Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Elan Lee, cofounder of Exploding Kittens.

This is a very special episode for me, one I’ve been looking forward to publishing for months. It features a behind-the-scenes look at my latest creative project, my new game COYOTE.

COYOTE is a fast, casual card game I created with Elan and the Exploding Kittens team. It has been my obsession for two years.

I worked really hard on every aspect of this one (concept, mechanics, art, you name it)!

You can finally buy it everywhere, including Amazon, Target, Walmart, and 8,000+ retail locations worldwide. It’s been a hit with 100+ test families, my friends, and at conferences around the world. It now produces guaranteed laughs with kids, adults, tipsy people, serious people… all who enjoy unleashing their inner trickster.

If you’ve benefited from my podcast, newsletter, books, or anything at all, please grab a copy or two! It only costs $10-12 and can provide hours upon hours of fun. It takes minutes to learn and 10 minutes to play. Under the hood, it’s also designed to be a good workout for your brain.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to get a product on the shelves of something like Walmart or Target, or simply create a game, this podcast covers it all.

P.S. One last thing: read to the end for a very fun surprise that involves a mystery Hollywood party.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss: Hello, ladies and germs, boys and girls. This is another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I’m Tim Ferriss and I’m sitting with a friend of mine who I brought to my podcast with a secret agenda that has ended up two years later with a very, very not-so-secret-for-long outcome that we’re going to talk about, Elan Lee.

Elan Lee: Thanks.

Tim Ferriss: Nice to see you again.

Elan Lee: It’s nice to see you too. That was a secret agenda. That was a two-year-in-the-making secret agenda.

Tim Ferriss: Two years in the making. So what we’re going to do in this conversation, and I just hijacked his bio because I’ve had too much caffeine, so I’m going to let him do the self-intro in a second. But we’re going to give you a peek behind the curtain, under the hood, open the kimono, choose your metaphor. We’re going to talk about the creative process, the development process, thinking about distribution, retail, all of these things which I have not heard discussed anywhere else in depth.

Elan Lee: You buried the lead. All of that stuff of — 

Tim Ferriss: Of a game that we created that from the very beginning was something I’ve wanted to do my whole life, which is create a game. I was raised, protected in some ways by Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. It was my refuge from bullying and also just the straight boredom of most of my schooling at the time. And that immersive experience, the ability to get lost in a world of imagination and fun and laughter and emotion was so incredibly important. It was so formative for me that the seed was planted really early. And I think you know this because I probably sent you a photograph of this at one point. I still have all of my modules. I have The Player’s Handbook, First Edition, Dungeon Master’s Guide, all of the dice, everything from when I was a kid. I’ve kept it to this day.

Elan Lee: I love this, I love this. But hold on.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: If you’re not going to say it, I’m going to say it. Tim Ferriss made a game.

Tim Ferriss: I did.

Elan Lee: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: It took me 47 years, but here we are.

So the game, I’ll just show it to camera for people who want a visual who are not watching this. If you’re listening, you can go to tim.blog/coyote. So I’m giving a bit of what you might call foreshadowing in the biz. But this is the game. It is a card game. It’s called Coyote. That name did not come easily. We went through about 537 different names and lots of testing and we’ll talk about some of that. But this is the game and it’s effectively, I’d like to hear your pitch because we have slightly different approaches, but I would say it is rock-paper-scissors on steroids. So there are God knows how many, maybe 20 different gestures, something like that, 66 total cards. And you can play cooperatively where you’re all trying to beat the game together or competitively where you can sabotage individual players, throw curveballs of all different types, and that relates to the name Coyote, if you think about the trickster mythology associated with Coyote.

Elan Lee: Yeah

Tim Ferriss: We never got to your bio. Who the hell are you?

Elan Lee: Oh, that’s the least interesting part of this whole thing.

Tim Ferriss: No, I know, but it puts it in perspective and just explain the company a bit, the scope of it, et cetera

Elan Lee: I love talking about games, I hate talking about myself. So I will try.

Tim Ferriss: That’s why it takes someone like me to force you to do it.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Okay, here we go. My name is Elan Lee. I am the co-creator and CEO of Exploding Kittens. I believe we’re the number one independent game studio in the world, something like that. I don’t know. We’ve sold a whole bunch of games. We’ve sold 60 million games at this point and been running that company for 10 years now. And before that I was the chief design officer at the Xbox and before that I worked at a pet store.

Tim Ferriss: And for people who want the full journey, including the sort of magical tinderbox that was Kickstarter way back in the day, how this whole adventure started 10 plus years ago, listen to the first conversation that I did with Elan.

I had wanted to make a game and quickly realized that an RPG, something like Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, was going to be too complicated for me and my friends as adults to play. It would be too hard for me to recruit my friends where you have, let’s just say, a full day, then you have dinner, maybe you have a few drinks, and then you have an hour before people split. There’s no way I’m going to get someone to build, for instance, a chaotic good gray elf, which was my orientation, and work from there. It’s just not going to happen.

And meanwhile, about maybe it was a year or two years before I invited you on the podcast, I found this game Poetry for Neanderthals and holy shit, had so much fun with that with my friends. I thought, “Okay, I think I want to tilt my game dreams,” which at that point had no real direction, “towards something more casual.” But in the meantime, I’d also been listening to all sorts of podcasts and so on that we’ll get to. But you’ve explained your background.

Elan Lee: Well, hold on. So what you just described is exactly why I started Exploding Kittens, because I also — okay, a little bit different. Unlike you, I, when I encounter those crazy two and four and six-hour games, I am immediately turned off. I can’t focus for that long. I can’t understand the rules. If it takes longer than five minutes to explain a game, I am gone. I have no ability to play that game. And so the whole reason I started this company, and I think the whole reason that you made the pivot from giant role-playing games to being interested in the creation of casual fast-party games is this golden rule of two minutes to learn, 15 minutes to play because nothing’s at stake there, right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: You’re going to learn it. You’re either going to love the game or you’re going to hate it, but whatever, you committed five minutes total to that thing. And I love the games where after the five-minute commitment, you’re still going to play for two hours. But they’re going to be in these little five-minute sessions over and over and over again. And it sounds like that’s the experience you had, which makes me so happy because that means mission accomplished. That’s exactly what I wanted to build.

Tim Ferriss: And we’re going to talk about different rules or tenets that you have because what I want to do in this conversation, we’re definitely going to talk about the process of building this game because I am really, really happy with it and really proud.

Elan Lee: It’s so good. You should be. It’s so good.

Tim Ferriss: And we’ll have a lot to talk about. But the motivation also of basically showing the cards, I’m going to use so many mixed metaphors here, is to teach people game design and explain why this has possessed such a toehold in my mind for so long.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Well, you went through a journey and I’m excited looking at that journey through your eyes of, “I don’t even know what I want to build, but I know I want to build a fun experience that I would enjoy, that my friends would enjoy,” all the way through to this thing is at every Walmart and Target in North America. That journey is incredible and you got to see it for the first time. You absolutely drank from the firehose here.

This was fun for me because I had to walk you through this, right? You’ve never sold a game before. So walking through the process of how you make a game and how you sell a game, it doesn’t work the way people think. So retailers have a buyer per category. So if anybody wants to sell something to a retailer, you want something in Target or Walmart or Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The way it works is you have to convince the buyer for your category to take your thing, right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: They have limited shelf space. It’s very precious real estate. So you have to convince them that your thing is better than anybody else’s thing. And twice a year they have these things called line reviews.

The buyers have to buy games for next year, right? They need to put stuff on the shelf. There’s only a certain number of meetings they can physically have in a period of time because it’s usually one or two or maybe three people. So they take as many meetings as they can. It’s usually a dozen, maybe two dozen. And in those meetings — 

Tim Ferriss: In your case, with different game manufacturers, different studios.

Elan Lee: Exactly. So they’ll take a meeting with Hasbro and they’ll take a meeting with Mattel and all the big guys. And in those meetings, 20, 30, 50 games are pitched to them in every single one of those meetings. And then they’ll make a decision on which ones they’re going to purchase and stock for the next year. So that’s line review. The tricky parts for line review is one, you got to do a great job, but even before that, you got to get that meeting, right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: They only have time for a certain number of meetings. So you have to put yourself in a position where you can get in that room.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so we’re going to talk strategy and tactics for line review in a minute because, and take this as a compliment, you are one of the best in-person salespeople I’ve ever seen.

Elan Lee: That could also be an insult, but I’ll take it, I’ll take it.

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s not an insult. No, no, it’s not an insult. Everybody’s in sales, whether they like to admit it or not, whether you’re selling ideas, you’re selling a position, a perspective, if you want to call it deal making. This is what I used to say in my class, my guest lecture that I taught for 10 years, once or twice a year in high-tech entrepreneurship. I would start off by saying, “Who here wants to be in sales?” No hands would go up and I would say, “Well, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. Bad news is you’re all in sales. And let me explain why. If you want to call it deal making, fine, you’re going to have to negotiate. You don’t get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.”

Elan Lee: That’s well said.

Tim Ferriss: “And you get what you can present in a very persuasive way.” I was like, “The good news is you can learn it.”

Elan Lee: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: This is a coachable, learnable skill, which I completely still believe. There’s some people who may have a little bit of extraversion, charismatic reality, distortion, field advantage, but you can become excellent even if you start with zero raw materials. 

Okay, so the journey, wanted to make a game my whole life, but it was this vague, “Maybe someday. God, wouldn’t it be nice?”

Elan Lee: Let me just poke at that for a second.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure.

Elan Lee: Why?

Tim Ferriss: The why is I wanted to imbue someone else’s experience with the magic I felt playing D&D.

Elan Lee: Well said.

Tim Ferriss: That’s it.

Or much easier games, right? It’s such a simple game. I used to play Sorry and Monopoly. And as a young kid, I just thought Sorry was the most hilarious thing when you could look someone in the eyes and go, “Sorry,” and knock their stuff off the board. I didn’t always respond well when it happened to me. It doesn’t have to be the incredibly immersive, complex game that D&D is, although I still think that is just like Gary Gygax and the team way back in the day, holy cow. Also, by the way, for people who don’t know, Gen Con, huge convention, started out around Lake Geneva and was, I believe, created by the TSR guys way back in the day.

Elan Lee: I believe that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, Gen Con from Lake Geneva and then was the Generals Convention, and now is nothing. Now Gen Con doesn’t stand for anything because it’s in Indianapolis. But anyway, sorry. It was an aside.

Tim Ferriss: It’s an aside. So that was the kind of impetus behind wanting to make a game, but it didn’t have any form. And then I suppose it was maybe two and a half, three years ago, I was like, “Okay, I’d like to actually take a deeper dive here.” Because there are lots of things we have on our, say, list of New Year’s resolutions. For instance, for a long time I had “Develop the side splits like Jean-Claude Van Damme.” Never happened, but it was there every fucking year and it just got punted. I was like, “Well, didn’t do it. Okay, this year is the year.” But there was no plan, there were no deadlines, there were no constraints, which is the power of constraints, which we’ll probably talk about.

Elan Lee: Absolutely, yes.

Tim Ferriss: It is so critical. It’s not just critical. It is additive to have constraints, which seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. Well, we’ll, I’m sure, get to that.

So I started looking at different options and the catalyst for this actually was something way back in the day, some of you will remember called The Legend of CØCKPUNCH, and that was an NFT project — remember those? Which raised two million bucks for fundamental science and mechanistic studies basically related to mental health. So all the proceeds from that, if you want to look it up, it’s easy to find Legend of CØCKPUNCH. But all the proceeds went to a nonprofit foundation, which then funds mental health, therapeutic research and things related to that. But in the process of doing that, I got to, with very low stakes because I think it’s helpful when possible, especially if you’re an intrepid beginner wading into unfamiliar creative waters, make the stakes super, super low, right? And even before this podcast, it’s like, “Okay, this is a very unusual conversation where it’s like, “Look, we’re not doing this live. If we really don’t like it, we can scrap the whole thing.” So reduce, reduce, reduce the pressure and the stakes until you can get started, right?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: With writing, I got the advice long ago, two crappy pages per day. That’s it.

Elan Lee: Love it.

Tim Ferriss: And then you actually put pen to paper.

Elan Lee: Yeah, the overlaps are enormous with games. But, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Super related. Also the iterative process. All right, so using The Legend of CØCKPUNCH as this pretext, basically I started writing fiction and so I wrote these very, very, it turned out to be very involved, very viable fantasy histories and pieces, tying all of these greater houses together and then having these protagonists, the father and then the son, who’s Tyrolean, and yada, yada, yada, yada. And I still think there might be something there, but in the process of creating that, I thought to myself, “This would actually make a fantastic game. And it wouldn’t have to be as complicated as D&D, but you would have allies, you would have age old amenities, would have different strengths, certain strengths that cancel out other strengths, weaknesses that can be taken advantage of.”

And that led me to start listening to a podcast called Think Like a Game Designer with Justin Gary, which is outstanding. I recommend people check it out. And a lot of the focus there, not entirely, but a lot of the focus there was on trading card games, alternately called collectible card games, I guess. Wizards of the Coast who created Magic: The Gathering, patented and trademarked one of them. So they seem to be used interchangeably. But Justin, also former high-level competitive Magic: The Gathering player, has a lot of knowledge around that world. He’s developed some incredibly successful games in that genre where you’re building a deck, you’re buying certain cards or decks with the hopes of getting certain cards and assembling your toolkit basically. And that was initially where my mind went in terms of game concept.

But I realized a few things really quickly. I was a D&D guy, which predated Magic: The Gathering. My brother was a Magic: The Gathering guy. But I’ve never really played Magic. And when I began to delve into it, I was like, “You know what? I would like to think of this as D&D light, but this is incredibly nuanced.” Right?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: To be good at this — 

Elan Lee: Oh, for sure, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — it is incredibly nuanced. And also if you’re against someone who is really experienced or just has their mind wired for it, you are going to be obliterated.

Elan Lee: Absolutely right.

Tim Ferriss: And that’s what happened to me playing a friend of mine, kudos to Mike, just got slayed. And God bless Mike, he’s like a number of my friends who just kind of want to watch you die slowly in this agonizing ill-fated gameplay where you’re kind of whimpering along until they put you out of your misery.

Elan Lee: Yeah, yeah, you play a card, he said, “Isn’t this cute? You think you’ve got it. Watch this.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is just not really my thing. So I thought to myself, okay, looking at some of the casual games I really like, there is an opportunity, and this will come back later, for the underdog or the person who is behind to win. So there’s an element, it is skill-based, but there’s an element of chance and this is going to come back. So then Poetry for Neanderthals, I don’t know how I found it initially, frankly. I think I probably went into a game shop and I was like, “Hey,” and this relates to why, as an adult, I want to spend less time in front of screens and ultimately if I look back and do this thing every year called a past year review, people can find it online, you can read all about it and do it yourself. You don’t have to buy anything, past year review.

Where I look at the peak positive and negative emotional experiences of the past year, I go through my whole calendar. Sometimes I’ll go through my photos, sometimes I’ll go through my text messages or my sent folder in the inbox. And lo and behold, and this is not a revelation for some people, but the activities did not matter as much as the people. So then the question is, how do I create different contexts for interacting with, let’s just say, my 10 or 15 closest friends? Some of that is doing things outside in the wilderness that are active and so on. But that’s a heavy lift, that’s a heavier lift than — 

Elan Lee: A high barrier of entry.

Tim Ferriss: — playing a casual game, right? So it’s like if I’m here in Austin, where we are right now, and my friends or a bunch of my friends come in for South by Southwest and I manage to get them together for one night, what can we play that will get us off of our goddamn phones and deepen our relationship and create memories that we can hold onto that will stick around? That’s it. That’s it, right?

Elan Lee: So good.

Tim Ferriss: And then we had our conversation and that’s kind of when everything, I guess, kicked off. Just a couple of things maybe that we should mention also. After our conversation when, I think, very shyly I must have reached out to you at some point shortly thereafter, and I was kind of like, “Hey, guy, not sure if this would be interesting, but maybe kind of sort, do you want to talk about maybe making a game together or something?”

Elan Lee: I remember this exact conversation. It’s like asking me out on a first date.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like scratching my head looking at the ground. And that’s how the whole thing got kicked off. And I want to mention something related to that, which was for the last probably three years, my New Year’s resolutions have been very — they’re very broad, but they’re pretty specific. So I had two. One is doing more delegation, which is figure it out delegation. So what that means is rather than doing what I’m hardwired to do with my OCD and perfectionism, which is, “Here, go do this thing. Let me give you a 20-page installation manual explaining exactly what to do,” versus, “Here’s roughly what I want done. Just figure it out and get it done. I don’t want to make any decisions, So don’t come back to me with 12 options. Just make the best you can.”

And I’ll expect Reid Hoffman also, LinkedIn has mentioned this sort of a 10 percent footfall rate, like 10 percent of the time something’s going to go sideways and that’s fine in the interest of reducing decision fatigue and making things faster. So one was more figure it out delegation and number two was sprints with creatives. And for me what that meant as someone who has operated as a lone wolf, which by the way is a contradiction in terms, but who has been a solo operator for most of my creative projects, I was like, “You know what? It just isn’t that fun anymore to do it solo.” And it’s also antithetical to some of the creative projects I want to pursue like a game.

I mean, there are some amazing solo game designers. Not to say there aren’t, but I was like, “You know what? I want to try to be more social in my creativity and collaborate with creatives and do sprints.” Now, sometimes those sprints turn into longer things, but those have been sort of my two guiding lights for the last few years, which is what then gave me the ability to build up the courage. It sounds so ridiculous to say, but to actually reach out to you and be like, “Hey, do you want to actually just bat around the possibility of something?”

Elan Lee: So from my perspective, that conversation, I got very excited to work with you on something, one, because it turns out you’re just a lovely human being and so much fun to hang out with.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you.

