The State and Future of Board Games 2023

[Music] thank you hello GDC well yeah we can get a little crazy it's the end of the day let's hear some Applause for these panelists right now yeah uh welcome this is the state and future of tabletop games if you're not in the right spot this is your your moment to walk awkwardly out of the room while we all watch everybody's in the right spot that's good to know um this is going to be a discussion it's going to be an open discussion I've got some amazing panelists here and I'm going to introduce them here in just a moment but before we start I want to introduce myself my name is Knox Weiler berth I am the creative director and general manager at Hunter's entertainment I'm honored to be here and I'm just as interested to hear how this panel goes as all of you I I'm really excited by the people that are up here and we're going to go a little bit more into that in just a minute but before we

start they've asked me here at GDC to make sure that you know a few things first of all the silence is for your phone not for you uh we we definitely want to make sure that all your devices are turned off out of respect we're not getting rings and interruptions in the middle of this engaging conversation we're about to have uh the other thing though is that feel free to interact you just applaud it you can do more great let's keep the energy high and let's have a good time without further Ado I'd like to introduce you to your panel today we have some amazing guest speakers up here uh Elizabeth sampat would you like to introduce yourself sure uh hi my name is Elizabeth sampat um mostly I've been working in uh in digital games a lot of mobile games I've worked on Subway Surfers Plants vs Zombies 2 um Hungry Shark world but what a lot of people don't know is I actually got my start in Indie role-playing games uh back in like 2006 2007. I also made an

independent game called deadbolt that was an indicate nominee I think back in 2013 and I'm just really excited to be up here thank you so much uh Carol Mertz you're next what do you want to say about yourself hi uh I'm Carol Mertz I am a senior game designer at exploding kittens which is a mass Market board game publisher and I work on design and development of those Mass Market games so I worked on hand-to-hand wombat which had an accessibility post-mortem earlier today you may have seen as well as exploding kittens recipes for disaster exploding kittens two player and many many more that are coming out later this year so I also before I was in board games I worked on a lot of Indie Games some of you may have played hellcouch at a previous GDC and other other various Indie video games and things but yeah that's me thanks for being here thank you uh Ming Liu would you like to talk a little bit about yourself and what you do hi everybody my name is mingle and I work for 90s sound of fire ux as a senior ux

research manager I'm a big fan of Tip Top games and have reached experience this time I attend to this round table I'm really unhappy I have this chance to talk with uh with everybody about the tabletop game we're really excited to have you thanks for being here last but certainly not least we have cole Worley would you like to talk a little bit about yourself and what you do hi my name is hello my name is Cole I'm the creative director at leader games co-founder of really good games I designed root and oath uh and Pax Premiere and the upcoming game arcs and I do a lot of work helping to organize the studio as well we're a small Studio based in St Paul Minnesota but we now have about 15 people and we are dedicated to making our weird games so amazing thank you again for being here so we've got a number of great panelists here we're going to get right into it we're going to have a conversation I've prepared a few questions just to get us started but then we're going to want to open it up to all of you so when the time comes if

you have questions we're going to ask that you very orderly in a way that you can understand each other you're gonna break up here onto either side there is a microphone here and a microphone on this side but only when I uh I give you the word that we're going to actually break off into audience questions I'd say don't start lining up right away you're going to be standing there for a little while all right well let's jump right into it and let's let's talk about this and find out exactly how these panels feel about where we're at now with tabletop games in the year 2023. um the first question that I have is a pretty straightforward basic question that's going to uh give us a bit of an overview of what we're talking about today what is the most important innovation in the tabletop space at this time I'm going to start with Carol Carol do you want to speak a little bit on that this is this is the simple question um I I honestly what I'm seeing right now is a lot of Publishers really pushing toward ecological sustainability um I think this is this is also you know when we get into the future this is going to be shocking also what I talk

about there um but we're seeing a lot of Publishers getting really excited about looking for ways that we can go to production and use recycled materials think about way the ways that we can cut down on components and you know space in shipping containers things like that are it's really interesting to see and then we've got like the green games Alliance which I don't know if any y'all have heard of this but they just released this amazing paper specifically covering this and specifically on how Publishers and designers can be taking this into greater consideration so yes that's to me I think is the the number one biggest Innovation and most important innovation that we're seeing right now it uses a lot of paper it's no joke what we do in our industry and like creating so much uh waste and and there are ways that we can improve that so that makes a lot of sense um thanks Carol Elizabeth do you want to take the question sure um as you probably won't be surprised from my background I think one of the most interesting things that's been happening lately is sort of the blurring

of lines between uh tabletop games and and digital games a lot of digital games having companion apps or getting digital versions of games so that you can you know play Lords of Water Deep on the airplane without bringing a whole bunch of cards or that kind of thing I think the the sort of um you know they've always been quite separate think but I think um in a way that's bringing the the joy and the togetherness of sitting side by side and playing a board game together places where you wouldn't normally be able to it's interesting that you bring that up we're actually going to talk a little bit more about that in depth in just a little while it's exciting yeah Cole do you have a thought well just building on that I think one of the biggest changes in the past two three years that is really changing how games get made and played is not just the shift to digital spaces but also the shift in of the conversation around games two digital places now they've been in digital places for a long time obviously we have websites like Board Game Geek and venues like

