Going Cardboard: a Board Game Documentary

thank you [Music] my grandfather taught us how to play you know everything from war to casino to poker rummy gin backgammon uh we'd go on long trips somewhere and we'd be had that all in the in the station with like one of us leaning over the seat the other one's sitting in the back i would sit down with my brother who would play different things on a rainy day and whatnot and we played a lot of games for the holidays you know pretty much from sort of thanksgiving to christmas and every time we would go you know to be with our grandparents we'd always play games there's still probably a closet full of games at my parents house yeah i grew up playing a lot of games as a kid it was one of the things that we did our house we didn't have a tv we didn't watch many movies much at all we read lots of books but when we wanted to do something as a family we played board games [Music] you know a lot of people who don't play games regularly say well i used to do that as a kid but you know you still do play games [Music] if you go back 25 years or something like that 30 years now i think the markets were very similar the games that you bought in the united states were the same games that were popular in europe at that time the publishers in germany and the press in germany they got together and decided to create a jury of people in the press to once a year select the best game that was published in the last year they call it spielberg which is game of the year and by doing that it's grown to the point now where the game that wins will be able to sell hundreds of thousands of games within the next year because solely because they won the award origins has an origins award which is done by the the game industry the gamma which is the game manufacturers association runs that show and has been giving out the orange awards for many many years but there's no real national award that he has the significance of the sdj by making an award that was worth winning financially and financially is very important it's nice to have an award to put on the shelf but i think by making an award that was worth the money to go for well people go for it and as a result over the last 30 years you know artists got better publishers got better so the whole gaming scene if you want to call it that in germany kind of rallied around and everybody individually and collectively worked very hard to be the one that won the award next year so one big difference between the u.s and the german game market is that newspapers in germany will run game review columns they will have people who review games regularly and therefore the public will know oh this game exists this game exists i'll give you the one stories we're in the grand hotel esplanade in berlin and the the press conference was at 10 am or 11 am as i came off the elevator an associated press reporter was there he says you have to come with me and i said well i have to be over there for the presentation he says i have a deadline and i need you your pictures are viewed so i was like nobody was there to tell me what to do so we actually went outside the hotel and he took a picture of me with uh with the game in one hand and with an elf doll and the other this was alphaland and elf doll and the other that picture was in almost every paper in germany the next day of course even the games that don't win are better than they were 5 10 15 years ago so i think that's how it happened to be different there we didn't have a similar situation in the united states [Music] i think in america there is this games are kids stuff and then there is the hobby market and the hobby market is these typical students who spend an enormous lot of time on very sophisticated games but the middle ground what i call so to speak to the family the core isn't quite there in america the mirror game started in 1999 so that's our 11th year and so right around then people that have been in the industry know that that was kind of a big changing point for when games were getting big board games specifically board and card games so you had these like three iterations you had like miniatures games back in the 70s and you know what we will call historicals now so there was that kind of iteration then you had role-playing games you know also starting in the 70s and going into the 80s and really big in the 80s yeah you have the dungeon and dragons you have all these things which are very attractive to the people in the teens and 20s and they have the time for it and then into the 90s now you've got collectible games you've got pokemon which was huge as more of really a collectible phenomenon than a game but it brought attention to the game no surprise that the trading card games which are relatively complex happen in america i guess it was 1993 or so there was a game that came out called magic the gathering and you might have heard of that one so i became kind of a magic junkie for a couple of years 93 94 95 and then it wasn't until probably 98 that a good friend of mine named dan grandquist introduced me to a game called settlers of catan settlers of catan which has been described as a cardboard crack people that liked games that maybe bought everything that hasbro released or played some of these war games or you know would find you know it would get every avalon hill game that ever came out they started hearing about this game in germany called the settlers of catan or siebler von koton in german but it was hard to get a hold of because it was made in germany so you had to know a buddy that was an army or somebody that traveled for business or somebody that was coming over for vacation or something for some reason to go and buy you a copy and mail it back to the us copy started sneaking into the united states and people loved the game i think the big breakthrough game was settlers you know when that came through you know my eyes were opened i mean it was starting to open and i was you know i was just hooked from there settlers of katana is a game that i've always been amazed by because it seems like if if you teach it to non-gamers i would think that it would be a little bit too complicated but it doesn't seem to be [Music] [Music] if [Music] my name is klaus tuber i'm a game designer and one of my most famous games is katan so katan was inspired by my dad read a lot about the vikings and then and also he thought it was very interesting the um to see that they're not on they were not only raiders but they also were involved in trade when i read about the vikings when they discovered isle iceland i have thought what would happen if some explorers come to an island there's no one and what will they do if you drew a circle around all of the asor islands you would probably get like what what is uh you know katan in his mind and it's quasi um historical in terms that a viking tribe could have come out and and settled on this fictitious island um if if that in fact the asorts were just a little bit more bigger and had more you know had sheep and all of the katana resources to offer so and i was reading games magazine and found heard about these games settlers guitar and carcassonne and i looked at the games and i thought ah they look a little boring but i guess i'll try them out to see if they're any good or not they were suddenly we discovered euro games and they were wonderful they were a lot shorter fun very interactive i remember the first time we played puerto rico and i was just like i think i was like this game is amazing i think the first designer game i bought was adelfe flichte also known as hoity-toity have the spiel of jar symbols like what the heck was that i said well if it's game of the year in germany it can't be all that bad these aren't the kind of games you're likely to find in a toys r us or a walmart they were exotic they were interesting and everyone participated at the same time it wasn't you know you were waiting for your turn to come around so i mean you open it up and you get something that has real wood pieces and nice feeling cards and this theme the thing that really blows away when you opened it up was the production values were just fantastic and it was a whole nother world one of my co-workers who's actually now my husband uh came in and he said hey you