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Almost everyone who loves games eventually has an idea for one. Maybe you’ve imagined a mechanic you’ve never seen before, have a theme you desperately want to turn into a game, or played one of your favorite games and thought, “This is great, but what if it did this instead?”

Coming up with ideas is easy. Turning one of those ideas into something you can actually play is where most aspiring designers get stuck.

I’ve seen people spend months, sometimes years, thinking about their game before they ever put anything on the table. They write pages of rules, invent hundreds of cards, build elaborate worlds, and start worrying about artwork, balance, manufacturing, and publishing. These are all important parts of creating a finished game, but worrying about them too early can prevent you from doing the one thing that actually matters at the beginning: finding out whether your idea works.

Your first job isn’t to make a great game. Your first job is to make something you can play. Here are three steps to get there.

Step 1: Brainstorm Without Judging Yourself

One of the biggest mistakes new designers make is trying to come up with the perfect idea before they start working. They assume professional game designers begin with a brilliant concept and then simply figure out how to execute it, but that isn’t how creativity works.

When I brainstorm, my goal isn’t to come up with good ideas. My goal is to come up with lots of ideas, because the more possibilities I generate, the better my chances of finding something interesting among them.

Give yourself twenty minutes, grab a notebook, open a document, or stand in front of a whiteboard and start writing. Write down mechanics, themes, components, victory conditions, player interactions, and even ridiculous ideas that probably won’t work. At this stage, there are no bad ideas because you aren’t deciding what belongs in the game yet. You’re creating raw material that you can evaluate later.

This distinction matters because your first idea is usually the most obvious one. If you immediately stop to analyze whether it will work, your critical brain takes over before your creative brain has had a chance to explore. Instead, keep generating ideas and allow one thought to lead naturally into another, pushing yourself past the obvious answers and into territory you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

You can see this same principle at work in other art forms. A songwriter working with a broad concept like love, heartbreak, alienation, or excitement might begin by writing down the first fifty words that come to mind, then deliberately exclude those words from the lyrics. By removing the most obvious choices, they force themselves to search for less familiar language, make unexpected connections, and develop metaphors they probably wouldn’t have discovered if they had simply gone with their first ideas.

You can apply the same approach to game design. If you’re having trouble getting started, look at the games you already love and ask yourself what specifically attracts you to them. What mechanics create your favorite moments? What would you remove or change? What two things have you never seen combined before? Once you have the obvious answers, don’t stop there. Keep going and see what comes next.

You don’t need to invent something completely original. Creativity often comes from taking concepts we’ve encountered before, pushing beyond their most obvious expressions, and combining them in ways that create a new experience. The more raw material you give yourself, the more opportunities you have to discover one of those combinations.

There will be plenty of time to judge your ideas later. For now, your job is to have them.

Step 2: Find the One Thing Worth Testing

Once you’ve filled the page with ideas, your job changes completely. Now you want to look at everything you’ve created, organize it, find the patterns, and start eliminating ideas until you discover the part of the game that most deserves to be tested.

Ask yourself a simple question: What is the most exciting thing here?

You’re not looking for the entire game yet. You’re looking for the mechanic, interaction, or experience that made you want to create this game in the first place. Once you’ve identified it, your goal is to figure out the minimum number of additional systems required to put that idea in front of a player.

Imagine you want to make a game about wizards fighting over magical territory. During your brainstorm, you’ve come up with spells, characters, resources, factions, maps, equipment, and dozens of magical abilities. There may be enough ideas on that page to eventually fill an entire game, but the thing that really excites you is a system where every spell permanently changes the battlefield.

Great. That’s what you need to test.

You don’t need fifty spells, six factions, a campaign system, or a beautifully illustrated map to answer the most important question in front of you. You need enough pieces to discover whether permanently changing the battlefield with spells creates interesting decisions.

This is one of the most important habits you can develop as a game designer because your goal isn’t to prove that your game works. Your goal is to test your assumptions and learn something.

Every additional mechanic you add makes that test more complicated. If you build five different systems at once and the game isn’t fun, you may have no idea which system caused the problem. When you isolate the thing you’re most excited about, you can learn quickly whether you’ve found something worth developing.

Take your giant brainstorm and cut ruthlessly until you’ve found the smallest interesting piece worth testing.

Step 3: Build the Cheapest, Ugliest Version Possible

Once you’ve identified what you want to test, it’s time to make the game real, which is where a lot of new designers suddenly slow down. The idea that existed perfectly inside your head now has to become an actual thing, and the temptation is to make that thing look and feel as much like a finished game as possible…

Resist that temptation!

I’ve been designing games professionally for decades, and my early prototypes are still ugly. They’re either made on Tabletop Simulator or from index cards, scraps of paper, borrowed game pieces, poker chips, dice, markers, and whatever else happens to be lying around. The goal isn’t to impress anyone with the prototype because much of it is going to change after you play.

Remember, the purpose of a prototype is to learn something as quickly and cheaply as possible, not to have a perfect game right off the bat.

If you’re designing a card game, don’t spend three weeks laying out beautiful cards when handwritten index cards will answer the same question. If you need resources, grab poker chips. If you need characters, steal some pieces from another board game. If you need a board, draw one on a piece of paper. Make it ugly and simple, so you’re not emotionally attached to anything aesthetic. Once you know an idea works, you can invest more time in making it better, but early in the process flexibility is far more valuable than presentation.

What do you need for a prototype?

A useful prototype only needs three things: rules, components, and questions.

You need enough rules for someone to play, enough components to represent the information players need, and a clear idea of what you’re trying to learn. Before you play, write down the question your prototype is supposed to answer. Maybe you want to know whether choosing between two actions creates an interesting decision, whether your combat system creates tension, or whether building your engine is actually satisfying.

You don’t even need a complete game to answer those questions. If five minutes of gameplay tells you that your central mechanic isn’t fun, you’ve learned something valuable without spending weeks building everything around it. You can change the mechanic, try another idea from your brainstorm, and run the experiment again.

That is the real purpose of your first prototype: to give you information that helps you iterate effectively.

On to the next one…

There is a dangerous point in every creative project where thinking starts to feel like doing. You research, take notes, brainstorm mechanics, imagine characters, and think about what the finished game might eventually become. All of that work can be useful, but eventually your ideas have to collide with reality.

Game design happens through iteration. You make something, play it, discover what works and what doesn’t, change it, and play again. The faster you can move through that process, the more opportunities you have to learn, and the better your game is likely to become.

If you’ve been sitting on a game idea, give yourself a deadline for getting something playable on the table. Spend twenty minutes generating ideas without judging them, identify the single thing you’re most excited to test, then grab some cards, dice, markers, or whatever else you have lying around and build the simplest version you possibly can.

When you finally play it, there’s a good chance it won’t work the way you imagined. That’s okay. In fact, that’s the point.

Here’s the good news: with a game on the table, you’ve stopped thinking about making a game and started designing one.

P.S. If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.

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About Ryan S. Dancey

Ryan S. Dancey is an absolute titan of the gaming industry whose strategic vision has fundamentally shaped the modern tabletop and digital landscapes. Ryan co-created Legend of the Five Rings, published the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and spearheaded the creation of the revolutionary Open Gaming License (OGL) alongside an elite team at Wizards of the Coast—a move that forever altered the trajectory of role-playing games. His entrepreneurial journey spans from bootstrapping a "fake" mail-order company that accidentally became real, to orchestrating Wizards’ historic acquisition of TSR, to living in Reykjavik as CMO for CCP Games working on EVE Online, and serving a decade as Chief Operating Officer at AEG (publisher of the Spiel des Jahres winner Cascadia). Today, Ryan serves as President of Wide Pacific Horizon, a strategic consulting and content creation firm based in Everett, Washington. In this episode, we unpack the wild dawn of the '90s TCG boom, the mechanics of collectible economies, what it takes to pull off industry-defining business deals, and a deeply honest, transparent conversation about the reality of AI and the future of creative work.

Connect with Ryan:

• Website: widepacifichorizon.com

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rsdancey

• BlueSky: @ryandancey.com

Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

• The Fine Line Between Self-Belief and Arrogance: To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to possess an almost irrational confidence in your ability to figure things out. When you are young or broke, you take wild leaps because you truly believe you will survive the fall. You don’t need to have every answer on day one, but having the intrinsic belief that you can pivot, adapt, and learn on the fly is what separates dreamers from builders.

• The Math and Mechanics of TCG Booms: Trading card games are powered by an irresistibly addictive loop of intermittent positive reinforcement and a healthy, long-term TCG ecosystem requires a delicate balance across three distinct groups: competitive players, casual collectors, and serious collectors/investors. If your game tilts too heavily toward speculation without a solid player base, the bubble will inevitably burst when investors run out of buyers.

• Practice with AI : We are living through a civilizational inflection point right now with machine learning. While the origins of these models come with thorny ethical questions, hiding your head in the sand will only leave you behind. These tools are democratizing production, allowing single creators to execute projects that used to require entire studios.

