We make a board game

Summary

Planet Money – "We Make a Board Game" (October 1, 2025)

Overview

In this episode, the Planet Money team embarks on an ambitious—and playful—experiment: designing their own board game with hopes of creating a "Monopoly killer." The episode delves into the economics of tabletop games, interviews successful independent designers, explores the explosion of gaming thanks to platforms like Kickstarter, and reveals the show's plans to co-create a game with the makers of "Exploding Kittens." Throughout, the team reflect on business models, manufacturing challenges, and the mechanics of making a great game, all while inviting listeners along for the creative and commercial journey.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Board Game Boom: At Gen Con (00:27–07:14)

• Gen Con Experience: Kenny Malone and Erica Barris attend the country's largest tabletop gaming convention, marveling at the thousands of new games released annually.
• Indie Success Story: Interview with Leonie Grundler, founder of Lioness Games and creator of "Biome," showcases the indie hustle, from handmade prototypes to family involvement in marketing (e.g., parents demoing, wearing game-piece earrings).
• The Competition: Acknowledgement of the steep challenge—upwards of 5,000 games debut each year.

“If you love to play games, it has never been better. But the flip side… there has never been more competition.” — Erica Barris (04:16)

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2. Economics "Embedded" in Board Games (05:26–07:14)

• Both "Monopoly" and "Settlers of Catan" are highlighted as economic simulators, serving as inspiration for the Planet Money game.
• Eureka: The show’s premise aligns naturally with board games—making economics accessible and fun.

“The CliffsNotes definition of economics is the allocation of scarce resources.” — Kenny Malone (06:20)

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3. The Indie Board Game Path & Kickstarter Revolution (09:19–19:57)

• Leonie’s Journey: Originally inspired by “Settlers of Catan” and “Wingspan,” Leonie describes moving from game nights to rapid prototyping and seeking market feedback.
• Kickstarter as Game Changer: The rise of crowdfunding has allowed designers to bypass traditional publishers, maintain creative control, and reach eager backers directly.

“Tabletop Games is actually the largest category on Kickstarter… It’s so cool.” — Leonie Grundler (13:30)

• Biome’s Success: Raised $400,000, manufactured 12,000 copies (in multiple languages), and overcame major logistical hurdles—especially international tariffs and manufacturing constraints.

“If I had tried to sell a very sad cardboard only game of Biome, I would have to charge 100 to $120 to the consumer.” — Leonie Grundler (19:21)

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4. Manufacturing & Tariff Rollercoaster (18:19–19:41)

• Leonie details the volatile costs of importing her game, with duties jumping from $255 for 5,500 games to over $6,300 for 1,700 games—a vivid illustration of how global trade policy impacts small creators.

“From about 5 cents per game, up to about $3.74 per game.” — Kenny Malone (19:03)

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5. To Partner or Not to Partner (19:57–20:54)

• Discussion of the relative merits of going independent versus working with an established game publisher. Leonie validates both paths, emphasizing community-building.

“No, you’re not selling out. You’re just… bringing more people to the hobby.” — Leonie Grundler (20:33)

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6. Learning from Exploding Kittens (23:15–33:08)

• Planet Money’s Past & Exploding Kittens’ Mega-Kickstarter: NPR’s past shirt campaign is dwarfed by Exploding Kittens’ $8.8 million success.
• Game Design 101: Alon Lee of Exploding Kittens helps the team clarify its goals: Who is the audience? What does “success” mean? Should the game be educational or just entertaining?

“The game itself should not be entertaining. The game should make the people you’re playing with entertaining.” — Alon Lee, Exploding Kittens (29:35)

• Party Games vs. Eurogames: Contrasting high-complexity, niche strategy games (Eurogames like Catan) with simple, mass-appeal party games.

“Party games are much simpler to learn, they take way less time to play, and as a result, they tend to have more of a mass appeal.” — Erica Barris (28:48)

• Core Mechanics: Alon critiques “Candyland” as lacking player agency, explaining the critical importance of game loops that are engaging and interactive.

“Candyland is… get to the end of this path… 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.” — Alon Lee, Exploding Kittens (30:09)

• Innovation Mandate: Alon insists their joint game should offer a novel gameplay mechanic—not just a clever retheme of an existing game loop.

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7. Next Steps: Game Development Homework (33:08–33:54)

• Both teams agree to do “homework”: Exploding Kittens will prototype new mechanics; Planet Money will brainstorm three big economic themes for the game to explore.

