Board Game Design Day: The Making of Pandemic Legacy

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the first talk of the board game track and this is the first year the GDC is doing board game so thank you for being here I am Rob davio this is Matt leok and we are here talk about pandemic Legacy if that's not what you meant to hear you're in the wrong room um oh sorry I'm not supposed to wander P stay on camera you're going to fall off okay uh before we begin uh I'm just wondering or we're just wondering it's hard to see with the glare how many people have played at least some of pandemic Legacy whoa okay how many people played all of it all right get on at the rest of you um who has not played it just so I I know it's all the people who haven't but it's just

show hands okay we will not be largely and mostly spoiling anything in pandemic Legacy because it is a board game with spoilers um we will talk elliptically about various things so if you've played you'll understand what we're talking about and if you haven't if you do choose to play and you get to it you'll say oh that's what they were talking about um anything else before we get no I think that's I think that's a perfect start okay so here we are there's pandemic Legacy this came out in octob October of 2015 and represented combination of two different things based on a legacy game I had done in a pandemic that Matt did and here's what we're going to be doing today right so we're not going to read all the story all this slide here but we will tell you we're going to start out with our origin stories which of course are the most interesting part of any story um and then the rest of the cliched titles that you see up above so all right a little background on us

here's our origin stories so I'm Matt leok I'm a former user experience designer I've been a designer of one type of another for most of my professional career I worked in the Bay Area for about 16 years on um in Bay Area companies like Yahoo and AOL Netscape um about two and a half years ago I left that I left Hightech full-time to go full-time into board game design and these are some of the games that I've designed in the meantime that's largely due to the success of uh pandemic so I know raised your hands for pandemic Legacy but um how many of you played pandemic the base game okay great so I'm not going to explain to you how this game works it's a Cooperative game you fight disease and so on um yeah I won't be labor that that point too much it's and that never gets old by the way I just love seeing that so that's how you get to leave your job and Do It full time yeah um I'm Rob davio I have been a professional board game designer since 1998 when I tumbled into a job at Hasbro

Parker Brothers Milton Bradley just in time to uh do all these great games for Star Wars episode one um you know you do part part of my job in May 1999 was going to go see the Phantom menis with a notebook so I could write Trivial Pursuit questions and let me tell you after seeing that five days in a row the excitement of seeing Star Wars for work really wore off um these are some of the games that I have done uh over the years I've done a lot of Risk games uh did work on betrayal at house in the hill that I'm happy with there's other games on there kids games and things that uh I haven't done I've done about 80 games maybe that have been published um but in 2011 I did a game called Risk Legacy um who has played Risk Legacy here okay some so I'll just give a little brief thing the whole point of a legacy game is that uh and I'm giving a whole talk tomorrow to do a deep dive of Legacy games General but top level here

is two parts some of the actions you take in one game permanently carry over to Future games so everyone's game starts out in the same place and then heads in a different direction um this involves stickers this involves markers this involves the dramatic ripping up of cards which is done infrequently but the thing everyone knows because it's such a social taboo um and the second part as you can see from the envelopes there on the inside of that box up there um new content is delivered when you play it's like having expansions in the box but instead of instead of just opening it whenever you open it narratively for either achieving something so I had done this and Matt had done pandemic and then in 2013 um he got in touch with me and asked if we wanted to do pandemic Legacy yeah I had been working with zman to that point we were trying to figure out how to develop our pandemic into kind of a franchise so we batter around a lot of ideas you know maybe we could do pandemic dice game maybe we could do pandemic the card game and then we said

uh hey how about pandemic the Legacy game and we just kind of laughed I I I I was really intimidated by the idea I'm not sure if it was because I was working full-time or the the whole idea of a pandemic Legacy was just too overwhelming or intimidating but I never really seriously considered it at all until maybe I don't know six months later I was sketching in a notebook and jotting down different ideas for twists and turns and how something like that might work and I was just hooked I I needed to to uh uh go a little bit below the surface and proceeded to try to figure out how to talk to Mr davio here um and managed to um get his contact information through um zman and sent him a a quick note rob you might want to mention where we were at at the time so I I I uh sent you this note basically saying hey what do you think pandemic Legacy um is that going to work for you yeah and I wrote back yes in like a 100 Point type cuz I had just started my own company and was looking for any sort of work [Laughter]

uh luckily I said yes to this one yeah we've been working together ever since on on Legacy games um no and I and uh we had a lot of a lot of questions a lot of design questions we're going to basically take you through over the next um half hour or so half hour 40 minutes uh why we made the decisions we did uh what worked which luckily was most of it what didn't work there were a few things that didn't and um some of the learnings that we had about how to make this a project this big in the board game space but really when we sat down in September of 2013 and then when we did it again two years later to start season 2 it's pretty much that um it's a lot of unknowns we've both made board games and so we basically kind of just sat down and said like what are some key things that make a legacy game um cuz at that point there had been exactly one um and so we sort of pulled it apart and realized that there were there two

things that make a good fit to turn a a a traditional board game into a legacy game and those are this uh a simple core engine uh pandemic is a great game and it actually has a relatively simple core of rules um a lot of people play it who don't play a lot of games it's Cooperative so you can help each other if someone doesn't get the rules and as Matt Matt's done a number of expansions that shows that you can build and stretch and move it in different direction which means as we designed a legacy game and if it starts with basically pandemic we can move it to go to different places with rules we knew that would work and it also has a robust theme which is more my thing which is okay it's a world and there's diseases and everything's going wrong cool I get that everyone's going to get that it sounds like a fun way to torture players as you go through this experience it wasn't like trying to make a legacy game out a bridge or something or Uno you know there's a world there there's a good underpinning for a St story so um that's the first thing like

