Debriefing SPIEL 24 - Tag 2
| Artist: | BGT Brettspiel-Podcast |
| Album: | BGT Brettspiel-Podcast |
| Year: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://theboardgametheory.de/ |
| 33:39 | Interview with Matt Martens from Leder Games |
Dirk:
Hello dear listeners out there on the end devices. Nice that you switched on again. Day two begins, day one is over. You may have already heard the episode, maybe not yet, however you like. We are definitely back, Olli is in the car on the way to the fair. This time Nils and Dennis.
Dennis:
Hello!
Dirk:
Hello!
Dennis:
Just once loudly.
Dirk:
Yes, exactly. Very nice. Yes, we still had a few things. We said yesterday that we were still at Star Wars Unlimited event by Asmodee. We'll tell you something about that in a moment. Dennis, did you have a report from yesterday?
Dennis:
Exactly. I had not talked about it yesterday in my tired head. We watched Sibylle. We are now live on Kickstarter. So if you hear that, we went live yesterday. That's a game, you're in Sibylle, so you have to predict the future. It's also a bit about predicting what the other players will do on the table. Very nice material, very beautifully designed tarot cards. I don't know much about this area. doesn't seem esoteric to me at all, but it's just a topic that's on it, as it has worked for me. Otherwise, I don't think that would have affected me at all, but that's how I found it to be beautifully designed. I think tarot cards are just as nice to look at. My wife likes that too. And the special clue about the game is, they found out in the research that tarot cards are always built up at the same time, that you always have a cross bar at the top left and bottom right, and a vertical bar at the top left where you have space or wherever the same thing is. They have tarot cards with them, but they also have sleeves where the game-deciding information is printed on it and you can use your own tarot cards. And I thought that's really clever in such a bubble or for people who like to deal with it and who have these sets, that they can just use the sleeves, their own tarot cards and then be able to play with their own tarot set.
Dirk:
Yes, that's funny, that's cool.
Dennis:
That's a nice detail. Exactly, and it's a nice material. And from the prices, what I've seen, it's once 49 and 79 euros. For me, that sounded fair in the connoisseur area. So Deluxe for 79 with metal coins, with such shiny full cards and so on. That was pretty nice. So it's cool made. French publishing house. If you go there, get yourself into a somewhat more groundbreaking English, but with a lot of fun. You get so much fun with it.
Dirk:
Very nice, very nice. Then we still have Duck and Cava was played by Olli, right?
Dennis:
Yes, it was at Captain Games. They wrote me a letter. Last year they released a big game called Age of Sivolution.
Dirk:
Path of Sivolution.
Dennis:
Path of Sivolution, okay. And now Duck and Cava. At first I thought, okay, it's quite cute from the look of it. quite sweet. They are all like squeaky ducks and that's how they run around on the knife. They are relatively present, all in bright yellow. There is somehow a guy who they push around in the bathtub and no idea. Yes, and that's actually quite funny. You just have seven different duck decks. They are funny illustrated, like fantasy and Halloween movies, pirates and so on. They are numbered from 1 to 12 and you place it in a 4x3 grid in front of you and each card has a splash point at the bottom.
Dennis:
Your bathroom is wet and you don't get wet. And then you have another stack, you draw a card, there is a number on it, and you can move this end. And it then covers an adjacent end. And so it gets less and less. When a card is drawn with a number that no one else has in their deck, then you have to say quack. And if everyone said quack, then it goes away. And if, depending on the number of players, I think if we play it to four, if then seven cards change, it's over. And then everyone counts his splash minus points or you can also turn off if you have covered all of them to one and then the splash points that you have on the bottom are quasi plus points and then count positive and then you can do a little bit that I did then go at risk there is one end that has five splash points and I have then always tried to have the only one only if that just didn't work out super simple you can play with seven people in this basic box You can play it with 7 people and then there is a promo additional deck that is illustrated very cool. There is every end of another illustrator and then you have two additional decks and then you can play it with Moin. Theoretically, you can do that ... no, that probably doesn't make any sense. I'll take the basic box again and then with even more. But I was positively surprised.
Dirk:
Yes, it was definitely a very nice in-between thing. Very, very cool. Exactly, and then we were at Asmodee at the Star Wars event. I told you yesterday that we won't talk about it much. We were just a bit disappointed because no numbers were said. Well, maybe we don't have to say concrete numbers, but roughly speaking, there were retailers and influencers, but basically people who want to report on it. And just to say, everything was great and super cool and now it goes on. And they showed us a game mat for the Twin Suns format.
Dennis:
And that's it. And they revealed a card.
Dirk:
Yes, they revealed a card. Jar Jar Binks will be coming as a card. It's clear that he will come, no one doubted that. What I found much more important, Dars Maul will now be a leader unit. I would have liked it if he would not be a leader unit again. The guy always struggles in the series. They could have said a little more.
Dennis:
I think, how it is going now.
Dirk:
How many things have taken place. And besides the sales figures, I would have actually wished that they would say something about Organized Play. How did the Planetary Qualifier go? How was the feedback? How is it going now?
Dennis:
For me, it also seemed like that from the construction. Last year we sat down there and then it was really a lecture where we sat in rows and really listened to it in a concentrated way. This year it was directly with tables that you sat on, which should then be used for playing. And they could have said that too, if they just said, hey, this will be an event If we could organize plays for you, where you can play as Bubble, and we have time for you to chat briefly about certain things, then that would be a different announcement. But I'm already with the expectation like last year. You sit there, you get what's presented, you can report on something, and now we can report that there is nothing to report.
Dirk:
Yes, so it goes on. There is the new set. The designers were there yesterday, you could play with them. Alex also had his Vader card signed. Alex played a lot and I think it was cool for them, but for the sake of reporting it wasn't that great.
Dennis:
Yes, I see exactly the same. Also a bit of an outlook for the next year and something like that, I somehow missed everything. It was just like, hey cool that you're there, everything was great and now you can play here.
Dirk:
Exactly, you can also celebrate sometimes, that's not a problem, but a little more information would have been cool too. Well, now we're on our way to the fair. We have one or the other exciting thing in store for you. There will probably be a longer vlog at the end of this episode. You can then be surprised what happens there. That's just in advance why the episode is so long. We'll do it like yesterday. We'll get in touch in between with the things we've discovered.
Dennis:
Exactly, keep in touch. We have promotions for you, so let us know if you see us.
Dirk:
Exactly.
Dennis:
And come to the Meet & Play tomorrow.
Dirk:
Yes, tomorrow is Meet & Play on Saturday. It will definitely be there from 2 p.m. in the Saal Europa.
Dennis:
Yes, that's important. It's completely sold out. If you've heard this episode and don't have a ticket yet, you probably won't get one either.
Dirk:
Yes, that's a shame. But you might have to say that. Did we say that yesterday? I don't know if I did, but you can say that again. I feel like it's not that overfilled. They've somehow covered it up now, apparently. And of course it was full. I mean, it's a big event that's sold out. Accordingly, it was full. But I never had the feeling that I was being pushed through the corridors.
Dennis:
There was a lot of complaining yesterday, which I have heard, which I find very ungrateful on a very high level, because I think it is super organized. I think the audience is great. Of course, it is full in hall 3, but it was already much fuller in hall 3. It was already a bit more uncomfortable in hall 3.
Dirk:
Yes, definitely. And they have changed the hall layout a bit again. Cosmos was still in hall 3 last year. And now they are no longer there. And that definitely felt like it pulled something out.
Dennis:
The only one slight point of criticism, and that is, they actually have to get it done, that the stands show their booth numbers properly.
Dirk:
Yes, that was a bit exhausting in between.
Dennis:
But yes, that's really easy peasy exhausting.
Dirk:
I thought it was nice that a lot of things that were noticed last year have been organized, it feels like they have been approached. Well, then yes, let's put a lid on it here first and we'll hear from you later. Ciao ciao. So, here we are again. Maybe a lot of hall, because we are in a big hall. We are standing in hall 8. Somewhere in the corner we pulled back a bit. Dennis, hello. And me. And we already had a very productive morning so far. We just met Olli again. Lars distributes flyers diligently at the fair. So if you see Lars running around, He collects a flyer, he probably also has chrono-full promos, otherwise we just stood at an OEM READ manufacturer for board game bags, that was kind of funny. They print everything on it, they come from China, the Hunter and Kron Bag probably comes from there too.
Dennis:
It looked very much like that, yes.
Dirk:
And they say, yes, yes, colleagues do that too and stuff. Yes. But the actual highlight for Dennis and me was this morning, we were at Leader Games, we had Matt Martens, the community and event manager of Leader Games, and maybe some of you are familiar with Space Gates Peace Turtles, our beloved Twilight Imperium podcast, an interview. We chatted for about an hour, then we were able to go back to the business lounge over Hall 3, because Leader Games is here, but not with its own stand, because he explained to us that it's not that easy to get all this stuff from the USA to Germany.
