I’ve been there. I wrote Neuroshima RPG, put my heart and soul into it, made the game successful in Poland and then I became the main enemy of the fans of the game.

I couldn’t understand this. I was really shocked when I was reading mean comments on the Internet about me ruining the game. Fans were disappointed with the game’s expansions, or with the lack of expansions, or with the price of expansions, or with the artwork, or whatever. There was always–always!–a reason to complain about the Neuroshima series.

I was their main enemy. That jerk. That fucker. That Trzewiczek-the-asshole. The guy who ruined their beloved game.

I was sitting in front of my computer and I wanted to scream. Hey, guys! I am the one who created the game. I am the one who wrote the book you love. I am the one who gave you hundreds of hours of great RPG sessions. Why do you hate me?

That was tough. I learned the lesson. This year I’ll turn 40. A wise man, this Trzewiczek, has now become.

***

We are afraid of change. Change is always something unknown and we don’t like the unknown. We like the stuff we know. We feel safe with the stuff we know. There is this famous quote from a Polish movie that goes: ‘The songs I like the most are the songs I already know’. Pretty accurate, huh?

Announcing a new edition of the game is announcing a change. A publisher is telling you that the game you know, the game you love, the game you spent hundreds of hours with is going to change.

Let’s face it. These changes cannot be good. It’s obvious that they will ruin the game. Why would they change it in the first place?! Leave the game alone, you [redacted]!

***

A couple of days ago we announced a new edition of 51st State. The famous Master Set. The BGG threads went hot.

“F**k, this is the one thing I wished they kept”

“Horrible changes, the hype for me is dead.”

“It just sounds like they gutted all the things I found most interesting”

and so on and so forth.

First of all: it’s not ‘they’. It’s me. There is no Smoking Man who stays in the shadow and is ruining your game. It’s me. The guy who created the game in the first place in 2010.

I spent the last few months polishing the game and making it better. I removed a ton of rules that were not necessary. I rebalanced the cards. I made it quicker and more riveting. It’s either me or you now, there is no time for a ‘we have five rounds’ stroll as in Imperial Settlers. Just this weekend Merry crushed me at the end of the third round. That was something I did not see coming. You feel the pressure from the very first turn. Either you make your engine going or you are out. It’s a gamer’s game for real.

But even though I know the game is better, I know I will disappoint many fans of the game. I have no doubts about that. Because…

***

I’ve been there. I designed 51st State, put my heart and soul into it, made it the game successful worldwide and then I became the main…

edited by Piotr, thank you!

So Buonacoure makes fun of me. He calls me the Cool Kid On The Block because I use Snapchat and we all know that only kids use Snapchat, right?

Well, yes and no.

Snapchat is a medium for kids. It’s a medium for MTV celebs, for movie stars and sportsmen. I am none of them. No one is interested in seeing my wardrobe or my morning workout. I am pretty aware of that. So what the hell am I doing on Snapchat?

I talk about game design. I show my work. I show how I play test games. I show how my games are born.

Why not on Twitter? Why not on Facebook? Why not on YouTube? Why not here on this blog?

Cause each medium has its specific features and tools. Each medium is perfect for a different kind of message. You guys consume each medium for different reasons.

I chat with you on Twitter, I post mean comments to my board game friends, I banter and I love it. I got almost 10K followers because I feel that on Twitter I’m in my element, I can feel this medium with my entire soul. This is like my native environment. Punchlines, bantering, 140 letters that go straight to the point. Find me on Twitter at @trzewik and start bantering. Can’t wait to meet you there.

I have an official Facebook profile at facebook.com/trzewiczek where people who like my games can see updates every couple of days about what’s going on with me. I write short updates, post pictures and I am much more active there when I am visiting new places. It lets me show cool conventions and cities I visit. This is my most serious and official channel of communication with you.

I run the #askboardgames show (which previously was a Portal Games vlog and evolved). That is my medium for having a constant Q&A session with the gamers. When I visit conventions, you guys catch me and ask me many questions. That’s basically the formula for the show. You don’t need to grab me at conventions anymore. You can ask me questions about my opinion on Pandemic Legacy, about the app in First Martians or about the next Robinson Crusoe expansion release date and I’ll answer in the show. I used to answer a ton of email questions every day. Because of this show I was able to reduce it drastically. You guys are updated with my weekly answers. Clean and simple.

So, finally Snapchat, huh? Do I really need another channel of communication? What for?!

Snapchat is for unofficial stuff. It’s for prototypes that are in the works. It’s for stuff I  cannot post on BGG yet. It’s for videos that can’t get published on YouTube. It’s for work in progress, for dirty stuff, for uncut, unprepared versions of my games. The real work. Nothing photoshopped, if you know what I mean.

Listen, you don’t need to be the Cool Kid On The Block. You only need to be a gamer who wants to see First Martians coming to life in real time. Without photoshopping. Without the marketing bullshit. Just the real stuff and a real prototype.

Join Cool Kid.