if for a legacy game is like it needs to start out relatively simple and then um build on top of it with like and have a story that builds on top and if you go back and forth because when we design we will get stuck on the the rules and the you know the mechanisms and then we'll figure out what the story is or we'll figure out the story and then get stuck and then go back and forth and really when we design there's a lot of back and forth between the two right so with Mr you know risk roll a lot of dice Star Wars trivia Pursuit storyteller and clean Euro guy we were hoping for this combination smooth chocolate peanut butter delicious right there there was a very big fear that we were going to end up with that I just love how that glistens I have no idea he's get that slide off Matt is weirded out every time we practice okay first question do you yeah so I mean the big question was like how do we do that how do we string 20 games in a row and make them kind of work together um there were a lot of unanswered questions about how to

structure it uh no one had done a Cooperative Legacy game before and so we we looked at a number of different options um this first option well the first option is doing what I did in Risk Legacy so in Risk Legacy players play games and there's a number of envelopes with Triggers on them in the sense of it tells you when to open it and the if you remember from the box or if you played it opens up and the Box stays open like a pizza L open because that's supposed to remind you of things that are available so if you're like planing and then you see it you're like I want to go for that um I get into this in detail tomorrow I really underestimated what a draw that was I was just like taunting them with Christmas presents right to to go for um but what you end up with is you end up something where you have the players in the middle in control and then each blue circle represents uh like a new story bit a new twist or turn where new rules are brought in and sometimes you have to go through a darker Circle to get to the lighter Circle and then when you're done there's kind of like just an ending off to the side like oh hey you've opened everything it's done and that worked in

Risk but risk legy was very sandbox play it's very tongue and cheek almost I mean it's like got comic book uh tropy stuff in there like you shouldn't play it and feel like wow that's a really tightly written story it's not like it's it was more trying to figure out how to make the Legacy idea work so we we thought with this that that that could work and that was one option but after talking about it for a while we wanted something that was a little bit more um like linear like where one thing leads to another other in a more logical story path right so one of the things we explored was uh branching you know could we have a story path where certain players would Branch off into one fork and other players would Branch off into another fork and we kept running into problems um this is probably no surprise to a lot of you I mean that first Branch for example if you hit that and you end early you feel like you've kind of broken your game you've only gotten half the value out of it and then us as content providers you know as we're writing all this stuff um the thought that you know a huge percentage of the game is not going to be seen by a lot of

the people um and a lot of the packages would go unopened didn't quite resonate well we were having difficulty coming up with u story and and the complexity of the product was kind of overwhelming so we abandoned this one pretty early yeah and then we stumbled a what upon what we thought was a pretty clever way of telling a story and we it's that yeah and that had a lot of Promise in it and we felt we could do something with that Mel I don't know if anybody's tried that before yeah um by doing that there's a lot of concern with these Legacy games of it being consumable of it of it ending of not seeing all the content of getting your money's worth and so by getting away from branching and by doing this we could allow people to see almost all of the content but in slightly different ways so group a might make certain decisions that let them deviate from the path and then we kind of pull them back and it goes back and forth so it's one continual Road where you take this little Meandering journey

through it and then group two um you know would do that so at the end when they talked about their experiences they all basically had the same experience um but made different choices along the way so it felt a little different and that gave us a lot of narrative control to try to tell a story and also to figure out when we were building rules okay like a happens and then B happens and then C happens and but you know there might be gaps in between but it let us um have more control when when building it and that turned into yeah the trick then was trying to figure out how to actually unroll that in the game how do you do that when typically you take the game off the shelf you play it and then you put it back on the shelf and the next time you take it out again it's the same game how do we how do we unveil this new material and we uh uh came up with this concept of a legacy deck uh which basically you go through from top to bottom you start on this big stop card which is inspired by the SAT tests you know put your pencils down um and then you just flip through the cards one at a time and we could gradually unveil

new rules and new characters and so on and other surprises um as the game progressed forward yeah it also leads to the very fun rule in the rule book saying if you drop it on the floor uh get someone who's not playing the game to put it back together in order which might be the first time that's been written in a in a board game rule book uh so we had that and we're like okay that that's going to work that's going to deliver things in the order that we want them to but how many games how many games do people want to commit to and this is an interesting sort of like product proposition question rather than a game design question it's like if we give you 100 one hour games boy we're promising a lot of content and no one will finish right like it just will wear out it's welcome if we give you six amazing games many people will finish and then complain that they weren't enough so there was a big question when I had done Risk Legacy I had just randomly picked 15 games well not randomly I gave it some thought that turned out to be a pretty good number right it's enough that you feel like your money's worth but not so much that you can't get people back together and

so we started talking about um 12 to 15 yeah yeah 15 seemed like a little too much to me yeah all that's actually 15 is pretty much where it netted out at the end but um we were like how about 12 which led to the other cunning idea that 12 is a number that's you can put on a timeline so um we added the the basically divid it into months and then we thought okay there's a lot of things you're not going to know in this game there's a lot of things are going to un un certain but you're going to know that February comes after January and you are going to know that you're going to play till December so you have this comforting feeling of there are going to be 12 experiences in the game they logically follow each other and it's not like you get to game eight and we say okay now it's over right you know when it ends from the very beginning and that gives you a little bit of peace of mind because one of the things that we like to do is not give you peace of mind while you're playing this and so we had to make sure there were certain areas where you knew that like you knew what was happening like you had a lay of the

