Randy Hoyt – World’s Fair & the Cost of Running a Kickstarter

Board Game Authority

In today’s podcast Randy Hoyt, of Foxtrot Games, goes into a lot of detail regarding all of the costs associated with running a Kickstarter campaign. We also talk about what it was like when Lanterns won the Mensa Select award, and we learn that Randy doesn’t like getting wet.

RICHARD: Hello, this is Richard Miles with boardgameauthority.com and today my guest is

RANDY: Randy Hoyt, owner of Foxtrot Games.

RICHARD: Hi Randy, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. You have a Kickstarter coming up for World’s Fair, tell us when we can expect to see that?

RANDY: Yeah, we’re targeting September 29th, which is about two weeks from when we’re recording.

RICHARD: Now, we’ll certainly get into World’s Fair but, first let’s talk about the other games that Foxtrot has. You have two games on store shelves right now, is that correct?

RANDY: That’s correct, we have Relic Expedition, our first game. It’s a jungle exploration game, think, like Indiana Jones. The board starts small and as you explore out a bunch of new tiles are revealed and the jungle grows in unpredictable ways each time. The second game is Lanterns the Harvest Festival, that’s another tile laying game, you’re playing an artisan in imperial China decorating the palace lake with floating lanterns to gain favor with the emperor.

RICHARD: Now, I must confess, I haven’t played Relic Expeditions but I have played Lanterns and that’s a family favorite. It’s actually a big hit anywhere I take it: board game night, a relative’s house, everybody seems to really enjoy this game and, as I understand it, Lanterns the Harvest Festival won a Mensa Select Award. Is that correct?

RANDY: It did, yeah, it was in, I guess, the beginning of May.

RICHARD: And what was winning the Mensa Select Award like for Foxtrot Games?

RANDY: Oh, man, it was so great to, hear the news. It was on Twitter, we’d been told that it would be about two weeks after the judging that we would hear but that afternoon it started coming up on Twitter and, you know, we saw the first tweets I’m like, “Is this for real? This person seems to be, like they’re part of the Mensa Select, like, is this, is this, really happening?”

And so, just sort of over the course of an hour seeing a bunch of different tweets that it finally seemed real and it was, just great to, when you put so much effort and energy into a product that you love and to just have, you know, just hundreds of people that participated in the judging love it also, it’s just so rewarding and so wonderful, yeah, it was, I was grinning like the whole next week.

RICHARD: Congratulation, it is well-deserved, that game is deceptively simple, with some underlying complexity, due to the fact that on your turn you not only select the colors that you’re going to receive but also what colors you’re going to give your opponents. I haven’t really seen that mechanic in a lot of games and I really enjoy it.

RANDY: And when I first saw, when I first read the rulebook for it, I mean, this was a game designed by Christopher Chung, and he submitted it to us, and when I read the rulebook and saw that mechanic where when I place a tile I give everyone else, including myself, a resource I just thought, “Wow, that’s really cool. That’s a really easy sale when I explain it to people and if the game is really fun, I’m going to want to make this.” And, still, to this day when I explain the game to people, I get 30 seconds, and their eyes just light up when I tell them, “You get a resource but so do all your opponents.” And, that’s the hook in that game and it plays out so nicely.

RICHARD: Yeah, it really does. I read a few days ago where Lanterns is about to sell 10,000 copies.

RANDY: That’s right, we just sold out of our second print run and when we sell out, as a publisher, that means we’ve sold the games to distributors and retailers.

RICHARD: Right, yeah.

RANDY: So there’s plenty of copies you can go out and buy. Just this last week, it is now in Barnes and Noble. So swing by your local Barnes and Noble retailer and pick up a copy there, if you haven’t. It’s also on Amazon and in a number of friendly local game stores.

RICHARD: Getting into Barnes and Nobles is a pretty big deal. I know that Lanterns was co-published by Renegade. Did their involvement facilitate getting into Barnes and Noble?

