A Conversation With: Off The Page Games Designers of MIND MGMT
After our coverage of MIND MGMT, which you can see here, we were left with some burning questions. We decided to reach out to the designers and get our inquiries answered. What we weren’t expecting was the wonderful conversation that ensued.
If you’re not familiar with MIND MGMT, it is the latest design from the famed design duo responsible for games such as: JunkArt, Bellfort, Akrotiri and more! Mind MGMT is a hidden movement game where players take on the roles of rogue agents or a devious corporation dedicated to stopping on another. Its a fascinating combination of hidden movement, pattern recognition and some seriously impressive art. If you’d like to find out more, check out the Kickstarter or get a psychically charged glimpse into the minds of the creators right here:
Jan: Well, hello hello Jay and Sen, welcome to our side of the pond! Always a pleasure to see you. Hope you don't mind the change in scenery. We're big fans of ducks here.
Jay: Hello! Or as we like to say in Canada, “Hello!”
Sen: We have two official languages in Canada, so “bonjour”, aussi!
Jan: So, there's a lot to talk about today: a new game and a new company! But first, for those of our readers that might not be too familiar with your work; who are you and what games have you designed in the past? Who exactly are the Bamboozle Brothers?
Jay: What haven’t we designed??? I joke but we are proud that we have designed a really varied list of game types. We’re not going to get pigeon-holed into one classification! Take a look at these beauties (now there’s an outdated Canadian-ism):
Euro-strategy: Belfort, Akrotiri, Godfather: A New Don, Tortuga
Party: But Wait There’s More, Train of Thought
Dexterity: Junk Art
Deduction: Orphan Black, MIB Undercover
Social: D&D: Rock Paper Wizard and WWE: Headlock Paper Scissors (both also designed with Josh Cappel)
Abstract: Tic Tac Moo
Trick Taking: Djinn
Escape Room in a box: Scooby-Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion
One vs. Many: MIND MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game”
Sen: The Bamboozle Brothers are just two dudes who decided to keep in touch with each other by making games together even though they were separated by 3000 kilometers.
Jan: That's definitely one way to interact with international friends. Your repertoire is seriously impressive. I find it fascinating how diverse your games are. Out of your entire catalog of titles, I don't think there's even the slightest overlap of theme or mechanics! Is that something you both intentionally strive for?
Sen: Yes, both Jay and I like lots of different types of games and so we set out to be versatile in our design skills from the get go. Each new game is a new challenge to us! Now that we’re doing more games in the same line (e.g. the D&D / WWE game), you’ll see some overlap; we’re always looking to differentiate one game from another, however.
Jay: We’re both just so motivated by new things. We want to always be working on something new and different. More so than ever before, this is also becoming an imperative to getting published too. Publishers want their games to stand out and be different, and so do we!
Jan: I know for sure I’m always on the lookout of a fresh perspective. In other words, I believe that mindset also translates to the consumer side! With that being said, I've seen plenty of designers find their comfort zone and produce a particular type of title on a regular basis with various degrees of success. What challenges and disadvantages would you say there’s to each approach? Do you feel there's additional risk involved in producing games that don't necessarily have a formula to them?
Jay: I think the benefit to us is that we’re always learning and stretching our abilities. That is fun and keeps us motivated. The disadvantage is that we start from scratch on some designs because we don’t have knowledge of some key things that make a specific type of game work. For example, when we started work on the Orphan Black game, we had never made a social deduction game, so it took us a while to wrap our heads around how to make one that was different from the others on the market at the time.
Sen: Another advantage is that our take on a genre is likely to be new - we don’t have any laurels to rest on, so to speak, so we’re not using mechanisms that we borrow from our other games. One of the other risks is the problem with being too innovative (yes, it’s possible) and not hitting the market in that sweet spot. Most of the highly popular games, you’ll notice, have only 1 or 2 areas of innovation. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I guess!
Some of the rogue agents in action.
Jan: Speaking of innovation and uniqueness, your latest game seems to be aiming at both. Could you give us a brief introduction to MIND MGMT?
Sen: MIND MGMT tells the story of a group of rogue agents who used to work for a global espionage agency called (you guessed it) MIND MGMT (pronounced MIND MANAGEMENT). One group of players takes on the role of these agents as they try to take down the agency that is being controlled by a solitary player. The game uses hidden movement as the MIND MGMT player is trying to move their recruiter in secret to bring new spies into the fold while avoiding capture by the rogue agents. The rogue agents may not know where the recruiter is, initially, but they have psychic abilities to assist them in the task!
Jan: The theme is definitely compelling! In regards to this genre, this is your first foray into hidden movement games, is it not? Was there an inherent problem with the genre that you wanted to work on with MIND MGMT, and if so, how did you address it?
Jay: We had a few goals. We wanted to make hidden movement accessible to more players which meant getting the play time to under an hour. While Scotland Yard can be played fairly quickly, we also wanted something more modern and with more strategy. We also had to do the IP justice. MIND MGMT has been my favourite comic for the last 20 years and we wanted to capture the feeling of the comic more than just specific characters and settings. Once we thought about hidden movement as the type of game it could be we realized that we found a game that could get that essence of ‘being in one’s head’ that MIND MGMT does so well.
