The Fireside Games Interview
FIRESIDE GAMES has been publishing family friendly, innovative and accessible games since 2009, when they released their seminal tower defense co-op title CASTLE PANIC. I sat down with Justin DeWitt, one half of the company he runs with his wife and business partner Anne Marie to talk game design, future plans and identity in a rapidly expanding world of game companies.
NOTE: This interview was back in early March, 2020, just as concerns about the COVID-19 Virus were beginning to make themselves known. Both of us had our next conventions cancelled at that show, after we recorded this. Some content may not be 100% accurate as a result, but Justin was rather prescient when looking towards this year all the same. This interview originally appeared in Tabletops & Tentacles Issue #2
KRIS- Thanks for sitting down with me, Justin. Your wife is the CEO and you are the CCO of Fireside Games, but essentially the two of you do everything in the company. Can you tell us a little bit about your end of things running a game publisher for the last eleven years?
JUSTIN- CCO stands for Chief Creative Officer. Since we founded the company together we can kind of make up any title we wanted, but that's legit what I do. I designed Castle Panic and a bunch of our products so I am really heavy on the design side of things and then I have been the person that's developed any games that get pitched to us. I do a lot of the graphic design and layout and production work as well... I wear a lot of hats when it gets into the nitty gritty. Anne Marie has designed some of our games and works heavily on the development end. She's much more about the long term strategy, the business planning, handling the business contacts, the people that handle the warehouse for us...
I've definitely found with game design in particular that there's a thousand different hats you're wearing and you're often sharing those hats at the same time.
Oh, yes.
Do you think it’s important to have certain jobs set aside and delegated to certain people?
I think it comes down to who's got the skill and the patience for it. Like, I'm really not good at math. It's not my thing, so Anne Marie handles all of our books and things like that, but I'm very good at creative problem solving which can involve things like international freight and of course all of the design stuff. You have to play to your specialties. Also, so you don't drive yourself crazy because you're gonna be wearing eight hats in this industry. Unless you're a big company, which most of us aren't.
It's funny how many people see something like Castle Panic that is kind of an icon in the industry and assume that its a big company producing it.
I saw a chart one time that had the actual number of employees at board game companies and it's pretty hilarious – you've got Hasbro and Milton Bradley, then it jumps to Watz, then there's this HUGE drop to companies like Asmodee that has like thirty employees but a lot of these smaller studios if they have more than 5 people, they're big. And then it's where those employees are working – is it community involvement, organized play?
For us we run pretty lean. We've been as many as five people at one point. We had graphic designers and salespeople, but right now its back down to just Anne Marie and me. We also have some contract work for graphic design and things where there's just not quite enough work for a full time employee. Every minute you're doing any of that other stuff, you're not making games.
That is a big problem for game designers. I've found social media takes up an obscene amount of my time.
Yeah at one point we contracted that out and we've since brought it back in-house and we are thinking about contracting it out again...
Any time it falls on me I'm like... “I don't want to do this anymore!”
It's just keeping up with it and doing it justice that's so hard. I have ideas like puzzles on Twitter and Instagram promotions and then I don't have time to manage all of that.
You guys have been publishing games for a while now – ten years?
Yeah – Castle Panic, our first game, launched in November of 2009
Speaking of Castle Panic, you are doing more Castle Panic stuff...
Yes we are – it was supposed to be part of the ten-year anniversary last year but it ended up getting pushed back. We are super proud to announce Castle Panic Deluxe! I've been teasing it for a year, everyone's wanted it for ten years. It will be a full deluxe version with sculpted miniatures for the castle and the monsters.
I've seen the prototype and it is really cool. We are big fans of Castle Panic because my wife doesn't play competitive games and that was one of the first coop games we got into. The minis on this look great. The new visual aspect of it looks amazing.
