Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the debut episode of Crafts and Conquer.
Speaker: I am your host, Michael, and I am here to take you on a journey into both the world of craft beer and board games.
Speaker: Two passions I have a lot of.
Speaker: I've drank a lot of craft beer over the years, more than I really wish to admit to.
Speaker: And the last couple of years, I've been really, really into board games.
Speaker: My wife and I play a lot of Arkham Horror, DC Deck Builder, Forbidden Island, Star Wars Outer Rim.
Speaker: So we kind of have an eclectic little selection, but that's what this show is about.
Speaker: This show is for me to share my passion for both these things with you, the listener.
Speaker: We'll have a lot of interviews with people from both industries and also fans and just people that love both.
Speaker: So we'll be talking to a wide range of people on this show.
Speaker: This first episode, we have a great interview with Josh and Evan from Very Special Games.
Speaker: I picked up a game off of Kickstarter called Abduction and immediately fell in love with it.
Speaker: Josh and Evan did an amazing job creating this game.
Speaker: You'll learn more about it during the interview.
Speaker: But I can say is my wife and I have added to our regular rotation.
Speaker: We have already picked up the expansion for it after we only played the game like twice.
Speaker: So it is so much fun.
Speaker: Hope you enjoyed the interview.
Speaker: I'm really excited about this.
Speaker: We have an interview with Josh and Evan from Evan and Josh's Very Special Games.
Speaker: The reason they're on is because number one, they are amazing game designers.
Speaker: And number two, I'm obsessed with their game Abduction, which we'll talk about more in the interview.
Speaker: But the fact that you get to kidnap ducks from around the universe while being yelled at by Dave is just a fascinating and fascinating thing.
Speaker: So go ahead, guys, if you want to introduce yourselves.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I'm Evan Katz, one half of Evan and Josh's Very Special Games Company.
Speaker: And I'm Josh Roberts, the other half, maybe the less necessary half in a lot of ways.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much, guys, for joining me.
Speaker: We'll get right in.
Speaker: How did you guys get into game design?
Speaker: You better let Josh take this one.
Speaker: He can give you the full bridge version of the story.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So Evan and I worked at the same growth strategy and innovation consulting firm in Memphis, Tennessee.
Speaker: At the time it was called Southern Growth Studio.
Speaker: It's now called Epic Pivot.
Speaker: And one day I showed up at work at my normal time and Evan was already there, which was a weird day in and of itself out of the gate.
Speaker: But as I walked in, he told me about a conversation he had the night before with a friend about whether or not there was a correlation between a variety of things.
Speaker: But the example he gave was your age and how much you were willing to spend on a steak dinner.
Speaker: So if you imagine your college in your 20s and maybe $20 is kind of the cap, you're headed to Applebee's to get their ribeye.
Speaker: But, you know, you get into your 60s and you've had a long career and some success and, you know, maybe you're willing to spend a little more on dinner.
Speaker: And, you know, I'm sure a little chuckle, slightly amusing.
Speaker: And then he said, do you think we can make a game out of that concept?
Speaker: And that was a really interesting question for me.
Speaker: So that day, you know, we drew up on sticky notes, you know, some some kind of weird stuff.
Speaker: X axis options and just some cards we thought were funny for Y axis.
Speaker: And that sort of became the early version of our first game Charity Party.
Speaker: And by lunchtime that day, we were in the conference room of the consultancy playing a very early, too hard to play and understand version of Charity Party.
Speaker: But it was kind of clear that everybody had fun with the concept and there might be something there.
Speaker: So this was only a couple hours.
Speaker: Like literally you started in the morning and were playing it at noon?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: That's inspiration.
Speaker: We're talking literally on sticky notes.
Speaker: Like the way it worked was you'd have kind of the...
Speaker: a line for any for a chart, the trend line, and then there'd be a x axis, which would be something like, you know, time or time of day or maybe someone's age.
Speaker: And so you'd like pair those things randomly together.
Speaker: And then we had, you know, just in probably half an hour, drawn up a bunch of potential labels for this graph, which would be like the y axis.
Speaker: And one that sticks out in my mind that I don't have a picture of somewhere.
Speaker: That was the first time I was like, oh, this is really funny.
Speaker: The trend line that had been drawn was, well, it was for a graph of someone's age for their whole life going from like zero to 90 or something.
Speaker: And then the trend line was like mostly, mostly flat and kind of in the middle and then just spikes up huge right around age 38 and then comes back down.
Speaker: And the, the.
Speaker: card that someone played to label that graph was fear of vampires.
Speaker: And I just, there's such a story there.
Speaker: I was like, what happened in this person's life at age 38?
Speaker: Were they suddenly were like, oh shit.
Speaker: So I think after that, we thought there was really something that could be fleshed out.
Speaker: Maybe they watched a Leslie Nielsen movie, Dead and Loving It.
Speaker: That was, it scared them to death.
Speaker: So that's interesting that it came that way and you had that moment.
Speaker: Do you guys still have the sticky notes?
Speaker: I have them.
Speaker: Not all of them, but I have many of those somewhere kind of in a plastic bag back in my closet of very early activities.
Speaker: Oh, you got to frame those.
Speaker: You got to put them up like your first dollar bill.
Speaker: You hang them on the wall of your office so you can be like, look, that's where it started.
Speaker: Yeah, it's one of those things that, yeah, at the time, it wasn't clear that those were going to be worth saving.
Speaker: So I don't know that we did a good job.
Speaker: Now, you guys are brothers, correct?
Speaker: That's what I read on your bios?
Speaker: Oh, if only.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: I thought I read that in the bio.
Speaker: I'm sorry about that.
