(upbeat music) - Inverse Genius presents on board games episode 541 Gaming Adventures. (upbeat music) - We are listening to on board games where game industry veterans talk about the board and card gaming hobby while exploring topics of interest to gamers, designers, and publishers. - In this episode, Eric and Bruce are joined by BGG, Jeff Anderson to talk all about board game cruises and conventions. On board games is sponsored by our amazing patrons at patreon.com/obg. Everything that comes in from a Patreon goes to cover our monthly podcasting costs, which we incredibly appreciate. Thank you so much. Now we have a merch store. If you wanted to get yourself an on board games hat or t-shirt or cool cat a gaming shirt, head on over to inversegenius.com and click on the store link. As always, we live for feedback. So email us at onboardgamesmailbag@gmail.com and go to the guild guild 325 on BGG or check us out on Facebook and Twitter, mostly Facebook at onboard games or inversegenius. And as always, please share the news of onboard games. Those you think might enjoy it. We love new listeners. Thanks. Hello and welcome to another amazing episode of onboard games. It is amazing because of our guests that we have with us today, but before we jump into that, I am your host, Eric Dewey. You can find me at ericdewey.com where the big book of everything, a book for free that you can document your life is available. So check that out. One of my, I call him a guest. He's really a host, but one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, Mr. Bruce Fog the third. Welcome, Bruce. Dr. Dewey, thank you so much once again for being honestly far too kind. Far too kind is what you are. Although I, anytime I try to do like a real geek thing, I try to use onboard games as my credibility. You're cred, you're street cred. We don't know. I'm like, no, I should get a press badge. I'm with onboard games. I'm a host. There you go. It doesn't work often, but I did try it every time and I will not be ceasing that particular plan. Fantastic. Well, speaking of someone who has some street cred, at least in the gamer world, we are joined by Mr. Jeff Anderson, Jeff of BGG and a whole bunch of other stuff. But Jeff, welcome. - Well, thank you guys. I appreciate the invites. I had to come on after all the nice things you said about me on a previous episode. - Yes. He heard the scooter reference. And if I may quote you, thumbs up, which is not what you said is implied. - No, I said I absolutely muppet identify as scooter, so I will own it. That was great. - Yeah, Jeff, a hundred percent, I can say. 'Cause like I said, I spent time with the electric mayhem. And the only way they were getting on a bus or playing at a venue was if your uncle had them. There was no other way they were doing it. (laughing) - That's right. Thanks guys, it's great to be here. - Excellent. So, Jeff, if people want to find you, where can they find you on the internet? - Well, I am on board game geek. I use her name, Captain Quicks, QWYX, you can email me, Jeff@boardgamegeek.com. I run the BGG con and BGG spring game conventions. I also run the BGG at sea gaming cruises and lots of other gaming cruises. And all of those are listed over at quicks.events. QWYX.events. That takes you to all of my variety of board gaming cruises. - Fantastic. All righty, well, before we dive into the topic of the day, Jeff, have you played anything interesting or noteworthy lately? - I have, I've played a couple of things. One brand new, in fact, it's not even out yet. One that's a few years old, but I am a recent acolyte to the cult. The, I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about two different things or one at a time. - Sure, you're the guest. You didn't get away with anything. - Well, the, so I'll just mention briefly, the old thing that I am a recent convert to is blood on the clock tower. Since we just talked about gaming cruises a couple of months ago, the pandemonium institute reached out to me through a friend to run an official clock tower cruise. And I had not even played blood on the clock tower yet. I had played a whole bunch of werewolf back in the day and kind of burned out on social deduction. And I said, well, I need to figure this game out. And I am all in. It's a ton of fun. It's the social deduction game for gamers. If you don't like social deduction, this might be the one that you will like. I will say it's still social deduction, but there's just such a fun puzzle to it. Everyone's involved, having a lot of fun. I ran it as the storyteller at least half a dozen times during BGG Spring last month and I recently started playing it online as well, getting ready for the screws next year. So that's the old, well, not old game. It's well, it's coming up on a 10 year anniversary since it was first shown, but it's been around four or five years. It really got big during the pandemic. Everybody playing through Discord. - Yeah, yeah. So one of the things I'm curious about on the cruise would be the, let's just say the quality of gameplay, the first game versus the quality of gameplay on the last game, you know what I mean? Like everyone's has been playing this game, presumably multiple times through the cruise. And so their skills are getting better, their deductions are getting better, the logic. And you know, the things that occurred at the beginning, even if they're experienced, you know, it's a different group and now you start to know the dynamics and oh, you know, Jeff's always the demon. So like, you know, that kind of stuff. - It's funny you say that I've played four games online now and I have been the demon every single time. I finally won last night or was it the night before? And I won't go into the epic story of it, but I felt pretty awesome about it. But I'm four for four as the demon online. But on the cruise, we're gonna have a ton of people that are there for, you know, playing clock tower the first time. We have a ton of people that are gonna be very experienced and Ben Burns is in the clock tower community as kind of well known as the host, the storyteller. He's gonna be on the cruise with us running games and we'll have games for beginners, games for experienced. It's so good that it's very welcoming and beginner friendly. - Yeah, awesome. Bruce, how about you? Anything new or interesting to talk about? - I have played some new games, one that is very new. I think it just came out to all Kickstarter folks and a friend of mine said, "I think you should have this game, check it out." It is charcuterie the board game. (laughs) Has that been covered on here? - Has not. - And I know it hasn't been covered on an episode that I've done. I can't remember if anybody else did it or not. - No. - I don't think so. - So here's what I'll say. It is so much more a board game than I think it has any right to be. (laughs) I did not expect this because essentially during the game, it is I pick you choose and then you're building charcuterie boards out of meats and cheese and fruits and vegetables and dips. I expected hearing all that, that there would be no game whatsoever. And what I got was, I don't know if this moment ever hit either of you, but that point where a forest, prussian and Funko like started to make games that had like the Willy Wonka theme and they started to be real games. And you were like, wait a minute, what do you mean you made a legit Euro game out of Pan Am Airlines, which has been completely defunct? How did you do it? - Yeah. - How did you take the Universal Monsters and make us another cooperative game that still works? I feel that way about charcuterie. How did you take charcuterie boards and make a half decent intro game out of them where