One of the things we are really excited about – and a thing that took us a while to engineer - was how to track the points. In the base game, the monsters are just tokens and you rotate them to track damage and one of the things I didn't want was for the monsters to be pointing sideways because that just feels weird. So we came up with a rotateable base on the bottom so that spins to track damage and the monster can always stay facing the castle. For proper aesthetic value for a castle siege. *laughs*
Little details like that really make a difference.
It's so fun. The walls have little cracks in them and vines growing. It's little things like the boulder that has always just been a token. It's still an instant token in the deluxe version; you don't really need a piece for the boulder since you resolve it instantly, but we went ahead and made a giant boulder that you can just roll at the castle if you want. You never need to play with it but we are making one anyway.
Tar was another challenge because the figures are now fully three-dimensional. The old tar token was a round cutout chipboard piece that you put on the tile which is super elegant and worked great but it wont work for miniatures and we spent months trying to design a tar that would lay over them. At one point we were working with a silly putty type material to hang over the minis, which was messy and nasty. Instead we are going to print a triangular donut-like blob that you put the monster into for the tar token.
Thats a nicely elegant solution to it – it still lets you see the mini.
Yeah, its visually different; it looks like he's stuck in this blob of tar. I'm particularly proud of that and the spinning base. We worked with Chad Hoverter who worked on the Mice and Mystics game and has done a lot of minis work in the industry. He did an amazing job at taking the 2D art and rendering these full 3D miniatures.
The artists that work in 3D sculpting is mind-boggling to me. You do a lot of other types of games as well. You have a more abstract game coming out soon?
Yes, Stringamajig is coming. It is getting on a boat a week after we are recording this and we are thinking it will be a May release. (It ultimately released in June and is available now) It's our first party game. For being a lighter hobby company, we have never done a party game and though I've had a lot of them pitched, I've just never had any of them spark. We could do another Apples to Apples, but I don't want to.
Stringamajig was pitched to us late 2018. It was pitched to us at GenCon and we just signed it on the spot. We were like “This is exactly what we were looking for!” It's a very silly party game thats a mix of charades and drawing but you have to use a string. There's special challenges like drawing with your eyes closed or drawing with two players and the string isn't supposed to leave the table. Unless its a two player challenge, then you have to do it in the air, which is even more hilarious to watch people struggle through.
That's such a great touch to the game. You embrace the silliness. The string has an interesting heft to it.
Yes, we went back and forth with the factory on that because finding the right kind of string was challenging. It's essentially a paracord but we went back and forth because a lot of those are either really soft or really stiff and we needed a mix. You're drawing details like legs of an animal or fingers on a hand and you need it to hold a certain amount of kink. Our factory was like “I can get string.” and I was like “No, no, I need a special kind of string.”
Thats the logistics end of things that, as a publisher, must be incredibly challenging.
It can be. Its also really fun though. One thing you'll never know when talking to a factory is what they might be able to do and sometimes you'll just get surprised. We've done all sorts of things from custom dice to minis and cards and cardboard and every once in a while you'll reach out and be like “So I need a rubber band, but it has to be 2” thick and it has to be able to stretch EXACTLY this far.” and they'll say “Let us go research and we will get back to you.” But its fun.
Sometimes they are just amazingly on point. We got the string in two tries. Its really fun to have good partners like that.
As someone who works as both a designer and publisher, do you find it tricky to decide what's more important?
Insanely difficult. Honestly, I would say thats probably the hardest part of what we do. We started Fireside games because I'm a designer and I wanted to make games. At the time, I didn't think there was anyone doing what I wanted to do, so we started our own company. This was before Kickstarter too, so we were really crazy. The trick now is that its so hard to find the time to get that deep dive, really chew on the designs the way I like to. Grind them out and get the sharp edges off when I have nine hundred other things that need doing.
Like today; we are at a convention and SaltCon's been fun, but with both of us here, nothing is getting done at Fireside. I'll start getting hives if I start thinking about all of the things I should be doing back home. Thats a constant struggle running your own company; theres a million little parts that need to be moved and someone's gotta move them and its probably going to be you.
