Ryan Miller co-designer and brand manager at Ravensburger shares the joy he gets from making people happy.
Have you every wondered what it takes to design one of those sprawling trading card games? It's not that often that a news series pops up, there are a few major series but one of the newest to hit the tabletops is DISNEY LORCANA by Ravensburger. Ryan Miller is the co-designer and brand manager and sat down to share how a childhood love of Dungeons & Dragons, time working at Wizards of the Coast and how The Princess Bride lead him to making this new game.
Find out more about Shimmering Skies the next expansion for the game, the fifth series and how to balance increasing mechanics in an ever expanding card set, design intentions behind this new expansion and why putting smiles on people's faces is Ryan's driving goal.
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RYAN MILLER: I believe that I was put on this earth to make smiles happen, really. And so the most inspiring thing to me is when I go to an event, and I see people having a great time, making memories, sitting down with each other, um having fun. And if I've had something to do with that, it's incredibly fulfilling to me.
GIANNI DI GIOVANNI: Hello, this is Lightmap from Sifter, our games interview show. I'm Gianni. Today we're diving into the design. of the trading card game Disney Lorcana with Ryan Miller, one of the co-designers from Ravensburger, before we jump into that, let's find out what's been making the news on Walkthrough SIFTER's news podcast. Let's go.
ANNOUNCER: Articles to read, podcasts to listen to, and videos to watch on sifter.com.au
GIANNI: Now, I'm going to start with a confession here. I know Aladdin, off by heart, word for word, every lyric, every line of dialogue. To say that I watched it a few times would probably be underselling it. um It's pretty true for a lot of the Disney films that hold a pretty special place in my heart. And, you know, I really recently had a chance to dig into the trading card game, Disney Lorcana, which pulls from the Disney world and offers a game where options are pretty much limitless. And so, Ryan, I'm curious. You've got this game here. You've got a long history of designing card games and working in the game space. But Lightmap is a game design show where we like to dig into how people who make games got to where they are. Can you take us back to the beginning?
RYAN: Well, it actually started when I was like 11 years old. um I uh, a friend of mine at school told me about Dungeon and Dragons and uh, everything he told me just was amazing. I was like I'm sure my eyes are bigger and bigger with every sentence yeah Yeah, he he was telling me, you know, he didn't tell me the rules He just said oh this game where you get to play as knights and wizards and you go in dungeons and find treasure And you fight dragons and i'm sure with every sentence my eyes are just going [mimes widening eyes with hands]
Um, now at that time I didn't have access to the books. I couldn't get to the books. I was like, you know, like I couldn't afford them. I was like 11-year-old, like, you know, ah limited, uh, liquid funds at the time. And, and so I started making up my own, uh, games and started really wrestling with questions about how to make these experiences. Like, uh, you know, if someone swings a sword, how do you know you hit now this time? I didn't even know that that game used, uh, dice had no idea. um But I started working you know with that and really started to find that not only did I really enjoy it, I loved the challenge of it, but also kind of had a knack for it. i had you know but on Now I'd say the other thing that started me on this journey was actually earlier than that, as I grew up in Southern California, about two-hour drive north of Disneyland.
And when I was a little boy, my grandmother would take me to Disneyland. And one of the things, even at that young age, I didn't know the word immersion. I i couldn't have said that at that age, but I could feel it when I walked into that space. When you walk into Disneyland, you are transported ah to a whole different world. um you know You walk through, there's that brick archway, and you walk into Main Street, USA, and then you take that left into into venture land or a ah further left into frontier land. You're just transported, right? And that was always so fascinating to me. It's so fun. And then later on, of course, when I got into tabletop gaming, I had a similar feel of like being transported. And I always loved that aspect of games, having me make decisions as if I was a submarine captain or a pirate ship captain or some other type of captain, lots of captains. And then, you know, path forward a few years um and decide I was actually looking into a career in law enforcement.
But I wanted to, I was in the U.S. Army for a few years and after I got out of the Army, I decided, okay, I'm going to move to Seattle and try to get a job.