guys want to play a game we're like like monopoly or you know like the normal scrabble and he's like no i had this weird game called carcassonne so we loved it so much we made him play every day for six months yes the fun part is there is this concept or this word of being a gateway a gateway game is it introduces you to those it has strategy but it also has elements of luck it's something that people can relate to quickly and they can pick up quickly well i mean the with katan so many people can can grasp how to play that game ticket to ride is kind of the optimum there's three rules basically and that's all you need to know and you can start playing this is where i you know i played this game a ton i really enjoyed my whole family enjoys it you know and this is sincere i'm not lying i'm telling you like this is from my experience you will enjoy tickets ride and literally like three other groups of customers are in the store and a group over here goes oh yeah that game's awesome we have it and we've played it and then another person challenge and they go yeah that game's awesome and then the other person he's like oh yeah we play that a bunch several years ago i had two emails within a couple of days both basically said i played i took your game ticket to ride to my grandmother's house and i played with my grandmother and my kids and the next day my grandmother called me and said the next time you come you bring that train game back well someone likes boating there's a game called power boats which is a racing game if someone likes horse racing there's some really nice uh royal turf is a nice horse racing game if someone like cars you've got things like formula day which is a car racing game i think there are family games there are you know games for gamers and games for families and in between and beginners and so on and so forth so there's a wide variety of stuff you know a whole new world every time you open a box one minute you're on the banks of the nail farming crops and the nail rivers flooding you then you're off climbing a mountain or building some monument chopping off kings of england's heads yes exactly you know ancient rome is popular a lot of historical themes um pirates are always good the ultimate goal for reefing counties is trying to feed your parrot fish a lot of coral tiles which will score varying numbers of points into the game based on which coral is dominant over other corals i always try and sell bonanza by telling people that it's the best german game about bean farming they'll ever play you're trying to grow these different corals on the board and you take ownership of them by putting a shrimp on it have a left dog and a white dog and depending on which dog is stronger depends on if you're turning right or if you're turning left so there are things for people just tired and just came from work and wanted to have a good time with families and kids so there are games for that you know war games still exist they didn't stop making them in the 60s they still make them if you want to play a game basically you need a degree in engineering to play they have them whether it's a deck building game or a card game or a collectible card game or a trading card game or a board game or a miniature game or a party gamer it doesn't matter i can go on for you know days all the different subcategories of things it's a war game oh well i don't like that that's a rolling move game or i like this because it has worker management those things don't really matter really what we draw the line is like people like well how do you define this game how do you categorize oh my god is it fun whenever i talk about i like board games the next message i'm going to hear is oh you mean like monopoly and then sometimes if i'm feeling snarky i'll say no i mean fun games like well it's not really my favorite monopoly is a very old game it was a different time and this time didn't have the pace our time has so if the game lasts too long it didn't matter i'm okay with monopoly um we have our house rules but so does everyone else uh i've never played it the way it's supposed to be played a lot of people are surprised that you know you found out where like if you land on the space and nobody buys the house it goes up for auction so there's an auction all the time i never played that way if i could wave my magic wand and make all the monopolies become settlers of catan and suddenly you know everybody knows how to play that instead i think it's a good thing i think it's better game i think it's more fun they won't think like oh well maybe monopoly isn't a great game they'll think monopoly was my child it was awesome they get defensive but monopoly isn't that great a game for the most part you know that that american you know you think about what they call ameritrash or just america games that have an american uh heritage or a pedigree i don't like the term because i happen to like some of those games i think to me what ameritrash games are sort of popular games that are not quite family games things like monopoly but that are produced by american companies so hero escape being one that's set up upstairs right now things like that um i personally just like board games i don't really care where they came from or or who designed them when anime just got popular in america like it was niche it was just starting to grow into something more only the best of the best got translated and brought over so people didn't see the thousand craft robot shows they saw like the few great shows and with this boutique gaming it's the same thing only this field this year only the really good games primarily get translated and it's easy for someone to say oh german games are the best in the world because they see the 99 hit rate oh french movies are so great yeah because you only see the two that get put in the art theater right you don't see the 200 that no one ever wants to watch again in their entire lives there's the american style game which is kind of the crunchy like theme and rolling lots of dice and then there's the euro style game which is like no dice and not as much player interaction and take that and we've kind of tried to blend the two of them together take our inspiration from both them now i will say monopoly there's a new version this tropical tycoon monopoly which uses victory points and you accumulate points throughout the game in addition each player has a special ability that they can use in the game and it uses a dvd but so if you want to try monopoly with a little bit of euro game flavor try out monopoly tropical tycoon and you'll find that it it makes monopoly a more palatable experience because it's not just about grinding everyone into the dust so for me it's a starting point of discussion it still serves its purpose i mean it taught me how to count it's an important game and we can't like understate the the importance and this is how great the game was for what it was but at the same time we can't overstate how good the game is because it's not that good there's a lot of great people that i met that i game with regularly now two or three fridays a month to play games and you know just be social order some pizza and things like that so i moved to syracuse and for a few years would play with people i could find colleagues and things like that but then i decided to start a board gaming group so i contacted the local game shop owner and said i'd like to start the syracuse sportgamers group i'd like to meet here at the shop we talked back and forth about what that would involve but they did have an open night and so we got this started now the first month or so it was pretty much just me [Laughter] and then a few people wandered by and wanted to see what was going on and i showed them and then they brought some of their friends and then more people wandered by and so it's actually grown and grown in some nights we've had 30 or 40 people show up i teach in school so i started board game club if i didn't teach in school i would talk to a school and see if i could start one there anyway i started one at my church i have a board game tonight at my church when i was near army bases i started board game clubs on the different bases for the soldiers and then i find whatever local groups in area and if there's not a