- He's a Memphis-born board game designer, making sure your friends and family game nights are anything but boring.

From designing their first game on sticky notes to selling over a million copies worldwide, we hope you're inspired by the upcoming story of a creative entrepreneur from the 901.

I'm Andy Mannis, and this is a conversation with Josh Roberts.

Josh, thank you for joining us this afternoon.

We appreciate it, man.

- Sure, thanks for having me.

- So I've gotta ask right off the bat, how does one even get started in making board games?

- Sure.

It was largely an accident.

My business partner and I both worked at a growth strategy and innovation firm in town called Southern Growth Studio at the time.

They're called Epic, Epic Pivot now, excuse me.

And one day I walked into work and my business partner tells me about this conversation he had the night before with some friends.

And the premise was, is there a direct correlation between your age and how much money you're willing to spend on a steak dinner?

And he goes on and on about it a little bit and it's a little blase, but he says at the end, "Do you think we can make a game outta that?"

And I've been playing board games my whole life and that question like was really intriguing to me.

So that day we drew up a bunch of concepts on sticky notes.

So we drew up some Y-axis things and some X-axis things.

By lunchtime we were in the conference room playing our very first version of Charty Party with our interns.

And it was pretty clunky, it was really hard to do, and it wasn't a lot of continuous fun, but there were glimmers of fun along the way.

So we knew we had something.

That's how it all started.

- Man, it seems like there's gotta be a lot that goes into making a game.

I mean, you have to come up with the concept.

You then you have to come up with some rules, and you guys did all this on sticky notes?

- Yeah, well, so we came up with the concept and I think we kind of benefited from coming into board game design accidentally, 'cause I think there's a lot of things that you're supposed to do that we didn't know to do.

So we skipped it.

And we took the sticky note concept as far as we could.

And then we started making cards on Google Slides and we'd print 'em up at FedEx Office and cut 'em out by hand so we'd have real cards.

And then we found this website called the Game Crafter, where you can do one-off production runs of your game concepts and they got kind of everything you might need, cards and little tokens and whatever else you might find in a board game box.

So we made one copy of Charty Party that we toted around all over the city.

I still kind of remember the first time we took it to Wiseacre and I put it on the table, the big square table at the OG Wiseacre, and it was like covered in fluid as bar tops tend to be.

And it made me very nervous that we had our one and only prototype sitting on a bar top covered in, you know, I'm guessing beer.

- Hopefully beer.

- Yeah, right?

- Well so you mentioned, kind of a lot to get into in here too as far as the story goes, but you mentioned that you really liked to play board games a lot when you were a kid.

So let's kind of rewind just a little bit and let's talk about your childhood and some of your favorite board games.

- Favorite might be a strong word for some of the ones I started with.

So early on, we did play Monopoly when I was pretty young.

We played a lot of Sorry and Life, but I think the ones that really stood out to me, if you're familiar with Fireball Island, it's recently been republished, which is pretty awesome.

But back in the '80s it was like this foam core mountain board and it had this totem on the top, and I don't even remember how to play exactly, but at certain points in the game, you get to put this red marble in the back of the totem and spin it around and fire it off and it goes down the trail and hopefully knocks your opponents off the mountain they're trying to climb, which is super cool.

The other one that I loved, and this is kind of contradictory to what I told you at the beginning, it's called Space Quest, and I love that one because it's basically Monopoly set in space.

But I ended up loving it because my dad went on a trip to DC and bought it for me as a souvenir from the Air and Space Museum.

So like, there was an emotional connection to this game, even though it was a clone of this thing that I hated.

Somehow I ended up loving this version.

- Gotcha, so that love for board games as a kid obviously translated to being an adult.

Do you play, did you play board games before you started making them, like as an adult?

Like what were some of your favorites?

Do you still go back and play the ones that you liked when you were a kid?

Or are you kind of discovering new ones as you get older?

- Discovering a lot of new ones as I get older, and it's kind of hard to remember the chronology.

I mean, if you look around Board to Beers here, I think they've got something like 3,000 games and there's something like 6,000 new games get released every year.

So like remembering what you played when over the last 20 years is kind of tough.

