I have recently escaped from the very end of RageCon in Sparks, Nevada with the designer of Parks, Trails and Cosmoctopus Henry Audubon, and we are enjoying a wonderful Indian feast. In reality, this all happened more than a year ago, but I’m pretending I’m right there. It was actually such a fun time, I do honestly remember it like it was recent. The food has arrived, and we have ventured into the sated realm of philosophy, math, and history.

Audubon: Right. Do you like big numbers?

DTD: I love big numbers. I mean, how big do you want to go here? I mean… old school is Googol and Googolplex, and then you talk about… what is it, the G number – Gray’s number?

Audubon: Graham’s number.

Henry knows much more about obscure math than I. A Googol is a 1 with one hundred zeros after it. And yes, that is the correct spelling. A googolplex is a 1 with a gogol number of zeros after it. Grahams number is much much bigger.

DTD: Graham’s number! I had the word wrong. Which is ridiculous, and just recently someone described a number that’s bigger than Graham’s number and has a bigger… It’s actually useful, ’cause it’s not just a “bigger number” – it’s “what use does this have? What thought process is unique about this number?”

Audubon: Yeah, I mean Graham’s number is dwarfed in the hierarchy of large numbers. I mean, it was big at a time, and at the time it was the biggest number ever used in a mathematical paper, which was exciting.

DTD: Well, I’m behind then. In the Big Number fan user base.

Audubon: Well I mean, certain functions grow really, really quickly. There’s a whole… There’s a whole study of fast growing functions. Things like the Busy Beaver problem, which is fascinating from a computer perspective of how… What’s the largest string that that a computer can output for a given amount of states, or however you want to express the Busy Beaver function. But it gets huge so quickly – you can actually get really long strings coming out of relatively short starting programs.

DTD: Short starting points.

Audubon: Yeah, and then tree! Tree is another fast growing function. Tree(3), an enormous number. Then you can think about inputting Graham’s number into that, and start chaining all these things together and yeah… Anyways, it’s just it’s all fun right?

Tree is a function relating to creating branching trees. Tree(1) =1 and Tree(2)=3. However, Tree(3) is already bigger than Graham’s number. In short, the Tree() function measures how many differnt ways colored dots can be connected in a tree. Tree(1) uses one color of dots, Tree(2) uses two colors. There is a great description of the Tree() function here and in this video by Numberphile.

DTD: Oh, I think they’re amazing. There was… For a while there was a contest going on to program, the slowest sort. And that got into these questions of… You know, you couldn’t cheat, and just put it on infinite loop or something. You actually had to do a sort, but what was the slowest algorithm to sort?

Audubon: That is really funny. I love that.

DTD: Oh, I thought that was amazing.

Audubon: Are there any clever ideas to come from that, like how to slow it way down and how to get super inefficient? It’s probably largely unexplored.

DTD: I don’t remember the details of it. This is stuff that I read about and heard about in the 80’s.

Slowsort was created in 1984 by Andrei Broder and Jorge Stolfi, and uses “multiply and surrender”, the opposite of “divide and conquer”.

Audubon: Wow.

DTD: Yeah, there was… You know some people would just do – pick two items in your sort, swap them, see if you’re right. But there were a lot of other extravagant ways to do it, and there’s a whole branch of “bad programming”, so to speak, where you talk about the most inefficient and the craziest and the weirdest ways to do whatever – they’re super cool.

Audubon:  This is kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of inefficiency and efficiency, but have you followed like Code Golf at all? Have you seen these Code Golf challenges?

DTD: Yes! Yes, I heard about this! I barely know about it, but someone else had brought it up.

Code Golf are competitions in computer science to create the shortest source code to do a certain task. Entire languages have been created just to take advantage of short source codes and golfing.

Audubon: Code Golf, it’s all about creating the shortest possible program that achieves some function, but it’s amazing how the level of compression that can go on when people aren’t striving for any kind of readability or maintainability, it’s just for the Code Golf challenge, and the programs are unreadable.