I still very much feel like it's a game? You don't lose that. You can do such a good job. You're like, I'm not playing a gamified thing. But a lot of the decisions make sense and have meaning the way they have you lay things out on the board. The rule is essentially you're given a little charcuterie board and every piece must be touching the board and must be at least half visible. So what those two rules do in concert is make it so you have to make it look like a charcuterie board. So you actually start like fanning out cheese and fanning out meats and putting vegetables in the right places. I found it to be a real clever little game that you can show just about anybody. I have not played the advanced rules. I don't think they're probably all that advanced. But for a solid game that would be, what we would think of for a lot of board game geeks to think it was like a target game, right? The kind of game that could be in a target that you could show most people that wouldn't upset a lot of folks, that wouldn't be so many rules that people would return it, but would still be enough game that if it said Funko or Forest Prousion or something like that in the box, you wouldn't be shocked by it. That's what this feels like to me. The parts look great. It's photogenic as all get out. I played it sort of a half public thing in a sort of event with more people than you'd expect. And people were taking pictures of it because when everything's on the board, it looks real, real good. So I would say if you're, if the idea of a food-based game making a charcuterie board sounds like a thing you're interested in, I would not hesitate to give this game a try. I would say if we use the famous on board games, traffic light system, I'm gonna say yellow only because the game is all in the first couple of places seemed a little easy. So if you're looking for a brain burner about making charcuterie, maybe look to a wholly different team. But I would say more or less for me, this does exactly what it says on the 10, which is it makes a fine gamified experience out of actually making a charcuterie board, you want to take a picture of. So if you know folks that would like that theme, I think you have a fantastic game to check out here. - So I feel like there's this little mini grouping of games that are coming out that are food-related. With fancy bits, you know, you're dim sum, there's the, I can't think of some of the others off the top of my head, but there's like a sushi one and a few others, sushi both and stuff. - At the day that we went, we did a day of them. So we played this, we played Steam Up, which is the one with a little dim sum. Wait, sushi boat, which is the one with the sushi conveyor belt. All of them, I would say, I think this is the one. If you said I need one, a food-based game, this is the one that I would get of those that I think would appeal to the most people the easiest. I mean, it's also maybe the one you'd burn out on the fastest, but I don't think you buy a game like this because you plan to play it every single week in your game group. So for me of those food-based games, I love them all and I love that I can now have a food-based game night with a bunch of very legit games. All of them, I think, Sharkudori for me has been kind of the star of the show. - Awesome, excellent. Well, I brought to the table the Plum Island Horror. This was recommended to me by one of the people on the board game geek, or sorry, the Podfather Cruise. We were talking about solo games that we enjoyed. And he's like, "Have you played the Plum Island Horror?" And I had seen it, but I hadn't ever played it. It's a GMT game. The basic theme is it's zombies, monsters, horrors, they're effectively zombies. And they're coming down and you need to rescue as many people as you can and stop them from overrunning everything. So it's kind of a tower defense kind of game, but it's got its tongue really firmly planted in cheek. It's late '70s, early '80s-ish themed, just based on technology and things like that. But everything is, like I said, there's a tongue in cheek. There's a Captain America that can show up occasionally and fight some of these zombies with you. There are different factions that you can play and each faction has basically their own special abilities. You have your different people that run around. The city faction with the mayor and stuff, the trash guy is Ed Norton, the bus guy is Ralph Kramden, I mean, so that's the kind of tongue in cheek that they have in the whole game. And so, meanwhile, there's these hordes of zombies coming down, you've got civilians everywhere. And one of the things that's kind of fun is they're worth a certain amount of points, but on the back is their name. So this could be one of them is the Partridge family. One of them is a group of, I can't remember now, like they work at a gas station or something like that. So each one of these actually has a name and occasionally things come up like, oh, if one of these people has been rescued, then you can get a bonus or whatnot. But there's a lot of this kind of little story building that's in there along in the game itself. And I think it's kind of fun. Have you, have either of you seen it or played it? - I have not seen that one. - I am looking at it as we speak. - Excellent. - And what it brings to me looking at it is 1950s. See, has that like 1950s, no, I haven't played it. So I'm sure the technology is right. But the looks of it, and especially having crammed it in it. - Yes. - It looks to me very much like a pulp horror magazine from the '50s or '60s that like, you know, the kind of thing that you figure you would see like Elvira holding up in a shoot to reference an old thing in the '80s. It's sort of how it best to describe it. - And I agree with that. The only reason I bump it up a little bit is the National Guard based on the weapons they have, M16s and M60s and there's a Huey with guns on it. And that's the only thing that kind of pushes it up in the timeframe, but it really doesn't matter. You know, it's got its sort of schlocky B-movie theme and you just kind of run with it. And the game itself is kind of fun, except go ahead Bruce, did you have something? - Oh no, I was just gonna say the references are great because the fire marshal, his fire marshal bill. - Yup, and I think the mayor is the mayor from Twin Pines in Back to the Future. - Oh yeah, yeah. - I'm not sure. I think that might be Ranger Mayor barriers, but I don't know. - Mayberry, I always thought it was just an Andy Griffith reference, but who knows? - That it could be. And then Bill LaFlam as the, yeah, no, it knows exactly what it is. - Yes, that's exactly right. Now, it's a cooperative game and overall it's pretty fun. The, it's not even a hesitation. This is a GMT game. GMT tends to make war games, right? And so in the complexity scale on GMT side, it's not super complex, but you know, you're not gonna pop this route right after playing pandemic because suddenly this rule book is like four times the size. None of it is difficult, but there are exceptions. And some of these exceptions are a little annoying. Like, oh, at night, the monsters move one space more. Okay, I can see that, but you've got to remember 'cause each day is broken into morning, day and night. So each, you've got to remember, oh, now the stack of monsters moves one extra space. And so it's a lot of that kind of, that's where the complexity lies in is remembering some of the subtlety to it. But I played it twice now and I've had a lot of fun with it. You know, like I said, it stays in its lane. It knows exactly what it's doing. It does tend to feel like one or two turns before the game is over. The game is usually