November 19, 2025 • 33 mins
How do you lead a team that kills thousands of ideas - and still keep everyone excited to create again the next day?
That’s business as usual for Elan Lee, co-creator and now CEO of Exploding Kittens. You might not know his name, but there’s a good chance you’ve played one of his games.
Exploding Kittens became one of the most backed Kickstarter campaigns in history - raising nearly $9 million from over 200,000 backers in just 30 days - and has since sold more than 60 million games worldwide.
In this episode, Elan and I dive into how he’s built a creative culture that thrives on iteration and honesty. He shares the psychology behind turning casual players into superfans, why creative constraints beat blue-sky brainstorming every time, and how his team’s “no, kill it” rule turned chaos into innovation.
Elan and I discuss:
- How Exploding Kittens became one of Kickstarter’s biggest success stories
- The psychology behind turning casual players into superfans
- Why creative constraints spark better ideas than “blue-sky” brainstorming
- How Elan runs design retreats that generate thousands of ideas in days
- The “no, kill it” rule that keeps creativity high and egos low
- Balancing creativity with commercial success - knowing when to walk away
- How a single question - “Do you want to play again?” - determines when a game is done
KEY QUOTES
“Games shouldn’t be entertaining - they should make the people playing them entertaining.”
“Every great idea starts out terrible. You just have to give it room to evolve.”
“We don’t use ‘yes, and…’. We use ‘no, kill it,’ because we know we can generate a thousand more ide
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
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
(00:33):
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
(00:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
For optimizing your day.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Isn't it ridiculous? Ten years in and we still have
more backers than any Kickstarter campaign in history.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
How many backers was it in total?
Speaker 1 (01:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
That's absolutely nots. Tell me what do you put that
success down to? What are your lessons looking back on that?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
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.
(02:32):
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,
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:36):
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.
(03:57):
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,
(04:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
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
(05:01):
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,
(05:24):
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
(05:45):
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
(06:08):
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.
(06:29):
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
(06:49):
go out and tell all your friends.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
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
(07:30):
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,
(07:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
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?
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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
(08:43):
I've never even heard of before.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
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
(09:17):
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
(09:39):
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
(09:59):
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
(10:20):
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
(10:41):
the game continues, the tension and drama increases, it ratchets
up because now there's fewer and fewer safe cards left.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
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
(11:23):
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
(11:45):
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,
(12:07):
we know we'll have a hit on our hands. That's interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
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
(12:30):
I guess, like what is going to be funnier?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
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
(12:53):
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
(13:16):
is game design and his job is audience whisperer.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
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
(13:56):
come up with a game. We will spend three days
and come up with nothing.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
It's just awful.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
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.
(14:22):
Now we're cooking with gas.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
What are some other constraints that you might bring into
the process.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:09):
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.
(15:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
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.
(16:30):
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
(16:52):
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,
(17:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
We are very very.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
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.
(18:22):
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
(18:44):
we're at no, kill it and on we go.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (18:57):
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
(19:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
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.
(20:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
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
(20:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
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?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
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
(21:40):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
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
(23:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Okay, great, So we put.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
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?
(23:42):
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.
(24:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
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,
(24:55):
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
(25:17):
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.
(25:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
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.
(26:06):
To correct me on the.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Name, that's called Let's hit each other with fake swords.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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,
(26:50):
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
(27:10):
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,
(27:34):
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
(27:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
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
(28:36):
submit a day early? Am I done? Done? How do
you know when an idea is done?
Speaker 1 (28:40):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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
(30:04):
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,
(30:28):
I will stop tinkering with the game.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
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?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
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
(31:46):
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.
(32:09):
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
(32:30):
the top selling games in the world right now. So
it's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
It's absolutely my pleasure. I cannot believe I get paid
to make games for a living.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
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
Speaker 3 (33:09):
The traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the
Cooler Nation
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.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
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
(00:33):
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
(00:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
For optimizing your day.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Isn't it ridiculous? Ten years in and we still have
more backers than any Kickstarter campaign in history.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
How many backers was it in total?
Speaker 1 (01:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
That's absolutely nots. Tell me what do you put that
success down to? What are your lessons looking back on that?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
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.
(02:32):
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,
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:36):
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.
(03:57):
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,
(04:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
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
(05:01):
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,
(05:24):
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
(05:45):
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
(06:08):
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.
(06:29):
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
(06:49):
go out and tell all your friends.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
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
(07:30):
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,
(07:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
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?
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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
(08:43):
I've never even heard of before.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
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
(09:17):
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
(09:39):
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
(09:59):
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
(10:20):
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
(10:41):
the game continues, the tension and drama increases, it ratchets
up because now there's fewer and fewer safe cards left.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
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
(11:23):
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
(11:45):
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,
(12:07):
we know we'll have a hit on our hands. That's interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
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
(12:30):
I guess, like what is going to be funnier?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
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
(12:53):
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
(13:16):
is game design and his job is audience whisperer.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
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
(13:56):
come up with a game. We will spend three days
and come up with nothing.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
It's just awful.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
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.
(14:22):
Now we're cooking with gas.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
What are some other constraints that you might bring into
the process.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:09):
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.
(15:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
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.
(16:30):
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
(16:52):
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,
(17:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
We are very very.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
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.
(18:22):
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
(18:44):
we're at no, kill it and on we go.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (18:57):
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
(19:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
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.
(20:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
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
(20:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
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?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
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
(21:40):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
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
(23:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Okay, great, So we put.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
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?
(23:42):
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.
(24:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
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,
(24:55):
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
(25:17):
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.
(25:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
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.
(26:06):
To correct me on the.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Name, that's called Let's hit each other with fake swords.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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,
(26:50):
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
(27:10):
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,
(27:34):
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
(27:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
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
(28:36):
submit a day early? Am I done? Done? How do
you know when an idea is done?
Speaker 1 (28:40):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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
(30:04):
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,
(30:28):
I will stop tinkering with the game.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
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?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
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
(31:46):
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.
(32:09):
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
(32:30):
the top selling games in the world right now. So
it's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
It's absolutely my pleasure. I cannot believe I get paid
to make games for a living.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
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
Speaker 3 (33:09):
The traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the
Cooler Nation
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