land so one of the tricks then is uh how do you balance this um one of the things with Risk Legacy is it's a competitive game so if one player starts to get far ahead the other players can kind of serve as a check uh we were doing a a Cooperative game that changed over time and so the the big fear that I had was that you know players would start to lose and then because they lost and the the world got worse they would continue to lose at a a faster rate you get this posit a feedback loop and thingss would spiral out of control and then you'd throw the game out because you're so frustrated so we needed to figure out ways to uh Put negative feedback loops into the game and the first one we uh worked on was um one that plays off of these event cards uh pandemic and pandemic Legacy shipped with event cards and they're these special superpower cards you can play out of out of phase and um they're good for two reasons one they give you a special power and the second thing is they kind of Pat out the the player deck which is the clock for the game and when the deck Runs Out you

lose the game so these are pretty valuable so we start the players off with a certain number of them and we um decided that you know if if players continue to win we can we can pull some of those back kind of basically give them a handicap and if they if they lose we can give them more and we needed to come up with some sort of like rationalization or story reason for this and so we came up with a notion of funding basically if you win a game um the powers that be determined of course that you're you're doing so well that we're going to cut back your funding uh and you get fewer cards and so and but if you lose a game U you know this this stuff needs to be contained and uh you get more budget so uh kind of a tongue-and-cheek way of you know basically modifying the U the number of cards you get uh up and down here's here's an example of a game calendar people U keeping track of um game after game and uh getting getting more cars as a result of losing or or um fewer as a result of winning and what's funny is that actually came out of a play test

you can sit and we can talk to each other all day long and then you get into a play test and you come up with the idea that you never would have had play testing and this was just an attempt to make my friends feel less bad right they were play testing and then they lost the game and they're like oh that's horrible we were about to win and we lost and it was just like you have more event cards you have more funding play again please and they were like that sounds great consolation prize yeah and then I got on my phone with Matt I'm like okay I think I think this worked hold on we just did something um so that's worked that became one of our our main ways to keep everyone in the middle and the and the The Hope was that you know one group like this might be between 0 2 4 and six and then another group that wasn't as good might float between like 6 8 and 10 right that both of them are are going up and down within their comfort zone but they have two different Comfort zones so it's scales for different levels of um play groups yeah another thing we learned though is that um so if you play

January and you lose and then you play February and you lose and you play March and you lose um you might feel like you're being dragged through the entire timeline that um you know you can't really catch up you can't take advantage of what you've learned uh again so we actually broke each month into two pieces so if you win the game uh you move on to the next month um however if you lose it you get one more chance to play it again you can take advantage of all the learnings that you got through through your mistakes and uh so we've got this sort of like uh two-part month system as it were and that worked worked fairly well if you lost you you got hey you got a consolation prize you got additional funding and you get one more shot before moving on we didn't want to keep doing that though if you kept losing and keep playing January over and over again the game would quickly become a grind and people would get really worn out and and want to leave it on the Shelf um there was also the risk that because your funding goes up when you lose and because at the end of every game you get these two sort of permanent stickers or goodies that make it easier

that we had to be really aware that it wasn't like let's just tank 6 months in a row and then become superheroes and then we can win like the back half of things so now that we've solved like losing is okay and it's not going to lead to more losing with funding and also letting you repeat a month gives you a chance to like do better and maybe get some more goodies because you've played another game we were in a position where maybe we had gone too far the other way and now we weren't encouraging you to win so so that led to these cards yeah so these win bonus cards are essentially uh positive incentives for winning um you know you shouldn't have to tell players that you should want to win but they're Gamers right they're going to look at and go like hey it's better to lose a few games in a row because then our funding will go up we'll get more event cards so we give them this carrot um but then we quickly realized well if we tell them what the win bonus is they're going to min max and go oh okay well this bonus is not quite as good as the two event cards so I think we should still lose and then you feel bad cuz you're kind of

playing against what the game's intent is so we solved that by uh putting it a scratch material over it so now you really want to win because you don't know what you're going to miss if you don't and uh so that was our our hidden carrot yep it's the fear of missing out if you lose and you don't get to see it and you rip it up and it goes away and you never knew what happened and that's a really powerful incentive in Legacy games is well but I want to see what it is and so um yeah and they're all a little different and they all can't be so good that again it leads to winning leading to more winning but it has to be good enough that you felt like you earned it when you scratched it off it's a lot of psychology that we discovered in this we're going to get into that you know uh not in this next section but the second half of the talk yeah second half of the talk so now we had some of our sort of mechanisms in place it was going to be 12 to 24 games it was going to be an average of about 18 it turns out 16 to 15 to 18 games that you win more often than you lose it's not a 50/50 win ratio so you end up repeating a couple months and if you lose both parts of a

month which happens to people it feels like a particular low point or a downbeat as we'll get to in a second so now we had to go flip over to the other side we talked about which is well how do we tell a story with it so we can just keep throwing like cards and numbers and math and actions at you but ultimately we wanted to tell a story and U when we were going back to prepare this we went and realized that of the entire game the entire plot of the game is told in 23 cards some of which aren't even filled um so we had to basically find a way to make a lot of things familiar so that the story was something that just kind of filled in the blanks like here's the next thing you go of course right of course that happened of course that character shows up right now um and and that relies on some using a lot of familiarity with with genres um and so we sat down and this movie was out around the time we were working on it and we're like yeah that's kind of it

it's kind of like a' 70s movie but redone into a modern movie and it's an action thriller and it's got a little bit of you know it's got some action scenes and a little bit of character building and then that led to our other huge Insight which is movies have three acts now I know we're blowing your mind with this timeline in this threea structure but stay with us it'll make linear plot now structure yeah um so we're kind of like wow we can really just kind of kind of literally craft this into three acts act one you do this act two you do this act three you do this neither of us have ever studied screenwriting so what we're about to say may be horribly wrong if you have said it but or terribly obvious or terribly obvious like guess one of the two but you know we basically we read some books and we kind of thought about it and it you know did a little bit of light research and so we kind of said wow you got act one act two act three and then we had both read a book um I'll let you talk yeah yeah well read Hamlet's hit points by Robin laws and he goes into