Reddit and Twitter where there's always been a lot of discussion about board games but increasingly sites like Discord uh you know Discord servers are becoming real hubs for not just the discussion of games but the generation of new games so you know mini game series and I'll just sort of reference too in the conflict simulation world the coin series the conflict counter Insurgency series and the levian campaign series which are two fairly complex historical game serieses both have extremely active discords that have produced literally dozens of new iterations of the games many of which are going right into publication pipelines so we're seeing a real Democrat democratization of the publishing process and of the development process and it's happening in those kinds of digital spaces yeah I don't think anybody can argue that it's changing everything you know there's a lot of different tools that are out there but Discord has definitely changed the game uh Ming would you like to take the question do you have anything you'd like to say yeah I want to talk because in China the table developed the history is quite

determined with the Western World maybe in this three years because of from maybe from 2020 because during the pandemic case of this is as the modern technology has made it possible for gamers to select to play with friends online now a lot of tabletop game kind of you the players can use the app private friends online so more and more times like such as us we talked with our friends said let's play together this this night we open a new room and type so we can simplify the precise by only needing to click on application and lowering the entry power when we play the game so mobile apps are making things more accessible for everybody yeah yeah I don't think any of us are going to argue with that okay

let's move on to the next question what game or games do you feel are innovating the space currently and why um I mean why don't we start with you this time if you or do you want some time to think about it and I can bounce back yeah this part I will talk about maybe the next such as script murder I just talked with during my themes because the group of murder is the most famous sorry that's okay come on take your time so foreign because people can play the character they choose and play with other friends together be like such like a rarp game like we just said the core of this game is created social and immersive experience making players feel like they

are not just playing a board game but also part of our ARP where they can perform and fully immerse in themselves okay uh Cole what game or game do you think or games do you feel like are innovating the space currently and why well I think one of the interesting things about tabletop is how the different sectors of innovation often don't talk to each other and then there'll be these moments where a particular mechanism or idea sort of cross-pollinates and I think we're right on the edge of one of those moments or maybe in one uh when it comes to the cross-pollination between what's happening in the Indie RPG scene and what's happening in tabletop one of the games that really blew me away that I've played recently is Ross Cowan's uh the city of winter I played the fall of magic was quite impressed with it but the city of winter uh does something really remarkable which is that it it it's a it's essentially a collaborative storytelling game but it provides about two steps more structure than most collaborative storytelling games and the result is that it has an incredibly intimate and profound

um storytelling generation system that is great for players who are usually uncomfortable working in that form and I think we're going to see a lot more games tabletop more traditional board games building on some of those storytelling practices if I could jump in there instead of giving my own answer I I couldn't agree more I think that you even see that coming from the Indie RPG section try almost those role-playing games becoming almost more board game like like I'm thinking a lot about uh the work of Avery Alder who's a phenomenal uh RPG designer with a quiet year where you're sort of making a map also um she has Ribbon Drive which is a game where basically you're you're telling a story about a road trip that you're all taking together and one of the core mechanics of the game is actually that everybody brings their own mix CD or their own playlist and the playlist actually informs what happens in the games so I think particularly when you're talking about what's happening on the bleeding edge in tabletop RPGs you see them pushing more and more towards having more tactility and and physical

components and I think we're also going to see sort of the lines blurring between tabletop board games and tabletop role-playing games in the future can I offer just a small footnote to your reminder which is that both a lot of Avery Adler's games and also the city of winter and fall of magic it's worth noting are produced domestically 100 and they have really amazing physical Productions but they're produced in Washington state um and are very cautious about the sustainability of their their materials great job just tying like all three of us together there perfect Carol you want to add anything yeah so for me I think it's less about necessarily Innovation and more about leaning into the needs that we kind of discovered among ourselves during the pandemic like this sense of isolation the sense of needing connection we're seeing a lot of these really beautiful games like we're not really strangers in the mind and way of length and these things that kind of develop uh more verbal intimacy among players in a really interesting way that allows people to feel more connected even if

they can't play in the same space which I think is something that is really special that we're seeing right now in the mass market so this is stuff that people who are not traditional board game players are seeing and engaging with and to me I think that's really special and a really interesting way of pulling people into this space that we're seeing more now than we've ever seen before I mean the pandemic changed everything oh yeah especially with game space I think it carried people through a lot you know and the way that it's uh evolving because of that I think is really interesting all right let's move on a little bit here um what advice would you give to designers for developing games for the future uh in kind of the I don't want to say post-pandemic but the pandemic world that we're in now I mean like what advice would you give those uh designers do you want to start Carol sure I mean like I said earlier like thinking with environmental sustainability in mind like that starts at the design concept um so thinking about how you can develop games that just use less but do more is

uh something that is going to be really important also right now as we're seeing you know obviously the economy is softening a little bit and Publishers have less money to put into games cost of goods have to stay lower so figuring out how you can keep your component costs down is going to be how you're going to find a publisher who actually wants to publish your work right so you know thinking in in those lines we're you know we're solving two problems here we're helping the planet by reducing greenhouse gases and we're also making King player we're making games that are more affordable for our players and that are more affordable to produce in general so that's that's kind of where I would suggest that especially new designers start thinking um especially as they're starting to pitch to their first Publishers doing that with you know conscientiously and being able to say to their Publishers hey let me help you become more sustainable is I think a really really smart move right now great um does Elizabeth do you want to serve us something sure um my answer is

