I got a chance to have a conversation HEX Game Designer Ben Stoll at GenCon. We discussed a wide range of topics including:
- Ben’s GenCon experiences throughout the years
- His thoughts on interacting with the KickStarter backers
- How much time he gets to play/test Hex, his favorite deck types and cards
- Some interesting thoughts on a number of game design-related areas:
- Resources, and what sets HEX apart
- Set 2 Sapphire Dragon
- The “ambush” mechanic
- Motivations for working on HEX
You can find the audio in this post. Here’s the full transcript:
Interviewer: Excellent. So, I’m here with -
Ben Stoll: Ben Stoll.
Interviewer: Ben, so how many GenCons have you been to?
Ben Stoll: Oh man. I don’t think I’ve missed a GenCon since I was 15 or so. This is at least 12 in a row. Maybe more.
Interviewer: Really?
Ben Stoll: Yeah.
Interviewer: In the past years, what’s been your highlight of all the ones before this one?
Ben Stoll: Sure. It’s funny because as I get older, it’s different. When I first came here, my first Gen Con, I remember I played Settlers of Catan. My dad showed it to me and I was, “This is amazing!” It was a new experience for me. I’ve always loved TCGs, miniatures games. Then there was a big period of my life where I was doing that, and what I was excited about was tournaments and things like that.
Recent years, to be honest with you actually, my favorite thing – of course I’m now working at Crypto, so it’s a different experience now. I love being here for getting to interface with our fans. People come up and they want to demo our games, and we want to show our products to people. Cryptozoic in general and me as well, very personally, we love the community and stuff like that. So getting to interface with people face-to-face.
If someone tells you they like your game, it’s the best feeling in the world. It’s like, you got to make someone happy by doing this sweet creative thing and making a game, it’s pure bliss. It’s like living the dream. That’s my favorite thing these days is people.
Then beyond that, I would say the art show. I love artists. I love playing to artists and I love buying – I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on art.
Interviewer: Really? What sort of things did you pick up?
Ben Stoll: This guy that I love, Tony Steel, he does these really cute takes on stuff, so I just bought five prints from him. I’m gonna do a little theme on a wall somewhere in my house or something. It’s Greek monsters, so he’s got a little cute Cyclops, a little sheep running around, a cute Medusa and a cute Hydra. They’re evil, but very cute. I love that kind of stuff, goofy, quirky stuff like that.
Interviewer: Excellent. What about this one in particular? HEX is new, you’ve been able to talk to people about it. What’s been the highlight of this Gen Con?
Ben Stoll: I would say the absolute highlight so far was last night, the Dragon Lord dinner was awesome because it was end of a long workday. Now we get to go have this super-good dinner, best dinner I’ve had here at this Con, and all of you guys are there, which is super-fun. I never want to shut up when I’m talking to you guys and I’m always, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I went on so long,” and then everybody’s always, “No, it’s okay, we wanted you to spill your guts.” So, I was, “Okay, great.”
I got to have a nice dinner, got to hang out with everybody, and it was lots of positive energy because we are the people on our end that love HEX the most and you are the people on your end that love HEX the most, so us all getting to hang out is amazing. So, yeah.
Interviewer: I agree, it was a lot of fun. It must have been six hours just flew by, it felt like 15 minutes.
Ben Stoll: Oh my God, I know. I could have stayed there literally all night. I was so sad they kicked us out. We were still hovering outside, even after the doors closed, for a while. It was great.
Interviewer: Is there anything non-Cryptozoic that you’ve tried to do at the Con? Was there any game you were interested in seeing?
Ben Stoll: Let me see. Man, normally what I do is I just walk the floor, and there’s not always something ahead of time that I’ve necessarily picked out because I usually just do it on the fly. So no, there was no product I came here specifically, to be perfectly honest, and was, “I have to test this thing out.”
I usually just walk the floor, feel it out, demo as much as I can. We did the publisher speed-dating thing the other night. That was awesome and that kind of took the place of that for me this year.
Interviewer: What was that?
Ben Stoll: It was such a great idea. Basically, a bunch of publishers – we teamed up with – oh my gosh, with – what are those guys called? It doesn’t matter, I’m sorry. Sorry guys that I was about to plug ’cause you guys are awesome and I can’t remember who you are – but the publishers went table to table and everybody gave a five-minute game design pitch for their game.
These are unpublished game designers largely. One guy had been published previously, but for the most part, these are the people that are trying to get their game design career off the ground. So, they pitch their game for five minutes to us and we follow up with the people that we’re interested in. That was a lot of fun.