Find me at trzewik23

[warning: this post contains strong language. If you don’t accept such language, please, don’t read this post, visit me next week when I’ll have a new article. Thank you and sorry for the trouble.]

On Monday I posted a short article explaining how the Neuroshima RPG book came to life. It’s sort of a preface for today’s article, so if you have a moment please, head to my other blog post and read it. It’s a 3–minute read, a really short story. It’ll give you a good background for today’s article.

Link to Monday’s article.

***

There were plenty of reasons why the Neuroshima RPG was a tremendous success. It was because there was no other post-apocalyptic game on the market. It was because of its rich and immersive world. It was because of a huge marketing campaign I created.

And it was because it read like no other book on the market.

Let me just give you a few examples.

How did we describe the Abilities of Player Characters in the Character Creation chapter? More or less like this:

Dexterity
You need this to be high to shoot well. If you can’t shoot, you’ll die. You need this to be high because you will need to escape from ruined buildings that have just collapsed, or to drive a motorbike and try to escape from mutants. You need this to be high or you’d better start creating a new character because this one is already dead.

Perception
You had better focus. There is death [to be found] in every corner of the ruins… in every bunker, old shelter… everywhere. If your perception sucks, you’ll wake up with a gun next to your stupid head and ‘boom!’ will be the last thing you’ll ever hear. Have too few points of Perception and you won’t even see that fucking tomahawk that is coming to cut you in half.

Charisma
Yeah, sure, invest in Charisma you dumb-ass. It’s super helpful when you are surrounded by 10 pissed-off villagers who want to kick your ass and your ammo is gone. Yeah, sure, I bet Perception will save your ass when you need to interrogate this ganger to know when his gang is going to attack your hideout. Let me just ask you one question. Have you ever hear of a dude who dodged a bullet when he had a gun next to his head? Because I tell you this… I did hear about a guy who was able to convince people to put the fucking gun away.
So low Charisma? I don’t think so…

Intelligence
Sure, you might be agile like a gorilla. You might have the perception of damn Jessie James. You might be a charismatic bad ass like Tommy Lee fucking Jones, but you’ll end up dumb as shit if you don’t invest in Intelligence. Guess, what…

And it went on and on in that manner. Every single sentence in the book was written for the player, and by saying “player” I mean a gamer who loves RPGs, who wants to create the best character possible and he wants to enjoy this process. Lots of jokes, lots of meta-stories, lots of bantering with player so he knows that we – authors of the book – know what we are talking about.

It’s not [merely] a boring rulebook that just includes all the how-to-play rules. It was an amazing, engaging, funny guide that told players how to survive in the world of Neuroshima and how to create a cool character. This is true for how we wrote the whole Character creation chapter and  this is true for how we wrote the rest of the book.

A chapter describing Europe in the Neuroshima RPG? It goes more or less like this: “Europe, mate?! I have no fucking idea what’s 10 miles away from the shithole we are in now and you ask me about Europe? Are you kidding me? There is no radio, no TV, no Internet, and you want to know about Europe. What’s the next thing you’ll want to know? What’s my opinion on the weather on Mars? Wake up, dumb-ass. No one knows a shit about Europe.”

And that’s all about Europe you’d find in the rulebook. That’s how we rolled back then.

***

I’m writing about the Neuroshima RPG because I strongly believe that the revolutionary approach we made regarding the language in this book… the way we wrote it… was an extremely important part of its success . Players loved to read it. Players immediately got engaged in the game and its world. Players would – they really would! – quote the book like some movie one-liners. They were posting ‘the best of’ quotes and sentences from the book. It was a blast for so many players.

Board game rulebooks are a whole different animal. They have much more in common with technical manuals for your new DVD player than with RPG books.

And yet, I’ve been struggling lately with the idea of making them more reader / geek friendly. I wonder what if instead of writing: “Each player draws 7 cards, chooses one to keep and passes the rest to the player on his left. Players repeat this process until every player has one card remaining. This card is kept along with all previously chosen cards.” I would just simply write: “Draft 7 cards. Friendly advice – choose the best of them and then crush your opponents.”

Wouldn’t it be cool to read rulebooks that are fun? Rulebooks that provide important information but don’t spend the time on explaining every stupid detail we all know? I mean, do we really need to read sentences like: “Put the board in the middle of the table so every player has a comfortable reach.”

I don’t know.

I have a well-earned reputation of a guy who was involved in extremely terrible rulebooks. I know that. I messed a lot. I am probably the last person who should talk about improving the way we write rulebooks. And yet, yes, I am struggling with this topic. And yes, I am trying a different approach. And yes, I want all of us to have better and better rulebooks.

I might try doing something crazy with the 51st State rulebook but before I do this, I’ll probably post some fragments on BGG and ask you guys for your opinion. Would you be interested in telling me that I should or shouldn’t take that route? Would you like rulebooks to be fun and engaging to read or you just want them to be extremely precise and you don’t care that they are boring as shit?

Please, give me your thoughts. Meanwhile, I’m going back to experiment with the 51st State rulebook…

Edited by Piotr, thank you.