Speaker: That's okay.
Speaker: Sometimes on various websites, people put my last name as Katz.
Speaker: So it's easy to make that mistake if you kind of like Board Game Geek, I think has me listed as Josh Katz.
Speaker: Some other places do.
Speaker: But it's not true.
Speaker: My last name is Josh Roberts.
Speaker: We're poorly related and follicularly.
Speaker: So you're, you're, you're, you're brothers now in arms, you're brothers in the war of board games.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And it is a war.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: So like what kind of games do you guys play or what'd you guys play when you were doing that?
Speaker: So like, if you were going to sit down for a game night, what would you crack out?
Speaker: Like, what's your idea game?
Speaker: Uh, both say, no, we could, uh, the greatest party game ever created wavelength.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So my wife and I play a good bit of games.
Speaker: I think the staples for us these days, depending on time,
Speaker: If we're going to go long form, there's a game called My Father's Work, which is kind of like a generational engine builder worker placement hybrid that's really cool.
Speaker: But it takes three hours to play.
Speaker: So with two kids in the house, it's not always easy to do that.
Speaker: We've never finished.
Speaker: I don't think we'll ever finish a session of that game in one night.
Speaker: It usually spans out over a week or so.
Speaker: Acropolis is something we'll play a lot.
Speaker: One of the things that's really appealing about that one for us is our nine-year-old can play, our 10-year-old now can play it with us.
Speaker: And when he eventually loses interest and drops out, it kind of nicely transitions from three players to two.
Speaker: um with without missing a beat which is cool um my wife and i play a lot of a game called onitama which is like a really elegant um kind of almost like chess but not really um it's it's that's one of the black and white stones correct you move across the board oh okay i'm thinking of a different one i think you're thinking of shobu um which we played a little bit um
Speaker: The mirroring thing tends to frustrate my better half, so she doesn't love that.
Speaker: Onitama is like you've got five pieces.
Speaker: One of them is your sensei, so like your king.
Speaker: And the players trade cards back and forth for the moves you could make.
Speaker: And it's basically can you capture everybody else's pieces or get your sensei to their dojo?
Speaker: And like it takes five minutes to play.
Speaker: So you can play 100 games in an hour.
Speaker: It's really awesome and super fun.
Speaker: So you're waiting for the Cobra.
Speaker: So everybody should be waiting for the Cobra Kai, you know, cover version because it sounds like it could be, you know, that show in a game.
Speaker: Oh, my God, if only.
Speaker: I don't know what he's doing now.
Speaker: But even the packaging, the pieces, that game is just awesome from end to end.
Speaker: And if anybody deserves a lucrative licensing deal on their concept, it's him.
Speaker: I think that we're also playing the Star Wars Clone Wars game right now that's based on the pandemic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which, you know, having a 10 year old son, I'm doing everything in my power I can to get him attached to Star Wars.
Speaker: And that's been that's been nice for provoking his interest there.
Speaker: How is that game?
Speaker: I play Pandemic a lot and I'm thinking about picking up the Clone Wars one because it looks interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: I mean, do you like Pandemic a lot?
Speaker: Yes, I love Pandemic.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Then if you're interested in playing Pandemic with a different set of clothes on, I would endorse it highly.
Speaker: Yeah, pandemic is one of those games I describe it as there's 47 ways to lose and you could lose in the first turn and not realize it and only one way to win.
Speaker: And, you know, I don't know how many times I've come down, my wife and I have come down to the last two cards.
Speaker: You're like, please be Budapest.
Speaker: Please be Budapest.
Speaker: And neither of them are there.
Speaker: And you're just like, great.
Speaker: That's wonderful.
Speaker: And you've lost, you know, you lost 10 cards ago, but you have no idea you actually lost.
Speaker: Yeah, we play Outer Rim.
Speaker: Have you ever played Outer Rim from Star Wars?
Speaker: No, I haven't.
Speaker: It's a big game.
Speaker: I bought the expansion.
Speaker: It's not even bigger.
Speaker: You really have to plan it out.
Speaker: You're playing a smuggler and you got to go around and do different things and cargo and bounties and all this different stuff.
Speaker: But you move around the universe.
Speaker: It's this big arch and you got to move around your ship and stuff like that.
Speaker: So it's interesting.
Speaker: Oh, I think we saw somebody playing that at Gen Con.
Speaker: Like it takes up a ton of table space, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I have it on my kitchen table and especially with the expansion, it makes it even bigger.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We saw somebody playing that at a hotel bar at Gen Con.
Speaker: And all I recognized was like Star Wars pieces and then it was gigantic.
Speaker: And I was like, man, we should skip our next meeting and see if we can sit in on that.
Speaker: Gonna have to buy myself a bigger table.
Speaker: Yeah, the nice thing about it is with the expansion is originally you had to go like if you were arching, not to talk about other people's games, but you had to go from one end of the universe to the other.
Speaker: You had to go actually across to get to the other side.
Speaker: And when they made it bigger, they added these little at the ends now that you can jump from one side of the board to the other side of the boards because literally it would take you four turns to get all the way across the board to get where you needed to.
Speaker: So I was like, oh, great.
Speaker: That's a grind.
Speaker: Not for nothing, while we were making Abduction, there was a significant part of me who was like, can we get the Star Wars license and make this a Star Wars game?
Speaker: But I'm glad we went the direction we did, because I think it makes more sense.
Speaker: I hope one day we still have that opportunity to have a spin-off themed version.
Speaker: There's Star Wars Catan.
Speaker: Wouldn't it be hilarious if Dave was just Vader?
Speaker: Sending you out to stormtroopers to collect the Jedis?