local group then i start one i've met some of my favorite people or people that i would consider to be our best friends through gaming strangers will invite people into their homes to play games at the drop of a hat like we we'd moved into the middleton valley weren't there that long and we met some people at the local gaming club that night we just went over to their apartment and you know we'd known each other for like a couple hours and we played uh starfarers of catan like way into the night it was super awesome people i've met through board gaming i have i i know people in all 50 states i know people in over 50 countries that global network is so neat that special network of people who have this common interest gamers have that connection where you say i'm going to be in california you know next month for whatever reason where can i go to play games we're not scared we're not hurting each other it's not a police situation my mom was like going to a strangest house i'm like like why not i've been to hundreds of strangers houses whatever if this game's in the house is a good house yeah [Music] what happened was around 1999 we were looking for board gaming groups in the area we couldn't find any so we ended up putting out some calls on various email groups and uh some of the internet forums like some of the use net forms and we found out that there were a lot of groups in the area what we discovered was that many of the groups didn't know each other and so people were gaming but they didn't really understand that there were other groups doing exactly the same thing so we decided that we would sort of form a list where the groups could at least interact a little bit people that were looking for more gaming could go to more than one group and uh finally we got the list up to about 50 or 60 people and we decided that this was probably a good time to actually have an event that brought all of the local groups together and we had unity games won i think in january 2000 and 44 people showed up and we couldn't believe that we had 44 people that would come for the day and play games and we kept doing them and each time they kept growing a little bit and you know today i know we're over 350 i haven't looked at the final count so it's pretty exciting a lot of times i don't feel the need to buy games because everybody around me is a gamer and i'm like hey i know he bought this game we'll just play that over his house or he'll bring in that game that's a short half hour game we'll play it over lunch one day and so um when you're surrounded by so many people that are gamers um you don't necessarily need to get everything but there's always the collecting element and some people just like to have them well i my game collection isn't that big it's actually kind of a modest number my game collection is pretty small compared to some of the people here it's between 100 and 130 games that's not that big three to 350 maybe we have probably 350 games or so over 400 really i think so wow probably about twice as many as i should have about 425 games i think my game collection hovers at around 500. we have about 500 right now um we're behind on inventorying it's something over 11 000 probably about eleven thousand five hundred ish somewhere in there collecting is the best game of all um in some senses uh i like searching out in the thrift stores and auctions and that sort of stuff that's a lot of fun i had to start inventorying when i started losing track of what i had come back from an auction and then discover uh heck i already had this one so then as we got more and more it became more important for like insurance purposes and whatnot so yeah so it's all inventoried and then as far as actually where something physically is i just remember it for the most part i always have to ask her yeah and the one who knows where they are i always say i'm gonna stop or i if i'm going to get more games i need to get rid of some first it doesn't always work out that way there's always that one game that i haven't played in you know five or six years but you know you never know when i get old and i go to that uh old folks gaming home you know and they don't make this game anymore you know i may i may need it the game stores so these stores that are game stores they don't have games they have comics and sports cards and like they have a couple games but like you don't walk in like games this place is all about games and they're not stores because they don't sell anything they just stand there anymore like they're like game vendors they're like oh you can bring that up to the counter if you want and i'm gonna sit here the whole time it's the standard comic book guy you know you may pay me five dollars for that today um and he comes up and you know gives you the thing and then he sells it to you or he doesn't because he wanted to close early or something you know that sort of unprofessional atmosphere and so that's what we didn't like and that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to make a better breed of game store because we want that to integrate with the local community we want to be a positive force within the community it's hard to leave he opened a second store so quickly it's completely well stocked it's packed i go down there on saturday goodness there's a lot of people down there and he's really doing a great job let's say i have a budget of 50 a month that i spend on games or 25 a month okay cool spend that at your local store a portion of that is going to maintain the physical presence in your community that will then bring new people in so that your gaming group doesn't die over time because you can meet people there through events all that stuff and you can't do that online you can meet people online that's great and you can coordinate events and all that stuff but it doesn't replace the people that aren't going on those sites to find out about things online i was down there in manchester the other day a woman walked in to ask for something not a game she was looking for toys particular shop i don't know what exactly i didn't hear what she was asking for but it was he's like well no we don't carry that we carry a lot of board games this that the other and within 10 minutes she had already left her information and signed up for the free game drawing and had taken a couple of game recommendations from him for her nephews uh and said you know this is really great i never knew all this existed before i have to come back and you're just like holy cow dan we're trying to focus on having the best selection the best service and the best presentation the best experience for games that's all we're trying to do the designing community for games is amazing where do the greatest board games in the world come from i'll tell you everywhere originally most of the designs were german or european and it slowly begins that the americans sort of make their own sort of footprint and you get americans who are designing games of that ilk i can name you great games that come from germany from america from france from italy from japan from korea from taiwan previously we had no idea who the american game designers were there was no recognition for them they didn't appear in boxes there was nothing to let you know that this game was designed by a person so that was sort of where it got started was uh just typing board games into a search engine one day and it kind of catapulted from there a few years later i was lucky enough to be invited to alan moon's gathering of friends and met you know all these great people designers um heads of game publishing you know companies and i thought well i could do this i saw a job posting at the fantasy flight website and uh i'm like well i've got a pretty good job right now but this is kind of a dream job i have to apply for it so i applied and didn't hear back for a long time and then uh and then a couple months later i got a call back and i said we want to fly out for an interview and it just kind of worked out so yeah i had nearly every other hell game going and i just loved the idea of visiting their factory and meeting some game designers etc over in america so got on a plane flew to america i rocked up to the uh avalon hill office and she said hey i'm here from australia any possibility