00:00:00
Speaker 1: You know that improv theory where they say you never say no, you all say yes, and we hate that. We don't use that at all. That's the worst idea.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: That was Elan Lee. You probably haven't heard of him, but there's a good chance you've played the game. He is most famous for co creating Exploding Kittens. Exploding Kittens remains one of the most backed Kickstarter campaigns in history, raising nearly nine million dollars across over two hundred thousand backers in just thirty days, and also Exploding Kittens is one of my family's absolute favorite games to play. Elan is now the CEO of Exploding Kittens, and under his leadership, the company has spawned over thirty different games, including some of my favorites, such as Throw Throw Burrito and Poetry for Neanderthals, with more than sixty million games sold since it's founding in twenty fifteen. In this conversation, Elan unpacks the psychology behind his company's success, how to turn fans into super fans, why creative constraints can spark brilliance, and how to lead teams through thousands of rejected ideas without anyone's ego getting bruised.
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Speaker 3: Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies.
00:01:23
Speaker 2: For optimizing your day.
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Speaker 3: I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber.
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Speaker 2: I want to start by talking about the Exploiting Kitten's Kickstarter campaign, which I think is still one of the most successful campaigns that Kickstarter has ever had.
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Speaker 1: Isn't it ridiculous? Ten years in and we still have more backers than any Kickstarter campaign in history.
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Speaker 2: How many backers was it in total?
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Speaker 1: I think the official numbers around two hundred and nineteen thousand. There were more stragglers that came on afterwards and we had to, you know, like let them in a under the radar, but the official numbers is right there, just under two hundred and twenty.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: That's absolutely nots. Tell me what do you put that success down to? What are your lessons looking back on that?
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Speaker 1: There's two really important things I learned about Kickstarter, and let me say these are very unique to exploding kittens, and a whole bunch of people have replicated this since then, so they don't work as well anymore. But I will at least tell you where we started. I'll let you kind of modify it in your own brain however you would like. First and foremost, we did not start from zero. We did a few things before the campaign launched to make sure that day one was really, really big. And the easiest thing was my partner, Matt Inman, who is the creator and the author of the Oatmeal, the online comic, and so he spent ten years creating following, just creating incredible content so that on day one, when we launched, he's able to post to his community and say, guess what, I made a game, And that's a huge statement. It's like such an important, exciting statement that all of his fans show up and they back the project because they trust him and he's spent ten years building that trust. The other tool that we used that I think is a really important one that goes massively underused, is you get to create a preview page on Kickstarter, and what that means is you get to build your whole campaign in advance. You get to share that page and its eventual launch date with as many people as you would like. And the tool that we used quite a bit was we shared it with people that we knew had reach. And I'm going to give you a huge peak behind the curtain. Here. We intentionally inserted errors, spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, the lack of paragraph breaks, images that wouldn't load. And the reason is not because we like to be sloppy, but it's because nobody wants to look at a preview page and say this is great good luck, like what good is that? They're not going to actually share that. But if they look at the page and say, I love this good luck. By the way, you have a typo in your title. Did you see that? And we respond, oh, you're so smart, Oh my goodness, thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, we'll fix that right away. Without you, this thing would have probably failed. We would have looked so dumb. And then when we launch those people want to post about the campaign. So it was a little tricky, little psychological whatever. But it worked. It worked really really well. And now that I've said it out loud, it probably won't work at all. But there you go.
00:04:26
Speaker 2: I love that. I think I've never heard that into strategy. Tell me about how you turn casual fans into super fans, because I've heard that this is quite important in how you've achieved such success, for sure.
00:04:41
Speaker 1: So I have a kind of a fundamental theory about in game design, which is I think that games should not be entertaining. I think games should make the players that you're playing with entertaining. It should just be a tool set to accommodate that. And along with that, there's a whole bunch of corollaries that kind of emerge from that fundamental premise. So, if you imagine you are playing a game for the first time, everything about the game, hopefully if it's designed well at least if it's one of my games, is going to reward you for playing with the other players. You're going to look across the table and you're going to see maybe someone that you love and trust across the table from you give you kind of a devious smile, and now you're wonder, oh no, oh, what cards have they got? Oh no, what's about to happen? Well, maybe I should preempt that and play something before they get a chance to enact whatever horrible plan they have concocted in their mind. And it's that relationship that drives the game forward. I also believe that when you play your second game, you learn from all the previous interactions you had in the first game, and you start to change your strategy. You start to use the tool set that the game provides, the cards, the board, the dice, whatever, to alter the way the game is played and hopefully come up with a better outcome than the first game. And that will repeat on your third game, and four game and fifth game. And that's just basic gameplay. But here's how it creates super fans. Slowly, methodically, and in tiny little baby steps, you are creating a sense of mastery. Each player, for themselves is having an experience that lets them get better and better and better at this thing in a way that they have discovered. The game did not hand this to them. The game just said, here's the tools, here's other people. Go have fun, and slowly you figure out I know how to have you more fun. I'm getting better at this game. All my opponents are getting better too, so I have to up my game every single time I play. And that, I believe is how you create super fans. Right, That's how everyone walks away from that experience with this sense of ownership, this sense of discovery, the sense that, like, you are now a better version of yourself, and you have this game to think for it. And now don't you want to go out and tell all your friends.
00:06:51
Speaker 2: I don't think that many listeners are experts in game design, and so something I would love you to explain is what is a core gameplay loop? Because from what I understand, this is critical to your creative process and creating a new game.
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Speaker 1: Look, it's a totally geeky insider game designer term, but it is very important, and you actually already know what it is. You've just never heard the term before. Any game you've ever loved that you've played over and over again. If you look very carefully at it, you will be able to identify the core gameplay loop. And all that is is a very simple interaction that you repeat over and over and over and over again to get you from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. It might be a trading cards mechanic. It might be an acquire property and collect rent mechanic. Whatever it is, if you look carefully enough, it's the thing that you just keep doing, and hopefully the best games the ones you play over and over again. It's not identical. Every time it gets better, it gets enhanced, the tension increases, the stakes increase. Whatever it is adds a little bit to that core gameplay loop, so that every time you go around loop you get more and more satisfaction, joy, intrigued, tension, fear, whatever it is that the game wants to enhance, you get more and more out of that loop. That's the driver.
00:08:09
Speaker 2: And so are there a set number of core gameplay loops that exist? Is it kind of like story acts where you've kind of got like your seven fundamental story acts in movie world?
