How One Homeschooling Couple Turned a Card Game Idea Into Reality

Jason Hsieh (00:42)
Welcome back to Toy Business Unboxed. Today’s guests are Astrid and Clint, a dynamic couple who have turned a homeschooling project with their kids into a striving indie game business. In 2020, while living in Vietnam, they created their first card game, Stack the Scoops, which has made its way down to Amazon and different retail stores. In this episode, they will walk us through their journey from the first idea to like navigating the productions and also launching a new indie

publisher and start building momentum for their business. Thank you so much for being on our podcast today.

Clint Bush (01:16)
Yeah, thanks for having us.

Astrid Vinje (01:17)
Thank you.

Jason Hsieh (01:18)
So let’s go back to the beginning. Can we talk about the origin story of the project and the story behind the product that you currently have?

Clint Bush (01:27)
Yeah, so we were traveling full time and homeschooling our kids when the pandemic came. And so we were in Vietnam at the time, staying there for a month and turned into three months. And so we were, while we were there, we had brought a couple card games with us and we as a family like board games. So we were playing board games and our kids at the time were six and nine.

I was playing with just playing one of the games that we had. And I just came thought, hey, it’d be fun to kind of design another game. I used to be a graphic designer. So I’ve kind of reskinned other games before just kind of to make them fun, just kind of as a design project, just a personal project. So that’s what we’re playing. We’re playing one of the games that we like called Mille bornes.

that I had just redesigned for my own sake. So we were playing that and I thought, it’d be fun to kind of redesign another game. And so then I just asked my daughter, was like, let’s come up with some game ideas. And so she came up with like an ice cream theme and then we just kind of started spit balling it from there and kind of fleshed out the initial gameplay just in the 20 minutes that we were playing there. And that’s really actually how the idea

came about and then Astrid I think you were doing some video stuff or something and you came into the room afterwards and yeah.

Astrid Vinje (02:50)
Yeah, you told me about the game and then I said, ⁓ let’s make it into like a card game. Let’s cut up some paper. So we like sat there and we made different cards. We just like cut up, you know, eight by 11 sheets of paper and like hand drew cards. And then we started playing the game as Clint and our daughter had like envisioned it.

would be.

Clint Bush (03:14)
Yeah, that was literally like a little bit the rest of that day and then I think the next we really started flushing out just the cutting out the pieces of paper and drawing it out. So yeah.

Jason Hsieh (03:25)
I see. What moment do you realize that you actually could want to sell it as like an actual product?

Astrid Vinje (03:31)
Yeah, I mean, it was actually pretty kind of right away. So I guess one of the things that we’ve always wanted to do is to have a product to sell online as sort of like passive income. That is just something to be able to have like an income stream beyond.

Jason Hsieh (03:52)
You

saw this passive before you start, once you start it’s not really passive.

Clint Bush (03:56)
you

Astrid Vinje (03:57)
It’s not passive. some kind of, you know, some kind of income stream where you’re not like charging your services, you’re trading your services or your time for things. Both Clint and I, you know, we have full time jobs, but we used to have a side hustle of like freelance work, and we’re kind of tired of doing

like freelance stuff, so we wanted to move more into like product type of income. So I was thinking, well, this would be kind of fun and my thinking has always been, let’s just try it. If it fails, it fails. That’s okay. You know, at least you tried, right? So when we played the game and when I was thinking, you know,

this is a fun game from start to finish. And like, think other families will like it. Let’s make it into a product. Let’s make it into something that you can sell. How hard can it be?

Jason Hsieh (04:51)
You don’t know what you don’t know,

Astrid Vinje (04:55)
Exactly.

Clint Bush (04:56)
Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (04:56)
So I know you also have a copy of the game with you. Could you also share the game and also explain the gameplay and the rules, etc. That would be very insightful.

Astrid Vinje (05:06)
So this is our game. It’s called Stack the Scoops. And like Clint said, it’s an ice cream themed game. The point of the game is you want to make like a set of base, scoop, and topping cards.

Jason Hsieh (05:20)
Mm-hmm.

Astrid Vinje (05:21)
And you earn points that way. And then sometimes there are bonus cards that you can get like this. This is like a double scoop. So then you can add that to your set. And then that’ll be like, you know, the sum of your, the points you get from here times two, since this is double, we also have a triple scoop card. So

It’s fairly easy. Everybody has like a set of seven cards in their hand and then you’re playing off of stacks in the middle of the table and you’re trying to complete sets of the stacks in the in middle of the table and then once you complete a set then those cards are for you to collect. ⁓

Jason Hsieh (05:59)
Is there

also action card in the game that you can fight or steal card from other players?

