More than just a creator: Interview with Bryce on his new board game “Rescuing Robin Hood”

This is an unsponsored interview with the creator of “Rescuing Robin Hood” board game Bryce Brown. Be sure to check out “Rescuing Robin Hood” Indiegogo page by following this link. 3 days left until the end of this campaign!

Please just tell me a little bit about yourself and what you did before founding the Castillo Games.

One unique thing about me: I grew up in Niger, in Africa. For me and my family, community service was always a very important part of my background. I looked at that and have seen business as an opportunity to get back to the community and help people and make a difference positively. I worked as a financial analyst, a marketing analyst and a pricing analyst both at Caterpillar and TDS Telecom. That was very gratifying work. But I didn’t have a chance to give back in the way that I wanted to. So I took a sabbatical year in my seventh year of working there and used that year to help the homeless and to learn Spanish. Those two activities were my main focuses. I liked that routine. It was a nice break for me. Out of that I started designing the board game called “Rescuing Robin Hood”. After the initial investments I was able to hire a number of contractors as well. I have a total of six contractors working for me now on a part time basis. Starting this business has been a really cool way to give back to the community by investing in people and helping people to really grow.

Starting this business has been a really cool way to give back to the community by investing in people and helping people to really grow.

You mentioned you were working with the homeless prior to your work on “Rescuing Robin Hood”. What was eye-opening for you in that experience?

In working with the homeless, one of the things that I realized was that there are a lot of systems that make it very challenging to get out of poverty. For instance, Medicaid is done as an “all or nothing” system. Once you reach above $1,100 in monthly income you lose all your benefits immediately. So there is an incentive to stay and only work a certain number of hours. I met people that wanted to get out. But because of the way that things were set up, people still want to work twenty five hours instead of 40. Because otherwise they would lose all the all Medicaid benefits. That was an eye opener for me to realize that there are some problems. When you don’t actually meet the people, it’s easy to think that these people are being lazy. But in reality, you meet the people you start seeing things differently. These are the people that would like to get out, but it’s a hard situation. That was a key learning for me, and such an experience just opened my eyes..

Let’s take a step back to Castillo Games. The idea came to you around September 2019. How did you decide to design it around Robin Hood?

“Rescuing Robin Hood” is a collaborative deck building game. The way deck building games work is you draw a certain number of cards every turn and then you get new cards into your deck. And then as time goes on, your deck becomes stronger and stronger and you progress. That’s the idea of a deck building game. “Dominion”, which came out in 2008, was the first major deck building game. The other feature that I wanted to add was a collaborative atmosphere that would let the players work together to defeat an “enemy”. There is a game called “Pandemic”, in which everyone is working to fight a pandemic. But as I thought through it, I realized that people are going to be tired of fighting pandemics as a game. So I was determined to come up with a new collaborative game. The theme of Robin Hood came to me as an easy theme for many people to connect with. Defeating the Sheriff of Nottingham and rescuing villagers who are being carried off to prison for not paying their taxes is something that people are familiar with, making it easy for the players to jump into the adventure right away. There is no need to explain the whole backstory. That’s how I came up with this theme. From that I started to think through all the different attributes the characters would have. That’s how the actual process of game creation began.

At first, I just came up with a list of characters. There is a medieval census called the Doomsday Book. This census has a giant list of names. I went through a compilation of 48 pages of unique names in that book, checking the names that people had back in the medieval age. At the time people had names such as Torquil or Dicken. That was a fun way of going back in history and learning what type of names existed. I was thinking through the outlook of those characters and some strengths a particular hero would have. To come up with the actual appearance of the hero, I worked together with an artist, and he started to create those characters. And he has come up with unique art for each person.

How long did it take you to transition from the idea stage to actually starting playing with other people?

It took me only two months. I had 80 to 100 unique names of different characters. It was one day that I had a lot of insight into starting it. This game turned out to be very popular. People really enjoyed play testing it even on the first play test. After play testing this game 19 different times with 30 different people, only one person didn’t have fun playing it. So I felt that was pretty cool, and I started play testing it with the other board games developers as well. People that designed board games for their professions also felt that “Rescuing Robin Hood” was really strong. That’s when I decided to incorporate Castillo Games to publish “Rescuing Robin Hood”.

You seem to have talked to many board game creators while you were creating the game. How strong is the board game community in Madison?

Yes, I talked to quite a number of the board game creators. The community is strong and it’s great to have it!. The board game community is pretty helpful. People want the best board games that are out there. So even though we are competitors, we still all help each other out and give ideas, trying to make each other’s games better. You don’t have a whole lot of industries where competitors are all helping each other out.

So even though we are competitors, we still all help each other out and give ideas, trying to make each other’s games better. You don’t have a whole lot of industries where competitors are all helping each other out.

You came up with the idea, you already had the product in mind, but then all of a sudden you had to do so much work that is not about the product itself, but about finding investors, hiring contractors and making sure that they do their job. So how was that experience for you?