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Speaker 1: There probably are. But the good news is games are still early enough in their evolution that we have not discovered all of them for sure, Like there's a bunch that get repeated over and over. But I pick like my three favorite games every year because I play hundreds of them, and every year I am shocked and delighted to find at least three brand new gameplay loops that I've never even heard of before.
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Speaker 2: Okay, so let's take exploding kittens, which I've got are very well used set of explaining kittens describe what is the core gameplay loop, and exploding kittens just kind of bring that concept to life.
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Speaker 1: I'll tell you a little bit of the origin story. I was watching a movie and in Deer Hunter, they have a Russian Roulette scene, And if you don't know, Russian Roulette is the most insane game ever played by human beings. You take a revolver with six chambers, you put one bullet in it. You spin the revolver and you hold it up to your head and you pull the trigger and you hope it doesn't fire the bullet killing you. And if you survive, you hand it to the next player who repeats this thing, and you keep going until somebody dies. I watched this in a scene in a movie and just thought, like, this is crazy. This is absolutely insane. And here's there's two ways to play Russianroulette. There's pass it around and rotate the revolver every time. The crazier way is you're not allowed to rotate it, meaning first time you pull the trigger, there's one and a sixth chance you die, the second time there's one in five, then one in four, and eventually one hundred percent chance that you will die when you pull the trigger. So I looked at that and I said, that looks a lot like core gameplay loop, Like that's really interesting. Not that I want to ever, ever, ever play that game with those kind of stakes, but what if you take a deck of cards. Let's say it's fifty two cards, like a standard poker deck, and you put in one joker into that deck. That's the bullet. The first time you shuffle that deck and then draw a card, you have a one in fifty two chance of drawing the joker and dying. But if you don't draw the joker, the odds are very much in your favor that you will not draw it. If you don't draw the joker. Now, what if that card helped you avoid the joker next time? So? What if that card let you peek at a card before you draw? What if that card lets you force somebody else to draw instead of you? What if that card let you steal cards from other players to enhance your chances next time? Like on and on it goes. Everything I just said is an enhancement to a core gameplay loop. And as the game continues, the tension and drama increases, it ratchets up because now there's fewer and fewer safe cards left.
00:10:49
Speaker 2: What then, with that gameplay the loop, why was exploding Kittens like so successful? Do you think? Because I can imagine there are some pretty like dulla ways to apply the idea of Russian Roulette to a cod game.
00:11:03
Speaker 1: Look, I think there's two really important things about Exploding Kittens, and there's two really important things about every game. One is, it's got to be a really good game. What I just described to you has proven itself to be a really good game because it's simple to learn, easy to pick up, easy to explain to a friend. You can play it over and over again, and the game will be completely different every time you play. That's a really good game. Second is how do you sell that game? And it is equally important because without this a good game, the best game makes no difference in the world. And so we knew how to sell this game. We knew oatmeal art on every card is going to be really important. We knew a really funny name is going to be really important. We knew the Internet loves cats, so let's theme it everything about cats. Like we were able to identify all the things that would enable us to sell this game. We found a way to say, really like Russian Roulette with cards, really like this notion of cute, adorable kittens that you're more scared of than anything else. Because that dichotomy is really fun. Let's mash those two things together. As long as we can make them fit, we know we'll have a hit on our hands. That's interesting.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: Sorry, I want to ask I guess about that decision making process. Like when I was chatting to my daughter Frankie, who's eleven years old and a massive fan of what you've created, I said, what questions might you have for Elan? And her first question is why not puppies? And I want to know how do you make those decisions where I guess, like what is going to be funnier?
00:12:32
Speaker 1: I wish I could say I had a formula like something, I could say, well, I drotted out on my whiteboard and I figure it all out. But I will say this, My partner, Matt Inman, has this secret ability, his superpower. I kind of secretly when he's not around call him the audience whisperer because she knows. He just knows when he tells you. If you were to ask him this question, if you were to say, what's funnier exploding kittens are exploding puppies, you will, without hesitating say exploding kittens. And if you were to ask him why, very likely he will not be able to answer. But he's right, Matt knows what is funny, when it's funny, how it should be delivered to optimize the funny. And now my job is game design and his job is audience whisperer.
00:13:19
Speaker 2: I love that. I want to know where an idea comes from. Like, what do you find is your You know you've been doing this for I think ten years. The company's ten year old. Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, that's quitrazy. What's become your process for coming up with new ideas for new games?
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Speaker 1: The thing that I found is most important whenever we have like brainstorming sessions is constraints. I hate Blue Sky brainstorming sessions. When we sit down you know, I work with four other designers, five other designers now, so there's a team of six of us. When we sit down around a table and the idea is, hey, everyone, let's come up with a game. We will spend three days and come up with nothing.
00:14:00
Speaker 2: It's just awful.
00:14:02
Speaker 1: But if we go to a toy store and buy twenty toys, and then we go to a pet store and buy twenty pet toys, and then we go to a pool supply store and buy twenty inflatable objects, and then we put all of those on the table and we say, grab two things, come up with a game. Now we're cooking with gas.
00:14:23
Speaker 2: What are some other constraints that you might bring into the process.
00:14:26
Speaker 1: So we focus a lot on audience constraints. So we want to make sure we know the exploding kittens audience. We know their age, we know their gender, we know they're usually looking for games to bring to a party as a gift or to a game night, like we know all this stuff, so that's a really important one. We know game length really important. The sweet spot for us is a twenty minute game. So we know that once you start playing a game and the twenty minute markets and you're like still in the introductory phase, let's stop working on that game. And then the final one and maybe the most important hints on what I said, which is we know we need games that we can sell easily. So that means we have to come up with one liners for the game, a one sentence description of what this game is that not only can we put on a website and on a box and on social media, but that is so memorable and interesting that when someone plays the game and reads that one liner, it ingrains itself in their head and then they go when they want to describe the game to all their friends because they had this beautiful experience with mastery and progression. Now they will use that one liner in order to evangelize the game to everybody else. So if we can't figure out a game that can be easily described in one sentence, we will usually not pursue that game.
00:15:46
Speaker 2: I find that so interesting, Like, I think that that applies to so many different industries, different products and services, not just game design. I heard you talk about the quarterly design retreats that you have, and I would love you to explain like what that process involves, because yeah, I found it incredibly interesting. Thanks.