Every piece of artwork was prepared by the comic’s creator.
Jan: When we started to cover MIND MGMT, we weren’t aware it was based on a comic series! After I found out I just have to ask: did the comic inspire the game or was the game the perfect fit for the comic?
Jay: We met Matt Kindt, the creator and artist of MIND MGMT, 4 years ago at GenCon and he had played our Akrotiri game and loved it. We loved MIND MGMT so it was a perfect match!
Sen: Matt is a huge gaming fan and when we approached him about doing a game for MIND MGMT, he was totally on board, as you can see from all the custom art work he’s done for the game. We’re not reusing much from the comic book. We had tried a bunch of different games to fit the comic - a fully co-operative put-out-fires game, a tableau-building game about erased memories - but in the end, this hidden movement game we had been working on fit so well. With Matt’s help, we made it fit even better, customizing the gameplay to the world of MIND MGMT.
Interested in the comic? Read more about it here!
Jan: For those of us who aren’t familiar with the comic book, what exactly IS MIND MGMT? Oh and please keep the memory defragmentation game in mind for the future, that sounds wonderful!
Sen: MIND MGMT is a trip, plain and simple. It’s the tale of psychic spies charged with making the world a safer place. Of course, absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the old adage goes…
Jay: MIND MGMT wasn’t always corrupt. They’ve helped shape world events for decades. But as those in charge started using the agency for more nefarious reasons, that’s when some agents decided to defect and try to take them down. The story is amazing and I highly recommend others check out the comic if you like the concepts presented in the board game!
One of the Recruiters main tools for securing victory.
Jan: I’m definitely going to seek out a copy, the world building sounds incredible. With that additional context, what other steps did you take to tie the game and the source material even more so?
Sen: We’ve used a lot of the terminology and characters from the series. Anyone who’s a fan knows that Matt loves to write copious notes in the margins - we’ve taken a lot of that marginalia and given it new life in the game, incorporating Matt’s incredible ideas as new parts of the game that we reveal in the SHIFT system.
Jay: Matt really takes advantage of any medium he’s in, and I like to think that we do too. So when we started putting this together, we brainstormed on ways that we could really subvert people’s expectations as to what you can do with board games. One interesting thing is how to deal with rules for sealed packages. Legacy games have tried things like adding stickers to rule books, but I’ve found that they’re not comprehensive enough and you often have to go to BoardGameGeek to see if anyone has an answer for you. How we’re doing it is that every card in the SHIFT System packages will have a code word on it. You will be guided to go to FluxSafeHouse, enter that word and you’ll be given all the extra rules and edge cases that we couldn’t fit on the cards. Oh and also (and this is top secret, so don’t tell anyone!) there are and will be words sprinkled throughout the components and art that stand out in a weird way. I wonder what would happen if you entered those words into this website.
SHIFT Packs? What SHIFT Packs?
Jan: Ok ok, let’s take it easy here. My curiosity can only be so piqued! So far we’ve talked about thematic ties, SHIFT Packages and a new mindset when approaching hidden movement. There's one particular mechanic and/or feature I’m excited about: Mental Note Tokens. They are such a fascinating addition. When did this particular innovation come about during the design process?
Sen: We started with no note taking allowed and quickly realized that people needed to track the information to deduce the path. We gave the rogue agents a notepad to track their movements.
Jay: Right, and no one used it, or they didn’t know how or when to use it properly.
Sen: To make it easier, we gave them a duplicate of the map to keep track of where they thought the Recruiter was on their own map.
Jay: But then only one person was writing notes on it and not everyone could see it. So we tried using tokens on the board. This made setup and gameplay fiddly as the tokens each had numbers printed on them, and it still didn’t help players keep track of other pieces of information.
Sen: Players needed to keep track of information but they needed the flexibility of being able to track lots of different types of information in ways that made sense to the team. How could we accomplish that?
Jay: Oh I know -- we let people write on those tokens!! Yes, dry erase tokens have been an amazing advancement that lets everyone see what is known information.
Sen: “Known” being the operative word. In most deduction games, getting a hit is always great, but sometimes getting a miss feels bad. In MIND MGMT, getting a miss means you’re actually getting a ton of information.
Jay: Exactly! Using those Mental Note Tokens to keep track of each miss is the key to this game. If you ask, ”Have you ever been to a Faraday Mind Tree?” on turn 9 and the Recruiter says “No”, then that means you can write “1-9 X” on 5 Mental Note tokens and place one on each of the Faraday Mind Trees because each feature appears 5 times on the board.
Sen: Here’s a protip: if you keep track of all your information and you take a bird’s-eye view of the map around mid-game, you may just see a distinct path of adjacent spaces where you don’t have misses… Sometimes, the negative space is just as important as the positive space...
The notes in action.