a little bit more touchy-feely just based on the kinds of games that I make um I would really strongly suggest that you think about what is missing in your social interactions with the people that you want to play with because as long as if any game is a two-player game or has more than one player that game is fundamentally about social interaction first and foremost before anything else so if you're starting when you're starting working on a game think about what you want the social experience to be what you want the social dynamics to look like and then start thinking about what is an experience that you would like to have that you haven't had in in games I think something a lot of new designers sort of get hung up on is wanting to almost recreate their favorite game or the game that made them love love games as a child but really if you look at all of the wonderful experiences you're having and you sort of catalog them and you ask yourself what's missing and and how can I get there I think you'll end up with something that has a really unique uh

proposition that would be highly marketable and also compelling to people yes I love telling people to think about their players as components yes so like these are bodies that you can utilize use it like right yeah that's interesting players is components that makes sense uh Cole do you want to talk a little bit about this yeah I think it's so important uh to tell new designers to emphasize the degree to which uh games aren't created by a single person even if you are a single person alone you need those player components you need them to help you make the thing and so any game that gets made is made because there was a community that rallied around it and that helped you take the game across the finish line so you have to pay attention a good a good starting game designer is also going to be a good Community manager at some very core level and one way to do that kind of roofing off a few of the recent comment is to think about the urgency of of the game there has to be a reason in for them to want to play and one of the best things that you can

do is as a starting out as a new game designer is ask yourself why does this game need to exist at all what is the urgency what's the thing that is making me want to finish this and if you could find that that argument the urgency of your game then you'll be able to Rally other people to that flag and that's going to help create the community that's going to take the game across the finish line great would you like to talk me okay I will give some advice based on Chinese background so my advice is IP crossover and the mutual learning can better complement tabletop Game and video game which are not at odds with one another and this the second is for the tabletop game to go in popular in China they must be combined with other entertainment medium Michael wear tissues and the internet and the television in order to gain Mutual publicity strengthen their social aspects as selling point and join more

players as a fresh form of entertainment for daily life great um I'm going to actually Veer us off the road here a little bit because I have kind of a sub question to what I just asked as designers yourselves what tools and methods do you use to start a project and anybody who wants to jump in can just start interestingly like during the pandemic we leaned so hard on tabletop simulator and like now that we're also just we're in a hybrid work environment we still use it a lot it sucks it feels like you have forks for hands but it's so helpful because you can just you can rapidly iterate you can change things up you can you know pop in a brand new game in seconds and that's made a really big difference like having forks for hands isn't so bad sometimes do you feel like you would have used it if you had been in a position where you kind of had absolutely not no we would have we would have avoided it at all costs yeah um like you know obviously we do prototyping in-house you know like we'll we'll do rapid prototypes as quickly as

we can mock it up in illustrator or whatever and print it out but again talking about sustainability that uses a lot of materials and if you're wanting to rapidly iterate moving into a digital space is such a good way of doing that can I ask you really quickly how do you gather play test materials and like when you're working with a team and they're giving you feedback on something that you're testing out in that space what do you do to kind of collect that information and then utilize it are you talking about just play test data playtest data specifically with a digital space like we're working with folks yeah I love recording it like that's that's something that I pulled from video games is like you'll see a lot of play test discussions talking about like well you can just record your play tests if they're digital um so I like you know we'll play over Zoom so I'll record the zoom call we'll do screen share we record what's happening on the table and we record players reactions and that's ultimately where you get your information it's so truthful because sometimes you get play test you have to filter everything because you're not sure how the people who are undergoing the play test are honestly responding to what you've given them and so you've got to kind of filter

it through that but when you have that video content that you can look back on being able to then kind of witness their reactions to things tells you a lot yeah you can tell when people check out you can tell when people are having fun it's so important yeah and we do it at Hunters all the time anybody else want to jump in so I want to say something about TTS a tabletop simulator because it really I mean it trans I think everyone who works in the industry professionally it transformed our workflow the iterative loop that used to depend on your poor play tester having to go to FedEx after work to print and assemble a new copy and hope it's done in time for their Friday game night that's gone now now we get to push out versions and it starts looking a lot more like video game development and so I want to offer a very technical um comment about TTS for people who use it to test which is the most valuable thing you can do when you're using TTS and this is so specific so sorry about narrowing the scope of this panel is to turn off caching and to host the files somewhere where you have direct access to their their link so getting a direct Dropbox link and the reason for this is

then when you export using InDesign and you export all your files you load up TTS and you don't have to do anything all the cards are now the most current version and I wish someone would have told me that eight months into the pandemic it's been so long updating all these silly Json files I mean the the main tool that I feel like I use are you basically ask yourself the question when you're starting to design what do I need to to implement a new adjustment to this game and to test it and just write out the test as if you were doing a factory study what are the steps and then get better at those steps spend some time learning InDesign spend some time learning tabletop simulator and if you don't want to pay for tabletop simulator know that there are many good free Alternatives including screen top which is fully browser-based likewise many of the things that InDesign does can be done in other other pieces of software great does anybody else want to jump in on this I guess one thing that's more geared towards Indie developers than

