Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone, Jim Phoenix here. And today for what's cracking, we've got none other than will scoon over, if you don't know Will ya? Wills. Ahaha. He is one of the designers for Steve Jackson games and we talk about everything from game design to Khan Scott and of course the big one coming out and backer it. We did. So should you. The munchkin big box, all this and more. And next, what's cracking it?
Hey everyone, Jim Phoenix here. And today we've got a great one for you. We've got none other than Will. Scoot over. And it is the best time to have him on the program because Munchkin is back in a big, big way. That's why you can do big botch munchkins on backer kit, not the other place. So backer kid, don't be like me, back or kid it. And I can't wait to get into this interview. I have to tell you right now, Will, first of all, thank you very much for appearing on the show.
I've got so many questions about this game.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Well, thanks for having us.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: This game. Okay, if you ever seen the red box, have you played red box D and D?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: I have never played red box D and D. I've played various versions of older D and D, but I missed out on the, the oldest D and D. Oh, wow.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: So maybe for my generation, as were the elder statesman now my generation, my God, saying that we grew up on red box, this is something we had to go to a catalog store and get sent to the Cadillac store and then print up or pick it up. So when I see the designs in this game and it's bringing the, the concept intention dragons, bringing the new nostalgia of it all into this humongous box, that's an amazing feat for me. So how was it to design something like this, given the history of Eric?
[00:02:03] Speaker B: So this is a collection of mostly existing Munchkin cards that we wanted to put out as a kind of big celebratory. You've been a fan for a long time. Here's a big deal. Or you've never took the plunge? Here's a big deal.
Munchkin has been around since 2001. So it had a 20 year anniversary a couple of years ago, but with the global pandemic and everything else going on, we didn't really have the time and the space to give it a big hurrah. And we were been talking for a while about this kind of big deal, and John Kovalik, who's also the classic Munchkin artist. Other people have drawn Munchkin cards, but John's been around since that very first set back in 2001. We wanted to work with him to do that kind of big celebratory thing, and then he pitched the idea of a little bit of a reference to old, old school D and D. So then, yeah, we, of course, had to go with a red box with the big dragon picture and all that kind of stuff.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: No, that's. It's an amazing thing. And 20 plus years is its own legacy. Really? Yeah. Two legacies coming together, and I think you guys nailed it. I'm looking at the backer kit, which is up until May 16.
It's amazing value. I wish my red box looked as halfway as good as.
There's so much cool stuff going into it. So when you're doing this as one big send off that you had to miss because of pandemic. Right. Is it more pressure for you? What, what goes through your mind?
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Well, the biggest questions were exactly what to do with this set. Right. Because we've got so much to pull from, so much history of Munchkin, so many things to do that we knew we wanted to make it an entry point for brand new players or a celebration of existing players.
So most of it was logistical choices of what products go in this box.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: What special bonuses do we give people?
We had, we had John Kovalik draw some brand new art that people never seen before for some existing products and some brand new cards that are tossed in here to make it a little bit more special.
And then there's just some other kind of celebratory tchotchkes is what I like to think of them as just cool things, like a great big giant munchkin coin and a lanyard you can wear at cons and some other stuff we've never done before. There's going to be some, some wooden meeples in here, probably depending on stretch goals and stuff like that. As, as we speak, there are still 22 days left in this on backer kit.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: So we've got some other things behind the scenes happening with potential stretch goals and stuff like that that are not public yet as of right now. But if you're hearing this, in a week and looking back at it, some of this stuff will have solidified or changed.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Well, that's. That's the greatest thing about backer kit, because it allows people to put something out that's going to be well developed, not rushed. The studio is not breathing down your neck anymore. It gives you a little more space. And honestly at this point right now is over a half mil.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: It is 678, almost $79,000.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: That's insane. When you're growing up did you think one day I'm going to put something out like the people are gonna give me over a half million dollars?
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Well I mean they're not giving it to me, right. They're giving it to the larger concept. So yeah, it's a little bit easier to wrap your brain around that kind of thing.
But it's not, it's not the biggest surprise because like I said, munchkins got this massive legacy. It's sold we think millions of copies. There are bunch good players all over the world in multiple languages and stuff. So it's not the biggest stretch, but every time that you are successful on a, you know, on a campaign of any kind, crowdfunding, it's, it's always nice to see and it's always a little bit surprising because you never know. Right? Like we, we set the goal at 75,000 because this was, this was a big thing that, you know, take a bite out of.