Clint Bush (06:04)
So yeah, so we’ll step it back for just a second. when we started actually flushing out beyond just the initial concept that my daughter and I were talking about, we actually started flushing out the game rules. one the things that we noticed is that the board game market is very interesting. We kind of learned why this is the case now that we’ve been in the board game industry, but

Most of the interesting games are geared towards 14 and up. any, I won’t say non interesting games, but games that tend to be geared toward young kids sometimes can be pretty simple is a way to put it. And so we are frustrated by that because we love board games in general, but

Because the market tends to be for older kids and above, there was kind of a gap. So one of the things that we wanted is we wanted a game that was easy. Like I said, our kids were six and nine at the time. So we wanted a game that could span multiple ages all the way into adults that we didn’t mind playing, but were also simple enough for the kids. Since we were homeschooling the kids at the time, we liked having some sort of educational element. That’s why we kind of have it like math point-based.

And then one of the considerations right from the beginning was that I personally just wanted it all positive play, meaning it was more just accumulation and kind of trick taking. So one of the philosophies was also like introduce like classic card game techniques like trick taking or set taking that kind of thing into it as well. So the initial the initial gameplay didn’t have any action cards or anything like that.

It was mostly just trick-taking and then we did do a expansion pack that also then added some of the action cards like dropped scoops, some action cards you can play on other players, wild cards, that kind of stuff.

Astrid Vinje (07:50)
Yeah,

cards that could take points away from other players or cancel a play or wild cards too could be either. Because the other aspect of it is we have two different colors of cards. So there’s like pink cards and green cards. And so to create a set, you have to match the color. So this is more for like for younger players that don’t know.

how to do the adding. can at least just focus on matching the colors and stuff like that too.

Clint Bush (08:19)
We always encourage, even when we demo the game, encourage families with younger kids to play it different ways. So we’ve had families play it like memory style in all sorts of different ways. it was just one of the intents. We wanted it kind of versatile in that way because it was going to be played with younger kids.

Jason Hsieh (08:35)
Yeah, I see. What is the age group that you are trying to design the game for?

Astrid Vinje (08:42)
Five and all.

Clint Bush (08:42)
Yeah,

five and older, about five to ten is kind of the sweet spot.

Jason Hsieh (08:46)
I see, I see, I see. And the game ends when you complete a certain amount of set? Or when does the game end?

Astrid Vinje (08:52)
So the game ends when you either run out of cards in your hand or you run out of cards in the deck. Because we have 120 cards. if you have, like, say you have a set of seven cards and you can’t play any of them, then you have to draw a card. And then you either play it or if you can’t, then the play moves to the next person. So as soon as somebody runs out of all the cards in their hand or

you run out of all the cards in the draw pile, then the game ends then you spend like five minutes adding and multiplying.

Clint Bush (09:25)
And we’re planning on at some point launching like a second version of this where we revise the rules and stuff. I mean, that’s the thing with games too. you could iterate on it forever and never launch a product. we went with the initial games that we had play tested. We liked it. But since then,

we launched in 2020 so it’s been five years. Yeah, so we We have some new ideas on how the rules can be tweaked a little bit and things like that. Yeah.

Astrid Vinje (09:51)
And we got a lot of good feedback from people, families really enjoy it because it’s all ages essentially. the parents don’t get bored playing the game with their kids, which is what we wanted. Because when you’re playing, like what Clint said earlier, when you’re playing some of these young kid games, it’s like, OK, let me just… Hard and all that stuff. At least this game, we feel like…

Clint Bush (10:11)
No offense to anyone who creates

Astrid Vinje (10:18)
the parents can also be a little bit, like both the kids and the parents can be like strategic and.

Clint Bush (10:23)
Yeah. Yeah. Grandparents love it, especially who’ve heard. It was fun. It was interesting challenge of play testing this because we created the game during the pandemic. So it’s not like we could go to play testing events in person or anything like that. So we just created a print and play cards and sent them out that way. So we just sent them out a bunch, created like a Google form for feedback.

That’s kind how we did our play testing during the pandemic.

Jason Hsieh (10:50)
I see, see, I see. And do you also was able to find a manufacturer in Vietnam or how do you handle that during the pandemic?

