#821: My Two-Year Secret Project, COYOTE — The Strategies and Tactics for Building a Bestseller from Nothing with Elan Lee of Exploding Kittens

0:00 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show boy. This is a special one. I'll keep my intro brief as my conversation with Alan Lee, which you're about to hear, covers the whole backstory. This is a very, very, very Fun episode for me, one I've been looking forward to publishing for months and actually about two years, because my brand new card game, Coyote, created in collaboration with Alan and Exploding Kins, which started with this podcast. is now a national bestseller. It's everywhere. just launched to eight thousand locations worldwide, including Walmart, Target, Amazon, and gajillion others. It's a very fast paced car game, takes minutes to learn, hard to master, hat tip nylon, butnell, and three hundred million plus social views of gameplay now online. Everything's going bananas.

0:50 And please check it out. Please, please check it out. If I've done anything that you've benefited from, coyote game.com. And there's a lot under the hood that I think you might find of interest, even if you're not a gamer, you don't think about yourself as playing games. CoyoteGame.com, super, super satisfying the entire team at Exploring Kittens. is incredible. They're rock stars. A pleasure to work with. So enjoy my conversation with Alan Lee. We talk about the art of the pitch. We talk about figuring out mass retail. We talk about prototyping. We talk about game development. We talk about the nuts and bolts behind the scenes backstory of creating something like this. From Nothing. One last thing, stick around to the end for a very fun surprise that involves a Mystery Hollywood party that you might be able to join. Would love you to join. So stick around. Please enjoy right after just a few words from the partners who make this podcast possible.

1:39 If I were to update the four hour work week. Which I get asked to do a lot. I would really only add one thing, and that is a section on AI tools, because for everything I described with virtual assistants and with so much more, you can do with technology. immediately. And that can be automated, delegated. There's so much that you can do. And this is also why I recommend this episode's sponsor Gamma for creating incredible professional slide decks better, cheaper, and faster than you ever thought possible. It's pretty head spinning. I polled all of you on social, 10 million plus people about Gamma, and some of you called it a game changer, mind blowing, and far and away the best project

2:20 product in the category. Those are all your quotes. With gamma, you can just drop in an idea, an outline, a document, a PowerPoint, and gamma will turn it into a stunning ready to share presentation in seconds. And then if you want to turn that into a website or whatever else, again Snap of the fingers and it's done. With more than 50 million users, it's already the most popular AI presentation platform in the world. So stop wasting time dragging stuff around, fidgeting with bullet points, and let gamma turn your content into high quality presentations so you can spend your time on other things that matter. Explore gamma today at gamma. Dot app that's G A M M A dot APP. Gemma. App

2:58 Listeners get thirty percent off any plan by using promo code TIM at checkout. So use promo code TIM TIM at gamma.com. Not to be a salty old dog, but then again, that's what I am. But in the early two thousands, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were Atrocious. They tried hard, but man was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. Huge pain in the ass. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Which is this episode's sponsor? Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world.

3:33 Believe it or not, I got to know them when they had eight or nine employees. And now ten percent of all e-commerce in the US is on Shopify, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to my very own limited edition Cockpunch coffee. Remember that? Story for another time. Now back to the early two thousands. Then nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted, even in the last twenty-four months, the magic that is now possible? With AI, Shopify. has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools.

4:04 That will accelerate everything, write product descriptions, page headlines. even enhance your product photography. You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates to match your brand's style and create email and social media campaigns to get the word out. Wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns. And beyond. It's all under one umbrella. And man, oh man, could I have used that back in the day. And if I ever do something like that again in e commerce, I will use Shopify. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your one dollar per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash Tim.

4:50 Why not learn a little bit more? Shopify.com slash Tim one more time. Shopify.com slash Tim. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then also do personal questions. No, we're just seeing that.

5:08 a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscaler. No Hello, ladies and gyms, boys and girls. This is another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. I am Tim Ferris, and I'm sitting with a friend of mine. Who?

5:29 I brought to my podcast with a secret agenda. That has ended up Two years later. With a very, very Not so secret for long.

5:39 outcome that we're gonna talk about. Alan Lee. Thanks. Nice to see you again. It's nice to see you too. That was a secret agenda. That was a two-year in the making secret agenda. Two years in the making. So What we're gonna do in this conversation, and I just hijacked Hio because I've had too much caffeine, so I'm gonna let him do the self intro in a second, but We're gonna give you a peek.

6:01 Behind the curtain. Under the hood. Open the kimono, choose your metaphor. We're gonna talk about the creative process, the development process, thinking about distribution, retail, all these things. Which I have not heard discussed anywhere else in depth.

6:17 You buried the lead. All of that stuff. Of Of A game.

6:23 That We created. That From the very beginning. was something I've wanted to do my whole life, which is create a game.

6:32 I was raised. protected in some ways by Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. It was my refuge. from bullying and also just the straight boredom of most of my schooling at the time. And that immersive experience, the ability to get lost.

6:51 in a world of imagination and fun and laughter and emotion was so Incredibly important. It was so formative for me. that the seed was planted really early. And I think you know this because I probably sent you a photograph of this at one point. I still have all of my modules. I have the player's handbook. First edition. Dunge's guide.

7:16 All of the dice. Everything. From when I was a kid. I've kept it to this day. I love this. I love this. Hold on.

7:23 Yeah. If you're not gonna say it, I'm gonna say it. Yeah. Tim Ferris made a game. I did. That's amazing. It took me forty seven years, but that's huge. Here we are. So the game, I'll just show it to camera for people who want a visual. who are not watching this, if you're listening.

7:40 you can go to Tim.blog slash coyote. So I'm giving a bit of what you might call foreshadowing in the biz. But this is the game. It is a card game. It's called Coyote. That name did not come easily. We went through about five hundred and seventy three different names and lots of testing and we'll talk about some of that. But this is the game.

8:03 And it's effectively I'd like to hear your pitch, because we have slightly different approaches. But I would say it is rock, paper, scissors on steroids. So there are God knows how many. maybe twenty different gestures, something like that. Sixty six total cards. And You can play cooperatively where you're all trying to beat the game together, or competitively where you can

8:26 Sabotage. individual players. throw curve balls of all different types. And that relates to the name Coyote. If you think about the trickster mythology associated

8:37 With coyoting. Yeah. We never got to your bio. Who the hell are you? Oh that's the least interesting part of the whole thing. I know, but it puts it in perspective. And just explain the company a bit, the scope of it, et cetera. I love talking about games. I hate talking about myself. So I will try to That's why it takes someone like me to force you to do it. Yeah. Okay, here we go. My name's Ilan Lee. I am the co-creator and CEO of Exploding Kittens. I believe We're the number one independent game studio in the world, something like that.

9:06 I don't know. We've sold a whole bunch of games. We've sold sixty million games at this point. And Been running that company for ten years now. And uh before that I was the chief design officer at the Xbox and before that I worked at a pet store. And for people who want the full journey, including the sort of magical tinder box that was Kickstarter way back in the day.

9:28 How this whole adventure started. Yeah. Ten, ten plus years ago. Listen to the first conversation that I did with A lot. I had wanted to make a game.

9:38 and quickly realized that a an RPG, something like Dungeons and Dragons, right? Role playing game. Mm-hmm. Two Complicated.

9:49 for me and my friends as adults. to play. It would be too hard for me to recruit my friends. Where you have Let's just say full day. Then you have dinner, maybe you have a few drinks, and then you have an hour before people split. There's no way.

10:05 I'm gonna get someone to build For instance, you know, like a Hey. Chaotic good. Grey elf.

10:13 And like which is sort of was my orientation. And work from there. It's just not gonna happen. Yeah. And meanwhile, about maybe it was a year or two years before I invited you on the podcast. I found this game. Poetry for Neanderthal.

10:28 And holy shit, had so much fun with that. with my friends I thought okay I think I wanna tilt my game dreams, which at that point had no real direction towards something more casual. Yeah. But in the meantime I'd also been listening to all sorts of podcasts and uh so on that we'll get to. But

10:51 You've explained your background. Well hold on. So what you just described. Is exactly why I started exploding kittens. Because A little bit different. Unlike you.

11:01 I when I encounter those crazy two and four and six hour games I am immediately turned off. Like I can't focus for that long. I can't understand the rules. If if it takes longer than five minutes to explain a game, I am gone. Like I have no ability to play that game. And so The whole reason I started this company and I think the whole reason

11:21 That you made the pivot from giant role playing games. interested in the creation of casual fast party games is like This golden rule of like Two minutes to learn, fifteen minutes to play.

11:36 Nothing's at stake there, right? You're gonna learn it. You're either gonna love the game or you're gonna hate it, but whatever you committed five minutes total to that thing. And I love the games where after the five minute commitment You're still gonna play for two hours. But they're gonna be in these little five minute sessions over and over and over again. And it sounds like that's the experience you had, which makes me so happy. Mm-hmm. Because that means like, you know, mission accomplished. Like that's what exactly what I wanted to build. And we're gonna talk about different

12:03 rules or tenets that you have because what I want to do in this conversation. We're definitely gonna talk about the process of building this game because I'm really Really happy with it and really proud of it. And uh we'll have a lot to talk about. But The motivation also of

12:23 basically showing the cards. I'm gonna use so many mixed metaphors here. Is To teach people Game design. Yeah. And

12:32 Explain why this is Possessed. Such a Told in my mind for so long. Yeah. Right. Well, you went through a journey. And I I'm excited. Like

12:44 looking at that journey through your eyes of I don't Even know what I want to build. But I know I want to build a fun experience. that I would enjoy, that my friends would enjoy, all the way through to this thing is at every Walmart and Target in North America.

12:58 That Journey? Is incredible. And You got to see it for the first time. Like you absolutely drank from the fire hose here. This was fun for me because

13:07 I had to walk you through this, right? You've never sold a game before. So walking through the process of how you make a game and how you sell a game. It doesn't work the way people think. So Retailers have a buyer per category. So if anybody wants to sell something to a retailer, you want something in Target or Walmart or Amazon or Barnes and Noble, the way it works is You have to convince the buyer for your category.

13:31 to take your thing, right? They have limited shelf space. It's very precious real estate. So you have to convince them that your thing is better than anybody else's thing. And twice a year, they have these things called line reviews. So the buyers have to buy games for next year, right? They need to put stuff on the shelf. There's only a certain number of meetings they can physically have. In a period of time.

13:54 Usually one or two, or maybe three people. So they take as many meetings as they can. It's usually a dozen, maybe two dozen. And In those meetings. Yeah.

14:06 Manufacturer, different studios. Exactly. So they'll take a meeting with Hasbro, and they'll take a meeting with Mattel, and they'll take a meet, you know, all all the big guys. And In those meetings. 20, 30, 50 games are pitched to them in every single one of those meetings. And then they'll make a decision on which ones they're going to purchase and stock for the next year. So that's line review. The tricky parts for line review is one, you got to do a great job, but even before that, you got to get that meeting, right? They only have time for a certain number of meetings.

14:34 So you have to put yourself in a position where you can get in that room. Mm-hmm. All right. So we're gonna talk strategy and tactics for a line review in a minute because You are And take this as a compliment. You're one of the best in person salespeople I've ever seen. That could also be an insult, but it's not an insult. I'll take it. I'll take it. No, no, it's not an insult. Everybody's in sales, whether they like to admit it or not. Whether you're selling ideas.

15:00 You're selling a position, a perspective. If you want to call it deal making. This is what I used to say in my class, my guest lecture that I taught for 10 years. Once or twice a year. in high tech entrepreneurship, I would start off by saying, like, who here wants to be in sales? No hands would go up. And I've got and I would say Well, I've got some good news and I got some bad news. Yeah. Bad news is you're all on sales. Yeah. Let me explain why. If you want to call a deal making fine, you're going to have to negotiate.

15:27 Like you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Well said. And you get what you can present in a very persuasive way. I was like, good news is you can learn it. This is a coachable learnable skill. Which I completely still believe. There's some people who may have a little bit of extroversion, charismatic, reality distortion field advantage, but you can become excellent. Yeah. Even if you start with zero raw materials. Yeah. Okay, so the journey wanted to make a game my whole life. Okay, but it was this vague

15:57 Maybe someday, God, wouldn't it be nice. Let me just poke at that for a second. Sure. Why. The why is I wanted to imbu someone else's experience with the magic I felt playing.

16:14 D. Well said. That's it. Or Much easier games, right? I used to play It's such a simple game. I used to play sorry and Monopoly. Yeah. And as a young kid, I just thought sorry was the most hilarious thing when you could look someone in the eyes and go, sorry and knock their stuff off the board. Didn't always respond well when it happened to me. Yeah.

16:35 But it doesn't have to be the Incredibly immersive complex game that D is. Although I still think that is just like Gary Gygax and the team way back in the day. Holy cow. Also, by the way, for people to don't know, Gen Con.

16:51 Huge convention. Started out. around Lake Geneva. Yeah. And was I believe created by the T S R guys. I believe that's right. Yeah. Gen Con from Lake Geneva and then was the general's convention. And now is nothing. Now Gen Con doesn't stand for anything because it's in Indianapolis. But anyway, sorry. It's an aside. So that was the kind of impetus behind wanting to make a game, but it didn't have any form. And then

17:16 I suppose it was maybe like two and a half, three years ago I was like Okay, I'd like to actually take a deeper dive here. Because There are lots of things we have on our Say list of New Year's resolutions, for instance, like for a long time I had like

17:33 Develop the side splits like Jean Claude Van Damme. Never happened, but it was there every fucking year. And it just got punted. I was like, Well, it didn't do it. Okay, this year is the year. But there was no Plan. There were there were no deadlines. Yeah. There were no constraints. Yeah. Right, which is The power of constraints, which we'll probably talk about. It is so critical.

17:55 It's not just critical, it is additive to have constraints, which seems like contradiction, but it's not. We'll we'll I'm sure get to that. So I started looking at different options and the catalyst for this actually was something way back in the day, some of you will remember, called the Legend of Cock Punch. And that was an NFT project. Remember those? Which raised Two million bucks for fundamental science and like mechanistic studies basically related to mental health. So all of the proceeds from that.

18:27 If you want to look it up, it's easy to find. Legend of Cockbunch, but all the proceeds went to a nonprofit foundation, which then fund. Mental health therapeutic. research and things related to that. But in the process of doing that, I got to with very low stakes because I think it's helpful when possible, especially if you're an intrepid Beginner. wading into unfamiliar creative waters make the stake super, super low.

18:52 And even before this podcast, it's like, Okay, this is a very unusual conversation. It's like, look, we're not doing this live. If we d really don't like it, we can scrap the whole thing. So Like reduce, reduce, reduce the pressure and the stakes until you can get started, right? Yeah. With writing, I got the advice long ago, like two crappy pages per day. That's it. Love it.

19:13 And then you actually put pen to paper. Yeah. Yeah, the overlaps are enormous with game design. But yeah, yeah, super, super related, also the iterative process. Using the legend of cock punch as this pretext, basically, I started writing fiction. And so I wrote these very, very turned out to be very involved.

19:34 very viable sort of fantasy histories and pieces tying all of these greater houses together. And then having these protagonists. Uh the the father and then the son who's Tyronean and yada yada yada yada. And I still think there might be something there, but in the process of creating that, I thought to myself, this would actually make a fantastic Game.

19:56 And it wouldn't have to be as complicated. As D. Mm-hmm. But you would have to do it. Allies, you would have age old enities, you would have different strengths, certain strengths that cancel out other strengths, weaknesses that can be taken advantage of. And that led me to

20:13 Start listening to a podcast. Called Think Like a Game Designer. with Justin Gary, which is outstanding. Recommend people check it out. And a lot of the focus there, not entirely, but a lot of the focus there was on Trading card games. alternately called collectible card games, I guess. Wizards of the coast, who created Magic the Gathering.

20:35 patented and trademarked one of them. So they seem to be used interchangeably. But Justin also former high level competitive Magic the Gathering player. has a lot of knowledge around that world. He's developed some incredibly successful games in that genre.

20:51 Where you're building a deck, you're buying. certain cards or decks with the hopes of getting certain cards and assembling Your toolkit, basically. And that was initially where my mind Went in terms of

21:06 game concept. But I realized a few things really quickly. Number one I was a D guy which predated Magic the Gathering. My brother was a Magic the Gathering guy, but I've never really played Magic. Yeah and When I began to delve into it, I was like, you know what, I would like to think of this as D light, but this is incredibly

21:24 Nuanced. Yeah. Right. To to be good at this. Oh, for sure. It is incredibly nuanced. And also if you're against someone who is really experienced or just has their mind wired for it. You are going to be obliterated. Absolutely. And that's what happened to me playing a friend of mine. Kudos to Mike. Just got slayed. And God bless Mike.

21:44 He's like a number of my friends who just kind of want to watch you Die slowly in this agonizing Ill fated gameplay where you're kind of whimpering along until they like your which is just not really my thing. So I thought to myself okay. looking at some of the casual games I really like, there is an opportunity and this will come back later. Four.

22:12 the underdog or the person who is behind to win. Mm-hmm. It is skill based, but there's an element of chance. And uh this is gonna come back. So then Poetry for Neanderthals. I don't know how I found it initially, frankly. I think I probably went into a game shop and I was like, Hey

22:30 And this relates to why as an adult. I want to spend less time in front of screens. And ultimately If I look back and do this thing every year called a past year review, people can find it online. You can read all about it and do it yourself. You don't have to buy anything. Past your review.

22:47 Where I look at the peak positive and negative emotional experiences of the past year. I go through my whole calendar. Sometimes I'll go through my photos, sometimes I'll go through my text messages or my sent folder in the inbox. And

23:02 Lo and behold, and this is not a revelation for some people, but the activities did not matter as much as the people. So then the question is, how do I create Different contexts. for interacting with let's just say my ten or fifteen closest friends. Yeah. Some of that is doing things outside in the wilderness that are active and so on. But that's a heavy lift. That's a heavier lift.

23:27 By playing a casual game. Right. So it's like if I'm here in Austin where we are right now. And my friends Or a bunch of my friends come in for South by Southwest. And I managed to get them together for one night. Yeah.

23:41 What can we play? That will get us off of our goddamn phones. And deepen our relationship and create memories. That we can't. Hold on to.

