THE 500
So, I’ve started a blog, I guess. It’ll be weekly (I hope), and will always be 500 words (I promise). It’ll largely be my perspectives on being a one person design/publishing entity. Most things will be light, some won’t. I hope to inject some of the non-gaming influences that drive my design and publishing processes. Each week there will be a music link to an album that is on rotation while I’m working - I don’t work unless I’m listening to music.
This blog-thing is a creative requirement I’ve set for myself; both to write and create more, but also to set a personal standard to reach each week. It’s also an excuse to help train myself out of two spaces after each period. Finally, it’s an attempt to put myself out there a bit more.
Thank you for reading!
John
PS: If you want to know when a new 500 goes live, make sure you're signed up for the SBG mailing list.
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The 500 x05 - BGG Gratings
BGG (boardgamegeek.com – the largest hobby gaming site) ratings are extremely important to me, a small publisher. I also know there are people who think they’re meaningless. I want them to matter a bit more to most people. Since lists are hot, here are my top 5 ways to make BGG ratings better.
1. Games are rated on a 1-5 scale. You know, just like almost every other modern site on the planet that offers a rating system. BGG’s current ratings guidelines are too open to interpretation or manipulation. It’s difficult for smaller publishers who will almost never get enough ratings to offset low ratings or BGG's internal averaging algorithm. That’s not even taking into account the BGG users who craft their own esoteric rating systems.
2. New users cannot rate games. If ratings matter, then allowing people to make an account and drop 1s and 10s on their first login, really shouldn’t be a thing. For a site that cares a whole lot about moderation in their forums, allowing this to occur (something with actual real life consequences), is kind of a weird move.
3. Games cannot be rated until they’ve been released. When a game is added to the BGG database, one of the things that must be filled out is the game’s release date. Using the current BGG rating system as a way to highlight excitement or bad actors is an easy-to-use and effective tool, I get it. There are plenty of other places to highlight those kinds of things. There aren’t a whole lot of other places to rate tabletop games, and none with the reach of BGG.
4. Game Publishers or Game Designers can’t rate games. At best it’s tacky, at worst it’s gross. Checking out a designer and seeing that they’ve given shitty ratings to other people’s games is just, well, shitty. It’s almost as bad as seeing people rate their own games a 10. I understand; the tabletop industry is largely comprised of people who play games. I know it’s not as simple as the spectator/participant dichotomy (Ok, I do think it’s that simple), but BGG is pretty much the only place to rate games. There are other avenues to talk yourself up or take a dump on your competition.
5. Verified Ratings. I don’t think you should have to own a game to be able to rate it, but I do think actually playing a game should be a prerequisite to leaving a rating. All of the above stuff would be pretty easy to implement. This one would be tougher, if not impossible. But would it be that difficult to require raters to also log a play?
None of this is going to happen, I know that. I also know that those changes would probably be better for smaller publishers than it would larger ones. I’m lucky that there are people who play and rate my games; I want their ratings to matter. Currently, I completely understand why some think ratings are worthless.
Music for the Week: Nature TV - EP 1 [FULL]
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The 500 x04 - Wanting Pariahs
I wanted to write a designer diary. You know, the thing where I walk through the sketches, spreadsheets, and light bulb moments? Then realized I didn’t want to write a designer diary. I take terrible notes. Pariahs started out like most of my games: a collision of ideas forming into something more than a sum of its parts. Unused parts were stored away for use another time, or deleted from a spreadsheet forever. Instead of writing about the how, I wanted to write about what I wanted Pariahs to be.
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about why I make games. I don’t know what’s different now; it feels a lot like the last few years for designing. Is that what made it seem different; reality finally setting in? In hindsight, the game that would become Pariahs was me working some of that out.
I wanted to make something completely new; something bigger. I mean, still small by industry standards, but big to me. A game that used mechanics I was comfortable designing with and mechanics people in hobby gaming™ were familiar with; combining them into something that felt both familiar and foreign. I wanted to make an inexpensive, small footprint card game that looked big on the table and felt like a game that should have cubes to convert and a board.
