Games discussed in this episode:
- 1:53 AEGIS Combining Robots
- 12:15 Magic the Gathering
- 12:42 Warhammer 40K
- 20:02 Gloomhaven
- 23:15 Protospiel
Introductory Guy
Welcome to design thinking games, a gaming and User Experience podcast card carrying UXers Tim Broadwater and Michael Schofield examine the player experience of board games, pen and paper role-playing games, live-action games and video games. Play through the backlog on your podcatcher of choice and on the web at designthinkinggames.com.
Tim Broadwater
Design thinking is a process used to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions. In this podcast, we apply design thinking to gaming. Today, we’re joined on design thinking games by Breeze Grigas from Zephyr Workshops. Thank you so much for joining us.
Breeze Grigas
Hey, yo, thank you for having me on.
Tim Broadwater
We went to P.A.X. East, and we had an intercept where we talked to you candidly about your game studio and A.E.G.I.S. But for those who didn’t listen to that episode, maybe you can speak to really quickly, you know, who you are, the name of your design studio, and then probably the games you’re most proud of.
Breeze Grigas
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So my name is Breeze, like the wind, it’s my real name. I am the director at Zephyr workshop. We are a board game development studio based in Washington, although we’re all from Massachusetts. And our flagship sort of game is A.E.G.I.S. Combining Robots. It is a tactics game about having a team of five robots, fighting against your opponent’s team of five robots, and combining smaller robots into bigger robots. And there’s a lot of content in the box that was basically made to be a, you know, a faster, more accessible, more affordable, like, version of like the more popular WarGames in the, in the genre. So we did. We’ve been doing that game for a while. We Kickstarted in 2018. And then we published it. We Kickstarted in 2017 and published it in 2018/2019. We sold through all of it right on time for the pandemic. And then, during that we have been working on a whole bunch of new stuff.
Tim Broadwater
Oh, nice. So, um, when I talk to you, or like when we talk to you at P.A.X. East, you are working on the second edition.
Breeze Grigas
Yep. So yeah, we are making the first box of A.E.G.I.S. had like 100 playable robots in it. And then we’re doing a second box called Second Ignition, which is its standalone game but is cross-compatible with the first box. So it’s basically like an L.C.G. type model that we’re going for, like a third box or fourth box, and then will you all be able to play all of them on their own? But also, they’ll all be cross-compatible with one another. And that’s what we spent most of the pandemic doing and finishing up. And then we’re going to throw it up on Kickstarter soon, along with reprinting the first game.
Tim Broadwater
And so can they work together or separately? Correct.
Breeze Grigas
Yeah, they work together. And separately, you can own one without the other. But together, they make each other better.
Tim Broadwater
Yeah, I know that I’ve been talking to you. And I’ve been trying to get a hold of this original one. And it’s hard to get a hold of because, you know, you’d have to get it on eBay or Facebook marketplace or something. But I’m glad to hear that you’re also reprinting it. Are you is that going to be rolled up in the Kickstarter as well? Or just kind of will happen?
Breeze Grigas
Yeah, that will be rolled up as it’ll all be rolled up in the same Kickstarter. And yeah, no, that’s that was actually news to me. When you said, you couldn’t find a copy. I’m like, no way. There’s always like,
Michael Schofield
It’s a good problem to have, though. Yeah.
Breeze Grigas
Yeah. The other BoardGameGeek marketplace is empty; eBay’s empty; I couldn’t find any on Amazon, so I guess our game was just like now we’re very hard to find. Collectible status. Yeah.
Tim Broadwater
Exclusivity! There you go.
Breeze Grigas
Right. It’s still available up on TableTop Sim, though, which is honestly where most of our regular players play it anyway. So that’s always an option.
Michael Schofield
Like is the experience dramatically different without, like, the box that says jack full of all those pieces? I imagine that the map is really similar to Tabletop Sim?
