Legacy Games: From Risk to Pandemic to SeaFall & Beyond

i'm getting up early to listen to a grown man talk about stickers for an hour my name's rob davio i've been a game designer for 18 years board game designer professionally most of that time with hasbro i'll get into that a little bit as we go and out of all the games i've done and i don't have an exact count but i've done 70 or 80 games in various forms over those 18 years nothing has quite resonated uh more than the three games that i put out risk legacy pandemic legacy and sifal and i couldn't figure out why and i'm still not sure i figured out why but i'm going to give an attempt today to talk about why these games have sort of caught on how they have why they are controversial um where they might go from here i'm going to talk for you know 35 40 to 45 minutes and then we'll take questions from people here but before i begin i just wanted to kind of get a sense of

what you're looking for in the talk so who has played a legacy game here all right so most of you i will keep it spoiler free for those of you who haven't it's just second nature now it's like some sort of like deep training if you i'm an operative like i just maintain cover the entire time um who is thinking of designing a legacy game okay a few brave souls out there so i'll give some tips on what i've learned and what i do now when i approach new ones because i have one that's coming out later this year and i'm working on three other ones right now so just to give a little background of where i am and what i'm doing and to kind of warm up with some shameless plugs i do non-legacy stuff i know it's a big surprise to many people and i have some games coming out later this year early next year i've got a game based on the lock and key comic book a game in the middle based on mountains of madness by lovecraft that one's a little different because i think it's really boring when the characters get to go insane but the players don't so i tried to

i tried to change that for this one and then a game for the titans of gaming which about opposite from a legacy game in my usual work as you can do i'm also the chief restoration officer in a new game company called restoration games where we take old out of print games and restore them and put them back into print this is our first year's line that we're just finishing up right now and they'll be out later this year so stop thief from 1979 indulgence and downforce are renamed from a game called dragon master and a game called top race so that's fun so sometimes i'm just mining the vault for old ideas and bring them back but what i'm really going to talk about today is covenants and i had a ton of really bad ark of the covenant jokes that i'm not going to get into and you're welcome for that because when i woke up this morning i realized how awful they were they were so clever when i wrote them like awful clever but they're not clever whatsoever and by covenants i mean nothing legal

nothing binding nothing biblical but almost every inter-human interaction especially when you're dealing with strangers has some sort of underlying covenant you don't expect the cook to poison your food at a restaurant you don't expect to be punched in the face when you buy coffee or walk down the street right these some things are illegal and then there's some things that are just sort of culturally inappropriate and vary from culture culture and it's no different as a game designer i realize that when when you make a game as a game designer the you have a covenant with the players and there's certain expectations that are sort of unspoken and perhaps even unknown to both parties that you're agreeing to to deal with and basically be beholden to what i realize is that legacy games are disruptive in a way and controversial because when i came up with the idea i accidentally broke a number of these covenants which makes it sort of exhilarating in one sense and off putting in another to some people who don't want them broken

this is the same thing and i'm not comparing myself to him or a success but that george r r martin did with game of thrones which is there is a covenant that the main character cannot be really killed just set back and he made a pretty good point of saying he could abuse that main notion and he did it so that the reader would always be nervous and care more about every character because no one was truly safe so i think sometimes you know if you're designing something creative and you're sometimes designing something new if at all possible and i don't know how possible this is because this is me looking back eight years later and and spending a lot of time thinking about it being able to identify covenants between the person that you're designing something for in yourself and figuring out if these are actual covenants that are inviolate and need to be maintained or if it's something that's just a cultural shorthand that can be broken or otherwise manipulated so that's about as heady as we're gonna

get in this after this we're gonna talk about games and stickers um so what path led me to deciding one day that it was gonna be really fun to make a game that you write on and that you rip up cards for so it all starts in the 70s that's not exactly me but it might as well be me um everyone was blonde and the world was orange from like the friction from the corduroy or something like that that was going on so i grew up i grew up in the 70s and then when i got to about 1980 i discovered d which storytelling one game leads to another and i got so good at i moved on to advanced d d so that's why i get to be up here because i became advanced and so whole new things changed there um d d remains a through line through a lot of my designs and a lot of my thinking and you know when i was 12 years old i played a lot of it when people ask me now what's your favorite game i say it's very simple it's playing first edition d with my friends and my brothers when i'm 12 but i don't get to do that anymore but it's maintaining the idea of getting up one morning and then saying like where were we yesterday

what was happening and then something happens and then a character dies or you lose something you get that bad die roll and you fudge it all the time in d d but in general you get this sense of things to just move forward and you're just picking up where you left off so that's always been in my mind and i discovered d d when i was at camp at age 12 and at the same time because i didn't really want to go away to camp my uh parents let me bring my first comic books that was the exact one that i well not the exact ones a picture of the exact one that i got to uh bring with me and again this also has episodic storytelling what happens in the next chapter and it's not uncommon it's television it's comic books it's serialized novels of the 19th century um but the idea is pick up where you left off and then you know i went through and i played a ton of i played a ton of infocom games i still get nostalgia seeing that blue on cyan screen like that's like why isn't this still the default user interface in the world nothing has been improved upon since that so i played a lot of of those games and

then let's see if anyone i did had two deep nerd cuts i wanted to bring up i was a member of the star wars fan club and got banthatrax magazine delivered to me um which got me so hyped for empire strikes back because i was seven to ten reading a you know quarterly i think fan news magazine they're sending pictures and i was out of my mind like only a kid could be and then somehow the movie was better so i also will maintain that that is the best movie ever made because it was for me and on the right is something called adventure construction kit has anyone seen this or played with it couple people oh wow of course i'm at the gdc um this was something put out 1985 84 86 which basically let you create your own little world and you had characters and you could set different genres and write dialogues and walk around and open chess and do stuff and i played around and i sort of fell in love with the theory of it i think in the reality either i was using it wrong or they were missing one vital point which is when