That way when I'm older and maybe I'm retired, I won't wonder, I won't be like, what if I had done it? What if I'd given it a real try? So I moved to Seattle, I got like, the first job I got at Wizards of the Coast was actually working at their, they used to have this really beautiful tournament centre ah near the University of Washington. And my first job was a Magic judge. They're working at nights, five nights a week, judging Magic tournaments. But kind of from there, I just would talk to anyone I could about game design and gamers and the whole thing and really worked my way up through, ended up ah working in retail during the summer of Pokémon back in 99.
Then went up to corporate as a brand manager and then eventually started a company with some friends of mine to do my first trading card game, which was co-design between myself and new Peter Schmidt. It was the Warhammer 40k CCG that came out in 2000 or 2001 rather. And so it was really, you know, and then it was just years of that kind of work. And then finally, about three years later, I finally got the job I came to Seattle to get, which was working as a game designer at Wizards of the Coast. So it took me about seven years after I moved to Seattle to get that. But all along the way, just learning so much. And then of course, you know, Wizards is just a great place to learn so much about game design. It was a unique environment. And then went freelance.
In about 2014, I left Wizards to do freelance. I really wanted to make lots of different games and um started working with lots of different publishers. And I've been very fortunate to put out more games than, you know, I probably should have. ah and And really had a great time with that. And then it was actually working on a freelance, uh, role for Ravensburger that I found out about this project. So I had been doing a game. Uh, I had actually been working with Steve Warner, who's my co-designer on Lorcana. He was my game design manager when I was working with, uh, freelance. He was working inside Ravensburger.
He was managing, and I was doing a board game based off of The Princess Bride, which is an eighties movie that I don't know how, yeah yeah you know, why you it's a great film. I just don't, I don't assume that like people outside of America know it is the yeah it's ah absolutely one of my favourite movies and, uh, I made, uh, I pitched a design for it and they picked it up. And so we were working together on that. And then as we were wrapping up a product, uh, kind of design on that project, he tells me about this project at that time was called "project famous". Cause we hadn't come up with a name yet. Um, and, uh, when he told me about it, I have to admit at first, I was kind of sceptical because trading card games are really tough to make. uh, they're more complicated on just about every level than a board game is. And board games are already a complicated product, right? It's not like I'm trying to say those are simple because they are not. But when you add on the extra complexities from a product and design standpoint for a trade card game, it just really, you know, and so when a company, you know, wants to get into the trade card games, it can be very challenging, right? And it is very challenging, but That, you know, so I was a little sceptical and that was until I got a copy, my first copy of Princess Bride and I saw how beautiful that game was.
I mean, it was, the attention to detail was so high that it was very clear that this was made with a lot of love. Now, I know it was designed with a lot of love because I love that, that movie. And, you know, it's been my favourite movie ever since it came out or one, ah I'm sorry, one of my favourite movies since it came out. So, uh, but to see how much love went into just the production of the art and everything else, I, you know, and then I started looking into villainous, which of course has been out for a while and is, you know, really done a great job again with that attention to detail and just a beautiful game, a lot of fun gameplay. And I realized that, you know, they already have this kind of relationship with Disney fans and with Disney, that's fairly unique and I thought wow I you know I went from being sceptical to being to feeling like Ravensburger might be the only company that could really do this right
GIANNI: It's interesting look just hearing you talk about that it's really clear that sort of game design has captured your imagination you've got a history of doing this over many different ways and I'm just wondering you know, with this particular game, um how to how can you take your imagination and sort of apply that to a new type of trading card game? Because it builds on the history of all the different games in the past. I guess people have played Pokémon, they might have played Yu-Gi-Oh, they might have played Magic back in the day, and they often maybe have never played anything at all because they might just be a Disney fan. I'm just curious about your design intentions around making this game and where you kind of situated in the history of all the card games that have been in the past?