Show Notes

“So we created an ad for a company that didn’t exist called RPG International, and we ran that ad in Dungeon Magazine... And then the phone started to ring.” (00:05:22)

Sometimes the best way to validate a market is to throw an offer out into the wild and see if anyone bites. Ryan and his partner started a “fake” mail-order company just to get wholesale discounts on D&D books for their personal group, but the market demand was so real that customers forced them into becoming a legitimate business. Don’t wait until you have a flawless 50-page business plan. Test demand first, let your audience show you what’s real, and build the infrastructure as you scale.

“And Bob, who is a brilliant salesman, convinced her that we were the answer to all of her problems, and we walked out of that room with a letter of intent to buy the company” (00:24:40)

This is one of the most audacious moves in tabletop history. Five Rings Publishing was a tiny studio running low on runway, but instead of folding, they read the market signals, spotted that industry titan TSR was in deep financial trouble, and secured a letter of intent to buy them out before flipping the deal to Wizards of the Coast. As an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to make bold, strategic swings. When you recognize macro shifts before anyone else, you can leverage positioning to punch way above your weight class.

“Booster packs provide what psychologists call intermittent decreasing positive reinforcement, which has been determined to be the most addictive behavior pattern you can subject a human brain to...” (00:38:15)

Ryan breaks down the exact psychological engine behind the trading card game model. TCGs are financial and psychological powerhouses engineered around variable reward loops. Understanding the behavioral mechanics of your business model allows you to design experiences that generate deep engagement, but as creators, we also have to understand how to balance that excitement with long-term player trust so the ecosystem stays healthy.

“AI is going to enable individuals and teams to do things that they could never do. ” (01:27:15)

This is the true promise of modern machine intelligence. Beyond all the noise and controversy, AI can strip away technical and financial barriers that used to keep incredible ideas locked inside people’s heads. Whether you’re an indie designer or a veteran, these tools allow single creators to execute at a scale previously reserved for massive studios with multi-million dollar budgets.

P.S. If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.

I used to think choosing my friends was about who I liked, but I eventually realized I was choosing something else: who I would become.

A few months ago, I wrote about treating your life the way a great designer treats a game or product, where instead of relying on willpower to make the right choices over and over again, you can intentionally design your environment so those choices become easier.

In the article, I focused on our physical environment: putting your gym bag by the door, removing junk food from the kitchen, and eliminating distractions from your workspace. The focus was on making success the path of least resistance. If you want to learn more about that approach, you can read the full article here.

In this article, I’ll focus on another part of your environment that may be even more powerful than the physical spaces you occupy: the people around you.

Design Your Social Environment

The habits, attitudes, and expectations of the people you spend time with have an enormous influence on what you do. Human beings are social creatures, constantly looking to the people around us for signals about what is normal, what is possible, and what is expected of us. If everyone around you exercises, exercising feels normal. If your friends are building things, working on themselves, or pursuing ambitious goals, those behaviors start to feel normal too. The opposite is also true, because if everyone around you complains about their job but never does anything about it, or talks about wanting to change but never takes action, eventually that can start to feel normal as well.

Research into social networks has found that behaviors and emotional states such as obesity, smoking, and happiness tend to cluster among connected people, which doesn’t mean your friends control your behavior or determine your future, but it does mean their behavior helps to shape the environment where choices are made. So the first lesson is to pay attention to what your social environment is making normal, and then decide whether that version of normal is helping you become the person you want to be.

I learned this lesson the hard way, because at different points in my life I had people I loved who were pulling me toward behaviors and ways of thinking that weren’t helping me grow, and some of those people were close friends or family. For a long time, I thought I had two choices:

• I could accept those relationships exactly as they were, even when they were having a negative effect on me

• I could have some dramatic confrontation and cut people out of my life.

Neither felt right. Fortunately, I learned a much better strategy: fill your calendar.

Fill Your Calendar

Instead of focusing on who I needed to remove from my life, I started thinking about who and what I wanted to add, so I joined activities, spent more time with people who were doing things I wanted to do, and built new friendships around interests and goals that mattered to me. As my calendar filled with new people and new activities, I naturally had less time for relationships that were pulling me in the wrong direction, and rather than having some dramatic breakup with my old life, I was simply spending more of my time building a new one.

That changed the way I think about this completely, because if someone you love wants to grow with you, that’s fantastic, and you should invite them along, encourage them, and help them when you can. Growing alongside people you already care about is one of the best possible outcomes, but you can’t make someone change, and you don’t have to make their choices your choices. You can still care about someone while recognizing that spending less time with them may be the right decision, and you can create that space without declaring war or burning a bridge.

This is another form of environment design, because instead of relying on willpower to constantly resist the influence of the people around you, you can deliberately spend more time in places where the behaviors you want are already normal. The more your social environment supports the person you are trying to become, the less energy you have to spend fighting against it.

P.S. If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.

Go Where Your Desired Behavior Is Normal

One of the easiest ways to change your social environment is to ask yourself, Where are the people who are already doing the thing I want to do? Once you find it, then start spending time there.

If you want to exercise more, join a running club, recreational sports league, or a gym where people actually know each other (like Crossfit, F45, or Orangetheory); if you want to build a company, spend time around entrepreneurs and communities built to support them; if you want to become a better game designer, go to conventions, playtests, and designer meetups; and if you want to contribute more to your community, volunteer. Depending on what you care about, there are meetups, masterminds, workshops, classes, charities, clubs, and communities filled with people who have already made the behavior you want part of their normal lives, and simply spending more time in those environments can change what feels normal in yours.

I wouldn’t recommend trying to completely reinvent your social circle overnight. Lasting change happens through a series of smaller decisions that compound over time. Start putting yourself in environments where the behaviors you want are already happening, meet a few people, return consistently, and give those relationships enough time to develop naturally.

For a lot of people, especially those who are introverted or shy, this can be intimidating, because walking into a room full of strangers and trying to “network” sounds miserable. Fortunately, you don’t need to work the room or impress everyone there, all you need to do is meet one person. Find someone you naturally gravitate toward, be genuinely curious about them, ask what they’re working on or how they became involved with the group, and look for opportunities to help before asking for anything yourself.

Then come back, because the second time you walk into the room there will be one person you know, and after a few more visits there might be two, then five, then ten. Those small interactions build over time, and eventually you aren’t walking into a room full of strangers anymore, instead you’re walking into your community.

Design the People Around You

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to design our physical environments, but our social environment deserves the same attention. The people around us influence what we talk about, what we spend our time doing, what we believe is possible, and even what kinds of lives we imagine for ourselves, so choosing where and with whom we spend our time is one of the most powerful forms of environment design available to us.

I’m not suggesting treating relationships like productivity tools, abandoning people the moment they struggle, or surrounding yourself only with people who can do something for you. It means recognizing that the people around you help define what feels normal, while also accepting that you have some control over whose influence occupies most of your time.

There’s something powerful about being around curious people who make things, take care of themselves, and pursue things that matter to them. People who challenge you when you need it, celebrate you when you succeed, and care enough to tell you the truth instead of simply telling you what you want to hear.

Just as importantly, you’re part of that environment too. A great social circle is always changing, and while the people around you inevitably shape who you become, your presence is also helping shape what that circle becomes next.

In the end, willpower alone isn’t enough. Every environment you inhabit is either making your desired behaviors easier or making them harder. You can design a life that naturally pulls you toward the person you want to become, and the people you share that life with are one of the most important parts of that design.

You can see a full playthrough of the game here. If you want to be one of the first to get the game, there’s less than one week left to back it on Gamefound! You can also read a deep dive into the mechanics in my design diary updates on Gamefound.

The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™

We launched Ascension at Gen Con 16 years ago, and it was such a joy to come back, interact with fans, show off the game, and even hang out with Tom Bombadil!

But Gen Con is also one of the few times each year that I set aside to play new games and see what mechanics are out there. I wanted to write a quick review of the games I played and break down the interesting mechanics behind each one. These games aren’t necessarily new this year at Gen Con, but they were new to me, and some of them are quite innovative.

Spoiler alert: I saved a sleeper hit for last!

Wingspan Pocket

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/473508/wingspan-pocket

This new entry from Elizabeth Hargrave is my new go-to version of Wingspan. We talked about Wingspan on the last podcast episode I recorded with Elizabeth, and the game has been a massive hit, spawning numerous expansions and variants. But Wingspan Pocket does what few games have done well: it translates the emotional core of a medium-to-heavy game into a bite-sized version.

Wingspan Pocket uses the backs of cards to represent the food types and resources needed to play your birds, while tucked cards represent bonus points. A simple reserve-row and active-row system lets you acquire birds, resources, and eggs before building an active row of up to six birds, triggering the engine-building abilities that make the game what it is.

Each turn presents a meaningful but simple choice: draft two resources or birds, play a bird by paying its cost, or lay up to three eggs, followed by triggering any active bird powers. Once someone plays their sixth bird, the game ends at the conclusion of the round after all players have had an equal number of turns. You earn victory points for birds played, cards tucked beneath birds, and optional goal cards. There’s also a solo mode that I haven’t tried yet.

