"Wingspan" Designer Elizabeth Hargrave Advances the Game Industry

Today we talk with Elizabeth Hargrave, one of today's most successful game designers, responsible for the instant classic, Wingspan. Bringing a feminine aesthetic, along with a formidable business acumen, she is advancing the game industry into the modern era.

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This video was recorded on Nov. 01, 2023.

David Gardner: Breaking the rules is an approach that works well in investing, and in business, and in life. For nine years now with this podcast, I try to speak to all three, never one without the other two, never two without the third -- investing, business, life, they're all intermingled. But as Yoda once said, ''There is another.'' That was at the end of the Empire Strikes Back. Spoiler alert he was referring to Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan. For me, "there is another" references a fourth gravitational force around which this Podcast rotates. As any long time listener will know, that is games. Investing, business, life, games. This week I get to introduce you to the designer of one of the most successful and decorated board games of the past decade. Her name is Elizabeth Hargrave and her game -- played it -- Wingspan. Elizabeth Hargrave, Wingspan. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Over the years, I've shared with you many of my favorite tabletop gaming recommendations, my games series that leads off every December, before the holidays, before holiday gifts. That's coming again soon, Fools and I have welcomed world-class game designers like Richard Garfield, who created Magic: The Gathering. Rob Daviau, the godfather of legacy games, Reiner Knizia, The good doctor one of maybe the first person to make a full-time career out of game design and others. Elizabeth Hargrave first published tabletop board game, Wingspan, four years ago. Challenging players to attract a beautiful and diverse collection of birds to their wildlife preserves. It's a competitive light to medium-weight strategy game playable in about an hour. Where did she come from? How did she, a first-time designer, do it? What business lessons can we learn from this million-selling plus tabletop board game and the woman who created it? Elizabeth Hargrave is here in studio at Fool HQ, and I'm excited for her to tell her story and share. Elizabeth, welcome to Rule Breaker Investing.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

David Gardner: Is this your first investing Podcast?

Elizabeth Hargrave: I believe so, yes.

David Gardner: I'm delighted that I could [laughs] be that for you. As I referenced at the start, we do spend about a third of our time on the stock market and investing, and a third of our time on business, so we're going to be getting into that some. But a third on life, and that really connects, but there's a fourth, there's another, and that's games. That's the fourth thing that I've credited in over the course of time, and I'm so delighted to have one of our best game designers operating today, somebody who's created just a remarkable, prominent primary work. We'll get into that a little bit, and a number of other games since that have done well, and some more coming, and we're going to talk about that in a little while Elizabeth Hargrave. But let me just start by asking, were you raised in a gaming family?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Not over the top gaming, we had games, we played a lot of hearts and Scrabble in my family.

David Gardner: Good games?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yeah. I recently played Sorry with my friends kids and went and called my mom and apologized. [laughs] Making play Sorry with me.

David Gardner: Am I right that sorry has no choice? You're simply rolling dice and moving or is there an element of choice?

Elizabeth Hargrave: You have multiple pieces that you can.

David Gardner: Yeah.

Elizabeth Hargrave: If they've made it out of the starting position. But remember you're like just rolling over and over and over, hoping that you get the right role to even be able to play the game.

David Gardner: It's so like this. Was it all a trick on us? Was it called, sorry, by the designer, cynically, or Parker Brothers or Hasbro, whoever was behind that? Sorry, sorry that we sold you this game.

Elizabeth Hargrave: No. For kids, I think that game does have a place in the world for kids playing with parents because it is so chance-based that kids actually do have a chance against their parents as opposed to, the kinds of games that you and I enjoy playing where we want a lot of agency and control over what happens in the game which is hard to play with a kid that doesn't have the same analytical capabilities and you can't keep up with their parents.

David Gardner: You're right. That's such I'm glad to use that word, agency. Elizabeth, I don't know if you're familiar with his work C. Thi Nguyen. Have you ever come across him? He's a games philosopher. I would say he's the games philosopher because there are a lot of people with PhDs in philosophy rattling around major American universities saying it's all about games, but C. Thi Nguyen is one such. I had him on the Podcast earlier this year, fantastic conversation and he was just talking about the unique thing that games offer as art because I take very seriously the notion that games are art. I don't even need to be serious about that, to me that's obvious. You may or may not agree, and we're not even trying to go down this rabbit hole, but he said what defines games as an art is agency. That's what they bring versus painting or sculpture, or music that you actually participate and you have choice an agency. That's why I have inveighed against Candy Land multiple times in the past in this show [laughs] because there's no agency at all in Candy Land. Sorry. At least you have which pawn will I move if I'm even starting? But I'm glad you said agency because to me that defines great games.

Elizabeth Hargrave: At least great games for adults.

David Gardner: That's what I should have said.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yeah. Because I think there's a role that games play for kids that's about learning to take turns, learning to be a good loser. There's a lot of social things that games teach kids that don't necessarily require them to give the kids a lot of agency. But yes, in the games for adults, the games that we enjoy playing, that's this whole modern world, since the '80s and '90s really that didn't exist when we were kids in the same way. It's all about agency, it's about feeling like the things you do on your turn are meaningful within the game, that you have some hope of impacting the outcome, and that the best player is going to win.

David Gardner: Yeah. Which I would say, I hope for of life as well, that the best players will win life and that we have agency throughout. Some people feel a lot more agency than others, depending on where we are in the world right now, but the overlap between games and life and thinking about agency are worthy of more reflection. Then we're going to give it right now because I want to ask you my next question. Elizabeth, were you inventing games as a child, were you somebody who was just coming up with stuff?

Elizabeth Hargrave: I don't remember inventing any games as a kid, I was outdoors a lot as a kid. When I was in elementary school, I lived in Southern Illinois and we lived on the edge of a national forest. It was the time when parents would just, shoo their kids outside and tell him to come home by dark. My friends and I would run around in the woods until dark and, play hobo and whatever, I don't know, fairy houses. I was not designing games but had other imaginative forms of play in my childhood.