Elan Lee: But two, I asked you that very fundamental question. You said, “Hey, do you want to build a game?” And I said, “Why do you want to build a game?” And your answer was almost identical to what you just related. You talked about your past experiences, you talked about childhood memories of games, you talked about what you like and what you don’t like. And what became very clear to me was there’s something special going on here. Tim wants to treat his friends and his audience to something extraordinary. And we get approached all the time by people who want to make games, big celebrities and singers and actors, all of them want to make a game. And whenever I ask them the question “Why?” the answer is invariably, “Because my agent told me to,” or, “Because I think I can make money,” or really very superficial. Often they’re not game players at all. They have no connection to the experience of game design.

And when I spoke to you, none of that was present. Instead it was, “This is a very personal thing to me, and ultimately I want to give a gift.” And that’s when my brain started lighting up. It’s like, “Oh, this is going to be fun. He’s in this for all the reasons I’m in this and that means we can make something very special together.” And I think we have.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, we definitely have. And another question that is sometimes a little tricky to apply, but that has been in my mind for a while, since Seth Godin, very well-known author, thinker, just incredibly sage and awesome human being. He reframed for me, which is the reframing of the question, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” Right?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good question. Like what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? All right, that’s freeing. But the way he tweaks that is he said, “What would you do if you knew you would fail?” In other words, like, what would you do for which the process alone would make it worth it? And for me, because I mean, we became fast friends very quickly, and I was like, “Okay, that’s rare for me as an adult, number one.” And I’ve been banging this around in my own little head for so long. Even if this ends up not making the cut for whatever reason, this seems worth it to me, right?

Elan Lee: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Because coming back to the people over activities also, I was like, “Love hanging out with Elan and connecting. I am going to learn a lot.” And at the very worst, I learn a lot and we’ve deepened our relationship. And that stuff just snowballs over time. It transcends a single project. So even if this had not manifested, it would’ve been worth it and that’s how I try to pick my projects these days.

Elan Lee: So when we first started down this path together, I remember I came out, we sort of visited each other back and forth a few times. And I remember every time I would pack a suitcase full of games and we would sit with some of your friends and we’d play games all night long and you’d say, “I like this one. I don’t like this one. I like this part.” But ultimately, we weren’t making any progress. We were just learning vocabulary, essentially. And I would go home and my wife would be like, “How’d it go? What did you learn? Are you going to make a game together?” And I’d be like, “I don’t know. No, we just hung out and had fun.” And she’d be like, “Wasn’t that a huge disappointment? You traveled 2,000 miles to go see him?” I’m like, “No, it was just fun. Nah, I’m not disappointed at all. We’ll just do it again next month and we’ll see how it goes.” And we did that five or six times. And I remember walking away from each one just thinking, same thing, “If this goes nowhere, I’m having so much fun.” That’s so rare.

Tim Ferriss: It is rare. And if you can orient your life or professional life, and look, I’m not saying this is possible for everyone, but it’s to some extent more possible than people realize. You might not be able to run out and invite Elan on your podcast and then awkwardly approach him like a sheepish 12-year-old boy to ask him on a date. But taking the lens of picking projects based on creating or deepening relationships and learning/developing skills, if you just do that over time, it is almost inevitable that you will win, whatever winning means to you.

Elan Lee: Yeah, value the process, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s talk a little bit about the origin story. Now, I’ll throw out a couple of things here and we’re going to talk about the game development, and then we’re also going to talk about how to sell this thing. How does that work?

Elan Lee: And it’s worth saying, designing a game, I remember you asked me this early on. You started out from the, “Hey, let’s design a game,” and then we’re basically done. And I remember really forcing myself to think through this process because I wanted to explain it to you. “No, that’s half of it. The other half is selling the game. And just as much work goes into that. And if you’re not willing to do it or if you have no mechanism by which you can do it, might as well not design the game because one without the other, useless.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. So it depends on the scale you’re going after, right? If you want to make something for your friends, you can do that.

Elan Lee: Sure, Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But in this particular case, I mean — 

Elan Lee: You wanted to make something cool and share it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I wanted to share. I wanted to share it. So that kind of dictated parts of the process that we needed to weigh really heavily. So the game development process, I mean, we started off looking at the possibilities of modifying existing games, right? So looking at, say, Poetry for Neanderthals — 

Elan Lee: Poetry, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — with an alternate set of rules or a different deck plus A, B, or C. We looked at prototype games that you alluded to earlier, bringing the suitcase, right?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So we did that all over the country.

Elan Lee: Yeah, I showed up, I remember. So I have this notebook of game ideas three, 400 in there, and I add more every month. And I remember I picked my favorites, like five or six of them, and I would show up with just the jankiest prototypes. Like, “Here’s something I scribbled on a few cards.” I took some dice and I rubbed out the little nubs on the dice and hand wrote something on all the die faces. “Instead, let’s try playing this weird game.” And you were very patient and you had a lot of vision, thankfully, to look at these just horrible, very hastily created prototypes and say, not, “This is no fun, let’s move on.” But you would always say, “Oh, I like this. I like the — that moment where we had a conversation about what you were going to do next. I like that part. I didn’t like the rest of it, but I like that part.” And that astute sense of notes, really thoughtful and forward moving notes was ultimately what guided our conversation. Because then the next time, I don’t have to pick from 400 games to bring. Now I know, “Okay, this cooperative thing, he liked that conversation aspect. There’s only six games I’ve got like that. Let me bring those six and we’ll refine it even farther.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. So we can talk about the Toronto trip. The Toronto project.

Elan Lee: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: That is where things started to gel. Because we’d had a number of these meetings around the country where we would do a one to three day sprint of testing, take all these notes and we’d done a few of these and we’ve both got a lot going on and your wife would ask you how it went and you’re like, “Well, I’m not really sure. I think we had fun, but no game as of yet.” And so we scheduled time. I was going to fly to Toronto to do a sprint. You were going to bring in an expert game designer, sort of game mechanic specialist — 

Elan Lee: Ken Gruhl, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — Ken. And it was like, “Okay, this is the trip. If we make it happen, great. If not, we’re just going to call spade a spade.”

Elan Lee: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: We were circling around this thing but not really getting it done.

Elan Lee: It was like meeting number eight or nine at that point.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, we tried a lot. And it was during that trip that the very primitive sort of germ of an idea started to resonate, which ended up being Coyote. And I remember a few things, and thank God also for Ken’s apparent photographic memory with the way things transpired, but we’re walking around all over the place in Toronto, the three of us, just spitballing. Then it starts to rain and we seek shelter. We failed twice, I think, with various coffee shops.

Elan Lee: Yeah, can’t get in.

Tim Ferriss: No room, no seats, whatever it might be. End up sitting in this weird kind of multipurpose building. And I remember where we were sitting and we played, I guess in English it’s Hanabi.

Elan Lee: Hanabi.

Tim Ferriss: Hanabi, which is Hanabi in Japanese, which is fireworks.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And hana’s flower. Bi in this case is fire. So it’s like flower fire. That’s Hanabi.

Elan Lee: For everybody out there, if you haven’t played Hanabi, go try this game. It is very special.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So we played that game, kind of killing time, giving it a shot, because you guys had mentioned it. And I was like, “Okay, this is a very elegant game.” And from that, liked the cooperative aspect. So when people think game, I think most folks are more familiar, maybe exclusively familiar, with the sort of winner-takes-all or team-versus-team competitive type of game. But I really enjoyed, and I’d seen this in other ways in different capacities, but the cooperative option and the cooperative aspect of this.

So that then gets stuck in the mind and the rain clears up. We go for a walk by the water. And I remember we were sort of — well, I’ll own it, I was kind of stalled. I’ll be the kind of hair plugging the drain in the bathtub. Because I was trying to search my mind for game examples. But I was thinking tabletop games because that was the canvas we were painting upon. And we’re walking, we’re walking. We’ve had quite a bit of caffeine by this point and it was either you or Ken, I think it was you, who asked, “Well, just broadly speaking, any kind of game, what games have you really enjoyed?”

And that’s where Rock, Paper, Scissors came up, right?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Rochambeau. And I just — as dumb as it might sound, and I said this at the time, I was like, “I love Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Especially when you play over an extended period of time with friends, maybe there’s some alcohol involved or not, you don’t need to have it involved. But you start to pick up tells, you start to pick up patterns, and it’s actually very, very fun.

Elan Lee: So it’s important to note, the moment you bring up Rock, Paper, Scissors in any game design discussion, that’s usually the end of the conversation, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: Because there’s nothing to that game. There’s three tools, deploy a tool, determine a winner, you’re done. It is only when you say, “Let’s acknowledge Rock, Paper, Scissors is no fun unless you play multiple times.” Because now we’ve made a very important transition. We’re not playing the game anymore, we’re playing each other.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: Right? Because I know what you did last time. You think I’m going to throw scissors again. And now we’re playing each other. Yes, rock, paper, scissors are the tools by which we’re playing each other, but suddenly we’re playing a very different game and it starts — it cannot start in round one. It starts in round two and it moves forward from there. And once we started having that discussion, things started to get really interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, things got interesting. And do you want to show the prototype deck?

Elan Lee: Yeah, I’ll show.

Tim Ferriss: And part of the reason I want to show this prototype deck, and we’ll describe it for people who aren’t watching, is quick and dirty is the fucking way to go. And I will just make another recommendation for Stephen Key. So Stephen Key has a book called the One Simple Idea, which is about licensing and creating inventions. He’s got a number of books now. But Stephen has made a gajillion dollars creating games for all the biggies that you can possibly think of. And he uses construction paper and glue you would find in a second grade class and a handful of markers.

Elan Lee: Love it. This is already my — 

Tim Ferriss: And this is by and large, that is how he creates these amazing — now, when I say — they can be games, they can be toys. He’s pretty broad spectrum. But it might be a new way to play basketball, shooting dirty laundry into a hamper, right?

Elan Lee: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Something like that. And he prototypes these things incredibly quickly. And for him, for what he does, that is enough. He is able to put together a pitch, he’s able to sell it and he’s able to develop these amazing passive income streams with these annuities that just come in — 

Elan Lee: So good.

Tim Ferriss: — from all these different places. But that relates to what we’re looking at.

Elan Lee: Okay. I love that we have not even described what Coyote is yet.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.

Elan Lee: But that’s okay because it’s more fun I think, to walk — I think the value of this conversation is to actually talk through the creative process and talk through — I think a lot of people want to make games, this is how you do it. And we went through this two-year journey and we arrived at a very happy outcome. So I’m excited to talk about, “Well, let me show you the very ugly, very first deck we ever built.” So we had this conversation about Rock, Paper, Scissors, and I knew there was something there because we were talking about players playing — my fundamental premise behind all game design is games should not be entertaining. Games should make the players entertaining.

And suddenly, when you said, “Rock, Paper, Scissors over time,” I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” But three tools, rock, paper and scissors, not a very robust tool set. We can’t really play a game that way. So I ran home and started scribbling on cards. These are just blank cards. I took Sharpies, I buy these by the thousands on Amazon. So I had a ton of these and we just started scribbling. And so we made a card that says rock, and we made a card that says paper, and we made a card that says scissors. And we thought, “What if we’re all on the same team? But what if these cards here are not tools to fight with each other? What if these are a challenge that we have to all solve together?”

And so we started just putting down a bunch of things, rock, paper, scissors, rock, rock, paper. And we’re like, “All right, we’ll sit around the table and we’ll all just do this pattern. Everyone do scissors. Now everyone do paper. Now everyone do rock.”

Tim Ferriss: And we’d been talking about these different variations and ideas on the walk and then we ended up back at your dining room table — 

Elan Lee: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: — with tons — 

Elan Lee: Seriously scribbling.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, scribbling and modifying cards as we went.

Elan Lee: Yeah, exactly. So now the modifiers are really the most interesting thing. Because the game that I’m describing right now is useless. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: We can all do scissors and then all do paper. Who cares, right? There’s nothing here. But now we have a baseline. We’re all going to do this thing. Cool, easy. And then we started doing these modifiers, all players do all blue cards. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: So we start scribbling rock, paper, scissors in different colors, and then we’ve got this modifier. So now everyone’s going to — sorry, I’m going to do scissors, but then we’re all going to do paper and then back to you just doing rock, and things like that. And so then it was like, “Okay, well, skip a player after every red card. Okay, shout every blue card,” right? Then we just started writing all these crazy modifiers. I’m just putting all these cards all over the table because the challenge got more and more interesting.

And then it was like, “Okay, so something interesting is possible here. Now what if instead of just splashing cards all over the paper, what if we were responsible for this? What if one at a time everyone had to add a new card to the table to make this challenge harder and harder and harder?” And that’s when we started talking about the vocabulary of this game. What are these cards? What makes this thing harder? Rock and paper and scissors very quickly got eliminated from the game because they’re so boring.

So we started talking about, “Well, okay, what if you’re making a peace sign?” And then you came up with, “Well, what if you pose a ballerina on a card? And what if you slap the shoulder or the person next to you on a card? And what if you have to — ” I remember one of our earliest notes was, “Eliminate all shouting cards,” because that was no fun at all.

Tim Ferriss: We tested that. And then that got all old real quick.

Elan Lee: Right, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: And also as we’re play testing, right? As we’re inventing mechanics and testing different things. So we play for a few rounds being like, “Okay, that was okay, but what do you guys think of this?” “Okay, we like this aspect.” “Great, let’s make four more of those cards of different colors.” And then we played again.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then we played again. And then we’d iterate and we played again.

Elan Lee: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And we ended up with, I mean, spreadsheets full of different cards. And this is all still now in cooperative mode at that point.

Elan Lee: All in cooperative mode.

Tim Ferriss: And — 

Elan Lee: But over the next week, I would say we designed 80 percent of the game. We were at this stalled-at-one-percent mode for months. And then in a matter of days, 80 percent done. Because we found this every time we played some version of this, the immediate answer when we were done playing was, “Let’s go again.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So is that the litmus test for you?

Elan Lee: For sure.

Tim Ferriss: I mean in terms of the indicators that something is worth further development, right?

Elan Lee: Yeah,.

Tim Ferriss: Because you have 400 in your notebook and so you’re not going to develop all of those. What are some of the — could be a water feel that you have, but what are some of the indicators where you’re like, “Oh, okay.”

Elan Lee: So there’s two things to talk about here. Certainly “Let’s play again” is a great one, but to set your mind in a place where you’re willing to say, “Imagine this, but tweaked, but something a little different.” There’s this principle I love called the zero effect. Zero effect.

Tim Ferriss: Zero effect?

Elan Lee: Yeah, zero effect. It’s from a movie, I think, in the late ’80s, early ’90s, somewhere around there called Zero Effect. And there’s this one scene where they explain what the zero effect is. And it is as follows, if you’ve lost your car keys and you’re looking for your car keys, here you are in your living room, you’re looking for car keys, the chances of you finding your car keys are very low because there’s so many things in this room that are not your car keys. So your chances of finding that one thing very, very low. If instead you are trying to find anything, your chances of success are suddenly at a hundred percent. You will find something, as long as you don’t care what it is that you found.

That’s my favorite premise for brainstorming and for early testing. Don’t lock in your head, “I’m looking for this particular thing. I must find X. I must find X.” Because the chances that you’re going to find that thing are almost non-existent. But if you can keep your brain open and say, “I’m just looking for something. I don’t care what it is, something, anything, and I’ll tweak it later, I’ll play with it later. I’ll find some way to consider this thing I found my car keys.” As long as you’re willing to make that leap, brainstorming becomes a pleasure.

Tim Ferriss: And does that take the form of, “What if, blah?” “What if we blah?” “What if this card did blah?”

Elan Lee: Precisely. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Is it a series of what ifs?

Elan Lee: And you’re not scared for all of those to fail, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: Because you can come up with those all day long. And that’s what we did, right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: Over the next few days, that process, “What if, blah. Let’s try it. What if, blah, let’s try it. What if, whatever, let’s try it.” And as long as the answer is always, “Let’s try it,” you will a hundred percent find what you’re looking for.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so let’s make some recommendations for people listening or watching. What books or resources would you recommend for people who are interested in game development? Now, I want to reiterate also, whether you think you’re playing games or not, you’re already playing games in life.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So for me, this is a way of putting on a table what we’ve already implicitly agreed to in our own lives in ways that we generally don’t realize, which is we’re all playing games. Now what does that mean? That means that beyond Maslow’s basic rungs on the ladder, shelter, warmth, food, et cetera, at some point, particularly as adults, maybe it’s before you go to school, maybe it’s when you’re in college, but you have decided to play or you have just ended up drafting into a game with certain rules, certain conditions for winning or losing certain ranking mechanisms. And step number one is figuring out what games you’re playing.

Elan Lee: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So I would suggest that learning about building games helps you to put on x-ray vision glasses, where you start to see the world is comprised of tons of games.

Elan Lee: Yeah, it’s so true. And you start to dive deeper into game theory. What is the prisoner’s dilemma? What is a zero sum game? If you can start to identify those very fundamental game design concepts in the real world, you can jump to the end of a conversation so much faster. You can avoid so many missteps because everything follows, within reason, everything follows game design principles because this practice, this art form has been so well studied and so well researched and so well documented that you get to take advantage of all of that. And I love that.

I use that for my relationships. I use that as playing with my kids. I use that at work all the time. It’s just there’s these fundamental principles of game design. And I’ll talk about a book I’d love that illustrates them. But, yeah, they can be applied to anything. You’re right, you’re playing a game all the time. And the first step is to be aware that you are playing a game.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: All right, so I’ve got two books.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s hear it.

Elan Lee: One is, let’s see, A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. Raph Koster? Raph Koster? R-A-P-H, Raph. It’ll outline all these fundamentals. It is the first game design book I ever read. It is the one I go back to and refer to the most often. It’s just got everything and the author is brilliant and go read that book.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: The second one is going to be a little controversial.

Tim Ferriss: Memoirs of a Geisha?