you play tested it and kind of move people around and did things when you wanted to reset it you had to go manually put everything back right you couldn't just be okay let's reset and so you test them like this is great move this guy back put that in the chest lock this door so i never really moved on so these are some of the things that formulated my life as a kid and i never thought for a moment it would lead to anything professional but i grew up in age 28 i became a professional game designer um which still seems even though it is a ton of work it seems in some way like it can't actually be what i've been doing for a living i mean my career is old enough to vote and smoke so it's should feel normal right now along the line a couple games that i i worked on risk 2210ad which you know started to talk about like making bigger games and factions and and working with an engine already in this case the risk engine to do more interesting things and you know that's part of the thread that would lead to risk legacy um i was one of the three people who all claim 70 of the design work on

betrayal at house on the hill which is probably fair because it's a big game and then i think the math holds um i was not the original inventor on that but i worked on it for about a year and a half at hasbro some sort of either second designer or developer there's really no word for it but i kind of fell in love with the fact that you start a game and then it goes in an unexpected direction like you're halfway and like you got surprised by the game you literally don't know when you're starting the game um what's going to happen or even how to win so the idea that a game can sort of come out and surprise you while you're playing it was something i inherited from the inventor of this and get to spend a lot of time with and sort of internalized i was one of the designers on heroscape so then again like narrative storytelling and campaign development and um i'm still really proud of this game the fact that we sold it as base take your toy box and shake it out onto your lego set and then you've got a game um fortunately price of plastic is tied

into the price of petroleum and from when we conceived the idea until like five years later it became sort of cost ineffective to me but the one game that i think is the direct predecessor to the legacy idea is something that most people don't even know of and would be very surprised to find out what it is which is lord of the rings trivia pursuit dvd i'm sorry trivial pursuit lord of the rings dvd the trivial pursuit brand comes first um this was uh something i worked on i worked on a number of dvd games in the middle of last decade um if you think you have restrictions in the code you have to work with dvds were a whole other exciting world there was no real standard to them different dvd players would make different calls to different code however they wanted to do it because most time you put it in and you played a movie um but this was a fad and this was a thing and and hasbro jumped on board and i did a number of things with it and what i did with lord of the rings i was doing a lot of work with trivial pursuit of the time is derivative is a box of cards and you

take out a card and you read it i don't know why i'm telling you this you kind of understand how that works um but there's something interesting about themed trivia theme trivia the person buying this probably knows lord of the rings you wouldn't buy it for them or you wouldn't buy it for yourself unless you had an interest in lord of the rings but that person playing a trivia game is probably with people who don't know as much as they do about lord of the rings so you have a dilemma as a designer which is do you write easy questions or do you write hard questions because either way you're alienating about you know half of your audience who's likely to be playing this so what you usually end up doing is doing a mix of both and then you put it in a card box and you randomly draw it out and you get a question and now again you've got a 50 chance of the person who's good at it getting some really obvious question of the person who's not good at getting some ludicrous question and they both feel frustrated by the experience so i had what i thought was a clever idea of on the dvd um sort of turning the box of cards which is randomly shuffled into something and this is an analog version

which is a more controlled experience so there are different pre-programmed games on the on the dvd and game one starts in the shire and contains very easy questions in game 15 or 18 was on mount doom and contained all hard questions so you could as a group decide how you were going to play and which level you were going to play and it essentially took the random box of cards and just sorted it from easy to hard people lost their [ __ ] because i made a consumable game that had an end amazon reviews were difficult when you're done you're done you can't go back and replay it the fact that a box of cards has the same number of questions but i just sort them in order was an argument that i couldn't make because the box is perceived to be infinitely replayable and there's this weird psychological thing where if you draw out a question you've had before you just go i've had that before and you read another one because you just don't know somewhere in that box is a magic new

question that you haven't found before so it was weird because i'm thinking hasbro had research that shows an active game family plays like twice a year so that box can last a long time and this dvd can last a long time and i thought i had been done something very interesting to make a better user experience but what i realized is that perceived infinite replay is highly valued in the board game series i'm going to talk about a lot of covenants and a lot of assumptions right now and they all apply to board games i realize that a lot of these don't apply to digital games and i uh stole or i guess borrowed or was inspired by a lot of digital uh pieces when i was porting him over to the to the analog world so somehow infinite replay was highly valued and what i had done is i had broken a covenant that i'd even realize and i don't think anyone realizes existed which is the player of the board game decides

how much a game is played and that's always been the case when you buy a board game it is up to you to decide how long that game is played it is not up to me as a designer what i had done is i had taken away sort of a fundamental agreement from the players and said no no this is my decision this is my decision now i'm deciding how much you play and even though it was basically more than they would ever play and gave them a better experience when they played i had accidentally violated this covenant of who gets to make this decision and that is something that continues with the legacy game series um not really getting into what the legacy is but i guess i'll take a quick brief thing i assume if you're here you know how they play but i guess for 30 seconds i'll say some of the actions you take place in one game carry forward into the next game that's wrapped up within a narrative that has emergent content through packets and envelopes and then at the end of this campaign the game is either completely finished in the case of a pandemic or sort of stabilizes and you can play it in its final state in the case of risk legacy

and sifal but some reason this covenant this is i i took it away even even yesterday on a different panel i did on on pandemic legacy one of the questions at the end someone said well yeah given that you can only play it once and it was sort of like this lead thing and i don't think it meant to be confrontational but when you hear that for about eight years running it gets it gets confrontational and i said well hold on you get to play it about 16 or 18 times and instead of being something where you can only play it or 16 or 18 times i've given you a reason to play it 16 or 18 times but that's a very interesting argument because it's very emotional because about this covenant you took something away that's my choice and you can do it at a re well you can do it at restaurants now like oh just whatever the chef wants or give me the tasting menu and i'm not going to pick but you can still see what's coming and you can opt out and there's a few or not go to the restaurant or something like that so it's interesting of whether the creator gets to decide how much they decide versus the end user and so i thought about it i realized that people really want games to be like groundhog day

