The State and Future of Board Games

[Music] hi everybody well that was unexpected welcome to uh sunny san francisco and the first day of gdc 2019 and the third state and future of board games panel which i'm very excited to present this year i'm paul dean i'm one of the co-founders of shut up and sit down i'm also a writer and a games journalist and uh wannabe games designer and so many other things but more interesting than me are three other wonderful people on a panel who have agreed to appear this year starting as far away from me as possible i'd like everyone to introduce themselves because this year we have a particularly awesome panel um i'm jen sandercock i make edible tabletop games so they're games that you actually have to eat um so i've put them i've put 13 different games um into a cookbook which has is part recipes part part rules and uh yeah

jonathan yeah uh hi everyone i'm jonathan yang i'm a game designer i've worked with i've done a lot of games live for a number of different games including star wars imperial assault doom the board game game of thrones trivia uh and more recently uh power rangers heroes of the grid uh nickelodeon splat attack and sonic dice rush which which is coming out very soon i didn't know about that yeah uh and i also also done uh games independently a game called bargain quest which was covered by shut up and sit down and yeah i just do a lot of game design and susan hi i'm susan mckinley ross and i'm a toy and game designer i've designed i've licensed over 40 products in over a dozen games the most popular is quirkle which has been described as scrabble with shapes and colors my quirkle won this build of jars in 2011 and another game i designed that's done really well is called hoot al hoot it's a cooperative game where children are trying to get the owls back to the nest

before the sun comes up and because of my toy background i'm mostly in the family games market thank you all for coming i would like to ask oh by the way i should tell you all the format for this for the last few years has always been we'll talk a fa about a few topics together on the panel for about sort of 30 40 minutes and then we'll open up to the floor please come at us with any questions you like we have such a diverse range of people this year that i think you could touch on anything and someone will have something cool to say about it um we actually started an hour early in the in the speaker's lounge by accident just talking about stuff we're excited by can i ask you all what in the last 12 months has excited you most in tabletop gaming what do you think is most interesting right now um i think for me some of this i mean other than like personal successes i think some of the stuff i'm interested in is seeing um much more wider

recognition of a wider range of tabletop games so they're not all quite hardcore games there's a lot of stuff for families or light games um and there's a lot of food themed game twits which i i like food themed games i don't get why [Laughter] um well let's see there's a couple of things that i've been finding really particularly exciting some of them are just games uh technology is continuing to evolve like manufacturing technology particularly uh fantasy flights there was a talk earlier today about key forge right the first unique deck game which uh even like one year like a year ago would not have been possible right to produce uh just because of the limitations of digital printing and like they've created a whole new method that have opened up a huge range of new possibilities for design and a lot of that kind of innovation is happening right now and i'm just super excited to see what's gonna what's coming down the pipe um the other thing that i'm really excited about is that there's a lot more kind of multi media board game stuff going on uh

things like renegade games has a tea dragon society which is both a board game and a comic book and they're working with oni press on that and i just found that really charming because a lot of games have like wonderful worlds and awesome artwork and like we don't often get to explore those worlds in the same way that we might explore like star wars which exists on every single possible level oh my goodness yes but if a franchise starts as a tabletop game or something like that like i mean i guess we have the clue movie uh but you know and what a fine movie it is yeah i think those are two things that i'm super excited about that have been coming coming out this year similarly i'm i'm really excited about the the scope and the variety of games that are available right now i feel like there's more interesting mechanics there's more interesting themes there's more interesting materials being used in games like food or toys or water or air people are are doing new and novel things that i don't think would have been happening five years ago

i didn't go to toy fair this year but i watched the reports from a website called the game aisle and basically she took photos of all the cool games that were coming out and i was looking through them and i was getting that pang of oh i wish i designed that and that's an excellent feeling when you're looking at the games coming out and and they inspire you to to make things so i'm really excited about the variety of things that are out on the market right now well we touched on this briefly before the panel started about is the market gonna saturate at any point because it was last year it was something like three and a half thousand new board games came out which works out about ten new board games a day which is too many for me to play and jonathan you said something like four thousand this yeah yeah that is what i've heard reported is that about 4 000 games have been announced or are already uh in production this year like by now right how is that possible how is there a market for that uh turns out there's a lot of people uh okay with a fair amount of income and also

board games are spreading right like more and more communities are having access to board games or like learning about it i mean i think we could definitely credit things like critical role for like making uh things like dungeons and dragons feel much more mainstream uh and just like the market is continuing to grow when people are finding more and like people are still finding success uh you know going forward and i'm personally a little bit nervous about like how how far we can stretch this uh but it's so far it's continuing to you know trend outward and trend upward and more products and more people buying these products and it's been crazy it continues to be crazy yeah i i think as a designer and a gamer i'm excited about the saturation i think the market is saturated if i were a publisher or a manufacturer or a retailer i'd be much more worried about it because how do you stock what's going to sell how do you know what's going to work for your store many harder choices at that level but as