Dennis:
Exactly. For Gen Con and so on, they just had a huge stand with 18 tables, that you can play with, with a huge set-up and so on, and to bring the logistics over here is just a lot of effort. Then just having to stand around here somewhere in Europe, that doesn't help either. And then Matt also explained that he doesn't speak German, so to find people who can explain Arx in German, like the other Liedergames games, that's not easy and he can't do it and he can't do it. That's why they were looking for a partnership.
Dirk:
All About Games, which is not a publisher, but they offer these services and in Hall 3 there are many US publishers under the All About Games logo. They also have their logo there, but that's why there are also many other US publishers besides Leader Games. Renegade Studios is there, for example, or Don't Panic has opened things up there. Exactly. So, before we talk about it, we have the interview. You don't have to listen to it in English. It's at the end of this episode. There's a chapter mark. So, this episode is probably about two hours long, if you watch it on the clock. But don't worry, the first part is in German, the recap of the fair. And at the end is the interview with Matt Martens, where there are more details. We still want to briefly...
Dennis:
Everyone who is good at English, I recommend you to listen to it. Because you can just listen to the metal in a fantastic way and it's a lot of fun. I also listened to it all the time. So I encourage you, if you can speak a little bit of English, you should listen to it.
Dirk:
Otherwise I wouldn't hear it hanging in the background. That would be nonsense. Of course, it's definitely made for listening. We still want to give you a little recap, in case you don't feel like it or don't have time to listen to everything we've talked about. We have already explained the organisational aspect of it. ARX is in the delivery. The feedback has been great, we are very happy with it. It has already gone into the second print run. The retail stuff should be delivered soon. There was a strike on the east coast with the dock workers, so it delayed a bit. But otherwise it should be in the stores soon and the other presentations are all going out and coming. We asked what German translation is. It will come to Spielwerks. They are very satisfied with that. I personally also think that they have it as a partner. It's a very good partnership, said Matt, and that's exactly where it's going to be in about a year. He explained that for the other things too. They give the material to the translation free of charge as soon as they have transmitted their production data. Because until then, something can always change. And he also explained the translation of ... it's not translating, it's localizing. And especially from these leader games and ARCs and Root, where there are a lot of subtleties. And what's interesting is that they don't use keywords. And that's why it's just plain English, as he said. And that's not that easy.
Dennis:
But they have recognized that there is an issue and are working on it. They have told us that they want to set up a database where you can quickly find the cards.
Dirk:
Yes, there are already the cards. The leader card database is already there. Anyone who doesn't know and wants to look up how the cards work on any of the Leader Games games, will find the Leader Games page. So not only on ARK, but on all games that have the cards. And in the future it should be the wish that all the translations ...
Dennis:
Exactly, that's what I was about to say. It's really in all translations. And then you can go there as a player and compare how it's meant, how it's meant with the other card and is it similar, and help yourself. Because it's also a lot about, as Leader Games has told us, being able to help yourself, to be able to work your way in there and to have all the tools to do that. So that's very important for them.
Dirk:
Because they are not a giant store and how else should it work?
Dennis:
Yes exactly.
Dirk:
That's why it's so cool.
Dennis:
Exactly. And in the process they also plan to play a lot of inquiries and FAQs that they can then offer. And yes, he imagines that once a quarter, once a year, It's like a patch, an errata, where you know as a player that you can just wait until the errata comes and then it's updated again. Then most questions will probably be dealt with, because of course with these games, which of course also interact a lot, the answer comes, yes, we think so and so. And sometimes you can't even tell whether that leads to another special case. And that's why they collect it together and then hand it out together. That's the idea, that it's also an editorial-accompanied answer. And not just you send a question and get one answer back. But yes, great question, we take it up and then it comes.
Dirk:
Yes, otherwise, what else can be said about ARX? It's exciting in any case. It's a very competitive game, if you like. And competitive games invite you to tournaments.
Dennis:
Yes, yes, yes.
Dirk:
And that's what they're doing now. There will also be online tournaments. But there will be mainly local, in-person tournaments. And even if you now have a board game store, where you say, hey, that would be cool if it was offered to us, go to Leader Games, write to Matt, say a nice greeting and then they send the stuff over and try to support that, that this can happen.
Dennis:
Exactly. And so that your board game stores are not alone, They also provide a framework, but that doesn't have to be kept in mind, it's just a guideline, a best practice, how to set up such a tournament, for what scalability, what you have to pay attention to, they also want to deliver that.
Dirk:
Exactly, because they didn't have that with Root, for example, it came very much from the community and there they also learn how to give it more as a publisher side, if you want to carry out a tournament, how they can imagine it.
Dennis:
Exactly, but also very important, not necessarily, but hey, here are tips for you, how you can do it and if you want to do it differently, give us feedback, how it went.
Dirk:
Exactly, but I don't think it's a compulsion to understand, but performing a tournament is not that easy, especially with something like this, how it can go down, so it's pretty cool. Yes, what else did we ask? Then of course we talked briefly about the other titles, so what does that mean briefly? We talked for an hour. Things got longer. The Oath Kickstarter campaign has now been completed. It's in the hot development phase, crazy things are happening. It will also come to Spielworks, but the Oath release is at the end of 2025, beginning of 2026. Currently planned in English that it will be delivered and then Spielworks in English. Yes, later. I thought it was cool that the Kickstarter went very well, that it is still a very active community, that there are people who are really looking forward to it.
Dennis:
Yes, they are even pushing it further. He also said very briefly that it will be the role-playing aspect in the expansion and this feeling into your own faction a little more. That's the plan. And yes, that the Kickstarter was so successful was the order for Coal. The mission is to not only do what we promised, but to give full throttle.
Dirk:
Root will get an expansion. That sounded super exciting. What is planned there are two new factions, two new maps. One map that supports the six-player mode more strongly, so that it is not as cozy on the map. I'm curious what that is. That's still a bit in the future. Currently, the Ahoy expansion is going into production. Yes, exactly, he said it's going into production. It's a game that I didn't have on the list at all. I know that it exists, but I've never played it. But it looked pretty cool. And maybe with the expansion, because that sounded very exciting, I'll have to look at it again.
Dennis:
Exactly. I'll be waiting for the expansion and then think about whether I'll get it in English or German. Should be possible.
Dirk:
Of course, we'll also come to Spielbergs. Exactly.
Dennis:
And what he then said sounded exciting, how this movement puzzle is then understood. Even though it's a smaller game, also for Leader Games, it still has this, I have to pay attention to what my fellow players are doing so that I can react to it and can plan ahead or be ahead before they do their strong actions. And that's obviously what can happen there.
Dirk:
Yes, otherwise you just have to listen to the interview for the further details. What was also interesting was that Leader Games doesn't make exclusives. Somehow you know that, but it was interesting to hear that they just don't make Kickstarter exclusives. You can always do everything they do, as long as they are in stock, you can still get them. And after the interview we chatted a little bit more on the way back to the stand. And then again found out, even if leader games all have such a similar spirit, even if they are made by different people and a large part of this spirit is just, The artwork by Kyle Farren, which is so cool and no matter how crazy the topic is, they are so small, sweet people and in the end it's just a game and that helps a lot with these games.
Dennis:
Yes, overall it was a super nice appointment. He also gave a little insight into the Gen Con and how he was with it compared to food. Also very exciting.
Dirk:
Definitely, because most people only tell the Germans, oh it's completely different, a lot more soccer experience and so on. Yes, he definitely saw it differently. Just listen to what he says. Exactly.
Dennis:
And you just notice it. And I think that's a second hand thing, because I only experience the products. But you just notice that this team is very well curated, as I think. They fit together very well. Cole and Josh say that Josh is a new designer who also works on the route expansion. They have a lot of energy that they bring in and very different approaches, but a lot of energy that they bring into this team. And you just notice that they have a pleasure in working on the things. We love these games and you can tell from the games.
Dirk:
Well, that was our personal highlight for the whole trade fair. There will be some cool stuff coming up. Of course, the Meet & Play is coming up tomorrow. We're looking forward to it. We haven't said that yet, but there won't be a big tournament this time. We'll bring some small things to play with, nothing too big. I have Netrunner with me if someone wants to play with me. We'll definitely have Star Wars Unlimited with us if someone wants to play. And hasn't done that yet. Otherwise, a few other nice little things. Olli just went to the Ravensburger Lunch and Play, where he will be able to tell some nice things. After that there will be a Cosmos date with Beeple. We'll hear what else has come up. Exactly.
Dennis:
I'm just happy today. We've also met a few people. They gave me some tips. I will now take a look at some smaller games and maybe tell you about them tomorrow, whether I've taken them with me or not. Exactly. And now the fun part really begins. And now we really.
Dirk:
Have to break off for a moment, because over there is Pile of Happiness. We have to say hello now.
Dennis:
Exactly.
Dirk:
See you. Ciao, ciao.
Dennis:
Hello.
Dirk:
Yes, hello, dear listeners. We are back. After we haven't heard from each other for a long time, we are still stifled over the fair. And we are now at Olli's at the Feuerchen. That's brusseling for the little barbecue evening we're doing today. Olli, how are you? What else have you seen?
