BOARD GAMES 1: We're making a game

0:28This message comes from Bonterra. packed like sardines inside a convention center hallway, waiting for the main doors to open. The crowd is surging. Is it open yet? Hopefully. That is some random guy squashed up next to us. I was hoping for some large announcement, but... The announcement is the screams of the week being trampled. This convention is called Gen Con. It is the largest tabletop gaming convention in the country. We're talking board games and card games and role-playing games. And the sea of people we're with are all waiting to get into the exhibition floor where all kinds of new games are on display.

1:06From big companies like Hasbro all the way down to little independent game designers showing their first games ever. It's happening. We're going. We're going. We spill into a room as big as what feels like three football fields full of so many kiosks with so many people selling so many games. And I instantly regress into a giddy little child. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, it's overwhelming. Okay, so why have we come here? Well, board games rule, obviously, A. But B, let's just call it for now, market research. Do you want to tell me about the game you have? Yeah, that's our transhuman sci-fi game.

1:48The game takes place 10 years after we lost the war with a group of AIs. So it takes place 10 years from now? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Yeah, so Canvas Critters is a mosaic-making game. where you play as these animal artists, and you're trying to impress the animal museum curator. She's a rather skeptical-looking rabbit. Yeah. Would you like to tell me about Biome? Yeah. This is a nature-themed tableau builder where you are trying to build a biodiverse ecosystem of plants and animals. That last voice is Leonie Grundler. She's 29, founder and CEO of Lioness Games. Biome is her company's first game, and she has a copy spread out on the table in front of her, trying to draw people in.

2:28And it is working because Biome is an unusually eye-catching game. It has dozens and dozens of cards with different beautifully illustrated animals and plants, plus hundreds of little very cute wooden animal pieces, and then the real showstopper, a bunch of fully functional but little baby-sized birds' nests. And yes, we have little tiny straw nests with tiny wooden chicks and rabbits that you put in the nest. It's hard to overstate how adorable these little nests are. I'm pretty happy with how they came out. Now, in Leonie's game, you earn points by playing plant and animal cards, and then the right combinations of those, at the right time, will cause extra special things to happen.

3:09In the spring, if you've played a bird next to a tree or a rabbit next to any plant, they will nest and have babies. As in little wooden babies that go into those adorable nests and earn even more points. Unless your opponents have predator cards and feast on your young. What do you want? Nature's brutal. Welcome to Biome. As we talk to Leonie, we start to realize that she kind of is this board game company. It's basically her. And then anyone else she could drag into this for help. So my sister helped with a lot of the art and graphic design, which is really cool. And my parents are demoing down the hall.

3:41Your parents are somewhere showing people this game? Yeah. I feel like I need to go find them. Yeah, you should. Oh my gosh. As we wander over to find Leonie's parents somewhere in this airplane hangar full of plastic tables with people hawking games, it is so clear that what we've been hearing is true. We are in a golden age of games. Like when I was a kid in the 90s, maybe 700, 800 new games came out each year. Today, it is like 5 ,000. If you love to play games, it has never been better. But the flip side to that goldenness, 5 ,000 games a year? If you make games, there has never been more competition.

4:21So someone like Leone has to do anything she can think of to stand out. From manufacturing little birds' nests to enlisting her parents to travel across the country and rope strangers into trying her game. Hello guys. I met your daughter, I think. Oh yeah. Hello. Leone's mom has earrings made out of two of the little wooden pieces from the game. The sun is part of the resource, the sunlight. You're wearing sunlight resource earrings. I love them. Leone's parents, Leone, the hundreds of other game sellers here are all hoping they've created the next blockbuster game. The term we have heard is Monopoly Killer.

