where one of the people in the group was a mathematician who also is a high-level
0:58:48 chess player, if I remember correctly. And he just smoked everyone because he had the mind for it.
0:58:54 So what do you do for that? Well, we ended up, this took a lot of playtesting to ultimately land
0:58:58 on this. And I want to ask you about playtesting, particularly if it’s kind of hands off the wheel
0:59:01 and you have people playing the game without you.
0:59:02 Yeah. Terrifying.
0:59:08 Yeah. And this comes back to the underdog being able to win, not getting my ass smoked and magic
0:59:14 over and over again by someone who’s just got better hardwiring for it. And that’s where the attack
0:59:19 cards came from. So there are these attack cards in the deck, which to the simplification side,
0:59:23 you can play in cooperative mode to modify a card. I don’t want to get too in the weeds.
0:59:27 I want to give you more credit for this because I don’t think you’re taking enough credit. So
0:59:32 all right, let me, let me phrase this a different way. So the basic premise of the game is we have a
0:59:38 whole bunch of activities on the table, right? Ballerina, peace sign, whatever it is, thumbs up,
0:59:42 thumbs down, lean and make a fart noise. Yeah, exactly. Lean and make a fart noise. So we’ve got all
0:59:45 these things that we’re all going to do. And then on top of that- It’s a fan favorite.
0:59:49 That’s right. It’s such a good card. On top of that, we have all these modifier cards and they
0:59:53 modify, you have to skip a player after this one, ignore this card, do this one twice.
0:59:55 Those are generally the coyote cards.
1:00:01 The coyote cards. And you had this great idea. You said, because some players are naturally gifted at
1:00:07 this game, far more so than others. And because some players are going to naturally fall behind and
1:00:12 they need a way to sabotage the first place. If you’re in last place, you need a way to sabotage
1:00:16 the first place player. If you’ve ever played Mario Kart, you know this feeling very well. And you
1:00:22 said, what if we took some of these modifiers? All players have to do all the blue cards with one
1:00:23 hand instead of two. Yeah.
1:00:25 But what if instead of all the blue- Or with Tyrannosaurus arms.
1:00:28 Or Tyrannosaurus arms. You have to do all your movements with Tyrannosaurus arms.
1:00:34 What if instead of playing that on all blue cards on the table, what if you just put that,
1:00:40 slide it right in front of another player. And now only they have to do it for every single
1:00:44 one of their turns that you’ve put a curse on them, right? You’ve attacked the last place player
1:00:48 has attacked the first place player. And I remember thinking, Tim, you’re just like a natural game
1:00:53 designer. Like this, that’s such a nice moment. And it’s such an easy modification. And of course,
1:00:57 my answer was, I don’t know, let’s try it. And then we tried it and it was glorious.
1:01:04 And I love moments like that for two reasons. One is because you had learned at that point to
1:01:09 speak like a game designer. Instead of saying, I think we just need to sabotage people. Instead,
1:01:13 you said, some people are really good at this game. We have to address that. Some people are
1:01:20 naturally bad at this game. We need to give them a tool. And those terms, speaking in that language,
1:01:26 armed with that vocabulary, suddenly the answer to you became so clear. Like, here’s how we solve
1:01:31 those problems. And that’s great. I guarantee you would not have been capable of that when we
1:01:32 started this process.
1:01:36 Yeah, no, I wouldn’t have had the, sometimes artists talk about the visual library, right?
1:01:41 Just the exposure to different types of artwork, different forms, different silhouettes,
1:01:47 different structures so that they can pull from that visual library to inform whatever they’re
1:01:52 trying to build or solve for. And it’s the same with game design, same with everything. Like you need
1:02:00 to build your ABCs so you can convey what you’re trying to say in terms that are solvable, if that
1:02:00 makes any sense.
1:02:02 Yeah, totally. You’re a quick study too.
1:02:08 Yeah, helped getting the books that you recommended. I’m not going to dox my friend in question, but
1:02:17 as long-term listeners will know, I was in a former life neuroscience major, and then in the last 10 years
1:02:25 have funded a lot of science. And I always have just had this hankering and this dream of being
1:02:30 involved in neuroscience. It continues to this day. And in the process of building this game,
1:02:37 and this is not how I necessarily sell it because this is going to sound terrible, but through many
1:02:43 experiments with different companies and so on, I’ve concluded that even though generally Americans,
1:02:51 I’ll throw it on Americans, I’m American, say they want to be smarter, they will typically not pay for
1:02:56 something that is designed to make them smarter, unless it’s a magic pill. And then sometimes the
1:03:04 answer is yes. But what I was hoping to also do with this game is to create something that would,
1:03:10 and this has not been proven, there’s no randomized controlled study examining this, although that might
1:03:16 change at some point is to design something that would help those players who are not good at this
1:03:21 or the people who are in the middle of the bell curve or the people who are good to get better.
1:03:29 And for people who are interested in looking at some, they’re not perfect analogs, but they’re similar.
1:03:35 People can check out the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, WCST. It’s a neurophysiological test
1:03:40 used to assess cognitive flexibility and executive functions, particularly the ability to shift
1:03:45 cognitive sets and learn from feedback. All right. So participants must sort cards based on an
1:03:50 initially unknown rule, which changes after a certain number of correct sorts. Now, this is not
1:03:57 a perfect parallel because that does not in and of itself make for a fun game, right? So fun number one,
1:04:03 lots of probably rank ordered like one, two, three, four, five, but could I also Trojan horse?
1:04:11 In cognitive training. And I think the answer, this is from a lay perspective and obviously I’m biased
1:04:19 because I’m involved in every step of making this thing, but I think it does the trick. And what
1:04:28 people will notice is, and you know this too, the game starts off so easy and people are like,
1:04:34 there’s nothing to it. And then once a modifier or two come out, people are like, oh, oh, wait a
1:04:41 second. This is getting really tricky. And if for instance, I’ve had lifelong insomnia, you want to
1:04:47 sleep better? Play this game before you go to bed. And by the end, you will feel like you just did
1:04:52 a workout, a full brain workout for your cognition.
1:04:56 You know what I love about that part? I learned to play the drums years and years ago. And I
1:05:01 remember I would learn these new patterns and it was like, you know, your right hand has to do this
1:05:04 and your left hand has to do this and your right leg has to do this. And I remember thinking,
1:05:10 no way, like, no way I can’t do that. And you work at it and you work at it and you work at it. And
1:05:14 suddenly it starts to click just a little bit, right? Like, oh, my right hand did the right thing.
1:05:19 And it’s like, you can feel new like neurons coming to life, right? Like your brain is doing
1:05:26 something that five minutes ago you could not do. This is the first game I’ve ever played that does
1:05:31 that exact same thing. And I remember the first time I felt that way in a very early play test,
1:05:37 my eyes got all wide. And I was like, there’s something magical going on here. Like, I know I’m
1:05:43 psyching myself out, but I feel new things happening in my brain because five minutes ago, I could not do
1:05:48 this pattern. And now I can. And, you know, we can go all the way around the table and you can add a
1:05:52 new card and I will still be able to do this pattern that I couldn’t do just five minutes ago.
1:06:00 Yeah, totally. And what’s cool as well as you get to see just how specialized certain minds are
1:06:05 and where you might have an Achilles heel. So for instance, and this is true for some folks,
1:06:11 we have the modifiers ranked by difficulty because ultimately with Coyote, you’re in charge of how hard
1:06:16 you make the game. Like you are in full charge of how easy, moderate, or difficult you make it.
1:06:22 And we didn’t even talk about how this game is designed to make you a game designer. We’ll talk
1:06:29 about that with the blank cards, but this is a sort of creativity unlock as much as a game. That’s the
1:06:34 intention behind it, which is part of the reason that I’m really excited to see what the hell it does
1:06:40 is when it’s released into the wild, which it effectively is now. Now the specialization piece,
1:06:46 I’ll just speak to that. So for instance, for me, skipping turns, skipping players,
1:06:51 it is a blind spot. It is an Achilles heel for me. That’s true for quite a few folks.
1:06:51 Yeah.
1:06:57 But for other people, for instance, if we’re going around the table, most people would be familiar
1:06:59 with, you know, we will rock you, right?
1:06:59 We will rock you.
1:07:04 So it’s like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So the way you play the game as you go around
1:07:10 is you go boom, boom. You can hit the table with your hands. You can do it with close fists. You
1:07:16 know, you could probably clap it if you want, but it’s boom, boom. And then one person does the move.
1:07:16 Yeah.
1:07:17 Like let’s take the ballet, right?
1:07:17 Yeah.
1:07:21 Where you’re going to do a pirouette. You have to do the motion and you have to say the motion.
1:07:25 So then these two things can be split or confused later.
1:07:25 Yeah.
1:07:31 We won’t get too deep into that. And then it’s boom, boom, next person, boom, boom, next person.
1:07:31 Yeah.
1:07:36 And it goes around and then it just gets more and more complicated. I remember when we were
1:07:42 first experimenting with the modifier that said, okay, it’s now three bumps instead of two.
1:07:48 So it’s boom, boom, boom. And then, and there were, I remember, I’m not going to call them out,
1:07:50 but there’s one person who just could not do it.
1:07:50 I know.
1:07:54 Right. And I was one of those people, my brain would start melting out of my ears at
1:07:55 that point. I don’t know why though.
1:07:59 Yeah. It’s weird. So they’re very specific. You’ll, you’ll find each person will have a
1:08:03 super strength and a super weakness and you will figure it out by playing this game.
1:08:09 Yeah. And just from a game design perspective, also, I’d love to hear you talk about finding
1:08:14 the sweet spot. And we could talk about Bushnell’s law, right? The, uh, of Atari fame, right?
1:08:19 The game, you know, I’m paraphrasing here, but a good game is easy to learn and difficult
1:08:20 to master. Yeah.
1:08:28 But how do you, in the course of play testing, working with prototypes, find the sweet spot
1:08:35 of difficulty, right? Because with this game, well, through making this game, I’ve just really
1:08:42 come to appreciate how hard it is to create a game where people experience that sweet spot.
1:08:47 Because if you were to take Coyote and make it too easy, what a simple game to make.
1:08:48 Sure.
1:08:55 Right. If you wanted to make it basically impossible and not fun to play, also very easy. But to find
1:09:00 that sweet spot on the graph is incredibly challenging.
1:09:08 Yeah. So the way I think about this is when you first encounter any game, the first thought that has
1:09:13 to go into your brain is I can do that, right? You hear it described and you have to think I can do
1:09:17 that. And then you have to try the game and that has to be reinforced. The game has to say, yep,
1:09:23 you can do that. And you have to feel like, okay, I thought I could do it. I can do it. This is great.
1:09:29 But that’s only going to last a few seconds. The next thought that has to go into your brain is I
1:09:36 understand the path to mastery. Like I understand how to get better at this. And then the next thought
1:09:44 is, and I can do that too. So you have to see the moment a modifier card comes out or the moment any
1:09:49 complication happens in your favorite game. It has to like stop you dead in your tracks. It has to be
1:09:55 like, Oh, the thing I just did to start the game and was really good at, I thought I could do it.
1:10:00 I could do it. That’s not going to work here. I have to rethink my strategy or I have to get better
1:10:05 at something else. And then those two follow-up thoughts have to show up in quick succession.
1:10:11 I know what I have to do and I can do that too. And that’s really the art to me of that,
1:10:16 that ramping up of game design. And you have to keep hitting that. I think I can do that. Yes,
1:10:21 you can. Now you can’t anymore, but you know what you have to do and you can do that too.
1:10:26 And then that’s going to get blocked. And you think, okay, now I know what I have to do and I
1:10:31 can do that too. And you have to keep hitting those two things and it’s rinse and repeat over and over
1:10:37 and over again. And if you can hit that, you are just holding somebody’s hand from the beginning of
1:10:41 the game to the end of the game. And they’re going to get great at it. They’re going to achieve that sense
1:10:49 mastery over time. Yeah. And if you listening or watching have any game that you consider simple
1:11:01 that you enjoy, rest assured there was an absurd, absurd amount of development and testing and revising
1:11:07 that went into it. Just to give you an example, like this is by all outward appearances, a very simple
1:11:13 game. The three to eight players, you probably play with more 10 minutes says age is 10 plus I’ve,
1:11:18 I’ve seen people playing with their kids who are much younger and it’s actually hilarious and super
1:11:23 fun. There are so many levers you can pull here, right? You have the action cards, which are these
1:11:28 cute little salamander cards with the different motions and gestures and so on. You’ve got just the
1:11:33 sheer number of cards. How many variants do you have? How many total cards do you have? How many
1:11:38 coyote versus attack cards? When you have a fully shuffled deck, what does that actually look like?
1:11:41 Yeah. There’s so many different variables that you have to think through.
1:11:45 Yeah. One of my favorite things is we’re starting to see people compete now. Like,
1:11:52 so we set up this page of here are table configurations. Here’s like an array of cards
1:11:58 in exactly this order with exactly these modifiers. This one’s hard. This one’s impossible.
1:12:03 This one is going to kill you. And we’ve started to see just, and you know, the game is barely
1:12:07 available so far, but we started to see some people try to tackle those challenges.
1:12:08 Okay. I didn’t even know that.
1:12:09 It’s incredible.
1:12:15 Yeah. So where this came from also is in the four hour chef a million years ago, came out in 2012,
1:12:20 which was actually a book about accelerated learning confusingly, but putting that aside,
1:12:24 there were a few recipes in that book. I think one was called dragon force Chuck Cohen or something
1:12:30 like that, which was named after this video game track that people found impossible to
1:12:37 play on guitar. And then there was something a la ancienne, which was this just ludicrously complex
1:12:43 French dish that involved fish. And I was like, okay, look, if you’ve done everything up to this
1:12:48 point and you want to take a quantum leap forward and try something that is considered effectively
1:12:53 impossible by most people, here you go. And so that’s what we created on this particular page.
1:13:00 I will just say, having tested all of the challenges on that page, I can do exactly one
1:13:07 of them. Like the last two are so hard and we’ve already seen someone, a table of six people
1:13:10 succeed at the middle of that. They’ve already done it.
1:13:11 That’s nuts.
1:13:14 I’ve never seen anyone do the crazy hard one, but it’s coming.
1:13:19 Yeah. So people can check it out and there may or may not be a bunch of excitement around that.
1:13:23 So I will, I will just say there may be incentives later to be good at this game. I will leave it at
1:13:28 that for now. I tell you what, we’re going to come back to some of the blank cards and we’ll
1:13:35 talk about those features, but let’s talk about a bit more of the process of making any game. We
1:13:40 could talk about Coyote specifically, of course, because you have a process for this. How many
1:13:43 games per year do you guys put out on average?