Clint Bush (10:57)
Well, that’s one of the places we made a mistake. we had to change later. So when I originally was doing kind of personal design projects or reskinning other games just for our own personal product, I was using a website that was kind of an all-in-service one. They printed out of China, but they had a UI that basically is like intended for very short runs, one copy to

100 copies at the most, right? So very short runs. The beautiful part of that is they were full service. So they handle a lot of like pre-production graphic design work. They handled all the shipping, they handle all that stuff. The downside that we learned later after we’d already done some bulk ordering from them is that we were massively overpaying for manufacturing, massively overpaying for.

Manufacturing and we didn’t realize that until we were We’d already been selling in Amazon for a while. We were thinking of going into retail. We were working with a distributor or warehousing Person and he was asking kind of what our numbers were and we told them and he’s like Yeah, you guys are way overpaying and so he then put us in contact with a couple different manufacturers that then I started reaching out in contacting so

Like we have upcoming games in the next year or two that we want to launch. And so my process is way different now. Now I know lots of manufacturers. I know how to kind of reach out and vet those or at least get estimates and quotes. And I know more what I’m looking for. But at the time we were, we had no experience manufacturing anything. We were not product people. We were not business people. We kind of learning all this on the fly. we, yeah, it was our business school. we like to joke.

Astrid Vinje (12:36)
Yeah, I met like another indie game publisher and he was saying that it’s like you’re failing forward. We’re like making mistakes as we go along with it, you know, it’s still helping us in our business.

Jason Hsieh (12:44)
Yeah

For sure, I can relate to that. That’s how I started in 2016 myself as well. So yeah, the only little advantage I have is I do speak Chinese, so a little bit easier to communicate with the factory, I guess. I don’t need to go through a middle person. I can just go direct. So, but manufacturing and getting the right manufacturers is definitely a challenging part initially. What are some of the other unexpected challenges that you face when you’re building the product and the business?

Clint Bush (13:19)
I well, I think from a from a design standpoint, there’s a lot. So like I said, it used to be a graphic design. This one I did all the illustration design myself and there was a lot of considerations we had printed. I knew there was going to a lot of design work, so that I was already expecting. But then you know you make one change to the card. So for example, we printed a prototype and we had it sent to us this. So we were already back in the States by the time we got the actual prototype.

And we started playing it and quickly realized, this is like, if you’re holding the cards in your hand, you can’t see the icons and you can’t see the numbers. there’s like, there’s all these like user experience flaws in the game itself. I then had to go and redesign. Well, it’s 120 cards. And I had just basically a flat illustrator file, if you’re familiar with Adobe products. And so I just had to go and

Jason Hsieh (14:01)
Yeah.

Clint Bush (14:12)
change every single card on that thing. Now, my design process since has changed, but like when you’re designing for those many components and things, that was one the challenges that I faced in the early part, just the design phase before we got to the manufacturing.

Astrid Vinje (14:28)
Yeah.

And I think like for me, the main thing was getting it sold on either on Amazon or getting it in retail stores. that is sort of when we started our, when we organized the company and like the things that we’re working on, Clint ended up taking on mostly like the design and manufacturing stuff.

So then I was like, okay, well, I’ll do like the sales marketing distribution aspect of it. And so even that, like have some experience with just, you know, social media, online marketing type of stuff, cause I have a travel blog. And so I’ve been doing that for a while. So then I was like, oh, well, I can,

take the learnings from that and apply it to here. But then that only covers like, you know, 10 % of the product stuff, you know? just even like learning all the ins and outs of Amazon, which I’m still learning trying to get, you know, our product in stores, know, retail stores and stuff, or even have like distributors

look at our game. That stuff has been challenging for us.

Clint Bush (15:43)
Yeah, it’s like even in go back to like the manufacturing stuff, like we’re still learning. So like, when we switched the manufacturer, like I said, they were kind of all they were hands on. So they handled everything. And then we were just storing the games in a storage unit, where we’re living or where we’re living. But when we switched to a different manufacturer, and we had a warehouse, and this was two years in and all of sudden we had a whole another set of

learning curve to go through because now we had to figure out how we had to work with. Yeah, shipping company like an import company. Yeah, so we had to do imports. We had to work with the warehousing. We had to coordinate we had to figure out how to do payments because before we were just paying by the credit card on this website because they were full service. But now we had to figure out like wiring money. So like so it was like

This whole other level of, and then we actually were exposed to different shipping methods because now we have the option of shipping by cargo, by cargo ship or flight. So there was like all of sudden all these options that we were like not even aware of before that we had to learn.