great detail about Beats and these moments that U provide uh moments of uplift or down uh down lift um uh that modulate people's emotions um sort of like just the moment by moment um how a game how uh screenplay how music how any of these things kind of play out and he he came up with a whole vocabulary of these things uh most of them are procedural uh an upbeat that's a procedural beat kind of moves your protagonist toward his goal and everybody feels better but you can also have down beats that move the protagonist away from the um their goal there's dramatic ones which are more about the protagonist internal struggle but there's other ones that are less um less obvious or were less obvious to me like things like building anticipation gives you a downbeat because it creates a lot of tension in a game um and then you have reveals which are upbeats and a lot of this stuff mapped really well into um you know the hidden things in these Legacy games and then the RS that you get later and so we started playing

with this vocabulary first at a very micro level looking at all the different moment by- um elements of a pandemic game per se so you've got things like hey we discovered a cure that's a that's a great upbeat everybody's happy about that or oh and epidemic came out and uh things are getting really really bad and you have a downbeat um you can kind of telescope out and apply these things to um the the ACT structure right so the first thing we did is we just basically said okay things have to suck at the end of act one and act two you know basically Luke's aunt and uncle have to die and then Obi-Wan has to die um so we kind of basically wanted to have these moments so if you have played this game and you have played April and September there you go um I have had people come up to me at conventions who I don't know get uncomfortably close and just go September walk away I take it really as a badge of honor um which you know then means that we have to build you up to have an upbeat beforehand and then this isn't an

exact mapping but we spent a lot of time when we were discussing like well this is kind of an upbeat or this is a downbeat or we just introduce like problem problem problem people are going to get despondent so maybe we should back up and do problem partial solution problem how much do we introduce um at the like beginning of a game how much do you introduce at the end of a game because if you finish February and the next thing you do is March anything happens after February before March is sort of in the same place right it's between it's going to happen before your next game but if you do it at the end of February you're finishing up your game and we give you something then it's like a cliffhanger um that you you're going to live with until you decide to start March and sometimes it's right away where if we do it at the beginning of March you have no time to process so like the game started you're sitting down to play and you're like oh here's some new information and it feels like you're off and running and it's a subtle difference but sometimes we found with our play test groups that moving them from one to the other folks like different upbeats or down it was like taking the the beats that were I had

looked at within a game and looking at how they could be applied to the connective tissue that kind of glued the games together and it it leads to a lot of that kind of like binge play or the page Turner effect where you get to the end of the chapter and you want to move on to the next one so which is all well and good if we were doing like a screenwriting 101 class um but we aren't right it's like we were talking about that like about how do we get these things into a game itself and many months were spent um and then we uh you know realize pretty soon that we had an an old friend yeah so you know how do you do this in a board game we we were able to Leverage The Legacy deck for this initially it was just a way to kind of parse out uh characters and and other components and new rules and so on but we were able to kind of slice it in with with story cards in addition to the other um components okay yeah so each game starts with and this is this is going to be a spoiler if you haven't played we're going to show you the top card of the deck I apologize um there it is these things

called mission mission briefings which lets us set the like tone of what you have to do um this is you know there are 12 months there are 12 of these so it's about half of the story content just takes place at the beginning of each each month and we tried to pack a lot into each one of these right so you know the first sentence is uh hey you're a veteran like you know the drill like we want to reward you cuz you've played pandemic so we're all like you got this and then we're like you know there's causing problems we're just going to kind of frame it up here in case you're not paying attention well that's not so good what's that some you know mutate faster than usual is is not really that comfortable and then we have someone looking into that like I don't know what that means but that might be comforting it might not be comforting and but don't panic Don't Panic for now keep it under control you got this and like okay Panic a little right so one of them may mutate beyond our capability so in two or three sentences we kind of cheated and put an M Dash so but it you know we can indicated a lot of the tone that we were

trying to do um and they were they were fun to write these and if you finished and you still have them I encourage you to go back and and read them again knowing what you know so um so that was one of the ways that we could basically squeeze a lot of a lot of narrative into a short space and we were limited I mean we we didn't want to have okay let's start and you card read a card read a card read a card read a like where did you know a book in card form was not what we were going for yeah I one of the themes here was just trying to do a lot with a little so the game ships with a bunch of stickers these are uh psychological scars that you put on your character and uh we don't have a lot of room on these because they're they're small they've got to go on cards um we have quite a few of them and uh there's localization to consider the character count expands you know and you go to other languages so you know how do you how do you get this stuff across it turns out that just having a single keyword like Insomniac or fear of small PLS is enough to kind of is enough of a hook to really get players role playing

or um it provides so much more story hooks than just uh just the raw mechanism that's on the on the card so it doesn't take a whole lot to really unlock story ens no all of you who play these games want to tell a story so if we just say reduce your hand limit by one card you're like okay but if it's like why do you only have you know six cards or five cards in your hand it's like cuz I can't sleep and like we just had to give you that one thing so you could shout out something during the game um my favorite one was PTSD which is up in the corner which um you lose an action if you start in the region where you got this and then you write down to the region it was one of our first ideas which is I can't go back to Africa why like I just can't go back to Africa um which leads into the psychology of what we were trying to do and that's that's this next part that we're going to get into so we've talked a little bit about the structure and we've talked a little bit about how we what you know arrang the story and then but let's get into this psychology because it's very different in one of