than people who are already working inside of a company I know one question when I was doing a lot of talks about about tabletop game design um one of the number one questions I would get is is how do I even get play testers and I would say that the number one most important tool you have are your friends and your family because if you pitch them a game idea and they don't want to play test it that's already information for you like I I hate to say it but that's that's the first and best funnel because if what you really want to do is make games you need to make sure that you're working on something that people are interested in playing and so relying on on the people who care about you most first and foremost and who might be willing to go a little bit outside of their comfort zone because they like you if they're saying no to you maybe move on to the next idea yeah like if your pitch can't be on the back of the box and somebody looks at it in retail and is like yeah I want to buy that then nobody's gonna buy it right even if it's it's the greatest game in the world you have to get the first couple people to

buy it and tell their friends about it and force them to play it and if you can't get those first couple people no one will ever know so I'll go ahead it's a little like the practice of writing rules where if you find yourself having a hard time articulating a rule there's a problem with the design like the English language is a fabulous tool it should be able to handle the rules of your game um when you're actually boiling it down and you get that log line for your game do you do that at the beginning of your process or at the end after you have the entire game to me it's more like I don't know if who if you're familiar with the way that like music is made but often what a vocalist will do is is come in and almost acapella do what they call a scratch track which is just laying down the vocals and then the session uh the session session musicians will come in and they'll lay down the instrumental tracks and then at the end the the singer comes back and does the actual vocals and that's sort of the way I think about like the the elevator pitch or the or the log line like you come up with one first and that gets people into

the door and then the more you see how the game evolves at the very last thing you do is you go back to that original elevator pitch or that log line and you ask yourself if that makes sense and if there needs to be any alteration yeah man we're game designers we play test that exactly iterate everything well I I think about a pitch for a game as you know the star are that everything else is orbiting around right that I've been working over the past couple years with this designer Joe Kelly on their game Molly house which is about queer culture in 1720s London and it's mostly about these houses where people were allowed to explore all kinds of different identities and the Crackdown by the various early versions of the police even before the police had really formed as an institution and the first time I played their game I found the game to be a total mess but the design there was something about it that was very compelling the core pitch was good and then every time I would play a new version the game was completely different but they were still orbiting

the same star and so when I'm looking at a design I don't really care if they're using the same mechanism or if they have a a clever little mechanical hook the I'm really interested in what what are the attributes of the star because and so allow yourself if you're working on a game to change things to really dramatically reconfigure your game especially if it's true to that initial pitch I want to make a little space here for Ming Ming do you want to jump in on this yeah I maybe talk about you also Forza based on China because Alex I will give a old guys example such as The Werewolf of mineral house initial user based on what small dude primarily to the of my experience to ensure a positive gaming experience every players need a qualified host and the players need Master extremely fine-turned design communication techniques but after the app online

merged so more and more people can place by either handle they can say they can talk with others by voice and tapped words with other other the the thing the same group they can talk with them so the designers need to think maybe based in China need to think how it can be easily understand for the players because in China most people just want to play the game with friends for a major time they don't want to pay um pay a lot of time to study how to play the game so based on China needs to eat quite easier for everybody company it's the most important part that accessibility do you have any advice for how to how to create that in your game design yeah

its mass for them is easier to understand how to play the game and can use the tall or the other mechanics in too easy to join the game and play the game great thank you all right does anybody want to jump in on the last of that or should we move on let's keep going now we've already talked a lot about this already but I think there's so much more space for us to explore it how do you see digital tools interacting with tabletop games in the future and should it I think we all have opinions on this but let's start with Cole Cole do you want to take this I'm curious of hand-to-hand wombat was developed using tabletop simulator and so I just I want to I want to ask that question before I provide do it yeah yeah yeah it's a long story we've got the time um so hand-to-hand wombat evolved from a very very different game that was testable in tabletop simulator but unfortunately obviously the physicality of it prevented so for those of you who are

unfamiliar hand-to-hand wombat is a very tactile social deduction game where you close your eyes and you build towers and one of the people is sabotaging those Towers so uh you don't know who that is um it's just some bad wombat and doing that in tabletop simulator and getting all of the sizing right and importing all of them bottles and everything you need you need the physicality you need the hands like I said the players are components in this game so unfortunately tabletop simulator simply didn't work but we did push it as far as we could go until we got to that point um but it was an interesting process because we had to play test it during the pandemic um but yeah hand-to-hand wombat is one where we we actually decided to cut down on cost of goods by incorporating the phone timer instead of incorporate like we didn't we didn't want to add the additional cost for our players by having some custom designed plastic you know uh timer that that has a audio

alarm we decided folks already have phones in their pockets you know those phones are accessible so they they can modify how the alarm goes off they can set it to vibrate they can set it to a sound whatever they want and that that's going to cut down on the cost of the game well the reason the reason I asked you about it is because it's one of the few games I knew that was made during the pandemic which to me doesn't show it's it's pandemic pedigree uh you know we were working on um my game oath during the pandemic and its development took a turn mostly for the better uh during the pandemic because it changed how the way the game worked uh we had a version of oath that we played literally the day in the office before we shut it down where players took single action impulses it was a kind of radical branch of the game it was sort of promising then the pandemic happened and we changed how the game worked to give players a little bit longer turns because it was so much easier to play test digitally if someone just takes their turn and then we know that in the course of the game you're going to be taking eight turns with four