Speaker: To organize them into patterns?
Speaker: That's what you don't get to see in the movies is that 80% of a stormtrooper's job is just collecting ducks and doing paperwork.
Speaker: And Vader's rise through middle management and up to the top of the room.
Speaker: The backstory.
Speaker: There was a Saturday Night Live skit that they did with the new movies when it was Undercover Boss with Kylo Ren.
Speaker: And he went around.
Speaker: That was a great, exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker: You're like, oh, it is that way.
Speaker: Like, you got to think about it is all these people are on this space station and somebody's got to clean the toilets.
Speaker: Yeah, they're not.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So Evan, what do you play?
Speaker: Uh, well, it's always funny when people ask me this question, because the short answer is, oh, I don't play games.
Speaker: But that's not true.
Speaker: But it's definitely true that I am not someone who plays heavy strategy games or really even too many, like new light strategy games.
Speaker: Yeah, I do have a soft spot for Catan.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: and despite the rage that it causes everyone.
Speaker: I think I really enjoy playing games where they're something that they're simple enough that
Speaker: players can learn them very quickly.
Speaker: And so we can kind of skip to the, all right, we all understand the rules and the basic strategy standpoint.
Speaker: Like, let's get to some of the more in-depth strategy rather than you got to play it three or four times before that starts to emerge.
Speaker: And a lot of that, of course, has to do with my own patience.
Speaker: But it does, you know, I'm really into games like I've played a ton of Scrabble.
Speaker: I still play a lot of Scrabble against people on my phone every day.
Speaker: I think I'm the only one still doing that.
Speaker: But, you know, games like that or even Bananagrams, which I don't know if people even consider that a board game when they start to think of it.
Speaker: I'm like, you learn those rules.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, it could be.
Speaker: But I think there's actually quite a lot of strategy to Bananagrams.
Speaker: But other games that I've really enjoyed recently, of course, Josh mentioned Wavelength, or I mentioned Wavelength, which is a party game where you have to kind of convince your team where something is on a spectrum, something like hot to cold, or something like...
Speaker: weird to normal.
Speaker: And so just it's just a brilliant concept.
Speaker: We we know that creator that really like that one.
Speaker: But I think Josh and I both really enjoyed this game called Dimension, which is super simple to learn again.
Speaker: You're basically trying to stack these colored spheres in a way that doesn't violate any of the conditions that the game will generate for you at any given turn.
Speaker: And I think I also really appreciate games like that where
Speaker: they are almost self-generating, kind of in the way Pandemic is, which I do like Pandemic as well.
Speaker: But it's going to be fresh every time and perhaps even fresh in ways that the creators didn't even really ever intend or they didn't have to.
Speaker: These aren't scenarios that they sat down and created individually.
Speaker: They just kind of put the parameters out and then the game is going to make you something new each time.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's one of the really great things.
Speaker: We'll start talking about abduction is that way.
Speaker: Every time you crack it open, it's a different game every time because you don't know how the cards are going to come out.
Speaker: You don't know how the ducks are going to come out.
Speaker: So, okay, where did abduction come from and why ducks?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Josh, why don't you talk about why ducks?
Speaker: And I'll talk, I was just going back through some pictures and notes.
Speaker: And I think for me, there are three games that abduction was inspired by.
Speaker: But that I, at least on my end, but you have, you have a better.
Speaker: I don't even know how we like landed on the actual concept, but my recollection of this is, so we've got this Google slides document that we put in
Speaker: Every idea we have for a game concept.
Speaker: So when it's time that we're on the front end of the game development cycle, we revisit that.
Speaker: It's like, is there anything that we're both into that we want to try to pursue?
Speaker: Maybe the dumbest idea in that whole document, a real distinction because there's a lot of dumb ideas in this document...
Speaker: was this thing that I put in there called Aqueducts.
Speaker: And Aqueducts was – I'm embarrassed to tell the story of what Aqueducts is.
Speaker: It's a physics game.
Speaker: It's a water displacement game.
Speaker: Basically, it was it.
Speaker: It's a drinking game.
Speaker: Disguised is not a drinking game necessarily.
Speaker: Which, you know, in hindsight, with what Heroes of Arcadia is doing, maybe we should have made Aqueducts.
Speaker: Anyway, the idea was... Richard, you've still got time.
Speaker: You can go a duck route.
Speaker: You can have a whole duck section.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: So the idea was there was like a series of shot glasses, you know, from very small thimble shot glasses up to a pint glass, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the players would have to move their ducks sort of Mancala style from one end to the other.
Speaker: but there'd be escalating amounts of liquid in each thing, and I wanted to figure out how to break the laws of physics so the ducts would all be the same size and weight but have different densities somehow.
Speaker: Again, really terrible idea.
Speaker: But the idea was, can you get from one end to the other?
Speaker: It's the thing that happens with different materials.
Speaker: It's not a total pipe dream, Josh.
Speaker: We can do that.
Speaker: The hard part would be...
Speaker: keeping the weight consistent and the density wildly different enough, you know, anyway, anyway, um, uh, the germ of an idea.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, uh,
Speaker: I bought a whole bunch of plastic ducks is the end of this story, and we had them laying around.
Speaker: And then, as Evan often does, came up with a game concept that was brilliant.
Speaker: But I think at the time, you were just using wooden tokens or something.
Speaker: Did it start with you using the ducks?
Speaker: I feel like I initially got to be made.
Speaker: I thought it would be played with like M&Ms or something.
Speaker: And then I was like looking for something to to simulate those M&Ms, which I was too lazy to go to the store to get.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, I have these colored ducks on my desk from Josh's weird idea.