RANDY: Yeah, I mean, partnering with Renegade was a big boost. Scott, over at Renegade, has been in the industry for a very long time. He was at Cryptozoic, most recently, and a number of other places. So he’s been on the business side of gaming for quite a while; he knows a lot about how the industry works. He’s met a lot of the people on the distribution side, with retailers and, I believe, I think Barnes and Noble saw it on a GAMA trade show. I might be mistaken about that but Scott had regular meetings with the buyers from, you know, all the major distributors and retailers, and those were, it’s not just that he had connections that I didn’t have, it was the knowledge too, to even know which events were important to go to.

You know, with Kickstarting you can easily just put a game up on Kickstarter and not have any real plan for what to do after you’ve got extra copies, and how distribution works, and how to get into stores. I mean our original plan, when we launched our first game, was, “Oh, we’re going to mail a postcard to every retailer after the campaign”, not knowing exactly how retailers buy games and who they want to buy from and all that. So, there was a lot of knowledge that I didn’t have and Scott knew a lot about how you could get a game, like Lanterns, in front of people and give them a shot to look at it, evaluate it, and see if they wanted to carry it, and Barnes and Noble did want to carry it.

RICHARD: With about 10,000 copies going through distribution and now Lanterns is in Barnes and Noble, that’s got to feel good.

RANDY: I’m very pleased and, I mean, the way that this industry works is that the hit games are the ones that really make any money. It’s really hard off a very small print run to even recoup your art costs and marketing costs. You know, if you’re getting a booth and paying a bunch of money for artwork, and all the set up fees, and the high, you know, the higher cost per unit on a small print run.

It’s just really hard to make any money and what you’re really trying to do is make a game that becomes a hit that you can reprint, and reprint, and reprint. And they’re cheaper per unit when you reprint them and, then, try to get, you know, just sort of get that word of mouth. The more people that are playing it, the more people are telling their friends about it, the more people are, then, buying it, and playing it, and telling their friends about it, and it can, sort of, get into orbit, if you will.

RICHARD: Since you mentioned it a little, let’s talk about the cost involved and the potential profit that can be expected from a board game Kickstarter campaign. I think it was shortly after the Lanterns campaign or, maybe, during it, that I read in a forum post from you saying that “Foxtrot Games had yet to break even on its initial investment that was required to publish your games.” A lot of people want to look at Kickstarter as some kind of magical cash cow, but the reality is, and especially for first time project creators, is that you’re not going to make enough money to quit your day job.

RANDY: That’s understating it. *laughs*

RICHARD: Well, you know, some people coming into the industry though, they see those mega-hits, right? They’re breaking a million dollars, right? And that doesn’t happen for most everyone. Those are anomalies; those are not the regular Kickstarters that you and everyone else are running. You know, most people are hitting $20k-60k, maybe $70k, a $90k Kickstarter is really good.

If you can raise $90k that’s great, but there are a few of the outliners where they’re making one million, three million, you know, if you’re looking at some of the really big ones, they’re making eight million dollars. That looks nice, that looks enticing, but, the reality is on you’re first Kickstarter when you’re making $10,000 or when you’re making $30,000, that’s not take home money.

RANDY: Right.

RICHARD: So can you go into, just explain a little bit about what you did, you don’t have to go into specifics or whatever, but where the costs goes, where the potential profit comes from, that sort of thing.

RANDY: Absolutely, yeah. With Relic Expedition, my business partner, he’s my step-brother also, Tyler Seigal, he did a lot of the artwork for the game and I did the game design. All that was, I guess, free in a sense. We did it with sweat equity so we didn’t have to pay a license to a game designer and we didn’t have to pay for quite a lot of artwork; we did that ourselves, but we still had quite a bit of costs. With our first campaign, you know, we payed money for advertising, we paid money for prototypes that we could send out for play testing, and on some reviews.