a designer and a gamer it's very exciting and i i also am worried about the short-term future is the sustainable but i i hope we i think there's some hope that we could eventually get to a book model where there are lots of people who read a wide range of books and there will be a lot of people who play a wide range of games and i'm hoping that that's that's what can happen for our industry um and then the other thing is i'm a gamer who had a game night this weekend and puerto rico got played and puerto rico's old shouldn't get played anymore at game nights but it's a good game and it ended up getting played and i think we're there are gamers evolving now who are only going to play games once or twice they're not going to keep puerto rico on their shelves for years and years and play it over and over again and that's more like the book model that's more you read a book once or you buy a book because you're interested in it you don't necessarily get around to reading it i'm hoping something like that can help the level of market saturation that there is yeah

i do feel that that uh this is having an interesting effect on people attempting to create lifestyle games like you know i'm not sure we'll ever get or you know it'll be very challenging for another game to be like magic the gathering where it's like that is the only game some people you know some gamers play or like you know there's just so many options out there and it's so hard to make it you know your one hobby is following this one game and all of its expansions now it's like oh here's a game i like i played it a couple times and if an expansion comes out maybe i'll break it out again and that is becoming more and more of a thing but usually for people who are financially stable enough to use games as a leisure activity they are still games are still a luxury product which is yeah uh has continued to be true um and they're just becoming a more and more popular luxury product which is also exciting but i think we should pay attention to that uh accessibility is a big deal in board games right now um and as games become more uh more popular we also want them to

become more accessible to bring in new players because you know this is not there are only so there are a lot of players out there but not all of them are interested in exactly the same themes or exactly the same mechanics some people you know want to play games while having a snack i was gonna say i mean that that could be someone's entry into tabletop gaming could be edible games that could be this bizarre but fascinating vector of that spreading yeah i mean i do i do feel like somewhat i've tried to uh target bakers as well as gamers like most of my games aren't super hardcore games so if somebody is a hardcore gamer they probably will bounce off my games a bit but people who are like oh i want to do a fun thing before maybe i play a hardcore game or i really love baking and i want to show off all my amazing baking skills there's like games for that in the books so sort of reflecting on that then what makes it interesting to be a board games designer now in 2019 there's a lot of people at gdc who are more and more interested in board games loads of

people prototype things on tabletop if they're thinking of going into digital games design why should they stick with board games why should a person be a board games designer i i think uh partly like kickstarter is still like there are a lot of games on kickstarter but if you have a genuinely good idea it will come to the surface and people will find out about it like because i think there's generally in the tabletop space there's people who every week check kickstarter what uh what are the kickstarters out right now and so people are consciously looking through that system and so i think if you are able to come up with something that's able to stand out from the hundreds of games that are out on kickstarter at any one time then there's a chance for you and that feels good that genuinely good products can still stand out and be noticed i'm i mean sort of part and parcel to the fact that we're getting so many more games coming out right uh the systems for creating like actually manufacturing

those games are becoming more and more accessible right we're having uh websites like gamecrafter now allows you to do custom punch outs which they weren't doing you know a couple of years ago and like all of these things will allow uh people to make even really small print runs of games just for themselves just for their hobby and once you have that maybe you're going to try and like run a kickstarter or maybe you're going to try and you know pitch it to a publisher and that you know the the barrier for entry for board games is lower than it's ever been honestly like and the ability for people who have access to the internet to create a game that looks nice and that feels you know professional really kind of fuels that dream and that desire to make something cool and to you know put it out there and uh even even as big as the board game market is growing people are hungry you know people want like with all these games coming out players are having a harder time finding exactly the game that suits the thing that they really personally want right and there was a long time when uh in

video games where like people weren't making adventure games right yes and then once and so no one was serving that market because that market was considered a niche market i think a similar thing is happening in tabletop right where uh we are able to now make games that are more targeted at a specific group of people or at a specific audience that is currently underserved or that just like you know they want a new thing that fits their paradigm for their type of gamer yeah yeah that's very well then i mean with that in mind if kickstarter exists if all this infrastructure is appearing is this is kickstarter the place that independents should start if there are people here who want to make their own board games where would you tell them to go to should they be pitching to big publishers i think you're going to get a range of answers to that question so we should each take it yeah um yeah i mean i think i think there are opportunities on kickstarter but i was i

was looking over kickstarter earlier this week about you know what's available right now and i am constantly looking at what's on kickstarter and it does feel like the games that are successful are people who are not first-time creators so it does seem like it's very you know unless you have something that really stands out it's very difficult to get started it's it's better than probably digital games i would say still to be able to get in the barrier to entry is okay but it's it's not easy um so when i started my business i had been a product developer and a product designer and i started my company with the express purpose of product design and i'd done product development i know how important safety packaging advertising shipping all of it is and i knew that that's an expertise that wasn't what i wanted to have i wanted to focus on the design part and i really i didn't have the opportunity for kickstarter when i started um but i wouldn't have gone that route anyway because i i really like having a partner who has that expertise

and takes over that part of the job angie holmes holmstrom is the wholesale manager for mind wearing and she sells corkle all over the world so much better than i can and i'm so glad that i have a team doing all of that and working on my behalf on the game all the time when i'm working on the next game um so for me the having a publisher and having the eyes of a publisher in the polish of a publisher and expertise of a publisher is is my preference as a designer but i recognize the financial incentive for kickstarter is a can work much better for designers and if you're willing to put in the extra work that kickstarter requires you can really maintain control of your game in a way that you might not necessarily be able to with a publisher can i can i just say though like on the kickstarter front you i feel like you can't ever get enough money to be able to make it to be able to pay yourself at all you can get enough money to make a product like if all you're doing is