Speaker: So we'll just use those temporarily.
Speaker: Were they like big ones or small ones?
Speaker: They're actually identical to the ducks that are in the game right now.
Speaker: You can buy those on Amazon.
Speaker: They're not the exact same colors, but that was a thing that existed.
Speaker: If anyone drives a Jeep, they may have encountered them because they're big in Jeep culture.
Speaker: Yeah, I've seen that and don't understand it, but yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker: People put them on their side mirrors.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So these decks have been around.
Speaker: But I was thinking back, and I will do my best to quickly walk through where, to me, this idea came from.
Speaker: And of course, everything kind of gets clearer and warped in hindsight at the same time.
Speaker: But I played a round of S game Dominion, which if you haven't played, I Googled it.
Speaker: Apparently, it was one of the first, if not the first deck builder games.
Speaker: I don't know if that's true or not, but the idea is that you start out with a small deck of kind of low-power cards, and then you'll randomly draw out five of them at a time, and then you can use that combination of five that come out to kind of purchase more cards from the bank or whatever it may be, and then eventually all the cards you purchase, along with the ones you already had, get shuffled back into your kind of random cards,
Speaker: deck, and then you keep doing this.
Speaker: And so you are trying to acquire cards in ways that hopefully will, when they're drawn randomly, kind of have a high likelihood of coming out in combinations that are powerful and useful to you.
Speaker: And I never played a game like that before.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, this is this is a really interesting, pretty simple fun concept.
Speaker: But unfortunately to me, it was trapped within the name deck builder.
Speaker: And which which is, you know, even even to a kind of mid level game player like myself is a little bit.
Speaker: inaccessible.
Speaker: And I'm like, that's certainly not something that my mother has ever gotten to want to play or even somebody who's not a card game player.
Speaker: And, you know, a lot of the games also have find themselves in fantasy realm or, you know, magic gathering adjacent.
Speaker: And so I was thinking, all right, is there where we can kind of like break this concept out of that into a totally different sphere, but keep the mechanic of it?
Speaker: So so the idea that I was thinking of was like, what if I had a bag of M&Ms, basically, and just different cute colored things and you would draw them out in like a line.
Speaker: And if they came out in either certain patterns or streaks of the same color that they would that would be good for you.
Speaker: And so, you know, you could then use those to somehow acquire more things of that color and something you got.
Speaker: Just don't eat your tokens.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: Don't eat the tokens because that's going to lose your power.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I started playing that with ducks.
Speaker: And one thing was apparent was that it wasn't any fun.
Speaker: But I was messing around with it and realized, okay, it's not fun if you just are relying on statistics to...
Speaker: hope that you get three ducks that are pink to come out in a row from your bag.
Speaker: But if you can have a row of them out, say 10 of them, and then maybe you have some cards that let you do things that rearrange the order of your line.
Speaker: That's a little bit more interesting and has some thought go into it and actually reminded me of this game, Guillotine, that I played many times, which is a...
Speaker: kind of irreverent take on the French Revolution, where there's a line of noble people, and your job is to rearrange that line and behead the noble person that is most valuable.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So does it actually have a guillotine?
Speaker: Do you get to pull a little thing to make the blade come down?
Speaker: It does come with one.
Speaker: It is non-functional, but yes, it is a paper guillotine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the, whether, whether or not how you feel about the concept, the flavor of that game, um,
Speaker: the line rear management mechanic had stuck with me.
Speaker: And and so that that certainly influenced things there.
Speaker: And then my my roommate at the time, Vince, who I had been forcing to play this game with me, was like, you know, this game might be a lot better if there were two lines of ducks, not just one.
Speaker: And and that's where the pattern, the pattern idea came from and everything.
Speaker: Well, that was when we suddenly got to this kind of Mancala-style version where instead of, you know, in a way, it is a line of 10 ducks still, but it's been folded in half because the ducks do travel down the street.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: That's part of the fun of the game.
Speaker: Part of the fun of the game.
Speaker: But once they're in this kind of stacked line where they're both moving in opposite directions, you're able to do a lot more interesting movements that involve top and bottom, side to side.
Speaker: And I've been talking for a hot second here.
Speaker: No, you're good.
Speaker: The last game that inspired this was then it suddenly it was clearly related to Candy Crush or B.J.
Speaker: Which we've all played.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, most popular mobile app game of all time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One of the things that's great about the game.
Speaker: is number one is the tactile-ness of it because the ducks are this amazing resin that just feels good in your hands.
Speaker: And then the silicone, is it silicone or rubber?
Speaker: The spaceship itself, the UFO, reaching your hand in there.
Speaker: It's an amazing feeling and it does add something to it to reach in and kind of fiddle around.
Speaker: And my wife and I, when we play, we always pick it up and shake it in an attempt to get, you know, you're hoping for that duck on top.
Speaker: And even then I dig in.
Speaker: Was that part of the plan?
Speaker: Is it, were you testing different materials for the ducks and it just came out that way?
Speaker: Or was it just, Hey, these are, we feel good.
Speaker: Go ahead, Josh.
Speaker: But I think this is a great example of, I wanted one thing, Josh wanted another thing and neither of them would have been as good as what we ended up with, I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and I think it's, it's sort of one of the spots where we find some creative tension, which I think is important.
Speaker: in any creative pursuit to have a partner that doesn't think exactly like you.
Speaker: And sort of the example here with our game components, like I want to bolt on, if it were up to me, we would have figured out how to make the UFO hover and like it would have lights on it and a tractor beam and the whole thing, right?
Speaker: But of course that game costs $12,000 to make and you have to sell it for $40,000 to get any profit, which is not a good business plan.