David Gardner: Absolutely and I know nature is something. Is this something that you've gone back and gotten a PhD in at any point? I'm not quite clear in your educational background, Elizabeth, I know you went to Brown where my brother Tom Gardner went as well so Providence Rhode Island.

Elizabeth Hargrave: My degree there was in public policy and then I went to graduate school for it, too, which is what brought me here to D.C. [inaudible].

David Gardner: Things start to make sense. Okay, good. But not really making up games as a child. At some point you started making up games as an adult, we're going to get into that in a little while. But I was googling you and learning, anybody can find out a lot more about Elizabeth at elizhargrave.com and that's your personal website. There I discovered that you blogged extensively, I would say, especially 2009-2015. Elizabeth, I clicked through some, I flick back through them and tips for enjoying the natural world in around outside the Washington DC area was a big part of your haunt back then. Really lovely like pictures, pointers, inspirations, obviously driven by your love of nature. You wrote at one point, ''DC is about as far North as I'm willing to live.'' Elizabeth, is that still true, and what are your reflections on your blogging days?

Elizabeth Hargrave: That is still true. My brother went the opposite way and lives in Montana and has just convinced me to go there for Christmas and I'm a little terrified.

David Gardner: Do you have a flight in and out?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yeah.

David Gardner: Not a helicopter drop or anything.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It'll all be fine. I mentioned we lived in Southern Illinois and then we moved from there to Florida. That's my happy place in the warmth. As for the blocking, it took a lot of time. I really enjoyed it. But after a certain point, the time I stopped was actually around the time that I started designing Wingspan. I think it might have been that my creative energy was focused elsewhere.

David Gardner: I'm wondering as we start to move because 2019 was the year that Wingspan was published. A big part of my interest, we're going to get into this a little bit later too, is just design. I love design and understanding process and how people come up with things. I'm fascinated by that. There are lots of Wingspan fans listening to us right now. I very much want to get there. But before we go there, I'm just curious. Your professional life. What were you doing in 2015 and then you started to think about and make a game? I'm even wondering, are you working today? Are you now a full-time game designer? I'm not even sure, but could you talk about your professional life over the last eight to ten years?

Elizabeth Hargrave: I can go back a little bit farther than that for a little context. I came to DC in the '90s and started working for the federal government. I worked at the Department of Health and Human Services for a while, and then I was on the hill for a few years and realized after a few years, that was not a great fit for me. A little too intense.

David Gardner: Could you give a quick example? Is there an anecdote? What does intense feel like?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Very long hours with just high pressure all the time in the sense of like everybody thinks that their thing is the most important and it needs to be done yesterday. [inaudible] none of it actually ever gets done. It's just frustrating. I think that feeling has probably only gotten worse over time. I went from there to actually I quit for six months and traveled. Then came back and got a job doing consulting, but policy research in a consulting capacity. I was doing a lot of focus groups and interviews with people who are affected by the Medicare program. That was always my specialty, healthcare for the elderly and people with disabilities. I went from the hill, I actually quit my job and traveled for six months to get a clean break. Then came back and started doing policy research based out of a consulting firm. I was working mostly on the Medicare program, so healthcare for people with disabilities and the elderly. All through the time that I was designing Wingspan, I was doing that but in a freelance capacity. The time that I was spending on consulting was pretty variable. There were times that I was probably more than 40 hours a week and other times that I had, you know, good chunks of time that I could spend on game design, great. Which was a really nice luxury to have 'cause I really do, once I get into the flow of working on something, I can get pretty obsessed and it's nice to be able to run with that.

David Gardner: It also causes people usually to finish things like some of my friends who could really focus. I won't quite say mono task because that's its own thing. But I mean, these people tend to finish things, you tackle something and you take it down, that's steered to the ground. You've obviously done that a bunch of times now with games. But let me ask you about games, because where did that emerge from? I mean, I get that you were starting somewhere after blogging, but you didn't design games as a kid, it sounds like? When did you start to, I don't know, push cardboard around on a prototypical game mat of your own design?

Elizabeth Hargrave: I had discovered sort of modern hobby board games, board games for adults around 2005. I've been playing for eight or ten years old. Awesome. I think I started working on Wingspan really in like 2013, 2014. Part of it was really just feeling like I love all of the ways that these games work, but what they are about does not speak to me at all. We were playing a lot of games about trains and castles and you know, sci-fi. We were playing a lot of race for the Galaxy. None of those topics are like passions [LAUGHTER] in any way. My husband at one point literally said, what if there was race for the galaxy bit with birds?

David Gardner: Boom.

Elizabeth Hargrave: My brain just like latched on to that. That was really the jumping-off point. Then the next several years we're just iterating on that idea over and over until something worked.

David Gardner: Race for the Galaxy. Again, gamers listening to us will know that that is a Tableau building, pure card game, very popular, very playable, 25-30 minutes for those who know it. Lots of icons. You have to memorize a new language, in this case a visual language of icons. Tom Lehman design, very popular game, something you know, that makes a lot of sense to model on. I love how it was kind of the switch of the theme. Now you added a lot of your own mechanisms. By no means does Wingspan look or feel like race for the galaxy in particular. But I see how that launched you and it was the thematic substitution that it sounds like caught your attention. I totally get so many of the games that I have in my library are about trains, [LAUGHTER] or Dungeons and Dragons or sci-fi. This or that, there are some economic stimulation. There are a lot of games that have names of European cities.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yes.