“The next phase will be really intriguing.” — Alex Goldmark (33:48)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The Crowd at Gen Con:
  “I instantly regress into a giddy little child. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. It’s overwhelming.” — Kenny Malone (01:16)

• Kickstarter’s Impact:
  “Decades of game fans with decades of ideas didn’t need to go through Parker Brothers anymore.” — Kenny Malone (14:33)

• On Unrealistic Board Game Manufacturing in the US:
  “If I had tried to sell a very sad cardboard only game of Biome, I would have to charge 100 to $120 to the consumer.” — Leonie Grundler (19:21)

• The First Exploding Kittens Meeting:
  “Let’s agree we’re aiming for fun, something that will sell well and we don’t care how it does on board games.” — Alex Goldmark (32:49)

• Exploding Kittens’ Design Philosophy:
  “The game itself should not be entertaining. The game should make the people you’re playing with entertaining.” — Alon Lee (29:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------------| | 00:27–03:00 | Gen Con convention, meeting Leonie/the Biome game | | 03:00–05:04 | "Monopoly Killer" dream, defining the market | | 06:07–07:14 | Economics as core to board games, launching the project| | 09:19–14:26 | Leonie’s design journey, prototyping, Kickstarting | | 14:26–16:31 | Kickstarter's impact and the flood of indie games | | 16:31–17:07 | Biome’s Kickstarter numbers and manufacturing | | 18:19–19:41 | Tariffs and manufacturing constraints | | 20:10–20:54 | Partnering in the industry, Leonie's advice | | 23:15–24:45 | Exploding Kittens’ record-breaking Kickstarter | | 25:03–26:37 | Defining success, audience, and the "educational" label| | 29:35–30:39 | What makes a game fun: core mechanic | | 32:49–33:27 | Agreeing on fun, broad reach, and innovation | | 34:10–34:25 | Teaser for next episode: spinning economic ideas |

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Tone and Style

Playful, curious, and self-aware—with nerdy enthusiasm and a lively, accessible approach to economics and entrepreneurship. The hosts are candid about their lack of prior game-making experience, honest about the challenges, and eager to learn from the best while inviting listeners to contribute.

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Summary & Takeaways

• The Planet Money team is taking a hands-on approach to understanding the board game industry's explosive growth—and underlying economics—by making a board game themselves.
• They learn from indie success Leonie Grundler ("Biome"), whose story illustrates the shift from corporate gatekeeping to crowdfunded independence.
• Tariffs, global manufacturing, and creative control are central, ever-changing challenges for new game makers.
• The team partners with Exploding Kittens, revealing fundamental debates: party game versus strategy Eurogame, educational versus simply “smart,” innovation versus retheming, and what it means to make a game with mass appeal.
• The next episode promises listeners a peek into game design: spinning complicated economics into playful, innovative game mechanics.

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For those who missed the episode, this is a brisk, entertaining primer on how economic forces shape even the most fun corners of culture—and how launching a board game is at heart an economics experiment itself.

Transcript

[Narrator/Announcer]

Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. What does it mean to live a rich life? Maybe it's full of brave first leaps, tearful goodbyes and everything in between. And with over a hundred years of experience, your Edward Jones financial advisor can help. Edward Jones Member SIPC this is Planet Money from NPR.

[Kenny Malone]

Check 1, 2, check 1, 2. It's opening in one minute. Here we go. We are packed like sardines inside a convention center hallway waiting for the main doors to open. Crowd is surging. Is it open yet?

[Erica Barris]

Hopefully that is some random guy squashed up next to us.

[Kenny Malone]

I was hoping for some large announcement, but the announcement is the screams of the week being trampled. This convention is called Gen Con. It is the largest tabletop gaming convention in the country. We're talking board games and card games and role playing games.

[Erica Barris]

And the sea of people we're with are all waiting to get into the exhibition floor where all kinds of new games are on display. From big companies like Hasbro all the way down to little independent game designers showing their first games ever.

[Kenny Malone]

It's happening. We're going, we're going to. We spill into a room as big as what feels like three football fields full of so many kiosks with so many people selling so many games and I instantly regress into a giddy little child. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. It's overwhelming. Okay, so why have we come here? Well, board games rule obviously. A, But B, let's just call it for now market research. Do you want to tell me about the game you have? Yeah, that's our transhuman sci fi game. The game takes place 10 years after we lost the war with a group of AIs. So it takes place 10 years from now? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Yeah.

[Leonie Grundler]

So Canvas Critters is a mosaic making game where you play as these animal artists and you're trying to impress the animal museum curator.

[Kenny Malone]

She's a rather skeptical looking rabbit. Yeah. 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 ecosyste of plants and animals.