1:13:48 So it’s funny. I actually built this out as a graph. So our first year we did one, our second
1:13:58 year we did two, our third year we did two again. Last year we did 14. This year we’ll do 23, I think.
1:13:58 Wow.
1:14:05 Yeah. It’s a lot. It’s really fun. We built this incredibly robust pipeline from design all the way
1:14:11 through to testing and then sales and marketing. And I feel obligated to just keep that pipeline full
1:14:14 because it’s such a beautiful thing we built. So we do a lot of games.
1:14:21 All right. Let’s get some info that we wouldn’t normally have any access to.
1:14:21 All right.
1:14:27 If you do an 80-20 analysis, it’s not going to be exactly 80-20, but you get where I’m going. On your
1:14:34 best-selling games, what’s on the leaderboard? What are the top X number of games? Five, three,
1:14:35 four, whatever the number.
1:14:41 Up until last year, number one, the top-selling game in the world amongst all games was Exploding
1:14:42 Kittens.
1:14:44 That’s nuts, man.
1:14:45 It’s nuts. It’s nuts.
1:14:49 It makes no sense. But I’ll tell you something I’m even more proud of. It’s now number two.
1:14:58 Number one is a game called Hurry Up Chicken Butt. Hurry Up Chicken Butt is a game I designed with my
1:15:04 four-year-old daughter, and she did most of the design. And it is outselling Exploding Kittens.
1:15:08 It is selling one game every four seconds.
1:15:08 Wow.
1:15:12 Yeah. It’s nuts. And it was designed by a four-year-old.
1:15:16 Okay. So we got Hurry Up Chicken Butt, Exploding Kittens.
1:15:23 Yeah. The next few spots in the global sales are constantly shifting. Everybody’s fighting for
1:15:29 those. But our entries into that list, which are constantly shifting, Poetry for Neanderthals is
1:15:34 usually number three. Throw Throw Burrito is usually either number five or six. And the rest are
1:15:35 just totally random.
1:15:40 Yeah. Okay. Got it. So what has made Hurry Up Chicken Butt a success?
1:15:44 So remember what I said, if you have the best design game in the world…
1:15:50 And by the way, when we spoke, I think two years ago, you were just beginning to talk about this.
1:15:52 I don’t think it had launched at that point.
1:15:55 No, I hadn’t. Yeah. It has been an absolute rocket ship.
1:16:00 What are the magic ingredients? Why has it worked? Because not all games do that.
1:16:01 Yeah. No, they don’t.
1:16:08 And you’ve had now with the number of games that EK Exploding Kittens has developed, you’ve had a chance
1:16:12 to see a lot of different ideas come through the doors and go out the doors.
1:16:18 Some games last a season. Some games last a decade. So Hurry Up Chicken Butt in particular. I wrote a list
1:16:24 of the things I wanted that game to accomplish. And my daughter had all these ideas. Here’s what I want
1:16:29 to do. And you’re going to do this. And you’re going to run up and jump up and down. But I had a list
1:16:35 list of things that I needed to know were in this game in order for me as a parent to buy it for my
1:16:42 kid. And they were as follows. The game has to be as much fun for me to play as it is for my daughter.
1:16:49 That’s a hard one. That killed most designs that we came up with. Number two, my daughter has to be
1:16:55 able to beat me at this game, even though I’m not letting her win. Holy crap, is that a hard one?
1:17:03 Number three, the game cannot have any losers. It can have a winner, but it cannot have any losers.
1:17:10 Those three were like my guiding lights. It was like, I need to check off these three checkboxes
1:17:16 for this game to be good. And we worked on 100 million designs. Like, she’s great. She’ll just
1:17:19 be like, oh, you don’t like this one? Here’s another one. You don’t like that one? Here’s another one.
1:17:26 And she just kept firing them off. And we finally got to this game that hit all three of those.
1:17:29 That, as I said earlier, is only half the battle.
1:17:31 That’s, yeah, that’s the necessary but not sufficient.
1:17:36 Exactly. So now we have a game that I’m in love with, that we play every single night,
1:17:40 that she can beat me at regularly. And I am trying my absolute hardest to beat her. And this
1:17:45 four-year-old is kicking my ass at this game. Love that. Love it. And I’m having a blast, right?
1:17:50 This is my first time hearing about these criteria, just for people listening. This is all new to me.
1:17:53 When my daughter got old enough to start playing games, right around when she turned four,
1:17:59 you know, we went out and bought all these games. And I just hated them. They were so boring. And I
1:18:05 hated playing. And so we just designed our own. Like, we just made them better. And it was important
1:18:10 for me to have that list. Because unless I know what success looks like, I’ll just stay in brainstorming
1:18:16 mode forever. So I made that list, finally hit it. And then we entered into part two.
1:18:20 And here, my daughter has very little to do with it, right? Here’s where I sit down with the marketing
1:18:24 and sales team. And I was like, what the hell are we going to call this thing? And we went through
1:18:26 a thousand different names.
1:18:27 Yeah. I know the feeling.
1:18:34 Yeah. Yeah. We did that. But once I had like 10 names that I really liked, we sat down with my
1:18:41 daughter and all her friends. And I would just read them off. And there was no contest. I got to
1:18:45 hurry up chicken butt. And they’re like, just laughing hysterically, jumping up and down. They
1:18:49 didn’t even want to hear the rest of the names. I was like, okay. All right. So that was a really
1:18:54 nice step forward. It was like, I know I got a game that’s like, just fire for kids. Like,
1:19:00 they’re just so excited about this. And the next thing was, all right, well, what do we make this box
1:19:07 look like? The game itself involves a character and a die shaker and some sound effects. Like,
1:19:12 it’s got all this stuff packed into this character, this chicken. And I was like, I can’t just hide
1:19:18 that. Like, I have to put that in a box where you can see it. And that was really hard. The difference
1:19:27 between box design for like an iPhone and a game is an iPhone will spend like a hundred dollars on that
1:19:31 box with the materials and making it beautiful. And when you open your iPhone, you take the box
1:19:38 and you throw it away. In a game, you’ve got about 40 cents to spend on the box and it has to last
1:19:45 forever. It sucks, right? The equation is totally backwards, but I needed a thing that displayed the
1:19:51 chicken and told you it made noise and lets you shake around the die and still hold its structure as
1:19:56 a box so that you could remove this thing, play with it, and then reinsert it into the box in a way that
1:20:00 isn’t going to mess with the integrity of the box. It’s structural integrity. So that was really hard,
1:20:02 but we finally solved that.
1:20:06 Did you do that before or after you started testing the waters with retailers?
1:20:08 After.
1:20:08 After.
1:20:09 Yeah.
1:20:16 Okay. I don’t want to hijack, but whenever it makes sense, I would love to know at what point you start
1:20:18 testing the waters.
1:20:24 Well, we’re, we’re, we do this backwards. So most people, and when we started, you have to do it the
1:20:30 opposite way. You have to walk in to those sales pitches and you have to say, here’s the final
1:20:35 product. Look how beautiful it is. You don’t have to trust us that this isn’t going to sell. You can
1:20:41 look at this thing and know that it’s going to sell for this game. Luckily, because we have a really
1:20:49 good track record, we walked in with no box. I, all I walked in with was a rough idea, name scribbled on
1:20:55 a piece of paper. And I said, trust me, this is going to be great. We’re going to solve everything.
1:21:02 It’s going to be amazing. And they said, okay, yeah, sold. Let’s buy it. That comes from 10 years
1:21:03 of pitching them hit after hit.
1:21:11 Got it. I got it. So if it were earlier in Exploding Kittens existence, you go in with the
1:21:11 finished box.
1:21:12 Yeah. They’re never taking a flyer on that.
1:21:16 Who creates the finished box? Do you guys create it in-house? How do you prototype something like that?
1:21:21 Yeah. We have an incredible team. We have a large scale printer. We print on actual cardboard. We have
1:21:27 a paper folder, right? So we can actually build the boxes, which was an investment. Like that’s not
1:21:33 off the shelf machinery. But normally whatever manufacturer you’re working with, they send
1:21:37 you a prototype box, right? Because they make it and they want it. They want you to see the final
1:21:41 product. And that’s what you go into the sales meetings with. You say like, look, here’s the box.
1:21:46 Here’s how much it’s going to weigh. Here’s the final presentation. We’ve been working on it for a
1:21:51 year and a half. Here it is. I walk into those meetings. Like I got an idea. I’ve been working on it
1:21:55 for three weeks. I want you to buy it right now. I don’t have any materials to show you. So it’s a
1:22:01 different kind of pitch that I’m very proud of because I’ve earned that, right? And we haven’t
1:22:06 ever let them down. So in the case of Coyote, there was a lot of playtesting that was done
1:22:11 before we ended up in line review meetings. Yeah. Wow. We skipped that whole part, didn’t
1:22:18 we? Yeah. All right. So could you talk about your secret cabal of families? Yeah. Yeah.
1:22:23 Secret cabal of families. I love it. All right. Another chapter for your memoir.
1:22:28 Yeah. Right. That’s a good title there. So here’s how most game companies test games.
1:22:33 If you had partnered with a different games company, here’s what your experience would have been like.
1:22:38 All right. We got a game. We really like it. It’s really fun. Lots of internal testing. Everyone’s
1:22:46 on board. We now need external testing. And they go to these market research groups and they pull
1:22:53 people strangers in and they sit in a room with a one-way mirror and they show the game and they play
1:23:00 the game with people they don’t know. And they order in some crappy catered lunch and they play the game
1:23:05 and then they rate it on a scale of one to 10 and they fill out this form that’s like, here’s what I
1:23:10 liked and here’s what I didn’t like and here’s what I would improve. And then you get to watch those
1:23:16 videos and they present you back all these forms and you get to make a determination. Okay. Nobody plays games
1:23:21 like that. You don’t play games with strangers. When was the last time you played a board game with a stranger?
1:23:22 Can’t even remember.
1:23:23 It doesn’t happen.
1:23:24 Yeah.
1:23:29 The testing procedure that all these other companies go through is fundamentally flawed.
1:23:32 They’re using a resource because it’s the only resource that exists.
1:23:37 So I sat down with, that’s what we did our first time. We went through one of those companies and
1:23:40 they gave us all the results. And I looked at these results and I was like, oh my God, we just burned
1:23:47 $25,000 on this thing and it’s useless. So I realized at that moment, because nothing better exists,
1:23:48 we’re going to have to build it ourselves.
1:23:54 So I started reaching out to at first our Kickstarter community and then our Discord community and then
1:23:59 our Reddit community as we grow and grow and grow and said, look, I got a bunch of prototypes.
1:24:05 I need families and friends who get together regularly to play games and I’m going to mail you
1:24:10 a free game. You don’t even have to send it back to me. It’s yours forever. You get this amazing
1:24:16 prototype. All I ask in return is upon receiving it within 24 hours, you play the game with your friends
1:24:21 and family and you record the session and you send me that video and that’s it. That’s all I want in
1:24:29 return. And within about 12 months, we had 400 families sign up for this thing. They are called
1:24:36 our kiddie test pilots. They’re this incredible group of enthusiastic game players that give us the
1:24:42 best feedback and we don’t have them fill out a questionnaire. All we ask them at the end of the
1:24:47 test session, we say, look into the camera and answer one question. The only question we care
1:24:53 about, do you want to play again? And we know a game is ready when everybody looks into that lens and
1:24:57 says, hell yes. And that’s it. That’s our testing process.
1:25:06 What are some of the pass fail marks or green versus red signals that you look for? In other words,
1:25:14 I imagine the response rate could vary, but you don’t know if that’s because people are busy or if
1:25:20 it’s the wrong time of year or maybe they looked at the game, the box and so on and it just didn’t sell
1:25:22 them. So they didn’t play it. Totally.
1:25:26 Is that something you pay attention to? Are the people, I’m sure I’m not the only person
1:25:34 wondering this, like if they’re part of this special VIP get free game group, are they disincentivized
1:25:39 to say, hell no, I would not play this game again? So do you get a false positive signal?
1:25:46 How do you think through what constitutes a thumbs up versus a thumb sideways versus a thumbs down?
1:25:51 There are a lot of false positives for sure. And there’s no way I can solve that problem. We prompt
1:25:57 them in advance. We’re like, look, we need honesty. This game will get great if you tell us that
1:26:02 something’s broken with it. Like we need to know that. And they’re motivated because we also send them
1:26:07 the final version of the game, right? So they know that’s coming. They know a better version is coming
1:26:11 if they help us make it better. So some of the problem is solved that way, but not all of it.
1:26:14 So that’s why the video is so important.
1:26:17 If they say we had a great time and you’re watching, you’re like,
1:26:18 yeah, they’re not having a great time.
1:26:23 Count the number of eye rolls, right? Or, you know, a great one, they’ll take the instructions.
1:26:30 I love this. They’ll open the instructions. And when you see, you see that eyes go wide and they
1:26:37 like inhale back and they’re like, it’s like, oh, yeah, something. That’s terrible.
1:26:42 Right. And that’s really important. And there’s no survey in the world they can fill out. That’s
1:26:44 going to tell me that you need to watch the moment.
1:26:47 Yeah, because they may not even realize they’re doing it.
1:26:47 Yeah, exactly.
1:26:49 So how are they going to report it?
1:26:53 Yeah. And that’s why the video is so important. And we have very specific instructions for the
1:26:54 video, right? Like…
1:26:57 And what are they? Because I’m wondering, how in the hell do you review 400 videos?
1:27:04 Well, one, we watch them at like 4x speed. And two is we’ve got a whole team of people that watch
1:27:09 them and they flag moments. They don’t even say why this moment is important. Something happened
1:27:12 here. Something happened here. I’m going to go on to the next video now. And then the next group of
1:27:17 people will go through and look at those flags and say, oh, they’re big, deep inhale. Rules
1:27:18 confusion.
1:27:21 Nerd question. What do you use software-wise for flagging stuff?
1:27:21 Vimeo.
1:27:22 Vimeo.
1:27:22 Yeah.
1:27:26 Okay. All right. So you have people upload their videos to Vimeo?
1:27:26 Exactly.
1:27:27 Got it.
1:27:33 So this whole process takes months and it’s really important. And the other thing is,
1:27:37 like, I got 400 test families, but I’m only going to send out five games at a time. The reason is,
1:27:43 I need to collect that feedback, make changes, and send out the next batch. Otherwise, I’ve got 10
1:27:48 results for a version and it’s useful. I know what the next five are going to be like because I saw
1:27:48 them on the first five.
1:27:55 I got it. So is it then, just to state my understanding, with the kitty test pilots,
1:28:00 you basically have, you’re not sending out the same version to 400, 600 people at once.
1:28:01 Five at a time.