00:16:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of Look, there's no rocket science I'm about to describe, but we have found that getting everyone in the same room, physical location, making eye contact is the best way to start with the game design process. So we usually either use my house or we rent an airbnb. Anyone who is remote we fly them in. We usually do this for three days, and it's three days of us all sleeping in the same place, eating the same meals, like really really getting in there with each other and making sure that like you're not distracted by your phone you have no other meetings, there are no other obligations, like all of the pressure that you normally experience. We've all committed to put all of that stuff on hold for these three days because we're going to play. And more important than play is we're going to iterate. All the best ideas that I've had, that anyone has ever had start out as terrible ideas, and they have to have room to evolve from terrible to great. And you can only do that with focus, with relentlessness, and with the passion. That is kind of like contagious when we all get in the room together and somebody says, yes, but what if? And then somebody else says, oh, I like that, but what if this? And on and on that process goes in order for us to either get to great or to say this has no chance, let's abandon it and move on.
00:17:35
Speaker 2: What else would I be observing? Like if I was a fly on the wall for this creative process where you've you know, put away all the pressures of daily life, what else would I observe that I would be like, Oh, wow, that's interesting.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: You know that improv theory where they say you never say no, you alls say yes. And we hate that. We don't use that at all. That's the worst idea.
00:17:58
Speaker 2: We are very very.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: Liberal with Yeah, that sucks. Let's just move on. And that's great because we're going through so many ideas so quickly. It's very important to not take any personal pride in anything. Instead to say, here's why I don't think this thing is going to work. Ever, let's not waste any more time on it, because we are capable of generating a thousand more ideas in the next hour. Let's move on. And undoubtedly we are abandoning tons of gems in there, stuff that could eventually be developed into something amazing if we adopted the yes and theory. But we'd only be going through two or three ideas a day. And what I much prefer is to go through thousands a day because the output for those meetings is incredible. And we learned that right, like we started with yes and now we're at no, kill it and on we go.
00:18:48
Speaker 2: And how do you create the conditions so that people and not just leaving with the ego in the rubbish ship? How does that work?
00:18:57
Speaker 1: It's just leadership. It's like I show I give everybody permission to destroy my ideas immediately, and the first time they do, I'm very careful to show Okay, yeah, cool, let's pick up what about this, and I pick up another thing, and as long as they can see, there's no ego involved, nothing is taken personally. By the end of their first session, especially when we have new designers in there, by the end of those three days, everyone is so proud of the like five or six beautiful things that we have come up with that you know, Okay, next time, I'm going to trust this process. It works so well, so let's just go with it.
00:19:33
Speaker 2: How are you making decisions? Because I imagine I mean, like, if you're generating that many ideas, every idea that you're caping, your killing involves it like essentially a decision, even if it's a micro decision. What's the process for that.
00:19:45
Speaker 1: As soon as somebody says to kill an idea, that's usually the definitive answer, unless someone else wants to chime in and say, wait a second, here's why I think we should spend another minute on that. If a game or a core loop has champion like that, we'll linger on it for sure until all of those exceptions have been exhausted and Once that happens, then we move on. So it's a very collective decision making process. There is no leader in the room. There's nobody with authority. It's do we think this thing has legs or not. They are very talented people in that room. We all trust each other and so we just trust the group think to get us through that process.
00:20:25
Speaker 2: Coming up, Elan reveals what really happens inside his team's chaotic design retreats, where a thousand ideas are born and most are killed within minutes. And he also shares how they protect creative safety while dismantling each other's work and why they're no kill it rule might be the secret to lasting innovation. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work, can Live. I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com. Now I've heard that the sales and marketing team join this retreat at some point. Can you tell me why that is and what happens then?
00:21:18
Speaker 1: So, we used to come out of these meetings with like twelve ideas and our goal is like, okay, well, now let's develop these ideas and you know three or four of them will eventually see the light of day. Now when we get our twelve ideas on day three, the second half of day three is reserved for presentation, and that means we open the doors to our little Airbnb and the whole marketing and sales team comes in. And these are the people responsible for figuring out what the posts are on social media and selling to the giant retailers in the world, and making sure that every game is not only a good game, but paired with that vital and essential ability to sell that game. And so we pitched the game to them, and then we brainstorm with them, what's the one liner for this? What does the first fifteen seconds of a social media post for this look like? Can you imagine watching footage of this and thinking I want to play I'd be so good at that. We are the game designers, they are the marketers. If they cannot solve that problem, that's when those games die. They could be the best games in the world. Nothing personal will leave them in their little notebook where all the notes were taken and say, yeah, let's move on to one of the other twelve, we came up with.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: Wow, what's an example of a game where yourself and the designers like this is gold, and sales and marketing said, we cannot sell this.
00:22:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh this happened just last month. We had our retreat and we came up with this game that I was absolutely in love with. So there's this game I used to play in elementary school called Horse, and it's played on a basketball court. And what you do is you take the basketball and you shoot it into a hoop from anywhere you want, and then the next person has to shoot it from that same location. If they make it, they get a point. If they miss it, they lose a point. Okay, great, that's the whole game. So we thought, all right, what if we combined that with like shuffleboard or horseshoes or a smaller kind of parlor game where you're just tossing an object and trying to get it to hit another object.
00:23:17
Speaker 2: Okay, great, So we put.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: Down an object somewhere in the room. Everybody stands on the other side of the room. Now you have to toss this object to hit that object. But here's the trick. You get to apply any obstacle or constraint. You want to yourself, Want to close your eyes? Cool, close your eyes? Want to spin around three times before you throw it? Great? Do that? Want to do it from the other room? Great? Want somebody else to push you while you're throwing it? Great? Do that? It was so much fun. We showed it to the marketing team and they're like, oh, no way, Like, there's just there's no way to show the right video because objects are moving so far across a large space, and there's so many cards involved, and the constraints are very hard to understand immediately. You need to study them, and how they overlap with each other is very complex. And one player has to go and then we have to wait, and then another player has to go and they have to apply the same constraints. And now we're at two minutes and all we have is fifteen seconds and on and on and on. So, without any ego and nothing personal, we said, cool, game's dead, let's move on.
00:24:20
Speaker 2: Wow, do ideas that you're presenting to sales and marketing, do ones that you're kind of lukewarm on get through with this? Surprise is where sales and marketing are like, oh my god, this is amazing. But you guys were thinking, Eh, it's okay.
00:24:32
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. Yes, that's the beauty of this, right, Like, we show them a lot of games that are kind of half baked. We would never show them anything that we think is terrible, but we do show them many games that were like, Okay, this one didn't make it quite across the finish line. There's something interesting, but we're not sure what. So we actually have a game coming out next year. It doesn't even have a name yet, so I can't even spoil it. But it involved math, and we're like, there's no way we're selling a math game. Nobody wants to do math. But we showed it to them anyway, and we're like, here's this math game. And the sales team said, okay, if you remove ninety percent of the math and just leave addition, just addition. Anybody can add two numbers together as long as they're single digit numbers. What if you were just adding two things together very quickly. Does the game survive that? And we looked at it and we're like, yeah, the game survives that, sure, no problem. And they said this is going to be the greatest game of all time. Like okay, I'm going to trust you on this, and over the last six months we have taken that little seed and developed it into a spectacular game. It's going to be so great. Right now, we're just calling it the used to be math Game, and eventually we'll come up with a better name for it.