That's some advice I give to people that ask me about starting their own game company. A lot of people forget that when you do a Kickstarter, you are starting a game company. You're gonna have to make your next game, you need to pay taxes, deal with international freight, safety testing. You have to fund all of this stuff... Do you want to do that? Because its a lot of work. You'll notice I did not say game design anywhere in there! That fun thing you want to do? You may want to stay doing that and not run your own company.
We were very much about starting our own business. Anne Marie had the business skills and I had the physical skills for getting things manufactured and we decided we knew enough to make it work, but I cannot imagine jumping in without that kind of experience.
It's gotten so much more overwhelming with the sheer amount of content out there too.
Yeah its so hard right now to have a game that has any meat and lasts in the public consciousness. It's crazy right now.
When you are looking for games to publish, are you looking for a certain aesthetic? How did you decide what Fireside Games was?
For us it came pretty early. There were a couple of prototype games before Castle Panic but when we designed it and friends were asking us to bring over “that castle game,” we decided we should do something with it. We looked at selling it to other companies as a freelance designer and pitching it, but couldn't find anyone that was really doing what my “catalog” was. Thats when we realized it. We took a step back and saw that we had a brand. Accessible, family friendly, light, under-an-hour type games.
So once we nailed that down, that's been our guiding light for the whole thing. The lighter side of the hobby.
We are very big on bringing new gamers into the hobby. I'm evangelistic about that. I will always grab a newbie and say “Come on, let me show you how this works.” So with that in mind when we are looking for games, we aren't looking for a miniatures game about the war of 1812, I don't need that. Give me your short, quick, fun game, but we aren't a party game company yet either.
Honestly when I sit down to play a game I try to screen it to make sure its at least in our wheelhouse and after that what I'm looking for is fun. I want to sit down and say “Cool, lets play this again.” If im not thrilled, why would anyone else be? That's the first thing it has to have; that zing. Then I have to take a step back and see if it has the zing but is maybe too euro, or not family friendly, but usually we've prescreened that before we start to play.
I'm also looking for a game that could be evergreen; something we can sell forever, to everybody.
Thats a really challenging thing too. Your modus operandi is not an easy thing.
Yeah. How do you put all of that on a list?
We need to have fun immediately and it needs to sell for a decade.
And I want that magic sparkle that no one can put in a bottle twice. It is tricky but I do think most of the games we've made have had most of that. Some have sold better than others but I love everything in our catalog. We look for that zing. Then the big part is: “What will the market think?”
Looking at the way the board game market has changed over the years... Where do you think it's sitting? Do you think it's continuing to grow? Everybody always talks about a bubble, whether it exists or if board games will just continue to explode.
Thats a good question because everyone is always like YES or NO. I personally feel like as a consumer it is a new golden age but there is a challenge because as a consumer, you're gonna miss 80-90% of what's out there. There's just too much. If you're a casual player, you're missing so much. But there's also a lot you wont like anyway as a casual player. It's a niche hobby. When we started you had to know where the game store was to know what games there were. Then it became more popular. Tabletop came out, (A Youtube video series created by Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day about board games) now you see articles in Forbes about games.
It is more accessible, but its still a niche hobby. If we were to leave this con and go two blocks away and knock on a door and say “Hey have you ever heard of the board game Splendor?” Most people wouldn't. It's not like movies or video games where the general public understands how they work. Most people look at it and go “Thats kind of weird.” Theres a huge chunk of the market that aren't into it yet.
I compare it a little bit to the model train thing the guys that are into it love it, and there are stores that just sell model trains. They can be really expensive, they don't have enough room to store all of their model train stuff... does this sound familiar?