Breeze Grigas
It’s like it’s better and worse. Like in some areas, it’s never a perfect one. For one thing, the game looks different in tabletop SIM like real life. It has standees button tabletops. And we use tiles because you look at it from the top down. And the tabletop sim helps with setup. We have a bunch of automated things where you can just hit a button, and it’ll poop out a robot team for you. And like it’ll set up the board and take out all appropriate things with like, really quickly. Not that our get a real-life game doesn’t really have that bad of a setup either. But you still have to like hunt and peck for some like your appropriate cards and pieces sometimes. So tabletop sim makes that easier. And then tabletop but then also tabletop sim’s, like playing a board game with oven mitts on, so it makes a little bit longer, more cumbersome so you give and you take
Tim Broadwater
I’m a kid of the 80s, and I love Voltron. And, you know, Transformers and combining robots is amazing. I’m kind of wondering about the inspiration for this game. Can you speak to how it came into existence?
Breeze Grigas
I used to go to Blockbuster as a kid and rent the same Voltron, Transformers, and like Starvengers VHSes say over and over. And because of that, I do this instead of being a doctor. So yeah, I watched a lot of cartoons, and then that ended up shaping its way into, I guess, my career.
Tim Broadwater
Were you going to be a doctor then? (No, not at all, lol).
Michael Schofield
I love the idea that there’s a trajectory of how you spent your early days in Blockbuster is what you ended up in your real life.
Breeze Grigas
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. I think that’s how it works. I could have worked on real robots at Boston Dynamics. But then I watched too many cartoons one day, which obviously flung me into the starving artist orbit.
Tim Broadwater
Different timeline. That’s how it happens.
Michael Schofield
We feel like over the pandemic like there’s been a whole influx of solo people getting into creating their own T.T.R.P.G. this creator space is really getting a flush. My bias was like, oh, yeah, we’re talking to another person. But you kept on saying, Oh, “we we” and “I’m the director,” so, at some point, you formed a team? What’s that Like?
Breeze Grigas
Oh, yeah, so it’s my friends and me out of college from this company. If you actually look at, you ever see like the credits for the first A.E.G.I.S. box there’s like 70 people in the credits because there’s the first day just box was in development for like six years because we didn’t know what we’re doing. And so I went through this whole saga, just like on a flight. We self-published it. Then we went through another publisher, and then self-published again, for realsies the second time, and then but yeah, so currently, like, you know, the team’s like, you know, four people, five people. And also not only that, we have like a bunch of new artists I’ve been working with the last couple of years on the new box, too. So, you know, there’s still I do I still do a good vast majority of like, the actual game production stuff. The first box actually did most of the art too. But now I don’t have to do that anymore. So I got to hire artists, and I can just be the art director. But yeah, no, it’s cool. I wish I had more people, and I divvied out my workload better, but it’s also still better than being completely solo. Because that would be utterly impossible to make a game of our scale as one person
Tim Broadwater
How long were you kind of interested in gaming, not specifically tabletop board gaming or you know in general, and then can you speak to how does one even How did you even get interested or think about like you couldn’t make a game and started to do it and how did that happen?
Breeze Grigas
Well, I went to school. I guess it started like I was in high school. And then I went to I decided I had to go to a game design college because there was a little thing tacked on to the guidance counselor’s wall. And then I applied, and I got in because my college had no standards whatsoever. And then I end up doing really, I end up doing pretty well there. So A.E.G.I.S. actually started as a senior capstone project in my final year of school, or actually the final semester of my final year of school, A.E.G.I.S. was our, like, senior project. And yeah, I wanted to. I guess I’ve always wanted to like make games. I didn’t know, really, I originally went into college to do character art for games, but I always just kind of knew I wanted to make things. So yeah, I went to school, M.I.T. did a screwed around for three and a half years and then made this in the last semester through, like, the product, pretty chaotic process. And then, when I started this game, I actually had very little experience in tabletop gaming. I played magic. And like, you know, I had the No, I knew all the rudimentary is off, you know, mainstream board games. But I did not know anything. Actually, my friend described it to me. He was a big Warhammer enthusiast. So one day, I’m just like, tell me everything. They told me everything about Warhammer. I just need to know how it works. Because we were on this project together. And I was like, Okay, I just need to know what, okay, how does Warhammer work? And he explains that he gets out the way he gets in front of the whiteboard and the audience. Yeah.