David Gardner: Those two. A lot of games like that, but I believe. No worries at all. Go ahead. I was going to say, cough it out. You're all good. I'm going to pick up there three, two, one. Good. But I believe with your 2019 publication of Wingspan, which we're now going to talk about. Which turns out you were designing 5,6 years beforehand. Not only did you catch the gaming world in a place it wasn't expecting, with a theme building an aviary attracting birds that a lot of people hadn't seen before. But the beautiful hand-painted cards, the Audubon-looking illustrations on each card. That each bird would be represented with its own special ability and its value. All of a sudden, what I've noticed since then, we'll talk about this later too. There are a lot of other games about nature right now, and I don't really think there were that many before 2019. But I think, you know, swap out the Dungeons and Dragons themes and maybe the sci-fi spaceship themes. It feels like nature, specifically earth and the planet that we live on, the planet we're trying to protect. I feel like in a lot of ways, you have ignited a firestorm of copycats in a good way who now recognize, Let's make games, not about, I don't know, scantily clad warrior maidens, but in fact, about grizzly bears, a game like Cascadia recently, also celebrating nature. Anyway, your husband triggered this by saying that. That was a beautiful question.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It really was. Wingspan definitely wasn't the first game with a nature theme. And I think some of the other ones that came out probably were already in the works by the time Wingspan had come out. I don't think I could take full credit for this wave, but I do think it was a hole in the market that probably other designers were also feeling. I think now we're far enough out that some of the games that are coming out now are directly inspired by Wingspan. I mean, you see it in a game like Earth. Just came out right where they've got the fun facts on the bottom of the card.

David Gardner: You started with that and who doesn't like? We were talking to our colleague, Dan Boyd here at the Motley Fool. Dan Behind the Glass for many a Motley Fool podcast and Motley Fool Live. Dan was just saying to you, because we got to hang out with Dan beforehand, and he was just saying pause for a second. I just lost my train of thought. He just said that thing [LAUGHTER] and it wasn't. What had you just said, Elizabeth, that triggered that?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Earth had the fun facts on the bot.

David Gardner: Yes, exactly. Thank you. Three, two, one. Go. You're awesome. Thank you. [inaudible] 57 years old. I didn't do this when I have a 37, 3, 2, 1 go. Dan said the way he plays wingspan with his father and brother is they always read the fun fact at the bottom of each of your bird cards. You're right. I mean, I know you're not trying to claim that you started all this, I'm crediting you with that a little bit, but do you modestly can demur? But I will say that, the idea of putting nature facts right there in the game learning as we're playing. Sure, it's happened many times in the past, but you are a really iconic version of that in just the last few years.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I do think Wingspan can take credit for showing that there's a market for that theme. I think a lot of board game publishers have to be very risk-averse in picking the games that they publish. They know that castles and trains have sold in the past, but they're putting out all this capital to send off to the manufacturer to print a bunch of games. They have these physical objects that they then have to sell and they don't want to print more than they're going to be able to sell and so Tried and True has been the name of the game for a long time. I'm happy that we have opened up another genre. Genre isn't the right word for it really, but subject area.

David Gardner: Subject area indeed and a very broad and deep one. Wingspan has been an absolute phenomenon since its debut just four years ago, 2019. Many listening now will have played it. I've regularly featured it and it's expansions on my games episodes here. But of course, many more will not yet have played Wingspan. This is almost silly or sublime for me to ask the designer of Wingspan but Elizabeth, would you give an overview of your game?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yeah. Wingspan is a game where it has 180 bird cards in a deck and you're trying to play those bird cards out in front of you onto your own personal player mat. It's very much like you're building your own little world that no one else can mess with. Every time you play a bird in front of you, it makes you better at doing something else in the game. So you need to draw more cards, you need to get food to feed your birds or you need to be able to lay eggs on your birds to score points. As you're playing the bird cards out in front of you, it's making your turns more powerful for the future. You start out the game taking these really simple, just like I'm just going to draw this one card on my turn and by the end of the game you're like, I get to draw two cards, and then I get to use this bird to do this thing, and this bird to do this thing. You get these super complex-

David Gardner: Combo chained horrific.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Combo-tastic turns by the end of the game.

David Gardner: My first play, I was just [inaudible] and I'm checking my own stats as someone, by the way, who logs each game I play into the wonderful BG Stats app. I've played, Wingspan, I just checked it 56 times. That's a lot of play for me. Someone who plays more than 100 different games every year. But I know it's paltry compared to your biggest fans, we've had so much fun with the bass game and all the expansions. My first play I'm just noting was January 17th of 2019. When did the game come out? 2019 first week?

Elizabeth Hargrave: You were an early adopter.

David Gardner: Thank you. It was a learning game. I played it with my son Gabe, was an amazing birder and so much fun to play the game with because he has his own fun facts. He adds in about all the different birds [laughs]. But I noted that I blew one rule, and I'm wondering if this is the most frequently blown rule you would know, Elizabeth. But we forgot in that learning game to pay the egg cost when playing new birds in the second and succeeding columns. Do people do that?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Took off like crazy.

David Gardner: Exactly. In fact, I invalidated our final scores because we didn't play by the actual rules. But that's why we play learning games.

Elizabeth Hargrave: That is a rule that confuses people in multiple directions. People do what you did and people also get confused in the opposite direction that they think that you have to play an egg to do anything on your entire player mat which then you can't do.

David Gardner: That's like playing sorry and trying to get your pawns started. [laughs]

Elizabeth Hargrave: I think that is a victim that the bird can only be so big to fit into a standard game box. There's like a very standard square size and cards are a standard size and so the three rows that your bird cards go in take a certain amount of size on the player mat and then the row for everything else about playing a bird was this tiny little row.

David Gardner: At the top.

Elizabeth Hargrave: People perceive it as not being parallel to the other three.