00:25:43
Speaker 2: I'm interested in naming something that struck me as a family. We recently bought Coyote, one of your newer games that you did with Tim Ferriss, and my daughter took out the little pamphlet instruction guide, and then it's got a few other games that you're promoting that you might like, and now she's become obsessed with I'm going to get the name wrong. It was having fights with fake swords. To correct me on the.
00:26:07
Speaker 1: Name, that's called Let's hit each other with fake swords.
00:26:11
Speaker 2: Yes, so my daughter has become obsessed with this game, even though we do not own it. I said, okay, Frankie, we're going to go to the toy store on the weekend. We're going to get this game finally. But she's been talking about it for weeks. So I want to know, like, what goes into naming a game.
00:26:27
Speaker 1: Our names come from all over the place, naming is very hard, right, Like, not only do you have to pick a perfect name that's evocative and relatable, but you also have to make sure that somebody else hasn't already come up with that name, or that is not the name of an app already, or like, there's all these things that shoot down name ideas. So what we typically do is we spend a long time on names. First, we come up with a bunch of names, and then we show it to the art team and they usually throw all of them away and they come up with a brand new set of ideas because they can pair it with beautiful, hilarious imagery. And usually we throw some of those away and then Matt usually chimes in and he says, well, I've got this perfect eddie. Matt is the one who came up with let's hit each other with fake swords. We were calling it something like had the word sword in it, but it was very obscure and it was a weird pun and it had something to do with owls and anyway, it was bizarre and strange and didn't come across. But sometimes names come from someone. In that case, Matt hadn't actually worked on that game. He was just kind of walking through and said, don't be coy about this. This game is about sword fighting, so let's call it Let's hit each other with fake swords. It's long, and it's cumbersome, and it's barely going to fit on the box, but it's going to be great because as soon as you read that name, you know how to play this game. Nothing else is required. So these ideas can really come from anywhere. They often do come from anywhere. And the only thing I will say about naming is we get it wrong about twenty percent of the time. We have a few games out there that just had bad names and didn't resonate properly, and each of those we've learned a lot from. And at the very very least, every time we come up with a new name that's wrong, it's a brand new mistake. We were at least not making the same mistakes over and over again.
00:28:14
Speaker 2: Something that I find really interesting around producing creative projects is knowing when you're done. And I'm kind of I'm feeling this at the moment because I'm writing my fifth book. The manuscript is due in a week exactly with the publishers, and it's kind of that question now that you reach where it's like, okay, am I done? Would I even submit a day early? Am I done? Done? How do you know when an idea is done?
00:28:40
Speaker 1: Oh? I feel your pain on such a visceral level. I know, I know exactly what you're going through. So we have a secret weapon. If it was up to me, games would never be done, I would work on them forever and I would never release a single thing. And investors don't like that very much. So we need a different approach. And we have this luxury, which is games must be tested. And so we have this group called the Kiddy Test Pilots. There's four hundred families that have volunteered for this program, and the contract we have with them is we're going to send you games for free, and you're going to get to see things before anybody else in the world, as long as when you play them, you're willing to tape that play session and then send us the recording. And that's how we learned. That's how we learned what worked, what didn't work. We weren't in the room to explain the game. Did it still work? Were people smiling? Where they exasperated? Where were the problems? On and on? And I used to back when I iterated games forever. I used to have this long questionnaire that I would ask people at the end of that and I have them fill out this form. What were your favorite parts of the game? What were your least favorite parts of the game? Were there are enough components? Were there too many cards? Were there too few cards? When did you get bored? Which partner was confusing? You can imagine this horrible form of like fifty questions and most of them have the same answer, and it's just dreadful and nobody's going to read it anyway, So why am I wasting my time? Now? The form we send people is one sentence long, and that single sentence is do you want to play again? And I have a deal with my team and with my investors that when ninety nine percent of the responses to that question are yes, I will stop tinkering with the game.
00:30:30
Speaker 2: Wow. I love that answer, and also I love the Kiddy Test Pilot group. Have you got a waiting list? Where do I sign up?
00:30:38
Speaker 1: We do, We do have a waiting list, but I would encourage you to sign up, but I will send you the link. Families do drop out from time to time, and yeah, we always want to leave it at about four hundred because that's about the delivery budget that we have to ship these games all over the world.
00:30:55
Speaker 2: My final question for people that I mean, I imagine that they are going to be listeners that have played Exploiting Kittens. But you've got I think sixty games. Is that right.
00:31:04
Speaker 1: I've said it was sixty games for the last year, and I just checked with our product team. It is more than one hundred. I think we're at one hundred and three now.
00:31:12
Speaker 2: My gosh. Okay, So the listeners that I have loved hearing you speak about game design, and I'm like, I want to play a game. I'm inspired. Where should I start? What is your advice.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: If you're playing with let's say, like teenagers to adults, and you're looking for fast, funny, easy cannot be at Exploding Kittens. If you are looking for a much more casual party game where everyone is just going to yell and laugh. We have a game called Poetry for Neanderthals. That is, you have to get your teammates to say a word that only you can see on this card, and you can only speak using single syllable words. That's the whole game, and you immediately sound like a caveman. You have no choice. This thing make fire me not know what else to say. You know, it's just. And then if you are looking for even more casual than that, the other one I always recommend is our game called Happy Salmon, which is ninety seconds long start to finish. It is so fun. If you need an ice breaker, if you need something just fast and furious, that's the best one. And then I'll say, finally, for very young kids like ages four and up, we have a game out there called Hurry Up Chicken Butt and I designed that game with my four year old daughter. She's actually the lead designer on that game, and it's one of the top selling games in the world right now. So it's just incredible.
00:32:33
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, Alan, I've just loved this chat. I also love the research process in the lead up to this chat. Thank you so much for all the joy that you are putting out into the world. It's just it's magical.
00:32:45
Speaker 1: It's absolutely my pleasure. I cannot believe I get paid to make games for a living.
