Lauren Woolsey: 00:09 Hello and welcome back to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility. I'm your host, Lauren Woolsey, and I'm here today with Nick Yu to talk about Adventure Tactics: Domianne's Tower. Welcome nick. Nick Yu: 00:21 Thanks for having me. Lauren Woolsey: 00:23 So what's this game's backstory? Nick Yu: 00:26 It comes from the friendship I have with Letiman Games owner, Dan Letzring. We do shows every year. We're both in upstate New York and we've both known each other as you know, local board game designers slash publishers. And you know, our association goes back five or six years, but we always help playtest each other's games. But we've never worked on anything together. And couple of years ago we decided that we should change that and we, we were just saying, you know, what's like, what's your favorite game? Ah, and turns out our favorite video game for both of us is final fantasy tactics and we're like, nobody has really done the job system from final fantasy tactics in a board game before. So that's what we set out to do, is implement the job system in a, in a board game, which it seems pretty daunting at the time. Lauren Woolsey: 01:08 [Laughs] Yeah. So talk me through that game's development path. So you had the idea and now it's a full fledged game. So how did it get there? Nick Yu: 01:17 Well the core development actually took place over the course of that initial weekend. I went home from that conversation, like, really energized. I had actually taking their couple of years off from design because my wife and I, we have three young kids, they're all five and under. [Lauren: Laughs] So it was tough for me to work a full time job and try to find that work life balance. Right. [Lauren: Sure, yeah] The kids were getting a little older, you know, our oldest kids are now in a, they're going to be in first grade coming up, so they're a little older now. Gave me some time and apparently those ideas had been germinating, like gestating it in my head. And I dropped a 20 page document - Lauren Woolsey: 01:46 Just waiting for an outlet! New Speaker: 01:50 Yeah, exactly. It just all came pouring out at, like I asked my wife like, did I sleep? And she's like, I'm not sure if I'm like, I don't know if I actually slept that weekend. But I came back to Dan with this 20 page document, the next, and he's like, whoa, and I had all the classes, the rough outline for how the game would play. And of course, you know, things were tweaked, we tweaked and have changed things for balance. But the core class system that stayed intact from the very first draft. So I'm pretty proud of that. Lauren Woolsey: 02:13 That's awesome. Yeah. A lot of things can change for a game, but it's a really good feeling when the big idea you had kind of sticks with it. [Nick: yep.] So what are the primary goals of the players in this game? Nick Yu: 02:25 Yep. So it's a very cooperative game. You know, you have, you're kind of a hero's journey. We start off with humble origins in a village and a circumstance kind of forces you together and eventually, uh, I don't want to, Dan's going to be mad if I, if I spoke to many plot elements. Yeah. But there's an important child. I think there's kind of a Willow influence there. Willow was one of my favorite movies growing up. So you have to safeguard this child of destiny and eventually you'll run up against the evil Queen Domianne. Lauren Woolsey: 02:51 Oh, okay. So without too many spoilers. We now have a sense that it's a cooperative game. And - [Nick: yep, fully cooperative]. What are the primary mechanics that the players are using in order to reach their goals? Nick Yu: 03:03 Yeah, so in between as you level up and you multi-class throughout all the different classes, there's a bit of deck building, job building. Um, so that's kind of the in-between metagame. When you start off and when you level up, you get cards from the class you decide to level up in. So that way you can build your deck and then you also have options to cull whenever you level up too, so you can really try to customize it. So I love cards in deck building. So apparently every design I make is some element of that makes it in and then that that gives you your cards for play. And so when you're actually doing the fighting that campaign scenarios, there's action economy, hand management, things that you're probably pretty familiar with from other similar games that you know, and obviously your cooperative tactics. Like it really does matter what your friends are doing. And, uh, I encourage people to always be talking to each other, uh, you know, uh, planning out your moves together. Lauren Woolsey: 03:53 Certainly. For the campaign, about how many games does it run or does it vary depending on how, I don't want to say well or poorly players are doing, [Nick: laughs] but you know? Nick Yu: 04:03 You always move forward. There's three different ways to go through a scenario. You can either succeed, fail or succeed with a bonus objective. So, and that can kind of change branches that you go down into the campaign, too. Um, there are over 15 scenarios with kind of an endless skirmish mode once you finished the campaign, but you will probably only see nine or ten through a play through. And we tried to keep everything to more manageable bite-sized chunks. So each scenario on average takes about 45 minutes. Lauren Woolsey: 04:31 That definitely is going to make it easier to get to the table, that's for sure. Nick Yu: 04:34 Yeah, we hope so. Lauren Woolsey: 04:36 All right, so before we move too far further, I want to reach the question that we always ask our guests, which is: what does accessibility mean to you? Nick Yu: 04:45 Yeah. You know, I even thought about this before you told me about this question and I'm to starting to really struggle with it, but for me, accessibility is either the absence of gatekeeping, especially in the board game industry. We see a lot of that, but sometimes it's very arbitrary, but