David Gardner: I hear you and I want to talk some about the production of the game and your publisher. Your publisher, Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games Fame, who's been on this podcast. I had Jamey on maybe four or five years ago. I'd love to hear some of how you met him and some of the initial partnership. But what I want to say about him and you and I talked about this beforehand, is I had Jamey on maybe 2018 because he had conquered Kickstarter. In my mind, he'd even written a book about how to win on Kickstarter as just his own solo guy. Just figuring out that there is a way you could sell and produce and promote games more effectively through Kickstarter, which I think a lot of people know is the big crowdfunding site that found many things, games included. He just raised $1.8 million for his game Scythe, which is another wonderful Stonemaier game alongside Wingspan. You were mentioning that Wingspan, which came out a year or so later, was the first time-.

Elizabeth Hargrave: That he did not use Kickstarter for one of his games. I think publishers use Kickstarter for a few reasons. One is to gauge demand for their games. As I was saying before, it can be really hard to know how many copies to print and it can be disastrous to be wrong and print too many. In the case of Wingspan, it's not great to print too few.

David Gardner: Did that happen?

Elizabeth Hargrave: But there was an article about me in The New York Times and there were no copies of Wingspan available to capitalize on that.

David Gardner: Ouch. [laughs] Although it still seems like you've done pretty well.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It turned out OK.

David Gardner: They eventually got around and bought it, but that's not great timing.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It turned out OK.

David Gardner: Are you trying to stop the articles to print it three months later?

Elizabeth Hargrave: The other big reason that publishers use Kickstarter is they get a higher margin on the games because if you're selling into retail or you're selling through a wholesaler and that wholesaler is only giving the publisher maybe 50% of the retail price of a game. Whereas a Kickstarter, they're getting the full list price minus whatever. I forget what the Kickstarter percentage is, it's not 50%. So they can get a really high margin on that first bunch of games and then print extras to also sell in retail. At the same time, be doing this market research of like how many people even want this game. We don't even know. I don't want to put words in Jamey's mouth. My understanding that he said, I think publicly, is that he's decided that the amount that Kickstarter takes out isn't worth it, number 1. Number 2, he would rather have the game available, have people order it, and then just have it show up at their house the next week, instead of the big drawback with Kickstarter is that you're asking people to pay $60 or more for a game, and then to wait 8-12 months before it shows up at their doorstep.

David Gardner: I've done that a few times.

Elizabeth Hargrave: A big lag. He just like as someone providing things that bring people Joy wants that lag to be much shorter.

David Gardner: I think it's quite brilliant. I've noticed that change and I've forgotten the Wingspan was the first game that he's done that with. You and I also mentioned, well, you just said it, that you kind of under produced based on under supply against the demand that was out there. Maybe that was his first experiment, a learning journey for everybody. But I've noticed every Stoneware game since has been also done the same way. I have to say as a customer, I love that, and I hope Jamey's listening. I love what you're doing because it's a delight to get excited and know about a new games out by a designer you appreciate, or at least a publisher that you know, and it's going to arrive in two or three weeks. That takes a lot of moxie, some hot spot and probably some market researcher numbers to know how many to print in the first place that you have to make often in China and ship sometimes for a month to get through customs to get here. There's a huge amount of logistics he's managing right now by taking that risk himself.

Elizabeth Hargrave: You have to have the cash flow to do it too, because you're paying the manufacturer upfront and then getting paid for the games.

David Gardner: Now, this gets us a little bit into the digital games world because Wingspan doesn't just exist as an analog copy, although it does, and this is something else we were talking about. I really love playing games because I love playing with the people around the table. Board game, arena BGA for big time gamers. You'll know this is like a magnet site. Increasingly wear digital games, digital copy Wingspan. I also remember my iPad, I think eight or 10 years ago, all of a sudden, for the first time, a game that I esteemed was there on my iPad. I had to pay 399 for the app, instead of 3999 for the game. I still pay 3999 for the game Elizabeth because I don't know if you're like me, but I like to play real games around the table with other people.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yes, I do both. I prefer to play in person, and I do think that you get a lot out of playing games in person in terms of that social interaction, in terms of unplugging your eyeballs from the screen, in terms of the tactile feeling of playing with the pieces. You can get none of that from playing online. But also for me, board games scratch such an itch in my brain that I also enjoy. It's more like playing a puzzle when I'm playing online. It just give me those juicy decisions to make.

David Gardner: You don't have to wait for somebody to come over to your house or wax things on Saturday at 6:30 PM you could just tap in. Also I will say, and I do greatly admire and I'm glad that that digital world exists, even though I'm not availing myself of it too much. But if you think about it, probably the greatest players of individual games in the world are out there competing right there in digital format. They've got Elo ratings, they've got their BGA profiles. If you want to play in the NBA, if we're talking about sports, you either have to be as a woman in the WNBA or as a man in the NBA, a really great athlete and you're only playing analog, but digitally, the greatest NBA players of every individual game are typically somewhere out there in the apps, out on BGA, with their ratings and they're playing thousands of times.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It's incredible. There's been an event, it just happened a couple of months ago in Las Vegas called the World Series of Board Gaming. Do you know about this event? Which is a very high-stakes game tournament. You play multiple events, all leading up to, I forget, it's a $25,000 purse or something.

David Gardner: Not bad.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I have a friend who's considering playing in the Wingspan tournament next year and he is doing that. He's training on board game arena.

David Gardner: That makes a lot of sense and so now getting back into the business of this, I'm curious for whatever you want to share. I'm not asking for any of Jamey's secret cards or inside dope here, but I'm curious, what is the business model like when you take Wingspan from a beautiful box game into the digital world?

Elizabeth Hargrave: It is something that I blissfully don't actually have to participate in at all. But I do know a little bit. He licensed the digital rights to an outside.

