♪ >> PAYTON: For people who might not know you, but might know your games, would you mind just introducing yourself and saying what you do?

>> Hi, my name is Cole Wehrle.

I'm the creative director at Leder Games, which is a little game studio based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

And I'm the cofounder of Wehrlegig Games, which is an historical game studio that is based both in St. Paul and in Bloomington.

>> PAYTON: Tell me about, your, like, you know, your journey going through tabletop, because I know you used to be in academia, but how did you get started designing for tabletop?

>> Well, when I was a graduate student, I started getting interested in using games in the classroom.

And I have been playing games for a long time, but I was curious at how they could be used to teach.

And so over the course of my time at the University of Texas, I found myself designing lots of little games, some just for use in my classroom, but others for wider publication.

And by the time I had finished my graduate work, I found that more people were paying attention to my games than my academic articles.

And so when I went off on the job market, I found myself kind of whisked away to the north, and I started working at this small game studio here.

And I -- I've been playing games my entire life.

I've been interested in games for a long time, but there was something about game design.

It was this intersection of performance art and also, you know, building models, little mathematical models and then also, you know, just narrative that really compelled me.

And so we -- we got together and we worked on a bunch of games together.

The biggest one that I've worked on is a game called Root, which is an asymmetric strategy game, and that has really propelled Leder Games.

We now have a pretty large staff, and we are doing really well, and we've just been using that, the success of Root to get into bigger and bigger narrative projects.

>> PAYTON: What would you say were some of those, like, skills that you brought over from academia that helped with wrapping your head around, you know, all the complexities of designing games?

>> Well, the most important one is probably just the ability to focus on a long project for a long amount of time -- you know, a big project for a long amount of time.

So most of the time -- and I think this is always a key thing I always have to underline about the games.

The sort of games I work on take about 18 months to two years to execute.

The really big ones can take three years.

That doesn't include all the time you spend before getting started where you are just doing research.

In a lot of ways, they are like writing a book.

What separates them is that once you start writing the book, you have to start performing it and testing it and workshoping it.

So it's somewhere between a book and an album, right?

Because there's an element where you need to be doing a lot of, like, live testing.

And then there's also just a lot of, like, quiet thought that goes into it.

On a more practical side, when I was at the University of Texas, I worked at this thing called The Digital Writing and Research Lab, where we spent a lot of times learning and teaching students how to use graphic design programs, you know, learn their way through the Adobe Suite and things like that.

I found that work was tremendously important.

And, I mean, one of the things that I like best about working in the game industry is that it's a very scrappy place.

You never really know what you are going to end up doing from one day to the next.

And so I found, you know, at Indiana, I was a journalism student.

All of that work I did learning how to write for broadcast, translates directly to making Kickstarter videos, to, you know, conducting kind of broadcast design streams where we talk about our process, and just helping me articulate the work of design.

Because in the space of tabletop games, talking about your game is almost as important as designing it.

>> PAYTON: Knowing your games, like Root and Oath and John Company, what would you say are some of the through lines or the themes in the games that you create?

>> I'm really interested in interactive games that let the players decide the shape of the story.

So I like to think about games as grammars, as -- basically, what I'm trying to do when I sit players down to a game I worked on is provide them with some really good nouns and some really good verbs.

And then they get to assemble the stories out of those things.

So they're almost like improv exercises in some way.

And the games I've worked on have all been kind of political or historical in nature, but they are unified by a sense of storytelling that is primarily player driven.

Now, that's all to talk about the narrative side.

In terms of the game play, the games that I work on tend to have a lot of risk.

They're about risk management and understanding how risk changes your -- the way players make decisions.

They also spend a lot of time thinking about emergent partnerships and alliances.

I love the moments when you find yourself with an uncomfortable bedfellow, and you have to figure out how you and this person you don't really like are going to accomplish some kind of shared goal.

So these aren't games that you really get to play alone or puzzles that you can kind of solve by yourself.

I like games that are fundamentally social experiences and that's certainly something that connects all of my own work.

>> PAYTON: Speaking of which, your games are also very mechanically deep, very complex.

How do you go about balancing that with keeping it approachable, or is that even something that you are, like, concerned with?

Like, I don't know, how do you strike that balance?

>> I have a reputation for potentially, I guess, for games that tend to be a little rulesy.

But I try to be very conscious of the amount of rules that I'm presenting players with.