5:01Frankly, this gets to why we've come to this convention in the first place. In this world, the Monopoly Killer is some mythical game that if you could invent it, would dethrone what is probably the most popular game of all time in the U.S. and make you rich beyond your wildest Mr. Monopoly monocled money bag dreams. There is a game people have pointed to as a contender. It's German. Many of you have probably played it. That possible monopoly killer, Settlers of Catan. Catan, Catan, however you say it. This is a game where you build roads and you trade resources like wool and wood and you try to earn points by building settlements and cities.

5:45It is awesome. It has sold so many copies. It did not, however, kill Monopoly per se. No, we just now have two hugely popular games that each make a fortune. And we at Planet Money couldn't help but notice both are about economics, right? Yeah. Monopoly, obviously. Real estate, bankruptcy, antitrust, really. Settlers of Catan, road building, distribution of resources. I mean, literally the CliffsNotes definition of economics is the allocation of scarce resources. And it's not just these games. So many board games are tiny little economic simulators. They do what we try to do at Planet Money, bring people into the world of economics in a fun, accessible way.

6:31And so is Planet Money not the perfect entity to create not just the Monopoly killer, but the killer of Catan? And so we are making a board game. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Erika Barris. Planet Money, the game. A monopoly killer. A slayer of settlers of Catan. Or, you know, let's be real. We'd be happy if it was just really fun and people wanted to play it. Yes, we have been busy for the past year and are so excited to finally share everything we've learned from throwing ourselves into one of the most crowded business spaces on the planet. Over the next series of episodes, we are going to get an inside look at how you pitch a game for the shelves of big box retail.

7:20Are you going to get in the room for the pitch? They emailed me last night. We can be in the room for the pitch. Oh, no. I have a pitch, though. I have arm movements that are going to happen. We'll get closer than ever to this unusual moment in global manufacturing. So the tariffs would eat into their cut and not. So they would ostensibly pick it up. The question is, do they charge us back for it? And if everything goes well, we should have a real game that you, listening at home, will be able to play on your table. You have to remember the first time you play it, you have a lot of questions. Does it help to know that it is inspired by a Nobel Prize winning paper about the asymmetry of information in the used car market?

8:02I don't know anything you just said. But before all of that, we are going to need your help, listeners. Lots of your help. So stay tuned. This message comes from Vanguard. Capturing value in the bond market is not easy. That's why Vanguard offers a suite of over 80 institutional quality bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global team of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. They're designed for financial advisors looking to give their clients consistent results year in and year out. See the record at Vanguard.com slash audio. That's Vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk.

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9:23Work with the best. Insperity. How you HR matters. Learn more at insperity.com slash tiger. All right. We are making a board game. How does one make a board game? We should ask. Oh, yeah. That little detail. Now, luckily, we had just met someone who could help with this. How many games do you own? I think around between 90 and 100. Oh, that's it? I know. It's because I've moved a few times. That's a lot of games. This, again, is Leonie Grundler, who we met, along with her parents, at the giant game convention. We called her back a few weeks later. Yeah, because not long ago, Leonie was just like us, trying to figure out where to begin and how to navigate this incredibly complicated business.

10:19Plus, she had made the kind of game we were jealous of. You know, Biome had all those beautiful pieces and nests, of course, but it's also a long, layered game. It teaches its players about ecology. I think we want that, but, you know, economy instead. Right. So we thought it would be instructive to simply hear how Leonie did all of this, starting from the beginning. The first game I ever loved was probably Werewolf, which is like the German version of Mafia. Leonie's mom is German. She spent summers in Germany playing all kinds of games with her cousins. Then it wasn't until high school when I was introduced to Settlers of Catan that I really fell in love with board games.

11:03And we like to call Catan the gateway game into the industry. Specifically, it's a gateway to the category of board games known as Eurogames. Yeah, Eurogames, first popular in Europe, tend to be more complex games built to reward strategy and not random luck. And I've always thought of this category as more thinky games like Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride, if you've heard of those. But it's really Settlers of Catan that gets credit for breaking through first in the U.S. And young Leonie fell hard for it in high school. You know, friends would go after high school and get boba or play sports. So, yeah, playing Catan every day was not like super mainstream for high schoolers.