they want to start in the same place when they wake up in the morning and they want to make little different choices in their day to see where it ends and they want to do it as much as possible do they want to save the was it the kid who falls out of the tree do they want you know and but groundhog's day is this sort of analogy and that the main character does mature and learn and go on and and no things different but people really like the conception of a board game being in their control and that there's these safe parameters around like what they can do which led me to think about different experiences different creative experiences if you're if you're a consuming narrative for the most part or you're consuming something some things are very repeatable and when you repeat them they're exactly the same things and some things are more experiential which is like when you do it you're you're done and you you can't do it again or you can't do it exactly the same way and sort of the traditional ones and this is deliberately off center is you know you there's a movie and then you see the movie again and it's the movie and there's a book and there's there's music and when you you put on

sergeant pepper you're going to get the same songs in the same order and no one's upset about this and games are they people wanted to be largely repeatable but i move the letter e over the line to be like but i want to experience it a different way i want to come in at different angles and play with it but i want it to be a repeatable experience but almost all of these things which are traditionally repeatable also have sort of an experiential equivalent so instead of going to a movie which granted it's repeatable now that you can just get it into your home or you can own it 50 years ago it's different but if you go to see a play which is a lot like a movie it's going to be different every time you buy a ticket depends like who the actors are or understudy or what choices they made or what theater it in and even if you see the exact same people do it three nights in a row it's going to have these little nuances and if you don't like the play in the middle you can leave but you don't get your money back from your ticket and no one else can come in and take where you left off um you know if you once again you got to buy a new ticket it's the same thing with a concert which is a musical

equivalent to theater and you know for books there are coloring books and there are crossword puzzles and no one gets mad when they go back to their coloring book that they colored and they're like god's used up like this i this is ridiculous my other book isn't used up but this one is like there's it's these had like these sort of alternate versions where you could experience them one and manipulate them and then be done but the board game world didn't really have this equivalent and i'd like to say that i really like sat down and thought this all through at the time but again this is looking back over years of sort of unconscious thinking made conscious now there's one flip side that i just sort of made an analogy to and i put this out as a design challenge to all of you that i hope no one takes me up on it which is food is a consumable experience and no one has made a repeatable food experience yet so it can go the other way so that's an open space free for you to design in however you like um so some years pass

and uh just circumstances and i've talked about this a lot in other talks and things so i'll kind of gloss over here because i'm trying not to duplicate from other things you can find me talking about online there was this brainstorm where i had we were talking about clue and there was this big moment where i made a joke as i like to do in corporate meetings where i said i don't know why they keep inviting these people back to dinner every night they always kill someone and everyone's like ha ha and i was like oh wait a minute wait a minute and i said well what if the game didn't reset what if it really was tuesday after monday and we knew that mustard killed someone and my boss who's a big game designer and things kind of gave me this like oh like we had this look like well that's that that might be something and then everyone else is like oh that was a good joke about dinner um so i kind of put it off to the side and then i you know i realized okay i had found that thing i found a thing where you play a game and then the next day the game's kind of like it's the next day it's we're used that we go to bed and we wake up it's the next day like this is not a radical

thought for any place except this gaming space and i got excited about that and i'm like well what really makes it the next day like when what actions and consequences and things and how does this work and started playing around and i i came up with something i realized what everyone's going to do is one of two things it's either they're going to start playing and they're going to be playing clue and i had these things called clue the usual suspects and you're getting grudges and enemies any little rap sheet like in your world it's mustard in your world it's peacock and there was a couple things are going to happen one people are going to get to the point where they don't like a decision they made a couple games ago and they're going to rewind it they're going to be like nope revert to save what did okay here's before i you know got the merchant mad and then i had the people chasing me in skyrim so i'm going to just back up to there because that's what you want to do you want to control your experience so that you're always the the hero of the story or the villain or whatever you want to be able to choose that and you want to be able to manipulate that and most games give you the ability to do that and that felt like cheating a bit to me

um and then i also realized to be very like selfish is if how are you going to track this how are you going to get up and play a game remember if you're playing twice a year or something even if it was a couple weeks you're like what happened and there was going to be like tokens and bags and markers and you would have to like have this very elaborate craft project about how this all like goes together i'm like if you just kind of wrote on it and put a sticker on it then it's just done and you don't have to worry about it coming apart so part of this whole permanent was to prevent cheating but a large part of it was to make my job easier and to make the game which i thought at times could be like 10 year olds playing clue easier to manage and so then you get this idea of permanent change now the game doesn't tell you to to burn things but some people are very very excited about the fact that they can finally abuse a game component because we don't don't touch that and don't eat your chips near it and sleeve that and don't rifle shuffle this thing and do it's like they're so precious

when they're really pieces of cardboard which i recognize and i don't like take a game and step on it just to prove a point and things like that like i take care of my games as well there was a nice release for doing this and this comes back remember i talked about comic books that was one of the things i collected and i put them in backs and sleeves because this was going to be my retirement fund in the 80s everyone's going to want you know the silver wolverine cover or whatever it is and um and then i bought some basically they were just fall off a back of a van comic books after office scruffy guy in new york city right after i graduated college like it was like hey hey man you want some comics 10 bucks and i'm like oh sure here you go they were already beat up and i brought them back to my little new york apartment and i threw them everywhere and i stepped on them and it was this release of not having to take care of something and it was really freeing so that was in my mind when i thought of this so this has been probably the especially the destruction of components the biggest uh sticking point on a lot of these