over, right? You've either won or you know you're going to win or you've lost, but those last few turns aren't too typically difficult to play out. So, but anyway, I enjoyed the Plum Island horror. Give it a yellow light again because it's, it's not the kind of game that you would be able to drop in front of anybody, but it's not super hard or complex either. And it's just a solo and co-op. Yeah, I mean co-op, you're going to be playing multiple handed. So you'll play two factions, but, but yeah, it works fine both ways. It's not super hard to keep track of things. - I love it. - Can I jump in with a bonus? - Absolutely. - A game I've been playing lately. - Absolutely. - So this game is not out yet. It's coming out at GenCon. I got to see it at the gathering of friends earlier this year and I brought a kind of homemade copy on the Podfather careers. Eric, I don't know if you've ever played this with us at nine. - Oh, is this the cooperative Texas Hold 'em game? - This is the gang, G-A-N-G, the gang coming from Cosmos. Designer John Cooper and Corey Heath. John was at the gathering of friends, showed the game to me. I actually, I walked by a table of friends that were all playing it at like 10.30 at night and I had an early flight the next day and I was headed to bed. And one of my good friends, also named Bruce, says, "You've got to sit down and play this right now." And 'cause he knew it would be right at my alley. And I watched it for a little bit. He got it from the table, sat me down playing it and it's just amazing, so much fun. It's basically co-op Texas Hold 'em. So imagine there's five or six of you playing Texas Hold 'em, but instead of betting, you are silently Allah, the mind, pulling chips to rank your hands. And there's, if there's six of you playing, there's chips numbered one to six. If you have the best hand, you pull the six 'cause it has the most value. You obviously can't talk about your hand with anybody else and you just silently pull it from the middle or you pull a chip away from somebody else. Or you push your own chip back into the middle. If you don't like what's going on, you just can't push a chip onto someone else. They have to have their own agency in pulling a chip. But at some point, it will settle out that you all have a chip in front of you. And that's just based on your whole cards. And then we do the flop. We put three more cards out and we do the exact same thing. There's now a different colored set of chips for you to rank your hands with. And then we do the turn and then we do the river. And so that final set, if we are correct in ranking our hands at the final time, we win the hand. If we are incorrect, we lose the hand. And the theme of it is that you're trying to break into a series of bank malts. And every time you win, you make the next hand harder. And this is what really sets the game apart is there's these separate decks of cards of challenges and power-ups. The game calls them something different. I can't remember what it is. But if you win, you get a challenge to make the next hand harder. Like instead of everybody getting two cards, they get three cards faced down, which actually does make it harder. Or if you lose the hand, you realize you have to hire somebody else as part of your thieving crew. So you go out and hire a mastermind or a hacker or something, they're all thematic. And you get a benefit like, okay, before we start, we all have our whole cards. We're gonna go around the circle right now and declare how many face cards you have in your two cards. And so you say zero, one or two, if Jack, Queen, or King. And so you get to see who's got face cards. And then that helps. So that's gonna make it easier 'cause you've given information about your hand. I just, I can't stop playing this game. I mean, I love playing teach you at night when I'm at a con. But now it's a toss-up. I'll grab this one and play it instead 'cause it's just so much fun. And I think it's gonna be one of the big hits at GenCon. It'll be out at GenCon and it's gonna be big. - That is awesome. Everybody that I heard play it on the cruise loved it. I never heard anyone who didn't like it. I did not play it, but I did see it. But it was at that point, it was cards and chips, but still it looks fun. - Yeah, I actually, I just brought a deck of cards and I had dice. So we were using colored dice, you know, Pips one to six. I did get permission from the designer from John. He emailed me the list of, or at least a subset of power-ups and challenges 'cause that's kind of the unique components of the game. And so we were able to play it a little bit by randomly picking one of those to make the next hand harder or easier. But it's, yeah, everyone I've played it with loves it. And I asked the designer, I was talking to John. And I said, now I can see people who love poker are gonna love this. What about the non-poker crowd? And I actually played it with some non-poker people. And it works just as well 'cause all you, you just need a little cheat sheet, which the game includes that, you know, high card, pair two, pair three of a kind, all you have to do is be able to understand the rankings and, you know, what hand beats what? You don't have to worry about any of the betting, but it's all about the evaluation. But it's co-op, so we're trying to work together. No disrespect to my good friend, Eric Martin, who absolutely loves the mind. But for me, it turns the mind into an actual game rather than this interesting social experience. - Where you're staring at each other. - Right, this has the same kind of staring and the same kind of, you know, should I pull that chip or do you want that chip for evaluation, silent evaluation, but puts it in a nice game package, so. - That is awesome. - Yeah, that is very cool. I heard about this. The other designer, Corey Heath, I believe was actually at the last event I was at because I didn't know anything about this. And then when it was all over, the guy who ran the whole thing said, "Oh, Bruce, I should have told you." There's a game you might think you're going to care about having spent ears as a poker dealer. The designer was at the thing, I just never introduced the two of you. It's like, "Oh, my God, this looks amazing." - Well, they also designed, I think it's a co-design. I think they're both names. I should look it up if they're only for a website. - It's John Cooper and Corey Heath. - Yeah, I think they designed Zendo, which is also one of my all-time favorite games. - Okay, I've heard of Zendo, I've never played Zendo. - Zendo, it doesn't sound like you're in the tech industry, but I use Zendo as the best debugging experience. If you've got programmers out there, Zendo is all about debugging. - There we go, I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a liberal arts guy here. (laughing) I don't know if I scream that through the microphone, but now-- - The gold LeMay curtain behind you is kind of throwing off a little bit of that vibe. - I'm trying as hard as heck. You can't see it out there, folks. But it is two folks that got new the assignment. It's all, they're in front of Calyx or Calyx equivalent, shelves full of board games of different ages and rarities, so much probably we're never published. I have a gold LeMay curtain. (laughing) - I think, yeah, that just says words or says a lot about it to us. - We all bring different things to the table and it's great. - Big catch. 