23:51 That will stick around. That's it. That's okay. Right? And then we had our conversation and that's kinda when everything I guess kicked off. Just a couple of things.

24:00 that we should mention also. After our conversation. When I think very shyly I I must have reached out to you at some point shortly thereafter and I was kinda like Hey guy.

24:12 Not sure if this would be interesting, but Maybe kinda, sort of. Do you want to talk about maybe making a game together or something? I remember this exact conversation. Yeah. It's like asking me out on a first date. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like scratching my head, looking at the ground. And that's how the whole thing got kicked off. And I wanna mention Something related to that, which was for the last Probably three years.

24:38 My near's resolutions Have been Very Broad, but they're pretty specific. So I had two. One is doing more delegation, which is figure it out delegation. So What that means is

24:52 rather than doing what I'm hardwired to do with my O CD and perfectionism, which is here, go do this thing. Let me give you A twenty page. installation manual explaining exactly what to do versus Here's roughly what I want done. Just figure it out and get it done.

25:07 Yep I don't wanna make any decisions. Yep. So don't come back to me with twelve options. Just Make the best decisions you can. Yeah. And I'll expect uh you know Reid Hoffman also of LinkedIn that has mentioned this sort of a ten percent

25:20 Fault rate, like ten percent of the time something's gonna go sideways. And that's fine in the interest of reducing Decision fatigue and Making things faster. So one was more figure it out delegation, and number two was sprints with creatives. And for me what that meant as someone who was operated as a

25:40 Lone Wolf, which by the way is a contradiction in terms. But who's been a solo operator for most of my creative projects. I was like, you know what? It just isn't. that fun anymore. To do it solo. Yeah. And it's also antithetical to some of the

25:55 creative projects I want to pursue. Like a game. Yeah. I mean, there are some amazing solo game designers not to Not to say there aren't. Uh, but I was like, you know what, I wanna try to be more social in my creativity and collaborate with creatives and do sprints. Now sometimes those sprints turn into longer things. But those have been sort of my two guiding lights for the last few years, which is what then gave me

26:24 The ability to build up the courage. It sounds so ridiculous to say, but to actually reach out to you and be like, hey, do you want to actually just bat around Well the possibility of something. So from my perspective that conversation. Like I got very excited to work with you on something. One, because it turns out you're just a lovely human being and so much fun to hang out with. But

26:46 Two. I asked you that very fundamental question. You said, Hey, do you want to build a game? And I said, Why do you want to build a game? In your answer. Was

26:55 almost identical to what you just relayed, right? You you talked about your past experiences, you talked about childhood memories of games, you talked about what you like, what you don't like. And what became very clear to me Was There's something special going on here. Chim Wants to treat his friends and his audience

27:14 Extraordinary. And we get approached all the time by people who want to make games big. celebrities and singers and actors, all of them wanna make a game. And whenever I ask them the question why, the answer is invariably'cause my agent told me to, or because I think I can make money, or you know

27:32 Really. Very superficial. Often they're not game players at all. They have no connection to the experience of game design. And when I spoke to you, none of that was present. Instead, it was This is a very personal thing to me and ultimately I want

27:48 To Give a gift. Mm. And That's when my brain started lighting up. It's like

27:54 Oh, this is gonna be fun. Like he is in this for all the reasons I'm in this. And that means we can make something very special together. And I think we have. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely have an al and another

28:05 question that is sometimes a little tricky to apply, but that has been in my mind for a while. since Seth Goten, very well known author, thinker, just incredibly sage and awesome human being. He reframed for me, which is the reframing of the question, what would you do If

28:25 you knew you couldn't fail. Right. That's that's a good question. Like what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? All right, that's that's freeing. But the way he tweaks that is he said. What would you do if you knew you would fail? In other words. What would you do?

28:39 For which the process alone would make it worth it. And for me. Because I mean, we became fast friends. Very quickly. Right.

28:48 And I was like, Okay, that's rare for me as an adult, number one. And I've been Banging this around in my own little head. For so long.

29:01 Even if this ends up not Making the cut for whatever reason. This seems worth it to me. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because coming back to the kind of people over activities also I was like Love hanging out with Alan.

29:15 And connecting. I am gonna learn a lot. And at the very worst I learn a lot. And we've deepened our relationship. And that stuff just snowballs over time. It transcends a single project. So even if this had not manifested. Yeah.

29:29 it would have been worth it. And that's how I try to pick my Projects. When we first started down this path together, I remember I came out We sort of visited each other back and forth a few times and I remember every time I would

29:43 pack a suitcase full of games. Right. And we would sit with some of your friends and we'd play games like all night long. And you'd say, I like this one. I don't like this one. I like this product. But ultimately we weren't Making any progress. learning vocabulary, essentially. And I would go home and my wife would be like, How to go. What did you learn? You know, are you gonna make a game together? And I'd be like I don't know. No, we just we just hung out and had fun and and and she'd be like

30:09 Wasn't that a a huge disappointment you just you know, you traveled, you know, two thousand miles to go see him? I'm like No, it's just fun. I'm not disappointed at all. We'll just do it again next month and we'll see how it goes. And we did that like five or six times. And And I remember walking away from each one just thinking like same thing. If this goes nowhere, I'm just I'm having so much fun. Yeah.

30:28 That's so rare. It is rare, and if you can orient your Life. or professional life, and look, I'm not saying this is possible for everyone, but it's to some extent more possible than people realize. You might not be able to like run out and invite Elon on your podcast and then awkwardly approach him like a sheepish twelve year old boy to ask him on a date, but

30:51 Taking the lens of Picking projects based on creating or deepening relationships and learning slash developing skills. If you just do that over time, it is almost inevitable that you will win. Whatever winning means to you. Yeah. Value the process.

31:08 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. It's a mess out there. The hypercomplexities of the US economy, global economy can be very confusing, and there's a lot of conflicting advice, but saving and investing doesn't have to be complicated. Here's something refreshingly simple to use, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now you can earn 4%.

31:38 APY, that's annual percentage yield on your cash from partner banks with the wealthfront cash account, that's nearly ten times the national average, according to FDIC.gov. So Don't wait. Earn 4% APY on your cash today. Plus, it's eligible for up to$8 million in FDIC insurance through partner banks. And when you open an account today, you'll get an extra$50 bonus with a deposit of$500 or more. There are already more than 1 million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth. So check it out. Visit wealthfront.com slash Tim to get started. One more time, that's Weltfront.

32:14 Dot com slash Tim This is a paid endorsement of Wealthfront. Wealthfront brokerage isn't a bank. The APY is subject to change. For more information, see the episode description. I Let's talk a little bit about the the origin story. Now I'll throw out A couple of things here.

32:31 And we're gonna talk about the game development and then we're also gonna talk about How to sell this thing. How does that work? Yeah. And and it's worth saying. Designing a game. I remember you asked me this early on. You started out from the

32:46 Hey, let's design a game and then we're basically done. And I remember really forcing myself to think through this process because I wanted to explain it to you. No, that's half of it. Other half is selling the game. And

32:57 Just as much work. goes into that. And if you're not willing to do it or if you have no mechanism by which you can do it. Might as well not design the game. Because one without the other. Useless.

33:07 Yeah. Yeah. So Depends on the scale you're going after, right? If you want to make something for your friends, sure. You can do that. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Yeah. But in this particular case I mean you wanted to make something cool and share it. Yeah, I wanna share. I wanted to share it. So that kinda dictated parts of the process that We need to weigh really heavily. So the game development process, I mean, we started off looking at the possibilities

33:31 Uh Modifying existing games. Right. So looking at say Poetry for an Aerthalt with an alternate set of rules or a a different deck plus A B or C. We looked at Prototype games.

33:46 That Uh you alluded to earlier, bringing the suitcase. So we did that. All over the country. Yeah. I showed up I remember I have this notebook of game ideas.

33:57 Three, four hundred in there. And I I add more every month. And I remember I picked my favorites, like five or six of them. And I would show up with Just jankiest prototypes. Like, here's something I scribbled on a few cards. Here's I took some dice and I like rubbed out the little nubs on the dice and hand wrote something on all the die faces instead. Let's try playing this weird game. And You were very patient and you had a lot of vision, thankfully, to look at these Just

34:23 Horrible. very hastily created prototypes and say Not This is no fun, let's move on. But you would always say like Oh, I like this. I like that moment where we had a conversation about what you were gonna do next. I like that part. I didn't like the rest of it, but I like that part. And that astute sense of

34:41 Notes like really thoughtful And forward. moving notes. was ultimately what guided our conversation. Cause then the next time I don't have to pick from four hundred games to bring. Now I know like, okay.

34:55 This cooperative thing. He liked that conversation aspect. There's only six games I've got like that. Let me bring those six and we'll refine it even farther. Yeah, totally. We can talk about The Toronto strip. The Tr the Toronto Project. So that that is where things start to gel because We had had a number of these meetings around the country where we would do a A one to kind of three day.

35:18 Sprint of testing. Take all these notes. And we've done a few of these and we've both got a lot going on. And Your wife would ask you how it went and you're like Well not really sh

35:30 I think we had fun. But No game as of yet. So we scheduled time, I was gonna fly to Toronto to do a sprint. You were gonna bring in uh expert game designer, sort of game mechanic specialist. Ken Grill.

35:46 And it was like okay, this is the trip. If we make it happen, great. If not, we're just gonna call spade a spade. Yeah. Like we we seem to not we're like circling around this thing, but not really getting it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we tried a lot. And it was During that trip that the very primitive sort of germ of an idea started to resonate, which ended up being

36:11 Coyote. And I remember a few things and thank God also for Ken's apparent photographic memory with the things transpired. But we're walking around all over the place in Toronto, the three of us, just spitballing. Yeah. Then it starts to rain. Yeah. And we seek shelter. We fail. Twice, I think. With various coffee shops like no room, no seats, whatever it might be. End up sitting in this weird

36:39 Kind of multi purpose building. Yeah. And I remember where we were sitting and we played I guess in English it's Hanabe. Hanabe. Hanabe, which is hanabe in Japanese. It's just fireworks. Yeah.

36:52 And Hana's flower B in this case fire, so it's like flower fire. That's hana bi. For everybody out there, if you haven't played Hanabe Go try this game. Yeah. It is very special. So we played that game kind of killing time, giving it a shot. You guys had mentioned it. And I was like, Okay, this is a very elegant game.

37:12 And from that liked the cooperative aspect. So when people think game Mm-hmm. I think most folks No. more familiar, maybe exclusively familiar with the sort of winner takes all or team versus team competitive type of game. But I really enjoyed, and I'd seen this in other ways in different capacities, but the cooperative option and the cooperative aspect of it. So that then gets kind of stuck in the mind.

37:38 And the rain clears up, we go for a walk by the water. Mm-hmm. And I remember well I'll I'll own it. I was kind of stalled. I'll be the kind of Hair plugging the drain in the bathtub.

37:53 Because I was trying to search my mind for Game examples. But I was thinking tabletop games because that was the canvas we were sort of painting upon. Yeah. And we're walking, we're walking, had quite a bit of caffeine by this point.

38:10 And it was either you or Ken. I think it was you. Who asked? Broadly speaking, any kind of game. What games have you really enjoyed? Mm-hmm. And that's where

38:22 Rock, papers, scissors came up. Yeah. Right? Roe Chambeau. And I just as dumb as it might sound, and I said this at the time, I was like, I love Rock, paper, scissors. Yeah. It's just it is, especially when you play over an extended period of time with friends. Maybe there's some alcohol involved or not. You don't need to have involved, but you start to pick up tells, you start to pick up patterns. And it's actually very, very fun. So

38:48 It's important to note The moment you bring up rock, paper, scissors in any game design discussion, that's usually the end of the conversation, right? There's nothing to that game. There's three tools, deploy a tool. Determine a winner, you're done. It is only when You say

39:03 Let's acknowledge rock, paper, scissors is no fun. Unless You play multiple times. Because now We've made a very important transition. We're not playing the game anymore. We're playing each other.

39:14 Yeah. Right? Because I know what you did last time. You think I'm gonna throw scissors again. Right. And now we're playing each other. Yeah. Yes, rock, paper, scissors are the tools by which we're playing each other, but suddenly we're playing a very different game and it starts It cannot start in round one. It starts in round two and it moves forward from there. Yeah. And once we started having that discussion,

39:34 Things started to get really interesting. Yeah. Things got interesting. And uh do you want to show The prototype

39:41 deck. And part of the reason I want to show this prototype deck, and we'll describe it for people who aren't watching. Is Quick and dirty is the fucking way to go. Yeah. And I I will just make another recommendation for Stephen Key. So Stephen Key has a book called The One Simple Idea, which is about licensing and creating inventions. He's got a number of books now, but

40:06 Stephen has made a gajillion dollars creating games for All the biggie's that you can possibly think of. And he uses construction paper

40:17 And glue you would find in a second grade class. And a handful of markers. And This is by and large, that is how he creates

40:29 These amazing They can be games, they can be toys. Yeah. He's pretty broad spectrum, but it might be A new way to play basketball, shooting dirty laundry into a hamper, right? Something like that. And he prototypes these things incredibly quickly. And for him, for what he does,

40:46 That is enough. Yeah. He is able to put together a pitch, he's able to sell it, and he's able to develop these amazing passive income streams with these annuities that just come in. So good. From all these different places. But that relates to what we're looking at. Okay. So I love that. We have not even.

41:04 described what Coyote is yet. But that's okay. Yeah. I think the value of this conversation is to actually talk through the creative process and talk through I think a lot of people want to make games. This is how you do it. And we went through this two year journey and we arrived at a very happy outcome. Yeah. So I'm excited to talk about well, let me show you the very ugly very first deck we ever built. So We had this conversation about rock, paper, scissors, and I knew there was something there.

41:30 Because we were talking about my fundamental premise behind all game design is games should not be entertaining. Game should make the players entertaining. Yep. And suddenly when you said rock, paper, scissors over time, I was like Oh, that's Perfect. Mm-hmm.

41:45 But Three tools, rock, paper, and scissors. Not a very robust tool set. Right. We can't really play a game that way. So Ran home.

41:54 And started scribbling on cards. These are just blank cards. I took Sharpie's, I'd buy these like by the thousands on Amazon. So I had a ton of these and we just started scribbling. And so we made a card that says rock and we made a card that says paper, and we made a card that says scissors, and we thought What if we're all on the same team? But what if these cards Or not Tools to fight with each other.

42:14 What if these are a challenge that we have to all solve together? And so we started just putting down a bunch of things, rock, paper, scissors, rock, rock, paper. And we're we're like, all right, we'll sit around the table and we'll all just do this pattern. Everyone do scissors now, everyone do paper, now everyone do writing. these different variations and ideas on the walk. And then we ended up

42:37 back at your dining room table. That's right. With scribbling. Yeah, scribbling and modifying cards as we went. Exactly. So now the modifiers are really the most interesting thing because The game that I'm describing right now is useless. We can all do scissors and then all do peer. Who cares, right? There's nothing here. But

42:57 Now We have a baseline. We're all gonna do this thing. Cool, easy. And then we started doing these modifiers. All players do all blue cards. And so we start scribbling rock, paper, scissor in different colors, and then we've got this modifier. So now I'm gonna do scissors, but then we're all gonna do paper, and then back to you just doing rock and things like that. And so and then then it was like, Okay, well, skip A player after every red card. Okay, shout every blue card, right? And we should start writing all these crazy modifiers. I'm just putting all these cards all over the table because

43:28 The challenge got more and more interesting. And then it was like okay. So something interesting is possible here. Now what if instead of just splashing cards all over the paper. What if we were responsible for this? What if one at a time everyone had to add a new card. to the table to make this challenge harder and harder and harder.

43:45 And that's when we started talking about the vocabulary of this game. What are these cards? What makes this thing harder? Rock and paper and scissors very quickly got eliminated from the game because they're so boring. Yeah. So we started talking about, well, okay, what if you're making a peace sign? And then you came up with, Well, what if you pose like a ballerina on a card? And what if you slap the shoulder of the person next to you on a card? And what if you have to, oh, I remember one of our earliest notes was Eliminate all shouting cards. We tested that and then that got old real quick. Right, exactly. And also As were

44:21 play testing, right? As we're inventing mechanics and testing different things. We play for a few rounds and be like, Okay. That was okay, but what do you guys say this? Okay, we like this aspect. Great, let's like make four more of those cards of different colors. Yeah. And then we play it again. Yeah. And then we play it again. And then we iterate and then we play it again. That's right. And We ended up with I mean spreadsheets.

44:42 Full of Different cars. And this is all still now in Cooperative mode. All in cooperative mode. At that point. But

44:51 Over the next week. I would say we designed Eighty percent of the game. We were at this like stalled at one percent mode for Months.

44:59 And then in a matter of days. Eighty percent done. Yep. Because we found this like Every time we played some version of this The immediate answer when we were done playing was

45:10 Let's go again. Yeah. Is that the litmus test for you? I mean, in terms of The indicators. that something is worth further development, right? Because yeah, you have four hundred in your notebook. Right. Yeah so you're not gonna develop all of those.

45:25 What are some of the Could be a water feel that you have, but like what are some of the indicators where you're like, Oh, okay. So there's two things to talk about here. Certainly. Let's play again is a great one. But

45:37 To set your mind in a place. Were you willing to say Imagine this but tweaked, but something a little different. There's this principle I love. Called the zero effect. Zero effect. Zero effect. Yeah, Zero Effect. It's from a movie, I think in the late 80s, early 90s, somewhere around there called The Zero Effect. And

45:55 There's this one scene where they explain what the zero effect is. It is as follows. If you've lost your car keys and you're looking for your car keys. Here you are in your living room, you're looking for a car keys. The chances of you finding your car keys A very low.

46:09 Because there's so many things in this room that are not your car keys. So your chances of finding that one thing. Very, very low. If instead You were trying to find.

46:20 Anything. Your chances of success are suddenly at a hundred percent. You will find something. As long as you don't care what it is that you found.

46:29 That's my favorite premise for brainstorming and for early testing. Don't lock in your head. I'm looking for this particular thing. I must find X. I must find X. Cause the chances that you're gonna find that thing. are almost non existent. But if you can keep your brain open.