these games because you're committing to kind of go on this journey with us for 15 games um and you don't know what's going to happen but we did right so we wanted to have like a lot of moments that basically sort of scared you but ultimately didn't get too scared or or scared that you broke it I did get that a lot I think we broke it no you didn't break it and this this first uh method or trick is is really obvious I mean there's there's a lot of packaged content that you can't see right away there's eight packages there's five dossier which are like little Advent calendars so it's almost like you know a bunch of Christmas presents wrapped up in the box and that led to a lot of uh fear of missing out basically on behalf of the players they want to keep playing so they see what's inside the boxes see what's behind the hidden doors uh that was a pretty powerful motivator to for people to keep playing and it's actually interesting psychologically because you want to keep playing so you see what's in the packages but people won't open the pack like well I don't have time and my friends moving away I'll just open them

up and see what happens like no no you have to finish except for you you did but that was for work um sorry um so the next thing we did psychologically was we wanted you to care about these people in this world and you care about things by giving them names when you name something you own a piece of it and now you care so the medic is fine you probably played lots of pandemic where you're like I'll be the medic but that medic has a name he's Pedro and Pedro has feelings and he has a past and he's got a friend named Wallace up there in the corner um he's got some other things going on that we've redacted for people who haven't played and you can see down below that Pedro might end up with a couple scars he might end up not sleeping well he might become afraid of airplanes um and the reason that we do this is we want you to have these little stories with we want you to have attachments and so as you play with

these characters and they go on their Journey it's much more interesting cuz people are more interesting than things and so most people here are people and so you understand how they work and um and so like by basically giving you these little moments to imprint and bond on things then you know and get attached to it you cared more you want to do this one I want don't you take this one okay so going back to our old friend the up and down Beats I don't know if you noticed but what we like to do in this game is we like to give you a downbeat which is here's a new problem like in January we give you a problem and you're like this is a bad problem we don't like this problem that you gave us and then in February you struggle with that new problem and it's a lot of work to try to fix it and it's really distracting you so then at the end of February or the beginning of March we give you a tool to make that problem easier and because you've just struggled with it for a month you're like oh that's

good that's going to help that power is going to help that person's going to help okay this is fantastic oh they've just given us a new problem and so we constantly give you a problem let you struggle give you some tools give you a new problem let you struggle give you some tools and just kind of repeat this process not quite so formulaically but basically over the course of the 12 months but as the problems Mount even though the tools Mount you don't have enough time or resources to use all of them so you're in a position of like what do we use the tools for what do we not use the tools for and that's part of the Legacy experience where group a might choose to spend a lot of time on positive mutations so that they don't have to deal with diseases where other people will use tools for other spoilery things so they don't have to deal with those problems over there um but either way you don't have enough tools to make the game easy you're just choosing which things are easier for you and which things you have to work with um but that there was that upbeat downbeat of problem struggle solution that we gave you we were able to pull off a lot of these

psychological tricks I think because the players trusted us and in order to build that trust we designed in some safety nets into the game this is box eight or package 8 one of my favorite things in the game um when you open up the box one of the first instructions you read is to take uh this sticker that you see here off the sticker sheet and put it on box eight we don't say why that's important we don't really spend a whole lot of time on it but it's the absolute first thing you see and the first thing you're supposed to do so you know internally hey this is kind of important and if you read it it says uh open Package eight if you lose four games in a row it's just one simple sentence but it provided just tremendous amounts of value to us as you can imagine we had a lot of play testers and some of them would lose a game and get a little frustrated then they'd lose another one and get frustrated if they lost that third one they're about ready to you know consider their $70 purchase a complete waste of time you know Shred the thing be embarrassed put it on the shelf or or say nasty things about you know at least Rob on Twitter um he gets all he gets all the

Mean Tweets um but we were able to get around that by just including this the single sticker basically so now if you lose those three games you're like okay we lost three we suck but at least we didn't have to open up package eight um it kind of sets his anchor at four which is like okay four is bad uh but also you know that hey you know if if we do lose four games at least we get to open the present you know we get to open up the package and see what's in there and there there are things in there that are going to help you so you open it up and um there is a safety net there's there's some U material in that will help you get your game back on track and and get you back on the rails and so it's very simple solution but uh provided just a tremendous amount of value to the game uh yeah and I do see a lot of people when they write you know talks about this like we we struggled we didn't do a good job at the end we feel like we didn't do that well but we didn't open Package eight right so they feel good about it so as you can imagine this is uh just a

sheer joy to play test in balance and so we're going to talk a little bit about how we did that um which is the following top I just really like that pun I'm sorry it was very early and it made me laugh too hard um all right so this is something that Matt taught me so Matt will so I came out of user experience design in the valley where we did a lot of usability testing and we we started to do some eth ethnographic research at Yahoo where we'd go into the field with cameras and record people using our products um since then everybody got these smartphones everybody's got a camera phone in their pocket and uh I just started taking advantage of that so for the last I don't know three or four years I've been asking people who are blind testing to take out their their phones and just record themselves as they're playing the game in their you know on their kitchen table and it's amazing the kinds of data and how valuable that that information is um in addition to to just I'm always surprised

at how relaxed people are in this environment because they're using their own equipment they're in their own home I've got video of people like smoking pot uh in front of this before it was legal uh like on camera recorded sent to a stranger they don't know just really relaxed so you get very naturalistic uh feedback on it and you get feedback that you wouldn't get from a self-report form or just from analyzing the raw data so uh one of my favorite moments from this group was actually watching them open up um a big reveal at the end of act one in an early version of the game where the thing just landed like a ton of bricks it was just a just a just a dead dead beat they looked at each other they shook their heads and you would never see that on a on a feedback form but they were just you know it it did not work for them at all and uh we knew that we needed to to to rejigger the story this wasn't a mechanical thing this is a thematic thing and uh it's something that we just have been able to internalize and really empathize with if