Speaker: And if it were up to me, we would just include a piece of paper that said UFO on it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And keep all the money for ourselves.
Speaker: The ducks would be M&Ms, and in the instructions it would say, you have to go to the store and buy the M&Ms yourself.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You have to subscribe, too.
Speaker: We'll send you one M&M.
Speaker: Yes, we'll send you the M&M.
Speaker: Once a month, you get a bag of M&Ms to resupply yourself.
Speaker: That's actually funny.
Speaker: Yeah, but so the spot where the way we think about this, where it kind of comes together is –
Speaker: you recognize, and you talked about this with, with you and your wife, that there's a lot of games out there that are two or three decks of cards, maybe some meeples and you smash them together in whatever way you do.
Speaker: And, um, there's a lot of those, uh, you know, several thousand new games are launched every year.
Speaker: So it's like, how do we, how do we both take pride in our creative process, but stand out among the crowd?
Speaker: And one of the ways you could do that is let's, let's create components that,
Speaker: are completely off the wall that nobody's seen before that aren't being used in games.
Speaker: You know, we're working on stuff right now.
Speaker: We've, we've pushed our manufacturing partners to the limits of their abilities with some of this stuff.
Speaker: They like had to bring on new team members to be able to make these, you know, buy new machines and this, that, and that.
Speaker: You're creating jobs.
Speaker: You're, you're, you're creating jobs through fun.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That's an awfully generous way of putting it.
Speaker: It is like, you know, if abduction was M&Ms and a paper-crafted UFO –
Speaker: What does that look like in a video on TikTok?
Speaker: What does it look like in a picture on a Facebook ad?
Speaker: And like that's not the reason we pursue creative things creatively necessarily, but we do run a business.
Speaker: So you do have to think about that stuff at some point.
Speaker: Like I'm sure any musician coming up right now is like,
Speaker: When they're thinking of the hook of their song, it's like, if this goes viral on TikTok, how are people going to use the hook of my song?
Speaker: And how is that song going to be received if it's used in ways I don't intend?
Speaker: So like you've got to – there's just modern day considerations you have to make and it's just the reality of where we are right now.
Speaker: Who writes the comedy for the game?
Speaker: Because the cards on each of the cards for the patterns, there's Dave gives you either yells at you or I think one was offhand.
Speaker: I'm trying to remember I'm offhand, but one was like, hey, let's get this done quick so we can have a three day weekend and do this.
Speaker: And even the instruction book, the fact that starts with congratulations, welcome intern.
Speaker: Like right off the bat, you're just like, this is different.
Speaker: This is fun.
Speaker: And that was part of it.
Speaker: And the whole description of why ducks, because ducks are all over the universe.
Speaker: It just made it so much fun to like, I sat down a lot of times.
Speaker: I think we all do this.
Speaker: You, you, you read direction books, but you don't, you, you, everybody now every game comes with the rule book and the how to play, because they know no one actually reads the rule book until you need it.
Speaker: But yours was just so much fun to flip through and read and the little quotes and stuff like that.
Speaker: So who writes Dave's lines?
Speaker: uh, pretty good split on that one.
Speaker: Is that, yeah.
Speaker: So I think, yes.
Speaker: Um, and it's, it's true of Charity Party.
Speaker: It's true of Ransom Notes.
Speaker: It's true of, you know, Charity Party is a good example because to this day I can go through the, the 250 Y access cards and I can tell you who wrote which one, um, with a hundred percent confidence that I get it right.
Speaker: Because, um,
Speaker: Evan and I have very distinct styles and senses of humor, but they, they, it tends to be complimentary, not overlapping, not redundant.
Speaker: So where that matters, like the abduction instruction manual, you know, I had this idea that it should, it should not just be instructions, like it should be a sort of world building element.
Speaker: And I wrote a short novel and then,
Speaker: And then I think Evan made it useful and good.
Speaker: Well, let's even back that up a step further of there is a month or two of when the game, when the concept, the gameplay that more or less is how it is today existed, but it was just the ducks and there was no spaceship.
Speaker: And then one day Josh came and said, you know, what if we called it abduction and it's it's a tractor beam situation where the spaceship is moving the ducks around.
Speaker: And I was kind of like,
Speaker: I don't know about it.
Speaker: Quickly came to my senses of, oh yeah, that's way better.
Speaker: So yeah, let me expand on that quickly.
Speaker: I don't like it when there's games that do stuff like, why are these ducks moving on the pond?
Speaker: And there's no reason for it.
Speaker: And I know it's kind of dumb and it's not necessary for the game to work.
Speaker: But I wanted there to be a reason that the ducks get manipulated around the board and disappear.
Speaker: And so the only thing that made sense was aliens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anyway, so then we do the instruction thing the way we talked about.
Speaker: And then Dave, I remember we had a spreadsheet for each of the cards.
Speaker: And I wrote a version of what Dave would say.
Speaker: Evan wrote a version of what Dave would say.
Speaker: And we would meet on a fairly regular basis and be like, this is a good idea.
Speaker: This idea is better.
Speaker: What if we combine these two ideas and just kind of Frankensteined it together into what
Speaker: Dave kind of became but I think we both contributed to that, you know pretty thoroughly
Speaker: So you mentioned the fact that the ducks disappear.
Speaker: And that's one of the things that's fascinating, frustrating, and fun about the game is it's the two lines of ducks.
Speaker: And when you remove a pattern, in a way, you're almost hurting yourself because now you have to move everything around or depending on what cards are pulled, people can take ducks.
Speaker: And I've had so many times where my wife and I are playing against each other and either we don't realize that we're both going after the same pattern, which will kill you, or the fact that you're like one away and then...