46:47 And say I'm just looking for something. I don't care what it is. Something. Anything. Mm-hmm. And I'll tweak it later, I'll play with it later, I'll find some way to consider this thing I found my car keys.

46:59 As long as you're willing to make that leap. Brainstorming becomes a pleasure. And does that Take the form of what if Blah. What if we blah. What if the this card did blah, is it precisely. Yeah. And you're not scared.

47:13 Fruit. All of those to fail. Yeah, right? Because you can come up with those all day long. And that's what we did, right? Over the next few days. That process, what if blah. Let's try it.

47:23 What is Block? Let's try it. What if Whatever. Let's try it. And as long as the answer is always let's try it. You will.

47:31 A hundred percent. Find what you're looking for. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Alright, so let's make some recommendations for people listening or watching.

47:41 What books or resources would you recommend for people who are interested in game development. And I wanna reiterate also. Whether you think you're playing games or not, you're already playing games in life. So for me, this is a way of putting on a table. what we've already implicitly agreed to in our own lives in ways that we generally don't realize, which is we're all

48:07 playing games. Now what does that mean? That means that Beyond. Maslow's Basic. Wrongs on the ladder.

48:15 Shelter. Warmth. Food. Et cetera, at some point. Particularly as adults, maybe it's before you go to school, maybe it's when you're in college.

48:26 But you have decided to play Or you have just ended up drafting into A game with certain rules, yeah, certain conditions for winning or losing. Yeah. Certain ranking mechanisms. And

48:42 Step number one is figuring out what games you're playing. Mm-hmm. Okay. I would suggest that learning about

48:51 Building games. Helps you. to put on X ray vision glasses where you start to see the world as comprised So true. Tons of games. Yeah. It's so true. And you start to dive deeper into game theory, like what is the prisoner's dilemma?

49:08 What is a zero sum game? Like If you can start to identify those very fundamental game design Concepts. In the real world. You can jump to the end of a conversation so much faster. You can avoid so many missteps because

49:23 Everything follows within reason, everything follows game design principles. Because this practice this art form has been so well studied and so well researched and so well documented. That you get to take advantage of all of that. And I love that. I use that for my relationships. I use that playing with my kids. I use that at work all the time. It's just

49:45 There's these fundamental principles of game design. And I'll talk about a book I love that illustrates them. But yeah, they can be applied to anything. You're right. You're playing a game all the time. And the first step is to be aware that you are playing a game. All right, so I got two bucks. Let's hear it. One is a theory of fun. Mm-hmm. By Raf Coster. Raf Coster, Ralph Cost R

50:05 A P H. Right. Outline all these fundamentals. It is the first game design book I ever read. It is the one I go back to and refer to the most often. It's just got everything and the author is brilliant and go read that book.

50:20 The second one is gonna be a little controversial. No more civic shit. It's called Don't Shoot the Dog. Oh. This is a

50:31 An exceptional book. Exceptional book. So it's by turn. Explicitly about game design. It is not at all about game design, but here's the thing. This book, the fundamental premise of this book is You are trying to teach A companion, a dog.

50:49 to behave in a certain way. And the answer To how best to do that. Is When things go wrong, at least not to blame

50:58 The dog. Is to fundamentally change the way you operate. And the way you convey information and the way you look at the world in order to better relate. Chew your dog. And to the way that the dog understands and sees the world.

51:12 It is The best game design principle I have ever encountered in my life. And

51:20 True, it has nothing to do with game design, but When you're designing a game. You're designing it for a target. Right, for someone who isn't you and you're not even gonna be in the room when they encounter it. And to have in your brain from the very first step

51:36 Every problem that comes up is my problem, not theirs. Every responsibility is my responsibility, not theirs. And if you can get that in your head. And design games that way. Those are the games I found that are the most successful. Mm-hmm. This is don't shoot the dog.

51:54 Terrible title, but It is the fundamental starting point that I recommend to anyone who's interested in dog training. Mm-hmm. And Karen Pryor is one of the popularizers of clicker training. As a way of shaping behavior, I believe she had experience with marine mammals, which by the way, you can't whack on the butt with a newspaper. Yeah.

52:17 To punish them. In other words, negative reinforcement. So how do you do it? You use positive reinforcement and use Clickers or whistles or different tools. Yeah. And I believe the back of the book, people will be able to fact check this, but it basically says, you know, whether you want to get Your dog to heal.

52:34 Your cat to stop. laying on the kitchen table or your Mother in law to stop nagging you. Like the principles are all the same. Yeah. And At the end of it, like you said, is this radical ownership.

52:48 It may not be a Your fault, but it is your responsibility. Exactly. And in a lot of cases, certainly with game design and instructions and so on, it is actually your fault. Yeah. If people are confused it is your fault. Yeah. Before I started exploding kittens, I designed games for friends. Mm-hmm I just had the hardest time. When I wasn't in the room, people were not enjoying those games. And it was only once I read that book

53:09 Then I've realized The fault is absolutely mine. Because I'm trying to get them to have as much fun as I want them to have. And the fact that they're not I keep blaming them.

53:20 That's so wrong. So what did you do? How did you fix that? So one there's basically two parts. One starts with design. One says The game has to be So simple.

53:33 That it is almost self correcting. And I have to strip out All complication. I have to remove all nuance. I need any time I'm like thinking of the rules and I say If this happens, then this happens.

53:46 Except if The moment I say accept, I've gone down a wrong path. Right. Like I need to get rid of all of that stuff. That was the first part. And then the second part is in writing the actual instructions and figuring out Like if I'm sitting in the room

54:01 You're gonna get this game because I'm gonna explain it and I'm gonna be enthusiastic. And when you ask a question, I'm gonna answer the question. And when you get confused, I'm gonna clarify it. Like I can a hundred percent do that, 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 to anticipate those questions, and I have to cut them off before they come up, and I have to correct behavior. because I know exactly where you're gonna go off course and fix it in the instructions. And that kind of one two punch. changed my game design from

54:31 Yeah, like 10% of the people get this to like 95% of the people get this. Yeah, one aspect, I mean there's so many aspects, but one aspect of this that I enjoyed. was related to the instructions. Yeah. And so number one, you make it really clear. in the instructions, which we both poured over ad nauseum, but reading is the worst way to learn a game. Go watch this video. QR code. Right. So that's number one. But if you're going to put into text, And I think I'm pretty good at this, but I was very impressed with your ability to identify anything that could be Misunderstood.

55:04 Or that wasn't yet defined. Yeah. broader connotation that would steer people off course. Yeah and the number of edits in that Google Doc. I mean it's gotta be in the hundreds, right? Hundreds of edits. Yeah.

55:21 The most important skill. Is You will write better instructions. You will Convey information to people better.

55:29 If you can clear your mind. If you can approach any set of instructions from the perspective of Things I know. I do not yet know.

55:38 And the words that come out of my mouth Have to Not only fill my brain with the required knowledge Basically beginners mind, right? Putting yourself in the place of someone who has never seen the stuff. Exactly. And it's so hard to do because you have this information in your head. It must be there, otherwise you're not gonna be able to explain the thing. But to back all the way up.

55:57 And say I'm just gonna split my brain in two. There's this one reading a script, and I know the information I have to get out. But the other half is the recipient of that script and it knows nothing. If you can do that.

56:11 So hard. It takes so much practice. If you can do that. you're gonna not only be able to design good games and write good instructions, but you're also gonna be able to just converse more effectively, just out in the world in general. You mentioned I think it was two minutes to learn.

56:27 Fifteen minutes to play. Yeah. What other Golden rules or Guiding tenets do you have? Yeah.

56:36 For yourself when you're doing game design with in exploding kittens. If a component does not need to be in the game, remove it from the game. Right. So an example of that would be we had these chits or like little Chips. Like chips. Like, bingo chips that we were using for lives. Yeah. For strikes. Yeah.

56:53 And turns out you don't need that. Yeah, because you got a whole thing of cards right here. Just use those. You can use cards by flipping them over and using the back of the card. Exactly. That's a perfect example. Right. Like We have this thing where we're like Hey. You know what'd be fun is if everybody had a big hand of cards and we're gonna play cards and you make decisions and like I get that.

57:13 Most games you play, you have a hand of cards and you're gonna play a card and you're making a decision. That's awesome. But you know what? That's a private moment. And you reveal a card. Every game you've ever played when you play Uno. You've got a hand of cards, you're making a decision, you play a card, you've revealed what card you just played.

57:29 And I remember thinking. Is there a simpler version of that? And it turns out there is. And the simpler version in Coyote is Take some cards, put them all face up on the table, and then decide which one you're gonna pick. That's very similar to having a deck of cards, but now

57:45 It's public. Now it's public. Right. And also When the competitive version was brought in, which is the way that I like to play the way I would suggest people play, but you can warm up with cooperative. If you have somebody in your life or in your family, you just cannot lose without uh creating a huge pain in the ass.

58:04 Then the cooperative mode is really fun, but the Competitive mode. Then allows the group decision on which card to play potentially, although ultimately it's individual, right? That that has implications. for cooperative when it's public. Yeah. But also for competitive. Yeah.

58:22 There are a number of tweaks made to this, but I mentioned earlier sabotaging. So we had competitive, but different minds are wired for different games. Yeah. And so God forbid. What happens to you is what happened to one of my employees who was play testing this where One of the people in the group.

58:39 was a mathematician Who also is a high level chess player, if I'm remembering correctly. And he just smoked everyone because he had the mind for it. Yeah. So what do you do for that? Well, we ended up This took a lot of play testing. to ultimately land on this and I wanna ask you about play testing, particularly if it's kinda hands off the wheel and you have Yeah. People playing the game without you. Yeah. Terrifying. Yeah. And this comes back to the underdog being able to win.

59:05 Not getting my ass smoked in magic over and over again by someone who's just got better hardware for it. And that's where the attack cards came from. Yeah. So there are these attack cards in the deck, which To the simplification side, you can play in cooperative mode to modify a card. I don't want to get too in the weeds. More credit for this'cause I don't think you're taking enough credit. So all right. Let me let me phrase this a different way.

59:29 The basic premise of the game is we have a whole bunch of activities on the table, right? Ballerina. Peace sign. Whatever it is, thumbs up, thumbs down, lean and make a fart noise. Yeah. Exactly. Lean and make a fart noise. So we got all these things that we're all gonna do. And then on top of that It's a fan favorite. That's right. It's such a good card. On top of that, we have all these modifier cards and they modify

59:49 You have to skip a player after this one, ignore this card, do this one twice. Generally the coyote. And you had this great idea. He said. Because some players are naturally gifted at this game, far more so than others. And because

1:00:03 Some players are going to naturally fall behind and they need a way to sabotage the first place. If you're in last place, you need a way to sabotage the first place player. If you've ever played Mario Kart, you know this feeling very well. And you said What if we took some of these modifiers? All players have to Do All the blue cards with one hand instead of two. Yeah. But what if instead of Tyrannosaurus arms or Tyrannosaurus arms. You have to do all your movements with Tyrannosaurus arms. What if instead of playing that on all blue cards on the table. What if

1:00:32 You just put that, slide it right in front of another player. And now only they have to do it. For every single one of their turns, that you've put a curse on them. Yeah. Right. You've attacked the last place player has attacked the first place player. And I remember thinking. Tim, you're just like a natural game designer. Like this that's such a nice moment and it's such an easy modification. And of course, my answer was, I don't know, let's try it. And then we tried it and it was glorious. And I love moments like that. For two reasons. One is because You had learned at that point to speak like a game designer. Instead of saying, I think we just need to sabotage people.

1:01:08 Instead, you said, some people are really good at this game. We have to address that. Some people are naturally bad at this game. We need to give them a tool. And those terms speaking in that language, armed with that vocabulary, suddenly the answer. to you became so clear. Like, here's how we solve those problems.

1:01:26 That's great. I guarantee you would not have been capable of that. When we started this process. Yeah. No, I wouldn't have had the sometimes you know artists talk about the visual library, right? Just the exposure. to different types of artwork, different forms, different silhouettes, different structures, so that they can pull from that. visual library to inform whatever they're trying to build or solve for. And it's the same with game design, same with everything. Like you need to build

1:01:52 Your ABCs. So you can convey what you're trying to say in terms that are solvable, if that makes any sense. Totally. You're a quick study too. Yeah, helped getting the books that you recommended. I'm not gonna dox my friend in question, but

1:02:08 As long term listeners will know, I was In a former life. neurosci major and then in the last ten years have funded a lot of science. And I always I've just had this hankering

1:02:22 in this dream of being involved in neuroscience. It continues to this day. And In the process of building this game, and this is not how I necessarily sell it because This is gonna sound terrible, but through many experiments with different companies and so on, I've concluded that even though

1:02:40 Generally Americans. I'll throw it on Americans. I'm American. Say they want to be smarter. They will typically not pay for something that is designed to make them smarter. Yeah. Unless it's a magic pill. And then sometimes the answer is yes. But What I was hoping to also do with this game was Is to create something.

1:03:02 That would And this has not been proven. There's no randomized controlled study examining this, although that might change at some point, is to Design something that would help those players who are not good at this, or the people who are in the middle of the bell curve. People were good. To get better. Yeah.

1:03:21 And for people who are interested in looking at S They're not perfect. Analogs, but they're similar. People can check out the Wisconsin card sorting test. WCST. It's a neurophysiological test. Used to assess cognitive flexibility and executive functions, particularly the ability to shift cognitive sets and learn from feedback.

1:03:41 All right. So participants must sort cards based on an initially unknown rule, which changes after a certain number of correct sorts. Now this is not A perfect Parallel because that does not in and of itself make for a fun game. Right. So fun number one.

1:03:57 Lots of probably rank ordered like one, two, three, four, five, but could I also Trojan horse. Yeah. In. Love it. Cognitive training. And I think the answer this is from a lay perspective, and obviously I'm biased because

1:04:12 Involved in every step of making this thing. But I think it does the trick. And what people will notice is, and you know this too. The game starts off So easy.

1:04:25 And people are like there's nothing to it. Yeah. And then once a modifier to come out, people are like Oh. Oh wait a second. Yeah. This is getting really tricky. Yeah.

1:04:35 And If For instance, like I've had lifelong insomnia. You want to sleep better? Play this game before you go to bed. And by the end, you will feel like you just did. A workout. Yeah. A full yeah. Full brain workout for your cognition. You know what I love about that part?

1:04:52 I learned to play the drums years and years ago. And I remember I would learn these new patterns. And it was like, you know, your right hand has to do this and your left hand has to do this and your right leg has to do this and you're and I remember thinking, Mm. 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 suddenly it starts to click just a little bit. Right. Like, oh, my my right hand did the right thing. And it's like you can feel new like neurons coming to life, right? Like your brain is doing something that five minutes ago you could not do.

1:05:21 This is the first game I've ever played. That does that exact same thing. And I remember the first time I felt that way in a very early play test, my eyes got all wide, and I was like, There's something magical going on here. Like I know I'm psyching myself out, but I feel new things happening in my brain because five minutes ago I could not do this pattern. And now I can.

1:05:44 And you know, we can go all the way around the table and you can add a new card, and I will still be able to do this pattern that I couldn't do. Just five minutes ago. Yeah, totally. And what's cool As well as you get to see just how specialized certain minds are. Yeah. And where you might have an Achilles heal. So for instance, and this is true for some folks, we have the modifiers ranked by difficulty because ultimately with Coyote, you're in charge of how hard you make the game. Like you are in full charge of how Easy, moderate, or difficult you make it. And we didn't even talk about

1:06:17 how this game is designed. to make you a game designer. We'll talk about that with the blank cards. But this is a sort of creativity unlock as much as a game. That's the intention behind it, which is part of the reason that um Really excited to See what the hell it does when it's released into the wild, which it effectively is now. Now the

1:06:37 The specialization piece, I'll just speak to that. So for instance, for me Skipping. Turns skipping players. It is a blind spot. It is an Achilles hill for me. That's true for quite a few folks. Yeah. But for other people, for instance, if we're going around the table

1:06:55 Most people would be familiar with, you know, we will rock you. Rock you. So it's like boom boom. Boom boom sh So the way you play the game is you go around. Is You go.

1:07:05 Boom boom. You can hit the table with your hands, you can do it with closed fists, you know, you could probably clap it if you want, but it's boom boom, and then one person does the move. Yeah. Like let's take the ballet, right? You're gonna do a pirouette. You have to do the motion and you have to say the motion. So then these two things can be split or confused later. Yeah. We won't get to that too deep into that. And then it's boom boom next person, boom, boom, next person. Yeah. And it goes around. And then it just gets more and more complicated. I remember when we were first experimenting with the modifier that said, Okay, it's now three bumps instead of two. So it's boom boom boom. And then And there were

1:07:46 I remember I'm not gonna call them out, but there's one person who just could not do it. I know. Right. And I was one of those people. My brain would start melting out of my ears at that point. I don't know why, though. Yeah. It's weird. So they're very specific. You'll you'll find each person will have a super strength and a super weakness. And you will figure it out by playing this game. Yeah. And just from a game design perspective also, I'd love to hear you talk about Finding the sweet spot. I mean, we could talk about Bushnell's Law, right? The uh Atari fame, right? The game you know, I'm paraphrasing here, but a good game is easy to learn and difficult to master. Yeah. But how do you in the course of Play testing.

1:08:24 More than with prototypes. Find the sweet spot of difficulty, right? Because with this game. Well through making this game. I've just really come to appreciate. How

1:08:36 Hard it is. to create a game where people experience that sweet spot. Because if you were to take Coyote and make it too easy. What a simple game to make. Sure. Right? Oh yeah. If you wanted to make it basically impossible and not fun to play.

1:08:51 Also very easy. But to find that sweet spot on the graph. Is Incredibly challenging. Yeah. So the way I think about this.

1:09:02 Is When you first encounter it. Any game. The first thought that has to go into your brain is I can do that.

1:09:10 Right. You hear it described and you have to think, I can do that. And then you have to try the game and that has to be reinforced. The game has to say, yep. You can do that. And you have to feel like Okay.

1:09:20 I thought I could do it. I can do it. This is great. But that's only gonna last a few seconds. The next thought that has to go into your brain is I understand the path to mastery.

1:09:31 Like I understand. how to get better at this. And then the next thought is. And I can do that too. So you have to see The moment a modifier card comes out. Or the the moment any complication happens in your favorite game.