or five actions rather than 60 turns with lots of little interrupts and I I think that we're starting to actually see in in the crop of games that have come out in the past couple years the marks of design during pandemic for better and worse you know one of the examples that comes to mind is Isaac childress's new gloomhaven title Frost Haven which Timmy is like barely a physical object and I I like a lot of things about about the the design but if you've ever tried to open up the box you'll ask yourself the question is this supposed to be a board game at all I mean it's so large and and one can see how they would developed it extensively using digital tools but it maybe wasn't as designed to be a physical object and you know so I've had this uh you know we've been sorting through this problem when it comes to questions of you know introducing games with interrupts interrupts are really hard to do in a digital space even when you're running cameras and you can see people it's just hard to communicate that week and I compare that to design work you know something like Sid Saxons I'm the boss from the early 90s which isn't a game

entirely built around interrupts something like that I feel like just couldn't exist in the course because of this difficult conversation on Zoom let alone and interrupting mechanics right and so I think that like you know there there's been a lot that we've gained from using these digital tools but they are also steering the design conversation away from certain kinds of designs do you as a follow-up to that do you feel like there are things that you now do completely different in your Design Studio based on what you've learned from that or are you trying to move yourself back over to some of your original techniques and processes when it came to the development of arcs I didn't build a TTS kit for the first year of iteration which was a lot of work and it was done on purpose because I wanted to make sure that the core action Loop of the game was players sitting around a table and having that back and forth and then once we got to the more serious development work of course we had to move into TTS but we've had to introduce kind of safeguards to protect our design practice from too much digital thinking in that early stage where it's particularly vulnerable

amazing um Ming do you have anything you'd like to add to this yeah for this this question I think the digitals is quite use useful for the broader game such as some games when we first take the books we play the game we need to read the rule but as the first time we can't make sure the rules I understand is right or is wrong so the first time if I use the board game and used an app we had to check my thing is right okay we can play together and use the app help us to to check every step is good so race I think it can help us okay maybe it's kind of easier for everybody play the game as the first time so it's a guide in initially learning the game yeah okay great do you want to jump in do you have anything that you'd like to add Elizabeth sure I think one thing that's really important when we

think about this is that there are definitely things as as we've sort of discussed already that you can do on tabletop that you just can't emulate in digital but also the other the other way around is very much true like if you look at uh what's going on in a typical ccg versus Marvel snap like there are just some mechanics that work better in digital that you would not really be able to emulate in a tabletop space but on the other hand you know as somebody who was initially you know designing tabletop games back in 2006 when there weren't a lot of digital components what I really learned in in sort of like trying to create like Java apps to help with my uh so that people could play my RPGs on IRC to let you know how old I am um is that the magic of a tabletop game is that when players are bought in if you've missed something in your rules sort of the social contract or the fact that human brains are sort of elastic

and Nimble they can they can sort of you know Glide over that but if you for example forget to say what size dice to put in your game blowback which definitely happened to me if you if you try to emulate that in a computer computer doesn't give a like it will just break and so I think one thing that's that's super useful about getting more digital tools involved or trying to digitize parts of the the tabletop game experience is that it makes you a much tighter designer you have to make sure that everything is really buttoned up in a way that you can sort of get away with if you're not trying to make it digital um let me ask you really quickly how how do you integrate or even think about like video content when you're making something do you consider that do you think about like how maybe a tutorial might be used or how maybe you can utilize it within the course of your game itself I think when when we start thinking about incorporating digital content into board games I think the most important thing is to think about how players are

interacting with it and to make sure that it it makes the game more accessible and more approachable in some way um the the idea of of just tossing in something digital because it feels trendy I think is really frightening to me because that takes away a lot of what makes board games magical and that is engaging with people around the table right right um and so I think that's a heavy consideration do you ever think we're going to get to a place where like VR or some other technology is going to allow for that intimacy still and be able to be uh digitized so that you'll be able to find that still but not be at the same table in my opinion yeah absolutely not yeah the physicality is so key it is you're not in the same room it's not happening well it's about I mean like you can have you can have a valuable experience digitally sure but you're not going to have that same level of presence that same level of human interaction as when you're sitting around the table as when you're sharing cards as when you're touching the same

components like it is just such a core human experience to me that like no no digital replacement is ever going to take over that that's well said uh does anybody else want to jump in on that no I couldn't say it better oh yeah no I mean neither could I well said okay let's move on um this is again you know we've talked a little bit around this but let's let's uh codify some of it what are some of the best lessons from the past four years that creators can carry into the future um and do you want to start cool or four years that's right is this a pandemic question discussion specifically like we've already talked around it in a little bit but the idea that you know we have changed the way that we design we've changed the way that games are made well I mean I I'm going to kind of circle back to what I was saying earlier uh which is I think it's important to recognize that we're making games we're making these objects and we can think about the games as objects that we're selling and and the problem with that way of thinking is that after the game is sold our

relationship with the player ends they've bought the house they're the new owner and they're not going to call us for plumbing advice um but I think that one of the things that I feel like I've had to to really learn and root is a big part of this is that players want a lot more from the Publishers and we should think about A continuing relationship with play with the player and this doesn't just mean expansions and DLCs and other kinds of content it means treating the game and the players who gather around it as sort of parts of a community and I don't mean community in a cynical way I mean like an actual community that is oriented around a passion for something one of the things about root um that I I don't mention very often but I guess I'll mention here because you know not that many people are watching is that root was not designed to be expanded at all uh we built sort of four factions and then we did really well on Kickstarter and so we thought okay we'll figure out how to put two more in but we had no idea that we would ever expand the game and at this point it would

