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Playability Podcast

Episode 6: The Seals of Cthulhu (Sean Epperson)

Run time: 18 minutes, 53 seconds

Episode recorded by Rebecca Strang.

Playability is produced by Mike Risley.

Transcript auto-generated by YouTube and edited by Rebecca Strang.

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Music intro:	00:00

Rebecca Strang:	00:07	
Hello and welcome to Playability, where we hold conversations at the 
crossroads of gameplay and accessibility. I'm your host, Rebecca Strang, and I'm 
joined today by Sean Epperson of Thing 12 games. Sean recently had a 
successful Kickstarter campaign for The Seals of Cthulhu, which should be 
fulfilling in early 2019. Welcome to the show, Sean. 

Sean Epperson:	00:29	
Hey, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. 

Rebecca Strang:	00:31	
Yeah, very glad to have you here. So can you tell our listeners a bit about The 
Seals of Cthulhu, what the development path was like and about the game 
itself? 

Sean Epperson:	00:40	
Uh, yeah. It was actually kind of interesting. The Seals of Cthulhu started off as 
an idea that I had that I wanted to explore which one player has something that 
the other player wants and they know that that thing has no intrinsic value to 
them, but the value comes in the fact that the other player wants what they 
have and the other player has that same condition and the two of them have to 
sort of figure out how am I more successful than the other person kinda through 
a trading thing. I did a mock up of the game and it was inherently unfun. It was 
just terrible. So I shelved it for, I don't know, six months, a year or so and kind of 
forgot about it. And we were going to a friend's house and I was pulling some 
stuff out... I've got a designer box that I keep all these pieces in and I needed 
something for some game and I happened to see these cards that I made and 
I'm like, "oh, I remember this game, it was terrible!" And all of a sudden I just 
had this moment of serendipitous inspiration. And all of a sudden I thought, "Oh 
I know how to fix this! I think I know what was missing." And I quickly mocked 
up the cards and went off to my friends house for game night and was like, 
"okay, before we play any games, we have to test this out. I have to find out if 
this is on track or not or if I'm crazy." And you know, of course it was 
unbalanced and all that kind of stuff, but the fun was there. The piece that was 
missing... I was like "Oh, yay!" From that point on, I kept working on it and I 
liked the idea of having the two opposing sides. We thought about, well, what 
would make an oppositional force sort of situation. And I've always been 
wanting to kind of do my own Cthulhu-style game, you know, I'm a big fan of 
that mythos. And so yeah. So the characters are investigators and the cultists. 
The investigators, their goal is to essentially shut down the cultists and end up 
having the most control points. Each card that they have has a value and a 
control value because the interesting thing about it is that all of your cards have 
half of the art on them and in order to actually use the ability, there's sort of like 
three different ways that your card is useful. To actually use the ability on the 
card you have to get the card from the other player and you do that through 
this blind bidding mechanism where each player on their turn is going to put a 
card face down and they're gonna put out a bit of what they're willing to give to 
the other player in order to take control of that card, have it face up and 
accessible to them. And the other player can come back in a bid over the top of 
them and it kinda goes back and forth. Once a card is flipped face up, the other 
person gets all of the bidding currency that was put out and once that card is 
available you can use it for further bidding potential. So your cards are useful for 
bidding to try and keep control over different cards or it can be useful for having 
victory points or useful if you get both halves, using an ability that allows you to 
really kind of wreck the other player in different ways. And because it's a 
Cthulhu game, there's always going to be one Elder God in each game and the 
Elder Gods are gonna do some pretty crazy things. Sometimes there are things 
that you don't necessarily want to have control of. You don't actually want to 
have both of them and that's a good way to try and trick the other player and 
you thinking, "well, okay, if they're bidding pretty heavily on this, they really 
want this card." And then all of a sudden you get it and your like, "oh great, now 
I have control over this thing and it's starting, it's gonna start wrecking me." 

Rebecca Strang:	04:02	
Yeah. I did um, print-and-play a preview of the game when it was released and 
the matching of the two halves of the card art was something that I really 
enjoyed in the game. I can't think... Off the top of my head. I can't really think of 
another game where I've seen that. So that was a really cool way to use that 
mechanic. And the bidding process was a lot of fun because you know, you're 
not just playing the game, you're kind of playing the player too. 