In the spirit of games like San Juan and Monopoly Deal, this is a hit for players looking for smaller, portable games that pack the strategic and emotional punch of their larger counterparts. It’s an excellent example of a designer who truly understands the core tension of her game and can present it in a much more compact package.

Think Like A Game Designer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Winterhaven Woods

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/339302/winterhaven-woods

This game has a beautiful minimalist forest theme and a simple draft-and-play mechanic similar to games like Sushi Go! and my own game Dungeon Draft. The theme and mechanics, however, are a bit of a mismatch for me.

You draft predators, herbivores, and trees, then place them in one of your three woodland spaces or out in the open meadow. The scoring system for these different animals and plants, however, felt a bit convoluted. For example, wolves can hunt animals in your meadow or in other players’ meadows. They must hunt in sets of three, they can only hunt unprotected animals, and there’s a timing system based on the moon phase shown on the cards that determines which player hunts first.

It’s a medium-weight scoring system layered on top of a lightweight theme and drafting mechanism. The game is decent, but I felt the scoring complexity didn’t earn its keep relative to the gameplay value. For a lightweight drafting game, I’d rather play Sushi Go!; for something heavier, 7 Wonders or Dungeon Draft pack more bang for the buck (no pun intended in a game about hunting).

Time Breaker

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220234/time-breaker

This Looney Labs game fulfills the promise of being simple and cute while staying true to the company’s brand (congratulations to the Looneys on celebrating 30 years of publishing!).

You play as time cops hunting a time bandit on a randomized board made up of different time tiles, each of which allows you to “jump” to another tile. On your turn, you either move through one of these portals or play a card from your hand to move yourself or the time bandit. If you’re in the same space as the time bandit, you arrest him and he moves with you until another player arrests him or a card causes him to change locations.

My only complaint is that the board contains a lot of numbers, with each tile listing a “Travel From Time,” “Current Time,” and “Travel To Time,” making the paths a bit difficult to follow. Other than that, it’s a simple, cute, lightweight game.

Chrononauts is another time-themed game from Looney Labs that I highly recommend. You set up the board using the current timeline of historical events and receive a secret objective from an alternate future that requires changing history to match your timeline. You create paradoxes and play alternate-history cards until one player wins, or until too many paradoxes are created and everyone loses. If you haven’t played Chrononauts, you should.

Playthings

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/449930/playthings

I technically didn’t play this one myself, but I watched it being played, and it may have been the most innovative game I saw at Gen Con.

Players alternate taking on the role of the “Night Terror,” hiding the toys of the other players while everyone else closes their eyes. The unique mechanic is that players physically sense what happens as the Night Terror drops toys and bells onto the playmat, with different senses activated depending on the situation (for example, placing fingers underneath the mat as toys are dropped).

I have no idea whether the game is actually good, but I love seeing this kind of innovation and clever use of different senses to bring a game to life!

Tag Team

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/434906/tag-team

Many designers I know are trying to capture the mechanics of autobattlers (popular digital games such as Teamfight Tactics) in a tabletop format. Autobattlers are defined by a drafting phase followed by automatic combat resolution. Tag Team combines this idea with deckbuilding in a way that feels interesting and unique.

You pick two fighters to form your starting deck and determine the order of the cards. During combat, the cards flip in that predefined order against your opponent to resolve the round. Then you draft another card from your reserve and add it to your deck, but you can’t reorder it. Only by inserting the new card into a specific position can you shift the battle in your favor, taking into account what you just learned about your opponent’s deck.

The variety created by the “pick two” team-building system leads to interesting combinations, and the restrictions on deck order make every decision meaningful. I’ll need to play this game more to see how well it holds up over repeated plays, but after just one game it accomplished what every game should: it made me want to play again.

Nocturian

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/264925/nocturion

This was the sleeper hit for me. I had never heard of the game or the company behind it, but the layout and presentation immediately caught my eye.

Nocturian is a worker-placement game in which each round begins with a die roll. The available dice determine which action spaces can be selected that round, dramatically shifting the strategy from turn to turn. There’s also an innovative timing mechanism, with a tracker in the center of the board that advances by different amounts depending on which resources players choose to collect. As the tracker moves, it both replenishes depleted resources and changes which side of the board offers double resources that turn. Once the tracker completes a certain number of laps around the board (depending on player count), the game ends.

The game offers a relatively familiar system of gathering resources and spending them on quests and abilities that earn victory points, but everything comes together in a satisfying package that plays in under an hour. Nocturian is a great example of a game that introduces a few fresh ideas (dice-driven worker placement and an innovative timing mechanism) while otherwise executing the fundamentals extremely well.

This was the only game I absolutely had to play a second time at Gen Con, and one of only two (Wingspan Pocket was the other) that will stay in my collection for a long time!

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About Chad Ellis

Chad Ellis is a game enthusiast, strategist, and designer with an incredible range of experience across competitive tabletop, corporate leadership, and live reality gaming. Chad started his game publishing career partnering with Rob Dougherty under the Your Move Games brand, releasing innovative designs like Battleground Fantasy Warfare: a clever system that compressed large-scale miniature wargaming down into card sets. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and has held executive leadership positions across a wide range of organizations, from small startups to global giants like Siemens. Today, Chad is the founder and operator of Boda Borg Boston, a massive 30,000-square-foot reality gaming center featuring 24 distinct, physical “Quests” that challenge teams mentally and physically. His tabletop roots run deep, from playing on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour alongside the legendary Your Move Games testing group, to competitive chess, to running an epic D&D campaign for his kids. Chad also writes a political Substack titled Letters to my Uncles at happygeekchad.substack.com.

Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

• Mutual Teacher/Student Relationships: The secret to building an elite playtesting group or an incredible business partnership is surrounding yourself with people where you are both a teacher and a student at the exact same time. Zero ego with a radical willingness to share and learn. When we were coming up in the Your Move Games house back in the day, nobody cared who had the higher Pro Tour finish, everyone listened, everyone pushed each other, and everyone grew together.

• Bad Clients Drive Out Good Clients: Bad clients will drive out good clients every single time if you let them. If you dilute your messaging trying to appeal to everyone, you end up captivating no one. Nobody gets to unilaterally decide who loves their game; it’s a designer’s job is to get out there, test with different groups, and discover who it actually resonates with.

• Test a Hypothesis, Don’t Just Test: Don’t just run blind playtests hoping to stumble on feedback, instead test a very specific hypothesis. You need to know exactly how every single test converts into actionable data, and more importantly, you have to possess the discipline to change when the the data proves you wrong.

• Frictionless Hook Points: Identify your game’s exact hook point, which is the precise moment where a player’s eyes light up and they go, “Oh wow, I get it”. Once you know where that moment lives, your entire design goal is to ruthlessly strip away every single ounce of friction between a person sitting down and experiencing that spark.

• Negotiation as a Co-op Game: Negotiation isn’t a zero-sum, competitive battle where one person wins and the other loses—it’s a co-op game. When you shift the conversation away from rigid positions and demands toward underlying interests, you stop fighting over slices and start expanding the size of the pie so everybody walks away winning.

Show Notes

“I think what got us was we never got the retail stores to see us as an ally because for them there was this fear that if I hook a miniature player on Battleground, I’m gonna stop selling him super expensive miniatures and start selling him decks of cards. And so they had to believe that this was gonna be an and rather than an or.” (00:20:41)

Chad gives us a crucial lesson on distributor and retail psychology. When he created Battleground Fantasy Warfare, he knew he had a brilliant system that solved the setup and portability issues of miniature games, but local game stores saw it as a threat to their high-margin miniature sales rather than an additive entry point. If your product relies on a middleman, you can’t just convince the end consumer—you have to design a narrative that proves to the retailer that your product expands their pie rather than cannibalizing it.

“In most deals people are gonna say, ‘Here’s an amount that I want,’ or ‘a term that I want.’ And getting them to think, okay, let’s set aside the demands. Let’s decide the positions that we’re going for. What are the goals? What are the interests? What do you want to have?” (00:39:41)

This is straight from Chad’s Harvard Business background. When negotiations stall, it’s almost always because both sides are digging their heels into rigid positions and demands. The moment you step back and ask “Why do you want that?”, you unlock the underlying interests. Once you understand what someone actually cares about (whether it’s timing, creative freedom, or risk mitigation) you can craft creative structures that deliver on their real goals while still protecting your own.

“When you go into one of [Boda Borg’s] challenges, you don’t know what your objective is, you don’t know what you’re not allowed to do, but if anybody breaks the rules, the team fails. And from the moment you open the door to a challenge, you’ve got two minutes or less before you run out of time.” (00:44:46)

In live reality gaming, designing for immediate failure is actually the key to fun. Traditional escape rooms design around success, guiding players toward a close finish with hints. Boda Borg reverses this by dropping players into a room with zero instructions and a tight two-minute clock. By turning failure into an instant, low-stakes reset loop, players instantly engage in rapid hypothesis testing, communication, and iteration.