1:28:05 Five at a time. And then you look at that cohort and see what comes back.
1:28:06 It’s always the same stuff.
1:28:09 Then you tweak, and then it goes out to the next group.
1:28:10 Exactly. The next five.
1:28:16 Over what period of time do you get a prototype to the max number who are going to receive it?
1:28:22 It usually, like, I would say six to eight months. We’re tweaking two things. One is we’re tweaking
1:28:28 gameplay, but much more commonly, we’re tweaking the instructions. Because gameplay has already
1:28:33 survived internal testing. So we know the game is fun. If we know this game is fun, and then we watch
1:28:38 a video of people not having fun, chances are it’s the instructions, not the game. And so that’s what
1:28:39 we start attacking at that moment.
1:28:45 Got it. What are some of the risks of internal testing? Because I’ve always wondered, for instance,
1:28:52 when I have, as I’m doing right now, doing a bunch of writing, and I have people proofreading or test
1:28:58 reading my writing, I do not only do it with professional writers. I mean, they’re very good,
1:29:04 and I know I’m very fortunate to know some amazing writers, but they’re also a little too close to the
1:29:08 material, right? It’s like a travel writer who can’t stop looking at their travel experience through
1:29:12 the lens of a writer. They have lost the ability to just travel and have fun.
1:29:13 Yeah, yeah.
1:29:16 What are some of the risks, if any, of internal testing?
1:29:20 So you and I have the same instinct here. I remember when we were testing this game internally,
1:29:21 hadn’t gone out the door yet.
1:29:22 This game.
1:29:27 This game, Coyote, yeah. I remember you would say, hey, can you show me test results? But
1:29:32 can you have your accounting team test it instead of your game design team? And I remember thinking,
1:29:38 yeah, that’s what we do. I’m not interested in the game design team’s results. So I would show you
1:29:43 the accounting team’s results. And I would show you the sales team’s results who hadn’t even ever
1:29:50 seen the game. Our internal testing starts out with the game design team, of course, but very quickly
1:29:54 has to move on to the other teams, specifically the other teams who have never seen the game and don’t
1:29:59 know the background. Because those are really the only tests that we care about. So your instinct is
1:30:04 perfect there. And I’m very happy to say you didn’t have to teach us that. We already knew that part.
1:30:10 I mean, if I’m teaching you anything, I don’t know what it would be. Other than my obsessive
1:30:17 focus on, I’m sorry, for the volume of email and the volume of text messages and the volume of
1:30:18 everything.
1:30:25 Every single one of those made the game better. Truly. Truly. I mean, okay, look, we’ve only done,
1:30:29 we’ve done, I think, two partnerships total, three partnerships total. We did a game with
1:30:33 Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. We did a game with Jeff Probst of Survivor. And now we’ve done a game
1:30:37 with Tim Ferriss. You probably sent more notes than the other two combined.
1:30:45 I sent a lot of notes. Sent a lot of notes. I really had a blast with it. And I remember this
1:30:51 moment and I’m wondering if this happened before or after the line review meetings. I think it might
1:30:58 have been afterwards, but you could place it for me because this is my first game and I don’t put my
1:31:05 name on anything, right? That was part of the very truthful pitch. It’s not like one of, you know,
1:31:16 I don’t have Tim Ferriss microwave ancient lovers and Tim Ferriss sneakers. And then just as an aside,
1:31:20 I have a Tim Ferriss game. It’s like, no, no, no. I don’t put my name on anything. So I take it very,
1:31:27 very seriously. And I think it was, tell me if I’m getting this wrong. Pretty sure it was Carly.
1:31:29 It was amazing.
1:31:31 Carly’s the president of the Telet and Kittens.
1:31:36 Carly’s incredible because there’s always a fear for me, at least where it’s like in maybe
1:31:41 internally, I think it’s great. And then it gets released into the wild and then, oh shit,
1:31:44 there’s a real problem. Like Houston, we have a problem.
1:31:45 Yeah. And you can’t take it back.
1:31:53 Right. So what do you do? And I remember Carly, I want to say sent a text to me. She was in,
1:31:59 I want to say Germany at some type of gaming convention or meeting of distributors. I don’t
1:32:05 remember the exact context, but she said, Coyote was bell of the ball. She’s like, you would not
1:32:12 believe we had an entire like huge room full of people playing, smashing on the tables over and
1:32:15 over and over and over again. And I was like, whew.
1:32:17 Yeah. Isn’t that a great feeling?
1:32:19 Here we go. LFG.
1:32:25 She sent me a video of that. So just to set the stage there, there’s 2000 people at this hotel of
1:32:30 the like 25 hotels that are part of this convention. And there’s one games room and
1:32:35 there’s like 10 tables in there. And the idea is there should be a different game at every table
1:32:42 and everyone’s testing out the games and sampling them. And we put Coyote on one table and almost
1:32:48 immediately people started gathering around. And so those people said, can we just grab another copy
1:32:51 and we’ll just put it on the next table? Just so not everyone has to gather around this one table
1:32:56 because it looked so intriguing. And so they sent it to another table. And then by the time
1:33:02 Carly sent me a video, it was at every table in the room. Like it was just an entire hotel playing
1:33:05 this one game because nobody wanted to play anything else.
1:33:06 Yeah. Wild.
1:33:11 It was so neat. It was so neat. And like how gratifying, like, you know, we’ve been killing
1:33:18 ourselves on this thing and to see an audience receive it and say, thank you for the gift.
1:33:23 Yeah. Yeah, totally. And also, I mean, I said it to you guys and look, it says technically
1:33:31 it says age 10 plus. So I don’t want to contradict that, but if you’re willing to modify the rules,
1:33:36 which is something that I encourage, and we have that in the instructions, house rules,
1:33:40 feel free to modify the rules. But I sent you guys the video of my friend’s four-year-old
1:33:48 after she played, which was such an amazing video. And this is the first thing I’ve ever done
1:33:52 that can include families and kids, right? Directly.
1:33:52 Easily.
1:33:57 Where it’s like four-year-old, 10-year-old is not going to have any interest or necessarily
1:34:01 the capacity to read one of my phone books that are like 600 pages long. It’s not going to happen.
1:34:09 So this is also so much fun to finally now that it’s kind of released into the wild to start
1:34:12 seeing these things bubbling up that I hoped would be there.
1:34:18 It’s the reason you make a game, right? You want to share an experience that then the recipients get
1:34:22 to share with those people that they love. That’s why you make a game. That’s exactly what we made here.
1:34:27 So let’s talk about the selling process a little bit more because you said, right? There’s the game
1:34:32 development, there’s building the game, there’s crafting the game. But there is an equally important
1:34:38 part, which is how do you get this thing into people’s hands? And for that, you need distribution.
1:34:44 So could you, this is going to be a callback. Remember that line review, the very beginning,
1:34:50 then I took us on a very meandering path, but there was a point to it. How do you pitch big retailers?
1:34:55 How does that happen? And like, how did you do it in the beginning of Exploding Kittens and how,
1:34:59 I know it’s changed over time as you’ve built your track record, but nonetheless,
1:35:06 you still need to do it. And actually, here’s a data point that most people will never hear anyone
1:35:13 talk about. What percentage of your sales are offline retail versus online?
1:35:17 All right, we’ll start there. Yeah, we never share these numbers, but for you, Tim.
1:35:18 Thank you.
1:35:27 Here we go. 70% of our sales are in-person retail. Only 30% are online sales. Totally backwards than
1:35:33 what you’d expect for almost any industry. But yeah, people like to walk into a store. They like to see
1:35:38 and touch and feel the game and flip it over and read the back and compare it to the other games. And
1:35:46 that’s where we sell our games, which means not only do I need tremendous retail buy-in, those sales
1:35:52 meetings are so important, those line reviews, but also the game has to sell itself on the shelf,
1:35:58 right? When you’re walking down that games aisle, 70% of our audience does this. You need to look at all
1:36:05 the game, hundreds of games, and you need to stop dead in your tracks on this one. And you needed to
1:36:12 say, Ooh, what’s that? Right? And that’s starts at that line review starts with getting them to say,
1:36:15 not only are we going to commit to this game, but we’re going to put it in multiple locations. So we,
1:36:22 so you see it more than once, right? Very important. Also, we work with them to figure out the color scheme.
1:36:28 And you and I, we did tons of surveys on the color scheme and the character and everything to stop
1:36:33 people in their tracks. Yeah. So just a quick sidebar, and I keep doing this, but some of you
1:36:38 may remember, and for those who’ve never heard it, I’ll just tell you for my very first book for our
1:36:44 work week, I used Google AdWords to test the top, let’s just call it 10 title and subtitle contenders,
1:36:52 right? So I bid on keywords that were related to the subject matter in the book. And then these sponsored
1:36:59 results, the ads were automatically split tested, like multivariate tested by Google.
1:37:06 They will do this automatically. And then all of the URLs, I had different URLs for each title option.
1:37:10 They just took people to an under construction page because I didn’t care about conversion. I cared
1:37:18 about interest, sufficient interest to click. And that is how I figured out the title. And then for the
1:37:25 cover, back in the day, I went to Borders, which was on University of Palo Alto. And I had a counter,
1:37:35 like you might see from a bouncer at the front of a club. And I put different covers onto a book of the
1:37:38 same dimensions on the shelf. Oh, wow.
1:37:45 I guess I didn’t tell you this under the new nonfiction. Oh my God. And I just during the peak
1:37:49 hours over a couple of days, I just tracked the number of times it got picked up. Oh, that’s so
1:37:57 good. And then I used that to determine which cover to use. I love this. And now there are better or
1:38:02 certainly easier tools to use. So we ended up, there are a number of them. I’ll just mention a few. So we
1:38:10 used PickFu, P-I-C-K-F-U.com. There’s also Intellivy, I-N-T-E-L-L-I-V-Y. And then there’s
1:38:16 another one called Sticky Beak also. But these allow you to do roughly the same thing, which is
1:38:24 you can take, for instance, with this box design or any type of art, or you could probably do it with
1:38:34 copy many different things. You can survey people who fit a particular demographic. You could identify
1:38:41 whatever the age is, the gender, if they are members of a particular service, whether they have
1:38:46 prime membership or this membership or that membership. You can fine slice it however you
1:38:52 want, and then you can serve up variants. So for this coyote who you see on the cover, I’ll explain
1:38:59 to people. Basically, the box looks like a slightly enlarged box for a deck of cards.
1:39:08 And then the top of the box is this beautiful autumnal orange, almost a saffron, like Buddhist
1:39:11 robe. We spent so much time on these colors.
1:39:16 We spent so much time on this. It is impossible to overstate how much time I spent on this and
1:39:21 everybody spent on it. Then there’s this beautiful lime green. I remember taking photographs
1:39:28 of particular leaves at particular times of the year with light coming through it to identify
1:39:36 the hexadecimal or whatever, the Pantone numbers for this particular green.
1:39:37 Oh, I remember this as well.
1:39:41 Yeah, you remember. And then looking at color theory and the color wheel, and oh my God,
1:39:47 it went on and on. But above the coyote, which is in the center of the box, there is this
1:39:56 upper portion of a cartoon coyote’s head. And very much trickster. Where it ended up is there’s a little
1:40:02 hat on the coyote, there’s an earring, there’s a wink, and the snout is where it’s cut off. So you
1:40:07 don’t see the nose, right? And this was originally, I remember sketching this initially on a Zoom call
1:40:15 by pen and paper and then holding it up to the Zoom call to the camera and then later sending the scan
1:40:21 and then we worked from there. But we had variants with no hat. We had variants with no earring. We
1:40:27 had variants with both eyes open looking to camera, so to speak. We had both eyes open looking in one
1:40:34 direction, like off to the side. And we were able to very quickly get a very good statistical signal
1:40:35 on what people preferred.
1:40:43 Yes. However, to your credit, when you showed me that character, initially, both the coyote’s eyes
1:40:48 were open. And we had some questions about the hat. And I remember asking you all these questions.
1:40:51 What do you think of a wink? What do you think of an earring? What do you think of a hat? What do you
1:40:55 think of one eye closed with both eyes closed? What do you think? What do you think? And to your
1:41:00 credit, your answer was always, let’s test it. I don’t want to have an opinion about this. I do
1:41:05 have an opinion, but I don’t even want to tell you. Let’s test it. And that is such an intelligent way
1:41:11 to approach this. And ultimately, this beautiful character that we ended up with was so clearly the
1:41:13 winner. It wasn’t even close.
1:41:18 Yeah. Wasn’t even close. And so we were able to get this very strong signal from thousands of people
1:41:24 voting. And boom, here we are. Okay. So we were talking about
1:41:33 the sort of road to retail, right? So it’s 70% of your sales are in-person retail versus online.
1:41:33 Yeah. Right.
1:41:39 And therefore, the stakes are high for these line review.
1:41:45 Yeah. Yeah. Line reviews are a big deal. And I remember we really wanted to all show up in
1:41:51 person. I remember you were trying so hard. Our first line review was with Walmart in Bentonville,
1:41:55 Arkansas. I remember you wanted so badly to be there. And there was some scheduling conflict
1:42:00 that just wasn’t going to let it happen. And we tried to change the date. But again, you know,
1:42:04 they’ve got so many meetings and you got to get in at exactly this time. And they couldn’t change it to
1:42:09 anything appropriate. And I remember thinking like, oh, we’re sunk. Like, I don’t know how to sell this
1:42:14 game without Tim there in the room, like showing how much passion he has. And you had a great solve.
1:42:20 You just recorded a video of all that passion. And you sat down in front of the camera and you just
1:42:24 riffed on the game. You were just like, here’s why I love this. Here’s why this is important to me.
1:42:29 Here’s why I made this game. First time I put my name on a thing and you recorded this beautiful
1:42:35 impassioned video. And I remember walking in to the line review and sitting down and saying,
1:42:40 I have a new game. First thing I’m going to do is we’re going to play this game.
1:42:43 And I’m not going to tell you anything about it. We’re just going to play this game.
1:42:48 And I set up the game. And within five minutes, they’re laughing and they’re having this incredible
1:42:55 time. And they’re like, oh, this is amazing. This is so much fun. How are you going to sell this thing?
1:43:00 And I said, I’m going to play a video for you now. And that was it. It was that one-two punch.
1:43:06 It was like, we’ve nailed game design and we’ve nailed the pitch. We know exactly who to talk to
1:43:14 and how to talk to them. And they saw those two elements and they’re like, full line purchase.
1:43:19 Every single store is getting this game. Yeah. Wild.
1:43:26 I mean, that has never happened on an initial pitch for us ever. Normally we get into a subset of stores
1:43:29 and then eventually it rolls out to all the stores. This was the first time ever they said,
1:43:32 whatever it takes. We need this game everywhere.