trying to get your dream out there kickstarter will do that but like i think like having the other person to look after a bunch of stuff it really takes a lot of time to do all of that and and the nice part of of having the publisher is i designed corkl in 2006 um i'm continuing to design quirkle spin-offs and expansions because that's what i've been asked for but i'm i'm not there continuing to work on it and grow it and i can spend my time on other things so it's really nice having other people invested in the growth of in the growth of something you're working on and you can move on to the next design project i i really appreciate that yeah i feel like as a platform kickstarter has changed a lot over the years it's become a little bit more uh in some ways much more stable like uh there are a lot more sort of orthodox ways of running a kickstarter which is both good and bad because there they're all these rules that people follow like one of the fascinating things is like the rule of thumb is like launch your kickstarter on a tuesday right yeah and

that's like that's the that's the idea but but here's the thing right everyone knows that right and so now every tuesday like 900 kickstarters launch and where's yours it's in there right like it's it's unless people are getting that in their feed it's much it's it's challenging for them to see it uh and you know with all of these rules with all these new setups where it's like play you know kickstarter backers now demand like we want to see a gameplay video we want to see reviews ahead of time you should send it out to all these reviewers we want to see and which means you have to make prototypes for every reviewer before the game is done we want to see how the game looks we want to see near final artwork on this kickstarter like used to be you could run a kick shutter with like a couple of art pieces and a really good game idea and you know be really earnest right when i did the bargain quest kickstarter originally one of the pieces of advice i got was like hey uh do the video yourself like do you know to have you know use your laptop camera or whatever and just sort of talk about your game and what you're trying to do and that really worked that worked all

right at the time but these days people want uh like trailers for their board games for like them to do crazy money they see like a human face like who's this what is this this doesn't seem professional at all uh which is a weird expectation to have for kickstarter but it's one people are increasingly having yeah right and they're becoming a lot less tolerant of mistakes along that road as well uh if you you know they're like all these kickstarters have already happened and clearly we expect you to operate as good as the best kickstarter and i would say i mean first of all that doesn't sound like the work of a single person anymore and secondly um i mean what was it simon said it was at the end of last year i mean they've had apparently all this kickstarter success but maybe the profits aren't quite there because they are investing so much money in this marketing and making what they are yeah the creator of scythe posted like a really wonderful series of articles about stone like you can look at the stonemeyer games website but they posted a series of articles about like why i

don't put my games on kickstarter anymore right like why the platform no longer works for my model but they also posted a series that were like but if i did make a kickstarter here's how i would do it now and they were and then by the end of it they're like okay maybe we'll do another one because they have but you know they have to play the game super differently and it's a really intimidating prospect for new designers but i mean i wouldn't necessarily say don't go for it but there are community expectations that like might need to be researched and you need to set your expectations right like you can't expect to make gloomhaven money every time no you know and but fans will expect you to deliver gloomhaven quality correspondence and gloomhaven quality like graphic designer what have you like a lot and it's it can be intimidating uh being that available to fans there was a really good talk earlier today by the people who made dream daddy about um being constantly available which is a thing people don't think about about kickstarter sorry i'm starting to ramble a bit but when you run a kickstarter you are also

on the hook to correspond with every you know commenter every single person who has an idea about your game or has an opinion about your game and if you go quiet for like more than 48 hours during a kickstarter people start to yeah ask questions and get upset and i was gonna say or sometimes generally if you manage social media for a popular brand or what becomes a popular brand which isn't always even in your control based on this then um i mean i would like to ask all the panel how did you personally start how where did your initial success come from and based on that what advice do you have for you know future aspiring designers how do they become a success now that everything is constantly changing okay well so i mean my start in the industry was incredibly orthodox right like i applied for uh fantasy flight games game design uh position for an associate game designer and you know that application was very much it felt like applying to college right it's like here's you know an essay section and here like write the

rules to rock paper scissors uh that sort of stuff and then you know standard interview and then i was in a salary game design position for a while which is really not a job that exists like i mean it does but it's not one that is readily available it is a hard job to find it most companies don't keep game designers on staff in that way uh from there after you know i was at ffg for several years and then i uh left uh to you know go independent uh partly at the behest of tim fowers uh who is a big you know who has done had a lot of success with kickstarter with a lot of these things and um i think uh for any new designer i think definitely reach out to creators that you know and that you like who have products similar to yours because the industry is fairly is still kind of young and it's still not like super it's not so crazy like tim is so excited when new designers want to talk to him and he will answer any question that you have uh i mean same here just feel free

to reach out to me on twitter or whatever but like most designers that you know uh will be thrilled to talk about how they're doing and like give you advice and give you suggestions about what's you know what worked for them um because we want this industry to grow and we want you know kind of to see uh one of the big things though is that we are not always publishers i get a lot of people who message me like hey i have this game idea and i'm like i'm not a publisher uh that sounds like a great idea but like or like i probably shouldn't look at it legally but uh like don't do that right but you can reach out for advice on like um you know so what did you do when you were running your kickstarter are there any things i might want to avoid and some of them will be too busy to answer you but some of them will be thrilled to you know to talk and to give you advice of like pitfalls to avoid so based on that would you recommend that orthodox approach if you apply to a large company and sort of cut your teeth there uh i am for me i was very privileged i was uh