Michael Schofield
For our audience, how does Warhammer work? And go.
Breeze Grigas
not enough time in the day! So yeah, so I came from a background I played. I played lots of handheld strategy games like fire emblem in advance, whereas which are very, very streamlined, single-digit numbers. Everything’s very intuitive. And then I got explained Warhammer, which every there’s like a million different units. You can there’s a bunch of different factions that contain those units. Every unit has its own textbook size, the book that explains how the faction works. And those books change over time. And the actual process of setting up the game and playing the game is like a four-hour process. And I just couldn’t, I couldn’t actually, you know, you measure it all with a ruler. And I actually just couldn’t at that point. I had no familiarity. So I couldn’t even believe what I was hearing. It’s just like, what if I just want to put dudes on a map and move them? And we take turns, and we shoot each other? What is this? What is this? Some arcane process?
Tim Broadwater
Warhammer for dummies? Yeah, that’s literally working on life. So you got paired with a person who loved Warhammer. And when you were coming up with a game together, that’s where this conversation kind of came from.
Breeze Grigas
I was he was telling me about this. I’m like, Oh, how do I like the entire time like, Hey, how can we streamline this, I can make this simpler and actually be able to, like, you know, make it as an idiot student who didn’t know what they were doing. So that’s where A.E.G.I.S. came from. It just like it all hit me in like, an like a day. It’s just like, thinking about like, what if there are five different types of robot and they could put the different colors of room these five different types of robot together into different combinations? What if you basically just played pretty similarly, from a bird’s eye view to like Fire Emblem or advanced words, you know, simple, small teams, you move back and forth? And so that, it kind of like it kind of came, it kind of came together. The core concepts all came together pretty quickly.
Tim Broadwater
I’m assuming it was received. Well, like, did people tell you to like, this is legit, you should publish this or like, for your senior project, or?
Breeze Grigas
No, it was not. There’s not a lot of supportiveness. Oh, my God, when you go to a game design school, it’s not that great of a one.
Michael Schofield
We’re professional UXers, man. Everyone tells us everything we do sucks.
Breeze Grigas
Oh, yeah, no, exactly. So yeah. A lot of people were very disillusioned by the time we were about to graduate. And you know, I was like, hell-bent on actually making a game with this degree that I paid for. So I like I went the very full month into it. And we, we first show, he just decided to throw it together and show it at like some local conventions, and my hand make some copies, like physically and make them like we got dice from here and pieces from here and stuff. And we’d like threw them together and put them in a handmade box, and we brought like 10 copies to like sell it like some really like local Podunk convention and And that was the encouraging part is when we first sold our first couple of copies, like these handmade copies, and then from there, we ramped up, and we made like the next time we went, it was our first time at P.A.X. East. So we made like 100 copies, and we sold them there. And then, from there, we got the attention of a publisher, and we signed on with them. And we kind of like spun our wheels with them for a while. But through working with them, we learned everything about the board game industry, we went to like Gen Con for the first time, and like all these other major conventions we shipped around to, and like the whole process of using InDesign, like Adobe InDesign to like, make our cards instead of manually making everything in Photoshop.
Tim Broadwater
mail-merging them. Oh, and templates and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Breeze Grigas
Oh, yeah. So we went through like a crash. When we were working with our publisher, we went through like a crash course on how to actually functionally make a board game, ship it and market it and stuff like that. So even though like we didn’t end up going through that publisher, ultimately, and publishing the game through them, we learned a lot.
Tim Broadwater
So when you sold your first version, like where you kind of build it yourself and add a local con. Like before that? I guess I’m wondering, one thing that we’d like to know, as it relates kind of to the theme of our podcast, is like, how did you handle playtesting? Like, how did you refine the game? Was that all done in school? Or is it a kind of post? You know, have you even after the first version you sold or up to it? I mean, are you always tweaking and testing the game? Can you speak to that?