“When we’re designing, we know that not everybody is gonna love every quest” (00:58:34)

When you build a multi-game ecosystem or an interactive space like Boda Borg, stop trying to make every single attraction appeal to every single visitor. Some players want intense physical Ninja Warrior challenges; others want to sit in a room for 20 hours solving a complex logic puzzle like Boda Borg’s Potions quest. Design a diverse portfolio of experiences so different player archetypes can choose their own adventure and still leave completely thrilled.

You can find Think Like a Game Designer on these platforms:

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About Luke Peterschmidt

Luke Peterschmidt is a brilliant leader in the tabletop gaming industry who currently serves as the Head of Active Category Management at Asmodee. In this uniquely structured role, Luke has been managing the legendary The Lord of the Rings™ portfolio. Right now, I am incredibly lucky to be working directly with him as we partner up to launch The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™ on Gamefound this July 14th, 2026. Luke and I have a long history of debating, discussing, and collaborating on projects across the industry, such as Bakugan. In this episode, we unpack the massive operational challenges of stewarding a world as foundational as Middle-earth, how to lead high-performing teams by getting completely out of their way, and how our creative roles must evolve as we scale up our careers. Plus, if you are catching this as it drops, Luke and I are hitting the stage together for a couple of panels at San Diego Comic-Con 2026!

Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

• The Pressure of Caring a Lot: Nobody wants to be the designer who goes down in history as the one who botched a legendary world like The Lord of the Rings™. Every single designer who touches an intellectual property of this magnitude feels that exact same weight. Creating inside a universe you personally worship is an unbelievable mix of intense excitement and raw terror, and it leads to a lot of sleepless nights trying to make something great. At the same time, that fear is a feature, not a bug. You want to hunt for the specific creative projects that scare you just enough to force you out of your comfort zone and push you to build a masterpiece.

• Strategy is Saying No to Easy Money: True corporate or creative strategy has absolutely nothing to do with hitting a random quarterly budget number; it’s about having the discipline to turn down fast cash if it derails your ultimate vision. You have to define a strategic roadmap so crystal-clear that anyone on your team can look you in the eye, throw your own words back in your face, and tell you “no” and you have to completely agree with them. If a quick, short-term win pulls your focus away from your long-term destination, you have to let it go.

• Look for Strengths, Not Weaknesses: We waste way too much mental energy trying to patch up our minor flaws instead of ruthlessly exploiting our core superpowers. In game design, a product with a few visible imperfections but a mind-blowing, uniquely memorable hook is infinitely better than a perfectly polished, completely smooth pearl that has absolutely nothing special to say. The exact same rule applies to your life. Stop agonizing over your baseline weaknesses, and instead just build a killer team or find the right tools to handle them, and pour 100% of your focus into what makes you exceptional.

Show Notes

“Maps are really important to The Lord of the Rings. When you have a fantasy world, you draw a map and you define what’s on that map, and then with time, you define further and further down. With a science fiction property, you design a universe, and then when you wanna make new stuff, you just add a new planet further away And so you’re not forced to make a cohesive world that makes sense.” (00:06:54)

Luke points out an incredible structural distinction here between worldbuilding in fantasy versus science fiction. In sci-fi, if you need a new asset, obstacle, or story beat, you can just make up a brand-new planet out in the ether. Yet, good fantasy forces you to look at a locked map and work tightly within those fixed boundaries. It’s the exact same trap designers fall into when they think infinite rules give them freedom, the truth is that true cohesive elegance only happens when you force yourself to work inside strict constraints.

“Core values like being publisher agnostic were set in stone because rationally, no one should trust Asmodee not to just keep the best stuff for themselves, right?” (00:09:00)

I love this behind-the-scenes look at how Luke set up his entire management framework at Asmodee. When you sit at the top of a massive corporate entity, people are naturally going to assume you’re going to act purely in your own short-term interest. By explicitly baking “publisher agnosticism” directly into the operation’s foundation, Luke proved through structural actions that he was taking a long-tail macro view to scale the health of the entire brand over a decade, rather than just scrambling for a quick licensing check.

“My code is for the super fans: they’re swan feather people […] they know the feather on Tom Bombadil’s hat is a swan […] when the swan feather person speaks they’re usually right.” (00:15:15)

This is a masterclass lesson on how to treat an obsessive fandom. When you adapt a world that people have spent their entire lives studying, you have to satisfy both the casual audience and the “swan feather people” who know every granular line of the lore. If your design ignores those hyper-specific details, your core community will see right through it. Pay close attention to the micro-details that your most passionate players care about—when they call you out, listen, be humble, and get it right.

“There’s nothing better to me than leaving a team or a client when I was a consultant, and then have them just crush it going forward.” (00:48:28)

We close out with a beautiful look at what true leadership actually means as your career scales up. When you are running a business or a division, you have to let go of the narcissistic need to have your personal finger on every single trophy or scoring play. Your ultimate value as a leader or an executive isn’t the work you execute directly; it’s the ripple effects of the teams you build, empower, and leave behind to crush the goals without you.

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“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” — Bruce Lee

Have you ever noticed how much you can learn about someone from which store they obsess over? We are defined by what we consume. As a wide-eyed child, I would dart through the aisles of Toys R Us, my heart racing with each new discovery. I jumped for joy when I got my first Optimus Prime or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Pizza Thrower vehicle (with real pizza-tossing action)!

As the years passed, my obsessions evolved. The bright colors and plastic figurines of the toy store gave way to the sleek gadgets and cutting-edge technology of Best Buy. I found myself entranced by the latest computers, gaming systems, and big-screen TVs, each one promising an immersive escape into digital worlds. I geeked out over specs and features, dreaming of the ultimate gaming setup with mind-blowing graphics and heart-pounding surround sound.

At some point, the store I got most excited about was the office supply store. My eyes lit up as I walked in. I envisioned the perfect workspace, one that would liberate me from clutter and anxiety. The feel of a perfectly-balanced ballpoint pen would inspire me to write something brilliant. I was sure of it. The smell of a leather organizer holding a fresh notepad would lend gravitas as I captured critical notes in a meeting. The Zen beauty of the perfect desk organizer would mirror my soul as everything was nestled in its proper place.

If you haven’t realized how nerdy I am by this point, you have now. I was obsessed. I couldn’t rest until I had the perfect tools.

Obsession, when harnessed properly, is the engine behind meaningful achievement. It will push you past obstacles and roadblocks and the inevitable losses life throws at you.

My obsession with productivity artifacts led directly to writing this substack. My hunt for the perfect set of tools was never satisfied. Searching for the ultimate journal became a particular fixation. I wanted a journal I could easily carry with me, that would lay open perfectly on my desk, and would have just enough direction to keep me organized while giving me room to be creative.

I couldn’t find it. Some wouldn’t lay open right. Others were too bulky. Most had subsections and labels that made no sense to me. I started creating my own journal using a rubber band and note cards. Each day, I jotted down my three most important tasks for the day, listed my three core habits, and wrote three things I was grateful for. The three-by-five note cards fit in my pocket perfectly and easily laid flat on a desk.

I continued to refine my note cards until I eventually transformed them into the Level Up Journal, which included early versions of many of the principles I write about here. Feedback from the thousands of readers who used the journal helped me to refine the principles and make them more useful to a wide range of people. By leveraging my own peculiar obsession, I transformed my passion for productivity and my annoying tool search into a creative mission. The recipe of “scratching your own itch” and diving deeply into the details of your obsessions shaped some of the most iconic products in the world and it is a strategy you can use too.

Steve Jobs embodied obsession as a superpower. When developing the first Macintosh, he insisted the computer greet users with a friendly face rather than a cold command line, a revolutionary concept at the time. He drove his team relentlessly toward this vision of making computers intuitive and inviting.

His perfectionism extended beyond what customers would see. Jobs demanded even the internal circuit boards be elegantly designed, telling his team that true artistry meant caring about parts no one would ever look at. “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers,” he would say, “you’re not going to use plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall.”

This obsessive attention to detail shaped everything he touched. His product keynotes became legendary performances that he would spend weeks rehearsing down to the minute. When creating the iPhone, he rejected dozens of prototypes until his vision of a true pocket computer was realized, ultimately transforming the entire mobile industry.

While others scattered their attention, he channeled all his energy into the most important, transformative work he could do. He spent time on minutiae, because when you are working on the right things, it’s the minutiae that matters. What Jobs understood is that how you spend your attention is how you spend your life. Every choice about where to focus is also a choice about what you love enough to give your limited time to.

You don’t need to be Steve Jobs to harness this power. To cultivate a healthy obsession, we need to be clear about what is worth obsessing over and what gets in the way.

In our modern world, distractions wage a constant war for our focus. Advertisements, social media notifications, emails and cat videos fragment our attention into a thousand pieces. We bounce from task to task, never fully present, never diving deep.

The result? Our ability to focus on what matters has grown weak, like a muscle that’s atrophied from lack of use. To do truly meaningful work, we find projects worthy of deep, sustained attention. Once we have that clarity, focus will follow.

And there’s nothing like death to provide that clarity.

The Clarity of the Grave

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” -Steve Jobs

In any game, knowing the timer is running out changes how you play. Life works the same way. Most people would rather not look at the clock. But ignoring your mortality doesn’t make you live longer. It just makes you live less.

