So if we're trying to hook people, what's the show?
Give me the elevator pitch.
Ding.
Hi.
You have to say hello.
You're in an elevator.
It's going to be random if I just start talking about what I do.
New show bit, getting each other to break.
Hello.
Hi, I'm Jason.
Hi, Jason.
I'm a very important business executive.
That's right.
That's who uses elevators.
Well, we are a podcast making a board game company making a board game.
Mind is blown.
Tell me more.
We are a two person podcast, but that is the face of who we are as The Misplay because behind
the scenes there are a handful of gamers and friends who are working with us to create
a board game company.
That's our goal.
We want to create a board game company that is making a board game.
This is not a podcast that is telling you how to build a board game.
We're telling you how we built ours.
Starting at nothing and creating a board game that we can launch on crowdfunding.
That's our story.
Ding floor seven.
Well, the misplay.com.
Bye.
I'm Hunter Pence and you're listening to the misplay podcast.
Oh, yeah.
Hello and welcome to the misplay where we create two page one page games.
My name is Mark.
My name is Jason.
We are The Misplay.
We're a podcast about making a board game company that makes board games.
That's the idea.
We are going to create a board game.
This is episode one.
The board game does not exist yet.
The podcast really does not exist yet.
The board game company does not really exist yet.
Kind of.
We'll get to that.
But this is episode one and the idea in every episode is we are going to tell you where
we are, what we're working on and what's next.
But for this episode, instead of where are we, we thought we'd start with who are we.
Well, my name is Mark.
I am a lifelong fan of games.
I grew up playing traditional 52 guard deck playing card games like hearts or euchre or
cribbage or go fish, depending on how old I was.
And in tandem with that, I was always I've been a lifelong video game fan also.
As I got a little bit older and a little bit nerdier, I got into tabletop role playing
games like Dungeons and Dragons, some of the White Wolf games, if you're familiar with
Vampire the Masquerade and that genre, and then as I continued to grow and expand my
repertoire of games, I got into things like Magic the Gathering, digital card game, Eternal
and deeper into board games in general.
Do you have any nines?
Go fish.
I love that.
I love that go fish was was something worth mentioning.
Was that something that was you played with your family?
I played a lot with my mom.
Yeah.
And then Gin was the game of choice in my family.
I'm more of a 500 drummy kind of guy.
My name is Jason.
And like Mark, games have been a central part of my life.
A little bit different, though, in that I was always creating games outside inside.
I used to run a paper baseball league inside my house with my family.
They will not have fond memories of it, but I do.
Outside in the snow, I used to shovel paths around our house and then we'd play tag on
them.
There were these hedges in my backyard that I had.
I had a neighbor, a friend of mine, and we tossed the ball over the hedges back and forth
just to play catch.
And then slowly points were involved.
And then, you know, we got really competitive about it.
We used to we didn't own risk, but we went to the hardware store and we bought like nuts
and bolts and screws.
And then we created our own risk board game.
So for me, I have always been really passionate about creating games.
The other thing about us and who we are is that this is not our first rodeo.
Actually, if it were a rodeo, it would be my first one.
Have you ever been to the rodeo?
I've been to a bullfight.
It's close.
But I mean that this is not our first podcast.
Right.
So the misplay is something that has existed for several years through that podcast.
We were fortunate enough to create a community around the misplay.
And it wasn't just us.
It wasn't just Mark and Jason.
There was a whole team of people that we were working with to create not just a podcast,
but they were creating meta reports.
They were creating spoiler articles.
They were creating blogs about playing this game.
And I think this was the next logical step for us to take it a little bit further and
say, hey, we want to create something a little bit more tangible, a little bit more, a little
bigger.
And then you came and pitched me the idea of making a board game.
That's right.
And so this is the new challenge.
This is the new thing.
This is beyond, it feels beyond a passion project.
This is something I really want to create with you and with other people.
For me, it's about two things.
The old show about Eternal, as you pitched it to me, was a combination of you wanting
to make a podcast and me having this interest in Eternal as a particular game.
And it was something that we could carve out time for and create time to spend together
while we worked on this creative project.
So for me, it's partially still that or largely still that.
The other part I'll call, I like the spotlight a little bit.
I have a background as a performing musician.