RYAN: Yeah. So, we, you know, the first step I think for a lot of game design is like, who is this for? and That's the first step for, you know, depending on what you're trying to do. ah You know, who is this game for? And we really had to think about who we wanted to make this for. And we came up with two big groups. One group, of course, is trading card gamers. um of which I count myself, you know, a part of that group. And the other is Disney fans, which I also count myself a part of that group. We wanted a game where trading card gamers could find that really cool strategy and lots of skill testing moments and things like that. But that was still welcoming for Disney fans who have maybe never played, as you mentioned, you know, maybe have never played a card game like this before.
And I think that trading curvy and design actually does this fairly well because the design itself, like the actual you know rules of the game um can be fairly welcoming. I always think of like the structure of a house, right? Like that's the game design itself. um and it's got to be kind of solid, but it's got to have the stuff you need in it, right? It's got to have the kitchen and the bathrooms and the bedrooms and things like that. But the fun and the and the and the theme are really what the cards do, right? That's the job of the cards and so, we can make a welcoming design that is relatively easy for folks to pick up um that had never played a game like this before, but that still allows that through card design and, and you know, that allows for that strategy, right? The strategy for a veteran trading card gamer will really be about like deck building and how they play ah their cards.
But even in the basic design, there's some skill testing moments, I think the most obvious one is which card to put down as a resource, right? I think that's a very skilled testing moment. Not a new mechanic by any stretch of the imagination, but I think we did add a kind of nice twist to it because we have like not all cards can be used that way. And so that adds a lot of really interesting design and development. But anyway, going back to that, so we, you know, figured out who we wanted to make this game for. And we kind of thought about, you know, you kind of have to put their head on your head and think about it through their lens. Like what would a player like this want? And really the Disney fan, you know, we felt like they just want to like put their favourite characters together and have them out on the table. And like anything that got in the way of that was kind of, you know, not something we wanted to do, right? You know, we wanted to kind of move around that.
We really started with, you know, we at the beginning, we were never interested in making like an innovative design. I think the term innovation can be. uh dangerous sometimes because really, it's all it's not we weren't about innovating we were about elevating the theme itself we wanted the game design to get out of the way so that people could enjoy the themes and the characters uh right and that was most important um to us and so to that end we wanted we put together uh a bunch of games we started in November of 2021, Oh my, time and in this era is so strange. Anyway, we started, um and we just started designing all these different card games and all these different ideas. And usually, it followed this kind of trail of getting very excited. I know as a game designer, you've probably done this too, like, you know, getting very excited, very excited, very excited. And then you play it, play it, play it. And then something cracks the egg and you're like, no. And then you just kind of like, oh, it's not going to work. And you kind of put it to the wayside and you just, and you start over again. Uh, we probably did that about a dozen times before we got to a place that we really liked because a lot of times we would say, okay, this is not, this is either getting in the way. Like we had it early on, we had kind of an engine builder idea. Like you would kind of put your cards out in a row and then every turn you would resolve your row and then add to your row. And it was just getting in the way. It's like, I just want my fun characters out, right? It was just too much of like attention grabbing like, Hey, everyone, look, look at this. Look at this design. Look at it. Look at it.
I was like, no, no, that's not why people are here. They're here for their characters and their stories, right? um and so about five months in, we started to crystallize on the design that became Disney Lorcana. And that's when, you know, we had had had been excited several times before this. So by this point, you're kind of jaded and you're kind of scared. You're waiting for like the shoe to drop. And the more we started playing it, the more we liked it. And we started kind of tweaking, you know, little aspects of it um and playing again. and about six months after we started, we feel like we had pencils down on what we felt was a pretty fun design.
GIANNI: I'm curious when you when you're now going to be into your fifth set, Shimmering Skies, just about to come out, you know building on each of those individual sets that have come out, if a player jumps in there, how do you consider that from the perspective of someone who's like, 'Oh, I actually just like Wreck-It Ralph characters, so that's why I've got to go and buy this particular series' and then understanding that the game has kind of evolved if they're playing with a player who's playing with something from you know the first chapter or something like that?