We waste our lives distracted by minutiae. We wander through the world in a waking trance of consuming, posturing, and numbing. The recent death of my good friend Alex (which I wrote more about here), brought this insight front and center for me. Don’t wait until you’re on your deathbed to realize your life was spent poorly.

Exercise—Write Your Eulogy

This exercise transformed my life when I first did it twenty years ago. It helps cultivate a healthy awareness of mortality and separate the trivial from the triumphant.

Imagine your funeral, many years from now. You lived your dream life and now get to watch people eulogize you. Take a moment to picture it. Where are you? Who is there? What are they saying? Are you praised as a loving partner, parent, or friend? Did you inspire others or accomplish great deeds? Were you known in your community for being charitable and good? Let the scene come to life before you start writing.

Now write the eulogy. Spend ten to fifteen minutes writing from the perspective of someone who loved you deeply: a partner, a child, a lifelong friend. Write about the legacy you want to leave, not the titles you held or the money you made. Focus on impact, relationships, and how you made people feel. What stories will they tell? What did they learn from you? What were your defining qualities?

When you are done, sit with what you wrote and ask yourself three questions:

1. Will the path I am on today lead to the life described in that eulogy?

2. What do I need to focus on now to close the gap?

3. What distractions or trivial concerns can I let go of starting today?

When thinking through the path you are on today, if it does not align with the vision of your ideal eulogy, imagine the worst case scenario outcomes of continuing on your current path. Imagine the lost opportunity and regret you might have. Only then, come back to the present, and imagine that though you lived your life incorrectly the first time around, you have been given a second chance to make things right. Answer questions two and three from that frame.

The Eulogy exercise helps you transform your passions into the type of focus needed to achieve great things in any field.

Identify the path you want to be on.

Maintain your focus relentlessly on that path.

Remove everything else that gets in the way.

Our attention will get spent one way or another. You now have a picture of what your life can be if you obsessively point it at the things that matter. The only question left is whether you are willing to aim it there now, while you still have time.

About Ben Seck

Ben Seck is an absolute titan of global game development and competitive play whose career path is a masterclass in strategic execution. Ben and I go back nearly 30 years to our early days on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour circuit, where he won a Grand Prix in Cape Town and scored a Pro Tour top eight. Unlike most of our old-school peers, Ben is still actively crushing tournaments competitively today. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the R&D trenches at Upper Deck Entertainment during the wild-west era of the Vs System card game, both eventually shifting from pure game design into brand and product management. While I left to bootstrap Stone Blade, Ben strategically expanded his toolkit by jumping into the digital free-to-play explosion at Zynga. Since then, he has served as a senior leader and executive at some of the biggest entertainment powerhouses on earth (including Walt Disney, King, and Scopely) and is currently the Head of New Games at Gram Games in London. He has managed teams of hundreds and launched massive digital projects played by tens of millions of users globally. In this episode, we break down how to treat your creative career like a game you intend to win, the massive structural differences between tabletop and digital monetization, and what real leadership looks like when you’re managing massive teams across corporate environments.

If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.

Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

• How to "Game" Your Career: To game your career, you have to be completely at peace with the fact that games are a commercial art form where understanding how to sell your product is a vital piece of the puzzle. Don't let yourself get stuck in a comfortable routine . Push your boundaries by chasing high-growth markets, and whenever you hit a gap in your knowledge, relentlessly ask questions and learn on someone else's dime.
  Ben and I took completely different paths (him in corporate mobile and me bootstrapping an indie studio) but we both used calculated risks to minimize dead draws and massively increase our surface area for positive luck. Ultimately, the true metric of success isn't a fancy corporate title; it's whether you effortlessly get out of bed because you're genuinely excited about the work you get to do.

• The Lifespan and Cadence of Digital Complexity: A massive misconception in tabletop circles is that free-to-play mobile titles are inherently “simple” games. The reality is that digital titles don’t have less complexity; they just allocate their complexity points across a much longer timeline. Up front, your onboarding funnel is brutally tight, and if you don’t hook a casual player in the first two minutes, they delete the app forever. That said, once a user is plays regularly after a month or two, their tolerance for systemic depth sky-rockets. The secret is using universal themes and recognizable cultural tropes as an anchor so players get systems for free, allowing you to steadily layer in immense complexity over years without alienating your audience.

• Culture Over Hierarchy: Leading teams at scale, whether it’s an intimate indie squad or a studio of 170 people, means abandoning rigid, top-down corporate hierarchies. Especially in a hybrid work environment, a leader’s primary job is to intentionally construct a culture that keeps people from hiding in their silos. You want to explicitly carve out unstructured whiteboarding spaces on Zoom or over office lunches to protect that organic, big-brain creative spark which calendars can kill. Your team needs to see through your consistent, daily actions that you will fiercely advocate for their interests and back them up when decisions are made behind closed doors.

Show Notes

“You’ll do the thing you do better if you know how the people around you are also contributing to your thing.” (00:27:00)

Ben pulls back the curtain on why working in isolated corporate silos completely kills great product design. When we were back at Upper Deck, the R&D team was fundamentally disconnected from the realities of manufacturing, performance marketing, and our actual consumer base. We designed brilliant, hyper-tactical games that were perfect for pro card players like us, but we completely alienated the casual kid walking into a comic shop who just wanted to play with Batman. If you want to scale up, you have to regularly audit every department around you. Understanding how engineering, data analysis, and user acquisition interface with your mechanics is the only way to transform a niche passion project into a massive commercial engine.

“I don’t think a lot of game makers go through that process of ‘Is my game livable?’ As in, can I live with it? Do I have a lifestyle that matches the game?” (00:54:40)

This is an incredible lens for evaluating market research and player mechanics. Whether you’re launching a mobile app or shipping an $80 big-box tabletop board game, you have to design for the actual, granular lifestyle cadence of your target demographic. Early resource-management games bombed completely because they forced players to wait exactly one hour for an action loop to refresh, which is a timing window that doesn’t match any natural human routine. You have to personify your users and align your loops with the natural transition points of their day like waiting in line for a morning coffee, scrolling during a lunch break, or relaxing right before bed. Your design must be livable, or your players will opt out.

“I think you get this little bit of personal echo chamber. I’ve been successful, and sometimes you get there via attrition or sometimes you just it’s licked the correct boot.” (01:08:14)

Corporate environments are absolutely packed with people who fail upwards or survive purely through compliance. Just because you found massive commercial success or made great design choices in your past does not mean your current creative instincts are infallible. As an executive or studio head, you have to actively build protective structures to ensure the quiet introverts and independent thinkers on your team have a safe channel to completely shred your baseline assumptions . If you aren’t constantly inviting your staff to call out your blind spots, your past success will eventually blind you to your future failures.

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One of the most common mistakes game designers make is thinking of art and game design as separate things. They are not.

Every visual choice, rule, component, and interaction combines to create a single experience. In Think Like a Game Designer, I talk about how a designer’s job is to create an experiences for players. Rules are simply one of the tools we use to accomplish that goal, while art is another.

At Stone Blade, we spend a lot of time thinking about how artwork can support gameplay. One of the simplest examples is faction identity in Ascension. Each faction has a distinct visual language. Lifebound cards lean into greens. Enlightened cards use blues. Void cards emphasize purples. Mechana cards feature metallic browns and golds. Monsters are predominantly red.

A player should be able to glance at the center row and immediately understand what kinds of cards are available. The art is helping teach the game. Long before a player reads the text box, the artwork is already communicat…

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About Ivan Van Norman

Ivan Van Norman is a true powerhouse of indie tabletop publishing and media innovation, bringing over 15 years of deep industry expertise to the table. Our paths cross all the way back to the very first year Gen Con introduced Entrepreneur’s Alley, where our tiny 10x10 booths were literally shoved into the back corner of the convention hall, facing a wall right next to the food court. While I was out there hawking the first print run of Ascension, Ivan was launching Hunters Entertainment. Since then, Ivan has carved out an incredible track record, serving as an executive producer and host at Geek & Sundry during the wild dawn of the web-streaming boom, helping lay the early foundational blocks for massive cultural phenomena like Critical Role, and co-owning Hunters Entertainment. He’s the publisher behind brilliant, boundary-pushing projects like the silent, text-messaging RPG Alice Is Missing. In this episode, we discuss the brutal realities of transitioning from a broke creator to a successful studio owner, how shifting mediums completely transform the mechanics of storytelling, and why your graveyard of discarded ideas is secretly your greatest design asset.

If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.

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Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

• Everybody Prepares You for Failure, Nobody Prepares You for Success: This is one of the heaviest and most accurate insights in the whole episode. When you’re an indie creator operating on a shoestring budget, you don’t answer to anyone. Yet, the absolute second you find real commercial traction, the entire game changes. Suddenly, you have a team depending on you for their livelihood and their paychecks, which turns every single creative gamble into a high-stakes business decision. You also have an audience that cares deeply your game and feels a sense of ownership of it, leading to a threat of audience capture if you cater to them in at the cost of innovation. Learning how to scale your success while fiercely protecting your original creative voice is easily the hardest evolution you have to make as a founder.