Breeze Grigas
Oh, my. Yeah, no. So when you’re starting, we’re starting out. I guess I didn’t know what we were doing. So you know, ignorance is bliss because you are uninhibited by knowledge. So we, when we first made the game, we put it out, like we made the first little initial copies, you know, that wasn’t played tested. We play, we playtested it, so nothing was theoretically broken. But was it balanced? No, not really. And then we refined it a bunch more by the time we made like the next, like, 100 copies that we would sell at P.A.X., but even those were like, you know, we weren’t, this was not Gloomhaven. So this is not because, like, we were just thinking like, well, if we look at the cards, and we think about how they work, that’s obviously a form of balancing the game. It’s not, don’t do that. So yeah, there was, so we just without worrying about it too much. We just, you know, we made we threw the cards together, we made the rulebook as decent as it could be, and actually very proud of our original rulebook, I made that in Photoshop 40 pages, and we, the game was playable, and decent, and some things were degenerate, and like, our card designs could have looked better, and you know, whatever. But through selling those, we learned stuff. And like a lot of playtesting actually came while we were demoing at events because there’s no better type of testing for your product than showing it to total randos and just having them trying to try it out and play it with you. And you’ll figure out which things are which things work and don’t work very rapidly. And that’s actually where a lot of our agents play testing in general. Got done in subsequent years as we just went to a lot of conventions and, you know, all the way up until three published the actual final version of the game and like 2018. You know, we were adjusting and changing things and refining things based on feedback and questions people had and things like that.
Tim Broadwater
Yeah, I think that’s yeah, I guess I’m wondering like, when we are I was at P.A.X., some people were admitted like, Hey, we’re still alpha testing we’re we’re still playtesting that’s why we’re here where other people are like no, we got the game. We’re ready. We want to let people know about it where other people were building hype for like Kickstarters or like back, you know, and so I was kind of curious because it seems to be also like like you said, a great place to where you can you know, actually interact with your players and two birds one stone promote it, but also play test it simultaneously.
Breeze Grigas
Yep, and that’s exactly what we were doing a Pax East this year. Like A.E.G.I.S., two is in like a pretty good state because we were playing testing it online all throughout the pandemic, but nothing beats just you go to a convention, and you play the game 100 times, like across four days. So yeah, there’s so we were, you know, we were whipping out the Sharpie and changing numbers and stuff and just really catching things that we hadn’t caught before. Luckily all the core things were still looking pretty good. But ya know that when you when, it comes to just like, really seeing the big picture of like, how will what? What’re your average numbers look like? Is the game length too long or too short? That’s where you really that’s when you can start to really see it when you go to a convention. Yeah,
Tim Broadwater
I kind of want to ask because some people, you know, that we kind of talked to you Do it all through Tabletop Simulator. And they’re just like, hey, we had to do over playtesting that way. And then other people go to things like protospiel, which is like a conference for playtesting specifically, and just wondering if you’ve was that part of your strategy?
Breeze Grigas
you get different information from different types of playtests. Online play tests are still good for like, measuring. Do my rules work? Are things intuitive, but you don’t really know if your board game works or not until you’re playing it a lot in real life? Because things that are easy and digital might just get lost on you in real life, or vice versa?
Tim Broadwater
Setting up a board like you were talking about.
Breeze Grigas
Setting up the board. Is it easy to parse something when it’s all displayed in front of you, like on a real physical table? How often are you reaching your arm over people to touch and grab things, you know, things that just don’t matter digitally? Because you can like zoom in and out and things like that. So knowing how usable, like physically usable your game, is, and how long the actual game time is or something, those are things that you can only find out in real life. We try to, you know, you still try to do like both we do a lot of our like intensive balance testing with like our diehard fans on our Discord online, because that’s where we’re gonna get like, the walls of text feedback about why this mechanic should do this instead of that. Pax feedback is actually a lot more like, why are our average games 10 minutes longer than we think they should be? What mechanics are slowing the game down? Is something too complicated? Our Tech’s not doing enough damage is, you know, things like that stuff that you that we really didn’t actually notice until we started throwing it into conventions again at unplugged and East.