It’s been good. In TDS I was considered for a rotational leadership program, so people felt that I had the skills for a managerial role. I did have the skills and I have just been able to use them.In terms of the difficulties, I think some of the biggest hurdles were resolving the issues about founding the Castillo Games, following the procedures and getting the investors. It took me some time to learn how to get the investors as a small business owner. And that was the hardest hurdle to overcome, which held me up for quite a while. I am very grateful for the University of Wisconsin Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic. This organization helped me out for free with legal advice as well as finding the lawyers. The hiring process was good. I posted very late for an internship — in the first week of April, which is very late for a summer internship — but since a lot of internships, unfortunately, were canceled due to COVID-19 we were able to hire excellent candidates. I decided to hire several part timers because they were excellent. They are doing really good jobs. They are currently working remotely, two in Wisconsin, three in Illinois and one in Maryland.

How did you figure out how much you even need to raise? There are many various questions you might have asked yourself that resulted in selling a certain percentage of ownership in exchange for the investments.

One of the things I looked at first were other Kickstarter campaigns, how they got successful in the past. What’s realistic in terms of the sales I can make in a year if I do a good job at marketing. I thought through how much I can pay people. I would love to pay an infinite amount of money to help people. But that’s not realistic. I had to figure out what’s the right amount, because I want to be generous, but at the same time, frugal too so there should be a balance. I came up with something that I thought was right. And people also, as they were interviewing, felt good about their offers. That was the part related to the budgeting, coming up with the costs for lawyers, for accountants, for hiring people for marketing — Facebook and Instagram ads, etc. It was very similar to doing a business case for the company. Because, according to my estimates, I only needed to raise twenty five thousand dollars, I geared towards finding investors who were friends.

You got investors, you hired contractors. Then you needed to launch an Indiegogo campaign, and I’m guessing you already had all the goals and the timelines clear in your mind. Looking back into the past, would you have done anything different now?

I would say from a crowdfunding perspective, one thing I underestimated was how important the lead up to the period is. You almost are better off spending on marketing on the front end, before you get anything, than on the back end. The first 24 to 48 hours is really make or break for crowdfunding. That’s when you are going to have the most enthusiasm for it. And I underestimated that. I set the goal very low so that we could achieve it. The money we raise is needed just for the virtual version of the board game. I can produce the virtual game at a very inexpensive rate, which is good. The more backing I get, the more employment I can provide to people. I’m not looking at it just as a way to boost the profits. The money I raise is going to hiring more people. I have specific goals: if we hit five thousands, our artist gets a pay raise and all the marketing associates get more hours to work. And I have told the world about this. This is an accountability to people who decide to sponsor our game. I look at this campaign as a kind of a sponsorship that goes into the art. Later this fall, our plan is to do the Kickstarter; the money raised on Kickstarter would be used for creation of the hard copy of the product. The cool thing about the Indiegogo we are currently do is it gives sponsors the online version is that you can play with anywhere in the world and you don’t have to wait months for it to come out. You can connect with your friends now. It’s hard to find things that connect you with friends sometimes. So “Rescuing Robin Hood” game is useful in this sense.

How did in general COVID-19 affect Castillo Games? Did you have to make any type of critical decisions?

Then COVID-19 happened and there was an uncertainty about whether we were going to keep on working on the game. I took a step back and realized that the business still makes sense. I reached out to investors and showed them my business model, and they were excited about it, too, because there are not many businesses that work really well during COVID-19. But the board game Industry is one of those because people are looking for something that would brighten their day. So I decided to go ahead and start Castillo Games

The pandemic has also largely caused a shift in marketing. Originally our plan was to go to board game conferences and market our game there. And that’s what you would typically do. But once the board game conferences were canceled we started to think about the other ways of marketing our product. That’s how we decided to do Facebook and Instagram marketing. Now the budget that was originally scheduled for the conference will go toward the ads, and will, hopefully, translate into sales.

The other problem was figuring out how to connect with people, because people still want to connect in a real way. That was something that we’ve done. For instance, the board game community eventually came up with online board game conferences. This had never happened before. But now we are doing the conferences over a table top simulator. And thankfully, we have created an online version, so we could now play-test our game. I had an opportunity to do that and that was an adaptation. Another adaptation that we are working on currently is hosting Board Game Trivia Nights. That will help the communities to connect with people in the current environment. We have an ad and you can like our ad, but you can also connect with us. We are going to host the events and have fun, and that’s a good way to connect with people.

What keeps you excited about Castillo Games and what is the next step in your journey?

The next step is building our online presence. We are currently very focused on a Kickstarter campaign, which will start either in September or November. Right now we will see the results of our campaign in Indiegogo, which will end this coming weekend (July 5th). Then it will be the Kickstarter campaign in the fall. After that we are going to finalize things with manufacturers and set up a pre-order. Personally, what I am most excited about is being able to come up with ideas for how we are going to market the product on Kickstarter and how we are going to sell it. We decided to push that out so that would give us some more time to think creatively. The marketing associates and summer interns that I’ve been working with are very strong and innovative. Working with them and helping them to develop is something that I love, too, given my deep passion to help people get stronger. I could’ve become a professor but did not decide to be. Instead, my teaching potential comes out from my mentorship

Big Stories Small Businesses interviews small and local businesses, currently focusing on the effects of COVID-19.
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