Sean Epperson:	04:29	
Yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Strang:	04:30	
So, yeah, that was a lot of fun. And so here at Playability we do like to have a 
focus on accessibility in gaming. So what does accessibility mean to you? 

Sean Epperson:	04:39	
Accessibility to me means that as many players as possible are able to enjoy the 
gaming experience at the table. And that should cross borders across, you know, 
genders, across religious barriers, across maybe physical disabilities or things 
like that. So I started off in the video game industry and I've been in the industry 
for like 15, 18 years, something like that, so I'm very familiar with the visual 
media and having to make accommodations in order to be accessible to a wider 
variety of people. For example, having things that are color friendly for people 
that happen to be colorblind and there's lots of different colorblind variations. 
The most common tend to be red/green, purple/yellow, blue/orange, things like 
that where they happen to look really close alike. We saw an issue with this in 
the board game industry with Century Spice Road. There's a lot of cubes in that 
game. And the colors that they chose for those cubes happened to be in a pallet 
that made it really difficult for colorblind people to differentiate between what 
they were and that wasn't an issue in Century Road, they fixed that with the 
gems. And I think they tried to fix it with their next game because they got a lot 
of flack for it, deservedly so. I think these are things that are easy to be aware of 
and publishers especially have... It's on us to be aware of them and to find ways 
to work around that. There's lots of different ways to do that. For Seals of 
Cthulhu, one thing that I wanted to do as far as accessibility is make sure that 
there wasn't the white male kind of focus on character types which was pretty 
prevalent and can still be somewhat prevalent in a lot of different games. And 
you'll see that in a lot of like space games maybe from like five years ago where 
everybody is a white dude, right, like that's not really cool and we want 
everyone to feel like they have some sort of representation game. And I think 
that's a cool thing to have. So all of our characters are a lot of different visual 
looks as far as the racial tones, how they come across. We even have two 
female characters, one male character and one character that you're not really 
sure, I mean, they could be male, they could be female, a little more, you know, 
gender nonspecific. 

Rebecca Strang:	07:03	
Great. And so when you were play testing Seals of Cthulhu, were there any 
challenges that you came across where you had to tweak or alter anything as far 
as accessibility with the game? 

Sean Epperson:	07:18	
Uh, let's see, anything we had to tweak... Uh, not specifically. From, from the 
design point forward, I'm always, that's always kind of in the back of my mind. 
I'm always thinking about that stuff. Um, when we got to the art stage, when we 
were designing the playable characters, I specifically told the artists, you know, 
here's what I want to do, here's the sort of thing that we want to capture, you 
know, these character types, these sort of looks, these ethnicities and things like 
that. So when we did play testing with those, nobody ever complained. If 
anything we had people saying, "oh, that was really cool that you have this 
character type" or that you got this. One of the reviewers we had, he was super 
excited that we had someone that was kind of gender fluid in the game. It was 
very, you know, unique for them to see and we felt like, "Oh cool, you know, we 
made someone else feel included in the gameplay. That's great." So um, yeah, I 
mean because I'm always thinking about that, we typically don't have any issues 
with it because we're mindful of it from the start. 

Rebecca Strang:	08:22	
Yeah, and that's a great point too. I think a lot of people, when you're asking 
about accessibility, a lot of people will come back and say, "oh, but it takes more 
time, or it costs more money to make things accessible like that," but I think if 
it's something that is in the minds of the designers and the publishers from the 
beginning and it's something you're planning for and it's just something you do, 
then it alleviates a lot of having to go back and change things because you're 
getting feedback that a game isn't as welcoming as you thought it was. 

Sean Epperson:	08:55	
Yeah. And I think that's... I'll be a little honest here, I think someone complaining 
that it costs more money, I think that's a copout, that's not an acceptable 
answer for me. I think that there's always some creative ways that you could 
make something more accessible. Like, if it's, you know, a colorblindness issue, 
if it's a physical issue, things like that. You're, we're creative people and that's 
the whole thing of doing game design is thinking creatively, thinking outside of 
the normal box and spend some time thinking about it. I guarantee you can 
come up with some way and that is not going to break the bank and make the 
game unattainable financially to make it more accessible. 