1:43:37 Which is, I mean, still very surreal for me. And I’m so grateful, obviously.
1:43:42 And it’s terrifying at the same time. I’m not going to lie. This is Mr.
1:43:46 dip the toe, then one foot, then weight up to the ankles. This is just
1:43:48 Yeah. Fire hose on.
1:43:53 Full Monty from second zero. What are other keys to
1:43:58 pitching in a line review? And that could also be, I’ll just
1:44:04 offer another option, which is what are some common mistakes that people make or that you
1:44:05 suspect people make?
1:44:09 So the first most common mistake.
1:44:12 Because this could be for games, but it could be for cosmetics. It could be for anything.
1:44:16 For anything. The first question is how are you represented in that room? Remember I said
1:44:21 they only take a certain number of meetings. It took us like five years to get one of those
1:44:21 meetings.
1:44:27 Wow. Even with the thunderous, crazy lightning in a bottle success of Exploding Kids.
1:44:28 They only have so many hours.
1:44:29 Yeah.
1:44:35 Yeah. So what you have to do instead is you find someone who already has a meeting and you hire
1:44:40 them as your publisher, and then they represent your game in their meeting. That’s how most companies do
1:44:46 it. And that’s how we did it for years. So the first problem is you have to make sure that whoever
1:44:51 is representing you, assuming you can’t be in the room, because 99.9% of the people can’t,
1:44:55 they are representing you the right way. With enough attention, they’re pitching it the right
1:44:58 way. They’re representing it the right way. They’re saying the right words. They’re conveying the right
1:44:59 fun.
1:45:00 How do you ensure that?
1:45:06 It’s a personal relationship. And it’s just hard. It’s really hard. And to be honest, I don’t want to
1:45:10 name names, but we went through like three different publishers and I wasn’t happy with how any of them.
1:45:17 How did you, this may or may not be something you can talk about, but how did you craft the deal
1:45:21 structure such that you could take a swing and then you’re like, okay, swing and a miss, we’re going
1:45:25 to go to someone else. And then swing and a miss, we’re going to go to someone else. How are those
1:45:26 deals structured?
1:45:34 We got very lucky because our Kickstarter campaign was so through the roof, that fed into our Amazon sales
1:45:39 immediately. And so I could go from publisher to publisher saying,
1:45:44 you know, look how many games I sold last week. Look how many I sold the week before that.
1:45:49 This is a prestigious title that you want to represent. And then when they wouldn’t represent
1:45:53 me properly, wouldn’t get the right sales, couldn’t get the right deal structure in place. Cause we also
1:46:00 demand quite a bit as far as where the game is placed. Is it in aisle? Is it out of aisle? Meaning
1:46:01 is it in the game section or somewhere else?
1:46:03 Ankle height versus eye height.
1:46:07 Exactly right. Those bottom shelves are like a death sentence, right? They’re like, nobody looks down
1:46:12 there. Can we get games at checkout? Like where they’re selling chewing gum? Can we put games
1:46:17 there? Can we get games in the catalog? All this stuff that I wanted for our games was just not
1:46:24 being properly represented for us. So eventually after our sales got high enough, I finally was able
1:46:29 to stop doing that silly dance with these publishers and we were able to publish our own games.
1:46:36 Quick question. So if I’m hearing you correctly, the success of the direct consumer, right? The DTC,
1:46:43 Kickstarter, Amazon, or I should say online, those successes allowed you to dictate certain
1:46:46 deal terms with the publishers. They had flexibility.
1:46:54 And they allow us to say, you want to represent us. Even then, they only have a one, maybe two hour
1:46:58 meeting. And so there’s only so many games they can pitch, right? So how do they fill that library?
1:47:02 And then you get to the point where you can go and book those meetings yourself.
1:47:08 How important was having a critical mass of SKUs? Because I have to imagine if I’m a major retailer,
1:47:12 I don’t want to have a meeting with someone who only has one thing to sell.
1:47:16 That’s why we couldn’t do it at first. It was only once we had, I think 10 games was the magic number
1:47:17 to make it worth their while.
1:47:19 Okay. Got it.
1:47:24 Yeah. And that takes a long time, right? And it’s not just 10 games, it’s 10 bestsellers.
1:47:28 And unless you’re there, they’re just like, yeah, just go through a publisher.
1:47:32 Like we don’t have time for it. We take 10 meetings, we don’t have time for an 11th.
1:47:37 All right. So what have you learned understanding, but to the extent possible,
1:47:45 if we can put aside the element of Exploding Kittens having and developing this incredible track record,
1:47:52 which allows you to not cut corners in a bad way, but you can go in without a finished prototype of the box, et cetera.
1:47:52 Right.
1:47:57 If we put that aside for the moment, what have you learned about line reviews?
1:48:03 If you look at your first outing versus the more refined line reviews.
1:48:10 And I’m spending a lot of time on this guys, because this applies to everything. Like it applies to so much.
1:48:15 You have a movie. Okay, fine. How are people going to see the movie? Yeah, you can go direct,
1:48:18 but you might want a distribution partner. Like what we’re talking about will apply to that pitch
1:48:20 meeting. A lot of it, right?
1:48:20 Yeah.
1:48:24 And it’s sort of the stuff that mainstream magic is made of.
1:48:25 Yeah.
1:48:28 Is figuring out how to craft these meetings.
1:48:31 Yeah. Remember you said, like it or not, you’re in sales?
1:48:32 Yeah.
1:48:36 Here it is. This is where the rubber meets the road. Like dust off your tap dancing shoes,
1:48:41 because holy crap, these are tough. So you have to walk into that meeting. And first you have to
1:48:44 keep in mind, you are their 10th meeting.
1:48:45 Yeah.
1:48:49 Even if you’re not their 10th meeting, you’re their 10th meeting, right? Like they’re in this like,
1:48:54 I’m tired. I want to get out of this room. I’ve been at this for too long. Like they’re in that
1:49:00 mindset. So the first thing you got to do is get them out of that funk. You need them to understand
1:49:06 that this is going to be the best of the 10 meetings. And you do that with enthusiasm. You do that with
1:49:12 props. You do that with a cool video, right? Like the stuff that can get them out of, oh, this isn’t
1:49:18 like the other meetings. Cool. Like that’s where you start. We show up with two of those suitcases,
1:49:23 not the little carry on ones, like the giant, crazy roller bag suitcases, and they’re filled
1:49:29 with products. So we fill those two suitcases with games, like the most beautiful games we’ve got,
1:49:33 even stuff that we’re not pitching that day, even stuff we know we’ll never see the light of day
1:49:39 because we’re going to set all of those up. And the basic premise is buy into this world.
1:49:42 Exploding Kittens is not a product. It’s a whole world.
1:49:49 And you can have this world on your store shelves. And so that’s how we start. And that’s a really
1:49:56 nice way to start. Okay. Then what they’re expecting is, okay, pitch us a game one at a time.
1:50:00 Pitch this. Okay. You’re done. Okay. Pitch the next one. Okay. You’re done. Pitch the next one.
1:50:04 So what we do is very different. Instead of pitching a game and then pitching the next one,
1:50:10 just like I said for Coyote, we’re like, hey, we’re going to play a game. And usually they say,
1:50:14 we don’t have time to play. Can you just pitch it? And I say, no, we’re going to play a game.
1:50:20 Confrontation. I get it. But I force them to play the games. Every single one of them.
1:50:23 Now, I’m not going to play all the way through. I’m not going to spend 10 or 20 minutes.
1:50:27 All right. This might seem like a trivial detail, but I don’t think it is.
1:50:27 Yeah.
1:50:32 You in a tuxedo on a top hat for this? Are you dressed in your Sunday’s finest?
1:50:37 Oh, yeah. Oh, it’s so funny. So I learned this at my Microsoft days. If I dress up,
1:50:41 if I wear a tuxedo, if I wear a suit, if I even wear a button-up shirt,
1:50:46 nobody takes me seriously. Because I’m supposed to be the creative guy, right? I have to wear the
1:50:51 creative guy uniform. I have to wear a t-shirt. I have to wear jeans. Otherwise, no one looks at me.
1:50:57 So that’s how I show up. Luckily, it’s a really comfortable uniform for me.
1:51:06 So I force them to play. And I’m there being the game’s biggest cheerleader. I don’t usually let them
1:51:11 win, but I usually orchestrate a scenario in the game where they’re having as much fun as possible.
1:51:16 And my goal is for them to have exactly those emotions that we talked about. When we start,
1:51:20 I need them to think, I can do that. And then a minute in, I need them to think,
1:51:25 oh, I did that. What’s next? Oh, I can do that next thing too. And I’m just crafting that.
1:51:30 And right at the point where they’re like, oh, I know what the next thing is. I pull the game away.
1:51:33 We’re done playing. Now let me tell you how we’re going to sell this game.
1:51:39 And it’s because at that point, they’re drooling. And I do that 10 times in a meeting. And we just
1:51:44 keep hitting that over and over. And I am very aware that the last two games I pitch are usually
1:51:48 not going to be purchased because they’re exhausted. Because that roller coaster, they’ve been up and
1:51:51 down too many times. So you’re going to have to figure out the sequence.
1:51:58 Yes. Do you start with the game you hope is going to be the big purchase? Or how do you
1:52:05 sequence it? Yeah. We open with our shortest, easiest pitch. And what that usually is,
1:52:09 is an Exploding Kittens expansion. So if I need to sell an expansion box or a new Exploding Kittens
1:52:14 product, and I know I don’t have to work very hard to sell it because they always sell, that’ll
1:52:18 take the first spot. That just warms the waters, gets us all eased in. A little yes momentum.
1:52:23 Exactly. Doesn’t hurt. Yeah. The number two spot is the glory spot. Whoever’s there,
1:52:28 that’s the game I’m actually pitching today. That’s where Coyote was, right? That’s the big
1:52:32 thing we’re going to talk about. And then the next five are equal. It doesn’t matter what order they
1:52:39 are. Usually we’ll sell all five of those. At a typical meeting, all five. What happens after that
1:52:47 is very iffy. Now, you mentioned you play the game, get them super excited, hopefully the drilling over
1:52:51 it. And then you say, all right, I’m going to take the game away. Here’s how we’re going to sell it.
1:52:54 What is included in the, here’s how we’re going to sell it?
1:52:59 Yeah. Okay. So important. So this has changed over the last three years. It used to be,
1:53:04 I have to start with the box and we still start. I shouldn’t say it used to be, it still is. We start
1:53:08 with the box. Look how beautiful this thing is. Here’s, and we do a mock-up. Here’s how it looks
1:53:13 on the shelf. And it’s usually from a photograph we took like that morning. Like we want to show you,
1:53:16 hey, Target, here’s what your shelf looks like. Hey, Walmart, here’s what your shelf looks like.
1:53:19 Here is our game right there in line.
1:53:23 And I should mention, this probably goes without saying, but you were not just showing up and
1:53:26 winging it. I mean, you guys- Oh my God.
1:53:30 …reherse like you’re going to be performing once in a lifetime at Carnegie Hall.
1:53:34 It is, if we screw up this meeting, our company is screwed.
1:53:35 Yeah.
1:53:37 Like we don’t survive a bad meeting.
1:53:37 Yeah.
1:53:44 So yeah, there is nothing that matters more than this. This is arguably 70% of our business
1:53:50 this year. If we mess up this meeting, we will see a 70% drop. Like if they bought zero games,
1:53:52 I don’t know that our company would survive that.
1:53:52 Yeah.
1:53:59 So it’s a big deal. We rehearse constantly. We make changes constantly. We make all these props.
1:54:04 Like we try to get the spot either right after breakfast or right after lunch, because that’s
1:54:05 when they’re in the best moods.
1:54:13 All of it is orchestrated and so carefully. Every single thing is orchestrated. Who’s in
1:54:15 the meeting? How many chairs are we going to fill?
1:54:20 How do you request those time slots? Because I imagine you’re not the only people who are
1:54:27 thinking about this, right? It makes me think of the data. It’s like a kind of meta analysis
1:54:32 long ago, looking at judges’ verdicts before or after meals and leniency.
1:54:34 Yeah. Right. So how do you get the right slots? Yeah.
1:54:37 Yeah. So how do you angle for those?
1:54:42 There’s an art to that as well. So we have agents, we have representatives, one for Target
1:54:49 and one for Walmart. And these are people who live in those cities and they live and breathe
1:54:56 sales with the sales rep. So their job, the very kind of cynical way to say it is they’re
1:55:02 like lobbyists, right? Ambassadors. Ambassadors. There we go. That’s a much more appropriate
1:55:09 way. They have been doing the job for longer than the salespeople, longer than the buyers
1:55:14 have. And as a result, the relationship that they have with the buyers is actually one of
1:55:18 education, right? Because they’ve seen all the mistakes. They know where all the landmines
1:55:23 are. They know how to avoid them. And so part of the art of getting the best meetings, of getting
1:55:26 yourself set up the best is to hire the best agent.
1:55:29 How does someone find said agents?
1:55:30 Friends of friends of friends.
1:55:30 Yeah.
1:55:33 The best ones already have too many clients, right?
1:55:34 Right.
1:55:34 You can’t work with them.
1:55:35 The usual situation.
1:55:39 Yeah, exactly. But if you have a good enough brand, if you have the right relationships,
1:55:44 if you can talk to the right people, and if you’re persistent, you can get the right agents.
1:55:48 I actually thought we didn’t need an agent at all at first. I was like, we can just do,
1:55:52 we’re going to show up the day before, we’re going to walk into these meetings. And some
1:55:58 very good friends of mine in the industry said, you’re an idiot. It’s just not going to work.
1:56:02 So we started working with agents and they are incredible. I mean, they know the industry.
1:56:08 Just to dig into that a little, why wouldn’t that work? Is it that the code of etiquette and
1:56:13 the way everything has been set up involves those agents and therefore it wouldn’t work?
1:56:19 Or are there other reasons why going in guns blazing without representation wouldn’t work?
1:56:24 The answer is both. So the buyers are much less likely to take you seriously unless you have an
1:56:26 agent in the room. And part of that is just because-
1:56:29 I guess part of it is just like, these fools don’t know how this is done.
1:56:29 Exactly right.
1:56:32 Right? They’re showing up to Downton Abbey wearing a tank top.
1:56:33 Exactly right.
1:56:34 And they don’t know how to use the silverware.
1:56:35 Exactly.
1:56:38 Why should I trust their ability to be a good partner and actually get things done on time
1:56:39 if they haven’t done their homework?
1:56:42 Precisely. And the other half is you haven’t done your homework.
1:56:43 Yeah.
1:56:47 Like you actually don’t know. You actually don’t know how to use the silverware, right?