with Domianne's Tower, Adventure Tactics, we've tried to make a very accessible game, something that would be widespread, something that a lot of people could just pick up and play. Especially a lot of the tactical battlers in this realm, Descent and Gloomhaven, they're very daunting. [Lauren: oh year.] That was a lot of people are like, oh my gosh, I don't want to get into that. Yeah. Dan's descend group has gone through I think three or four different iterations because people drop in and out and I don't think he's ever finished at the same campaign yet. So we want something that people can actually play through. Lauren Woolsey: 05:27 Yeah, for sure. With especially your shorter time per scenario, it's a lot easier to kind of commit to doing these somewhat regularly, especially if people have regular, either weekly or monthly game groups that they can bring people together for. Nick Yu: 05:41 Right, exactly. And Dan is very good about this. Yeah. It's kind of joking, but it's true. Dan is like a pretty woke individual. You really made a push for diversity among the cast. And I didn't really realize this, and this is terrible because I'm a minority, right? Like I should've been like, oh, you know, we should have a diverse cast. No, I subscribed to the, you know, your DnD, like JRR Tolkien, like white power fantasy. Like with the cast. He's like, no, no, no, let's, let's revisit that with the artist. And he's like, let's make sure that, you know, we have more females, let's say, can make sure that, you know, we have some, some diverse cast members and a lot of people have stopped and said to us, wow, you know, you, this is a very diverse cast. You know, there aren't like chainmail bikinis on the females. You know, it seems like it, you know, it's a good representation. It's a good slice of humanity and that's something that I want to really consider it without, without Dan's input. Lauren Woolsey: 06:27 Yeah, it's surprising. So you mentioned that, you know, being a minority, you'd think that you'd have this kind of more awareness, but it is true that like our whole society is built around that being a default. Like no matter who you are, unless you question those assumptions, there's this built in default that we have to fight against. Yeah. Nick Yu: 06:46 Right. Especially in that medieval fantasy world. Like, think about all the classical heroes. Like I mentioned Lord of the Rings. But you know, you're, the Witcher is really huge drone. You know, those are your Classic Heroes, Huh? You don't have a lot of minority or you have a female characters playing those major roles as protagonists in here and fantasies. And we've actually gotten a little bit of pushback for some backers, which I don't want to say it was unexpected, but uh, [Lauren: yeahhhh...] You know, we're saying, hey, you know, this is the vision that we're committed to and you know, I can't say it any better than Dan. Someone posted on the BGG forums, you know, are you guys going to introduce another man, male character, because I know there's three female characters and two males. It's like, I want to be able to play this with my son. [Lauren makes a short noise that seems to indicate rolling eyes and a sarcastic brief laugh at how often women have had to play as male characters.] And Dan had the perfect response. He said, you know, all five characters are playable by all genders. Right. [Lauren: yup.] It doesn't matter what gender and you can play with whichever characters. So. [Lauren: Exactly. Right.] I don't think I could've have answered any better than that. Lauren Woolsey: 07:36 That's perfect. So you mentioned the, the art and the cast and the playable characters. Were there any other decisions that you made in the game design process with accessibility in mind? Nick Yu: 07:47 Yeah. Another one that I think gets brought up frequently, and I've heard some of your other guests answer this way too, is people with vision impairment, color blindness particularly, that's a big one. And we actually went through, when we had Jason Kingsley do the design for the cards. We went through a lot of those different color tests to make sure that the different types of cards were all very distinct from each other, even with people with different types of colorblindness. Lauren Woolsey: 08:09 Yeah. Excellent. That's thankfully becoming more of a kind of baseline for publishers, but it's always still surprising when that's not the case. [Nick: yep.] When you take into consideration the games theme, the mechanics and these accessibility ideas we've talked about, who would you say is your target audience? Nick Yu: 08:26 Well, I think, um, like, I don't want to say this is for Gloomhaven-light or people who are afraid to try to Descent and Gloomhaven, but I think that's how this game is kind of ended up whether we'd set out to do that intentionally or not because really I wasn't thinking about that in the end. But the way the game develops, it certainly came out that way. And I'll also, when I said true co-op, it is a full co-op. There's no like Descent needs either an app or a dungeon master player. Everything's done through AI and each scenario has a specific boss deck that you follow and the original design, everybody had their own individual experience points and their own individual experience pool and would level up separately. But we found very quickly that working against the cooperative spirit of the game and Gloomhaven, you know, you can have one person kind of run around and grab all the loot and level up a ton and you know, to me you know that that's great in its own right, but that's not what we were trying to do. Lauren Woolsey: 09:19 It didn't have the right fit for yours. [Nick: yeah.] What is your favorite part of the game? If you sit down and play it, what's your absolute favorite part? Nick Yu: 09:25 For me, it's not even playing the game. It's making a bunch of different character builds. Like I have a big problem with DnD and honestly, any RPG, like