you know i had some amount of savings saved up that i was able to say move to minnesota from california uh which is not something everyone could have done also i know at fantasy flight they also offer an internship and several of their employees were former interns but that that uh internship was not a paid internship you know it was like they worked very hard to you know we work very hard to teach the interns and like to give them a valuable experience but it is just it's not a paid position and so only the people who could do that were people who could afford to basically take like three months to just you know come into a studio every day and just kind of learn right like it's almost like going to school i think uh absolutely when you see these job openings like uh you can't lose anything by applying and half of the applications are really good exercises right like write the rules to rock paper scissors coherently is a great thing to do just you know even if i had never gotten the job it helped me as a as a you know in my technical writing so susan is that the best way to

become a games designer i have no idea um my own experience was i knew i wanted to create something and you're asking why be a game designer earlier and it's because you have to make something you're just driven you're compelled you wake up in the middle of the night and you think about it that's the reason you become a novelist or you design jewelry or wallpaper or anything you're just compelled and so i knew i wanted to design something but i didn't know what and i worked at a toy and game company and they gave me the opportunity to turn in ideas and i went a little overboard and turned in 200 ideas and they said okay we're going to move you to the product development department and teach you how to do this i was super lucky i was at the toy and game company because i wanted to make something and they made things and then when i started they moved out of the area and i was looking for another job and i couldn't find anything i liked as much and my husband encouraged me to start my own company i had the the blessing and the privilege of having a partner who had a full-time job and insurance and i could start a company

with the ability to fail and that was a great gift that not everybody has but i started in toys and toys have in-house designers toy companies design things in-house they're much less used to working with out-of-house designers when i switched to games i found game companies are much more open to working with out-of-house designers that's their model so they're much more approachable they're much more willing to look at things they're much more willing to work with people who don't have as much experience so it's it's really kickstarter is one way to get in but game companies are are much more open than a lot of different industries are and i think that's i think that's a really nice thing about it and what you said is true also i know many designers who are happy to answer emails and respond to requests about information it's still a very friendly um friendly industry and advice as you're designing games i try to remember this myself write your instructions early and often you can do

yourself no harm by starting to write instructions as soon as you possibly can edit them stay on top of them keep them current with your current version of the game it will just help in the end because instruction writing is one of the hardest parts of this job and the sooner you start the easier it is can i ask how do you get 200 ideas for games i have like two they weren't they weren't just games it was toys and games so it was 200 different products that i could see in this company's line and i was young i didn't sleep for a month i was so excited about having i was so excited about having one of these become an actual product um i think of those 205 became actual products which was not a bad ratio for someone who had no clue what they were doing um and i got to work on two of them and turn them into products and i when you get to hold them in your hand you're like i need this it's it's really exciting so jen is that the secret don't sleep oh no i like sleep a lot i like sleep a lot maybe that's why i'm still like i don't feel like i have

financial stability at the moment in my life like i've done a kickstarter that did very well for most people's expectations of a kickstarter but it's not really an appropriate salary i luckily have a partner who is able to support me um as well so yeah yeah i kind of come from a digital games background which also isn't very stable but feels a little bit more stable than tabletop games in terms of being able to have a career or a job in it so yeah i'm not sure what i'm going to be doing when i ship my kickstarter because i can't i don't feel like doing another kickstarter is going to be financially viable for me so have you found your experience making video games is something that has transferable skills though i mean yeah definitely i mean to me game design for digital and game design for tabletop are very similar and i think even more so for me making edible games because in most tabletop games the the things that you have on the like you

know the pieces that you have they're not like consumable for many games obviously there's legacy games but like in digital games people can destroy stuff all over the place and so because i'm making edible games where stuff is gonna have to be eaten it's basically destroyed so my digital games really helped with my my design for tabletop interesting okay um on a more serious topic in the past 12 months there's been a fee i mean this is a topic that has come up on this panel several times now but it feels uh increasingly intense i would say over the last year there's been growing discussion of cultural appropriation in games in sensitivity in board games uh conflating cultures poor and offensive attempts of representation sometimes is this a serious problem in the industry is it something that we need to address last year i would add uh one of our panelists last year anna was mentioning that she did not feel the board games was nearly as representative or equitable as video games for her having

worked in both i have a hot take well i have a take on this one and i definitely agree that uh tabletop games are not there yet but i also uh feel that you kind of have to be bad at something before you get good at something and we are currently bad at a thing but it is i think it is still a sign of uh the industry moving towards more uh games that even try to represent different cultures even though they are sometimes failing in their execution or failing in their ability to consult these cultures that they want to show off but like it's kind of there is an element that i feel like kind of refreshed to see a greater variety of themes than like uh western military history or western military history or western economic history but there's so much of it yeah i know right um but you know as we get a greater variety and as we get more themes that are differentiating themselves people