Astrid Vinje (16:51)
And then all of those, you know, kind of goes into like the pricing as well. And so you’re balancing like what the actual costs of all of these versus like what consumers are willing to pay for a game of this size. And and I think another thing is this is like the latest size of our box, but the first box that we had was like half the size.

thicker, but half the size because we were like, let’s try and cut, you know, be as, as economical as possible. And this might, people might like this because it’s a small box and they can just throw it in their purse or bag and carry it wherever they want. So we had this idea that a small box would be, would appeal to consumers and on Amazon it sells okay.

Because they’re buying off of like the pictures and not by the box, but when we started selling our games in stores that small box like got lost on the shelf like nobody would nobody would like look at it because it’s just such a small thing.

Clint Bush (17:57)
Not

not only that but like the way I had designed the box if if it wasn’t put on the shelf in exactly one way then go to the game was anything and I as soon as I saw the first time on the shelf and it wasn’t like in a proper configuration with basically the front showing I was like, oh my god, I have to redesign this like you see you cannot see

Astrid Vinje (18:23)
So now we have like, you know, people know that this is an ice cream game because it’s got ice cream on there and then we have the label and the logo on every side of the box. And then the back has way more information about the gameplay and things, know. That stuff we learned two years into the game. So I intentionally didn’t

Clint Bush (18:34)
Every way it can.

Astrid Vinje (18:50)
bring the old box because I’m just like, well, now it’s a collector’s item. But we learned that from just talking to other people. We went to a conference and there was a lady that was talking about packaging. And that was something that we talked to her and she gave us some feedback about how we can make our box a little bit better. we also talked to some of the stores.

that we had our game in and they gave us some feedback too. But yeah, was something that costs, know, it added more to the cost of our production, but yeah.

Clint Bush (19:25)
Yeah

Jason Hsieh (19:27)
Yeah, I see. I see. I think that’s why it’s so important to network with other people in the industry and just learn from other people’s lesson. And, you know, I also learned tons of lesson over the years and I’ve been doing this for nine years and still learning every single day about different changes and different things that we can really optimize for our business. But I want to take a step back talking about the marketing.

Remind me, did you also did a Kickstarter campaign for the product as well?

Clint Bush (19:56)
No, we self-funded So we had looked in doing Kickstarter initially because we knew that’s where most of the games were being sold or at least initially launched off When we started looking at Kickstarter, the whole process was already new to us. Designing a board game, designing a product, doing all that, figuring out the manufacturing, all that stuff was a brand new process to us. Kickstarter is also a whole nother level of learning. It’s just,

Jason Hsieh (20:21)
Yes.

Clint Bush (20:21)
I mean, it’s, think initially when we started researching is like, you know, okay, we’ll read a couple things and we’ll kind of figure it out. And it’s like social media and it’s like, no, it’s, it’s a whole strategy. There’s a whole, you have to build up an audience. And we were like, let’s save that for a future game. Let’s, let’s just focus on getting this initial product out there. Go through the learning curve that we know we’re going to go through with launching a product.

And then we can always go back to Kickstarter. We’re still planning that. I think future games we are going to go through Kickstarter, or at least try Kickstarter and see.

Astrid Vinje (20:55)
I mean, you the benefit of Kickstarter is that it allows you to like launch something without having a lot of capital. I we were fortunate to have, be able to like, you know, self-fund it. But yeah, I think you’re right though, it’s like another job. Like you have to devote at least, you know, a full month.

of your time to the Kickstarter campaign before, you know, once you launch it and get, and even before that, right? Like generating your audience and making, building that up. And we just felt like it was one extra thing to add to our list. let’s not do that. And it’s fortunately, you know, like a card game, like what we created,

Clint Bush (21:33)
Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (21:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. I see. I see. see.

Astrid Vinje (21:41)
is not as expensive to manufacture as a full onboard game with multiple pieces and components.

Clint Bush (21:48)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a good place to start. Yeah

Jason Hsieh (21:51)
Yeah, that’s true. true. So looking back, what are some of the things you will be doing differently if you restart this process from scratch again?

Clint Bush (22:00)
I think one of the things we’ll do is we’ll try to build an audience earlier. We’ll try to do stuff more in person, like playtesting events, that kind of stuff, to build a network. For sure. I think we will playtest the game way more than we playtested to start with. What about you?

Astrid Vinje (22:17)
A bigger box.

Jason Hsieh (22:21)
Okay.

Astrid Vinje (22:23)
I did mention in the beginning of like this is a little small Yeah, so like I think that this would probably be the smallest size box that we would make you know to for for any kind of game in the future, yeah, and I think the other thing would be to shop around

Clint Bush (22:26)
No, It’s alright.

