Lauren Woolsey: 00:09 Hello, 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 Tony Miller to talk about his most recent project. Kabuto Sumo. Hi Tony! Tony Miller: 00:22 Hi! Lauren Woolsey: 00:24 All right, so tell me about this game's backstory. I know I've seen a lot of the stages on social media, which has been awesome, but kind of give me an overall summary of how this game got to where it is. Tony Miller: 00:37 Absolutely. Absolutely. So it started about four or five months ago at this point, and my first published game Fire in the Library was shipping out to everybody and I was seeing it all over social media. And then I got my copies and I was showing my son who's six and I was showing him and he was all excited because it was "daddy's game" and he knew it was daddy's game, but it wasn't a game that he could play. Fire in the Library has a lot of text, my six year old is not reading yet. He reads some, but we're talking, you know, three letter words, Dr. Seuss books, that kind of stuff. He's not at the level of parsing special abilities - Lauren Woolsey: 01:19 Right, the cognitive load you need. Tony Miller: 01:20 Yeah, exactly. Like, the multiple interlocking abilities on cards is not something that he's up to as of yet in this stage in his education. So like he, you know, was excited for me because he saw, I was excited, thought that the game was really neat. It definitely looks really neat having Beth Sobel artwork really helps, but it wasn't a game that he could play. And what he wanted to do was play with me. So sitting there as a game designer going, okay, how can I design a game that he can play? What, what are the requirements in this regard? And so the first thing that was obvious was there couldn't be any text or if there was text, it had to be very, very limited. He knows his numbers, he knows his shapes, he knows small words. But I needed to keep reading requirements to the absolute minimum. Tony Miller: 02:15 So I started thinking about things that he likes and just kind of brainstorming like, well, what does my son like? He likes, you know, Marvel comic books. He likes going to the arcades with me. He likes those coin pusher games that exist in arcades that people waste tons of money in. And as I'm thinking about this, like thinking about an analog board game design pushing one thing with another thing is something that's very tactile, is very analog and is something that like board games can do better than anybody else. [Lauren: Sure.] So I kind of just latched onto this idea of like, okay, so what he really likes is when the coin hits in exactly the right spot and the pusher arm comes down and creates that waterfall of coins off the end. That's like, he lives for those moments - Lauren Woolsey: 03:08 Who doesn't like that though! Tony Miller: 03:09 Yeah, I know, right. But we'll go to like an arcade and he'll spend all of his arcade money trying to make that happen. So I knew that this already was going to be a winning formula with him, but I had no idea what I was going to do. Like how is this a game that's, you know, a way to get you to spend all your money so that the house always wins. You know, there's gotta be some, some way to turn this into an actual game. So not knowing what it was going to be game wise, I got my copy of Catacombs down off my shelf and grabbed all the big chunky wooden disks out of it. Catacombs disks come in like four different sizes. They have the big gigantic pieces that you stick through the holes in the board that act as walls and things. And then they have the medium sized pieces, which are the characters, the smaller sized pieces, which are the, the little things like goblins and stuff. And then they have really tiny pieces that are like arrows and projectiles. Well, the little tiny pieces were right out. They were way too small. So I grabbed the three other sizes and I just started like messing around with them and like I had an idea of they're going to be, I'm going to put them on a board and you'll push one in from one side and knock something out of a boundary and you know, that'll be like how you score? Sure. Whatever. So I'm just playing around with this and it's like it feels good to the hand and it, it has a tactile nature to it that is fun, but it still wasn't really a game. It was mostly just us messing around with it. Tony Miller: 04:42 So one of my other hobbies, one of my other passions in life is professional wrestling. And in the spring, new Japan pro wrestling has their Wrestling Dontaku event. Every spring, it's a big like multi-day wrestling show that they put on for one of their festival seasons, one of their holidays. And I'm watching this event and they have this video package that runs at the beginning of the show and it's talking about Japan in the spring time and it shows like cherry blossoms falling from the trees and torrential downpours of rain. And then it shows these two big old beetles fighting each other. And I'm looking at this and thinking to myself exactly, it was like, like lightning almost. It was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. What is this? I need to know more. So I hop on Wikipedia and the Google machine and I start looking at everything I possibly can about these beetles. So Japanese rhinoceros beetles, which are kabutomushi, which means basically "helmet bug," kabuto meaning helmet and mushi being bug or insect, I guess, is the better way of putting it. They emerge from the ground in their larval state. They, they come out of the ground as full blown adult beetles in the springtime and the males actually fight each other using their very interesting head gear as it were. Why they're called the helmet beetles, is that they have big horns on the front of their head, like a rhinoceros, Japanese rhinoceros beetles. It's weird how all of our naming is so just on the nose here, but okay. They come out and they wrestle for mating purposes. They, they basically push each other around and almost like joust with their horns and um, reading up on these beetles and I'm just suddenly fascinated. Like they're big, chonky beetles. They're big circles. Like they look like a big 'ol oval shape. Just like my big old disks that I've been playing around with in my prototype and the more I look at it like the more things start connecting and then all of a sudden I find a paragraph