of designing a game for you eric dodd and his son jack dot took me out to dinner that night and we talked for five hours about what things i could do et cetera et cetera and anyway they said yeah go home to australia do do a sequel to one of our games and i picked diplomacy and yeah that's how it all started so many people in the board game design business are such unpretentious people i meet famous people all the time and no one blinks oh this is richard board the designer of memoir 44. okay great good to meet you and it's not it's like meeting a rock star except they're friendly accessible when they're not surrounded by guards welcome to the dungeon twister i'm a big addict of all the extreme sports gliding sports and all that kite surfing snowboarding composer single rapper and now a publisher with ludically well gift chat really came from a very simple question my daughter asked we were actually trying to conversation about what game to invent it was just after christmas and she asked this really kind of poignant question which was how does father christmas decide what gifts to give to children and you know from that i was like i was on a radio interview and i'm chatting and someone calls in the radio uh host goes okay nick so it's great we've got a live customer of yours on the line who's played the game and i'm in there oh this is not going to go down the middle this is either going to be a lover or a hater i don't know which one it's going to be and the woman sort of went off on this tirade about how wonderful the game was and she goes she'd always want to be cryogenically preserved right which is just crazy and she'd never had the courage to tell her family about this gift right so she plays the game and this is kind of just the serendipitous kind of thing that happened with gift wrap out comes that gift out of the pack because that is one of the gifts in the game to be frozen and so it comes up i mean amongst a whole lot of other gifts well none of her family gave that gift she said it was her greatest gift comes to scoring it everyone scores really badly but now they know you know family that hadn't happened but gift wrap just provided that means where that could happen the biggest people in gaming are the publishers uh the designers are important but the publishers are the ones who actually get the game from the designers uh creative mind and onto our tables and these publishers are are big i would say jay tomlinson from rio grande zev from z man games the folks over at mayfair games uh christian peterson is a big driving force from fantasy flight games uh all the little smaller publishers the publishers from germany days of wonder there's just so many different companies i'm afraid that i'm going to miss one but the publishers are out there and they're making it work i i think i mentioned this in a column i did on my site the jay thompson you know is in a way the father of all this like everything we see around here at all the conventions you can a lot of it leads right back to jay and i don't think jay gets enough credit for being sort of the father of all this my home office overlooked the rio grande river and so on the day that i set as a deadline to come up with a title i'm looking at the rio grande river thinking i got to come up with a name and i didn't want jay's games or anything like that and i said oh rio grande games i i learned of the games about 15 years ago and said wow these are really great and kind of decided that they ought they would be also enjoyed by people who spoke english but of course not while they were in german so certainly the games were already out in germany but he was the one who came up with the brilliant idea of publishing the games co-publishing them in english and bringing them over here the idea was simply well talk to the germans see if they would allow me to do english versions of them and they did people always like to think oh there's this huge competition between companies and whatnot you know at its core we all are understand i think that it's a growing market and that you know anyone that if so if we teach if i were to teach someone carcassonne and they like it it's likely that at some point in the future they may run across the settlers of catan you know i say that semi facetiously because they will you go to a show and like we help each other out like we're near we were near zman's booth last year and zev is a great guy and always go over and i say hi and there's competitiveness in the sense that we all want to do well and and uh you know but there's not if if mayfair or you know rio grande they get more people involved in board games that's better for me people help each other out it's just it's a really friendly industry who are the game designers who are the people making you know modern strategy games and to a large degree they all have other careers and they're all doing other things there are very few people who make a living designing games my professional job is a family physician i do sports medicine and gaming is my hobby so my day job i work in publishing i do production work for school textbooks my job is in the federal ministry for the environment of germany i'm a forest ranger so it's pretty much like you know aragon lord of the rings very much like that with less orcs and more mending and their surveys and things like that i was actually a director of a big mortgage company i used to be a computer programmer years ago but that's all behind me now i'm an advocate which is broadly the equivalent of an english banister but it means that i get to be not only a lawyer but i get to wear a wig and i'm the only person at the scottish bar that looks younger with a wig on i found a way to to be only game designer by publishing my own stuff uh so i get more money out of each copy so i don't have to have a success of a million games or something like that so i can cancel i i went to the biggest game board game fair in the world which is in germany in essen in 1991 and there were a lot of guys with little small company stuff they they have a little booth and yeah some handmade stuff whatever 200 copies and i was seeing that it is possible to do so really this has been the case ever since you know games really started way back when because like george parker used to design and play all his games back in the 18th and 1900s that's how he started he made a game and then he took the train to boston you can imagine back in the you know the eighteen hundreds from the train to boston and walked around to different shops and was like would you like to sell my game would you like to sell my game so we're really kind of still at that phase like people are still doing that essen is actually kind of the reason for that because they can take day trips they can go over there on a saturday or something like that get in go buy a couple games put them on their shelves and now over the next year they'll play them and you know that's what they do and the cool thing about it is is that the um that gives rise to small publishers where you know in our market there's just very little place for small publishers it's really hard as a publisher to make it in this business i mean i wouldn't want to do it my name is greg lamb and in my spare time i run paradise games a independent games company that i started with a couple of friends back in 2001 right now it's just me though and i put out uh games whenever i can and uh three of them have been in the games 100 issue of games magazine this is one of the earlier board games that we've done called knock about it's on the front they made a t-shirt just for commercial sake with the board and in the back is the uh rules of the game you know that's some publishers go to self publication route to avoid that i can control everything you know i can be the auteur and present the games how i want to present them and sometimes that situation works out fantastically if you look at someone like freedom and frieza who now publishes several games a year both through his own company and through other companies and he has a huge number of fans who like his his style of work in germany the games all start with a letter f because of my name friedman frieza and the game company 2 f spiele so they are always starting with an f and they