Olli:
Good, good. I was at a few or an event. Was it mainly about food? No, nonsense. In Ravensburg they always do the lunch and play. They talk a little bit about Lorkana. In contrast to the Star Wars event yesterday, there were also a few specific numbers. But I don't really know them, because I don't know much about the Lorkana theme. But they said, how did the Organized Play develop and so on. And what was very interesting, they are now probably doing regional. There is a European tournament in North America, then in Disneyland Paris and somewhere in the USA in Disneyland and then there will be a world championship and the winner will get a unique card, a golden Mickey Mouse card, which is only available once. And they said everything is going great. I'm not in Lokana at all.
Dirk:
Yes, but at least you got a little bit of an idea of how the tournament scene is going. What else was there that you presented? Stefan Feld was on site.
Olli:
Stefan Feld, exactly. Next year the next Feldbrecher will come out at Ravensburger. Strangely enough, they are also going into the expert area now. And it's called the Sandburgs of Burgund. That's not a joke. They're making a children's version of Burgund. Stefan Feldt and his wife, now don't lie to me, I think her name is Susanne Feldt, worked together. And they had two prototypes. That looked really funny. We only heard a little bit about the rule explanation, but then everyone wanted to be on the table. And that's why I couldn't try it out. But I think that's pretty cool. He said on stage that Ravensburger would be interested in a children's game, if he would be willing to do it. But then he said, hey, I just did Evolution and that would be a great reference.
Dirk:
Then a children's game would be hidden somewhere in that thing. Okay, cool. Anything else exciting about Ravensburger?
Olli:
Yes, there is the overall lineup. There was nothing so mega ...
Dirk:
In the family area quite a lot.
Olli:
Yes, but also there, I don't know, they are now bringing a Lotti-Karotti-Einhorn version, then they have many of their old ones, they are now 50 years old, this blue triangle, there is then somehow a new Labyrinth version and nothing so mega, the only thing that I find interesting is this Horrified, there is now somehow a new version, I think I'll take a closer look at that, I don't know, the first version was at least at the beginning, it was somehow only USA exclusive actually.
Dirk:
Yes, I don't know exactly.
Olli:
I've already given you the name. Okay, yes.
Dirk:
But I'm not really interested in it. I don't know what it's about. But I definitely heard there should be a second one.
Olli:
Exactly. Yes, and from there I'm directly to Cosmos. We had an appointment with Beeple. We looked at the news there a little bit. And there is such an interesting thing or rather there are two titles, Medical Mysteries or something like that.
Dirk:
Yes, I've heard of that.
Olli:
Yes, yes. That's kind of like Dr. House, where you get to read a patient's file and then have to look at which medication he gets and he can die and whatever. But yes, a bit of a crime game, exit game-like, but with this medical topic. That sounded very interesting somehow.
Dirk:
Interesting, but something completely different.
Olli:
And the usual suspects, like Far Away, which I think everyone knows by now. What I also have on my list is this Battle Royale that they have, a children's game, that looks really cool.
Dirk:
You play that in the box, right?
Olli:
Yes, it's kind of a plastic structure where you can knock on it and the others throw it away. That looked very interesting. Then they have this new family series, which is the transition from children to family games. Is the crew in there? The crew family is in there and then there is also this adventure game that the Crown has written. That's also Adventure Games Family and then there is a family version, which is still very well known. That should be a new series.
Dirk:
Yes, exciting. Okay, so there are also other cool things collected, other information. Were you still there somewhere or was that an appointment?
Olli:
Then I was still at Skellig. There I found the big year market the most interesting. That looked pretty cool. Then of course the Necrony was also there, but I think everyone knows that. But it's just the German version now. There are probably all kinds of extensions and such. Only the big box they have, they don't exist there.
Dirk:
Okay, that's probably language neutral.
Olli:
Isn't it? And then I will be at the end, but I would hand it over to Dennis. We are still at IceMax.
Dirk:
Ah, very nice. At IceMax, which is currently starting with Terrorscape, such a huge thing. What else is exciting? Exactly.
Olli:
Zoe told us that at IceMax they will do the second season of Terrorscape. Okay. More rooms, more investigators. I've never played Terrorscape before, but it's all going to be me.
Dirk:
Okay.
Olli:
And they will change the topic. It's going to be a sci-fi game. So you get sci-fi horror as a Terrorscape. And it seems to be really successful. Again, all tables were occupied when we were there. It was now Friday evening at half past five. And then we also introduced the new game from them. It's called Skirmishes.
Dirk:
Is that a skirmish?
Olli:
That's a card skirmish. Where you play units and play against the opponent with the attackers. Against the opponent is for two to four players and you can just play a duel game for two, for four you play as a team and for three you play as three against each other and then you have to look a bit so that you can take the points and the next ones away from each other. It's a completely different game for them, so I think it's really cool with IceMax that they really build up a very different line-up and then dare to do something. Very We took a very special illustration, we were very proud of it, we took an artist who was not yet active in the board game field, who put a lot of heart into it. Very, very unique, recognizable style. So you can take a look at that. The prototypes they have are there. It's already very far away.
Dirk:
They are also in Hall 3, right?
Olli:
Exactly, they are also in Hall 3 and for the first time, I think, not on Kickstarter, but they will hopefully publish it in Essen next year, without making a Kickstarter beforehand.
Dirk:
Okay, no phobic action or anything like that?
Olli:
We don't know that yet, we haven't said that yet.
Dirk:
To clarify a little what you have to bring with you.
Olli:
Exactly, but I think it's cool that they do it like that and don't do it on the Kickstarter as a pre-order. We are sure that it will come and we have prototypes there and then we will also bring it out. And we can now also afford it.
Dirk:
Yes exactly, that would be cool.
Olli:
Exactly, and then we were still at SpielDAS with Robert and we had Nebelwind there.
Dirk:
Yes exactly, at that time you were waiting for a very large box.
Olli:
Exactly, my goal was actually not a large box.
Dirk:
Exactly, and then a foggy wind comes in.
Olli:
Exactly, then a foggy wind comes in. And yes, it's a networking game. The premise is that the world in which it plays is hidden in the fog and only the peaks go out. And you just build on these mountain tops, you just build harvests and then you have to connect certain points with each other, then you get points. You have such large whales that fly there, they can also transport resources. That can happen in your network, then it happens for free. If you move that somewhere else in a whale, you have to spend krill for it. And that krill. Krill.
Dirk:
Krill. So that the whales have something good. Yes, exactly.
Olli:
And there is only very little of it, very difficult to get. So you have to make sure that you're building your network well. And the most exciting thing about the game is that you have an action selection mechanism with poker chips from 1 to 5. And at the beginning of the round you decide to put one of them away. As far as I understand it, the height has no say in the quality of the action you do, but there are four bars and there are also one to five actions on it.
Dirk:
That's just the kind of action you do.
Olli:
That's the kind of action you do. You start with one and you play up to four, then you play up to five and you even play two and then you have to decide which lane you want to go to. And if someone is already there and you've already thought about it, you can't go there. You have to go somewhere else. And I think that's very exciting to do that. Cool.
Dirk:
Exactly.
Olli:
And yes, that's one to five games. And with a time of, Robert said, four and a half hours. At five, he estimates about two hours. And then I thought, fits exactly into our group. And then I just took it. And it looks very valuable from the material. Robert also told a little bit about it.
Dirk:
Now I'm going to ask the next question, because it's definitely by far the most complex game.
Olli:
No, it's not the most complex game. It's the biggest game. The most complex one, he says, is Robo Rally.
Dirk:
Roborelly.
Olli:
No, not Roborelly. Olli, what's the name of the robot game again? Roborelly, Roboclash? Roborelly? No, that's not Roborelly. That's kind of an expert thing. Robo... I'll do it right away. A lot of professionals are working here. Exactly. There's a whole bunch of content creators around and nobody knows what the game is called. And he said that's the most complex thing they have. And Nebelwind is, he would say, more in the basement area.
Dirk:
But of course a very large box and also an expert price tag.
Olli:
That's definitely a commitment. I think, as he said, it's going really well, it's really selling well.
Dirk:
Yes, okay, that's nice.
Olli:
And that's what other games that went really well last year are for, such as... Raising Robots. Raising Robots, and the other one that was shot last year... That was With a Smile and a Gun. Yes, exactly. And that was sold out so quickly last year and no one is interested in it this year. No one wants to play either. So it's totally crazy and it's really very unique how it spreads like that and yes, Yes, and that's what makes it all so funny, that it's going so weird, but Nebelwind is doing well and the Ninja game is doing well with them and he's very satisfied with it. He said he's stressed out all the time because he's selling all the time and then he also shot the game of the day's closing video. We just went when Robert had to go to him.
Dirk:
That's of course cool for Robert.
Olli:
Yes, yes, we're very happy.
Dirk:
Well, anything else exciting in between?