• The Medium is the Mechanic: If you want your creative stories to break through the modern cultural noise, you have to design explicitly for the technology where your audience actually lives. Felicia Day and Geek & Sundry did it by leveraging the wild west of early YouTube and Twitch to unlock long-form TTRPG streaming. Alice Is Missing did it by turning a standard smartphone group text into an intensely emotional narrative engine. During our chat, Ivan’s insights actually inspired me start work on a brand-new design concept right at the table: how to build an ultra-short-form video RPG engineered entirely for Shorts, Reels, and Twitch.

• Less Money Equals More Radical Execution: Starting out broke right out of college gives you a massive, counterintuitive edge, because without a cash cushion, you are forced into a level of radical execution you just can't fake. Ivan and I launched right in a brutal recession, building display tables out of inventory boxes and dragging ammo cans down the hot streets of Indianapolis. That said, the real secret to surviving over the long haul as a serial entrepreneur is a beautiful touch of amnesia. We are naturally wired to avoid pain, and if you perfectly remembered the bone-deep exhaustion and near-failures of a launch, you'd never take a big risk again. You need that selective memory loss to trick yourself into thinking "this next launch will be smooth" just to find the sheer audacity to stand at the starting line again. It acts as a psychological shock absorber, wiping away the baggage of past failures so you can always approach a blank sheet of paper with total confidence.

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Show Notes

“Dude, this is the first edition: handwriting font with sticky notes, with giant orphan spaces, and tape and stuff.” (00:11:12)

If you are waiting until your game looks completely flawless and polished before you put it out into the world, you are paralyzing your progress. Ivan describes his very first print run, filled with handwriting fonts and sticky notes. I teach this to my design students all the time: your first endeavor is going to have major flaws, but done is infinitely better than perfect. Stop agonizing over the paint color before you’ve even proven the foundation of your game is fun.

“No one ever thought for a minute that it was a good idea to have a four-hour long video where people are playing Dungeons & Dragons, right?” (00:27:00)

When you are trying to innovate in a brand-new space, you have to throw the traditional corporate rulebook completely out the window. Before Critical Role exploded into a massive juggernaut, there wasn’t a single traditional media executive on the planet who would look at a four-hour raw stream of people sitting around playing Dungeons & Dragons and greenlight it as a commercial home run. Yet, Ivan and the team at Geek & Sundry didn’t wait around for anyone’s permission… they just completely focused on the content they loved and trusted that the medium would find its audience. True creative breakthroughs happen when you stop trying to satisfy generic industry expectations and instead have the audacity to build a unique platform around your passions.

“People want these more condensed experiences.” (01:02:40)

The macro landscape of player attention is shifting fast right now. While massive, $100 big-box legacy games will always have a dedicated lane, the modern market is craving tight, condensed experiences you can get to the table in an hour. Players are aggressively purging their shelves because their lives are busy and choices are infinite. If you can design a game that guarantees a complete, emotionally fulfilling narrative arc within a strictly locked time limit, you unlock a massive competitive edge.

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“At the end of life, our questions are very simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?” — Jack Kornfield

Death doesn’t wait for convenient moments. I learned this week that a good friend, and icon of the gaming world, Alex Cimo (aka Cimmoooooooo) passed away. We first met during the initial reveal of my game Bakugan, where Alex was one of over a dozen VIPs flown in to get ane early preview of the game. His keen wit, insight, and charm won me over instantly. More than anyone else in the room, he understood both the nuances of design and the art of marketing and how they intertwine. Most importantly, he united it all with a genuinely good soul, using his keen strategic mind to grow not only his own brand but to help everyone in his community. We collaborated on some fun projects, including a hexagon cage match watched by over 500K people.

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About Zvi

My history with Zvi Mowshowitz goes back over 20 years to our days as teammates on the Magic Pro Tour, where we won a Grand Prix and top-8ed a Pro Tour together. After his competitive gaming career and a stint designing games at Wizards of the Coast and heading up a Cyberpunk TCG design team in Denver, Zvi took his unique systems-thinking mind into high-stakes finance. He managed risk as a professional bookmaker in sports betting, traded crypto for a hedge fund, and worked quantitative trading desks at firms like Jane Street. Today, he’s focused his incredible intellect on the world of artificial intelligence, writing five times a week at his blog, Don’t Worry About the Vase, tracking the breakneck evolution of large language models and the critical safety challenge of AI alignment. In this episode, we dive deep into the math of pattern recognition, our wild days on the Pro Tour, the high-stress realities of trading, and how to navigate the massive societal shifts coming with AI. Zvi delivers insights on rationality and adaptability that will resonate with anyone trying to think clearly in a rapidly changing world.

Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

• Adaptability is Everything: From knowing exactly what resource matters turn to turn in a high-level game of Magic, to jumping into a wildly shifting crypto market or predicting the future of AI, your ability to adapt is what keeps you alive. Zvi and I spent countless hours grinding out reps on ugly, old-school software back in the day just to build that baseline pattern recognition. The world changes fast, but if you put in the reps and learn to spot macro patterns early, you build a mental toolkit that allows you to pivot beautifully across any industry.

• Someone Out There is Working Harder Than You: Zvi and I spent some time talking about Zvi’s old teammate, and argugably the best Magic player in history, the legendary Kai Budde—who sadly passed away recently. At one point, Kai actually left his testing group because he felt Zvi wasn’t working hard enough to win. It was a massive reality check. People look at the best of the best and assume they are just innate geniuses making it look effortless, but the truth is Kai was just insanely, relentlessly prepared. There is absolutely no substitute for putting in the time and focus. At the end of the day, luck favors the prepared.

• Physical Fitness is Mental Fitness: Zvi and I shared the hilarious story of his emergency makeover at Pro Tour New York, but it points to a much deeper truth about functional health. Back in our peak Pro Tour days, neither of us was taking care of our bodies, and it actively cost us mental acuity and late-day stamina. When you treat health like an afterthought, you are severely throttling your brain power. Look, you don’t need a crazy, hyper-optimized workout routine to see the benefits—the 80/20 rule here is just doing something reasonable consistently. Every ounce of energy you invest in your physical foundation pays out a return in raw focus and quality of life.

If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.

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“You need a really good partner like someone who’s really game... We could literally spend two hours and then two hours more.” (00:04:22)

Zvi zeroes in on something I've felt my entire career: you absolutely need elite creative collaborators who share your unique mental wavelength and can thrive in the middle of a heavy grind. High-level progression is never a solo sport. It completely relies on having a reliable sparring partner who can ruthlessly stress-test your logic and call out your biases without friction. If you want to achieve exceptional breakthrough velocity in your work, stop trying to do it all in a vacuum and focus heavily on finding your specific "lab partner".

“The reason why Emergence didn’t work... was we didn’t have the retention. We couldn’t keep an initial player who signed up coming back for that second day... we didn’t have our outer loop of, like, reasons to reward you playing more games set up properly.” (00:13:20)

This is a killer, honest look at the commercial failure of Zvi’s game, Emergence. It’s an incredibly easy trap for developers to hyper-focus on building deep, beautifully complex inner mechanics while completely ignoring the outer loops. Look, if your onboarding process doesn't visually reward players or establish clear progression hooks right off the bat, they are going to churn long before they ever get a chance to discover your game’s deeper strategic beauty.

“Then every individual game is completely random what happens but over time there's so many different games that the truth wins out. You get rewarded, you get justice.” (01:10:10)

Reflecting on his five years managing risk against the sharpest players and market forces on the planet, Zvi hits on a massive mathematical truth: you have to trust the law of large numbers. Sure, in the short term, local variance can deal devastating, brutal blowouts that make no sense. But if your fundamental statistical edge is secure and you consistently execute your rules without burning out mentally, the macro reality eventually takes over and justice is served. Stop obsessing over immediate, erratic data points and focus your energy exclusively on long-tail expected value.

"Elias Yudkowsky was one of the first people to understand the problem that was coming, and his response to the problem was I need to teach people what I call the art of rationality... because if they don't think better, they won't be able to understand the AI situation..." (01:39:16)

We close out the episode with a vital reality check on surviving the oncoming AI tidal wave. In a world that is accelerating way faster than traditional regulation can handle, relying on simple binary thinking, panic, or surface-level political soundbites is a surefire recipe for disaster. Surviving and adapting to this future means you have to train your own mind for objective, systems-level logic, learn to model dynamic incentives clearly, and practice absolute intellectual clarity.

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A few weeks ago, my team and I sat down to playtest a cooperative mode for our upcoming The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™ game. On paper, the setup is a natural fit. You and your friends play as members of the Fellowship. Each player has goals tied to their character, and the Fellowship must complete a certain number of goals to win. Meanwhile, Frodo carries the One Ring and steadily accumulates Corruption. If Frodo falls, everyone loses.

The first session was fun. The second session was fun. Then one of my more blunt playtesters said the quiet part out loud.

“What is my presence here actually doing to change the game compared to just one person manually running an extra position?”