So I took a setting I’d been saving (far future religious/political elections), and worked on taking those ideas and making them fit together. I knew it wouldn’t be a commercial success; none of my games will ever be that. That didn’t stop me from wanting it to be my idea of success.
I wanted a game that wouldn’t stand in Omen’s shadow. Not because I thought it was better than the game that many consider my best, but because it stood in a completely different light. I wanted it to be its own game.
I wanted a lot from Pariahs, so I put a lot in. I got a lot out. I don’t like weighing my games against each other. Some are less work than others, because I’m not designing every game for the same reason. I don’t expect identical things from individual design. Pariahs gave me what I wanted out of it. Were it a turnip, I would’ve seen watery red.
Under promise and over deliver. I try my best not to oversell my excitement for my games. I’m proud of everything I put out in the world for one reason or another. Yeah, not all of them land like I’d like, but that’s the nature of creating. I’m excited for Pariahs. I think it sets a new standard, not just for me, but for what people expect from my games. I’ll be surprised if Pariahs doesn’t become some people’s favorite SBG game.
Pariahs was more than I expected. It was the game I needed it to be. It made me question my place in games. It made me question Kickstarter. I’m thankful for it.
Music for the Week: Tokyo Tea Room - No Future Plans (Full EP)
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The 500 x03 - Shadow Boxing
For a company called Small Box Games, you’d figure boxes would be easy. They’re not. They’re the most difficult (and potentially most expensive) thing for making games domestically at the scale I’m making games.
I don’t make games that compete for space, or attention, on a retailer’s shelf. I have no reason to sell air; I try to offer as little air as possible. Affordable and small; that's what I care about. Yes, Box is in the name, but more importantly, so is Games. Games have always been what I’ve cared the most about. A game without a box is still a game. A box without a game is just a box.
Over the years I’ve offered my games a variety of ways. From stock boxes that I hand-wrapped in the early days, to hand pressed bags, tuck boxes, and fancy custom made boxes when I actually sold enough of a game to make the MOQ make sense. And then there’s everything in between. 17 years has given me a lot of time to experiment with a lot of different packaging ideas and approaches; trying to figure out what I can feasibly make domestically for a reasonable price. It’s tough. I’ll be trying a new box soon. It’s durable, it’s affordable. It’s not a tuck box. It’s also not a traditional game box, so I’m holding my breath on how it’ll be received.
For the majority of people who enjoy my games, the packaging for my games, while adequate and sometimes even nice, is secondary to what’s in the packaging. Sure, they have preferences, but they usually aren’t deal breakers. I’ve said I’m interested in growing Small Box Games, but in a space where most people don’t sleeve, where those who do sleeve think everyone sleeves, and where most people don’t care how a game will fit on their Ikea shelf, but those who do care won’t buy it if it doesn’t fit; it’s tough to find solid footing. My focus is on mechanics, card quality, and illustrations. I don’t really care that much about how my games look on a shelf; I care about what they look like on the table.
Sure, I do care a bit about their presentation. I care more about offering affordable, interesting games. I try to do what I think makes the most people the most happy: a box that’s just big enough for sleeved cards and rules. I don’t do inserts, so if a person doesn’t sleeve, it makes the box a bit more roomy than it should be. I’ve looked into inserts. Anything that the people who care about inserts would be happy with would price out pretty much all but my most loyal of customers. There’s an entire niche (within a niche) industry in games of companies selling nothing but secondary storage options for games. Carrying cases. Organizers. Inserts. Storage. Options exist for people who care about these things. Those companies can focus on storage, I’m going to focus on games.
Music for the Week: Beauty Queen - Out of Touch EP
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The 500 x02 - Daily Specials
In another life, I would have been a chef. I love cooking. I still have misguided ideas of opening a food truck. Once, I was asked in an interview how much time it took me to make a game. My answer was: how long does it take to cook dinner? I think the tongue-in-cheekness of this response was lost a little bit; I couldn’t design a game in an hour. I meant that games, like meals, have different prep times.