I don't really have a comparable creative or performing arts outlet.
And this kind of scratches that similar vein.
I get to be on the mic.
I get to perform.
I've played around with streaming on Twitch before.
That's something that I might entertain bringing back as a co-occurring content for this.
I like the performance aspect.
I like the back and forth.
I like the entertainment piece.
And I like board games.
So before we start, before we get into where we're at right now, let's take a minute.
And this week's episode is brought to you by...
A sponsor that we didn't make up.
We don't have a real sponsor this time, but we are going to.
So on our last podcast, how much money did we make from corporate sponsorship?
$0.
That's right.
$0.
And I'm hell bent on topping that.
So here's my idea with the sponsor.
We sell this 30 to 60 second ad right here in our podcast for $1.
Anybody who wants to buy an ad on the misplay right now can do that.
It's $1.
And we will run that ad for as long as the show goes on or until somebody purchases this
spot again for $2.
And then we'll switch ads.
So we're going to gamify the sponsor.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
The misplay auction?
Yeah, that was the idea is that we'd create a game inside of the podcast for our sponsor
section.
I think it's incredible value.
$1 for an ad here.
I'm going to buy it right now.
What is your company?
The misplay.
I was going to say my dance fighting group, but you know.
Okay.
So we are going to sell this spot for $1.
You're going to be able to purchase it on Discord.
Find us at themisplay.com.
You'll find links to our Discord there.
Don't come sponsor the show.
Game on.
What are we working on, Mark?
Where are we at right now?
We said we're going to create a board game.
Where are we at right now?
You sent me a homework assignment.
I did.
You told me all the research says if we want to make games, we need to make games.
So you gave me a homework assignment to make a board game.
That's what I did.
So we both created one page games.
There's an asterisk by mine at the moment, but we both created one page games because
that was the advice from all of the research.
When you start looking into the space and you listen to other podcasts, you look at
other blogs, all of the advice is you want to make board games?
Make a board game.
And it makes sense.
If you want to be good at bowling, go bowling.
If you want to be good at golf, go golf.
If you want to be a really good partner, look up how to therapy.
And that's true of anything.
If you want to be good, Mark is a dance fighter.
I play capoeira.
Do you play?
Is that what it's called?
That's what it's called.
You play.
I didn't.
It's a game.
Okay.
In order to get good at that, Mark, you have to play the game.
There you go.
If we're going to create board games, we have to just start creating board games.
And so we did that and we have brought them here for the two of us to play.
Mark, your game is called?
Word Warpers.
Sell it to me.
It's a quick action packed word game where you and your opponent each take turns turning
one five letter word into a new five letter word using three different ways of changing
words.
And when somebody can't meet the timer or one player uses up their entire word bank,
they win.
I like it.
Outwit your opponent by using fancier words than they're able to rearrange.
You got a catchphrase too.
You got a little catchphrase.
What is it again?
Outwit your opponents with fancier words than they can rearrange.
Wow, that's great.
That'll go on the box.
Buy it for a dollar.
Let's play.
All right.
And then you're going to hit lap to restart.
In Mark's game, we started with the five letter word bread.
Then I changed it into break.
Mark changes it into tweak.
I go twerk, which I think is legal.
And we continued playing, changing it back and forth several times before eventually
Mark changed it into a word he didn't think was a word.
And so we called it there and we gave me the win.
Tolls, T-O-L-E-S.
Oh, is my word not a word?
Let's call that the end because I don't think tolls is a real word.
Victory is mine somehow?
Somehow.
No, that's not right.
GG.
Tell me what you think about the game and pay attention to I took this opportunity as
an exercise in rule writing.
So be really critical of things that weren't clear in the way that the rules were written
because that was my objective as I wrote the game.
You want critical.
I want to start with the positives.
I was really impressed with this game.
Infinite amount of JSONs at an infinite amount of typewriters doesn't come up with this game.
This is not at all what I was expecting.
I thought it'd be more like Candyland.
I really did.
This should actually be a game.
This could be a game.
This is like Wordle, but you got to be a little bit smarter to play it.
So first, it's really great.
It's really fun.
It's fun.
It's good.
That's nice of you to say.
Thank you.
I really like it.
I like playing.