11:48Not every single day. Right, exactly. Leonie went off to college, studied hospitality administration, not at all thinking about designing board games. And then COVID hits. The pandemic was huge for board games. Sales went through the roof. People were locked into their bubbles playing board games. And Leonie, during COVID, got laid off from her job. So, of course, I spent that summer playing a ton of this game called Wingspan. The bird game. The bird game. Exactly. And so in Wingspan, you are playing these bird cards and the birds lay eggs. But the eggs just sit there. And I was like, what if there were snakes that could eat the eggs from other players?

12:33Aha! A new board game idea was born. Leone was now one of like a gazillion people who thought they had a good game idea. The question was, what next? Leone goes all in, testing out whether it is a good game idea. So I started prototyping. I was printing out cards and cutting out cards. Even my grandma helped me cut out cards. After a year and a half, Leone had a final prototype of her game biome. She was now one of maybe half a gazillion people with a prototype of a game. So now what? Well, 30 or 40 years ago, Leone would need to go to a company like Parker Brothers and say, hey, do you want to buy this biome game idea for me?

13:19And then the Brothers Parker would be like, well, look, Leone, we're still selling millions of copies of Monopoly and developing our own games internally. So, well, yeah, I don't know, probably it's going to be a pass on these cute nests and your game, buddy. For decades and decades, it was incredibly hard for some regular old game enthusiasts like Leone to get her board game idea to the market. And then came Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site. Tabletop games is actually the largest category on Kickstarter, which is so cool. Get out of here. Yeah, it is. It's so cool. This is Orbeo. This is Masterpiece.

13:55Right. If you haven't been on Kickstarter in the last 10 years. Introducing Quark's particle puzzle. It really does feel like it's become all tabletop games on there. This is Cargo, a classic card game where you're stacking cargo. Girls don't just change every turn. They stack up on top of you and your friends, and until the whole table erupts in chaos. Here's how it works. At any given time, there are between 650 and 750 games, or like game paraphernalia projects, on Kickstarter trying to get made. The total number since the beginning of Kickstarter, 57 ,067 and counting. In Goblin Party, you lead your goblin clan to take revenge on those pesky heroes and adventurers.

14:42Which makes sense. Kickstarter was like a floodgate opening between a tsunami of game ideas and game demand. Yeah, decades of game fans with decades of ideas didn't need to go through Parker Brothers anymore. They could go directly to the rising flood of board game enthusiasts and ask directly, like, hey, do you like my idea? Because if enough of you pre-order my game for, say,$45, I can go make this thing. So when Leone's prototype of Biome was ready, she had a choice. She could still try and pitch it to a professional game-making company. They would help her polish up the design, deal with manufacturing, maybe some marketing.

15:22But, you know, this assumes they would even accept her game. And if they did, Leonie says she would earn a tiny fraction of the sales and maybe seed a lot of creative control of her game. I was like, Biome is my baby. Like, I, you know, want to have control over it as much as possible. And so it was going to be the Kickstarter route for Leonie. But she didn't do this casually. Oh, no, no. She hired a company that specializes in launching Kickstarter campaigns. That is how big this Kickstarter world has gotten. And they helped her with all kinds of stuff, including... Welcome to the breathtaking world of Biome.

16:01Giving her tips on making this Biome Explainer video, featuring an Australian accent that I have to say is working very effectively on me. Move through the seasons, simultaneously collecting resources and playing wildlife cards. But beware, in summer, your opponent's predators roam. Will you guide your biome to peaceful victory or become the apex predator? The theory is games need a lot of buzz before the Kickstarter campaign even kicks off. That way, when you do launch, a big chunk of people will already want to buy your game, which might then cause it to shoot up Kickstarter's website and get even more people to buy your game.