we hadn't seen it uh on on camera um above the table so um yeah so we we just get a ton of feedback from that yeah so what we do is every time we have a version ready to go we find somewhere between two to four groups and those groups will play as many games as we have done so we might only have like January through March or January through July they record every game then they upload it as they play and then we watch them and we take notes and we have discovered that 1.6 speed is as fast as you can go and still pay attention um sometimes I'll push it to 1.8 but I miss things um because we're looking at dozens or hundreds of hours for each batch of play testing somewhere between 10200 hours for season 1 it was more for season two um and so that turns into the wonderful world of game design which is a giant spreadsheet of notes and anecdotes whether it says uh observation which might lead if you see the green a design

idea red is an issue the time code because he'll watch like maybe group a and I'll watch Group B and we record the the timing so if I see a note on his I can go to the video and do it um we have redacted things out for the you out of courtesy for people who haven't played but there's two things of uh interest to know one is that 730 notes from this particular round and you get things like this how do you exhibit abnormal thoughts this was a throwaway comment from one uh play tester so the end of act one there's something that's revealed and and the card had said you know they're exhibiting abnormal thoughts how do you exhibit abnormal thoughts I'm like that's a really good point so the final card says they're exhibiting abnormal behavior never would have caught that cuz like I wrote it that made perfect sense everyone read it unless someone on the video is like made this comment and then it got recorded here and then we're like yeah yeah that should be fixed so you find these tiny tiny things right another thing I like to uh just just for

myself to keep myself honest is to note all the observations and issues separately from the ideas as often I'll watch a group that I'll be sitting with and I'll have tons of ideas and I'll write down all the ideas but I won't I I'll just sweep all the issues under the rug I just want to make the game better you know cut to the chase just put the good idea in but then you find out the good idea is not so good anymore and you throw the idea out and you've lost track of the issue so um just kind of like bracketing all this stuff uh bracketing the ideas over here and the observations and the issues really helps keep us honest I think when we're doing it um so this catches many interesting things we're going to kind of show you something that was uh on the editing room floor from season 1 so as you get to the middle of the game those of you have played we ask you to go search for things and it's a relatively simple little side Journey that we wanted you to do and the final game shipped with a simple little side mechanism by which to do it but we got so caught up in the design when we were first doing it is like people are going to want a whole new game to break out right here like you're like and so we designed this

thing this is one of uh I think three different well probably more than that we lost like a month trying to create like you're at a game and another now obviously this isn't the final Graphics but he had this idea because pandemic you know takes place in world and then you go to cities and so we wanted like oh we want you to search Paris well so we're going to zoom in and there's going to be like a city block card and now it's going to be almost like a tactical mini game or you're move moving and there's AI stuff moving we were so delighted yeah it was kind of cool it was also just kind of stapled on the side of the game it didn't really make any sense at all right um You need like a whole other table right to manage this and stuff so we noticed very early on that every time this was about June I think it comes out you just watched The Players kind of deflate when they had to pull this stuff out cu and then they're like reading it and then the whole thing comes to a stop for 20 minutes right like right in the middle of a 45 minute game you have a 20 minute break which is horrible um so anyway we kept simplifying and simplifying until we

made it as simple as possible and then everyone's like this is great thank you um but we had never shown that before it took us a while to find it and we were laughing last week when we pulled that out like yeah that was a great idea um so then after the uh we get those 700 and some odd observations we have a lot of phone calls we live on opposite Coast so we use video video conferencing and we go through each one and we talk about it and then we turn it into a punch list that's small but still pretty big of things we want to do so here's one list of all the changes we made coming out of a play test it's deliberately uh so small that you can't read it here but when this talk is up later you can go through and see all the notes if you're so inclined yeah so all the issues and ideas get converted into really prescriptive very specific things that we can do and we sign up for them and knock them off and uh yeah do all the I don't know I I've got some a little bit of an agile background so uh we're able to you know apply some of that it it's easier for us because it's

just the two of us we can do it all in in drive but uh yeah we can we can be pretty efficient uh this way but some stuff does get through um this next uh this next card actually slipped through the cracks um this is one card that looks pretty innocent uh just as time is running out and it's got some fairly simple instructions um at least they look simple to me and Rob and our copy editor um so it turns out though uh humans have a real hard time um with cognition when it comes to a negative paired with an or I don't know why uh but just tons of posts Board Game Geek about this one not you know opening the wrong package and being confused and so on so we've we've uh rewarded this in the in the next uh rewarded it in the second uh printing but uh you know you can't catch everything yeah what we meant you if either six or seven was unopened scratch this card not that they both had to be unopened or both opened it was made perfect sense every time I read now I'm like no it makes perfect

sense but yeah I think if you're an engineer or you're into grammar then you're like solid um but this caused some problems cuz this was a a big moment so having a lot of people scratch it when they shouldn't or should when or actually the big problem is people didn't scratch it when they should have and this is supposed to get the game back on track if you are behind on some certain objectives and you're entering act three and we want those objectives to be solved we want to catch you back up and so if you don't scratch it and you keep playing and then you get to a point like wait we can't we can't win and then you have to go back and find that card and realize you should have scratched it so we cleaned up the language there yeah another valuable thing that you learn from uh doing the video testing is that just how well the actual physical um components work um you know does that sticker fit in the rules are people can people find things in the rules are the do the pieces actually fit on the board um that's sort of stuff all the human factors kinds of things when we were designing this game we had a legacy deck that had stickers in it so as you played the game you would find a card it had stickers in it you'd peel it off you

