JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The Planet Money team is getting into the board game business because some of the most popular board games are all about economics. Think Monopoly and Settlers of Catan. But as Erika Beras and Kenny Malone from the Planet Money podcast find out, making a game that is fun and teaches economics is - well, it's kind of hard.
ERIKA BERAS, BYLINE: We started our game journey at Gen Con.
KENNY MALONE, BYLINE: The crowd is surging. Is it open yet? Hopefully. Gen Con in Indianapolis is the country's largest tabletop-gaming convention. There are a lot of gamers here, and there are a lot of new games entering the market.
BERAS: Every year, about 5,000 new games come out from big companies like Hasbro and from small indie game makers like Leonie Grundler.
MALONE: Would you like to tell me about Biome?
LEONIE GRUNDLER: Yeah. This is a nature-themed tableau-builder, where you are trying to build a biodiverse ecosystem of plants and animals.
MALONE: Leonie is the founder and CEO of Lioness Games. Biome is the first game she's made. She funded it on Kickstarter.
GRUNDLER: Tabletop games is actually the largest category on Kickstarter, which is so...
BERAS: Get out of here.
GRUNDLER: Yeah.
BERAS: Really?
GRUNDLER: It is. It's so cool.
BERAS: More than 57,000 game-related projects have been launched on Kickstarter.
MALONE: We're first-time game-makers, and Kickstarter could work for us, but we don't know anything about designing, manufacturing or distributing a game. So we told Leonie that we were opting for a kind of shortcut maybe.
BERAS: Is it cheating if Planet Money - if we could link up with, like, a bigger producer or a partner who's had more experience doing this kind of thing?
GRUNDLER: Not at all.
BERAS: Oh, it's OK?
GRUNDLER: It's OK. It's great.
BERAS: We're not selling out (laughter)?
GRUNDLER: No, you're not selling out. You know, you'll - with your audience and network, you'll get more people excited to play your game hopefully. And then - so you're - just by bringing more people to the hobby, you're, you know, helping everyone out.
BERAS: So we ended up with a partner that once set a record on Kickstarter for raising $8.8 million for a game - Exploding Kittens. The company has since made dozens of other games.
MALONE: We tell them our goal, that we want to make a fun game about economics. And the company's co-creator Elan Lee says, OK, but the thing he's concerned about is much more basic. He's thinking about something called a core mechanic.
ELAN LEE: So every game you have ever played has a core mechanic in it somewhere. It's sometimes called a board game loop or a game loop, things like that. It's the repetitive thing that you do over and over again that drives you from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. Hopefully it escalates and you get better at it the more you do it.
BERAS: The best games have a good core mechanic, but coming up with that core mechanic is not easy.
LEE: Well, the worst game ever invented is Candy Land.
(LAUGHTER)
MALONE: Take that, children.
LEE: (Laughter) The reason that I pick on that game a lot is Candy Land is get to the end of this path, right? And the way you get to the end of this path is you draw cards, and the cards tell you how to move. There is no faculty there, right? There's no decision-making. There's no mastery. There's no interaction. You might as well not be in the room. And so why are you bothering to have that experience?
MALONE: Elan says we need to come up with a core mechanic that is fun and novel.
BERAS: And so, after nearly a year of trial and error and many, many, many versions, we did it. We have a fun, new core mechanic. And we actually have a prototype of a game. You can download it, play it and send us feedback. It's at planetmoneygame.com.
Erika Beras.
MALONE: Kenny Malone, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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