I'll just say like especially if you come up with a character builder and we found a very good team that we have an online character builder for tactics too. But yeah, I'll just make like a billion characters before I even play one second. Like, uh, all the Elder Scrolls games. Like I'll sit in the character creator for forever. Like I'll be in there for like an hour before I actually start playing. Lauren Woolsey: 09:49 Do you have like a single favorite character for Adventure Tactics or is there one that's like near and dear to your heart? Nick Yu: 09:55 I don't because I feel like they're all my, my children. But if I had to pick and Dan was like, he said someone's going to ask you, you have to pick. If I have to pick, my favorite class is War Mage and it's also because it's Elwyn, you know, he starts off is this retired mage and he's kind of bumbly but you can see the progression through the art and the artists. Jacob crafted an amazing job showing, you know, different possible branches like organic growth, like uh, Elwyn starting off as the wizard could eventually become the War Mage, but anyone can become a War Mage. But we tried to illustrate ones that would, that would make sense. Lauren Woolsey: 10:24 Seem like a natural progression, yeah. [Nick: exactly.] What do you think makes the game most memorable for players if you watch them doing playtests or just hearing feedback from players? Nick Yu: 10:35 I think a lot of the decision making people are surprised by how tactical some of that really gets. And um - Lauren Woolsey: 10:41 It's in the name! They should know better! [Laughs] Nick Yu: 10:41 Exactly right. You'd think so. And also we don't have any exploration aspects, right? Part of Descent and Gloomhaven is exploring the map and going through that. But with Adventure Tactics, I wanted to make sure it was boss fight, set piece, boss fight. So it feels very cinematic and it can be very tense. And also there's dice rolling in the game to kind of replace the accuracy mechanic. And anytime you roll dice and like it's make or break, you know, if I make this role, we win this scenario. If I fail this then you know the things are looking, crimp. A lot of those moments I feel like even in just people who have played tested and only play the first couple of scenarios, they already have one of those, you know, cinematic moments. Lauren Woolsey: 11:20 That's awesome. Now for our listeners interested in getting a copy of this game, is it available? Nick Yu: 11:23 Yup. If you're listening now it's on Kickstarter. If you're listening when this podcast goes live, we should be in the last two days of the Kickstarter. So please check us out. We funded on the first day, but now we're pushing through all those stretch goals to make the game as awesome as possible. Lauren Woolsey: 11:37 Fabulous. And then when the Kickstarter ends, where will the game be available at that point? Nick Yu: 11:42 Hopefully everywhere. [Lauren: laughs, "always a good answer!"] I think the Kickstarter is doing well enough where you know you should be able to find it online either through Dan's website for a direct order at Letiman Games, but also should be going normal distribution channels and your, you know, your local favorite game store. Lauren Woolsey: 11:56 Fabulous. If people wanted to reach out to you on social media, how could they reach you? Nick Yu: 12:03 I always say it's easy to find me with - through Dan because I'm terrible at social media and I didn't really think about my usernames very well. Like on Twitter, you know my handle, it's Y U T I N G X I A N G and it makes sense to me, that's my Chinese name. [Lauren: Sure, yeah!] Trying to explain that to somebody else, like spelling it out. It's awful. Trying to get people to follow me, but Twitter is probably the medium I interact with the most frequently because there's a lot of board game people on there. [Lauren: There really are.] Boardgame Twitter is very active and fun and very positive, so I try to keep up on that [Lauren: Most days.] But you can find me. Yeah, most most days. Yeah. Not always. It's like any social media, but you got, yeah, you can find me through Dan. I'm always interacting with his stuff too and he's at Letiman Games Dot Com and we actually set up a fan page for Adventure Tactics through Dan's Facebook page too. Lauren Woolsey: 12:49 Oh, awesome. And we'll have the link for that in our episode description. Awesome. Is there anything else you want to tell everybody about the game that we haven't touched on? Nick Yu: 12:57 I don't think so. I mean the main thing for me was, you know, the real driving force to design Adventure Tactics was the class building, the class exploration of the leveling up in Adventure Tactics. Then again, I think that's very unique and we haven't really seen that in tabletop yet. Lauren Woolsey: 13:13 Yeah, I'll fully admit that. I have friends who play gloom haven and I'm glad I didn't commit to that amount of time. And so this seems like a really good fit. If I wanted to get into that kind of game, that it's shorter, easier to get to the table and still fully cooperative and I don't have to worry about did I get too much loot and you know, making the others feel bad, because it's all shared. [Nick: yep] It's nice. Nick Yu: 13:36 Yeah. And so that for us, you know, that was our aim to make it more accessible. Yep. Lauren Woolsey: 13:41 Awesome. Well thank you so much for coming on. This was a fabulous episode. Nick Yu: 13:45 Thank you so much for having me. Lauren Woolsey: 13:47 For more information about the topics that we discussed in this episode and the links that we just mentioned, we'll have those in the About This Episode section on our website at playabilitypod.com and if our listeners have any questions or comments that you'd like to share with us, please email us at playabilitypod at gmail dot com and find us on major social media platforms as @playabilitypod. Thanks again for listening. Play with a new perspective.