legacy games a lot of people are very very happy to go along with everything except that and if you've only tangentially heard of it a lot of times like oh that game where you rip up a card because it just feels wrong so i realize that there's a there's a second covenant that comes to board games and said they allow for consequence-free exploration the whole point of a board game is you know probably most of us really don't want to fight a war or necessarily crush our you know enemies into the ground economically or be hunted by a serial killer or what you know a number of things that games can explore probably most of us also don't want to be bean farmers right for like different reasons right so the theme of a game it lets you basically try things that are conservative or radical or just different but the idea is that you know at the end of the game it all goes back in the box and it didn't happen so there's this covenant that you can play on but this is kind of there's a very very other big big very

successful branch of gaming called casinos which play upon the exact opposite which is the thrill of making it matter so one other thing i thought about is like well poker is a very very bad game unless you have stakes in the game that hurt just enough that you don't want to lose them you know it's a it's a game about money played with people that happens to have cards on the table and so i was like can we kind of take some of this can we break this covenant again it wasn't this conscious and basically say let's let's put some skin in the game here's a card rip it up here's a decision you make you can't take that decision back does that get the blood going or does it make people mad and i don't really have an answer but it was sort of exciting enough to give it a try so i present all this stuff to hasbro for clue and they looked at me like i had lost my mind which is fair um so it went away again for like another year or six months and then we're thinking about things doing for risk and um

and i was like well you know that idea might work for risk and my boss that i talked to i was like i think you should give it a try and it was one of many things we were going to do with risk and really kind of dug into it and decided to start designing what became risk legacy permanent change putting stuff on the board building factions games carrying snacks and so without getting too much into the like the nitty gritty design you can ask about it after if you want more details um yeah the tension was there people were really nervous about like what's going to happen next and don't ruin this and oh this happened in the game and it's going to be there and it's sort of like hitting all these notes that i was hoping it would then something magical happened which is cliffhangers you know come back next week and see what happens it's like you get to the end of the game and people were like i want to play this again because i want to see what happens next and it says oh there's a reason that you want to play the game again the game finally spoke up and said here's a reason not to put me back in the closet total accident but i was like let's let's mine this for where it's worth and then what happened

with risk legacy is i just decided i was going to give up most rational thought of what a game was supposed to do and just any crazy idea i had i put in there and we'll get to the this craziest one in a little bit that you probably know about so an interesting side effect is that games uh all games almost all life experiences you have the sense of i don't know what i'm doing and then you have to gain mastery and there's this thrill of learning how to play a game and eric lang mentioned this yesterday on a different panel another game designer that some of the most exciting parts of the game are the end of the first game into like game three or four where you know what's going on but you don't know how to do it well and then everyone reaches a point where you've gained mastery and now you're sort of getting into like secondary and tertiary strategies and it's like comfort food but a lot of people and part of the reason people don't go back to games again and again and again especially now in the board game world is you want to get that sort of that that hit of the new and learning mastery and this is fisher random chess um bobby fischer came up with i'm not a

chess expert i'm not an expert on this but he scrambles the pieces in the back row so there's certain rules the king is always between the rooks black mirrors white and there's a black and white bishop well now you're in the mid game from the first turn you've just taken away the mastery of learning the opening moves to chess because there is no more opening moves so a test chess skill instead of chess knowledge wow if we just keep changing this game we can kind of duplicate some of this and keep people in that first couple games the entire experience that they're playing so part of this is preventing people from ever feeling like they know how to play because whatever they did in the last game it's only 90 relevant to this game um and so that was a kind of fun thing but i made mistakes and the big mistake i made was everything was sort of random now risk i'm assuming most people here played risk and most people here don't play risk anymore risk is in some sense sort of like this skinner box experience of how well

people psychologically handle the edge of the bell curve right it's like there's no reason why you should have just lost all those troops but you did um and so one of the things i had was you know like you roll three sixes when you're attacking and like the areas destroyed in a giant like nuclear you know devastation and that sounded really cool because every die roll was tense well as a designer i'd given up way too much control that could happen the very first role of the game it might never happen it might happen on the last roll or the same like there was just not enough control over when this happened and i realized if you're gonna ask people to make permanent changes in a game they should be the ones doing it that's one of the things that i've put in all the legacy games which is you may not understand what you just did you may not understand why you just did it but in almost every single case you were responsible or it was preventable or you had some sort of general under you were an agent of that and in risk legacy you had full control so which is right here which is you know

um you know there was a sticker that's on a card and you choose one to put a sticker on a board and later on you might really regret it but you did it so it's like actions have consequences and what i always wanted was when you look back at it it always makes sense in retrospect why that happened um so that leads to another covenant which is board games the designer always controls the materials here's the game it's done play with it they're never like here's most of the game here's a bunch of stickers here's some plastic pieces just kind of put them together however you like and it all work out right you have this trust as a as a player which is okay you've done your job and my job is now to enjoy your job and what the legacy games do is they sort of stop eighty percent along the way and say i've done or we've done co-designer this much of the game now together we're going to do the last part of the game you are now become like a an unwilling co-designer who has very limited knowledge of what

you're designing um and i think that that's like you know it's it's exhilarating to some people uh in every gamer as a game designer so you know you get to sort of get in and put your fingerprint on on things and it's just basically like permission to make house rules but the downside to the giving people these cards is because it was so new and because it was so powerful because it was so different it was like giving uh matches to a toddler in the sense that i would give out 10 stickers and they'd be gone within the first two turns of the game like well i'm going to do this well i'm going to do this what i'm going to do and then you get to the second game and you have this incredible hangover of why'd we do that there's nothing fun left to do and we've made a mess of our board so i was like well i can't give them all the materials right now i need to wait and say like here's a couple things learn how to use your tools play for a while integrate those and now here's some new tools and i'm like well i gotta i gotta put them in a box or something or lock em up um and which led to the the second big