1:56:53 When we walk into a meeting, the agent has done a year’s worth of work prepping for that meeting.
1:56:58 They’ve made sure the buyers know what you’re going to pitch, how many games you’re going to pitch,
1:57:02 what the order of the games is. They’ve made sure that you know the sales for the previous
1:57:06 purchases they’ve made going into the meeting. So they already have the confidence in like,
1:57:07 yes, these people are going to deliver.
1:57:13 they’ve made sure that inventory levels are where they need to be so that a meeting doesn’t get
1:57:17 sidetracked by them saying, this game is sold out. How did you let that happen? Right? Like
1:57:23 so many things can go wrong that the agent is fixing before they go wrong so that the meeting stays
1:57:25 on the rails and gets you to success.
1:57:25 Okay.
1:57:26 Got it.
1:57:34 So that agent is the person who lobbies for the appointment after breakfast or lunch.
1:57:39 but you have to know to ask for it, right? You have to know because your agent has other clients,
1:57:43 right? They’re going to sit through maybe three, sometimes four meetings in that sell cycle.
1:57:50 And they’re going to give that prime slot to the one who asks for it. So you’ve got to know to ask
1:57:54 for it. Here I am telling you on this podcast, it’s probably going to make my job a little bit
1:57:57 harder for the next sales round, but so be it.
1:58:02 Yeah. I mean, people listening need to hop through a few hoops before they end up being
1:58:04 viable competition.
1:58:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. There’s a few other tricks.
1:58:11 And we will, and we are going to come back to, if you’re just developing a game at your kitchen
1:58:15 table, what are some of the first steps? So we’re going to get there.
1:58:16 Yeah, for sure.
1:58:18 But in the meantime, you said a couple of tricks of the trade.
1:58:22 There’s a few more. I should be a little careful about what I say, but look.
1:58:23 You can always bleep things out at Atlanta.
1:58:30 So you want to pay attention to, believe it or not, all of the retailers have color themes year by
1:58:36 year. So you want to make sure that when you walk into a meeting, your boxes match that
1:58:38 color scheme, it makes it much easier for them to say yes.
1:58:40 Had no idea.
1:58:45 Yeah, right. I know. Because why would you? Because why would anybody, right? There’s things like
1:58:52 those agents are given permission to read the notes from the all hands meeting from the company. So
1:58:57 they know what the company’s priorities are. And so you want to sit down with your agent in advance
1:59:03 and say, those buyers, what are they going to get promotions and raises based on this year?
1:59:10 Is it more throughput at the store? Is it promote online sales? Is it match the color scheme? Is
1:59:15 it, you know, whatever, whatever it is, you don’t, you want to make sure. Yeah. And you want to make
1:59:20 sure that when they look at your games, they think, I’m really trying to promote online sales this year.
1:59:27 Whoa, this game would do great on our website. And then the next game, this game would do great on
1:59:30 our website as well. And by the time you get to the end of the meeting, they’re like, oh my God,
1:59:34 I can get a promotion if I just buy all 10 of these games, right? Like that’s what you want them to walk
1:59:35 away with.
1:59:39 All right. So these meetings are huge. We’ve established this. Huge deal.
1:59:39 So important.
1:59:41 You mentioned a couple of tricks of the trade.
1:59:41 Yeah.
1:59:47 Any other tips, tricks, learnings along the way?
1:59:52 So what happens after those meetings is also very important. There’s two things we have to talk
1:59:57 about. One is pricing structure and the other is marketing. So in the meeting, you talk a little
2:00:01 bit about both. You have to now include marketing. Remember I said three years ago, things were
2:00:08 different than today. Three years ago, the marketing plan that you show for your game is largely your
2:00:13 own website. Maybe you’ve bought some TV commercials, things like billboards, product placement here and
2:00:20 there are things like that. Today, none of that matters. All they care about is social media because
2:00:23 that’s the only form of marketing for games that works anymore.
2:00:31 I should say also, it particularly works on, as my understanding, platforms like TikTok or now that
2:00:37 other platforms have realized to avoid TikTok consuming their market share, they need to push and reward
2:00:38 short form video.
2:00:38 That’s right.
2:00:42 Short form video. Casual games are perfectly suited.
2:00:43 Yeah.
2:00:44 Too short form video.
2:00:51 Yeah. And the way that you build the most effective videos for those is you need to inspire, I think,
2:01:01 two emotions. One, I understand what those people are experiencing right now. And two, I would like to
2:01:07 experience that. And it took me forever to get to those two sentences, right? At first it was, let’s show
2:01:13 gameplay. Let’s show setup. Let’s show a memorable moment. Let’s show people screaming and yelling because
2:01:19 they’re having so much fun. None of that matters. None of that works. That looks like fun. I could
2:01:22 have that much fun. That’s it. That’s what you’re trying to show.
2:01:24 How does that differ from the first?
2:01:30 It’s very, very focused, right? Like you want to show, remember we talked about mastery early on.
2:01:34 Well, I also asked you guys because we were talking about this very early on in the process, right?
2:01:34 Yeah.
2:01:38 Also because if I’m procrastinating doing something hard, I like to talk about the marketing because
2:01:44 it’s a lot easier for me to talk about. But I wanted to see examples of videos that had worked.
2:01:45 Yeah.
2:01:46 For any of your games.
2:01:46 Yeah.
2:01:51 Right? Social posts. And so they were sent over and I was like, okay, I think I can do this why this works.
2:01:52 Yeah.
2:01:57 Often it was like one person playing, the other person kind of like struggling to guess what the
2:02:01 other person was doing and one person losing it laughing, right?
2:02:01 Yeah.
2:02:01 Yeah.
2:02:07 Just inconsolably, but in the best possible way, like losing it, getting the giggles out of control.
2:02:12 Yeah. Okay. So I’ll tell you one of the most effective pieces of media we have ever used
2:02:16 was for Poetry for Neanderthals. This has like, at this point, like, I don’t know,
2:02:20 tens of millions of views. And all it is, is here’s how you play Poetry for Neanderthals.
2:02:24 I have a secret word on this card. I have to get you to say that word. And I can only speak
2:02:29 using single syllable words. That’s the whole game. If I mess up, someone sitting next to me has a
2:02:34 giant inflatable Neanderthal club and they get to bonk me on the head. All right. So there’s our
2:02:39 whole game. The best video we’ve ever seen is someone who’s trying to get a person to say the
2:02:43 word garage. And we know they’re trying to get the person to say the word garage because we put that
2:02:46 right on the screen. We show you, here’s the secret word. It’s garage. And they’re just saying,
2:02:58 car, go here. Car hole, car hole, this car hole, big car hole. And everyone’s losing it.
2:03:02 And the poor person trying to guess is like, what the fuck’s a car hole? Like what? Glove
2:03:07 compartment? What are you trying to say? And then they say like vehicle and multiple syllable word.
2:03:11 And so they get bonked on the head. Okay. Here’s why that video is so effective. It’s those two
2:03:18 sentences. One is I see the experience they’re having. I get that. And the secondary sort of
2:03:20 corollary is I could do better than that.
2:03:25 Is this a video? I think I remember seeing this where this might’ve been a separate video,
2:03:29 but there’s a woman who’s the poet and then there’s the guy next to her holding,
2:03:36 holding the club. Like the ax is going to drop and everyone’s losing it, including the guy with the
2:03:36 back.
2:03:41 Right. Cause you look at that and you say, I understand the rules immediately. Right. I understand the
2:03:47 experience they’re having. I would like to have that experience. And that’s what makes for an
2:03:48 effective social media video.
2:03:50 All right. So how do you pitch that?
2:03:56 Well, we show a lot of examples and we show track record. We say, look, here’s how many views our last
2:03:59 round of videos got. Here’s how many likes, here’s how many shares, here’s how many subscriptions,
2:04:04 like all the stuff we show them right there in the meeting. We never had to do that. Like this is a
2:04:10 brand new phenomenon. And we say, here’s the type of video that we’re going to craft for this new game.
2:04:16 And we always couch it in those two sentences. Here’s how we’re going to explain the fun people
2:04:21 are having. And here’s how we’re going to make the audience feel like they would like to have that
2:04:26 much fun as well. And that’s been very effective for us. So that’s now half the meeting, right?
2:04:29 Cause every game we start by, I demo the game, social media strategy.
2:04:36 Yes. I demo the game. I pull the game back. We talk a little bit about the pricing structure
2:04:40 and the theme and the box and all that. And then we go right into social media strategy for that game.
2:04:44 Because I have to spend as much time on that as I did on the game design because they are equally
2:04:51 important now. It’s huge. Such a difference. All right. So for somebody listening who is thinking
2:04:57 about making game, and I really encourage everyone to do that. And I’m just going to flash, this is as
2:05:05 good a time as any, just to flash these blank cards that are within every coyote box and they are
2:05:11 color coded. You can use these to make action cards, which are these different gestures and
2:05:15 actions. Those are the templates that we use. These are the templates. You can use them to make coyote
2:05:19 cards, these modifiers. You can use them to make the attack cards, which you use to sabotage other people.
2:05:26 There are other ways to play those cards. This is intended to invite everyone to basically create
2:05:29 their own game by modifying the rules. That’s right.
2:05:34 Or adding new elements that are uniquely their own. You can have fun with your friends. You can have fun
2:05:40 with your kids. I mean, this is intended to make you a part of the creative process, which you will be
2:05:45 part of anyway, just by the way you play the game. But this takes it to another level. And this was a
2:05:52 really important element for me. So this will be a warmup in a sense. You get to try game design,
2:05:58 game development light with these blank cards. But let’s say somebody then decides they want to
2:06:04 give it a go. Maybe it’s with one of their kids like you did with your daughter. Maybe it’s by
2:06:09 themselves. Who knows? Maybe it’s going to the game shop, local game shop, which I really recommend
2:06:16 people do. If you’ve never been to a real proper game shop, go in on a game night when people are set
2:06:22 up. And also check out the games you might not be inclined to check out. So if you’re a casual gamer,
2:06:26 like go to a Warhammer night, see what that’s about. Totally. You know, check out like these
2:06:32 different worlds. You know, another secret weapon is go to a game shop, find the owner or even the
2:06:36 person behind the counter, like someone who knows what they’re talking about and just say, I’m looking
2:06:43 for a game. What game do you wish more people would give a try? And you will find the gems that way
2:06:48 because they know, but maybe the game doesn’t have the best box or the best name or some, it fell
2:06:54 short somewhere and people just aren’t buying it, but they know it’s amazing. That’s where you find
2:07:01 them. It’s a great experience. So start testing the waters in that way. It’s so easy to do in a place
2:07:07 like Austin. I mean, this is Austin. People might think of game locations and X, Y, Z. They’re all over
2:07:14 the place. There happens to be a really vibrant scene here. And if one wanted to start developing
2:07:22 their own game, let’s say they find something that starts to stick. Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay. We’ve
2:07:27 got a tiger by the tail. This seems to be working. They’re playtesting. It might take a while. Like
2:07:33 Settlers of Catan, I think. Klaus Teuber had like 150 versions before. Like that’s a, that’s a complex
2:07:39 game. Yeah. But let’s say they start to develop the game and they’re like, all right, I would like to
2:07:45 try to sell this. Yeah. What are the options? Yeah. What would you say to someone who’s like,
2:07:51 they’re smart? Yeah. They can plan. Yeah. Like they’ve operated in the world before. Right. So they’re not
2:07:58 new to adulting. Yeah. But they have no experience in selling games. There are three paths. I’ll tell
2:08:03 you all three paths and I’ll tell you my favorite one. All right. Okay. Path number one, self-publishing.
2:08:11 Self-publishing is hard, but you can print out your own decks. You can design everything yourself.
2:08:16 You can write the rules yourself. You can do absolutely everything yourself. And then you can spend a few
2:08:21 thousand dollars, publish a few hundred copies and send them out to all your friends. Okay. So that’s
2:08:26 option one. It sucks. Don’t do that one. It’s just the worst. I mean, you’re just going to make every
2:08:30 mistake and you’re going to have to pay for your mistakes and you pay for every mistake. Right.
2:08:35 And then once you make the mistake, now you can’t take it back and you can’t do it. Just don’t
2:08:40 self-publish. It’s a terrible idea. Okay. There’s number one. That’s not my favorite one. Number two
2:08:46 is you go to an existing publisher, Hasbro, Mattel, nowadays exploding kittens, right? Like you can
2:08:52 approach big publishers, pitch your game, and then strike a deal with them where they will handle
2:09:00 all the risk, but they will also take most of the reward. Okay. You can still honestly get very rich
2:09:06 this way, but you have to get into their portfolio, right? So either you need a track record or you just
2:09:11 have to absolutely wow them, or you have to show up with some bona fides. You can’t just say,
2:09:14 I’m a brand new designer. Here’s my brand new game. Please publish me.
2:09:20 How would you, maybe there are exceptions, right? Where people have wowed them.
2:09:24 First time game designer with a game. Yeah. How does one do that?
2:09:26 You go to a convention. You go to a convention. Yeah. You go to a convention,
2:09:32 you demo your game. They will all show up. They’re like agents recruiting for a sports team,
2:09:36 right? They’re going to show up to all of those places and they’re going to walk the halls and they’re
2:09:42 going to check even the smallest booths and they’re going to even go to the big convention halls where
2:09:45 everyone just has their own little folding table or even a temporary folding table, right? Like
2:09:50 they’re going to look at all of that stuff. So it is possible to do it that way, but you have to keep
2:09:57 in mind, they have very few slots open and they usually only have one or two agents, scouts looking
2:10:03 for games. So your chances of success there are low as a first time person, much better if you can
2:10:07 schedule a meeting and they will take that meeting. And then you can say, here’s why you should not
2:10:14 say no to this. What are the things you can do or put in a pitch that increase the likelihood of
2:10:18 getting a meeting outside of being an influencer at 20 million followers on Instagram? Well, yeah,
2:10:23 that helps, right? But the reason that helps is what I was going to say is the ability to sell the game,
2:10:26 whatever it is. Maybe it’s your- By the way, also true of nonfiction writing.
2:10:27 Exactly right.
2:10:28 If you’re selling a book.
2:10:32 And for selling a screenplay and for really selling anything, you need to be able to say,
2:10:38 here’s why people are going to take notice of this thing and why you would be a fool to pass on this
2:10:43 opportunity. That’s hard. Oftentimes the best way to do that is to have already done it, which means
2:10:49 your first time out, you need what I’m about to talk about, which is option three. Option three,
2:10:54 crowdfunding. This is relatively new, right? Like 10, 15 years old.
2:10:59 So it is, I guess, self-publishing in a sense, but you’re getting other people to fund the development.