Elan Lee: It’s called Don’t Shoot the Dog.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, this is an exceptional book.

Elan Lee: Exceptional book. It is by Karen Pryor.

Tim Ferriss: It is not explicitly about game design, at all.

Elan Lee: It is not at all about game design. But here’s the thing, this book, the fundamental premise of this book is you are trying to teach a companion, a dog, to behave in a certain way. And the answer to how best to do that is not to, when things go wrong at least, not to blame the dog, is to fundamentally change the way you operate and the way you convey information and the way you look at the world in order to better relate to your dog and to the way that the dog understands and sees the world.

It is the best game design principle I have ever encountered in my life. And true, it has nothing to do with game design, but when you’re designing a game, you’re designing it for a target, for someone who isn’t you and you’re not even going to be in the room when they encounter it. And to have in your brain from the very first step, “Every problem that comes up is my problem, not theirs. Every responsibility is my responsibility, not theirs.” And if you can get that in your head and design games that way, those are the games I have found that are the most successful.

Tim Ferriss: This is Don’t Shoot the Dog, terrible title, but it is the fundamental starting point that I recommend to anyone who’s interested in dog training. And Karen Pryor is one of the popularizers of clicker training as a way of shaping behavior. I believe she had experience with marine mammals, which by the way, you can’t whack on the butt with a newspaper to punish them, so in other words, negative reinforcement. So how do you do it? You use positive reinforcement. You use clickers or whistles or different tools.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I believe the back of the book, people will be able to fact-check this, but it basically says whether you want to get your dog to heel, your cat to stop laying on the kitchen table, or your mother-in-law to stop nagging you, the principles are all the same. And at the end of it, like you said, is this radical ownership of “It may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility.”

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: And in a lot of cases, certainly with game design and instructions and so on, it is actually your fault. If people are confused, it is your fault.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no, but it’s the best way. Before I started Exploding Kittens, I designed games for friends and I just had the hardest time. When I wasn’t in the room, people were not enjoying those games. And it was only once I read that book that I realized the fault is absolutely mine. Because I’m trying to get them to have as much fun as I want them to have and the fact that they’re not, I keep blaming them. And that’s so wrong.

Tim Ferriss: So what did you do? How did you fix that?

Elan Lee: There’s basically two parts. One starts with design. One says the game has to be so simple that it is almost self-correcting. And I have to strip out all complication, I have to remove all nuance. Any time I’m thinking of the rules and I say, “Okay, if this happens, then this happens, except if — ” The moment I say “except,” I’ve gone down a wrong path. I need to get rid of all of that stuff. That was the first part.

And then the second part is in writing the actual instructions and figuring out how — if I’m sitting in the room, you’re going to get this game because I’m going to explain it and I’m going to be enthusiastic. And when you ask a question, I’m going to answer the question. And when you get confused, I’m going to clarify it. I can a hundred percent do that. But a piece of paper trying to do that same thing, I have to write it as if I’m in the room and I have to anticipate those questions and I have to cut them off before they come up and I have to correct behavior because I know exactly where you’re going to go off course and fix it in the instructions. And that kind of one-two punch changed my game design from like 10 percent of the people get this to 95 percent of the people get this.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, one aspect — I mean there’s so many aspects, but one aspect of this that I enjoyed was related to the instructions.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And so number one, you make it really clear in the instructions, which we both poured over ad nauseum. But reading is the worst way to learn a game. Go watch this video, QR code. So that’s number one. But if you’re going to put it into text — and I think I’m pretty good at this, but I was very impressed with your ability to identify anything that could be misunderstood or that wasn’t yet defined or that could be taken with another more broader connotation that would steer people off course. And the number of edits in that Google Doc.

Elan Lee: I mean, it’s got to be in the hundreds, right?

Tim Ferriss: From all of us, hundreds and hundreds of edits.

Elan Lee: So the most important skill is you will write better instructions, you will convey information to people better if you can clear your mind. If you can approach any set of instructions from the perspective of the things I know I do not yet know, and the words that come out of my mouth have to not only fill my brain with the required knowledge — 

Tim Ferriss: I see basically beginner’s mind, right?

Elan Lee: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Putting yourself in the place of someone who has never seen this before.

Elan Lee: Exactly. And it’s so hard to do because you have this information in your head. It must be there, otherwise you’re not going to be able to explain the thing. But to back all the way up and say, “I’m just going to split my brain in two. There’s this one reading script and I know the information I have to get out, but the other half is the recipient of that script and it knows nothing.” If you can do that — and it’s so hard, it takes so much practice. If you can do that, you’re going to not only be able to design good games and write good instructions, but you’re also going to be able to just converse more effectively just out in the world in general.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. All right. You mentioned I think it was two minutes to learn, 15 minutes to play.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What other golden or guiding tenets do you have for yourself when you’re doing game design within Exploding Kittens?

Elan Lee: Oh, good question. If a component does not need to be in the game, remove it from the game.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So an example of that would be we had these chits or little chips, like poker chips.

Elan Lee: Like bingo chips.

Tim Ferriss: Like bingo chips that we were using for lives or strikes, and turns out you don’t need that. You can use — 

Elan Lee: Yeah, because you’ve got a whole thing of cards right here, just use those.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You can use cards by flipping them over and using the back of the card.

Elan Lee: Exactly. That’s a perfect example. Right? We have this thing where we’re like, “Hey, you know what would be fun is if everybody had a big hand of cards and we’re going to play cards and you make decisions.” I’m like, “I get that.” Most games you play, you have a hand of cards and you’re going to play a card and you’re making a decision. That’s awesome. But you know what? That’s a private moment and you reveal a card. Every game you’ve ever played. When you play UNO, you’ve got a hand of cards, you’re making a decision, you play a card, you’ve revealed what card you just played.

And I remember thinking, “Is there a simpler version of that?” And it turns out there is. And the simpler version in Coyote is take some cards, put them all face up on the table, and then decide which one you’re going to pick. That’s very similar to having a deck of cards, but now it’s public.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s public.

Elan Lee: Right?

Tim Ferriss: And also when the competitive version was brought in, which is the way that I like to play, the way I would suggest people play, but you can warm up with cooperative or if you have somebody in your life or in your family who just cannot lose without creating a huge pain in the ass, then the cooperative mode is really fun. But the competitive mode then allows the group decision on which card to play potentially, although ultimately that’s individual. That has implications for cooperative when it’s public. But also for competitive.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: There are a number of tweaks made to this, but I mentioned earlier, sabotaging. So we had competitive, but different minds are wired for different games.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And so, God forbid, what happens to you is what happened to one of my employees who was play testing this, where one of the people in the group was a mathematician who also is high-level chess player if I remember correctly.

Elan Lee: Oh, no.

Tim Ferriss: And he just smoked everyone because he had the mind for it.

Elan Lee: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So what do you do for that? Well, we ended up — and this took a lot of play testing to ultimately land on this. And I want to ask you about play testing, particularly if it’s kind of hands off the wheel and you have people playing the game without you.

Elan Lee: Yeah, terrifying

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Realized — and this comes back to the underdog being able to win, not getting my ass smoked in Magic over and over again by someone who’s just got better hardwiring for it.

Elan Lee: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: And that’s where the attack cards came from. Right?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So there are these attack cards in the deck, which to the simplification side, you can play in cooperative mode to modify a card. I don’t want to get too in the weeds.

Elan Lee: Well, I want to give you more credit for this because I don’t think you’re taking enough credit. All right, let me phrase this a different way. So the basic premise of the game is we have a whole bunch of activities on the table, right? Ballerina, peace sign, whatever it is, thumbs up, thumbs down, smile, frown.

Tim Ferriss: Lean and make a fart noise.

Elan Lee: Yeah, exactly, lean and make a fart noise. So we’ve got all these things that we’re all going to do. And then on top of that — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s a fan favorite.

Elan Lee: That’s right. That’s such a good card. On top of that, we have all these modifier cards and they modify — you have to skip a player after this one, ignore this card, do this one twice.

Tim Ferriss: Those are generally the Coyote cards.

Elan Lee: The Coyote cards. And you had this great idea, you said, “Because some players are naturally gifted at this game, far more so than others, and because some players are going to naturally fall behind and they need a way to sabotage the first place.” If you’re in last place, you need a way to sabotage the first place player. If you’ve ever played Mario Kart, you know this feeling very well. And you said, “What if we took some of these modifiers, every time — all players have to do all the blue cards with one hand instead of two.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: But what if instead of all the blue — 

Tim Ferriss: Or Tyrannosaurus arms.

Elan Lee: Or Tyrannosaurus arms, you have to do all your movements with Tyrannosaurus arms. What if instead of playing that on all blue cards on the table, what if you just put that, slide it right in front of another player and now only they have to do it? For every single one of their turns. You’ve put a curse on them. The last place player has attacked the first place player. And I remember thinking, “Tim, you’re like a natural game designer.” That’s such a nice moment and it’s such an easy modification.

And of course my answer was, “I don’t know, let’s try it.” And then we tried it and it was glorious. And I love moments like that for two reasons. One is because you had learned at that point to speak like a game designer. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: Instead of saying, “I think we just need to sabotage people,” instead you said, “Some people are really good at this game. We have to address that. Some people are naturally bad at this game. We need to give them a tool.” And those terms, speaking in that language, armed with that vocabulary, suddenly the answer to you became so clear, like, “Here’s how we solve those problems.” That’s great.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: I guarantee you would not have been capable of that when we started this process.

Tim Ferriss: No way. Yeah, no, I wouldn’t have had the — sometimes artists talk about the visual library, just the exposure to different types of artwork, different forms, different silhouettes, different structures so that they can pull from that visual library to inform whatever they’re trying to build or solve for. And it’s the same with game design, same with everything. You need to build your ABCs so you can convey what you’re trying to say in terms that are solvable, if that makes any sense.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Totally. You’re a quick study too.

Tim Ferriss: Helped getting the books that you recommended. 

All right, so I’m not going to dox my friend in question. But as long-term listeners will know, I was, in a former life, a neuroscience major and then, in the last 10 years, have funded a lot of science. I always have just had this hankering and this dream of being involved in neuroscience; it continues to this day. And in the process of building this game — and this is not how I necessarily sell it, because this is going to sound terrible, but through many experiments with different companies and so on, I’ve concluded that even though generally Americans, I’ll throw it on Americans, I’m American, say they want to be smarter, they will typically not pay for something that is designed to make them smarter unless it’s a magic pill, and then sometimes the answer is yes.

But what I was hoping to also do with this game is to create something that would — and this has not been proven, there’s no randomized controlled study examining this, although that might change at some point. — is to design something that would help those players who are not good at this, or the people who are in the middle of the bell curve or the people who are good to get better.

And for people who are interested in looking at some — they’re not perfect analogs, but they’re similar. People can check out the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, WCST. It’s a neurophysiological test used to assess cognitive flexibility in executive functions, particularly the ability to shift cognitive sets and learn from feedback. All right, so participants must sort cards based on an initially unknown rule, which changes after a certain number of correct sorts. Now this is not a perfect parallel because that does not, in and of itself, make for a fun game. Right?

Elan Lee: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: So fun number one, lots of probably rank ordered like one, two, three, four, five. But could I also Trojan horse in — 

Elan Lee: Yeah, love it.

Tim Ferriss: — cognitive training.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I think the answer — this is from a lay perspective, and obviously I’m biased because I’m involved in every step, I’m making this thing, but I think it does the trick. And what people will notice is, and you know this too, the game starts off so easy.

Elan Lee: There’s nothing to it.

Tim Ferriss: And people are like, “There’s nothing to it.”

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then once a modifier or two comes out, people are like, “Oh, oh, wait a second, this is getting really tricky.” And if, for instance, I’ve had lifelong insomnia, you want to sleep better, play this game before you go to bed. And by the end you will feel like you just did a workout, a full brain workout for your cognition.

Elan Lee: You know what I love about that part? I learned to play the drums years and years ago, and I remember I would learn these new patterns and it was like your right hand has to do this and your left hand has to do this, and your right leg has to do this and your — and I remember thinking, “No way, no way. I can’t do that.” And you work at it and you work at it and you work at it and suddenly it starts to click, just a little bit. Like, “Oh, my right hand did the right thing.” And it’s like you can feel new neurons coming to life. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Elan Lee: Your brain is doing something that five minutes ago you could not do. This is the first game I’ve ever played that does that exact same thing. And I remember the first time I felt that way in a very early play test, my eyes got all wide and I was like, “There is something magical going on here. I know I’m psyching myself out, but I feel new things happening in my brain because five minutes ago I could not do this pattern and now I can. We can go all the way around the table and you can add a new card and I will still be able to do this pattern that I couldn’t do just five minutes ago.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. And what’s cool as well is you get to see just how specialized certain minds are and where you might have an Achilles heel. So for instance, and this is true for some folks, we have the modifiers ranked by difficulty just so you can — because ultimately with Coyote, you’re in charge of how hard you make the game.

Elan Lee: Mm-hmm. That’s right. That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: You are in full charge of how easy, moderate, or difficult you make it. And we didn’t even talk about how this game is designed to make you a game designer. We’ll talk about that with the blank cards. But this is a sort of creativity unlock as much as a game. That’s the intention behind it, which is part of the reason that I’m really excited to see what the hell it does when it’s released into the wild, which effectively is now.

Elan Lee: That’s going to — 

Tim Ferriss: Now the specialization piece, I’ll just speak to that. So for instance, for me, skipping turns, skipping players, it is a blind spot. It is an Achilles heel for me. That’s true for quite a few folks.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But for other people, for instance, if we’re going around the table, most people would be familiar with “We Will Rock You.”

Elan Lee: “We Will Rock You,” yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So it’s like boom, boom, boom, boom. So the way you play the game is you go around is you go “Boom, boom,” and you can hit the table with your hands. You can do it with closed fists. You could probably clap it if you want, but it’s boom, boom. And then one person does the move. Like let’s take the ballet, we’re going to do a pirouette. You have to do the motion and you have to say the motion. So then these two things can be split or confused later. We want to get — 

Elan Lee: We’ll get to that later.

Tim Ferriss: — too deep into that. And then it’s boom, boom, next person, boom, boom, next person. And it goes around. And then it just gets more and more complicated.

So I remember when we were first experimenting with the modifier that said, okay, it’s now three bumps instead of two. So it’s boom, boom, boom. And then the move. And there were, I remember, I’m not going to call them out, but there’s one person who just could not do it.

Elan Lee: I know. I was one of those people. My brain would start melting out of my ears at that point. I don’t know why though.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. It’s weird. It’s weird. So they’re very specific. You’ll find each person will have a super strength and a super weakness, and you’ll figure it out by playing this game.

And just from a game design perspective also, I’d love to hear you talk about finding the sweet spot. I mean, we could talk about Bushnell’s law of Atari fame, the game, I’m paraphrasing here, but a good game is easy to learn and difficult to master.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But how do you, in the course of play testing, working with prototypes find the sweet spot of difficulty? Because with this game, well, through making this game, I’ve just really come to appreciate how hard it is to create a game where people experience that sweet spot. Because if you were to take Coyote and make it too easy, what a simple game to make.

Elan Lee: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Elan Lee: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: If you wanted to make it basically impossible and not fun to play, also very easy. But to find that sweet spot on the graph is incredibly challenging.

Elan Lee: Yeah. So the way I think about this is when you first encounter any game, the first thought that has to go into your brain is, “I can do that.” You hear it described, and you have to think, “I can do that.” And then you have to try the game and that has to be reinforced. The game has to say, “Yep, you can do that.” And you have to feel like, “Okay, I thought I could do it. I can do it. This is great.” But that’s only going to last a few seconds. The next thought that has to go into your brain is, “I understand the path to mastery. I understand how to get better at this.” And then the next thought is, “And I can do that too.”

So you have to see the moment a modifier card comes out, or the moment any complication happens in your favorite game, it has to stop you dead in your tracks. It has to be like, “Ooh, the thing I just did to start the game and was really good at, I thought I could do it. I could do it. That’s not going to work here. I have to rethink my strategy, or I have to get better at something else.” And then those two follow-up thoughts have to show up in quick succession: “I know what I have to do and I can do that too.”

And that’s really the art to me of that ramping up of game design. And you have to keep hitting that “I think I can do that”; “Yes, you can. Now you can’t anymore, but you know what you have to do and you can do that too.” And then that’s going to get blocked. And you think, “Okay, now what? Now I know what I have to do and I can do that too.” And you have to just keep hitting those two things. And it’s rinse and repeat over and over and over again. And if you can hit that, you are just holding somebody’s hand from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. And they’re going to get great at it, they’re going to achieve that sense of mastery over time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and if you, listening or watching, have any game that you consider simple that you enjoy, rest assured there was an absurd, absurd amount of development and testing and revising that went into it. And just to give you an example, this is by all outward appearance a very simple game. And the three to eight players you could probably play with more, 10 minutes, says age is 10 plus. I’ve seen people playing with their kids who are much younger and it’s actually hilarious and super fun. There are so many levers you can pull here. You have the action cards, which are these cute little salamander cards with the different motions and gestures and so on. You’ve got just the sheer number of cards. How many variants do you have? How many total cards do you have? How many Coyote versus attack cards? When you have a fully shuffled deck, what does that actually look like? There’s so many different variables that you have to think through.

Elan Lee: Yeah. And we even set up, one of my favorite things is we’re starting to see people compete now. So we set up this page of, here are table configurations. Here’s an array of cards in exactly this order with exactly these modifiers. This one’s hard, this one’s impossible. This one is going to kill you. And we’ve started to see, the game is barely available so far, but we started to see some people try to tackle those challenges.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, fun. Okay. I didn’t even know that.