So when we set out on a big project, like at Leder, working as the creative director, part of my job is to assign studio resources and to think about project budgets.

And we can think of a project budget in a lot of ways.

Like, you think about the amount of art pieces a game might require, the amount of development resources that we want to assign to a title.

Another way of thinking about budget is to think about the complexity budget.

So every game has a weight that it -- it has an ask that it's -- that it's telling, hey, players, it's gonna take an hour to learn how to play this game.

Or it's gonna take five minutes to learn how to play this game.

And so if I'm making a party game that I know has to be taught in probably less than five minutes and I have a rule in this party game that takes a minute to explain, well, that's taking a lot of the complexity budget.

So as we go through games pretty early on in the process of development, we sort of figure out, like, what is this game's weight class?

And then as we're evaluating every rule, we always ask ourselves a question, like, is this rule worth the trouble?

My general sense when it comes to the design, both the product design and the mechanical design of games I work on, is that every single part of the design, even the part that -- the parts that people are really gonna love, it's all liability.

It's all making the game harder to teach, harder to set up, harder to play, and for that reason, I'm constantly, constantly trying to simplify the games.

I want them as fast to set up and tear down as possible.

I want them as easy to teach as possible.

I need the rules to get out of the way so that the players can just kind of exist within the world.

>> PAYTON: One of my friends last week was teaching us how to play Root.

And he's sort of going through, well, how do you play?

Well, pick a character, and then we'll go through and then sort of -- but I noticed with that game, at least, you know, it's essentially like you've got four different games competing against each other, four different rule sets.

Is there a mechanic in one of your games that you are exceptionally proud of that you're just kind of, like, you know, does it get lost with all the other stuff that you are hoping that people will take notice of more or that you maybe want to bring back in a future project?

Is there a mechanic that you especially like?

>> So Root has been kind of an unlikely success story, because it's quite -- it's quite a mean game.

And currently in the tabletop space, mean games are not terribly fashionable.

And so we wanted to make a bet with -- about aggressive games when we were working on Root, and the bet looked something like this.

If you look at the kinds of video games that people play or the kinds of movies they might watch, meanness, violence, conflict, is at the center of all of those things.

And so we think that it's a really important narrative element, and we want a game that can explore it, but we had to find the right thematic footing to let players explore it in a safe environment.

Now, that can sound like a bit of a contradiction.

But what we were trying to do is say, like, okay, if we want players to be comfortable in a high-conflict environment, how can we dress it up?

And our staff artist, Kyle Ferrin, had the brilliant insight to say, like, well, if we give it the appearance of a YA novel or a Saturday morning cartoon in this kind of animal aesthetic, it will ground the game and it will let players feel comfortable in a high-conflict environment.

Now, I tried to reflect that cleverness mechanically too.

And so I ran into this interesting problem, where I thought, okay, well, one person is going to have to throw the dice first.

Someone is going to be mean at the start of the game of Root, and I want them to not feel bad about the mean decision they are making, because what they are doing is they are establishing the feeling of the game.

One thing that happens sometimes in high-conflict games is that the conflict doesn't start until the third act, and in those games, players tend to get a little upset when the conflict does start because they felt like, look, I sat down to play a friendly game about trading, and then at the very end of the game, you started marching all over my part of the land.

So to get around this, the principal aggressor in the -- in Root is -- is a programming game.

And what that means is it's a game where you sort of set a particular plan, and then every turn you have to execute that plan, and then add to it.

And because this player is the aggressor and because they're not deciding who to attack, they are simply executing a plan that's been previously set, it gives them a bit of plausible deniability.

And so what it does is they say, like, look, I didn't mean to attack you, Payton, but I promised my constituents that I would, and so I'm going to do that, and I'm sorry about that.

And next turn, like, well, maybe I'm attacking you even more, but, look, I'm just doing what the plan told me.

And that deniability allows the players to start play acting very early in the process and sort of kicks off the entire story of the game.

And I -- I think it's a very subtle thing that can get kind of easily passed over, but it's one of the ways in which a game mechanism can help establish the mood in ways beyond just the art.

>> PAYTON: Love what you said about, you know, mean games, and I got to watch your GDC talk about that too.

How do you keep a mean game from being unfun, or do you think that is the fun, the sort of -- a space to act against your friends and stab each other in the back and stuff?

>> I find fun is one of those tricky, tricky words.

Where when we play games, we are attracted by the games that we think of as fun, but fun as a word is kind of an empty signifier.

