Steve Thomas: Gene, welcome back to the podcast.
Gene Ambaum: Hey, Steve. How you doing?
Steve Thomas: Good. So you’ve been on a couple times before. You and Bill, when you were doing Unshelved, were like the second guests on the podcast way back…
Gene Ambaum: Oh, wow, really?
Steve Thomas: And then you and Willow were on for Library Comic a couple of years ago. But, right now, mostly having you on to get an update on what’s going on with Library Comic and stuff, but also the big thing is your Kickstarter for Library Game. So let’s start with that. Where did the idea of doing a Library Game come from?
Gene Ambaum: I play a lot of board games, a lot of card games. I’m always buying new card games, new board games, driving my wife insane. We have to learn new rules. We have to learn a new game. I really like game mechanics. I like kinda simpler games that have one mechanic or two and I’m always trying to go, “oh, would that mechanic work in a game about libraries?” And so I’m always jotting down ideas about that kind of stuff.
I guess this is the third game Willow and I have made together, but the second one we’ve published. The second one is still in development. It’s taking some extra work, and I don’t know if it’s ever gonna see the light of day. But this one kind of settled into a problem patrons versus library staff kind of game.
So I love 5 Crowns. It’s been a game that we’ve played since I think the mid-’90s with people. It’s really easy to teach people. It’s kind of a rummy style game. And a different card goes wild each hand until you’ve played, I think it’s 10 hands, 10 or 11, hands that you play total. And a different card is wild each hand, and it’s a five-suited deck of cards. And I thought, oh, I like that. So I ended up with a five-suited deck of poker cards and just kinda started playing with that idea.
We started prototyping a couple years ago and as Willow drew the problem patron cards and the library staff cards, I was kinda trying to work out what they did. And I settled on the problem patrons being able to break the rules in certain ways when they’re played and to grab cards from people who’ve played cards already or from different places in the deck or the draw pile.
And the decks, we call the decks the Stacks. There’s two draw decks that are the Stacks. And the goal of the game is to check out, and the problem patrons keep you from checking out. And there are ultra mean ways to play with the problem patrons and then there are nicer ways too. I’ve tried to make different rule sets and different amounts of problem patrons and librarians. And so at the end, Willow just drew and ended up with all these great, like the library staff cards are all based on Library Comic characters. But the problem patron cards Willow just drew and I realized in my brain the problem patrons always outnumber the staff somehow. That seems to be the way the ecosystem worked where I worked for a long time.
And so these cards are all available. We recommend playing with a certain number depending on how many players you’re playing with and what kind of game you wanna run. But you can dump all 10 problem patron cards and all nine library staff cards into the deck at the same time if you want just absolute chaos in the game.
I think it ends up being really fun. But the Library Game Kickstarter has all the details of this and a couple of shots of the cards. I didn’t put all the cards in there ’cause I didn’t wanna spoil the surprise of opening the deck. There’s a couple of the problem patron cards that are just so funny but I think they’re gonna be funnier if you see them when you open the deck instead of seeing them in the kind of the montage of hands that we have on there.
I’m just really excited. I’m just really excited about it. I’m excited that people are excited about it.
Steve Thomas: I don’t like it necessarily when I’m looking at a Kickstarter for a game sometimes and they show every single thing and it’s like I do like being excited. ‘Cause like even with this game or any kind of card game that I get, whether it’s Kickstarter or anything, I don’t usually go flipping through the cards so I can see what every single card looks like. I look at the rules and I might look at an example of something to make sure I understand what it looks like. But I like being surprised when I’m playing. To me it’s like going through and reading all the Trivial Pursuit cards ahead of time.
Gene Ambaum: My friends and I were playing a monthly game of a game called Oath, which is by one of my favorite game designers Cole Wehrle. And Oath is this amazing game that kind of has a memory. You keep parts of the board intact based on who won the last game, and they become the ruler who’s defending in the next game. But there’s so many different cards and so many different suits, and you take out randomly a few of the cards and put in randomly a few of the cards that you haven’t been using into the deck each round. And we make it a point of not looking at what we’re doing so that we’re always shocked by the powers of the cards. It’s a fantasy medieval times theme. But I find that really fun and I think that really influenced me in not putting those in the Kickstarter.
Although like you, I see everybody who’s like, “Oh, the components on this are so cool so I’m gonna show you everything,” and I totally get that. But I’m pretty comfortable with where everything is at right now. I’m still hoping it’s gonna go higher. Like we’ve got one stretch goal which is for a patch for each backer. It’s like a limited edition book cart patch, and it’s our flaming book cart with the rainbow colors on the flames and everything. And so I think that’s gonna happen.