'Cause I don't think I invented that before, I didn't say that because just to sound like I was cool, I thought that was an actual board game. - What, Zendo? - Yeah. - Yeah, it is. - Oh, yeah, Zendo is-- - It was in my three heath and Andrew Looney. It uses the Looney over their heads. - There we go, that's why I know it. Okay, thank you, I needed that moment. I'm sorry for everybody else out there that had to go through, and I needed to figure that out, or it was gonna nag me for the rest of the week. - Yeah, and I know John has done a lot of other Ice House games as well using the pyramid. So I don't know if he worked on Zendo or not, but I know he did some others too, so. - Awesome. Bruce, did you have anything else? I just have one letter thing left. - I am going to say no this time. I don't think I have another thing to worry about. I think I've eaten up enough of our time. - So I got a box of games from the Grand Gamers Guild, sort of their GenCon releases. And there's the Marriage Mixup, which is the next one of their puzzle 18 card holiday hijinks things. There's an Endangered One, which is the, it's not part of the Holiday Hijinks, but it's the same kind of concept. And a couple other games, but one, Bruce, I think you might be interested in, is a game called Words of a Feather. - Okay. - Essentially what happens is you have five words in front of you, let's just say, heat, earth, or fire, earth, water. They don't necessarily have to be elements, they're just five words, okay? And you're going to pick two of them, and you're gonna write a word that you feel is related. And the example they use is if you have fire and water, you write the word steam, right? And then everybody does this. They have a little sort of just one type of word that they write on. And then everyone kind of reveals, and for everyone that you match, you get a point. And then even if you don't guess right, if you match somebody else, you still get a point. And then there's some bedding that's involved in there as well. So it's a real cute conceptual game. But where it really kind of takes off, no pun intended, is the display. The box is huge, right? So it's probably like 12, 13, 14 inches tall, about eight inches. Weirdly enough, on the back of the box is a place where you would hang it up. You know, like the little hooks you see in retail, but it doesn't go all the way through. So you could only put one of them on there. I'm not exactly sure what it's there for. But you open the box and the cards that you sort of have your words on are supposed to be like peacock feathers. And you sort of make this big, beautiful, almost mandala looking thing around it. And there's a ceramic bowl in the middle that's holding your points, your little cubes or not cubes, little crystals that are points. And it just screams, I want this to be as elegant as possible. - Yeah. - I'm looking at pictures right now on the geek. This is over the top, that's gorgeous. - It is so beautifully done. Words of a feather. I'm pretty sure it's a European publication that, you know, Mark at Grand Gamers Guild will also often co-produce and bring them into the United States. But I haven't actually played it yet. And the gameplay seems fairly straightforward. You know, it's your basic party game where there's a sheet, you know, one sheet of paper that tells you how to play the rules. - Yeah. - But just the presentation is just amazing. - My work, I have to say, and we talk about this every so often on here, Eric, being that I'm old and I've been around gaming for a while is that seeing that this is where we've gotten to with party games makes me so happy. Because I remember on the party game cast talking about wacky box syndrome, which was the problem we had in the beginning was everything just had to be in a wacky box. The parts when you brought it out, but it had to have like four types of fonts and some had to be tiny and some had to be giant and there had to be like, maybe an un-bodied, set of teeth screaming or something on it. And seeing it go from that to something like this that's genuine art, it's just so cool to see. - I wanna see the discussion is like, you know what we really need? It's a ceramic bowl to hold these pieces. (laughing) And the guy's like, yeah, I agree completely. And it does work, it works great. But when I took it out, you know, I was expecting a plastic bowl or a cardboard bowl or something like, oh, this is legit ceramic. So I'm looking forward to playing it. It is a beautiful game, but I just, I had to mention it. - Wow. - All righty, well, let's take a quick break and we would come back, we're gonna talk, we're gonna learn how to run some amazing conventions. - I look forward to it. (laughing) (upbeat music) - Hey, this is Eric. I just wanted to let you guys know that since 2020, we've been using Zencaster to do all of our recording, which has been a huge help to us because what it allows you to do is have your basic website where you can connect with one another and communicate with one another, you know, like your zooms and your teams, but it also records everything in a separate track, which is critical when editing time comes around. So hey, I encourage you to check out Zencaster, z-e-n-c-a-s-t-r.com and use keyword on board games, all one word. - Thanks. (upbeat music) - All righty. - And we're back, I'm still Eric, he's still Bruce, Jeff Anderson hasn't run away either, so we're excited. - I'm still here. - So yeah, I've known Jeff for years 'cause attending VGGCon and by known means recognize Jeff for years, participated in the VGG poker tournaments, chatted with them very briefly while three other people were asking them about stuff. But it was on the podfather cruise, obviously, that I really got to actually spend some time with Jeff and, you know, he was mentioning, oh, if you go to Quick's events, you can see all the things that are going on. Two, four, six, eight, 10, 12, 13 different items sitting there on the conventions list. At least the majority of those are too happen. And there, I see the podfather cruise is on there, so perhaps that one just ended, but that's a lot of stuff. - I have automated some things, but I am currently managing seven unique cruises for this year and next year in that I'm taking bookings and getting people registered. And they're all in different states. One of them, I fly to Barcelona a week from tomorrow, and so I'm handling last minute changes in the contract with the cruise line. We unfortunately just had a cancellation yesterday, so I have to manage trying to get them back as much money as I can, even though we're last minute. At the same time, next week is when my final payment is due to the cruise line for my September cruise. And so there's lots of stuff I have to do for that one. We've just kind of opened the clock tower cruise recently, and so that one's in its infancy. And then there's four other cruises next year that are just kind of homing along. It's too early to be panicking about them yet, but people still book every week or two. I get somebody to add into the cruise. And so just kind of those are in maintenance mode. - Yeah, that's just amazing. And what I really appreciate about Jeff is he and I are kind of like mine, right? We're very meticulous, detail-oriented, or at the very least put procedures in place so that we can keep track of I/O this much to this cruise line and those kinds of things. So I certainly appreciate it. One of the tours that we did, the buses were split between your bus and Stephen Bonacor's bus. And you said, if you want to have fun, you go on Stephen's bus. If you want to get there on time, you go on our bus. And I was like, yeah, this is my guy. This is my tribe. - Yeah, well, let me just say splatter, spieling games are some of my favorites, you know, logistics, detail-oriented, resource management. That kind of thing. - People could say it's like spreadsheet, the board game, you're like, I'm in. - I'm in, let's do it. - Just like Bruce, right? You