2:11:04 Two things. Yes to that. Exactly right. Other people are funding 100% of the development,
2:11:10 which is incredible. But also you are collecting those funds on a platform that promotes the game,
2:11:15 right? People are there watching your video. You’re trying to convince them-
2:11:16 It is a discovery platform.
2:11:19 Exactly. Perfectly phrased. It is a discovery platform.
2:11:25 That was missing 15 years ago. I mean, watch my self-published YouTube video and hopefully fund
2:11:30 my game. It just didn’t exist. So now people are looking at crowdfunding sites, looking for cool
2:11:37 new experiences and backing them. And that’s a new invention. And that’s really cool. And it’s not my
2:11:41 favorite one either. So I just said I’d pick my favorite and I just pitched three and I said,
2:11:47 none of them are my favorite. Here’s my actual favorite. A combination of two and three.
2:11:53 Start on crowdfunding, especially if it’s your first time out. Learn everything you can. Your
2:11:57 first project’s probably going to fail. That’s okay. You got nothing to stick. You didn’t lose anything.
2:12:02 Fix it. Relaunch it. Fix it again. Relaunch it again. Take as many times as you need. There’s
2:12:07 nothing at risk here. You’re just learning the process. Awesome. When you get a success
2:12:14 on whatever crowdfunding platform you love, now go to those publishers and say,
2:12:21 here are my bona fides. Here’s proof that this thing is going to sell. I’ve already sold this once.
2:12:24 I’ve already gotten 10,000 packages. Do you do that before you have shipped the game?
2:12:31 No. Very important. No. Ship the game first. If the only thing you can prove is that you are a train
2:12:37 wreck waiting to happen, you will get nothing from them. So ship the game. Show that you’re
2:12:42 organized. Even if it’s a small fulfillment, like you sell 100 copies of your game. Show that you can
2:12:47 fulfill those 100 copies. And then start to show the reactions to those. If you’ve only got 100 people
2:12:53 who bought the game, reach out to every single one of them and beg them to record a video about how much
2:12:58 they love your game. And now go to publishers with that. That’s really what you’re searching for.
2:13:04 Use crowdfunding. It’s exactly what it is. It’s a way to launch your new game to then take to step two.
2:13:08 Let me ask this. There may be people listening or watching who think to themselves,
2:13:17 that sounds awesome. But wasn’t the heyday of crowdfunding three, four, five years ago?
2:13:17 Yes.
2:13:18 You hear less about it.
2:13:19 Yeah.
2:13:25 Certainly for, let’s say, selling to 100 people or maybe many, many more. I’m sure there are runaway
2:13:32 success campaigns even today. But are there any tweaks that you would add to it?
2:13:35 It’s really tricky. Okay. So here’s what happened with crowdfunding. We launched on Kickstarter.
2:13:42 Exploding Kittens launched on Kickstarter. And by some amazing twist of fate, that was perfect timing.
2:13:47 Very few people had heard of Kickstarter. They heard about this funny, silly thing. It was drawn
2:13:52 by the oatmeal. Matt already had this incredibly large audience. And people showed up and they said,
2:13:58 Ooh, crowdfunding. Ooh, this thing costs 20 bucks. I’m going to back this thing. And we had 219,000
2:14:05 people try that thing. Amazing. Right? Unheard of success. Those people then over the next, let’s call it
2:14:10 five years, stayed on Kickstarter. And they backed other things, other games, other projects, whatever.
2:14:18 And what they found was the nature of Kickstarter is such that only about 50% of those projects shipped.
2:14:25 Either the thing that shipped was nowhere close to the thing promised, or the thing never shipped and they
2:14:28 never got their money back. Whatever it is. People got burned.
2:14:33 They got burned. And they had a terrible experience. And now when you say, hey, back my Kickstarter,
2:14:39 everyone’s got this memory implanted of, oh, that was a bad experience for me. Maybe I even had some
2:14:43 great experiences, but I also had those bad ones and this is not worth it. And I’m not going back to
2:14:48 that site or any crowdfunding site. So that’s the problem. We’re not seeing the numbers we used to see
2:14:58 because everyone’s walking in with this baggage and it sucks. My only advice is there is now a secondary
2:15:04 ecosystem around Kickstarter. Other websites that have gotten very good at promoting projects that
2:15:11 have gotten very good at advertising new offerings on Kickstarter and building trust, right? Like if you
2:15:18 get on this other series. So it’s like a curated site. Exactly. That’s project. Exactly right. And here’s
2:15:27 the thing. Those companies almost always take a percentage of what the maker gets in exchange for
2:15:33 helping them with fulfillment, with creation, with everything. So not only are you buying into a
2:15:38 trusted ecosystem, but you also know there’s multiple parties involved that are going to work very hard to
2:15:42 make sure you get that product. What are some of those companies? I’d have to look them up. Okay. Yeah.
2:15:46 No problem. All right. We’ll put maybe links to a few of them in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:15:51 There’s a ton of them. They all have like the word backer in them somewhere. Backer found and backer this
2:15:55 and backer that. Yeah. I just. Okay. We’ll put a couple of links in the show notes. Tim.blog slash
2:16:00 podcast. You can find it. And I will also just give a shout out to a friend of mine who at some point
2:16:05 you have to meet. Maybe you’ve met him already. Craig Mudd. Does that name right? No, I don’t know.
2:16:13 All right. So Craig is gem of a human, amazing writer, also very technical as a software engineer,
2:16:21 software development expert. And he at one point for his beautiful books that he has bound and
2:16:29 crafted in Japan. These are works of art. They’re absolutely beautiful. And he created basically a,
2:16:35 I don’t know if open source is the right term, but he does have the code available on GitHub for anybody
2:16:42 who wants it called, I think it’s called Craig Starter, which is effectively if you want to host your
2:16:50 own crowdfunding campaign. Yeah. And in his opinion, fix some of the bugs that were difficult to contend
2:16:56 with. Interesting. Then boom, you can do that. Oh, I love that. And I think he incorporated
2:17:04 Shopify and other add-ons, different services could be sort of as modules. I’m sure I’m not using the
2:17:09 terminology, but incorporated into it. I love it. So people can also check that out. And I have two
2:17:14 interviews with Craig. You should check out both of them. They’re absolutely fantastic. Okay. So folks
2:17:22 can look at these services as basically a stamp of credibility. They will help not only with the
2:17:26 promotion, if you are so vetted, but with the fulfillment, right? Like the third-party logistics.
2:17:31 Now, I don’t think we’re going to see a crowdfunding campaign on the scale of Exploding Kittens these
2:17:37 days. Yeah. There are a few exceptions. You just interviewed one of them. Yeah. Brandon Sanderson.
2:17:43 Exactly. Yeah. So like out of control. 45 million dollar or whatever it was. Just Kickstarter campaign
2:17:48 for fantasy books. Bonkers. Unheard of. Yeah. Unheard of. But what I love is that that shows like
2:17:56 this is not even a remotely dead platform. No. There is success to be had here. You just have to be
2:18:01 creative. He started out with a great fan base. He picked an incredible title. The first word of
2:18:06 his campaign was, surprise. No one’s done that before. What does that mean? And just everything
2:18:12 about it. Smart on top of smart on top of smart. I loved it. Loved it. So it’s very possible, but it’s
2:18:18 also very rare. And you have to be smart about it. Yeah. Well, here’s the thing. It’s possible and who
2:18:25 cares, right? It may not have the gravitational pull that it had five years ago. Yeah. But if you can’t
2:18:32 sell anything in a crowdfunding campaign, you are not going to sell any buyer at mass retail.
2:18:34 Absolutely. Right. It’s not going to happen. Absolutely. Right.
2:18:40 And therefore, you save yourself years of banging your head against a brick wall when you’re never
2:18:46 going to break through. Yeah. If you get, and this might not sound like good news, but if it’s going
2:18:50 to fail, you want to fail as quickly as possible. It’s great news. As long as you don’t take it
2:18:57 personally, as long as you say this. How many games do you guys screw around with on any level
2:19:04 and how many make the cut? We probably work on a hundred games a year and less than 20 make the
2:19:10 cut. That’s with all of your experience. Yeah. Yeah. That’s probably way higher than it should
2:19:15 be. Like I’m probably pushing forward games that have no right to be pushed forward. But again,
2:19:21 don’t take it personally. You say, this game is flawed. And the faster you can figure that out,
2:19:23 the faster you can move on to a game that isn’t flawed.
2:19:31 If I heard you correctly, then it’s crowdfunding. You establish some numbers and so on that you can
2:19:40 share that show traction at the same time, game reactions, et cetera. Then you take all of that
2:19:49 to book a meeting at a trade show or a conference or convention with one of these publishers who already
2:19:54 has the annual meetings and line reviews. Exactly right. And you make a pitch to do a deal
2:19:59 with them. That’s my favorite path through this. What deal terms do you need to pay attention to?
2:20:03 So there is one very important number that you’re going to get, and it’s going to seem like a very
2:20:11 low number, but here’s how this works. Most publishers are going to throw a number at you like 2%.
2:20:18 Yeah. And you’re going to think, wait a second. I was the inventor. I get 80% and you’re offering me
2:20:26 2%. But here’s what that number actually means. They, the publisher, are going to take on all the
2:20:30 risk. They’re going to do all the printing. They’re going to do all the relationship management. They’re
2:20:34 going to do that sales meeting. They’re supporting hundreds of people on their staff. They’re doing
2:20:44 all this stuff that you are not doing. But in exchange for that, that 2% isn’t 2% of the profit.
2:20:50 It’s 2% of the revenue. Yeah. Top line. Exactly. And that is a very important distinction.
2:20:58 That makes that 2% probably closer to like 20%, 30% once you do all the math.
2:21:00 It’s the opposite of Hollywood accounting, right? Exactly.
2:21:04 It’s not some percentage of net income, which is defined in some Byzantine way to
2:21:07 precisely fuck you every week away from Sunday. Precisely right.
2:21:11 Just to reiterate what you just said, like 2% is more like 20 plus percent.
2:21:13 Yes. That’s exactly right.
2:21:16 Of profit. Yeah. And you can ask them to break down that math for you. You can say,
2:21:20 show me the spreadsheet. Show me like what you’re spending, what your responsibilities are,
2:21:25 what mine are. After all of those numbers are crunched, what is the total amount you’re going to
2:21:30 spend on this game? Show me your total projections on what’s coming in. Show me how much I’m going to
2:21:35 make of that. And then you can start comparing those numbers yourself and see, oh, of the money that
2:21:40 came in, I’m getting 20% of it. Even though this number only says 2%, once you crunch that math,
2:21:47 this is a pretty decent deal. And you can get higher than 2%, usually not as a first-time developer,
2:21:52 but I’ve seen deals anywhere from like 2% to 12% on the super high end.
2:21:59 Like you’ve got to be a rock star. Because at 12%, now you’re at like 50%, right? And that’s
2:22:04 tough to get to. Like you’ve got to really pull your weight to get numbers like that.
2:22:12 So those are what the deals look like. And then after that, then the whole relationship moves into
2:22:15 this like, okay, now what the hell are we actually making? Right? Like what is the quality of the
2:22:18 cards? What are the components in the box? Are you allowed to change rules?
2:22:24 Is the deal structure similar to a book publishing contract in the sense that the game developer
2:22:26 would get an advance against sales?
2:22:27 Sometimes.
2:22:28 Sometimes.
2:22:33 Yeah. You can negotiate that. I’ve seen publishers do that or not do that. I will just say for
2:22:35 Exploding Kittens, we never do advances.
2:22:41 It’s fundamentally different also from say, nonfiction book publishing in the following sense.
2:22:47 If you’re taking a, let’s call it conventional publishing approach, which is very similar to
2:22:52 selling the game, right? It’s like you have an agent, you’ve got the editors, let’s just say the,
2:22:58 and the publishers who are the buyers of sorts. The editor might be the category buyer, right?
2:23:01 But they have to get the okay from the publisher for signing off on deals.
2:23:02 Exactly. Yep.
2:23:10 And you’ll have your royalty rate, which varies widely, but let’s just say somewhere depending
2:23:17 on paperback versus hardcover up to probably a maximum in conventional deals of 12 to 15%
2:23:18 Yeah.
2:23:19 Of cover.
2:23:19 Yeah.
2:23:21 Right. Which is also, again, of cover.
2:23:21 Yeah.
2:23:30 And then there’s the advance. The critical difference that I was alluding to is typically when a nonfiction
2:23:36 book is sold, you are selling a book proposal, which is a writing sample and a marketing plan.
2:23:47 And if, and only if a publisher decides to sign a contract and buy the book, do you get an advance
2:23:52 to buy you the time so you can stop doing all of these other things to write the full book?
2:23:52 Got it. Got it.
2:23:55 Whereas with the game, like you’ve got to, the game’s got to be ready.
2:24:01 It’s done. Yeah. Now let’s call it like 90% done to be fair. Right. And usually when we take
2:24:06 on games, we change them significantly just because there’s always a better version. And through
2:24:10 testing, we discover it. The reason we don’t do advances partially is exactly what you’re saying.
2:24:13 You’re already done, right? We’re not trying to pull you off of other projects.
2:24:14 Yeah. You don’t have to stop your nine to five.
2:24:21 Exactly. Exactly. But the other reason is because I want a partnership. I’m not here to say you sold
2:24:26 us this game. Now we’re never going to talk again. I want you here every day. I want skin in the game.
2:24:31 We’re going to all make this better together, which is why we do so few partnerships.
2:24:36 When you do partnerships, meaning you’re the publisher, you’re paying someone a royalty,
2:24:45 how do you typically find those? So for instance, and I imagine a lot of it is you guys canvassing
2:24:51 and basically asking the question that you recommended people ask the store owners.
2:24:57 Which game do you wish people played more often? And then you find something that has the bones of
2:25:03 a really good game, but a piece of it is shitting the bed, right? There’s something that is broken and
2:25:09 you’re like, oh, we could fix that broken thing. Or do you take cold submissions? How does that work?
2:25:14 We have a submission form on our website. We almost never find anything there. It’s hard. It’s time
2:25:19 consuming to go through all of them. And honestly, it’s just not the highest quality. We also go to
2:25:23 conventions. We look a little bit around there. Sometimes we find a diamond in the rough.
2:25:25 But that’s a crowded fish and hole, right?
2:25:31 Very crowded. The most effective way are those agents. We talk to those two agents and we say,
2:25:35 hey, people approach you all the time wanting you to be their agent. And you have to turn a lot of
2:25:39 them down. The ones that you feel terrible about because they’re such a good game and they just
2:25:43 can’t get in the door, send them to us. And that works really well.