are finding like oh hey how do i uh set myself apart well let's start doing things that people haven't done uh and then sometimes they'll execute on those things less less than appropriately and i'm really hopeful that the industry will be taking these as learning experiences um there are a lot of cool uh websites that are you know analyzing games via accessibility and like doing all these things that are gaining a solid traction in the community which is nice and that uh i am i have some nervousness about call out culture and that's a larger conversation about how internet discourse is done but i uh actually feel remarkable like i feel more optimistic than i had in the past that we will get there although i also feel very strongly that we are not there uh and that we are not doing as good a job as we can be representing various cultures and identities and yeah that i mean i would say my experience of

meeting games designers and hanging out with games designers and interviewing games designers is a lot of them look like this how do we change that can we change that uh i mean yeah i mean i guess some of it's just i know sometimes going to like board game conventions i walk into a room and it's just full yeah i should make sure i talk enjoy this um yeah you go into a ballgame convention and it's like full of people who i don't i'm like i look at people i'm like i don't know if i identify with you i don't know if i'm going to be able to have anything in common um with you and i think there's a lot more of a range of different ball game conventions out there that now are much more inclusive and anybody can turn up and i think that helps with the funnel of trying to get more uh more voices in there like if you're not even able to go to a convention space and feel comfortable playing those games then you're probably not going to try to design like board

games at all so i i think that's part of the step i mean i think we've uh we've discussed that financial stability is very important and there is a cultural element to financial stability there are more you know wealth gaps pay gaps all of these things are true uh depending on you know kind of where you exist and that will affect whether or not you can uh succeed or you feel comfortable attempting to succeed in the industry we are you know there are people who are doing a lot of work trying to foster more inclusive behavior among players which will lead into more inclusive behavior among you know within the design scene as we get more people who are enthusiastic about games in general i'm very heartened to have found out recently that the winner of the most recent uh the new game key forge which we had talked about their big their biggest event the vault tour was won by a female gamer as well and that was that is not common in you know competitive card game scenes and

that's kind of a heartening event to happen even though it took a while but yeah i think there are barriers to entry that companies are working on and that we as a culture are uh struggling with and it will take time and it will take people who are in positions of power uh making active decisions and making choices that are like okay let's see i want more marginalized voices in my game or i think this game would be more interesting if we can have like this culture represented accurately and we can serve like this either community or this you know present this thing that we don't see often effectively and that will usually require a more diverse set of creators like that is i think you know we live in a capitalist society and uh currently diversity is kind of where the money is like a lot of games that are being produced that have more diverse themes are being are being people are responding very well to those you know we're getting more

uh even in the digi even in the digital space right like overwatch is incredibly diverse with its cast and not all not consistently successfully there are some issues but that gain like those characters have really struck a chord in a lot of communities that uh that a competitive shooter would almost never have hit otherwise right like you don't see call of duty showing up on tumblr right i mean you do a little bit but that's a small question i haven't spent enough time on tumblr yeah clearly we're talking about social spaces or game spaces have all of you spent some time in a board games cafe yeah i would say how many folks here a quick show of hands have been to a board game cafe [Music] yeah okay um this seems to be a growing scene this is really only a thing that i've started doing over the last couple of years is this do we think this is going to be permanent um do we think it's going to help the industry in general and help the marketing games and maybe also you know help change the atmosphere i've

enjoyed a lot of board game cafes more than i've enjoyed some conventions i've been to i i feel like there's um like it feels like often that it's like in one city there is a a board game cafe and people are kind of forced to do whatever style of ballgame cafe that is i feel like i've tried to go to a few different board game cafes and some of them they feel a lot more inclusive in terms of the sort the range of games that they supply to people um and then the sort of events that they they throw um some of them i think i mean the tabletop industry is very broad and it feels like there should be more cafes that the that are across that broad ability so like there's some that are for more hardcore people who want to be playing key forge or whatever it is but then there's some who just want to play with their kids and and think and like you know more casual games i'd love to see you know them specializing a bit more um

two things uh in my own experience anecdotal evidence um the quirkle had us a really unique experience in terms of contacting digital media digital media and board game cafes my husband chris was really good at sending out copies of corkl when it first came out and he sent one to w eric martin who at that point was running board game news and he declared quirkle his his game of the year in 2000 i think 2007 that's when he got it and um and he was really excited about it and he had a friend in germany jeffrey ellers who said will you please bring it to germany i want to try it and play it we're going to meet up at this board game cafes bill weiss which i think was one of the very first board game cafes and i'd really like to play it there so eric brought corkel to germany and played it with jeffrey and michael who owns the cafe and torsten gimler who is the publisher at schmitchbill and torsten is the person who ended up licensing quirkle for the german publisher so

for me and then corker went on to win this bill of jar so for me board game cafe is super important and reaching out to different forms of media and letting them know about your game super important that led very directly to to the publisher quirkle ended up with in germany and also i think in that case quirkle found a stronger foothold among gamers because we did that outreach than we expected i think if we hadn't been reaching out to different public different content reviewers sort of people um quirkle might not have had that uh might not have found a home among gamers that it did it would have just stayed in the family game market and it spread from there so very personal experience of value of board game cafes and then the other thing is one of the things that i think is super exciting about games right now is the growing base of gamers are people who are excited about learning new games and i think american gamers for