Neuroshima RPG game is the most offensive book you’d ever read in your life if I ever went crazy and decided to translate it into English.

Don’t worry. I am not that crazy. I won’t translate it. Let me tell you a story, though. Its first part comes today, the second will follow on Wednesday…

***

So I was in my twenties and I had serious financial problems. Portal Games was a small company struggling to survive. I was in debt, I had bailiff problems, I had no money in my account and I had a ton of debts a ton of creditors to pay off. I was in serious trouble. We were publishing a magazine about RPGs, we were publishing some small indie RPG games, we were trying our best to earn money in the RPG industry but already owed printing houses a lot of money, and piles of unsold products were piling high in our storeroom.

It was 2002, for three years I had been facing constant financial problems, three years of enormous stress, sleepless nights, unpaid invoices and working 24/7 without a single break and without a single dollar in my account. It was September 2002 when I told my closest friend, Michal Oracz, that I was tired and I was ready to try one more time to live our dream but then I was done. We decided that Neuroshima RPG will be our last try.

“It’s going to be a success or we are done here.”

***

We were working like crazy. I was writing like a madman. After 16 weeks of working all days and nights long, with almost no sleep, we wrote a book of over 500 pages. Never before had I written so much great stuff in so little time – and I’ve never done it again. With the amazing ideas and imagination of Michal Oracz, with the amazing faction chapters by Marcin Blacha and with me being the best fucking RPG writer on this planet, we compiled an amazing book and finally, at the end of that year we had a printable version in our hands. It was unbelievable material, funny, provocative; full of ideas, adventure hooks, jokes; the way it was written made it different from each and every other RPG on the market.  It read like a damn good novel, you started reading page 1 and couldn’t put the book away until you finished the last page.

Trust me, I know how to write. And these were my best writing days. I fought for my dream come true.

I had no money to print it, though. We had the material, we did not have the money.

Do you want to know how people dealt with this problem before the KS? I had an honest heart-to-heart conversation with Michal Oracz. I told him that we’d print 3000 books. Back then, it was 3 times more than an average print run of an RPG book in Poland. We both knew that I had no money to pay for it and that the sum stated on the invoice will be too large to somehow just wriggle out of it. The plan was simple enough – I’d just order the books and pray for a miracle to happen. Either we created a bestseller that would be going like hot cakes, or we would be fucked, Portal Games would go bankrupt and our dreams would be over.

In late January I sent the files to the printing house knowing that that was it. I paid them a small amount of money in advance and didn’t tell them that it was all I had. That and my hopes. I knew that either this was going to be the best RPG out there, or I had just screwed up my whole life.

***

Guess what! Neuroshima RPG was a huge success. People were buying it like crazy. Within a few months we did a reprint. Over a couple of years it became the most popular RPG in Poland superseding D&D, Warhammer RPG, Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulhu. We wrote the best RPG in Poland.

I didn’t screw up my life. I have lived my dream.

to be continued…

edited by Piotr,

thank you Piotr!

If you have listened to or read any of the interviews I gave in the previous two or three years, you’ve probably noticed one thing. This one thing was – I was sending a message: ‘It’s just a beginning. It’s not started yet.’

I have a unique perspective – I am active here in the U.S., and I closely observe how the market grows and at the same time I work in Poland and I observe and analyze the Polish market. I run businesses in these two countries. It gives me a pretty interesting angle.

I know how many copies of Neuroshima Hex, Robinson Crusoe or Imperial Settlers I sell in Poland. I also know how many times the U.S. is bigger than Poland. And I also know how much more people earn here than in Poland.

In all interviews I am going to give this year I could repeat it over and over again. “It’s just a beginning. It’s not started yet”.

But actually I won’t. I have pretty exciting news for you. It’s started. Mark the date. January 2016.

We all saw it coming. Asmodee is the biggest company in our market. Lately it has been acquiring companies one after another. What is most important for all of us, Asmodee also acquired the rights to two titles: Spot it and Catan.

Does it mean Asmodee will come to Gen con, fight for customers with Portal Games, Strongold Games, Plaid Hat Games, and destroy us? Or does it actually rather mean that they are gathering forces to fight for new customers? To go to Target, Barnes & Nobles or any other sale market and bring new people to our hobby?

That biggest company in the hobby sent a clear message: “We are ready to bring new people to the industry. We have Catan. We have Spot it. We have Ticket to Ride. We have all these amazing gateway games. We have the knowledge and resources, and we will use them in the best way possible.”

I can’t wait to see what is going to happen in 2016. I know we geeks are super excited about the second season of Pandemic: Legacy. I know you can’t wait to hear about a new game by Stefan Feld. Hopefully some of you are also eager to see what game Mr. Trzewiczek is going to announce on 23rd January during a Portal Games convention. But these will be only small, minor [insignificant] releases of 2016 compared to what will happen in the whole year.

In 2016 boardgaming in the U.S. will explode.

I said it. You may quote me on this.

edited by Piotr. Thank you!