That’s the question that haunts every cooperative game designer. And the honest answer, in most cases, is “not much.”

The Quarterback Problem

In game design, we call this “quarterbacking.” One dominant player at the table figures out the optimal play and starts directing everyone else. “You should buy that car…

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About Nate Heiss

Nate Heiss is a true game design chameleon. His 25-plus year career spans from competitive Magic: The Gathering play to designing iconic cards like Goblin Guide at Wizards of the Coast. He then took those skills into the AAA video game world, working as a designer and creative director at studios like Warner Brothers and PopCap on massive mobile hits like Plants vs. Zombies Heroes. Nate and I have been geeking out about game design since we met on the Magic Pro Tour in the late 90s, and now we’re finally teaming up on Gundam Assemble, an upcoming tabletop skirmish miniatures game. In this episode, we dive deep into the differences between physical and digital design, the ethics and realities of free-to-play business models, and how to capture the elusive magic of discovery in an internet age. Nate delivers profound insights that will resonate with anyone building games or trying to navigate a creative career.

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Justin’s Ah-Ha! Moments

• The Shift From Player to Designer Mindset: Nate and I discuss a classic trap many pro players fall into when they start designing: trying to "beat" the players. It's easy to bring a competitive ego into R&D and focus on squashing dominant strategies to prove how smart you are. But great design isn't about winning; it's about crafting a fun experience. Once you soften that competitive edge, you realize your true goal is to empower players to make their own discoveries.

• The Economics of Free-to-Play Dictate Design: We tackle the controversial topic of free-to-play games. Nate points out that companies succeeding in this space aren't necessarily making "better" games; they are mastering live service and content costs. If a studio can "turn the crank" and produce engaging content at a fraction of the cost, they gain a massive competitive advantage. It shifts the design problem from just making an great game (which is table stakes) to efficiently delivering ongoing value over time.

• Roguelikes are the Modern Gold Rush: I've always wanted to recreate the feeling of opening an early Magic pack—when nobody knew the optimal strategies and everything felt like an untamed frontier. Nate brilliantly identifies that roguelikes are where this feeling lives today. By taking a core loop and exploding it into a massive, randomized possibility space on every run, roguelikes force players to adapt and experiment, capturing that communal feeling of discovery over and over again.

If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.

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Show Notes

“So anything was possible back then and nobody knew anything. And so it was kind of like the gold rush, right?” (00:08:24)

Nate and I reminisce about the early days of competitive Magic: The Gathering and how the lack of internet information created an virtually forgotten sense of discovery.

Today, games are often “solved” within weeks of release. The lesson for modern designers is to figure out mechanical ways (like roguelike systems or heavily constrained drafting) to artificially recreate that “gold rush” feeling so players can still experience the joy of uncovering something unknown.

“I think running a business or diving into the arena with a thousand other competitors, you have to be kind of crazy. It doesn’t work otherwise.” (00:23:45)

We discuss the sheer hubris required to launch a new game or company in a saturated market. Nate highlights that this “craziness” isn’t a flaw; it’s a vital feature. You need an almost irrational level of confidence to throw caution to the wind and push a project forward. Those who maintain a positive attitude and aggressively take calculated risks generally have a much higher success rate than those who get paralyzed by negativity or extreme caution.

“Those are the companies that end up succeeding more not necessarily because their game is better but because they can turn the crank more at a cheaper cost” (00:49:59)

Nate gives a stark look at the reality of free-to-play mobile games. While designers want to focus entirely on making the most fun game possible, live-service success often comes down to product management and content pipelines. If a studio can create content efficiently and cheaply, they can outlast competitors with better gameplay but higher overhead. It’s a sobering but essential lesson: your business model and your production costs are just as critical to your game’s survival as your core mechanics.

“So I think that the important thing is to get the unfun complexity out of the way.” (01:17:57)

Nate breaks down a core philosophy my company is applying to Gundam Assemble. It is easy for designers to add intricate abilities that look great on paper but ultimately just make a player’s brain hurt at the table. Good development means relentlessly stripping away mechanics that cause frustrating, feel-bad moments. When you clear out the clunky upkeep and “gotcha” mechanics, the game feels smoother and players can focus entirely on the fun combinatorics of building their teams.

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Fifteen years ago I sold the first copy of Ascension. Eighteen months before that, I quit my dream job as game designer for Upper Deck Entertainment. I’d recently finished the World of Warcraft Miniatures game, a huge project that took me three years to bring to life. I spent countless late nights trapped at first in a tiny grey cubicle, and eventually, in a windowless grey office. At the time, getting that office was a big deal, but I think back to the white walls and generic office cabinets now with a sense of wonder that this self-imposed prison was considered a prize at the time.

I walked out of Upper Deck’s lobby, a huge place covered with expensive sports memorabilia, thinking: am I making the right choice? Filled with fear and doubt, I chose to take fate into my own hands.

• My goal: create something awesome.

• My problem: I had no idea…

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About Mark

Mark Rosewater is the Head Designer for Magic: The Gathering and one of the most influential voices in modern game design. With decades of experience shaping one of the most successful and enduring games in the world, Mark has led the design of countless sets and pioneered many of the systems that define Magic today. Known for his deep understanding of player psychology and his ability to translate complex ideas into elegant design, Mark has spent his career exploring what makes games resonate on an emotional level. In this episode, he shares hard-earned lessons about creativity, audience connection, and why great design starts with how you want players to feel.

• Check out Mood Swings, a new game by Mark Rosewater

• Making Magic

• Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

• Mark Rosewater Tumblr

• Mark Rosewater Bsky

Justin’s Ah-Ha! Moments

Why You Should Fear Indifference More Than Criticism: Strong negative reactions mean people care about your game. Indifference means it didn’t land at all. The best games spark emotion, even when that emotion is mixed or uncomfortable.

The Real Goal of Game Design Is Emotional Impact: Mechanics are only a means to an end. What players remember is how the game made them feel: tension, excitement, surprise, or triumph. The most effective designs start with the emotional experience and use mechanics to deliver it.

Why Complexity Can Be a Strength When Used Correctly: Magic: The Gathering continues to grow as a game because of its depth and the space it offers for expansion. Yet the secret to a complex game is that it still needs enough clarity for new players to enter. When creating a game with complexity, the goal is to preserve what makes your game compelling while making it accessible.

Show Notes

“Good design is all about making wrong choices.” (00:11:17)

Becoming a great designer requires exploring, testing, and discovering what doesn’t work. Every wrong choice teaches you something. The faster you’re willing to be decisive and commit to your ideas, the faster you get to something that actually works. Don’t hesitate—commit and learn from it.

“The data is so essential.” (00:20:50)

Mark explains how much of Magic’s success comes from constantly listening to players and analyzing behavior. There’s no shortage of data (playtests, player feedback, sales trends, format popularity) but the challenge is knowing what to do with it. He says that data is all about finding patterns and understanding what’s actually driving player behavior. Players will tell you what they like, but not always why. Part of the designer’s job is to interpret those signals and turn them into better decisions about what to build next.

“The idea essentially is can we sell somebody a basic game that is expandable if they want it to be expandable, but not if they don’t.” (00:45:52)

Here Mark is talking specifically about the structure of his new game. The goal is to create a complete experience out of the box, while still allowing for expansion over time. That’s a difficult balance. If the base game feels incomplete, casual players drop off. If expansions feel unnecessary, engaged players lose interest.

“I’ve had 28 years of iterative loops.” (01:12:33)

Mark has been revisiting Mood Swings for nearly three decades, refining and rethinking it over time. While this is an extreme version of iteration, it highlights a broader truth, which is that some ideas take years to fully realize. Sometimes the idea for a game will evolve alongside your skills and perspective. The lesson is to hold onto ideas that matter, keep testing them, and recognize that the right version may only emerge much later.

“If you can make your audience see themselves in your game, you will be very successful.” (01:30:17)

Mark and I discuss how the way a game ties to a player’s identity drives replayability. Systems like colors in Magic or classes and races in Dungeons & Dragons give players a way to express who they are through play. That sense of self-expression creates a deeper connection, turning the game into a space where players can explore different versions of themselves in a safe and meaningful way.

You can find Think Like a Game Designer on these platforms:

If you’ve ever wanted to create meaningful change in your own life but weren’t sure how to make it stick, Design Labs explores this process in depth. Through 60+ lessons, practical exercises, and a private Discord community, you’ll learn how to design systems that turn intention into action, using the same principles that shape behavior in great games.

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A two-hour meeting produced more working automation than most teams ship in a quarter.

I’ve written about the power of AI before, even though it is a controversial subject in my industry. I do this for three reasons:

1. AI is here and wishing it wasn’t doesn’t help.

2. If you aren’t using it in your day-to-day work, you won’t be prepared for what’s coming.

3. If your work happens on a computer and your company isn’t using AI, it will be eclipsed by someone who is.

Here’s the problem I kept running into with my team: everyone agreed AI was a big deal, but nobody was using it in their actual work.