Olli:
I was there with Basti, my confidant, and then we walked around and looked at Space Mission. He also took part in it. It's a game where you have to do missions, like space missions, where you have to fulfill missions and so on. It's an independent publisher, it's the first game I've seen of them. It looked a bit old-fashioned from the material, but Basti said it would be really cool. I'll ask him if he plays it. He'll play it solo. How well it works, he took that with him. I said to him, hey, I'm not sure what to take with me. I said, think about it, if you want to spend the money somewhere, there is at least an independent publishing house. And in the worst case, you have a cool coreosum in the shelf. That's pretty cool. For the price and for the material it was 60 euros, it was totally okay.
Dirk:
Okay, cool. Yes. Anything else interesting?
Olli:
No, no, no. I only have a few things where I have adjusted myself. I took a few smaller titles with me. We talked about Duck and Cover yesterday. Overall, you have to say, even today again, yes, it was full in Hall 3, but it wasn't overflowing and it was really cool.
Dirk:
I also have the feeling you have it under control. I'm excited to see how it will be tomorrow. On Saturday is traditionally the full day, but that's the meet and play, you can withdraw here. Exactly, if there's nothing else, I haven't seen anything exciting.
Olli:
No, exactly. Have fun for everyone who is still on it and now listen to the interview with Matt.
Dirk:
Exactly, have fun with it and then we'll hear from each other again tomorrow on MEET&PLAY.
Olli:
Exactly, see you then, bye. That's it again with The Board Game Theory. Thanks for watching.
Dirk:
Okay, here we are again with our long-awaited interview. I'll start in German and then we'll switch to English. There will be a German recap later, but from now on it will be in English. So I just started greeting everyone in German. But I'm here with Matt Martens from Leader Games. Hi, Matt.
Matt:
Hi, how are you doing?
Dirk:
I'm fine. How are you? Good, good. Yeah, it's right early in the morning. We got a space in your business launch.
Matt:
Oh, yeah, my business launch. Very good.
Dirk:
Your very own one. I'm prestigious now. Yeah, you told us a little bit about it. It's your partner. You're doing the European.
Matt:
Yeah, when we do our European conventions, it's like essentially in America, we have one set of booth supplies that we ship around the country. And in order to do anything in Europe, it's just not an option. So we end up having to use partners. So for UK Games Expo and Essen this year, we've been all about games consulting and using a big part of their booth space. They essentially have a big booth with demos. And so we've been able to run like eight ARCs demo tables in their space, and then a full retail space. So it takes a huge amount of the burden off of us. And me and a small number of our team can come and just do the meetings we have to do, rather than having to try and send 16 staff members overseas.
Dirk:
So the demos, everything is run by All About Games. That's right.
Matt:
Yeah, yeah. And especially my new job here at Leader leader is event coordinating, and the scariest idea to me would be having to find and make connections in Germany with people that can teach ARCs in German. I am not even slightly equipped to be able to do that, but they have teams of people here and so they know how to get... Volunteers or mentors that can teach the game well and answer questions, especially since we, you know, there's not an official German language version yet, so it's people who are having to do sort of double duty in that regard.
Dirk:
Yeah, about the German version, I think we will talk about it a little bit later, yeah. But first, how was your trip to Germany? It's your first time?
Matt:
It is! My first time to Germany at all, my second time to Europe, and my first time to Essen, obviously. And it was good. Our flight on the way over here, the little TV screens completely didn't work at all, which was maybe frustrating for a lot of people. But for me, it was like, okay, my only option is to sleep then. I must catch up on the sleep. I did okay. I had a crazy, this is super off topic. I had like, I think my blood pressure dropped. I almost passed out on the plane, which has never happened to me. Super weird. So I say I had a good trip over, but actually it's the worst flight I've ever been on. But oh well. But here you are.
Dirk:
So everything worked out. Here I am.
Matt:
We made it.
Dirk:
And how do you like it at Spears? It's great.
Matt:
It is quite a different layout from other conventions. There's five separate halls of actual activity going on, and so it's kind of a nice structure where you get into Gen Con and it's just this massive behemoth of one huge open room where everything is, and it's kind of a nightmare. mayor. Okay. And everything being broken up felt like parsable and like, okay, I'm just going to do this little section for now. And then we'll take a break and then we'll go do, you know, whatever. And, and I've, I've liked it. Obviously I, I don't know any German. I'm useless. I did no homework because I wasn't even sure I was going on this trip.
Dirk:
Until maybe a couple months.
Matt:
Ago. And so that part has been, maybe my only difficulty is just like, Oh, don't know how to read any of the signs, gotta figure out how to get around anyways. But luckily I am very happy to just sort of, mess around and fall all over the place and just make mistakes until I end up in the right space.
Dirk:
So not too stressful. Most of the people here in Germany are equipped to answer these questions.
Matt:
Yeah, exactly. Anyone I needed to ask, they've either been able to point me in the right direction or help me out.
Dirk:
And yeah, compared to GenCon, that would be very interesting for us because I've never been to GenCon before. It's quite a trip just to go visiting there. What's the key differences?
Matt:
Yeah, everyone describes Essen in comparison to Gen Con as a very, like, sales-oriented show. But also within that, like, the demo culture is, I would say, pretty different here. So the idea that every booth has, like, a few tables and, like, you come up, you run, you know, maybe a full demo or whatever or a truncated version. But that that's like you know you you are almost expected to like sit and play for a minute before you go buying anything okay booth whereas at Gen Con a lot of the boot there's some booths with demos but a lot of them it's it's kind of just the retail space okay and then Gen Con has more like exterior rooms so when when we booth at Gen Con now we have like a 30 foot by 60 foot if that I I don't know meters, but it's a decent-sized little side room, and we run all of our demos out of that. So it's like a secluded space that's just our own.
Matt:
Well, but it's not out in the middle of all the exhibit hall. It's like a quarantined-off room that just has our stuff in it. So that was kind of like a second retail space for us and a larger demo space. We were running like 18 games of ARX every two hours. And so that's like our bigger thing. and then our booth was on a smaller scale and just a retail space, no demo space at all. So here we kind of take the two things and put them together, cram them into one space and yeah, have the eight tables. So there's definitely, I felt like more like.
Matt:
Desire to walk through the exhibit hall and just sort of like stop at every little demo table along the way whereas you might you Kind of schedule everything at Gen Con. Everything is like a ticketed admission Okay.
Dirk:
So if you.
Matt:
Want to do a demo you have to have ordered that ticket back in March Or whatever and even if they're free It's like you got to get yourself on the list to go be a part of all these things So you have to like you have to go to Gen Con with a plan in place. And SN, it feels like you can like, oh, what's this? Let me sit down.
Dirk:
Let me try out the demo.
Matt:
Let me see what's going on.
Dirk:
More like exploring. Exactly. And speaking of exploring, did you have the time to explore any of the games here?
Matt:
We wandered around a little bit. I haven't done the deep dive to try to buy anything. I was walking around with Cole Worley yesterday, and he's of course like a freak about games, and he knows every game that's ever existed, and it's all just in this memory bank that he stashes in the back of his brain. And And he was pulling out, like, he was just finding these. He said he found this one game he's been looking for for a decade.
Dirk:
Okay.
Matt:
And you can only get for, like, $200 online. And he found it in a random used shop here for 30 euros. And he was like, my dreams have come true.
Dirk:
Okay.
Matt:
There's all sorts of cool novelty finds. But, yeah, I mean, we wandered around. I have, like, a list of games from people back at the office.
Dirk:
That I have to, like, you know.
Matt:
We're trying to get for everybody. I'm, you know, kind of an idiot, and I only play, like, three board games.
Dirk:
Period.
Matt:
And so I always get overwhelmed a little bit at the big conventions because it's just like, It's easy for me to forget there's 14 million board games that get released every year. There's just so many new things. And so it's always like a shock to my.
Dirk:
System to look.
Matt:
Around and be like, oh my gosh, I don't even know where to start. Is this Twilight Imperium? No, I don't know what to do with myself then.
Dirk:
Oh no. Yeah, I see, I see. Yeah, it's quite a lot at Speed, especially at Speed. All the small and large releases and everything. You can see games from all over the world. It's quite overwhelming, yeah, definitely. So what was on the list for your friends at the office?
Matt:
Yeah, there's the, So there's like a follow-up to Onerim, and I don't remember the name of it, but Patrick, leader at work, was very desperate to have me meet the designer and find out. I haven't done it yet. That's on my task list for today, is to go get this follow-up to Onerim. And then Brooke, who is kind of like one of my marketing associates at Leader, is basically just a feverish collector of tiny, cute little box games. And I don't know if she plays any of them almost ever, but she just has a shelf full of hundreds of tiny little games. And so she had like a big list of stuff like Oink Games and.
Dirk:
Different companies like that.
Matt:
All the little things.
Dirk:
Yeah, okay, great. So yeah, back to Leader Games and ARX maybe to start with. ARX has been delivered to the backers quite recently, even in Europe. So Dennis and I already got our copies. We played some games already, great fun. But yeah, from your point of view, from Leader Games, how was the reception of the game so far?
