•tactic34:00
Sharpies, blank cards and the birth of the modifier deck
Tim shows the original prototype deck on camera and makes the case that quick and dirty is the only way to go, citing Stephen Key, author of One Simple Idea, who has made enormous money inventing games and toys using construction paper, glue and markers you would find in a second grade classroom — enough to build a pitch, sell it, and generate licensing annuities. Elan's own prototypes were equally janky: blank cards bought by the thousands on Amazon, Sharpies, and dice with the nubs sanded off so he could hand-write new faces. He describes building the very first Coyote deck. He made a rock card, a paper card, and a scissors card, and asked what if these were not tools to fight each other with but a challenge the table had to solve together — everyone does scissors, now everyone does paper, now rock. He is candid that this game is useless, but it was a baseline. Then came modifiers: all players do all blue cards, skip a player after every red card, shout every blue card. Cards ended up spread across the table because the challenge kept getting more interesting. The next leap was responsibility — instead of splashing cards down, each player in turn must add a card that makes the challenge harder. Rock, paper and scissors were eliminated early for being boring, replaced by peace signs, ballerina poses and slapping the shoulder of the person next to you. Shouting cards were tested and cut for getting old fast. Elan's summary: stalled at one percent for months, then eighty percent of the game in a week, because the answer after every session was let's go again.
- Elan prototypes with blank cards bought by the thousand and Sharpies, and has sanded the faces off dice to hand-write on them.
- The first Coyote build inverted rock paper scissors from a duel into a cooperative pattern the whole table performs.
- Modifier cards — colour rules, skips, shouts — were what made the baseline challenge interesting.
- Making each player responsible for adding a card that increases difficulty turned a pattern exercise into a game.
- The litmus test for continuing was the reflexive 'let's go again' at the end of every session.
“so ran home and started scribbling on cards. these are just blank cards. i took sharpies. i i buy these like by the thousands on…”
“but over the next week, i would say we designed 80% of the game. we were at this like stalled at 1% mode for months”
“every time we played some version of this, the immediate answer when we were done playing was let's go again”
#prototyping#iteration#playtesting#modifiers#stephen-key
•tactic51:30
Cut the chips, flip the cards face up, and let the loser punch back
Tim asks what other golden rules govern design at Exploding Kittens, and Elan offers one immediately: if a component does not need to be in the game, remove it from the game. The worked example is Coyote's lives or strikes, originally tracked with bingo chips, which turned out to be unnecessary because you can simply flip a card over and use its back. The second and larger cut concerns the hand of cards. Every game you have played — Uno included — gives you a hand, a private decision and a revealed card. Elan asked whether there was a simpler version, and there was: put the cards face up on the table and choose from them in the open. It is nearly identical mechanically but now public, which changes the social texture of every turn. From there the conversation moves to the problem of asymmetric skill. During playtesting, one group contained a mathematician who was also a high-level chess player and simply smoked everybody. Tim's contribution — which Elan credits and says he was not taking enough credit for — was to take an existing modifier such as everyone must do all movements with Tyrannosaurus arms, and instead of applying it to all blue cards, slide it in front of one specific player so only they suffer it on every turn. That is a curse, and it lets the last place player attack the first place player, a Mario Kart feeling. Elan's response was I don't know, let's try it, and it was glorious. His broader point is that Tim could make the suggestion because he had by then learned to speak like a game designer: instead of saying we should sabotage people, he said some people are naturally good at this and some are naturally bad, and we need to give the bad ones a tool.
- Elan's stated tenet is that any component which does not need to be in the game should be removed from it.
- Bingo chips tracking lives were replaced by flipping existing cards over.
- Moving from a hidden hand to face-up cards keeps the decision but makes it public and social.
- Attack cards let a trailing player curse the leader, solving asymmetric skill without changing the core rules.
- Tim could contribute the mechanic because he had acquired the vocabulary to state the problem in design terms.