Speaker: they do something or you realize oh i could do this and then you're like oh wait a minute that pattern is there and you take that pattern instead thinking you got the easy one and then suddenly you realize you just killed yourself for the entire rest of the game you know that is what makes it fun that's what would be interesting was that the purpose was that the idea to get strategy into it oh for sure um yeah oh go ahead
Speaker: I think, and you know, as we're having this conversation, I'm looking back at our kind of behind the scenes content from our Google Drive folder of where all this lives.
Speaker: And you can kind of see the, you know, the archaeological dig of where the game came from.
Speaker: And there were many times when we went back and forth on, well, is the game
Speaker: where should the game sit in the balance between luck and strategy and how much you can mess with your opponents versus it's something that's almost completely solitaire and
Speaker: And all of that translates into how long does the game take?
Speaker: How intense versus casual is the game?
Speaker: And we found a lot of times small changes, extremely small changes to the rules had a huge impact on some of that stuff.
Speaker: For instance, for a long time, there was no limit to how many formation cards you could take in a turn.
Speaker: So if you had the ability, you could actually grab two formation cards in one turn.
Speaker: And I think we also had a rule where much kind of like the solo play version of the game, if you got a formation card, you got to take some more action cards.
Speaker: So in theory, do these kind of like chain reaction.
Speaker: Oh, my God, I just got like seven cards in a row turns.
Speaker: And yeah, now now looking back, that's insane.
Speaker: But at the time we were like, oh, that's cool and fun.
Speaker: And like, you know, caters to somebody who
Speaker: has a lot of strategic foresight.
Speaker: But it sucks for everyone else because you got to sit there not only while one person's turn takes a while, but then you got to wait for them to refill their ducks and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: So a lot of those kind of strategic considerations need to be weighed against.
Speaker: Well, what's the experience like for people who aren't playing right now, but are still sitting at the table?
Speaker: And that's part of the fun of the game also is the randomness of it that when you remove your ducks, you reach in to pull new ducks out of a blind UFO.
Speaker: And I'm sure you guys already know this and I've been frustrated by it when you need one duck color.
Speaker: And for some reason you can never find that color.
Speaker: And you're just you're just pulling through and you know, you put all the ducks back in it.
Speaker: I mean, they're all the ducks are there.
Speaker: And you're shaking it and you're pulling and you're like, oh, I need the blue duck.
Speaker: And you just keep pulling white ones.
Speaker: And you keep taking the car where it says, you can remove ducks.
Speaker: Fine, I'm moving ducks and taking them out.
Speaker: And I'm just like, it's so frustrating.
Speaker: But again, that's what makes it fun.
Speaker: Yeah, I would just add to, I agree with you for sure, Michael.
Speaker: And I would just add to what Evan was saying.
Speaker: There was a mechanic early on where you'd
Speaker: You didn't have to capture the formation in the exact orientation that it shows up on the card.
Speaker: So like you could get it if it was upside down or backwards or mirror image, whatever.
Speaker: um and and what that turned into is is the formation cards there was no like achievement to it like it was they were all too easy available at all times um so we limited it to it that it had to be precise uh but there's still enough luck and randomness where you know evan evan kind of started down this path like i can play abduction with my 10 year old son
Speaker: Because I can't plan ahead 10 turns.
Speaker: If I could plan ahead 10 turns, I would kill him every single game to the extent it would not be fun for him to sit at the table and play with me.
Speaker: And I think there are thousands of games out there.
Speaker: that are objectively great and precise and consider like an amount of deep analytical thinking that our games don't necessarily require.
Speaker: But those games aren't for everybody.
Speaker: And one of the things that we take a lot of pride in is trying to make games that are accessible.
Speaker: So if you show up at a party and four to six people are going to sit around a table and play a game, it doesn't take you two hours to teach them how to do it.
Speaker: And four people aren't bored right at it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: So we are Crafts and Conkers.
Speaker: So beer is obviously part of the show.
Speaker: That's one of the things that I am a craft beer aficionado.
Speaker: And I was told you guys like beer too.
Speaker: So if you were going to sit down and pick the perfect beer to drink with abduction, what would be that beer?
Speaker: I have an answer for that question, regardless of the context and activity.
Speaker: It is Tiny Bomb by Wiseacre Brewery in Memphis, Tennessee.
Speaker: No matter what you're doing, you should have a Tiny Bomb.
Speaker: What kind of beer is it?
Speaker: It's a Pilsner.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Crispy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, and there's a couple of things going on, uh, with Wiseacre in particular.
Speaker: So the, the two brew masters, um, spent years, uh, overseas in Germany, like perfecting their craft, um, and decided to set up their brewery in Memphis.
Speaker: Um, and like, this is true.
Speaker: I'm not just making this up cause I'm a, I'm a Memphis Homer.
Speaker: Um, we have, uh, the, the best tap water.
Speaker: likely in the world.
Speaker: Like there's a, we get our tap water through a sand filter that's underneath Memphis.
Speaker: And it's delicious and super drinkable.
Speaker: And as you know, beer is mostly water.
Speaker: So you start with, start with really good water.
Speaker: You end up with really good beer.
Speaker: And that's, that's what's happened with, with all the breweries here.
Speaker: But you know, my favorite being tiny bomb.
Speaker: All right, Evan, you got one.
Speaker: Yeah, I do.
Speaker: Well, I have a category.
Speaker: One of the first times I played abduction kind of for real, and by that I mean in a way where the rules were set up enough where you could kind of exist within them and try to win against some other people, was my parents came to town.