Jan: Ah, that’s a fantastic tidbit, I’ll keep it in mind for our next game. Another mechanic that I find intriguing is the pattern recognition and the spatiality that it brings with it. In contrast to other titles in the space, the recruiter is building out a puzzle for his opponent and himself. They’re not just trying to escape, they’re unweaving a very complicated web of their own creation. It’s this duality that, I feel, makes each game of MIND MGMT so interesting. What was the process like to define this flow?
Sen: We started out with the story that we wanted to tell with the game, working with the series creator, writer and artist, Matt Kindt, to come up with a cat-and-mouse tale that was compelling and had you on the edge of your seat on both sides of the table.
Jay: It took us awhile to actually land on hidden movement as the mechanic for MIND MGMT. We had to start from scratch a couple of times as we couldn’t crack the FEELING of the comic in our game. We tried a hidden traitor mechanic and while that was getting close, it wasn’t until we tried hidden movement that we realized that we found it. Trying to get inside a player’s head or trying to get players to believe one thing over another is what MIND MGMT is all about -- in the board game and in the comic!
A close-up of the main board.
Jan: Well, I think you guys really hit the nail on the head here! Now as we mentioned earlier on, this conversation isn’t all about MIND MGMT. Let's talk a bit about your new company: Off The Page Games! How did this come about and what made you decide to go into publishing?
Jay: Sen and I have often been asked why we don’t just publish it ourselves. The answer for the last decade was that we just weren’t interested. We loved designing and wanted to focus on that, and let publishers do what they do best! Then last year I found myself creating the Fail Faster Playtesting Journal for some friends as a lark, but they all loved it. It motivated me to put that on Kickstarter and I funded over 500% of my target! That gave me a lot of experience and knowledge on how to run a Kickstarter (mostly thanks to Stegmaier and Mathe’s blogs).
About a month after this campaign ends, the publisher that had signed MIND MGMT shut down and we ended up getting the rights back. So we had a meeting and it was Matt Kindt that asked, “why don’t we just do this ourselves?” He would do all the art and graphic design and we would publish.
I thought about it for a while and since I’ve been part time for a few years, I thought this is something I could do. I asked Sen if he would be OK if I was the publisher since he has a full time job. He was cool with it! The next step was figuring out the brand for the company. I had Fail Faster already doing well, but that didn’t seem like a good name for a publisher. I decided to focus my publishing efforts only on games based off of creator-owned comics. I don’t want to have to deal with corporate lawyers and whatnot. I also want to work with the creator to bring their stories to life as a board game. So from there, the name Off the Page Games was born as it has two meanings: these games come from off the page in the comics and onto your table, and these games will have table presence and will jump off the page at you!
“So we had a meeting and it was Matt Kindt that asked, ‘why don’t we just do this ourselves?’”
Jan: Ha, I love double entendres! Another thing I stumbled upon related to your efforts to become a publisher is your documentation! You have a series of videos detailing the steps you’ve taken to establish Off the Page Games. How has it been received so far? What other topics are you planning in the future?
Jay: I’ve always been a big believer in giving back to the community. Sen and I did that when we were just starting out. We wrote a blog detailing the steps we took to get our games published. That blog is referenced still today by people who have followed its steps (more info here). So when I started a board game company I knew I didn’t want to do a blog again (also because Jamey Stegmaier has done such a good job at it already), so a video series seemed like the thing to do.
It’s been amazing for me so far. It actually really helped me keep on top of my schedule because I needed a new episode every week. I needed to DO something this week so that I could talk about it in my YouTube show! I’ve heard a lot of great feedback from those that have watched it, but I knew it was never going to be a huge hit because the audience is literally people that want to start their own board game company.
Jan: Well, not being part of the publishing community I still find it fascinating! I’d like to conclude our interview by circling back to MIND MGMT. What has been the biggest challenge to bring MIND MGMT to the world? And one bonus question: What part of establishing your company have you enjoyed the most thus far?
Jay: It’s funny because while designing the game, Sen and I would come across a challenge on how to show something or how a component should look, and we’d always say that it’s the publisher’s problem, not ours. Well, low and behold, it now is my problem!
One of the big issues was the step tokens. In an earlier iteration, the recruiter had 25 numbered tokens, and they kept them behind their screen. When they had to place a step token, they had to grab the specific numbered token and place it face down. Then if that token was revealed, anyone could just flip it face up and reveal the number. That part was cool, but it was super fiddly trying to find the number you wanted in a sea of 25 tokens.
I came up with a bunch of different ideas, like turning the screen into a peg board and even the main board would have holes in it where you could stick these tokens. But then we had to figure out a way to hide the actual number printed on it. So many ideas! I even had the manufacturer in the loop on pricing some options.
At the same time we were having issues with the agents keeping track of information and when we came up with the Mental Note token idea, we saw that we could replace all our numbered step tokens with these as well. It was perfect, clean and elegant!
Jan: We’ll Jay and Sen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today! It’s been an absolute pleasure to learn about Mind MGMT, Off The Page Games and your overall process for game design. I hope to talk to you again about your next stellar design! Until then, stay safe and take a duck with you!
*For more information on Off the Page Games, please visit their website and follow their social channels. For more Mind MGMT, visit the Kickstarter.