We are a little bit like that industry. I think there's a few challenges right now. One is the glut of games. When we started Fireside, it was easy to have a game come out and have six months to a year to get its feet under it. Now you have about a week or two. I know some retailers that give a game seven days before they decide if they will ever reorder that game. With Kickstarter its even harder. Its a golden age for consumers but theres a glut for publishers and designers and some companies are struggling. They aren't sure if they'll be here in three years because its so hard to make a real living. Some people are going to hit a point where making games is a great hobby, but they can't make a business out of it. I think we will also see more acquisitions. Smaller companies merging or just dropping out. So I think yes, the hobby is growing and there are new people coming into the hobby every day. The problem is that we are outpacing them with the number of new games.
There's also a problem with the length of time these experiences take. Legacy games for instance; I know for a fact that my neighbors like board games but they will never play a legacy game. It used to be watching a movie, watching TV, playing a board game – it all used to be comparable. Now you have games that can literally be played for months and some people don't want that. It's too much of a commitment.
It feels daunting. I think what you were saying about the millions of people that don't know what board games are; those are potential customers, but we need gateway games to get them there. They can't look at games like Aeon's End or Gloomhaven and..
That's gonna break them. I've seen it on Amazon. I read a review from a man that had bought a game that we all universally consider a classic and he found the rules incomprehensible, he couldn't play it with his family or friends, he couldn't get it. And that's a real problem.
If someone walks into this show and the first game they sit down to is a four hour cube mover... they're done. They're gonna think board games are some nerdy thing they don't want and they'll miss out on all of the great stair step games we could be using to bring them into the hobby instead of chasing them away. Its crazy how many people have told us that castle panic is the first game they played, or that they could play it with their family and mom and kids. I got my grandma to play it, which is amazing.
Yeah, I think there is a place for that kind of game and people don't consider it when they are designing a game because they're in the hobby already. They love games and they want to build that next three hour epic that they would want to play.
Exactly, they've moved past that as a designer. They want to make what they like to play. It's the model train problem. And I think thats one of the dangers. We may see a bell curve on people joining the hobby that may have started back when Tabletop was going and there were a lot of great introductory games. If you look at the Board Game Geek hotness right now there's some crunchy games on there. If you walked into this con right now and saw some of these incredibly complex games and terms and imagery thats so unfamiliar, you might just turn and walk back out. And the thing is,board games are for them, they just don't know it.
It just takes the right amount of slope to get them there.
Yeah and then the cool thing is once they play that gateway game, they're ready for the next step. If they want to. I know a lot of people that like a certain simplicity in a game and that's where they're happy playing. And that's perfect too. So yeah, people not making certain games to draw in new players, people not making a living wage at game design, these are challenges we will be facing. And I'll tell you what, this Coronavirus will make a huge impact as well. Conventions are cancelled, shipping is and will continue to be a mess out of China right now and some people are literally living for that delivery of their next game. With the way the virus is slowing deliveries and complicating imports, there's only so long some folks can go without it before they can't keep the doors open.
It's amazing what a two-week forced delay can do to an industry or the world at large.
Yeah, if you ever thought we weren't all connected, take a look at what's going on now! It's going to be a weird, crazy year. This could be the year that changes everything because we do have an outside factor like the coronavirus.
Here we are about 4 months since we talked at SaltCon and it’s been a much bigger impact than I think any of us expected. The entire distribution chain for the game industry shutdown for a while and that of course slowed everything to a crawl. We’ve had an uptick in some online sales, but it can’t make up for the loss of all the sales through our Friendly Local Game Stores. Some elements are coming back, and distribution is reopening, but we know a lot of game stores that are still only doing curbside or delivery. Sadly, we also know of several game stores that just couldn’t hold on and have had to permanently close their doors. We are doing fine as we continue to work on the updated Kickstarter and other game development while we keep other games in stock, but we still don’t know what the new normal will be when this is all over. Even worse, now that we’re seeing the virus make a resurgence who knows how much longer it will take to get there?
If this looks like something you’d enjoy, check out their Kickstarter now - it’s live until June 3rd.
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