00:32:50
Speaker 2: If you like this chat with Elin, hop into the show notes because there's a link to a bonus episode I released with him, where we dive into how he's using AI to creativity. If you like today's Joe, make sure you git follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on
00:33:09
Speaker 3: The traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation
Speaker 1: You know that improv theory where they say you never say no, you all say yes, and we hate that. We don't use that at all. That's the worst idea.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: That was Elan Lee. You probably haven't heard of him, but there's a good chance you've played the game. He is most famous for co creating Exploding Kittens. Exploding Kittens remains one of the most backed Kickstarter campaigns in history, raising nearly nine million dollars across over two hundred thousand backers in just thirty days, and also Exploding Kittens is one of my family's absolute favorite games to play. Elan is now the CEO of Exploding Kittens, and under his leadership, the company has spawned over thirty different games, including some of my favorites, such as Throw Throw Burrito and Poetry for Neanderthals, with more than sixty million games sold since it's founding in twenty fifteen. In this conversation, Elan unpacks the psychology behind his company's success, how to turn fans into super fans, why creative constraints can spark brilliance, and how to lead teams through thousands of rejected ideas without anyone's ego getting bruised.
00:01:18
Speaker 3: Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies.
00:01:23
Speaker 2: For optimizing your day.
00:01:25
Speaker 3: I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: I want to start by talking about the Exploiting Kitten's Kickstarter campaign, which I think is still one of the most successful campaigns that Kickstarter has ever had.
00:01:43
Speaker 1: Isn't it ridiculous? Ten years in and we still have more backers than any Kickstarter campaign in history.
00:01:49
Speaker 2: How many backers was it in total?
00:01:51
Speaker 1: I think the official numbers around two hundred and nineteen thousand. There were more stragglers that came on afterwards and we had to, you know, like let them in a under the radar, but the official numbers is right there, just under two hundred and twenty.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: That's absolutely nots. Tell me what do you put that success down to? What are your lessons looking back on that?
00:02:11
Speaker 1: There's two really important things I learned about Kickstarter, and let me say these are very unique to exploding kittens, and a whole bunch of people have replicated this since then, so they don't work as well anymore. But I will at least tell you where we started. I'll let you kind of modify it in your own brain however you would like. First and foremost, we did not start from zero. We did a few things before the campaign launched to make sure that day one was really, really big. And the easiest thing was my partner, Matt Inman, who is the creator and the author of the Oatmeal, the online comic, and so he spent ten years creating following, just creating incredible content so that on day one, when we launched, he's able to post to his community and say, guess what, I made a game, And that's a huge statement. It's like such an important, exciting statement that all of his fans show up and they back the project because they trust him and he's spent ten years building that trust. The other tool that we used that I think is a really important one that goes massively underused, is you get to create a preview page on Kickstarter, and what that means is you get to build your whole campaign in advance. You get to share that page and its eventual launch date with as many people as you would like. And the tool that we used quite a bit was we shared it with people that we knew had reach. And I'm going to give you a huge peak behind the curtain. Here. We intentionally inserted errors, spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, the lack of paragraph breaks, images that wouldn't load. And the reason is not because we like to be sloppy, but it's because nobody wants to look at a preview page and say this is great good luck, like what good is that? They're not going to actually share that. But if they look at the page and say, I love this good luck. By the way, you have a typo in your title. Did you see that? And we respond, oh, you're so smart, Oh my goodness, thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, we'll fix that right away. Without you, this thing would have probably failed. We would have looked so dumb. And then when we launch those people want to post about the campaign. So it was a little tricky, little psychological whatever. But it worked. It worked really really well. And now that I've said it out loud, it probably won't work at all. But there you go.
00:04:26
Speaker 2: I love that. I think I've never heard that into strategy. Tell me about how you turn casual fans into super fans, because I've heard that this is quite important in how you've achieved such success, for sure.
00:04:41
Speaker 1: So I have a kind of a fundamental theory about in game design, which is I think that games should not be entertaining. I think games should make the players that you're playing with entertaining. It should just be a tool set to accommodate that. And along with that, there's a whole bunch of corollaries that kind of emerge from that fundamental premise. So, if you imagine you are playing a game for the first time, everything about the game, hopefully if it's designed well at least if it's one of my games, is going to reward you for playing with the other players. You're going to look across the table and you're going to see maybe someone that you love and trust across the table from you give you kind of a devious smile, and now you're wonder, oh no, oh, what cards have they got? Oh no, what's about to happen? Well, maybe I should preempt that and play something before they get a chance to enact whatever horrible plan they have concocted in their mind. And it's that relationship that drives the game forward. I also believe that when you play your second game, you learn from all the previous interactions you had in the first game, and you start to change your strategy. You start to use the tool set that the game provides, the cards, the board, the dice, whatever, to alter the way the game is played and hopefully come up with a better outcome than the first game. And that will repeat on your third game, and four game and fifth game. And that's just basic gameplay. But here's how it creates super fans. Slowly, methodically, and in tiny little baby steps, you are creating a sense of mastery. Each player, for themselves is having an experience that lets them get better and better and better at this thing in a way that they have discovered. The game did not hand this to them. The game just said, here's the tools, here's other people. Go have fun, and slowly you figure out I know how to have you more fun. I'm getting better at this game. All my opponents are getting better too, so I have to up my game every single time I play. And that, I believe is how you create super fans. Right, That's how everyone walks away from that experience with this sense of ownership, this sense of discovery, the sense that, like, you are now a better version of yourself, and you have this game to think for it. And now don't you want to go out and tell all your friends.
00:06:51
Speaker 2: I don't think that many listeners are experts in game design, and so something I would love you to explain is what is a core gameplay loop? Because from what I understand, this is critical to your creative process and creating a new game.
00:07:07
Speaker 1: Look, it's a totally geeky insider game designer term, but it is very important, and you actually already know what it is. You've just never heard the term before. Any game you've ever loved that you've played over and over again. If you look very carefully at it, you will be able to identify the core gameplay loop. And all that is is a very simple interaction that you repeat over and over and over and over again to get you from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. It might be a trading cards mechanic. It might be an acquire property and collect rent mechanic. Whatever it is, if you look carefully enough, it's the thing that you just keep doing, and hopefully the best games the ones you play over and over again. It's not identical. Every time it gets better, it gets enhanced, the tension increases, the stakes increase. Whatever it is adds a little bit to that core gameplay loop, so that every time you go around loop you get more and more satisfaction, joy, intrigued, tension, fear, whatever it is that the game wants to enhance, you get more and more out of that loop. That's the driver.
00:08:09
Speaker 2: And so are there a set number of core gameplay loops that exist? Is it kind of like story acts where you've kind of got like your seven fundamental story acts in movie world?