Matt:
I mean, it's been incredible. I mean, the feelings around the office are we haven't seen something like this since the launch of. Like, you know, Oath had its own kind of review storm and fever pitch and everything. But it's also such an experimental, odd title that, you know, it had a great peak and still does well. But Root is just different. Root is on this higher tier and Arx feels like it's building up to something similar. So we're, you know, very, very excited about the response rate and everything. thing.
Matt:
The pre-orders have been shipping out. There's been all sorts of fun, weird interruptions to our ability to get stuff to people. There was a dock strike along the entire eastern coast of America that just ended today, which is hilarious. So the pre-orders have been going out, and we're expecting it to actually start hitting retail spaces within the month. So there's been all these little delays, but Europe and America should both start seeing it in actual storefronts, like hopefully soon the only delays were getting we had actually already ordered a second printing like as when we did the first printing just to like get it out to to backers yeah and we immediately ordered a second printing just so that we could have enough to like have a huge retail release yeah it's a it's a great sign we we kind of trusted in the initial wave of success and and just said let's get let's get enough so that we don't have to do any sort of like allocating okay For at least most regions at launch or whatever, we were afraid of that thing where it's released, but then it's immediately gone from all retail speakers for months or whatever. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't feel good. So we're happy that that's going to actually start getting out to everybody. And yeah, I mean, reviews have been excellent. People really tap into it. I think the biggest question mark we had was similar to Oath.
Matt:
There's an expansion to ARX that's called the Blighted Reach expansion, and it's almost twice as expensive as the base game, which is a shock to a lot of people's systems, and it's this very experimental thing. And that's been the big question mark. It's like, are people going to...
Matt:
This thing is what we're trying to do and as far as i've seen you know the reviews all all kind of understand what what the theory behind the thing is and are really really getting into it yeah yeah.
Dirk:
Do you think it was in hindsight a good idea to split it up and.
Matt:
I think so well and especially i was just talking to someone yesterday who had done a demo and they were thrilled about the idea that it was split up because the way they put it to me was it's it's just nice to be onboarded so well and if the whole game had been released as the one huge, you know, 150 euro thing, I think people just would have bounced off of it, which is a little bit what happens with Oath. Oath is very daunting to people and they just kind of go, ah, my group's not going to do this. And Arx at the base level goes simpler to teach than even Root. I mean, even Root people are like, well, I have to learn what the Marquise the Cat is doing, what the Eerie is doing, and to play one game, I kind of have to learn four games or whatever and so to to discover throughout development that there was this core system That could work completely independently.
Matt:
Was like the best way to find like an actual onboarding presence to it, and I think you know hopefully You know from my standpoint like I love the blighted reach stuff. That's like one.
Matt:
Jazzes me up the most and the idea that there's an on-ramp that there's a way people can find their way to that rather than like try this was it way too much well too bad that's the only way to get no no i'm sorry i get yeah exactly i can have these stepping stones instead and there's there's even like a triple triple trickle effect because you can you know you do you do base arcs with like no asymmetry at all like it's everyone's just doing the same thing and you like we have found that to be an extremely rewarding teach. And even then, there's little funny hiccups that happen. The hardest part of the game is, and I've seen this in so many demos, so in the game you have to declare ambitions. And this is how you put objectives and victory points on the board. And what's so funny about someone playing the game for the first time is they're really nervous to declare an ambition because the logic is, you know, I don't know if I'll be able to win this ambition, so I don't want to just put points on the table. But then they'll finish a chapter and they'll say, I don't, I just don't really know what I'm doing. I'm not sure what, well, you didn't, you didn't put any victory points on the table. You kind of have to just swing for the, make some mistakes, fall off the bicycle a couple of times and then you'll figure out where to go from there. And then you can start introducing bits of asymmetry. There's the leaders and lore stuff that like, like trickles in little bits of, of, of flavor and, and asymmetry into the mix without being, I think, overbearing. And it's a good kind of guiding light to the Blighted Reef stuff that excites.
Dirk:
Me the most. Yeah, yeah, this is my experience, or my perception as well. So I teach to three groups now, and yeah, I would totally agree, it's super simple to teach, far more easier to teach in Root. It's very difficult to teach Root and get the people into it, and get the dynamics right, and not overwhelm with experienced players. It's much simpler with ARCs, I think, and it's, yeah. Then the people are asking, okay, do I need the expansion? Because a lot of our bubble are talking about, I need all the expansions right from the get-go. And I always tell them, no, no, it's different this time. Just play with the base game and you will have a ton of fun with it. It's no problem. You never have to buy the expansion at all if you don't want. But if you're really hooked into it, there's a next step to it. So that's what I see as well. It's good to hear that's working out.
Matt:
And I think what is also exciting within that is there was this, you know the the the big expansion is this like thematic you know huge thing but it kind of i mean i of course i like i play twilight imperium i like big stupid games yeah we we treat overly strategic or whatever when it's actually mostly about theme and the the big arc stuff is like that but the the fact that there is this actually like deeply competitive game yeah within just the base game is what kind of really excites me. We've seen like online a ton of response to like desires to get ARK's tournaments going. And you're not going to see very many ARK's Blighted Reach tournaments.
Dirk:
No, I don't think so, yeah.
Matt:
Because that's such a big thing. But the small base game version is actually getting a lot of that kind of traction. And I like that it is a game that gets to cater to both audiences. This is going to become this like hyper-competitive scene that can, you know, blitz through games of, you know, 90-minute sessions or whatever, but then also that thematic crowd has something else they can add into their set. But, I mean, yeah, all you have to do, you could buy base arcs and only ever buy that and have a huge thriving competitive scene to tap into.
Dirk:
And with the leaders in lore cards, there's a lot of asymmetry to add, so much variety. You have to play a lot of games before you've seen everything, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, you already mentioned the competitive scene. So what are the plans? So I know you already started talking about it, putting up a tournament. What are the plans from Leader Games? I know they are running root tournaments at Woodland Wizards. So what are your plans with that?
Matt:
Part of my new title at Leader is event coordinator, and that includes, like we talked about, convention-present stuff. But I also just obviously have a passion for tournaments, for competitive teams and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. I like the complicated, weird tournaments. and we want to see more in-person stuff, too. And so there's been a push from us to just like, what can we do to better facilitate, you know, localized tournaments and maybe is there a way to get those localized tournaments to feed into something larger? We don't, you know, I don't have anything in place yet, but we've been looking at, I was talking with.
Matt:
A friend of the studio at Gen Con, and he was going off on the Tekken fighting tournament scene, the fighting game tournament scene, and the structure of it and how different size tournaments can net you a certain number of points that lead into some bigger event. And I'm not turned off by that idea. I like the idea that we could start to get more things out there. Basically, Brooke and I get emails all the time from board game stores or whatever hosting tournaments. And if you're out there and you are looking to host a thing, seriously email us. We'll send you a couple copies of the game to help run the tournament or we'll do whatever we can. We want to try to get more things facilitated and more things going so that we can build a better network of this stuff and hopefully have it feel like more of a process. One of my goals is to actually get an outline of here's how Leader Games thinks you should run an ARX tournament. And here's kind of you know rather than a tournament organizer having to take all that logistical burden on themselves We can kind of provide like here's a framework of, Depending on how many players you expect what we think your tournament should look like and what kind of prize support we can offer And all of that so.
Dirk:
You're now taking this into your own hands rather than offloading it to the to the community come.
Matt:
Up That's kind of the goal. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that leader games will, Specifically host our own Yeah.
Dirk:
Of course, but you're providing a structure.
Matt:
But we're trying to provide that structure. I think I do have the goal of at next year's Gen Con having a larger scale ARX tournament from our frame, you know, of our own doing. But also if someone is trying to host an ARX tournament at Gen Con, we might just find a way to support them as much as possible. There's a lot of, in all of my, you know, kind of community organization and stuff, I really believe in giving as much power to people to make the thing what they want. You know your audience better than I do. So as much as I can give you a framework, that's great. But if you know what your audience likes, I just need to do whatever I can to facilitate that. And so I definitely like just trying to lend as much support as possible to community efforts. And I think Leader Games really prides itself on trying to be a sort of community-oriented. Our development process, we put everything out there. We showed every step of the way.
Dirk:
Which was really great. It's great to follow along and understand Colt's design process and the thinking behind it. It was so much fun to read and get you really into the game and understand aspects of the game much better.
Matt:
Absolutely. And it just keeps our fans from feeling like, I think, consumers. We don't view them as just the people that buy our products. It's like, no, this is our community. These are the people. we make games that we want people to play over and over and over forever and ever. Like we are not about the churn and burn. We will take three years to make a game if it takes three years to make a game because we want it to last on your shelf.
Dirk:
Okay, yeah, I understand. Yeah, that's nice to hear. But there was mainly local tournaments. In presence tournaments, you're talking now, you want to support local groups. What about online tournaments? Of course. That's planned as well?
