Board Gaming

One thing I haven’t written much about here is what board games we’ve been playing. But I’ve been recording every game I’ve played so far in 2024, which has been insightful. We started Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion with the kids, which was neat. We’ve played mainline Gloomhaven with our friend Max – probably our most-played board game of the last few years because we’ve had regular get-togethers to just crank through the campaign. I think we’re probably like 80% through the main campaign at this point?

It’s a great dungeon-crawler, and the card-based combat system is incredibly elegant. As a physical game, it’s too big, too complicated, and too unwieldy for me, but with the iPad app Gloomhaven Helper, it’s pretty great. Also works with JOTL, and JOTL is streamlined enough that it makes the whole experience pretty darned fast

We also played some Pitchcar, which is like Crokinole + Racing, and it’s probably the biggest hit with K, who so far says he likes “simpler” games more. It’s super fun, but the problem is that the kinds of tracks you can make from the included pieces in the base game are limited, but the expansions are impossible to get in the US. I’m gonna try laser-cutting some parts, but because the pieces are MDF + some sort of laminate, getting the thickness and texture right will be impossible. So I think I’m just gonna cut custom track parts, and use those instead of the included track parts – just replace the whole shebang. The big question is if the laser will cut deep enough grooves that the barriers will work. In any case, fun game – super accessible, fast, and building the tracks is as much fun as playing.

Last, I played Return to Dark Tower with Klay & Holly tonight, and that was a good time. I made a really bad decision one turn, and ended up dead due to an event that gave me a third corruption, but we fudged the turn (and a “make-up condition”) in order to keep things moving anyway, and got to the end of the scenario. If I’d not fought the random enemy on my turn, we would have achieved that result anyway. It was a good time. I’m curious to try out some of the expansion content, as the base game is fun, but in many ways feels a bit too much like Pandemic. It’s not that much like Pandemic, it just feels like the same kinds of pressures.

Other recent hits:

  • Project: Elite – played with J earlier in the day. Turn-based alien invasion w/ real-time dice combat. It’s an odd duck, but the real time element actually works pretty well – it’s very simple, but frantic.
  • Dorf Romantik – better than the video game it’s based on, which I like a lot. I’ve only played this solo, but I think that’s the best way to play it. A lovely little campaign, and a very charming, meditative, low-stakes game.
  • Spirit Island – played with Max for the first time. It’s a nice cooperative puzzle that’s complicated enough that it’s legitimately cooperative in a way that relies on everyone to know what they can do and work together.

Yeah – played a LOT of board games over the last few years. Will probably write more about some favorites soonish.

Music Stuff

Still noodling around with making noise. The most recent addition is an Elektron Syntakt. It’s weird – I have a bunch of fairly redundant stuff. The Deluge, Syntakt, JD-Xi, M8 Tracker, OP-Z and Push+Ableton are all broadly similar, functionality-wise. But they’re also all different. The Syntakt and Microfreak and OP-1 all overlap re: sound creation. It’s not like I have a set of “these are things that all do the one thing, and nothing overlaps” – and I think that’s fine.

For a long time I thought I had to optimize and justify all this stuff, but really, the justification is, “I like it, and it’s fun.” Different toys for different moments – sometimes the Roli Seaboard Blocks scratch an itch nothing else does. Or pulling out one of the POs or OPs and just messing around. The M8 is the greatest travel music scratchpad. The Push + Ableton can do basically *everything*, which no other single thing I have can quite replicate (though the Deluge is the closest).

Favorite gear? Sequencing-wise, no question it’s the Deluge. Sound-wise, the Syntakt packs a punch nothing else does, though the Microfreak comes close. The JD-Xi has some VERY punchy drums, and TBH, probably makes the TR-8 obsolete in my setup. And the TB-3.  But whatever. It’s fun. I enjoy it. It’s not “efficient”, it’s not “optimal” and it doesn’t “make sense”.

Fuck it! Who cares?!

Game Design Is An Actual Hard Job With Skills

There are very few people within the game industry that would argue that a good game designer isn’t worth their weight in gold. Why is it that so many folks outside the industry think it’s a trivial job they can do with no experience?