We didn’t get any reviews, I don’t think, before we launched but we did have a couple that came out during the campaign. We did hire someone to do video. We actually worked with two different people there. We overproduced, I think, our first video. We spent more money than we probably should have. And when you look at a Kickstarter video, a lot of that is what I would call ‘throw away money’ because it’s not going towards the game; you could make the game without the video.

So, you know, the artwork that you show off on your campaign is not throw away money because that’s artwork you’re going to put into the game. So it’s like using, if you use the artwork from the game on your campaign page or on your video that’s using assets that you have, whereas, a video is, you know, throwing that, you know, it’s just purely marketing money.

RICHARD: Right.

RANDY: We also paid for advertising and we did hire an artist to work with us on the box cover and we hired a graphic designer to work with us on the rulebook layout. So all of that money, you know, we spent before the campaign had started, or in the case of the video guys, they were friends who wouldn’t charge us unless our Kickstarter funded, which was very generous but we treated that like we had already spent that. So we came into it about, I would say $5,000, you could say in the hole.

I mean, we had saved up money from some projects that we had. We both work in digital space, my brother’s a graphic designer in Portland and I’m a web-developer. And we’d done some side projects, so we had $10,000 in the bank that was set aside for Foxtrot Game stuff. And we also spent money on forming an LLC and a number of buisinessy things that weren’t exactly related to the campaign, but they were related to building the company. So, those were one-time costs. And so then we went to Kickstarter, and I think what’s interesting to keep in mind is that the money that we raise on Kickstarter was going to just go to manufacturing and fulfillment.

RICHARD: Right.

RANDY: Our goal was not set to recoup the art costs. You know, in business terms they call that a sunk cost. And if you set your goal, you know, $5,000 higher to recoup marketing and art cost, it’s like if you get to… so our goal was $24,000. If we’d set our goal at $29k and we got $27k, let’s say, and we then didn’t fund, it’d be like, “Well, we didn’t really need to recoup the art cost, those were already spent, those are sunk cost, let’s just raise the money we need from here forward.”

So, we set our goal just at manufacturing and fulfillment. And so we hit our goal but that didn’t mean we recouped our art cost. So part of when I talk about losing money on that first campaign because even after we had fulfilled rewards we were still in the hole, and I’ll get into some of those reasons next, but, I mean the plan, I guess, was to be $5k in the hole if we funded and that was the plan, I guess.

RICHARD: Right.

RANDY: And that’s just part of investing, you’ve got to spend money to make money and all this sort of businessey terms. We thought if we could raise enough money to print the copies and have enough money for manufacturing and fulfillment, then we would have extra inventory that we could sell, and we could sell that, and then recoup our other costs in that. And, of course, if we had a huge campaign and raised four, five, six times our goal then we would’ve recouped all those costs and gone on and beyond and made more money, and you won’t get that profit if you don’t try.

So in a sense, in was, you know, investing some of our savings into this product hoping that we would get more out of it. When we actually got into the campaign there’s just a number of things that didn’t go as planned. A lot of it is, you know, naive first time creators. One of the things that’s really tricky is weighing your game. I always ask people now, “How much is your game going to weigh?” And it’s really, it’s actually hard to know that because you don’t have one, yet. The very last thing you know about your game is the weight because you get it, sort of at the very end, when it’s all done and weight plays a big factor in shipping.

So, our fulfillment cost for each copy of the game were about, I think, like $2.00 more than we were expecting because the game was just heavier than we thought it was going to be. You know, we had tried to get some estimates off of similar size games but our game has a lot more wood components, a lot more cardboard than we sort of factored in. And, by the time we unlocked some stretch goals, that was some extra bits, extra deck of cards, and that pushed the game weight even higher.

So, for every copy of the game that we shipped domestically was a couple bucks more than we expected, that was one of the issues, because of the weight. During the printing of the first game we had nine punchboards in the box with three different dies and people tell you to try to minimize number of dies that you have so that they’re all the same, you can get the same punch, and we had got that down as small as we could. We, you know, we made a mistake that we didn’t catch in the proofs and we ended up having to make two more dies and reprint two of those nine punchboards.