[Erica Barris]

That last voice is Leonie Grundler. She's 29, founder and CEO of Lioness Games. Biome is her company's first game and she has a copy spread out on the table in front of her trying to draw people in.

[Kenny Malone]

And it is working because Biome is an unusually eye catching game. It has dozens and dozens of cards with different beautifully illustrated animals and plants, plus hundreds of little Very cute wooden animal pieces. And then the real Showstopper, a bunch of fully functional but little baby sized bird's nest.

[Leonie Grundler]

And yes, we have little tiny straw nests with tiny wooden chicks and rabbits that you put in the nest.

[Kenny Malone]

It's hard to overstate how adorable these little nests are.

[Leonie Grundler]

I'm pretty happy with how they came out.

[Kenny Malone]

Now, in Leonie's game, you earn points by playing plant and animal cards. And then the right combinations of those at the right time will cause extra special things to happen.

[Leonie Grundler]

In the spring, if you have played a bird next to a tree or a rabbit next to any plant, they will nest and have babies, as in.

[Kenny Malone]

Little wooden babies that go into those adorable nests and earn even more points. Unless your opponents have predator cards and feast on your young. What do you want? Nature's brutal. Welcome to Biome.

[Erica Barris]

As we talk to Leonie, we start to realize that she kind of is this board game company. It's basically her and then anyone else she could drag into this for help.

[Leonie Grundler]

So my sister helped with a lot of the art and graphic design, which is really cool. And my parents are demoing down the hall.

[Kenny Malone]

Your parents are somewhere showing people this game.

[Leonie Grundler]

Yeah.

[Kenny Malone]

Wait, I feel like I need to go find them.

[Leonie Grundler]

Yeah, you should. Oh, my gosh.

[Kenny Malone]

As we wander over to find Leonie's parents somewhere in this, like, airplane hangar full of plastic tables with people hawking games, it is so clear that what we've been hearing is true. We are in a golden age of games. Like when I was a kid in the 90s, maybe 700, 800 new games came out each year. Today it is like 5,000. If you love to play games, it has never been better.

[Erica Barris]

But the flip side to that goldenness, 5,000 games a year. If you make games, there has never been more competition. So someone like Leonie has to do anything she can think of to stand out. From manufacturing little birds nests to enlisting her parents to travel across the country and rope strangers into trying her game.

[Kenny Malone]

Hello, guys. I met your daughter, I think. Oh, yeah.

[Erica Barris]

Hello. Leonie's mom has earrings made out of two of the little wooden pieces from the game.

[Leonie Grundler]

The sun is part of the resource.

[Kenny Malone]

The sunlights, they're wearing Sunlight Resource earrings. I love them.

[Erica Barris]

Leonie's parents, Leonie, the hundreds of other game sellers here are all hoping they've created the next blockbuster game. The term we have heard is Monopoly Killer.

[Kenny Malone]

Frankly, this gets to why we've come to this convention in the first place. In this world, the Monopoly Killer is some mythical game that if you could invent it, would dethrone what is probably the most popular game of all time in the US and make you rich beyond your wildest. Mr. Monopoly. Monocled money. Bag Dreams.

[Erica Barris]

There is a game people have pointed to as a contender. It's German. Many of you have probably played it. That possible Monopoly killer, Settlers of Catan.

[Kenny Malone]

Catan. Catan. However you say it, this is a game where you build roads and you trade resources like wool and wood, and you try to earn points by building settlements and cities. It is awesome. It has sold so many copies. It did not, however, kill Monopoly per se.

[Leonie Grundler]

No.

[Erica Barris]

We just now have two hugely popular games that each make a fortune. And we at Planet Money couldn't help but notice both are about economics, right?

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah. Monopoly, obviously. Real estate, bankruptcy, antitrust. Really. Settlers of Catan, road building, distribution of resources. I mean, literally, the CliffsNotes definition of economics is the allocation of scarce resources.

[Erica Barris]

And. But it's not just these games. So many board games are tiny little economic simulators. They do what we try to do at Planet Money, bring people into the world of economics in a fun, accessible way.

[Kenny Malone]

And so is Planet Money not the perfect entity to create not just the Monopoly Killer, but the Killer of Catan? And so we are making a board game. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone.

[Erica Barris]

And I'm Erica Barris.

[Kenny Malone]

Planet Money the game, A Monopoly killer.

[Erica Barris]

A slayer of Settlers of Catan, or.

[Kenny Malone]

You know, let's be real. We'd be happy if it was just really fun and people wanted to play it.

[Erica Barris]

Yes. We have been busy for the past year and are so excited to finally share everything we've learned from throwing ourselves into one of the most crowded business spaces on the planet.