But we did not predict sure it's going to get this money, dollars in this amount of time. It's all just, you know, crossing your fingers and hope at that point there's.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Still 22 days left. Yeah.
Right.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: So when you're doing that versus, oh my gosh, will this game sell? What's marketing gonna be like all the things, you know, normally 20 years ago. Yeah, the first munching box, you know, is like 20 years when munching came out 20 years ago. Slightly different landscape, different.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Oh yeah, everything has changed in the last decade, let alone, you know, 20 years ago when Steve originally designed Munchkin as kind of a kind of throwaway joke. Like he, he's always produced small games that are just kind of ideas. Right. Illuminati was kind of that way too. Like Illuminati was a. I wonder if this will work because no one had really made a standalone card game in the eighties like that. So he's always throughout his entire career just kind of created ideas that he thinks might work. And in the late nineties, early two thousands, the company produced half a dozen other games or more. And Munchkin just kind of hooked into the entire.
What it is to be a nerd and like D and D and other rpg's and stab your friends while you're, you know, making terrible puns.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: I'm pretty sure this on the box, like betrayal, you know, it's all about commodity and throwing your friend under the bus or throwing your friend more monsters. Yeah, it's a great part of it right now. You mentioned Steve Jackson's. I grew up on that, like, the eighties and nineties. I think most of my bank account went to Steve Jackson.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Sure. I mean, ogre, car words, gurps, illuminati, you know, games that have been part of. I mean, I'm old, but I'm not.
I'm not the same kind of nerds as a lot of other people my age because I had an isolated childhood, satanic panic and all that. So I never played car wars in the eighties. It's. It's one of my biggest sadnesses of, like, you know, I never discovered car wars because we didn't have good game stores and stuff where I grew up.
But. But, yeah, I talk to people at cons all the time. We have a new version of Car Wars, 6th edition, which is a kind of a. A massive overhaul reboot. And people will come up to the convention table and they're in their fifties or sixties, and they'll just gush about how much they loved car wars, you know, when they were a kid. And then they'll look at this and they'll be like, but this doesn't look anything like what I played when I was a child. And I'm like, well, yeah, things evolved. Things change. You know, the world moves forward, and then they play that game and they're like, well, it still feels like the same game, even though component wise and literal gameplay wise, it's very, very different. We managed to maintain that same, you know, feeling of cars with guns, driving fast, blowing each other up.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: As you're explaining this, I'm going back to my childhood. I'm like, I do remember this game. Yeah. Remember this game. I remember the lineage. And that was the coolest thing. If you rem. Yes. I also remember the, like, Sally Jesse Raphael satanic panic.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Touch the dragons will kill you. Uh huh. And people believe that. And hard rock, like, of course, like, neck and neck for a while. So if you got through that and you had, like, a Montgomery ward. So we'll sell these.
You can see the lineage of the red box to the aquamarine box, to this box, to the. That box. They were doing it back then, too. And now with Steve Jackson, and you guys are doing is even a grander scale because those were almost like the. The reboots. Like, oh, we have to fix this thing, like, right away. It's like a fixed kit. That's what dungeons and dragons was doing like, oh, my God. Wouldn't think players would get above player levels. Ten. Oh, boy. What do we do now? And now instead of that, you're being able to redesign things. You'd be able to take the things that we've experienced the last 20 years.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
It's always fun to be a part of game design because sometimes, sometimes what exists is perfect, and sometimes what exists, you know, was for its time. Like, I play a lot of modern D and D, and I look at older versions and I'm like, I don't think I could ever really, like the mass. The weirdness, whatever. Yeah.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: But if you do this, okay, watch. When you're growing up as a kid, you went through satanic panic. What made you want to become a game designer then?
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Oh, it was, it was. It was an accident. I've been playing games my whole life, like, right. Like chess, Monopoly. I found miniatures gaming with games workshop, forty k and that kind of stuff in the nineties. And then it was just.
Somebody had a job opening. Steve Jackson games had a job opening for an art director. And I was frustrated in my radio career, and so I just applied. And then that, you know, almost.
It'll be 18 years coming in a month or so.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Congratulations on that. That's journey.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: I haven't been. I haven't been with Steve Jackson games the whole time. I left and came back. But, yeah, it was just, I mean, this was also 2006 when the entire industry was different. You couldn't kickstart things, right? There was no crowdfunding back then.