Interviewer: You probably go to a lot of other Cons as well. Is this the best one? Is there another one you like?
Ben Stoll: Oh yeah. I love Cons, period, but I can snap answer that Gen Con is my favorite Con by far. It always has been. It’s my favorite four days out of the year. It’s better than Christmas.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about game design a little bit.
Ben Stoll: Yeah.
Interviewer: We had a really interesting conversation last night about resources and the availability of resources in TCGs. I was wondering whether or not you could talk about what you discussed last night, like why you think the HEX is -
Ben Stoll: Resource system is good?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Ben Stoll: Yeah. You mean, just go over some of that? Yeah, sure. A resource system has a lot of functionality. Many TCGs have some sort of mechanic tied to how you play the cards. The thing I like about a progressive resource system – there’s a lot.
For one thing, a progressive resource system lends the game to an arc. So, the game experiences more texture because as the game progresses; the things that we’re doing become more impactful. When I start out, I’m putting little troops into play and playing minor actions. As the game progresses, though, if I make it ’til Turn Six, either one of two things is happening. I don’t have any six drops in my deck ’cause I’m super-aggressive and you’re almost dead, so there’s lots of attention and excitement. Or I am a slower deck and I’m putting down some powerful six cross dragon and he’s gonna put you in a world of pain. So, I like that.
On a related note, the thing I like particularly about something like HEX’s resource system is because there’s enough consistency that you get a good, strategic consistent-feeling experience, but there’s enough variance that the game is not gonna play out the same way every time. There’s a lot of tension on, “Am I gonna get that resource when I need it? Is my opponent going to?” It doesn’t have to be as extreme as getting “resource screwed,” it’s no, if my opponent just stalls a little bit and doesn’t play that fifth resource on Turn Five, that’s still a big deal. When he’s drawing that card off his deck, there’s a lot of tension and importance in what that card’s gonna be.
Beyond that, HEX’s resource system is deliberately designed to take advantage of the fact that HEX is a digital game. So, the resource system is extremely streamlined. It gets out of your way. There’s no messing with turning resource cards sideways and, “Oh, I turned the wrong one sideways,” and “Did I play a resource this turn? I can’t remember.” All that stuff is eliminated.
You play your resource card, it disappears forever, it’s gone, and you just got this nice, little, simple, clean, digital interface that’s telling you, “You have this many resource points. This is your threshold.” So yeah, I’m actually very big on HEX’s resource system.
Interviewer: Then, we were talking about how the charge powers are a way to serve and insure against resource flood.
Ben Stoll: Yes, sure, I’ll go on about that. Yeah, as we all know though, of course, despite the fact that I’ve just touted variance in resource system as actually being fun – which it is – and I believe it just is, whether people know it or not. I think a lot of people that say, “Well, I hate getting screwed” and all this stuff, it’s like well, you think you hate it, you kind of do. But how fun would poker be if your pocket aces never got busted, right? It would stink.
But anyways, HEX’s resource system recognizes that TCG players can hate this, and it can be really miserable. It is true that the worst thing is sitting there, discarding a card at the end of your turn every turn ’cause you can’t play your cards. You signed up to play the game; you didn’t sign up to discard the dragon every turn. So, the way HEX’s resource system is I believe actually alleviates this issue and hits just the sweet spot as compared to certain other TCGs.
So, there’s a few things. In HEX, you have a charge power, and the more resources you play, that’s the major way to get charges. There’s other ways, too. So, you’re incentivized already to play more resources. What this does is it incentivizes you to potentially play more resources in your deck than you would in, say, in a game where you have to risk a resource being a dead draw.
In HEX, you never have that risk. A resource is always live. It always does something useful. In fact, sometimes drawing that eighth resource means you just got to put a 6 / 6 squirrel titan into play because of your charge power. So, it’s very the opposite of that eighth resource being a dead draw. Which, we all know a dead draw feels like it sucks, too. So, you’re already incentivized to play more resources.
Because of that, there are two things. One, it’s less bad when you draw a ton of resources because of the stuff I just went on about. And also, because you’re playing potentially more resources, you are less likely to get screwed because there’s more resources in your deck. And beyond that, the one last cute thing I’ll throw in because it is important is the way the thresholding system works, sometimes in a TCG when you draw that resource that you really need, it still doesn’t really get you out of the jam ’cause you’re sitting there with a bunch of cards in your hand. All of a sudden drawing a resource, now you’ve got the ability to play those cards, but you can still only play one of them at a time.