It doesn't really -- it doesn't necessarily mean something.

It means that you found something in a title that excited you.

That can come from all over the place.

And so one of the core bets that I try to make with my games is that I want players to feel things when they are playing, and they might feel -- feel mad or upset or -- or funny or silly.

I want -- I want the whole spectrum of emotional response when players are playing it, and I find that when they move through all of these feelings, that's gonna create in aggregate the fun.

One thing that I look at, you know, if players are doing something mean to another player, that other player I want to have different kinds of recourses.

I want there to be moments where they can feel like they can band together with the other players to kind of work against that.

I want them to feel a little -- a little spark of retribution because that's powering the story of the game.

>> PAYTON: I know you mentioned just a little bit ago, you know, it's not trendy for a game to be mean.

What are some of the trends you see in modern tabletop design, and what do you like?

What drives you up a wall?

>> So I only work on games in areas that I feel like are being poorly served by the current market.

It's just my general rule.

So, like, for instance, I -- I adore economic games where you are, you know, building train -- railway companies and things like that, but those games right now are really good.

And so I don't really have any reason to play them.

You know, we are in an exceptionally good time for game design.

One of the best games that I played last year was a game called Heat, which is a racing game published by Days of Wonder.

It's fantastic.

And it is so clever in how it puts you in the driver's seat.

I mean, I think games are usually turn-based exercises.

So it's really hard to make a race feel exciting, but Heat does it beautifully, and it's entirely about your relationship with your own car.

Are you going to be able to take that turn?

Do you need to take it a little bit sharper than you had been planning?

Maybe you don't mind the fact that your engine is getting, like, a little too hot.

And it just creates these wonderful, wonderful race experiences.

You know, in the broader -- in the broader world of design, I think that right now my biggest pet peeve in new designs are -- I work in the mid- to heavy-weight games.

That's where I live.

And I think that when I look at my peers -- and this is a funny thing coming from me, there's a tendency to over complicate just to give the game depth.

So I think it's not difficult to make a deep game by adding rules.

The difficulty is finding ways of making a deep game by removing rules.

And so sometimes when I play mid-weight games that have been recently published, I'm surprised by how much busy work they're giving my mind, and they're not just asking me to get right to the heart of a -- to the heart of a problem.

>> PAYTON: So I want to take kind of a step back and look at just overall, you know, tip to tail, making a game.

When you are staring at, you know, blank page, blank whiteboard, what is the first consideration that comes to you when it's time to start on a new project?

>> First thing that I like to think about is, what's the feeling that I want this game to create?

Or another way of stating that is, what do I want players to talk about when they are not playing the game?

You know, they're at the watercooler on Monday, and they're, like, I played this really weird -- I don't normally play games.

I played this really strange thing on Saturday night, and they just want to talk about it.

In the same way that, you know, when Wordle was getting really popular a year ago or so.

People would talk about what it was like to play Wordle.

Like, they were excited.

There was this earworm, like a mind worm.

They were just kinda thinking about this.

So I always try to start with that.

And then I walk back and I say, okay.

If that's the feeling, then I need to build a game, which means I need to be thinking about game mechanisms and theme and the usual exercise that I do is I first ask, who are the players?

Like, this is -- it's such a simple question, really, but who are the players?

And if it's an historic game, I look at the historic record, and I say who exercised agency?

Those are people who are playing something.

And then the second question is: What do they care about?

And that informs the victory condition.

So in my game about the East India company, I was, like, oh, there are these power broking families in England.

Those are the players, and they care a lot about respectability and, like, marrying up and buying fancy houses and, like, kind of the appearance of wealth and prestige.

So that gave me my players and my victory conditions.

And once you have that, everything else sort of spins from it.

So, you know, I tend to start with story, though.

So I don't think, like, oh, this is a cute mechanism.

Like, I want to make a game with the D6.

I would never start with a specific component.

Instead, I'm interested in, like, you know, that feeling when you make a risky bet.

Like, maybe -- maybe I'm thinking about blackjack.

And I think in blackjack, there's an amazing moment where everybody at the table sees you make a risky bet, and then they witness the bet failing or not failing.

And so I'm, like, ah, that's an interesting feeling.

Is there a way to do that in a way that isn't just a card game that takes a minute to play?

And I want to kind of broaden that out.

And like, oh, maybe -- maybe the risk could be used -- I can build that risk with a dice system or with something else.