I grew up playing some of these word games too.
Scrabble is on my list.
And I should just let people know right now.
You'll have a chance to play this game.
We're going to talk about it a little bit later how you play our games, but we're going
to have them in Discord and you'll be able to play this game as well.
One of the things you told me was that in creating this game, it was really an exercise
about creating rules.
Yes.
Correct.
And when I looked at the rules, I was definitely a little confused.
And it took me...
You had to do a little bit of extra explaining.
And what you did was really clear, I think, though you said I might have made one mistake.
It isn't just straightforward.
You come up with a five-letter word.
I come up with a five-letter word.
There's a couple of operations you have to do to change the letters.
So one was delete one letter and insert a new letter.
It wasn't clear to me like, where can I do that?
Your example was clock became locks.
But you also have to keep the letters in the same order.
So the order wasn't...
It wasn't clear to me that...
So I could just delete one letter and add a new letter, but it doesn't tell me I can't
rearrange them in any way.
That's true.
You think it would be helpful to have it say in the rules, you can't rearrange these letters.
Well, in one of your rules, you can, right?
So in that particular operation, maybe.
How did you feel?
You had me just read the rules and we just started playing.
Were there things I missed?
Was there something you would change?
So a little bit, I did playtest this with my family and some other friends.
And I did find there are some cases where the second operation of transforming two letters
and the third operation of swapping two letters and transforming one of them are a little
bit too similar in that there's a way where you can essentially do the swap and transform
where it winds up being functionally the same as transform two letters.
The way that the scoring worked, it just makes the rules not very useful to each other.
So I think I would relook at the third operation.
I think it is the most confusing.
It is the least intuitive and doesn't score as well as the other two.
How did you come up with the letters?
So we have these, it's essentially your scoreboard.
You have to try to use as many letters as possible.
How did you come up with that?
I guessed.
I wanted to have access to more than just a singular alphabet, A through Z.
And so I tried to make up a weighted scale based on a little bit of the frequency of
letters.
If you actually look at the first row, if you think Wheel of Fortune, R, S, T, L, N,
E are among the most common letters.
And I just went through and I also used a little bit of Scrabble scoring.
The words that score higher in Scrabble are less frequent.
And so I originally had less opportunity to use those.
And I think we even shorted down to two of each letter with some exceptions.
So I can tell you time is everything in this game.
If it's because we when we played, we alternated the time we started with 60 seconds and then
we moved down to 45 seconds.
Then we moved down to 30 seconds.
And your rules say players decide on the turn time limit.
I like rules like that where it's not, you know, this is the only way to play my game.
You have to play with a 45 second turn limit.
So I like that they get to decide.
And that does like change it dramatically.
A 30 second game versus a 60 second game is you feel the pressure in 30 seconds to come
up with a word.
By other word game aficionado and I played 30 second time and that was aggressive, but
it was fun.
The one the looking at your objectives and looking at like if we're looking at who was
scoring more words, I think it would be really hard to use all of these letters in a game.
And so it feels like the strategy isn't to try to use a lot.
It feels like the strategy is just change one so that you have more options going because
you you said once I've used it, once I use the Z for example, and I've used it once and
I probably can't use the Z in any capacity, but I can't ever use the Z again.
Right?
Right.
So if you have multiple copies of like A and S, it seems like the strategy would be just
go slowly because eventually that person is going to run out of time.
Maybe I think that would require playtesting beyond what I had the capacity to test.
Yeah.
I would be willing to bet I could find a way to work out being able to score two letters
at a time, a mixture of scoring one and two letters that would outpace you if your only
plan was to use score one letter.
Confidence on this guy.
I just think that many words exist in the language.
Sure.
I just know an eighth of them.
That's fair.
Well, thanks for playing.
I bet I do need to add because we our game actually ended because I played an illegal
word.
I played a word that didn't exist.
I should probably add that as an objective where if a player plays a word that is not
actually a word in the language that you're playing, the game ends and the other person
wins.
My game is called Mark vs. Jason.
Mark have you ever played Jenga?
A couple of times.
It's nothing like that.
It's completely different.
Go on.
I'm ready.
Do I need to put up my like, is this a blocking game?
Do I need to have my dance fight hands up?
You can block.