know real easy real straightforward but at the 11th hour we found out that we actually couldn't put sticker cards in the deck and we had a lot of them in there um and this was sort of a a panicky moment but we we worked through it and came up with these dossier the thing is we were never able to test the dossier and so a few things showed up after the the game was printed that became problems for example if you have a do door number six and a box number six and you tell them you tell your players to open number six you know sometimes they might open the wrong thing um this was encoded there you know not everybody makes this mistake but some people did they they jumped ahead and opened up package six instead of door number six to uh um to their disappointment I guess would be yeah no it's particularly frustrating because we tell you to open door number six it's either the first or one of the first things to open so you're very excited about opening something and you haven't seen any other context pack pack six is probably the last thing I want you to open by mistake at that moment yeah so

it was particularly bad numbering at a particularly bad time um the lesson here was that you know this kinds of testing with with video and actually physical components can can unearth some of this stuff um we uh we did a better job in season two and that everything's uniquely numbered like the package numbers and the dossier numbers all have unique coding so you can't possibly do that but you know again it's because we were done the game when we came up with the DOT with the dossier this one's related uh if you pull a a door off the dossier you've got it in your hand you're very excited about the card you don't look back at the the tear sheet that you just pulled it from even if it's got a big yellow box that's screaming at you to read it lots of people don't do that um so it's another thing that we would have une Earth I think if we were doing a higher Fidelity test so so yeah that's that's most of our talk uh basically what happened was we did it and it came out and it did well uh and you know yay Hobbits

um uh and so by and large it did well a lot of our stuff that we tried to do set out to do um and so we wanted to leave you quickly we got about 13 minutes with uh three quick takeaways which was you can um you can evoke a story with highlights attachment to characters and using some tropes like oh the world's ending or I'm the medic and uh yeah you can you can do a lot of this um you can you can actually manipulate people's uh emotions if if they trust you and a lot building that trust uh can you you you can use safety nets and anchors and provide the appropriate incentives in order to do that and the last thing is everyone thinks of the game as what happens when you take your first turn until the game is over but this games especially Legacy games are experiences so if you test above the table how people are reacting you get a lot more uh knowledge about the experience itself rather than the gameplay itself and that's kind of it I want to kind of just we have 13 minutes I want to get time to some questions so we'll

just leave that up there for no particular reason um while we take questions so there are uh two mics if you want to come up why on Earth did you make me destroy so many cards I trust did you yes uh so that is always the big thing is destroying a card a card is a piece of cardboard you destroy cardboard all the time and is imbued with meaning because we've been trained not to destroy cards um you can get by by not destroying them it's just our way of saying you won't need this again um it's going to get in the way it's going to cause clutter ultimately if you ripped up an entire deck of cards and just like a fit of rage or whatever you wanted to do you will basically spent 50 cents worth of material and then you can recycle it and it's nothing I it's you

know it was an idea for Risk Legacy and I'm like will people dare to do this and it was really really dramatic but I wanted people to be like this is permanent this is a one-way trip you're playing with real money it raises the stakes it raises the stakes right you're you you just put the chips on the board and now you you've got something to lose that's a little teaser for the next talk um thanks yeah right okay hi uh I just wanted to say thank you for this pretty amazing experience that I've had over the last couple of months playing pandemic Legacy um it's been incredible but um I have a question it's more about the original pandemic if you don't mind sure um like one of the most uh amazing mechanics I've seen in a long time is the idea of when you have an epidemic you pull a card from the bottom to infect kind of a new region uh where did this ID come from because you know I I have to credit Tom Layman for that uh we were doing aot of play testing at Alan Moon's Gathering of friends and we noticed that the when

the epidemic cards came out sometimes there was a lot of tension and sometimes there wasn't and it was only those moments where there weren't cities with three infection cubes on there and so he suggested this very simple idea of taking a card off the bottom it's off the bottom so you don't pull a card you've already had and that always an epidemic card is a problem from that point forward so yeah cool thanks thanks hi um so a question for both about um co-op games and Alpha gamer um situations especially we hear about it with pandemic a lot and I've been in those situations does the Legacy format help with that did you consider that as part of the design as a a possible problem that this could alleviate I don't think it was something that either Rob or I actually set out to try to solve but I do think it helps that there's some blurriness there's some fog there you don't know exactly the the one way to to win so because there's some uncertainty and there's lots of different ways to play the game right are you trying to optimize for the specific game you're playing tactically

or are you more focused on the long-term effects that affect the board for the entire Arc and because there's no one right answer I think that mitigates it somewhat yeah the um I talk about this a little in my talk tomorrow about Legacy games Legacy games uh you you avoid Mastery right every if you play a game in enough time you feel like you know how to play and then you're only being surprised by the variety within like the shuffle of the cards or someone else's actions but with a legacy game every is a brand new game and so you never quite are at that level of Mastery so to some extent it might mitigate the alpha gamer saying I played this 50 times I know how to win because they just got the same piece of new information that you did so a bit thank you thank you these games sound amazing I wonder if you could speak a bit more about your testing process did you also have them do written responses in addition to the videos uh and how did you compose those questions given that you were also going to see their game on video I think we did virtually no self-report I I we did not well we had