I think if you ask folks, they wouldn’t say that they think game design is a trivial job you can do with no experience. But it doesn’t matter what someone *says*, it matters what they *do*. So when you see someone *say* that game design is a job that requires deep understanding and experience, but then what they *do* is they start up a company and then design the game, despite having no experience doing it, what they’re *showing* is that they think eating pizza is the same as making pizza.

I see this *all over the place*. Educational companies trying to gamify their products. Game-centric startups. Healthcare “games”.

Game design can seem trivial when you think of it as just the high concept. “Let’s make a sci-fi game about rocketships and cat astronauts who land on a planet made of yarn!” But the high concept has to *do* something. It has to be the foundation of a whole wealth of interactions and decisions. Why cat astronauts? Why space? Why yarn?

Building games is about *focus*. Good ideas are all around you, and if your only metric is “this idea is good!” you’ll end up heading in 20 different directions. Most games? They’re about ONE core idea. Sure, that idea mutates everything it touches, so the whole game seems new. But every single feature – every single system you introduce into the game blows its complexity exponentially.

So a great game designer’s job is keeping the possibility space as interesting and as *simple* as possible. That complexity has to be *focused*. Every game I’ve designed that has failed has failed not because it was too simple, but because it was too complicated. Every game I’ve designed that has succeeded did so *because* it was simple, and could grow into something more complex.

Simplicity is *extremely difficult*. It’s very easy to grow, and very hard to pare down. My record of it is probably 50-50 at *best*, and that’s with *decades* of experience and insight and iteration. It’s an incredibly challenging, multidisciplinary problem that requires insight into a lot of different fields – art, psychology, technology at minimum – to really understand.

And yet, so many teams, and so many companies think it’s something they can do with zero experience, because they’ve played games.

I get it. And frankly, every experienced designer started that way. But most started on smaller projects, or by working for more experienced folks they could learn from. Starting up a company is a *terrible* place to learn game design, and if you think you’re the exception… you’re probably wrong.

Writing a Thing

Last year, when Eric Nehrlich was writing his (excellent) book You Have a Choice, we buddied up to be “accountability partners”. I started out wanting to write about my perspective on product development and team leadership, but I beat my head against it for a month before giving up. There was too much, it was too interconnected, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it all sensible. I ended up writing my little resume booklet.

I thought this year, I’d revise that booklet into something better – but I bounced off of that, too, because while it’s not perfect, it actually says everything I need it to say. I’m sure parts of it could be clearer, it could use a real example resume that goes from being bad to good, etc. But all the knowledge I wanted to get into it? It’s in there already. So I keep rewriting little bits of it, but I go back and re-read them, and they’re maybe marginally punchier, but there’s no new knowledge in there. So it got to feeling like I was running on a treadmill for no reason.

Tonight, my subconscious finally solved the first problem, after a year of working on it. I always feel like these answers emerge like a submarine breaking through the water’s surface or something. But it hit me:

For how to communicate ideas to a team well, read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. Or better yet, just watch his YouTube video about The Golden Circle. It’s everything great in the book without the fluff.

For how to incentivize and structure a team & peoples’ responsibility, and how to think about motivation, read Daniel Pink’s Drive. There’s an RSA Animate thing about that book, but I found it worth actually reading the whole thing.

For how to lead a team in a really interesting way, and to harness everyone’s complete potential, read L. David Marquet’s Turn This Ship Around. The entire book is essential reading for anyone in a position of power, and it will totally discombobulate your concept of what a leader’s real role is.

Those books are not exactly my worldview, but much like the current version of my resume book, they’re also “close enough”, and the things I’d have to add to that are mostly practical examples of how to put this stuff into practice in reality.

So now that I’ve completely buried the lede, the point is this:

Those books exist. They describe most of my perspective on team leadership and product development. But there is something that I’ve found that isn’t in those books, that was spawned by my specific experience, and is deeply fundamental to how I now think about product development and communication. And I think if you’ve followed my posts on LinkedIn for a bit, this next section will be really obvious.

The book I’m gonna start working on now I think will be called Anima. The subtitle will be something like “How to solve every single problem with your product in one sentence.”