that talks about how Japanese school children will actually find these beetles fighting and draw circles on the ground around them and pretend that it's a Sumo contest [Lauren: "oh!" laughs] and they'll actually like take bets and things on these contests between these two beetles. Tony Miller: 07:11 Now the beetles are totally unaware of it. They're just engaging in their normal rituals and it's not like dog fighting or cockfighting or anything where these beetles are being coerced to fight. This is just what they do. But Japanese schoolchildren bet on it and it's actually outlawed in several areas. Like the betting aspect is actually outlawed in several areas [Lauren: "oh, sure."] Like like Pokemon trading and stuff like that. Betting on beetle fighting. Who knew? But yeah, like reading this and I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Sumo. It's a Sumo contest. What are the rules of Sumo? So then now I'm falling down another hole. Looking up the rules of Sumo and how Sumo works. Lauren Woolsey: 07:52 Isn't the internet beautiful? Tony Miller: 07:54 Yes, it is the greatest thing ever for someone like me who wants to learn about one thing and then the 30 other things that you can't possibly really understand the first thing without also knowing. [Lauren: "Right." laughs] So now I'm looking up Sumo and it's like, okay, wait a minute, what if it, my game is a Sumo game featuring beetles. What if it's these big chonky beetle bois wrestling? And I use some of the things from Sumo. So the board is a ring, it's a circle. So it's also a disk that's really pleasing: disks on a disk. Looks really cool actually when set up on a table. So it has an aesthetic aspect to it. And what if you only care about some of the disks, like your particular beetle is the disk that you care about and all of the other disks just kind of fade into the background. They're there as part of the mechanism, but not any kind of anything else. Okay. So they're all going to be neutral colors now. So I want the beetles to be really basic primary colors that stand out and all of the others to be neutrals, whites, grays, blacks, so that they just kind of are there and it's obvious that they're there but they're in the background and the two that you want to pay attention to are the real focus. Tony Miller: 09:08 And then the rules are going to be, you either knock your opponent's beetle off or wait a minute, what do I do with all of the pieces that fall off? So this was like the next big aha moment as I was sitting there and I was just messing around with it and I was like, okay, so I push a piece on and all the other pieces move to accommodate it. Some of them fall off the other edge, what do I do? And my son who was sitting there watching me, he just reached over and picked up one of the pieces that had fallen off and pushed it back on. And I was like, wait a minute, what if the pieces that you knock off go to your supply so that later on in the game you can push with those pieces. So you'll have some that you start with and then anything that you knock off on your term that isn't your opponent's beetle becomes effectively ammunition in your efforts to knock them off. Tony Miller: 10:01 And then, well, what happens if somebody doesn't have any pieces left? Well, they lose. One of the ways that you can lose in Sumo is if you stop having any kind of forward momentum. So the goal is basically to get your opponent out of the ring or to halt all of their forward momentum. If you're on their side of the ring and the pushing isn't moving anymore, the person who's further on wins. So in this case, the pieces that you can push with or kind of the equivalent of the effort used in pushing. So. Lauren Woolsey: 10:34 That's a great fit! Tony Miller: 10:35 Yeah. All of this just kind of like swirled together in like a week of, from when I saw the, from when I saw the video package about Japan until I'm messing around with disks on my living room floor with my son watching me. And at that point we started doing all sorts of things. Like it's like, okay, so now I've got a ring. So I had a sheet of paper with a circular ring printed on it, pushing disks on and then we had one moment, where is this disk on or off? Okay, okay. So now we have to make it so that the platform is raised because if, if it goes off the edge and gravity takes over - Lauren Woolsey: 11:14 It's got somewhere to fall, yeah. Tony Miller: 11:15 Yeah. It tips and as soon as it's not on a flat plane anymore, you know that it's off and there's no argument. So things like that just kept showing up as I was testing it and as I was building it and my primary play tester was my son. I wanted to make the game for him and so I wanted to make sure that he could play it. I wanted to make sure that it was interesting for him and also a little selfishly that adults would enjoy playing it as well. I wanted to like playing it because if I'm going to play this with him over and over and over again, then I want there to be something for me. And so the emergent game play that came up from the simple pieces, the whole entire thing is a board that is a six inch disk and then a bunch of smaller disks in three sizes, small, medium and large that sit on top of the bigger disks and the emergent gameplay. Like when my son plays it, he's six and he's just, you know, slamming and banging his disks in from his side, pushing, trying to get as far as he can. There's not a lot of like plotting of angles or planning, but two adults playing it. It's like watching them play pool or chess, like they're factoring in the angles and if I push it this exact angle, am I going to rotate off of this disk or am I going to push it the way that I want? Tony Miller: 12:37 And yeah, disks, because they're circular, don't move the way that you want them to all the time. So sometimes you'll go to push a disk in and all that will happen is all the disks that are already on. We'll just kind of swallow it, like the empty space will disappear and then suddenly your disk will be there where it was and nothing else will have moved. And so because it doesn't behave 100% predictably, the variance in skill level between me and my son wasn't a major obstacle to playing it. Like I don't always win. I don't always lose either, but that makes it exciting. It's something that we can play on much more of an even