a long long time i don't know how long have been afraid of learning games families have played the games that they grew up grow you know parents played payday or monopoly or scrabble or parcheesi or sorry they played those games growing up and when they have kids they buy the same games because they don't want to learn new games and it's been a huge barrier of entry for american gamers to learn new games and right now i think in part because of board game cafes and in part because of all the videos teaching games we're experiencing the spread of people who like to learn new games which is totally different than what we've had before and i think there is going to be a driving force even though i think we're headed towards a problem with the oversaturation of games i think creating people who think learning games is fun is is going to change our market entirely um people who think that it's it's fun to try something new and introduce their friends to it and they're going to do it at board game cafes and they're going to do it by watching videos and learning games that way i think that's that's a really

strong force in our market right now i think that's a really interesting point do we think that digital content creators are part of the reason that the hobbies exploded so much because there's now so much learn to play stuff there's so much uh in terms of board game reviews on the internet and you know when people speak to me about discovering a board game they often say i didn't see it in a shop i definitely didn't see an ad for it anywhere i watched a review of it or something like that on youtube um i think definitely similarly on like kickstarter people are also courting content creators to like get the word out about their games and i think part of that is just because the internet is it is the most powerful like marketing tool anyone can have and youtube is huge right twitter is enormous and those like as those tools get more powerful like everyone wants to use those to market whatever their product is whether it's board games or anything else and so we are seeing a benefit from that um there are even some concerns about like you know if i want to learn to play this

game i'm not going to go to my local board game shop i might just go on youtube and see the a really excellent very concise how to play video that i won't have to like drive downtown to enjoy yeah um and like i think definitely we're uh seeing a lot of that in the fact that new designers are often trying to court those people with those with those audiences right because we can't like a lot of us you know creators we can't afford a huge marketing budget right we're not going to put up a billboard in times square but we can reach out to someone with a very good following and be like hey here's a copy of our game if you you know you are look they are often looking for content to cover and if they enjoy their your game maybe like you'll they'll put out a piece of content that people will hopefully enjoy and then they'll spread the word it's sort of a nice symbiotic relationship theoretically between developers and content you know digital content creators um i think certainly that is probably going to become more and more of the status quo

um particularly as apparently we as a society get more and more into these on digital celebrities right like twitch streamers and youtubers uh you know i mean i'm uh on the older end of millennials at this point so i'm not sure uh so i i hesitate to make any grand predictions about you know the future of digital technology but certainly in the moment it's a very powerful tool that people uh are working very hard to figure out how to use optimally um yeah and i mean with digital uh content producers we also have you know digital product or digital production like game crafter and we also have digital distribution like uh amazon where people don't go to their game shop to buy something they just buy it on amazon and i think um the i love brick and mortar stores like for the same reason we all have discussed and i am a bit worried because having looked behind the curtain at the economic incentives like you move so much product on amazon right like people move

so much product just i mean honestly it just amazon is enough to put a lot of places out of business yeah um and it is only kind of like through this die-hard dedication like we are kind of in the same position that bookstores were in uh you know when when borders collapsed right uh and yet like as we had discussed book sales physical like book sales are going up this year like there are more physical books being produced this year than previously which is not something i was expecting with the advent of kindle so maybe board games like board game shops will i strongly suspect they will survive in some fashion i don't know if they'll become huge but i don't think amazon has it in them to kill them at least sorry i guess i moved back to that previous discussion but uh do you have any thoughts on youtubers uh i mean i suddenly noticed uh like on my kickstarter campaign the influence of like you know shut up and sit down did a

review and i i think it was like a quarter of my backers came from that so i can't remember if that's the exact number but it was it was a really large number of my backers came because of that review and so like you know and i purposefully like i knew they had you know i you know courted basically uh because i knew it was important and it yeah it was i mean this is also assuming that it goes well with that content creator right like a negative review although honestly i've heard like people like uh a lot of people if like say tom vassell post like a review like i didn't much care for this particular game but they'll still talk about it that still gets it in front of eyeballs you know a lot of people are like oh i don't like games that tom likes maybe i'll like this i have found that if you don't like a game on the internet people will correct you and explain how you're wrong and buy it anyway getting into the conversation it really does seem like that um you know any news is or is there's no bad news there's no bad publicity yeah there's no such thing as bad publicity which i don't think is

true but bad publicity can still give create positive results there's one one more thing i'd like to quickly touch on uh we did discuss a bit about counterfeiting board games in the panel last year um is that something that has affected any of you this year in any way i i mean not really for me i mean i've recently been sending out some of my chapters to some of my backers who i call tasters because i like them and um yeah i mean i guess particularly with the sort of games i'm making people have to make it at home so it's kind of like a print and play game but i'm encouraging people to make their own so i'm somewhat encouraging people to like counterfeit and make their own edible games and maybe adjust my edible games if they don't like them so not so much for me a few a few years ago there was quite a spat of knockoff quirkles available on amazon and that was interesting um there were some bad reviews because they were poorly produced and they were selling and there was no way to tell if you were