RYAN: Yeah, that's ah it's a continual challenge with trading card game design. um You have to remember that every set is someone's first set every time. And so you can never lose track of your new players. You must always remember. Now, the nice thing is, you know every set we do is 200 plus cards. And what that means is that we can't we have lots of slots for different types of cards for different players. right and so when you're looking at designing a set for a trading card game, you have to look at it through the lens of different players and make sure you've got something there. So, you look at it through the hardcore tournament player lens, you look at it from more of the casual or you know fun lens, and you look at it from the new player lens as well. And so, you've got to make sure that ah, but you have something for everybody. And for newer players, you tend to want simpler cards at lower rarity. And oh, we had a We had a phrase, and I don't know if it originated Wizards, but we used a lot of Wizards. We called it "as fan" and as fan was like, as you fan a pack, what do you see? And we used a lot as like, okay, the as fan of cost three or less is this, right? Like, or something like that.
It was just a term of the shorthand to say, okay, you know, we look at a set from the 10,000 foot level where we see every single card, but we also have to make sure we're looking at it as what does this look like when you open a pack? Right. Early on for us, a lot of that was making sure that you had those simpler cards at lower rarities, so that when a new player is fanning a pack, they're not overwhelmed with were cards with lots of words on them and that sort of thing. Because that can, especially when you're first learning any game, ah those kinds of things should be fairly intimidating. So, um and we also want to make sure our Aspen had high ah ah distribution of ink. So we want to make sure that, you know, no matter what ink you're playing, you're always going to find a few cards in your pack. And then we also want to make sure that we had a lot of different franchises in the pack as well.
So there's a lot of ways that you have to kind of look at it. You know, we had, you know, I spoke about those three types of players, but there's a fourth that we had that a lens that we looked through and that's the Disney fan themselves to make sure that when they fan a pack, they get to see a nice mix of characters they know and love, but also occasionally we'll see those deeper cuts.
And I think those are really important as well. And so it's just a really interesting way and challenging way too, because we're doing a set every quarter. So this is a process that we're always working and iterating on and always looking at the sets through these different lenses. But you really got to make sure when you're designing a game like this that you are not just designing for one player. um You're designing for lots of different kinds of players and using your card set in a way that caters to those players at different levels.
GIANNI: What's the overall design intention behind Shimmering Skies? How are you changing the game for this particular set?
RYAN: I think our main thing was, so we've just getting off a narrative arc. So the last four, the first four sets were all about Ursula trying to basically take over the realm of Lorcana. She makes her own, she makes her own Illuminary, which you can kind of see in some of the art, especially for Illuminier's Quest. And so in set five, we wanted to kind of go back to the Illuminary, kind of go back to our basics, right? And, um, We feel like we're going to get a lot more Disney fans coming in at this stage because we have a really cool thing going on at D23, which happens in ah in ah and a week and a half now. And we're hoping that a lot of Disney fans at D23 and then and throughout the world will kind of see this and and try to get into it. So what we wanted to do is kind of go back ah from a design standpoint and also from a theme standpoint.
What we don't want to do, and this is ah just about any set, is add too much complexity in every set or too much new mechanics or things like that. um Because we feel that, again, since every set is someone's first set, if you're adding new mechanics every single set, those can have this kind of combinatorial effect that after a while the game, even though you're just doing the stuff that has been already established, can feel pretty heavy to someone who's just coming in at this stage, right?
So we while we do of course have new mechanics in the set on the cards, what we didn't do is like add a new card type like we did in set three with location cards and things like that. those Those types of mechanical jumps have to be deployed cautiously because they all involve additional complexity.
GIANNI: Do you sort of say, I know you say we're releasing them every quarter, but do you see those sort of larger mechanical steps as something you do every year? Is that kind of about the sort of timeframe you're thinking?
RYAN: We do them as needed, but I think every year is approximately correct. So when you're thinking about any game, but trading card games specifically, you would have what we would call a design space. And design space is, you know, I talked about the the house and like the basic rules and that foundational stuff. um That foundation creates amount of design space. And design space is simply what cards can do. What can cards do in this world? And the more complication you have in your game, the bigger your design space, right? Because there's just more stuff that cards can do. Now, of course, the downside of more complication is there's that that barrier potential barrier to entry to some folks because you know it might be too much for them or something like that.
