Board Game Business Podcast - Top 10 New Designer Mistakes

[Music] [Applause] I'm going to climb a tree watch out hi there welcome to another episode of the board game business podcast my name is Richard new and I'm here as always with Jeremy commander and Brian hin uh we're going to be talking today about the top 10 mistakes that uh new designers make and we're going to talk about it from a publisher standpoint with Brian Brian's made up a nice top 10 list for us so Brian what is your top in fact let's go backwards what's your number 10 uh thing that a new designer does wrong um a new designer should not make an Apples to Apples clone or Cards Against Humanity where you have just like a deck a small deck of cards a big deck of cards and you like have a judge and it goes around and you just like say what you put down one card that says I think the judge is going to laugh at this or you know it's it's Cards Against Humanity game cuz Cards Against has made so much money has been so successful and it has reached so many different people you know like people who don't play games like they they often start uh at least getting back into games by playing something like it Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity and so that they kind of think that's how a game can make and that they might start thinking about it too like oh I can do that I just have to like write a bunch of cards out and and make a bunch of money and that's it and there's a bajillion clones or add-ons or taken off of that so number nine number nine um so they they make a game that they want to play but nobody else does so this could be someone who um maybe they're really into ants they really like ants they have their ant farm and they just make a game you know about an ant farm that is just like goes into the different types of ants and different like what the queen does and it's just like just like nobody cares no one wants to play that game there's probably uh better examples too um um I think gameplay length can kill people too so you come by in this game oh this game looks interesting you know tell me about this game with the theme you're exploring underwater with a submarine I'm like oh that's cool how long it take to play Oh two to three hours I was at a pro field one time and a designer that I I he's done some other stuff I like I like his games he had a game like what's this one it's a oh it's a deck builder where you're a corporate executive you know you're going to get fired so you're just going to try to build the biggest golden parachute for yourself you can that's hilarious I love that theme and I like deck building and like how long does it take to play two to three hours like no I can't I can't stay there for two to three hours you know I just can't I can't do it so I'm about to be fired for two to three hours that is my number five so that that I completely agree with that it's too long gotta all right well let's go back to number eight then what we have for us there um it doesn't have much replayability I think that's a common one so you might play it once or twice and like hey that's kind of cute or clever there sort of one game way the the game sort of comes out and and resolves itself yeah yep yep it's just kind of the same thing over and over again you know so you um can bring it to a new group of people and they will enjoy themselves uh but if it doesn't have uh it doesn't make you want to play again like right away and if it doesn't want to make you want to play again next week and next month then it's not going to do very well okay so and you to bring out your product you the people all grown oh that again or like oh yeah I'd play that again and if you if you get a game if you get a prototype to the point where people ask to play it or ask to play it again then you know it's turn the corner that's really a really great game and the only game so I have games that they get that to some level they get some people asked to play it the only game I get like all the time is like past the pain like like people I forgotten have played this game A year later they come up to me like oh hey bring that pain in game I want to play that game again and so you know that that you've kind of you've hit that level where that it's a really good game it's nice if there's a lot of strategies that you can try and a lot of different paths that you can take to Victory and I mean that's that's nice for rep playability cuz then oh last time I tried to collect you know just a large number of one color now I'm going to go the entire rainbow and just try to do it through uh the commissions or whatever they were but and that will get me to play a game again if there's definitely multiple path to Victory like oh I you know I optimized over here this time this time I want to go the other way to see if I can win on you know pure money or whatever right and that that I like that a lot that'll get me to keep playing the game again if it has some replay value that's similar to my number six yeah I remember yeah we I was like we're coming up on one from your list not just one way to win right just one it has one ultimate strategy that you use every time um so that that's a common mistake I see too where you play a game and you know it seems to you know pretty much work it looks all right but strategy you got to go the boat strategy every time you just have to and and if somebody beats you to it you know or somehow takes takes it over you just don't have a chance to win so something like that that it's just a a broken game and it it makes people mad when they get down when they figure that out and there just like there needs to be more play testing at that point for the balance of the different yeah more play testing and and then just but also just realizing that that happened like my game only has one strategy uh we have number seven here so uh it has too many components so I see that a lot you know I'll sit down to play a game and they say here's your player mat here's your hit points here's your pile of chickens here we all wear hats so here's her hat and it just like goes on and I'm just like whoa I got a lot of stuff here and we got custom Dice and we have uh just so many different things in there uh games with economic systems and them usually have lots of resources and lots of you know different tokens and everything to represent