Cooking for me is about figuring out how to make something taste like an idea I have in my head. I love figuring out the spices, ingredients, and cooking methods. Texture is almost as important as flavor. I usually only look at recipes to make sure I’m not overlooking a spice, or to get a refresher on cooking times. I can almost guarantee you, whatever recipe you’re looking at, there’s not enough garlic listed. Unless you’re my dad, who hates garlic, or a vampire.
And I get it; making food to bring joy to people I care about is different than running a restaurant chain. Should that make it any less satisfying?
I approach game design in a similar way: I’m trying to make a physical thing work the way I imagine it should work in my head. I’m never trying to make a linguini dish my own by swapping out the pasta and calling it new. Sure, I might glance at a recipe or look at what spices are traditionally used if it’s not something I’ve cooked with or eaten before. But copying a recipe and changing a few things? That wouldn’t bring me any joy.
There are people who will eat a hamburger wherever they dine. They know they like a hamburger, and that’s what they’re going to get. It doesn’t matter what the restaurant is known for, or the type of cuisine it offers: they’re having the burger. It may have the restaurant’s special spin on it or be vegan. But, it’s still a burger. The restaurant knows the burger will sell.
This isn’t a knock on hamburger people; we’re all comfortable with the familiar to some degree. There’s a wide spectrum between homo hamburgerus and Andrew Zimmern. Just like there’s a spectrum between those who enjoy Solitaire and others willing to jump headfirst into City of Six Moons.
I see industry professionals (designers/publishers) often espouse that games take a set amount of time to finish, you have to do things a particular way, and if you want to be successful, then you have to follow a certain checklist. I think that’s horseshit. Those ideas exist for a set, specific outcome and someone else’s idea of what success looks like. A chef’s pop-up won’t ever rival the weekend sales of a local Applebee’s. That doesn’t make the pop-up less successful.
Like cooking, I make games to create. Hopefully it’s something that brings joy to people. People that I’ll never meet. That doesn’t make it any less satisfying.
Music for the Week: The Undercover Dream Lovers - In Real Time EP
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The 500 x01 - Positively Exhausted
My first entry for The 500 focused on how-to-play videos as an unofficial, yet somehow still required, checkmark for a game being considered done or worthy. While I do loathe being on the creator side of A/V stuff, I can’t quite wrap my head around this content’s actual relevance as a helpful consumable versus existing solely for marketing. What I wrote was more negative than I tend to be. So I shelved it. The idea for this blog-thing sat untouched for weeks while I figured out what I had to say, and how I wanted to say it.
I’ve spent the past 17 years living in a space that I built. I really like this space, as well as the people in it who helped me build it. I enjoy making games the way I make them, and I’ve said it so many times: SBG fans are the best in the hobby. But I wish that space was a bit bigger. If a few more people wanted to show up and hang out? That would be ok, too.
I make what I want, and for the most part, the people who buy my games like what they get. But I really want to grow. I want Small Box Games to be back on the same trajectory as 2017; as a potentially full time, viable thing for me. But, shit; things have really changed. Where I am now and where I want to be is a hard place to find in 2024; and I’ve been actively trying to build since 2019. I’m not looking for thousands of new fans; I’m looking for dozens. I don’t want to sell 10,000 copies of something; I’d be happy with 500. I want to love where I am with games, and right now, I don’t.
So, where does that leave me? I’m still trying to figure that out. With the types of games I make, it’s kind of hard to make advertising work with my games’ price and availability. There are some obvious things I could do, but doing those things potentially changes the scale of my company, and changing what makes SBG what it is at its core just isn’t something I’m interested in doing. I’m tired of being overly positive and being let down. I’m still positive; I’m just exhausted.
Aside from being something I genuinely want to do, The 500’s existence has some roots in marketing/exposure/whatever so that me, my games, and my company are potentially in the reader’s peripheral a little more often. But, it’s a bit more than that. I hope a lot more; it’s me being transparent about making games, my aspirations, and where I hope I exist as a maker. Is maker even the right word? I’d never label myself an artist. Artisan? Yeah, probably.
Will The 500 help steer more people into trying my games? I have no idea, but it’d be nice. Hopefully it’s at least interesting to the people who already enjoy what I make.
Music for the Week: L'Impératrice - Best Of