probably cost someone about 300 to buy all of the expansion content for root but we didn't build that content because we wanted to make that money we built the content because the community wanted us to support the game and so we realized that what root was wasn't something that we got full control over that it was something that we were negotiating with the audience and so I think one of the big takeaways I've had I just think that the pandemic made this clearer because it made the communities a little bit more graspable even though we weren't sharing the same kind of convention spaces with them I could see them on Discord playing the game I could read their conversations in different forums and I realized the games that we were making weren't just products that we were selling they weren't just objects that we were creating internally these were objects that people were gathering around informing communities around yeah you've mentioned Discord a couple of times now and that's obviously been a tool that's helped you a lot do you feel like the the and then Community is a loaded word right but like the the groups that have formed there the community uh input that you've gotten do you think that that is something that in the future you're going to lean on more heavily than you have in the past yeah

well we already do I mean we have um the leader games is oriented around the Woodland Warriors Discord which is a wonderful place we sponsor all kinds of contests there and we even design our games in such a way that we create kind of a new smaller Discord to handle a lot of the testing and then over the course of testing we build that Discord up and then eventually it can like launch its own Community or just sort of re-merge with the main Community but it's something that we think about a community's engagement with the game basically in the very first design meetings where we're talking about the nature of the game yeah I don't want to talk too much about my group and my company but we do have a group called action Rangers and we built them in as kind of community managers moderators and play testers and they use our Discord in a very similar way where they're they become the experts on the game for us so that they're also able to kind of like self-regulate and help build and answer questions even when we're not able to I mean they beat us to most of the explanations about our own games before we can even get in there now well I'll add one small thing about that which is a lot of our community members will generate digital tools for

supporting the games before we have a chance to do anything uh and in one of those tools in in the case of oath uh players would have frequently asked questions about cards we would post them on our website and eventually a player built a fully searchable Wonderful Card database that basically houses all of the different interactions with a huge the Oaths huge card base and they've even built that back into the tabletop simulator so that if you Mouse over a card it'll start loading all the community answers so these are these are people that you want to empower yeah absolutely you never want to say no to enthusiasm if I can riff a little bit on on something you just said uh earlier I think one of the biggest lessons from the last four years is that even though you know it has been a significant amount of times it's the very first lockdown I think for a lot of people social interaction is still fairly fraught and and people are still reaching for not just their their comfort TV shows or their Comfort movies but also like their comfort games and so

I think you are going to see more of like the idea of games as a service or expansions or sequels moving in moving more into the tabletop realm because people are really you know having structured rules for social interaction takes away some of that interact some of that anxiety about you know learning how to interact with people again and I think reaching for a game that is familiar that you already love but is just a little bit deeper or a sequel to that just makes that a little bit more comforting I guess I think people are getting really into like cozy games and that kind of thing I think people just yeah do they they just want to be want to feel comfortable with their friends and that's not something that a lot of the last four years has given us yeah right if I can jump in I totally agree with that and I feel like whether or not it's about you know developing community Through expansions and continuing to support the same project object I think from you know from my perspective as a mass Market designer I'm thinking about

how can I create approachable accessible games to bring new people into the community to introduce new people into this way of experiencing each other of playing with each other of building relationships and that to me is something that like I think the pandemic like I said earlier like that has introduced such a great need for that and also thinking about like can this game be played over a Discord call can this game be something that brings people together even if they're not in the same space I think that that's something that's really important to be thinking about as a designer in this current age do you feel like you have also found like Cole had said earlier that there's a desire for your games to be not that they weren't before but perhaps more organic and to be expandable and to have more uh built upon them potentially I mean so again coming from Mass Market we're thinking about like what what is actually going to sell on the shelves at Target or Walmart and frankly expansions don't I mean if we're being honest so so it's less we're thinking less about necessarily expansions and more about

how can we continue to support our players so for the game that I did exploding kittens recipes for disaster we gave you 130 cards and we gave you some recipes that we developed in-house and then blank recipe books and what I mean by recipes is ways of mixing those cards together for Unique experiences unique ways to play the game so we're encouraging our players to engage with our game in new ways engage with each other be creative and like explore game design on their own and beyond that for hand-to-hand wombat for example we posted some different you know alternative gameplay modes that they could play online we posted accessibility recommendations so that new people could approach the game from you know from a perspective that a game designer would recommend things like that I think are really viable ways of continued support for players without necessarily having to enter into the expansion space great Ming do you have anything that you would like to add yeah one time I talked

with one Creator that's the CEO of the armscape he also gave me some some opinion because the tip top game is a kind of funny show that people to interact in person and away from technology in the information age but some people they are not social driving and preferable quiet experience and less competition so he makes the products is the guy can place his parents himself by himself because you they can they make the perfect products finally craft a single player products unnecessary for this type of player so so they focused on improving the quality of the product by having detailed historical research and to and the correct gameplay elements so this allows players to gain a great

sense of fulfillment and reward well play so starting with solo play and building off of that into your multiplayer experiences yeah it's the upside wave is the multiplayer great well listen I only have one more question and then I'm going to open it up to the floor if you do have questions you can start to line up at either of these microphones I appreciate you bearing with me as I've asked these questions I want to say right now that the panelists didn't have any idea what these questions were going to be and they've done a phenomenal job so as you're lining up can we give them a round of applause foreign yeah uh the last thing I'm going to ask and I warned some of you about this one question but if you're on a desert island and you could bring three games with you what would they be we'll start over here Carol do that island with us as many as you want April but only three games okay a fake artist goes to New York consensual and