Elan Lee: It’s incredible.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so where this came from also is in The 4-Hour Chef a million years ago, came out in 2012, which was actually a book about accelerated learning, confusingly. But putting that aside, there were a few recipes in that book. I think one was called Dragon Force Chaconne or something like that, which was named after this video game track that people found impossible to play on guitar. And then there was something, a La Ancienne, which was this just ludicrously complex French dish that involved fish. And I was like, okay, look, if you’ve done everything up to this point and you want to take a quantum leap forward and try something that is considered effectively impossible by most people, here you go. And so that’s what we created on this particular page.

Elan Lee: I will just say, having tested all of the challenges on that page, I can do exactly one of them. The last two are so hard.

Tim Ferriss: They really are.

Elan Lee: And we’ve already seen someone, a table of six people succeed — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. Okay — 

Elan Lee: — at the middle one. They’ve already done it.

Tim Ferriss: That’s nuts.

Elan Lee: Yeah. I’ve never seen anyone do the crazy hard one.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: But it’s coming.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So people can check it out. And there may or may not be a bunch of excitement around that. So I will just say there may be incentives later to be good at this game. I will leave it at that for now.

So I tell you what, we’re going to come back to some of the blank cards and we’ll talk about those features. But let’s talk about a bit more of the process of making any game. We could talk about Coyote specifically of course, because you have a process for this.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How many games per year do you guys put out on average?

Elan Lee: So it’s funny, I actually built this out as a graph. So our first year we did one, our second year we did two. Our third year we did two again. Last year we did 14. This year we’ll do 23, I think.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Elan Lee: Yeah, it’s a lot. But we’ve built this, it’s really fun, we’ve built this incredibly robust pipeline from design all the way through to testing and then sales and then marketing. And I feel obligated to just keep that pipeline full because it’s such a beautiful thing we built. So we do a lot of games.

Tim Ferriss: All right, let’s get some info that we wouldn’t normally have any access to.

Elan Lee: All right.

Tim Ferriss: If you do an 80/20 analysis, it’s not going to be exactly 80/20, but you get where I’m going, on your best-selling games, what’s on the leaderboard? What are the top X number of games? Five, three, four, whatever the number.

Elan Lee: Well, up until last year, number one, the top-selling game in the world amongst all games was Exploding Kittens.

Tim Ferriss: That’s nuts, man.

Elan Lee: It’s nuts.

Tim Ferriss: Congratulations.

Elan Lee: It makes no sense, but I’ll tell you something I’m even more proud of. It’s now number two. Number one is a game called Hurry Up Chicken Butt. Hurry Up Chicken Butt is a game I designed with my four-year-old daughter, and she did most of the design. And it is outselling Exploding Kittens. It is selling one game every four seconds.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Elan Lee: Yeah, it’s nuts. And it was designed by a four-year-old.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so we’ve got a Hurry Up Chicken Butt, Exploding Kittens.

Elan Lee: Yeah. The next few spots in the global sales are constantly shifting. Everybody’s fighting for those, but we always have — our entries into that list, which are constantly shifting, Poetry for Neanderthals is usually number three. Throw Throw Burrito is usually either number five or six, and the rest are just totally random.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay, got it. So what has made Hurry Up Chicken Butt a success?

Elan Lee: Yeah. So remember what I said, if you have the best design game in the world — 

Tim Ferriss: And by the way, when we spoke I think two years ago — 

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — you were just beginning to talk about this. I don’t think it had launched at that point.

Elan Lee: No, it hadn’t. Yeah. Yeah. It has been an absolute rocket ship.

Tim Ferriss: What are the magic ingredients? Why has it worked? Because not all games do that.

Elan Lee: Yeah. No, they don’t.

Tim Ferriss: And you’ve had now, with the number of games that EK, Exploding Kittens, has developed, you’ve had a chance to see a lot of different ideas come through the doors and go out the doors.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Some games last a season, some games last a decade. So when I was designing games — okay, so Hurry Up Chicken Butt in particular, I wrote a list of the things I wanted that game to accomplish. And my daughter had all these ideas, “Here’s what I want to do, and you’re going to do this and you’re going to run up and jump up and down and blah.” But I had a list of things that I needed to know were in this game in order for me as a parent to buy it for my kid. And they were as follows. The game has to be as much fun for me to play as it is for my daughter. That’s a hard one.

Tim Ferriss: That’s hard.

Elan Lee: That killed most designs that we came up with. Number two, my daughter has to be able to beat me at this game, even though I’m not letting her win. Holy crap is that a hard one.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Elan Lee: Number three, the game cannot have any losers. It can have a winner, but it cannot have any losers.

Those three were my guiding lights. It was like, I need to check off these three check boxes for this game to be good. And we worked on a hundred million designs. She’s great. She’ll just be like, “Oh, you don’t like this one? Here’s another one. You don’t like that one? Here’s another one.” And she just kept firing them off. And we finally got to this game that hit all three of those. That, as I said earlier, is only half the battle.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s the necessary, but not sufficient —

Elan Lee: Exactly. So now we have a game that I’m in love with, that we play every single night that she can beat me at regularly. And I am trying my absolute hardest to beat her. And this four-year-old is kicking my ass at this game. Love that. Love it. And I’m having a blast.

Tim Ferriss: So this is my first time hearing about these criteria. Just for people listening, this is all new to me.

Elan Lee: When my daughter got old enough to start playing games right around when she turned four, we went out and bought all these games and I just hated them. They were so boring and I hated playing. And so we just designed our own. We just made them better. And it was important for me to have that list. ‘Cause unless I know what success looks like, I’ll just stay in brainstorming mode forever. So I made that list, finally hit it, and then we entered into part two. And here my daughter has very little to do with it. Here’s where I sit down with the marketing and sales team and I was like, “What the hell are we going to call this thing?” And we went through a thousand different names.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know the feeling.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we did that. But once I had 10 names that I really liked, we sat down with my daughter and all her friends and I would just read them off. And there was no contest. I got to Hurry Up Chicken Butt and they’re like just laughing hysterically, jumping up and down. They didn’t even want to hear the rest of the names. I was like, okay. Sold.

So that was a really nice step forward. It was like, I know I’ve got a game that’s just fire for kids. They’re just so excited about this. And the next thing was, all right, well what do we make this box look like? And I was like, I know it has to be — the game itself involves a character and a die shaker and some sound effects. It’s got all this stuff packed into this character, this chicken. And I was like, I can’t just hide that. I have to put that in a box where you can see it. And that was really hard.

The difference between box design for an iPhone and a game is an iPhone will spend a hundred dollars on that box with the materials and making it beautiful. And when you open your iPhone, you take the box and you throw it away. In a game, you’ve got about 40 cents to spend on the box and it has to last forever. It sucks. The equation is totally backwards, but I needed a thing that displayed the chicken and told you it made noise and lets you shake around the die and still hold its structure as a box so that you could remove this thing, play with it, and then reinsert it into the box in a way that isn’t going to mess with the integrity of the box — its structural integrity. So that was really hard, but we finally solved that. And then — 

Tim Ferriss: Did you do that before or after you started testing the waters with retailers?

Elan Lee: After.

Tim Ferriss: After?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I don’t want to hijack, but whenever it makes sense, I would love to know how, at what point you start testing the waters with

Elan Lee: Well, we do this backwards. And when we started, you have to do it the opposite way. You have to walk into those sales pitches and you have to say, “Here’s the final product. Look how beautiful it is. You don’t have to trust us that this is going to sell. You can look at this thing and know that it’s going to sell.” For this game, luckily, because we have a really good track record, we walked in with no box. All I walked in with was a rough idea, a name scribbled on a piece of paper. And I said, “Trust me, this is going to be great. We’re going to solve everything. It’s going to be amazing.” And they said, “Okay, yeah, sold. Let’s buy it.” That comes from 10 years of pitching them hit after hit after hit.

Tim Ferriss: I got it. So if it were earlier in Exploding Kittens’ existence, you go in with the finished box.

Elan Lee: Yeah. They’re never taking a flyer on that.

Tim Ferriss: Who creates the finished box? Do you guys create it in-house? How do you prototype something like that?

Elan Lee: Yeah, we have an incredible team. We have a large scale printer. We print on actual cardboard. We have a paper folder so we can actually build the boxes.

Which was an investment, that’s not off-the-shelf machinery, but it helps — okay, so look, normally whatever manufacturer you’re working with, they send you a prototype box. Because they make it and they want you to see the final product and that’s what you go into the sales meetings with. You say, “Look, here’s the box. Here’s how much it’s going to weigh. Here’s the final presentation. We’ve been working on it for a year and a half. Here it is.” I walk into those meetings like, “I got an idea, I’ve been working on it for three weeks. I want you to buy it right now. I don’t have any materials to show you.” So it’s a different kind of pitch that I’m very proud of because I’ve earned that and we haven’t ever let them down.

Tim Ferriss: So in the case of Coyote, there was a lot of play testing that was done before we ended up in line review meetings.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Wow. We skipped that whole part, didn’t we?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Elan Lee: All right.

Tim Ferriss: So could you talk about your secret cabal of families?

Elan Lee: Yeah, yeah. Secret cabal of families. I love it. All right, so — 

Tim Ferriss: Another chapter for your memoir.

Elan Lee: Yeah, right. That’s a good title there. So, okay, so here’s how most game companies test games. If you had partnered with a different games company, here’s what your experience would’ve been like. “All right, we got a game. We really like it. It’s really fun, lots of internal testing. Everyone’s on board. We now need external testing.” And they go to these market research groups and they pull strangers in and they sit in a room with a one-way mirror and they show the game and they play the game with people they don’t know and they order in some crappy catered lunch and they play the game and then they rate it on a scale of one to 10 and they fill out this form that’s like, “Here’s what I liked and here’s what I didn’t like and here’s what I would improve.” And then you get to watch those videos and they present you back all these forms and you get to make a determination.

Okay. Nobody plays games like that. You don’t play games with strangers. When was the last time you played a board game with a stranger?

Tim Ferriss: Can’t even remember.

Elan Lee: It doesn’t happen. Right? The testing procedure that all these other companies go through is fundamentally flawed. They’re using a resource because it’s the only resource that exists. So I sat down, that’s what we did our first time. We went through one of those companies and they gave us all the results. And I looked at these results and I was like, oh, my God, we just burned $25,000 on this thing and it’s useless. So I realized at that moment, because nothing better exists, we’re going to have to build it ourselves. So I started reaching out to, at first our Kickstarter community and then our Discord community and then our Reddit community as we grow and grow and grow and said, “Look, I got a bunch of prototypes. I need families and friends who get together regularly to play games and I’m going to mail you a free game. You don’t even have to send it back to me, it’s yours forever. You get this amazing prototype. All I ask in return is upon receiving it within 24 hours, you play the game with your friends and family and you record the session and you send me that video. And that’s it. That’s all I want in return.”

And within about 12 months, we had 400 families sign up for this thing. They are called our kiddie test pilots. And they’re this incredible group of enthusiastic game players that give us the best feedback. And we don’t have them fill out a questionnaire. All we ask them at the end of the test session, we say, “Look into the camera and answer one question. The only question we care about, do you want to play again?” And we know a game is ready when everybody looks into that lens and says, “Hell, yes!” And that’s it. That’s our testing process.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the pass/fail marks or green versus red signals that you look for? In other words, I imagine the response rate could vary, but you don’t know if that’s because people are busy or if it’s the wrong time of year or maybe they looked at the game, the box, and so on and it just didn’t sell them so they didn’t play it.

Elan Lee: Totally.

Tim Ferriss: Is that something you pay attention to? Are the people, I’m sure I’m not the only person wondering this, if they’re part of this special VIP get free game group, are they disincentivized to say, “Hell no, I would not play this game again.” So do you get a false positive signal?

Elan Lee: I see.

Tim Ferriss: How do you think through what constitutes a thumbs up versus a thumb sideways versus a thumbs down?

Elan Lee: Yeah. There are a lot of false positives for sure. And there’s no way I can solve that problem. We prompt them in advance. We’re like, “Look, we need honestly — this game will get great if you tell us that something’s broken with it. We need to know that.” And they’re motivated because we also send them the final version of the game. So they know that’s coming, they know a better version is coming if they help us make it better. So some of the problem is solved that way, but not all of it. So that’s why the video is so important.

Tim Ferriss: So they say, “We had a great time,” and you’re watching and you’re like, they are not having a great time.

Elan Lee: Yeah, yeah. Look, count the number of eye rolls. Or you know a great one, they’ll take the instructions — I love this. They’ll open the instructions. And when you see that eyes go wide and they inhale.

Tim Ferriss: Pull back and they’re like — 

Elan Lee: It’s like, “Oh, fuck.”

Tim Ferriss: Instruction apnea.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God.

Elan Lee: Something, that’s terrible. Right? And that’s really important. And there’s no survey in the world they can fill out that’s going to tell me that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: You need to watch the moment they see the instructions.

Tim Ferriss: Because they may not even realize they’re doing it.

Elan Lee: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: So how are they going to report it?

Elan Lee: Yeah. And that’s why the video is so important. And we have very specific instructions for the video.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, what are they? Because I’m wondering how in the hell do you review 400 videos?

Elan Lee: Oh, well one, we watch them at 4X speed and two is we’ve got a whole team of people that watch them and they flag moments. They don’t even say why this moment is important. Something happened here, something happened here. I’m going to go on to the next video now. And then the next group of people will go through and look at those flags and say, “Oh, big, deep inhale. Rules confusion.”

Tim Ferriss: Nerd question, what do you use software wise for flagging stuff?

Elan Lee: Vimeo.

Tim Ferriss: Vimeo, okay. So you have people upload their videos to Vimeo?

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Elan Lee: Yeah, so this whole process takes months and it’s really important. And the other thing is, I’ve got 400 test families, but I’m only going to send out five games at a time. The reason is I need to collect that feedback, make changes, and send out the next batch. Otherwise, I’ve got 10 results for a version and it’s useless. I know what the next five are going to be like ’cause I saw them on the first five.

Tim Ferriss: I got it. So is it then, just to state my understanding, with the kiddie test pilots, you basically have — you’re not sending out the same version to 400, 600 people at once?

Elan Lee: Five at a time.

Tim Ferriss: Five at a time. And then you look at that cohort and see what comes back?

Elan Lee: Mm-hmm. It’s always the same stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Then you tweak and then it goes out to the next group.

Elan Lee: Yeah, the next five.

Tim Ferriss: Over what period of time do you get a prototype to the max number who are going to receive it?

Elan Lee: Usually I would say six to eight months. And we’re tweaking two things. One is we’re tweaking gameplay, but much more commonly we’re tweaking the instructions. Because gameplay has already survived internal testing. So we know the game is fun. If we know this game is fun and then we watch a video of people not having fun, chances are it’s the instructions, not the game. And so that’s what we start attacking at that moment.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. What are some of the risks of internal testing? ‘Cause I’ve always wondered, for instance, when I have, as I’m doing right now, doing a bunch of writing and I have people proofreading or test reading my writing, I do not only do it with professional writers. I mean they’re very good and I know I’m very fortunate to know some amazing writers, but they’re also a little too close to the material. It’s like a travel writer who can’t stop looking at their travel experience through the lens of a writer. They have lost the ability to just travel and have fun.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So what are some of the risks, if any, of internal testing?

Elan Lee: So you and I have the same instinct here. I remember when we were testing this game internally, hadn’t gone out the door yet.

Tim Ferriss: This game?

Elan Lee: This game, Coyote. Yeah. I remember you would say, “Hey, can you show me test results? But can you have your accounting team test it instead of your game design team?” And I remember thinking, yeah, that’s what we do. I’m not interested in the game design team’s results. So I would show you the accounting team results and I would show you the sales people, the sales team’s results, who hadn’t even ever seen the game. Our internal testing starts out with the game design team, of course, but very quickly has to move on to the other teams, specifically the other teams who have never seen the game and don’t know the background. Because those are really the only tests that we care about. So your instinct is perfect there, and I’m very happy to say you didn’t have to teach us that, we already knew that part.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, if I’m teaching you anything, I don’t know what it would be other than my obsessive focus on — I’m sorry for the volume of email and the volume of text messages and the volume of everything.

Elan Lee: Every single one of those made the game better. Truly. Truly. I mean, okay, look, we’ve only done, we’ve done, I think two partnerships total. Three partnerships total. We did a game with Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. We did a game with Jeff Probst of Survivor, and now we’ve done a game with Tim Ferriss. You probably sent more notes than the other two combined.

Tim Ferriss: I sent a lot of notes. Sent a lot of notes. I really had a blast with it. And I remember this moment, and I’m wondering if this happened before or after the line review meetings. I think it might’ve been afterwards, but you could place it for me because this is my first game and I don’t put my name on anything. That was part of the very, very truthful pitch. It’s not like one of, I don’t have Tim Ferriss microwave enchiladas and Tim Ferriss sneakers. And then just as an aside, I have the Tim Ferriss game. It’s like, no, no, no, I don’t put my name on anything. So I take it very, very seriously. And I think it was, tell me if I’m getting this wrong, pretty sure it was Carly, who’s amazing.

Elan Lee: Carly is the president of Exploding Kittens.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Carly is incredible. And because there’s always a fear, for me at least, where it’s like, maybe internally I think it’s great, and then it gets released into the wild and then, oh, shit there’s a real problem. Like Houston, we have a problem.

Elan Lee: Yeah, and you can’t take it back.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So what do you do? And I remember Carly, I want to say, sent a text to me. She was in, I want to say Germany at some type of gaming convention or meeting of distributors. I don’t remember the exact context, but she said Coyote was belle of the ball. She’s like, “You would not believe we had an entire huge room full of people playing, smashing on the tables over and over and over and over again.” And I was like, whew.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Isn’t that a great feeling?

Tim Ferriss: Okay, here we go, LFG.