moment which is these secondary goals and the box lid was deliberately designed to be open so you could see them and i'm like well this is this is cool there's a chance for some narrative here right instead of saying open this at the end of game three it's like open this you know one of them is um when i'm trying to think what the exact thing is when one person when a person wins for the second time and so i could do the math be like well that's not gonna be game one and in a five player game it might be like all the way to like game nine or something like that but most time would be like game three or four so it gave me enough control as a designer to figure out here's when stuff comes out and i was like this is this is neat this is just like if you play a game and people go like here's the beginner rules the intermediate rules and the advanced rules and you're like okay i'm really cool i'm going to start with the advanced rules and then you play and you're like this game's hard i don't like it and but you know it's like i just took that and sort of it was kind of the reverse thing instead of saying i'm going to give you that choice i'm going to say i'm going to i'm going to leave it here i'm going to make you play the beginner game and then you earn your way to the intermediate game but you earn it in a thematic way

and i have seen with these legacy games totally unexpected side effect is people are like open a pack and they're like oh new rules no one gets excited about rules that just doesn't happen but i'm like wait wait wait wait oh wow right like you're like you're drawn into this thing so it's just a matter of opening something so in my mind like that kind of works because sometimes you're playing a game and the game doesn't work out you're not winning and you can look over there like well i'm not winning but maybe maybe i can do one of those things and sort of feel like and so i'm like okay this is how i had it in my head this is how this works i'm like that's that's cool i provided sort of secondary features to that huge misunderstanding on my part because the rest of the world saw it as this what's in there how do i get to it how fast do i get to it when does this happen why don't you and i work together i'll lose so you can win just so we can open that thing and so that's when i learned the power

of anticipation and the unknown this was not until the game came out that i really got a sense that for me would have been again sort of like the permanence was a way to make the game trackable the locked up content was to make the game that you didn't abuse the game with the first part that i made permanent and it's only in retrospect and i'm like oh yeah it was this total narrative thing that i was doing and the power of foreshadowing and everything like that um and so but once i kind of realized like this is the this is the sticker that closes the risk legacy box i'm like well like i said now i'm just gonna do whatever so i'm gonna put a note on there and make it a ritual and you have to cut it and you're breaking the seal on something like that um then there's another covenant that kind of comes in here which is game's going to tell you everything that's in the box uh hasbro is a big corporation it's got a lot of layers of lawyers and safeties and checks so the meetings i had in where they're like well we need to put the box contents on the outside i'm like well you can't

now those were some interesting meetings there were two meetings that i had many times one is making sure they come like can we say and more can we say at least can we say and and like again a lot of things that they realize had to be in there did not have to be in there they were just customs they weren't laws the other one was at least three times i'd be in a meeting in some production person like oh you would you would mark the stickers at permanent but i i switched it so you could peel them off and remove them because you know like no no it's permanent it's like yeah but that means you you can't pick them up again i'm like yep but you don't want that yes i do right and then three months later some other person be like hey we noticed you would put permanent stickers so we made them repeal i'm like no nope i want i want them to be where you even if you accidentally put the corner on something like that's it like it's got it's gonna be there or you're gonna rip off your board um but so this is another covenant it's like when you buy a board game we're telling you what's in the box we're telling you here's the rules here's the factions here's what you get you can look on the bottom and then when you open the rule book at the beginning you um can just kind of go down and

and some people just do it as an accounting to make sure that they got everything they were supposed to and there wasn't a production or some people like to get their head around the project and so i'm like no i'm not going to tell you there's a whole bunch of stuff in sealed boxes and hopefully we produced it right sometimes we don't c fall is fun because i've seen people there's a battery warning which you are required to put on nothing nothing with batteries that you'll see for um so then it led very quickly to well if i'm not telling you everything am i telling you the truth there's a certain amount of trust that i is a game designer of being truthful with you and i break this covenant every legacy game that i do it's just like an author it's narrative surprise and i'm like okay well how can we really use this and that's when i did this idea i don't know if all of you know about this it still continues to entertain me what i realized is people aren't going

to want to rip up a card and the first thing that risk legacy asks you to do is take out a card with two stickers on it apply one sticker to the faction you're playing and then rip up the card that contains the other sticker like the first thing is a or b and you can't go back and it's being torn up and i what i wanted was the people go nope and just quit right there like don't torture them like i just like it's this little litmus test of whether you're up for this but i also realize that everyone's going to go i'm not going to rip it up there's this big black plastic vacuum form tray in the box you're like there's no real way to put this i know i'll put it under the tray and when you pick up the tray that is taped to the bottom some people find it right away some people don't find it until they played 15 games because that tray is in there tight so basically it was a way to torture people who were meticulous [Laughter]

and i joked around at first that i was going to put in an envelope that said do not open until instructed and then never instruct them so to be fair i am nicer than i threatened to be and there's been a whole fascinating bits of psychology here around groups finding this and then spontaneously again i've given creative control over them house ruling how they're gonna we'll do it after everyone wins once we'll do it after eight games we'll do it after bill finally wins because he hasn't won we'll we won't open at all we'll open it right now and just to make sure that no one could find out what it was there are four random packets at the bottom two are bad for everyone just messes up your world one is bad only for the people who are there when it's opened and one is only good if you're there when it's opened because even if you wanted to google it you wouldn't have an answer of whether you wanted to be there or not

so then people open it and it's more often than not bad and then something very interesting happens with the psychology they integrate these rules into the game and play with this bad expansion because they open something they shouldn't there is no reason why they have to right if you're playing a game and you are like someone's like do you want to play with this expansion like i don't like it it's kind of a downbeat you're like okay cool we'll leave it out i just gave you an expansion and you're like well we got to do it [Laughter] and then they do and then people get mad at me like i open this envelope that you told me not to and it was bad and you're a jerk and i'm like so i haven't done anything that crazy since then but that is one of the more enjoyable moments of my