David Gardner: Developer.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Developer, I believe they're check, they're called Monster Couch and they just went off and developed the board game and then reached out to us when they had something ready for testing. But it was very far along and then we helped guide it just on the edges at that point, they had really had a very nice implementation by the time I saw anything and then they did a big round of beta testing where they got Wingspan fans to come in and play a whole bunch of games and now they've got this amazing community of people so they were just beta testing the Oceania Expansion which is about to come out digitally and there was all this buzz in the Wingspan Facebook group about everyone that has played testing it and how it's going and all this. But it's pretty much completely separate from Stonemaier as a game company. Not everyone does it that way. I know other game companies that have hired developers or that more directly contract out the development.

David Gardner: Board game geek aside, I've mentioned many times the magnet site for tabletop gamers worldwide. I believe I've used it for 20 plus years. I'm a huge fan of board game geek. Your game has, you may know this, your game has been rated on board game geek 84,000 times.

Elizabeth Hargrave: [inaudible]

David Gardner: That's pretty spectacular. Your game is the number 25 game all time at this point, so you've just cracked the top 25, and as I looked at the other, and I've played most of the games in the top 25, if not all, because I love games and I play all the games all the time. Sometimes I work and do podcasts. But there are only two games in the top 25 that have more ratings on them. Technically, they're all slightly higher rated than Wingspan, because you're 25, there's 24 ahead. But when you actually look at what people have played and rated, only two games ahead of Wingspan have been played more than Wingspan. Elizabeth, unfair quiz. That's why I'm asking, do you want to guess what either or both of those two games are?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Am I allowed to look at the list?

David Gardner: You're totally not allowed to look at the list [laughs] and you can instance.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I'm trying to remember what's in the top 25, what would have been rated more. See Gloomhaven and Brass I know are in the number 1 and number 2 slots, but I don't think they have that large a player.

David Gardner: You're right, your game has been played many more times than those two games.

Elizabeth Hargrave: They're much heavier, which is actually a bias on the board game geek ratings, which worries me for new gamers. If you are just learning about the world of board games, Gloomhaven and Brass are not where you should start, but they're the number 1 interiorated games.

David Gardner: You're right.

Elizabeth Hargrave: But I digress. I cannot think of what is in the top 25. As soon as you'll say them, I'll go, of course, and I just can't.

David Gardner: One of them you'll say, of course, and the other you might say, oh, and again, gamers, we're speaking to you right now and a lot of others I might be whistling Dixie, so cutting right to the chase, the most rated game of all in the top 25 is number 6. It's Terraforming Mars, and it's been rated 93,000 times. It's also been out substantially longer than Wingspan.

Elizabeth Hargrave: That's a great game.

David Gardner: It is a great game. Then the 18th game is 7 Wonders Duel, the two player card version of the very popular 7 Wonders board game that's been rated 88,000 times. But fun fact for you Elizabeth of the top 25 games of all time at this point, based on present gamer sentiment, only two of the ones ahead of you have been played more.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Have been rated. That's the other weird thing [laughs], who knows how many times any of them have been played and then it's such a niche thing to go rate a game on BoardGameGeek, and so I would guess actually that Wingspan has been played way more than either of those games because it has been played by a lot of people who do not know that BoardGameGeek exists.

David Gardner: That is such a good point. You're absolutely right, very geeky people, it's right there in the name BoardGameGeek, hang out and use the forums and other great assets that are there for gamers that I've appreciated as a community member for 20 plus years. Well, not a lot of people go to BGG necessarily and when we talk about a broadly relevant game, one that has attractive birds, welcomes you in with themes and playable mechanics. I would bet a lot more people have played Wingspan.

Elizabeth Hargrave: The thing that has blown my mind is how much it broke out into the birding world, and so there are a lot of people, that Wingspan was their first game, which was never really my intention. I say that it was, it was actually during the development process, a push and pull with me and Jamey, where he was saying, my gamers on my mailing list are going to want this to be nice and meaty and complex and I was saying, but I want people who like birds to be able to play it [laughs] to have some hope of playing it and I think we ended up in a really sweet spot because of that push and pull. But it's not necessarily the game that I would say, if you want to try a modern, grown up board game start here. It's a little bit more complex. I might send someone to Cascadia first. But I think the theme motivates people to push through that a little bit and stretch a little bit more than normal to make it work.

David Gardner: I'd like to point out in passing, people can log their plays on BoardGameGeek. Beyond just rating a game, I think it's a 8.5 out of 10, I think it's a 6.5 out of 10. Geeky people, I'm one of them.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I did too.

David Gardner: You did too? Good, so we're both geeks and I'm not surprised. I will say that as of this recording, Wingspan has been played by people who have logged it using BoardGameGeek which is admittedly a small group, 559,000, 579 times.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Wow.

David Gardner: That's a big number.

Elizabeth Hargrave: That is a big number.

David Gardner: No matter what. Let's move on.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It's sold 1.7 million copies. That is a measure of how many people are using BoardGameGeek?

David Gardner: Well, let's puzzle this out together because the people on BoardGameGeek also show how many own it, and it's 129,000 people. You just said 1.7.

Elizabeth Hargrave: As of the beginning of this year.

David Gardner: There we go. Less than 10% of people who own the game use BoardGameGeek and say, I just played it or I own it. One can only imagine, and that's got to feel pretty great for what I think was a first time published game designer with your Wingspan 2019 game that you started in 2013. Let's move on to one of my favorite topics, design. It could be the design of anything, really. I love to explore the creative process of writing with my authors in August. But really, I think my favorite form of design is game design. When I had Jamey Stegmaier a few years back, as I mentioned, he said and I quote, "I learned so much about my game designs by playing a wide variety of other games and it's also my main social outlet because I love playing games." Jamey went on, "I host a weekly game night every Wednesday and then we often play games on Saturday. Sometimes we'll get together for just a random game, other times in the week." Elizabeth, does this describe you? How much is playing, for you, a part of designing?