So that tends to be how I start.

Now, I can talk a little bit about process, because that, I mean, this is the more direct answer.

So the first step, whenever we are thinking about a game, is: What's the idea?

What's the core idea of the game?

And that could be a feeling.

It could be a mechanism.

It could be a little story, right?

You want a game, you want a game about the Salem Witch Trials or maybe you want a game about exploring a cave or whatever.

You need some kind of idea.

Or maybe you want to make a game where everybody has to wear different kinds of hats.

Like, it could be a -- it could have a physical hook.

It could have a story hook, but it needs to have some kind of hook.

When someone is walking by you on a busy convention hall and you are pitching your game to them, you need to be able to explain your game in 30 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds.

You need to be able to just get that idea.

Now, once you've got that, the next step is you have to build a proof of concept.

What is the smallest version of your game that could possibly exist?

And usually I don't want to see any art on those things.

I want to see it scrappy and loose.

I mean, all you need is a felt tipped pen and some index cards, and you are on your way and whatever, you know, hard components you might need.

And then once we've that proof of concept, at least at Leder Games, what we tend to do then is we start assigning it resources and vetting it.

And then the question is: Can you scale this up?

So, like, okay, you have a cave exploring game.

Make the simplest version of that, and then tell me that -- well, you know, do you want players to be able to explore the mammoth cave in this game?

All right.

Well, start building the mammoth cave.

Does your game fall apart halfway through because it's just too big of a cave?

And then once we, like, know that the game can be done, that's when we actually start giving it art and components and, you know, finding factories to produce it and all of those things.

>> PAYTON: I know, you know, with games like Root or Arcs, the other one that you've got coming up, you are making these worlds from scratch.

But in stuff like John Company or Pax Pamir, how long does the research process take, where you are taking these ideas that are just from factual history and trying to gamify them?

>> So John Company was the longest I've ever worked on the research of that game.

That research took over ten years of reading just in -- in a kind of background way, where as I would be doing research for other projects, I would find things that were appropriate for the game, and I would kind of add them to my notes.

Usually, when I'm working on historic game, if I'm doing it a little bit more directed, I generally say that the research takes as long as everything else.

So I will use -- I will use the Pamir as an example.

Pamir took basically two years to design.

The first edition took about a year, and then the second edition took about a year, and the research period was about a year and a half.

So before the design even began, I was reading and taking notes and just kind of slowly chipping away.

Now, this isn't the kind of thing that you can just show up at a library and just sit and read for eight hours a day for a few weeks.

What ends up happening is you just kind of slowly accrue notes and think through things, and it's always kind of lurking in the back of your mind, but it's a considerable part of the history games.

I think, you know, I'm working on a game right now about reconstruction.

And I am two years into my research -- I'm two years plus into my research process, and I don't even know when the end sight is, and I haven't even begun properly designing.

Now, I like that part of the process, but I can understand why a lot of people don't want to work in historic games because it does take a lot of leg work right at the front.

>> PAYTON: Now, do you hear from people who are, you know, the history buffs, the people who are, like, ready to be surprised when you put out a game, you know, like Pamir or Molly House, who come to you and say, like, you know, man, not only was it great to, you know, play a game that I found satisfying, but it was great to learn about something I might not have considered before?

>> One of my favorite parts of my job is oftentimes -- how often people send me book recommendations, or they send me pictures of them reading books that I have suggested.

Because I look at the history games as really being the first step in a wider inquiry of learning about how the -- a subject.

So all the history games have bibliographies and kind of reading guides at the end of them that just sort of walk the new players through some of the texts that inform the game.

And it's -- I'm so happy that whenever people -- when I see people buying books that I suggested.

And it's not because they took my suggestion, it's because they read the -- they played the game, and it is inspiring them to understand a period more deeply.

And I think about games as being exceptionally powerful tools for education, but they cannot act alone.

And this is always a really key thing I tell educators who are thinking about using games in classrooms, is to remember that the game is just one leg of the stool.

And you really need excellent primary and secondary sources to kind of sit along it.

And I will say that's true for even the fantasy games I work on.

You know, when we -- we're completing this massive science fiction game right now called Arcs.

When I was working on it, I made a very large list of all of the science fiction that I had been reading and some of the, like, theory of science fiction, just so people who wanted to follow along with the story, with the development of the game's storytelling strategy, could see some of the books that were informing it.