00:08:20
Speaker 1: There probably are. But the good news is games are still early enough in their evolution that we have not discovered all of them for sure, Like there's a bunch that get repeated over and over. But I pick like my three favorite games every year because I play hundreds of them, and every year I am shocked and delighted to find at least three brand new gameplay loops that I've never even heard of before.
00:08:45
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's take exploding kittens, which I've got are very well used set of explaining kittens describe what is the core gameplay loop, and exploding kittens just kind of bring that concept to life.
00:08:56
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a little bit of the origin story. I was watching a movie and in Deer Hunter, they have a Russian Roulette scene, And if you don't know, Russian Roulette is the most insane game ever played by human beings. You take a revolver with six chambers, you put one bullet in it. You spin the revolver and you hold it up to your head and you pull the trigger and you hope it doesn't fire the bullet killing you. And if you survive, you hand it to the next player who repeats this thing, and you keep going until somebody dies. I watched this in a scene in a movie and just thought, like, this is crazy. This is absolutely insane. And here's there's two ways to play Russianroulette. There's pass it around and rotate the revolver every time. The crazier way is you're not allowed to rotate it, meaning first time you pull the trigger, there's one and a sixth chance you die, the second time there's one in five, then one in four, and eventually one hundred percent chance that you will die when you pull the trigger. So I looked at that and I said, that looks a lot like core gameplay loop, Like that's really interesting. Not that I want to ever, ever, ever play that game with those kind of stakes, but what if you take a deck of cards. Let's say it's fifty two cards, like a standard poker deck, and you put in one joker into that deck. That's the bullet. The first time you shuffle that deck and then draw a card, you have a one in fifty two chance of drawing the joker and dying. But if you don't draw the joker, the odds are very much in your favor that you will not draw it. If you don't draw the joker. Now, what if that card helped you avoid the joker next time? So? What if that card let you peek at a card before you draw? What if that card lets you force somebody else to draw instead of you? What if that card let you steal cards from other players to enhance your chances next time? Like on and on it goes. Everything I just said is an enhancement to a core gameplay loop. And as the game continues, the tension and drama increases, it ratchets up because now there's fewer and fewer safe cards left.
00:10:49
Speaker 2: What then, with that gameplay the loop, why was exploding Kittens like so successful? Do you think? Because I can imagine there are some pretty like dulla ways to apply the idea of Russian Roulette to a cod game.
00:11:03
Speaker 1: Look, I think there's two really important things about Exploding Kittens, and there's two really important things about every game. One is, it's got to be a really good game. What I just described to you has proven itself to be a really good game because it's simple to learn, easy to pick up, easy to explain to a friend. You can play it over and over again, and the game will be completely different every time you play. That's a really good game. Second is how do you sell that game? And it is equally important because without this a good game, the best game makes no difference in the world. And so we knew how to sell this game. We knew oatmeal art on every card is going to be really important. We knew a really funny name is going to be really important. We knew the Internet loves cats, so let's theme it everything about cats. Like we were able to identify all the things that would enable us to sell this game. We found a way to say, really like Russian Roulette with cards, really like this notion of cute, adorable kittens that you're more scared of than anything else. Because that dichotomy is really fun. Let's mash those two things together. As long as we can make them fit, we know we'll have a hit on our hands. That's interesting.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: Sorry, I want to ask I guess about that decision making process. Like when I was chatting to my daughter Frankie, who's eleven years old and a massive fan of what you've created, I said, what questions might you have for Elan? And her first question is why not puppies? And I want to know how do you make those decisions where I guess, like what is going to be funnier?
00:12:32
Speaker 1: I wish I could say I had a formula like something, I could say, well, I drotted out on my whiteboard and I figure it all out. But I will say this, My partner, Matt Inman, has this secret ability, his superpower. I kind of secretly when he's not around call him the audience whisperer because she knows. He just knows when he tells you. If you were to ask him this question, if you were to say, what's funnier exploding kittens are exploding puppies, you will, without hesitating say exploding kittens. And if you were to ask him why, very likely he will not be able to answer. But he's right, Matt knows what is funny, when it's funny, how it should be delivered to optimize the funny. And now my job is game design and his job is audience whisperer.
00:13:19
Speaker 2: I love that. I want to know where an idea comes from. Like, what do you find is your You know you've been doing this for I think ten years. The company's ten year old. Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, that's quitrazy. What's become your process for coming up with new ideas for new games?
00:13:35
Speaker 1: The thing that I found is most important whenever we have like brainstorming sessions is constraints. I hate Blue Sky brainstorming sessions. When we sit down you know, I work with four other designers, five other designers now, so there's a team of six of us. When we sit down around a table and the idea is, hey, everyone, let's come up with a game. We will spend three days and come up with nothing.
00:14:00
Speaker 2: It's just awful.
00:14:02
Speaker 1: But if we go to a toy store and buy twenty toys, and then we go to a pet store and buy twenty pet toys, and then we go to a pool supply store and buy twenty inflatable objects, and then we put all of those on the table and we say, grab two things, come up with a game. Now we're cooking with gas.
00:14:23
Speaker 2: What are some other constraints that you might bring into the process.
00:14:26
Speaker 1: So we focus a lot on audience constraints. So we want to make sure we know the exploding kittens audience. We know their age, we know their gender, we know they're usually looking for games to bring to a party as a gift or to a game night, like we know all this stuff, so that's a really important one. We know game length really important. The sweet spot for us is a twenty minute game. So we know that once you start playing a game and the twenty minute markets and you're like still in the introductory phase, let's stop working on that game. And then the final one and maybe the most important hints on what I said, which is we know we need games that we can sell easily. So that means we have to come up with one liners for the game, a one sentence description of what this game is that not only can we put on a website and on a box and on social media, but that is so memorable and interesting that when someone plays the game and reads that one liner, it ingrains itself in their head and then they go when they want to describe the game to all their friends because they had this beautiful experience with mastery and progression. Now they will use that one liner in order to evangelize the game to everybody else. So if we can't figure out a game that can be easily described in one sentence, we will usually not pursue that game.
00:15:46
Speaker 2: I find that so interesting, Like, I think that that applies to so many different industries, different products and services, not just game design. I heard you talk about the quarterly design retreats that you have, and I would love you to explain like what that process involves, because yeah, I found it incredibly interesting. Thanks.