Elizabeth Hargrave: I think playing games makes you a better designer. I also think that in the time that we have in our day, play testing games that you're designing, it's a zero sum with time that you have to play published games. Also, it's my experience that my friends with kids have less time and mental bandwidth to play games than I do.

David Gardner: Darn kids.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Because I'm not playing as often as Jamey is in person. But I have learned that what I really need to do to make it happen is to schedule things. I have standing monthly things with some of my friends. I'm like, if nothing else happens this month, we're going to play on this Saturday of the month. Then I have other friends that we get together and play games. Then at the end of the night, we're going to be like, pull out your calendar, when's the next time we're going to play? Those two things have made a huge difference in how often I get games to the table because if it's just like, well let's play games some time, then it just gets lost in the sea of busy people with kids who never have time to do anything fun. [laughs]

David Gardner: Let's go back to just the root, the earliest days of Wingspan. Was it cards? Was it a bird on a card? Was it writing down a point value for that bird and then giving it a special effect? Did it start with the game board that you played the birds into? Just talk us through the initial design steps or wins.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It was cards only. My very first draft was I printed a bunch of pieces of card stock with a little clip art bird on them, and everything else was handwritten in pencil, super fast prototype. I have learned since then about the engineering concept of fail faster, which is apparently what I did accidentally. [laughs] I just get it to the table. I have trouble planning out a whole game in my head. I have to see how it is on the table and how things interact. I'm very tactile that way and visual, and it doesn't play out in my head. Have you been seeing this stuff online about how much can people visualize in their head? When I say picture an apple, do you see an apple in your head? I don't see an apple.

David Gardner: I'm not that way either. I would say you described an empirical process, which is very much how I go through life or pick stocks, or think about new ways of thinking about things. I need to prototype and just start playing with it because I can't think ahead of it. I think you described me in some ways, and I'm sure a lot of other people hearing you right now. It starts with cards. You're writing pencil, disability, this thing. What was the next step or eureka moment?

Elizabeth Hargrave: The bird cards have a lot of information on them, and I started keeping track of that in a spreadsheet. Eventually, one eureka moment was literally just learning there are programs you can use that then take that spreadsheet data and make a deck of cards for you. You have to tell it where to put all the information, but you tell it once for the card layout and then it makes all 52 or however many cards for you.

David Gardner: Nice.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I did not do that for a while. I was making each card by hand on the computer with a template. But when I changed the scoring rule for what a card was worth, I had to go in and change that number on every card. That was a big break through just in my prototyping process, but it was a lot of iteration. The basic mechanic of your acquiring cards and food and using them to play out birds in front of you has been stable the whole time. But everything else changed in many ways, in terms of the player mat didn't exist at first. The powers on the cards didn't really exist at first. Some birds got powers like the predators did things. The brown headed cowbird always had that power of when other people lay eggs, you get an egg.

David Gardner: That's because in real life, the cowbird lays its eggs in other birds' nests, which is one of the fun facts that I didn't know before I played Wingspan, but now I know.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Really, the reason that the fun facts ended up on the bottom of the cards was to explain specifically about the brown-headed cowbird because it is such a cool fact. I just think that that's a cool thing in the world that people should know about, and so I wanted it to be in the game. [laughs] Everything else is mushroom from there. People thought that was cool, and so let's go further down that road. After I pitched the game and was working with Jamey, a lot of the development that the two of us did together was around really building up. What I was talking about at the very beginning of that sense of engine building, that sense that your turns by the end of the game are much more exciting and more powerful than they were at the beginning of the game. That you've built something that's giving you more and more stuff. That was probably the weakest thing about Wingspan. It was a fun little game when I pitched it, but it didn't have a ton of engine building. When I pitched it, Jamey actually had me go work on it with that mission for a few months. And then send him a new version, and then he signed it once I had already built in some of that engine building, and then the player I met, took it to a whole another level.

David Gardner: Now, I know a big part of game design. I'm thinking about video games, I'm thinking about card games, tabletop games. I'm thinking about a lot of other things in life too. Play testing, putting it out there and seeing how people react. I'm curious how much of the development involved playtesting. Do you have any anecdotes or insights about the amount of play testing that a game like Wingspan gets or requires?

Elizabeth Hargrave: I lost track of how many times I play tested Wingspan. But people often say for a game in this class, you want to play test it at least 100 times before it's going to come out. I probably did way more than that. Now, that might be closer now that I'm starting my prototypes a little further along because I understand more about how games work and what's going to work. But I have a group of other designers that I play test with once a week. That gets me a bunch of play-tests, and then, now I have this great mailing list of people that are willing to play test my games here in the DC area. I can just set stuff up and people will come out. There's a couple of other groups here in DC. There's a lot of designers here in the DC metro area. Probably in most metro areas, you get this amazing critical mass. I think it's good to play test with other designers because number 1, you can a quid pro quo, you're not going to burn them out because you're also play testing their game for them.

David Gardner: I scratch your game, you scratch my game.

Elizabeth Hargrave: You can only buy people pizza so many times to play your crappy game draft. [laughs] But also they're just thinking about how games work at a different level than most gamers are. If you've got something in early stages and you really need to think about why something's working or not, that can be super helpful. I do think you also need to play test with random gamers or depending on what level you're aiming at, also, like random non-gamers if you want that to be your audience, because you get a different type of feedback. Designers can fill in a lot of things that you haven't said out loud and just know how something should work. But if you don't say them out loud, for the people that need it, you need to catch that. Gamers will catch stuff like that where you need to be really explicit about how the rules work, and just catch like other ways that people might interpret something, those things, and just to get the broadest possible number of people. If you look at my list of play testers in any of my games, I get a lot of people to play my games. I want that broad experience because different people will see things differently and value differently.

David Gardner: Did you know you had a hit?