DTD: Yes! And I’ve seen some amazing examples of it. There was a friend of mine who put the video game snake into a single tweet.

Audubon: That’s a good one.

DTD: That one was fun. And then some of the other kind of famous examples, and I’m bragging a little bit for… But if you look at the original source code for Unix, there’s a famous line that’s in C and it’s almost incomprehensible, and there’s a comment on it that says “You’re not supposed to understand this.”

Audubon: Funny.

My father has this on a T-Shirt. In Greek. Because he thinks its just that much more funny.

DTD: And that’s history, that’s been around since the 70’s. I always got a kick out of that. You still need to do a philosophy/logic board game, to prove this or disprove that, or something. I think that would be great.

Audubon: I would love to. I don’t know how to do it in in a way that would have a remote chance of being well-received by the market, though I think.

DTD: Oh I don’t care, I’ll buy all of them. [laughs]

Audubon: Alright – I’ll tell the publisher we have a big pre-order in.

He thinks I am joking.

DTD: Just say it’s Corey. He has a big pre-order. It’ll probably fly. That’s awesome. So, when did you really like go for it, and go for a design to actually… With the aim of getting a game published?

Audubon: When I was realizing that I was doing the wrong thing for me, in graduate school, I dropped out and basically lived at my Mom’s house for a bit, while I just went all in. She was very generous and saw that this was something I was really passionate about, and kind of just let me stay in her guest bedroom in Nashville. And I just kind of holed up there, and worked on games, and tried to break in and find something that would work.

DTD: Wow. So you went for the gusto! You said, you know, while you found something you were passionate about, I hadn’t realized at that point it was like, game design. Making a game now. That’s awesome.

Audubon: Yep. I really wanted it. And I put everything on hold socially. I didn’t have much going on, certainly wasn’t advancing any kind of career that had certainty to it. It was this big gamble, but finally found my way in. I was… I had a game that at the time was called Pirate Land.

DTD: OK.

Audubon: It was about pirate ships sailing around an island, and you’re kind of picking boats and taking actions and whatnot, but my… One of my brothers lives in the same city as the Keymaster Games folks, and he went out to one of their public playtest nights, and mentioned to them, “Hey, my younger brother has a game. You guys might, you know, want to check it out.” And so, they reached out to me, and we got to talking, and kind of found a deal to make it work. And they signed the game, and that got re-themed and re-interpreted as Space Park, which is my first public game.

DTD: Right!

Audubon: And at the time, Keymaster Games was really small. They had just done a game called Control. It was a small card game, but it had a successful Kickstarter campaign of ’bout… like $80,000 raised or something – enough to get the company kind of rolling, and their game Campy Creatures was still a few months away from crowdfunding when I was on.

Control by designer Mattox Shuler, co-owner of Keymaster Games, raised $73,615 in February 2016.

DTD: Now is that their big hit at this point? Because Campy Creatures still gets talked about a lot, and I know they had the second Kickstarter.

Campy Creatures by Mattox Shuler raised $77,886 in March 2017. The second edition with expansion raised $103,181 in November 2018.

Audubon: Yeah, yeah. I mean to be honest I don’t know these days; I don’t see the numbers on Campy Creatures, so I can’t be sure. But I know these days, I mean Parks is, you know… Is kind of outperforming other things.

DTD: I apologize, for some reason I hadn’t registered that Parks was with Keymaster.

And Parks is, of course, designed by one master Henry Audubon. Hey, I’ve never claimed to be a prepared, accurate interviewer.

Audubon: Oh yeah, it’s okay.

DTD: I don’t know, for some reason I had another publisher that I thought Parks was with. I should do my homework!