But like I told you, this thing just takes over my brain, it takes over my brain in a weird way and so I just can’t stop thinking about the logistics every day.
Steve Thomas: Does that make it weird now that it’s actually out in the world? Is it still in your brain in the same way?
Gene Ambaum: Not the game development. I thought people would have a lot more questions about the game as the campaign went on. I think maybe they’ll come as people start playing it a little bit and we’ll get more suggestions, more rule sets. ‘Cause I think having the input of everybody who’s playing it will be different than just having me and the people who I’ve play tested it with playing it.
But yeah, right now it’s the logistics of the fulfillment that are taking my brain over instead of the game. I was so glad when it funded ’cause I was like, “Oh, good. This is gonna happen now. Now I don’t have to worry about that.” And that happened almost immediately. That happened, I think, in 45 minutes. My friend Shannon emailed me to tell me. So that was fantastic. And now we’re getting close to the stretch goal which is at 300 backers we’re gonna do that, but probably a little bit before that.
And yeah, I don’t know. Now I’m just… I spent yesterday in my garage kind of making sure the fulfillment area is ready and, like, where’s everything gonna go and where am I gonna store the decks of cards when I get them and how much other stuff do I need and do I need to get ahead of that?
We did the Lego card catalog and book drop and stuff. And because this is a pre-order situation, I can afford to give a better price on that for people who are backing this but I’m like, “Oh, I need to get a start on that,” ’cause I actually have to assemble those myself in the garage. How much time is that gonna take? And then I have to order the parts from the people who sell used parts here and there. And yeah, so it’s just in my head right now.
And before I was gonna sit here and like think about, “Oh, how can I be really coherent talking about the game?” But as I sit here I’ve just got a page of notes that I’m making about what I need to do today in the garage and tomorrow and into next week.
Steve Thomas: ‘Cause I imagine you’ll set up like an assembly line basically once everything gets there and you package this and package that. And I don’t know if you have spreadsheets of different backer levels?
Gene Ambaum: I use a product called BackerKit which costs a percentage of the campaign and then the funds raised afterwards. But it lets people add things and it lets shipping be closer to real shipping as well. I don’t wanna make money on shipping, I just want to charge people what it actually costs. But it also lets people like add stuff and look at their cart and see did my shipping go up or not, which I think is much more fair. If I do Kickstarter add-ons I can’t do that live. So it’s like I get all these emails and messages going, “Why didn’t you do this?” And I’m like, “Oh, it’s just because I think this works out better,” but I’m terrible at explaining all these things. And I don’t know how much anybody wants to know, right? ‘Cause it’s just me in my own head, so yeah.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Like Kickstarter has added late pledges, so you can do a little bit but not really to the granular level that stuff like BackerKit’ll do I guess.
Gene Ambaum: Yeah. Yeah. And every time I run one of these things again, like everything has changed just enough that I have to now evaluate all these other choices. So I end up in these big like texting chains or email message chains with support staff just saying “Which of these is best for me?” And yeah, so there’s a lot of back and forth, but I really like using this part of my brain. It’s about once a year I get to use this part of my brain, I guess twice a year ’cause when I start to plan for conferences I have to do this too. It’s a little wild and weird, and there’s so many details that I’m like I’m also asking myself all the time like, “What did I miss? What did I totally forget this time?”
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you’re always coming up with, like you’ve done the collection of comics before, but you’ve done a lot of different types of Kickstarters before with the game now and the previous game and patches and all kinds of things. Is that just a fun part of using a different part of your brain than just writer?
Gene Ambaum: It’s strange, right? Like I think about myself like my business is indirect now. Like I use the proceeds from all the sales of stuff to support the comics habit. I don’t wanna do Patreon or something like that. I’d rather come to people and be like, “Oh, if you like my comics, maybe you’ll like my sensibility about this thing,” and some subset of you will support it.
It’s for me, like when newspapers sell advertising. Like a friend of mine who’s a journalist and I used to, as newspapers the business went down, I was like, “Yeah, but you’ve never had people directly support your content. They’ve always indirectly supported it because they wanted to find out about garage sales,” right? But I realized I’ve done the same thing to myself where I’m like, oh, people are like really willing to support the other ideas I have for related games or the Read Something deck back in the day or pins or whatever, and if it’s in the same space they’re much more likely to support it. And from these campaigns, I get people who come in and start checking out the comics too, so it’s always everything helps each other a little bit.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I imagine some of that stuff I know everybody generally who’s doing Kickstarters you wrap it into your budget that you get extras so that you can have extras that you can sell later. The Kickstarter people probably get a better deal on it but later on you can still sell it. And that ties into what you said. Your other big thing every year is conferences too, so you can take these pins and this game and things to your conference table and not just have a collection of comics there, but you can also have other stuff to sell, pins especially, I think, at conferences tend to go well, I think.