level and so absolutely. So it just, it all started from wanting to have something that I could play with him and then kind of letting all of that percolate in my head and being open to whatever shows up, I guess in that regard. Tony Miller: 13:35 In this case it happened to be beetles in Sumo wrestling. Yeah, and he has really enjoyed the game. We've played well over a hundred times at this point. [He] does ask me to play it. He calls it his game. He doesn't like to pronounce the title. [Lauren: laughs] And like he's just, he was very, very excited for me when I, I told him that I thought it was really, really good and I wanted to share it with other people and I actually asked his permission before I went to Origins this year, I was like, Raph, is it okay if I share your game with people? And he's like, yeah, yeah, everybody should play. So with his blessing, I, you know, started showing people at Origins and then we had all sorts of amazing developments there and then everything was so good that I brought it to GenCon and now it is signed. So it was a kind of a whirlwind of a design. [Lauren: that's a perfect story] Yeah. It, it just kind of came to be, I don't know how else to describe it. Like, like it needed me as a conduit to exist in the world. And Raphael as an inspiration, Raphael being my son. So, yeah. Lauren Woolsey: 14:43 There you go. And it seems like a lot of the decisions that you made with Raphael in mind also helped lend it to a, a larger audience. So accessibility ideas. The question we always ask our guests is what does accessibility mean to you? Tony Miller: 14:59 So accessibility to me means basically giving everyone a seat at the table. I don't want my designs or, or any of the activities that I engage in to be excluding people with no - uh, what's the word I'm looking for - no thought behind it. Like talking about Fire in the Library. I didn't build that game to be exclusionary, but once I had it in my hands and wanted to play it with my son, I realized I couldn't because he couldn't read. So he couldn't play the game. Now if he plays with me, I can explain what the cards do and he can make his own decisions. All of those accommodations are things that I can make so that I can play the game with him. And that's really what accessibility is for me is putting thought behind the decisions that you make so that you can have the audience that you want, the audience that's the broadest audience there is: humanity. [Lauren: mmhmm.] I don't want the stuff that I do to be unreachable for people or unusable to people. It doesn't serve a function at that point. I don't think of myself as an artist per se. Game design is art to some extent, but the primary reason I do it is to share it and so that's, you know, accessibility is making sure that I can share it with the most people possible and making sure that in particular the audience that you're looking at or approaching is a conscious decision on your part and you're not unintentionally leaving anyone out. Fire in the Library as a game doesn't work if you can't read. But if that's the audience I'm designing for is people who can read, then it was a conscious decision to include words on the cards. Just like in Kabuto Sumo, it was a conscious decision to not include any reading other than perhaps the rule book. So that's just consciousness, I guess in the grand scheme of things, being conscious of why you're making the decisions you're making and who it impacts when you do. Lauren Woolsey: 17:14 Yeah, absolutely. And I can see your game being played with people with drastically different skill levels, but also people who might not share a common language they won't need to to play this game the same way that they wouldn't for something like chess. So that's always nice. Tony Miller: 17:31 Oh yeah, language independence is a big deal. Lauren Woolsey: 17:33 Yes. Now you mentioned that the game is signed. When will the game be available for our listeners? Tony Miller: 17:40 So the game itself has been signed by Board Game Tables. The people who did On Tour and QE recently, their model is basically Kickstarter and direct to consumers. So you should expect it to show up on Kickstarter in 2020 it is being added to their lineups. So Lauren Woolsey: 18:00 That'll be fun. Well, awesome. This was such a nice conversation, especially to get the whole flow of your like step-by-step thought process. A lot of the times designs take so long that designers kind of lose track of those concrete steps and so it's really nice to get from you every single light bulb moment because it was such a quick development path, which sometimes we can be lucky about. (laughs) Tony Miller: 18:24 Yeah. Sometimes it's really lucky and the inspiration just kind of hits you and things come together intuitively and other times it takes a lot more pushing and pulling on threads to try and get things to gel. Yeah, exactly. And being able to remember all of the moments, the instances where the perspective on it change is definitely a benefit of a faster design process and really a a faster iterative loop. Just in general, do you have a game that takes, you know, 10 minutes to play? Like Kabuto Sumo does. You can get a lot more tests in than the four hour Euro, so it really turns itself to that kind of path. Lauren Woolsey: 19:06 Perfect. Well, I'm really looking forward to playing the finished version. For our listeners who want to get in contact with you or kind of keep up with any updates, where can we find you on social media? Tony Miller: 19:17 So the best place to find me is Twitter. I am there pretty much all the time I am, I am very active there. It's kind of my home away from home as I work from home, but I am "at bearded rogue" on Twitter and you can find me talking about wrestling, mental health or games, my own designs and various other things at that location. Lauren Woolsey: 19:43 It's always great to talk with you there and it was great to talk with you here as well. We're out of time, but it was fabulous having you on and I hope you have a wonderful afternoon. Tony Miller: 19:52 You too. Thank you very much for having me. This has been awesome. Lauren Woolsey: 19:55 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.com and find us on major social media platforms as at playabilitypod. Thanks again for listening. Play with a new perspective.