Audubon: That’s alright. Well that’s where the story goes, is that I did Space Park. And then I met the Keymaster Team – Maddox and Kyle, for the first time at Tennessee Game Days, which is a small convention in Nashville, not unlike RAGECon, actually. Just a good time gaming, local con. And I met them for the first time, and I showed them a game that I was working on. It was a cooperative western train heist game, that I had actually designed originally as a Star Wars game. Getting back to Star Wars. After walking out of The Force Awakens in theaters, I was inspired to do a game about the young Jedis escaping whatever the Stormtrooper raid on Luke’s Academy was. I think it gets mentioned at some point in The Force Awakens that there was… something happened – a raid on Luke’s academy, and so I was like, “Oh wow.” So, I made this whole dice game, cooperative game, about escaping the stormtroopers and kind doing all that. Anyways, at a certain point I realized, “Okay, I’m never going to get the Star Wars license, so let’s rework this.” And my dad, you know, growing up, showed me a lot of Westerns.

DTD: Cool.

Audubon: He loves westerns. And when I used to go out to see him, that was one of these things we would bond over. It was like rated-R movies that my mom wouldn’t show me, and westerns, and things like that.

DTD: That’s awesome!

[both laugh]

Audubon: So, I wanted to do a western. And anyways, so the Keymaster team picked up that game, they really liked it. They wanted to do something with it. And we were starting development on that, but just when we were kind of kicking off development, an opportunity of a lifetime, looking back, arose. Which was that 59 Parks Print Series, who does all of the artwork that we use in Parks…

DTD: Right.

59 Parks is a series of prints announced in 2016, each by a different artist, that celebrate the nations national parks. All 63 of them… To be fair, the Gateway Arch, the Indiana Dunes, White Sands New Mexico, and New River Gorge in West Virginia were made national parks after 2016.

Audubon: Reached out and expressed how big of fans they were of Campy Creatures.

DTD: Okay.

Audubon: So, they said “Hey Keymaster, if there’s ever any way that we could all do something together and collaborate, like you know, maybe we could make a board game?” And I was there doing the Space Park work, and then doing the Western work, and I think they were happy with how things were going with me, so they asked me if I had an interest in working with this pre-existing artwork, and trying to come up with a game for it. And I said that I was totally interested, and that I would give it a try. The original concept for it was going to be a pure card game, just like a tuckbox, deck of cards, where… No additional components. And so, I spent several months working on that, trying to make a card game. A pure card game of Parks.

DTD: Okay.

Audubon: And so there were a bunch of different iterations of that; none of them were great though. And so, at a certain point, the decision was made that what we’re going to do is make a traditional deck of cards that uses the 59 Parks art. Keymaster was going to publish a traditional playing card deck. And so therefore then, we don’t need to make a pure card game anymore – let’s make a larger strategy game, a full-fledged board game to go along with the deck of playing cards. And so, that’s then where they told me that – that was the new prompt of “Make a Board Game”.

DTD: Make a board game using standard cards themed to this art.

Audubon: The deck of playing cards was a separate project from Keymaster.

DTD: Oh, okay.

Audubon: Basically, they were just using for the face cards. Basically, they wanted originally to do a pure card game that just featured 59 parks art, but eventually they said “No, we’re just going to do a standard playing card deck that features some of the art, and then we’ll do a different project that’s the board game.” And so, then I went to work on that, and spent about, you know, 6 months working on the board game version for Parks. And came up with some things fairly quickly, like the basic structure of the trail. And one of the… It’s interesting, looking back everything seems very obvious, like “Oh, of course you’re hiking on a trail, and whatever.” But there was actually a time where we were not sure what the perspective you would have as a player in this game. Who are you and what are you doing? We were thinking, “Are you perhaps a wildlife photographer and you’re going around trying to snap shots of…?”

DTD: Or even if you’re at a game where you’re looking at that elegant, simpler level, is there a perspective? You know maybe it’s just selecting and matching or set collecting or…? Do it, you know, based on a mechanism rather than a theming.

Audubon: Right, but we knew just given the artwork and everything, we wanted to really place people in a situation and make them connect with what was going on in their setting. So, I wasn’t sure whether players were gonna be wildlife photographers or maybe you’re Park Rangers and you’re taking care of the trail, or… There were a lot of options, but then eventually it became clear of like, “No. Players need to be hikers, because that’s what people are gonna relate to.”