1:09:45 It has to like stop you dead in your tracks. It has to be like, oh The thing I just did. to start the game and was really good at it. I thought I could do it. I could do it. That's not gonna work here. I have to rethink my strategy, or I have to get better at something else.

1:10:01 And then those two follow up thoughts have to show up in quick succession. I know what I have to do and I can do that too. And that's really the art. to me of that that ramping up of game design. You have to keep hitting that. I think I can do that. Yes, you can.

1:10:16 Now you can't anymore. But you know what you have to do. And you can do that too. And then that's gonna get blocked. And you think, Okay.

1:10:23 Now I know what I have to do. And I can do that too. And you have to just keep hitting those two things and it just rinse and repeat over and over and over again. And if you can hit that. You are just holding somebody's hand from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. And they're gonna get great at it. They're gonna achieve that sense of mastery.

1:10:41 Over time. Yeah, and if you listening or watching Have any game that you consider simple that you enjoy Rest assured.

1:10:51 There was An absurd. Absurd. Amount of Development.

1:10:58 and testing and revising that went into it. Just to give you an example, like this is by all outward appearances a very simple game. The three to eight players, you could probably play with more. Ten minutes. Says age is ten plus. I've I've seen people playing with their kids who are much younger and it's actually hilarious and super fun.

1:11:18 There are so many levers you can pull here, right? You have the action cards, which are these cute little salamander cards with the different motions and gestures and so on. You've got just the sheer number of cards. How many variants do you have? How many total cards do you have? How many coyote versus attack cards when you have a ful shuffled deck, what does that actually look like? Yeah. There's so many different variables that you have to think through. Yeah. One of my favorite things is we're starting to see people compete now. Like so we set up this page. Uh.

1:11:46 Here are Table configurations. Here's like an array of cards. In exactly this order with exactly these modifiers. This one's hard. This one's impossible.

1:11:57 This one is going to kill you. And we've started to see Just you know, the game is barely available so far. But we started to see some people try to tackle those challenges. Okay, I didn't even know that. It's incredible. Yeah, so the where this came from also is in the four hour chef a million years ago. Came out in twenty twelve, which was actually a book about accelerated learning, confusingly. But Putting that aside. There were a few recipes in that book. I think one was called Dragon Force Chacon or something like that, which was named after this. video game track that people found impossible to play on guitar. Yeah.

1:12:30 And then there was something a la ancien, which was this just Ludicrously complex. Yeah. French dish that involved fish. And I was like, Okay, look. If you've done everything up to this point and you want to take a quantum leap forward and try something that is considered effectively uh impossible by most people, here you go. Yeah. And so that's what we created on this particular page. So no, I will just say

1:12:54 Having tested all of the challenges on that page. I can do exactly one of them. The last two are so hard. They're really hard. And we've already seen someone, a table of six people. succeed at the moment. Wow. Okay. Already done it. That's nuts. Yeah. I've never seen anyone do the crazy hard one. Yeah. But it's coming. Yeah, so people can check it out. And there may or may not be a bunch of excitement around that. So I will I will just say there may be incentives later to be good at this game. I will leave it at that.

1:13:23 For now. I tell you what, we're gonna come back to some of the blank cards and we'll talk about those features, but let's talk about A bit more of the process of making Any game. We could talk about Coyote specifically, of course. Because you have

1:13:37 Process for this. How many games per year You guys put out. Uh I do so. It's funny, I actually built this out as a graph. So our first year we did one, our second year we did two, our third year we did two again. Last year

1:13:51 We did. Fourteen. Mm. This year. We'll do twenty three. I think wow. Yeah.

1:13:58 It's a lot. Mm-hmm. It's really fun. We've built this incredibly robust pipeline. From design all the way through to testing and then sales and marketing. And I feel obligated to just keep that pipeline full because it's such a beautiful thing we build. So we do a lot of games. All right. Let's get S

1:14:17 Info that we wouldn't normally have any access to. If you do an eighty twenty analysis, it's not gonna be exactly eighty twenty, but you get where I'm going on your Best selling games. Yeah. What's on the leaderboard? What are the top X number of games, five, three, four, whatever the number.

1:14:34 Up until last year, number one. The top selling game in the world, amongst all games, was Exploding Kittens. That's nuts. It's nuts. Congratulations. It makes no sense. But I'll tell you something I'm even more proud of. It's now number two. Okay. Number one.

1:14:54 Hurry up chicken bite. It's a game I designed with my four year old daughter. And she did most of the design. Yeah. And it is out selling exploding kittens. Like it is selling one game every four seconds. Wow. Yeah.

1:15:08 It's nuts. And it was designed by a four year old. Okay. So we got Hurry up chicken butt. Yeah. Exploding kittens. Yeah.

1:15:16 The next few spots in the like global sales are constantly shifting. Like everybody's fighting for those. But our entries into that list, which are constantly shifting. Poetry Neandert for Neanderthal is usually number three. Throw throw burrito is usually either number five or six. And the rest are just totally random. Yeah. Okay, got it. So what has made Hurry Up Chicken Butt? A success.

1:15:40 So remember what I said. If you have the best design game in the world And by the way, when we spoke I think two years ago. Yeah. You were just beginning to talk about this. I don't think it had launched at that point. Yeah. It has been Absolute rocket ship.

1:15:54 Like What are the magic ingredients? Okay. Why has it worked? Because not not all games do that. Yeah. No. And you've had now with the number of games you've that EK explankins has developed. Yeah. You've had a chance to see a lot of different ideas come through the doors and go out the doors. Yeah. Yeah, some games last a season, some games last a decade. So hurry up, chicken butt in particular.

1:16:17 I wrote a list of the things I wanted that game to accomplish. And my daughter had you know All these ideas. Here's what I wanna do and you're gonna do this and you're gonna run up and jump up and down and But I had a list. Of things that I needed.

1:16:30 to know we're in this game in order for me as a parent to buy it for my kid. Mm-hmm. And they were as follows. The game has to be as much fun for me to play as it is for my daughter. Mm-hmm. That's a hard one. That's like that killed.

1:16:44 most designs that we came up with. Number two, my daughter has to be able to beat me at this game, even though I'm not letting her win. Mm-hmm. Holy crap is that a hard one. Number three. The game.

1:16:57 cannot have any losers. We can have a winner. But it cannot have any losers. Mm-hmm. Those three were like my guiding lights. It was like I need to check off these three check boxes. for this game to be good.

1:17:11 And we worked on a hundred million designs. Like she's great. She'll just be like, Oh, you don't like this one, here's another one. You don't like that one, here's another one. And she just kept Firing them off. And we finally got. That hit all three of those. That, as I said earlier, is only half the battle. That's yeah, that's the necessary but not sufficient. Exactly. So now we have a game that I'm in love with.

1:17:33 That we play every single night, that she can beat me at regularly, and I am trying my absolute hardest to beat her. And this four year old is kicking my ass at this game. Love that. Love it. And I'm having a blast, right? So this is my first time hearing about these criteria. Just for people listening. This is all new to me. When my daughter got old enough to start playing games right around when she turned four, You know, we went out and bought all these games and I Just hated them. They were so boring and I hated playing. And so We just designed our own. Like we just made them better. And It was important for me to have that list because unless I know what success looks like.

1:18:07 I'll just stay in brainstorming mode forever. So I made that list. Finally hit it. And then we entered into part Two. And here my daughter has very little to do with it, right? Here's where I sit down with the marketing and sales team, and it's like, what the hell are we gonna call this thing? And we went through A thousand different names. Yeah. I know the feeling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did that.

1:18:28 But once I had like ten names that I really liked. We sat down with my daughter and all her friends and I would just read them off. And There was no contest. Like it was just I got to hurry up, chicken butt, and they're like just laughing hysterically, jumping up and down. They didn't even want to hear the rest of the names. I was like, Okay. That's right.

1:18:47 So that was a really nice step forward. It was like I know I got a game that's like Just fire for kids. Like they're just so excited about this. And The next thing was all right, well. What do we make this box look like? Mm-hmm.

1:19:00 The game itself involves a character and a die shaker and uh some sound effects. Like it's got all this stuff packed into this character, this chicken. And I was like I can't just hide that. Like I have to put that in a box where you can see it. Mm-hmm. And that was really hard.

1:19:17 The difference between box design for like an iPhone. And a game. Is An iPhone will spend Like a hundred dollars on that box with the materials and making it beautiful. And when you open your iPhone, you take the box and you throw it away.

1:19:31 In a game. You've got about Forty cents to spend on the box. And it has to last forever.

1:19:38 It sucks, right? The equation is totally backwards. But I needed a thing that displayed the chicken. And told you it made noise and let you shake around the die. and still hold its structure as a box so that you could remove this thing, play with it, and then reinsert it into the box in a way that isn't gonna mess with the integrity of the box, structural integrity. So that was really hard, but we finally solved that. Did you do that before or after you started testing the waters with retailers?

1:20:06 After after. Yeah. Okay. What is not to I don't wanna hijack. Yeah. But whenever it makes sense, I would love to know how At what point you start Testing the waters. Yeah. Most people and when we started

1:20:22 You have to do it the opposite way. You have to walk in to Those sales pitches and you have to say, here's the final product. Look how beautiful it is. You don't have to trust us that this is gonna sell. You can look at this thing and know that it's gonna sell.

1:20:37 For this game, luckily, because we have a really good track record. We walked in with no box. I all I walked in with was a rough idea. Name scribbled on a piece of paper. And I said,

1:20:51 Trust me. This is gonna be great. We're gonna solve everything. gonna be amazing. And they said.

1:20:56 Okay. Yeah. Sold. Let's buy it. That comes from ten years of pitching them hit after hit again. I got it. So if it were earlier

1:21:06 Yeah. Exploding kittens existence. Yeah. You go in with the finished box. Yeah, they're never taking a flyer on that. Who creates the finished box? Do you guys create it in house? How do you prototype something like that? Yeah, we have an incredible team. We have a large scale printer. We print on actual cardboard. We have a paper folder, right? So we can actually build the boxes. Which was

1:21:25 An investment. Like that's not off the shelf machinery. But Normally, whatever manufacturer you're working with. they send you a prototype box, right? They cause they make it and they want it. They want you to see the final product. And that's what you go into. the sales meetings with. You say like look here's a box. Here's how much it's gonna weigh. Here's the final presentation.

1:21:44 We've been working on it for a year and a half. Here it is. I walk into those meetings like I got an idea. I've been working on it for three weeks. I want you to buy it right now. I don't have any materials to show you. So it's a different kind of pitch. Mm-hmm. that I'm very proud of because I've earned that, right? Like and we haven't ever let them down. So in the case of Coyote, there was a lot of play testing that was done.

1:22:05 four we ended up in Line review means. Yeah, wow. We skipped that whole part, didn't we? Yeah, yeah. All right. So could you talk about your Secret Cabal of Families. Yeah. Yeah. Secret Cabal of Families. I love it. All right. So Another chapter for your memoir. Yeah, right. That's a good title there. So here's how most game companies test games. If you had

1:22:28 partnered with a different games company. Here's what your experience would have been like. All right, we got a game. We really like it. It's really fun. Lots of internal testing. Everyone's on board. We now need external testing. And they go. To these. Market research groups and they pull

1:22:45 strangers in. And they sit in a room. with a one-way mirror and they show the game and they play the game with people they don't know and they order in some like crappy catered lunch. And they play the game and then they rate it on a scale of one to ten and they fill out this form that's like, here's what I liked and here's what I didn't like and here's what I would improve and then you get to watch those videos and they present you back all these forms and you get to make a determination.

1:23:14 Nobody plays games like that. You don't play games with strangers. When was the last time you played a board game with a stranger? Can't even ruin. It doesn't happen. Yeah. Right. The testing procedure. that all these other companies go through is fundamentally flawed. They're using a resource because it's the only resource that exists.

1:23:32 So I sat down. Well that's what we did our first time. We went through one of those companies and they gave us all the results and I looked at these results and I was like, Oh my God, we just burned twenty five thousand dollars on this thing and it's useless. So I realized at that moment Because nothing better exists, we're gonna have to build it ourselves. So I started reaching out to at first our Kickstarter community and then our Discord community and then our Reddit community as we grow and grow and grow and said, look.

1:23:57 I got a bunch of prototypes. I need Families and friends who get together regularly to play games. And I'm gonna mail you A free game.

1:24:06 You don't even have to send it back to me. It's yours forever. You get this amazing prototype. All I ask in return is upon receiving it within 24 hours. You play the game with your friends and family. And you record the session and you send me that video. And that's it. That's all I want in return. And

1:24:23 Within about Twelve months we had four hundred families sign up for this thing. They are called our kitty test pilots. They're this incredible group.

1:24:35 best feedback and we don't have them fill out a questionnaire. All we ask them at the end of the test session, we say look into the camera and answer one question. The only question we care about. Do you want to play again? And we know a game is ready.

1:24:51 When everybody looks into that lens and says Hell yes. And that's it. That's our testing process. What are some of the Pass fail marks or

1:25:02 green versus red signals that you look for. In other words, I imagine the response rate could vary, but you don't know if that's because people are busy or if 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 them, so they didn't play it. Totally. Is that something you pay attention to? Are the people I'm sure I'm not the only person wondering this, like if they're part of this. special VIP get free game group. Are they

1:25:32 Disincentivised to say. Hell no, I would not play this game again. So do you get a false positive side? Like how do you think through What constitutes A thumbs up versus a thumb sideways versus a thumbs down. There are a lot of false positives for sure. And there's no way I can solve that problem. We prompt them in advance. We're like, look.

1:25:52 We need honesty this game will get great. If you tell us that something's broken with it. Like we need to know that. Like and they're motivated because we also send them the final version of the game, right? So they know that's coming. They know a better version is coming if they help us make it better. So I Some of the problem is solved that way, but not all of it. So that's why the video is so important. If they say we had a great time and you're watching and you're like, they're not having a great time. Look count the number of eye rolls, right?

1:26:20 Or you know a great one? They'll take the instructions. I love this. They'll open the instructions. And when you see We see that eyes go wide and they like inhales. It's like oh

1:26:32 Yeah, something. That's terrible, right? And That's really important. And there's no survey in the world they can fill out that's gonna tell me that. You need to watch the moment. They may not even realize they're doing it. Yeah. Exactly. So how are they going to report it. Yeah. And that's why the video is so important. And we have very specific instructions for the video, right? Like what are they? 'Cause I'm wondering how in the hell do you review four hundred videos? Oh we well, one we watched them at like four X speed. Yeah.

1:27:00 And two is we've got a whole team of people that watch them and they flag moments. They don't even say why this moment is important. Something happened here. Something happened here. Some I'm gonna go on to the next video now. And then the next group of people will go through and look at those flags and say, Oh, they're Big deep inhale rules confusion. Not a question. What do you use software wise for flagging stuff? Vimeo. Vimeo. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you have people upload their videos to Vimeo. Exactly. Got it. So this whole process Takes months.

1:27:29 And it's really important. And the other thing is like I got 400 test families, but I'm only going to send out five games at a time. The reason is I need to collect that feedback, make changes, and send out the next batch. Otherwise, I've got 10 results. For a version and it's useful. I know what I know what the next five are gonna be like because I saw them on the first five. I got it. So is it then

1:27:50 Just to state my understanding. With the kitty test pilots, you basically have you're not sending out the same version to four hundred, six hundred people at five at a time. Five at a time. And then you look at that cohort and see what comes back. It's always the same stuff. Then you tweak. Then it goes out too.

1:28:08 Next two. Next five. Mm-hmm. Over what period of time do you get a prototype to the max number you're who are going to receive it. It usually like I would say six to eight months. Mm we're tweaking two things. One is we're tweaking gameplay. But much more commonly, we're tweaking the instructions. Cause gameplay has already survived internal testing. So we know the game is fun. If we know this game is fun.

1:28:31 And then we watch a video of people not having fun. Chances are it's the instructions, not the game. And so that's what we start attacking at that moment. Got it. What are some of the risks of internal testing? 'Cause I've always wondered, for instance, when I have

1:28:45 As I'm doing right now. Yeah, having doing a bunch of writing and I have people proofreading Or test reading my writing. Yeah. I do not only do it with professional writers. Yeah. I mean, they're very good and I know I'm very fortunate to know some amazing writers. Yeah. But they're also a little too close to the material. Right. It's like a travel writer who can't stop looking at their travel experience through the lens of a writer. They have lost the ability to just travel and have fun. Yeah.

1:29:12 What are some of the risks, if any, of internal testing? So you and I have the same instinct here. I remember when we were testing this game internally. Hadn't gone out the door yet. This game. This game. Coyote. Yeah. I remember You would say Hey, can you show me test results, but can you have like your accounting team test it instead of your game design team? And I remember thinking like Yeah. That's what we do. Like, I'm not interested in the game design team's results. So I would show you the accounting team results and I would show you like the sales team's results who hadn't even ever seen the game. Yeah.

1:29:44 Or Internal testing starts out with the game design team, of course, but very quickly has to move on to the other teams, specifically the other teams who have never seen the game and don't know the background. Because This are really the only tests that we care about. Yeah. So Your instinct is perfect there. And I'm very happy to say you didn't have to Teach us that, we already knew that part.

1:30:03 I mean teaching you anything, I don't know what it would be other than my Obsessive. Focus on I'm sorry for the volume of email and the volume of text messages and the volume of you know everything. It's uh every single one of those made the game better. Truly. Yeah. I mean Okay, look.

1:30:23 We've only done we've done um I think two partnerships total. Three partnerships total. We did a game with Pen Gillette of Pen and Teller. We did a game with Jeff Probst of Survivor, and then we've done a game with Tim Ferris. You probably sent more notes than the other two combined. I send a lot of notes. Send a lot of notes. I really had a blast with it and I remember this moment and I'm wondering if this happened before or after the line review meetings. I think it might have been

1:30:51 afterwards, but you could place it for me because This is my first game. And I don't put my name on anything, right? That was part of the very truthful pitch. It's not like one of you know, I don't have Tim Ferris Microwave ancient luck and you know Tim Ferris sneakers. And then just as an aside, uh Tim Ferris game, it's like, no, no, no, I don't put my name on anything. So I take it very, very seriously.