getting a good copy or bad copy before you bought it and my publisher worked with amazon and got those cleaned out but the reviews are still there of these bad copies of corkl this is a case where i'm really glad i have a publisher they're fighting counterfeits on on multiple fronts and i know russia is one country that particularly has a counterfeit problem we've had counterfeiting in canada we've had counterfeits here so it's an issue and i it's something that as a designer i don't have any idea how one controls it or what to do about it but i know it's a it's a growing problem in our industry and can affect um lots of different games amazon actually i believe there's a recent article amazon is actively cracking down on their sellers and they're making it a point to like make sure that hey if you want to sell a game on amazon you have to be like a registered seller and have a they're basically cracking down on the accountability of a set of people who produce these products and make sure that hey uh like people selling you know

these asmode titles or whatever are light like have have gotten their games from the appropriate channels in a lot of cases and that otherwise you will they they're categorizing them more and they're sort of cracking down all these little little shop fronts which are often fronts for counterfeit games um and they won't just automatically kind of just bundle them all together and be like ah these are the this is the product and we'll ship them out piecemeal uh which has been a bit which is probably a big get and this is probably the best way that we have to fight counterfeiters in that way and the more current problem i think is it alibaba that that's a bigger problem right now because that is so easily counterfeit products available there um so so excellent that they're finding out ways to make it work better on amazon and crack down the problem there but another another way for counterfeiters has broken out and i was reading an article that was talking about how the counterfeiters they're

they have these fantastic ways of figuring out what price point they need to sell the product they'll sell the most product and they're better at figuring that out than the publishers they've got it worked out so that they can sell it at that price and um that's what they'll sell the most and it's really interesting to me the amount of work they also put into their products crime is big business there you go yeah so if anyone has has a solution to how we defeat i don't know piracy can someone solve crime for us yeah um please step up we have a microphone that is just waiting for your questions on anything that you would like to reach out to the panel for hello hello how are you hi i'm good um i uh i'm a college professor and i teach game design and one of the experiments that i tried to do is i was like i'll make my own card game i went through a publisher i went through all that and i actually got it published um reviewed by nice talent yeah thanks uh

reviewed by dice tower twice made top ten big g con um how do you def and and and my game didn't do as far as like well as far as like sales are concerned but like i'm starting to see this trend of like all these you know solid games but they just get drowned out by the massive amounts of like other games that are just like you know waving right over like how do you deal with like cult of the new i mean i guess i'd say you've got a like i think it used to be on uh with tabletop games you just needed to have a good game to be able to stand out and i think now you've got to have something that's got a big hook that's not just a good game but it's like just captures people right like as soon as they almost hear the title or see the box they're like so i think you've got to do more there are absolutely amazing games that slip under the radar every day you know like i mean i totally agree yeah 10 you know what

was it paul like 10 new games get made every day basically like i think that's susan having 200 ideas that's true um yeah i mean it's hard and uh there is if there was a like recipe for guaranteed success then i don't think we would need conferences like this um but yeah i think one of the things is you know dedication is possible that it's the theme that didn't work it's possible that it's uh that you didn't have the right marketing push at the time but people will start and try and like you know bring copies multiple iterations i mean when uh bargain quest first came out right we had a very modest kickstarter success i think we printed like 2 000 copies and i think it's entirely possible that might have been all we would have ever printed if the game didn't if we you know didn't put in a lot of legwork like submitting it to you know different shows and like submitting it to different people and like just sort of going places and showing it off and putting in a huge amount of work and even that

we and even then we got lucky right we got uh you know we got positive reviews from shut up it's down which really gave us a huge social media boost and that allowed us to kind of move forward but not everyone has those opportunities but i think pursuing them is basically the only move most uh particularly small devs have um but hey good games get re-themed good games get reprinted all the time like and you know it's not your only shot uh and yeah all i could say is you should definitely don't give up on it but it's it's hard and like don't think of it as like a personal failing of your game or your product like oh no i i've learned a lot by i mean i learned that you need a team there's a lot of dedication it's it's insane but i really appreciate your insight thank you very much guys oh so and based on that susan i mean did you know with all these different ideas did you know quirkle was going to be the one that would take off so quickly

corkle came later when i had my own company and i was designing toys i wasn't designing games but i'd been hosting a game night for a very long time and quirkle came to me in a dream i almost fully finished and i got up in the morning i said that looks really cool that was really neat in my dream i got to go make that so i did and i was it worked out super well and since i was already a toy designer i i had already pitched to mind wear the toy company and they had turned down a bunch of my toys but i was like yeah this is going to fit their line i need to send it to them and i did and they accepted it immediately and went really well um i i didn't i did not know quirkle was going to become so popular i had no idea that it would be so well received i was ready for it to be a middling success you know i thought it was going to do well for a few years and it just continue continues to grow and thrive and i'm i'm just super blessed by it but i i did not

know that it was going to be my best-selling product wait you're telling me that you can design award-winning games in your sleep literally i need more naps [Laughter] yes next question hello it's rodrig commentary i'm krista from rebel game studio so osmond poland i just returned from reno a trade show a gamma trade show in reno and what like topics here covered were covered two years ago on retail and distribution conferences yeah in my opinion like what what was what we were talking about it's about overabundance over saturation and how to how to help brick-and-mortar stores to survive and and the other topics were consolidation of the market and some companies going under the last year was the hardest year for