The entire indie rpg scene was very, very small. So to get into doing it, you kind of had to either just branch out on your own and try something or find a job doing it. But nowadays there are people who are prolific in the rpg scene and the board game scene who are just doing their own thing all by themselves in their basement, asking people for money, which is the empowering thing that the modern world has given us.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: I'm glad you brought that up. And that's if you go to Jan Con and different comic cons and how big of the one in Boston right now? Pax. Yeah, if you go to these, you can see all these gaming companies out there, but you're also gonna see a lot of independent artists who are doing third party licensing for, like, free league system, whatever it's gonna be. And they're making what they want. They're making content. The original creators of the gaming system, they're getting refreshed players and refreshed content just by lending the license out.
It's an amazing time to be in gaming, and I think this is a great transformation that we're having. Maybe.
Maybe the pandemic gave us a lot of time in our hands and alone and going, you know, I want to do some social. How do I imagination again, you know, let's go back.
Where do you think game is going to go from here?
[00:13:08] Speaker B: I think everywhere and anywhere.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Right? Like, I. I never really played rpg's consistently throughout my entire life until the pandemic.
And then my friends were like, hey, we should hang out online and have a video chat. Yes. But we were all nerds. So about 15 minutes into just sitting around talking on our computers, we were like, why don't we play a game while we do this?
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Right?
[00:13:35] Speaker B: And so I think that, that there's a lot of people who, in the last five years, especially with the pandemic, have been keyed off to the idea that all this stuff exists that they never delved into. Like, we, when we're at Gen Con or Pax or anything, we meet people the entire convention who have never really dipped a toe into gaming. Like, right, I, a couple years ago at Gen Con, this exasperated young person walked in at like 11:00 p.m. On a Thursday night or something. Yeah. And so the show floors closed, the crowds have thinned out because it's late, and we're just, me and a couple of my friends are just standing in a hallway talking. And this person comes in one of the outside doors and looks around like they're confused. They don't know what's going on, but they're very excited, you could tell.
And they came over to us and they're like, I'm a gen con.
What's going on? And we're like, what do you mean what's going on? He's like, I just watched critical role play D and D last night Live at Gen Con, and I've never heard of it before, but I decided to drive like an hour to come to check it out. So there are people, even though there are people like us that have been playing games since the eighties, right? Munchkins existed 20 years. There's still people rediscovering and discovering this because the other thing we meet at cons is a lot of people who are like, I played games in my twenties, right? But then I had kids and I got a job, and now I'm, you know, in my thirties and something, and I. And I'm, you know, rediscovering all these things that I loved 15 or so years ago. So it's gonna be all of these new people that push all the directions for gaming to go. And we have better online tools now. We have crowdfunding to give people every opportunity to get their ideas out in the world. We have a lot of established companies doing new and interesting things. So there's really no limit to where it could go. We'll just have to wait and see.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: No, that's an amazing answer. And I thank you for bringing the gen con experience up because that's what, for me, the conventions are for. You have or brand new to something like, what's this? What's this? It's. And then I have Gen Khan. Last year I was showing my friend just a video. Like, oh, my God, it's so huge. Like, no, no, that's just part of the hall.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: There's a Lucas oil stadium over there. The hotels are this way. And the rest of the hall, it's through these corridors. I was like, yeah, it's amazing. People have never seen the big conventions. I think you can go there. It's something for everyone. It's for kids. It's for. It's for the entire family. The conventions are now. There's no. The satanic panic's over. And now my bank account to a.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Certain extent, but yeah, but even the smaller, the smaller segments of the hobby are growing. Adepticon is a miniatures only convention that happens in the Chicago area. They've been doing it since the early two thousands. I can't remember exactly how many adepticons there have been. I have a badge over there, but I can't see the roman numerals very clearly.
They just announced that they're moving to Milwaukee, which is just like a little ways north of Chicago. Right to a downtown convention center that's refurbished because they had 8000 people this last year, like a month ago. That's a 20% increase from the last attendance they had of the year before, which was around 6000.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: That's not bad, Grove. That's amazing.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: So they were already bursting at the seams in the really nice convention center in Schaumburg, which is northern suburbs of Chicago.