DTD: That’s what you do at a park.

Or so I hear. I have never been described as an “outdoorsy” type. I stayed at a very nice 4 star hotel in Yosemite National Park. Beautiful views out the windows while I ate fine room service.

Audubon: Right – that’s what you do, that’s what people have done. And that’s what will be nostalgic and tie in a game of Parks to their pre-existing memories of going to parks and hiking through. And so to establish that kind of connection, it had to be hiking game. And then it really became a matter of how to get it to feel like hiking. And part of that was getting the right pace, and rhythm to the movement of the hikers, to kind of give it a bit of a hiking feel. And I worked on that for quite a while: just how to make the hikers feel like they’re actually hiking.

DTD: It’s getting into your psychology again.

Audubon: Yeah, what unlocked that really for me was the allowing players have two hikers when they play. Because then it meant that on your turn, when you choose and you move one hiker any distance you want down the trail, it means that the other hiker is standing still. And thus, from the perspective of any one hiker on the trail, sometimes they’re going, sometimes they’re staying still. Sometimes you’re fast, sometimes you’re slow. And there’s this bit of off kilter rhythm.

DTD: A casualness.

Audubon: Yeah. A casualness, right. To the motion. Yeah, those are a few of the things that I was thinking about in making Parks. But yeah, I mean ultimately that game came out, and it Kickstarted while I was still living in my mom’s house. And then as soon as I got the check from the Kickstarter campaign, I moved up to Philadelphia, and that was three years ago.

Parks raised $419,675 in February 2019. Technically 5 years ago. This interview is really late. Because I am a terrible person.

DTD: That’s awesome. I love that you just went for it. It was like, “Well, this is what I do now.” ‘Cause I know the vast majority of designers aren’t really doing it that way: the side hobby at nights, and you know, and there’s quite a few well known designers, where it’s still it’s not their day job, it’s a side hobby. So that’s really cool. It reminds me of Ignacy [Trzewiczek] telling story of when… I think it was Neuroshima Hex, was kind of ready. He ordered a print run that he actually could not afford. And he said, “Well, this is it. This is what I’m doing or not.” so he ordered a print run that he did not have the money to cover, not even close. And it sold well enough that he could pay for the print run, so it was his deciding moment.

Ignacy tells some amazing stories. Someone should interview him. Or someone that has interviewed him should get off his butt and publish the interview… Someone terrible.

Audubon: That’s very cool.

DTD: And then, was Trails like just a natural next thing right after?

Audubon: You know, Parks had to be designed a bit in reverse, because the art pre-existed the design. And that’s not normally how design goes, right? It’s usually design, then the artwork will come later.

DTD: Yeah

Audubon: Trails also had a bit of a reverse development cycle, in a way too. So, the story of how about Trails came about, was that Parks got picked up by Target, and was doing quite well. And still is doing quite well in Target.

DTD: Yeah, congratulations.

Audubon: Oh, thank you so much, yeah.

DTD: No, it’s a brilliant elegant entry level design, that I just think works great.

Audubon: Thanks so much, appreciate that. So Keymaster had a meeting with Target, and Target wanted… They said, “Hey, we love Parks, and we’re happy to carry it, but it’s also like 50 bucks. Is there a way you can do a…”

DTD: “Can you do a smaller Parks?”

Smaller Parks. The American way. As an aside, the United States’ smallest park is Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon consisting of one tree, located in the median strip of SW Naito Parkway. 452 square inches (0.00007205784 acres).

Audubon: Yeah. And so Keymaster pitched them on, “Okay, we’ll do a $20 game, and here’s the box size, and here’s an approximate cover for it. And what do you think?” And they said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

DTD: This is before any design?

Audubon: This is… There’s no game at this point. It’s pitched on, just a product level.

DTD: [laughs] I know nobody’s ever done that before.