Maybe that’s too hoity-toity. I dunno. But that was the submarine that emerged from the deep. I can offload all the team leadership & most of the communication stuff onto those other books. They’re “good enough”, and unless I can contribute something substantial and worthwhile, you should just read those. The thing that I can contribute is this.

One sentence.

It’s a way to think deeply about every single bit of your product. It’s your North Star. It’s the sword you use to hack away the unnecessary parts. It’s how you empower everyone on your team.

And yeah, I know – grandiose claims. Sounds delusional. But the number of times over the years that it’s helped – and the number of times I’ve resisted doing it and failed, only to realize that not doing this process is *why* it failed – I think this is something that is uncommon in product development. And it’s uncommon in team leadership. And most important of all, I think when people think about giving a team responsibility and autonomy, this is the missing link – you can’t give people responsibility and autonomy without *understanding*, and *so frequently* when I talk to folks who are having team leadership/communication/product problems, it all comes back to this issue. That most people, most of the time, hand wave away a lot of uncertainty and lack of clarity, but that uncertainty/lack of clarity causes communication problems, prevents people from acting with autonomy, creates bottlenecks, etc. etc. etc.

So yeah. The one thing I want to communicate, it turns out, is the concept of “one thing”, and how you can totally supercharge everything you do in a startup or product development process by figuring out how to communicate what you’re doing to your customers and your team in one sentence.

Why I Can’t Be a Fractional Product Person

Over the years, the idea of a part time product-person role has come up. A fractional CPO, or something of that ilk. I have friends (and family) doing fractional CTO work, and that’s always seemed sensible to me. I *want* a fractional CPO position to work, because that’s the kind of work I’d love to be looking for.

But I’d never, ever hire a fractional CPO, and I’d recommend that you don’t, either.

I get why you’d want someone in that role. There’s some sort of limited-domain or limited-size product knowledge that you don’t have, and an injection of experience could make a huge difference. Your company is otherwise good, and the person leading the product charge currently can do *most* of the job, they just can’t quite do all of it.

But here’s the problem: The product is the business.

Yeah, you can make similar arguments that the tech stack/process is the business, or marketing is the business, or whatever. But I’m a product guy, so for me, the product is the thing. And it’s not just my bias. I think that your product is so central that the decisions you make around product will bleed out into everything else, and everything else about your company will similarly bleed into your product.

The problem with a fractional CPO is simple: They will never endure the full pain of their decisions.

Product pain comes in many forms. A consultant can be very good at solving short-term pain. But the problem is that many solutions to short-term pain cause long-term pain. And if your consultant isn’t around for the long term, they don’t consider that pain to the degree that they should.

That’s it. That’s the whole problem. But it’s unsolvable. Because no amount of intellectualizing or rationalizing how you’re anticipating that long term pain is the same as knowing that it will one day punch you in the face at the worst possible moment. Even full-time folks often make this mistake. But fractional product people are heavily incentivized *to make this exact mistake*, and because of that, they will – consciously or otherwise.

This is the central bit of your business, and an absolutely critical thing to get right. If you are having product problems, you need *full time*, heavily invested people who can fix those problems. If you can’t afford to hire a full-spectrum product person with the expertise you need, you are failing to hire one of the single most critical roles for your business, and your chances of failure will skyrocket.

I know it seems like a fractional CPO can be that boost of product knowledge you need. It means you don’t have to expand at a time when expansion is scary and expensive. But it is a bad investment. It will always be a bad investment, and the problem is that it will seem good until it catastrophically fails. Please don’t do it. You need a full-time product-focused person with the necessary expertise as a central role in your company.

Loyalty

Stopped by GDC for a few minutes this year, and one thing that was a stark contrast to when I regularly attended a few years ago was that the amount of company swag that people were wearing was 10% or less of what it was in the past.

Teams used to wear their company stuff loud & proud. I’m curious if the change is because everyone’s now unemployed, or they realize that companies aren’t their friends no matter how positively they feel about them in the moment, or both.

Probably a mix of all three. It’s a hard lesson to learn. Be loyal to people who treat you with respect. Never spend your loyalty on a company – it’ll never, ever be returned in kind.

VC & Games

I have friends who are VCs. VCs in games, even. So writing this, please understand that I’m not like “F all VCs under all circumstances.” There are some incredibly smart people who are motivated by the right things that are in the field doing the work, trying to give people opportunities.