RICHARD: Oh wow.

RANDY: So, that added an extra dollar cost to the game, for every copy, and it delayed us about seven weeks in the process. Just a simple little thing that could’ve gotten caught, and we proofed, and proofed, and proofed, until our eyes fell out and just missed one thing. Turned out to be a big thing unfortunately. So, there was that. And then one of our stretch goals was for engraved dice and our manufacturer had sent us samples of printed dice. They’d printed them for us, and we’d been playing with them, and they seemed to be doing really well, but you know, they were silk-screened printed and we knew that silk-screen printing dice could wear off but a number of games have used them successfully and, you know, we talked to our manufacturer about that and it seemed like that would work out well.

And we had a stretch goal for engraved dice, which are pretty expensive. And we were playing with, we were play-testing with the new dice for about a month or two, and during the campaign we just realized that they just weren’t going to cut it. The numbers were wearing off and when weren’t happy with them, so we unlocked, we just said, “We’re going to unlock the engraved dice stretch goal. We want those in there; we’ll just pay for those ourselves,” and we didn’t raise enough money to cover that cost. So we just went ahead and paid for that so that was another part of our loss.

And then shipping to Europe really caught us off-guard. So we did EU friendly shipping. We had, you know, a partner over there that we were going to ship the games to and we’ve gotten really good estimates on how much it was going to cost the mail the games from the fulfillment center in the EU to backers. The game was a little heavier but we didn’t have a ton of backers so it wasn’t quite as bad. The issue is: we really did not understand how much it was going to cost to ship the games from China to Europe.

You know, we had been told to estimate about $3 to $4 a game for freight, which we did, and that turned out to be about right for the big, thousand plus games from China to the U.S. But when we only had, I think, 80 copies of the game we needed to send to Europe the cost were more like $20 dollars a game. And we just, I just couldn’t have even fathomed that it would cost that much to ship that small a quantity; we basically airmailed them. You know I’ve since learned there are better options for smaller shipments, but this wasn’t something that had really hit our radar about how much, you know, how all the international shipping worked.

We were pretty good about getting the games from China to here but some of the other issues we just didn’t quite realize. Oh, and some of the other stretch goals we had made in the U.S. and I shipped those to the EU, and again, that was another expense that I did not foresee how much a small box of 80 promo items was going to cost me to ship to Europe.

RICHARD: Right, right.

RANDY: So, we had quite a lot of expense there. So by the time we got done with all of this not only had we not recouped our marketing costs, you know, we were pretty significantly in the hole. We’d spent, you know, we had $5,000, and these are all very rough numbers, I’d have to go dig back through all the spreadsheets and stuff, but, you know, we spent over the $5,000 that we had left over just to get the game fulfilled. And we did end up with, I think we needed 600 copies for backers, and our manufacturer’s minimum print run was 1,500 so we had 900 copies left over.

Now, we have sold, you know, almost all of them. We’re down to about 100, I think, so we have sold more after Kickstarter than we sold during Kickstarter, which is a great milestone. I was very pleased with that, and we did get, you know, we broke even, in a sense, we got back to zero. But we did not recoup, we won’t recoup all of our art and marketing costs, I don’t think, for, you know, all that stuff we had spent on Relic Expedition. So, that campaign, even when we sell out of our print run, will end up having cost us money. If we’re very lucky we’ll have just got to back to break even with that campaign.

RICHARD: Well, I applaud your decision to take some out of pocket money and make the best game that you possibly could, make something that you’re actually proud of to have on store shelves and in the homes of the people who bought it. I applaud you for going that extra mile.

RANDY: Yeah, and you asked me very specifically about costs and at no point in there did I say, “I wish I hadn’t done it,” or anything like that. It was such a, I mean, it was a rewarding experience to just go through that whole process and there are some things that you just can’t learn as well studying, reading up. I mean, I had done a lot of reading and research leading into the campaign; I was pretty thorough with all the things we needed to do. The game was pretty complicated with all the different pieces, custom meeples, custom dice, it was a pretty big project to bite off as the very first project. I had the money to lose, I think that was the thing, as I look back, not everyone has that kind of money to lose.