And because I -- you know, I think that just because I happen to be working on a fantasy game doesn't mean that I'm not doing research for it.

It's just a different kind of research.

>> PAYTON: So you still decided to give yourself homework?

>> Yeah, of course.

>> PAYTON: Okay.

Great.

You start with the smallest sort of -- yeah, the smallest prototype of the game, work through it, try and scale it up.

What other steps are there from, like, then to getting it in a box?

>> Sure.

>> PAYTON: And I know there's some other steps now too with like BackerKit, Kickstarter, that kind of stuff.

>> So the actual development of the game, to kind of zoom in on it, it works like any other design process, which is -- which is to say it is built around this thing called the iterate loop.

And the iterative loop says that you make something and then you test it.

You react to how that test went, and then you make it again.

And so, you know, one thing that I will often tell younger designers is, like, you really need to be learning graphic design and production and your own editorial skill, and sharpening your own editorial skills because you need to control that iterative loop as much as possible.

In order to make a game, you need to play a game a lot, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, and not only do you need to be playing the game a lot.

You need to be reacting to the game and changing it a lot, a lot, a lot.

Now, once the game is sound, the next step is you need to find the money it's going to take to produce it.

Now, that money falls into kind of two big buckets.

The first bucket is money you are going to spend on things like editors, artists, all of the internal back -- all the -- the kind of upfront development costs.

And then the second bucket is the actual printing of the game.

Most games are printed in China; although, some games are printed in the United States and Europe these days too, and India.

Games are expensive to produce, but not that expensive.

So if you were starting out and building a small, you know, card game, you could probably get that produced domestically for $10,000 or $20,000, but you might run into the very reasonable question of, where am I gonna get $10,000 or $20,000?

Now, this money is often too small for a bank to care about because it's like the smallest category business loan.

And so many creators in the past 15 years have gone to a platform called Kickstarter, which is a crowd funding platform, which has a very vibrant tabletop scene.

And what you will do is you will put together a Kickstarter page that involves a video, reviews, maybe print and plays of the game, and you will go out and panhandle for cash basically and say please, please, please, please help me, make my game become a reality.

Kickstarter is a critical, critical element to the modern tabletop universe.

My job and the job of the 14 people who work with me, would simply not exist without Kickstarter funding, and that is also true of our historical enterprise.

Once you've got that money raised, that will tell you what kind of game you get to make, basically.

So if you raised $1 million, congratulations, you can probably make any game you could possibly imagine.

If you barely scraped by and raised $10,000, maybe you are going to make something a little bit more modest.

And then after the campaign, we end up spending, you know -- about a year, sometimes it's half a year, sometimes it's more than a year, doing the work of actually finishing the game and then getting it to press.

It's produced in China, shipped over the ocean, and then hopefully we'll get released to all the backers.

And if you've done everything right, usually after you fulfilled the campaign, you have an additional quantity of copies, which you then sell to stores.

And if the game is loved, those stores might ask for more, and you might find yourself doing, you know, an additional print run.

And pretty much every product I've worked on kind of follows that general path.

>> PAYTON: Okay.

So when people like me complain about, like, hey, I backed a game like a year ago and I still don't have it, the chances are that game is not even finished yet?

>> Yeah.

It really depends -- it really depends on the company.

Some companies like to ship things right away.

So they will have the Kickstarter.

They will have, you know, three to four months of just finishing it up, and then they will get it done and off the boat.

I have a different way of working, which is I -- I view Kickstarter -- because our games are getting crowd funded, I consider it important to let the crowd funding audience see the internal workings of the game-making process, which means that we run our Kickstarters, both at Wehrlegig and Leder Games, about halfway through the development process.

So it's a little bit like building a kit computer with a clear case, and you're like, oh, I can see all the wires and it's a little gross and maybe I don't want to see all those things.

But we do that because we feel like we owe it to the public funding model to show people how we work.

And then the game eventually comes out.

Now, one of the great advantages of this model is that if a title is struggling, if it needs a little bit more time, oftentimes you can just ask your backers and say, hey, we are working on the game.

We kind of want to spend more time on it.

You don't really -- necessarily need their permission, but you can let them know, and I have basically always found that the people who back these games, they want the best version of the game to exist.

And so when we tell them, like, hey, let us spend another six months on this, it's gonna be really special when it comes out.

Pretty much universally, everyone says, well, of course.