Elizabeth Hargrave: No. It depends when you ask. When I pitched it to Stone Meyer, I thought I had a good game. When it went to press, I knew it was better than the game I had pitched. But at the point that I was pencils down on Wingspan, everything I had ever heard in how to be a game designer world was like OK, as a first time game designer in this niche industry, you should be happy if your board game sells 5,000 copies. That's a respectable first run. Then, at some point, I heard Jamey say on a podcast between then and when it actually came out that his minimum print run was 10, and I was like, that's bigger than 5,000. Great. Then, he didn't really engage me on the question of how many copies to print. But he did go out and talk to a bunch of distributors and try and figure out like, first-time game designer, game about Birds, what do you think the demand is going to be? They all told him aim low so he printed 10,000 copies of the game, which is his minimum print run. He put it up for sale. He did his thing where he teased it for a little while starting in November, saying this is going to be available for sale in January. When he started teasing it, I started to be, people are really excited for this. You could see it a little bit in that December 2018 period, you could tell something. There was this Venn diagram. The people in the Venn diagram of birders and gamers were losing their minds. The pictures he was posting were beautiful, like he did a really good job at the rollout.

David Gardner: It is a beautiful game and that's part of the pleasure of playing the game, especially that analog version of it.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Then, I had scheduled this vacation in January and I was on an island with no internet when Wingspan went for sale online, I came back and it had sold out. That's really when I knew.

David Gardner: That is so exciting. Again, you are a unicorn so far as I can tell, because very few first time game designers would hit like that. There's also a little bit. We'll have a quick side conversation about female board game designers and women in games. I know this is a passion of yours, and you've even taken the time on your blog at one point just to list every female game designer that came into contact with you. Or let you know, and there's a whole bunch of pictures making the point that there are a lot more female gamers and game designers than most people know. With that said though, Elizabeth, when we look at the top 25 games on board game gig, you may be the only female game designer. I'm not even sure in the top 100 how many there would be. You are a unicorn across a couple of different dynamics, and it's just got to be so much fun and so rewarding. I do have to ask you before we finish about what's coming next and what's coming up. Because while I focused on Wingspan, because it's the game so many have played, we know you're doing a lot of other work. But I'm curious, before we go there, may I ask you briefly, financially, has this been somewhat rewarding, rewarding, or extremely rewarding?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Life changing.

David Gardner: That is so awesome. Are you now able to be and do you want to be a full time game designer?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yes, so 2019 I juggled both, and I was going to all these board game conventions. I had to randomly go to Berlin on six weeks notice because I got nominated for the Kenner's fields yards, which is like the Oscar board games.

David Gardner: Exactly.

Elizabeth Hargrave: This German award, and they do not give you a lot of notice that you've been nominated. I already had stuff for my consulting job lined up. I was supposed to be on a site visit in North Carolina and I had to call up my clients who thank God, include some board gamers.

David Gardner: And explained that you need to go to Germany to perhaps receive the Kenner's fields yards?

Elizabeth Hargrave: They were like, you need to go to Berlin, we'll work it out, and we like jiggled some stuff around. Then I flew directly from the award ceremony, basically to my site visit. I was like, something's got to give here. Not that I expect to be doing that every year, but the board game circuit is a lot of convention travel and a lot of playtesting board games every week is more fun than non-consulting.

David Gardner: I believe it.

Elizabeth Hargrave: That same my main client came to me at the end of 2019. I was like, so it's time to renew this major contract that I had been doing for them for 12 years. They were like, we would love to have you back, but we're getting the impression that maybe you're not coming back.

David Gardner: That is a lot changing.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It is great. They were very understanding about it because they got the situation that I was in. I quit my day job. I'm doing this full-time, but I get royalties for every copy that sells and honestly, at this point, if I never designed another game, I'd probably also be OK.

David Gardner: How fantastic is that? I think your husband is pretty glad. He said, what if, instead of race my galaxy. What if we're birds? It's a partnership. Maybe it does take two to tango, but I know who did most of the work there. Just phenomenal. Speaking of work, could you share with us what you're working on now? I know imminent is another game release or two for you share what's imminent?

Elizabeth Hargrave: I have a game called The Fox Experiment that was on Kickstarter last year and will be coming out in retail at the end of November. Then the game that I just finished working on is a game called Undergrove, which is about mushrooms trading resources with trees. It is going to be on Kickstarter on November 7th through sometime in early December.

David Gardner: I see that's from Alderac Entertainment Group. While you are part of the Stonemaier's table, you are an independent designer and have game will travel and you've worked with a number of publishers at this point.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Yeah. That's pretty common for freelance designers to sort of hop around and find different publishers to work with. I started working with the AEG back in 2019. I pitched a game to them in 2018 before Wingspan came out. It was published a little while later called Mari Posa.

David Gardner: Yes.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I just really enjoyed working with them. The developer there who worked on Mari Posa with me is a former park ranger. We were just like two peas in a pod working together and decided we wanted to design a game from scratch together. That's what led to undergrowth. That's AEG has it because he actually works for AEG. They've got right of first refusal on that one.

David Gardner: It makes sense coming out from them. It makes sense coming out from you because on your home site you mentioned that if you're not game designing or playing games, you can be found in the Greater DC area, either hiking, birding, or looking for mushrooms in the Greater DC area. Tussy mussy, undergrowth. Obviously, the natural themes come naturally to you and publishers are increasingly interested.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I hope so.

David Gardner: Elizabeth you have graciously consented to play buy, sell, or hold with me at the end of this fantastic conversation together. Thank you again so much for all your insights and sharing and I'm so proud that you're in my city and that I'm in your city. It's great to have a phenomenon, not at all locally. In fact, you probably wouldn't be recognized on the street. But if you walk into any game convention anywhere in the world today, you're recognized. That's a fun dynamic.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It's a fun kind of fame. You can turn it on and off at will.