The goal, at least in my opinion, is maximum design space with minimal complicating effects, right? Not no complication because I think people are smart. They can figure things out that's not the problem but what you want to make sure is that any competition you put in your game yields maximum ratio of design space.
While also I like to say also playing itself playing for itself in fun. You can add a complicated rule to your game but if that, that rule is fun as well, then people are more likely to go, well, it's, yeah, it's a little complicated but It's kind of fun. Like, you know, I'm building a farm or I'm doing this, I'm doing that, or, you know, like locations, I think are a good example of this. They do add a decent amount of complication. They also, of course, add a lot more design space, both for location cards and for other cards to support them or call to them.
But they're also kind of fun because, you know, you're moving your characters to them. So there's this like thematic like, oh, you know, I've got Peter Pan at Pride Rock. That's just fun to say, right? um And so they have this way of of kind of paying their own rent, so to speak. And I think that's, that when possible, that's very important for game designers. Like make sure your complication ah pays for itself as much as possible and provides as much design space as you can get out of it with the minimal, you know, but minimizing that ratio of complexity to design space.
GIANNI: Well, we're almost out of time, but I couldn't go without asking you this. You're at D23, sure, Elsa and Anna and Aladdin are a big part of that, but there's also Star Wars, there's also Marvel. Is that something that Lorcana could potentially visit in future sets?
RYAN: I like to call that a Bruno question, and I just don't talk about Bruno. You know, it's like, you know, I just, my boss is getting mad when I talk about future sets.
GIANNI: He's not denying it, he's not denying it haha
RYAN: I don't just don't talk about Bruno. We don't talk about Bruno.
GIANNI: Outside of the game you're making, what is the most inspiring thing for you when designing games?
RYAN: I believe that I was put on this earth to make smiles happen, really. And so the most inspiring thing to me is when I go to an event, and I see people having a great time, making memories, sitting down with each other, um having fun. And if I've had something to do with that, it's incredibly fulfilling to me. It's it's really fun to see. And we you with Lorcana, for example, we have had a tremendous following of families that come together to play and that just I mean I get goosebumps right now just just thinking about it because it's such a wonderful thing to be a part of to see like there's mums and dads and kids and they're getting together to play Lorcana and I just think wow what a wonderful thing I get to be a part of and get to create I think that you know tabletop games are such a great way to make memories with friends and family and to relate with each other and it's a great way to experience your relationships with other folks.
And so to be a part of that is incredibly inspiring and fulfilling. And I'm always thinking about, how can I make my experiences better? How can I add more fun? how can i I mean, it's just always on my mind. Because I owe it to them. I believe that I owe it to my my players. They're the ones spending their time and money on what I do. And so I kind of owe them as much of any the best experience I can give them based on the time and of resources I have, of course. but i just I just love it. You know that feeling you get when you have purchased a gift for somebody and you're excited for them to open it? like That's my job. like That's what I do. like I'm so excited for people to open this up and enjoy it and and have fun with it. It's really just a wonderful business to be in. I'm just so proud of that what our team has done to bring Lorcana to Australia and New Zealand.
You know I'm just that little 11 year old kid who started you know trying to make his own D&D game, you know to have worked on a game that is now in so many countries and now in so many places and it's just an honour to be a part of this.
GIANNI: I can hear the joy in your voice. It was such a genuine pleasure to talk to you, Ryan. Thank you so much for sharing with me the design behind ah Disney Locana. Shimmering Skies is out on August 9th slash probably 10th here in Australia in game stores. And then later ah this month, it'll be available all over the place and you could find out more in the show notes. Head to sifter.com.au. You will find links to everything we've talked about, including some of our looks at the previous series. So thank you so much, Ryan.
RYAN: thanks for your time. Gianni had a blast and I hope to come down and visit y'all at some point in a few years.