00:16:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of Look, there's no rocket science I'm about to describe, but we have found that getting everyone in the same room, physical location, making eye contact is the best way to start with the game design process. So we usually either use my house or we rent an airbnb. Anyone who is remote we fly them in. We usually do this for three days, and it's three days of us all sleeping in the same place, eating the same meals, like really really getting in there with each other and making sure that like you're not distracted by your phone you have no other meetings, there are no other obligations, like all of the pressure that you normally experience. We've all committed to put all of that stuff on hold for these three days because we're going to play. And more important than play is we're going to iterate. All the best ideas that I've had, that anyone has ever had start out as terrible ideas, and they have to have room to evolve from terrible to great. And you can only do that with focus, with relentlessness, and with the passion. That is kind of like contagious when we all get in the room together and somebody says, yes, but what if? And then somebody else says, oh, I like that, but what if this? And on and on that process goes in order for us to either get to great or to say this has no chance, let's abandon it and move on.
00:17:35
Speaker 2: What else would I be observing? Like if I was a fly on the wall for this creative process where you've you know, put away all the pressures of daily life, what else would I observe that I would be like, Oh, wow, that's interesting.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: You know that improv theory where they say you never say no, you alls say yes. And we hate that. We don't use that at all. That's the worst idea.
00:17:58
Speaker 2: We are very very.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: Liberal with Yeah, that sucks. Let's just move on. And that's great because we're going through so many ideas so quickly. It's very important to not take any personal pride in anything. Instead to say, here's why I don't think this thing is going to work. Ever, let's not waste any more time on it, because we are capable of generating a thousand more ideas in the next hour. Let's move on. And undoubtedly we are abandoning tons of gems in there, stuff that could eventually be developed into something amazing if we adopted the yes and theory. But we'd only be going through two or three ideas a day. And what I much prefer is to go through thousands a day because the output for those meetings is incredible. And we learned that right, like we started with yes and now we're at no, kill it and on we go.
00:18:48
Speaker 2: And how do you create the conditions so that people and not just leaving with the ego in the rubbish ship? How does that work?
00:18:57
Speaker 1: It's just leadership. It's like I show I give everybody permission to destroy my ideas immediately, and the first time they do, I'm very careful to show Okay, yeah, cool, let's pick up what about this, and I pick up another thing, and as long as they can see, there's no ego involved, nothing is taken personally. By the end of their first session, especially when we have new designers in there, by the end of those three days, everyone is so proud of the like five or six beautiful things that we have come up with that you know, Okay, next time, I'm going to trust this process. It works so well, so let's just go with it.
00:19:33
Speaker 2: How are you making decisions? Because I imagine I mean, like, if you're generating that many ideas, every idea that you're caping, your killing involves it like essentially a decision, even if it's a micro decision. What's the process for that.
00:19:45
Speaker 1: As soon as somebody says to kill an idea, that's usually the definitive answer, unless someone else wants to chime in and say, wait a second, here's why I think we should spend another minute on that. If a game or a core loop has champion like that, we'll linger on it for sure until all of those exceptions have been exhausted and Once that happens, then we move on. So it's a very collective decision making process. There is no leader in the room. There's nobody with authority. It's do we think this thing has legs or not. They are very talented people in that room. We all trust each other and so we just trust the group think to get us through that process.
00:20:25
Speaker 2: Coming up, Elan reveals what really happens inside his team's chaotic design retreats, where a thousand ideas are born and most are killed within minutes. And he also shares how they protect creative safety while dismantling each other's work and why they're no kill it rule might be the secret to lasting innovation. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work, can Live. I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com. Now I've heard that the sales and marketing team join this retreat at some point. Can you tell me why that is and what happens then?
00:21:18
Speaker 1: So, we used to come out of these meetings with like twelve ideas and our goal is like, okay, well, now let's develop these ideas and you know three or four of them will eventually see the light of day. Now when we get our twelve ideas on day three, the second half of day three is reserved for presentation, and that means we open the doors to our little Airbnb and the whole marketing and sales team comes in. And these are the people responsible for figuring out what the posts are on social media and selling to the giant retailers in the world, and making sure that every game is not only a good game, but paired with that vital and essential ability to sell that game. And so we pitched the game to them, and then we brainstorm with them, what's the one liner for this? What does the first fifteen seconds of a social media post for this look like? Can you imagine watching footage of this and thinking I want to play I'd be so good at that. We are the game designers, they are the marketers. If they cannot solve that problem, that's when those games die. They could be the best games in the world. Nothing personal will leave them in their little notebook where all the notes were taken and say, yeah, let's move on to one of the other twelve, we came up with.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: Wow, what's an example of a game where yourself and the designers like this is gold, and sales and marketing said, we cannot sell this.
00:22:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh this happened just last month. We had our retreat and we came up with this game that I was absolutely in love with. So there's this game I used to play in elementary school called Horse, and it's played on a basketball court. And what you do is you take the basketball and you shoot it into a hoop from anywhere you want, and then the next person has to shoot it from that same location. If they make it, they get a point. If they miss it, they lose a point. Okay, great, that's the whole game. So we thought, all right, what if we combined that with like shuffleboard or horseshoes or a smaller kind of parlor game where you're just tossing an object and trying to get it to hit another object.
00:23:17
Speaker 2: Okay, great, So we put.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: Down an object somewhere in the room. Everybody stands on the other side of the room. Now you have to toss this object to hit that object. But here's the trick. You get to apply any obstacle or constraint. You want to yourself, Want to close your eyes? Cool, close your eyes? Want to spin around three times before you throw it? Great? Do that? Want to do it from the other room? Great? Want somebody else to push you while you're throwing it? Great? Do that? It was so much fun. We showed it to the marketing team and they're like, oh, no way, Like, there's just there's no way to show the right video because objects are moving so far across a large space, and there's so many cards involved, and the constraints are very hard to understand immediately. You need to study them, and how they overlap with each other is very complex. And one player has to go and then we have to wait, and then another player has to go and they have to apply the same constraints. And now we're at two minutes and all we have is fifteen seconds and on and on and on. So, without any ego and nothing personal, we said, cool, game's dead, let's move on.
00:24:20
Speaker 2: Wow, do ideas that you're presenting to sales and marketing, do ones that you're kind of lukewarm on get through with this? Surprise is where sales and marketing are like, oh my god, this is amazing. But you guys were thinking, Eh, it's okay.
00:24:32
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. Yes, that's the beauty of this, right, Like, we show them a lot of games that are kind of half baked. We would never show them anything that we think is terrible, but we do show them many games that were like, Okay, this one didn't make it quite across the finish line. There's something interesting, but we're not sure what. So we actually have a game coming out next year. It doesn't even have a name yet, so I can't even spoil it. But it involved math, and we're like, there's no way we're selling a math game. Nobody wants to do math. But we showed it to them anyway, and we're like, here's this math game. And the sales team said, okay, if you remove ninety percent of the math and just leave addition, just addition. Anybody can add two numbers together as long as they're single digit numbers. What if you were just adding two things together very quickly. Does the game survive that? And we looked at it and we're like, yeah, the game survives that, sure, no problem. And they said this is going to be the greatest game of all time. Like okay, I'm going to trust you on this, and over the last six months we have taken that little seed and developed it into a spectacular game. It's going to be so great. Right now, we're just calling it the used to be math Game, and eventually we'll come up with a better name for it.