Rebecca Strang:	09:37
Yeah. And so as far as the art for the game, I love all of the art in the game, that 
was one of the first things that drew me to Seals of Cthulhu and I know you've 
got a trio of artists who did various things in the game. So can you tell us a little 
bit about that team? 

Sean Epperson:	09:52
Yeah. Uh, so the artists... Son Duong is the main character and creature artist, 
the card artist. He's the one that, he's actually a neighbor of mine he lives a 
couple of houses down from me, and he designed the logo for Thing 12 Games, 
really cool guy, really awesome artist. I've always been wanting to work in a 
game specific way. His art is very... A lot of his art is really dark and spooky and 
supernatural and he's got this really cool sort of graffiti style design to it a little 
bit. And I felt like when it came to the Cthulhu mythos that he would be a great 
artist to kind of have this different take on what Cthulhu and all these creatures 
look like. And he actually was completely unaware of what any of that was, like 
he didn't know what Cthulhu was or anything, and I'm like well that's perfect. 
And he's like, well, "I need to go look up and see what all these things are..." I'm 
like, "no, no, no, no. I'll give you a description of what they could be, but I want 
your creative mind to come up with what you think that is. What's that visual 
interpretation to you?" And being a classical painter, that's what he does, he 
does a lot of physical painting, he's done murals on buildings here in Seattle. He 
came at a much different look than you typically see in board game art and I 
was super excited about that. So not only does the art have this holistic, uh, 
different look to it, but it's got a unique spin on what Cthulhu looks like and 
what Nyarlethotep and all these other creatures that he conjured up out of his 
brain and he's like, "Well I think that it might look like this." And, uh, Darren is 
doing... He did the logo for us and he did the original box art. He's been doing 
stuff with us for, gosh, since almost the inception of Thing 12. He's kind of our, 
our in house artist. He does a lot of cool stuff. He did the art for Dice of Crowns, 
he did the art for DIce of Pirates, a really talented guy that I worked with back in 
the video game days and he was a designer, but he also had a lot of really cool 
art that he did and eventually he left the game design world because the video 
game design world can be... kinda chew people up and spit them out. So he was 
doing his own thing and I'd contacted him way back in the day and was like, 
"Hey, I'd really like to have you do some art for us," and he was at a point where 
he didn't really feel as strongly about his art as he really should have and I was 
excited that we could actually be there to empower him and get him mentally 
up to a really good state of feeling more confident about himself. So we like 
working with people that we know and people that are good-hearted and have 
a good mind space. And so Darren was a natural. Kris Quistorff is our illustrator. 
He does a lot of our Kickstarter stuff, he does a lot of layout stuff, Kris is just 
incredibly talented. He is just being able to crank things out in insanely fast 
amounts of time. He made a playable version of Dice of Crowns in Unity in like a 
day and he came back and was like, "hey I made this thing that we can use it for 
the video." I'm like, "oh my Lord! He just did that? That's insane!" So he's super 
fun to work with. We've worked with a lot of different people. There's a lot of 
different artists that we're working with on a bunch of other projects and it's 
something that you really enjoy is getting to work with all these different people 
and being able to bring their art, bring their talents and show the world what 
these people can do. I think that's cool. 

Rebecca Strang:	13:40	
Yeah. And all the artists gorgeous. And I was, it kind of blows my mind... I would 
never have guessed that the creature art was done by someone who was totally 
unfamiliar with the Lovecraft mythos... They look amazing. 

Sean Epperson:	13:55	
Yeah, he did such a good job. Like, each time he turned one in I'm like, "Wow. 
That's just amazing." We really didn't do any revisions per se, we tweaked a 
little bit, but most of them, like the first thing that he turned in as far as, you 
know, the initial sketches before he really got into painting. I was like, "Yeah. 
That's great. Let's go with that. That's cool."

Rebecca Strang:	14:15	
That's amazing. So what's your favorite part of The Seals of Cthulhu?