[Kenny Malone]

Over the next series of episodes, we are going to get an inside look at how you pitch a game for the shelves of big box retail. Are you going to get in the room for the pitch?

[Erica Barris]

They emailed me last night. We can be in the room for the pitch, so.

[Alex Goldmark]

Oh, no, I have a pitch, though.

[Erica Barris]

I have arm movements that are going to happen. We'll get closer than ever to this unusual moment in global manufacturing.

[Kenny Malone]

So the tariffs would eat into their.

[Alex Goldmark]

Cut and not so they would ostensibly pick it up. The question is, do they charge us back for it?

[Erica Barris]

And if everything goes well, we should have a real game that you listening at home will be able to play on your table. You have to remember the first time.

[Leonie Grundler]

You play it, you have a lot of questions.

[Kenny Malone]

Does it help to know that it is inspired by a Nobel prize winning paper about the asymmetry of information in the used car market.

[Leonie Grundler]

I don't know anything you just said.

[Kenny Malone]

But before all of that we are going to need your help listeners. Lots of your help. So stay tuned.

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This message comes from LPL Financial. What if you could have more control over your future? LPL Financial removes the things holding you back and provides the services to push you forward. Because when it comes to your finances, your business, your future, LPL Financial believes the only question should be what if you could? LPL Financial member FINRA SIPC no strategy assures success or protects against loss. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principle. This message comes from Dell Technologies. The new Dell PC with Intel Core Ultra helps you fast forward through busy work, leaving more time for you. Time Get a new Dell PC at Dell.comai-PC all right, we are making a board game.

[Kenny Malone]

How does one make a board game? We should ask.

[Erica Barris]

Oh yeah, that little detail.

[Kenny Malone]

Now luckily we had just met someone who could help with this.

[Erica Barris]

How many games do you own?

[Leonie Grundler]

I think around between 90 and 100.

[Erica Barris]

Oh, that's it.

[Leonie Grundler]

I know it's cause I've moved a few times.

[Erica Barris]

I was playing. That's a lot of games.

[Kenny Malone]

This again is Leonie Grundler, who we met along with her parents at the Giant Game Convention. We called her back a few weeks later.

[Erica Barris]

Yeah, because not long ago, Leonie was just like us, trying to figure out where to begin and how to navigate this incredibly complicated business.

[Kenny Malone]

Plus she had made the kind of game we were jealous of. You know, Biome had all those beautiful pieces and nests, of course, but it's also a long layered game. It teaches its players about ecology. I think we want that, but you know, economy instead.

[Erica Barris]

Right. So we thought it would be instructive to simply hear how Leone did all of this, starting from the beginning.

[Leonie Grundler]

The first game I ever loved was probably Werewolf, which is like the German version of Mafia.

[Erica Barris]

Leonie's mom is German. She spent summers in Germany playing all kinds of games with her cousins.

[Leonie Grundler]

Then it wasn't until high school, when I was introduced to Settlers of Catan, that I really fell in love with board games. And we like to call Catan the gateway game into the industry.

[Erica Barris]

Specifically, it's a gateway to the Category of board games known as Eurogames.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, Eurogames, first popular in Europe, tend to be more complex games built to reward strategy and not random luck. And I've always thought of this category as more thinky games like Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride, if you've heard of those.

[Erica Barris]

But it's really Settlers of Catan that gets credit for breaking through first in the us and young Leone fell hard for it in high school.

[Leonie Grundler]

You know, friends would go after high school and get boba or play sports. So, yeah, playing Catan every day was not like super mainstream for high schoolers. Every single day, Right, Exactly.

[Erica Barris]

Leonie went off to college, studied hospitality administration. Not at all thinking about designing board games. And then Covid hits the pandemic was.

[Kenny Malone]

Huge for board games. Sales went through the roof. People were locked into their bubbles playing board games.

[Erica Barris]

And Leonie, during COVID got laid off from her job.

[Leonie Grundler]

So, of course I spent that summer playing a ton of this game called Wingspan.

[Erica Barris]

The bird game.

[Leonie Grundler]

The bird game, exactly. And so in Wingspan, you are playing these bird cards and the birds lay eggs, but the eggs just sit there. And I was like, what if there were snakes that could eat the eggs from other players?

[Kenny Malone]

Aha. A new board game idea was born. Leonie was now one of the, like, a gazillion people who thought they had a good game idea. The question was, what next?

[Erica Barris]

Leone goes all in, testing out whether it is a good game idea.

[Leonie Grundler]

So I started prototyping. I was printing out cards and cutting out cards. Even my grandma helped me cut out cards.

[Kenny Malone]

After a year and a half, Leone had a final prototype of her game, Biome. She was now one of maybe half a gazillion people with a prototype of a game. So now what?

[Erica Barris]

Well, 30 or 40 years ago, Leone would need to go to a company like Parker Brothers and say, hey, do you want to buy this Biome game idea for me?

[Kenny Malone]

And then the brothers Parker would be like, well, look, Leonie, we're still selling millions of copies of Monopoly and developing our own games internally. So, yeah, I don't know, probably it's going to be a pass on these cutenests and your game buddy.

[Erica Barris]

For decades and decades, it was incredibly hard for some regular old game enthusiasts like Leonie to get her board game idea to the market.

[Kenny Malone]

And then came Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site.

[Leonie Grundler]

Tabletop Games is actually the largest category on Kickstarter, which is so get out of here.

[Erica Barris]

Really?

[Leonie Grundler]

Yeah, it is. It's so cool.

[Alex Goldmark]

This is Orbio.

[Kenny Malone]

This is masterpiece.

[Erica Barris]

Right. If you haven't been on Kickstarter in the last 10 years.

[Kenny Malone]

Introducing Quark's particle Puzzle.

[Erica Barris]

It really does feel like it's become all tablet games on there.

[Leonie Grundler]

This is Cargo, a classic card game.

[Kenny Malone]

Where you're stacking Cargo, where you steal the world's most rules don't just change every turn. They stack up on top of you and your friends until the whole table erupts in chaos. Here's how it works. At any given time, there are between 650 and 750 games or, like, game paraphernalia projects on Kickstarter trying to get made. The total number since the beginning of Kickstarter, 57,067 and counting. In Goblin Party, you lead your Goblin clan to take revenge on those pesky heroes and adventurers.

[Erica Barris]

Which makes sense. Kickstarter was like a floodgate opening between a tsunami of game ideas and game demand.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, decades of game fans with decades of ideas didn't need to go through Parker Brothers anymore. They could go directly to the rising flood of of board game enthusiasts and ask directly, like, hey, do you like my idea? Because if enough of you pre order my game for, say, $45, I can go make this thing.

[Erica Barris]

So when Leonie's prototype of Biome was ready, she had a choice. She could still try and pitch it to a professional game making company. They would help her polish up the design, deal with manufacturing, maybe some marketing.

[Kenny Malone]

But, you know, this assumes they would even accept her game. And if they did, Leonie says she would earn a tiny fraction of the sales and maybe seed a lot of creative control of her game.

[Leonie Grundler]

I was like, biome is my baby. Like, I, you know, want to have control over it as much as possible.

[Erica Barris]

And so it was going to be the Kickstarter route for Leonie. But she didn't do this casually.

[Kenny Malone]

Oh, no, no. She hired a company that specializes in launching Kickstarter campaigns. That is how big this Kickstarter world has gotten. And they helped her with all kinds of stuff, including.

[Leonie Grundler]

Welcome to the breathtaking world of Biome.

[Kenny Malone]

Giving her tips on making this Biome explainer video featuring an Australian accent. That, I have to say, is working very effectively on me.

[Leonie Grundler]

Move through the seasons simultaneously collecting resources and playing wildlife cards.

[Kenny Malone]

But beware.

[Leonie Grundler]

In summer, your opponent's predators roam. Will you guide your Biome to peaceful victory or become the apex predator?

[Erica Barris]

The theory is games need a lot of buzz before the Kickstarter campaign even kicks off. That way, when you do launch, a big chunk of people will already want to buy your game. Which might then cause it to shoot up Kickstarter's website and get even more people to buy your game. So by the time she launched, Leonie already had Facebook ads, convention appearances, play tests.

[Kenny Malone]

Leonie's game cost $49 on Kickstarter. She wanted to pre sell around 1,000 copies, which would kickstart Biome into manufacturing by hopefully getting $40,000 in pre orders.

[Erica Barris]

So how did Biome do?

[Leonie Grundler]

Yeah, so Biome raised $400,000 on Kickstarter, which was insane. Super cool.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, things went quite well in Leonie's case. She met her funding goal in nine minutes and then shot way past it.

[Leonie Grundler]

So then we ended up manufacturing 12,000 games, some in English, some in German and some in French.

[Erica Barris]

Is 12,000 a lot or a little?

[Leonie Grundler]

So it's, it's a pretty good starting print run from what I've heard.

[Erica Barris]

Are you being modest? Is this like, are you like an insanely successful first time game designer and you're like, it's pretty good.

[Alex Goldmark]

Yeah. Hard.

[Leonie Grundler]

It's hard to answer that question.