00:25:43
Speaker 2: I'm interested in naming something that struck me as a family. We recently bought Coyote, one of your newer games that you did with Tim Ferriss, and my daughter took out the little pamphlet instruction guide, and then it's got a few other games that you're promoting that you might like, and now she's become obsessed with I'm going to get the name wrong. It was having fights with fake swords. To correct me on the.
00:26:07
Speaker 1: Name, that's called Let's hit each other with fake swords.
00:26:11
Speaker 2: Yes, so my daughter has become obsessed with this game, even though we do not own it. I said, okay, Frankie, we're going to go to the toy store on the weekend. We're going to get this game finally. But she's been talking about it for weeks. So I want to know, like, what goes into naming a game.
00:26:27
Speaker 1: Our names come from all over the place, naming is very hard, right, Like, not only do you have to pick a perfect name that's evocative and relatable, but you also have to make sure that somebody else hasn't already come up with that name, or that is not the name of an app already, or like, there's all these things that shoot down name ideas. So what we typically do is we spend a long time on names. First, we come up with a bunch of names, and then we show it to the art team and they usually throw all of them away and they come up with a brand new set of ideas because they can pair it with beautiful, hilarious imagery. And usually we throw some of those away and then Matt usually chimes in and he says, well, I've got this perfect eddie. Matt is the one who came up with let's hit each other with fake swords. We were calling it something like had the word sword in it, but it was very obscure and it was a weird pun and it had something to do with owls and anyway, it was bizarre and strange and didn't come across. But sometimes names come from someone. In that case, Matt hadn't actually worked on that game. He was just kind of walking through and said, don't be coy about this. This game is about sword fighting, so let's call it Let's hit each other with fake swords. It's long, and it's cumbersome, and it's barely going to fit on the box, but it's going to be great because as soon as you read that name, you know how to play this game. Nothing else is required. So these ideas can really come from anywhere. They often do come from anywhere. And the only thing I will say about naming is we get it wrong about twenty percent of the time. We have a few games out there that just had bad names and didn't resonate properly, and each of those we've learned a lot from. And at the very very least, every time we come up with a new name that's wrong, it's a brand new mistake. We were at least not making the same mistakes over and over again.
00:28:14
Speaker 2: Something that I find really interesting around producing creative projects is knowing when you're done. And I'm kind of I'm feeling this at the moment because I'm writing my fifth book. The manuscript is due in a week exactly with the publishers, and it's kind of that question now that you reach where it's like, okay, am I done? Would I even submit a day early? Am I done? Done? How do you know when an idea is done?
00:28:40
Speaker 1: Oh? I feel your pain on such a visceral level. I know, I know exactly what you're going through. So we have a secret weapon. If it was up to me, games would never be done, I would work on them forever and I would never release a single thing. And investors don't like that very much. So we need a different approach. And we have this luxury, which is games must be tested. And so we have this group called the Kiddy Test Pilots. There's four hundred families that have volunteered for this program, and the contract we have with them is we're going to send you games for free, and you're going to get to see things before anybody else in the world, as long as when you play them, you're willing to tape that play session and then send us the recording. And that's how we learned. That's how we learned what worked, what didn't work. We weren't in the room to explain the game. Did it still work? Were people smiling? Where they exasperated? Where were the problems? On and on? And I used to back when I iterated games forever. I used to have this long questionnaire that I would ask people at the end of that and I have them fill out this form. What were your favorite parts of the game? What were your least favorite parts of the game? Were there are enough components? Were there too many cards? Were there too few cards? When did you get bored? Which partner was confusing? You can imagine this horrible form of like fifty questions and most of them have the same answer, and it's just dreadful and nobody's going to read it anyway, So why am I wasting my time? Now? The form we send people is one sentence long, and that single sentence is do you want to play again? And I have a deal with my team and with my investors that when ninety nine percent of the responses to that question are yes, I will stop tinkering with the game.
00:30:30
Speaker 2: Wow. I love that answer, and also I love the Kiddy Test Pilot group. Have you got a waiting list? Where do I sign up?
00:30:38
Speaker 1: We do, We do have a waiting list, but I would encourage you to sign up, but I will send you the link. Families do drop out from time to time, and yeah, we always want to leave it at about four hundred because that's about the delivery budget that we have to ship these games all over the world.
00:30:55
Speaker 2: My final question for people that I mean, I imagine that they are going to be listeners that have played Exploiting Kittens. But you've got I think sixty games. Is that right.
00:31:04
Speaker 1: I've said it was sixty games for the last year, and I just checked with our product team. It is more than one hundred. I think we're at one hundred and three now.
00:31:12
Speaker 2: My gosh. Okay, So the listeners that I have loved hearing you speak about game design, and I'm like, I want to play a game. I'm inspired. Where should I start? What is your advice.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: If you're playing with let's say, like teenagers to adults, and you're looking for fast, funny, easy cannot be at Exploding Kittens. If you are looking for a much more casual party game where everyone is just going to yell and laugh. We have a game called Poetry for Neanderthals. That is, you have to get your teammates to say a word that only you can see on this card, and you can only speak using single syllable words. That's the whole game, and you immediately sound like a caveman. You have no choice. This thing make fire me not know what else to say. You know, it's just. And then if you are looking for even more casual than that, the other one I always recommend is our game called Happy Salmon, which is ninety seconds long start to finish. It is so fun. If you need an ice breaker, if you need something just fast and furious, that's the best one. And then I'll say, finally, for very young kids like ages four and up, we have a game out there called Hurry Up Chicken Butt and I designed that game with my four year old daughter. She's actually the lead designer on that game, and it's one of the top selling games in the world right now. So it's just incredible.
00:32:33
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, Alan, I've just loved this chat. I also love the research process in the lead up to this chat. Thank you so much for all the joy that you are putting out into the world. It's just it's magical.
00:32:45
Speaker 1: It's absolutely my pleasure. I cannot believe I get paid to make games for a living.
00:32:50
Speaker 2: If you like this chat with Elin, hop into the show notes because there's a link to a bonus episode I released with him, where we dive into how he's using AI to creativity. If you like today's Joe, make sure you git follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on
00:33:09
Speaker 3: The traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation
