male speaker: great. well, welcome everyone. i'm glad you all could make it,even though it's a day of the "star trek" opening,and some other exciting geek events.
settlers of catan 3d print, but we're in for realtreat today. we have eric hautemont. and that's really testing myhigh school french there, but i hope i said it right.
he's the co-founder andceo of board game publisher, days of wonder. so let's give him hand,first of all. [applause] male speaker: so eric and hisco-founder, mark kaufman, started days of wonderin 2002. and they've just won a lotof awards, including a prestigious german game of theyear award, again, which will test the limits of my europeanlanguages, so i won't try.
but they've won many otherindustry awards for their blockbuster title, "ticket toride." and they are one of the youngest companies to ever winthe prestigious german award. they also have a top-sellingapp store game. and so in the digital world ofsilicon valley, eric and mark have dared to go analog. and as you can tell, that'spaid off pretty well. but actually, eric is alsofrom a background of technology.
he was at companies like raydream, which was a 3d mac software developer. and he was at fractaldesign before. and so here today, he'll givea talk, and a q&a. and he'll sort of talk about his pathtowards going from digital to analog, why he decided to starta board game company. and then at the end, we'llactually have a chance to play board games with him. he has some "ticket toride" boxes here.
and so if you stick around,towards the end, we'll have some fun. so without further ado, let meintroduce eric to the stage. eric hautemont: thankyou, [inaudible]. thank you. hello, everyone. it's a pleasure to be here. it was kind of fun driving downthe shoreline, because i used to work at about two blocksfrom here 20 years ago.
so that brought back somegood memories, back in the digital days. but what i'd like to talk abouttoday is something a bit different, and that'sboard games. and the reason why board gamesare different is they're different from any other formof entertainment, and really any other form of consumerproduct you can think of. and they're different in a bigway, but that takes a while, especially when you're comingfrom the digital side, like i
did, to kind of like sink it. and the big difference ishow long they last. to put some things inperspective, the best selling board game today, in terms ofnumber of units sold, if not profit, is still a game called"monopoly," which was the best selling title back in 1935. now that's kind of like if errolflynn was making more money this year thanbrad pitt. or if cole porter was outsellinglady gaga, which
needless to say, no oneexpects would happen. right? and what's interesting is, ifyou look even at the packaged goods business-- you look at something like campbell's soup, for instance-- and their packaged goodbusiness, their soup, has changed more as a product thanhas "monopoly." and that is one thing that gave us pauseas we were starting the
business, but that was one ofthe things that attracted us to that business. and the reason that it attractedus to the business is because in another life, mypartner and i used to run high tech companies. i ran a photographics company inthe late '80s, early '90s, called ray dream, which wasdoing photographic software. and while that was fun, and welearned a lot, one thing that i felt frustrated with is, wesold that company to a company
called fractal design, whichhad just gone public. and two years later, i wasoffered to buy back that company, which i had soldto them for over $50 million, for $1. and i politely declined, and iwas right to decline because a friend of mine who [inaudible] lost his shirt. but what was frustrating aboutthat was, that while you can make money and learn things,there's very few companies--
and google is one of theexceptions, so i think you guys are lucky-- that can really stand the testof time on the digital side. and so that's one thing thatwas very attractive to us about the board game business. now, the flip side of that, ofcourse, is that means the incumbents, the "monopolies" ofthe world, if they've been on top for the last 80years, how are you going to displace them?
or how are you going to carveyour own place in the sun in that market? and that's an interestingchallenge. so when we started the company,we had a theory, and we had a bet. the theory was that the mainreason why those games can stand for so long at the top isnot because they have the best game design out there. i mean clearly, since"monopoly," game design has
evolved a lot. you have games now, like"settlers of catan" and "ticket to ride," that arguablyare better from a plain game design standpoint. so how come "monopoly"is still on top? well, we think the reason thatis if we were to take people up front that are in this room,or anywhere else in the world, for that matter, and iwas to invite some of you to my house to play a game, nomatter what's the game.
let's just assume it'sa good game. we'll play together. eight out of 10 of you at least,if not more, will have a great time. and at the end of the evening,you'll say, that was great. where can i go andbuy this game? now, i take the exact samesample of people, so the exact same people, and i give you acopy of the same game we were playing that night inthe shrink wrap.
and i call you back in sixmonths, and i ask you how you like the game. and a large number of you won'teven have cracked the shrink wrap open. ok? and so that was the theory. the theory was that while peopleenjoy playing board games, they don't like having tofigure out how to play the game that much.
the bet was that if that theoryis true, then what really matters, as a board gamecompany, is how can you get the large number of peopleto play the game correctly while getting them overthat initial fear? and truth be told, what'sinteresting with games like "monopoly" is that most peopledon't play the game right. and most people, when they goand buy a box of "monopoly," they buy it because theyremember buying it as a kid, and playing it--
not buying it as a kid, butplaying it as a kid. and then truth be told, whatthey'll do is they'll open the box, and they'll quickly browsethrough the rules. and they will still playit wrong, by the way. but which is a different issue,which is that great game designs, i think,are very [inaudible] to errors in the wayyou play that. so the interesting question thenwas that if that theory is true, how do you reach a lotof the people, and teach
them the game? and we felt that doing digitaleditions of the games would be a great way to do that. and the bet we made was thatmaybe if we did digital versions of our board games,right, we could develop a virtual circle where the salesof the physical board games would drive downloads of thedigital games, and the download of the digital gameswould drive the sales of the board game.
and you'd have that happy loopthat they develop together. so the question then becomes,the only question that really matters as a board game company,even though you're dealing with real cardboardpieces like that, is how do you make sure that your digitalversion is as good as your board game version? your cardboard version? i think before we go into thechallenges about designing the digital editions of the boardgames, one thing i'd like to,
i'd like to do some moredifferences between the digital side and thecardboard side. so what's interesting aboutthe cardboard side is that it's relatively quick andcheap to develop. the typical board game today,i'd say you can go and put a real cardboard board game in themarket for under $20,000. and you can develop thatin a couple of months. it's kind of tough to do thesame thing under the same budget and the same time framewith a digital game.
so that's one thing that is infavor of the cardboard side. the other thing that isinteresting about the cardboard is that people developthis really unique, very strong, emotionalattachment to the game itself. so again, taking some examples,if you take a game box like this, even if you endup opening this game, and not playing it for many years, andputting it away in a corner, one day you'll be just wantingto open it again. and you're going to go, gee, iwant to clean my apartment.
let's throw this, and thenyou're going to keep it. and most of the time, when youget above the trash can, you're going to say, no. looks too good. i'm too attached to it. i have good memories to it, andyou're putting it back. or you're playing it again. whereas, if you have a digitalversion, there's, i think, much less of a hangup to justpressing the delete button.
so there's a unique, emotionalattachment. now, the flip side of that,and the bad thing on the cardboard side, as you canimagine what happens when you're trying to ship hundredsof thousands of these boxes across the oceans witha small company. that's kind of a pain. it's definitely harder than justpublishing something on the google play storeor the app store. the other thing in favor of thedigital side is the price.
it tends to be a lot moreexcited, and a lot more willing to talk about digitalstuff than they are about traditional card gamesor board games. so that's a plus onthe digital side. and these are the maindifferences that we see between the cardboard sideand the digital side. now, let's talk about gamedesign and where the challenges are. so the thing that is veryparticular about board games
as a problem for developmentis that the rules you're dealing with have tobe very simple. and the reason why those ruleshave to be simple is because you're playing with thoserules in your head. so there's a minimum of keepyou're willing to do. and if you try to do toomuch, it's just not going to be much fun. and so what that means is that--that's what i call nowhere to hide.
there's no fancy graphics thatcan hide a bad game. if the interaction of your ruleset with the players who are playing it is not fun,there's no fancy graphic that is going to save you. the flip side of that is thatalso means that when you design a digital prototypeof the game, you can design it in text mode. that's what we did with the veryfirst digital version of the game we had.
we had a smaller card game welaunched in the company we've called "gang of four." andinitially, we developed a very simple text-basedversion of that. and the minute we knew the thingwas going to work is when we started playingthat multi-player card game in text mode. because that was fun, eventhough it was in text mode. and so my point is, if you havea game that is fun with sucky graphics, or intext mode, you know
you have a real winner. so that's one thing that isreally important to focus on. the next thing is that boardgames are fun because you're playing this simple setof rules against another human being. so yes, we can developartificial intelligence opponents. and for some games, you canactually develop world-class ai that will beat thehell out of you.
but that's not what is fun. what is really fun isinteracting with other people, and being able to compete mindagainst mind with all the weakness and logic thatcomes with that. and that creates a set ofinteresting issues from a development standpoint. one of the interesting issues isthe board games tend to be turn based. so you would think, well,they're perfect
asynchronous games. well, except when you look athow people really play board games, they aren't exactlyplaying them asynchronously. i mean, yes, they are takingtheir turns, but they're playing in one game session. you've don't like toplay over a billion different game sessions. and what we ended up discoveringis that what people really, really wantedthen-- and sometimes don't
know how to express it-- butwhat they really want with a digital board game is they wantthe best of both worlds. they want to be able to stop thegame asynchronously, and to start the game whatever theywant, because they might not be face to face with theother online players. but at the same time, when theyhappen to be together, they want the game to performlike a real-time game. so that's created somedifficulties. and i said the [inaudible] todevelop a basic board game
that people can enjoyas a multiplayer online games is this. it's quite significant as aresult of on those issues. so let's talk now about someof the specific design challenges that we see. one of the challengesis what kind of information do you display? when you have a real board game,you don't ask yourself, what am i displaying?
because if there isa stack of cards, there's a stack of cards. and everybody is looking at thisstack of cards, and gets the same information. now, when you display that stackof cards on the computer screen, or any electronicdevice, you don't have the same resolution. you don't have the sameperception of depth that you have with the realdeck of cards.
so at what point do you startshowing people that there's only a few cards leftin the deck? and how do you displaythat information? do you actually put a numberthat says, there's only three cards left in the deck, eric? or how do you accountfor that? this, i assure you,is non-trivial. the other issue that isnon-trivial is in the real world, you can deal withsomething that is quite large.
so you take a board, agame board like this. and you lay pretty, plastictrains on them. and the information reallyjumps at you. so when you're trying toconnect, let's say vancouver to atlanta, it's quite obviouson the map where those things are. when you're dealing with ascreen, whether it's a tablet screen, or even worse, if you'redealing with a smaller format screen, it's a lotharder to see that
information. and it's a lot easierto miss some things. so you're tempted to do thingsthat help prompt the user, and say, ok, these areyour objectives. well, the problem is in thereal world, you don't have something that flashes on theboard, these are your objectives. because everybody elsewould see it. and again, this kind of subtledesign changes change the
flavor of the game. so you have to be super carefulwhen you implement the game, and you decide whatinformation to display. you have to really think throughhow that's going to impact to the game. another issue is that realitytends to be a lot more complex than it looks. so going back to our first game,"gang of four," so it's trick-taking game whereyou have 64 cards.
you play with four players. each players has 16 cards. and you're trying to get rid ofyour cards before the other players do. and there's this thing, whichgives the game it's name, called the "gang of four," whereif you have four of a kind, that acts as a trump. and that allows you to playon anyone's hand. and when we started programmingthat game, people
complained, the gameis broken. there's way too many"gang of fours. and so, of course, if everybodyhas trumps in their hands, the game kindof breaks down. and so we looked at thecode initially. and we're thinking, ok, maybethere's a bug somewhere. so we run some starts, andwe look at actual game plays, and so on. and the odds of having a "gangof four," are exactly what
that the maps say it should. so we go, wait. there is no error in theway we programmed this. and then we realized the erroris a human error that is actually built in the physicalgame itself, and that the game realized that you don't need itto work, which is that when you play with a real deck ofcards, you will not truly do, that is, most humans won'treally, truly do a random shuffle from one endto the next.
and if you do a true,random shuffle, the game will break down. i grant you that. so if you guys play "gangof four," don't shuffle it too much. what that means is we had toactually go back and program a real shuffle that kind of mimicsthe way you would truly shuffle the deck. because otherwise, thegame does break down.
so that's one example. there's another even moreembarrassing and simple example of reality being morecomplex than it looks, or deeper and richer than itlooks, which is almost embarrassing to admit, which islinked to another game we have called "small world." andin "small world," it's kind of like a fantasy game of "risk."and you have a die. and that die you can roll onyour last conquest to try to grab your territory.
and that die has a feature thatis a bit unique, which is that there's one side with onepip, one with two, one with three, and the other threesides happen to be blank. ok. no big deal. when you play with the realgame, you grab the die. it seemed to reallyjump at you. i don't need to writeanything in the rules that says, beware.
this dice has threeblank sides. well, when we programmed theelectronic version, we started getting lots of reviews. and on the upside, it's veryfrustrating because you can't leave feedback or answers tothese people on their reviews. they're saying, thegame is cheating. i'm always rolling blanks. i'd realize, well, yeah. it's rolling the die for you.
and when it's rolling on thescreen, you don't really ever get a chance to see it'sliterally side by side. it kind of rolls too fast. it rolls like a real die, andyou can't really know that there's three blank sides. so that's another example whereyou really need to be careful about how you handlethe display of information, and how you translate thephysical components into the digital site.
one of the challenges isthe perception of time. when you're playing faceto face, you have the interaction. and that's true by the way-- it's not so much a digitalversus cardboard issue here. it's an issue of playing faceto face verus playing online against people that are onthe remote connection. which is that when you areplaying face to face, there is so many human interactions thatdoesn't really pertain to
the game itself, that comesinto play, that your perception of time is vastlydifferent from what it is when you just focus, lookingon your screen. and what that means is in a gamelike "gang of four" where you can play a hand or youcan pass, even if you could play that hand. and that information is crucial,because it's giving me, as your opponent, alot of information. if i see that you hesitateabout passing, i know
something about your hand thatyou don't want me to know. and what's happening is whenyou're just watching the screen, you have noone to look at. so you're missing that whole,additional information, social and as a result of that-- and we did this, reallytimed it. we did the test-- if you pause for evenless than a half a second, we will notice.
or the good playerswill notice. and that's somethingthey would never notice in the real world. so that is a challenge, and thatmeans that people will play the game differently. and you have to accept thatthere's some things you just won't to be able to change, andpeople will play the game differently. another example of that isbecause you have no one to
look at, and interact withdirectly, you will focus on what information you'represented with. so again, looking at that verysimple card game, "gang of four," it's a game where there'sfour players, but there's only one winner. and there's no second,third, fourth player. you're either the winner,or you lost. and when you play the gameonline, all you get to see at is potentially an avatar, thename of that avatar, which we
usually don't changeduring the game itself, and the score. and as a result of that, youfocus on the score a lot more than you would inthe real world. in the real world, people wouldwrite everyone's names. they would write downthe scores. and at the end of every coupleof hands, people will go and say, ok, what is your score? what is your score?
and that's kind of in thebackground of your mind, in the back of your mind. but it's not something thatis facing you on the screen all the time. and as a result of that, whatwe've seen is competitive players who play online get intothis metagame where the scoring information of all thepartners is so present in their mind that whole time thatit alters the way they play the game, and thestrategies they use.
another unique challenge for thedigital versions is that people will have a hardtime believing that ai doesn't cheat. a really hard time. so we have a game. it's a world war ii game. it's called "memoir 44." and it's a game where youget to roll lots of die. and when you roll those dices,people are not willing to
believe that the computer rollsthe same dice you are. so people ask us, they'llsay, i'm a programmer. i want to see your routine. so we show the actual code. and then they say, i wantto see recalls. so we published 500,000game recalls. and we explained to thosepeople, oh, by the way, the dice-rolling function hasno idea who it give that information to.
so the dice-rolling function isexactly the same as rolling the computer dice,and your dice. it doesn't know when it'sgiving the results. people still don't believe it. the reason why people don'tbelieve it is very simple. it's a game that youplay on the board. and we have the position ofdifferent pieces, and so on. that's going to be of impacton the strategy. and that's something that iskind of expensive to compute,
and in some instances, actuallytough to compute on the computer. the flip side of that is withthe computer, what you can really do much better than 99.9%of the human population is you can compute the odds. and you can compute theodds very well. so i'm holding a dice, and i'mlooking for this sample, and that sample, but not that one. this is five, and i'm lookingfor that one and that one.
the computer will do much betterthan the typical human. so as with all of that, when youprogram ai, we say, well, let's use the computerstrength, and let's program it that way. so our ai got really good atmaximizing its dice rolls. and that, combined with the factthat the perception of time changes, and that whenyou're playing in the computer, you see the dice rollshappen in a shorter, a compressed period of time.
totally changes yourperception. and it's really rigged up. i mean, you can show peoplethe actual evidence. it's basically we've come to theconclusion it's impossible to convince people theai isn't cheating. the other interesting challengewith ais is that sometimes the ai, the gamelooks simple to play. the rules are simple, like"ticket to ride." so you think, well, the ai shouldbe easy to program.
well, not so. it can be very difficult. it can be like reallydifficult. and the flip side of that isthere's games that look complex to play for humans, andthe ai is actually quite simple to program. one thing that we like to dois we don't think it's that interesting to tryto develop-- it's challenging, and it's notthat interesting, usually, to
try to develop an ai thatplays like a human does. because in that case, justgo and find a friend. i mean, come on. it's not that difficult,especially if you can play online. so we tried to takeadvantage of that. so with a game like "smallworld," for instance, we use the fact that the initialversion of the game was only a two-player game.
and in the two-player game,it's a zero-sum game. so whatever points i'm scoring,i'm taking away from you, and vice versa. and as a result of that, weused that in the way we designed the ai. and people felt that the gamewas super aggressive. it was super aggressive becauseyou'd put at a stack of armies like thaton one territory. and in the regular play in thereal world, people will never
go after that stack. they're literally physicallyintimidated by the height of your stack. even though all you need isone more token, ok, and it doesn't matter whether the stackis that high, or that high from a score standpoint. and so we were able to developsomething that played really fundamentally different. and that's kind of fun, becausewhat that shows you is
that when you're developingdigital games the right way, they will allow you to learnthe game, but they will scratch a different itch. so what you get as a playerfrom playing the digital version of the gamewill be different. and the pleasure you'll get outof it, and the frustration you'll get out of it sometimes,too, will be different from the one whenyou playing the cardboard. and that really has made thegame a success, the business a
success, because then you reallydo get that feedback loop where people who play thephysical board games are aware of the game, and are interested in playing it online. and that creates a base level,if you want, of sales online. that allows you to be visibleand stay visible if you have a large number of physicalplayers out there. and in turn, because you'revisible in the charts, people can buy the online version.
some people will discover thegame online, and eventually they'll want to go and buythe physical board game. because the physical boardgame will give them different things. and one of the things thatwill be different is the memories that youget out of it. if you think about when youwere playing board games, maybe as a child, i'm suremost of you can jog some memories of some specificgames where you remember
so-and-so did that afterhe was going to capture that territory. and it's much harder-- i'm not saying it'simpossible-- but it's much harder to have thesame emotional connection with a digital site. so being able to play on bothfronts is really something that we strive to do. and that's really, i think, thatreally captures what we
try to do as a business. we really enjoy being one footon the physical side, one foot on the digital side. that allows us to keep thebusiness interesting because, frankly, the cardboard side,it's interesting initially because the spectrum of time isso different and it impacts the way you drive and youdevelop your business. but after a while, you'vefigured it out. so you understand how thatfragmented, antiquated
distribution network works. and it kind of gets boring. the nice thing on the digitalside is things change so quickly that you always haveto stay on your toes. and so being able to combinethe two really makes for a fun, lifestyle business. and i think that kind of sumsup what i wanted to discuss about for getting thedesign of the games. and i'd be happy to openit to q&a now.
male speaker: so why don't youguys raise your hand, and i'll run by and put the mikein front of you. obviously, so we canget it recorded. audience: the digital versionsof your games are so good. i was just wondering how youguys made that pivot, or how you built up the team tostart creating those. eric hautemont: so i thinkthere's a couple of things that gave us an edge. one is that-- and that goes backto the fact that people
in the cardboard businesswill fail in a hurry. that's one of the things that,for us, makes it interesting, which is that there isno shortcut, and you need to go slow. and we tried to adopt the samething with the digital side. so one of the nice things aboutthe board game side is once you have-- it's both the best and the worstbusiness in the world, because it's like the bookpublishing business.
until you have a hit, it'sa really, really bad business to be in. and i would recommend to no oneinterested in making money to go in the boardgame business. because it's expensiveto manufacture. it's expensive to distribute. and it's low margins. but that's only true untilyou get a hit. and the day you get the next"ticket to ride," or the next
"harry potter" in the bookbusiness, that becomes a wonderful business. because once a year, youcall your printer. you say, please, prettyplease, print me some more money. there's very littlecompetition, and it lasts forever. and it's true. i mean, we look at "ticket toride." so we came up with
"ticket to ride" 10 years ago,and we've been selling more "ticket to ride" every singleyear of the board game. every single year thanthe year before. and our marketing expensesare literally this much. as my partner and friend, mark,likes to say, all the marketing is in the game box. we put all the money in the box,and the word of mouth is what's going to do it. now, the flip side of thatis the word of mouth
only goes so fast. so if you're in a hurry, justspend money and waste it. so i think the luxury of havingthose hits under our belt on the cardboard side hasallowed us to go very slow on the digital side. so the first version of "ticketto ride," the digital board game, was actually onthe web back in 2005 as a small java app. and initially, it was free.
and what we realized, as peoplestarted playing it, is that some people wereplaying it a lot. i mean a whole lot. like there's some people-- i won't name names-- but there'ssome people that have played in excess of80,000 games of "ticket to ride" online. now, online plays faster thanthe real board game, so if you're really fast and good--
and by the time you're at your80,000th game, you should be fast, at least, if not good-- you'd be able to play maybethree to five minutes, if it's a two-player game. but then they do do the math. 80,000 times three to fiveminutes, that's a pretty good chunk of time. so we realized that maybethere was a business for actually selling thedigital versions.
and what really, i think,allowed us to get to the next level was the unveilingof the ipad. and we have the ipad,and all the tablets. it's not specific to the ipad. but where i think the tablets,and not the phones, but the tablets differ from every otherform of device is that they have this first device thati think are really-- or can in certain usage be verytransparent, meaning that you can play on that device, and youdon't realize consciously
on that, that you'resitting in front of an electronic device. when i'm sitting in front ofcomputer playing a game of "ticket to ride," i know i'mintimately aware that i'm in front of my computer playing"ticket to ride." when you are playing on the tablet, sometimesyou can forget that. and it's especially true whenyou're playing face to face on the tablet. so the answer--
i guess the long-winded windedanswer to your question is the reason we've been successful, ithink, is we take our time. we don't hesitate to be late. so we have lots of people thatcome to us, and they say, we have a new platform. you must do that. so a couple of years ago, we hadpeople say, oh, if you're not on social live, ifyou're not on social networks, you're dead.
and we're like, maybewe're dead. maybe we're not. the nice thing is wecan afford to wait. and the same thing was true withconsoles, where people come in and say, you needto be on this console. well, no, we don't really,actually, because we're doing just fine on thecardboard side. we've got the digital sideof the business. and so if we're not on thatversion, we can be on the next
version, or the next version. and by the way, if we miss thetrain, maybe that train will go off road somewhere. and we don't have toworry about it. and we still have some time. audience: hi. so i play "memorial 44," andafter your comments about the ai, i was wondering if you'veever felt the urge to actually tweak the ai so thatit cheats, but in
favor of the player. a lot of video games do that. like they make it seem like it'sfair, but it's actually in favor of the player, so theplayer doesn't complain. eric hautemont: no, we don'tfor a couple of reasons. one is an economical reason,which is that we're a very small company, actually,in terms of people. we are 16 people worldwide, andthat includes the people that do the physical cardboardstuff, and all the people who
do the programming and the artfor the online versions. so once we have a version thatwe're happy with, we try not to tinker with it too muchbecause it's expensive. it's expensive not interms of money. it's expensive in termsof our time. and whatever time we spenddeveloping these additional tweaks to the ai is time that wedon't spend taking the next game online. so that's one reason.
the other one is that weactually think that part of the fun of doing ais, or ofplaying the ais, is figuring out the ai. it's almost like a puzzle. and once you've solved thatpuzzle, than frankly, we want to encourage people togo and play online. there's no way-- we could havethe entire company work on ais for "memorial 44" for the next10 years, and i still don't think we could duplicate thevariety of opponents that are
playing face to face. audience: a short followup. when can we expect androidversions of your games? [laughter] eric hautemont: so i'llgive an answer. i'll give an answer, but beforei give that answer, i need to promise everyone thatyou'll be able to keep your mouth shut for the next, uh,for the next two weeks. eric hautemont: so isthat a "yes?" ok.
so we'll be shipping-- and i know i've been kind offamous in the board game industry, because people-- every time we ship a new versionon the iphone, or something, people say, android,android, android. and i've actually gone to thepress a couple of years ago on record, and saying, we don'twant to do android versions, and here's why. and i got a lot of flak forthat from board gamers.
but we actually came in with-- we actually came with a "ticketto ride" version on the android tablets. and i say tablets. so we work on someof the large-- i mean, one thing that isinteresting, and kind of change for a small team likeus on android, is that you have this wide variety. you have this continuum ofphone factors, from like
really tiny phones all theway to large tablets. but you'll be able to play"ticket to ride" on tablets. the game will ship on googleplay on may 30. and if some of you areinterested, you can send me an email after we are done. you can send me an email ateric-- that's e-r-i-c-- @daysofwonder. and if you really can't waituntil may 30, we can probably get you to download theapplication we used to
distribute beta version,which is [inaudible] app, and send you an apk ofthe game ahead of time. the only thing we ask is, as acompany, we tend to be quite secretive about what we dountil the day we launch. so you're welcome to email me. i'll give you a version. please don't try to go and passit around or anything like that until may 30. audience: so my daughter and iwould like to play "ticket to
ride," but i find when we playtogether-- she's eight-- we don't play the sort ofcutthroat game of like, oh, i'm going to cut you off. and you can't finish a route. but we kind of played in acooperative way, where oh, i see you're trying tobuild over here. i'll build over there. have you thought about what someof your games, thinking about ways you could make themlike cooperative variants of
the games, or cooperativegameplay, so that for families and stuff? those kind of environments? eric hautemont: yeah. so we actually have a gamecalled "shadows over camelot," which is a game that is actuallybuilt around the whole idea of being cooperative,meaning that all the players togetherplay against the game mechanics itself.
now, even there, i'mafraid though, we couldn't quite help it. so we did put a small wrinklein that, which is that even though all the players areplaying together against the game mechanic itself, there isalways the possibility, or the risk, even in your case, thatone of the players is a traitor, and will win ifeverybody else loses. but you don't have a guaranteethat that player is there. and if you want to play it inpurely cooperative mode, you
can do that. on a game like "ticket to ride,"there's a way to play cooperatively, like on theasia map, for instance. we have a team version. so where players have a limitedamount of information, the connections, how theycan share together. so you're playing cooperatively,but you still playing competitively againstother players. and the reason for that is,again, with real board games,
you must use a very simpleset up rules. otherwise, you lose the vastmajority of players. and so it's difficult to keepthe tension that makes a game fun and tight when beingpurely cooperatively. so unless you design the gamefrom the ground up for that, i think it's very difficult totake a game that is not a cooperative game andturn it into one. audience: i was wondering ifyou could speak a bit about the collaboration processbetween the company and
working designers, and sortof like where the work-- how the work is split up. and also, i'm also curious aboutsort of like the origins of "ticket to ride," andhow you got started creating the game. eric hautemont: sure. so we're getting at how wework with game designers. it really runs the whole gamutfor a number of reasons, one of which is that we haven't mettwo game designers that
are the same. there's actually very few peoplein the business who make a living, full time,from game design. most of those that do makea living full time tend to be in the us. but there's game designersall around the world. and we've seen people that havesubmitted prototypes to us that we're working for thesecret service, that we're working for that coast guard, onthe equivalent of the coast
guards in other countries. people that are teachers. people that are priests. all kind of people. and so depending on the workthey do, and the type of designed they do, the amountof interactions we have is more or less significant. so we have some people that haveworked with us, and they say, i have a design,and the design was
perfect from the get-go. and so the interaction we hadwith them was sending a publishing agreement, and thenkeeping them informed as we went to develop the game fromthe graphic design standpoint that you want. one thing that wedon't do is-- and that goes back tothe [inaudible] collaboration-- is i actually don't believe inthe design by committee.
so when we do graphic design andthings like that, we have an art director. we discuss together. we discussed in the company, butthere's someone that makes the decision. and that someone is me, becausei'm the one who is paying for this mistake if wescrew up, and we don't sell the board game as well asi thought we would. so we inform the game designers,and we show them
who we're going to workwith, and so on. but it's not reallycollaborative in that we don't let them decide which[inaudible] they are going to work with. all the things like that. now, from a gameplay standpoint,depending on the game, it can be veryinteractive. so if we take a game like"memoir 44," richard borg developed that game,and designed a
great game about the-- sorry. my mind goes blank. he had designed a great gameabout the civil war. and we went to him, and we said,we'd like to do a game on world war ii. and we spent the better part ofsix months working with him on the game design itself,tweaking the game design that he had to make it workfor world war ii.
so it runs the whole gamut. now, regarding "ticket to ride,"the way we stumbled on "ticket to ride" is we went toa small board game conference in baltimore that isheld every year. and now it's movedto lancaster, pennsylvania, i think. it's called the world boardgame championship. it's kind of a misnomer to callit the world board game championship.
we tend to think of it asthe baltimore board game championship, because 95% of thepeople there are in close proximity of the convention. but it's a great conventionalwhere people go and play games competitively for a weekof time every summer. and we met with alan there. we'd never met withhim before. it was mark and myself. and we said, letme [inaudible].
and he said, oh, i have thesegame that i need to show you. and he pulled this smallcardboard box, and it says "station to station." and he putthe map on the table that looked like a cool versionof the original "ticket to ride" map. and we started playingthe game. he said, ok, so it'sa very simple game. here are the rules. and so we started playing two orthree times with mark, and
we look at each other,and we're like, yes, this feels good. and so then [inaudible] alan just wipes off of the wholemap clean and said, ok, so you understandhow it plays. so you can take ithome and decide. and with mark, we just said,like, you just stopped the whole game. you just destroyedour whole game.
we were playing! what did you do? and to this day, to this day,i'm not quite sure whether alan used that as a geniusmarketing trick to really make sure he had hooked us asa publisher, or not. now, alan will claim, if you askhim in public, alan will claim no recollection whatsoeverof ever wiping that board clean. but that's kind of thebackground story behind
"ticket to ride." and what was fun with that, andthat's true of all board games, is that i then traveledwith that little prototype. i actually flew to korea becauseback in 2004, there was kind of this boardgame craze in coffee shops in korea. and i wanted to witnessthat first hand. and so i traveled withthat small prototype. and what i saw there--
and i've seen it again and againwith board games-- is what's interesting is boardgames, if they're really good, they will work anywherein the world. so no matter whether you speakthe language of the people you play with or not, you canhave a great time. and we saw that. landed in korea. quickly was in a cafe where ihave no clue what people were talking about.
i couldn't understand a word,and they probably couldn't understand a word. you guys probably don'tunderstand half of the words i've been talking about. and i called mark, and i said,you know, this game is going to be big. we knew right then. so that's one of the nice thingsabout the prototypes is again, even if you have reallybad graphics, you'll know very
quickly, once you play withpeople, whether you have a winner or not. audience: so first of, i wantedto thank you very much. i absolutely love "ticket toride." i actually bought a copy for my family back home inchicago, and they've been playing it like every day forthe past several months. eric hautemont: thank you. thank you or sorry? audience: oh, it's more ofa thank you, actually.
it helped me survivea few trips home, which is always nice. one thing i noticed inparticular, because i play the tablet version a lot, is thatwhen you play the tablet version, it tends to be more ofa single player experience, even when you'replaying online. because your goal is to kindof finish your routes. where when you're playing inperson, there's more of this competitive edge, where you kindof want to screw people
over, and you wantto cut them off. and you want to kind of seewhere they're trying to get to, and cause more mayhem. is there any way of kind ofadding that into the digital version of the game? i just found that even thoughi play both copies, that my strategy changes fromgame to play. eric hautemont: what yousay is very true. i think it's very tough on agame like "ticket to ride."
and the reason for that, andthat's something that's shared with a lot of board gamedesigns, is that there's hidden information. and so because you have it, thathidden information, it's very difficult for us to havea commercially practical version where you could play"ticket to ride" sharing the same tablet as your digitalboard with other people sitting across from you. and until we get that, so thatmeans we have to assume, then,
that everybody has a phone,too, that they can use, to hold in their hand. and then you have todeal with all these interface issues of, ok-- again, the real worldis complex, or it's simpler than it looks. so when you have real cards inyour hand, you just drop you cards, and you're done. if you have a digital devicein your hand, and you're
trying to drop those cards ontothe digital device in the middle, it gets quicklypretty awkward. and you have to worry about yourbluetooth connection or your wi-fi connection droppingoff, and all kinds of crap that you don't have toworry about with a real deck of cards. so for games with hiddeninformation like "ticket to ride," i'd say it's verydifficult until the technology gets a lot more transparent.
now, with games like "smallworld," you can actually play a game of "small world" faceto face around the tablet. and in that case, we actuallysee the behavior on the type of play very much being thesame, with the kind of aggressiveness you describe,and so on. what's interesting is we run a"ticket to ride" tournament, championship tournament. real "ticket to ride" withthe real board game. and because we have people thathave played 80,000 games,
where lots of people online thatthink like, they're the king of "ticket to ride," andnobody can beat them. so when we started doingnational qualifications for that tournament, we had lotsof people who said, i'm so good online. i'm not even going to gofor the qualifiers. i'm just going to go in theactual competition, and i'm going to crush everyone. and i'd say over 90% of peoplethat had that kind of
attitude, got their clockcleaned when they actually played the real, physicalboard game. because it plays different. it really does. and we had the final wherewe had one person-- it was interesting. we had the final where we hadone best one that actually played a lot of physical boardgame versions of "ticket to ride."
and we had this opponent, whowas the opposite of my finalist, who was actually aprofessional player, in that he didn't really particularlycare, at the time, about "ticket to ride." he cares aboutplaying tournaments with money to win. and he studies the game, andhe just goes after that. and so he had only played likefive games of "ticket to ride" in real life, and a coupleof games online. but he'd studied all about theticket distribution, and
everything else. and he finished second. so i guess experiencedoes pay off. but it shows there'sdifferent sides. to us, that's part of what'sfun, is what you get out of playing online tends to bedifferent from what you get out of playing the physicalboard game. and so eventually, youend up buying both, which we love you for.
male speaker: all right. we just have time for acouple more questions. there's one from vc, andthen we're going to take one over here. so one from vc from henry. he asks, "given your emphasison simplicity of design, how do you feel about the recentpopularity of really complex games, like 'fantas.y flight,"coming out of "fantasy flight," like "civilization,""ora et labora?"
eric hautemont: so i think it'sinteresting that the more complex games can bevery exciting. and it's interesting youmentioned "civilization," because the old avalon hill"advanced civilization" is kind of the all-time favoriteof mine, even though i would never publish it asa board game. i have memories of playing downthe block, literally, for like 14 hours in a row. and that's some ofmy best memories.
i think the difference betweenthe long games, or the simple games and the complexgames, is the-- it goes back to theword of mouth. the word-of-mouth factor onthe complex games is a lot harder to grow fast. and so you have a muchsmaller population. so you have people thathave become, i'd say, board game literate. and so you have people thatactually-- you have a small
segment of the populationthat actually enjoys learning new games. and so when we go to like alanmoon's gathering of friends, there are people who are therejust to play new games. and if you propose to them toplay a game they've already played, they're goingto say, no. i actually want toplay a new game. and so there's people thatkind of enjoy that mental gymnastic, if you want.
and once you get over the hump,i can see why people enjoy that. but that's a verysmall minority. audience: so this is a slightlydifferent question. but you're talking aboutensuring the dice rolling in "memoir 44," and gameslike that, was fair. so i was curious as to why thedie in "small world" has the one across from the three,instead of having the three sides all across from blankfaces, which would have a
greater guarantee ofhaving a fair die. eric hautemont: actually,it's a good question. because in the game itself, thatdifference, when you look at the impact of the difference,makes no difference. so we went with whatever wasthe simplest for the game, which was easiest for the shopdesign, to give to the tool manufacturer to do. so that's the actualreason why.
we had a simulation when wedid that world board game championship with "ticketto ride." one of the two finalists came to me and said,ok, so i looked at whether the tournament rules work. and how are we going todecide who starts? it was the first personto win two games. and since there's no tie, withinthree games, you know what happens. and he's like, how are we goingto decide who's going to
start the first game? and i looked at the guy,and i said, say what? and he said, yeah, there'san advantage to whoever starts first. and i said, well, yeah, there's a theoretical advantage. and the guy got like really-- so we said, ok, fine. so i went to see theother finalist.
i said, ok. so that guy wants to discusswho's going to start. and the other finalist looked atme, and he said, that's ok. let him start. i'll just work a littlebit harder. and then he proceededto just crush him. and he won two games in a row. so i guess that kind ofsums up my view about those kind of things.
they're kind of fun to thinkup from a math standpoint. from a practical standpoint-- i'll give you the dicedesign that favors your odds any time. audience: about the onlineversus offline gaming. so in offline, oneof the biggest-- the thing that i enjoy mostis pitting people against each other. and you're like, oh,he's leading.
you should attack him,and so forth. and that like doesn't translateto online at all. and so i've been thinking. i saw this implemented for"dominion." i think it's over in google hangouts. and letting people like seeeach other, and then like encouraging that interaction. what do you think about that? could that be?
eric hautemont: the only thingabout that, the only reservation i have about thosekind of things-- and we [inaudible] people. that's why we don't implementthem ourselves. we let people, if they want--and we know there's some people, sometimes, that actuallywill literally open a chat channel, and just liketrash talk with each other during a game.
the reason we don't support thatdirectly in the game-- besides the fact that it's workthat we'd rather spend on designing other games-- so what i want to say is we'realways leery of things that remove transparency. we think it's already such achallenge to translate a physical board gameproperly online. that the more tools, the moretechnology you add, it's very difficult to do that in a waythat is really transparent.
so even though when i'm playingin real life, it's very easy for me to do sometrash talk, if i have to go and actually type that,we think that's a big distraction. and that's not a verytransparent way of communicating with people. and so that's the other reasonwhy we don't care so much about those kinds of things. we're really striving for, ithink, the technology not
getting in the way. i mean, that's one thing that isfascinating to us, being in silicon valley, there'sall these people-- every three months, there'ssomeone who's come out with a new dice design. and they go, look. there's this superduperelectronic dice, and it's got a usb connection. it's got a hard drive in it, andit does all these things.
i'm like, dice have worked finefor thousands of years. what's the point? and so we try and-- on the one hand, we look atnew technology, and we're really curious to see whathappens with google glasses in terms of certain types of hiddeninformation that we think it could take careof during the games. at the same time, we're reallycareful to go slow, and not do
things that are non-transparent,and really
become more cumbersome, andremove more than they add. male speaker: let's give erica big round of applause. male speaker: thanksagain for coming.