Matt:
Yeah, there's definitely a plan to keep facilitating online stuff. There's, you know, you can play ARKs on Tabletop Playground and Tabletop Simulator right now. We don't have anything else kind of like specifically, you know, completed or whatever yet. But, you know, we would love to see the online community grow for ARKs and we'll absolutely be able to support in the same way, you know, whether it be some sort of like just prize support. It gets a little bit trickier when it's online tournaments because people can be from anywhere playing it and it's not as easy as just like, let me ship four copies to this tournament organizer. And so we have to do a couple of extra hurdles, but as long as we can work out like a prize support, it usually ends up being like, What we can do is offer you a bunch of store credit passes on our website and then you're able to buy leader products. What is, I think, annoying from our perspective is, I say annoying, but it's a hilarious problem to have, our fans usually own everything that we make.
Dirk:
Yeah, yeah.
Matt:
You know, if you love Root, you probably have all of Root. So then what am I supposed to give for you?
Dirk:
Yeah, what do I give you?
Matt:
So sometimes in the past, you know, it's been like trying to develop more like shirts and hats and whatever else. But even that we haven't had as much of recently. And so there's that question always of like, what do you get the Root fan who has everything? What do you get the Arcs fan who already has all of Arcs? And so I think that's the bigger question we're trying to find some sort of answer to. And we don't really have it yet, but just trying to get more people interested in our other product lines is one thing. But I'd love to be able to have more than that. Something that, without it ever being... We essentially have a company policy of no exclusive things. We don't do a Kickstarter exclusive. We never do a show-only release.
Dirk:
Yeah, you always get the Kickstarter stuff later on.
Matt:
If we've released it, you will be able to buy it forever online, as long as we have printings available, you will be able to get everything we've ever put out into the world. And so that makes reward structures difficult for us.
Dirk:
We've got to step on our own toes. Okay, yeah, so there's something to look out for, and as you said, if anyone out there in Germany wants to run ARK tournaments...
Matt:
Yeah, please, email me, matt at leadergames.com, and I will do everything I can to help these tournament dreams come true. We want to see them.
Dirk:
Great, great. So, before we go to other ARCs line-up, leader games line-up, something about Behind the Curtains, you know anything about the Async ARCs experiment going on?
Matt:
Yeah, I wish I had more information. All I know is from community efforts, I know there are people working on like a Discord bot for Async ARCs. I'm feverishly waiting to hear more about it. I'm desperate to know, but I haven't seen any specific updates yet. So yeah, I mean, unfortunately, no news quite yet. Hopefully within like six months or something, we'll have kind of more information about whatever else is possible within ARX. But yeah, it's still a little early for more information yet. Yeah, unfortunately.
Dirk:
I was quite excited when I thought that Community Plays TI is trying to go down. I know, exactly.
Matt:
Doing an ARX version. It was a very cool project that was undergoing. Going shout out to my good buddy Wecker who does community plays TI and ran the first community plays arcs game which if you don't know is where essentially, 18 people can all pilot one faction or one presence and you all sort of work together through Discord to decide what actions you want to take on the board and you play against another team of however many people piloting one thing. And it's nonsense and you should not do it if you're a filthy tryhard. If you're trying to win, it is horrible, stupid things happen in those games and it's hilarious.
Dirk:
Yeah, but it's a fun experience. It's fun. It's so fun.
Matt:
So it's a great way to play stupid arcs.
Dirk:
Yeah, definitely, definitely. So to finish up the arcs, topic. How about the plans to put a German copy out?
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely. We were, luckily, we have a wonderful partnership with Spielwerks, and we have...
Dirk:
Yeah, it's a great partner. From Aalp in Germany, it's a great partner. You did a great choice.
Matt:
Uli is the absolute best, the coolest guy ever, and they have always just done amazing work. They, here at Essen, they've actually had a kind of a demo sample copy of their German translation, and we expect it to be available by next Essen. So we are always roughly a year out from our release is when some of our bigger translations, you know, German and French and a few others. So ideally within about a year, we should see those fully translated in German.
Dirk:
And ARC is a lot of text, a lot of nitty-gritty details about rules. And were you involved in the translation process? How much effort was put into it? How difficult was it back and forth with you guys?
Matt:
It is a lot, and it takes a lot of work to obviously, I mean, as you know, translating a game is so much more than translating, it's localizing, and I mean, luckily, well, actually, maybe this isn't lucky, one thing Leader Games never does is have, like, proper nouns. It's never, there's never, like, some mythical place that we've made up. Everything is more generalized terms, but then that also means sometimes those generalized terms, have an equivalent in German. And so then there's just so much work that has to go into figuring out how to actually properly localize those things. I will say an effort, Josh Yearsley, who is our rules editor and is the designer for the upcoming Root expansion, an effort we've been really trying to put work into is we now have a card database online for all of our games.
Dirk:
Yeah, that's great.
Matt:
Card.leadergames.com. And one of the goals from it, we were putting an early call out to the community of like, what would you want to see in this card debate card database and i'll i'll first roast the community a little bit a lot of people put in a lot of ideas that are like well that's a whole lot of work for almost no reward there's so little to be earned out of a lot of suggestions it's actually all fine we love every idea but some of them are like you don't understand that would take hours upon hours and then four people would ever use it but the one suggestion we saw over and over that is like becoming my My passion project is to get all of the translations in there because to be able to hot swap a card, like at the click of a button to be able to cycle through all of the various translations of one particular card, if you do have some sort of rules question in German, because perhaps the localization is just like not quite making the original English intent clear, this happens, right? If you can hot swap between multiple other languages and check against all of the other work that's been done, you can kind of discern your own answer. And I think that is such a better way to give fans of the games the tools themselves to be able to answer these rules questions. I know it's so hard in other languages to get these rules questions answered because obviously myself and Josh have no ability to support those things.
Matt:
And even when we partner with someone like Spielwerks, they're amazing, but it's not like they can always stick with one game forever ever and be iterating all these rules. They're not rules editors, they're our localization partner. It takes extra effort on our part to put in as many tools as we can so that people can find answers to their questions.
Dirk:
And it's hard for me in German to formulate my question. I have a game in German, in English, send it to you.
Matt:
Exactly.
Dirk:
You have to figure out what I meant.
Matt:
It's so many, you know, weird hoops you have to jump through. And so we're trying to reduce that as much as possible. It's not ready yet, but like essentially my plan is to start working with these localization partners even closer. As soon as Spielwerks has their translations done, they might be ready to send it to the printers, but I want to get their digital versions so I can get all of the cards up online and anybody trying to maybe play their English copy in Germany can very easily see these translations and get their copy played. And then even when the German one comes out, again, those questions can get answered. So hopefully in time, I think it's a project that will take a lot of time and a lot of effort.
Dirk:
And it will never be ended, maybe.
Matt:
Yeah, it'll be an ongoing process, but the goal being to be able to go through the backlog of really all of our games and get a bunch of the various languages all available on the same website where you can switch between each language at the click of a button.
Dirk:
Nice, nice. Any FAQ section plans? Yeah, yeah.
Matt:
So in terms of FAQ and question stuff, Josh, however you release his, I don't have as easy of a framework to get those, but there is the desire to be able to send our FAQs to our localization partners and get those also updated. And again, it's that same thing of I shouldn't be expecting my German partner to write their own FAQ. I need to be able to give them all of the tools at our disposal to let them get the information that needs to get out to the fans.
Dirk:
And you're collecting FAQs for some time now.
Matt:
Exactly. Yeah, we have lots of stuff worked out. So there currently exists, at least in English for now, an FAQ on our website for ARK's base game and a separate one for Blighted Reach. And those are getting worked on all the time. I mean, me and Josh have... At this point, it's kind of an every-other-week meeting to just catch ourselves up on outstanding ARK questions. The bigger plan, just at large for us, is to start releasing almost more like video game patch notes. The biggest thing that we've really learned over many years of this stuff is it's awesome, obviously, if someone wants to ping Josh on the Discord and ask a question, and Josh gets on that answer right there in the middle of their game. That's cool, but the reality too is sometimes you give an answer and you don't know all the ramifications of that answer Yeah, and then you you know three weeks later you get a questions like well You said this but then this results in this man this up, and then happens There's all these up you know there's so many little effects like that that spill out and so one of our goals is to almost treat more of these things like their own sort of development process where.
Matt:
We work on a slew of questions all together kind of behind closed doors get a bunch of answers and then almost put it out to beta, which is really just like, we'll put it out to the Discord, be like, hey, check our work. Does all of this, you know, instead of just one question being answered, here's 30 answers to questions. Do all of them make sense together? And then we can find those gaps where, oh, this resulted in an adverse effect we didn't expect. And then we can release like the official, here is an update to, you know, all of the rules and all the FAQs. So, you know, my goal is to see more like like, quarterly releases of a rules update, as it were. And, you know, I want to put on a big show about it and have a stream with Josh where it's almost like we're coming to you, our shareholders, to give you that, here's your hot questions being answered or whatever. But in general, yeah, it's trying to get, and especially trying to be more communicative about that process because I think it can be frustrating as a player of the games to just sort of, like, pop a question out there and hope it comes back, but if you can actually start to expand.