There are ways to block.
Kind of.
But dance, you're not even allowed to make contact in dance fighting.
It's not.
It's a safe sport.
What do you think you play apparently?
Well pitch me your game Jason.
Ding.
I'm in the elevator.
Oh yeah.
Are we going to play in the elevator?
I mean no.
Do you like board games?
Go on.
I do.
My game is a dice rolling, drafting battle game where we are trying to knock out the
other person.
I think for me, especially in playing games with you, the objective for me is always to
beat you.
And this is like literally beating you.
I'm literally going to beat you with like a golf club.
I really enjoy drafting.
That is definitely a mechanic I really like in games.
So we were at a time, pretty big magic players.
We played a lot of magic.
I really only liked drafting.
I only really liked draft.
You couldn't give me a hundred dollars to play commander.
Same.
You're just like, I might take the hundred dollars, but I'd be really mad about the hour
and a half I spend sitting next to you.
Four hours.
However long commander is, like no interest in that.
I really enjoy drafting in games.
And so draft is a feature of my game.
We draft equipment, we draft skills, we draft armor, we put them on our character and then
we fight and we fight by rolling dies.
I'd like the exhibit to show that Jason had to turn his one page over to two pages.
It's not pick up my game.
How many pieces of paper are you holding?
One page front.
How many pieces of paper are you holding?
One.
It's a one page game.
If you're only holding one piece of paper.
If you're going to number the pages on your game like they were a book.
Yes.
How would you number them?
Well, you don't usually number the first page.
So the backside would be one.
I don't know if I've broken any of the like actual rules for creating one page games.
Debatable.
You print it.
It's on one piece of paper.
If you have a double sided printer.
I could like, there's a way for me to squeeze it.
Like if you know.
Anyway.
And the abilities allow you to modify the dice.
So it's not just you roll a six.
I roll a five.
Right.
There's some other things that you can do and there's some strategy on when you use
certain abilities.
That's the idea behind Mark versus Jason.
Let's go.
In my game, we drafted abilities and then we battled by rolling the die.
And it was pretty clear that Mark had really good synergy with his abilities.
He had an ability that allowed him to triple his ones and twos.
He's really good at rolling twos, but also his other abilities allowed him to change
the die up or down one or two.
And so if you roll the three, he could make it a two if he wanted any just absolutely
crushing six, six, one, two, three, four, five.
Are you out of abilities?
Yeah, I'm out.
I think I'll up one mine and down one yours.
So you get me a one.
I take one.
I'm at 10.
I feel you're overpowered.
GG again.
Good game.
You got the best of me.
It's funny that we each won the other person's game.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is.
And your strategy in mind was really good.
I don't know how much of it was, oh, I can use these things in conjunction with each
other or it just worked out really well for you.
I think your observation about the unequal relative strength of the abilities I chose
versus what you had, I think that's a good observation and something that some knobs
that we would want to turn on if we look at our play test and how we would want to iterate
the times three on the nunchuck felt very, very good.
Probably a little too good.
Yeah, I'm thinking that should come down from triple to double instead of tripling your
ones and twos, doubling your ones and twos.
And I think it would have been a lot closer.
Yeah, I agree, especially in the first game.
But I think what else?
Fun factor.
I think it's hilarious.
I had a great time.
It reads very much like a, I'm not finding a good word for it, but like an ode to our
friendship, which I think you explained is the explicit goal, which while very flavorful
and entertaining for those of us on the end joke, I'm curious about how the little idiosyncrasies
or things will hit for people that are not us or not familiar with us.
I did wonder that.
I thought about that and I was creating, you know, the target for this particular game
was always you.
I think posting it to Discord, which is something that we are going to do, was always like this
bonus extra thing for people listening so that they can go and play and have fun.
But you were always the intended audience for this game.
High praise from the Mark in Mark versus Jason.
Well, I appreciate that.
I really liked the draft portion.
I think you balanced the turn taking well.
I think a lot of the features were interesting.
The things that you could do with the different abilities had appealed to me.
Was there anything that wasn't clear?
It wasn't clear to me whether all of the die adjustments could be done to your own dice
only or could be for either player.
Yeah.
And when I think about how I wrote them, I think I wrote them with the intention that
you can move anybody's, but I can understand why that wouldn't be clear.