Audubon: Ultimately, Keymaster brought me on board at a certain point. They did some work trying some different designs internally, and I think that they couldn’t find something that they really loved, and that was landing for them internally. And so, at a certain point, they reached out to me and said, “Hey, do you want to do this one?” And it was a pretty compressed amount of time, by the time that they got in touch with me. It was in December of 2020. So in December of 2020, I begin work on it, and I’m pretty sure that the deadline for all the design work to be done was February. So just a few months.

DTD: Oh man!

Audubon: But this is one of the advantages of going all in, so to speak, and being full time engaged in this, is that I was able to just push everything in my life kind of to the side for that three month period and just laser focus on Trails and just get it as good as I could get in that time period.

DTD: That’s insane.

Audubon: And we pulled it off. It was kind of crazy how it all happened, and then it came out that summer, and debuted in Target. But I think you’ll talk to a lot of designers… A more common experience for designers is yeah, you design. Years later – Oh, finally something hits the market. But for me, just imagine hearing about it, starting design in December, and then being on the shelves in Target in June.

Trails released on June 20, 2021.

DTD: That’s unheard of.

Audubon: Yeah, that is highly unusual.

DTD: You need water?

I was poised over the electronic “water” button on the table.

Audubon: Yes, please. So, Trails came about in a pressure cooker design environment.

DTD: Wow. It could have been your ET.

Audubon: Could have been, if we had overprinted it and then buried it in the landfill.

A classic 1980’s moment. ET was developed for the Atari 2600 video game console in 1982 under a very tight time constraint. The designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, had from July 27 until September 1 to complete the title. It sold well enough, but was followed by the video game crash of 1983, and so unsold copies were all buried in a landfill.

DTD: I just like that you got my reference. ’cause that had like a six-week development time.

Audubon: Oh really?

DTD: They got the license, and they said it had to be out by holiday season. And it was a six-week time period to code it and finish it. I actually… I talked a little bit to the coder who did ET, he’s a therapist in the Bay Area now, nice guy. Very nice guy.

Audubon: And how does he look back on his experience with ET? Is it painful?

DTD: Very reasonable. I mean he was in some of the documentaries about it when they unearthed the landfill. But he was… So video game coding in that time was insane. It was fast times, drugs, rock and roll, the whole thing. And he was the top. This is when the Atari cartridges were hot. He had done the Indiana Jones game, Yar’s Revenge. Very, very popular cartridge titles, so he was the natural one to pick. And the game was honestly, it was pretty solid. It was an interesting game. It felt like ET, it did the stuff ET was supposed to do. It had a few quirky bugs that everybody focused on, but it was more that the times killed it, then the game itself being bad. There was a glut on the market, and that drove the crash in the video game market much more than one or two bad games. It was just an absolute glut of uncontrolled, unrestricted games. Anything you can make just instantly came out. It’s like if there was no quality control in board games whatsoever. Although I think we had a little of that – it was a number of years ago, but every publisher basically said that they were going to make less games. So I think they’re more aware now of flooding the market.

I cannot stress how good Yar’s Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark were on the Atari 2600. They were the best of the best when I was 10. I still play them occasionally.

Audubon: Right. But that’s ultimately why Nintendo tried to keep more of a tight leash.

DTD: They went way the other way. Everything had to go through very strict quality control, and then they had limited numbers of sales. But yeah, it was reactionary. Love that that early history of the video game, that fascinates me like crazy. So, how was the whole Kickstarter process for you, back to Parks? ‘Cause it wasn’t really heyday of Kickstarter, it was still relatively early in the Kickstarter, wasn’t it?

Audubon: No, no, not necessarily. I mean it’s 2019 or 2018 would be the Kickstarter. So it’s in the maybe a middle period of some kind. Or yeah, depending on how you slice up the timeline, who knows?

DTD: That’s true.