Elan Lee: She sent me a video of that. So just to set the stage there, there are 2,000 people that — sorry, there’s 2,000 people at this hotel of the 25 hotels that are part of this convention. And there’s one games room and there’s 10 tables in there. And the idea is there should be a different game at every table. And everyone’s testing out the games and sampling them. And we put Coyote on one table and almost immediately people started gathering around. And so those people said, “Can we just grab another copy and we’ll just put it on the next table just so not everyone has to gather around this one table?” ‘Cause it looked so intriguing. And so they sent it to another table. And then by the time Carly sent me a video, it was at every table in the room. It was just an entire hotel playing this one game because nobody wanted to play anything else.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wild.

Elan Lee: It was so neat. It was so neat. And how gratifying? We’ve been killing ourselves on this thing. And to see an audience receive it and say, thank you for the gift.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, totally. And also, I mean, I said it to you guys and look, it says technically it says age 10 plus. So I don’t want to contradict that, but if you’re willing to modify the rules, which is something that I encourage, and we have that in the instructions, house rules, feel free to modify the rules. But I sent you guys the video of my friend’s four-year-old after she played, which was like this — 

Elan Lee: So good!

Tim Ferriss: It was such an amazing video. And this is the first thing I’ve ever done that can include families and kids directly/

Elan Lee: Easily.

Tim Ferriss: Where it’s like, four-year-old, 10-year-old is not going to have any interest or necessarily the capacity to read one of my phone books that are like 600 pages long. It’s not going to happen. So this is also so much fun to finally now that it’s kind of released into the wild to start seeing these things bubbling up that I hoped would be there.

Elan Lee: It’s the reason you make a game. You want to share an experience that then the recipients get to share with those people that they love. That’s why you make a game. That’s exactly what we’ve made here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So let’s talk about the selling process a little bit more. Because you said, there’s the game development, there’s building the game, there’s crafting the game. But there is an equally important part, which is how do you get this thing into people’s hands? And for that you need distribution.

So this is going to be a callback. Remember that line review at the very beginning and then I took us on a very meandering path, but there was a point to it. How do you pitch big retailers? How does that happen? And how did you do it in the beginning of Exploding Kittens and how — I know it’s changed over time as you’ve built your track record, but nonetheless you still need to do it. And actually, here’s a data point that most people will never hear anyone talk about. What percentage of your sales are offline retail versus online?

Elan Lee: Yeah. All right, we’ll start there. Yeah, we never share these numbers, but for you, Tim — 

Tim Ferriss: Thank you.

Elan Lee: — here we go. 70 percent of our sales are in-person retail. Only 30 percent are online sales. Totally backwards than what you’d expect for almost any industry. But yeah, people like to walk into a store, they like to see and touch and feel the game and flip it over and read the back and compare it to the other games. And that’s where we sell our games. Which means not only do I need tremendous retail buy-in, those sales meetings are so important, those line reviews.

But also the game has to sell itself on the shelf. When you’re walking down that games aisle, 70 percent of our audience does this. You need to look at all the game, hundreds of games, and you need to stop dead in your tracks on this one. And you need to say, “Ooh, what’s that?” And that starts at that line review, starts with getting them to say, not only are we going to commit to this game, but we’re going to put it in multiple locations. So you see it more than once. Very important. Also, we work with them to figure out the color scheme. And you and I, we did tons of surveys on the color scheme and the character and everything to stop people in their tracks.

Tim Ferriss: So just a quick sidebar. I know I keep doing this, but some of you may remember, and for those who never heard it I’ll just tell you, from my very first book, 4-Hour Workweek, I used Google AdWords to test the top, let’s just call it 10 title and subtitle contenders.

So I bid on keywords that were related to the subject matter in the book. And then the sponsored results, the ads were automatically split tested, like multivariate tested by Google. They will do this automatically. And then all of the URLs, I had different URLs for each title option. They just took people to an under construction page. Because I didn’t care about conversion, I cared about interest, sufficient interest click. And that is how I figured out the title. And then for the cover, back in the day, I went to Borders, which was on University Ave. in Palo Alto. And I had a counter, like you might see from a bouncer at the front of a club. And I put different covers onto a book of the same dimensions on the shelf.

Elan Lee: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: I guess I didn’t tell you this. Under the new nonfiction.

Elan Lee: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: And I just, during the peak hours over a couple of days, I just tracked the number of times it got picked up.

Elan Lee: Oh, that’s so good.

Tim Ferriss: And then I used that to determine which cover to use.

Elan Lee: I love this, I love this.

Tim Ferriss: Now there are better or certainly easier tools to use. So we ended up, there are a number of them, I’ll just mention a few. So we used PickFu, P-I-C-K-F-U.com. There’s also Intellivy, I-N-T-E-L-L-I-V-Y, and then there’s another one called Stickybeak also.

But these allow you to do roughly the same thing, which is you can take, for instance, with this box design or any type of art, or you could probably do it with copy, many different things. You can survey people who fit a particular demographic. And so you could identify whatever the ages, the gender, if they are members of a particular service, whether they have Prime membership or this membership or that membership. You can fine slice it however you want, and then you can serve up variants.

So for this coyote who you see on the cover, I’ll explain for the people, basically the box looks like a slightly enlarged box for a deck of cards and then the top of the box is this beautiful autumnal orange, almost a saffron, like Buddhist robe.

Elan Lee: We spent so much time on this color.

Tim Ferriss: We spent so much time on this, it is impossible to overstate how much time I spent on this and everybody spent on it. Then there’s this beautiful lime green. I remember taking photographs of particular leaves at particular times of the year with light coming through it to identify the hexadecimal or Pantone numbers for this particular grain.

Elan Lee: Oh, I remember this well, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you remember it, you remember it. And then looking at color theory and the color wheel and, oh, my God, it went on and on. But above the coyote which is in the center of the box, there is this upper portion of a cartoon coyote’s head and very much trickster. Where it ended up is there’s a little hat on the coyote, there’s an earring, there’s a wink and the snout is where it’s cut off so you don’t see the nose. And this was originally, I remember sketching this initially on a Zoom call by pen and paper and then holding it up to the Zoom call to the camera and then later sending the scan and then we worked from there. But we had variants with no hat, we had variants with no earring, we had variants with both eyes open looking to camera, so to speak, we had both eyes open looking in one direction off to the side and we were able to very quickly get a very good statistical signal on what people preferred.

Elan Lee: Yes. However — 

Tim Ferriss: However.

Elan Lee: — to your credit, when you showed me that character, I think, initially, both the coyote’s eyes were open and we had some questions about the hat and I remember asking you all these questions. “What do you think of a wink? What do you think of an earring? What do you think of a hat? What do you think of one eye closed? With both eyes closed? What do you think? What do you think?” And to your credit, your answer was always “Let’s test it. I don’t want to have an opinion about this, I do have an opinion but I don’t even want to tell you, let’s test it.” And that is such an intelligent way to approach this. And ultimately, this beautiful character that we ended up with was so clearly the winner, it wasn’t even close.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it wasn’t even close. And so we were able to get this very strong signal from thousands of people voting and, boom, here we are.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So, we were talking about the road to retail. So it’s 70 percent of your sales are in-person retail versus online.

Elan Lee: Yeah, right.

Tim Ferriss: And, therefore, the stakes are high for these line reviews.

Elan Lee: Yeah, line reviews are a big deal. And I remember, so we really wanted to all show up in person. I remember you were trying so hard to get — our first line review was with Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas. I remember you wanted so badly to be there and there was some scheduling conflict that just wasn’t going to let it happen. And we tried to change the date but, again, they’ve got so many meetings and you’ve got to get in in exactly this time and they couldn’t change it to anything appropriate. 

And I remember thinking, “Oh, we’re sunk, I don’t know how to sell this game without Tim there in the room showing how much passion he has.” And you had a great solve, you just recorded a video of all that passion and you sat down in front of the camera and you just riffed on the game. You were just like, “Here’s why I love this, here’s why this is important to me, here’s why I made this game, first time I put my name on a thing,” and you recorded this beautiful and passionate video.

And I remember walking into the line review and sitting down and saying, “I have a new game. First thing I’m going to do is we’re going to play this game and I’m not going to tell you anything about it, we’re just going to play this game.” And I set up the game and, within five minutes, they’re laughing and they’re having this incredible time and they’re like, “Oh, this is amazing, this is so much fun. How are you going to sell this thing?” And I said, “I’m going to play a video for you now,” and that was it. It was that one-two punch. It was we’ve nailed game design and we’ve nailed the pitch, we know exactly who to talk to and how to talk to them. And they saw those two elements and they’re full line purchase, every single store is getting this game.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wild, yeah.

Elan Lee: That has never happened on an initial pitch for us ever. Normally, we get into a subset of stores and then, eventually, it rolls out to all the stores. This was the first time ever they said, “Whatever it takes, we need this game everywhere.”

Tim Ferriss: Which is still very surreal for me and I’m so grateful, obviously, and it’s terrifying at the same time. Not going to lie, this is mister dip the toe, then one foot, then wade up to the ankles, this is just — 

Elan Lee: Yeah, fire hose on.

Tim Ferriss: — full Monty from second zero. 

What are other keys to pitching in a line review? And that could also be, I’ll just offer another option, which is what are some common mistakes that people make or that you suspect people make?

Elan Lee: Okay. So, the first most common mistake — 

Tim Ferriss: Because this could be for games but it could be for — 

Elan Lee: It’s for anything, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — cosmetics, it could be for anything.

Elan Lee: For anything. The first question is how are you represented in that room? Remember I said they only take a certain number of meetings, it took us five years to get one of those meetings.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Elan Lee: And the way that you get the — 

Tim Ferriss: Even with the thunderous, crazy lightning-in-a-bottle success of Exploding Kittens?

Elan Lee: They only have so many hours.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: Yeah. So what you have to do instead is you find someone who already has a meeting and you hire them as your publisher and then they represent your game in their meeting. That’s how most companies do it and that’s how we did it for years. So the first problem is you have to make sure that whoever’s representing you, assuming you can’t be in the room because 99.9 percent of the people can’t, they are representing you the right way. With enough attention, they’re pitching it the right way, they’re representing it the right way, they’re saying the right words, they’re conveying the right fun.

Tim Ferriss: How do you ensure that?

Elan Lee: It’s a personal relationship and you — It’s just hard, it’s really hard. And to be honest, I don’t want to name names, but we went through three different publishers and I wasn’t happy with how — 

Tim Ferriss: How did you, this may or may not be something you can talk about, but how did you craft the deal structure such that you could take a swing and then you’re like, “Okay, swing and a miss, we’re going to go to someone else. And then swing and a miss, we’re going to go to someone else.”

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How are those deals structured?

Elan Lee: We got very lucky. Because our Kickstarter campaign was so through the roof, that fed into our Amazon sales immediately. And so I could go from publisher to publisher saying, “Look how many games I sold the last week, look how many I sold the week before that. This is a prestigious title that you want to represent.” And then when they wouldn’t represent me properly, wouldn’t get the right sales, couldn’t get the right deal structure in place because we also demand quite a bit as far as where the game is placed, is it in aisle, is it out of aisle, meaning is it in the game section or somewhere else.

Tim Ferriss: Ankle height versus eye height.

Elan Lee: Exactly, right. Those bottom shelves are like a death sentence, nobody looks down there. Can we get games at checkout where they’re selling chewing gum, can we put games there? Can we get games in the catalog? All this stuff that I wanted for our games was just not being properly represented for us. So, eventually, after our sales got high enough, I finally was able to stop doing that silly dance with these publishers and we were able to publish our own games.

Tim Ferriss: Quick question. So, if I’m hearing you correctly, the success of the direct to consumer, the DTC, Kickstarter, Amazon, I should say online, those successes allowed you to dictate certain deal terms with the publishers so you had flexibility.

Elan Lee: Correct. And they allow us to say you want to represent us. Because, even then, they only have a one, maybe two-hour meeting and so there’s only so many games they can pitch so how do they fill that library.

Tim Ferriss: And then you get to the point where you can go and book those meetings yourself. How important was having a critical mass of SKUs?

Elan Lee: Oh, it’s everything, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Because I have to imagine, if I’m a major retailer, I don’t want to have a meeting with someone who only has one thing to sell.

Elan Lee: Well, that’s why we couldn’t do it at first. It was only once we had, I think, 10 games was the magic number to make it worth their while.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Okay, got it.

Elan Lee: Yeah. And that takes a long time. And it’s not just 10 games, it’s 10 bestsellers. And unless you’re there, they’re just like, “Yeah, just go through a publisher. We don’t have time for — “

Tim Ferriss: Don’t have time.

Elan Lee: We take 10 meetings, we don’t have time for an 11th.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. All right, so what have you learned understanding but, to the extent possible, if we can put aside the element of Exploding Kittens having and developing this incredible track record which allows you to not cut corners in a bad way but you can go in without a finished prototype of the box, et cetera. If we put that aside for the moment, what have you learned about line reviews if you look at your first outing versus — 

Elan Lee: Yeah. Oh, I love this.

Tim Ferriss: — the more refined line reviews?

Elan Lee: Yeah, okay.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m spending a lot of time on this, guys, because this applies to everything. It applies to so much. You have a movie? Okay, fine, how are people going to see the movie? Yeah, you can go direct but you might want a distribution partner. What we’re talking about will apply to that pitch meeting, a lot of it. And it’s the stuff that mainstream magic is made of is figuring out how to craft these meetings.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Remember you said, “Like it or not, you’re in sales?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: Here it is. This is where the rubber meets the road. Dust off your tap dancing shoes because, holy crap, these are tough. So you have to walk into that meeting and first you have to keep in mind you are their 10th meeting. Even if you’re not their 10th meeting, you’re their 10th meeting. They’re in this “I’m tired, I want to get out of this room, I’ve been at this for too long,” they’re in that mindset. So the first thing you’ve got to do is get them out of that funk. You need them to understand that this is going to be the best of the 10 meetings. And you do that with enthusiasm, you do that with props, you do that with a cool video. The stuff that can get them out of, “Oh, this isn’t like the other meetings.” Cool, that’s where you start.

So we walk into the room with two of those suitcases, not the ones that fit in the overhead, the big crazy ones you have to check and they’re filled with games, the most beautiful games we’ve got. Even stuff that we’re not pitching that day, even stuff we know will never see the light of day because we’re going to set all of those up. And the basic premise is buy into this world. Exploding Kittens is not a product, it’s a whole world and you can have this world on your store shelves. And so that’s how we start and that’s a really nice way to start. Okay. Then what they’re expecting is, “Okay, pitch us a game one at a time. Pitch this, okay, you’re done. Okay, pitch the next one. Okay, you’re done. Pitch the next one.” 

What we do is very different. Instead of pitching a game and then pitching the next one, just like I said, for Coyote, we’re like, “Hey, we’re going to play a game.” And usually they say, “We don’t have time to play, can you just pitch it?” And I say, “No, we’re going to play a game.” Confrontation, I get it, but I force them to play the games, every single one of them. Now, I’m not going to play all the way through, I’m not going to spend 10 or 20 minutes.

Tim Ferriss: All right. This might seem like a trivial detail but I don’t think it is. You in a tuxedo and a top hat for this? Are you dressed in your Sunday’s finest?

Elan Lee: Oh, yeah. Oh, it’s so funny. So I learned this in my Microsoft days. If I dress up, if I wear a tuxedo, if I wear a suit, if I even wear a button-up shirt, nobody takes me seriously because I’m supposed to be the creative guy. I have to wear the creative guy uniform, I have to wear a t-shirt, I have to wear jeans, otherwise, no one looks at me. So that’s how I show up.

Luckily, it’s a really comfortable uniform for me. So I force them to play and I’m there being the game’s biggest cheerleader. I don’t usually let them win, but I usually orchestrate a scenario in the game where they’re having as much fun as possible. And my goal is for them to have exactly those emotions that we talked about. When we start, I need them to think I can do that. And then, a minute in, I need them to think, “Oh, I did that. What’s next? Oh, I can do that next thing too.” And I am just crafting that.

And right at the point where they’re like, “Oh, I know what the next thing is,” I pull the game away. We’re done playing, now let me tell you how we’re going to sell this game. And it’s because, at that point, they’re drooling. And I do that 10 times in a meeting and we just keep hitting that over and over. And I am very aware that the last two games I pitch are usually not going to be purchased because they’re exhausted because that roller coaster — they’ve been up and down too many times.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So, you’re going to have to figure out the sequence.

Elan Lee: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Do you start with the game you hope is going to be the big purchase? How do you sequence it?

Elan Lee: Yeah, yeah. We open with our shortest, easiest pitch and what that usually is an Exploding Kittens expansion. So, if I need to sell an expansion box or a new Exploding Kittens product and I know I don’t have to work very hard to sell it because they always sell, that’ll take the first spot. That just warms the waters, gets us all eased in.

Tim Ferriss: A little yes momentum.

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t hurt.

Elan Lee: Yeah. The number two spot is the glory spot.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.

Elan Lee: Whoever is there, that’s the game I’m actually pitching today. That’s where Coyote was, that’s the big thing we’re going to talk about. And then the next five are equal, it doesn’t matter what order they are, those are — usually we’ll sell all five of those. At a typical meeting, all five. What happens after that is very iffy.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Now you mentioned you play the game, you get them super excited, hopefully, they’re drooling over it and then you say, “All right, I’m going to take the game away, here’s how we’re going to sell it.” What is included in the “Here’s how we’re going to sell it?”

Elan Lee: Oh, yeah, okay. So important. So this has changed over the last three years. It used to be I have to start with the box and we still — I shouldn’t say it used to be, it still is, we start with the box. “Look how beautiful this thing is,” and we do a mock-up, here’s how it looks on the shelf and it’s usually from a photograph we took that morning. We want to show you, “Hey, Target, here’s what your shelf looks like. Hey, Walmart, here’s what your shelf looks like. Here is our game right there in line.”

Tim Ferriss: And I should mention, this probably goes without saying, but you are not just showing up and winging it, you guys — 

Elan Lee: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — rehearse like you are going to be performing once in a lifetime at Carnegie Hall.