So they had to reach out and find more space because they have the potential to get even bigger next year if they see any kind of growth that's similar conventions pop up all over the place. There's. It seems like there's a new convention every year or two or three. Some of them are big, some of them are small.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Now if they go up a little bit more north to Lake Geneva, it'll be Jan Con all over again.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Well, that's funny, because Gary Khan, which is a smaller rpg convention, happens the same weekend as adepticon, and it's in that area.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: So there are already people that split their time between those two conventions because they are kind of close enough to drive between.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: I forgot all about Gary Khan.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Gary Khan. Game hold Con. Like, that's what I'm saying. There's all these, like, you think of Gen Con and Pax and the big conventions, but, like, these. These what you can think of as smaller conventions are slowly, I don't know, game hole con, 6000 people or something like that, too. So, like, these are not small conventions. They're not 60,000 people, like. Like Gen Con, but they are growing by leaps and bounds.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: And, you know, that's a great thing. One of the. Okay. Gen Con can be so big as overwhelming.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Yes.
I don't encourage people to go to Gen Con for their first con anymore because it's so big and you can just get lost in there.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Literally. Yeah, I've literally been lost. Like, my venue. Like, I have a meet. I have to do, like, something at 05:00 p.m., like, where. Where's this room at? Where's, like, where's the barnyard? What the.
Like, that's exactly it. And then packs unlimited comes out and we do smaller and smaller, smaller, smallers. The small cons are wonderful. Your local convention, support them. That. I think that's it. Just like supporting game designers, supporting people on backer kit. And you can support the Munchkin big box by May 16. 125. Can you imagine? This is a huge thing.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah, it is a whole.
It's a whole bunch of product all in one box. And some of it's new and some of its classic. But it is. It is also a deal at the. At the price.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: It's decks, it's doors, treasure. It's like you have over 500 cars and doors and treasure cards, dungeons. It's the dice.
Right? As I said, all the trask is as well. And the board, it's mind boggling on how much you guys are putting out for that backer kit. And I know backer kick gets a percent. Everyone gets their own kickbacks. But my God, for 125, this is a steal. And absolutely, we will definitely back this as well. What? Okay. We went from our love of rpg's and to the cons.
When you are about to retire, when you look back in your career, what's the one thing you think, man, I'm so glad I did this part.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Well, first off, game designers don't retire.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Never retire.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: There is not for one thing, sadly, there's not enough money in this industry to become like, oh, I mean, to some people there are, but, you know, rank and file game designers. It's like, I'm not going to be buying an island in the Bahamas, you know, you know, with the. With the winnings of my career. And it's not back breaking labor. Right. I'm not digging ditches. I could do this. I could do this until I'm old.
But the things I will fondly look back on are the experiences that anything I've worked on has given people. Because the best thing that can happen to a game designer is for them to meet someone at a convention or whatever and be told that the game that they made brought their friends together in a, you know, in a tough time. Or was that moment of reconnecting with old friends or whatever. Cause it's not.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: It's.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: It's not really the thing. It's the people. I've always. I've always liked this hobby. And the thing that I think is the most interesting thing moving forward in our, you know, modern world is that this hobby still involves a lot of in person, face to face human interaction.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: So that's the thing that I think is the coolest thing, the thing that I'm the most proud of, because I. I've been told, um, over the years by people that have come, you know, bumped into me at cons and stuff, that, like, I designed their most favorite game. But then they tell me why it's their favorite game. And almost always that's because the experiences they've had around it with their friends at the table and new friends, old friends, you know, strangers, whatever.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: But that, that is an amazing part. And I think you hit it on the head in multiple levels. I, as a kid, I used to dig ditches. Honestly, God, that was my first job. And whenever I'm doing something in gaming, I'm like, oh, man, no matter how bad my day is, I'm not digging that ditch anymore. Like this. Thank God for this. And it's the. You could have friends that read the same books. You have friends that can watch the same movies, but those don't change the game. It can change new every time. And if something can just kick out, boom. And that's what gives us a communal experience, I think that's so valuable. It's healing in a way, especially after the last I don't know. Pandemic time has been 50, 60 years by now. I don't know.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: It seems like sometimes it is definitely a blurs day kind of experience over the past few years.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time. Like, I'm gonna let you go back to designing better, bigger, huger, most monstrous games you can do. And I'm backing this. May 16 is a deadline. I'm backing it today. The go to backerkit.com. Just check out Steve Jackson games munchkin big box. Do yourself a favor and honestly, this is such a great. And even have a discord for it. Nice. Join the discord. Yeah. Madness of it. It's so very cool. Thank you very much, Will, for your time. I had a blast and I can't wait to see this thing. Honestly. God, I can live in this. This box is so big. I can live it. That's it.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: In the gateway box.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: Bye, everyone.