those things they don't I I'm sure they don't fall into that category for you but often when I see a game like that it makes me go H maybe I should find something else cuz I feel like there's a huge learning curve it's a turnoff for Publishers cuz they think oh yeah I've got to make you know this money deck of cards and I've got to do chipboard and I got to do Dice and I get two tokens are chips and the manufacturing cost spirals in their brain me one of the ways you can test this you know D is my game have too many components go to the game crafter put your game in with all the components and then see what the the the build price and the suggested MSRP like is going to be on the gamecrafter and if your game comes up to like $90 on the gamecrafter it's got too much stuff on it and a publisher to do it is going to be very hard and selling on Kickstarter is going be very hard because the the cost is just going to be too high MH building on that I also don't like games that uh to too many components have multiple randomizers like oh we have decks of cards that are random and we have a chip pull that's random and we have Dice and I've seen games that have all three random mechanics in the same game and I'm like why do I need to deal with three levels of Randomness in your game that's just going to drive me insane and you've tripled your component you have so many different components there so we've talked about number five we talked about as well so six and five we're down to four uh to complex so this is just uh uh a game that you play you know hundreds of times yourself with other people you understand it you designed it you know it so well it's sometimes hard to realize that nobody else will mhm so that recently played a game that uh the suggested but I don't know if we want to mention it but the uh what it was but the suggested we'll call them out we call out they made a lot of money and they they said in one of their updates they're they're working on improving that because they got feedback now from the outside as more people played it they got my money I I paid the money I could I have I paid money for it right suggested time was 45 to 60 minutes right yes okay and we played for 3 hours and we were a little more than halfway 60% done after 3 hours yeah you didn't you didn't say what it was this is Mega Man the board game okay here's what I'll say about Mega Man the board game I back on Kickstarter years ago they had lots of delays mostly related to licensing and Manufacturing uh and the uh license games are hard in that respect uh and it has a has a ton of components and the complexity was was pretty high with all the different things that happened and it had multiple randomizers both cards and dice kind of the one of the classic mistakes there and uh it felt like a Mega Man video game I love the Mega Man video games it was it was good am Merit trash and that I felt like I was in a Mega Man game I was collecting powers and going through the level and using energy and that was I mean the feeling of the game was was great if it was you know a third of the play time it would be better and we all we hit this randomizer problem we' go to the boss battle and beating the boss was just rolling the dice and getting a certain roll you had to roll it's a six-sided die only one face would help you beat the boss and your cards didn't really help you there and you know maybe you had a power that would help you from another boss maybe uh and so it was just it okay random let's try again roll a bunch of oh you made it or oh you didn't make it because the die screwed you and now you go back and that cost you another 15 minutes oh boy uh and so that uh that that lots of components of that so that that I'll give them there some pros and cons there feels like Mega Man and you know that feels like that's the game that really needs like um a second exension or expansion type thing like oh we kind of learned some lessons and cleaned it up mhm for in for complexity you know it's games like um uh Terror mystica maybe uh thing that um you if you sit down like you need to be a hardcore gamer to have a chance uh where a lot of people the first it'll take maybe a couple games in order for you to feel comfortable playing and really knowing what the objective is uh so games like that um are usually a bad idea you're targeting a really small group of people you're going to have a much larger group of people play The Epic long game yeah you'll have a much larger group of people who are going to sit down and really not like your game and and this is a common myth in board game circles you go to your board game night and the guys that show up every week are the most hardcore board game people and they want to play the big long 2hour game CU that's you know that scratches their itch as the super gamer but those guys are a fraction of the market they're the tip of the iceberg the large Market is the more casual player and if you have a game that plays it under an hour it's easier to learn you're going to sell more copies of your games so are you going to appeal to that you know top 10% of Gamers or you going to try to go for a larger chunk how I test this complexity thing is how long does it take to explain the rules and if it's over 5 minutes then I'm going to get nervous and it takes more than 10 minutes to explain the rules and your game is probably too complicated for something I'm really going to enjoy I'd rather play three other games in the same amount of time span all right we're getting to my top three here we go number three it's not fun there are games that work they're really well balanced uh you can sit down and play it they have rules they have a winning condition you can play through but you sit there it's you're doing a math problem or you're basically organizing a spreadsheet of uh of powers or I feel like that's where the game that I'm designing is right now it's like I had it's it's a fun idea I explained that okay the idea is this and people like oh let's play that you know and then we get in there it's like okay how does this work I got to add that and I got to you know it's it's I tried to simplify it down too like just symbols but it was it's it's gotten to the point where it just sort of like it's just about yeah adding up numbers and comparing them and it's like well this is doesn't feel like I'm doing the thing