Elan Lee: It is, if we screw up this meeting, our company is screwed. We don’t survive a bad meeting so, yeah, there is nothing that matters more than this. This is, arguably, 70 percent of our business this year. If we mess up this meeting, we will see a 70 percent drop. If they bought zero games, I don’t know that our company would survive that, so it’s a big deal. We rehearse constantly, we make changes constantly, we make all these props. We try to get the spot either right after breakfast or right after lunch because that’s when they’re in the best moods. All of it is orchestrated and so carefully. Who’s in the meeting? How many chairs are we going to fill?

Tim Ferriss: How do you request those time slots? Because I imagine you’re not the only people who are thinking about this, right? It makes me think of the data, it’s a meta-analysis long ago looking at judges’ verdicts before or after meals and leniency, right?

Elan Lee: Yeah, right. So, how do you get the right slots, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, how do you angle for those?

Elan Lee: There’s an art to that as well. So we have agents, we have representatives, one for Target and one for Walmart, and these are people who live in those cities, and they live and breathe sales with the sales rep. So, their job is — the very cynical way to say it is they’re like lobbyists but the more — 

Tim Ferriss: Ambassadors.

Elan Lee: Ambassadors, there we go. That’s a much more appropriate way. They have been doing the job for longer than the salespeople have, longer than the buyers have. And as a result, the relationship that they have with the buyers is actually one of education because they’ve seen all the mistakes, they know where all the landmines are, they know how to avoid them. And so part of the art of getting the best meetings, of getting yourself set up the best, is to hire the best agent.

Tim Ferriss: How does someone find said agents?

Elan Lee: Friends of friends of friends.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: The best ones already have too many clients. You can’t work with them.

Tim Ferriss: Right, the usual situation.

Elan Lee: Yeah, exactly. But if you have a good enough brand, if you have the right relationships, if you can talk to the right people and if you’re persistent, you can get the right agents. I actually thought we didn’t need an agent at all at first. I was like, “We can just do it, we’re going to show up the day before, we’re going to walk into these meetings,” and some very good friends of mine in the industry said, “You are an idiot, it’s just not going to work.” So we started working with agents and they’re incredible. They know the industry, they can — 

Tim Ferriss: Now, just to dig into that a little, why wouldn’t that work? Is it that the code of etiquette and the way everything has been set up involves those agents and, therefore, it wouldn’t work or are there other reasons why going in guns blazing without representation wouldn’t work?

Elan Lee: Yeah, both. The answer is both. So the buyers are much less likely to take you seriously unless you have an agent in the room. And part of that is just because — 

Tim Ferriss: I guess part of it is just these fools don’t know how this is done.

Elan Lee: Exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: Right. They’re showing up to Downton Abbey wearing a tank top.

Elan Lee: Exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: And they don’t know how to use the silverware.

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Why should I trust their ability to be a good partner and actually get things done on time if they haven’t done their homework?

Elan Lee: Precisely.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: And the other half is you haven’t done your homework.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elan Lee: You actually don’t know, you actually don’t know how to use the silverware. When we walk into a meeting, the agent has done a year’s worth of work prepping for that meeting. They have made sure the buyers know what you’re going to pitch, how many games you’re going to pitch, what the order of the games is. They’ve made sure that the sales for the previous purchases they’ve made going into the meeting so they already have the confidence in, yes, these people are going to deliver. They’ve made sure that inventory levels are where they need to be so that a meeting doesn’t get sidetracked by them saying “This game is sold out, how did you let that happen?” So many things can go wrong that the agent is fixing before they go wrong so that the meeting stays on the rails and gets you to success.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.

Elan Lee: It’s a full-time job and, without it — 

Tim Ferriss: And so that agent is the person who lobbies for the appointment after breakfast for lunch?

Elan Lee: Exactly, yes. But you have to know to ask for it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.

Elan Lee: Because your agent has other clients. They’re going to sit through maybe three, sometimes four meetings in that sell cycle and they’re going to give that prime slot to the one who asks for it. So you’ve got to know to ask for it. Here I am telling you on this podcast, it’s probably going to make my job a little bit harder for the next sales round, but so be it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. People listening need to hop through a few hoops before — 

Elan Lee: Yeah, fair enough, all right.

Tim Ferriss: — they end up being viable competition.

Elan Lee: Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. There’s a few other tricks that — 

Tim Ferriss: And we are going to come back to, if you’re just developing a game at your kitchen table, what are some of the first steps. So, we’re going to get to that.

Elan Lee: Yeah, we’ll get there. Yeah, for sure.

Tim Ferriss: But in the meantime, you said a couple of tricks of the trade?

Elan Lee: Yeah, there’s a few more. I should be a little careful about what I say but, look — 

Tim Ferriss: We can always bleep things in edit later.

Elan Lee: All right. So, you want to pay attention to, believe it or not, all of the retailers have color themes year by year. So you want to make sure that, when you walk into a meeting, your boxes match that color scheme, it makes it much easier for them to say yes.

Tim Ferriss: Had no idea.

Elan Lee: Yeah, right, I know. Because why would you? Because why would anybody, right? There’s things like those agents are given permission to read the notes from the all-hands meeting from the company so they know what the company’s priorities are. And so you want to sit down with your agent in advance and say, “Those buyers, what are they going to get promotions and raises based on this year? Is it more throughput at the store? Is it promote online sales? Is it match the color scheme?” Whatever it is, you want to make sure — 

Tim Ferriss: What are the incentives?

Elan Lee: Yeah. And you want to make sure that, when they look at your games, they think, “Oh, I’m really trying to promote online sales this year, whoa, this game would do great on our website. And then the next game, this game would do great on our website as well.” And by the time you get to the end of the meeting they’re like, “Oh, my God, I can get a promotion if I just buy all 10 of these games.” That’s what you want them to walk away with.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So, these meetings are huge, we’ve established this. A huge deal.

Elan Lee: So important.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned a couple of tricks to the trade. And any other tips, tricks, learnings along the way?

Elan Lee: So what happens after those meetings is also very important. Okay. So there’s two things we have to talk about. One is pricing structure and the other is marketing.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Elan Lee: So in the meeting you talk a little bit about both. You have to now include marketing. Remember I said three years ago things were different than today? Three years ago, the marketing plan that you show for your game is largely your own website. Maybe you’ve bought some TV commercials, things like billboards, product placement here and there, things like that. Today, none of that matters. All they care about is social media because that’s the only form of marketing for games that works anymore, so.

Tim Ferriss: I should say also it particularly works on, and this is my understanding, on platforms like TikTok or now that other platforms have realized to avoid TikTok consuming their market share, they need to push and reward short-form video.

Elan Lee: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Short-form video. Casual games are perfectly suited to short-form video.

Elan Lee: Yeah. And the way that you build the most effective videos for those is you need to inspire, I think, two emotions. One, “I understand what those people are experiencing right now,” And two, “I would like to experience that.” And it took me forever to get to those two sentences. At first it was, “Let’s show gameplay, let’s show setup, let’s show a memorable moment. Let’s show people screaming and yelling because they’re having so much fun.” None of that matters. None of that works. “That looks like fun. I could have that much fun.” That’s it. That’s what you’re trying to show.

Tim Ferriss: How does that differ from the first?

Elan Lee: Um, it’s very, very focused, you want to — remember we talked about mastery early on?

Tim Ferriss: Well, I also asked you guys, because we were talking about this very early on in the process, right?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Also, because if I’m procrastinating doing something hard, I like to talk about the marketing because it just is a lot easier for me to talk about. But I wanted to see examples of videos that had worked for any of your games.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Social posts. And so they were sent over. I was like, “Okay, I think I can deduce why this works.” Often it was one person playing the other person struggling to guess what the other person was doing and one person losing it laughing. Just inconsolably, but in the best possible way, losing it, getting the giggles out of control.

Elan Lee: Okay. So I’ll tell you, one of the most effective pieces of media we have ever used was for Poetry for Neanderthals. This has like at this point, I don’t know, tens of millions of views. And all it is — oh, sorry, “Here’s how you play Poetry for Neanderthals. I have to get you, I have a secret word on this card. I have to get you to say that word. And I can only speak using single syllable words. That’s the whole game. If I mess up, someone sitting next to me has a giant inflatable neanderthal club and they get to bonk me on the head.” All right. So there’s our whole game. The best video we’ve ever seen is someone who’s trying to get a person to say the word “garage.”

And we know they’re trying to get the person to say the word garage because we put that right on the screen. We show you, “Here’s the secret word, it’s garage.” And they’re just saying, “Car, go here. Car, hole, car hole. This car hole, big car hole.” And everyone’s losing it. And the poor person trying to guess is like, “What the fuck is a car hole? Glove compartment? What are you trying to say?” And then they say, “Vehicle. Multiple syllable word.” And so they get bonked on the head. Okay, here’s why that video is so effective. It’s those two senses. One is, “I see the experience they’re having. I get that.” And the secondary corollary is “I could do better than that.”

Tim Ferriss: Is this the video, I think I remember seeing this. This might have been a separate video, but there’s a woman who’s the poet and then there’s the guy next to her, holding the club.

Elan Lee: Yeah, so menacing.

Tim Ferriss: The ax is going to drop. Yeah. And everyone’s losing it, including the guy at the back.

Elan Lee: Because you look at that and you say, “I understand the rules,” immediately. “I understand the experience they’re having. I would like to have that experience.” And that’s what makes for an effective social media video.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so how do you pitch that?

Elan Lee: Well, we show a lot of examples and we show a track record. We say, “Look, here’s how many views our last round of videos got. Here’s how many likes, here’s how many shares, here’s how many subscriptions.” All this stuff, we show them right there in the meeting. We never had to do that. This is a brand new phenomenon. And we say, “Here’s the type of video that we’re going to craft for this new game,” and we always couch it in those two sentences. “Here’s how we’re going to explain the fun people are having and here’s how we’re going to make the audience feel like they would like to have that much fun as well.” And that’s been very effective for us. So that’s now half the meeting, because every game we start by, I demo the game.

Tim Ferriss: It’s social media strategy.

Elan Lee: Yes. I demo the game, I pull the game back, we talk a little bit about the pricing structure and the theme and the box and all that. And then we go right into social media strategy for that game. Because I have to spend as much time on that as I did on the game design because they’re equally important now. It’s huge. Such a difference.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so for somebody listening who is thinking about making a game, and I really encourage everyone to do that, and I’m just going to flash, this is as good a time as any, just to flash these blank cards that are within every Coyote box and they are color-coded. You can use these to make action cards, which are these different gestures and actions and so on.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Those are the templates that we use.

Tim Ferriss: These are the templates. You can use them to make Coyote cards, these modifiers. You can use them to make the attack cards which you use to sabotage other people. There are other ways to play those cards. This is intended to invite everyone to basically create their own game by modifying the rules.

Elan Lee: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Or adding new elements that are uniquely their own. You can have fun with your friends, you can have fun with your kids. I mean, this is intended to make you a part of the creative process, which you will be part of anyway, just by the way you play the game but this takes it to another level. And this was a really important element for me. So this will be a warm-up in a sense. You get to try game design, game development light, with these blank cards. But let’s say somebody then decides they want to give it a go, maybe it’s with one of their kids, like you did with your daughter. Maybe it’s by themselves. Who knows? Maybe it’s going to the game shop, local game shop, which I really recommend people do. If you’ve never been to a real proper game shop, go in on a game night when people are set up and also check out the games you might not be inclined to check out. So if you’re a casual gamer, go to a Warhammer night, see what that’s about.

Elan Lee: Totally.

Tim Ferriss: Check out these different worlds.

Elan Lee: Another secret weapon is go to a game shop, find the owner, or even the person behind the counter, someone who knows what they’re talking about. And just say, “I’m looking for a game. What game do you wish more people would give a try?” And you’ll find the gems that way because they know. But maybe the game doesn’t have the best box or the best name or it fell short somewhere and people just aren’t buying it, but they know it’s amazing. That’s where you find them. It’s a great experience.

Tim Ferriss: So start testing the waters in that way. It’s so easy to do in a place like Austin. I mean, this is Austin. People might think of game locations and X, Y, Z, they’re all over the place. There happens to be a really vibrant scene here. And if you wanted to, if one wanted to start developing their own game, let’s say they find something that starts to stick.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’ve got a tiger by the tail. This seems to be working. They’re play testing. It might take a while, like Settlers of Catan, I think Klaus Teuber had 150 versions before, that’s a complex game. But let’s say they start to develop the game and they’re like, “All right, I would like to try to sell this.” What are the options? What would you say to someone who’s like, they’re smart, they can plan, they’ve operated in the world before, so they’re not new to adulting, but they have no experience in selling games.

Elan Lee: There are three paths. I’ll tell you all three paths and then I’ll tell you my favorite one.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Elan Lee: Okay. Path number one, self-publishing. Self-publishing is hard, but you can print out your own decks. You can design everything yourself. You can write the rules yourself. You can do absolutely everything yourself. And then you can spend a few thousand dollars, publish a few hundred copies, and send them out to all your friends. Okay. So that’s option one. It sucks. Don’t do that one. It’s just the worst. I mean, you’re just going to make every mistake and you’re not — 

Tim Ferriss: And you’re going to have to pay for your mistakes.

Elan Lee: And you pay for every mistake, and then once you make the mistake, now you can’t take it back and you can’t undo it. Just don’t self-publish. It’s a terrible idea. Okay, there’s number one. That’s not my favorite one. Number two is you go to an existing publisher, Hasbro, Mattel, nowadays Exploding Kittens. You can approach big publishers, pitch your game, and then strike a deal with them where they will handle all the risk, but they will also take most of the reward. You can still honestly get very rich this way, but you have to get into their portfolio, so either you need a track record or you just have to absolutely wow them or you need some other — you have to show up with some bona fides. You can’t just say, “I’m a brand new designer, here’s my brand new game, please publish me.”

Tim Ferriss: How would you, maybe there are exceptions where people have wowed them, first time game designer with a game, how does one do that?

Elan Lee: You go to a convention.

Tim Ferriss: You go to a convention?

Elan Lee: Yeah, you go to a convention, you demo your game, they will all show up. They’re like agents recruiting for a sports team. They’re going to show up to all of those places and they’re going to walk the halls and they’re going to check even the smallest booths. And they’re going to even go to the big convention halls where everyone just has their own little folding table or even a temporary folding table. They’re going to look at all of that stuff. So it is possible to do it that way, but you have to keep in mind they have very few slots open and they usually only have one or two agents, scouts looking for games. So your chances of success there are low as a first-time person, much better if you can walk in, if you can schedule a meeting and they will take that meeting and then you can say, “Here’s why you should not say no to this.”

Tim Ferriss: What are the things you can do or put in a pitch that increase the likelihood of getting a meeting, outside of being an influencer with 20 million followers on Instagram?

Elan Lee: Well, yeah, that helps, but the reason that helps is, what I was going to say is the ability to sell the game, whatever it is, maybe you’re an influencer — 

Tim Ferriss: By the way, also true of nonfiction writing.

Elan Lee: Exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: If you’re selling a book.

Elan Lee: And for selling a screenplay and for really selling anything, you need to be able to say, “Here’s why people are going to take notice of this thing and why you would be a fool to pass on this opportunity.” That’s hard. Oftentimes the best way to do that is to have already done it, which means your first time out, you need what I’m about to talk about, which is option three. Option three, crowdfunding. This is relatively new, like 10, 15 years old.

Tim Ferriss: So it is, I guess, self-publishing in a sense, but you’re getting other people to fund the development.

Elan Lee: Two things, yes to that. Exactly right. Other people are funding a hundred percent of the development, which is incredible. But also you are collecting those funds on a platform that promotes the game. People are there watching your video, you’re trying to convince them.

Tim Ferriss: It is a discovery platform.

Elan Lee: Exactly. Perfectly phrased. It is a discovery platform that was missing 15 years ago. “Watch my self-published YouTube video and hopefully fund my game,” it just didn’t exist. So now people are looking at crowdfunding sites looking for cool new experiences and backing them. And that’s a new invention and that’s really cool. And it’s not my favorite one either. So I just said I picked my favorite and I just pitched three and I said, “None of them are my favorite.” Here’s my actual favorite. A combination of two and three. Start on crowdfunding, especially if it’s your first time out. Learn everything you can. Your first project is probably going to fail. That’s okay. You’ve got nothing at stake. You didn’t lose anything. Fix it. Relaunch it, fix it again. Relaunch it again. Take as many times as you need. There’s nothing at risk here. You’re just learning the process. Awesome. When you get a success on whatever crowdfunding platform you love, now go to those publishers and say, “Here are my bona fides. Here’s proof that this thing is going to sell. I’ve already sold this once. I’ve already gotten 10.”

Tim Ferriss: Do you do that before you have shipped the game?

Elan Lee: No. Very important. No. Ship the game first. If the only thing you can prove is that you are a train wreck waiting to happen, you will get nothing from them. So ship the game, show that you’re organized, even if it’s a small fulfillment like you sell a hundred copies of your game, show that you can fulfill those hundred copies and then start to show the reactions to those. If you’ve only got a hundred people who bought the game, reach out to every single one of them and beg them to record a video about how much they love your game. And now go to publishers with that. That’s really what you’re searching for. Use crowdfunding as exactly what it is, as a way to launch your new game to then take to step two.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask this. There may be people listening or watching who think to themselves, “That sounds awesome, but wasn’t the heyday of crowdfunding three, four, or five years ago?”

Elan Lee: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: You hear less about it. Certainly for, let’s say, selling to a hundred people or maybe many, many more, I’m sure there are runaway success campaigns even today, but are there any tweaks that you would add to it?