1:31:21 And I think it was Tell me if I'm getting this wrong. Pretty sure it was Carly. Carly's the president of T. Carly's incredible. Because there's always a fear for me at least where it's like in maybe internally I think it's great. And then it gets released into the wild and then oh shit. Yeah. There's a real problem. Like Houston, we have a problem. Yeah. And you can't take it back. Right. So what do you do?

1:31:45 And I remember Carly, I want to say s text. To me. She was in I wanna say Germany. at some type of gaming convention or meeting of distributors. I don't remember the exact

1:32:00 context, but she said coyote was bell of the ball. She's like, You would not believe We had an entire like huge room full of people playing, smashing on the tables over and over and over and over again. Yeah. Whew, yeah, isn't that a great feeling? Here we go, LFG. She she sent me a video of that. So just to set the stage there. There's 2,000 people at this hotel of the like 25 hotels that are part of this convention. And there's one games room and there's like 10 tables in there. And the idea is there should be a different game at every table, and everyone's testing out the games and sampling them. And we put coyote on one table.

1:32:39 And Almost immediately. people started gathering around. And so those people said Can we just grab another copy and we'll just put it on the next table, just so not everyone has to gather around this one table because it looks so intriguing. And so they send it to another table.

1:32:54 And then by the time Carly sent me a video, it was at Every table in the room. Like it was just an entire hotel playing this one game. Because nobody wanted to play anything else. Yeah. Wild. It was so neat.

1:33:06 It was so unlike. How gratifying. Like, you know, we've been killing ourselves on this thing. Yeah. And just see An audience receive it. And say

1:33:16 Thank you for the gift. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And also, I mean, I send it to you guys. And look, it says technically it says age ten plus. So I don't want to Contradict that, but If you're willing to modify the rules, which is something that I encourage and we have that in the instructions, house rules. Feel free to modify the rules, but I sent you guys the video of my friend's four year old after she played, which was like this. Such an amazing video. And

1:33:46 This is the first thing I've ever done. that can include families and kids, right? Yeah. Directly. Easily where it's like four year old, ten year old is not gonna have any interest or necessarily the capacity to read one of my phone books. Yeah, they're like six hundred pages long. It's not gonna happen. Right. So this is also So much fun.

1:34:04 To finally now. that it's kind of released into the wild to start. Seeing these things bubbling up that I hoped would be there. It's the reason you make a game, right? You want to share an experience that then the recipients get to share with those people that they love. That's why you make a game. That's exactly what we made here. Yeah. So let's talk about the selling process a little bit more because you you said, right? There's the game development, there's building the game, there's crafting the game. Yeah. But there is an equally important part, which is how do you

1:34:33 get this thing into people's hands. Yeah. And for that you need distribution. Yeah. So could you This is gonna be a callback. Remember that line review? The very beginning. Then I took us on a very meandering path, but there was a point to it. How do you pitch big retailers? Yeah. How does that happen? And like how did you do it in the beginning of Exploding Kittens? And how I know it's changed over time as you've built your track record, but nonetheless. You still

1:35:00 need to do it. And actually here's a data point that most people will never hear anyone talk about. What percentage Of your sales. R offline retail versus online. All right, we'll start there. Uh yeah, we never share these numbers, but for you, Tim. Thank you. Here we go.

1:35:18 Seventy percent of our sales. our in person retail. Only thirty percent. our online sales. Totally backwards than what you'd expect for almost any industry.

1:35:28 But yeah, people like to walk into a store. They like to see and touch and feel the game and flip it over and read the back and compare it to the other games and Um That's where we sell our games, which means Not only do I need tremendous retail buy-in, those sales meetings are so important, those line reviews, but also

1:35:49 The game has to sell itself on the shelf. Right. When you're walking down that games aisle, seventy percent of our audience does this. You need to look at all the game hundreds. Of games. And you need to stop dead in your tracks on this one.

1:36:03 And you need to say, ooh, what's that? Right. And that's Starts. But that line review starts with getting them to say, not only are we going to commit to this game, but we're going to put it in multiple locations. So we so you see it more than once, right? Very important. Also, we work with them.

1:36:19 to figure out the color scheme. And you and I, we we did tons of surveys on the color scheme and the character and everything to stop people in their tracks. So just a quick sidebar. I keep doing this. But Some of you may remember. And for those who never heard it, I'll just tell you, for my very first book, For Our Work Week, I used Google AdWords to test the top Let's just call it ten. Title and Subtitle Contenders.

1:36:44 Right. So I bid on keywords that were related to the subject matter in the book. And then the sponsored Results the ads. were automatically Split tested, like multivariate tested by Google.

1:36:58 They will do this automatically. And then all of the URLs. I had different URLs for each title option. They just took I didn't care about conversion. I cared about interest. Sufficient interest click. Yeah.

1:37:14 And that is how I figured out the title. And then for the cover. Back in the day I went to Borders, which was on University of Palo Alto. And I had a Counter. Like you might see

1:37:26 From a bouncer at the front of a club. And I put different covers onto a book of the same dimensions. On the shelf in Wow. I guess I didn't tell you this. Under the new nonfiction. Oh my God. And I just during the peak hours over a couple of days, I just tracked the number of times it got picked up. Oh that's so good. And then I used that to determine which

1:37:52 Cover to use. And now they're a better or certainly easier tools to use. So we ended up there are a number of them. I'll just mention a few. So we use PicFoo, P-I-C-K-F-U.com. There's also Intellivi. I N T L L I V Y and then there's another one called Sticky Beak also. But these allow you to do roughly the same thing, which is You can take, for instance, with this

1:38:19 Box design. Or any type of art. Or you could probably do it with copy. Many different things. you can survey

1:38:28 People who fit a particular demographic. you could identify whatever the ages, the gender if they are members of a particular service, whether they have

1:38:41 you know, prime membership or this membership or that membership, you can fine slice it however you want, and then you can serve up variants. Mm-hmm. Right. So for this coyote who you see on the cover, I'll explain it to people. Basically the box Looks like a slightly enlarged Box for a deck of cards. And

1:38:59 Then the top of the box is this beautiful Autumnal orange. Almost a saffron like Buddhist robe. We spent so much time on this color. So much time on this. It is impossible to overstate how much time I spent on this and everybody spent on it. Then there's this beautiful lime green. I remember taking photographs. Of particular leaves at particular times of the year with light coming through it to identify the like the hexadecimal or pantone numbers for this particular grade. I remember you remember. And then looking at color theory and the color wheel and oh my God. It went on and on. But above the coyote, which is in the center of the box

1:39:44 There is this Upper portion of a cartoon coyote's Head. And very much trickster. Where it ended up is there's a there's a little hat on the coyote, there's an earring, there's a wink, and the snout is Where it's cut off. So you don't see the nose.

1:40:02 Right. And this was originally I remember sketching this initially on a Zoom call. by pen and paper and then holding it up to the Zoom call to the camera. And then later sending the scan and then we worked from there. But we had variants with no hat. We had variants with no earring. We had variants with both eyes open looking to camera, so to speak. We had Both eyes open, looking in one direction, like off to the side. And we were able to very quickly

1:40:31 get a very good statistical signal on what people preferred. Yes. However, however. To your credit. When you showed me that character. Initially both the coyote's eyes were open.

1:40:42 Mm-hmm. And We had some questions about the hat and I remember asking you all these questions. What do you think of a wink? What do you think of an earring? What do you think of a head? What do you think of one eye closed? With both eyes closed. What do you what do you think? What do you think? And to your credit, your answer was always let's test it. Like. I don't want to have an opinion about this. I do have an opinion, but I don't even want to tell you. Let's test it.

1:41:02 And that is such an intelligent way to approach this. And ultimately, this beautiful character that we ended up with was so clearly the winner. Like it wasn't even close. Yeah, wasn't even close. And so we were able to get this very strong signal from thousands of people voting. And

1:41:20 Um. Here we are. Okay, so we were talking about the sort of road to retail. Right. So it's seventy percent. of your sales are in person retail versus online. Right.

1:41:33 And uh Therefore, the stakes are high. For these. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, line reviews are a big deal.

1:41:42 We really wanted To all show up in person. I remember you were trying so hard. Her first line review was with Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas. I remember you wanted so badly to be there and there was some scheduling conflict that just wasn't gonna let it happen. And we tried to change the date, but again, you know, they're they've got so many meetings and you gotta get in at exactly this time and they couldn't change it to anything appropriate. And I remember thinking like, Oh, we're sunk.

1:42:06 Like I don't know how to sell this game without Tim there in the room, like showing how much passion he has. And you had a great self. You just recorded a video of all that passion. And you sat down in front of the camera and you just riffed on the game. You were just like, Here's why I love this. Here's why this is important to me. Here's why I made this game. First time I put my name on a thing and you recorded this. beautiful impassioned video.

1:42:30 And I I remember walking in to the line review and sitting down and saying I have a new game. First thing I'm gonna do. is we're gonna play this game. And I'm not gonna tell you anything about it. We're just gonna play this game. And I set up the game, and within five minutes, they're laughing and they're having this incredible time, and they're like,

1:42:49 Oh, this is amazing. This is so much fun. How are you gonna sell this thing? And I said. I'm gonna play a video for you now.

1:42:57 And that was it. It was that one two punch. It was like we've nailed game design. And we've nailed the pitch. Like we've we know exactly who to talk to and how to talk to them. And they Saw those two elements.

1:43:10 And they're like Full line purchase. Every single store is getting this done. Yeah, wild. I mean that is never happened on an initial pitch for us ever.

1:43:23 Normally we get into a subset of stores and then eventually it rolls out to all the stores. This was the first time ever they said. Whatever it takes. We need this game everywhere. Which is I mean still very surreal for me and I'm so grateful, obviously. And it's terrifying at the same time. Not gonna lie. This is Mr. Dip the toe, then one foot, then weight up to the ankles. This is just fire hose on full full Monty from second zero. What are other keys to

1:43:53 Pitching. Mm-hmm. And that could also be I'll just offer another option, which is what are some common mistakes that people make. Well that you suspect people make.

1:44:05 So The first most common mistake. Because this could be for games, but it could be for cosmetics. It could be for anything. For anything. The first question is how are you represented in that room? Remember I said they only take a certain number of meetings. It took us like

1:44:18 five years to get one of those meetings. Wow. Even with the thunderous Crazy lightning in a bottle success of exploding. Yeah. Yeah. So what you have to do instead is you find someone who already has a meeting.

1:44:33 Mm-hmm. and you hire them as your publisher and then they represent your game in their meaning. That's how most companies do it. And that's how we did it for years. Mm-hmm. So the first problem is you have to make sure that whoever is representing you, assuming you can't be in the room, because 99.9% of the people can't.

1:44:50 They're representing you the right way. With enough attention. They're pitching it the right way. They're representing it the right way. They're saying the right words. They're conveying the right fun. How do you ensure that? It's a personal relationship. And it's just hard. It's really hard. And and to be honest, I I don't want to name names, but We went through like three different publishers, and I wasn't happy with how How did you this this may or may not be something you can talk about, but how did you

1:45:14 Craft the deal structure such that you could take a swing, and then you're like, Okay, swing and a miss, we're gonna go to someone else. And then swing and a miss, we're gonna go to someone else. Yeah. How are those deals structured? We got very lucky because our Kickstarter campaign was so Through the roof. Yeah. That fed into our Amazon sales. Immediately.

1:45:35 Mm-hmm. And so I could go from publisher to publisher saying You know, look how many games I sold last week. Look how many I'm I sold the week before that. This is a prestigious title that you want to represent. And then when they wouldn't represent me properly, wouldn't get the right sales, couldn't get the right deal structure in place,'cause we also demand quite a bit. as far as where the game is placed.

1:45:56 Is it in aisle? Is it out of aisle? Meaning is it in the game section or somewhere else? Ankle height versus eye height. Exactly right. Those bottom shelves are like a Death sentence, right? There like nobody looks down there. Can we get games at checkout, like where they're selling chewing gum? Can we put games there? Can we get games in the catalog? All the stuff that I wanted for our games. Was just not being properly represented for us. So eventually after our sales got high enough

1:46:22 I finally was able to stop doing that. silly dance with these publishers and we were able to publish our own games. Quick question. So If I'm hearing you correctly. The success of the direct

1:46:33 consumer, right? The DTC, Kickstarter, Amazon. Or I should say online. Those successes allowed you to dictate certain Deal terms. With the publishers who had flexibility. And they allow

1:46:47 Must say. You want to represent us. Even then, they only have a one, maybe two hour meeting. And there's only so many games they can pitch, right? So how do they fill that library? And then you get to the point where you can go And book those meetings yourself. How important was having a crit of skews?'Cause I have to imagine if

1:47:06 I'm a major retailer. I don't wanna have a meeting with someone who only has one thing to sell. That's why we couldn't do it at first. It was only once we had, I think ten games was the magic number to make it worth our while. Mm-hmm. Okay, got it. Yeah. And that takes a long time, right? Like and it's not just ten games, it's ten bestsellers. Yeah. And unless you're there. They're just like, Yeah, just go through a publisher.

1:47:27 Like we we we don't have time for we take ten meetings, we don't have time for an eleventh. Alright, so what have you learned? Understanding but If we can put aside the element of

1:47:40 Exploding kittens having And developing this incredible track record, 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. Right. If we put that aside for the moment. What have you learned about line reviews if you look at your first outing versus the more refined. Yeah. Line. And I'm spending a lot of time on this guys because this applies to

1:48:07 Everything. Like it it applies to so much. You have a movie? Okay, fine. How are people gonna see the movie? Yeah, you can go direct, but you might want distribution partner, like what we're talking about will apply to that pitch meaning, a lot of it, right? Yeah. And It's sort of the stuff that mainstream magic is made of. Yeah. It's figuring out how to craft.

1:48:26 These meetings. Yeah. Remember you said, like it or not, you're in sales. Yeah. Here it is. This is where the rubber meets the road. Like Dust off your tap dancing shoes, because holy crap, these are tough. So you have to walk into that meeting and you first you have to keep in mind You are their tenth meeting.

1:48:43 Yeah. Even if you're not their tenth meeting, you're their tenth meeting, right? Like they're they're in this like I'm tired. I wanna get out of this room. I've been at this for too long. Like they're in that mindset. So the first thing you gotta do is Get them out of that funk. You need them to understand.

1:49:00 that this is gonna be the best of the 10 meetings. And you do that with enthusiasm, you do that with props, you do that with a cool video, right? Like the stuff that can get them out of, oh, this isn't like the other meetings. Cool. Like That's where you start. We show up with the Two of those suitcases, not the little carry-on ones, like the giant crazy rollerbag suitcases, and they're filled with products. So we fill those two suitcases with games. Like the most beautiful

1:49:27 games we've got, even stuff that we're not pitching that day, even stuff we know we'll never see the light of day, because we're gonna set all of those up. And the basic premise is Buy into this world. Exploding kittens is not a product, it's a whole world. And you can have this world on your store shelves.

1:49:46 And so that's how we start. And that's a really Nice way to start. Okay. Then What they're expecting is okay.

1:49:53 Pitch us a game, one at a time. It's this. Okay, you're done. Okay. It's the next one. Okay, you're done. It's the next one. So what we do is very different. Instead of pitching a game and then pitching the next one. Just like I said for Coyote, we're like, hey We're gonna play a game. And usually they say

1:50:09 We don't have time to play. Can you just pitch it? And I say. No. We're gonna play a game. Confrontation. I get it. But I force them to play the games. Every single one of them. Now I'm not gonna play all the way through. I'm not gonna spend ten or twenty minutes. All right.

1:50:23 This might seem like a trivial detail, but yeah, I don't think it is. Yeah. You and uh tuxedo on a top hat for this, who dressed in your Sunday's finest. Yeah, oh it's so funny. So I learned this on my Microsoft days. Like if I dress up If I wear A tuxedo if I wear suit, if I even wear a button up shirt, nobody takes me seriously. 'Cause I'm supposed to be the creative guy, right? I have to wear the creative guy uniform. I have to wear a T shirt, I have to wear jeans, otherwise no one looks at me.

1:50:51 So that's how I show up. Luckily it's a really comfortable Uniform for me. Um So I force them to play.

1:50:59 And I'm there being like the game's biggest cheerleader. I Don't usually let them win, but I usually orchestrate a scenario in the game where they're having as much fun as possible. And my goal. is for them to have exactly those emotions that we talked about. When we start, I need them to think I can do that. And then a minute in, I need them to think, Oh, I did that. What's next? Oh, I can do that next thing too. And I just I'm just crafting that. And right at the point where they're like,

1:51:26 Oh. I know what the next thing is. I pull the game away. We're done playing. And now let me tell you how we're gonna sell this game. And it's because at that point they're drooling. And I do that. Ten times in a meeting. And we just keep hitting that over and over and

1:51:40 I am very aware that the last two games I pitch are usually not going to be purchased because they're exhausted. Because that roller coaster, they've been up and down too many times. So you're going to have to figure out the sequence. Yes. Do you start with The game you hope is gonna be. The big purchase or how do you sequence it? Yeah. We open With our shortest, easiest pitch. And what that usually is is an exploding kittens expansion. So if I need to sell an expansion box or a new exploding kittens product, and I know I don't have to work very hard to sell it,'cause

1:52:11 They always sell. That'll take the first spot. That just warms the waters, gets us all. Little yes momentum. Exactly. Doesn't hurt. Yeah. The number two spot is the glory spot. Okay. Like whoever's there is that's the game I'm actually pitching today. That's where Coyote was, right? Like that's the big thing we're gonna talk about. And then the next five are equal. Like it doesn't matter what order they are. Those are usually will sell all five of those. Uh at a typical meeting, all five. What happens after that is very iffy.

1:52:39 Mm-hmm. Now You mentioned You play the game, you get them super excited, hopefully the drilling over it, and then you say, All right, I'm gonna take the game away. Here's how we're gonna sell it.

1:52:51 what is included in the here's how we're gonna sell it. Yeah, okay. So important. So this has changed over the last three years. It used to be I have to start with the box. And we still start I shouldn't say it used to be, it still is. We start with the box. Look how beautiful this thing is. Here's and we we do a mock up. Here's how it looks on the shelf.