“if a component does not need to be in the game, remove it from the game”
“take some cards, put them all face up on the table, and then decide which one you're going to pick”
“you had learned at that point to speak like a game designer”
#component-design#simplicity#attack-cards#playtesting#design-vocabulary
•tactic1:17:30
The kitty test pilots: 400 families, one question, five copies at a time
Elan explains what would have happened had Tim partnered with any other games company: internal testing, then a market research group that pulls in strangers, sits them behind a one-way mirror with a crappy catered lunch, has them play and rate the game one to ten, and returns a stack of forms. His objection is contextual — nobody plays board games with strangers, so the procedure the whole industry uses is fundamentally flawed. Exploding Kittens tried it once, and Elan looked at the results and realised they had just burned twenty-five thousand dollars on something useless. Since nothing better existed they built it. He reached out first to their Kickstarter community, then Discord, then Reddit, offering a free prototype they keep forever in exchange for playing it with their own friends and family within twenty-four hours of receipt and sending the recorded session. Within about twelve months four hundred families had signed up — the kitty test pilots. They fill out no questionnaire; at the end they look into the camera and answer the only question the team cares about: do you want to play again. Elan concedes false positives are unsolvable, which is exactly why the video is mandatory — you count the eye rolls, or catch the wide-eyed inhale as someone opens the instructions, signals no survey could ever capture because testers do not know they are doing them. Videos go to Vimeo, are watched at 4x by a team that flags moments without diagnosing them, and a second team diagnoses the flags. Only five copies go out at a time so each cohort's feedback changes the next version, with six to eight months to work through the panel. Internally, testing moves off the design team fast and onto accounting and sales, who have never seen the game.
- Conventional games market research puts strangers in a mirrored room, which is invalid because nobody plays board games with strangers.
- A single conventional study cost Exploding Kittens twenty-five thousand dollars and produced nothing usable.
- Four hundred families receive free prototypes to keep, play within twenty-four hours, and film the session in their own homes.
- The single closing question, answered on camera, is do you want to play again.
- Prototypes ship five at a time so every cohort produces a product change, and internal testing moves off the design team to accounting and sales.
“nobody plays games like that. you don't play games with strangers”
“the only question we care about, do you want to play again?”
“i got 400 test families, but i'm only going to send out five games at a time”
#playtesting#user-research#community#video-feedback#product-validation
•tactic1:30:30
70% of sales are on a shelf — so test the coyote's hat, earring and wink
Tim asks for a number Elan says they never share: what percentage of sales are offline retail versus online. The answer is seventy percent in-person retail, thirty percent online — totally backwards from what you would expect for almost any industry. People want to walk into a store, see and touch and flip the game over and compare it to others. That has two consequences. Retail buying meetings are existential, and the game must sell itself on the shelf, stopping a shopper walking past hundreds of games. So Exploding Kittens works with retailers on colour scheme and character and runs surveys designed to stop people in their tracks. Tim offers his own lineage of the same practice. For The 4-Hour Workweek he bid on subject-related keywords in Google AdWords so around ten title and subtitle candidates were automatically split-tested, each pointing to a different URL that led to an under-construction page, because he cared about interest sufficient to click rather than conversion. For the cover, he placed different covers on a same-sized book in the new non-fiction section at Borders on University Avenue in Palo Alto and counted pickups with a bouncer's clicker over peak hours. Modern equivalents they used for Coyote include PickFu, Intellivy and Sticky Beak, which serve variants to fine-sliced demographics. The Coyote character went through variants with no hat, no earring, both eyes open to camera, both eyes looking off to the side, all against a saffron-orange and lime-green scheme Tim spent absurd amounts of time on, photographing backlit leaves to nail the Pantone. Elan's highest praise is for Tim's discipline: asked his opinion, he said he had one but did not want to give it — let's test it. The winner was not even close.
- Seventy percent of Exploding Kittens sales are in-person retail and only thirty percent online, the inverse of most industries.
- Because most buyers are browsing a shelf of hundreds of games, the box must stop them dead in their tracks unaided.
- Tim split-tested The 4-Hour Workweek's title with Google AdWords and its cover with a physical clicker count at Borders.
- Coyote's character and colours were resolved on demographic panels using PickFu, Intellivy and Sticky Beak.
- Tim deliberately withheld his own opinion so the panel would not be anchored, and the winning variant won by a wide margin.
