What could possibly go wrong?
This is a question we often ask ourselves when we’re trying something new at Stonemaier Games (or iterating on something we’ve already tried). How can we anticipate problems before they happen? Then, when the experiment or project is complete, we look back at what happened, why it happened, and how we can serve our customers better in the future. That’s called a postmortem.
I recently interviewed Nick Bentley at Underdog Games about Trekking the World Second Edition, and I reserved one of the topics we discussed for a future article (this one). Nick has implemented something called “premortems“, an in-depth examination of potential future failure, and I asked him to elaborate and provide an example. Here’s Nick with his insights:
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To create a premortem, you imagine possible futures in which your project has failed, and write down how it failed in each. As your project progresses, you regularly update the list of failure-scenarios as your understanding deepens.
It helps combat the optimism bias that tends to afflict creators. Here’s one that really got me:
Before we make a game, we usually start with a theme. Finding it starts with ideating hundreds of thematic concepts.
One theme we found that way, which we love, is “Great Women of History” – This eventually became our game Herstory.
Before we made it, I interviewed a bunch of target customers about their feelings regarding the topic.
I uncovered a pattern: some people would say “I really like the concept of this game, but I probably wouldn’t buy it because my [husband or son, usually] wouldn’t be into it.” This was to be a family game so that was an important use-case.
I heard it from a small minority of people, enough to notice that multiple people had said it, but not enough to think too much of it. I added it to my premortem but I was new to premortems and didn’t reflect heavily.
Later, after the game was published, I heard from a TON of customers that they weren’t able to play the game because someone in their family would essentially veto it because of the subject matter.
This in turn led me to study the ways games get vetoed, and led to a principle now enshrined in our principles document: Veto Avoidance.
In brief: multiplayer tabletop games aren’t like a lot of other products in that they need several people’s buy-in to do their most basic job: getting to the table. In family-gaming situations, it’s especially difficult because you don’t choose your family and members often have different interests and tastes. One veto can ensure a game isn’t played, and one anticipated veto can ensure a game isn’t purchased. You can read a short essay about it here.
I’m convinced one thing that makes Wingspan’s theme powerful is few veto birds, especially when presented as beautifully as Wingspan does.
Anyway, now I take premortems seriously. Even if I fail to address an item on a premortem well, it aids with learning and improving after the fact. It’s a win either way. It would be fun to return next year and compare Trekking the World 2nd Edition’s premortem with its postmortem (an essential step for us).
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Thanks Nick! If you’re curious to see what Nick and Underdog did with Trekking the World Second Edition, the Kickstarter launches on June 11.
There are three elements Nick mentioned that I’d like to elaborate on:
- Veto Avoidance: It’s really smart to ask why someone may choose not to play a game. I often think of this in terms of what might prevent a game from getting to the table. Setup time? A lack of player aids? It doesn’t play well at a specific player count? Check out our accessibility chart to see many categories to consider.
- A Multiverse of Failures: When we anticipate future problems, we have the choice either (a) to eliminate the source of the problem or (b) to mitigate the impact of the problem. For example, with Wyrmspan we anticipated that some people might think it’s just a reskin of Wingspan (a reskin is when the exact same mechanisms and abilities are used, with art and nomenclature being the only differences) despite there being a different designer on the box (a true reskin wouldn’t have a different designer), so we included a long list of gameplay differences in the rulebook and on our website. The key here is that I can’t prevent every mistake or misconception, but I can have a plan for most of them.
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Not every game is for every person. But whether they’re advisors or customers, if a person dismisses a game for a reason rooted (whether overt or subconscious) in a sexist or racist reason, that’s not feedback worth listening to. If my partner or gaming group vetoed Herstory due to the theme, that’s a problem with my partner or gaming group, not the game itself.
I think the best premortems are specific to the experiment, product, or project, but here are some general questions as a starting point:
- What if far fewer/more people want this than we anticipated?
- What if the art isn’t as good as we think it is?
- What if there are huge delays in production or shipping?
- What if the product is confusing, misunderstood, or frustrating?
- What if there’s something about the product that makes it difficult to use for the first time, any time, or in specific conditions?
- What if there’s an unexpected cost that has a significant impact on the price?
- What if there’s a gap or failure in our ecommerce systems that creates major headaches for our customers (and customer service team)?
- What complaints will customers have about the current version of the product?
As I was composing this list, I was reminded of a step we’ve added over the last few years that adds time to the schedule for any product but has been integral to decreasing potential issues: Even after all the playtesting we do for a game, we now also playtest the PPC (pre-production copy) as a team instead of just using it as a final examination of components before entering mass production. This often results in small-but-impactful changes to the product design (not the gameplay) that were nearly impossible to detect with prototype components.
What do you think about the concept of premortems? How have you used them in your profession?
Also read:
- Kickstarter Lesson #159: The Art of the Buffer
- No Designer, Publisher, or IP Is Foolproof
- Kickstarter Lesson #117: The 3 Funding Scenarios You Must Plan for
- The Big Question: What If This Actually Works?
- 3 Simple Steps to Learn If Your Art Is Good Enough for Kickstarter
If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content! You can also listen to posts like this in the audio version of the blog.
15 Comments on “Premortems: Back to the Future”
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Really interesting read (even though I’m not in the game design biz). That’s an interesting point Nick brought up about theme, namely because for my usual board gaming buds, theme is absolutely *not* a concern; they’re more into the gameplay mechanics. Any hard vetoes are rooted in those (like, they’ll always say ‘no’ if a game’s trivia or cooperative play). For theme they’re down for pretty much anything I put on the table. True, games with themes that click with their interests become favorites, but Wyrmspan and Pendulum are favorites even though they’re not into dragons or high fantasy (that’s my interest, lol!). Heck, we aren’t wine-drinkers, but I’m seriously considering Viticulture for my next Stonemaier purchase based on mechanics.