[Erica Barris]

Yeah. No, it is not hard to answer that question. She had an absurdly successful game launch.

[Alex Goldmark]

Yeah.

[Kenny Malone]

And okay, if we, Planet Money are going to make a game, I could imagine Kickstarter being a great route for us.

[Erica Barris]

We get total control. We don't have to pitch it to anybody except you, our audience.

[Kenny Malone]

And we can generate buzz ahead of the launch by talking to you about it. Plus, you know, we don't have an Aussie accent, but our colleague at the Indicator, Darian woods, has a killer New Zealand accent. Welcome to the breathtaking world of the Planet Money game. Also very much working for me. But yes, yes, we could totally pre sell enough games and raise enough money to Kickstart a Planet Money board game into existence through Kickstarter.

[Erica Barris]

But of course, Leonie's story does not stop with the fabulously successful pre sale of all her games.

[Kenny Malone]

No, she had to, you know, figure out how to then actually manufacture thousands and thousands of games. She had to source a factory in China who could make little wooden chicks and bunnies and those little nests.

[Erica Barris]

And then this year she had to figure out how to deal with the wild swings in tariffs.

[Leonie Grundler]

Last December, I imported about 5,500 games to the U.S. i paid $255 and 20 cents in like customs and duties fees.

[Erica Barris]

Okay.

[Leonie Grundler]

Earlier this month I imported 1,700 games, so you know, about a third. And I paid $6,354.81 in duties and customs fees.

[Kenny Malone]

So yeah, from about 5 cents per game, up to about $3.74 per game. And so Leoni, by the way, did look into making the game in the US she was going to have to turn all the cute little wooden creatures into cardboard and do something, maybe drop the adorable nest.

[Leonie Grundler]

If I had tried to sell a very sad cardboard only game of Biome, I would have to charge 100 to $120 to the consumer. And so that's why, you know, even with, with the tariffs, I know that I'm going to have to keep manufacturing in China.

[Erica Barris]

So that's where things stand for. Leonie started as a huge board game fan and Kickstarter allowed her to become the CEO of her own board game company and I guess COO and CIO and whatever else because she's the only full time employee of that board game company.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, we explained to Leonie that this scrappy independent Kickstarter route, it sounded noble but also like beyond all consuming.

[Erica Barris]

Okay, this sounds like it's still a hustle. It's very tough. Is it cheating if we, 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?

[Leonie Grundler]

Not at all.

[Erica Barris]

Oh, it's okay.

[Leonie Grundler]

It's okay. It's great.

[Erica Barris]

We're not selling out.

[Leonie 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.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, we were going to need to find a game publishing company to partner with.

[Erica Barris]

That's after the break.

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[Kenny Malone]

You know, Planet Money did do a Kickstarter once. This was back in 2013. We wanted to make a T shirt followed around the global economy.

[Alex Goldmark]

I'm Alex Bloomberg at Planet Money and one thing we have a lot of in public radio T shirts.

[Kenny Malone]

Not to brag, but every year we send them out. That campaign did set the Guinness World Record at the time for the most money raised by a publishing project on Kickstarter ever, nearly $600,000.

[Erica Barris]

Fast forward two years and our record had been obliterated. And the Kickstarter campaign, with by far the most supporters ever, was a new card game.

[Kenny Malone]

This audio is from that game's Kickstarter campaign video.

[Erica Barris]

We see the word kittens, then goats explosion.

[Kenny Malone]

All of this together in a single game.

[Erica Barris]

Exploding Kittens.

[Kenny Malone]

Our Planet Money Kickstarter record was about 600k. The Exploding Kittens card game raised almost $8.8 million. So I don't know if we are looking for a company to make our game with us partner who knows how to capture lightning in a bottle. It might make sense to talk to the people who made exploding kittens.

[Erica Barris]

Emails were sent and a mildly awkward zoom meeting was scheduled.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah.

[Alex Goldmark]

So thank you everybody for joining. We should do a little bit of introductions.

[Kenny Malone]

That is the voice of Planet Money's executive producer, Alex Goldmark. It's good to have him around on calls where we might sign any bad contracts. That way it's his fault, not mine and Erica's if that happens.

[Erica Barris]

Also in the meeting, Alon Lee, co creator of the Explorer Exploding Kittens card game and apparently a Planet Money listener.

[Alex Goldmark]

Have been listening for years. All the episodes. Just yeah, very excited to be on this call.

[Erica Barris]

We were also very excited to be in the room with exploding kittens because they have evolved into a major game manufacturer. Now since that first exploding Kittens game, they've published more than 70 games, many of which have made it onto the shelves at Walmart and target games called things like throw, throw, burrito, poetry for Neanderthals, really loud librarians now really, this.