Stubborn designer.

Astrid Vinje (22:49)
for a manufacturer and sort of just going with what is.

Clint Bush (22:52)
Yeah, we kind of pulled it out on hold this year for a number of reasons, launching a new game. But next year, we’re thinking maybe of trying to launch another game. And so, yeah, already contacted a few manufacturers to kind of get some pricing estimates. The other thing we learned about manufacturers is that sometimes they don’t have access to all different materials. So different manufacturers can sometimes have…

different materials, the different processes that you might be interested in. So that’s been helpful just to shop around. Plus like your reps, the reps you work with can be wildly different. Some of them are very, very nice to work with and hands-on and walk you through the process and some of them are very hands-off. And so it just kind of depends on how you like to work. And so that’s definitely one thing. I think we would also probably…

have more of a structured strategy of the actual launch day and kind of a lead up to the launch day. Because we kind of, we soft launched it, which is not necessarily a bad thing because that’s what we want to do. But we had not, we not really built up any sort of network or high or anything other than the beta testers or the testers. So we just kind of soft launched it and grew it from there. And I think for this, it worked fine.

But I think we would build up more of an audience first, yeah.

Jason Hsieh (24:06)
Okay, thank you for sharing that. And I think you also cover you, you’re also working on a few more products in the pipeline for next year as well. So as well, kind of wrapping up today’s interview, if you have to share just one piece of advice with someone else that’s also getting started in the toys and game industry, what would that be?

Clint Bush (24:26)
You can go first.

Astrid Vinje (24:27)
just do it. I think that from the, you know, conferences that we go to and just like these game industry events that we go to, we started talking to people, like we talked to a lot of people that are like, well, I have this game in mind and, and I’m just making it, you know, trying to make it perfect. And, and it’s not, it’s not quite ready yet.

To me, it’s like, your game is never gonna be 100 % perfect. And it does no service to the world if it’s just sitting in your head or in box and not being played by other people. And so don’t be afraid to just like get it out there, even if it’s not the best perfect iteration that you want it to be. Always create like,

second, you know, you can always refine it in future editions, but the point is to have people playing your game. So if nobody’s playing your game, then it’s not, it’s not, it’s not worthwhile.

Clint Bush (25:27)
Well, and the worst too is if something’s sitting in your head, there’s a very likely chance that someone else is also thinking of something similar. It’s horrible if you don’t launch something and then all of sudden you see someone else launch something that’s very similar and then you’re like, it’s so deflating. Yeah. So just get something else. think for me it’s, have a reason for what you’re doing and then share that.

Jason Hsieh (25:42)
Yeah.

Astrid Vinje (25:45)
it out there.

Clint Bush (25:52)
for example, from a design standpoint, like I said, one of the things with this game is we really want it to be for kids. Like we wanted kids to have fun with it. Even when we do it in conferences, we demo it at like events and stuff. It’s still cool to see like when kids walk up to the table and want to play it then they’re having fun playing it. know, the older gamers and stuff that walk right by the table and not give a second glance. That’s fine. It’s not it’s not for them. But like

having kids play it is great and that’s what we wanted and it’s like we have other games where we have like there’s cultural reasons why we want to put that game out there or there’s there’s others but there’s always like a reason that we want to build that product I mean like in your story Jason I think it’s powerful to you like there’s there’s a solid reason for the stuff that you guys do and I think that becomes a driving force so just

Know what your reason is. think it’s my advice. Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (26:47)
Thank you for sharing that. So where can our audience find you online?

Astrid Vinje (26:51)
So you can find Stack the Scoops on Amazon. Search up Stack the Scoops. And then also we have a website, vibugo.com. So our company is called Vibugo, V-I-B-U-G-O. And then you can also find us on Instagram and TikTok at vibugo.games. And then on Facebook, it’s just,

VIBUGo Games

Jason Hsieh (27:15)
I see. will make sure we put that in the show notes as well. And thank you so much for both of you to spend the time with us and share your experience, your knowledge with our audience as well.

Clint Bush (27:24)
Cool, yeah, thank you.

Astrid Vinje (27:25)
Yeah, thank you.

Jason Hsieh (27:25)
And for our audience, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. We hope you have enjoyed today’s conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you like what you have heard, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate your support and would love it if you can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague. For more resource tips and the latest update within the toys and game industry, visit our website at toy-launch.com. Join the conversation and connect with us.

on social media using #ToyBusinessUnboxed. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for any future episode. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy to the toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone.