Episode seven features the game Discount Salmon, a simple, speedy card game where players compete to save the most fish from a contaminated lake. The game is designed by Cara Heacock and Marcus Ross.

Marcus and Cara can be reached on twitter at @marcusross and @caraheacock, as well as @waterbeargames. For more about them, check their interview with Jared Rosen below where they discuss pre-game games, the role of humor in design, and medieval European tax policy. Yes, really.

JR: Where are you guys at personally, and with the design [of Discount Salmon], since the filming of Deathmatch?

Cara: We didn’t do a whole lot else with the artwork, but did end up working on the design to make some of the cards clearer; to make sure people always knew what each card did. We continued to do a lot of playtesting with our friends, and we really think we’ve ironed out some of the things that were wrong at the time that we presented. I dunno. What do you think, Marcus?

Marcus: I mean, we’ve definitely refined the cards and made them easier to play with. That said a lot of what you see that we presented made it through to the final game. The artwork is 95% of what it was [in the episode].

Cara: I feel like the artwork is about the same. Just that design change to make it clearer. But it’s virtually the same game.

JR: Which brings me to my next question: Fish. Why?

Cara: We have been doing Waterbear Games since September 2012, at an event called Start-Up Weekend. Start-Up Weekend is basically… you have Friday through Sunday to start a business. We decided to start Waterbear Games there, and the free T-shirts that we were given were given were this kind of… gaudy orange color?

Marcus: It was terrible. Awful.

Cara: Marcus decided the color was called Discount Salmon. It had a good ring to it! So we decided to make that into a game.

Marcus: We were saying, “Why would anyone discount salmon?” And we just ran with it.

JR: I mean, clearly it worked. The judges seemed to love the idea the second they heard the pitch.

Cara: It was nice to get laughter when we were doing our pitch for the game. That was a good reaction.

Marcus: It had gotten to the point where I forgot the game was actually funny. It was like, “Oh, right, jokes. We put those in this.”

JR: How long had you been working on it prior to coming into Deathmatch?

Cara: We came up with the idea in September 2012, but didn’t start working on it until around January of the following year. When did we have to turn in the game?

Marcus: I don’t know, but I remember we put in our entry on the last day.

Cara: Oh man, right. The game we were going to enter, that we hadn’t finalized all the mechanics for, was called Volcano Sacrifice.

Marcus: Because sacrifice is so much fun!

Cara: The idea is that you throw wheat and animals into a volcano to try and change the weather. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we just never finished it. So were like, well, Discount Salmon is pretty much done. We’ll just use that.

Marcus: Later I saw [The Downfall of Pompeii] and the mechanics are similar enough that we’d have gotten dismissed. So I’m glad it turned out this way!

JR: As far as making a pre-game game, what are some of the things you have to take into consideration as opposed to designing a longer board game?

Marcus: First thing – people want to get into that game as soon as possible and start having fun. Get the rules out of the way, get the mechanics down, and start having fun. I’ve played a lot of games where you can get through all the rules in about a minute. They’re very good at creating quick experiences where you can play nine or ten games before the night starts, and they’re all good, and they’re all unique, and they’re all fun experiences. That’s hugely important.

Cara: So basically, simple rules that are fast to explain.

JR: And when the judges are talking about avoiding potential gridlocking situations, how much playtesting do you generally need to see situations like that emerge?

Cara: Man, I dunno. It’s hard to quantify.

Marcus: You just playtest until it works.

Cara: We started out playing exclusively against each other, because whenever we make a game we play it against one another first to make sure it’s fun for us. And the first time we played Discount Salmon we knew we had something cool. So we started testing it out with our families, with our friends. Small groups and large groups, different ages, just getting a really big sample size to see how people reacted and quantify how many people this would work with. We also got a big variety of ages.

Marcus: The original concept for the game was a lot more complicated than the one we have now. Each problem [with the fish] had three or four fixes based on a quality level, and it just got to a point where it was getting so overcomplicated that it wasn’t fun anymore. I think the original deck had something like three hundred cards in it. So really by paring down and simplifying we were able to fix a lot of the issues almost as a matter of course. Think of it like this: What’s the simplest, lightest version of this game we can make that still gets the point across and is still fun? Because that’s the version that we want.

Cara: For example, we had the card for ugly. You could fix it with lipstick, you could fix it with blush, you could fix it with the dress, I don’t know. But all of them had too many fixes, and it was too confusing for most people. So we just kept the funniest fix and moved on.

JR: How do you work that humor into a card game like this?

Cara: I dunno, I feel like it’s hard to… not? I feel like its more fun to work on it if it’s funny. Most of the games we make, we don’t take the concept too seriously. Maybe that’s just the games we gravitate towards.

Marcus: It a game is still funny in three days, we keep it.

Cara: I guess we’re just too goofy to make a serious game.

Marcus: Plus, she won’t animate it if it’s not funny. I mean, if it doesn’t have some kind of interesting element, how are we going to get people to play our game? Why would they not play something else instead? There’s a difference between a game you can play for laughs and… you know… ‘The Terrifying Tax Laws of Medieval Europe.’

JR: I would play Terrifying Tax Laws of Medieval Europe.

Cara: That actually sounds really funny. See, we just can’t make serious games!

JR: Thinking about how people consume games, how do you think humor pulls people out of the genres they tend to entrench themselves in? What’s a good way to break habits and get people to try these new titles?

Marcus: It’s all in the name. You can say, “I’ve got a game called Discount Salmon. It’s about defective fish,” and they’re like, “What?!” There’s a draw right away. And then you can explain, you can give it a try. You’re in the door, as it were.

Cara: As a casual game, it won’t take very long to teach. It won’t take very long to play. If it’s less daunting people will generally give you a little bit of their time.

Marcus: With a bigger game you need balance, you need to fine tune everything, and with Discount Salmon we were able to really get down to having fun as quickly as possible.

JR: How many prototypes have you gone through, exactly, since founding Waterbear?

Cara: Oh, geez. Our first game was Cat Quest.

Marcus: We used that when we first pitched the company to investors, so that was kind of nuts.

Cara: There was Nom Nom Pretzel, which was for a convention hosted by a family with the last name Pretz. There was Volcano Sacrifice, there was Fancy Hats.

Marcus: There was Prancing Alpacas. Probably about a dozen games.

JR: Wow, you went right to investor pitches after founding the company?

Marcus: Hah! Oh yeah. When I first wanted to do board games I realized that I had zero artistic ability. No one would want to invest in anything I put down on pencil and paper. So I was like… “Cara, you busy?”

Cara: He talked me into going to Start-Up Weekend as an artist. Before that I wasn’t too into the board game culture, but gradually I’ve gotten pretty involved in it.

Marcus: We have a friend out here who just opened a board game café, and he literally has a thousand games. Literally, one thousand games. So we’ve both been exposed to a ton of games since. And that’s fun, and we’ve gotten a whole circle of friends out of it, but you really need to know what’s out there before you get into design. We learned that right away. You can’t just jump in most of the time – you absolutely have to play a ton of board games.

JR: Back to the convention – did you agree with how everything shook out during Deathmatch? The judges’ comments, the filming, how it all went down?

Marcus: We weren’t actually planning to go to Gen Con when we made finalists, actually! It ended up being kind of hectic, but it was still so cool. As many of us as we could got together one day and met at a bar, and we got some of our most valuable critiques from everyone playing it there.

Cara: Man, it was really nice to play with people who also made games. And Fart Party was surprisingly fun!

Marcus: Meeting everyone was nice. Everyone from the show was cool.

Cara: Trin [of Cards Against Humanity] was making fun of us for getting along so well during a deathmatch.

Marcus: I even got to play a game on the table they use for Tabletop. It was nuts!

JR: Any advice for up and coming board game designers?

Cara: Playtest a LOT! Get other people’s opinions and be sure not to live inside your own head with what you think is gonna be fun.

Marcus: And get started. We can procrastinate with aplomb. But really getting something down on paper where you can test it out, that’ll be a lot more valuable than thinking about it, talking about, asking a friend. Just put it down and start working it. P for Prototypes!

Cara: It also helps to have a partner. It helps to have another person to hold you accountable. Right now I’m in school, so we can’t do it as much, but before we’d meet once a week to go over the direction of the games and the company.

Marcus: Yeah, definitely wouldn’t have kept this up if Cara hadn’t made me. She’d be like, “Hey, what are we doing about the company this week?” And I’d be like, “This week? But we met last week! That’s just as good!”

Cara: Another thing that helps is to enter your games into competitions. If we hadn’t entered Deathmatch we’d just be working on Discount Salmon very insularly. So get it out there.

Marcus: Don’t be afraid of harsh judgment. They’re judging your game, not you.