[Kenny Malone]

Introductory zoom meeting with Elan and exploding kittens boils down to a first date. Do they want to make a game with Planet Money? Does Planet Money want to make a game with them?

[Erica Barris]

Simple in theory.

[Kenny Malone]

Our basic question here is, can we make a board game? And where do we start?

[Alex Goldmark]

Cool. All right, let me ask a few questions in order to answer that very exciting question. What does success look like? And who is your audience?

[Kenny Malone]

These are not rhetorical, I assume.

[Alex Goldmark]

No, I mean, we know we have a big audience that listens to the podcast, and some of them we assume, like board games.

[Kenny Malone]

That again, our executive producer, Alex Goldmark, who, bless him, could not help but immediately reveal how nerdily we were thinking about board games here.

[Alex Goldmark]

We want the game to, like, I don't know, show you something about the world of economics or maybe make you feel something about the world of economics. Okay, so I think when you say you want people to learn something or have feelings about something. Have a feeling about something that I get. Learn something.

[Kenny Malone]

Learn seems like a. Learn seems like a bad word. That seems like Alex. Alex said a bad word when he said learn.

[Alex Goldmark]

It's only bad if you want to, like, test it. If you just want to say like, yeah, you probably learned something, then that's fine.

[Kenny Malone]

Okay, great. Yes, the guy who helped make games about cats that explode and cavemen writing monosyllabic poetry and burritos that you throw at each other. Not exactly eager to pivot to an educational game.

[Erica Barris]

Fair enough. Educational games, school games do not fly off the shelves at Walmart or Target.

[Kenny Malone]

But maybe when we say things like learn and educational, we might be saying complex, like the game Leone made Biome, you know, pretty hardcore strategy game that takes 60 to 90 minutes to play, has such elaborate game pieces your mother can make earrings out of them.

[Erica Barris]

Yeah, the games they call Euro games, Settlers of Catan was a Eurogame and it has sold gazillions of copies.

[Kenny Malone]

So in my head, I think I had imagined that a Planet Money game should be like that. A Euro game that takes hours to play. Incredibly complex economic simulations beloved by the hardcore board gamers with a high ranking on the famous website boardgamegeek.com and it.

[Erica Barris]

Seemed like Elan was trying to gauge just how set was we were on making one of those high ranking board game geek Euro game style board games.

[Alex Goldmark]

When you say board game, I'm assuming you mean the requirement is not a board. It could be a card game or a throwables game or a run around the room game. I'm Assuming that's correct, perhaps.

[Kenny Malone]

I feel like we're at this, this. We've already arrived at a critical decision point. And what are the trade offs of these various.

[Alex Goldmark]

The trade offs are important and significant. Basically, we're trying to figure out is the goal to make a board game like on Board Game Geek, which typically means high cost of goods, high sale price, small audience. Right. There are very few games on Board Game Geek that satisfy the this made lots and lots of money criteria. On the other side of things is card game like Exploding Kittens. Very low cost of goods, very low price point, between $10 and $20, and sells millions and millions of units, but of course makes a lot less money on each of those sales. So. So we. We just got to figure out what the strategy is there.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah. Exploding Kittens doesn't really make Eurogames. They make what are known as party games. Some famous examples that are not by Exploding Kittens would be taboo or Apples to Apples or maybe even arguably uno.

[Erica Barris]

Party games are much simpler to learn, they take way less time to play, and as a result, they tend to have more of a mass appeal. Exploding Kittens is one of the best companies in the world at making these. If we want to make a Monopoly killer, a game that finds its way into as many homes as humanly possible, is it possible that we would have a better shot with a mass appeal party game?

[Kenny Malone]

It's possible. But I will admit I didn't really think of party games as smart games. My own personal bias, perhaps. And Planet Money should have a smart game. We knew that much. However, the more Elon talked, the more I realized, like, there clearly can be more science and complexity to a party game than I had thought.

[Alex Goldmark]

So the, the mantra that we have at this company, like every game we've ever launched, has satisfied only one criteria, and every game we've killed has failed this one criteria, which is the game itself should not be entertaining. The game should make the people you're playing with entertaining.

[Kenny Malone]

And I assume you're not going to badmouth an existing game that doesn't do that, but if you would, hypothetically, I'd be open to hearing it.

[Alex Goldmark]

Well, the worst game ever invented is Candyland.

[Kenny Malone]

Take that, children.

[Alex Goldmark]

The reason that I pick on that game a lot is Candyland 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?