1:53:08 And it's usually from a photograph we took like that morning. Like we want to show you Hey Target, here's what your shelf looks like. Hey Walmart, here's what your shelf look like. Here is our game right there in line. And I should mention this probably goes without saying, but You were not just showing up and winging it. I mean, you guys curse like you're gonna be performing once in a lifetime at Carnegie Hall. It is

1:53:30 If we screw up this meeting Our company is screwed. Yeah. Like we we don't survive a bad meeting. Yeah. So yeah, there is nothing that matters more than this. This is Arguably.

1:53:41 Seventy percent of our business this year. If we mess up this meeting, we will see a seventy percent drop. Like if they bought games. I don't know that a company would survive that. Yeah. So it's a big deal. We rehearse constantly. We can make changes constantly. We make all these props. Like we try to get the spot either right after breakfast or right after lunch, because that's when they're in the best moods.

1:54:04 All of it is orchestrated and so carefully. Every single thing is orchestrated. Who's in the meeting? How many chairs are we gonna fill? How do you request Those time slots.

1:54:17 'Cause I imagine you're not the only people who are thinking about this. Right. Makes me think of the Data kind of meta analysis long ago looking at judges verdicts yeah before or after meals yeah and leniency yeah right so how do you get the right slots yeah yeah so how do you so angle for those there's an art to that as well so we have agents we have a representatives One for Target and one for Walmart. And these are people

1:54:43 Who live in those cities. And they live and breathe sales with the sales rep. So Their job. The very Kind of cynical way to say it is

1:54:55 They're like lobbyists. Right. But the more ambassadors. There we go. That's the much more appropriate way. They have been doing the job. For longer than the sales people have, longer than the buyers have. And as a result The relationship that they have with the buyers is actually one of education, right? Because they've seen all the mistakes, they know where all the landmines are, they know how to avoid them. And so

1:55:19 Part of the art of getting the best meetings, of getting yourself set up the best. is to hire the best agent. How does someone find Set agents. Friends are friends of friends. Yeah. The best ones already have too many clients, right? Can't the usual situation. Yeah, exactly. But if you have a good enough brand, if you have the right relationships, if you can talk to the right people, and if you're persistent. You can get the right agents. I actually thought we didn't need an agent at all at first. I was like, we can just do, we're gonna show up the day before, we're gonna walk into these meetings.

1:55:51 And some very good friends of mine in the industry said. You're an idiot. Like this is not gonna work. So we started working with agents and they're incredible. I mean, they know the industry. Just to dig into that a little, why wouldn't that work? Is it that the code of etiquette And the way everything has been set up involves those agents and therefore it wouldn't work.

1:56:13 Or are there other reasons why going in guns blazing? Yeah. Without representation wouldn't be. The buyers are much less likely to take you seriously unless you have an agent in the room. And part of that is just part of it is just like these fools don't know how this is done. Exactly right. Right. They're showing up to Downton Abbey wearing a tank top. Exactly. And they don't know how to use the silverware. Exactly. Why should I trust their ability to be a good partner and actually get things done on time if they haven't done their homework. Precisely.

1:56:39 And the other half is You haven't done your homework. Yeah. Like you actually don't know. You actually don't know how to use the silverware, right? When we walk into a meeting The agent has done a year's worth of work prepping for that meeting.

1:56:53 They've made sure the buyers know what you're gonna pitch, how many games you're gonna pitch, what the order of the games is. They've made sure that you know the sales for the previous purchases they've made going into the meeting. So they already have the confidence in like, yes, these people are gonna deliver. They've made sure that Inventory levels are where they need to be so that a meeting doesn't get sidetracked by them saying This game is sold out. How did you let that happen? Right? Like So many things can go wrong. that the agent is fixing before they go wrong.

1:57:20 So that the meeting stays on the rails and gets you to success. Okay. Got it. It's a full time job. And so that agent is the person who lobbies for the appointment after breakfast or lunch. But you have to know to ask for it. Right. has other clients, right? They're gonna sit through maybe three, sometimes four meetings in that cell cycle. And

1:57:44 They're gonna give that Prime Slide. to the one who asks for it. So you gotta know to ask for it. Here I am. Telling you on this podcast, it's probably gonna make my job a little bit harder for the next sales round, but So be it. Yeah.

1:57:57 I mean people listening need to hop through a few hoops before being Bible companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. There's a few other shit. And we will and we are gonna come back to If you're just developing a game at your kitchen table. What are some of the first steps. So we're gonna get that. Yeah, for sure. But in the meantime, uh you said a couple of tricks of the trade. There's a few more I should be a little careful about what I say, but You can always bleep things in your edit later. You want to pay attention to

1:58:24 Believe it or not. All of the retailers. Have Color themes. Year by year.

1:58:31 So you wanna make sure that when you walk into a meeting Your boxes match that color scheme. Makes it much easier for them to say yes. Had no idea. Yeah, right. I know. Cause why would you? Because why would anybody? Right.

1:58:43 There's things like Those agents To read the notes from the all hands meeting. From the company. So they know what the company's priorities are. And so you want to sit down with your agent in advance and say,

1:58:57 Those buyers, what are they gonna get? promotions and raises based on this year. Mm-hmm. Is it More throughput at the store. Is it

1:59:06 Promote online sales. Is it match the color scheme? Is it you know whatever whatever it is you go you want to make sure Yeah. And you want to make sure. That when they look at your games, they think I'm really trying to promote online sales this year.

1:59:20 Well This game would do great on our website. And then the next game. This game would do great on our website as well, and by the time you get to the end of the meal they're like Oh my god.

1:59:29 I can get a promotion if I just buy all ten of these games, right? Like that's what you want them to walk away with. All right. So These meanings are huge. We've established this. Huge deal. So important. You mentioned a couple of tricks to the trade. Yeah. Any other Tips. Tricks.

1:59:44 Learnings along the way. So what happens after those meetings is also very important. There's two things we have to talk about. One is pricing structure and the other is marketing. So in the meeting, you talk a little bit about both. You have to now include marketing. Remember I said three years ago things were different than today?

2:00:01 Three years ago. The marketing plan that you show for your game is largely Your own website. Maybe you've bought some T V commercials, things like billboards, product placement here and there, things like that.

2:00:13 Mm-hmm. Today. None of that matters. All they care about is social media. Because that's the only form of marketing for games that works anymore. I should say also.

2:00:23 It particularly works. on is my understanding, platforms like TikTok or now that other platforms have realized To avoid. TikTok consuming their market share, they need to push and reward short form video. That's right. Short form video casual games. Are perfectly suited. Yeah.

2:00:42 to short form video. Yeah. And The way that you build the most effective videos for those is you need to inspire, I think, two emotions. One. I understand.

2:00:54 What those people are experiencing right now. Two. I would like to experience that. And it took me forever to get to those two sentences, right? At first it was let's show gameplay, let's show setup, let's show a a memorable moment, let's show people screaming and yelling because they're having so much fun. None of that matters. None of that works.

2:01:16 That looks like fun. I could have that much fun. That's it. That's what you're trying to show. How does that differ from the first

2:01:24 It's very, very focused, right? Like you want to show remember we talked about mastery early on. Well, I also asked you guys because we were talking about this very early on in the process, right? Yeah. Uh also because if I'm procrastinating doing something hard, I like to talk about the marketing because it's a lot easier for me to talk about. But I wanted to see examples of videos that had worked. Yeah. For any of your games. Yeah. Right, social bus. And so they were sent over and I was like, Okay. I think I can deuce why this works. Yeah. Often it was like one person playing, the other person kinda like struggling to guess what the other person was doing. And one person losing it laughing. Right. Yeah just

2:02:01 Inconsolably, but in the best possible way. Like losing it getting the giggles out of control. Yeah. Okay, so I'll tell you one of the most effective pieces of media we have ever used. Was for poetry for Neanderthal. This has like at this point like I don't know, tens of millions of views. And all it is is Here's how you play poetry for Neanderthos.

2:02:19 I have a secret word on this card. I have to get you to say that word, and I can only speak using single syllable words. That's the whole game. If I mess up Someone sitting next to me has a giant inflatable Neanderthal club and they get to bonk me on the head. All right. So there's our whole game. The best video we've ever seen is someone Who's trying to get a person to say the word garage. And we know they're trying to get the person to say the word garage because we put that right on the screen. We show you here's the secret word, it's garage.

2:02:45 And they're just saying Car Go here. H Hole, car hole, this car hole, big car hole. And everyone's losing it. And the poor person trying to guess is like, what the fuck's a carhole? Like what glove compartment? What are you trying to say? And then they say like vehicle and multiple syllable words and so they get bonked on the head.

2:03:07 Okay. Here's why that video is so effective. It's those two senses. One is I see the experience they're having. I get that. And

2:03:16 The secondary sort of corollary is. I could do better than that. Is this the video I think I remember seeing this where This might have been a separate video, but there's a woman who's the poet and then there's the guy next to her holding holding the club. Like so menacing is gonna drop. Yeah. And Everyone's losing it, including out the back. Right. Cause you look at that and you say, I understand the rules immediately.

2:03:39 Right? Mm-hmm. I understand the experience they're having. I would like to have that experience. Mm-hmm. And that's What makes for an effective social media video.

2:03:47 All right, so how do you pitch that? Well, we show a lot of examples and we show track record. We say look. Here's how many views our last round of videos got. Here's how many likes. Here's how many shares. Here's how many subscriptions. Like all the stuff we show them right there in the meeting. We never had to do that. Like this is a brand new phenomenon. And we say Here's the type of video that we're going to craft for this new game.

2:04:09 And we always Couch it. In those two sentences, here's how we're going to explain the fun people are having. And here's how we're going to make the audience feel like they would ha like to have that much fun as well. Mm-hmm.

2:04:21 And that's been very effective for us. So that's now half the meeting, right?'Cause every game we start by I demo the game. Social media strategy. Yes. I download the game. I pull the game back. We talk a little bit about the pricing structure and the theme and the box and all that. And then we go right into social media strategy for that game.

2:04:39 Because I have to spend as much time on that as I did on the game design, because they are equally important now. Mm-hmm. It's huge. Such a difference. All right, so for somebody listening who is thinking about Making game. And I really encourage everyone to do that. And I'm just gonna flash. This is as good a time as any, just to flash. these blank cards that are within every coyote box.

2:05:02 And they are color coded. You can use these to make action cards. Which are these different gestures and actions and those are the templates that we These are the templates. You can use them to make coyote cards, these modifiers. You can use them to make the attack cards, which you use to sabotage other people. There are other ways to play those cards. This is intended to invite everyone. Two basically create their own game.

2:05:26 By modifying the rules. That's right. Or adding new elements that are uniquely their own. You can Have fun with your friends, you can have fun with your kids. I mean, this is intended to make you a part of the creative process. Which you will be part of anyway, just by the way you play the game. Yeah. But this takes it to another level. And this was a really important element for me. So this will be a warm up in a sense. You get to try game design, game development light.

2:05:53 Right. With these blank cards. But let's say somebody then decides they want to Give it a go. Yeah, maybe it's with one of their kids, like You did with your daughter. Yeah. Maybe it's by themselves. Who knows? Maybe it's going to the game shop, local game shop, which I really recommend people do. If you have never been to like a real proper game shop, go in on a game night when people are set up and also check out the games you might not be inclined to check out.

2:06:19 So if you're a casual gamer, like go to a war hammer night, see what that's about. Totally. You know, check out like these different worlds. You know, another secret weapon is go to a game shop. find the owner or even the person behind the counter, like someone who knows what they're talking about and just say I'm looking for in game. What game do you wish more people would give a try? Mm-hmm.

2:06:40 And you will find the gems that way. Yeah'cause they know. But maybe the game doesn't have the best box or the best name or some it fell short somewhere and and and people just aren't buying it. But they know it's amazing. That's where you find them.

2:06:53 Yeah. It's a great experience. So Start Testing the waters in that way. It's so easy to do. In a place like Austin. I mean, this is Austin, people might think of game. locations and X, Y, Z. They're all over the place. Yeah. There happens to be a really vibrant scene here. And

2:07:10 If one wanted to. start developing their own game. Let's say They find something that starts to Stick. Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay. We've got a tiger by the tail. This seems to be working. They're play testing it. Might take a while. Like Settlers of Catan, I think. Klaus Troy had like 150 versions before we're like that's a that's a complex game. Yeah. But let's say

2:07:34 They start to Develop the game and they're like, All right. I would like to try to sell this. Yeah. What are the options?

2:07:41 Yeah. What would you Say to someone who's like they're smart. Yeah. They can plan like they've operated in the world before. Uh-huh. Right. So they're not new to adulting. Yeah. But they have no experience.

2:07:54 In selling games. There are three paths. I'll tell you all three paths and then I'll tell you my favorite one. All right. Okay. Path number one. Self publishing.

2:08:02 Uh-huh. Self-publishing is hard, but you can print out your own decks. You can design everything yourself. You can write the rules yourself. You can do absolutely everything yourself. And then you can spend a few thousand dollars, publish a few hundred copies. And send them out to all your friends. Okay. So that's option one. It sucks. Don't do that one. It's just the worst. I mean, you're just gonna make every mistake and you're gonna have to pay for your mistakes. And you pay for every mistake, right? And then once you make the mistake, now you can't take it back and you can't do it. Just don't self publish. It's a terrible idea. Okay. There's number one.

2:08:37 That's not my favorite one. Number two. is you go to an existing publisher, Hasbro, Mattel, nowadays exploding kittens, right? Like you can approach big publishers, pitch your game. And then strike a deal with them where they will handle All the risk.

2:08:53 But they will also Take most of the reward. Okay. You can still Honestly, get very rich this way. But

2:09:01 you have to get into their portfolio. Right. So either you need a track record, or you just have to absolutely wow them. Or You have to show up with some bona fides. You can't just say, I'm a brand new designer. Here's my brand new game, please publish me. How would you

2:09:16 Maybe there are exceptions, right, where people have wowed them. first time game designer of the game. Yeah. How does one do that? You go to a convention. You go to convention. Yeah. You go to a convention, you demo your game. They will all Show up. They're like agents recruiting for a sports team, right? They're gonna show up to all of those places and they're gonna walk the halls and they're gonna check even the smallest boost and they're gonna even go to the big convention halls where everyone just has their own little folding table or even a temporary folding table, right? Like they're gonna look at all of that stuff. So it is possible to do it that way, but

2:09:48 You have to keep in mind. They have very few slots open and they usually only have one or two Agents, scouts looking for games. Mm-hmm. So your chances of success there are low as a first time person. Much better if you can schedule a meeting. And they will take that meaning and then you can say, Here's why you should not say no to this.

2:10:10 Put in a pitch. that increase the likelihood of getting a meeting. Outside of being an influencer of twenty million followers on Instagram. Yeah. That helps, right? But the reason that helps is what I was gonna say is the ability to sell the game. Whatever it is. Maybe it's your way, also true of nonfiction writing. Exactly right. If you're selling a book, and for selling a screenplay. And for really selling anything, you need to be able to say here's why people are going to take notice of this thing and why you would be A fool to pass on this opportunity.

2:10:38 That's hard. Oftentimes the best way to do that is to have already done it. Which means your first time out. You need what I'm about to talk about, which is option three. All right. Option three.

2:10:48 Crowdfunding. Mm-hmm. This is Relatively new, right? Like 10, 15 years old. So it is, I guess, self publishing in a sense, but you're getting other people to fund the development. Two things. Yes to that. Exactly right. Other people are funding a hundred percent of the development, which is incredible.

2:11:04 But also. You are collecting those funds on a platform that promotes the game. Mm-hmm. Right. People are there. watching your video. You're trying to convince them It is a discovery platform. Exactly.

2:11:16 perfectly phrased. It is a discovery platform. That was missing fifteen years ago. I mean what watch my self-published YouTube video and hopefully fund my game. It just didn't exist. So now people are looking at crowdfunding sites. looking for cool new experiences and backing them.

2:11:32 And that's a new invention. And that's really cool. And it's not my favorite one either. Mm-hmm. So I just said I'd pick my favorite and I just pitched three and I said none of them are my favorite. Here's my actual favorite. A combination of two and three.

2:11:46 Start. On crowdfunding. Especially if it's your first time out. Learn you can. Your first project's probably gonna fail. That's okay. You got nothing to stake. You didn't lose anything. Fix it.

2:11:57 Relaunch it. Fix it again. Relaunch it again. Take as many times as you need. There's nothing at risk here. You're just learning the process. Awesome. When you get a success. On

2:12:08 Whatever crowdfunding platform you love. Now. go to those publishers. And say Sure.

2:12:15 Are my bona fides. Here's m proof. that this thing is gonna sell. I've already sold this once. I've already gotten it. Do you do that before you have shipped the game? No. Very important. No. Ship the game first. If the only thing you can prove is that you are a train wreck waiting to happen, you will get nothing from them. So

2:12:34 Ship the game. Show that you're organized. Even if it's a small fulfillment, like you sell a hundred copies of your game. Show that you can fulfill those hundred copies and then start to show the reactions to those. If you've only got a hundred people who bought the game. Reach out to every single one of them and beg them to record a video about how much they love your game. And now go to publishers with that. Right. Like that's really what you're searching for. Use crowdfunding is exactly what it is, is a way to launch your new game. To then take.

2:13:03 To step two. Let me ask this. There may be people listening or watching who think to themselves, that sounds awesome. But Wasn't the heyday of Crowdfunding.

2:13:14 Three, four, five years ago. Yes. You hear less about it. Yeah. Certainly for let's say selling two hundred people or maybe many, many more. I'm sure there Runaway success. Campaigns even today. But

2:13:27 Are there any tweaks that you would Add to it. It's really tricky. Okay, so here's what happened with crowdfunding. We launched on Kickstarter. Exploding kittens launched on Kickstarter. And You know, by some amazing twist of fate. That was perfect timing. Very few people had heard of Kickstarter. They heard about this funny, silly thing. It was drawn by the oatmeal. Already Matt already had this incredibly large audience. And people showed up.

2:13:50 And they said, Ooh. Crowdfunding. Ooh, this thing costs twenty bucks. I'm gonna back this thing. And we had two hundred and nineteen thousand people. Try that thing.

2:13:59 Amazing. Right. Unheard of success. Those people then over the next let's call it five years. Stay done Kickstarter. And they backed other things, other games, other projects, whatever. And what they found.