Matt:
If I know every quarter I have to release patch notes, so does the listener, so does the players, the player base. And so there can become this expectation. It's like, I know in March we'll get a release, so we'll wait until March, and then when March happens, we get all of that information all at once. And hopefully that back-and-forth communication style just keeps everybody a little bit more in the know rather than finding out, oh, actually, Josh hangs out on Reddit, and you can kind of ask him, and maybe if you poke around. It's just too informal of a process.
Dirk:
Yeah, it's a nice idea. Very nice. Okay, so ARK is obviously not the only game in the game, so there's a lot of other stuff coming out. The O's Kickstarter just wrapped up. That's right. And Ahoy expansion is already in progress.
Matt:
It's actually starting production this week. We had all these funny little nitpicky delays on it, and it just was approved last week. So the Ahoy expansion stuff, we're still expecting a quarter one. You know, it should be arriving to ports like by Lunar New Year is sort of our goal. And so we'll start to see that in the early part of the year, hitting backers and then eventually retail. The Oath Kickstarter is getting through development right now. And it's got some more waves to go, but kind of Cole is essentially finishing up like his main like ideation work on it. It has evolved a lot from what the initial pitch was. There's been so many more ideas, Cole is thinking as boldly as he could, essentially what happened is the Kickstarter for this Oath expansion did so well that Cole said, okay, that is essentially approval to go big. And that was the outstanding question for Oath, was actually how many people are still hanging out with Oath, and how many people still really want this.
Matt:
If the Kickstarter had been a modest, modestly sized thing, we would have just stuck to exactly what we promised and that's what we would have put out there. But because it did so much more, we want to give so much more. And so there's, you know, I don't have even all the details because I haven't been a part of the development process, but I know very soon we're about to put it out to online playtesting. We've basically been doing in-person playtesting of all these things at the offices back in Minnesota. And within a month or so we will probably put it to online playtesting essentially all you have to do is if you go to the discord and like ask can i get on to the playtesting you'll be able to get an invite to that playtesting uh discord and be a part of it so keep keep an eye out for that yeah you know like within the next month and then you'll be able to see what all what all cole's been up to.
Dirk:
Okay great to hear for all the old fans yeah but i think it's a little bit more niche product, but it's great to see it's getting loved.
Matt:
It's been cool, though, to see the community evolve, because what we discovered is there's so much more of, like, a role-playing scene around Oath. That's been sort of the fascinating community it's developed. It's not the, as opposed to ARX, where we were talking about, like, this hyper-competitive scene, the Oath scene is like, no, I like to dream up what my empire actually is, and that's really what... Exactly, and Cole's really been leaning into that. The new systems are much more about, like, lineage, and there's, like, a family system, where you are literally passing down your empire to the next generation. What kind of implications does that have in your next game of Oath? Yeah, very interesting new ideas and a lot of reworking of core systems of Oath in surprising ways. It's been really funny because there's been this kind of constant within the studio, you know, Cole will sort of tease out what he's working on, and even the other developers will be like, well, what are you doing? Are you just, like, remaking Oath? And they have a little bit of skepticism. And then they sit down with Cole and they play it, and they're like, oh, no, I get it. Oh, this just, like, slots right in. And this is just, like, what we should have done the first time, but it, like, it just flows through. and seeing each, you know, Nick and Josh all have the same reaction of like, oh, wait, this just works. It's very funny.
Dirk:
Okay, great to hear. And this will come to a German translation with Spreeworks as well?
Matt:
It will. Yeah, as far as I understand, yeah, that it will continue to be our plan. We love working with Uli, and so it should be on roughly that same time frame. So where Oath should be a maybe end of 2025, maybe early 2026, depends on, I think, a few things within this next wave of the development cycle. But, you know, a late next year somewhat release schedule, it would then be, again, about a year out for the German translation of that. So I know it's kind of annoying that we're always about a year out, but essentially.
Dirk:
But that's how it is.
Matt:
It is. I mean, the biggest thing, I think, from our perspective, I think maybe you see some bigger companies able to get their translations out, like, seemingly faster. But the big thing is they're also, they are very often ahead. Like, their product is finished maybe a little bit soon. As soon as ours is done, we are sending it out to the printer. So it's like we don't have that finalized script to send to our German partner until we're sending ours to the printer. So that translation process doesn't start until our production process.
Dirk:
Can start.
Matt:
And so the biggest reason for that delay is while we're printing our copies, Spielwerks is starting their work on getting everything translated. And that obviously takes a whole bunch of time in its own right. And so then once they finish their translations, then they have to start their own printing process. And they're even on a smaller scale than us, which means they got to find their slots to get their things printed. So it has that kind of a delay but it's you know that that's just part of the process for us.
Dirk:
Yeah and I think the games are worth the wait so if you really want to play them in German yeah you just have to wait it's worth it okay now I also also got an expansion and I know you really like ahoy I do I ought to be honest I never played a whore yeah yeah but what are the most exciting things about the expansion yeah.
Matt:
What's and I also know just for keeping on on topic about I I know the Ahoy translation is, like, fit to hit any day. The German Ahoy should be, like, arriving very, very soon as far as I understand. But the new stuff for me, I don't know if Nick would even want me saying it like this, but, like, I think it reinvents Ahoy. I almost think it's an Ahoy 2.0. It's Nick really making the game his own and leaning into the things that were, like, the most interesting about Ahoy. I like the base game factions, but the new ones, Ahoy is a game about movement more than anything else. It's a sailing game is what I've always sort of worded it as. And that movement in the base game is mostly tied up in like you're exploring tiles. So you're opening up new space and setting on the board. And that's kind of interesting. But the new expansions factions all deal with movement in such a specific, calculated, like puzzle kind of way that when you flip over that tile, every time you're exploring a new tile, you have this like huge decision to make because, You essentially get to decide at what angle you rotate this square tile. You have four different positions you could put it in. And in Ahoy, you have these islands that you're trying to hop between. And the spatial relationship of those islands, by rotating one tile like 90 degrees, it can completely change the entire shape of the game.
Dirk:
Okay.
Matt:
For especially these new factions. The idea being one of the new factions is these turtles that have ships with catapults on them. And they launch the turtles from the ship to an island. And so the idea is every turn you roll this die that says what your range is. So on this round, my launchers have to be two spaces away from an island. If I want to launch from a launcher to an island, I've got to be two spaces away, and then it'll land on the island. Next round, I might roll, and it's three spaces away. So I have to remaneuver all of my launchers every round to be that number of spaces away from the islands. And the other faction knows I need to be in those positions. So the other faction goes, oh, this round he needs to be three spaces away. I'm going to go get in the way of everything that's three spaces away from any given island. And you both have this push and pull. The other faction, the Bluefin, or the Blackfish Brigade, is their orcas. But they have this mechanic where you can essentially set up patrol on one side of the map And if you can draw a direct line from your flagship to the patrol you can like.
Matt:
Storm through every tile in one single move and like kill everything in your path essentially and again the other faction Knows you're setting up these little waypoints to do these blitzes. Yeah, and you have to like Manage that problem while you're also trying to like have territory control So both factions are just having this like constant puzzle battle and it's I mean every single turn you're making such a huge, impactful move. And that's to not even talk about the other expansion where there's two new.
Matt:
Offshoot factions. In Ahoy, there's essentially a blue faction versus a yellow faction. And the expansion replaces or swaps out the first one. So you could play with base game yellow and the new blue, or both the new blue and yellow. Or you can hot swap any of those, and then you can add in any of the third-party factions, the smuggler from the base game, or in the new stuff, the Leviathan, which is a huge sea snake that's playing a little game of, you remember Nokia Snake. You're playing Snake on the game board and trying to not eat your own tail. And then the other is this Coral Cat Pirates, which is sort of like the Smuggler, but you're actually collecting crew for, you have like multiple ships all sailing around with you around the map. And it's just, it's so much more puzzly and so much more engaging and it's snappy and it's fast to learn. And I just think it's great. And I think it's worthy of its own kind of hyper competitive scene. I know when I, I'm just such an annoying person to play with at the office because everyone at the office, they're developers. They're all about iteration, so they play games fast. And I sit there, and I toil over every move. And Nick is always tapping his fingers, like, can you just make a move? And it's like, no, I have to make the right move. It's not good. I can't just make any move. It's got to be the perfect move. So I think it is worthy of that kind of investment into it. So, yeah, I've been really, really excited for it to get out to everybody.
Dirk:
Okay, great to hear. Yeah. And, yeah, another big product is Root. Anything new planned for Root?
Matt:
Absolutely. Huge, huge Root expansion on the horizon. October 22nd is the launch of the Homeland expansion that Josh Earsley has been working on. It is hugely exciting. Josh has been putting in a ton of work on some, like, very inventive new factions. I think you know Cole is somewhat not handing the whole reins over to Josh But like this this one is Josh's expansion, and okay really getting on nice He's really getting to be like the the core person behind it. He's really kind of assembling his own team This is the first time at leader games. We've had two projects being worked on simultaneously Yeah, so Cole is heading up the oath stuff and Josh is heading up the the root stuff so there's really like two things in active development, which we've never had before and And the Root stuff, Josh just has his finger on the pulse of what makes Root unique. And so as a war game, he's super invested in investigating.