There's also something else that came up in our draft that my intention was clear, but
it's not clear in the rules is there's one thing that says you may use one time abilities.
I don't think there's a clear distinction here.
What is a one time ability versus what is a static ability?
We figured it out while we were playing, but to somebody else, if they just got this game
without you or I there, I think it would be a little unclear.
And you're talking about the like the multiplier for none checks and what were you using in
the game?
You were using plus one for evens.
Yeah.
Plus one every time.
So the only time it persist where the other abilities we had to choose to activate.
Right.
You know, like lower minus three, how many times can you use that in a round?
Can you just, and what is a round?
That was, that was one of the questions that came up.
What is a round?
What is a match?
What is a round?
Yeah.
The good things to define in the, either the setup or the rules.
I think if we're being really picky, you might want to define a little bit better, either
like on the page or what numbers to use to remove from a life total and what is a life
total and similar things, just defining really clearly the, the different terminology that
you're bringing that's carrying rule bearing weight.
Right.
This is why we did this.
These are the things that we want to start understanding.
You know, we didn't create these games to be published.
Like that was not the, the, the exercise was to just start building, just, just get your
hands in there, start making something.
I think mission accomplished.
Your game was fun.
You said mine was fun.
I like my game.
Yeah.
If we're going to sell one of these games, I think your game would be like the idea.
I would say, Oh, let's try to develop that further.
What else can we do?
I know you had said one of the things you didn't want to do is just have single letters.
I actually think it would be very interesting and simplified a little bit if it was just
one letter of each, it was just a through Z and you have to try to use them all or use
as many as possible, whatever it is.
I think that that simplification would be interesting to me rather than trying to, you
know, because I don't know how many letters you had, but it was more than 26.
I want to simplify it a little bit.
That's fair.
My thinking always was that the letter bank would be the tiebreaker or the last way that
the game would end.
I predicted that games would typically end with somebody not being able to meet the timer.
Right.
So it's a little bit of like a tiebreaker case.
I agree.
But yeah, we could definitely experiment more with how many letters and what distribution
of letters to use also.
Or change would propose a really significant change to how we would score letters in the
game.
Right.
Just a little bit.
Yeah.
I still think games would end on time because it becomes more challenging when you only
have access to one A.
That's true.
You probably shorten the game substantially by doing that.
There's also a world where like you could continue to play, you can use the A again,
even though you already used it once, you just can't score it again.
You know, it keeps you alive so you get to go to another round because you can change
your word, but you just can't score anything.
There's a lot we could do.
I really like your game.
So we want you all to be able to play these games as well.
So we are posting these games in our Discord.
You can find our Discord by going to themisplay.com and clicking on the Discord icon.
And after you've given both games a try, we put a little poll in there where you can rate
the games on rule writing, flavor, and fun factor.
And don't think about it in terms of like, which game is better?
Just like, did you like playing these games?
What did you think of the rules?
And if you want to leave any additional feedback, feel free to leave a comment in Discord.
Happy gaming and thanks for playing.
What's next?
I had a lot of fun today.
Me too.
We played games.
We had a little banter.
We talked.
We joked.
It was a good time.
We got to hang out.
Go on.
I'm a little bit apprehensive about the next show.
I think you're going to have more fun than I will.
Probably.
Because we're going to talk about some of the business stuff.
That's right.
The jargon, the processes, the legalese, maybe some spreadsheets.
That's a little bit beyond me, but Jason's going to guide us.
I know that isn't necessarily your jam, but it's all important.
It's the back end.
The things you do to create an actual legal partnership that will be the foundation for
the misplay as an LLC.
LLC, that stands for Little Lucky Company, right?
Yeah.
That's why you're in charge of these things.
That's why you don't have the password to anything.
Today's episode is brought to you by our Patreon sponsors, Mike C., Missy.
Consider donating at patreon.com slash the Missplint.
Hey.
Hi.
How's it going?
Okay.
Can I tell you about my board game company?
Sure.
It's called The Misplay and we are creating a podcast about making a board game company
that makes board games.
Do you like board games?
Is that your thing?
I do.
Perfect.
What's your favorite game?
Settlers of Catan.
Ding.
Bye.