2:14:11 was the nature of Kickstarter. Is such that Only about fifty percent of those projects shipped. Either. The thing that shipped was nowhere close to the thing promised.

2:14:23 Or the thing never shipped and they never got their money back. Whatever it is. People got burnt. They got burnt and they had a terrible experience. And now when you say, Hey, back my Kickstarter, everyone's got this memory implanted of, Oh, that was a bad experience for me. Maybe I even had some great experiences. But I also had those bad ones and this is not worth it. And I'm not going back to that site. Or any crowdfunding site. So that's the problem. We're not seeing the numbers we used to see.

2:14:47 Mm-hmm. walking in with this baggage and it sucks. Yeah. My only advice is There is now a secondary

2:14:57 ecosystem around Kickstarter. Other websites. That have gotten very good at promoting projects. They've gotten very good at advertising. new offerings on Kickstarter and building trust.

2:15:08 Right. Like If you get on this other So it's like a curated site exactly that's project. Exactly right. And here's the thing. Those companies Almost always take a percentage.

2:15:21 Of what the maker. Guts. Mm-hmm. In exchange for helping them with fulfillment. with creation, with everything. So Not only are you buying into a trusted ecosystem

2:15:34 But you also know there's multiple parties involved that are gonna work very hard to make sure you get that product. What are some of those companies? I would have to look them up. Okay. Yeah, no problem. All right. We'll put maybe links to a few of them in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a ton of them. They all have like the word backer in them somewhere. Backer found and backer this and backer that. Yeah. I just put a couple of links in the show notes. Tim.blog slash podcast, you can find it. And I will also just give a shout out to a Friend of mine who at some point you have to meet. Maybe you've met him already. Craig Maud, does that name repeat? No, I don't know, Craig.

2:16:06 is gem of a human, amazing writer, also very technical. As a software engineer, software development expert and he at one point for his beautiful books that he has bound and crafted in Japan. These are works of art. They're absolutely beautiful.

2:16:24 And He created basically A I don't know if open source is the right term, but he does have the code available on GitHub for anybody who wants it called I think it's called Craig Starter, which is effectively if you want to host your own Crowdfunding campaign. Yeah.

2:16:44 And Oh in his opinion, fix some of the bugs. that were difficult to contend with. Interesting. Then boom, you can do that. Oh, I love that. And uh I think he incorporated Shopifying other add-ons, different services could be sort of as modules. I'm sure I'm not using the right terminology, but incorporated into it. So people can also

2:17:06 Check that out. Yeah. Two interviews with Craig, you should check out both of them. They're they're lovely. Absolutely fantastic. Okay. So folks can look at these services as basically a stamp of credibility. They will help not only with the promotion if you are so vetted, but with the fulfillment, right? Like the third party legitimate.

2:17:26 I don't think we're gonna see Uh crowdfunding campaign on the scale of exploding kittens these days. Yeah. There are a few exceptions. You just interviewed one of them. In fact Brandon Santa Fe. Exactly. Yeah. So like out of control or whatever it was. Kickstarter game for Fantasy books. Unheard of. Yeah. Unheard of. But what I love is that that shows like this is not

2:17:49 Even uh remotely. Dead platform. No. There is success to be had here. You just have to be creative. He started out with a great fan base. He picked an incredible title. The first word. Of his campaign was surprise.

2:18:02 No one's done that before. What does that mean? And just everything about it. Smart on top of smart on top of smart. I loved it. Loved it. So it's very Possible. But it's also very rare. And you have to be smart about it. Yeah. Well here's the thing. It's possible

2:18:16 And who cares, right? It may not have the gravitational pull that it had. Five years ago. Yeah. But if you can't sell anything. In a crowdfunding campaign? You are not gonna sell them. any buyer at mass retail. Absolutely. It's not gonna happen. Absolutely. And therefore you save yourself years of banging your head against a brick wall. Yeah when you're never gonna break through. Yeah if you get and this might not sound like good news, but if it's gonna fail, you want to fail as quickly as possible. It's great news.

2:18:48 As long as you don't take it personally. As long as you say This we how many games do you guys Screw around with On any level. And how many make the cut?

2:18:58 We probably work on a hundred games a year. And Less than twenty, make the cut. That's with all of your experience. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

2:19:06 Yeah. That's probably way higher than it should be. Like I'm probably pushing forward games that have no right to be pushed forward. But Again, don't take it personally. You say, This game is flawed. And the faster you can figure that out.

2:19:20 The faster you can move on to a game that isn't flawed. So if I heard you correctly then it's Crowdfunding. You establish some Numbers and so on that you can share. Yeah.

2:19:31 That show traction of some time. game reactions, et cetera. Then You Take all of that. to

2:19:40 Book a meeting at a trade show or conference or convention with one of these publishers who already has the annual meetings and line reviews. Exactly right. And you make a pitch to do a deal with them. That's my favorite path through this. What deal terms do you need to s pay attention to? So there is one very important number that you're gonna get, and it's gonna seem like a very low number.

2:20:04 But Here's how this works. Most publishers are gonna throw a number at you, like two percent. Royalty rate. Yeah. And you're gonna think, wait a second. I was the inventor.

2:20:15 I get eighty percent. You're offering me two percent. But here's what that number actually means. They the publisher. are going to take on all the risk. They're gonna do all the printing. They're gonna do all the relationship management. They're gonna do that sales meeting. They're supporting hundreds of people on their staff. Like they're doing all the stuff that you are not doing.

2:20:36 But in exchange for that. That two percent. Isn't two percent of the prophet. It's two percent of the revenue. Yeah. Top line. Exactly.

2:20:47 And that is a very important distinction. That makes that two percent. Probably closer to like twenty percent, thirty percent once you do all the math. Exactly. Not some percentage of net income which is defined in some Byzantine way to Precisely fuck you over which way from Sunday. Precisely right. Just to reiterate what you just said, like two percent is more like twenty plus percent. Yes.

2:21:11 That's exactly profit. Yeah. And you can ask them to break down that math for you. You can say, Show me the spreadsheet, show me like What you're spending. what your responsibilities are, what mine are. After all of those numbers are crunched, what is the total amount you're going to spend on this game? Show me your total projections on what's coming in. Show me how much I'm going to make of that. And then you can start comparing those numbers yourself and see Oh. Of the money that came in, I'm getting twenty percent of it. Even though this number only says two percent.

2:21:38 Once you crunch that math. This is a pretty decent deal. And You can get higher than two percent. Usually not as a first time developer. But I've seen deals anywhere from like two to twelve percent on the super high end. Like you've got to be you've got to be a rock star. Because at twelve percent.

2:21:55 Now you're at like fifty percent, right? And that's Tough to get to like you've got it really pull your weight to get numbers like that. So So those are what the deals look like. And then

2:22:07 After that Then the whole relationship moves into this like, okay, now what the hell are we actually making? Right. Like, what is the quality of the cards? What are the components in the box? Are you allowed to change rules? Is the deal structure similar to a book publishing contract in the sense that the game developer would get an advance against sales? Or is that sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah, you can negotiate that. I've seen publishers do that or not do that. I will just say for exploding kittens, we never do advances. It's fundamentally different also from Say nonfiction. Mm-hmm. book publishing in the following sense. If you're taking a let's call it conventional publishing approach, which is very similar to something the game. Yeah. Right. It's like you have an agent, you've got the editors, let's just say the and the publishers who are the buyers of sorts.

2:22:55 The editor might be the category buyer. Yep. Right. But they have to get the okay from the publisher for Signing off on DLC. Yep. And you'll have your royalty rate, which varies. Widely but let's just say. Somewhere depending on paperback versus hardcover up to

2:23:11 probably a maximum in conventional deals of Twelve to fifteen percent. Yeah. Of cover. Yeah. Right. Which is also again of cover. Yeah. And Then there's the advanced the critical difference that I was alluding to is

2:23:27 Typically when a nonfiction book is sold, you are selling a book proposal. Which is a writing sample and a marketing plan. Wow. And If and only if A publisher.

2:23:40 decides to Sign a contract and buy the book. Yeah. Do you get in advance? To buy you the time so you can stop doing all these other things to write the full book. Whereas with the game, like You gotta get the game's gotta be ready. It's done. Yeah. Now

2:23:56 Let's call it like ninety percent done, to be fair. Right. And usually when we take on games, we change them significantly. Just because there's always a better version. And when through testing, we discover it. The reason we don't do advanced is partially is exactly what you're saying. You're already done, right? We're not trying to pull you off the project. You don't have to stop your nine to five. Exactly. But the other reason is because I want a partnership. I'm not here to say you sold us this game, now we're never gonna talk again. I want you here Every day. I want skin in the game. We're gonna all make this better together.

2:24:27 Which is why we do so few partnerships. Now when you do partnerships, meaning you're the publisher, you're paying someone a royalty. How do you typically find those? So for instance.

2:24:40 And I imagine a lot of it is you guys canvassing and basically asking the question that you recommended people ask. the store owners. Yeah. Which game do you wish people played more often? And then you find something That has the bones. of a really good game. Yeah. But a piece of it

2:24:59 is shitting the bed. Right. There's something that is broken and you're like, oh, we could fix that broken thing. Or do you take cold submissions? How does that work? We have a submission form on our website. We almost never find anything there. It's hard. It's time consuming to go through all of them and and honestly it's just not the highest quality.

2:25:17 We also go to conventions, we look a little bit around there. Sometimes we find a a diamond in the rush. Crowd crowded fishing hall, right? Crowded. The most effective way Are those agents. We talk to those two agents and we say, Hey People approach you all the time wanting you to be their agent and you have to turn a lot of them down.

2:25:35 The ones that you feel terrible about because they're such a good game and they just can't get in the door. Send them to us. Uh and that works really well. Yeah, smart. That's super smart. Aside from a crowdfunding campaign. What would actually cut through

2:25:50 In a submission. Are there any ingredients outside of here are A bunch of compelling data from a crowdfunding campaign. Yeah. Or Hey, I've designed a hundred hit games. Yeah, yeah, there's two. Right.

2:26:01 What other types of lines or elements would cut through the noise. Remember I said that phrase. The way we design games is we don't make games that are entertaining. We make games that make the players entertaining. Ninety percent of the game pitches I see.

2:26:17 Our attempts to be entertaining games. Mm. And I just immediately dismiss them. That looks like that game is working so hard to entertain the players. I don't care. The best games, the ones that I pay very careful attention to.

2:26:30 Or When everything you do in the game. creates an interaction between two players. Mm-hmm. I'm not interested in a four player game where all four players are playing solitaire. Like it's just who cares? Yeah. I'm interested in a game where the players are playing the players.

2:26:45 And I play a cry. We tweaked a lot in Coyote based on that. Exactly. Guiding principle. Those are the best games. Those are the ones I love the most. Those are the ones I wanna play over and over again. And it could be as simple as you you might I'm saying you, the listener. Or viewer might remember. Holding your cards facing you.

2:27:02 Versus having the cards. Night and day. Available to the entire table. That's right. Because now we're playing all together. And the card I choose. If I have a blind hand, if I have a deck of cards and I choose a card and then I play it. That is me.

2:27:18 presenting a game to the players. If I Have All my available cards face up on the table and everyone can see what I choose. And everyone's hoping I pick that first card, but in I and I hover my hand over it, and then I move to the second card instead. And everyone starts groaning and then I play that second card anyway. Now it's me playing the players. And those are the best games in the world.

2:27:39 What are some common Achilles heels. for games that have the potential to be great and huge successes. And I'm not gonna mention names, but we've talked about a couple of games that you've considered. buying or publishing And

2:27:57 I'm wondering what are some of the common Weaknesses where you're like This is a great game, but The reason it didn't work. is X or Y or Z.

2:28:11 So there's two basic places the games fall apart. One Is Right off the bat. Their boxes suck or the name sucks. The number of games out there.

2:28:22 Called the legendary folklore of Gorgonzell, right? Like I can't remember them. I don't know what they are. I look at it.

2:28:40 I I would Cock Punch aside, I would argue that those games, they have no chance of success. Yes, they're gonna sell 10 copies to the 10 people that bought the legendary tales of Gorgonzle volumes one through six, and they're gonna buy volume seven. Cool, great. I don't care. Picking the wrong name, picking a non descriptive name, putting a picture on the box that does not describe gameplay. At all. It does not Provide a compelling narrative about what experience you are about to have.

2:29:09 Those games have zero chance of success. And I see that over and over and over again. So You can fail right up front. And I've even seen the biggest publishers in the world mess this up. Especially now.

2:29:21 Game shells are so crowded. In you don't have five games to choose from, you have five hundred games to choose from. And a game that doesn't do a good job of saying, Pick me, pick me, pick me. You're just not gonna pick. So you will fail right there. Overly complicated packaging, too. I assume that a bunch. But there's just so much going on. There's no one dominant element. It's like what am I supposed to look at here? Yeah. What do you look at first? So you can't. Yeah. You don't look at anything. You look at the next box. It's just noise. Yeah. Just noise. So We worked very hard on coyote on all our games, but I remember having this discussion about coyote because this is such an important lesson. When you look at this box, we know.

2:29:59 The first thing you're gonna look at. And we know the second thing you're gonna look at. And we know the third thing you're gonna look at. And this is A formula.

2:30:07 And we crafted this. It's a formula. Yeah very carefully. By the way, also Exactly what works in old school print advertising. Yes. Right. Yes. Header image. Headline.

2:30:20 Subheading. Exactly right. Text. And those components are all present here. And if you fuck up the order, pardon my French. Yeah. The eye doesn't know how to track or it bounces around. Yeah. And if there's other

2:30:31 Better options right next door. Off you go. So We hit those three things on a box. Meticulously.

2:30:41 And Your reaction. Should not be I'm gonna buy that game. That's not our goal.

2:30:46 Your reaction is, I'm gonna pick up this game. And I'm gonna turn it over. Now I'm gonna read the back of the box. And now we've got a very different task. Now we have more real estate. We still know the first thing you're gonna look at, but now we care a little bit less about the second thing, as long as

2:31:01 you've already got enough interest, right? You've already committed to picking this thing up. You're willing to to read a little story. As long as you can see the end of that story and you know it's not too long, you're gonna read a little story. The goal of this is now purchase. I want you to get to the end of this experience and say, I got habit.

2:31:18 Mm-hmm. I want this. And just for people who can't see This particular Visual. And there's all sorts of stuff on the back of the card, which we won't get into, but Some people might notice interesting things on the back of the cards.

2:31:32 The dominant element on the back of the box is how to play. And man, we worked on this a lot too. with basically three pans. Step one, step two, step three. Put cards on the table, then take turns performing them. That's step one. And you got a little visual with the Salamander action cards. Then

2:31:49 Next part is play cards to help or sabotage other players. Shows two examples. Sabotage was a very carefully chosen word. Very carefully chosen. And then the last one is mess up and you're out. The last player standing wins. That's for competitive mode. Now one aspect of this that I think is very clever. Is Not sure if you should buy this game, question mark. Give us a few seconds to convince you, and then there's a QR code. Nobody does that.

2:32:13 Yeah, this is new. I know. Yeah. So what's the impetus behind this? So This was an idea I had that we're demoing on this game. First time ever. My idea was

2:32:24 If I went to the store with you I could convince you to buy my favorite game. Yeah. Because I'm gonna pitch the hell out of that game. But I'm not in the store with you. So that's a problem.

2:32:35 So my first idea Was For every retail location in the world, will they let us install a telephone that you can pick up and talk to somebody? And they said no. My second idea was

2:32:48 Can I hire a person to stand in every store and convince you to buy the game I want you to buy? And they said, sorta. But you have to pay for all of that. And so this was a lot of people. Yeah. Six thousand plus people. Um this is I know, right? Can you imagine? Uh so this is just a little QR code. And The idea is

2:33:08 I can't stand next to you. For every store. But I can tell you what I would have said had I been standing there. And so you scan this code and it's just a fifteen second video. In this case it's me, Tim, saying Listen.

2:33:22 You're holding a game in your hands. It's the greatest thing you'll ever see. Let me try to convince you. And it's just a pitch. It's just if I were standing next to you in the store, here's why you should buy this game. And I don't Think a lot of people are gonna scan that code, to be fair.

2:33:37 But for those who do, they're gonna have the experience of a friend telling them You should trust me. This is gonna be great, trust me. Yeah, and it doesn't take up that much real estate either. It's an easy addition to the box. So once again Test it. Yeah. Right. Test it. What's the worst that can happen? See what happens. Yeah. And I also want to

2:33:55 revisit something you mentioned earlier, which is that royalty rate. Yeah. Whether it's two percent, up to twelve percent in the book world. Let me take the book world and the publishing world in The book. Publishing. Sense.

2:34:10 Is changing a lot. But It's also quite consistent over time. Different things have changed. Sure, audio as a format.

2:34:19 has grown tremendously and become highly prized now versus ten years ago. Yeah. when I could carve out those rights. It's a lot harder to do now if you're gonna do the conventional route. But some folks will look at the percentages and they'll say, Well, wait a second. Max fifteen percent. After an escalator, I'm starting off at twelve percent for hardcover. That's ridiculous, right? I wrote the whole thing. I want to make the lines sure. Yeah there are

2:34:45 Some instances Where you can make that work. But I will say just a few things. When you begin For most people. Unless you are

2:34:54 Excellent. Uh running a Menticulously. Managed. Business.

2:35:02 It's actually pretty tough to beat those numbers. In part because you're gonna be sacrificing distribution. So the top of the funnel number is gonna be different. Secondly. When you factor in paying

2:35:16 Various agents. Various distributors. And all of these little costs that for you without any scale of having a thousand S in a department dedicated to it. You start to very quickly. Approach that number very quickly. And by the way, you're running a real business. Yeah. Right. This is not the easiest thing in the world to do.

2:35:38 at all. And I will probably do some experiments on that side of The equation in terms of self-publishing, which I would put in quotation marks because it's gonna be like augmented Yeah. Pseudo self publishing. On a few levels.