are always in green boxes this is a branding of my company and the translations normally still have the green box not all of them and in some translation issues the f is not in there anymore you know he also he works as a disc jockey he's worked part time in a game store he still does as far as i know he does all this stuff together and yet he does enough game design and sells enough where he can kind of you know do what do you do what he wants with that i want to put these games out into the community because i think there is definitely an audience for them and i actually i don't know how to do it in any other manner but self-publishing i mean i really dislike the process of trying to sell your idea to someone and waiting on them to approve you if someone wants to call and say hey we like restaurant row we'll pick it up i'm all ears but i actually pitched it in origins 2008 to a publisher and i actually hadn't heard from the publisher a year later when i had gotten my ducks in a row to the point where i could put the game out myself so i just put it out myself the thing about game designers is the really successful game designers are also businessmen and they do all the parts of the job promoting themselves and the ones who want to be artists and it's just like it's just like other types of artists if they if that's what they want to do that's fine but they're going to have a lot harder time to be successful just because you really have to run your your life like a business i mean ideally you can you know make a living and keep doing it but that's a very rare thing to happen you know the classic story is the people who designed a trivial pursuit when they first designed trailer pursuit they were they self-published the game and they did a lot of research to get questions and this than the other but they were not business people they came out with a game where uh forget the exact numbers but it was something like it cost them 60 to produce the game and they were selling them for around 30. they completely botched it they had no idea what they were doing in the business sense but they had sold the game to people and then they produced it they were losing money on every copy they sold but it became a media phenomenon and it got picked up by a larger publisher and then they made a ton of money my name is brian johnson and i i live in salem massachusetts and i'm a board game designer i've been living in salem now for a little over 12 years and as much as i love the town out of towners can sometimes especially this time of year being october can make life less than convenient need help finding some place what are you looking for to here you want to go to the dracula's castle on the wharf you want to go this way and take a left i guess that's what's what drives our economy here the tourism and the witch hats and the busloads of people that come into town every year and you know by the end of october i'm very ready for november 1st the idea for hong di it originally started in about 2005. i was working my normal job at night and the floor at work has it's just a bunch of squares the tiles are just all these squares and one night i was just looking at them and i was just seeing patterns in my mind with the squares on the floor and i went home that night and i had some graph paper and i started making the uh the different patterns that i was thinking of and then i heard about the proto-slam competition that cambridge games factory had uh was running at unity games which is a local convention i think there might have been four or five people who participated in it and they they really liked brian's great wall of china it's a fun game about building the chinese wall okay you're two to six players you're building chinese wall you've got these special roll cards that give you different actions you handle money they design together and you score points by building an awesome wall you want to contribute to the great wall of china and luckily i ended up winning first place in that and about two weeks later ed carter from cambridge games factory called me and asked me if i'd like to have my game published which of course i did when cambridge games factory originally picked it up i had a prototype that they put together for me and i went to the gathering of friends in 2007 and of course there's a lot of publishers there and other designers and things and so i was playing it with as many people as i could and one of the guys that i played it with was marcus welborn from jklm and then cambridge just [Music] it didn't actually it's not completely dead but there was some bumps in the road and they ended up giving me the option whether i wanted to back out of the contract and that's when jklm decided to pick up the game and i signed a new contract with them and now it's due to be released early 2009 so any time now so it's a sort of a way it's good that jk11 is picking up but it still has taken was it three four years now to get to get it to market uh i'm sure brian wanted that to happen a lot sooner than that even after jklm picked it up it's like oh we could pump that sucker out in two months you know and it's like but it was just delay after delay after delay i think that for them it was difficult because they were trying to release like three games at the same time this one tulip mania and ascendancy and all that that did was slow down all three games [Music] sometimes the contracts in the game world are very haphazard and a lot of handshake deals are made with people saying yeah we'll do this we'll do 3 000 copies of your game and you'll get this royalty and we're going to come out at this date it'll be a little email conversation that you know that's all we have and sometimes that's all you need because things work out fine and there's no problems and other times you need more who actually has the right to the game who owns the rights are you buying the rights are you licensing how long are you licensing the rights for in which languages in which countries all sorts of details that you know beginning designers or beginning publishers even may not be aware of or think about when they're coming out with their game to most people essen is a city in germany but if you ask a board gamer essen is mecca [Music] [Applause] describe essen in one sentence crazy it's so busy like this morning i arrived i had i had my box of mini gift wrap under my arm and i just got i couldn't move i got swept with the crowd like as you come in through the entrance am i oh i can't move and then i i got around one corner like and i was lost basically we have two big main game conventions in the united states one's origins one's gen con they're in the summer you know origins is like 15 000 gen cons 25 000. in essen they pull about 150 000 people this is 90 board games and it's so much you know and people just look at me like you're making all this up right this is not this is not true like no it's really you know it's true it's really just it's really just different [Music] oh thank you [Music] is [Music] you will hear more english italian french spanish japanese probably than you will german today because this is the day that everyone who has taken their paid vacation bought themselves a ticket to germany brought their travel luggage scale with them so they can weigh out on how much under their under their uh airplane weight allowance you know comes and buys a ton a ton of stuff come in on saturday and go to one of the booths and we're just walking down the aisles and you'll see mom and dad and the kids and grandma and grandpa there are at least ten hundred and every one of those is jam-packed full of people playing games off of stands [Music] [Music] it's so hard to explain to people what essen is like and and the closest government i can come is if you were to take a street fair which is a typical street fair in the u.s take everybody that's there and drop them into a game show read several reports from americans who went here and they were always amazed at such a big thing but whenever i read about gen con i thought hey can con must be similar but it's not at all i'm normally two days here on the first day i get the collector's stuff especially since they have connected make the con and the gamescon i can go to the one hall to get the