16:39So by the time she launched, Leone already had Facebook ads, convention appearances, playtests. Leone's game cost$49 on Kickstarter. She wanted to pre-sell around 1 ,000 copies, which would kickstart Biome into manufacturing by hopefully getting$40 ,000 in pre-orders. So how did Biome do? Yeah, so Biome raised$400 ,000 on Kickstarter, which was insane. Super cool. Yeah, things went quite well in Leone's case. She met her funding goal in nine minutes and then shot way past it. So then we ended up manufacturing 12 ,000 games, some in English, some in German and some in French. Is 12 ,000 a lot or a little?

17:26So it's a pretty good starting print run from what I've heard. Are you being modest? Is this like, are you like an insanely successful first time game designer and you're like, it's pretty good? Yeah, it's hard to answer that question. Yeah, no, it is not hard to answer that question. She had an absurdly successful game launch. Yeah, and okay, if we, Planet Money, are going to make a game, I could imagine Kickstarter being a great route for us. We get total control. We don't have to pitch it to anybody except you, our audience. And we can generate buzz ahead of the launch by talking to you about it.

18:05Plus, we don't have an Aussie accent, but our colleague at the Indicator, Darian Woods, has a killer New Zealand accent. Welcome to the breathtaking world of the Planet Money game. Also very much working for me. But yes, yes, we could totally pre-sell enough games and raise enough money to kickstart a Planet Money board game into existence through Kickstarter. But of course, Leone's story does not stop with the fabulously successful pre-sale of all her games. No. She had to, you know, figure out how to then actually manufacture thousands and thousands of games. She had to source a factory in China who could make little wooden chicks and bunnies and those little nests.

18:47And then this year, she had to figure out how to deal with the wild swings in tariffs. Last December, I imported about 5 ,500 games to the U.S. I paid$255.20 in like customs and duties fees. Earlier this month, I imported 1 ,700 games. So, you know, about a third. And I paid$6 ,354.81 in duties and customs fees. So, yeah, from about five cents per game up to about$3.74 per game. And so Leone, by the way, did look into making the game in the U.S. She was going to have to turn all the cute little wooden creatures into cardboard and do something, maybe drop the adorable nest. If I had tried to sell a very sad cardboard only game of Biome, I would have to charge$100 to$120 to the consumer.

19:50And so that's why, you know, even with the tariffs, I know that I'm going to have to keep manufacturing in China. So that's where things stand for Leonie. started as a huge board game fan, and Kickstarter allowed her to become the CEO of her own board game company, and I guess COO and CIO and whatever else, because she's the only full-time employee of that board game company. Yeah. We explained to Leone that this scrappy, independent Kickstarter route, it sounded noble, but also, like, beyond all-consuming. Okay. This sounds like it's still a hustle. It's very tough. Is it cheating if we, if Planet Money, if we could link up with like a bigger producer or a partner who's had more experience doing this kind of thing?

20:44Not at all. Oh, it's okay. It's okay. It's great. We're not selling out. No, you're not selling out. You know, with your audience and network, you'll get more people excited to play your game, hopefully. And then, so you're, just by bringing more people to the hobby, you're, you know, helping everyone out. Yeah, we're going to need to find a game publishing company to partner with. That's after the break.

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23:22We wanted to make a t-shirt, follow it around the global economy. I'm Alex Bloomberg at Planet Money. And one thing we have a lot of in public radio, t-shirts. Not to brag, but that campaign did set the Guinness World Record at the time for the most money raised by a publishing project on Kickstarter ever. Nearly$600 ,000. Fast forward two years and our record had been obliterated. And the Kickstarter campaign with by far the most supporters ever was a new card game. This audio is from that game's Kickstarter campaign video. We see the word kittens. Then goats. Explosions. All of this together in a single game.

24:10Exploding kittens. Our Planet Money Kickstarter record was about 600K. The Exploding Kittens card game raised almost$8.8 million. So, I don't know. If we are looking for a company to make our game with us, a partner who knows how to capture lightning in a bottle, it might make sense to talk to the people who made Exploding Kittens. Emails were sent, and a mildly awkward Zoom meeting was scheduled. Yeah. So, thank you everybody for joining. We should do a little bit of introductions. That is the voice of Planet Money's executive producer, Alex Goldmark. It's good to have him around on calls where we might sign any bad contracts.