RICHARD: Right.

RANDY: We had been very, before we jumped in, we had been very sure, you know, if this doesn’t work out and we end up somehow losing this money, this is okay. And I’m very, very proud of the product, and how it all went, and, you know, where we ended up. Of course, I would’ve loved to have made more money, I would’ve loved to have had a million dollar campaign, and quit my day job, and started making board games for a living, and been in magazines, and all kinds of things like, all that would’ve been great.

Who knows how much I thought it could do, you know, looking back it’s always hard to remember, before I launched, what I thought was realistic and what was my sort of dream goal back then. But yeah, I mean, and I met a lot of people. I will tell you, it was so much easier to get things moving with the second game so I could much more easily get reviewers to take my next Kickstarter campaign seriously.

Bloggers, Podcasters, reviewers, other industry people were much more willing to work with me, to get a review up, to, you know, tell people about the game. And all that made the second game infinitely easier. So, in a sense, you know, the game technically lost money but a lot of that money was spent building up credibility in the industry, some clout, connections, experience. And all of that I would say is money well spent and I would do it again. I mean, I wouldn’t do it again for a second time but I would do it again for the first time if I had to do it again.

RICHARD: Right, yeah. I think the street credibility, if you will, I think in this industry it goes a long way. And there are basically two groups in this industry: you’re either published or you’re not. And you can be very vocal in this industry, but until you’ve actually published a game you’re not really on the inside. You can gain momentum before your Kickstart, or you can gain contacts, you can start rubbing elbows at conventions and stuff, but until you actually get a game on store shelves you’re not really part of the club. But once you cross that bridge into publisherhood, or whatever you want to call it, once you cross that bridge, then you get your welcome badge.

RANDY: Yeah. And I think some of it is unfair and harsh to people who haven’t done it yet. And I think there are a lot of people designing games, looking to Kickstart their own projects, and it’s getting harder and harder for first time creators because they’re so many more of them trying. I mean, a lot of the games that you see now are way more professional looking, polished looking campaigns then you had two years ago. But there are so many more of them that it’s still hard; the bar just keeps getting higher and higher. And, you know, there are so many people now who won’t do Kickstarter previews as video reviewers, or they charge for them.

I was really fortunate during the Relic Expedition campaign. We had three reviewers. They saw our animal meeples in the game; we have monkeys, and boars, and snakes, and panthers, custom wood cut meeples. And they thought that those pieces were so cool that they were willing, they wanted to cover the game, and I didn’t have review copies when it first launched, and they were willing to do a print and play, which was crazy to me that they would cut out all those hexagons and circles in order to play the game. Gave us really good reviews and really helped the campaign go forward. And two of those sites were just starting out and they’re still going strong today. Now, today, you know, there’s so many campaigns, those same people today can’t print and play a review copy of a game. And I still feel bad about making them cut out 100 circles, circles are really hard to cut out. That is my, I’ll give that as a bonus tip here: If you are making a print and play, no circles. Make the lines straight to cut; it saves people a lot of heartache. But yeah, today, just finding people who will do a print and play of your game, today, is so much harder because there are so many. You know, all the campaigns are more professional, all the games, you know, are in a much better state and there’s just so many things to cover for reviewers.

RICHARD: Right, right. So we’re talking about Kickstarter, let’s switch gears. Foxtrot Games has a new game called ‘World’s Fair’ that’s about to be on Kickstarter, tell us a little bit about that game.

RANDY: Yeah, the game is called ‘World’s Fair 1893’, it was designed by J. Alex Kevern, he’s the designer of a few other games including Gold West, which just came out from TMG. He and I met at Gen Con, last year, 2014, a year ago, and played Lanterns there and talked about World’s Fair. He ended up submitting that to me then shortly after Gen Con. It plays in about 40 minutes; it’s for two to four players.

