Lauren Woolsey:     00:09          [Music introduction] 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 Joe Hopkins, the designer of Endangered. So Joe, how's it going?

Joe Hopkins:        00:22          Going good. How are you?

Lauren Woolsey:     00:24          Excellent! All right, so tell me about this game's backstory.

Joe Hopkins:        00:28          Sure. So I've been designing games for 10 years actually, and this is my first game that's going to be published. And for the majority of that time I had been building competitive games, games where only one person wins, because I knew that cooperative games take a lot of balancing. You have to do a lot of play testing. It's like, "I don't want to do a ton of play testing on that." But then I finally said, "you know what? I'm going to do a cooperative game." And this was a theme that spoke to me. It's a theme that is relevant. It's timely. It's happening right now. Yeah. And it just kind of took off, [I] showed it to Grand Gamers Guild and they loved it. I should've done a cooperative game sooner, I guess.

Lauren Woolsey:     01:09          [Laughs] Yeah. So I've played a prototype of this with you. For our listeners, can you go through the theme a little bit?

Joe Hopkins:        01:15          So Endangered is a cooperative game where you are a conservationist working together with the other players to save a species from extinction.

Lauren Woolsey:     01:26          And the game comes with a couple of different animal species that you're saving. What was the first one that you came up with, and how did you decide on which ones to add to the game?

Joe Hopkins:        01:38          The first one I came up with was the rhino scenario and that was a long time ago. And from there I did a whole bunch of research on what kind of issues that that species faced. And so I started working on the tiger scenario, which is actually what's in the base game. The base game will have two scenarios, the tigers and the sea otters.

Lauren Woolsey:     01:59          And then there's additional scenarios that you're working on as possible expansions?

Joe Hopkins:        02:05          Yeah, the panda scenario will be one of our stretch goals.

Lauren Woolsey:     02:09          Perfect. And so it's a cooperative game, so everyone's trying to win. And can you go through how the game plays? Like, what are the primary mechanics that the players have access to?

Joe Hopkins:        02:19          Yeah, the primary mechanic is, it's a dice placement game, so very similar to a worker placement except instead of placing your worker, you're rolling your dice and the die values indicate where you can place. You actually kind of are getting in each other's way a little bit with your worker placement and dice placement. In a normal competitive game, when you place your worker, you block someone and that's a good thing and in this case you place your worker and you block other people from using that action and it's a bad thing because you want them to be able to use that action. So that's the main mechanic there are of course, as in any cooperative game, bad things are trying to happen too. And your actions are mostly trying to stop those.

Lauren Woolsey:     03:04          Certainly. Now for winning the game, what do players have to achieve or accomplish in order to win the game?

Joe Hopkins:        03:12          In order to win the game, you have to convince the UN to pass a resolution to save the species. So during the game, you're going to be giving influence to the different ambassadors and it's the only way to win. There are a couple of ways to lose: if you run out of animals, if you know there's only one animal left in the world, well it's too late if you run out of time, or if you run out of habitat.

Lauren Woolsey:     03:35          Excellent. So let's turn now to our sort of focus here at Playability and the question that we ask all of our guests. What does accessibility mean to you?

Joe Hopkins:        03:45          Accessibility means to me the ability to play regardless of physical ability.

Lauren Woolsey:     03:53          And what decisions did you make in the game design process where you had accessibility in mind or changes that you've made along the way as you've learned more about what players will be able to do it with your game?

Joe Hopkins:        04:05          Well, the big thing is we want everyone to be able to see themselves in this game. This is not a game where you're building an ancient city or you're building robots in the future. This is a game about something that's happening now. It's something that everyone can do something about now. And so we've worked to make sure that not only is that this game is not just focused on American animals, not just focused on American government, but focused on the world, focused on everyone. So we've also made sure that all the characters in the game, we have different backgrounds, different races, different genders. We of course did you know the normal thing for game design, make sure it's colorblind friendly. This is also a cooperative game which really brings people together and there's no hidden information. So you don't actually have to physically move the pieces. You can be part of the conversation even if you can't actually manipulate the pieces, if you were paralyzed.

Lauren Woolsey:     05:07          Mhm, you can explain what you want to do on your turn. [Joe: Mhm, absolutely.] Right. I know that there are different player abilities in the game. Can you go through some of those and how you've incorporated those different backgrounds into the artwork for those?

Joe Hopkins:        05:23          Yeah, so each character has several different abilities, but each character, so we have five different characters, like we've got the TV wildlife host and the philanthropist and the zoologist, and on each character it's a double sided card. And on one side we have a male and on the other side we have a female and it's up to the player which side they want to play and that's strictly an aesthetic decision. It doesn't affect the game play, but we actually commissioned to the art done for both genders on every single character and we also made sure that we have many different races represented in those different characters.

Lauren Woolsey:     06:07          Yeah, having two genders is certainly a good start, and I know that that's always nice to be able to see yourself in the game. Even if it's a limited range that can be put into five characters, two sided, it's still a good start and a good thing to pay attention to. Taking into consideration the game's theme and the mechanics and everything, who would you say is the target audience for this game?