2:35:53 I would only have the confidence of doing that myself currently because I've gone through a conventional route multiple times. And I've also run quite a few businesses. Yeah. But if you've never what Steven Key I mentioned earlier, one simple idea for licensing, what what he might call venturing. Running a business. Yeah. Do not

2:36:12 underestimate the value of your time and sanity. Also, right? Because with Steven Wooddo, he's like, Hey look. I'll take The licensing deal. Maybe I'll negotiate the number up a little bit. Yeah. But he's like I can do

2:36:25 Twelve of those a year. Yeah. That's right. Right. That's exactly right. And it adds up to a lot. And no employees. Yeah. Yeah. No supply chain issues. No risk. No oops. That was printed the wrong way. Right. And now I have thousands of books. Oh my God. That

2:36:43 Or sitting in my garage unsold, gathering dust and mold. Let me tell you the simplest example of the difference between doing it yourself and getting help, valuing your time. Our very first game, Exploding Kittens, I needed to put a barcode on the box, right? Because it has to sell in retail. So I go, I'm like, I'm in a research. This is can't be too hard. So I do the research and I find this website and it's like, you know, you gotta pay some little subscription a hundred bucks a year. Whatever it is, and then and you can generate unlimited barcodes. Amazing. So I generate a barcode, I put it on the box. That wasn't so hard. Then target's like

2:37:15 Well, this is the wrong format. Like okay. I spend another hundred bucks, I get a different format bar put it on. Like We need a different barcode based on the palette that it's in.

2:37:25 And then I talked to Walmart and they're like, yeah, we use a different barcode format and we need this barcode to represent whether it was picked up in China or Mexico or Poland. So you actually need three different ones. Oh, and by the way, if it's bundled with other games, we need a fourth one. And by the way, if it ships into Arkansas, we need a fifth. And I was just like Help. Like, oh my god. Help. And that's the difference. Like you should not get good at this. Why would you want to get good at that? You know what's funny is I was actually gonna bring up the example.

2:37:54 Uh Yeah, what are they? U V C codes and ISPN and all this stuff. Because I also went down that route. I'm like, how hard could it be? Right. Oh, this is easy. Right. And uh lo and behold, actually it's a lot of brain damage. Yeah. I'm not saying that no one should. venture in the sense of self funding or self publishing, but it is a lot. Harder.

2:38:14 And much more consuming than most people realise. Yeah. And there's no Reason. Unless you want to do it for a living, there's no reason to get good at it. Yeah. Like there's no upside there.

2:38:26 And do it for a living, meaning handle those types of details. Exactly. Okay. We have a barcode person who does it for a living. She's quite good. I'm so happy she's on my team. All right. So on the side of selling games. What else have we not touched on? Any other aspects?

2:38:45 Another thing I learned along the way. is there's two kinds of selling. One is everything we've been talking about today. Your expectation Is I have sold you a game.

2:38:56 The game is now your responsibility. And we've negotiated a price. You the retailer, own this game now. And you're gonna sell it. The second kind is the kind that we actually

2:39:07 Engage in, which is You do own this game. But there are restrictions on how you can sell it. Can you explain that again? So when you say you own this game, you mean a retailer. You, the retailer, have purchased this palette of games for I get it. All right. Sorry. I was just clarifying because people might have heard that as you own like the IP of the game. Sorry, sorry, sorry, yes. So I were buying an inventory of this game. Correct.

2:39:30 Mm-hmm. Now. What if The game doesn't sell very well. Mm-hmm.

2:39:35 Whose problem is that? Yeah. Well, if you didn't think that through and it's just a straight sale. They can put it in a bargain bed. Or they can sell it to somebody else who's then gonna sell it. Or If you really didn't negotiate it, they can force you to buy it back from them.

2:39:50 the restrictions on what happens to the game, what they're allowed to do. Post sale. Is so meticulous. And these contracts get so long. And this is another thing. You don't want to get good at this. You just need to hire someone who has seen every imaginable mistake.

2:40:07 and knows what to argue for. And Oftentimes the retailers don't care that much about this part, especially because they have a lot of faith this thing's gonna do well, right? But when it goes poorly, if it goes poorly, and we've had a few examples of this. What do you do next? In the case of something as simple as like Amazon. Amazon has a terrible policy for returns.

2:40:27 Namely They will accept all returns and it is the vendor's responsibility, my responsibility. So you buy explodian kittens for game night, you play the game, you damage all the cards because you spilled beer all over them, you put them back in the box the next day after you had a great time, and you return it, and now that's my cost. Right. And that happens. Hundreds of times a week. It sucks. There's also this thing where

2:40:50 People will buy counterfeit games. Mm-hmm. And they'll buy then the real version. So they'll buy a counterfeit for a dollar. They'll buy the real version on Amazon, they'll keep the real version, they'll return the counterfeit, and now that's mine as well. And I just spent twenty dollars on that stupid counterfeit version, because that's coming back to me. Right. So

2:41:09 All of this stuff. has to be thought through in advance. And it's Tricky because some retailers, the targets in the Walmarts of the world, they are so willing to work with you on that stuff. Amazon, not so much. They're just like Oh, you don't like our policy?

2:41:23 All right, well maybe maybe a different platform is for you. So it's hard. It's really hard. And I should say that I've run into when I've talked about Termination clauses or what do we do when everyone's pissed off and things aren't working, because really that's the only time that you're gonna go back and look at the agreement.

2:41:42 Which is why uh Gary Keller, famous for his real estate empire, said you should really call them disagreements. Right. Like'cause it's the only time you're gonna look at them is when things are really going sideways. Right. And There are some people I've spoken to about the importance of these things like wow, it's really pessimistic. I'm like, No, no, no. Yeah. Let's understand the consequences of not going through this.

2:42:03 I know so many examples. of entrepreneurs who actually had a chance at A runaway success. Yeah. And they did not pay attention to these terms for say a QBC or Or

2:42:16 A huge retailer. And This could happen with Kickstarter as well, of course. They get overextended because now they have orders for God knows how much inventory that is well beyond their capacity, their experience, their financial means.

2:42:32 And in their mind. Let's take out the Kickstarter or crowdfunding. But they don't think about it The return policy. Yeah. And they get the hug of death, right? They overextend themselves financially to produce the inventory, they ship it and then

2:42:46 Any number of things can happen. It might be like net to seventy payment terms. Yeah. Oh god. So Could be just like cash flow suicide, right? On the front end. And on top of that. you might get all of it shipped back to you. All of it. And it's your problem.

2:43:00 And then that is so tragic that's the hug of death and you're done. Yeah. You've seen this. I mean, you've seen this picture. You have this friend whose apartment is filled with products. Yeah. And it's taken over their living space and they have no way to move it. I mean, I did that myself early on. Like one of my very I mean an audiobook product. I was gonna sell millions of this thing, uh Oh my God, didn't do any market testing, none of that stuff.

2:43:22 Just To higher my own supply. Right. And I had an entire garage full of these things that just melted in the heat ultimately. And at the time that that was a huge

2:43:33 financial risk. I mean I didn't take so much risk that it torpedoed me. But If I had had that level of self delusion and lack of experimentation a little later on. It very easily could have been a recipe for disaster. There's so many ways to mess this up. There's so many ways to mess it up. The only good news is

2:43:53 There is someone out there. Who has messed it up? In every possible way. Yeah. Or represented

2:43:59 People who have messed up exactly right every possible way. And those are the people you have to work with. You have to. And if you don't The risk you're taking on is just massive. And Luckily.

2:44:10 I had some very good advice early on. from people who said don't take this on yourself. Don't do this. And Best advice I ever got.

2:44:19 And I think maybe tell me if this is overreaching on my part, but Don't take this on yourself. No. In the sense.

2:44:27 That's After you've had Ten. Mega successes? Yeah. And you actually are fluent in retailese. Yeah. And you have the relationships. Yeah.

2:44:37 All right, now you can take some calculated risks. And now you can hire the people that you would otherwise contract Now you can pull them in house. Yeah. Because now you can afford their salaries. Now you want them to only be working on your own products. Great. That's a huge mark of success and really

2:44:54 That is exactly the way you reinvest in your own company. And To reiterate just a few things. If you want to develop a game, number one, you can just develop for Your family, your friends. And keep it small. And I will just say in the book world, a lot of later mega successes have started out that way. So you don't have to

2:45:14 Go for Scale, which I think can be a very dangerous word out of the gate. But as you mentioned, you can also With the blank cards. In coyote you can get a taste of it, see if you like it. Then you can use the books that you recommended.

2:45:29 And there are certainly other resources we'll put things in the show notes. to play around with prototyping. I mean look at these initial cards. These are blank cards with Sherpey writing on it. That's literally. That's the entire thing. And You can also find kits online. You can find them anywhere you want. Amazon has

2:45:48 gaming kits where the there are blank dice and cards and so on. So you can workshop it. So it's like build a bear for games, basically. That's right. And What I would add to that is You don't need to run a big business. To be a successful game designer. In fact

2:46:08 I would Imagine most of the legendary Game designers. are not running companies. They're designing games and licensing them.

2:46:17 And Man, there are some legends out there. They've created incredible games and they've generated Gigantic wealth for themselves. Right.

2:46:28 That two percent deal, that five percent deal, whatever it is. That faucet doesn't turn off. That's in perpetuity. So yeah. In summary.

2:46:38 I don't think the game's business is going anywhere. And also There is a lot of room. to innovate. There still is room. I mean there's so many games. But

2:46:48 I wouldn't have even Attempted. to create a game had I not thought there was space. Yeah. The thing is, it's like saying Is there still space?

2:46:57 in the book industry, in the movie industry. All a game is Is an idea. Delivered. In a new way.

2:47:06 Mm-hmm. Right. So When are we gonna run out of ideas? When are we gonna run out of delivery mechanisms? The answer to both of those individually is never. Combine them both together and like it's just Build games forever. You'll always have a new way to deliver it. Mm-hmm. All right. So I'm trying to think of anything that we missed. I do have

2:47:26 Yeah. Tantalizing offer for listeners and viewers, just for fun, because why not? And we will have also mentioned that in the intro. But before I get to that Anything.

2:47:40 We have left out Or any other resources People to watch. Maybe people to Google and Wikipedia, maybe? Anything at all.

2:47:56 I got two that are interesting. There is a podcast I quite like for game design. It's called fun problems. It's with Peter and AJ. All they do is they talk about game design. No. They do talk about More hardcore games. than I am accustomed to. Like it's a wide range of topics, but it's fun stuff. It's worth listening to if you want to know more about game design. And the second thing is because of you. Because of you, because of this process, this journey that we've been on over the last few years, I realized that I don't document

2:48:26 any of this ever. I never talk about what goes into a game design. I never talk about where to buy blank cards and I never talk about like why anybody can do this and what the process is like. So I've started recording it. And I've started for the first time, I can't believe I'm saying this. I actually started a YouTube channel. And you can actually go and Watch these instructional videos. Literally, if you want to make a game, the whole idea is here is how to make a game from scratch. Mm-hmm. Nobody's watching right now, but

2:48:56 YouTube.com at Elonly. That's E-L A N L E E. You can also just search him on YouTube, the first result will be our podcast together. Episode one. Yeah. And then within the first few results you'll also find it. But I'm pretty sure the URL is YouTube.com slash Uh. Elon.

2:49:17 And let's finish up with A few things. The first will be The tantalizing offer that I mentioned. So the tantalizing offer is this. There's no purchase required whatsoever. So if any sweepsticks sharks are out there, take it easy. Take it easy. So this is gonna be just a fun little it's not even a competition, just a fun little experiment.

2:49:43 that I wanna run. Hi, everyone, Tim here with an update. As details have changed since that first conversation with Alan, here's the tantalizing offer that I wanted to share with you. You have two very easy ways to enter for a chance to win a trip to a secret Los Angeles mansion for an unforgettable day or evening with me and Alan and maybe some special guests. Here's how. Option number one, simply visit any target or Walmart and take a fun photo or video with a coyote game. No purchase necessary. Option number two, if you already bought coyote, record yourself playing the game with friends or family. That's it. I would love to see it. Then share your photo or video on Instagram or TikTok, or both.

2:50:29 And tag me and Exploding Kittens. You can find us easily, but I'm at Tim Ferris on both. That's at Tim F E R R I S S, and Exploding Kittens is exploding kittens at Exploding Kittens on TikTok and at Game of Kittens on Instagram. So share your photo and or video on Instagram and or TikTok. Put them everywhere, why not? And tag both me and Exploding Kittens. Longtime listeners know that I have a love of deadlines. This is how things actually get done, so the deadline to post is August seventh. That means that's the one. That's

2:51:00 10 p.m. PSD August 17. By then, you need to have posted and done all this stuff. By August 31st, we'll randomly select five winners from people who post. Each winner will receive round trip airfare within the US, one night at a hotel. And will join us at our secret LA mansion party. And I think the legal elves wanted me to mention that that's gonna be coach airfair. So just to be super clear. Important legal disclaimer, no purchase necessary, open to US residents age 18 or older. So no little kids, no minotaurs allowed, void or prohibited, winners selected at random, odds depend on number of eligible entries. Travel dates must align with the event. Likely in September, we are still finalizing the time with the busiest man in show business, Elon Lee himself. For official rules, eligibility details, and final date, please visit Tim.blog slash Rules. So

2:51:49 Go ahead, post a creative TikTok or Insta Reel or a photo with Coyote by August seventeenth, 10 PM PST. Tag us and you might just be celebrating with us in Hollywood this fall. Now Back to the episode. And What else? Anything else to add? I have a little bit I have one more thing I wanna say. Oh okay. I want to hear one more thing.

2:52:11 I just wanted to thank you so much for Allowing me to be part of this incredible ride. Oh my god. And just collaborating on the game. It's been so meaningful for me and so much fun and so great to get closer with you and your family and we've all been traveling together since. I love it. And to work with the incredible team that you have, exploiting kittens. I'm not gonna mention the Mulks there, there are quite a few. Yeah. But it's just been such a joy and a dream come true to actually have this thing in my mind that was floating around that I've always wanted to do, and now here it is. And people can get it. Tim Ferris made a game. Yeah. No, look here's the thing. You're so welcome. And thank you. Like

2:52:51 We have limited time here and you have to choose your endeavors wisely. And this was one of the wisest choices I've ever made. Oh thanks, yeah. Oh all right. We're gonna go get Fantastic meal. It's Texas, so probably a bunch of meat. Who knows? Maybe some teal will make an appearance unbidden, you know. You never know. Strange things happen out here in Austin, Texas. And for everybody listening. We will link to all sorts of things, many resources that will help you. Think about how you might create a game.

2:53:24 You could start with the blank cards and coyote, those will actually teach you a lot. I think as you begin to experiment with these different elements. Because you're gonna fail. Because your first few are not gonna work. Yeah, and you'll learn why. Yeah. And then if you run out of blank cards, look, just go get some blank cards. Just go buy a blank deck and you can use those. But This is something anyone can do. Yeah. Right. You did this with your daughter when she was how old? Four. Four. Yeah. Right. This is an incredibly fun family activity. It's an incredibly fun friend activity.

2:53:55 And it gets you off of your screens. It's not good for you folks. So important. They are tools, but there is a point at which The tools become our masters, and that is where a lot Of the poison seeps in around the cracks. Yeah. And this thing builds memories.

2:54:13 Yeah. That's what you should be doing. That's what your phone isn't doing. This is building memories. Building memories with some durability. Not ephemera that get pushed out of your head as soon as you watch the next ten second club. This is something I've I've wanted to do for so long. And I'm thrilled that it's here. Fingers crossed, I'm still nervous as hell, obviously. But we've done so much playtesting. I mean hundreds of people have play test it at this point and have made these fine tuning tweaks along the way. So I would love everybody to Think about your life as a collection of games. You may not be aware of which games.

2:54:49 You're playing. Just yet. But Rest assured. In some respects you are playing games and you get to choose more games.

2:54:59 Then you realize. Most of them are optional. Not all of them. Sure. We have responsibilities as adults and so on, but this is a way to open up that Pandora's box of possibility. And we'll include a lot of resources in the show notes. Yeah. So Tim Domblog slash podcast. Just search.

2:55:19 Coyote. That'll probably be the easiest way to find it. C-O-Y-O-TE. And another time I'll explain the backstory there, which is pretty wild, but for another time. And Until next time, as always. Be a little kinder than is necessary. Not just to others, also to yourself.

2:55:37 Play wisely, find fun problems. And I am gonna check out that podcast. And Life is short. Have fun while you're here, folks. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

2:56:10 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps gadgets gizmas all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

2:56:59 Not to be a salty old dog, but then again, that's what I am. But in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. Huge pain in the ass. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Which is this episode's sponsor. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Believe it or not, I got to know them when they had eight or nine employees. And now 10% of all e-commerce in the US is on Shopify, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to my very own limited edition. Cock Punch Coffee, remember that? Story for another time. Now back to the early two thousands. Then nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted even in the last

2:57:46 twenty four months the magic that is now possible with AI Shopify. has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools. that will accelerate everything, write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates to match your brand's style and create email and social media campaigns to get the word out wherever your customers are scrolling or strawing. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. It's all under one umbrella. And man, oh man, could I have used that back in the day. And if I ever do something like that again in e-commerce, I will use Shopify. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash Tim. Why not learn a little bit more? Shopify.com slash Tim one more time, shopify.com slash Tim.

2:58:48 If I were to update the four hour workweek, Which I get asked to do a lot. I would really only add one thing, and that is a section on AI tools, because for everything I described with virtual assistants and with so much more, you can do with technology immediately. And that can be automated, delegated, there's so much that you can do. And this is also why I recommend this episode's sponsor, Gamma, for creating incredible professional slide decks better, cheaper, and faster than you ever thought possible. It's pretty head spinning. I polled all of you on social 10 million plus people about Gamma, and some of you called it a game changer, mind blowing, and far and away the best product in the category. Those are all your quotes.

2:59:31 With Gamma, you can just drop in an idea, an outline, a document, a PowerPoint, and Gamma will turn it into a stunning ready to share presentation in seconds. And then if you want to turn that into a website or whatever else, again, snap of the fingers and it's done. With more than 50 million users, it's already the most popular AI presentation platform in the world. So stop wasting time dragging stuff around, fidgeting with bullet points, and let gamma turn your content into high quality presentations so you can spend your time on other things that matter. Explore gamma today at gamma.app. That's g-a-m-a dot ap. Gamma.app Listeners get 30% off any plan by using promo code TIM at checkout. So use promo code TIMTIM at gamma.com. Mm.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.