Michael Schofield
To your point, you know, a better product comes out of observing people use it. And but I’m, I’m kind of curious, I don’t know if I don’t know how many people talk about this. What kind of like emotional gut punch? Is it to receive some sort of like critique or feedback? Or is that not really a? Is that less of a thing? And like the gaming play tests or community that it is? And you know,
Tim Broadwater
Yeah, cuz I think in UX, you definitely can something you’re like, Oh my God, I didn’t even consider that. Or like, really, something happens to where you’re like, Oh, and
Michael Schofield
one of the things we do with with with my team is like, train them to, like, not get emotionally attached to the critique, right? Because like, it’s, there’s a lot at stake. But we have to train people to like, not get destroyed. Like, like, what’s that? What’s that? Like? What’s that like receiving kind of like negative feedback? Or does it was that negative feedback always couched in a good way? Because the community is good.
Breeze Grigas
So it’s so getting negative feedback is actually awesome because the worst kind of feedback is just utter indifference. Oh, yeah, no, if people really feel strongly about something, and I mean, at least gives you something to hone in on to figure out what’s like, you know, what’s going on here. That’s why we don’t get a lot of it, mainly because so we make a niche game. And so people who hate it usually would never sit down to play it, to begin with. Yeah, so it’s like it’s with our game. Our Saturday morning cartoon Robot Game has a filter. So I like to literally filter people out. Where if they don’t want to play this tactical dice rolly Cartoon game, that immediately kind of cuts out a lot of people who would normally not play the game, to begin with. And then from there, we’ll get So it sounds, so it’s interesting, like feedback bias. So yeah, most of the feedback that we’ll get is from people who would like the game and would play the game anyway. But we spoke we do miss out on feedback, more general audience feedback. Like we don’t know why somebody looks at our poster. And like, just doesn’t it just doesn’t register in their brain, and they walked by it, or maybe they don’t like it or something.
Tim Broadwater
What’s wrong with you? You don’t like giant robots?
Michael Schofield
What? The problem is clearly with you, player!
Breeze Grigas
I was gonna say like, we have this big poster that we made for P.A.X. unplugged that has like a million characters all over. It’s very loud and very dense. And it’s almost like it’s like a Kryptonite that chases away people that don’t want to talk to you anyway. So, but yeah, like, if you like, as we try to make the game as, as we try to fulfill the promise that the game shows you with its art, right? So like, if you look at this game, our game is a dense, colorful thing. And so, if you liked the poster, you’ll probably be inclined to enjoy the game. And if you don’t like the poster, you probably won’t like the game.
Tim Broadwater
That’s cool to like Mike’s point. So we both do UX in digital products or software, you know, and kind of the podcast is the UX of gaming, or the player experience or P.X. or whatever people want to call it. Right. And it’s interesting to hear you say that, like, the worst feedback you can get is meh. You know, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you definitely want to get more than that. But then also, if there are people that are game designers, and we’re putting games out there, but they’re really not getting feedback from players at all. Do you have any thoughts or any thoughts about just the playtesting experience as it relates to that
Breeze Grigas
you have to move past being defensive or arguing against people who have feedback on your game because you like the idea that you put in. And it’s also then you also have to like. It also matters what kind of playtesters and feedback you’re getting. I mean, it’s very easy to brush off certain kinds of feedback, even though like, you shouldn’t, like I say, like, if see if I if we, if somebody like sat down, and they’re like, I hate this kind of game, I’m gonna play anyway. Because like, that my friend wants to play it. I’m like, okay, cool. Well, I would still like your feedback at the end regardless. So I can actually get a slight get insight into the mind of somebody who, because when you release a board game, there will be people who don’t like your game, people end up being forced to play it because somebody else wants to play it because that’s just the reality of board games. But I think you should, you should always listen to all feedback. But you should also consider, you have to consider where it’s coming from. Not all feedback is equal. It comes from different perspectives and from different types of players. And you have to still, while taking that into account, you have to also try to remember what your game is. You don’t have to like remodel your whole product to appeal to somebody who probably will never like it. But it’s still really useful to understand how your game is perceived by people.