Elan Lee: It’s really tricky. Okay, so here’s what happened with crowdfunding. So we launched on Kickstarter, Exploding Kittens launched on Kickstarter, and by some amazing twist of fate, that was perfect timing. Very few people had heard of Kickstarter. They heard about this funny, silly thing. It was drawn by The Oatmeal. Matt already had this incredibly large audience and people showed up and they said, “Ooh, crowdfunding. Ooh, this thing costs 20 bucks. I’m going to back this thing.” And we had 219,000 people try that thing. Amazing. Unheard of success. Those people then over the next, let’s call it five years, stayed on Kickstarter and they backed other things, other games, other projects, whatever. And what they found was the nature of Kickstarter is such that only about 50 percent of those projects that shipped either the thing that shipped was nowhere close to the thing promised, or the thing never shipped, and they never got their money back. Whatever it is.

Tim Ferriss: People got burned.

Elan Lee: They got burned, and they had a terrible experience. And now when you say, “Hey, back my Kickstarter,” everyone’s got this memory implanted of, “Oh, that was a bad experience for me. Maybe I even had some great experiences, but I also had those bad ones and this is not worth it. And I’m not going back to that site or any crowdfunding site.” So that’s the problem. We’re not seeing the numbers we used to see because everyone’s walking in with this baggage and it sucks. My only advice is there is now a secondary ecosystem around Kickstarter, other websites that have gotten very good at promoting projects, that have gotten very good at advertising new offerings on Kickstarter and building trust, like if you get on this other — 

Tim Ferriss: So it’s like a curated site that vets projects.

Elan Lee: Exactly right. And here’s the thing, those companies almost always take a percentage of what the maker gets in exchange for helping them with fulfillment, with creation, with everything. So not only are you buying into a trusted ecosystem, but you also know there’s multiple parties involved that are going to work very hard to make sure you get that product.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of those companies?

Elan Lee: I would have to look them up.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Yeah, no problem. All right, we’ll put maybe links to a few of them in the show notes.

Elan Lee: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a ton of them. They all have the word backer in them somewhere, backer found and backer this and backer that. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’ll put a couple of links in the show notes. Tim.blog/podcast, you can find it. 

And I will also just give a shout-out to a friend of mine who at some point you have to meet, maybe you’ve met him already. Craig Mod, does that name ring at all?

Elan Lee: No. I don’t know Craig.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so Craig is a gem of a human, amazing writer, also very technical as a software engineer, software development expert. And he, at one point, for his beautiful books that he has bound and crafted in Japan, these are works of art, they’re absolutely beautiful. And he created basically a, I don’t know if open source is the right term, but he does have the code available on GitHub for anybody who wants it, called, I think it’s called Craigstarter, which is effectively, if you want to host your own crowdfunding campaign and in his opinion, fix some of the bugs that were difficult to contend with.

Elan Lee: Interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Then boom, you can do that.

Elan Lee: Oh, I love that.

Tim Ferriss: And I think he incorporated Shopify and other add-ons, different services could be as modules. I’m sure I’m not using the right terminology, but incorporated into it.

Elan Lee: Super clever. I love it.

Tim Ferriss: So people can also check that out. And I have two interviews with Craig. You should check out both of them. They’re absolutely fantastic.

Elan Lee: Lovely.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so folks can look at these services as basically a stamp of credibility. They will help not only with the promotion if you are so vetted, but with the fulfillment, like that third-party logistics.

Elan Lee: That’s right. Now, I don’t think we’re going to see a crowdfunding campaign on the scale of Exploding Kittens these days. There are a few exceptions. You just interviewed one of them, in fact.

Tim Ferriss: Brandon Sanderson?

Elan Lee: Exactly, out of control success.

Tim Ferriss: $45 million, or whatever it was, Kickstarter campaign for fantasy books. Unheard of.

Elan Lee: Bonkers. Unheard of. But what I love is that that shows this is not even a remotely dead platform.

Tim Ferriss: No.

Elan Lee: There is success to be had here. You just have to be creative. I mean he started out with a great fan base. He picked an incredible title, the first word of his campaign was, “Surprise.” No one’s done that before. What does that mean? And just everything about it. Smart on top of smart on top of smart. I loved it. Loved it. So it’s very possible, but it’s also very rare and you have to be smart about it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, here’s the thing. It’s possible and who cares? It may not have the gravitational pull that it had five years ago, but if you can’t sell anything in a crowdfunding campaign, you are not going to sell any buyer at mass retail.

Elan Lee: Absolutely right.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not going to happen.

Elan Lee: Absolutely right.

Tim Ferriss: And therefore you save yourself years of banging your head against a brick wall when you’re never going to break through. If you get, and this might not sound like good news, but if it’s going to fail, you want to fail as quickly as possible.

Elan Lee: It’s great news, as long as you don’t take it personally, as long as you say “This product — “

Tim Ferriss: How many games do you guys screw around with on any level? And how many make the cut?

Elan Lee: We probably work on a hundred games a year and less than 20 make the cut.

Tim Ferriss: And that’s with all of your experience?

Elan Lee: Yeah. That’s probably way higher than it should be. I’m probably pushing forward games that have no right to be pushed forward. But again, you don’t take it personally. You say, “This game is flawed.” And the faster you can figure that out, the faster you can move on to a game that isn’t flawed.

Tim Ferriss: So if I heard you correctly then, it’s crowdfunding. You establish some numbers and so on that you can share that show traction at some type, game reactions, et cetera. Then you take all of that to book a meeting at a trade show or a conference or convention with one of these publishers who already has the annual meetings and line reviews.

Elan Lee: Exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: And you make a pitch to do a deal with them.

Elan Lee: That’s my favorite path through this.

Tim Ferriss: What deal terms do you need to pay attention to?

Elan Lee: Okay, so there is one very important number that you’re going to get, and it’s going to seem like a very low number, but here’s how this works. Most publishers are going to throw a number at you, like two percent.

Tim Ferriss: Royalty rate?

Elan Lee: Yeah. And you’re going to think, “Wait a second, I was the inventor, I get 80 percent and you’re offering me two percent?” But here’s what that number actually means. They, the publisher, are going to take on all the risk. They’re going to do all the printing, they’re going to do all the relationship management, they’re going to do that sales meeting, they’re supporting hundreds of people on their staff, they’re doing all this stuff that you are not doing. But in exchange for that, that two percent isn’t two percent of the profit, it’s two percent of the revenue.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Top line.

Elan Lee: Exactly. And that is a very important distinction. That makes that two percent probably closer to 20 percent, 30 percent once you do all the math.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the opposite of Hollywood accounting.

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not some percentage of net income, which is defined in some Byzantine way to fuck you every which way from Sunday.

Elan Lee: Precisely right.

Tim Ferriss: If it’s top line — 

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So just to reiterate what you just said, two percent is more like 20 plus percent?

Elan Lee: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: Of profit?

Elan Lee: Yeah. And you can ask them to break down that math for you. You can say, “Show me the spreadsheet, show me what you’re spending, what your responsibilities are, what mine are. After all of those numbers are crunched, what is the total amount you’re going to spend on this game? Show me your total projections on what’s coming in, show me how much I’m going to make of that.” And then you can start comparing those numbers yourself and see, “Oh, of the money that came in, I’m getting 20 percent of it. Even though this number only says two percent.” Once you crunch that math, this is a pretty decent deal. And you can get higher than two percent. Usually not as a first-time developer, but I’ve seen deals anywhere from two to 12 percent on the super high end.

Tim Ferriss: 12, wow.

Elan Lee: You’ve got to be a rockstar because at 12 percent, now you’re at 50 percent, and that’s tough to get to. You’ve got to really pull your weight to get numbers like that. So those are what the deals look like. And then after that, then the whole relationship moves into this like, “Okay, now what the hell are we actually making? What is the quality of the cards? What are the components in the box? Are you allowed to change rules?”

Tim Ferriss: Quick question, is the deal structure similar to a book publishing contract in the sense that the game developer would get an advance against sales? Or is that — 

Elan Lee: Sometimes.

Tim Ferriss: Sometimes?

Elan Lee: Yeah. You can negotiate that. I’ve seen publishers do that or not do that. I will just say for Exploding Kittens, we never do advances.

Tim Ferriss: It’s fundamentally different also from, say, nonfiction book publishing in the following sense. If you’re taking a, let’s call it conventional publishing approach, which is very similar to selling the game, it’s like you have an agent. You’ve got the editors, let’s just say, and the publishers who are the buyers of sorts, the editor might be the category buyer but they have to get the okay from the publisher for signing off on deals.

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: And you’ll have your royalty rate, which varies widely, but let’s just say somewhere depending on paperback versus hardcover, up to probably a maximum in conventional deals of 12 to 15 percent of cover, which is also, again, of cover. And then there’s the advance, but the critical difference that I was alluding to is typically when a nonfiction book is sold, you are selling a book proposal, which is a writing sample and a marketing plan.

Elan Lee: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And if, and only if, a publisher decides to sign a contract and buy the book, do you get an advance to buy you the time so you can stop doing all of these other things to write the full book, whereas with the game, the game’s got to be ready.

Elan Lee: It’s done. Yeah. Now let’s call it 90 percent done, to be fair. And usually when we take on games, we change them significantly just because there’s always a better version, and through testing, we discover it. But the reason we don’t do advances, partially, is exactly what you’re saying. You’re already done. We’re not trying to pull you off of other projects.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You don’t have to stop your nine to five.

Elan Lee: Exactly. Exactly. But the other reason is because I want a partnership. I’m not here to say, “You sold us this game. Now we’re never going to talk again.” I want you here every day. I want skin in the game. We’re going to all make this better together, which is why we do so few partnerships.

Tim Ferriss: Now, when you do partnerships, meaning you’re the publisher, you’re paying someone a royalty, how do you typically find those? So for instance, and I imagine a lot of it is you guys canvassing and basically asking the question that you recommended people ask the store owners, “Which game do you wish people played more often?” And then you find something that has the bones of a really good game but a piece of it is shitting the bed. There’s something that is broken and you’re like, “Oh, we can fix that broken thing.” Or do you take cold submissions? How does that work?

Elan Lee: We have a form. We have a submission form on our website. We almost never find anything there. It’s hard. It’s time-consuming to go through all of them and honestly, it’s just not the highest quality. We also go to conventions. We look a little bit around there. Sometimes we find a diamond in the rough.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a crowded fishing hole, right?

Elan Lee: Very crowded. The most effective way are those agents. We talk to those two agents and we say, “Hey, people approach you all the time wanting you to be their agent and you have to turn a lot of them down. The ones that you feel terrible about because they’re such a good game and they just can’t get in the door, send them to us.” And that works really well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Smart. That’s super smart. Aside from a crowdfunding campaign, what would actually cut through in a submission? Are there any ingredients outside of, here are a bunch of compelling data from a crowdfunding campaign?

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Or, “Hey, I’ve designed a hundred hit games.”

Elan Lee: Yeah. Yeah. There’s that.

Tim Ferriss: Aside from those two, what other types of lines or elements would cut through the noise?

Elan Lee: So remember I said that phrase, the way we design games is we don’t make games that are entertaining, we make games that make the players entertaining. 90 percent of the game pitches I see are attempts to be entertaining games and I just immediately dismiss them. That looks like that game is working so hard to entertain the players. I don’t care.

The best games, the ones that I pay very careful attention to, are when everything you do in the game creates an interaction between two players. I’m not interested in a four-player game where all four players are playing solitaire. It’s just, who cares? I’m interested in a game where the players are playing the players and I play a card — 

Tim Ferriss: We tweaked a lot in Coyote based on that.

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: So guiding principle.

Elan Lee: And those are the best games. Those are the ones I love the most. Those are the ones I want to play over and over again.

Tim Ferriss: And it could be as simple as you might, I’m saying you, the listener or viewer might remember holding your cards facing you versus having the cards available to the entire table.

Elan Lee: That’s right. Because now we’re playing all together. And the card I choose, if I have a blind hand, if I have a deck of cards and I choose a card and then I play it, that is me presenting a game to the players. If I have all my available cards face up on the table and everyone can see what I choose, and everyone’s hoping I pick that first card, and I hover my hand over it and then I move to the second card instead and everyone starts groaning and then I play that second card anyway, now it’s me playing the players. And those are the best games in the world.

Tim Ferriss: What are some common Achilles heels for games that have the potential to be great and huge successes? And I’m not going to mention names, but we’ve talked about a couple of games that you’ve considered buying or publishing, and I’m wondering what are some of the common weaknesses where you’re, this is a great game, but the reason it didn’t work is X or Y or Z.

Elan Lee: All right, so there’s two basic places the games fall apart. One is right off the bat, their boxes suck, or the name sucks. The number of games out there called The Legendary Folklore of Gorgonzel. I can’t remember them, I don’t know what they are. I look at this — 

Tim Ferriss: Got to throw a CØCKPUNCH in there, and then it’s problem solved.

Elan Lee: CØCKPUNCH aside, I would argue that those games, they have no chance of success. Yes, they’re going to sell 10 copies to the 10 people that bought The Legendary Tales of Gorgonzel volumes one through six, and they’re going to buy volume seven. Cool, great. I don’t care. Picking the wrong name, picking a non-descriptive name, putting a picture on the box that does not describe gameplay at all and does not provide a compelling narrative about what experience you are about to have, those games have zero chance of success. And I see that over and over and over again. You can fail right up front. And I’ve even seen the biggest publishers in the world mess this up, especially now that game shelves are so crowded and you don’t have five games to choose from, you have 500 games to choose from. And a game that doesn’t do a good job of saying, “Pick me, pick me, pick me,” you’re just not going to pick, so you will fail right there.

Tim Ferriss: Or really complicated packaging too. I’ve seen that a bunch.

Elan Lee: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: Where there’s just so much going on. There’s no one dominant element. It’s like, what am I supposed to look at here?

Elan Lee: Yeah, what do you look at first?

Tim Ferriss: So you can’t.

Elan Lee: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t look at anything, you look at the next box.

Elan Lee: It’s just noise. Just noise. We worked very hard on Coyote, on all our games, but I remember having this discussion about Coyote because this is such an important lesson. When you look at this box, we know the first thing you’re going to look at and we know the second thing you’re going to look at and we know the third thing you’re going to look at, and this is a formula, and we crafted this — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s a formula.

Elan Lee: — very carefully.

Tim Ferriss: By the way, also exactly what works in old school print advertising.

Elan Lee: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Elan Lee: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Header image, headline, subheading.

Elan Lee: Exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: Text.

Elan Lee: Yeah. And those components are all present here.

Tim Ferriss: And if you fuck up the order, pardon my French, the eye doesn’t know how to track or it bounces around.

Elan Lee: And if there’s other better options right next door, off you go. We hit those three things on a box meticulously, and your reaction should not be, “I’m going to buy that game.” That’s not our goal. Your reaction is, “I’m going to pick up this game and I’m going to turn it over and I’m going to read the back of the box.” And now we’ve got a very different task. Now we have more real estate we can afford. We still know the first thing you’re going to look at, but now we care a little bit less about the second thing. As long as you’ve already got enough interest, you’ve already committed to picking this thing up, now you’re willing to read a little story. As long as you can see the end of that story and you know it’s not too long, you’re going to read a little story. The goal of this is now purchase. I want you to get to the end of this experience and say, “I’ve got to have it. I want this.”

Tim Ferriss: And just for people who can’t see this particular visual, and there’s all sorts of stuff on the back of the card, which we won’t get into, but some people might notice interesting things on the back of the cards. The dominant element on the back of the box is how to play. And man, we worked on this a lot too, with basically three panes, step one, step two, step three. “Put cards on the table, then take turns performing them,” that’s step one. And you’ve got a little visual with the salamander action cards. Then next part is “Play cards to help or sabotage other players,” shows two examples.

Elan Lee: “Sabotage” was a very carefully chosen word, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: Very carefully chosen. And then the last one is “Mess up and you’re out. The last player standing wins.” That’s for competitive mode. Now, one aspect of this that I think is very clever is not sure if you should buy this game? Give us a few seconds to convince you. And then there’s a QR code.

Elan Lee: Nobody does that. This is new.

Tim Ferriss: I know. What’s the impetus behind this?

Elan Lee: This was an idea I had that we’re demoing on this game, first time ever. My idea was “If I went to the store with you, I could convince you to buy my favorite game because I’m going to pitch the hell out of that game.” But I’m not in the store with you, so that’s a problem. My first idea was for every retail location in the world, “Will they let us install a telephone that you can pick up and talk to somebody?” And they said, “No.” My second idea was, “Can I hire a person to stand in every store and convince you to buy the game I want you to buy?” And they said, “Sort of, but you have to pay for all of that.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s not going to work.” And so this was option three.

Tim Ferriss: It’s cool, it’s a lot of people. 6,000 plus people.

Elan Lee: I know, right? Can you imagine? This is just a little QR code. And the idea is I can’t stand next to you for every store, but I can tell you what I would’ve said had I been standing there. And so you scan this code and it’s just a 15-second video. In this case, it’s me, Tim, saying, “Listen, you’re holding a game in your hands. It’s the greatest thing you’ll ever see. Let me try to convince you.” And it’s just a pitch. It’s just, if I were standing next to you in the store, here’s why you should buy this game. And I don’t think a lot of people are going to scan that code, to be fair. But for those who do, they’re going to have the experience of a friend telling them, “You should trust me. This is going to be great, trust me.”

Tim Ferriss: And it doesn’t take up that much real estate either. It’s an easy addition to the box. Once again, test it. Right. Let’s test it.

Elan Lee: Test it. And what’s the worst that can happen?

Tim Ferriss: See what happens. And I also want to revisit something you mentioned earlier, which is that royalty rate, whether it’s two percent, it’s up to 12 percent in the book world. Let me take the book world and the publishing world in the book publishing sense is changing a lot, but it’s also quite consistent over time. Different things have changed, sure, audio as a format has grown tremendously and become highly prized now versus 10 years ago when I could carve out those rights, it’s a lot harder to do now if you’re going to do the conventional route. But some folks will look at the percentages and they’ll say, “Well, wait a second, max 15 percent after an escalator, I’m starting off at 12 percent for hardcover. That’s ridiculous. I wrote the whole thing, da, da, da, da, da. I want to make the lion’s share.”