live in Excel, right, Bruce? - Oh, good. Matter of fact, that was one of the things when I was at North Star that I told them in the interview was I was like, look, there's a lot of things I can do. I'm really dynamic, I can do, but I don't spreadsheet. I don't do it well, I'm not especially good at it. It makes me kind of angry, it exhausts me. And that's why, like, in the example we did for the Muppets, there has to be a Dr. Teeth play in the keys and somewhere scooter has to make sure that they're gonna get on the bus. And you have to have-- - That's right. - You need Bert's and Ernie's. If you don't have both Bert's and Ernie's, you're not gonna get through the show. - That is, well, and I do have to shout out, I mean, it's a little self-serving because BG Board Game Geek is connected with tabletop events, but being able to use tabletop events has helped me immensely because before I started doing the cruises on tabletop events, I was just doing them in a Shopify store and literally collating about seven different Google spreadsheets behind the scenes to keep everything in track for just one cruise. And when it's two cruises, you don't double it, you multiply them against each other, you know? - It's like two kids, but yeah. But now that I have tabletop events and I have some of my own Python code scripting that I've written to download from tabletop events and massage numbers and do things, it makes it a lot easier to keep everything in track. - Well, I was gonna say, one of the things I wanted to point out is that it's more than just booking the cruise and kind of all that stuff. I mean, you'll find tour opportunities that are outside of what the cruise provides and so you've got to kind of nail those down as well. So there's a lot of, let's just say extras, a lot more than just, you know, the cruise itself that I found to be kind of fun and exciting. - Yeah, there's, I don't always get to do it, it depends on the size of the group, but the short excursions, the pre-cruise excursions, a lot of that comes from Christine and I talking, my wife Christine and I, what do we wanna go do? Well, okay, let's look at that and if we can get a group together to go do it and all manage it, that'll make it a little bit cheaper for me to do rather than us just doing it by ourselves. So there's a, I will fess up to some self interest there as well, but sometimes when the group is too big, like on Mediterranean, we've got 170 people on the cruise. I did not put together any group excursions. What I did say is, okay, these are the excursions Christine and I have picked. Please join us, but you know, book it yourself if you want to do the same thing at the same time with us. And so it just depends on the size of the group, but. - You know, I don't wanna just talk about the cruises because more of my time is actually running the land-based conventions because those are 10 and 20 times the size of the cruises. - And that's one of those gonna say, in addition to these dozen or so cruises you've got going, oh, by the way, you're also running BGG Spring and BGG Fall, which is quite frankly, I don't know, third largest gaming convention in the US, fourth largest, it's big. - I don't know, I don't keep track per se, it's up there, it's regional size, but it has international draw. - Yeah, yeah. - So BGG Con peaked in 2019, we had about 3,500, 3,600 people. And I know there's other regional size cons out there, Kublicon, Dice Tower, I think is getting close. I think Geek Way to the West is probably somewhere in that range as well. - We're nowhere near the size of an origins or a Gen Con of packs, any of the packs is. We probably bigger than packs south, but they don't do packs south anymore. Now, if you add the two together. - Yeah, but you cap those too. - Right. - We do, we do, we're trying to provide a specific kind of experience, and it's not a Gen Con experience. Not that there's anything wrong with Gen Con, Gen Con's a great show, origins is a great show. They're just a different kind of experience. We're trying to scale up a weekend gaming retreat with your friends, where you can play games 24/7 and you know everybody there. Now, we've scaled beyond the part where you know everybody there, but we still try and keep it your home weekend gaming party. - But what always surprises me about that is every time I go to BGG is I will see people that I have no contact with except during BGG, and we just slot back in. Hey, we need to play something again. And again, you're talking 3,500 people, and yet there's still these people you just bump into. It was like, oh man, it was great playing such and such last year. Let's do something this year kind of thing. So you do kind of get that feeling. - Yeah, and there's, I have no control over any of that. And before we get too far down the road, I do want to say that there's no way I'm doing all this by myself. I mean, I've got a fantastic team. My wife helps a ton. We've got John and Laney phase. The four of us are kind of the core committee, the orange jerseys, so to speak. And we're on calls every week or every other week, all year long, planning all these shows. And then, I mean, huge shout out to Team Geek, our volunteer core, that numbers, depending on the size of the show, anywhere from 70 to 100, 120 members of Team Geek to help us run the convention. So I certainly don't want to take all the credit and I want to pass all the kudos to the whole rest of the team. But back to your point, the feel of the show, all I can really do is provide space and put in light touches on policies and create some experiences for people to find each other. But it's really the people that come and find each other and are welcoming and are willing to teach somebody else a game or to put up a player's wanted sign and let anybody sit down at their table and play a game. That's really what we focus on and what we try to provide. - Yeah, yeah. So Bruce, you have a kind of unique perspective in that you've been an attendee, you've been a vendor or exhibitor and you've also been a special guest. So how was your views? - All the shows really run very interestingly and you have ones that you like to do more than others. So I'll kind of give you what I would call the sort of the vendor place, which is you have to do GenCon because it's so gosh darn big. Because of that, it's not like the most fun to go to. If you're working the show, it is very much work, it doesn't really stop being work and you try to find things after the night that you can do. And I would say there, the touch of administration is never really, God, I don't want to say not positively noticed because like there's no crime or anything, but you aren't leaving that saying like, oh man, I met so many great volunteers, it really helped me. You more or less like met people that got you in the right place and all of the trains ran on time and you have nothing else to say past that. And then origins is very much like GenCon except you get a little bit more time to breathe. And if you have like, if you're the kind of person prone to a panic attack, if you're at origins, you can get out of the building quickly, which you cannot at GenCon. If you look at PAX, PAX unplugged is the one I would say reminds me most closest to board game gig because when you're done that one, they have, they're trying to build a culture. I think part of the problem is for, if you're just a board gamer, is they're building PAX culture and PAX culture and PAX lore run to a lot of shows you didn't go to, you know, 'cause they're doing bits from 11 years ago in Seattle that you just have to know 'cause you've had to pay attention. With board game geek, it has always felt like, and I think I'm gonna be only a millionth person to say it, like a board game geek summer camp. You kind of, you know the people, you generally kind of at least, I was there when it was still at the, at the old building at the airport. So you were very much there, even more trapped, unless you were gonna get on public transit and take a 35 minute trip into Dallas, you weren't leaving the complex. So because of that, it did two things. One, you never felt like you went to Dallas. And two, it very much had that like contained a summer camp vibe. I keep seeing the same people when I go to get dinner and I keep seeing them over here and more and more you feel like you're just a part of that community that like a small community is forming there. And that's the thing that at like a PAX, I would say the volunteers that are great to work with and you leave with a positive experience, you both share, but their size and with them being in the center of the action in Philadelphia, everyone's doing their thing and then leaving to wherever they can go to whatever beard nominated restaurant they can find up the street or whatever hole in the wall they heard about on TikTok. And no one's really sticking around unless you're kind of in that community of like, either you have a group of nerds that you do stuff with or any of us that are sort of that were in the board game section of being vendors, you all sort of form a bond because you're in this weird daywalker middle space like not really being in a 10D, but trying to have some fun. And I would say that becomes a lot more blurred at BGGCon because especially, I'm sure it's still the same way because it's the same group of people. But it was like, I could do my day for Northstar and then go to the Bad One Tops tournament and still find late night activities and still get in an hour that I could go to sleep and wake back up to start over with the full knowledge that if I wanted to burn the candle at both ends and get my Stephen Bonacore of the Year award and go from 4 a.m. and then wake back up at 6 a.m. to start over again that there would be programming the whole time that would be fun no matter what type of game or I was. So I think it's very much, it does a great job exactly what you're talking about which is it knows its size, it's not trying to grow past it, it is very welcoming and at least, I would imagine it has to be at least similar. You're gonna keep seeing the same people so many times that you're gonna feel that community that you see in a much smaller column as opposed to the bigger ones. - Yeah, one of our core philosophies is that we are a hotel ballroom kind of a show, not a convention center kind of a show and we're gonna stay that size. Hotel ballrooms only get so big. Now they get bigger here in Texas than anywhere else in the world but and we've got a really big one now downtown Dallas for our November show but I think it's interesting. I said it peaked in 2019 at 35, 3600 and then we all know what happened in 2020. We're slowly growing back. The Spring Show is actually still out at the airport where you were Bruce. We still have the Spring Show there and we just ran that show and we were just over 2000 attendees which is as big as it's ever been. The fall last year we hit 3000 this year I think will be within 10% above that 3,000 to 3,300. People are less comfortable being packed in the way they were back in 2019. We recognize that and we, it's never been our goal to sell the most tickets. It's never been our goal to grow as fast as we can. I've limited growth to be no more than 10 to 15 maybe 20% year over year because I want it to be organic. I want us to learn through the small mistakes and if you just double overnight you're gonna make the big mistakes. And so I think I don't know honestly if we'll ever leave the Hyatts. We really love the Hyatt properties that we have. There is one more step above. There's one more level of hotel ballroom that is bigger than we have right now. There's three different properties in Texas that I've looked at or in Dallas that I've looked at. I don't know that we're gonna make that last jump. We might stay where we are which means BGGCon will probably stay in the at most 4,000 attendee range. I think that would probably be as many as I could fit in there comfortably. I could pack more in but I think it's gonna be 3,500 to 4,000. We're also, it's also a different world since COVID. Some shows have had a challenge in growing again. I think most people who were comfortable going to shows before the pandemic are comfortable again now but it's not true 100% across the board but so that's kind of our philosophy on growth. And I mean, that's where BGG Spring came from. I did not want to make BGGCon any bigger when it was at 2,800 people. And so we started BGG Spring to take off the pressure and said, okay, we're gonna grow by having multiple events. It's the same thing I've done with the cruises. There are some other great board gaming cruises out there that are a lot bigger than the ones I run. Which is great for them. I want to keep it a small size. I won't get bigger than 200 people at a time. And so the way I grow the cruises is by doing more of them rather than doing larger ones. - I think that's such an attendee and as a special guest, I really like that. As a vendor, and I'm not really a vendor anymore so I'm not gonna throw out any opinions. Obviously the vendor needs more eyes to sell more things and more money in the room. I think that's just sort of the easiest way to go. Leaving that aside, having that kind of community environment at these is great. I know for a fact, doing like a GenCon. And once again, like you said, there's nothing wrong with a GenCon. If you want hot releases, if you want the coolest thing on earth, if you want to play true dungeon, that's the place you have to be. But Eric and I, at BGGCon, will accidentally see each other 10 times. At GenCon, we will on phones guiding each other, not one another for an hour. And that's the big difference is like the one that I did with you and Eric, or I'm sorry with you and Eric, with you and Donald. We were practically just running into each other and it wasn't even so much that I was at a table part of the time. It was when I would go get a coffee, we'd brine to each other. Whereas with those bigger shows, it literally is like, no, Eric, no, the other Arnold Schwarzenegger statue. (laughing) Okay, so go past the 17. Yeah, no, no, no, I know there's buses there. The other Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know? It just, those shows are so huge and it's great to see one where, you know, you've really thought about it. We're gonna cabinet these numbers. We're gonna make it so it still feels kind of close and fun. You can play a game with someone on Thursday and accidentally run into them Friday and play a game with them. And I think you're less going to see that at these bigger shows. You might, if you are, if you have a lifestyle game you play, you're like, well, I only play Lorkana. Well, the Lorkana area is only the size of Board Game GeekCon. So you might run into people again, but if you're just trolling the whole show, good luck. Yeah, and in fact, I literally had kind of that experience at last BGGCon 'cause usually Don goes with me, but this year he couldn't, so it was just me. And I go down, check in the hotel, get to my room, go in, check in a BGG, get my stuff. And as I'm walking back to drop my stuff off in the room, I bump into a guy that I know. And we're like, oh, hey, and so let's go play a game. And so we played two or three games, and then I'm just literally sitting down and bump into a group of guys that I know. And so basically through absolutely