Audubon: It was tremendously exciting. I mean for me when it was going on, it was shocking! I’d come into all projects, you know, optimistic and hopeful. But, you know, not expecting too much out of anything. Not to be primed for disappointment. Err… Yeah, I prime myself for disappointment.

I understand this technique.

DTD: [laughs] Start staring at the numbers every second.

Audubon: Yeah, well the interesting thing was Parks – you know the Kickstarter campaign, when you look at the numbers of it, it didn’t dip in the middle quite as much as you see in other campaigns. And so we basically were… We had a good day one and day two, and that was super exciting. But then it just like kept kind of cruising like another 10,000 every day. And it just kind of chugged along like that. So, it was like, “Whoa, how long is this going to continue for? This is crazy!” And then, yeah, by the end it was close to half a million, and I was like, “Oh my God, that’s incredible.” And then I got a check for my cut of the campaign, and I was like “I’m out of here, thank you Mom.”

[both laugh]

DTD: “See ya!”

Audubon: No, she was really happy for me. She’s like my biggest supporter and she’s such a generous person and has just really, really helped me out in so many ways.

DTD: That’s awesome.

Audubon: She’s really great.

DTD: That’s a great story. Do you want any naan? Are you skeptical?

Audubon: I’m a little skeptical at the moment, sorry about that.

The waiter was a bit confused when asked if the wetness on the bread was butter or not. There was a lengthy debate among the staff. They simply stated it was “simple”. I, too, would be dubious.

DTD: That’s cool. Sorry, not to worry at all, I understand. I’m gonna go for it. I don’t know, it’s acting like an oil rather than a ghee.

Audubon: I think it is an oil, but…

DTD: Yeah, they did not exude confidence.

Audubon: It’s okay, it’s actually more just like I don’t know that I… Sorry, I’m like sounding like I’m super picky.

DTD: No, no, it’s fine.

Audubon: I mean, oily naan… I was I was kind of hoping it was gonna be just plain.

DTD: Dry.

Audubon: Yeah, that’s what I was hoping. ’cause there’s like enough oil and moisture and whatnot in the other food that we’re eating.

DTD: It doesn’t feel oily to me.

Audubon: Okay, I may try a piece.

DTD: Mmmm… I do like Indian food.

Audubon: Definitely.

DTD: So, I promised that I would say Cosmoctopus like 14 times in a row. Just ’cause it’s so fun to say. Cosmoctopus. And I have not gotten a chance to play with it yet.

At the time of the interview, Henry was designing and planning Cosmoctopus. The game has since released, and it is one of my favorites. Cosmoctopus crowdfunded from Paper Fort Games in 2022 for £100,015. The title then went to retail through Lucky Duck. And there’s a plushie…

Audubon: I’d love to show you. I’d love to play with you, or at the very least to show you some of the cards and things, ’cause…

DTD: Please! If you’re not burnt out at this show, I have nothing else scheduled. I would love to see it. But I also understand that you’ve been demoing it like crazy.

Audubon: I’d love to show it to you. Yeah, yeah, I’ve been playing it over the weekend and yeah, people have been having a good time with it. But Cosmoctopus was a game that I channeled my lock down madness into. I was cooped up and stuck in my apartment.

There was a pandemic I heard.

DTD: [laughs] Space madness.

Audubon: Yeah, and I was working on this kind of cyberpunk game that then morphed into something else involving walruses, you know, hacking. And like very strange things. And I was thinking, like, “What for these”… “When the walruses discovered hacking, what is the equivalent of their Hollywood hacker vision?” This is where my mind was going with it.

Definitely madness.

DTD: You’re going on such strange tangents here, and somehow I really like it.

Audubon: Yeah, so I was thinking like “Okay, in hackers or something, they’re like flying through the city in 3D and all that.” But no, no that wouldn’t make sense. So I was thinking maybe they see like weird like deep sea creatures and things. And then just this, this kind of electric octopus thing just kind of appeared in my mind. And then I just started thinking, “Well, what’s it called?” I was just working on the words, the language, of it. And then eventually it just hit with the Cosmoctopus.