professional career um actually so i was at a game convention last year and someone was auctioning away one of these and and the people doing the auction asked me to open the box and change one component so that when they found it they had a customized version and because it was a last-minute request and i panicked i didn't know what to do so i opened up that envelope and then put my cell phone number and said text this to this cell phone when you open it figuring i'd have this wonderful plan when they texted me so nine months later when someone texts me and i'm like unpub 27 what does that mean and i like oh i was supposed to think of something so i'm like are you playing now they're like yeah we're playing we're in the middle we're waiting okay one sec and luckily i just came up with an idea that i was running i was a secret scientific bunker running teleporting portals between places and

they could text this number for the next two hours and i would open up two random portals but if they went through something good might happen or something bad might happen but they could get their jump on their enemy and they were so excited like we need a portal actually no they would do we need a portal between brazil and france like coming online and then i would literally roll percentile dice oh sorry you lost three troops on the way and we had a great time and then we shut the portal down actually it worked out really well at the end of that game they opened up another envelope which opened up this like really big dramatic point with this like big new bad guy in this dramatic twist and i was like they've tapped into our signal i'm sorry we helped cause this signing off and then just didn't answer any more of their texts thank you so these are some of the covenants and where there's a little bit more to talk about but these are some of the covenants i broke with with risk legacy and ultimately it ended up here where the players were

in the control of sort of these spokes which were these different packets in the sandbox play which is meant to be open in nearly any order i think it's possible to actually open them in in almost every order or every order and then you get to 15 games and then there's just the ending was like you're done it doesn't lead to any sort of climax like 15 games thank you for playing um and so it sort of looks like this and it came out and i expected it to i had like no f's to give at this point because hasbro had moved my job and i knew i was leaving hasbro and i'm like i don't think i can make it on my own i'm probably going to have to find a different career it was a good run um let's just do something crazy on the way out the door just to see what happens i don't get royalties from it i don't own a piece if it failed i didn't make less money there was no business thought in i'm like i saw eight copies this will be fun um so i was really thrilled when it was received very very well so i i set out and i'm on my own and i'm like um okay i'm gonna do another one what became c fall

and i had 14 years of doing kids games and i'm like i'm going to make the biggest thing that's ever been made ever yeah so um i want to do like longer playtime and more narrative and more unknown i'm like oh you want christmas presents i'm going to give you an empty board how's that and you're going to explore it and do stuff and then it took three years but we'll get back to it it's called foreshadowing um so in the meantime matt licock comes up to me and he's like hey let's take this idea for for pandemic and i'm like i don't think it's going to work as a co-op man um sorry but let's give it a try um so we sat down and i did uh we did a whole talk on this yesterday so i'm not going to get into in detail here because you can find it online after but one of the first things we did is like well we want more of a story we want more of a movie feel so we came up with something completely radical feel free to take pictures it's called a three act structure um we created a timeline of months and

we did upbeats and downbeats and we ended up basically taking this sort of freeform sandbox thing that would be done in risk and we turn it to a tightly scripted legacy deck where you start with card one and we go through and you get to card i think it's 60 or something in in season one and along the way like we are presenting a fairly linear narrative that you get to sort of wobble in different places but if you played pandemic legacy and we had a little breakout session here most of you would have similar experiences but you might say like oh no we never used that character or for us europe was more problematic for us it was south america but so you're having your own experience but it's within the it's starting um but the big question we had to do and this is for people who are interested in doing um legacy games a little bit of a design sidebar now we're getting away from covenants and to design things is uh is you as a designer have less and less control the longer the games go like people like why is it 15 at first i'm like well because that's a pretty big commitment already and i've had two people ask me this

weekend i'm like can we have like a six-pack legacy game experience just like a long weekend and i'm like okay two separate people ask me so i'll think about it but 15 felt like you got your money's worth but it's sort of capped because i felt like people weren't going to want to play after a certain point and the design cone of where the game was going to go was going to get so wide that as a designer i was going to have no idea if the game broke like it will break eventually if you give people the ability to keep changing it but what happened in risk and what uh happens in c fall is it's a competitive game so i'm relying on the players again unwitting co-designers to keep the game balance by beating up on the leader well you don't have that in a co-op game right so in a co-op game you're like a week matt and i just had these fears of literally the game just kicking the players in the fetal position like game after game after game and losing leading to losing and winning leading to winning and we get into this in more detail in our talk but basically you need to if you're designing have some way where

losing doesn't lead to more losing and winning doesn't lead to more winning but winning is always better and so there's a series of weird incentives and what we did was something called funding and pandemic legacy most of you probably know this um but there are event cars event cards are good because they give you actions and they pad a deck to give you more time so every time you win in pandemic legacy we took two cards away and every time you lost we gave you two extra cards so that you could stay in this in this zone also um this is important in a co-op game there's a safety net when we were play testing and people would win uh sorry lose i had some friends lose first game in january second game in january first game in february and they said well we're your friends and we'll keep playing testing this if you ask but we're pretty sure that we would throw this away because we broke the game i'm like no you didn't they're like we just lost the first three there's no way we're coming back and we kept playing and they kept going and they had a good time and matt and i were talking about we realized we put this box in that says open if you lose four games in

a row and all this does is provide a psychological anchor of you are doing fine until you lose four games in a row now if you lose four games in a row there's stuff in there that will help you but basically if you're like we lost the game like that happens you lost two games like okay we lost three games this is horrible now at least we didn't lose four if four we'd be in trouble but if we lose four we get what's in that box and they're like okay let's keep going then and until we let them know when they should panic they would panic after two losses or after three losses so all this does is sort of say like i know i'm gonna lie to you i know i'm gonna trick you i know i'm gonna do unexpected things but really honestly we want you to have a good time and we got your back if things get bad and so that became pandemic legacy some takeaways from there is a linear story can work cooperative can work and in fact maybe even better because you all integrate and learn new rules together and you can think through and as you open things it's not like one person is better at figuring out how to