I will tell you recently my wife and I got back into a game called Wingspan, that's pretty famous, and we've been beating that up pretty good.

It's a lot of fun.

There's another game that we play called Onitama, which is like a weird take on chess with a martial arts theme that's really fun for two people.

And then occasionally we'll get into some really deep, long form strategy stuff.

So we play this game called My Father's Work, which you play as like a mad scientist, but over three generations and like you, I guess die in between rounds and you can pass certain things down to your next iteration of your character.

Super fun.

Those are the three that really stand out to me, I guess.

- That's very interesting.

I mean, you just said something to me that stands out, six thousand games are made each year.

As a game designer, how do you come up with an idea that cuts through clutter?

- It's not easy, especially because a lot of times it's easy to have a very similar idea to somebody else.

So coming up with an original take on something and we really try with every one of our games to make something that's novel in some way, unique to the space.

And if it does have things in common with another game, we want to do something that makes it very distinct and live on its own.

But I, you know, our design process is rather informal.

My business partner, Evan and I keep a Google Slides document that I think at this point it's got like 300 ideas in it.

So each slide has like a headline, a few bullets and maybe a picture we found on Google Images that's just like, what if we make a game about bonsai trees, right?

And kind of a few descriptive bullets for what that might be.

And when we finish our development cycle, we go back to that document and we're like, "Hey, these three seem kind of interesting and cool," and we will mock it up the best we can with stuff that we can buy on Amazon or at Lowe's or whatever.

And like just paper craft a version of it and then we'll run some Facebook ads.

And that doesn't necessarily make the decision for us on which game we decide to get neck deep in the design process on.

But it informs it certainly, because if we can't market it, if we can't stand out, it might be really, really hard for it to be a productive product for us.

- So that, you guys are kind of, it's a little bit of pre-market testing I guess.

Are you trying to see... in the space of board games where there is a need per se?

- No, we... [laughing] Evan and I make stuff that we think is cool.

That's kind of the hard stop.

Like if we think it's interesting and fun, like we're gonna pursue it.

- It just takes you two, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

And we use the Facebook ad test to see kind of if there's enough people that maybe agree with us that this is a good idea for us to put our time into.

- So you kind of just went over a little bit of how you guys come up with some ideas.

I'm sure you have to do quite a bit of research into other board games to see, okay, is our idea similar, are they too similar?

What happens when you guys come up with an idea and then you find another board game that has very similar ideas?

Is it just chalking it back to the drawing board?

Or is that when you go in and kind of alter some of the minutia of the game that you have in mind?

- That's a good question.

Luckily we haven't run into a major problem with that yet.

You know, the first games we made were super accessible, quick to learn party games.

And in that space you almost can't be like, you know, "Are we too close to this?"

'Cause for a while every party game had the Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity judging mechanics.

- That was the first one that came to my mind was Cards Against Humanity.

- Yeah.

So I bring that up to say like, we changed the judging mechanic for both Ransom Notes and Puns of Anarchy.

So it's a little bit different than just somebody's gonna sit out this round and then choose a winner, but the judging mechanic's still there.

So like is that a copy of something that already exists?

You know, probably not, but it certainly shares characteristics.

I don't remember where I read it, but somebody much smarter about board games than I wrote a book and talked about how there's really only seven kinds of board games.

Like there's not a lot, there's engine builders, Tableau builders, like a few things, but like if that's true, if there's only seven ways to do this, like how many different ways can you do those seven things?

- Right, yeah.

You're gonna fit into one of those kinds of categories.

So it's gotta be really difficult.

And you've kind of touched on this a little bit, like coming up with the rules for each one of these.

I mean, that's gotta, that's gotta be a very painstaking process, right?

- Yeah, it can be.

Especially I think the magic in board game design for me is figuring out which of the hundreds of good ideas you're gonna have around a concept go together to make an elegant game that's fun to play.

So what I mean by that is we did a Kickstarter last year for a game called Tiny Laser Heist that's gonna launch in October.

And the first version of Tiny Laser Heist, I had bolted in all sorts of stuff.

Like there was safe cracking, there were cameras, there were guard dogs, like just all this stuff.