2:25:48 Yeah, smart. That’s super smart. Aside from a crowdfunding campaign,
2:25:55 what would actually cut through in a submission? Are there any ingredients outside of here are
2:25:57 a bunch of compelling data from a crowdfunding campaign?
2:25:57 Yeah.
2:26:00 Or, hey, I’ve designed a hundred hit games.
2:26:01 Yeah, yeah.
2:26:07 Aside from those two, what other types of lines or elements would cut through the noise?
2:26:12 Remember I said that phrase, the way we design games is we don’t make games that are entertaining.
2:26:18 We make games that make the players entertaining. 90% of the game pitches I see are attempts to be
2:26:25 entertaining games. And I just immediately dismiss them. That looks like that game is working so hard
2:26:31 to entertain the players. I don’t care. The best games, the ones that I pay very careful attention
2:26:37 to are when everything you do in the game creates an interaction between two players.
2:26:41 I’m not interested in a four-player game where all four players are playing solitaire.
2:26:43 Like, it’s just, who cares?
2:26:47 I’m interested in a game where the players are playing the players. And I play a card.
2:26:52 You tweaked a lot in Coyote based on that guiding principle.
2:26:56 Those are the best games. Those are the ones I love the most. Those are the ones I want to play over and over again.
2:27:02 And it could be as simple as you might, I’m saying you, the listener or viewer might remember holding
2:27:09 your cards facing you versus having the cards available to the entire table.
2:27:15 That’s right. Because now we’re playing all together. And the card I choose, if I have a blind hand,
2:27:21 if I have a deck of cards and I choose a card and then I play it, that is me presenting a game to the
2:27:27 players. If I have all my available cards face up on the table and everyone can see what I choose and
2:27:32 everyone’s hoping I pick that first card, but I, and I hover my hand over it and then I move to the
2:27:36 second card instead and everyone starts groaning. And then I play that second card anyway. Now it’s me
2:27:39 playing the players and those are the best games in the world.
2:27:49 What are some common Achilles heels for games that have the potential to be great and huge successes?
2:27:54 And I’m not going to mention names, but we’ve talked about a couple of games that you’ve considered
2:28:03 buying or publishing. And I’m wondering what are some of the common weaknesses where you’re like,
2:28:11 this is a great game, but the reason it didn’t work is X or Y or Z.
2:28:20 So there’s two basic places the games fall apart. One is right off the bat, their boxes suck or the
2:28:29 name sucks. The number of games out there called the legendary folklore of Gorgonzale, right? Like
2:28:33 I can’t remember them. I don’t know what they are. I look at this.
2:28:35 Got to throw a cock punch in there and then it’s problem solved.
2:28:49 I would, cock punch aside, I would argue that those games, they have no chance of success. Yes,
2:28:54 they’re going to sell 10 copies to the 10 people that bought the legendary tales of Gorgonzale volumes
2:28:58 one through six, and they’re going to buy volume seven. Cool. Great. I don’t care. Picking the wrong
2:29:03 name, picking a non-descriptive name, putting a picture on the box that does not describe gameplay
2:29:10 at all. It does not provide a compelling narrative about what experience you are about to have.
2:29:15 Those games have zero chance of success. And I see that over and over and over again.
2:29:20 So you can fail right up front. And I’ve even seen the biggest publishers in the world mess this up.
2:29:26 Especially now that game shelves are so crowded and you don’t have five games to choose from. You have
2:29:31 500 games to choose from. And a game that doesn’t do a good job of saying, pick me, pick me, pick me,
2:29:34 you’re just not going to pick. So you will fail right there.
2:29:39 A really complicated packaging too. I’ve seen that a bunch where there’s just so much going on. There’s
2:29:43 no one dominant element. It’s like, what am I supposed to look at here?
2:29:44 Yeah. What do you look at first?
2:29:44 So you can’t.
2:29:47 You don’t look at anything. You look at the next box.
2:29:53 It’s just noise. Yeah. Just noise. So we worked very hard on Coyote on all our games. But I remember
2:29:57 having this discussion about Coyote because this is such an important lesson. When you look at this
2:30:03 box, we know the first thing you’re going to look at. And we know the second thing you’re going to look
2:30:09 at. And we know the third thing you’re going to look at. And this is a formula. And we crafted this.
2:30:10 It’s a formula. Yeah.
2:30:11 Very carefully.
2:30:16 By the way, also exactly what works in old school print advertising.
2:30:17 Yes.
2:30:18 Right?
2:30:18 Yes.
2:30:21 Header image, headline, subheading.
2:30:22 Exactly right.
2:30:22 Text.
2:30:24 And those components are all present here.
2:30:30 And if you fuck up the order, pardon my French, the eye doesn’t know how to track or it bounces
2:30:31 around.
2:30:39 Yeah. And if there’s other better options right next door, off you go. So we hit those three things on a box.
2:30:48 And your reaction should not be, I’m going to buy that game. That’s not our goal. Your reaction is,
2:30:52 I’m going to pick up this game and I’m going to turn it over. Now I’m going to read the back of the
2:30:57 box. And now we’ve got a very different task. Now we have more real estate. We still know the first
2:31:03 thing you’re going to look at. Now we care a little bit less about the second thing. As long as you’ve
2:31:07 already got enough interest, right? You’ve already committed to picking this thing up. You’re willing to
2:31:11 to read a little story. As long as you can see the end of that story and you know, it’s not too long.
2:31:15 You’re going to read a little story. The goal of this is now purchase.
2:31:19 I want you to get to the end of this experience and say, I got to have it.
2:31:20 I want this.
2:31:27 And just for people who can’t see this particular visual, and there’s all sorts of stuff on the back
2:31:32 of the card, which we won’t get into, but some people might notice interesting things on the back of the
2:31:38 cards. The dominant element on the back of the box is how to play. And man, we worked on this a lot too.
2:31:44 With basically three pains. Step one, step two, step three. Put cards on the table, then take turns
2:31:49 performing them. That’s step one. And you got a little visual with the salamander action cards.
2:31:54 Then next part is play cards to help or sabotage other players. It shows two examples.
2:31:57 Abotage was a very carefully chosen word, by the way.
2:32:02 Very carefully chosen. And then the last one is mess up and you’re out. The last player standing
2:32:08 wins. That’s for competitive mode. Now, one aspect of this that I think is very clever is not sure if
2:32:12 you should buy this game, question mark. Give us a few seconds to convince you. And then there’s a QR code.
2:32:13 Nobody does that.
2:32:14 Yeah.
2:32:15 This is new.
2:32:15 I know.
2:32:16 Yeah.
2:32:18 So what’s the impetus behind this?
2:32:26 So this was an idea I had that we’re demoing on this game. First time ever. My idea was if I went to
2:32:30 the store with you, I could convince you to buy my favorite game. Yeah.
2:32:35 Because I’m going to pitch the hell out of that game. But I’m not in the store with you. So that’s a
2:32:41 problem. So my first idea was for every retail location in the world, will they let us install
2:32:48 a telephone that you can pick up and talk to somebody? And they said, no. And so my second
2:32:53 idea was, can I hire a person to stand in every store and convince you to buy the game I want you
2:32:58 to buy? And they said, sort of, but you have to pay for all of that. And I was like, oh, that’s not
2:33:00 going to work. And so this was option three.
2:33:01 That’s a lot of people.
2:33:01 Yeah.
2:33:02 6,000 plus people.
2:33:09 This is, I know, right? Can you imagine? So this is just a little QR code. And the idea is,
2:33:16 I can’t stand next to you for every store, but I can tell you what I would have said had I been
2:33:21 standing there. And so you scan this code and it’s just a 15 second video. In this case, it’s me,
2:33:26 Tim saying, listen, you’re holding a game in your hands. It’s the greatest thing you’ll ever see.
2:33:31 Let me try to convince you. And it’s just a pitch. It’s just, if I were standing next to you in the
2:33:37 store, here’s why you should buy this game. And I don’t think a lot of people are going to scan that
2:33:42 code to be fair. But for those who do, they’re going to have the experience of a friend telling
2:33:44 them, you should trust me. This is going to be great. Trust me.
2:33:49 Yeah. And it doesn’t take up that much real estate either. It’s an easy addition to the box. So once
2:33:57 again, test it, what’s the worst that can happen, see what happens. And I also want to revisit
2:34:04 something you mentioned earlier, which is that royalty rate, whether it’s 2%, up to 12% in the
2:34:12 book world. Let me take the book world and the publishing world in the book publishing sense is
2:34:19 changing a lot, but it’s also quite consistent over time. Different things have changed. Sure. Audio as
2:34:26 a format has grown tremendously and become highly prized now versus 10 years ago. When I could carve
2:34:31 out those rights, it’s a lot harder to do now if you’re going to do the conventional route. But some
2:34:37 folks will look at the percentages and they’ll say, well, wait a second, max 15% after an escalator,
2:34:43 I’m starting off at 12% for hardcover. That’s ridiculous. I wrote the whole thing. I want to
2:34:51 make the lion’s share. There are some instances where you can make that work, but I will say just a few
2:35:00 things. When you begin, for most people, unless you are excellent at running a meticulously managed
2:35:07 business, it’s actually pretty tough to beat those numbers. In part, because you’re going to be
2:35:13 sacrificing distribution. So the top of the funnel number is going to be different. Secondly,
2:35:23 when you factor in paying various agents, various distributors, and all of these little costs that
2:35:30 for you without any scale of having a thousand SKUs in a department dedicated to it, you start to very
2:35:33 quickly approach that number. Very quickly.
2:35:38 By the way, you’re running a real business. This is not the easiest thing in the world to do
2:35:46 at all. And I will probably do some experiments on that side of the equation in terms of self-publishing,
2:35:52 which I would put in quotation marks because it’s going to be like augmented pseudo self-publishing
2:35:58 on a few levels. I would only have the confidence of doing that myself currently because I’ve gone
2:36:03 through the conventional route multiple times. And I’ve also run quite a few businesses.
2:36:08 But if you’ve never, what Stephen Key, I mentioned earlier, one simple idea for licensing, what he
2:36:16 might call venturing, running a business, do not underestimate the value of your time and sanity
2:36:22 also. Because what Stephen would do, he’s like, hey, look, I’ll take the licensing deal. Maybe he’ll
2:36:27 negotiate the number up a little bit. Yeah. But he’s like, I can do 12 of those a year.
2:36:29 Yeah. That’s right.
2:36:29 Right.
2:36:30 That’s exactly right.
2:36:32 And it adds up to a lot and no employees.
2:36:33 Yeah. Yeah.
2:36:36 No supply chain issues.
2:36:36 No risk.
2:36:39 No, oops, that was printed the wrong way.
2:36:40 Right.
2:36:46 And now I have thousands of books that are sitting in my garage unsold, gathering dust
2:36:47 and mold.
2:36:51 Let me tell you the simplest example of the difference between doing it yourself and getting
2:36:56 help, valuing your time. Our very first game, Exploiting Kittens, I needed to put a barcode
2:37:00 on the box, right? Because it has to sell in retail. So I go, I’m like, I’m in a research.
2:37:04 This can’t be too hard. So I do the research and I find this website and it’s like, you know,
2:37:08 you got to pay some little subscription, a hundred bucks a year, whatever it is. And you can generate
2:37:13 unlimited barcodes. Amazing. So I generate a barcode. I put it on the box. That wasn’t so
2:37:19 hard. Then Target’s like, well, this is the wrong format. I’m like, okay, I spend another hundred
2:37:25 bucks. I get a different format, but put it on. I’m like, we need a different barcode based on the
2:37:29 palette that it’s in. And then I talked to Walmart and they’re like, yeah, we use a different barcode
2:37:34 format and we need this barcode to represent whether it was picked up in China or Mexico or
2:37:38 Poland. So you actually need three different ones. Oh, and by the way,
2:37:41 if it’s bundled with other games, we need a fourth one. And by the way, if it ships into
2:37:48 Arkansas, we need a fifth. And I was just like, help. Like, oh my God, help. And that’s the
2:37:51 difference. Like you should not get good at this. Why would you want to get good at that?
2:37:57 You know, what’s funny is I was actually going to bring up the example of the UPC codes and
2:38:02 ISBN and all this stuff, because I also went down that route. I’m like, how hard could it be?
2:38:08 Right. And lo and behold, actually it’s a lot of brain damage. Yeah. I’m not saying that no one
2:38:16 should venture in the sense of self-funding or self-publishing, but it is a lot harder and much
2:38:23 more consuming than most people realize. Yeah. And there’s no reason, unless you want to do it for a
2:38:27 living, there’s no reason to get good at it. Yeah. Like there’s no upside there.
2:38:31 And do it for a living, meaning handle those types of details. Right. Exactly.
2:38:35 Okay. Anyway, we have a barcode person who does it for a living. She’s quite good. I’m so happy
2:38:44 she’s on my team. All right. So on the side of selling games, what else have we not touched on?
2:38:52 Any other aspects? Another thing I learned along the way is there’s two kinds of selling. One is
2:38:58 everything we’ve been talking about today. Your expectation is I have sold you a game. The game
2:39:04 is now your responsibility and we’ve negotiated a price. You, the retailer, own this game now and
2:39:11 you’re going to sell it. The second kind is the kind that we actually engage in, which is you do own this
2:39:16 game, but there are restrictions on how you can sell it. Can you explain that again? So when you say
2:39:21 you own this game, you, me and a retailer, you, the retailer have purchased this pallet of games.
2:39:25 I get it. All right. Sorry. I was just clarifying because people might’ve heard that as you own like
2:39:30 the IP of the game. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yes. So I were buying an inventory of this game. Correct.
2:39:39 Now, what if the game doesn’t sell very well? Whose problem is that? Yeah. Well, if you didn’t think
2:39:44 that through and it’s just a straight sale, they can put it in a bargain bin or they can sell it to
2:39:49 somebody else who’s then going to sell it. Or if you really didn’t negotiate it, they can force you
2:39:55 to buy it back from them. The restrictions on what happens to the game, what they’re allowed to do
2:40:03 post-sale is so meticulous. And these contracts get so long. And this is another thing. You don’t want
2:40:08 to get good at this. You just need to hire someone who has seen every imaginable mistake and knows what
2:40:15 to argue for. And oftentimes the retailers don’t care that much about this part, especially because
2:40:19 they have a lot of faith. This thing’s going to do well, right? But when it goes poorly, if it goes
2:40:24 poorly, and we’ve had a few examples of this, what do you do next? In the case of something as simple
2:40:31 as like Amazon, Amazon has a terrible policy for returns. Namely, they will accept all returns and it is
2:40:36 the vendor’s responsibility, my responsibility. So you buy exploding kittens for game night,
2:40:40 you play the game, you damage all the cards because you spilled beer all over them. You put them back
2:40:44 in the box the next day after you had a great time and you return it. And now that’s my cost,
2:40:51 right? And that happens hundreds of times a week. It sucks. There’s also this thing where people will
2:40:57 buy counterfeit games and they’ll buy then the real version. So they’ll buy a counterfeit for a dollar.