24:51That way it's his fault, not mine and Erica's, if that happens. Also in the meeting, Alon Lee, co-creator of the Exploding Kittens card game and apparently a Planet Money listener. I've been listening for years, all the episodes. Just, yeah, very excited to be on this call. We were also very excited to be in the room with Exploding Kittens because they have evolved into a major game manufacturer now. Since that first Exploding Kittens game, they've published more than 70 games, many of which have made it onto the shelves at Walmart and Target. Games called things like Throw Throw Burrito, Poetry for Neanderthals, really loud librarians.

25:30Now, really, this introductory Zoom meeting with Elon and Exploding Kittens boils down to a first date. Do they want to make a game with Planet Money? Does Planet Money want to make a game with them? Simple. In theory. Our basic question here is, can we make a board game and where do we start? Cool. All right. Let me ask a few questions in order to answer that very exciting question. What does success look like, and who is your audience? These are not rhetorical, I assume. No. I mean, we have a big audience that listens to the podcast, and some of them we assume like board games. That, again, our executive producer, Alex Goldmark, who, bless him, could not help but immediately reveal how nerdily we were thinking about board games here.

26:23We want the game to, like, I don't know, show you something about the world of economics or maybe make you feel something about the world of economics um okay so i think when you say you want people to learn something or have feelings about something have a feeling about something that i get learn something learn learn seems like a learn seems like a bad word that seems like alex alex said a bad word when he said learn It's only bad if you want to, like, test it. If you just want to say, like, yeah, you probably learned something, then that's fine. Okay, great. Yes, the guy who helped make games about cats that explode and cavemen writing monosyllabic poetry and burritos that you throw at each other, not exactly eager to pivot to an educational game.

27:12Fair enough. Educational games, school games, do not fly off the shelves at Walmart or Target. But maybe when we say things like learn and educational, we might be saying complex, like the game Leone made, Biome. You know, a pretty hardcore strategy game that takes 60 to 90 minutes to play, has such elaborate game pieces, your mother can make earrings out of them. Yeah, the games they call Euro games. Settlers of Catan was a Euro game, and it has sold gazillions of copies. So in my head, I think I had imagined that a Planet Money game should be like that. A Euro game that takes hours to play, incredibly complex economic simulations, beloved by the hardcore board gamers, with a high ranking on the famous website BoardGameGeek.com.

28:01And it seemed like Alain was trying to gauge just how set we were on making one of those high ranking BoardGameGeek Euro game style board games. When you say board game, I'm assuming you mean the requirement is not a board. It could be a card game or a throwables game or a run around the room game. I'm assuming that's correct. Perhaps. I feel like we've already arrived at a critical decision point. And what are the tradeoffs of these various? Well, the tradeoffs are important and significant. um basically we're trying to figure out is the goal to make a board game like on board game geek which typically means high cost of goods uh high sale price small audience right there are very few games on board game geek that satisfy the this made lots and lots of money criteria uh On the other side of things is card game, like Exploding Kittens, very low cost of goods, very low price point between$10 and$20, and sells millions and millions of units, but of course makes a lot less money on each of those sales.

29:12So we just got to figure out what the strategy is there. Yeah. Exploding Kittens doesn't really make Euro games. They make what are known as party games. Some famous examples that are not by Exploding Kittens would be Taboo or Apples to Apples or maybe even arguably Uno. Party games are much simpler to learn. They take way less time to play. And as a result, they tend to have more of a mass appeal. Exploding Kittens is one of the best companies in the world at making these. If we want to make a Monopoly Killer, a game that finds its way into as many homes as humanly possible, is it possible that we would have a better shot with a mass appeal party game?