comics and then i go over to the role playing games and get the limited editions you're in this environment that you can all share no matter what language you're in i mean i still remember my first time when i went to spiel i was learning a game from a japanese designer there was a german person who was demoing the game speaking asking questions to the designer in japanese speaking to me in english and i was playing with three french people where one french person was translating in the french for the other two so it was four languages all at once mixing into this just so we could play this card game [Music] agricola the more on the more farmers the game about farming hard decisions cold winters yeah you log in we give you a card you can log in with you don't need a board game geek account log in and you can rate any game at the pair uh between one and five stars so uh do you play t-shirts i play [Music] i mean it is like the mecca of board gaming world where you go down on your knees five times a day and you play games on the floor because there's no room on the table [Music] i've been there and it is amazing you don't have to go there to enjoy board games but wow there's more board games there than you'll ever see the rest of your life put together i think every game designer every publisher is there it's just a very exciting place to go it's expensive when you live in america or another country outside of germany but wow every board gamer wants in their life even if you do once in your lifetime once before you die you need to make the make the pilgrimage to essen as it were the best place to present your games even today is at the essence show anybody who has a game whether it's one or three or ten to show can go to the show get a ticket walk in take a set of business cards just walk around up to the booth of the different publishers and ask to have a meeting to show what we find it easier to come to us and to publish our game to do a thousand copies and then if publishers want it they then they can speak to us in the way we can give it to them and it's much easier for us because we then license it and we can then go in to do the thing that we do best and it's fun for us which is published our next game when i came in 2000 i brought in lunatics loop and i insured it and uh little did i know you have to pay an import tax on your games so the import tax was well over you know my net for for the games i've been going i think since i was 13 14 or something yeah and uh so um that was very small uh initially and so that's that's been pretty um pretty amazing to come here and still see that you know it's still retained it's it's charm and soul and everything [Music] [Music] hi i'm marcus welborn i produce and many other things and do report ultimately anything to do with board gaming we will look at people's designs help develop games uh generally if we help develop we will go down the road of production uh we're aiming for one day i i really don't want to put too much of a date on it but we're early early next year so we've got we've got one game going through first which is now finished ready to go it's just waiting for me to press the button and juan lee is behind that we've got a little bit of catching up to do on last year i mean if we haven't made enough back on the last game we can't go to the next game it's just it's just one of those sort of cycle factors that thank you that makes things very difficult sometimes and frustrating because we want to move and we want to keep things going but it doesn't always work the way you want it to and sometimes bad things happen [Music] the publisher goes through things and they have to it takes time to work things out whether it's whether it's financial or if they're having some other kind of difficulty with production or translating whatever it is i know that those things take time to work out you know to put kind of a humorous spin on it i got an email a while ago from a friend of mine uh named john wonky and he had pre-ordered huang di about a year and a half ago now so it's been a long time and you know he kind of cheered me up a little bit when he said he sent me an email and he says you know it's okay because one of these days when i'm old and gray a box will show up at my door it'll be haunted i totally forgot about it and it was just really really funny because you know it made me think okay you know in the whole scheme of things a year two years okay it's hard to wait through it's hard to be patient but you know when you look at the bigger scale it's gonna eventually be out it's it's gonna get released you know and things will be better but it's just getting to the point where you know you i'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel so to speak we're getting so close [Music] aklm essentially declared bankruptcy um not real i don't know what it is in the uk but they essentially are out of business and prime games which is owned by somewhat the same people uh is going to be publishing some of the games that jklm was doing and there's a number game to kind of skip the queue where they were like we're going to publish these three games and then other things like you know went ahead of the the other stuff and now i i don't know there was a note about hongdae being available again where the designer now has the right to yeah the designer has the rights and he can you know take it somewhere else and brian posted he's like i didn't know about this it's very sad to see because ryan's a really sweet guy and the game is good and then through circumstances like this where you are partnering up with other people that's what happens and sometimes things just don't work out the way you want them to work out [Music] so there's a game in everybody right i mean it's absolutely true everyone's got a book inside them everyone's got a game inside them and if you want to publish that game you know just prepare yourself for the mental rollercoaster because it is it's quite a journey first piece of advice always is put something down on paper start putting your thoughts on paper ideas aren't worth anything there's no point in keeping an idea secret everyone has the same idea probably as you just tell it to everyone you know so that you can discuss it and maybe learn something new keeping it a secret is pointless you know even if you think oh you're gonna make money off of it no you're not the only thing that is worth anything is the ability and the talent to execute on an idea right if you have a game you like but you think it is not as good as it should be then it is a good good thing to do to work on it just to change it and sometimes you get only a game changed but sometimes you get a totally different game and then you're a game designer but every month or so we have hundreds of games that we've got about 80 of the way to being a game and then there's that critical moment where you have all the concepts and like everything's together but you need like the link and we just we never get the link and then we move on to some other game i think one of the things that's important about it is we didn't sit out and say we're going to make money what we want to do is sit out and have them publish a board game and take it to essen and i think you know if you don't have the passion for that then you're probably if you're thinking i'm gonna make i'm gonna produce a board game and make money it's not gonna work i hear people sometimes say i can't afford to go to germany well i couldn't afford it either but i can't couldn't afford not to go i think you need the heart it's the same with making a good novel or a good picture or without your heart you have no chance because the best games come out of passion like if you want a game to be good and you'll do everything it takes to make it good you'll play test it and if something's wrong with it you'll fix it it's easy when it's you know like a nintendo or something big or even like a you know standard american board games to get it just good enough to wear all right it might cost us ten thousand dollars and another week to make it this much better will we sell the same number of copies yes then just sell this game but the you know the crazy kinesia will sit there forever until the game is perfect miranda kenitsi has