[Erica Barris]

Yeah, Candyland is basically a kind of solitaire that happens to be played by a bunch of people sitting next to each other.

[Kenny Malone]

And this gets to what seems to really get Elan excited about designing games. Candyland's problem, he explains, is something known as its core mechanic.

[Alex Goldmark]

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 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.

[Erica Barris]

So Candyland, the mechanic is draw a card. The card tells you what space to move to. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

[Kenny Malone]

Not so fun. Slightly more complex example.

[Alex Goldmark]

If you look at something like Monopoly, right. The core mechanic is accumulate properties and make money off those properties. And so you just keep doing that, right. Over and over and over again. You get better at it. There's escalation because you've now got more properties, some people are losing properties, some people have more money, less money, et cetera. Right.

[Kenny Malone]

Are there any new game mechanics that we could like? Like would a goal be potentially also to be. To introduce a new kind of game mechanic to whatever we're building?

[Alex Goldmark]

Yeah, I think. Look, if, if the game is recognizable as just a skin on another game or a different way to present an existing gameplay loop, I get bored fast. Like I just, it's just not. I'd rather just play the original or not play that gameplay at all. So yeah, unless we come up with a brand new gameplay mechanic, I don't think we should bother.

[Kenny Malone]

Uh huh. At the end of about an hour with Alon and his team at Exploding Kittens, I don't know how to say it. We were starting to see ourselves in party game hats. Like it seemed like maybe there was a way to have both the mass appeal of a very fun party game, but also sneak in the complexity and nerdiness that we thought you could only get from an elaborate, highly rated board game geek Euro game like Catan.

[Erica Barris]

If we want to make a Monopoly killer, maybe the best chance is a super fun party game that is subtly smarter than you think.

[Alex Goldmark]

Let's, let's agree we're aiming for fun, something that will sell well and we don't care how it does on board games.

[Kenny Malone]

Correct.

[Alex Goldmark]

I don't care how it.

[Kenny Malone]

Yes.

[Alex Goldmark]

Amazing.

[Kenny Malone]

Awkward first date a success. We had in principle agreed to make the Planet Money game with exploding kittens and we had big goals.

[Erica Barris]

We wanted to make a mass appeal party game and we wanted to get it onto actual shelves at actual big box retailers.

[Kenny Malone]

We wanted our game to have a brand new core game mechanic and it must still be smart and complex and include, you know, some backdoor economics learning.

[Erica Barris]

So time to schedule the next date.

[Alex Goldmark]

I think what, what the next step here is. We do some homework and you do some homework and our homework is go play around with some interesting core gameplay mechanics. Your homework is give us three themes that are interesting to you as in.

[Erica Barris]

Economics themes, big ideas that we want in our party game.

[Alex Goldmark]

I'm curious to see what you come back with. The next phase will be really intriguing.

[Kenny Malone]

And we were off. Nice to meet you guys.

[Alex Goldmark]

Nice to meet all of you. Thank you so much.

[Kenny Malone]

Off to try and make one of the 5,000 board games coming out each year and see if we could get anyone interested at all.

[Erica Barris]

On the next Planet Money. We try to take our economic ideas and spin them into tabletop gaming gold, hopefully. Think about this. There are elves. They live forever, but they have to plan for retirement.

[Kenny Malone]

What are you gonna do? What does that even mean? Think about it. Yeah, got some work to do. This episode was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Marianne McCune, fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

[Erica Barris]

Special thanks to Asher McClanahan and Leonie's parents. Thanks so much.

[Kenny Malone]

Shout out. Leonie's parents hawk that game.

[Erica Barris]

I'm Erica Barris.

[Kenny Malone]

And I'm Kenny Malone. This, this is npr. Thanks for listening.

[Narrator/Announcer]

This message comes from Capital One. With the Venture X card, earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy. Plus get premium benefits at a collection of hotels. When booking through Capital One Travel. What's in your wallet? Terms apply [e-mail] support for NPR. And the following message come from Edward Jones. What does it mean to live a rich life? Maybe it's full of brave first leaps, tearful goodbyes, and everything in between. And with over 100 years of experience, your Edward Jones financial advisor can help. Edward Jones Member, SIPC I Want it.

[Kenny Malone]

That Way was a Backstreet Boys banger, but was it also a secret economics lesson? If you watch the music video, you can really see an illustration of the.

[Alex Goldmark]

Concept of comparative advantage.

[Kenny Malone]

All right. In our most recent bonus episode, we compete to see who can pick the most Planet Money song, movie and more from 1999. It's our first ever Planet Money pop culture draft, and you can hear it and support our work by signing up for [e-mail].