The pattern was familiar. People were reading social posts showing incredible AI outputs. They were hearing predictions about a “supersonic tsunami” headed our way. They were playing with ChatGPT and occasionally asking it basic questions and getting mediocre answers. They’d show up to meetings with “have you seen what Claude can do?” energy. Then, Monday morning, they’d open the same spreadsheet they’d been maintaining by hand for three years and just… keep maintaining it by hand.

I’ve seen this before. It’s the same gap that shows up every time I put a new prototype in front of playtesters. People can tell you what a game should feel like in the abstract. Rookie designers spend weeks theorizing what their game could do. The only way to find out what the game actually is is to put it on the table and play. Until your hands are on the cards, you’re just talking.

So I stopped talking about AI and ran a hackathon instead. Two hours. The whole team. The output was embarrassing—in a good way. We shipped working automations I’d been politely asking people to build for months. We prototyped a playtesting tool that had lived in two separate quarterly plans and never became real.

Here’s the agenda, almost exactly as we ran it. Steal it.

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About Ross

Ross Thompson is a marketing strategist focused on helping tabletop games and consumer brands grow through real-world connection. A veteran of the industry with over 15 years of experience in community building, events, and marketing, he most recently served as Director of Marketing at Atomic Mass Games, where he worked on titles like Star Wars: Legion, Marvel Crisis Protocol, and Star Wars: Shatterpoint. He now serves as Media and Events Director on the board at GAMA, focusing on strengthening the industry through better events and stronger connections between creators, retailers, and players. In this episode, Ross shares practical strategies for building real-world communities, working with influencers more effectively, and finding the right retail partners to support long-term growth.

If you’ve ever had a game idea but didn’t know how to turn it into a real, playable design, my Design Labs program walks you through the entire process. With 60+ lessons, practical assignments, and a private Discord community, you’ll learn how to move from inspiration to prototype, playtesting, iteration, and publishing.

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Justin’s Ah-Ha Moments:

• The Power of Physical Gatherings: As digital spaces become more saturated and competitive, the value of real-world interaction increases. Physical events, in-store demos, and face-to-face networking create deeper trust and stronger relationships than online engagement alone. The brands that win are the ones willing to invest in showing up in person and building connections over time.

• The Best Way to Use Influencers in Marketing: The biggest audiences aren’t always the most effective. Instead of chasing large, expensive creators, focus on building relationships with influencers who genuinely connect with your product. Test broadly, pay attention to who resonates, and double down on the partnerships that create real engagement and long-term value.

• How to Target the Right Stores to Partner With: Not all retail partners are equal. The key is identifying stores that actively engage their communities and are open to collaboration. The most effective in-store marketing comes from working closely with store owners, understanding what works for their audience, and using direct feedback to refine your approach over time.

  Think Like A Game Designer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Show Notes:

“I just like bringing people together. I think it’s very fun.” (00:04:23)

We start by discussing one of Ross’s strongest skills: bringing people together. It’s a real strategic advantage, and one that’s often underestimated in the gaming world. Ross has built his career around creating spaces where people can connect, share information, and help each other move forward. In a crowded industry, the ability to gather the right people in the right room can change the trajectory of a game and even an entire company.

“I try to break up my content creator channels by different divisions.” (00:32:14)

This is one of the clearest frameworks in the episode. Ross breaks creators down by platform, audience, content, and community fit. That’s the difference between running influencer campaigns and actually building a strategy. Most people guess and hope something works, but Ross’s strategy is more intentional: you define what you’re looking for, test against it, and then build from what proves out.

“Start with what you actually want to do.” (00:57:32)

Ross starts his marketing process by mapping his ideal version of a campaign before cutting anything back. Then he works backward from cost, goals, and actual value to shape a plan that actually delivers on that vision. He says that the key is clarity first, and then the planning follows from there because when you know exactly what you’re trying to create, every decision becomes easier, like what to cut, what to keep, where to invest.

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Design Your Environment

Your environment is like a river’s current: it can either carry you toward your goals or sweep you away from them. Most of us exhaust ourselves swimming upstream, fighting our surroundings with pure willpower. But there’s a smarter way: redesign the river itself.

Designers spend a lot of time thinking about how to craft joyful and easy experiences. Think about the last time you unboxed a new iPhone. Everything from the subtle resistance of the lid to the perfect alignment of the components was designed to create a moment of delight. Now contrast that with struggling through poorly translated furniture instructions or fighting with an app that bombards you with flashing notifications. This is the difference between good and bad User Experience (UX) design—and these same principles can transform your daily life.

So, how do we define good UX design, and how can we apply it to our lives? Good UX design leads to effortless, efficient, and enjoyable experiences.

• Effortless: The path to your desired action should be obvious and friction-free.

• Efficient: Eliminate unnecessary distractions and decisions.

• Enjoyable: The experience should spark positive emotions.

In a game, designers carefully craft these experiences:

• Effortless: Clear icons and buttons make sure the most important information is easy to find.

• Efficient: Less useful information is hidden behind menus or unlocked at higher levels to avoid clutter for a new player.

• Enjoyable: Beautiful icons, art and buttons provide immediate, clear feedback when a user engages.

What would it look like to apply great UX design to life? For each goal, ask yourself how you can make it effortless, efficient, and enjoyable.

So applied to health this might be:

• Effortless: A gym bag packed and waiting by the door makes working out feel like the natural choice.

• Efficient: A kitchen stocked only with healthy foods removes the nightly battle between your goals and that bag of chips.

• Enjoyable: A fun playlist and an enjoyable warm up exercise make starting your workout pleasant.

Applied to work this might be:

• Effortless: Your top 3 goals written the night before on an index card or in the Level Up Journal, make it clear what to work on as soon as you sit down.

• Efficient: Closing all communication apps and non-essential tabs makes your most important task front and center when you start the day.

• Enjoyable: A beautiful workspace with natural light and a great cup of coffee or tea makes deep work feel like a treat rather than a chore.

Just as a well-designed game guides players naturally toward success, you can build your environment to make positive choices inevitable rather than exhausting. Think of yourself as the UX designer of your own life. Each small environmental tweak (the workout clothes laid out the night before, the fruit bowl displayed prominently on your counter, the meditation cushion placed by a sunny window) creates a path of least resistance toward your goals.

Over time, these thoughtful adjustments compound. The gym isn’t just a place you force yourself to go; it becomes a natural part of your morning routine. Healthy eating isn’t a constant battle of willpower; it’s simply what’s available. Deep work isn’t something you have to psych yourself up for; it’s what happens naturally in your carefully crafted workspace. By intentionally designing your environment, you transform the exhausting upstream swim of behavior change into a gentle downstream float toward the person you want to become.

If you’ve ever wanted to create meaningful change in your own life but weren’t sure how to make it stick, Design Labs explores this process in depth. Through 60+ lessons, practical exercises, and a private Discord community, you’ll learn how to design systems that turn intention into action, using the same principles that shape behavior in great games.

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Design Your Physical Environment

Set aside a special place, tool, and time for your most important work. Make these as appealing as possible so they draw your attention.

A comfortable chair, clean desk, and high-quality pens can all influence your psyche when it comes to creative work. I find I am much more creative when I have a leather-bound notebook and a bunch of colored pens to doodle and brainstorm with. Find tools you love to make the work more appealing.

If you want to exercise, have nice workout equipment and gear laid out ahead of time. I personally start each workout with a light five-minute stretching routine, and I listen to EDM (electronic dance music) when I’m doing cardio and heavy metal when I do resistance training.

What you take away is more important than anything you might add to your environment. Like a sculptor creating a masterpiece, your goal is to remove everything that doesn’t belong. Clear away clutter, eliminate distractions, and avoid bad habit triggers. Tell those around you when you will be in focus mode. Those snacks calling your name from the pantry? They’re setting you up for failure. (Trust me; I’ve never won a staring contest with a cookie jar.)

Design a space that makes success the path of least resistance. Ask yourself: What could I remove today to make tomorrow’s goals my default choice?

Make Small Changes Now

Start where you are. Choose one goal that matters to you right now—not next month, not next year. This week, make a strategic shift:

Next week, choose one more adjustment. Like compound interest, these small environmental tweaks accumulate into dramatic transformations. In three months, you’ll barely recognize your old habitat or the habits it used to harbor.

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I held a death grip on my seat as we jolted down the dirt road to Ensenada. Bree’s candy red Jeep bounced over each crater-sized pothole while she let out gleeful squeals, deliberately aiming for puddles that sent muddy water cascading across our windshield. White-knuckled, I forced a thin smile, trying not to envision us in some Mexican emergency room. This wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured my first volunteer trip abroad.

Just a week earlier, I’d dragged myself home from another gaming meetup, nauseous from too much pizza and beer, wondering if that was all there was to life. That night, fueled by a mix of restlessness and impulse, I signed up to build homes in Mexico. That is how, seven days later, I found myself at a group meetup in San Diego, watching a blonde fitness trainer named Bree twirl her Jeep keys and grin at her newest passenger.

As we drove, Bree radiated the kind of boundless energy you’d expect from a personal trainer and bikini model. She filled the three-hour journey w…

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