2:41:01 They’ll buy the real version on Amazon. They’ll keep the real version. They’ll return the
2:41:07 counterfeit. And now that’s mine as well. And I just spent $20 on that stupid counterfeit version
2:41:12 because that’s coming back to me, right? So all of this stuff has to be thought through in advance.
2:41:17 And it’s tricky because some retailers, the targets in the Walmarts of the world,
2:41:22 they are so willing to work with you on that stuff. Amazon, not so much. They’re just like,
2:41:26 oh, you don’t like our policy? All right. Well, maybe a different platform is for you.
2:41:31 So it’s hard. It’s really hard.
2:41:38 And I should say that I’ve run into when I’ve talked about termination clauses or what do we do when
2:41:41 everyone’s pissed off and things aren’t working? Because really, that’s the only time that you’re
2:41:46 going to go back and look at the agreement, which is why Gary Keller, famous for his real estate empire,
2:41:48 said, you should really call them disagreements.
2:41:52 Right? Because it’s the only time you’re going to look at them is when things are really going
2:41:57 sideways. And there are some people I’ve spoken to about the importance of these things. They’re
2:42:02 like, wow, it’s really pessimistic. I’m like, no, no, no. Let’s understand the consequences of not
2:42:09 going through this. I know so many examples of entrepreneurs who actually had a chance at
2:42:18 a runaway success. And they did not pay attention to these terms for say a QVC or a huge retailer.
2:42:25 And this could happen with Kickstarter as well, of course. They get overextended because now they
2:42:31 have orders for God knows how much inventory that is well beyond their capacity, their experience,
2:42:37 their financial means. And in their mind, let’s take out the Kickstarter or crowdfunding,
2:42:43 but they don’t think about the return policy and they get the hug of death. They overextend
2:42:48 themselves financially to produce the inventory. They ship it. And then any number of things can
2:42:55 happen. It might be like net 270 payment terms. So it could be just like cashflow suicide right
2:43:00 on the front end. And on top of that, you might get all of it shipped back to you and it’s your
2:43:03 problem. And then that is the hug of death and you’re done.
2:43:07 Yeah. You’ve seen this. I mean, you’ve seen this picture. You have this friend whose apartment is
2:43:12 filled with products and it’s taken over their living space and they have no way to move it.
2:43:18 I mean, I did that myself early on. I made an audiobook product. I was going to sell millions
2:43:24 of this thing. Oh my God. Didn’t do any market testing. None of that stuff. Just high on my own
2:43:29 supply. Right. And I had an entire garage full of these things. They just melted in the heat
2:43:36 ultimately. And at the time though, that was a huge financial risk. I mean, I didn’t take so much
2:43:44 risk that it torpedoed me. But if I had had that level of self-delusion and lack of experimentation
2:43:48 a little later on, it very easily could have been a recipe for disaster.
2:43:53 There’s so many ways to mess this up. There’s so many ways to mess it up. The only good news is
2:43:57 there is someone out there who has messed it up in every possible way.
2:44:02 Yeah. Or represented people who have messed it up in every possible way.
2:44:07 And those are the people you have to work with. You have to. And if you don’t, the risk you’re
2:44:15 taking on is just massive. And luckily, I had some very good advice early on from people who said,
2:44:19 don’t take this on yourself. Don’t do this. And it’s the best advice I ever got.
2:44:27 And I think maybe, tell me if this is overreaching on my part, but don’t take this on yourself now.
2:44:36 In the sense that after you’ve had 10 mega successes, and you actually are fluent in retail ease,
2:44:40 and you have the relationships, all right, now you can take some calculated risks.
2:44:46 And now you can hire the people that you would otherwise contract. Now you can pull them in-house.
2:44:47 Yeah.
2:44:51 Because now you can afford their salaries. Now you want them to only be working on your own products.
2:44:57 Great. That’s a huge mark of success. And really, that is exactly the way you reinvest in your own
2:44:58 company.
2:45:04 Mm-hmm. And to reiterate just a few things, if you want to develop a game, number one,
2:45:09 you can just develop for your family, your friends, and keep it small. And I will just
2:45:14 say in the book world, a lot of later mega successes have started out that way. So you
2:45:21 don’t have to go for scale, which I think can be a very dangerous word out of the gate. But as you
2:45:27 mentioned, you can also, with the blank cards in Coyote, you can get a taste of it, see if you like
2:45:32 it. Then you can use the books that you recommended. And there are certainly other resources. We’ll put
2:45:37 things in the show notes to play around with prototyping. I mean, look at these initial
2:45:41 cards. These are blank cards with Sharpie writing.
2:45:42 That’s it. That’s it.
2:45:42 Literally it.
2:45:47 That’s it. That’s the entire thing. And you can also find kits online. You can find them
2:45:55 anywhere you want. Amazon has gaming kits where there are blank dice and cards and so on. So
2:46:02 you can workshop it. So it’s like build a bear for games. Yeah, that’s right. And what I would add to
2:46:09 that is you don’t need to run a big business to be a successful game designer. In fact, I would
2:46:17 imagine most of the legendary game designers are not running companies. They’re designing games and
2:46:21 licensing them. And man, there are some legends out there.
2:46:27 They’ve created incredible games and they’ve generated gigantic wealth for themselves, right?
2:46:33 Because in success, that 2% deal, that 5% deal, whatever it is, that faucet doesn’t turn off.
2:46:40 That’s in perpetuity. So yeah. In summary, I don’t think the games business is going anywhere.
2:46:48 And also, there is a lot of room to innovate. There still is room. I mean, there’s so many games,
2:46:54 but I wouldn’t have even attempted to create a game had I not thought there was space.
2:46:59 Yeah. And the thing is, it’s like saying, is there still space in the book industry,
2:47:10 in the movie industry? All a game is, is an idea delivered in a new way, right? So when are we going
2:47:14 to run out of ideas? When are we going to run out of delivery mechanisms? The answer to both of those
2:47:20 individually is never. Combine them both together and like, it’s just build games forever. You’ll
2:47:25 always have a new way to deliver it. All right. So I’m trying to think of anything that we missed.
2:47:35 I do have a tantalizing offer for listeners and viewers just for fun, because why not? And we will
2:47:42 have also mentioned that in the intro. But before I get to that, anything critical that we’ve forgotten?
2:47:52 Is there anything that we have left out or any other resources, people to watch, maybe? People to
2:47:55 Google and Wikipedia, maybe? Anything at all?
2:48:01 All right. I got two. I got two that are interesting. One is, there is a podcast I quite like for game
2:48:06 design. It’s called Fun Problems. That’s with Peter and AJ. All they do is they talk about game
2:48:14 design. Now, they do talk about more hardcore games than I am accustomed to. Like, it’s a wide range of
2:48:18 topics, but it’s fun stuff. It’s worth listening to if you want to know more about game design.
2:48:23 And the second thing is because of you. Because of you, because of this process, this journey that
2:48:29 we’ve been on over the last few years, I realized that I don’t document any of this ever. I never talk
2:48:34 about what goes into a game design. I never talk about where to buy blank cards. And I never talk
2:48:39 about like why anybody can do this and what the process is like. So I’ve started recording it and
2:48:44 I’ve started for the first time. I can’t believe I’m saying this. I actually started a YouTube channel
2:48:50 and you can actually go and watch these instructional videos. Literally, if you want to make a game,
2:48:56 the whole idea is here is how to make a game from scratch. Nobody’s watching right now, but
2:49:06 YouTube.com at Elon Lee. That’s E-L-A-N-L-E-E. You can also just search him on YouTube. The first
2:49:12 result will be our podcast together, episode one. And then within the first few results, you’ll also
2:49:22 find it. But I’m pretty sure the URL is YouTube.com slash at Elon Lee. And let’s finish up with a few
2:49:29 things. The first will be the tantalizing offer that I mentioned. So the tantalizing offer is this,
2:49:34 there’s no purchase required whatsoever. So if any sweet sticks, sharks are out there,
2:49:42 take it easy, take it easy. So this is going to be just a fun little, it’s not even a competition,
2:49:45 just a fun little experiment that I want to run.
2:49:55 Hi everyone. Tim here with an update as details have changed since that first conversation with
2:50:00 Elon. Here’s the tantalizing offer that I wanted to share with you. You have two very easy ways to
2:50:06 enter for a chance to win a trip to a secret Los Angeles mansion for an unforgettable day or evening
2:50:11 with me and Elon and maybe some special guests. Here’s how option number one, simply visit any
2:50:18 target or Walmart and take a fun photo or video with a coyote game. No purchase necessary option.
2:50:23 Number two, if you already bought coyote, record yourself playing the game with friends or family.
2:50:29 That’s it. I would love to see it. Then share your photo or video on Instagram or Tik TOK or both
2:50:36 and tag me and exploding kittens. You can find us easily, but I’m at Tim Ferriss on both. That’s at
2:50:43 Tim F E R R I S S and exploding kittens is exploding kittens at exploding kittens on Tik TOK and at game
2:50:49 of kittens on Instagram. So share your photo and or video on Instagram and or Tik TOK, put them
2:50:54 everywhere. Why not? And tag both me and exploding kittens. Long-time listeners know that I have a love
2:50:59 of deadlines. This is how things actually get done. So the deadline to post is August 17.
2:51:07 That means that 10 PM PSD, August 17 by then you need to have posted and done all this stuff by
2:51:13 August 31st. We’ll randomly select five winners from people who post each winner will receive round
2:51:18 trip airfare within the U S one night at a hotel and we’ll join us at our secret LA mansion party.
2:51:23 And I think the legal elves wanted me to mention that that’s going to be coach airfare. So just to be
2:51:29 super clear, important legal disclaimer, no purchase necessary open to U S residents age 18 or older.
2:51:35 So no little kids, no minotaurs allowed void where prohibited winners selected at random odds depend
2:51:39 on number of eligible entries. Travel dates must align with the event. Likely in September,
2:51:43 we are still finalizing the time with the busiest man in show business,
2:51:48 Elon Lee himself for official rules, eligibility details, and final date. Please visit Tim dot blog
2:51:54 slash rules. So go ahead, post a creative Tik TOK or Insta reel or a photo with coyote by August
2:52:01 17th, 10 PM PST tag us. And you might just be celebrating with us in Hollywood this fall. Now
2:52:03 back to the episode.
2:52:11 And what else? Anything else to add? I have a little bit of one more thing I want to say.
2:52:12 Oh, okay. I want to hear one more thing.
2:52:18 I just wanted to thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this incredible ride and just
2:52:24 collaborating on the game. It’s been so meaningful for me and so much fun and so great to get closer
2:52:29 with you and your family. And we’ve all been traveling together since and to work with the
2:52:33 incredible team that you have, Exploiting Kittens. I’m not going to mention the Malks or there are quite a
2:52:41 few, but it’s just been such a joy and a dream come true to actually have this thing in my mind
2:52:45 that was floating around that I’ve always wanted to do. And now here it is. And people can get it.
2:52:46 Tim Ferriss made a game.
2:52:48 Yeah.
2:52:54 No, look, here’s the thing. You’re so welcome. And thank you. Like we have limited time here
2:52:59 and you have to choose your endeavors wisely. And this was one of the wisest choices I’ve ever made.
2:53:00 Oh, thanks, man.
2:53:01 Yeah.
2:53:06 Oh, all right. We’re going to go get a fantastic meal. It’s Texas, so probably a bunch of meat.
2:53:13 Who knows? Maybe some tequila and make an appearance unbidden. You know, strange things happen out here
2:53:20 in Austin, Texas. And for everybody listening, we will link to all sorts of things, many resources
2:53:27 that will help you think about how you might create a game. You can start with the blank cards in Coyote.
2:53:33 Those will actually teach you a lot, I think, as you begin to experiment with these different elements.
2:53:35 Because you’re going to fail. Because your first few are not going to work.
2:53:35 Yeah.
2:53:36 And you’ll learn why.
2:53:37 Yeah.
2:53:40 And then if you run out of blank cards, look, just go get some blank cards.
2:53:40 Yeah.
2:53:46 Just go buy a blank deck and you can use those. But this is something anyone can do.
2:53:46 Yeah.
2:53:49 Right? You did this with your daughter when she was how old?
2:53:49 Four.
2:53:50 Four.
2:53:50 Yeah.
2:53:56 Right? This is an incredibly fun family activity. It’s an incredibly fun friend activity.
2:54:02 And it gets you off of your screens. It’s not good for you folks.
2:54:02 So important.
2:54:08 They are tools. But there is a point at which the tools become our masters. And that is where
2:54:11 a lot of the poison seeps in around the cracks.
2:54:11 Yeah.
2:54:14 This thing builds memories.
2:54:14 Yeah.
2:54:18 That’s what you should be doing. That’s what your phone isn’t doing. This is building memories.
2:54:24 building memories with some durability. Not ephemera. They get pushed out of your head as soon as you
2:54:30 watch the next 10 second clip. So this is something I’ve wanted to do for so long. And I’m thrilled
2:54:35 that it’s here. Fingers crossed. I’m still nervous as hell, obviously. But we’ve done so much playtesting.
2:54:42 I mean, hundreds of people have playtested at this point. And have made these fine tuning tweaks along
2:54:49 the way. So I would love everybody to think about your life as a collection of games. You may not be
2:54:57 aware of which games you’re playing just yet. But rest assured, in some respects, you are playing
2:55:04 games. And you get to choose more games than you realize. Most of them are optional. Not all of them.
2:55:11 Sure. We have responsibilities as adults and so on. But this is a way to open up that Pandora’s box
2:55:15 of possibility. And we’ll include a lot of resources in the show notes.
2:55:22 So Tim.blog.com slash podcast. Just search Coyote. That’ll probably be the easiest way to find it.
2:55:29 C-O-Y-O-T-E. And another time I’ll explain the backstory there, which is pretty wild, but for
2:55:36 another time. And until next time, as always, be a little kinder than is necessary. Not just to others,
2:55:42 also to yourself. Play wisely. Find fun problems. And I am going to check out that podcast.
2:55:49 And life is short. Have fun while you’re here, folks. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.
2:55:56 Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet
2:56:00 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
2:56:05 before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
2:56:11 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up. Easy to cancel. It is
2:56:17 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered
2:56:22 or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes
2:56:29 articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks
2:56:35 and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange,
2:56:41 esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that
2:56:47 sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend,
2:56:52 something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that
2:56:57 into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
2:57:03 Thanks for listening. Not to be a salty old dog, but then again, that’s what I am. But in the early
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