Tim Broadwater
What advice would you give to aspiring game designers? There just seems to be a lot of like sayings or aphorisms or general truths or guidance that people have. And I’m just wondering, what is yours? Like, what would you say to aspiring game designers?
Breeze Grigas
If you’re gonna make a board game, there’s really no reason not to just do it. If it’s like the easiest thing to do because you can just take out a bunch of note cards and a pen, bam, five minutes later, you can have a board game that probably sucks, but you can play it. It’s so much easier to do than making apps from an entry point perspective. Or like making video games where you have to like, you know, it could be months or weeks before your stupid thing even turns on. But in board games, you can just jump kind of right into it. And if you have an idea, you can try to get that thing to paper, or you get that you can get that like you can go from brain to paper without too many barriers, and you don’t even need to have. It’s cool if the game has a beginning, middle and end. But if you even just like make one part of it like the core like a mechanic or whatever, just to see if it works. You can just like bust that out and run it back really quickly. So I would just not hesitate. If you want to make a card game or a board game, it’s just you should jump into it. There are lots of resources available to you. There are lots of good Facebook groups. Board Game Design Lab community is where I post in a lot of very active. You should go to conventions to test other people’s games in like various testing areas like Gen Con and origins. There’s always like, the first exposure room or the play of whatever play tests or the unplugged room or whatever playtesting room, you can, that’s a really easy way to get into making more games is play testing other people’s board games, and you can kind of start getting an idea of how what is a prototype look like? How can you ask these other designers questions? The whole board game industry has probably like 1000 people big. So once you start learning things and people, it’s pretty exponential how fast you’ll grow and learn things.
Tim Broadwater
Are you able to speak to like, you know, when people when you think that Kickstarter is gonna launch or like, roughly upon time of the year or something
Breeze Grigas
as soon as possible. We’re literally at the mode where like, I just need to finish like Kickstarter page. We have the preview page up right now; you can find it. You can find the agencies it’s called A.E.G.I.S. 2 or A.E.G.I.S. Season 2 or A.E.G.I.S. Second Ignition, that’s all the same thing. But you can find it up. If you search for it, we have a couple 100 subscribers on it on the Kickstarter page already. So just go there and hit the remind me button. And then you will get a ding when we click start.
Tim Broadwater
I’m already a subscriber because I love games that are six-player games. They’re kind of hard to find. And so it checks off a lot of cool boxes for me and probably for our listeners too. So if people want to learn more about you or get in touch with you, or learn more about the game sort of coming, how would you tell people to get in touch,
Breeze Grigas
you can go to our website at Zephyr workshop.com. And the easiest and best way to really follow up with whatever we’re doing is probably just to go into our Discord or follow us on Twitter at Zephyr underscore workshop.
Michael Schofield
Well, listener, I hope you enjoyed that episode of design thinking games that we just had with Breeze. If you like the show, like our heart and favorite us and your podcatcher of choice. Specifically, if you’d like more interviews like this, please let us know. Any kind of feedback is appreciated, especially the kind that comes in five-star ratings on Apple podcasts. If you are interested in getting in front of our audience, we have extremely affordable advertisements that we handcraft from the clay of the earth for merely the cost of a fancy coffee. Consider you probably heard one of those advertisements today. Consider that you yourself could have something as epic as one of those advertisers. If you just want to try to give us money and support us for keeping the lights on, we put a lot of work into Design Thinking games patreon.com/design Thinking games is your place to go. We have delightful tiers that are named after the original Wolfenstein classic, Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein. And if you can’t afford it or you don’t want to afford it every other week thereabouts every three weeks, we have a show for you on all the podcatchers of choice. That’s it. Voltron assemble.
Introductory Guy
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