In HEX, because of the way the thresholding system works, I rip that Ruby resource, I now have a Ruby threshold, suddenly all the Ruby cards in my hand are live, and so suddenly I’m right in the game now. I just got to totally catch up, and that’s a very exciting, fun moment. Not like, “Oh, I’m slightly less getting run over than I was before.” That’s my long spiel about the resource system.
Interviewer: Yeah, and compared to the experience over the last few days, it does feel like you’ve got something to do. There have been lots of games where I would traditionally have been resource-screwed, but you can still do a lot of things with two or three resources, especially in some of the Aggro decks.
Ben Stoll: Cool.
Interviewer: I’m interested in whether or not you have a pet card or mechanic in Set One that you were sad about?
Ben Stoll: Oh yes, I am. This card I really liked. It was really fun and it was very digital, and I have been told that we can do it later, but of course our tech guys are working hard. We got priorities, we got to get Alpha out to you guys, we got to get Beta out, we got to get the whole thing out.
Chris Woods, who’s our lead tech guy, he’s so good. He’s told me no almost never. This maybe, in fact, was the only sweet rare that I wanted to put in that he said, “Listen, it’s gonna make everything easier if you hold off on this one.” And I said, “Okay.” But what it was – and he was, “You may see it in the future.” So, a potential free spoiler, who knows?
He was a Coyotle. The Coyotle, they are experts in trapping and ambushing and things like that. So, he was a Coyotle Ambusher. What he was is, you could play him at quick speed any time you could play a quick action. Normally, you can’t play troops on your opponent’s turn. This guy you could.
But, even beyond that, you could play him when he was on top of your deck as though he was in your hand. You could see that he was on top of your deck, but your opponent can’t. So, your opponent might be sitting there and going, “Oh my opponent’s got no cards in his hand. He’s got nothing in play. I’m totally good just to have a free pass and attack over.” And then you’re, “Nope, Coyotle Ambusher off the top of my deck. Block.”
Interviewer: That sounds like a lot of fun.
Ben Stoll: Yeah.
Interviewer: That would be interesting. How many things didn’t get into Set One just because you didn’t have time to do the tech implementation of it?
Ben Stoll: Like I said, actually very few. That was the only one I could actually think of off the top of my head. I feel like maybe there were a couple other cards, but the thing is is the reason why HEX is gonna be so great, partially is because of all this cool digital stuff we get to do. We’ve known since Day One we want to be able to do every last funky, awesome, crazy, creative thing we can think up. In general, there wasn’t much. We got to do pretty much almost everything we wanted to do, yeah.
Interviewer: Excellent. I think I know the answer to this question, but probably other people don’t. What is your favorite deck type, archetype?
Ben Stoll: Gosh, I have so many favorites, I feel bad not mentioning any of – I love all the racial decks a lot. There’s lots of stuff you can do besides building a deck that’s centered around one of the main races, but those are all a lot of fun, I think. My favorite one of those is the Dwarf deck.
The Dwarves are, you’ll notice – or maybe you won’t, maybe – but you might notice that the Dwarf troops in general are small. They’re not big bruisers, like some of the other tribes. They can even be expensive for one attack two defense dudes and stuff like that. But their whole thing is, they recruit artifact troops to go to war for them, and they work together and tinker with artifacts and make all kinds of crazy stuff happen. The Dwarves get to do a lot of funky, weird stuff the other guys don’t get to do, and they’re a lot of fun.
Interviewer: When you’re designing cards or trimming the set or whatnot, how do you stop your personal preferences from influencing the set?
Ben Stoll: This is part of your maturation process as a game designer. Especially us ones that are very creative and we’re actually thinking up the crazy ideas, we have to really keep ourselves in check. Even myself included, there have been times where it’s just like I can tell that I’m getting too married to my own idea and Dan has to be, “No, we are putting this to rest. This is not acceptable. You are out of your mind.”
Then I will start to think about it and I go, “Yeah, and he’s probably right. Also, I’m probably championing this not because it’s right, but because I’ve got a little soft spot in my heart for it.” So, you just have to learn that about yourself and pay attention, and we do a pretty good job with that at Crypto, yeah.
Interviewer: You don’t need to tell me what they are, but are we going to see brand new mechanics in either Set One or Set Two that we’ve never heard of before?
Ben Stoll: Ah, interesting. I’m trying to think – I’m not sure -
Interviewer: ’Cause all of the mechanics we know about so far are traditional TCG mechanics, for the most part.
Ben Stoll: Oh yeah, of course, now I think about it. Yeah, Set One or Set Two, you said?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Ben Stoll: Yeah, both. There’s tons of new stuff in Set Two that no one’s ever seen, and also though, there is some stuff in Set Two that is a really sweet next level of progression of some awesome stuff you’ll see in Set One. So some of the stuff in Set One that people are already going crazy over, we take it to the next level in Set Two. But yeah, there’s also gonna be a few totally brand new things in Set Two.