just he has really crossed the barrier where he has very good designs where he has a lot of fans people who want his work he successfully does new designs he does spin-offs of existing designs so he's fulfilling what publishers are asking him to do at the same time he's you know submitting his other things he knows what publishers want to see we can have a creative session in an afternoon and have two or three ideas which may fly but to then develop an idea into a product which is fantastic and really perfect it takes many months and so every idea almost becomes a burden i'm almost burdened by the many ideas i have and the team have because the development process is a long long circle and so i have my famous drawers at home in the in the in the studio which used to be 40 and they grew and grew and now it's 90. we have 90 drawers each drawer has one game and then one game idea in them which is in development in the gaming industry i just wanted to leave a trace i never ever dreamed it will reach this like this box to the box i'm i please myself i did the box but i would have loved to buy myself as a player and i thought same way as when i designed the game if i please myself maybe i'll please the most part of the same players in the world people sometimes say to me like well we'd love to have your job well they would now for sure but but like they they probably wouldn't have enjoyed all the other years as much i worked as a waiter most of my my life that i wasn't working in game companies and i i didn't mind that because it's just i could make my own hours and stuff so um yeah it's just i i think some people are successful right away without too much effort i certainly wasn't that way and so i appreciated a lot that uh you know what i had to go through at the end of a game of dominion when it comes to the point where the provinces are almost going to run out right and you're never going to shuffle your deck again you just forget buying action cards is dutchy ducky dutchy unless you can afford a problem and every time that happens he's like don't you panic time he buys deductions and i'm like what's dpt he's like dutchy panic time and i'm like i've been doing that we all know that same strategy of dutchy panic time but he had a name for it you know so it's like as soon as he brings that out it's like yeah dvt let's go end game's over my own son's music teacher asked me after one of his lessons a couple of months ago he said oh you know you all are german you know did you uh have you ever played dominion over thanksgiving break you know we played dominion very addictive everyone is building their own deck as they play this game but the the combinations are endless and yet it's simple enough that young children can play with adults and it's one of those few games i bring out and everyone seems to like it well that's that's that's the story that would instill hope and i guess you know a uh a designer who has some designs but doesn't know what to do with them so i made uh in october of 2006 and i made a bunch of cards which i eventually divided up into the main set in two expansions and then i made three more games that had nothing to do with the minion and my friends just refused to try them they were utterly uninterested they just wanted to play dominion and so okay i made more dominion expansions and so you know who should i show dominion to and i looked at the boxes of games i have i don't have a large collection but i have some and i looked at the boxes and it was rio grande rio grande we were going to do okay i'll contact rio grande i get a you know a number of emails on a regular basis from people saying you know do you consider designs from outside sources you know what do i have to do and i have a very standard answer um which is i only look at games at conventions i'll be at these conventions over the next year and this was like in january and the first con was in june just oh so i picked the first one which was origins okay i'll go to origins and he said great see you there and in the intervening time i mean i worked on these expansions more and then i worked on making polished versions of some of my older games that is just pre-year prototypes so that i could show them off it was really great that was at origins two years ago and someone said you got to play this game i think you'll like this game because i like hard games and so we went over we played it we said this is really good origins came around and the meeting time came around and you know we found each other and i sat down and the first game he showed me was dominion i said well i'll do that one so do you have a speculation on who you think might win uh well i think the minion probably is going against why haven't you tried dominion yet i've been working with that oh it's really fun and he plays out very well with two or three i didn't know about this stuff until making dominion and then everyone said oh this is the important award you know this is the one that matters that really affects sales uh it looked to me like probably it would get a special complex game award like they've done a few times when it didn't get a special complexity more and was actually nominated then i thought well it's not going to win because it's too complex [Music] it's a video presentation for the five nominees for smearless jars and then uh they left the cover and there was dominion it was a fabulous moment i called the the printer to place the big order and i called donald to let him know he called my wife you know it was it was nice to win it's a you know it's one thing to have your prediction about the world that you're confident and it's another thing for the world to back that up with stuff actually happening about who are the you know the famed american designers you know there's there's not a lot not a lot that we could talk about you know donald vacarino is an american there we go donald vacarino one game of the year in germany in 2009 and ask anyone on the street and that's going to be like why i don't know what you're talking about because game of the year in germany does not mean anything in the us even though the game will sell you know millions of copies around the world um the question is jay is the medium that successful in the u.s as it is over youtube yes it is very very popular in the u.s and actually around the world we're in 16 languages yes dominion is now appearing i see it in borders in barnes and noble it's in other game stores you know it's it's out there but there is zero marketing and there's zero presence or awareness of what it is um it's just sort of leaking out in bits and pieces and it's up to people who are interested in games to go out and do the research and find out what's coming you know i want to see what andy looney is coming out with next no one knows who andy looney is and he has a game a card game called flux which is now in its fourth edition there's all sorts of spin-offs it sold an unbelievable number of copies if you look at records from game stores and say which are the best-selling games flux is always up there near the top the other one being munchkin so we got steve jackson and andy looney it's probably the best-selling american designers on the market today no one is going to you know no one in the general population is going to have a clue who these guys are even though all of steve jackson's games come from a company called steve jackson games because they're like do people even play board games anymore doesn't everybody just play video games these days and then they realize that there's this whole world that they're not even aware of and i think there are some great gateway games out there like settlers that make people aware of like holy cow this is this is something new and and i didn't even realize that people even still played board games i hear those kinds of comments from new customers all the time where have these games been how come i didn't know about it i think what it would take is is people in a high profile situation it's like a movie star or some kind of tv personality who says i play games and i enjoy and this is what i play we just need to keep the signals coming and keep the message consistent and you know things will build from there so fundamentally the only barrier to selling