And then, you know, you start putting it in front of people and you watch 'em play and it's like, I don't understand how to do the safe cracking and should I prioritize that over the lock picking, over the, you know, stealing the jewel.

So our process, and I think this is very universal, this is not distinct to Evan and I, but the process we tend to follow is we have the idea, we cobble together all the good ideas around it that we can think of, and we play a version of that that's just like clunky and overwhelming and just a lot to deal with.

But you pay attention to what your play testers are interested in doing when they're playing with that concept.

And then you just start to cut stuff off that doesn't serve the core fun activity, right?

So it's one of the things that you have to do to be a good game designer is know when to kill your children, which can be really, really hard.

I mean there's stuff that we cut out of Tiny Laser Heist that I love that we might revisit someday to make a game around that, but it just didn't work in the context of that specific concept.

- How many play tests do you think you guys probably do on average before you're ready to roll a game out?

Like I said, I'm sure it's a very painstaking process.

- It can be, I think there's probably some data science behind this that there's probably a rule of what you're supposed to do with the number of play tests that we do not follow.

'Cause we don't know it.

We will play test it until we know it's good.

- It's just like a feeling you guys get?

- Well, you can really see when stuff's broken during the play testing phase.

So like for Ransom Notes, a couple play tests with like my friends and family around the table, we kind of understood what was gonna make this game good and we developed it almost all the way, played it with a couple mixed groups, it's a hit with everybody, everybody understands how to do it, everybody's having a good time.

And when that's happening, I mean, do you need to play it with a thousand different people over two years?

Like, probably not.

And then something like Abducktion that's a little more complicated and has more moving parts and more strategic depth and needs for balance and you know, kind of all the game design words, I played when, we were finishing up just the solo player version of that, I played 200 games in a row by myself, solo and like put in a spreadsheet, this is what happened, this is how I felt about it, and like we ran Pivot tables to do the analysis.

So we probably did get close to a thousand play tests on Abducktion, whereas Ransom Notes probably had, you know, 20.

But that's our biggest hit.

And it's in Target in Barnes and Noble and kind of, you know, five stars on Amazon.

It was the number one board game on Amazon last holiday season.

So like we didn't play test it exhaustively, but we did something right.

- I want to talk about getting into the production of the games.

Like you mentioned earlier you guys had a company that produced like your test concepts.

What happens when you guys get the game to the point where you're like, all right, people are having fun, this is a finished product.

What are the next steps?

Do you reach out to a company for like mass production or how does that process work?

- Yeah, so just to fill in a little bit of the gap between the Game Crafter copy and mass production.

So we don't always finish our games all the way before we put 'em on Kickstarter, but we always go on Kickstarter for two reasons.

So the first is it helps you test the market a little bit more than that first preliminary Facebook test that I talked about.

You get to put it in front of a larger audience that Kickstarter sort of has baked in and it's a very game-friendly audience on Kickstarter.

So you get a lot of good critical feedback.

A couple times off the top of my head, I remember like, we got feedback in the comments on our Kickstarter campaigns and implemented those things into the game.

And then the second thing with Kickstarter, we're a growing company, but we're still small enough that if we have a new concept and we decide to take a gamble on it and order 20,000 units, if it doesn't go, you know, that might put us outta business.

So Kickstarter helps you de-risk the front end of a product launch by giving you the capital you need to do your first print run.

And you know, you have to to give your Kickstarter backers the game they pledged to support and all that other stuff.

But there's enough margin baked in there that you can do a print run much larger than your Kickstarter campaign and then see if the product has legs without gambling the health of the company on it.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So how much of that process did you guys have to learn on the fly?

Was that something you guys already kind of had a background in or it's just one of those things that you're like, well, we don't know what we don't know, so here we go.

- No, a hundred percent of how we got this business started is, you know, we had the idea for Charty Party.

I told you the story about the sticky notes in the conference room with the interns, and then we just sort of started taking what we thought was the next logical step.

And it was kind of under the auspices of, it might be interesting to learn about Kickstarter for the sake of our clients.

Like maybe one day one of the clients at the consulting firm will need to do a Kickstarter campaign, so we might as well do this.