groups who sat down and did like a focus group for themselves on video for our benefit and that was really helpful but I don't think Rob I actually can posted any questions uh for them to answer directly we did collect some data for win loss and that sort of thing but most of it is on the tape I mean if it if it was um you know we could look at the players and we could see their emotions they didn't have to describe their emotions cuz they I mean there authorities on that but uh sometimes hindsight's not so great so that we just kept going back to the tape really and and sometimes I think um we go back to them and ask a question like you seem clar clarify like watch this and this was kind of a problem and why did you do this did you not understand the rule and they'd be like oh right and but no survey type kinds of things like did you enjoy that or you know what was your favorite part or anything like that it's all yeah just the tape it's a lot of video to watch we get a lot and you know we yeah we can watch who won uh okay first epidemic second epidemic finish

the round oh they forgot this role like it's a lot of those notes are just watching play byplay the sort of things that you would have gotten from like a survey where we were looking for data hey hey you guys made a good game thank you but it's a game designed to be played one time so my question is to what degree were you worried about people being spoiled either through Let's Plays or just and not wanting to play the game anymore uh bit very well I don't know a bit right there's always a concerned with Risk Legacy I was like how much are people going to spoil it and then I discovered that the Gaming Community just went oh here's a game with spoilers cool and then just didn't spoil it and I was like whoa I mean not if you go looking you could find it the publisher zman was brilliant they turned it into an event by having it come out worldwide on the same day in every country two minutes minimize like the United States gets it first and then they write reviews then you're reading about it and

you're like I would have bought it but it spoiled it in the review and I didn't want to do that so uh Essen uh game fair in Germany is a big game fair in October and it it came out the first day of that but it was in New Zealand and California and I think Russia lagged a couple weeks but other than that so yeah that was the way to avoid that you don't play it once you play it 18 times fair enough okay I also have a spoiler question related to spoilers as a concept What's the statute of limitations for you guys giving a talk where you're like all right I'm we're going crazy we're talking about every beat of the game when are you know when are we going to get that full spoiler talk if ever um tomorrow okay I don't know I um cuz I mean like we all know Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father like sorry sorry guys what so like so you know but this not you're this these are sort of the first games with spoilers board games with spoilers so you know what do you think that that going to be more honest question is probably pretty soon and most people here like have played it and hopefully

when we talked about Act One twists and act two twists you know what we were talking about but just to save it from the people who had heard about it and wanted to play it but I'm guessing sometime in the next year I will talk about season one much more honestly and then season two you know we'll be out we won't talk about that um when I do podcasts now like there's usually a point where like okay now you just and then I'll get into the spoilers like give people a chance to to not listen but it's still selling well and still reaching new people like if if if it was out of print I'd talk about it all day long cuz it had run its course thank you um did you make any special considerations when designing for the uh varying player counts so like the game can play a little differently at two players than at four for example it's a I don't think we did actually I mean at first it was going to be a three to four player game but then we realized it's a great couples game because it's easy to field the team um it is a little easier with two players uh you play it with uh two characters each if you want but no we just we kept it simple so yeah you

can um you play right out of the box just like you might Play Pandemic with your characters so cool thank you part of the reason for that is pandemic had been tested with two to four and also we didn't feel like giving ourselves any additional design challenges by having different rules for the player count yeah it multiplied over the complexity the payoff okay so we got two more questions and we got four more minutes what before we take the question just want to remind people to fill out your valuations you can tell I was a teacher at one point um fill out your evaluations so that the GDC has a sense of how this new board game you know talk branch is is going for future years uh yes I was wondering if you could speak to a moment about the your sort of difference in experience between balancing a competitive Legacy game and a Cooperative Legacy game in particular how that was balancing against for lack of a better term in AI versus balancing between actual other players he should probably take that yeah so in in Risk leg Legacy I made the Assumption which worked most of the time but not all the time if player a kept winning and they

were getting bonuses which led to them winning more than players b through D would gang up on them and bring them back to the herd and because the game goes in so many different directions I needed the players to act as policing agents where that fell down is when groups are like well it didn't feel right to pick on that person so they just kept winning and and then the game would go off the rail so I knew that lesson coming in here but we really did have this fear and we spent time at the beginning talking about it of like you know you're like on the ground in the fetal position the game's just kicking you game after game like you know like just like well um and turns out that that um funding worked and solved like 90% of our problems in that point and you know like uh allowing you to pick two things at the end of every game that would help you in the next game and if you lost the game you get an a free game to try it again gives you two more things then if you would won the game if that makes sense were just about enough to

kind of work but it was a lot of fingers crossed and then watching the play test and never seeing it or if it went off the rails we knew why thank you y so really quickly talk about materials if you would all these play tests hundreds of play tests oh God did corporate pay for all these stickers and tearing up cards and everything and what would your advice be for the garage developer um trying to De we both work out of our home homes as garage developers um no we just built it ourselves like when we have to send out four prototypes towards the end when you have the full kit with we make like actual dossier my wife God bless her hand cuts perforations into the into the dossier I'm more of a scorer I she's like an arts and crafts person but they're they're very timec consuming um there are some tricks I mean early on I would print out stickers and put them on actual cards uh we used a lot we got a lot of pandemic sets and actually used those cardbacks for season 2 was almost

exclusively card sleeves U because they're much easier to to change out um there's a lot of print on demand services but we don't typically do that because the iteration Cycle's too long um and uh yeah a lot of money as well so I don't know it's 1059 and I the two of you sort of came up first what he was first okay I if if you've got a 5-second question we can give you a 5sec answer um just um thanks for the talk by the way uh just had a question did you guys consider doing stuff like uh cross campaigning like two groups of player influencing the same board or some stuff like that yeah we like a challenge uh figured yeah no no I I've thought about that people have come up to me with like okay now that you've got you've mastered this like how can we raise the stakes it's entertaining uh but we haven't planned it so okay thank you thanks