a deck of cards okay yeah that's a good answer actually that is a really good answer thank you give me a new game what do you think um there's an out of print board game that I love called Attica that um I would it's it's probably my favorite board game of all time I'd say uh Sentinels of the Multiverse with every single expansion that's a lot yeah and then I'd I'd probably say Mancala okay where are you cool um all right this answer would change daily but at this moment I would say a deck of cards probably a copy of Blood on the clock tower and maybe an obscure not obscure but a train game 1817. okay yeah uh and poker chips for the train game yeah for poker chips you've got to have the poker chips uh Ming do you have games that you'd like to name out and it's a game now how much is the major series because it's the Solo solo players there is I already take

the game today okay you've got it right here so you're already ready for your desert island yeah okay uh let's go ahead and move over to some questions we'll start over here would you like to start um I'm not really sure how to best ask this but as we move through you know 10 15 years from now where 3D printing is much cheaper and you know basically everyone under 30 has interacted with one in some meaningful way uh sort of business or design wise how can tabletop design kind of cope with that and utilize it and leverage it to create different experiences we've started um we're having a real active conversation at our company about 3D printing because what we're finding is that it's not worth the money and the time and the effort to design extremely good box inserts because some fan is going to make one that is better way better and

they're going to post the stls on thingiverse or sell them and so it's a it's kind of meaning that for us we move away from the auxiliary stuff because you know rather than making something calibrated for the ultra true fan we know they're gonna they're gonna make their own bespoke solution to those problems so we'll just focus on the things that they would have trouble making that's great um all right thank you for the question I will say like we had a we had a fan that actually created an entire uh Discord bot for us for Alice's bissing and we of course ended up paying them for the work and ingesting it into our full uh process but it was it was incredible the amount of work that people are willing to put into those things what do you have for a question hi so um picking up on some of the themes that you've been discussing this afternoon um post pandemic in this more isolated world I feel like 2022 was a bit of a watershed moment for solo gaming games like final girl [Music] um and I feel very conflicted about this

myself because I do agree with the idea that in tabletop games at least 50 of the components are the people and the value for me in tabletop gaming over digital gaming is the social interaction but on the other hand I have friends now who have gone deep into tabletop games who were never interested before but they've done so through solo games so I just have an open question to all of you of do you feel that do you feel threatened by solo games do you feel like they're if they can have an interaction with multiplayer games how you design for solo versions of for example something like exploding kittens um you know is there a mass Market to that big broad open question but just yeah SOLO games how do you feel should visual novels feel threatened by books I yeah I think that um while my practice with game design is is fundamentally around human interaction I think if you're designing a solo game there are things that you

can do again in a tabletop game that you can't do in a digital experience the tactility I think is great um there was a great uh a great game oh I'm forgetting the name um by Kevin Allen Jr um Way Way Back uh in the early 2000s I think it was called sweet Agatha where basically it was a book and you you it was a mystery and you sort of had to cut it apart and put it back together to figure out what happened to Agatha and I think there's something really magical about that it's it's you know sometimes you want to have that kind of interesting tactile experience and you don't you don't have other players and I think you know there's nothing wrong with that as long as you're really thinking about what is this solo experience providing that you can't get in any other medium great thanks for the question do you want anything I'll just say that you know solo games are uh uh played alone but experienced together because solo players love talking to each other about the experiences playing the games and it's made them a real community that

means that even for a game like John company a negotiation game it was worth the time and the effort to find a good solo designer to build a negotiating bot for that design because these the community is that organized great let's take a question from over here yeah yeah uh I'm uh well it's weird hearing my own voice uh I'm a game developer but I absolutely love playing board games especially when I can get the friend group together um but because I'm gonna have a right don't actually I'm not I'm not familiar with like the design process for for board games so one of the things that you said that I found was very interesting was that you use tabletop Simulator for prototyping so I was curious what uh if you think post pandemic if that'll continue to be like an important prototyping tool and if uh like what what particular feature is like the most important and like what what doesn't it do that you wish it did or could do better so I I use it primarily at this point for viability testing um because it you know player response

is not going to be the same they're they're processing so many more things when they're trying to figure out the software they're trying to figure out how to interact they're trying to understand why there are forks for hands so like doing all of that makes the gameplay experience notably different and it's really really important to do you know the tail end at the very least of your work in the physical space but it has been great for Rapid iteration and viability testing for you know identifying where's the fun Factor where do we dig into this that sort of thing and balancing like basic balancing type of stuff it's so good for that great thanks for the question let's start with a question over here please hi so um I'm I'm getting into the board game Space uh coming from the digital end of things and I've been doing a lot of like physical testing with play groups and stuff like that but um as someone who doesn't have a huge following what's the easiest way or like the various ways

that you would recommend to actually get a game onto shelves because I have a game that's working but it's like how do I find the audience for that game and maybe that's a longer question but I I have an answer for this so I'd say two things one look for other communities of designers uh the the if you live in a city that has an active approach we all seen it's a great scene um one of the people you know there are a lot of designers who are in a similar place and one thing you can all do to help each other is to play each other's games uh in terms of finding the right publisher the biggest piece of advice I give to folks is that Publishers are not here to grade your game to say that this is an A plus game we'd love to publish it what's happening is that you have something you want which is your game to be published and the publisher is also looking for a successful game and they have their own interests and market share and all these concerns and if those two tumblers line up then the game gets published and if they don't line up it doesn't mean anything's wrong with your game it just means they didn't line up so look for Publishers that are doing work that is adjacent to what your game