When we ran into, we need a real copy of this game, but we don't have a bunch of money to order 10,000 of them, We'd look around the internet, we'd find the Game Crafter.

And then during the Kickstarter campaign, it was going pretty well by itself, but then about six or seven days in, you know, it was going well enough that we were interested and we were like, well, what could we do to make this better?

And we started looking around the internet again for, you know, how do people make board games work?

And it turns out Facebook ads were kind of a thing at the time and we started doing those and then the Charty Party Kickstarter campaign kind of outperformed our expectations.

You know, luckily there's a lot of literature on Kickstarter for board game developers that's like, you know, if you're gonna manufacture something, here are the two manufacturers you probably start with.

So we started with one of them.

I think a real break for us that is very hard for a lot of self-publishing game creators is my best friend of like 30 years is in international freight.

So I, like we found the manufacturer, we started the ball rolling with them.

Evan and I looked at each other like, cool, how do we get it from China-- - How do we distribute - To the United States?

- Yeah.

And I was like, Hey, my buddy Kenneth knows how to do this.

And I called him and I was like, "Hey, we're doing this thing, can you help me?"

He was like, yeah, just put me in touch and we'll take care of all that.

So this thing that a lot of people, rightfully so, get nervous about was very easy for me just by pure chance, which was nice.

And then, you know, once you get your first print run, which we try to get, we've got this formula that is, you know, a multiplier of how the Kickstarter campaign does that we apply to the off-season months, and then there's a larger multiplier for November and December when people are holiday shopping.

So we try to order that amount to get our new products at least one holiday season.

And that's how you really know if you have something.

Like, if you can't sell it in December, it's probably not worth doing.

So that's kind of, I don't know, the continuum from start to market.

- Wow, that's, and you guys had to figure out all of the business stuff, all of the logistics stuff, all of the marketing stuff kind of on the fly.

That's incredible that you guys were able to do that and have success with it as well.

When I met you a couple years ago, I think you guys only had three games and now we're up to how many?

- Eight.

If you count the ones that aren't launched but are launching in the next few months, it's 11.

And we have this sort of, I call it a moonshot goal, moonshot for us.

I think there are companies who would laugh at this, we're hoping to launch 10 new products next year.

But that, like, that's a big ambition for us.

- Okay.

Awesome.

Well, I mean, you guys have hit I think several of your goals it looks like so far.

Let's kind of talk about the games that you already have published and then we can kind of talk about a little bit, maybe a sneak peek of what's to come next.

- Yeah, sure.

So our workhorse is Ransom Notes.

Ransom Notes is a party game that comes with 250 prompt cards in the main version, there's three different versions.

Anyway, so the prompt cards are sort of all over the map.

My favorite one is "write the eulogy for your boss who you openly despise".

There's one that's like "write a jingle for a toupe store".

And then the players have this word cloud of like 60 to 70 word magnets they use to respond to the prompt card as best they can.

And the comedy tends to come from the broken grammar and the creativity of the individual players.

And I think, you know, it's hard to disparage Cards Against Humanity because Ransom Notes doesn't exist without it.

Cards Against Humanity brought a lot of people to the game table that otherwise wouldn't have played games.

Where we're different and I think better is you're not relying on jokes that Evan and I wrote to be funny in Ransom Notes.

Like we curated the word magnets.

We were very careful about that.

We were very, you know, deliberate in the words we chose, but it's still up to the players to like look at what they have and put it together in a way that makes sense for them.

So that's Ransom Notes.

Abducktion is sort of our rising star.

It's a very light strategy game.

- Is this the first game that you guys made that wasn't like the party, judgment, judging system kind of game?

- Yeah, it is.

And that was quite a learning curve for us.

I don't know how far down that road you want to go, but- - Well, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I would love to hear about some of the challenges that you guys faced when creating a completely different style of game for the first time.

- Yeah, sure.

So by the time we got to Abducktion, we had a pretty good cadence and process for this is how you make a party game.

Like, if you can't tell somebody how to play it in two minutes, it's too complicated.

So cut all the stuff off that that makes you go to minute three or four in the explanation.