In Set One a lot of the mechanics, because we spoil lots of different stuff and we’re trying to show different angles, some of the major keywords and stuff you’ve probably seen most of already, like there’s not another Inspire, where there’s something that’s across 20 cards. I think you guys have seen most of the major things like that, but there is lots of smaller stuff that you guys haven’t seen. Really cool escalations of five-card cycle. We have some stuff that’s in that space where there’s five cards that are all cool in a certain way people haven’t seen, lots of individual one-off designs that do funky digital stuff that no one’s seen yet ’cause we didn’t want to spoil everything ahead of time. We want it to still be sweet when you open the set. So, there’s still plenty of new stuff, yeah.
Interviewer: So, you basically spoiled the Zeedu, Sapphire Dragon (Set 2) last night. Who’s card was that? That was something you thought up? Someone else?
Ben Stoll: Yeah, that was me, yeah.
Interviewer: What was the thought behind it?
Ben Stoll: Well, part of the thought behind it was the dragons. There’s gonna end up being at least – what we have planned right now for right now, there’s one major dragon in each of the shards. We want each dragon to also be very representative of its shard. So Jadiim the Wild Dragon, that dude is just about the biggest, baddest dude on the block. He is monstrous.
That’s what Wild is partially about. It’s like we have big dudes that are fighting and turning sideways and bashing you down, and our troops are very powerful and they get buffed, and that’s – Jadiim’s all of that stuff. So, for Sapphire, Sapphire is very much about, I want to take control of the situation. How can I strategically optimize this to be as perfect as possible?
So, the Sapphire Dragon is very much about you’ve got very many options because when he does his thing and you choose a cost and you create a bunch of copies of the cost of that card in your hand and in play, well, between your hand and in play you’re probably gonna have many different costs going on. So, although the other cute thing you can do with them is to be, I’m building the all four cost stack up, of course, but otherwise when he connects, you have to be very strategic and most of the dragons are just like, “Here I am. You better stop me or you’re a dead man.” Zeedu forces you to think, and that’s a very Sapphire thing to do, so.
Interviewer: Right. ‘Cause presumably, you’re also thinking if you’ve got one in your hand, you’re thinking about what you’re gonna hold in your hand to maximize the value of his ability, once you play him and he gets a hit in.
Ben Stoll: Absolutely.
Interviewer: Then, you’ve been doing HEX for, what, two and a half years now, is it still fresh? Are you still as excited about it as you might have been back in the beginning?
Ben Stoll: Yeah.
Interviewer: It’s really new to us, but it’s not very new to you, so.
Ben Stoll: So, it’s funny. I’ll be honest. I’ll tell you, there’s a progression here. Right now, I’m actually more excited than I’ve ever been because working on Set Two has been this reinvigoration of joy ’cause we spent so long on Set One. But anyways, right now I’m super-excited. Working on Set Two is great. Seeing the PV stuff starting to finally become also really polished and awesome is great.
Then, of course, Gen Con in particular. This weekend is actually the most excited I’ve ever been because we’re showing it now for the first time. Well, not showing it, but people are playing it for the first time. Any time there’s a moment like that, it’s super-exciting. When the Kickstarter was going on, super-exciting. In the very beginning, also super-exciting. But I will, of course, be honest and admit there was a period of time in there where it’s just, we’re 16 months in. I’ve been slaving away, grinding away.
Interviewer: You’re not sure it was going anywhere?
Ben Stoll: Right. All of us really believe in the game, but we don’t have any external validation yet. We’re just, “I fricking hope banging our head against this thing to make it perfect is actually worthwhile. I don’t know.” Because we thought it was gonna be good, but when the Kickstarter goes up, you don’t know. Everybody’s still crossing their fingers and stressing out.
There was a period of time in there where for sure, I felt burned out. It’s a lot of work. That’s a long time for me. I know video games in general have long development cycles. I’m not used to quite such a long development cycle as HEX is personally as a hobby game designer historically. So, there was definitely a period of time there where I was burned out, we were all worried and kind of stressed. But that time is over now. We’re pumped again, so yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah, it must be exciting to see basically 16 games happening every 10 or 15 minutes and going really smoothly, in the scheme of things.
Ben Stoll: Absolutely.
Interviewer: Well, thank you for the time, Ben.
Ben Stoll: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, man.
Interviewer: We appreciate you taking the time out of your day.
Ben Stoll: Totally. It was fun.
[End of Audio]