no effort on my own, I have bumped into multiple groups to play games with the entire weekend, let alone just the normal players wanted or whatever that you're doing, so. Yeah, I do wanna throw out for anybody listening that hasn't come to a con before, and you're not gonna bump into people you already know. We do other things as well to try and ease you into the experience and get you into finding your new best friend gaming. We have, we call it our orphans and first-timers, meet up. We have the players wanted science we've referred to, everybody's welcoming to play a game. You know, the library is the new speed dating supermarket. You just browse games in the library and see somebody else pull a game off that you might be interested in. Hey, ask them, oh, that looks cool. Do you already have a group to play that? No, let's go play. And you're off to the races. You've got new best friends for the whole weekend. Absolutely, and cool other events, having been a special guest for a couple of shows but for one of them being a BGG. Doing Whits and Wagers, which was the thing where if you had 10 people with you, cool, we'll take you off, but if you're just here by yourself, pop on in, same I did the poker, played in the poker tournament one time. And it's the same deal, hey, just come on over here and don't worry, in two hours and you're complaining about your bad beat to somebody, they will also tell you they don't wanna hear it. But then you thought you were going to get. I think you also get that, I was like at the side of one and I think if I ever get to show up again, I'll get to partially host one. But the spiel of thorns, which are the crazy, crazy events, the spiel runs, where it's all just wild and wacky games. That's another one where you can come in and find a team of people that are all sailing, yeah, I don't know either, let's figure out what this is. And there's something cool about that at this show. And I would say origins kind of shares it a little bit because you can still buy those tokens and get into a event. With GenCon, I find that a little bit harder 'cause there's so many events and you have no idea what's gonna sell out and everything's so far apart and you have to commit yourself to walking into a football stadium. And that is also a bit harder that is a bit cooler thing about something like a BGG con as you're paying attention to that. 'Cause I can say, as a presenter and as an entertainer, the only thing worse than only three people showing up is triple the room size. Both of those are bad places to be. And as much as my least favorite thing is having to try to do like a full show for three people because you're yelling to the back of the room that three people are like, just calm down, triple the room size is the next worst thing because you did not anticipate it. So it's nice to have a show of people are paying attention to these things. - Let me just, since we're talking GenCon, I do need to promote or at least give a shout out to the board game geek hosted hot games room that is at GenCon. That is a great place to go and meet people. So, excellent. - Absolutely. And a lot of the events at GenCon are as well. And there's all kinds of stuff. And once again, the thing that's great about GenCon is you're gonna have events there that you may never see pop up somewhere else because it's just you've gotta have all these people in a place to reach a large enough consensus to get enough people to fill the room for whatever really weird project you have that you wanna do. But I do find it to be slightly harder to just kinda roll up and make something happen to those. And I would find something like a "Wits and Wagers" game. Sometimes it would be 11 people because we were somewhere weird. But if we were in the right place at the right time, it was three times the ballroom. And you're like, uh-oh, how do we do "Wits and Wagers" for, what did you say, 270 people? Yeah, I don't know either guys. - Yeah, we would. - We make sure we know ahead of time how much space we have for the event and limit tickets and signups to do that. - And I think with only, you know, 3,500 people, you have less inclination of people just showing up and saying, "Well, I'm just gonna keep standing here. "We'll see what happens." You know, you get a little more being able to say like, "I'm sorry, we might try to make another one tomorrow. "This one's filled." At 3,000 people, they're gonna see each other tomorrow. People will go, "Okay, well, I'll come back." At a place where it's 175,000 people. And everyone's barely in number. They're like, "I'll just stand here and wait this out. "Let's see what happens. "Let's see what happens." - So one of the things that I found to be a bit challenging about the gaming cruises is this conflict between doing gaming stuff and doing cruise stuff. And what I loved about the Pot Father Cruises and a lot of your cruises is that they're repositioning cruises. So there's a lot of at sea days, which to me is the perfect time because you can do cruise stuff if you want to, but you know, gaming stuff as well. You're not missing out on, "Oh, I wanna see, you know, "the fjords or the glaciers or the volcanoes." That kind of stuff. - The perfect itinerary for me that I always try and look at is basically a seven day cruise. You've got, you know, you're getting on the ship and off the ship, so you've really got six days in the meat of the sandwich. Three days at sea, three days at different ports. That's really what I'm targeting. Because I want to see new parts of the world. I like traveling the world. I like the cultural exchange, the experience of learning, you know, new cultures, new cuisines, things like that. But for it to be a gaming cruise, you know, usually it's not a problem to get those days at sea because you have to travel to get somewhere. This cruise that I'm going on, you know, next weekend is breaking that rule. And I'll be honest, I'm a little nervous about it. It's a Mediterranean cruise, leaving out of Barcelona. We are in a new different port every single day, except the very last day. And a lot of those port days, you can be assured till eight or nine o'clock at night because it's not that far to get to the next city that we're going to go visit. I am a little hesitant about how much gaming is actually going to happen on this cruise. Now, I'm sure there's going to be some people that get tired or they don't want to go ashore every single different city. They might pick two or three, and so they'll stay on the ship and play games, even if we're in port. That happens even if even when we're in Alaska, that happens, which boggles my mind. But this one, it's okay, everybody come back, we're going to have dinner, and then we'll go play a game at night before we get up and do the next day. And then there's one big day where we'll all see each other in the conference center on the last day. So I'm nervous about this one because the lack of sea days. But all my other itineraries, I've always got about or at least half time at sea. Now, if you really want time at sea, I do have to talk about the epicness of next spring. - Yes. It's interesting to lead up to this. So I had planned for the 2020 cruise to be something unique. I saw an itinerary pop up that I had never seen before, and I was real nervous about it because it was 15 days, but it was Seattle, the Tokyo. And I thought, well, no one's going to be able to get that much time off work or it's a little expensive, but it was Seattle to one port in Alaska and then all the way across the Pacific over to Tokyo. And so I threw it out there hoping to get maybe 20 cabins 'cause that's kind of minimum critical mass to make something work. I mean, I