But one thing that I really don’t think people think about enough is what the whole game really is. VCs are funding things with the expectation of *astonishing* returns or failure, because that’s essentially how the market works. You make a lot of money on massive successes. You lose money on everything else (even moderate successes).

So taking money from VCs sets you on a specific trajectory to either be a massive success or die. This then informs *literally everything you do*. It may not start out that way, but it will evolve into that over time. This has huge follow-on effects. It dictates what kinds of games are made. How games are marketed. Who they’re targeted at. How mechanics work. What monetization is like.

It’s not “Here’s money make your dream game.” And I worry that a lot of folks who are thinking about building companies are turning to VCs believing they can raise cash to build their dream. The moment you take VC money, you’re not building your dream. You’re building a product to maximize potential to make as much money as possible to return to their fund.

Some VCs will have a process for this that realizes that in games, the biggest successes are unlikely and weird and very personal that then explode in unexpected ways, and they will help you build something very close to your dream. 

So there’s a huge difference in aligning yourself with VCs that have deep, deep, deeeeeeep personal experience building games – leaders – the folks that build the business models, the core mechanics, the plans. They can be value-adds.

But I’d suggest this is not *most* VCs in games. It’s certainly not *most* VCs. And the best way to distinguish the two is to ask folks you know who have been funded by these orgs. And second best, ask folks who have experience building the plans and business models and who have achieved some sort of success, and have them look at the VC to see if the folks behind them know their shit.

This is your dream. This is probably one of the most important decisions you can make, because if you go with a team that doesn’t align with your values and experiences, it won’t be your dream anymore. 

It’ll be an unending nightmare.

How Not to Introduce Yourself

“I am looking for work and am a [role].”

I can’t begin to tell you what a bad approach this is to looking for work.

Let’s say you have an enormous network of folks who know you and your work, and would love to work with you again. Does this appeal to them? No – it puts the *work* on them of trying to figure out the details of what you want, or how to convince someone they know that you’d be interesting to work with.

Let’s say you don’t have a huge network of folks who have experience with you – what does this tell them? Almost nothing, other than “Yeah, you’re looking for a role that we’re hiring for. So?”

When you’re looking for a job, you have to make a case for why someone would want to work with you, and make it a no-effort, no-brainer, as much as you can.

“Hello! I’m a game designer who loves to build combat systems with a focus on strategic depth and visceral, immediate feedback. I recently worked on [game] that [had some particular thing that people who like combat systems will love], which [achieved some sort of critical/commercial success/accolade]. If you’re looking for someone who can make your game’s combat distinctive, memorable, and something players will love, [link to resume].”

The things you want to do are to be able to show you have a perspective on your job that comes from experience, that you’re a good fit for something that people are specifically looking for (even if it makes you *less* broadly appealing), and that you sound like a real human with unique skills.

Yes, this is more effort, and requires some introspection. But it also shows that you understand your job is to do the work, to make it easy for others to understand your value, and that not only can you solve the problem they’re looking to solve, you’re going to make the person looking to fill the position’s life easy.

DO NOT throw out random, generic, quick “I’m out of a job & looking for work – hire me!” statements. Doing so is putting your worst foot forward, and it makes a terrible first impression. Take a few moments and craft a statement that reflects who you are and what you’re looking for.

layoffs jobsearch resume

Recent Stuffs

Got a new bike for the first time in a long while. Decided to finally pull the trigger on an electric cargo bike, and got the Specialized Globe Haul ST with two front panniers and the passenger kit, which lets someone sit on the back. It’s great! I’ve been using my old Cannondale Super-V outfitted with a Superpedestrian Copenhagen wheel, but that’s been discontinued (so who knows about any support), and because everything is contained in the wheel, it’s both short on power and range.

While the Haul is still limited by “class 3 ebike” regulations (28mph pedal assist, 20mph throttle), the extra torque makes a HUGE difference going up hills.