There are some instances where you can make that work, but I will say just a few things. When you begin, for most people, unless you are excellent at running a meticulously managed business, it’s actually pretty tough to beat those numbers. In part because you’re going to be sacrificing distribution, so the top of the funnel number is going to be different. Secondly, when you factor in paying various agents, various distributors, and all of these little costs that for you, without any scale of having a thousand skews in a department dedicated to it, you start to very quickly approach that number.

Elan Lee: Very quickly.

Tim Ferriss: And by the way, you’re running a real business. This is not the easiest thing in the world to do at all. And I will probably do some experiments on that side of the equation in terms of “self-publishing,” which I would put in quotation marks because it’s going to be augmented pseudo self-publishing on a few levels. But I would only have the confidence of doing that myself currently, because I’ve gone through the conventional route multiple times and I’ve also run quite a few businesses. But if you’ve never, what Stephen Key, I mentioned earlier, one simple idea for licensing, what he might call venturing, running a business, do not underestimate the value of your time and sanity also.

Elan Lee: It’s so true.

Tim Ferriss: Because he’s, “Hey, look, I’ll take the licensing deal, maybe I’ll negotiate the number up a little bit.” But he’s like, “I can do 12 of those a year.”

Elan Lee: That’s right. That’s exactly it.

Tim Ferriss: And it adds up to a lot. And I have no employees, no supply chain issues.

Elan Lee: No risk.

Tim Ferriss: No, “Oops, that was printed the wrong way and now I have thousands of books —” 

Elan Lee: You have to recall those. Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: “— that are sitting in my garage unsold, gathering dust and mold.”

Elan Lee: Let me tell you the simplest example of the difference between doing it yourself and getting help, valuing your time. Our very first game Exploding Kittens, I needed to put a barcode on the box because it has to sell in retail. I go, I’m like, I’m going to research this, this can’t be too hard. I do the research and I find this website and it’s, you’ve got to pay some little subscription, 100 bucks a year, whatever it is, and you can generate unlimited barcodes. Amazing. I generate a barcode, I put it on the box. That wasn’t so hard.

Then Target’s like, “Well, this is the wrong format.” I’m like, “Okay.” I spend another 100 bucks, I get a different format bar, put it on. They’re like, “We need a different barcode based on the palette that it’s in.” And then I talk to Walmart and they’re like, “Yeah, we use a different barcode format and we need this barcode to represent whether it was picked up in China or Mexico or Poland, so you actually need three different ones. Oh, and by the way, if it’s bundled with other games, we need a fourth one. And by the way, if it ships into Arkansas, we need a fifth.” And I was just like, “Help. Oh, my God, help.” And that’s the difference. You should not get good at this. Why would you want to get good at that?

Tim Ferriss: What’s funny is I was actually going to bring up the example of the UPC codes and the ISBN and all this stuff because I also went down that rabbit hole. I’m like, “How hard could it be?”

Elan Lee: Right, right.

Tim Ferriss: “Oh, this is easy.” And lo and behold, actually it’s a lot of brain damage. I’m not saying that no one should Venture in the sense of self-funding or self-publishing, but it is a lot harder and much more consuming than most people realize.

Elan Lee: And there’s no reason, unless you want to do it for a living, there’s no reason to get good at it. There’s no upside there.

Tim Ferriss: And do it for a living meaning handle those types of details.

Elan Lee: Right, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Elan Lee: Anyway, we have a barcode person who does it for a living. She’s quite good. I’m so happy she’s on my team.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so on the side of selling games, what else have we not touched on? Any other aspects?

Elan Lee: Let’s see. Another thing I learned along the way is there’s two kinds of selling. One is everything we’ve been talking about today. And your expectation is, “I have sold you a game, the game is now your responsibility. And we’ve negotiated a price, you, the retailer, own this game now and you’re going to sell it.” The second kind is the kind that we actually engage in, which is you do own this game, but there are restrictions on how you can sell it.

Tim Ferriss: Can you explain that again? When you say you own this game, you mean a retailer?

Elan Lee: You, the retailer, have purchased this palette of games from me.

Tim Ferriss: I get it. All right. Sorry, I was just clarifying because people might’ve heard that as you own the IP of the game.

Elan Lee: Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: You are buying an inventory of this game.

Elan Lee: Correct. Now, what if the game doesn’t sell very well? Whose problem is that? Well, if you didn’t think that through and it’s just a straight sale, they can put it in a bargain bin or they can sell it to somebody else who’s then going to sell it. Or if you really didn’t negotiate it, they can force you to buy it back from them.

The restrictions on what happens to the game, what they’re allowed to do post-sale is so meticulous and these contracts get so long. And this is another thing, you don’t want to get good at this. You just need to hire someone who has seen every imaginable mistake and knows what to argue for. And oftentimes the retailers don’t care that much about this part, especially because they have a lot of faith. This thing’s going to do well. But when it goes poorly, if it goes poorly, and we’ve had a few examples of this, what do you do next?

In the case of something as simple as Amazon, Amazon has a terrible policy for returns. Namely, they will accept all returns and it is the vendor’s responsibility, my responsibility. You buy Exploding Kittens from GameKnight, you play the game, you damage all the cards because you spilled beer all over them, you put them back in the box the next day after you had a great time and you return it and now that’s my cost. And that happens hundreds of times a week. It sucks.

There’s also this thing where people will buy counterfeit games and they’ll buy, then, the real version. They’ll buy a counterfeit for a dollar, they’ll buy the real version on Amazon, they’ll keep the real version, they’ll return the counterfeit and now that’s mine as well. And I just spent $20 on that stupid counterfeit version because that’s coming back to me. All of this stuff has to be thought through in advance and it’s tricky, because some retailers, the Targets and the Walmarts in the world, they are so willing to work with you on that stuff. Amazon, not so much. They’re just like, “Oh, you don’t like our policy? All right, well maybe a different platform is for you.” It’s hard. It’s really hard.

Tim Ferriss: And I should say that I’ve run into, when I’ve talked about termination clauses or what do we do when everyone’s pissed off and things aren’t working? Because really that’s the only time that you’re going to go back and look at the agreement, which is why Gary Keller, famous for his real estate empire, said, “You should really call them disagreements.” The only time you’re going to look at them is when things are really going sideways.

Elan Lee: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And there are some people I’ve spoken to about the importance of these things, like, “Wow, that’s really pessimistic.” I’m like, “No, no, no.” Let’s understand the consequences of not going through this. I know so many examples of entrepreneurs who actually had a chance at a runaway success and they did not pay attention to these terms for, say, a QVC or a huge retailer. And this could happen with Kickstarter as well, of course, they get overextended because now they have orders for God knows how much inventory that is well beyond their capacity, their experience, their financial means. And in their mind, let’s take out the Kickstarter or crowdfunding, but they don’t think about the return policy and they get the hug of death. They overextend themselves financially to produce the inventory, they ship it, and then any number of things can happen. It might be net 270 payment terms.

Elan Lee: Oh, God.

Tim Ferriss: It could be just — 

Elan Lee: So brutal.

Tim Ferriss: — cash flow suicide right on the front end. And on top of that you might get all of it shipped back to you — 

Elan Lee: All of it.

Tim Ferriss: — and it’s your problem. And then that — 

Elan Lee: It’s so tragic.

Tim Ferriss: — is the hug of death and you’re done.

Elan Lee: And then you’ve seen this, you’ve seen this picture. You have this friend whose apartment is filled with products and it’s taken over their living space and they have no way to move it.

Tim Ferriss: I did that myself early on. I made an audiobook product. I was going to sell millions of this thing. Oh, my God. Didn’t do any market testing, none of that stuff, just high on my own supply. And I had an entire garage full of these things that just melted in the heat ultimately. And at the time though, that was a huge financial risk. I didn’t take so much risk that it torpedoed me, but if I had had that level of self-delusion and lack of experimentation a little later on, it very easily could have been a recipe for disaster.

Elan Lee: Totally. Look, there’s so many ways to mess this up. There’s so many ways to mess this up. And the only good news is there is someone out there who has messed it up in every possible way.

Tim Ferriss: Or represented people who have messed it up — 

Elan Lee: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: — in every possible way.

Elan Lee: And those are the people you have to work with. You have to. If you don’t, the risk you’re taking on is just massive. Luckily, I had some very good advice early on from people who said, “Don’t take this on yourself. Just don’t do this.” And it’s the best advice I ever got.

Tim Ferriss: And I think maybe tell me if this is overreaching on my part, but don’t take this on yourself now in the sense that after you’ve had 10 mega successes and you actually are fluent in retailese and you have the relationships, all right, now you can take some calculated risks.

Elan Lee: And now you can hire the people that you would otherwise contract, now you can pull them in-house. Because now you can afford their salaries and now you want them to only be working on your own products. Great. That’s a huge mark of success and really that is exactly the way you reinvest in your own company.

Tim Ferriss: And to reiterate just a few things, if you want to develop a game, number one, you can just develop it for your family, your friends, and keep it small. And I will just say in the book world, a lot of later mega successes have started out that way. You don’t have to go for scale, which I think can be a very dangerous word out of the gate. But as you mentioned, you can also, with the blank cards in Coyote, you can get a taste of it, see if you like it, then you can use the books that you recommended. And there are certainly other resources, we’ll put things in the show notes, to play around with prototyping. Look at these initial cards. These are blank cards with Sharpie writing on them.

Elan Lee: That’s it.

Tim Ferriss: That’s it.

Elan Lee: That’s literally it.

Tim Ferriss: That’s it, that’s the entire thing. And you can also find kits online, you can find them anywhere you want. Amazon has gaming kits where there are blank dice and cards and so on so you can workshop it.

Elan Lee: Easy. It’s so easy.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like Build-A-Bear for games basically.

Elan Lee: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And what I would add to that is you don’t need to run a big business to be a successful game designer.

Elan Lee: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: In fact, I would imagine most of the legendary game designers are not running companies.

Elan Lee: No, definitely not.

Tim Ferriss: They’re designing games and licensing them. And man, there are some legends out there.

Elan Lee: Legends. They’ve created incredible games and they’ve generated gigantic wealth for themselves because in success, that two percent deal, that five percent deal, whatever it is, that faucet doesn’t turn off, that’s in perpetuity. In summary, I don’t think the games business is going anywhere.

Tim Ferriss: And also there is a lot of room to innovate. There still is room. There’s so many games, but I wouldn’t have even attempted to create a game had I not thought there was space.

Elan Lee: The thing is, it’s like saying, is there still space in the book industry, in the movie industry? All a game is is an idea delivered in a new way. When are we going to run out of ideas? When are we going to run out of delivery mechanisms? The answer to both of those individually is never. Combine them both together and it’s just build games forever. You’ll always have a new way — 

Tim Ferriss: Option.

Elan Lee: — to deliver it.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so I’m trying to think of anything that we missed. I do have a tantalizing offer for listeners and viewers just for fun because why not? And we will have also mentioned that in the intro. But before I get to that, anything critical that we’ve forgotten? Is there anything that we have left out or any other resources, people to watch, maybe people to Google and Wikipedia maybe? Anything at all?

Elan Lee: All right. I’ve got two. I’ve got two that are interesting. One is there is a podcast I quite like for game design, it’s called Fun Problems, it’s with Peter and AJ. And all they do is they talk about game design. Now, they do talk about more hardcore games than I am accustomed to. It’s a wide range of topics, but it’s fun stuff and it’s worth listening to if you want to know more about game design.

And the second thing is, because of you. Because of you, because of this process, this journey that we’ve been on over the last few years, I realized that I don’t document any of this ever. I never talk about what goes into a game design, I never talk about where to buy blank cards, and I never talk about why anybody can do this and what the process is like. I’ve started recording it and I started for the first time, I can’t believe I’m saying this, I actually started a YouTube channel and you can actually go and watch these instructional videos. Literally if you want to make a game, the whole idea is: here is how to make a game from scratch. Nobody’s watching right now, but — 

Tim Ferriss: YouTube.com at Elan Lee, that’s E-L-A-N-L-E-E. You can also just search him on YouTube. The first result will be our podcast together.

Elan Lee: That’s true.

Tim Ferriss: Episode one. And then within the first few results, you’ll also find it. But I’m pretty sure the URL is YouTube.com/@ElanLee. And let’s finish up with a few things. The first will be the tantalizing offer that I mentioned. The tantalizing offer is this, there’s no purchase required whatsoever, so if any sweepstakes sharks are out there, take it easy, take it easy. This is going to be just a fun little, it’s not even a competition, just a fun little experiment that I want to run. 

*** [Interview pauses]

02:46:00 to 02:48:14 

Tim Ferriss: Hi, everyone, Tim here with an update, as details have changed since that first conversation with Elan. Here’s the tantalizing offer that I wanted to share with you. 

You have two very easy ways to enter for a chance to win a trip to a secret Los Angeles mansion for an unforgettable day or evening with me and Elan and maybe some special guests. Here’s how. 

Option number one, simply visit any Target or Walmart and take a fun photo or video with a Coyote game. No purchase necessary. Option number two, if you already bought Coyote, record yourself playing the game with friends or family. That’s it. I would love to see it. Then share your photo or video on Instagram or Tik Tok or both and tag me and ExplodingKittens. You can find us easily, but I’m @TimFerris on both. That’s @ Tim F-e-r-r-i-s-s and Exploding Kittens is ExplodingKittens on Tik Tok and @GameOfKittens on Instagram. So share your photo and or video on Instagram and or Tik Tok. Put them everywhere. Why not? And tag both me and Exploding Kittens. 

Longtime listeners know that I have a love of deadlines. This is how things actually get done. So, the deadline to post is August 17. That means that 10:00 p.m. PDT August 17. By then, you need to have posted and done all this stuff. By August 31st, we’ll randomly select five winners from people who post. Each winner will receive roundtrip airfare within the US, one night at a hotel, and will join us at our secret LA mansion party. And I think the legal elves wanted me to mention that that’s going to be coach airfare. So, just to be super clear, important legal disclaimer. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents aged 18 or older. So no little kids, no minotaurs allowed. Void where prohibited. Winners selected at random. Odds depend on number of eligible entries. Travel dates must align with the event likely in September. We are still finalizing the time with the busiest man in show business, Elan Lee himself. For official rules, eligibility details, and final date, please visit tim.blog/rules.

So, go ahead, post a creative Tik Tok or Insta real or a photo with Coyote by August 17th, 10 p.m. PDT. Tag us and you might just be celebrating with us in Hollywood this fall. Now, back to the episode.

*** [Interview resumes]

Tim Ferriss: What else? Anything else to add? I have a little bit. I have one more thing I want to say.

Elan Lee: Oh, okay. I want to hear one more thing.

Tim Ferriss: I just wanted to thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this incredible ride — 

Elan Lee: Oh, my goodness.

Tim Ferriss: — and just collaborating on the game. It’s been so meaningful for me and so much fun and so great to get closer with you and your family, and we’ve all been traveling together since.

Elan Lee: I love it.

Tim Ferriss: And to work with the incredible team that you have at Exploding Kittens. I’m not going to mention them all because there are quite few — 

Elan Lee: So many.

Tim Ferriss: — but it’s just been such a joy and a dream come true to actually have this thing in my mind that was floating around that I’ve always wanted to do. And now here it is and people can get it.

Elan Lee: Tim Ferriss made a game. Look, here’s the thing — 

Tim Ferriss: I’m thinking — 

Elan Lee: — you’re so welcome and thank you. We have limited time here and you have to choose your endeavors wisely, and this was one of the wisest choices I’ve ever made.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks, man. All right. We’re going to go get a fantastic meal. It’s Texas, so probably a bunch of meat, barbecue. Who knows, maybe some tequila and make an appearance unbidden. You never know. Strange things happen out here in Austin, Texas. And for everybody listening, we will link to all sorts of things, many resources that will help you think about how you might create a game. You could start with the blank cards in Coyote. Those will actually teach you a lot, I think, as you begin to experiment with these different elements.

Elan Lee: Because you’re going to fail, because your first few are not going to work and you’ll learn why.

Tim Ferriss: And then if you run out of blank cards, look, just go get some blank cards. Just go buy a blank deck and you can use those. But this is something anyone can do. You did this with your daughter when she was how old?

Elan Lee: Four.

Tim Ferriss: Four. This is an incredibly fun family activity. It’s an incredibly fun friend activity and it gets you off of your screens. It’s not good for you folks.

Elan Lee: So important.

Tim Ferriss: They are tools, but there is a point at which the tools become our masters and that is where a lot of the poison seeps in around the cracks.

Elan Lee: This thing builds memories. That’s what you should be doing. That’s what your phone isn’t doing. This is building memories.

Tim Ferriss: Building memories with some durability, not ephemera that get pushed out of your head as soon as you watch the next 10-second clip. This is something I’ve wanted to do for so long and I’m thrilled that it’s here. Fingers crossed. I’m still nervous as hell, obviously. But we’ve done so much play testing. Hundreds of people have play tested at this point and have made these fine-tuning tweaks along the way. I would love everybody to think about your life as a collection of games. You may not be aware of which games you’re playing just yet, but rest assured in some respects you are playing games and you get to choose more games than you realize. Most of them are optional, not all of them. Sure, we have responsibilities as adults and so on, but this is a way to open up that Pandora’s box of possibility.

And we’ll include a lot of resources in the show notes, so tim.blog/podcast, just search Coyote. That’ll probably be the easiest way to find it. C-O-Y-O-T-E. And another time I’ll explain the backstory there, which is pretty wild, but for another time. And until next time, as always, be a little kinder than is necessary, not just to others, also to yourself. Play wisely. Find fun problems. And I’m going to check out that podcast. And life is short, have fun while you’re here, folks. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.