Speaker: This would have been about when I moved to Atlanta, a few months after it, so...
Speaker: Well, whenever that was in the end, the timing matters because we had just launched a game a couple of months ago called Open Relationships, which is our first Kickstarter that didn't do so hot.
Speaker: It did fine.
Speaker: But, you know, we were kind of used to each Kickstarter was a bigger success than the last.
Speaker: And and this game, for reasons we didn't fully understand at the time, hadn't done that well.
Speaker: The good news is on that one, we've recently relaunched it under the name Venns with Benefits.
Speaker: It's a Venn diagram making party game.
Speaker: We made some changes to it.
Speaker: It's doing way better.
Speaker: So happy ending to that story.
Speaker: But at the time, I was, you know, kind of feeling both down about that launch and also feeling like, dang, we got to, we got to
Speaker: figure out what our next game is going to be.
Speaker: And when my parents came to visit, which is kind of early of that year, I played two games with them when they were here, or at least two prototypes.
Speaker: And one was this game that was a mess of connected strings and ping pong balls.
Speaker: And I think I didn't even really know what this game was about.
Speaker: And we were like 15 minutes in and my dad looked at me and said, son, I hate this.
Speaker: Wow, talk about taking it right out of you.
Speaker: Just being honest.
Speaker: But that one also has a happy ending in that despite his words of encouragement, that game became Tiny Laser Heist, which we launched recently, which involves a bunch of...
Speaker: strings stretched between a museum when they're lasers and you got to avoid them.
Speaker: The other game that we played was abduction and it was far enough along that we were able to take it to a brewery down the street.
Speaker: And my parents are big, dark beer people, so I don't know exactly which ones we got, but we got some porters and stouts and had a table and it was kind of like early spring day in the sun.
Speaker: And
Speaker: being able to see abduction for the first time, like as a play it out at the brewery type of game and just see how it was like lightweight enough to I mean, literally to easily carry there, but also to I can chat with my my mom while my dad's taking his turn and then and then it moves on.
Speaker: And so it has that nice level of space for you to kind of engage and disengage naturally.
Speaker: um anyway that was long-winded way to say it yeah i'm a big i'm i'm a monster beer guy i i like the imperials imperial ipas big stouts big porters like you know i i'll go out with my friends and they'll be like oh i'll have an ipa and i'll have this and i'll be like oh i'll have that 13 imperial barrel aged one and they look at me like are you insane that's the first beer you're gonna do i'm like yeah you start heavy you go for it so yeah i i
Speaker: That's always been my thing.
Speaker: Uh, right now I've got a bunch of IPAs in my fridge, a couple of different breweries.
Speaker: So that's good.
Speaker: What are some of the breweries you guys like in Memphis in that area?
Speaker: So Evan's in Atlanta now.
Speaker: Um, I'll talk about that, but I, so Memphis, I, one of the things that I espouse about why the city is so awesome is we have an incredible local beer scene.
Speaker: Um, again, because of the water.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I think you kind of can't go wrong.
Speaker: You know, I've talked about Wiseacre endlessly.
Speaker: The OG in Memphis is called Ghost River.
Speaker: Um, they do a good job and they've got a little tap room, uh, downtown, um, that has a kitchen for a new wing order, which combines another, uh, Memphis delicacy Supreme, uh, in hot wings.
Speaker: Um, there's Meddlesome Brewery.
Speaker: That's like right around the corner from my house, which is nice.
Speaker: Um, and then I think the other one, uh, that, that I would frequent and, um, holds a near and dear place in my heart is, uh, Memphis made.
Speaker: And what's cool about them, for me, sentimentally, is they've got like all these picnic tables in their tap room.
Speaker: And Evan set up a gigantic playtest for our game Puns of Anarchy with a bunch of his college friends one night.
Speaker: And like, that's when we knew that game had some magic to it.
Speaker: Like there were, I don't know what, 20 people playing in four or five different pods.
Speaker: just riotous laughter the whole night.
Speaker: And I was like, we got something here.
Speaker: That was cool.
Speaker: And, you know, in Atlanta, there's there's actually feel like Memphis has more breweries per capita.
Speaker: But Atlanta, of course, has and it's probably because of the water.
Speaker: Atlanta has plenty.
Speaker: I'm a I'm a small brewery guy.
Speaker: So there's actually the one I mentioned that we played abduction at was right around the corner called Bigger Staff Brewing.
Speaker: And they make some great dark beers.
Speaker: And then another one right nearby.
Speaker: I'm in kind of the just east of downtown area called Imaginarium.
Speaker: that has, it must be 20 beers on tap at any time that they're making in-house.
Speaker: So very, very cool spot to visit if you're ever in Atlanta.
Speaker: Great little tap room.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: Yeah, I noticed that a lot of your games before Abduction were word-based.
Speaker: You had, you know, the Bin Party even coming out, Ransom Node, Charity Party.
Speaker: Where was that transition?
Speaker: Like, at what point did you guys say, okay, we got to get away from what we were doing and kind of come up with something new?
Speaker: Or was it a planned thing?
Speaker: I think the simplest answer is we were out of ideas.
Speaker: But but, you know, I think the the other equally true one was we as much as we like word games or these humor based party games, and I hope we'll continue to go back to them in a way.
Speaker: Each one, if you look at Charity Party, and we started with Charity Party, and we made Puns of Anarchy, which has dry erase markers in it.
Speaker: Then we made Ransom Notes, which has word magnets and metal trays in it.
Speaker: Each one started to have more unusual components to it, even though they were still in word games territory.
Speaker: And I think we both enjoy just that sort of expansion.