is doing and think about your pitch to The Publisher not just this game is going to be the next magic actually don't tell them that because they'll stop listening to you um but what you can say is you can say look I saw the kinds of games that you're working on I think there's a little bit of a hole in what you're publishing and I think this game would fit in that spot that's great advice I mean it's apples and oranges you know when you pitch something and it just doesn't land it doesn't necessarily mean that the game's not right somewhere it's just not right with that publisher all right thanks for the question thank you over here sir hi so one thing that I'm seeing a bit with for example Mansions of Madness that ties in with a lot of the things that you have all been talking about today is leveraging the tactile experience but still providing for expandability in the digital through a digital medium right and uh how how do you think because I'm I'm

suspecting that this is going to become more common it just makes a lot of business sense as well but when you have these communities that form around the game like you're mentioning and you also have potentially Publishers that want to continue to capitalize on it how do you feel about sort of retaining control of that core idea when you're you've provided more a tool set and the game is sort of infinitely expandable or do you just not do that does anybody want to take that we've got to let it go I mean I I when when root came out we started getting fan factions about every week and at first they were to use a word used earlier today curios just kind of fun little things and then there were 20 and then there were 50 and then there were hundreds of them and we just sort of let it happen and we actually tried to

support our games at Whirly gig we actually put all our games in the Creative Commons which feels right because many of them uh use art that's in the public domain so I want all the games all the icons everything it's all in the Creative Commons and we we include very easy to disassemble kits for people who want to raid those files and at leader we always build card templates things like that provide access to the community we love sharing our our files because it's going to bring a lot more people into the tent than it's going to scare away yeah I think that would be the one thing that I would suggest too is is developing creative tools that can also guide your players in the direction that you would like to see them go um like I said like about recipes for disaster right like we don't necessarily want our players developing their own cards because that can break the game in exploding kittens really really quickly but developing a recipe and assembling a handful of cards is a really fun way to explore and learn and grow with the game um so just as an example of of ways that

you can sort of help help create some guard rails for your players and thanks thanks for the question uh right here hi I think today you've talked about digital tools such as Discord and tabletop simulator and I'm wondering whether there are other digital tools that you have been using such as like uh tools for balancing game uh game economy or um say generative uh tools to offer like rapid prototyping wanna take that my favorite although this is mostly used in the digital space my favorite tool for modeling a player economy is something called machinations yes yes it's it's so good um basically you you put in all of your your faucets and your sinks um and then it you can simulate hundreds or or thousands of of rounds of play and you can see where where you need to tweak things and you can do that all in

real time without having to get out any components um it's brilliant and my favorite Google spreadsheets yes uh it's essential I I use a fair bit of python actually if I'm working on any kind of um any kind of event system that I can build a model I'll build it to just just with python and then more recently I've started using MC dice which is a Monte Carlo dice simulator developed by a person who's probably in this room and it is uh exceptionally good if you uh need to very quickly um model anything that is involves different kinds of die rolling and things like that and I use this both when doing kind of preliminary design work but also when we're actually doing play tests after we run a particular combat I will run it through the simulator and say okay How likely was what happened you know that's really smart Ming do you have any tools that you use yeah it's a tool I use the yes when I play the so we're all familiar hosts because where I played with my friends I just

create a room my friends joined the room which drove the character and then we play the game when I will evil evil side I just said I'm a good person and that helps the decision with my partner by test so the voice and the test is quite different I think it's quite easier for us playing such as because in the past we need to open the eye no no words just use words that kill this guy or do the other things it's quite easier for us now one last question here so so so this question is for me specifically on Chinese market so uh under the current circumstance of the tightening up on of publication number uh issued by the government what do you

see and especially since you pointed out it's very important to have a combined force from all platforms to gain publicity of your game of your IP usually it takes a lot of resource to do that to pull that up successfully so what do you think what where do you see the future of Indie table Hub games developers in Chinese market in the in the next five years maybe yeah in Chinese market it's the most important I think is about the culture not just this morning the courses about the history and we currently also have the script and products that come in with history elements because it used based on this more cultural combined with the products connects the Chinese famous culture spreads to the overseas as more and more people know about the Chinese new culture and new products I think this

during this part can make more people know the Chinese culture and then also for the Chinese person because like some children if you if you ask them less than history they think oh it's quite difficult I don't want to but you told them this is a game you are a player they want to play the game and these during the play they know technology they learn the history and a lot of other things it's a good way to afford for them for education or a lot of other things amazing we are out of time I want to thank everybody for joining us and I want to thank the panelists and you can too now by applauding for them please I have all their information up here it's been up here for a little while if you take a photo you'll be able to contact these folks across the internet and make sure to let them know on social media how you feel about this panel and I want to remind each and every one of you you have the ability to fill out a

survey if you like these panelists if you like this panel please fill it out it takes less than 30 seconds it helps us out it helps GDC out it helps everybody out it helps you out so you can have good content next year as well I want to thank every single one of these panelists they will be outside for a little while if you have further questions they may be there to follow up with you and thank you again enjoy your GDC thank you