Spend eight months, spend a year if you need it.

And that's -- you know, the project that we are finishing now, Arcs, we've been working on for basically three years, and it's been -- it will come out almost two years after the crowd funding campaign.

And everyone is very happy with it.

And the -- the success of that crowd funding campaign has enabled us to make it basically twice as big as we had initially planned.

>> PAYTON: I know we've talked a bit about the research, the production side of it.

What would you say is the most difficult or infuriating part of tabletop game design that the average person just playing the game would have no idea about?

>> I would -- well, there's so many things.

One of them is figuring out the right box size and how the game should pack up.

This seems like such a small thing, but it is incredibly frustrating.

>> PAYTON: I'm with you.

It's frustrating because a box has to do completely different things at every stage of the process.

So a factory designs a box and its organizational tray to make sure the game can be shipped to the publisher without damaging the components.

And the publisher needs to design a box so that it can, you know, stand up in a store and look nice on a shelf.

And a player wants a box that is easy to, like, take out the components and put them back in and not take up too much space on their shelf.

And oftentimes, every single one of those different needs asks for a very different kind of box.

So if you've ever gotten a box and you thought, this box is too big or too small, know that they really were trying to figure out the right box size.

And it also -- working on the box is also hard because it's the last thing that you do.

And so it's a difficult task that comes at the very end of the creative process when you are tired.

And so I -- you know, I always -- we always have to, like, have a pep talk and say, okay, we are getting ready to finalize box sizes.

Let's, you know -- I'm gonna bring in doughnuts that day.

We will have a nice fun day of it to kind of perk up the team because it is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

The other thing is writing rules is very hard.

When I was working on Root, we did -- we do these things called rules usability tests where we invite a lot of people to come play a game.

We have an observer at every single table who is not allowed to talk.

He's only allowed to take notes, and we watch people learn the game.

And when we did that with Root, we saw groups that read the rules very carefully and they did a great job learning the game.

They did it basically like an A student.

They followed every rule.

There were other groups that flipped through the rulebook.

They half read the examples and then they tried to learn how to play the game from the examples.

And that's -- that's fine.

You know, I have a good friend at Hasbro who once told me that the first thing he learned at Hasbro is that no one actually read the rules to the games.

They just -- they leaf through it.

You get like one leaf, and then they start playing.

And what will happen is as there are problems, they will go back to the rules, and by the end of the first game or the second game, they may have learned the rules, but they may not have.

I mean, many of us know how to play the game Monopoly, but very few of us have read the Monopoly rules.

You might have been taught Monopoly by a grandparent who had been taught Monopoly when they were young.

And so by the time, you know, it becomes sort of like a folk -- a piece of folk art.

And so the actual writing of rules is incredibly difficult.

It's something that takes a ton of time, and it's very easy to assume that because a rule book is short, it's an easy thing to write, and the opposite is the case.

>> PAYTON: Before I let you go, I know you've got a couple projects coming out.

So would you mind just saying a bit about Molly House and Arcs and what you've coming down the pipeline?

>> Sure.

So our -- at Leder Games, our massive science fiction space opera comes out to retail this year.

Hopefully it will be at Gen Con.

People who preordered it through the crowd funding campaign will be getting it in the spring.

I'm tremendously excited about it.

It is a brilliant, beautiful science fiction story generator, and I think for people who like Root and want to -- to play more games like that, you will find tons of stuff to explore.

And then my brother and I are releasing our new game, hopefully towards the end of this year.

It's called Molly House.

It is a game done in collaboration with a brilliant designer from Bristol named Jo Kelly.

It is about queer subcultures in early 18th century London and about really the rise of modern policing and morality policing.

So this is a game about drag balls and throwing parties, while trying to hide from the society for the reformation of manners.

It's an absolute blast to play.

And it's always fun to do the historical games because Drew and I get to do really lavish, lavish productions on it.

So if you are interested in that, both games are available for preorder, either by going to ledergames.com or Wehrlegiggames.com.

>> PAYTON: Excellent.

Yeah, and I will have all that stuff in the description, and all that kind of stuff.

But I appreciate it so much, taking the time, talking with me.

But before I let you go, is there anything else that you wanted to add that I didn't touch on or anything like that?

>> I don't think so.

This was -- this was great.

I'm sorry it took so long for us to settle into a time.

>> PAYTON: That's okay.

It's not like it's a busy time of year at all.

>> No.

No.