Matt:
Powers that don't get as represented in war. And so the homeland expansion is one of the factions is the lily pad diaspora. And it's literally a sort of marginally unaffiliated diaspora in the woodland that has been sort of pushed out of their land and is just trying to rebuild their own kind of society. And so it's introducing an entire new deck of cards and a new suit to the game board. So they're frogs. And you can essentially convert a clearing on the board into a frog clearing. They place tokens on the map, and you essentially can, like, let's say it was a fox clearing. I put a frog token on the board. Now that clearing is both frog and fox. And if you come battle me, you will upset the diaspora. You will make them militant. And if I become militant in that clearing, I cover up the fox clearing. And now it's not even a fox clearing. And so if you were, you know, let's say you were the duchy, and you were controlling that clearing, and you needed to use that fox clearing to reveal your fox cards to get your thing, It's not a fox clearing anymore. And you need to go get frog cards because that's who lives there now. And it's that whole kind of like the society has shifted in a really different and unique way. And so the diaspora itself is trying to avoid being pushed to this militant framework.
Matt:
They would like their scoring economy is, frankly, generally better if they can stay peaceful. But if they are pushed to be militant, they can choose the war path. And if the society thrusts that upon them, you know, they don't just willingly become militant, but if they are attacked, they will have to find a way to respond to that militarily.
Dirk:
Sounds great.
Matt:
It's really crazy. I mean, it's still in pretty active development. I've seen a lot of different iterations, but the core thesis is there, and that's what Josh is so good at, is, like, he's known what he wants this faction to do from the onset. How mechanically that exactly works out is whatever. He knows the thematics are truly a guiding principle. The same is true for the other faction is these, The name has changed multiple times in the last couple of weeks, so I might forget which one it is. I think it's called the Twilight Council now, but I might be wrong. Who knows? It'll be something different in German, so it doesn't matter.
Dirk:
Yeah, yeah, that's better, that's better. Forget it.
Matt:
But they are, similarly, they are a group of, you know, they're trying to run assemblies. They are trying to convince the woodland to lay down their arms.
Matt:
So what they do is they can set up these assembly sites. It's essentially like, you know, the Icelandic Thingvili or whatever. It's these old kind of medieval ideas of democratic assemblies or whatever. And the goal being for when other factions or even the Twilight Council in the clearing themselves, if they want to battle there, they have the option to do a new action, which is to assemble. And it's essentially saying, please don't fight. Let's find a way to lay down our arms. And you'll still remove warriors, but the context is different and the rewards are different.
Matt:
And so, you know, you would remove your warriors from that clearing and you, at the current iteration, you like gain a card. So you are given something for setting down your swords in the battle. And it's about trying to bring that kind of a piece to the woodland. But obviously the woodland doesn't like being told what to do. And so these assemblies can almost over push their might. And if the back wing, it used to be called back wing, if the Twilight Council gets too many assemblies out on the board, it starts to feel like, well, wait a second, are you just this new tyrannical presence, or who's writing the laws here? And they start passing these edicts, and the edicts can change some of the fundamental rules of their game that give them too much power. So the other factions are trying to say, actually, I like utilizing these assemblies, but I can't let you get too big for your britches. I can't let you flex your muscle too much. And so there's that delicate balance.
Dirk:
Okay, that sounds like a lot of changes to Root, a lot of new additions, even bigger than the Marauder expansion added to the game. Okay, sounds great. A new spin on the game and maybe bringing in a new developer or a different developer gives another perspective to the game as well.
Matt:
Yeah, it'll also come at this point. We're also talking about it'll have two new maps. And by that, I mean one new map board with two sides. And one of them is a map that Patrick Leder has actually had for a long time called the Swamp Map. It might get renamed to the Marsh Map. I don't know. But it is designed to be able to potentially upgrade to a higher player count. so a way to make it more fitting for a six-player game. That's got development still to go through it, but we all know that the six-player game is, in route, a little tight. Yeah, a little bit stepping on each other's toes. So the Swamp Map is trying to give some room for more factions to fit into the woodland.
Dirk:
That's very nice to hear.
Matt:
And then the flip side of that is actually Lord of the Board, who is a YouTube channel in America, Sam Smith designed a map a long time ago called the Gorge Map, and we've actually worked with him to be able to utilize his map. Kyle will redo the artwork for it. We might find ways to slightly redevelop it. But the idea is just a fascinating map, and Sam really had an understanding of what makes a route map really good. It is essentially a map where it's a canyon, and so you have bridges that go over the top of the canyon, or you can loop around and go through the center of the canyon. And so it's almost like a figure-eight kind of map, So whereas, you know, the typical route map is, you know, a series of networks that all kind of connect, this one has this sort of like over-underlapping quality to it that almost makes it feel like a 3D map. And it's really brilliant. I mean, you can go play on it today online. It's just available out there. It's available on BGG to print, but there will be a new version officially printed with this expansion.
Dirk:
It's nice to see these different maps for route. Because, as you said, it's quite an impact on the game, on the maps laid out. And I think it's great to hear that you will better support six players because often I hear okay I want war gamey Game and we are six people. We don't want to play Twilight Imperium And and six player.
Matt:
Route can take about as long as Twilight Imperium.
Dirk:
Yeah, like the problem right now But with a better map maybe it's a viable option It can tighten things up. Because it's in general a much tighter game and you will mostly enjoy it There are not many six-player games in that area out there. So it's quite hard to find a fit. So that's nice to hear. Okay, a lot of things happening at Rude as well. So anything else you can...
Matt:
Yeah, no, I mean, we are looking... We're really deep in the trenches of both of those games being developed. We're looking down the pipeline of what's next. We haven't even made internal decisions. We know we want to... We have multiple people in the studio working on new IPs. Patrick has a game called Opus. Nick has a game called Swarm, which he's talked about. There's a bunch of different projects all kind of in the works. We're always looking at stuff out there that we can tap into as well. Fort and Ahoy were both designs that we, from people and box probably the wrong word but like you know design from them and developed but we're we're outside designers that we we got from them so we're always looking at those things no decisions have been made yet we'll definitely be we will be communicative about those things once we once we do know more we would expect you know another kickstarter sometime in 2025 the biggest thing for us though is as a growing team that we're trying to balance is you know we have the ability to work on more projects at once but we don't want to have a bunch of outstanding, kickstarters for the community. So it's like ARKs hasn't hit retail yet. We're not about to put something else into everything. We know what that looks like from the outside perspective.
Dirk:
But you have your plans. Yeah, yeah.
Matt:
So hopefully we can finalize some decisions and have a lot of fun news. And I know Cole's already constantly thinking about new ARKs stuff. That has not left his mind. There's absolutely the plans to be able to expand ARKs. The question is when the question is exactly how and how much and everything but like that's absolutely in the pipeline i mean arcs is a game you can just look at the design and see it was designed to be expanded yeah the idea that everything especially like in the blighted reaches you know an entire faction is is all summarized in just cards just just simple poker size cards well that means if i need to make any adjustments or i want to add anything to it all I have to do is print more cards. I don't have to do any weird faction sheet materials. I don't need to do...
Dirk:
There's no complex components.
Matt:
I could release an expansion, and it could, if we wanted it to be, literally just be a deck of cards. I don't know if that will be what it looks like, but it is as simple as that if we choose to make it such. A good example of that is with Arcs, we do have an Errata pack that will be coming relatively soon. There was actually one unfortunate misprint in the Blighted Reach. One of the plot lines, the Steward plot line, had an error in it's printing, and so we needed to get the correct card out to people, and so within that, we found a bunch of other errata, and we're putting together, I think it's like 26-ish cards, And that's going to be a little card pack that we'll find a way to distribute out to everybody who already got the game. And then that pack will get packed into future printings so that the future printings.
Dirk:
Don't have those same areas. It shows how easy it is to fix things. Exactly.
Matt:
It's just a deck of cards. We can print it relatively cheaply and just get things out to people as fast as that. So that's really the goal with ARX.
Dirk:
Okay. Great to hear. So it sounds amazing. That's amazing. And again, so we are releasing this in the evening. There are two days left. Come by Leader Games, play ARKs. Eight tables sounds like a lot of tables to get to know ARKs.
Matt:
It can be a long demo, but hang out for just a little bit. And I've seen them cycle pretty well. So there's generally an opportunity to get in and try the game out.
Dirk:
Yeah, and on Saturdays, there's an event at Speedworks with Cole, I guess. So you can get over to Speedworks as well. And yeah, if you have nothing else to add, Matt?
Matt:
No, thank you both for taking the time It was a great time, and obviously thank you all for the work you guys do. I love this world of podcasting and media, and I think it's critical, so I just always have to say thank you to people who are doing this kind of stuff, because it's what keeps these communities active, it's what keeps people engaged, and I think you're invaluable.
Dirk:
Thanks, man. Thanks for your time.
Matt:
Of course.
Dirk:
It's great talking to you. Great to talk to you.
Matt:
Too.
Dirk:
And great to hear all the new stuff. Okay, bye-bye.
Matt:
Thank you, bye.