Good morning. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

With me today is one of my regular panel, Julian Rabbit Murdoch. Good morning. Julian, thanks for putting up of us here at your house. I love recording when it's actually in my house. I just roll out of bed, get some coffee, and I'm ready to go. It makes it easier for me, too, because when, you know, I fuck up as badly as I fucked up this week... Actually, no, it's not my fault.

I blame all of you guys for not playing Scourge of War.

And... you know, I fuck up as badly as I fucked up this week. Well, actually, no, it's not my fault. I blame, I'll blame all of you guys for not playing Scourge of War. And, uh, much promised Civil War episode? You know, I'm going to stop promising that. Okay? Like, it's going to happen. What's going to happen? Uh, it turns out it's very hard to schedule things with brain surgeons who are traveling to universities across the country to give lectures.

We are also joined by our old friend and formerly of Hasbro, now president of Ironwall Games,

Rob Davio.

Good morning.

Rob, welcome back to the show.

Thank you very much.

So sort of apropos of some of the things that we've been discussing this weekend as we talk about,

you know, you're a new game company and some of the challenges you're undertaking is you try to, you know, plan your first games and design your first games. Something is, you know, clearly, you know, sort of on your mind is, you know, issues of manufacturing and components. And it's also been something that's occurred to me with some of the games I've been playing lately, like, Elemental, what degree to like game enhancements game components contribute to our overall enjoyment and perception of a game and so I kind of wanted to you know just sort of start off

with you you know what's your approach to like component quality what are some of the

tradeoffs that you know you're concerned about when you're you, conceiving of how a board game's going to work?

Or even theme.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's interesting.

For 14 years, I was playing with Hasbro's money, right?

But they kept a very big watch on it.

You know, it's like part of my job as a game designer was not only make the game fun, but also what are the components, you know, what are the pieces, what are the plastics?

And you run cost after cost after cost to make it profitable. So a big part of my job was how it was manifested. Now I'm playing with my money. And I'm still months at least away from making these hard decisions and I have the experience

and I know the connections in Hong Kong and actually the Hasbro Manufacturing Plant right

near my house still is thinking about opening up and publishing games for anyone.

Oh, cool.

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