“70% of our sales are in-person retail. only 30% are online sales. totally backwards than what you'd expect for almost any industry”
“i cared about interest, sufficient interest to click”
“and to your credit, your answer was always, let's test it”
#retail#split-testing#packaging#market-research#cover-design
•tactic1:37:30
Inside the line review: suitcases, forced play, meal-time slots and the glory spot
This is the tactical core of the selling half. Elan tells the story of Coyote's first line review with Walmart in Bentonville, which Tim could not attend because the slot was immovable. Tim's fix was a recorded video of unfiltered passion about why he made the game and why it was the first thing he had put his name on. Elan walked in, refused to describe the game, set it up and made the buyers play; within five minutes they were laughing and asking how he intended to sell it, at which point he played Tim's video. The result was a full-line purchase — every single store — which Elan says has never happened for them on an initial pitch. He then generalises. You are always their tenth meeting, so the first job is breaking them out of the funk with enthusiasm, props and video. He brings two oversized checked suitcases of beautiful games, including ones he is not pitching and ones that will never ship, because the premise is that Exploding Kittens is a world, not a product. Buyers ask him to skip the play and just pitch; he says no, and forces every game. He orchestrates the four thoughts of the mastery ladder, then pulls the game away right when they want more and moves to the commercial half. He opens with the shortest, easiest pitch — usually an Exploding Kittens expansion — puts the real target in the glory second spot, treats the next five as equal and sells them all, and accepts that the last two will not land. He wears the creative-guy uniform of t-shirt and jeans because a suit costs him credibility. Agents in Bentonville and Minneapolis lobby for slots right after breakfast or lunch, read the retailer's all-hands notes, and brief him on what buyers get promoted for. And retailers have annual colour themes your boxes should match.
- Coyote's first Walmart line review produced a full-line purchase, unprecedented for an Exploding Kittens initial pitch.
- Elan refuses to pitch and forces buyers to play, then removes the game at the peak of their engagement.
- The sequence is fixed: easiest pitch first for momentum, the real target second in the glory spot, and nothing important last.
- Agents lobby for post-meal slots, read retailer all-hands notes, and reveal what buyers are incentivised on that year.
- Small signals compound — matching the retailer's annual colour theme and wearing the creative-guy uniform both make yes easier.
“you first you have to keep in mind you are their 10th meeting”
“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”
“the number two spot is the glory spot”
#line-review#sales-tactics#retail-buyers#agents#pitching
•tactic1:55:30
Car hole: the two sentences that make a short-form video work
Elan explains what changed in the sales meeting over three years. The marketing plan you used to show was your website, some TV commercials, billboards and a bit of product placement. Today none of that matters — all buyers care about is social media, because it is the only form of game marketing that still works, and short-form video and casual games are a natural fit now that every platform pushes the format to compete with TikTok. The creative brief reduces to two sentences, which Elan says took him forever to reach: the viewer must think, I understand what those people are experiencing right now, and I would like to experience that. Everything he tried before failed — show gameplay, show setup, show a memorable moment, show people screaming and yelling because they are having so much fun. None of it works. The proof is Exploding Kittens' single most effective piece of media, a Poetry for Neanderthals clip with tens of millions of views. The rules are trivially legible because the secret word, garage, is shown on screen: a player must get a teammate to say it using only single-syllable words, and a mistake earns a bonk from a giant inflatable Neanderthal club. He says car go here, car hole, car hole, this car hole, big car hole, and everyone is losing it while the guesser demands to know what a car hole is. It works because you see the experience and you also think you could do better than that. Elan brings hard numbers on views, likes, shares and subscriptions into the line review, then presents the specific video planned for the new game framed in the same two sentences — which now takes up about half of every game's slot in the meeting.
- Social is now the only marketing that works for games; website, TV, billboards and product placement no longer register with buyers.
- The entire creative brief is two thoughts: I understand what they are experiencing, and I want to experience that.
- Showing gameplay, setup, memorable moments or people laughing does not on its own produce either thought.
- The garage clip works because the audience is given the secret word, making the rules and the struggle instantly legible.
- The corollary thought — I could do better than that — is what converts a viewer into someone who wants to play.
“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”
“that looks like fun. i could have that much fun. that's it. that's what you're trying to show”
“i see the experience they're having. i get that. and the secondary sort of corlary is i could do better than that”
#social-media#short-form-video#marketing#tiktok#creative-brief