too much bookkeeping will I did a dice game with my design partner I hate dice as a randomizer I'm more of a card guy so he's been picturing me dice games for years now he he sends me the outline this is the dice no no this I don't like it no so finally like this look at the third draft of this particular dice game I'm like well this actually sounds pretty good I'm going to try it and we tried it and the core mechanic of the game is fun but there was so much bookkeeping of like tracking your points and rankings and all that stuff that it killed the fun of the game all the bookkeeping work in the game it made it just too much work play most games that I see that are you know like as far as like keeping score like on a pad of paper uh work best if it's like at the end of a round you know if you're doing it during the middle of the round it takes away from gameplay but at the end of the round or at the end of the game if you can just sit there and add up everything and you're good to go the other thing that I would say would be unfun for me that's not like Matthew or anything like that would be if I don't have anything to do on my opponent's turn and you go around the table different players and I'm just sitting there you know what I'm going to go over and get myself another drink you know I'm going to go to the bathroom right I'll come back and it still won't even be my turn you know that is a that's not a fun game simultaneous play wait for your turn yeah yep I agree with that number two uh it doesn't let the player make interesting decisions or choices so again this is another kind of case of the game works um but uh it's I kind of just always do the same thing or maybe I draw a hand of of cards and it's just like well I play the high card uh or I play the low card and then I play the next lowest it's just like I do have I could play the high card but I know that's not going to give me the best chance to win so I'm always going to keep doing this and you just keep making the same things where maybe you have do I go white or do I go black and like I guess I'll go black but it doesn't have much of a an impact on the game um and or or it's just like uh okay I have to discard a card now discard a card uh but if if it was like I could either discard a card or spend into gold uh or maybe move my truck up one spot you know like then it it gives me something like H now I can I can do a lot of different things it's not you know you did kind of make me be a false Choice has to be a meaningful choice choice to do yeah people like that they like to choose between things and not just kind of do like well I guess I do that again number one number one number one it's not unique yeah so you just take I play the game and although I'm playing a game that's different maybe the mechanics are different or this combination of mechanics are different but I feel like I've played this before that that's what uh I I've seen often times in games too we could go back to number 10 where it's the Apples to Apples you know you can do any variant of that you want I'm still going to feel like I'm playing Apples to Apples uh and or you can even take you know the auction system from raw you can take the the uh the deck building from Dominion you can put it together uh and but if I still feel like I'm playing kind of one of those games or both of those games I've already had this a big one I a lot of deck building games don't do anything past essentially what Dominion does and so I I feel like yeah every whenever someone's like hey play this deck building game I'm like okay and then we start and it's like okay so essentially I'm just doing Dominion Dominion with a new theme maybe a new Twist on it but still yeah it's just Dominion building on that it's it's not unique mhm in and that I would ask you as a publisher cuz I've heard conflicting views of this and different Publishers like a differently some Publishers like when you sit down and explain a game to them you compare it to other games this is like blah blah blah and blah blah blah mixed together we have like this from so and so like this was so and so some Publishers like p a movie that way this is this meets this that's how movies work right they all they like remakes and rehashes of things because that's how the market works and I've had other Publishers say don't do that at all that's just a turn off if it's like another game and so as when someone is showing you a game do you like it if they compare it to other games or no I don't um if they do mention that if they say you know yeah this is like carcassone then I am going to compare it to that as I play but that's probably not a good thing I want I want a new experience uniqueness cells especially for a company you know that we're still mostly based on Kickstarter for beginner for to see if a game is good enough to to sell you know we'll start on kick starter and you need a unique game that's the most important thing about it and so that's what I want so if I think this is just like carcassone or too much like carcassone I'm not going to touch it okay well thank you guys for joining us this week uh that was Brian's top 10 list next week we'll be back with Jeremy's top 10 list yeah we'll let the listeners decide and the viewers decide I've been your host Richard newon I'm here as always with Jerry MCM maner and Brian HK and I'll see you across the table someday hey this is Richard to remind you that you can check out our website at board game. bus old episodes are indexed by subject to make finding an answer to your question easier you can find links to our BGG Guild other networking sites and if you feel like supporting us our patreon account donations are used for equipment to improve the presentation of our podcast thanks for watching or listening thanks so much for watching The Dice Tower videos find more great videos and reviews as well as our toprated audio podcast at diow docomo find other great shows at diow network.com I'm Eric summerer and you've been watching The Dice Tower The Dice Tower is sponsored by cool stuff Inc where you can find great games for great prices cool stuff in stock check them out at cool stuffinc.com

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 105,174

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming

Id: 4cLvXh8Fp68

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2016