use this new tool um and time done walks can work whereas risk legacy you sort of chose how things happen for the most part in pandemic we're like here's your next bit of content now we've heard criticisms that it's a little too railroady but people enjoyed it so with season two there's a little more creative choice um so let's go back to seafall and i realize i'm i'm talking too much i want to get to questions it got big and it stayed shaggy and it got some mixed reviews although now i've seen later reviews and later people playing is i think the people who i wanted to have play it are finding it i think a lot of people who played earlier people had played pandemic legacy and expected this to be like a season two but it's a much heavier game it was designed to be but it is because it was a heavier game um there's some things longer play time discourages bins play i think with risk and pandemic they're 45 minutes to an hour you get done and you say let's play again c fall can be two hours you don't say let's play again and then mentally when people like do you want to play another game you might be like i don't know if we have time tonight right so with this game where i'm giving

you reasons to play again and again and again one of the things i need to give you is a quick cleaner experience [Music] the rules start heavier and ramp up more which means the early games need to be more of a tutorial they need to be like handled i had to take a lot of rules out which means some of the early games like oh this is a little flat and then you open up some stuff and you're like oh this is where the game gets good which is where i had started it but then people were confused so moving the whole complexity scale up leads to a lot of issues in those early games which get compounded by a longer play time but i will tell you there's some really cool stuff in there so if you're into like a big sprawling lord of the rings d d campaign sort of longer thing i think there's a lot of fantastic stuff in there and i'm very happy with it it just didn't meet the expectations that have been set with the first two games that had come up so other people have jumped into this pool um so going downstream right after risk legacy came out the pathfinder adventure card game sorry i should say card game on there it

came out and mike selinker the designer said he had played risk legacy he's like oh that's cool we're allowed to do that now all right you can make things change and continue and create campaigns cool and then he went off and and did this um there's this game that just came out now called gloomhaven that is not two boxes stacked to get stacked together that is the gloomhaven box which i was going to bring out and play with some friends out here until i realized it was the suitcase like it i mean it's it's huge it's a big map it's a tactical dungeon crawling thing with branching characters and all these little boxes in there and mex versus minions there's a board game that came out from riot last year which has like a box with a miniature in it and a campaign play and then even a card game called fabled fruit what most of the games i just went through are doing though is there took that second moment the aha moment writes oh there's gonna be narrative contents locked up fabled fruit makes a point of saying this is not a legacy game it's not a

legacy game like it was like on the back it's almost like hey rob this is not one of your games because they didn't do the permanent change they didn't do that perm they just said oh we can lock up content or otherwise keep you from doing it or have a deck that as you play the game you bring new stuff in so people are sort of taking the less controversial half of things and implementing the games and i think it's fantastic that you know all of this is happening because now again like giving you a reason to play the game again and again again to ramp up in complexity to start you out simple to give you some actions moving forward um and then for me like i said i'm working on three other ones right now um and then you know just pigeon hole holding myself just right in there my brother though told me he said hey i'm from boston he's like david ortiz doesn't bunt he's like just keep making these legacy games until everyone tells you to stop making them so i have this coming out in the third quarter matt and i have this coming out excited it's very different from the first one

um the box bottom just leaked so i can say things now like it takes place 71 years in the future and the world's already ruined good luck so here are some of the covenants that we talked about i can leave those up if anyone want to ask about them but we've got about 10 minutes now to take questions there's two microphones there if you want to line up i can't really see you because the lights on either side of those or you can shout from your seats if you like also i need to tell you to fill in your evaluations and we'll start over here hello yep uh so one of the big differences between board games and video games is that the video game kind of enforces the rules for you yep whereas in board games the players have to do that yep i've heard a bunch of stories of people who started a pandemic legacy campaign messed up the rules in their first game and then never went back to it okay i was wondering when you were designing whether you put much consideration into the fact that people might just get the rules really wrong and maybe get a different experience

than what was meant well that's the problem with any board game and i've made this analogy before in other talks which is learning a board game would be like if you're going to learn a new tv show and you have to spend 20 minutes doing a reading comprehension test and answering questions and then when you watch the show like scenes are out of place and one character speaks in spanish for no reason right and you get to the end you're like i don't i don't really like that i don't like the spanish-speaking guy and they're like why no that's not supposed to be right and you're like oh hold on and then you take the test again and then you get to watch it like it's a really unfair burden put on people that gets compounded in the legacy games now what matt and i put at the end of the book is like it's all cool you're not going to break it if you mess something up just cut your funding or add your funding and just keep rolling with it so of course like you know it's discouraging or you know tell me who they are i'll tell them it's okay and they can keep playing like giving up after one game i would hate to have that happen right there were some people were playing a c fall game and they found out in game nine they were playing something horribly wrong and they went on bg g and asked about it and um and everyone's like nah it's fine right it's good like you just keep rolling

with you're all playing under the same roll so it's a necessary problem of board games it gets compounded legacy games and matt and i to an extent in season one and religiously in season two tried to do like forms and factors and numbers and reminders and cards and putting things in certain places to guide this experience even more thank you okay hi hi john arnold from handle ever games uh i was curious uh as you mentioned video games inspired a lot about what's going on in legacy games uh do you have any thoughts about digital versions of legacy tabletop games any opportunities or challenges that you could think of yeah well i mean the challenge is what is it because like a digital game already has campaign modes and they already have like branching narratives and unlockable content and a lot of the stuff that i cribbed and put back in here and so i don't want to do is end up having a photocopy of a photocopy going backwards i mean the joke i always make is when you when you finish the game it uninstalls itself and you have to buy it again for five bucks or something