Sean Epperson:	14:22	
My favorite part, huh... I love the really interesting combos is that you can get. 
So usually when you use an item you have to break that item to use its ability, 
you know you've got both face up and you're going to turn one face down, but 
there are other cards that will let you turn cards that are face down back face 
up. So if you're planning and you're clever enough, you can actually get some 
interesting combos where you can, you know, trigger a card multiple times and 
trigger a couple different things and really mess up a player. I think that's really 
kind of a cool thing to kind of work towards because you've only got a very small 
number of rounds to make it happen. So you really have to kind of dial in like 
"okay, how am I going to, am I going to do this thing and this thing."

Rebecca Strang:	15:05	
Yeah, it's kind of like the tiniest engine builder in a game. And so what do you 
think makes this game memorable for players? 

Sean Epperson:	15:16	
I think that makes it memorable and I think it's just the kind of experience that 
you can have in a short amount of time. It gives you that sort of deep-thinky, 
how am I going to outwit my opponent sort of feeling that you get from a 
crunchier games, but it plays in 20 minutes. So you can have these sort of 
explosive games where you can get just totally wrecked and you don't feel like, 
"well I'll never played this game again" because it's only 20 minutes. Right? So 
anyway, you're like "I know, I see where I screwed up" because you look down 
and you'd be like, "okay, I did this, this triggered, he did this thing because of 
that..." You can sort of like sort of backpedal and walk backwards through the 
game and see where you might have screwed up and you could have done 
something a little differently. Maybe you overspent on something or you used a 
card maybe when you shouldn't have strategically. And because that timeframe 
is so short, you're like, "okay, I'm going to try this again, but I'm a little bit 
differently this time." 

Rebecca Strang:	16:09	
Awesome. And so taking into consideration, you know, the theme, the 
mechanics, the accessibility that we've talked about, who would you say is the 
primary target audience for Seals of Cthulhu? 

Sean Epperson:	16:20	
Primary audience is people that enjoy two player games. People that enjoy 
thinky games where they have to outwit and strategize around their opponent. 

Rebecca Strang:	16:31	
Alright. And for listeners who are interested in getting a copy but may have 
missed the Kickstarter, where can they preorder and what is your current 
fulfillment schedule? 

Sean Epperson:	16:42	
If someone's interested in checking it out and they want to get on the preorder, 
you can go to Kickstarter.com and look up "Seals of Cthulhu", there is a link 
there that will take them to the preorder page. Current fulfillment we're still 
tracking for early next year. We are currently working on all of the wood boxes. 
There were two different tiers in the Kickstarter where people could get a kind 
of a prototype version of the game with these really cool wooden boxes that are 
laser engraved with the logo. We're currently painting all of those and that's 
taking a lot of time. They look gorgeous though! So, we're getting those made. 
We're working on the box art. There's a couple surprises in store for people that 
backed and anyone that happens to get in on the preorder, they'll be a part of 
that as well. So we're finishing up those things and then we're going to get 
everything over to manufacturing. So all the cards are basically done and we're 
just finishing up the rules manual as far as it's layout and look and that sort of 
thing as well as the, some of the physical pieces that are part of the board game 
box itself. 

Rebecca Strang:	17:53	
Okay, great. And for people who want to keep up with news and find you guys 
online, where can they find you and, uh, Thing 12 Games online?

Sean Epperson:	18:03	
Uh, we are on instagram @Thing12Games. We are, I am on twitter all the time 
@Thing12Games and on facebook, Thing 12 Games, and our website is 
www.Thing12Games.com.

Rebecca Strang:	18:17	
Alright, great. Well hopefully everybody will go and check that out. Like I said, 
it's a fun game, quick and the art is beautiful. So you'll definitely want to go take 
a look at that. Thank you so much for joining us today to talk about The Seals of 
Cthulhu.

Sean Epperson:	18:30	
Yeah. Thank you for having me, Rebecca. I appreciate it. 

Rebecca Strang:	18:32	
Alrighty, and thank you listeners for listening to this episode of Playability. If you 
have any questions or comments you would like to share with us, please email 
us at playabilitypod@gmail.com or find us on major social media platforms 
@PlayabilityPod. Thanks again for listening. I hope this episode helps you play 
with a new perspective.