can go lower, if I know going into it, I can go lower, but for the kind of experience I'm wanting to do, I'm hoping for at least 20 cabins. I sold 75 cabins. I think that thing sold out way faster than I expected. So everyone was really excited about that itinerary. And then 2021 was supposed to be the Mediterranean cruise that we're doing next week. Well, we all know the 2020 cruise got canceled, the 2021 cruise got canceled. Ever since then I've been telling Royal Caribbean, as soon as you do another Transpacifica Tokyo, I want to be the group on that cruise. I want the conference center, I want the ship. So my contact reached out to me and said, okay, we're going to do it. The issue is it's going to be like 22 to 24 days long, but it's going to be all the way from Singapore, to Tokyo, to Seattle, all one big long epic cruise. And I said, oh, okay, I'll do it. You know, maybe I can get 12 people that are, there's got to be at least 12 Steve Abonacors out there who are already retired that can take that time off. Let's hope not. Yeah, that's true, that's true. So I said, okay, I'll do it. So we started quoting it. Before we got done with the contract, they said, oh, we're actually going to break it into two. It's going to be Singapore to Tokyo for 12 days. And then Tokyo, five days in more ports in Japan, than across the Pacific to Seattle. I said, okay, perfect. I will do the Tokyo to Seattle leg. The problem is I had already been talking with some people about this back when it was 24, 25 days, just trying to gauge interest. And there were a number of people that were excited about it and said, all right, well, I'll throw it out there. Why not both, right? And so I did contract both back-to-back Singapore to Seattle. I'm sorry, Singapore to Tokyo. And that one, I don't want to take the time to pull it up, but we leave Singapore, we have a day at sea, and then we're in Vietnam, and then we have a day at sea. And then I don't know my geography right now, but then we're in Hong Kong and we have a day at sea. And then we're in Taiwan, and then we have a day at sea. So it's like every other day, looking at all these Southeast Asia, ending in Tokyo. And then we actually have two days in Tokyo where we change over. And then we have like three or four different ports in Tokyo across five days. And then we have nine days across the water to Seattle. We cross the international date line on May 5th, which means for the one time in your life, if you're a big part of your, you can live Cinco de Mayo twice in a row. You will have two Cinco de Mayo's in 2025. And so I've put it out there. I have at least half a dozen people who are doing both back-to-back. This is a kind of a smaller ship. I'm only doing 50 cabins. I've already sold 20 cabins for Singapore and 25 cabins for Tokyo. So they're already almost half full, half sold out. So, but that's a long way to say, if you want days at sea, I got nine in a row for you. I got days sailing across the Pacific. And being worried about that, what are people gonna do for nine days? Well, I have a special guest coming on that leg, a good friend of mine who's a solid gamer. In fact, he and I played my father's work last year. I taught it to him. I know you guys were talking about that game on a previous episode. Dan Wells is a professional storyteller. He's a best-selling author. He's actually got a movie made from one of his books called "I am not a serial killer". He's a professional dungeon master. Yeah, you should look the movie up. Christopher Lloyd's in it. It's actually really good if you like kind of horror, supernatural kind of weirdness. Anyway, he's a good friend of mine. I've been to some of his gaming events and he's coming on my Mediterranean cruise next week, but he's a special guest on the Tokyo leg specifically so that I can put him to work running some epic role-playing arcs during those nine days. We're gonna have a lot of fun with some role-playing games and other games, so. That is awesome, that is, 'cause that was, when we were doing the five or six days at sea, that was so much fun is doing stuff on the ship and going to the conference room and playing big old games and just kind of bouncing back and forth. So definitely excited about that. So I do need to, I know we're wrapping up but I just do wanna plug the board game geek cruises. I know I've alluded to Mediterranean in a week. I don't know if this is gonna go up in time, but we're getting close to selling out the September cruise out of New York City up into New England and Canada. My final payment deadline is the end of this month on that one, so I don't know if anybody's out there listening. I actually, I don't have many cabins left anyway, but I've got plenty of room for next year. BGGC International is going to be Norwegian fjords sailing out of Southampton in the summer, July 20, or June 29th to July 6th. And then in the fall, we're gonna sail out of Los Angeles and down to Western Mexico, Cabell St. Lucas, Mazelon, and Puerto Vallarta. And I do wanna put a plug out there. I just convinced Candace. If you know Candace Harris from BGGC Media, she runs the board game geek podcast and lots of other BGGC Media stuff. She lives in LA. I just convinced her to come on the cruise with us out of LA next fall. - So you can rub elbows with two, three BGG folk. - Maybe more, maybe more, but we'll see. But as I said earlier, all of those are linked at quicks.events. QWYX.events. That's just a forwarding link over to my group on the tabletop.events. - Fantastic. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a lot of fun. I'm just excited to kind of get a peek behind the curtains, especially events that I go to regularly. So that was a lot of fun. - Thank you so much for having me on. And if there's anything we didn't get to, I'm always happy to talk about the stuff that I do. So shoot me an email or talk more later. - Absolutely. Well, I'm Eric Dewey. - I'm Bruce Vogue. - I'm Jeff. - And you've been listening too? - On board games! - That's it for this episode of On Board Games. If you enjoy On Board Games, join our guild on board game geek. You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, hard us on board game links, give us a five star review on iTunes or patronize us at patreon.com/obg. Want to be on the show? Please be in touch with the topic ideas far and advanced as possible, as our schedule does fill up. You can find out more about the On Board Games podcast at inversegenius.com. Email us questions, comments, or snide remarks at onboardgamesmailbag@gmail.com. On board games is licensed under creative comments, attribution, non-commercial, no-derivative works, 4.0 international license. Thanks. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. - I'm just a shocking little game. I would say, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. - Alrighty, we all good? Everyone happy? - Yes. - Mm-hmm. - Yep, alright. - Yeah, I'm coming through, okay? - Oh yeah, you're right. - Absolutely. - You're better than Bruce. I mean, coming through. - Just kidding. - Just kidding. - You didn't crash Zencaster, so that gives you a 1.0. (laughing) - Oh, that's good, that's good. This is a pretty slick setup, I'm impressed. - Yeah, when it works, it's phenomenal. When I recorded a couple of weeks ago with Steve from Australia, I had made the critical error of saying, I really haven't had any problems using Zencaster. And in that case, it crashed six times. We ended up just talking over discord and recording our own tracks at the end of it. I was like, oh, I'm never gonna say that again. (laughing) I just spliced all that, but we didn't lose anything. That was the great thing. I just had to splice it all together.