David Gardner: Yeah or just go mushrooming and not even worry about things. Buy, sell, or hold. These are not stocks, but I'm asking you, if they were stocks, would you be buying, selling, or holding? Let's start with the game Monopoly. If Monopoly were a stock, would you be buying, selling, or holding and why?

Elizabeth Hargrave: Are we talking literally about the stock of Monopoly? Because Monopoly still sells millions of copies. As a financial investment, the company that makes Monopoly is doing great. But as a game that I want to play, not so much.

David Gardner: That's a very good answer along both dynamics because it's ambiguous. It actually points to something that you are very familiar with as both a game designer, but also, in a sense, an entrepreneur. Or somebody who's increasingly familiar with the business world. You mentioned to me before we came on, there's not much market research in the world of tabletop games. It's mushrooming. Speaking of mushrooms, in terms of players and sales and visibility, I feel like games. There's so many more today than in our youth and so many better ones today than in our youth. Yet there's not much market research.

Elizabeth Hargrave: That's my understanding. I'm sure at the level of Hasbro, in the level of monopoly, they're definitely doing market research. People in the industry typically segment mass market, which is the world of Hasbro versus be market. People often call it the World of Stonemaier, these more complex niche board games that we've been talking about. I think the lines between those are blurring quite a bit. But Stonemaier when they signed Wingspan was a one person company. They don't have a market research budget.

David Gardner: Wow.

Elizabeth Hargrave: It's just a guy running a company by the seat of his pants. He's hired some staff since then.

David Gardner: Well, he certainly has earned it, and I'm happy to hear that because he needs a lot of help shipping millions of games as a dude. [laughs]. Next one up for you. Buy, sell, or hold the number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 over the next 50 years.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Buy. It's got to go up.

David Gardner: It has been, how can it not?

Elizabeth Hargrave: There's a lot of room for growth.

David Gardner: There is. I think I'm talking to a feminist with a small f, maybe not a capital F.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I'll take any F.

David Gardner: I don't even know if it's fair for me to say that I'm a feminist, but what I'll say is that I think that I always am excited when I see a female CEO for a stock I'm researching because I feel as if that tells me two things. First of all, that this is a stock I'm researching means is an excellent company because I don't look for mediocre companies. Second, I feel like that person probably had to jump more hurdles to get to that place than if she were a he. That gives me more confidence in those kinds of companies. Boy don't we need more traditional if this is fair traditional female energy in our world at large. Not just a lot less sci-fi and trains and castles, but a lot less confrontation, a lot less division. There are a lot of things swarming around our city of Washington DC that I feel like are male ego driven for the most part, and I can't wait for the future. You're a buyer. Next one up, buy, sell, or hold artificial intelligence.

Elizabeth Hargrave: This one's hard. This one's been controversial in the board game world because this Terraforming marriage just had an expansion that they announced where a lot of the art was done by AI, with programs that do not promise that they are using art that they have permission to use. Some of it was probably built on art that was just scraped from the Internet and that artists did not give permission for. Which I have problems with. But all of that said, I think the train has left the station on AI in general. It's clearly doing things that people find useful in many different ways. I don't want to paint a broad brush and say like AI can't happen, AI is obviously going to happen. I think we need to think carefully about what the best ways are to do it and the best ways to protect people's intellectual property in the context that it's happening.

David Gardner: It is happening in real time. I agree with you that the train has left the station, the horse is out of the barn. It's going to be fascinating to figure out, not just the next two years, but backwards from 100 years from now to understand how we got there and where we ended up in terms of who's creating what, who owns what. This is obviously something that will be relevant to games and publishing, and many other areas of our society. Two more for you, Elizabeth. buy, sell, or hold crowdfunding if it were a stock.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Somewhere in the hold to buy category, I'm not sure if it's going to continue growing, but it's certainly something that I think people are going to continue using within board games specifically, we've seen a couple of alternatives to Kickstarter sprout up, which I think is a really interesting development. They seem to be doing well. I think there's demand for it. I think it is within the industry that I know the best. It's serving a real purpose as we talked about. At least a hold.

David Gardner: Last one, buy, sell, or hold, giving games as Christmas presents.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Buy but carefully. I think It's important to really think about who you're buying for and what they're going to play. The game that I recommend as a Christmas present for almost anyone is Just One. Have you played Just One?

David Gardner: I sure have. I've talked about it in this podcast and I've given it away. I've told many people to give it to others and it's worked because everyone loves the game, Just One, which is basically playing up to seven players. It's a word game and you can explain it. Please do in 30 seconds or less because it's that simple.

Elizabeth Hargrave: You're playing cooperatively and the person who's it needs to guess one word. Everyone else knows that word and they have to write just one word as a clue on a little dry race board?

David Gardner: Yeah.

Elizabeth Hargrave: I've actually played it with more than seven. Someone just needs a piece of paper and a pencil to write their word on. It's interesting so the one trick like that would be too easy. The trick is that if two clue givers write the same word, they cancel each other out and then the guesser doesn't get to see that word. If you go too obvious with your clue, it might not get included. Then the guesser can be really like [laughs] have a bunch of weird things of people that were trying to not be obvious and not cancel out. Then you get like the layers upon layers of like, we were both trying to not be obvious and canceled each other out [laughs] by thinking of the same second level thing. It's fun and funny and everyone just gets how to play. If you need a game for people that don't play games yet or that don't actually want to think that hard. I've never met someone that doesn't like Just One.

David Gardner: Great tip, Elizabeth. You were full of insight, you were full of energy and gaming goodness. That's what I've enjoyed most about you. Because while I'm just meeting you for the first time, I feel like I've gotten to know you over the last four years because I've played your game 56 or more times over the course of these last four years. Some fellow Fools listening to us have played it a lot more than that. Elizabeth Hargrave, thank you for bringing joy to the world.

Elizabeth Hargrave: Thanks for having me.