games and assuming it's a reasonably good game is someone learning it and and understanding how to play it so word of mouth is by far the best way um and it works no matter what the distribution channel is there's a project that's um forget what it's called it's basically about gaming in public uh and they coordinate events and all that stuff and then i think they start doing contests and such so like oh tell us about an event that you ran in public because we want gaming to be out there it's gonna take time and that's that's you know everyone you know everyone still kind of dismisses it as you know sort of the hobby and and all of that but you know we can look at our numbers and we can look at the the efforts that we've been putting into this and we can see that that's happening it's it's it's coming and it will come we play games and so we're growing up having our kids play games and not as just like oh yeah you kids go play games like hey we want we want to play games with you like when this guy gets to be you know three we've got like lists set out they're like these are the games you're going to play and i remember [Music] playing a balloon cup with my youngest daughter she was maybe seven and she's there holding her cards and she's studying the layout you know it's maybe a big game looking at her cards looking at the layout finally she looks up at me and says dad i've got him very innocently dad i've got a hand of crap this i think is the first generation where we're actively kind of training our kids in the panoply of games that are available and that's really cool by putting board games on computer game on computers and video game systems opens up people's eyes to it as well settlers of catan and some other games are on like xbox and things like that well i was i was a real big doubter about that when when when days of wonder had tickets right online i was like wow we're giving the product away for free but that just isn't true and and and i was just wrong about that they have figures that say when somebody logs on as a guest they know and then if that same person comes back with a number that they bought their product they log on again and the numbers are really impressive for how many people within 30 days go out and buy the product after they play it online and i mean you just can't argue with that there are people who would never have discovered the game and who have bought the board game now because they've been exposed to it through xbox but it takes away some of the face-to-face social interaction where you can read people's emotions you know read their face and it's a different beast than playing that way but i don't think it's a bad thing it opens it up to hey this is a fun game oh i could buy a real physical version of it and play with friends you know here in the house video gives you a lot of things better than analog games you can't replace that experience of that analog experience and that's where we're starting to see things like the touch surface where you're taking the aspects that are good about computers to chips especially as chips get so tiny now that you could just put them in anything so you're starting to simulate that experience we're still in an analog environment we're touching things you know we're not touching and sometimes you even i'm rolling dice and really physical dice and then they get reflected because they have chips in them and stuff so that's really neat to see develop but that's not replacing the face-to-face experience it's enhancing it for the video game it took about a year a little bit of a year actually but compared to other video games this is still a small project so yeah it's about a year with something like seven or eight people so if the game is a success right from the start they already fought and put into the program everything needed to implement all the new expansions on the contrary i could develop characters especially for the video game that would be put in the video game first playtested worldwide for the video game and if people like them and all that we could as little publish them as board game doing a team with some characters that came from the video game we are going to do cross things like this in both ways if i look at the nintendo ds i've done games for the nintendo ds it's a much more closed system you have to buy the games for 20 30 euros when i go to the iphone it costs me a dollar and i get a game and i can have fun with that as well it's a slightly different type of game this is a new challenge because it's not that i don't really suggest you take the old games and just translate them one to one what i'm saying is you need to take the spirit and the core of the new media with what you visit with your work and then you need to kind of do it justice and bring out the strengths of that the world changes and i think one of the things is also i believe i need to change with the world and it's not i must but i want to because i find it exciting my quote if if there is one associated with me and board game geek and board gaming in general is i genuinely believe the world's a better place if more people play board games people say you know are you retired i mean i'm never really going to be retired because i love what i do and and whether i do it significantly less or whatever i do i just love what i do there's no way why would i stop i think it it it encourages people to interact face-to-face it encourages people to think outside of their normal thought patterns i think it helps keep you sharp long-term it's social it gets people together a lot of face-to-face action so there's a lot of interaction going on you're hanging out with people hanging out with friends i'm nothing wrong with that that's what board games do and when you when you nail that puzzle when you when your plan works it's it's you know you get that sort of rush you know settler's guitar and changed my life for crypt's sake it got me interested in board gaming got me introduced to aldi got me introduced to george the guy i've been working for on wall street for us you know several years i mean you know it's great i love them that's that's the only reason i care about money you know i want to design games all day every day [Music] because you know it'd be so easy to do a game about seagulls because look at all the action they do right when you look at that i mean how could you not [Music] whoever can stand on the rock the longest [Music] what was really funny is she starts kindergarten right and they send this paper home for us to fill out for them and it had one of your favorite board games so we put lord of the rings confrontation and i told my wife i would love to see that teacher's face so really if you want to get gamers if you want to if you want to be a serial killer and get gamers just have a truck but instead of free candy it's like free settlers i just drive down the street like just like the dnd truck and then there's all the little nerds come out of the house oh my god and then you close the door i've been here i've been here before we're going in circles [Music] okay so what do you think of um this kind of porting over that's going on you know like um katan being i love you see you see what gaming does [Music] i'm one of the few people who got upset when the the price of gas um went down because for a while my car was actually worth something i'm here all week try the fish thank you [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Lorien Green

Views: 67,880

Keywords:

Id: JmZ1J6V_8Sg

Length: 75min 9sec (4509 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bleuchz]

Opens with a cat in a Dominion box. That's how you know it's legit.

[u/The_CEE]

Thanks for posting this! I've been meaning to watch this documentary for years.

[u/Eternal_Revolution]

Finally! Have a physical copy that I have loaned out to many friends. One of the topics is exploring the original pitch of Dominion.

[u/alan_mendelsohn2022]

This was a nostalgic watch for me. When Pandemic and Dominion were new, when DoW was a company, pre-hat era Vasel, etc.

[u/e3kmouse]

This is a great documentary about the board game industry (circa 2008). I'm looking forward to re-watching it to see how things have changed, even in the short time since the was initially created.