but i don't think that anyone's gonna let us get away with that um i don't know i suspect it would be something like a series of board games and campaign mode where actions have consequences um but i don't know exactly what it is it's something that people have been asking me about lately and i don't have a clear answer for it because it feels like again it's going back to a medium where a lot of stuff came from but there's an explosion sort of so what's that sort of like post an explosion i haven't played that yet oh i need to it's a physical bejeweled that's also gone back to a digital version okay hi uh thanks for the talk also i'd say uh to that idea a server side lock everybody in can't undo your save pay 15 for the legacy style expansion pass i would do that with co-op friends anyway my question is the play testing process especially when you are explicitly breaking covenants and you are trying to make a game that is essentially [ __ ] with some players expectations but also want to play test a long game like i'd love to hear how you go after

that what you really look for in that feedback that's actually valuable to you yeah so there's three different games that i've done or four if include season two which is done and with you know to finish that last year they all had a slightly different uh play testing methodology and the one that worked the best was the one from pandemic legacy which is a qualitative over quantitative at hasbro it was just the usual play test group c fall plaid hat did a great job of doing their usual thing that you would do for something like a a deck building game which is to get a lot of data from a lot of different groups um but what matt has does with all his games we do pandemic legacy is we gave it to two to four groups at a time and had them video their entire experience including before the game and then after the game and then we watched all of these and made hundreds and hundreds of notes because you can't get enough data meaningful data across the spectrum it's more important to get really good data focused in because they're more of an experiential game it makes a little bit less it's a little bit less important whether it is this costed two or costed three because it's a something you can make a different

choice on later we still try to get it right what's more important is people got confused this text was too long this didn't fit on the board this rule was they stopped play for seven minutes figuring out this rule this rule shouldn't come out in the middle of the game it should come out at the end of the game because it's longer to integrate so uh with legacy games now going forward to me it's it's a video it's a lot of work it's hundreds of hours of video watching and making notes but that's how you find all the things that aren't in the game but above the game like above the table okay got four minutes so i probably take these three questions okay i'm interested in the covenant that the players make with each other to continue playing the game um with like an rpg you say oh we're going to play d and d once a month whatever and it's effectively infinite yep but and with regular board games we're going to play board games every week it's going to be different it's whatever we sit down to play but here i'm finding it difficult to find a group who's

going to commit to pandemic legacy or c fall yep um basically the campaign nature of dnd is i inherited a lot of things from dnd or took a lot of things and one of the things i also took is the how do we get a group together problem uh it's like forming a band right like everyone has great ideas and then it just falls apart um it's different it lives in that space of hey we're going to do this thing and it's going to take we're going to play you know the first game we played our game group every week is going to be pandemic legacy and that will take our time for the next three months that's one of the reasons people said they wanted they want a six-pack they wanted like five games and i'm done or eight games and i'm done because my i was so concerned about adding the value that we put the number at like 12 or 15 but i'm discovering now that maybe that's not as important as doing something where you can get a group together and committing and maybe a smaller number makes sense i don't have a magic answer other than it's the same issues that come from from dnd so um and we went we made a point with pandemic legacy to make it a

two-player game because it's a good couples game or parent and child game right it doesn't need a large it's easier to get one person together than three right okay okay i i don't have an answer unfortunately what were some of the lessons you learned about tuning and balancing on a game like betrayal at house on the hill that you applied to the legacy game yeah well that's probably the first time i've heard the phrase tune and balance associated with betrayal at house [Laughter] yeah it's surprising yeah um yeah my take is sometimes tuning in balance is not as vital as the experience what what happens in legacy is there's always a chance to fix it later right you make a chance and like oh that was a bad idea it's like well at the end of this game we now have to do this to correct for that because it didn't work how we wanted to give enough people enough tools that they can solve whatever problem they created that's when matt and i will talk about what designing like well if they really mess up this portion we'll give them these tools if they

don't pay attention to that we'll give them these tools so i don't know what problems you're going to have in your world but we should have found a solution for all of it so you may say like well we never use these stickers it's like well you didn't end up with a problem there so for me it's not about balancing it it's trying to think of every problem and giving them the ability to balance it themselves okay uh you showed some of the other games that are starting to do more sort of continuing campaigns and stuff like that um but that none of them are doing the more permanent changes that the legacy games are doing do you think more games will start doing you know writing on the boards and stickers are you excited about that and will they be called legacy games they can be called legacy games if they want i i mean i'm associated with it but i control or own nothing to it um because i thought of the idea why i work for a corporation so thank you hasbro for not locking that down um some people are doing it gloomhaven's doing it a little bit i i was a little behind on time so i didn't get into his detail but that is multiple groups can be playing exploring the same world at the same time so group a might raid this tomb and shut it down before b gets there on a

different night right one of the things about a legacy game is you can't leave it at a library and everyone plays it but gloomhaven you could you could walk and be like oh that other group that plays on tuesday got that sword right so there's some interesting things that are going on with with permanence now and i think i think when risk came out people saw it as an interesting fad um or an interesting idea a number of people tried it and said this is ridiculously difficult to do and probably is never going to be successful again and then pandemic came out and everyone now said okay maybe there's something to this and i keep hearing through the grapevine that there are more coming out i think we're starting to see other people doing it based on it and they'll come up with all sorts of new ideas that i couldn't possibly think of because i'm now at the point where i'm like this is how it's done like it's gone from crazy idea to here are the rules of how to do it really quickly um so i'm looking forward to people shaking up my assumptions of what what this can do it's 10 31 so i'm afraid they're going to kick us out now so i want to thank you all for taking the time this morning