The idea is you’re an organizer in the World’s Fair of 1893, in Chicago, this is the World’s Fair where the Ferris wheel debuted and they had the beautiful, white city buildings. Cracker Jacks and Juicy Fruit debuted, and just a bunch of things, a bunch of firsts, it was a really big time for America innovation. Telsa and Edison were both at the fair and AC current won out in the bid to light the fair.

RICHARD: Right.

RANDY: Real big turning point in American technology and industry. In the game you’re playing an organizer and there are five areas in the fair and you are trying to use your supporters to gain majorities, to be a leader, with most supporters in an area. And you’re also collecting exhibit cards. You’re collecting the prestigious exhibits that go in those white city buildings and you’re also collecting tickets for the midway attractions, the more fun things, like the hot air balloon, the camel rides, the Ferris wheel itself, those things.

So, it’s a bit of a lighter euro game, you’re trying to win more majorities and collect cards that match the areas you can win. You know, the turns are relatively short but there’s a few different ways to score that sort of, every decision you make effects a couple of those different ways and you’re trying to weave together a coherent set of exhibits that you’ve collected in areas that you’ve won, so the most supporters in.

RICHARD: Oh, wow that sounds interesting. That’s certainly a neat time from America’s history. Let’s talk about the rewards here for a moment.

RANDY: The reward level I’m most excited about is the one dollar level. So if you followed our Lanterns campaign, I say I’m most excited about, I’m actually most excited about the game, let’s just be completely honest, but the one dollar level I do want to talk about a little bit. We, with Lanterns, if you pledged a dollar we would place a real floating lantern in water and dedicate it to you and we had a nice, little shot. I shot it by my waterfall down by my house, we had about 40 lanterns floating in the water. With this one, the one dollar campaign will get you a souvenir postcard because souvenir postcards were first introduced at the World’s Fair. You could get postcards before but the first time they were sold as souvenirs was at this World’s Fair.

We really like to draw the full fematic experience into the campaign as best we can. We’ll be talking a lot about the history of the fair throughout this campaign so that, you know, the game isn’t educational exactly but throughout this campaign people should be able to learn some information about the fair, maybe get excited about it. If a few people go off and do some Wikipedia research or pick up a book or two about the fair that would be really great.

RICHARD: Wow, yeah, that sounds really awesome. I, for one, am certainly interested in everything that debuted at this World’s Fair. Some things I can’t really imagine my life without and other things, I think it would just be amazing to have been there and kind of experienced the unveiling of it. To get like, “What is this new, weird contraption?” You know, like the Ferris wheel, if I could see that for the first time would be, like the first time in history, would be really neat.

RANDY: Well, on the Ferris wheel, people were afraid the Ferris wheel was going to fall over, like they were really concerned that on a windy day it would topple over. It looked very precarious, there were reports of people going crazy on the Ferris wheel because of the, you know, that new experience of being up that high in the air, out in the open, the vertigo you would get from going around. It’s just not something we can really appreciate today how novel that was…

RICHARD: Yeah, yeah.

RANDY: When George Ferris submitted the idea to the fair it was rejected at first as a complete monstrosity that would never work, and he spent time going back and doing better calculations, and working with someone to come up with better drawings to resubmit it, and it was approved and then they rejected it again. They thought there was no way it would work so when they finally did accept it into the fair he was behind schedule and it was not ready when the fair opened. I think it made its first revolution about a month into the fair and its first passenger a good seven weeks into the fair.

RICHARD: Yeah, wow, really interesting stuff. I do agree it’s kind of hard to appreciate the, kind of the majesty and grander of it all because we just take a lot of things for granted today. It’s, you know, the things from back there are so commonplace, now, or we’ve advanced, you know, past those initial inventions, we’ve improved upon them.