Gene Ambaum: Pins and games and stuff, and like you just have to have something interesting on the table ’cause I think there’s a lot of people selling T-shirts now, but it’s like, does anybody else have the vision board that I made a couple years ago for trying to figure out what you’re gonna read next. I’m like, nobody else has that sitting on their table. So even if I only sell three, it’s at least something we can come up and talk about and chat, and then I can get you to sign up for my comics or, just kinda get the pitch.
So yeah, it’s fun and weird and slightly indirect, but it’s definitely scratching all the parts of my brain throughout the year.
Steve Thomas: You mentioned that when Willow was coming up with the sketches, I assume you all talked about it in advance of like Problem Patrons, like you gave them some ideas and they came up with their own ideas and were some of them from the comic too that we did a comic about this guy, so now he’s gonna be a card in the game?
Gene Ambaum: I didn’t really look back. It was a bigger challenge to figure out what each of the library staff members in the comic was gonna do. And there’s some people we don’t see very often in the comic, and it’s oh, what’s that person doing on the card that’s uniquely them? And then how do we emphasize that on the card? The cards are only red and black ink on a white background, and so we ended up using red as an emphasis color for each of the library staff cards and the problem patron cards, which I think worked out really well, but that didn’t occur to us until just right near the end, right before we were submitting final art.
The problem patrons, like we don’t have a lot of recurring problem patrons in Library Comic. It’s not quite like Unshelved where we had people with nicknames or whatever. Willow just draws people and Willow, she’s probably drawing people over and over again and they’re not realizing it exactly. But she’s great at just like coming up with like a new person who doesn’t have the same look of people that we’ve had before. So if I want somebody to be a recurring character from like somebody I wrote five strips before, I have to really specify it and be like, “This person was in strip number blah blah blah, and this is what’s going on.”
But for the problem patron cards, we did different things. Here’s … I’ll show you one. Like that person has never appeared in the comic. You know what I mean? We had a really good time. And I think when the ideas made us laugh it was fantastic, and then Willow would just draw them and it’s oh, that doesn’t look exactly what I thought it was gonna look like, but it looks better in 99 ways that I never have specified. So yeah, I really just can just turn her loose.
Steve Thomas: Do you generally find is your audience generally librarians? Is that kind of the bulk of who’s reading and who’s purchasing and things like that?
Gene Ambaum: I think it’s librarians and kind of book people for the most part. I wouldn’t say librarians; it’s library people, right? Library people and book people. And so the number of people who work in libraries or know somebody who works in libraries, who has somebody in their family who works in libraries, has heard the stories, right? It’s a massive group, and that seems to be it.
It’s funny, when strips get outside of that boundary a little bit- I get a lot of “What the hell is this?” Comments from people who aren’t getting it. And then what’s really funny is especially on Facebook or Instagram, like people will dive in and be like, “Oh, no, this happens. This is what the situation is. I’ve seen this a bunch of times.” “No, you’re kidding.” “No, this really happens.” And, mostly people are pretty civil to each other. But but it’s weird to see it break outside, kind of organically based on traffic, and then to see people just go, “I don’t get this.” And it’s like I guess it’s not really for you, right? It’s just my brain at this point. And that’s kinda where it’s going, so whatever.
Steve Thomas: And I think a lot of it can translate just like to retail in general. So to anybody who’s ever worked retail can get some of that.
Gene Ambaum: My favorite thing is like seeing somebody behave badly out in the world and then putting that in the comic somehow.
Well, everybody knows “Gene” is not my real name, right? And I don’t ever say where I work. When I was still working as a sub in the library system, which lasted up until COVID, I would come in and people would be like, “Oh, you should’ve been here yesterday. You missed this.” And they would tell me the great story.
And then one day I was in the library for the great story. I was working at like this info desk and I was talking to a friend of mine who was working there with me but was also the manager of the info desk at the time. And down the stairs comes this naked woman just throwing all of her clothes on the floor. And I started laughing ’cause I was like, “Finally, I’m here for the story.”
Steve Thomas: All right, Gene, thank you so much for coming on. And again, as long as you’re listening in the first week or two, you have plenty of time to get over and back the Kickstarter, and of course there’s a link in the show notes or you can probably find it pretty easily by Googling over there.
Gene Ambaum: Just Google “Library Game” and it’ll come up and it’ll still be available for order even if it’s after the Kickstarter. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