Speaker: And at some point,
Speaker: it's hard to uh make a word game that that has really cool components to it i don't want to say they don't exist because some certainly do but um i think we are both just pretty inspired to say hey do you think we can kind of you know we've made these humor games but can we make a game where that's not the core value to it so it was a bit of a leap for sure to try abduction
Speaker: I would add a different perspective to that too, which I, not to say what Evan said is not completely accurate.
Speaker: It is, but like we, we don't have a writer's room.
Speaker: We don't have a staff.
Speaker: It's the two of us.
Speaker: And like, I could write 10,000 more ransom notes cards, but you know, you're, you're getting 10,000 more ransom notes cards written from my perspective with my sense of humor.
Speaker: And, and you know, like do you,
Speaker: Do you want and need that?
Speaker: Or should we try to apply our creative energy to something else?
Speaker: And listen, I love ransom notes.
Speaker: I think it's awesome.
Speaker: It's hilarious.
Speaker: But like, you know, I'm going to write 10,000 more cards that kind of have the same tone and the same sense of humor.
Speaker: And maybe that's not necessary.
Speaker: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker: It's been great talking to you guys.
Speaker: I got a rapid fire section for you.
Speaker: I want to ask five questions real fast.
Speaker: You can each answer individually.
Speaker: That's what I like.
Speaker: It's that, you know, first thing that comes to mind as you do it.
Speaker: I'll start with what game do you wish you designed?
Speaker: Wavelength.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: If games were kids, which one's your favorite?
Speaker: Benz with Benefits.
Speaker: I'm going to say Charty Party only because, you know.
Speaker: It's the first.
Speaker: It's the first.
Speaker: And we don't play it that often, but I'll come back to it sometimes and be like, man, this game is funny as shit.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So if you could drink only one style of beer forever, what would it be?
Speaker: Any bomb.
Speaker: Porter.
Speaker: Porter.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Seth or Jedi?
Speaker: Jedi.
Speaker: Jedi.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That's what I like.
Speaker: I like that combination.
Speaker: I'm definitely the evil overlord of our business.
Speaker: So am I. I just went to Hollywood Studios.
Speaker: Oh, God, I just dated myself.
Speaker: Hollywood Studios and rode Rise of the Resistance.
Speaker: And literally the whole time I'm thinking, I don't want to be.
Speaker: I want to join the First Order.
Speaker: I want to go with that.
Speaker: It's mostly because I think they have better outfits, though.
Speaker: Oh, by far.
Speaker: All right, one last one.
Speaker: If you could play abduction with anyone alive or dead, who would it be?
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Famous, not famous, doesn't matter.
Speaker: Yeah, so martial arts is a big part of my life, so it's hard for me not to say Bruce Lee.
Speaker: I'm not sure Bruce Lee would be fun to play abduction with, but I just want to hang out with him.
Speaker: He's an excuse.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So I think if given the opportunity to resurrect him and hang out, I would choose Bruce Lee.
Speaker: But would you let him win just so he doesn't karate chop you across the throat?
Speaker: No?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Absolutely not.
Speaker: He's a little dude.
Speaker: I think I could probably kick his ass if push came to shove.
Speaker: But more importantly, he would not respect that.
Speaker: He would frown upon me throwing the game for him.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Evan?
Speaker: Uh, it's so, uh, we're going with first thought, best thought here.
Speaker: And it's so funny that Josh and I both picked like, you know, uh, famous warriors basically.
Speaker: Um, cause abduction is not that intense of a game.
Speaker: Um, but, uh, during, during COVID, uh, I got into some weird hobbies as we all do.
Speaker: And one of them was the, uh, the ancient game of go, um, which is, you, you know, you may have seen it.
Speaker: It's like kind of, uh,
Speaker: chess like in a way, but it's with a bunch of white and black stones.
Speaker: You're moving them around the board.
Speaker: Very ancient game, especially popular in Asia.
Speaker: And there's this like ancient woodcut of some general in the fifth century or something who's like having his arm amputated or something from like a battle wound while he's playing Go and that he's just
Speaker: Clearly a master of all strategy and himself.
Speaker: And I just have always, I'd like to be on the other side of that woodcut and have abduction be in the center.
Speaker: So the random general of getting his arm cut off, you're going to get him drunk and play abduction.
Speaker: I like to think I can bring a bit of peace to his mind in that moment.
Speaker: But what you say makes sense, though, because a game like Abduction actually does teach you strategy and thinking outside the box.
Speaker: So for like a general or somebody like that, it makes total sense because you have to be thinking five steps ahead of what you're going to do in hopes that your opponent doesn't think the same thing.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's right.
Speaker: I'd like to clarify that this is not a general from the Roman Empire.
Speaker: I know it's a hot topic right now, and I don't think about the Roman Empire every day.
Speaker: for anyone interpreting that.
Speaker: So, well, thank you so much, guys, Josh and Evan.
Speaker: I really appreciate talking to you.
Speaker: Hopefully we'll talk again in the future.
Speaker: Any final thoughts real fast before we stop?
Speaker: I don't think so.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker: And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about games and hope people keep playing.
Speaker: Yeah, this was a ton of fun and I look forward to listening to some future episodes.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Thank you so much to Evan and Josh for joining me today on this debut episode.
Speaker: If you're interested in getting Abduction or any of the other games from Very Special Games, you can go to their website at veryspecialgames.com or they're also available on Amazon, just like everything else in the world.
Speaker: If you're interested in being on the show, if you have some love of beer or board games or you think it'd be interesting or you have some
Speaker: connection in that industry, give me an email at craftsandaconquer at gmail.com.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker: And may your beer be cold and your dice roll through.