That being said, theme does hold some importance; I’m the primary purchaser and have passed over many a game because I know the theme won’t be received well, like horror, zombies, vampires, or my personal hardest pass, pandemics (I lived through one, why would I want to relive it?!?).
Thanks, Hazel! Let me know if you end up trying Viticulture. :)
Did HerStory not do well? I got it as a gift for my girlfriend and she absolutely loves it. It’s one of her favorites. It’s also one of the few games that’s accessible enough from a complexity and theme perspective that her Mom and all her friends can play it. She’s a librarian and intends to have a library event with it. She loves the library element of the theme as well.
Honestly I’m mortified if it didn’t do well because female gamers felt the men in their lives wouldn’t play it with them since they didn’t want to play a game celebrating famous influential women in history. We love reading the fun facts out loud to each other at the end. My girlfriend and I run the gambit of different complexities of games, but we really love and appreciate games that are fun and easy to teach to if family and new gamers. If HerStory didn’t do well because of the theme it’s not the product that needs to change, it’s the gamers. I expect more out of other male gamers to support the female gamers in their lives.
I’m glad you didn’t have your veto avoidance mind set at the time and made HerStory. I hope it makes you feel better knowing that it has connected many people that felt excluded by themes in board games and interested in gaming and education. It’s a really important game and I’m glad it exists. Please thank you so much.
Premortems are a critical part of Risk Management, and I’m surprised more people don’t implement some form of it, or even know about it.
In my day job, we have a very simple tool, what we call FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis), where you basically play a pessimist, and write down anything and everything that could fail ever, during or after the project, in any worse-case or best-case scenario.
Once you have the list, you assign 2 values: The first one is how probable it is that this particular scenario will happen (is it something that will only happen if everything goes wrong, or is it something that will most likely happen, even if you don’t know how bad or how prevalent). The second value is the impact – *IF* this happens, how bad will it be? Will you have to recall every product ever sold? Or is it something that will be solved simply by sending an email?
Both are graded 1-9 (but you can use any other scale).
Once you have both values, multiply them and get a number. By itself it doesn’t have much meaning, but it allows you to sort every possible future problem according to the actual impact, so you can FOCUS your efforts for solving/mitigating.
Sometimes we include a third value – spread. Is the risk related to one user/customer, or to everyone?
Anyway… as things are being mitigated, either the probability or the impact change, which makes this a live list of what to focus on next.
I find this the best way to handle risks. It’s impossible to mitigate everything that can happen, but if you don’t have a specific priority, it’s also hard to know which one to work on, and which risks are acceptable.
Thank you for sharing about FMEA, Ben! I like the use of two different values (and maybe 3).
Sounds a lot like Threat-Modelling from Security perspective. Definetly a good approach.
Thanks for allowing me to contribute to your blog Jamey! I love the general premortem list you provided. One item I’ve recently added to my general list: do player evaluation biases on the first play lead players to play the game in such a way that the game becomes boring? I’ve seen this sort of thing corrode the 1st play experience enough times that I think it should be on our list now. Important because a lot of people decide what they think about a game (and rate it) after that first play.
That’s a really interesting question! Really, any questions first impressions are great for premortems.
truth
I laughed when I read the bit about Wingspan likely not being vetoed because… birds. That’s exactly why we were late to the game, since my wife really doesn’t like birds. I finally bought it a year ago and “slipped” it into the rotation for a try… and now it’s one of our go-to games despite the birds ;-). The funny thing is that we’re far more into dragons as a theme but haven’t pulled the trigger on Wyrmspan because Wingspan is just that solid. Maybe someday when we’ve wrung every ounce of fun out of Wingspan.
Okay, more on point, I do think that that the #1 component to veto avoidance is theme. We may have been the exception on Wingspan (so many bird-lovers out there!), but I can’t count the number of games we won’t even consider because… Zombies or Pirates. I’m not sure publishers can avoid this – you have to pick SOME theme and you can’t win’em all – but it would be great if some more popular games were re-themed to open up more markets. This does happen a bit, but I wish it happened more.
And even more on point, I was in engineering leadership most of my career, and I can attest that premortems (which I think is just a nuance on classic “risk management”) are essential to successful projects. To the point of wondering why anyone doing any kind of project management wouldn’t do something similar? It’s pretty obvious when looking from the outside in whether a company is doing something like this – we see you Jamey and appreciate how smoothly things go at Stonemaier relative to most publishers.
Tony: I agree that among hobby gamers, the bird theme isn’t an auto-buy (that was actually a major reason why the first print run was only 10,000 units). But for those not as entrenched in the hobby, we’ve found it to be a universally appealing (or at least not unappealing) theme. :)
Tony Teshera’s comment, “it would be great if some more popular games were re-themed to open up more markets.” prompts my naive question. Would publishing a game (NOT by the copyright holder/publisher of the original game) with a new specific theme that plays exactly like a classic popular game be ethically acceptable, (quite apart from legally allowable)?
I think that would be frowned upon if the mechanisms were identical (and illegal if the text is identical).
Where does that put all those re-themed Monopoly games?
If there are any not published by the owners of Monopoly or their subsidiaries, perhaps there’s something about Monopoly (as an older game) that’s open source? I’m not sure about that specific case.