I’ve been picking up and dropping off the kids at school, and getting to either school is trivial. I can make it take effort, I can make it take almost no effort. It’s great. So trading a car ride + no exercise for a bike ride + some exercise is a win. It’s also been weighing on me more that even though the Tesla doesn’t take any gas, it *does* take a lot of energy, since it’s a big heavy car, and an eBike is going to be monstrously more efficient. And in the week and some that I’ve had the bike, every time I’ve taken it out it’s replaced a car ride. So that’s been more than half of the excursions out of the house. It’s basically, “Am I going to be carrying something I absolutely cannot carry on the eBike? Then I’ll take the car.” So winging, picking up large foamboards for J’s presentation at school – stuff like that.

But yeah. Good stuff.

Been playing Halo Infinite and Fortnite almost exclusively these days – Halo’s gameplay is great, but holy cats the progression system sucks. They’ve made big improvements since launch, but it’s kind of unbelievable that their live ops team is moving this slowly. I can only imagine the announcement of a move to Unreal must be brought on by how outdated their internal engine must be, and how hard it is to keep pace with stuff like Fortnite.

Fortnite, on the other hand, has a genuinely amazing progression system, but the gameplay’s starting to get a little boring. I assume that’s one of the drives that Epic’s making for Unreal Engine for Fortnite – being able to take advantage of the player base and tech to build something different is pretty tempting, and knowing that they’re going to pay folks who make content… I’m looking into it.

Otherwise, mostly smaller games – Citizen Sleeper is excellent, Pizza Tower is insane. Picked up a handful of 3DS games before the eShop shut down – Metroid: Samus Returns (which feels surprisingly like Dread, though I shouldn’t be surprised – same dev), Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice (the only one we didn’t have AFAIK), the “other content” for Fire Emblem: Fates, and Mario & Luigi: Dream Team – a series I’ve always liked but never gotten particularly deep into.

The 3DS is an odd duck. The 3D is really quite good, and it makes games on the platform feel really unique. I probably wouldn’t have picked up rando games at the closing of most other shops, because remakes will eventually make most good games accessible again. But the 3DS… it’s so reliant on the hardware that once those games are gone, they’re never going to feel the same again.

So yeah. We’ve got a couple trips coming up that I’m super excited about. Heading back to Maui in a bit, and then this summer, finally going back to Korea & Japan for the first time in 20+ years. Been learning both Korean & refreshing Japanese via Duolingo, which is pretty damn good. Progress is slow, but it’ll be way better than nothing. 😀

Friends Are Terrible Co-Founders

With all the layoffs, there are going to be a lot of folks who decide that this is their chance to take a swing at being an #entrepreneur and forming a #startup. If that’s you, fantastic. Here’s the single most important piece of advice I can give you:

When you look for a #cofounder (and you should), you want to find someone whose skills *complement* yours that you HAVE WORKED WITH in STRESSFUL SITUATIONS before.

It’s tempting to start a company with people you like. I get it. But here’s the catch: if you haven’t worked with your friend & potential co-founder before, you don’t actually know what they’re like when stuff goes crazy at work. And in startups, things will be crazy all the time.

I founded a company with someone I’d lived with for a few years before. I knew them as someone who was smart, considerate, gentle, empathic, and reliable. What I discovered was instead that they were self-centered, egotistic, a terrible, borderline abusive manager, and so catastrophically flaky they any time something exploded and got genuinely difficult, the only thing I could rely on them for was to not be there when we should have been working on things together.

Starting a company with someone isn’t like being friends. It’s like being the ne plus ultra of coworkers – a comparison I like a lot more than the common “it’s like being married”. It’s not like being married. It’s like being tied together hanging off a bridge with anvils around both of your ankles. You need to work together under intense and constant pressure or you’re both screwed.

So look around. That person who was there with you when you had an impossible deadline to meet? The one who you always turn to when you have problems? The quiet person that folks often overlook who does all the actual hard shit? These are the kinds of people you want to be thinking about, not the office entertainer/fun person that everyone thinks is hilarious.

Your co-founders should come from the strongest, most effective of your work relationships. Most startups fail. And they fail for all kinds of reasons. But the most common reason I’ve seen is that co-founder relationships fall apart. Friends become bitter enemies. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to a lot of people I know. The co-founder relationships that are most likely to succeed are the ones forged under the shared pressure of having worked together in difficult circumstances.