So yeah it’s certainly a neat time; very interesting to kind of take a look back at it and I’m glad there are a few board games out there that are kind of taking a real world, it is fun, but real world history. There’s all the fantasy games you can want out there but real world history, there’s not, you know, by percentage wise, there’s not that many that make it to my table.

So, I’m glad that there are publishers out there who are saying, “You know what? We can make history fun.” I applaud that. And now it’s time to get into a little Q&A, a segment I like to call, ‘Inside the Board Game Designer’s Studio’. First question, “Would you rather travel to the bottom of the ocean or the surface of the moon?”

RANDY: I think I would pick the moon. Both would be amazing, both are places and experience, I think, that would be great to have and you would, if you came back to normal Earth, surface of the Earth, you, your life, would be forever changed. But I think going out to the moon feels much further out. I mean you’re still on Earth if you go under water.

RICHARD: True, but at this point in time we have mapped out more of the surface of the moon, and like actually spent more like human feet on that surface than we have at the bottom, at the absolute depths of the ocean.

RANDY: So that is true. I think we take it for granted that we’ve explored the whole Earth in a way that we really haven’t and, I think, that’s why the moon seems like the most obvious choice to me but, I mean, you’re definitely right. There’s a lot of this planet that we have not seen or experienced fully.

RICHARD: Keeping with our water theme, “Do you prefer snow-skiing or water-skiing?”

RANDY: I prefer sitting in a cabin in the mountains drinking hot chocolate, probably, is what I’d prefer. I have been water skiing, or wake-boarding, or, I’ve done some stuff in the boats, I don’t like getting wet though, so I would probably have to pick snow-skiing. I have not snow-skied before, but I think I would enjoy that more.

RICHARD: Well, I’m going to take snow-skiing as your answer and after a 6-4 vote that is the correct answer. Job well done. Okay, next question, “If you could live anywhere in the world, excluding the good ‘ole U.S. of A, where would that be?”

RANDY: Well, I was going to say, “Seattle”. I was born outside of Seattle and Tacoma and I love visiting there, but you threw me off with the outside of the U.S.A. part. I’ve been to England, multiple times, and have enjoyed it there. I think I would probably pick that on the short notice, out somewhere… I went to London, but somewhere outside of there like we went out to Oxford and Cambridge, so maybe a small University town outside of, you know, outside of London. Let’s say that I would live in Oxford.

RICHARD: Not a bad choice and with England you don’t have to learn a new language so bonus.

RANDY: It’s kind of a copout answer. I am sure there’s lots of other exciting places to live. I will say the most, the place I’m most excited about visiting, is my wife and I are going to go to the Olympics, the Winter Olympics, in 2026 to celebrate our 25th anniversary.

RICHARD: Oh wow, congratulations.

RANDY: We love the winter Olympics and we don’t yet know where that will be so we’ll see where that is. We’re watching closely now that the bids are coming in for the 2026 games and one of the places that was going to make a bid was Bozeman, Montana. Their bid luckily has been withdrawn so…

RICHARD: Yeah.

RANDY: We’re hoping to go somewhere outside of the United States for that trip.

RICHARD: Wow, that’s kind of interesting cool that you guys would kind of agree that we’re going, no matter where it is. We’re going to go see that Winter Olympics. That’s pretty neat, I like that, that’s an awesome idea.

Randy, I appreciate you coming on the show today, it’s very insightful, and I enjoyed the look inside your company Foxtrot Games. Everyone, be sure to check out the Kickstarter campaign for World’s Fair, which launches on September 29th.

RANDY: Well, thanks for having me, I just love what you do and talking with designers and publishers. Depending on when this goes out if you want to see the campaign page, or take a look at the preview, or sign up to get notified when it does launch, you can go to worldsfairgame.com and that will re-direct you to the appropriate place.

RICHARD: Well again, thank you, it was certainly a pleasure.

RANDY: You’re show is great, being able to, you know, this series, talking to other designers and publishers and hearing from them their experience is great. So I appreciate you doing that and thank you for giving me the time to share mine.

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