Joe Hopkins:        06:31          The target audience of the game is players that enjoy cooperative games at about a medium weight complexity in terms of game design. The game is very relevant. It's very topical about, you know, it's about something that's happening now and we hope that that also appeals to people might not be into games as well. And so the complexity level isn't quite at a gateway level, it's a little bit higher than that. But we found that even players that are not into games not like into those hardcore long "gamer games" still really enjoy it. Especially since it's cooperative. You don't have to catch everything on the first pass since the entire table is working together. And so if someone says, no, don't, don't do that because of this, you're like, you don't end up in a situation where everyone else is beating you and there's nothing you can do about it, since you're all working together. We do have a family version that we're also going to be releasing as one of the stretch goals hopefully. And that one will appeal to kids as young as six. [Lauren: Excellent] so, playing with a parent. Yeah.

Lauren Woolsey:     07:40          Yeah! Now what do you think makes this game most memorable for players?

Joe Hopkins:        07:45          Yeah, so this game is very emotional actually, and it's rare that you find a game that elicits a lot of strong emotions for good or for bad. But during this game you have animals on the board and unfortunately sometimes there are cards that require you to remove those animals. People get very upset about that. They're like, "no, I don't-- No!" It really, um, is very memorable because of those, those things. Because of that, when that happens, like I said, it's very emotional. It's, it's not the same emotion as when you know you're playing a war game and you lose an army. Most people are like, oh, well that's okay, I'll, I'll just do this next turn. But yeah, losing that one little cardboard animal, people get very upset about that. So...

Lauren Woolsey:     08:31          They get very invested. Yeah [Joe: yeah, they do.] What's your favorite part of the game, as a player and not just from a game design perspective?

Joe Hopkins:        08:40          Yeah. My favorite part of the game is the placing of the dice. It's like since you are blocking each other with your dice, you have to make sure that you're being very cooperative and talking through your decisions people. And it's very puzzly as well. Like, oh, we need to do this right now, but if I do this, I'm going to block you. And working through that puzzle as a group is a really great experience I feel.

Lauren Woolsey:     09:08          Yeah, I certainly had fun playing. It was, uh, it was certainly an older version of the prototype, but even then it was, it was quite fun. Do you have a way that you've found to mitigate any like Alpha Gamer personalities?

Joe Hopkins:        09:23          Yeah, we had Chris Badell, the designer of Sentinels on the Multiverse, he played this game. And he gave us a really good piece of advice and that was that there's some cooperative games that completely eliminate the Alpha player or they address it, but there are other games like Sentinels where, and Alpha Gamer can exist, but it's much rarer because each person has their own role. Each person has their own thing that they're good at. Before I talked with him, each role was pretty much the same and so it really pushed us to make sure that each of those roles had a different field. The philanthropist is really good at collecting money. Zoologist has really good at handling the animals. The lobbyist is really good at convincing the ambassadors in influencing them to win the game. So it makes it so that if there's someone who is an Alpha Gamer, you are maybe going to get alpha-gamed by them because you know your role, you know what you're doing.

Lauren Woolsey:     10:19          Yeah. It's certainly good to lean into the changes or the variable player powers so people feel more invested in what they are and what they are contributing to the group rather than being kind of interchangeable. That's a good piece of advice. For our listeners interested in getting a copy of this game, when will it be available or where can they go to get a copy?

Joe Hopkins:        10:41          It's going to be on Kickstarter April 2nd through the 26th and it's going to be released by Grand Gamers Guild. So if you go to GrandGamersGuild.com, sign up for the newsletter, we'll make sure you know what's going on.

Lauren Woolsey:     10:56          Perfect. And how can our listeners connect with you on social media?

Joe Hopkins:        11:01          Oh, you can reach me on Twitter. I'm at average Joe Games. That's A V G Joe Games. You can also reach me at Joe HopkinsHopkins' games@gmail.com

Lauren Woolsey:     11:12          Perfect. And for the Kickstarter, this episode will probably come out during that Kickstarter process. Are there any other stretch goals to the game that you're hoping to reach?

Joe Hopkins:        11:24          Yeah, so the pandas scenario is one that I really hope we hit, that we fund that one, the family version, I mentioned that already. We also have some additional player powers for each of the different characters and uh, right now the animal tokens are going to be punchout chits. We've seen some like a screen printed wood that is really awesome. I'm hoping we we fund that.

Lauren Woolsey:     11:47          Oh, I bet that would be gorgeous.

Joe Hopkins:        11:50          Oh yeah. Yeah. The game itself is very beautiful. Beth Sobel and Ben Flores were our artists and they did a really good job.

Lauren Woolsey:     11:57          Oh, that's fabulous. Well, I look forward to seeing the completed and beautified version. Well thank you so much for coming on and talking about Endangered today and I look forward to the next time I get to play it.

Joe Hopkins:        12:10          Yeah, absolutely. [Lauren: Thanks again.] Yeah, thanks for having me.

Lauren Woolsey:     12:13          [Music begins] 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 dot com. And if our listeners have any questions or comments that you would like to share with us, please email us at playabilitypod at gmail dot com and find us on major social media platforms as at playabilitypod. Thanks again for listening, play with a new perspective.