many european publishers and distributors so and probably you know that's a kind of domino effect we won't be buying new new titles from you developers and and game artists if if you won't be prospering the topic for you here to understand i want to share it it's no we are not no longer looking for new good games we are looking for games that we that the games that are already evergreens that have their solid place on is on the shelves that we can put new instead of them yeah we are now no longer willing to expand our catalogs or portfolio we that's why these old games are still going strong because it's for us it has better rate of interest to invest in promoting the games that we already have than to introduce new ones and start earning money

in next two years or something yeah if we solve the problem that's currently on a distribution side yeah then that you probably can avoid the the the problems that we are now experiencing and that's that's what we are now trying to uh to solve yeah so keep on keep on with good work but your competition is not only this 900 games on kickstarter currently all all these bestsellers and evergreens better than yeah so i think we're down for seven minutes we should get moving yes uh the next speaker please yes hi just wondering how do you think that global availability is affecting the hobby for example i'm from south america and it's pretty hard to get most board games that i guess it's easier to come by either in north america or europe so as you are speaking about you know market saturation and how the

the scene can continue to grow do you think that there is you know something to be said about that you're not actually serving the whole available population that is into the hub yeah there are absolutely markets that we are not serving actively partly because uh distribution can be very difficult in those regions currently and there are other like you know broader infrastructure reasons or a lot of publishers don't want to be the first one to dive in and invest heavily and take a risk in a region that isn't proven right yeah as things as things get bigger people become more risk-averse i think this is possibly a big advantage to things like print and play so that we can get more and more like easily accessible games in those kinds of regions but yeah it's it's hard particularly when you're running a physical product that requires things like translation and you know physical shipping of a two kilogram box can i just say i don't know if it's it's just that like i grew up in australia and sure i haven't lived in australia for a while and board games have got a

lot more popular since i've left but they were very expensive in australia australia speaks the same language as the in the us it's quite a similar culture like sure australia's different but even so it was very expensive to get so i think there must be more than just transport and the things i mean i assume australia's getting better but it's still really difficult there's also just you know taxes based on governments right like being able to figure out like okay what are the import taxes for this region and yeah like some smaller publishers just don't have the bandwidth to be able to you know to run the import taxes for you know every single country uh which is unfortunate but will hopefully get better as the industry gets bigger and more successful and and there's the problems of um you can't just sell to one store in a country uh you you need a base so usually you need a partner in that country who has a distribution channel and can sell it to a lot of stores so it's it's a real

investment each country you move into finding someone you can work with and figuring out how you're going to sell your container of games that's going to be specific to that market and going to be shipped there who is going to take those games you can't just do a print run of a thousand for them they're going to take a print run of 10 000 in a container and you need a partner who's going to help you get through all those so it's unfortunately it makes it so much harder to move into different countries because of that less hard than it used to be but still it's a real challenge i think we have time for maybe one more question this is worthy being the last question but i'll try um we're starting to see a trend in bigger retailers of doing exclusive games for them walmart was exclusive distributor of fog of love target has a couple of games that are only available through them um do you think this is a positive thing for the industry you think it's a negative you think it's just a flash in the pan can i immediately say speaking

as a chap who lived in vancouver for quite a while when something is available in target which is not even in your country that's quite frustrating uh i think it's absolutely a positive sign that like these you know giant monoliths think that games are valuable enough that they want to have exclusivity of certain of products like this that they think that they want to that that is a valuable thing it's a good sign i do think it's bad for all of the accessibility reasons that we've mentioned you know leading into this right like um a game being exclusive to only one kind of store means it's harder for people who don't have access to that kind of store or you know people who have ethical issues with say how certain stores run themselves or what have you well in the industry as a whole is balancing between the friendly local game store the specialty store that is supporting and growing the game in the beginning and then target can come in and um and take that popular game and make it available on much wider market but they didn't necessarily do the work of building that so as a as a publisher

you have to struggle with these these two different competing merchants you're dealing with the specialty market and the mass market and how to service them both and honor both of them for the different things they provide for your game so exclusives in target are tricky interesting a positive sign but not necessarily the best way to i don't know there you go we get an exclusive prize for a big partner and then it continues it helps us to promote the product and and i know that actually happens a lot with the target exclusive i know less about the walmart exclusives i know that they are often limited time and then they become available in a wider basis yeah to put it on the recording yeah some uh some publishers will give exclusivity for a short time before letting that uh run but that's also a big contract issue right like as a designer oftentimes i may not get a say in whether a game goes exclusive to one company or another and

because that's a business decision right and uh yeah how long that exclusivity lasts is a huge component and yeah i think i don't know personally i'm not crazy about it just because i want everyone to play all of the games uh but yeah it is we live in a society with uh market forces and that is how that is how they want if that is how they will carry the game that is how they'll carry it you know that's just we play ball think we are we have about half a minute left so i just want to say thank you so much to my panelists for agreeing to appear this evening you have been terrific thank you all of you also for coming and for your questions um i should mention that this talk and all the previous ones are available online in the gdc vault or on youtube where you can leave comments where you can tell us what you think about them which is always helpful um but more importantly on that topic i am always told every year please fill in

your evaluation forms tell us what you thought tell us what you liked tell us who you're excited about because that feedback is incredibly useful and it guides us to what we do next year thank you very much panelists you