DTD: That’s so cool.

Audubon: And at that point the whole project pivoted, where I was like, “Okay, forget everything that came before.” It’s like this is the new starting point.

DTD: This is what we’re doing.

Audubon: Now it’s all about this. And so yeah, this Cosmoctopus, this celestial cephalopod. And the devotees, and the kind of cult. There’s a lot of like esoteric numerology and stuff, like, woven into the game about like the number 8.

DTD: Is it all about 8’s? I was gonna say…

Audubon: Well, it’s actually… 8 is the star of the show, but it’s really about Fibonacci numbers.

I was so frigging excited to hear about Fibonacci numerology in a board game. The Fibonacci sequence starts with 0, 1, then each successive number is the sum of the previous two. It occurs in nature quite a bit. Makes spirals and such.

DTD: Alright!

Audubon: Of which 8 is one. So, just as a reminder that the Fibonacci numbers are 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and then 13. And then so, in the game, I only use Fibonacci numbers.

DTD: OK…

Audubon: And that’s one of many of these, like new little number patterns that I put in as Easter eggs for, you know, nerdy folks who are into that kind of thing. So the Cult of Cosmoctopus is all about the number 8, and you’re…

DTD: I’m loving this more and more and more.

Audubon: People do not count higher than 8. You’re forbidden from… Why would you? Why would you go higher than 8? 8 is as good as it can get. But, so in my game, I thought, “Well, what is the next Fibonacci number? It’s 13.” That number has its own kind of mystique to it, and so I set aside these cards in the game that are up for grabs from the very start. They’re called “forbidden knowledge”, and what you need is to get 13 of particular resources to claim the forbidden knowledge, to be the first to grab it And so, it’s this idea of like breaking past the 8 barrier, and jumping up to the next place – this 13. And grabbing hold of this forbidden knowledge.

Triskaidekaphobia

DTD: Wow!

Audubon: Yeah. So anyways, I just got super inspired just by some kind of psychedelia and just mind-expanding, hallucinatory, kind of thinking, alongside some mathematics, and just… And then the madness of the lockdown and just being stuck at home, it all just flowed into that game.

DTD: This sounds so amazing. This sounds like what I like to read about and think about and watch about all the time. This is right up my jam.

Audubon: I hope you dig it when you get a chance to play. And then the way that that got… I would say in general, different designers have of course different styles, and for me, like I’m not a big playtester early in my design process. So I hear advice a lot of the times of, “what’s most important is to fail faster”, “hit a prototype onto the table as quickly as possible”, “You have no idea where you stand if you haven’t put your game in front of people”, and…

DTD: Well, I’ve always kind of heard it as the biggest energy barrier is just making it. So that leads to that next conclusion of just don’t even worry about whether it’s good or bad – just make it. And then, get reactionary and iterate.

Audubon: Yeah. So that’s very common – the iterative approach. It’s very empirical. It’s very like “build something tangible and subject it to an empirical test. The playtests at the table, where we’re going to see what people observe. We’re going to see what thoughts emerge from this experiment we’re doing here of the playtest.”

DTD: Yeah

Audubon: Whereas I’m more… Less of an empiricist, and more of a rationalist in the game design spectrum, where I’ll sit and scheme for a long time. And just think and think and I walk a lot, so I walk around Philadelphia thinking about it.

DTD: [laughs] Thinking about Cosmoctopus.

Audubon: Or whatever game is on my mind.

DTD: I wanna just picture you walking around Philadelphia imagining psychedelic numerology octopuses.

I can totally picture Henry wandering the city aimlessly, pondering a celestial cephalopod, basking in his inky presence.

Audubon: Well, I wish you were there to see it happen.

DTD: I can see it in my mind, and how could it get better?

Come back for part four, where we discuss the origin story behind Cosmoctopus, Floe, Iron Horse, and many more. Plus the nature of originality, the double edged blade of experience, and general board gaming excitement. Deep stuff. Inky blackness deep.