And there should be like a single thing that players are doing and it should be very easy.

We try to make our games open to the players' creativity.

So like, can we make it so you can tell inside jokes or roast your friends?

We also try to try to do a little bit of, if you're shy or if you're not happy with your answer for a round, like, can we help you hide and not make a fool of yourself in front of your friends?

I don't know that we always succeed with that one, but we try.

Anyway, so we got to a point where we could do that very well.

But one day I said to Evan, you know, we could keep writing content for Ransom Notes forever.

Like, I probably wrote 10,000 prompts for Ransom Notes and it was just, I'd be cutting the grass and something would pop in my head, I'd pull out my phone, write it in the Google sheet, and we just did that exhaustively.

But like, my sense of humor is existential dread.

Like, that's it.

And so how much of that does the world need in party games?

Like, I'm not gonna write stuff that's different than that.

And you know, like I mentioned earlier, I've played games my whole life, and on that Google sheet or on that slides document, we had some concepts for some light strategy stuff.

And I said to Evan, it would be really cool if we did a fully baked, like deep strategy game, stripped it down to the bare essentials to make it very accessible and made it not look like Lord of the Rings.

So like, people who don't have those proclivities and taste wouldn't be turned off by like, this is not wizards and orcs fighting, right?

Like it's some cute little ducks moving around in space for some reason.

- Something everyone can relate to.

[both laughing] - Yeah, right.

No doubt.

So we had a couple ideas that we wanted to try.

We ended up getting the ducks, I had this idea for a concept called Ah-queducks, Ak-queducks, and it was basically like a line of shot glasses.

And the idea was how many ducks could you move from one end to the other without spilling the water in the glass?

And it was terrible.

It would've worked.

- Sounds like water gets everywhere.

- Well, it does.

And there just wasn't anything to it.

Like we would've had to change the laws of physics and like if we could make ducks that were the same size but displaced water differently, like, then it might've been fun, but we can't do that.

So we didn't, but we had all these ducks and we knew the ducks tested well in Facebook ads.

So we looked through the document and we're like, what other ideas do we have that might make sense as a home for the ducks?

So we had, we had Abducktion, but it was just like these wooden tokens on a board and we were like, yay, let's try this with ducks instead of wooden tokens and see if that works and if it resonates.

And from there I was like, well, the ducks shouldn't just move around the board.

There should be something that makes them move and a reason they're moving.

So we came up with the UFO and kind of the research project that these aliens are doing on the ducks and that's how it was born.

- And it's been a big hit ever since.

- Yeah.

Thank you.

- Before we get outta here today, I definitely want to make sure we mention something about the space that we're in here today, Board to Beers, because they've been, I guess almost instrumental in helping you guys succeed, right?

- For sure, no, we certainly wouldn't be where we are without Board to Beers.

So if you're not familiar, Board to Beers is Memphis' only board game bar.

I think there's around 3,000 games in here.

But I think the real superpower of this place is you can walk in having never played a game before, Drew or Taylor will ask you a couple questions and make a recommendation for you that's gonna be right on.

But the thing that's the coolest, I think is, is Taylor, the woman who owns this place, you can pick any box on these shelves and she can teach you how to play it without like, she knows off the top of her head how to teach you to play.

- That's an impressive superpower.

- It's very cool, and she can have you and your group of friends up and playing something super complicated in a matter of minutes.

So it's a great way to spend time.

- But they also allowed you to do a lot of play testing in here and I think that's a, again, probably very instrumental in your success, right?

- Yeah, you know, like any successful restaurant or bar, Board to Beers has a group of regulars.

And as a board game designer, I can't buy better feedback than you can get from people who play several games every day of the week.

Like there are people here who you can put a concept in front of them and they can point out all the stuff that's wrong with it in two minutes and help you get on the right path very quickly.

So that might be why we don't have to exhaustively play test is because some of the play testers we get because of the access at Board to Beers are so high level and so informative that we can kind of take some shortcuts here and there and still get to a really good polished product.

- Gotcha.

Well thank you Josh, it was a pleasure talking to you today.

And thank you for joining us for A Conversation with Josh Roberts.

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